Fairy Tales and Fables from Weimar Days

Collected Utopian Tales / New and Revised Edition

Jack Zipes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319692753
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is a collection of traditional German fairy tales and fables, deliberately transformed into utopian narratives and social commentary by political activists in the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). Against a backdrop of financial and political instability, widespread homelessness, and the reformation of public institutions, numerous gifted writers such as Berta Lask, Kurt Schwitters, Hermynia zur Mühlen, Oskar Maria Graf, Bruno Schönlank, and Joachim Ringelnatz responded to the need for hope among the common people by creating fairy tales and fables that offered a new and critical vision of social conditions. Though many of their tales deal with the grim situation of common people and their apparent helplessness, they are founded on the principle of hope. This revised edition includes over 50 illustrations by contemporary international artists who reveal how similar the Weimar conditions were to the conditions in which we presently live. In this respect, the Weimar fairy talesand fables have not lost their spirit and significance.

Part IIntroduction

© The Author(s) 2018

Jack Zipes (ed.)Fairy Tales and Fables from Weimar Dayshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69275-3_1

Begin Abstract

Recovering the Utopian Spirit of Fairy Tales and Fables from the Weimar Republic

Jack Zipes¹

(1)

Minneapolis, USA

End Abstract

Why, all of a sudden, so it seems, did highly political men and women, completely committed to furthering class struggle in Germany during the Weimar period, begin in 1920 to write and illustrate fairy tales and fables for children? What was it that impelled gifted political writers to dedicate themselves to transforming traditional fairy tales and fables into remarkable utopian narratives and provocative social commentaries until the Weimar Republic’s collapse in 1933? There are no simple answers to these questions because many of the writers of the utopian tales disappeared, were killed by the Nazis, or were forced into exile, where they left few records about their work. Nevertheless, there are enough traces of their fairy-tale productivity during the Weimar period to enable us to regain an understanding of their efforts, which also means recovering their utopian spirit for the present. After all, we are living in a time of conflicts that bear a strong resemblance to the chaos of early twentieth-century Europe.

The Weimar period (1919–1933) is perhaps one of the most critical epochs in German history, for it marked the first unified democratic German State, and it also gave birth to national socialism. Nothing stood still during the Weimar Republic. It began with financial and political instability, thousands of homeless people, vast experimentation in the arts, and the reformation of public institutions. The Social Democrats endeavored to prevent the nation from falling apart at the seams and compromised its socialist policies from the beginning. From 1923 to 1929, it appeared that their politics of compromise might work. However, the worldwide economic depression of 1929 dashed the German experiment with democracy, and from 1933 the Nazis brought about a revolution of German society that perverted the utopian dreams of all of those who had sought to revolutionise German society in 1918–1919 and had failed.

The Youth Movements

Paradoxically, the utopian fairy tales and fables were engendered by the failed revolutions of 1918–1919, for these stories reflected the mistakes made by German revolutionaries, and they also depicted the extent to which class conflicts remained unresolved. Once the radical Spartacus group, under the leadership of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and the workers and soldiers’ movement were defeated in Berlin and Hamburg by the end of 1918, and once the Munich Räterepublik (soviet republic) was overthrown in the spring of 1919 and the Hungarian Räterepublik was vanquished in 1920, the Communists and other radicals were compelled to withdraw, analyse their mistakes, and set new policies and strategies to recommence their struggle for power in Germany.

Almost all political parties and groups realized after World War I that Germany’s destiny would depend on the education and socialisation of the young, and consequently the period between 1919 and 1933 saw the flowering of hundreds of youth groups, along with numerous endeavours to reform the public school system and the living and working conditions for children and teenagers. Of course, the origins of the youth movement can be traced back to the formation of the Wanderbund (1896), which led to the Wandervogel (hiker) movement in 1900, an uprising against the materialist values and decadence of the upper classes. However, the Wandervogel groups, which remained fairly active until the demise of the Weimar Republic, were geared to teenagers and university students of the middle classes. The emphasis was on a return to nature, comradeship, holistic living, and resistance to arbitrary authority. The groups tended to be exclusive and apolitical, so they were easily co-opted by the German regime to serve military interests during World War I; and even though the Wandervogel groups became more antiauthoritarian after the war, they never established a political programme that addressed the majority of the young in Germany. Therefore, if anything, this movement provided a retreat from politics and an ideology concerned with the ‘purity’ of life and nature that eventually benefited the Nazi cause.

