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  • Die Brüder Grimm: Eine Biographie
  • Ann Schmiesing (bio)
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 Wilhelm's 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 were all soon pierced through with pin marks—symbolic, in Martus's view, of the [End Page 164] penetrating power of literacy (24). Commenting on the death of the Grimms' father, Martus relates Jacob's moving recollection of seeing his father's casket and observes that the pension their family subsequently received made up only about one-sixth of the income the family had previously enjoyed (thus making the support provided by aunt Henriette Zimmer indispensable to the family's financial well-being). The brothers' industriousness as students, their status as underdogs, and factors such as Wilhelm's precarious health are probed in the opening chapters, and here as in subsequent chapters Martus gives a nuanced assessment of the brothers' respective personalities.

Qualifying the tendency to portray Jacob as the chief scholar of the two, Martus emphasizes that such portrayals undervalue Wilhelm's role as the contact person for many of the Grimms' scholarly interests. To facilitate the collecting of fairy tales, he notes, Wilhelm maintained an extensive correspondence and participated in many social gatherings. Whereas Jacob disregarded etiquette and convention, Wilhelm was the more flexible of the two. These and other character traits are also palpable as Martus explores the brothers' relationship with figures including Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Bettine von Arnim, and Hoffmann von Fallersleben, to name only a few. Of further interest is Martus's portrayal of the Grimms' occasionally strained relationship with their younger siblings and of Wilhelm's friendship with Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff and marriage to Dorothea Wild.

Martus also vividly describes the Grimms' relationship to the places where they lived, and he perceptively assesses the impact of Hessian, Hannoverian, and Prussian monarchs...

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