Framing the Brothers Grimm

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Donald Haas e , Detroit

Framing the Brothers Grimm: Paratexts and Intercultural Transmission in Postwar English0 Language Editions of the Kinder- und Hausmrchen* 0
Humans love not only to tell stories, but to tell stories about stories. The stories that we tell each other about Grimms fairy tales account for much of the writing that goes on in Grimm scholarship. The conventional narrative that has been constructed to explain the world-wide reception of Grimms Kinderund Hausmrchen involves a series of transformations and paradoxes that raise interesting questions. It begins with Grimms own alleged transformation of the oral tradition into published text, a metamorphosis that ostensibly renders the audible legible between the covers of a book. When this already transformed German original is then transmitted across cultures to Anglo-American readers, for example that printed text undergoes another linguistic-cultural transformation, a metamorphosis that renders into English what was uniquely and historically German 1. The translated text is now at least two removes from the Grimms original sources, which according to the conventional narrative supposedly drew their authority and value from their authenticity as oral narratives of the German folk. Given these transformations and paradoxes, we can legitimately wonder how to account for the Grimms continuing success abroad. That is, if oral authenticity is compromised by the printed text, and if the linguistic authority of the original is compromised through translation, what value does the English edition now have? One ready answer is that Grimms scholarly collection for the preservation of the oral tradition has been received largely as a book of childrens literature for popular consumption. In fact, the collections ultimate success reflects simultaneously the emergence of folklore studies and the rise of childrens literature in the nineteenth century. But that intersection of national-ethnic culture with childrens literary culture only intensifies ques0 * Paper presented at the 13 th conference of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, July 1620, 2001, Melbourne, Australia. 1 For a discussion of how translators attempt to negotiate the transformation of Grimms language into English, see Alderson 1993; Seago 1998; and Sutton 1996. The path into another language is not always direct, as pointed out by Tomkowiak, who notes that Not all [] translations are based on German copies[.] Japanese and South American translators for instance, frequently used English versions, some translations into Russian are based on French editions (1987, 202). This clearly further complicates the question of transmission.

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tions about the intercultural transmission of Grimms tales. How, in AngloAmerican contexts, do published translations appropriate Grimms linguisticcultural project and endow the stories with value and authority? How, in other words, do translators, editors, and publishers who exercise primary, if not exclusive, control over the translated texts come to grips with the Grimms cultural agenda in English-language publications aimed ostensibly at the Anglo-American childrens-book market? One way of addressing these questions is to consider the linguistic process of translation, that is, the manner in which the stories are translated from the German language into English. This is the route taken principally by scholars such as Martin Sutton in his book on The Sin-Complex: A Critical Study of English Versions of the Grimms Kinder- und Hausmrchen in the Nineteenth Century (1996) and Karen Seago in her dissertation entitled Transculturations: Making Sleeping Beauty. The Translation of a Grimm Mrchen into an English Fairy Tale in the Nineteenth Century (1998). Although dealing with a different cultural context, it is also worth noting Cay Dollerups book on Tales and Translation: The Grimm Tales from Pan-Germanic Narratives to Shared International Fairytales (1999). Dollerups study of Danish translations of the Kinder- und Hausmrchen is particularly revealing because it also illuminates the extent to which paratextual characteristics help shape the production and reception of the Grimms tales in the recipient culture. Indeed, studying the paratextual dimension of English-language translations and editions offers another, equally important method of addressing questions about the way in which Grimms stories are appropriated, transmitted, and received across cultures. Accordingly, it is the paratextual dimension that I explore in this paper. Much of what we know or believe about Grimms tales comes not only from the stories, but also through paratexts. Paratext is the term used by Grard Genette to describe those elements of a literary text that surround it and present it as a text titles, authorial names, dedications, forewords, introductions, and so on. [T]he paratext, according to Genette, is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public (1997, 1). Describing the paratext as a threshold and citing Philippe Lejeunes reference to a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls ones whole reading of the text, Genette goes on to say that this fringe, always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of t r a n s a c t i o n : a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that whether well or poorly understood and achieved is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies) (1997, 2). As authors or at least authorial agents the Grimms carefully framed their collection with a variety of significant paratexts that sought to contextualize their fairy tales and explain to the reader a multitude of relevant and often complex issues. The title, designation

