Jakob Norberg’s new book brings together many strands of scholarship to describe in thoughtful detail how the work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm contributed to the rise of nationalist thought and politics in the German lands during the first half of the nineteenth century. It goes beyond the well-known sources about the Grimms’ biographies to make a compelling argument that the brothers–Jacob in greater measure, but Wilhelm significantly too–were central contributors to the lively scholarly conversation in post-Napoleonic, pre-unification Germany about language variants, grammar, language change, cultural life, folk narrative, and literary history. Norberg’s argument extends these well-established facts, however, to contend that through their practice as philologists they played a major part in developing new forms of argument about national identity and political sovereignty grounded in scholarly knowledge of language, narrative, and cultural life. Jacob Grimm in particular, as Norberg argues, “sought to promote philology…as the discipline best able to uncover the preconditions of legitimate authority” (3). While the book is not without weaknesses, especially for those interested in the ongoing re-evaluation of the Grimms’ legacy as folklorists and the ways in which the many editions of their Children’s and Household Tales remain the focus of so much scholarly and pedagogical interest, it demonstrates with forceful clarity that the Grimms’ work cannot be brushed aside as superseded antiquarianism by historians, political thinkers, and Germanists, but rather must be taken carefully into account by all scholars interested in the emergence of nationalist discourses in nineteenth-century Europe.
The book is organized into six chapters, the first establishing the general argument about the Grimms’ contribution to the development of nationalist thought, and the subsequent five, in chronological sequence, each weaving a well-known and cohesive textual aspect of their work into the larger narrative of the development of nationalism. While this narrative carries through the book clearly, Germanists and folklorists may find that primary texts and secondary literature on the Grimms’ interpretive strategies, literary techniques, collecting goals, and scholarly methods often seem to be treated only as supporting material that contextualizes the Grimms’ work within the larger picture of nationalist thought, the Napoleonic Wars, and the conflicts over constitutionalism, royal authority, and popular sovereignty in the subsequent decades.
The book’s methodological approach lends it a certain repetitive, even pedantic, quality. Chapters of the book tend to find their grounding in large claims paraphrased from high theory (sometimes unattributed in the main text) about historiography, community, sovereignty and the state. The scholarly apparatus is impressive and very thorough, but clearly reveals what the book is and what it is not. The introduction alone cites Leo Strauss, Plato, Ernest Gellner, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Perry Anderson, Benedict Anderson, Michel Foucault, David Blackbourn, and Jürgen Osterhammel. Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar, and Donald Haase on the textual history of the Children’s and Household Tales are given quick mention, but only in two footnotes to a single short sentence (7). Chapter 2 treats the context of the Children’s and Household Tales directly. It privileges in its explanatory framework issues of military mobilization, nationalist rhetoric by figures like Herder, Fichte, and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, and the concept of “folk hatred” developed by Ernst Moritz Arndt. In it, a handful of references are made to Zipes, Siegfried Neumann, and Hans-Jörg Uther, and Heinz Röllecke on the interpretation, editorial process, and transmission of the tales, but these references are minor asides in the service of the argument about the Grimms’ nationalist project. The tales themselves, whether as texts, objects of (potentially imagined or constructed) oral tradition, or through the process of their collection, editing, and expurgation, are never the focus.
The third chapter treats Wilhelm Grimm’s work on the Nibelungenlied alongside his legal thought and prefaces to the Children’s and Household Tales. Discussion of the tales’ “liminal space, neither inside nor outside of literature” points to a potentially very interesting scholarly conversation found in a few footnotes to Tatar, Elliot Schreiber, and Marina Warner (104). This discussion never really becomes more than a short scholarly aside, however. The remaining three chapters treat major spheres of Jacob Grimm’s work: his political rhetoric of Vaterlandsliebe across the decades up to his position as a leader in the scholarly society of Germanists and the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, with special focus on his support of the First Schleswig War, his ambivalent position about universal primary schooling due to its potential to efface local particularity, and the nationalist implications of his History of the German Language. All of these chapters again have elements that will pique the interest of folklorists and Germanists interested in Grimm’s work, but the emphasis always remains on how Grimm was “caught in a bind” between being “both an advocate of political unity on a linguistic basis and an expert on indigenous folk traditions rooted in particular localities” (144). This “bind” was rooted in his commitment to nationalist rhetoric and ideals, and that, therefore, is where the focus in Norberg’s discussion remains. This gives the book focus and clarity, but leaves some potential threads of argument unwoven.
The book is also written in a sometimes slightly stilted, jargon-heavy fashion. It is for a scholarly audience, and will likely not be accessible to the kind of undergraduates who take popular courses built around the Grimms’ tales. It would be of great benefit to such courses to have a book–or at least a clear and thorough chapter of one fully grounded in the literature on the tales–that could link discourses of nationhood to the history and interpretation of the tales. This book does not try to be that one. It succeeds admirably in exploring and explaining the Grimms’ nationalist commitments. Much more work, however, remains to be done.
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[Review length: 947 words • Review posted on October 2, 2023]