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  • "Europe Illustrates the Grimms" or "A Magical Time at the International Youth Library"
  • Katja Wiebe

With the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm as one of the main themes of the International Youth Library 2018/2019 programming, the Blutenburg Castle became a truly magical place. An extensive program of exhibitions and events focused on the universe of the Grimm fairy tales as a contribution to the European Cultural Heritage Year 2018 and attracted 7,679 visitors.

Children's and Household Tales (German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, first published in two volumes in 1812 and 1815, respectively, are the best-known and most translated German-language works worldwide. While the first edition was a plain text edition, the "Small Edition" of 1825 appeared with wood engravings by Ludwig Emil Grimm, the younger brother of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Wilhelm Grimm had adapted and linguistically revised the fairy tales for a broader audience, including children. The "Small Edition" provided the blueprint for illustrating the Grimms' fairy tales, and it is still widely used today. Following Emil Ludwig Grimm, Ludwig Richter created wood engravings in 1853, which became enormously popular and transposed Children's and Household Tales into a conservative everyday world against a medieval backdrop. This stereotypical German fairy tale idyll continues to influence many fairy tale picture-books to this day.


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Funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and Art, the International Youth Library's "Grimm Project" took a look at the European reception of Grimms' fairy tales in picturebook illustration. Two exhibitions with accompanying school class programs, a conference, and an artist talk and roundtable discussion all explored the question of how the canonized texts of the Brothers Grimm—a German national icon—are staged, interpreted, or updated in other European countries, each with their own pictorial traditions and pedagogical frames of reference. [End Page 79]

Exhibition I—"Happily Ever After: Europe Illustrates the Grimms"

The exhibition "Happily Ever After: Europe Illustrates the Grimms" was dedicated to the reception of Grimm fairy tales by European illustrators. It soon became apparent that many contemporary illustrators from Europe have found new images for the well-known fairy tales with humor and wit, creative commitment, and artistic license to interpret the fairy tale world in a timeless or contemporary way.

The exhibition brought together fifty-three original and unusual examples from the holdings of the International Youth Library that have been published since the turn of the millennium. Illustrators represented seventeen European countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, and the United Kingdom. These artists' illustrations for thirteen different Grimm fairy tales are unique and intriguing.


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Octavia Monaco, for example, sets "Snow White" in a Tuscan landscape, while Roberto Innocenti and Arthur Leboeuf send "Little Red Riding Hood" into the urban jungle. Sophia Martineck transports "Hansel and Gretel" into the present in her fairy tale comic and dresses them in contemporary fashion in heavy hoodies. Claudia Palmarucci stages "The Bremen Town Musicians" as a workers' parable, and Annemarie van Haeringen has a little goat called Snow White knitting monsters to tell the fairy tale of the "Wolf and the Seven Little Goats" from an unusual perspective. These are just a few examples of the original and imaginative ways in which European illustrators play with an extremely flexible narrative material.

Conceptually, the exhibition follows the typical plot elements and narrative structures of fairy tales: beginning with the departure of the main character (Section I), the exhibition traces the hero's path (Section II) to a trial, task, or struggle, which may involve temptation, threat, or even the loneliness of exile (Section III). The last two sections show how the hero overcomes this critical situation (Section IV) and celebrate the happy ending (Section V).

The school class programs "You're a Fairy-Tale Hero!," "Hansel and Gretel in the Shopping Mall," "Enchanted Birds (Jorinde and Joringel)," and "The Woods—a Wolf—a Red Riding Hood" accompanied the exhibition. Some of the artistic outcomes of the sixty-three school workshops are currently on display in...

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