Content area
Full Text
Die Brüder Grimm: Eine Biographie. By Steffen Martus. Berlin: Rowohlt, 2009. 608 pp.
A dominant theme in Steffen Martus's impressive biography of the Brothers Grimm is the interplay between unity and individuality, or what Wilhelm Grimm referred to as the "innere Einigkeit der Gegensätze" ("inner unity of contrasts"). The straightforward title of Martus's work suggests this interplay: as the plural and singular indicate, this is both one biography and yet two, a portrait of two distinct personalities who shared the closest of brotherly and scholarly bonds. Some works on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have tended to focus more on Jacob than on Wilhelm, as, for example, Ludwig Denecke 's Jacob Grimm und sein Bruder Wilhelm (1971). By contrast, Martus successfully conveys the "inner unity" of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms' brotherhood and scholarly pursuits without neglecting either figure's unique identity or achievements. His work is also more detailed than Hermann Gerstner's biography of the Brothers Grimm (1970) or more recent works such as the considerably shorter biography by Hans-Georg Schede (2004). Readable, engaging, and insightful, Die Brüder Grimm: Eine Biographie is a much-needed contribution to Grimm scholarship.
In a five -page introduction, Martus contrasts the Grimms' recollections of an idyllic childhood with prevailing views of children in the nineteenth century, as well as with the harsh depictions of childhood in many of the fairy tales they collected. He observes that the Grimms' admiration of the child's naïve curiosity sheds light on their own scholarly inquisitiveness, and he describes their appreciation of the past as making them two of the "most modern traditionalists of their time" (9). He further observes that the Grimms were simultaneously revolutionary and conservative in their political stances and that their contemporaries often found their scholarship provocative or disappointing. These observations, together with the overarching theme of unity and individuality, are studied in the seven chronologically arranged chapters that follow. A useful timeline of important dates appears at the end of the book.
Rich detail accompanies Martus's presentation of Jacob's and Wilhelms lives. In the first chapter, for example, the reader learns that Jacob's aunt Charlotte Schlemmer taught him to read by pointing out the various letters of the alphabet with a pin and that, according to Jacob, the letters on the page...