Sometimes one is tempted to imagine being a mouse in Wolfgang Mieder’s personal archive to get an idea what further treasures are accumulating and awaiting Mieder’s masterful sorting and commenting, to reach publication for a grateful audience of scholars and teachers in various humanities disciplines. Since 2001, Mieder has published seven volumes of what he terms “cultural motif studies,” and though we know him mostly as the world’s premier proverb scholar, this native German internationalist has an open eye and mind for other forms of verbal art and enjoys traveling the wide terrain between folklore and literary production. Thus, he devoted volume one of this book series to the flower petal love oracle “loves me, loves me not,” another deals with the legend of the Pied Piper, and yet another with versions and cartoons surrounding Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum.”
The present volume is organized much as the previous six. In ten chapters, Mieder spreads out what he briefly sketches in the preface—evidence of the cultural impact and manifold reworkings of Hänsel and Gretel, one of the most popular Märchen of the Brothers Grimm’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM). The Grimms opted to replace the general original manuscript title, “Little Brother and Little Sister,” for the 1812 publication with “Hänsel und Gretel.” These two—for their time—highly common names and the coupling of a male and female heroine allowed also, so Mieder notes, for identification on the part of listeners and readers of either gender. The introductory chapter offers notes on the most likely sources behind the variant that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm elaborated on for their KHM; Mieder also traces individual motifs and points to the literary quality in evidence which makes an influence of the Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoys collections likely. However, it is not the tale’s origin that is of interest here but rather the impact it has had in art, literature, music, humor, and advertising. Thus the introduction summarizes aspects of extant scholarship on the tale for interested readers and emphasizes particularly what he considers the realism inherent in the tale’s symbolic language, a point one might want to argue with were it the main focus of this volume. Chapter 4 reprints four versions of the tale as published under the KHM heading (1812, 1819, 1857) as well as the original manuscript version from 1810.
In the following chapters, Wolfgang Mieder proceeds to provide all the evidence he has collected of the tale’s manifesting in facets of everyday life. Paper- and woodcuts, primarily illustrating the tale, are brought together in chapter 4. Chapter 5 assembles folksong texts thematizing Hänsel and Gretel, comic songs from present-day German comedians, and an excerpt from Engelbert Humperdink’s libretto for the well-known opera. One of the longest chapters assembles literary reworkings and allusions to the tale, followed by a chapter on fairy tale poetry. The material in these chapters is particularly rich as it illustrates again and again the availability of Märchen plots as lasting cultural resources for commentary on social transformations, time-bound political issues, as well as humor (my personal favorite is Paul Maar’s 1968 retelling of the story from the point of view of the witch). A brief chapter assembles aphorisms devoted to Hänsel and Gretel. Chapters 9 through 11 separate largely humorous visuals of the story in a chapter on comic strips, joke drawings, and socio-political caricatures; naturally, there is overlap to be expected here, as the last thematic category could also be placed in the two preceding ones. Lastly, there is an assembly of allusions to the tale in advertising.
Each chapter opens with a few interpretive observations, leaving ample space for further analysis. Much as in the other volumes in this Mieder series (and as in a number of volumes of this nature Mieder has published in English), the asset of this work is the making available of material for others to relish as well as to work with. The volume is particularly useful for teaching purposes as it stimulates thought about the versatility of one particular tale and the adaptability of plots, motifs, and figures to a variety of media. This versatility furthers the longevity of a narrative vehicle which could have, were it not for the serendipitous coincidence of a flourishing publishing industry and two gifted collector-editor-scholars, vanished long ago from the cultural repertoire.
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[Review length: 719 words • Review posted on January 26, 2010]