Grimms Wörter: Eine Liebeserklärung (review)

Grimms Wörter is a thought-provoking book with an unusual interpretation of the legacy of the Brothers Grimm that has little to do with fairy tales. Indeed, what else could be expected from Günter Grass, the most famous, if not most notorious writer of postwar Germany? Despite the fact that Grass has written two fairy-tale novels, Der Butt (The Flounder, 1977) and Die Rättin (The Rat, 1986), as well as Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), which has clear parallels with “Tom Thumb” tales, his book about the Brothers Grimm and their words does not focus on their tales and their influence on his own writing. Although Grass subtitles his book “A Declaration of Love,” there is very little love for the Grimms. Rather, Grass’s book is more a memoir and critical interrogation of the Grimms’ lives and work on the German Dictionary, a study of the significance of words, a pastiche of constant wordplay and free associations, and a series of political ruminations that sheds light on Grass’s life and questions the lives of the Brothers Grimm. This is not to say that Grass’s book denigrates the Grimms. Indeed, he fuses their lives and problems with his own to try to explain why a reunified Germany in the twenty-first century is scandalous and why words by themselves cannot explain his disappointment—and perhaps the Grimms’ as well—in the decline of freedom and democracy in present-day Germany.

Grass weaves together three strands of history in this remarkable book: (1) a sociopolitical biography of the Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859); (2) a chronicle of the development of the German Dictionary (Das deutsche Wörterbuch, 1838–1961), first edited by the brothers, who were able to complete only four volumes, up to the letter F, during their lifetime; and (3) pungent memories of Grass’s lifetime (1927 to the present), which are linked to his two more recent memoirs, Beim Häuten der Zwebel (Peeling the Onion, 2007) and Die Box (The Box, 2008). Each one of the nine chapters in this book begins with a letter and words that set off a chain reaction of associations related to the three interwoven strands. If Grass’s book is a declaration of love, then it is to the words themselves and to Grass’s own astonishing capacity to combine German words and phrases in startling ways that lead to hidden meanings and astute political observations. Most of all, through his woven strands Grass attends to words to free the mind.

The first strand deals with the sociopolitical conditions that shaped the Grimms’ own declaration of love for the research of ancient words, tales, and documents. Unfortunately, Grass skims their early years in Kassel and Marburg that formed their views about folklore and culture under the influence of Karl von Savigny, Achim von Arnim, and Clemens Brentano and in debates with the leading philologists of their times. Much of this information can be found in Steffen Martus’s new informative biography, Die Brüder Grimm: Eine Biographie (2009). Nevertheless, Grass’s focus on the Göttingen period enables him to demonstrate more clearly than Martus how the Grimms were swept up by the political struggles of the times and how their allegiance to the integrity of words, such as their oath to the constitution of Hannover, formed bonds that they refused to break. The brothers formed a deep attachment to one another and to Germany through words, even though Germany was not unified at that time. In particular, Grass demonstrates that, once they were compelled to leave Göttingen in 1837 because Ernst August, the King of Hannover, had illegally broken the constitution of the principality, the Grimms spent their lives dedicated to conserving the value of words and oaths and freedom of speech. After a brief period of indecision in Kassel, the Grimms signed a contract with the publishers Karl Reimer and Salomon Hirzel to begin work on the German Dictionary...