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of the compilers, dedication, preface, and annotations were all intended to help the recipient understand the place, nature, and function of the tales in historical, political, cultural, ethnic, mythological, scholarly, and pedagogical terms. Without these paratexts legitimizing and contextualizing them, the tales would likely have been an unremarkable assemblage of disdained stories. They became texts worthy of attention and serious reception only in light of the Grimms larger and enormously successful cultural project that sought to give the stories legitimacy as primary cultural documents from oral tradition (Khler-Zlch 1993, 42 and 51). So one measure of how translators of Grimms stories deal with cultural issues important to the Grimms is the extent to which their translations make use (or no use) of Grimms paratexts. In other words, the question is how translators, editors, and publishers, in order to direct their readers attention, frame Grimms translated stories with their own allographic, editorial paratexts from dust jackets and titles to prefaces and notes. What sort of cultural discourse characterizes these new paratexts, and what cultural values are foregrounded for readers? Do these paratexts attempt to duplicate and transmit the Grimms linguistic-cultural agenda, do they appropriate the tales for the culture of the intended audience, or do they attempt to lend the tales authority by re-presenting them as culturally transcendent and universal? It is remarkable that there is no English-language edition of Grimms fairy tales that accurately reflects in paratextual terms Grimms own publication. In that sense Grimms fairy tales the Kinder- und Hausmrchen has never, not once, been translated into English. If one takes the last Large Edition published in Grimms lifetime the well-known seventh edition as the standard, then only Margaret Hunts 1884 two-volume translation comes close. Hunts translation, which aimed in no way for the childrens book market, is the only English-language edition to include all the stories of that edition as well as Grimms pioneering scholarly annotations. Hunt, however, omits Grimms important programmatic foreword which amounts nearly to a manifesto of folk-narrative scholarship and replaces it with a long introduction by Andrew Lang, which frames the German tales in broader anthropological terms and supports the theory of polygenesis and thus the universality of folktales. Moreover, as Karen Seago has demonstrated (1998, chapter 8), Hunt selectively translates and glosses the Grimms annotations where she disagrees with their theory of folktale origins, a paratextual adjustment that is entirely invisible to the unsuspecting reader who may have faith in the fidelity of Hunts translation of the Grimms original scholarly commentary. By suppressing the original preface and altering the annotations, Hunts effort to provide a translation of Grimms work for scholars is severely compromised. One searches in vain not only here, but in any so-called complete translation for the Grimms culturally authentic foreword or annotations or any set of original paratexts that attempt to direct a readers understanding of the tales. In fact, Wilhelm Grimms prefaces were only made fully available in English in 1987 by Maria

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Tatar, but even then they appeared divorced from the full corpus of tales they were intended to introduce 2. As a consequence, there is no English-language edition of the Kinder- und Hausmrchen that organizes, frames, and presents or re-presents the stories to us in the same way as the Grimms themselves published the tales as part of their cultural project. To be sure, a number of translations present themselves as complete. The publisher Pantheon has reprinted Hunts Victorian translation, as revised by James Stern and illustrated by the German exile artist Josef Scharl, many times since 1944 as The Complete Grimms Fairy Tales (Hunt 1972); but that reprint lacks not only Grimms preface (and even Andrew Langs substitute introduction), but also Hunts original translation of the Grimms annotations 3 . Decoupling the Grimms stories from their German context might have made good sense in 1944, when the Pantheon reprint first began to appear, but the fact remains that the translation is anything but complete. In 1977, Ralph Manheim published Grimms Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories , but his translation is a similarly amputated version of Grimm. In addition to ignoring all paratexts from the prefaces to annotations Manheim makes no effort to represent any part of the corpus of tales and versions that belong to any edition other than that of 1857. Given the developments in German Grimm scholarship occurring in the mid-1970s, particularly the publication of the tales in the lenberg manuscript and their 1812 counterparts (Rlleke 1975), Manheims 1977 translation missed an opportunity to exhibit a greater awareness of the complexity involved in representing a complete picture of Grimms work. It is indicative of Manheims misrepresentation of Grimms collection that his book, which is obviously based on the tales in the Grimms seventh edition of 1857, purports to be a translation of the
2

In her 1987 study of the Grimms tales, Tatar made the prefaces to the two volumes of the first edition (1812/15) and the preface to the second edition (1819) available for the first time in full English translation (Tatar 1987, 203233). In 1996, Gumbrecht and Schnapp also published an annotated English translation of the 1819 preface. They note that because of the broad international reception of [the Kinder- und Hausmrchen] as a reader for children the preface has not been available in a modern English translation that gives attention to its singular historical importance despite its standing as one of the outstanding foundational documents for the academic discipline of literary studies [] (Gumbrecht/ Schnapp 1996, 475). Gumbrecht and Schnapp apparently overlooked Tatars earlier translation. Moreover, they claim to have identified a translation of the preface in Edgar Taylors translation of German Popular Stories (1823/26). While correct that Taylors translation of Grimms tales is not available at most university libraries, they are mistaken that it includes a translation of Grimms preface (Gumbrecht/ Schnapp 1996, 488, note 1). Earlier, Peppard had provided an abbreviated translation of the 1812 preface in his biography of the Grimms (Peppard 1971, 5355). The Pantheon Hunt translation is framed by an introduction by Padraic Colum, which notes that We have another past besides the past that history tells us about [] (Hunt 1972, xiv), and a Folkloristic Commentary by Joseph Campbell, which concludes that The folk tale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul (Hunt 1972, 864).

