Stills from the 2021 version of the movie Cinderella Image source: CFP
In 1812, the German Chinese dialecticians, historians, and fairy tale writers Jacob Green and William Green published for the first time the Children's and Family Fairy Tales, which later generations called Grimm's Fairy Tales. Among them, "Little Red Riding Hood", "Cinderella", "Snow White" and many other works can be described as household names. On March 26th, the "Seminar to Commemorate the 210th Anniversary of the Publication of Grimm's Fairy Tales" organized by the German Literature Branch of the Chinese Foreign Literature Society was held online, and researchers of Grimm's Fairy Tales and lovers of German literature attended the conference.
Profoundly influenced German Chinese and linguistics
Jacob Greene and Wilhelm Greene, as collectors of German folktales and ancient legends, contributed greatly to the development of the German national language. Li Yongping, a researcher at the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and president of the German Literature Branch, proposed that the Brothers Grimm believed that nations were based on a common language. Faced with the fragmentation of Germany at that time, they were influenced by the German philosopher Fichte's speech "Speech to the German Nation" and tried to promote the unity of the German nation by constructing a unified language, so the Grimm's Fairy Tales naturally contained a deep sense of German unity.
Jacob Green once said that our language is our history. Li Rui, a young teacher of the German Department of Peking University, believes that this view coincides with Marx's view that language is the "existence of a community" and Lenin's view that the nation is essentially a "language community", and regards the construction of the national language community as a prerequisite for the nation to move from division to unification. By combing through the history of the construction of the German national language community in the 19th century, she mentioned that Marx and Engels specifically mentioned the Brothers Grimm's "History of German Language" in their correspondence, and was influenced by the concept of language constructed in the book.
Talking about how to understand the identity construction of the Brothers Grimm, Cheng Lin, associate professor of the School of Western Languages and Cultures of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, said that in the eyes of literary researchers, the Brothers Grimm are not only fairy tale collators and members of the late Romantic school, but also philologists and builders of national consciousness. In 1846, Jacob Green explicitly identified Goethe, Schiller, and others as the true builders of Germany at the Congress of German Scholars, and entrusted the philologists with the task of mentally constructing the nation-state. "It is with such a sense of mission that the Brothers Grimm position themselves as a linguist who promotes the construction of national consciousness." Cheng Lin proposed that in order to obtain a three-dimensional "portrait of Green", researchers cannot ignore their political empowerment of philological work.
Zhang Yan, a young teacher in the German Department of Tongji University, also paid attention to the political connotations of the Grimm brothers' "German Legends". On the basis of carefully combing the early growth experience of the Brothers Grimm, she believes that the two brothers' large-scale collection and collation of German folklore has its specific patriotic background, so after the first edition of the Grimm's Fairy Tales was published, they soon launched a two-volume "German Legend", which made an important contribution to the study of folk literature of their own people. It was under the call and inspiration of the Brothers Grimm that by the mid-19th century, there was a wide collection of folk literature in almost all European countries, and even the collection and collation of folk tales and legends was regarded as the sacred mission of scholars.
Discover the educational value of Grimm's Fairy Tales
"Grimm's Fairy Tales" collects traditional German folk fairy tales, and has been artistically processed and adapted, which not only has the simplicity and nature of folk literature, but also has unique characteristics, and the narrative style is self-contained. But because it contains a terrifying storyline and hints at sex, it is controversial whether Grimm's Fairy Tales is suitable for children. Liu Na, an associate professor at Heilongjiang University's School of Spanish Languages, said that children's literature should not only focus on how to expose children to topics that may be related to terror and sex, but should focus on how to let children know the world in what appropriate way and when. In her view, "Grimm's Fairy Tales" has the appropriate language, the art form of abstract symbols and the way children can tell them, which can have a positive impact on children's education and cognition.
Behind the controversy, the cultural positioning of the work is highlighted. Wang Liping, associate professor of the Department of Foreign Chinese And Literature at Tsinghua University, said that "Grimm's Fairy Tales" is regarded as both a classic of children's literature and bears the criticism of children's inappropriateness; although it is regarded as German national literature, the title of the book is not "German Fairy Tales", but "Children and Family Fairy Tales". This situation is related to the Brothers Grimm's understanding of children's education and the positioning of fairy tales, as well as to their shaping of German cultural traditions. Therefore, by clarifying the meaning of children and fairy tales in the words of the Brothers Grimm, we can understand why the Grimm's Fairy Tales are both "books of education" and "epics".
The dissemination of Grimm's Fairy Tales in China was one of the highlights of the seminar. Du Weihua, associate professor at the School of Western Languages and Cultures at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, analyzed the translation of Grimm's Fairy Tales in the German Monthly in the 1920s. Based on the bilingual characteristics of the translation, the composition of the translators, and the choice of texts, this teaching journal, co-edited by teachers and students of Tongji University in Shanghai, not only played a role in guiding German teaching and disseminating German culture, but also cultivated a new generation of translators, such as Wei Yixin, who was just starting out at that time, and later became the translator of the first full translation of China's "Grimm's Fairy Tales".
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