In contrast to the Wandervogel movement, the three major political alignments that developed after World War I – the Social Democrats (SPD), the Communists (KPD), and the National Socialists (NDSAP) – focused a great deal of their energy on organising the young from the working class and the lower middle class, in other words, the disenfranchised majority. The reasons these political parties took such an interest is clear: the dissatisfaction on the part of young people with the existing conditions in Germany had turned them into potential revolutionaries, and they had shown this in their participation in the November Revolution of 1918 and in their work in the Bavarian Räterepublik. During the early years of the Weimar Republic, from 1919 to 1924, thousands of youngsters were homeless; if they did have a home, it was often a room inhabited by several people. Prostitution and crime among the working classes became a ‘normal’ way to earn a living. The school system neglected the needs of working-class and lower-middle-class children and was geared to send those children out to work by the time they were twelve, whereas middle-class children were channelled through schools that led to university. Moreover, the school system was run in a bureaucratic and authoritarian manner that permitted corporal punishment and provided little consultation with parents. There was virtually no sex education, and abortions were illegal. The majority of children and teenagers who found work were generally given meagre wages and suffered poor working conditions. Given the devastating inflation from 1919 to 1924 and the chaotic temper of the times, which often led to military conflict and violent strikes, growing up in Weimar Germany led to a feeling of tremendous instability and fear among the young.

To offset the miserable conditions and the disquietude of German youth, the Social Democrats, the Communists and the National Socialists formed extremely effective youth movements to mobilise the young, supposedly in the interests of young people but basically to serve the interests of their respective parties. This is not to deny the fact that a vast number of adults were genuinely concerned about the plight of the young and sought to make their particular political party or social organisation responsive to the problems faced by children and teenagers. Moreover, given that the interests of the young and the political parties often coincided, it would be fair to say that German youth felt in many instances that their needs were being addressed, or might be addressed, and they responded commensurately to the politics and programmes of the parties.

In 1919 the SPD formed its youth group, the Verband der Arbeiterjugendvereine Deutschlands, which changed its name in 1922 to the Verband der sozialistischen Arbeiterjugend (SAJ, Union of Young Socialist Workers). At the time it had more than one hundred thousand members, mainly teenagers. In 1927 the Rote Falkengruppen (Red Falcon Groups) were organized as part of the SAJ movement. In addition, the SPD founded the Kinderfreunde (Friends of Children) movement that organized children between the ages of eight and twelve and published two important journals, Der Kinderfreund and Kinderland. The SPD’s focus was not emphatically political, in contrast to the KPD and NSDAP. For instance, it did not seek to create major changes in the tracking system of the schools or in the basic hierarchical structure. The SPD focused on providing ‘neutral’ cultural conditions in schools and other institutions to allow children of all social classes to develop a moral character and the virtues necessary for the creation of a genuinely democratic society. Social change was thus dependent on the evolution (not revolution) of society based on human rights such as freedom of speech, religion and thought. However, the SPD youth organisations outside school did try to provide a more critical ‘socialist’ viewpoint and built youth centres in which important educational, artistic and sports programmes were developed for the young to provide them with meaningful leisure activities. In this regard, the SPD did not endeavour to make political activists out of its members but sought to provide enlightenment on affairs that concerned them. Only towards the end of the Weimar Republic did the SPD youth organisations play a militant role in party politics. In general, the SPD’s youth movement supported the liberal humanistic programs of the government without questioning some of the more debatable authoritarian and class-biased institutions geared toward educating the young.

It was just the opposite with the Communist Party. In 1920 it formed the Freie Sozialistische Jugend (FSJ), which was transformed into the Kommunistische Jugend Deutschlands (KJD, The Communist Youth of Germany) and grew to have more than fifty thousand members. The major focus of the Communists was to make political activists out of the young, and it was for this reason that their platform, even when it shifted somewhat over the years, always included a programme to change the school system and the factories. Because the schools were established according to tracking systems that benefited the rich, the Communists fought for changes that would do away with such tracking and bring about a general education combining vocational, scientific and humanistic programs specifically directed towards overcoming exploitation and hierarchies in the workplace and at home. Everything was to be oriented towards bringing about the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, so the Communist local and cell groups structured their youth-centre programmes around activities that furthered a sense of class struggle. Of course, there were also sports and cultural programmes that were not directly involved in the class struggle. However, for the most part, the young were indoctrinated into party politics and encouraged to develop political plays supporting the Communist programme and to carry on agit-prop programmes up to 1933.

In like manner, the National Socialists intended their youth organisations to be politically active and to reinforce their race and culture programmes. In 1926 the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) and the NS-Deutscherstudentenbund (the NS German Student League) were formed, and they copied the youth work that Communist and Socialist youth organisations had already been doing – obviously with a different emphasis. The National Socialists set up a comprehensive indoctrination programme based on the Führerprinzip; it sought through the use of uniforms, symbols, and military discipline to provide a ‘nationalistic community’ that would oppose the dangers of a Marxist conspiracy and/or a Jewish capitalist takeover. It is interesting to note that almost 40 percent of the NSDAP membership in 1931 was under thirty, for the National Socialists were able to channel the anger and frustration of the young into paramilitary action, with total belief in and obedience to a ‘messianic’ figure like Hitler. The Nazis were not interested in transforming the school system but in taking it over and cleansing it of the ‘filth’ that had spoiled Germany. Moreover, they formed tight-knit units throughout Germany in which sports and cultural programs were intended to strengthen the resolve of a pure German youth for the great struggle to save Germany.