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Complete Kinder- und and [sic] Hausmrchen as first published in 1819 (Manheim 1977, [iv]). Manheims errors about the first publication of Grimms tales and about the edition he has translated can be attributed to his use of the misleading Winkler edition (Grimm 1989) and, more importantly, his disregard for the textual history of the Kinder- und Hausmrchen 4. In contrast, and on firm scholarly ground, Jack Zipess translation, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm , provides not only the stories of the 1857 edition, but also thirty-two tales that had been omitted from Grimms earlier editions, as well as eight tales selected from the annotations of 1856 (Zipes 1992). In that sense, Zipess edition does present, as he claims, the most c o m p r e h e n s i v e translation of the Grimms tales to date (1992, xxxii; emphasis added) 5. However, once again the important paratexts have been put aside. So, despite these efforts and important advances, there is no c o m p l e t e translation of Grimms fairy tales in English. It is questionable, in fact, whether there could be such a complete translation. The problem has to do with the extraordinarily difficult nature of Grimms text. Identifying Grimms collection as a published text a s a b o o k is, perhaps surprisingly, a formidable task. While we speak without qualification and generously generalize about Grimms Fairy Tales , as if the referent of that phrase required no elaboration, the textual and editorial history of that title makes it impossible to speak definitively of a single text. In fact, Grimms fairy tales constitute not simply a book but m a n y books. As Grimm scholarship over the last twenty-five years has stressed, the Kinderund Hausmrchen is a dynamic publishing phenomenon that existed in seventeen different authorized editions in the Grimms lifetime alone 6. The collection emerged over six decades and underwent ongoing editorial revisions, deletions, substitutions, and reframings. It existed simultaneously in two fundamentally different formats: the large, multivolume annotated edition, intended primarily for scholars; and the small, illustrated edition of fifty selected tales intended for wider readership. The Large Edition, which contained ultimately over two hundred stories, appeared in differing formats throughout its

Manheim notes that he has used the Winkler-Verlag edition (Manheim 1977, [iv]). This popular edition (Grimm 1989) has given more than one reader the impression that it reprints the Grimms second edition of 1819 due to the fact that the principal introductory paratext in even later editions of the Kinder- und Hausmrchen is the preface dated 1819; cf. the caution expressed in Tatar 1987, xxii. However, it is not quite accurate that all these tales appear here in English for the first time (Zipes 1992, xxxii). Selected Grimm tales, other than those from the 1857 edition, had been translated by Ruth Michaelis-Jena and Arthur Ratcliff; see Michaelis-Jena/ Ratcliff 1956; and Michaelis-Jena/ Ratcliff 1960. The philological complexity of Grimms texts is evidenced by the challenge scholars face in creating an historical-critical edition of the tales, as demonstrated by Bluhm 1995, 5976; see also the various editions of Grimms tales by Rlleke (1975; 1982; 1984; 1985a; 1985b; 1986; 1987; 1989). For a concise description of the complexity of the Grimms texts, see Rlleke 1985b, 11781180.

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seven editions, with the accumulation of important frontispieces, an epigraph, appended prefaces, and a changing selection of other paratexts illuminating the Grimms emerging conception of their work and the tales they presented. The ten Small Editions included a consistent fifty tales, but also underwent editorial revisions and included important, authorized illustrations that added another paratextual dimension to its identity. Even the annotations to the Large Edition exist in three versions of 1812/15, 1822, and 1856. Although we tend to think of the final Large Edition as the standard of reference, it is clear that there are multiple Grimm versions of the Kinder- und Hausmrchen and that these are different from each other not only in light of the individual tales that make up the central text(s) the stories but also in light of the diverse paratexts that direct our transaction with these stories and their original editors. In the final analysis, it might even be more accurate to think of Grimms Fairy Tales not even as an assortment of many b o o k s , but rather as an i d e a and a postmodern idea at that 7. Even disregarding problems of language, then, translation of the Kinder- und Hausmrchen can be no simple matter. The relative sensitivity of translators to the complex textual issues that I just outlined tells us something about their understanding of the stories they are mediating for us. By disregarding the textual complexity of the Grimms work and by omitting the paratexts that were so crucial to the Grimms own publications, translators and editors dismember the collection and re-present the tales for English-speaking readers without their authentic historical context. When translators and editors speak for the Grimms, whose voices are now left out of the initial transaction between reader and authorial text, they replace the Grimms frame with their own. There are at least three pragmatic reasons that this occurs in English-language editions. In the first place, most translations of Grimms stories even the so-called complete translations are targeted, at least in part, for the juvenile book market 8. Publishers know that neither children nor the adults who purchase these books for them will be attracted at the point of purchase by a volume that includes the complete paratextual apparatus of the Grimms Large Edition. The book, to be sure, must speak to the potential adult purchaser, but must not appear to be a scholarly text, which is certainly how the complete text would appear. This is a purely pragmatic decision having to do with the costs of producing and marketing a book 9 . Secondly, the content of Grimms

