Two Hundred Years After Once Upon a Time: The Legacy of the Brothers Grimm and Their Tales in Germany

Because there have been excellent studies about the influence and heritage of the Grimms’ tales up to 1990—I am thinking here of Donald Haase’s edited book The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales—in this essay I focus on the legacy of the Grimms’ tales in the German sociocultural context of the last twenty years. I discuss some of the more recent popular manifestations of their stories in German literature and film and then move on to an analysis of scholarly studies that, in contrast to popular culture, have grounded the legacy of the Grimms in substantial ways. In the conclusion I argue that English-speaking scholars who study the Grimms’ fairy tales should be paying more attention to the inter- relationship between philology and narratology in the Grimms’ collection of folktales