January Meme: German Folklore

[selenak]

Old joke from my university days: German folklore owes most of its existence to the Romantic Age. (And the ones immediately before and after, but English-speaking folk lump all those writers and professors together under the label "Romantic", so for the purposes of this entry, let's stick with that, otherwise the post will be over by the time I've

Comments

[tebasile7]

Thank you, that was very interesting and cleared up the question I had after finding the Loreley in book of ballads by Heine and being very puzzled by this.
The book we had for music lessons in school hat not credited him. :-(

But calling everything Romantic Age makes me shudder as I like(d in school) quite a lot of literature and poetry from that time period BUT the Romantics and wrote a veritable " Verriss" about " Der Spinnerin Nachtlied" when I was asked to compare it a later poem by Goethe ;-). I was quite the pretentious snob I believe. Heine actually nailed my attitude towards Romantics with " Wahrhaftig" https://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/pommeren/Gedichte/BdL/Rom-20.html
;-)

[selenak]

Alas, I'm not surprised about your school book. :(

I hear you on the English speaking world randomly slapping the label "Romantic" on writers of utterly diverse and different schools of German writing through almost half a century. However, in defense of the actual German Romantics, they contain not just Eichendorff but also E.T.A. Hoffmann, on the other end of the emotional scala. And one of our extremely intriguing early female poets, Karoline von Günderode. And the Schlegel-Tieck translations of Shakespeare became an enduring classic (despite all the many later and sometimes far more accurate translations) for a reason. It's not all Äuglein and Blümlein. (Plus Heine himself wasn't immune to using all those tropes, and not just in irony.)

[tebasile7]

Please look for my real comment in Spam, I semm to have had a problem with the log in. Thanks!

[sonetka]

I remember being assigned some stories by Tieck and really enjoying them, they definitely had the feeling of fairy tales which had gone through the looking-glass, so to speak, and featured people who were definitely not alive today. (Russian fairy tales also tend to end with the "If they didn't die, they're still alive now" formulation but I haven't got a clue who standardized them or to what degree). I never knew that Lorelei had been anonymized! I've seen that a few times but it was more of a drifting process -- someone repeats or retells a story they read somewhere, then someone else repeats it, and before you know it it's an Old Folk Legend, or even better, a Strange But True Real Occurrence! (This happened to a few of Ambrose Bierce's short stories

[selenak]

ve seen that a few times but it was more of a drifting process -- someone repeats or retells a story they read somewhere, then someone else repeats it, and before you know it it's an Old Folk Legend

My own favourite example for this is the story of the Frog and the Scorpion. I'm not a 100% sure, but I think Orson Welles made that one up for Mr. Arkadin. By the time The Crying Game used it, it had become an old legend/myth, and when it shows up on Voyager, Chakotay tells it as a story "of my people". Orson, director of F for Fake, would be proud.

But yeah, it happening to the Loreley song is definitely due to the Nazis.

Even if the Grimms had actually gone out and interviewed scores of peasants, the end results would, I think, have ended up being dramatically reshaped in order to appeal to book-buyers.

Agreed.