On Grimms tales in postmodern contexts, see Walsh 2001. On Grimms Fairy Tales as an idea, i.e., as a variable lexical signifier [that] carries a changing array of signifieds, different for each individual imagination that conceives of it, see ibid., 18 f. My specific arguments here would not apply necessarily to all translations, of course. Zipess important translation (1992), for example, does omit the Grimms authorized paratexts, but provides its own scholarly apparatus that critically addresses the works textual complexity, sociohistorical context, and editorial methods. Still, the translation does pursue its own critical agenda, as does any publication, scholarly or popular. On the packaging of Grimms tales for the childrens book market, see Hearne 1988.

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prefaces and their annotations would make it evident that the Grimms did not primarily conceive of their collection as childrens literature. This would complicate publishers marketing strategies, which in general rely heavily on positioning fairy-tale collections as childrens literature. And finally, the Grimms prefaces raise historical, nationalistic-ethnic, and scholarly issues that are usually antithetical to the translators mission, which is to produce a text that will resonate with contemporary readers. Pragmatically, and again for reasons of targeted reception and marketability, translations are compromised by the need to negotiate a cultural transfer by producing texts to which the receiving culture will be receptive. In transferring the text from one language and culture to another, translators find themselves much in the same position as the Grimms did when transferring oral texts into the medium of print. In the Grimms case, they opted to speak, in print, for the folk. Similarly, rather than let the Grimms speak for themselves, translators find it more convenient to reframe the tales in their own way. This final point is illustrated by examining how translators deal with the Grimms methods of collecting and editing tales. The prefaces to the Kinderund Hausmrchen contain important pronouncements by the Grimms concerning their pedagogical intentions 10, as well as their editorial methods and textual alterations. Accordingly, scholarship has focused intensively on these passages to come to grips with the question of the brothers fidelity to the oral tradition. This, too, is an issue that resists facile generalization, but the crucial point for this discussion is that in their prefaces, the Grimms admit to editorial emendations and alterations that can give us reason to suspect, not their integrity as pioneering folklorists, but the accuracy of their stories as authentic products of the oral tradition 11. As a result of these investigations, Grimm scholarship has gained new insights into Grimms collection as a historical phenomenon that documents the appropriation of oral tradition and earlymodern print traditions by middle-class literary consciousness of the nineteenth century. Concomitantly, this historical insight has significantly discredited the appealing romance of Grimms tales as timeless, universal myths from the anonymous folk. Increasingly, scholarship has become more comfortable with the notion that the Kinder- und Hausmrchen are not folktales but a form of literary adaptation, which, in one sense, would justify the exclusion of Grimms paratexts that frame the collection as folklore. Still, translators and editors of English-language editions have typically framed their translations with their own prefaces perpetuating this erroneous

10 11

See Steinlein 1987, 117120. For diverse views of the issues related to Grimms editorial methods, including the nature of their sources and informants, as well as questions of authenticity and fidelity, see: Bluhm 1995, 124; Jones 1991; Rlleke 2000; Sacchetto 1990; and Tatar 1987. For a discussion of orality and authenticity as presented within the framework of nineteenth-century collections of fairy tales and legends, see Khler-Zlch 1999.

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mythic view, albeit without including Grimms paratexts. Examples are legion, and I cite only a few to demonstrate one important way in which this framing occurs. My examples which come from the postwar/Cold-War period focus on a deceptive but appealing strategy that has evolved to make sense of the Grimms own contradictory claims about the cultural authenticity of their works. Confronted with evidence of Grimms editorial revisions, new framers of the tales have sought to rationalize the presence of the brothers voice in the text as a superior form of the folks own voice. Frances Clarke Sayers, writing in 1968, even cites the Grimms admission that the mode of telling and carrying out particular details is principally due to us that is, that they did in fact have a hand in the narration and composition of the tales. Yet Sayers introduces this important evidence of the Grimms literary intrusions with a naive insistence on their fidelity to the folk voice: The nineteenth century was the century in which folklore was acknowledged by the respectable and lettered folk. Poets, novelists, and storytellers; sociologists and theologians used and manipulated it, each to his own end. The difference with the Brothers Grimm was that they recognized the depth and breadth of the tales and were determined to transfer the integrity of their origins from the storytellers tongues (the told story) to the preserving alchemy of print, as directly as possible, with no distortion of the cultivated and literary mind to soften the matter or invent interpolations of its own. Sayers manages this compelling slight of hand by referring to the preserving alchemy of print, a meaningless phrase that wants us to believe that print can magically transform orality without a mediating impact. It cannot, of course; and the Grimms editing makes it clear that they did not preserve the integrity of the oral tradition, especially when many of their texts had already originated in printed sources. As Linda Dgh has noted, the Grimms source texts, including the orally based texts, were frequently already very much of literary origin, and it was only through their claims presented in paratexts that the tales assumed oral status: Although the Grimm collection [] depends on literary, sometimes translated sources, even if the source was second-hand, a reteller has read it from a book or heard it from another reader who read it from a book, its authors claim folk (primitive, rustic, illiterate) origin. With the Grimms and their supporters, the Mrchen (the same body of complex tales) becomes celebrated as ancestral German heritage preserved by the peasant folk (1990, 164). Significantly, translators and editors who uphold the idea of oral authenticity and peasant origins typically decouple those concepts from cultural authenticity or cultural specificity what Dgh referred to as ancestral German heritage. Using a strategy similar to that of Sayers, the editor of a 1966 reprint of Lucy Cranes translation entitled Household Stories (1882) upholds the idea of Grimms fidelity to the oral tradition while appearing to acknowledge their hand in editing: If tape recorders had been available at the beginning of the nineteenth century the work of the Brothers Grimm would have been a lot easier. Chances are, however, that all of the generations who have enjoyed the fruits of that work would have been the losers thereby. [ M]uch has been