Given the grim situation of the majority of young people in Germany from 1919 to 1933, and the intense competition of the different political parties to win their support – and the other conservative and liberal parties had their youth organisations as well – we must ask again: why would the more radical youth groups, leaders and writers want to focus on developing special fairy tales and fables as a means of contributing to the class struggle?

The Status of the Fairy Tale

Though it might seem at first a strange notion to Anglophone readers, the fairy tale has always played a vital role in German politics. The oral folktales and fables told by the peasants over the past centuries have always had a political and utopian aspect, and the literary fairy tales, which originated for adults and children at the end of the eighteenth century, were highly political. For instance, the Romantic writers, who wrote mainly for adults, used the fairy tale to comment on the philistinism of the German bourgeoisie and the perversion of Enlightenment ideals. The fairy tales written for children were filled with Christian references and were intended to socialise children according to the norms of Protestant ethics. Moreover, many of the tales for adults and children contained allusions to the Napoleonic Wars as well as nationalist messages.

Throughout the nineteenth century the literary fairy tale, bolstered by the popularity of the collections of the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm Hauff, and Ludwig Bechstein, grew in public favour, and by the beginning of the twentieth century it had virtually become the German genre. Indeed, if one were to scan the works of the most famous German authors, from Goethe to Günter Grass, one would find very few who had not written at least one fairy tale. Of course, most of these tales were for adults and are vastly different in their themes and styles. But they reflect how seriously Germans take the fairy tale and how significant it is to their education and socialisation. By the 1870s the Bechstein and Grimm fairy tales – and those by others such as Robert Reinecke and the Dane, Hans Christian Andersen – had been introduced into the school system and had become standard reading material for children. The traditional Christmas play, presented in the public theatres throughout Germany since the 1850s, became the fairy-tale play Peterchens Mondfahrt (Little Peter’s Trip to the Moon); and if that particular play was not produced, another fairy-tale drama would be performed – a tradition that has continued to the present day. All in all, if one were to consider that the oral folktale tradition was still strong in Germany and served as the source for many of the literary fairy tales, it is not difficult to see that the fairy tale had become the most popular genre and served to provide a sense of community. That is, the shared referential system of the symbols and motifs of a cultivated fairy-tale canon gave German readers, young and old, a means to identify themselves with important aspects of German culture.

Certainly, as far as young listeners and readers were concerned, the fairy tale came to be used in a conservative sense that had political overtones. The predominant use of such classical tales as those of ‘Cinderella’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘The Frog King’, ‘Rapunzel’, ‘Snow White’ and others reinforced the patriarchal order and gender specification in German upbringing. The male hero is the adventurer, the doer, and the rescuer, whereas the female protagonist is generally passive if not comatose. Moreover, the Grimm and Bechstein tales often conserve a medieval notion of ‘might makes right’ along with typical ‘bourgeois myths’ of industriousness, cleanliness, and truthfulness as holiness. Generally speaking, the victor at the end of the classical tale is someone who is unique, exceptional, rising above all others.

It was particularly this elitist feature, which admittedly has beneficial psychological aspects for young children needful of positive ego reinforcement, that became cultivated in the literary fairy tales for children during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The major trend in fairy-tale books, largely published for middle-class children, was toward ‘redemptive’ tales, in which an exceptional protagonist had magical adventures and exhibited a brand of goodness and harmony that conformed to the standards and expectations of conservative German society. The works of Hans Dominik (Technische Märchen, 1903), Sophie Reinheimer (Von Sonne, Regen, Schnee und Wind, 1907; Aus Tannenwalds Kinderstube, 1909), and Waldemar Bonsels (Die Biene Maja, 1912) are characteristic of this type of fairy tale, which was developed in three different ways during the 1920s.

Firstly, there were numerous didactic tales, especially those published in children’s journals and annuals like Auerbachs Kinder-Kalender, Hahns Kinder- und Märchen-Kalender, and Die Jugendlust, which incorporated orthodox religious notions and furthered conventional social ideas in a seemingly innocent manner. Generally speaking, the fairy-tale garb was used to cloak an ideology that rationalised the use of power in authoritarian ways.

Secondly, there were many idyllic fairy tales intended to divert children from confronting social problems and issues and make it appear that ‘magical intervention’ could easily resolve conflicts of any kind. These tales were often exotic and sought to transport the young reader to other worlds, as in Clara Hepner’s Der Meister und seine Schüler (1922). Some of the tales were ornamental pastiches, such as Frida Schanz’s Schneewittchens Hochzeit (1928) and Ina Seidel’s Das wunderbare Geißleinbuch (1925), in which classical tales were playfully patched together in an amusing way, as though the social fragments of children’s stressful lives could be as easily reassembled. The best collect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Learning from Mistakes
• Part III. Kings, Tyrants, Misers and Other Fools
• Part IV. Animal Wisdom
• Part V. Freedom Through Solidarity
• Back Matter