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made of the fact that they transcribed their tales just as they came from the lips of the people. This [] is not so. A tape recorder c o u l d have done that. It took the brothers over thirteen years to collect the tales that appear in the volume you now hold and while every one of them is an authentic folk tale they have been transmuted into true literature by the humanity, love and poetic feeling of the Brothers Grimm (G. H. 1966). Paralleling Sayerss verbal legerdemain, this editor has reclaimed the tales discredited oral authenticity by simply declaring the very methods that deprive the stories of their claim to authenticity to be superior forms of preserving authenticity. Readers are actually encouraged to believe that Grimms editing is more accurate than a tape recording for preserving the voice of the folk and has like Sayerss alchemy transformed the tales into an even higher form of humanity. This rhetorical move erases the cultural specificity of the tales and ascribes universal humanity to the authentic folk voice. A nearly identical strategy and rationalization are used by Ralph Manheim in his 1977 translation, Grimms Tales for Young and Old. In his Translators Preface , Manheim writes the following: Some students of folklore have found fault with the Grimm brothers for improving on the tales they collected. The Grimms themselves claimed to have taken down the stories faithfully. Of course they improved on the spoken word; some storytellers are fluent, others hem and haw, and from the storytelling point of view there would seem to be no point in recording their hemming and hawing. But at the same time the Grimms w e r e astonishingly faithful []. More important and this, I believe, is the greatest mark of their genius they make us hear the voices of the individual storytellers, and much more clearly I am sure than if they had been two tape recorders. In the German text the human voice [] is a natural human voice, speaking as someone might speak [] (1977, 1). There are several rhetorical strategies at work here, but the most significant in the context I have developed is Manheims appeal to a higher form of fidelity. That is, like the editor above, Manheim, sensing that the battle over fidelity is lost, shifts the discourse of the debate by equating the Grimms very failure to be faithful to the oral tradition with true faithfulness to it. Drawing on the same tape recorder motif we saw earlier, Manheim irrationally declares that the Grimms have been more faithful to the oral tradition than if they had had the audiorecording technology to achieve that fidelity. This has the effect of helping us forget that the print technology on which the Grimms relied is in fact a technology. This myth of the natural also turns our attention to the voices of the individual storytellers, who speak more clearly when Grimms act as ventriloquists and speak for them. And ultimately Manheim invokes the human voice as a natural human voice, thus once again naturalizing and universalizing the tales in the name of humanity. These examples reveal a tendency among translators to re-frame Grimms stories in ways that preserve the myth of their natural origin and their universal, transcendent nature while simultaneously ignoring their cultural specifi-

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city. Stripping the Grimms collection of its original paratexts is a pragmatic marketing decision based on the understanding that fairy tales have a wider appeal when dehistoricized and presented not as cultural artifacts but as natural transcultural possessions. The allographic paratexts provided by translators and editors reflect this same universalizing tendency. Their introductions and prefaces frequently attempt to direct readers attention away from historical facts that discredit the mythic origins of the tales and to portray the stories as impersonal, ahistorical expressions of a higher humanity. Marketing, however, is only one motive driving this strategic substitution of paratexts. While English-language paratexts invoke the myth of the folk and of oral authenticity to lend the translated tales authority, they simultaneously erase the German voice by substituting a universal human voice. Given this act of ventriloquism, we can ask whether this erasure and re-appropriation may be viewed as an act of cultural colonialism. Although one would not typically think of Anglo-American- German cultural relations in a colonial or postcolonial context, it is useful to recall that the principal examples presented here are from English-language editions published during the postwar era and in the wake of British and American occupation. Just as postwar German editions attempted to recuperate the Grimms from the damage done by their conscription into the service of National-Socialist folklore and pedagogy 12, so did translations produced by occupying cultures attempt to eradicate the tales German character by reappropriating them in the name of a higher humanity. Such is the strategy in a 1959 re-telling of Grimms Fairy Tales by Amabel Williams-Ellis, who uses a biographical note to defuse the Grimms identity as German nationalists by reclaiming their tales in the name of humankind. German patriots though they were, she writes in this postwar London publication, [the brothers] would have been glad to know that later research suggests that this [worldwide diffusion of the tales] is in fact a humble proof of the brotherhood of man (Williams-Ellis 1959, 333). In his essay on Memory and Cultural Translation , Gabriel Motzkin notes that, The tendency to the universalization of the collective memory has been present since antiquity, but it has been [] accelerated by historical events that impinge on all peoples. All the nations that fought in the Second World War are defined by their memory of that war, however great the differences between their memories. Except for the Germans, the Germans are the other for all the peoples who fought in the war on either side, even if the Germans are a different other for each of the respective peoples (1996, 274). I would argue that the tendency to universalize the Grimms tales in the postwar era derives significantly from the war itself and from the Anglo-American attitude toward the German as the other an other who must be dominated, tamed, and civilized.
12

On the role of folklore and fairy tales in Nazi Germany, see Bausinger 1965; Kamenetsky 1977; and Zipes 1983, 134169. On the postwar German reception of Grimms tales, see Zipes 1993.

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This form of colonialist thinking and control extended even to Grimms fairy tales, which in eyes of the British occupying forces had contributed to the barbaric behavior of the Germans. Such were the hysterical claims of T. J. Leonard in his infamous 1947 indictment, First Steps in Cruelty, published in the British Zone Review. To dehistoricize and denationalize the Grimms stories, the tales had to be presented not as the narratives of a specifically Germanic people, but as a collection that transcended its origins and evinced an anonymous humanity. The Kinder- und Hausmrchen , which were presented as the creation of as it were a German Volk ohne Buch, had simultaneously to become for its postwar Anglo-American audiences a Buch ohne Volk. There is a difference, of course, between misunderstanding and misrepresenting Grimms tales as a strategy of cultural appropriation, domination, and homogenization, on the one hand, and intentionally reframing them as a site of intercultural contact and hybridization, on the other. In todays global context in the post-postwar era and at a time when the multicultural nature of western societies is becoming increasingly recognized, the tendency to explore and underscore the intercultural connections of Grimms collection grows 13. In these situations there are a similar tendency and new reason to omit original paratextual materials not only in English-language translations, but also in postunification-era German editions. For example, Hans-Jrg Uthers valuable edition of the Kinder- und Hausmrchen includes a volume of his own commentary that emphasizes the stories international variants and reception (Uther 1996). In another internationally oriented project Grimms Mrchen International Ingrid Tomkowiak and Ulrich Marzolph have reprinted ten Grimm tales in conjunction with variants from within and beyond Europe (Tomkowiak/ Marzolph 1996). Most recently, if we return to English-language texts, in an anthology entitled The Great Fairy Tale Tradition , Jack Zipes (2001) has surrounded English translations of Grimm tales with translations of French and Italian literary variants by both men and women a Eurocentric project to be sure, but one that simultaneously historicizes the Grimms stories and relativizes their traditionally canonical position within a more inclusive multicultural and less gendered context. Moreover, Zipess essay on Cross-Cultural Connections and the Contamination of the Classical Fairy Tale, which helps to frame the anthologized tales, reasserts the cultural specificity of individual tales while stressing that they contain universal motifs and components that the writers borrowed consciously and unconsciously from other cultures in an endeavor to imbue their symbolical stories with very specific commentaries on the mores and manners of their time (Zipes 2001, 845). Resurrecting the term contamination, Zipes rejects the idea of folktale or fairytale purity and emphasizes the role of cross-cultural contamination what we might want to call instead hybridization as a phenomenon that is essential

13

On the necessity of pursuing intercultural issues in Grimms work, see Haase 1999.

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for the continuing production, transmission, and reception of the fairy tale. Though we do not realize it, Zipes argues, we bring ourselves closer to people from many different cultures through the cross-cultural connections of the tales, even though we endow them with our own specific individual and cultural meanings as we appropriate them (2001, 868). As suggested by these final examples from the postunification era, the notes, titles, and essays that frame these recent editions of Grimms tales do not seek to camouflage the act of cultural appropriation or to erase the tales historicity and specific cultural context. Nor do they substitute for the specifically cultural the vague idea of a homogenous humanity onto which we project our own cultural identity. Instead, these recent efforts to view Grimms tales in international and cross-cultural contexts underscore difference and hybridity in cross-cultural transactions. If paratexts exist, as Genette notes, in a zone of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that [] is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it, then paratextual devices in fairy-tale translations and editions may be more important in the tales reception than the mrchen themselves. And because they have a p u b l i c impact on how readers understand, respond to, and evaluate written cultural artifacts, authorial and editorial paratexts have a social, cultural, and political role. Engaged in a continuing debate about the identity and hierarchy of cultures, the paratexts that present Grimms stories seek to direct and capture the readers allegiance in a struggle over the tales authority, control, and ownership 14 , and most fundamentally in a struggle over the stories that we tell each other about them. References
Alderson, Brian: The Spoken and the Read: German Popular Stories and English Popular Diction. In: Haase 1993b, 5977. Bausinger, Hermann: Volksideologie und Volksforschung: Zur nationalsozialistischen Volkskunde. In: Zeitschrift fr Volkskunde 61 (1965) 177204. Bluhm, Lothar: Grimm-Philologie: Beitrge zur Mrchenforschung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Hildesheim 1995. Dgh, Linda: The Variant and the Folklorization Process in Mrchen and Legend. In: Grg-Karady, Veronika (ed.): Dun conte lautre: La variabilit dans la littrature orale. Paris 1990, 161173. Dollerup, Cay: Tales and Translation: The Grimm Tales from Pan- Germanic Narratives to Shared International Fairytales. Amsterdam 1999. Genette, Grard: Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge 1997. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm: Kinder- und Hausmrchen. Mnchen 1989. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich/ Schnapp, Jeffrey T. (trans./eds.): Preface to Kinder- und Hausmrchen gesammelt durch die Brder Grimm (1819). In: Bloch, R. Howard/ Nichols, Stephen G. (eds.): Medievalism and the Modernist Temper. Baltimore 1996, 475492.

14

On the question of cultural ownership of fairy tales, see Haase 1993a.

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H., G.: From the Editor to the Reader. In: Crane, Lucy (trans.): Household Stories from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm [1882]. Ann Arbor 1966, no pagination. Haase, Donald: Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership of Fairy Tales. In: Blatt, Gloria (ed.): Once Upon a Folktale: Capturing the Folklore Process with Children. New York 1993, 6377 (reprint in: Merveilles et contes 7 [1993] 383402) (= Haase 1993a). id. (ed.): The Reception of Grimms Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions. Detroit 1993 (= Haase 1993b). id.: Re-Viewing the Grimm Corpus: Grimm Scholarship in an Era of Celebrations. In: Monatshefte 91 (1999) 121131. Hearne, Betsy: Booking the Brothers Grimm: Art, Adaptations, and Economics. In: McGlathery, James M. (ed.): The Brothers Grimm and Folktale. Urbana 1988, 220233. Hunt, Margaret (trans.): Grimms Household Tales 12. London 1884 (reprint Detroit 1968). ead. (trans.): The Complete Grimms Fairy Tales. Revised by James Stern (1944). New York 1972. Jones, Steven Swann: In Defense of the Grimms: The Aesthetics of Style in Oral and Printed Folktale Texts. In: Southern Folklore 48 (1991) 255274. Kamenetsky, Christa: Folktale and Ideology in the Third Reich. In: Journal of American Folklore 90 (1977) 168178. Khler-Zlch, Ines: Heinrich Prhle: A Successor to the Brothers Grimm. In: Haase 1993b, 4158. ead.: Der Diskurs ber den Ton: Zur Prsentation von Mrchen und Sagen in Sammlungen des 19. Jahrhunderts. In: Schmitt, Christoph (ed.): Homo narrans: Studien zur populren Erzhlkultur. Festschrift fr Siegfried Neumann zum 65. Geburtstag. Mnster/ New York 1999, 2550. Lang, Andrew: Introduction: Household Tales; Their Origins, Diffusion, and Relations to the Higher Myths. In: Hunt 1884, vol. 1, ixlxxv. Leonard, T. J.: First Steps in Cruelty. In: British Zone Review: A Fortnightly Review of the Activities of the Control Commission for Germany (B.E.) and Military Government 1, 37 (1947) 1013. Manheim, Ralph (trans.): Grimms Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories. New York 1977. Michaelis-Jena, Ruth/ Ratcliff, Arthur (trans.): Grimms Other Tales. Selected by Wilhelm Hansen. London 1956 (reprint Edinburgh 1984). iid. (trans./eds.): New Tales from Grimm. Edinburgh 1960. Motzkin, Gabriel: Memory and Cultural Translation. In: Budick, Sanford/ Iser, Wolfgang (eds.): The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between. Stanford 1996, 265281, 343. Peppard, Murray B.: Paths through the Forest: A Biography of the Brothers Grimm. New York 1971. Rlleke, Heinz (ed.): Die lteste Mrchensammlung der Brder Grimm: Synopse der handschriftlichen Urfassung von 1810 und der Erstdrucke von 1812. Cologny- Genve 1975. id. (ed.): Kinder- und Hausmrchen 12: Nach der 2. vermehrten und verbesserten Auflage von 1819. Kln 1982. id. (ed.): Kinder- und Hausmrchen 13: Ausgabe letzter Hand mit den Originalanmerkungen der Brder Grimm. Stuttgart 1984. id. (ed.): Kinder- und Hausmrchen gesammelt durch die Brder Grimm: Kleine Ausgabe von 1858. Frankfurt am Main 1985 (= Rlleke 1985a). id. (ed.): Kinder- und Hausmrchen gesammelt durch die Brder Grimm: Vollstndige Ausgabe auf der Grundlage der dritten Auflage (1837). Frankfurt am Main 1985 (= Rlleke 1985b). id. (ed., in collaboration with Ulrike Marquardt): Kinder- und Hausmrchen gesammelt durch die Brder Grimm 12 + Ergnzungsheft: Vergrerter Nachdruck der zweibndigen Erstausgabe von 1812 und 1815. Gttingen 1986.

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id. (ed.): Unbekannte Mrchen von Wilhelm und Jacob Grimm. Kln 1987. id. (ed.): Die wahren Mrchen der Brder Grimm. Frankfurt am Main 1989. id.: Die Mrchen der Brder Grimm: Quellen und Studien. Trier 2000. Sacchetto, Claudia: Deutsche Mrchen zwischen J. K. A. Musus und den Brdern Grimm. In: Annali di Ca Foscari 29, 12 (1990) 265297. Sayers, Frances Clarke: Introduction. In: Grimms Fairy Tales. Based on the Frances Jenkins Olcott edition of the English translation by Margaret Hunt. Chicago 1968, no pagination. Seago, Karen: Transculturations: Making Sleeping Beauty. The Translation of a Grimm Mrchen into an English Fairy Tale in the Nineteenth Century. Diss. London 1998. Steinlein, Rdiger: Die domestizierte Phantasie: Studien zur Kinderliteratur, Kinderlektre und Literaturpdagogik des 18. und frhen 19. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg 1987. Sutton, Martin: The Sin- Complex: A Critical Study of English Versions of the Grimms Kinder- und Hausmrchen in the Nineteenth Century. Kassel 1996. Tatar, Maria: The Hard Facts of the Grimms Fairy Tales. Princeton 1987. Tomkowiak, Ingrid: Grimms Household Tales Abroad: Some Aspects of Cultural Mediation. In: German Studies in India 11, 4 (1987) 198207. ead./ Marzolph, Ulrich (eds.): Grimms Mrchen International 12: Zehn der bekanntesten Grimmschen Mrchen und ihre europischen und auereuropischen Verwandten. Paderborn 1996. Uther, Hans-Jrg (ed.): Kinder- und Hausmrchen 14: Nach der Groen Ausgabe von 1857, textkritisch revidiert, kommentiert und durch Register erschlossen. Mnchen 1996. Walsh, Michael G.: Grimms Kinder- und Hausmrchen in Postmodern Contexts. Diss. Detroit 2001. Williams-Ellis, Amabel: Grimms Fairy Tales. London 1959. Zipes, Jack: Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New York 1983. id. (trans.): The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Expanded edition. New York 1992. id.: The Struggle for the Grimms Throne: The Legacy of the Grimms Tales in the FRG and GDR since 1945. In: Haase 1993b, 167206. id. (ed.): The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. New York 2001.

Abstract
This article demonstrates how postwar English-language editions of Grimms Kinderund Hausmrchen are framed by editorial paratexts that promote the tales authenticity and universality through strategies that dehistoricize them and deny both their literary nature and cultural specificity. In the final analysis, the paper considers whether this kind of intercultural transmission, especially in an age of globalization and multiculturalism, constitutes cultural colonization.

Rsum
Dans cet article nous dmontrons comment, dans les ditions anglaises et amricaines daprs-guerre des Kinder- und Hausmrchen , les paratextes rdactionnels affirment lauthenticit et luniversalit des contes, et ce travers des stratgies qui nient leur historicit et par consquent leur nature littraire et leur spcificit culturelle. Il sagit de savoir, en fin de compte, si ce genre de transmission interculturelle peut constituer une colonisation culturelle, surtout dans une priode de globalisation et de multiculturalisme.

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Zusammenfassung
Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die Funktion von Paratexten in englischsprachigen Ausgaben von Grimms Kinder- und Hausmrchen seit dem 2. Weltkrieg. Es wird dargelegt, wie gewisse paratextuelle Strategien die Grimmschen Mrchen von ihren historischen, literarischen und kulturellen Bedingungen loslsen, um ihnen dadurch Authenzitt und universelle Relevanz zu verleihen. Schlielich wird die Frage aufgeworfen, ob diese Art interkultureller berlieferung, besonders in einer Zeit der Globalisierung und des Multikulturalismus, als kulturelle Kolonialisierung gelten sollte.