Blog of Andreas Eschenbacher

The Good Cloth - something in favor of the Brothers Grimm. As Oliver Geister reports in his book,   the Grimm Brothers have de selected the Fairy Tale ‘Der gute Lappen’ (No. 387; The good cloth; there are two version but the ending is the same). Christian Wilhelm Dietrich: Der Kurzwarenhändler, 1741 /  Gemeinfrei,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=870043 Two sisters were in possession of a good, old cloth that made to gold whatever was wrapped in it. One day, when the clever daughter went to church, a Jewish haberdasher came to the sister’s house and praised his good new cloths that he offered to exchange for a bad old ones (certainly knowing about the value of this special magic old cloth of the sisters).   Now, the younger stupid one of the two sisters  agreed to such deal …  [here the story breaks and it only contains the following sentence in parentheses]:               (Afterwards the Jew becomes a dog, the girls become chickens , and the chickens finall

Now, surprisingly, there is also one pro-Semitic Grimm  tale: The tale ‘ Die klare Sonne bringts an den Tag ’ (The bright sun will bring it into the light of day) was told by the Fairy Tale Teller Dorothea Viehmann to the Grimm Brothers in July 1813.  Dorothea Viehmann by Ludwig Emil Grimm  German Wikipedia; Image contributor: Marietta; 10:15, 16. Jan 2006 Marietta 1433 x 1410 (470.635 Byte) Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=789148 ⁋ See: https://www.grimmstories.com/language.php?grimm=115&l=de&r=en Here, a greedy tailor’s apprentice kills a Jew and finally gets executed for this crime. ⁋ For some pictures , please see here https://www.maerchenatlas.de/deutsche-maerchen/grimms-marchen/die-klare-sonne-bringts-an-den-tag/   But since this was a pro-Semitic story, it was not suitable for the NAZIs.  The German writer Josef Prestel wrote in 1938: Wir haben keine Veranlassung, unseren Kindern das [dieses] Märchen in Grimms Wortlaut zu erzählen

The Jew Among Thorns (Children’s and Household Tales No.110) The next one ‚ Der Jude im Dorn ’ (The Jew Among Thorns / The Jew in the Brumble), Grimm’s Fairy Tale No. 110, is very controversial . It describes a Jew (standing in for all Jews) as being a greedy, depraved monster who deserves humiliation and punishment (this was a comment by Maria Tatar [1] ). ⁋  It’s again a long story (you can read the entire tale here [2] .  Wikipedia provides a synopsis [3] . After three years, a good servant only receives three hellers from his stingy master and is satisfied because he doesn't understand anything about money. He meets a little man who asks him for the money and, when he sees his good heart, grants him three wishes . He wants a bird's reed [a blowpipe] that hits everything, a violin,  whose music makes everyone dance, and third, that whenever I ask a favor of anyone, it will be granted. Then he meets a Jew for whom he shoots a bird from a tree with the blowpipe.

Now to the anti-Semitic fairy tales (as collected by the Brothers Grimm).  Fairy tale No. 7: Der gute Handel (The Good Bargain).   The story is a bit lengthy, but it boils down to a farmer making something stupid, then making something else even more stupid, then getting beaten up and finally complaining about all this to the King. His stupidity makes the King’s daughter loudly laugh (which she never did). The King was so happy about this that he promised the farmer his daughter. But the farmer (stupidly) denied the offer which made the King very angry. So he promised him a different ‘reward’, namely 500, which he will receive in three days. The farmer thought that the king had promised him 500 in (valuable) Curant Coins - whose value was defined by the metal they were made of, i.e. good hard money. Now, the farmer was approached by a guard who overheard the conversation and he pressed him for some of the reward because in any case 500 would be far too much for the farmer to de

The Perfect Weapon Can the Grimm’s Fairy Tales indeed be used as antisemitic weapon? Yes, they can – at least some of them (most not). (But there were others that came handy). It is known that the Grimm Brothers wrote disrespectfully about the Jews (the following examples taken from the cited book by Oliver Geister ). Double portrait of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. © Stadt Kassel (only for editorial use). http://www.expedition-grimm.de/de/presse/pressefotos.html Examples: … alle Judenwörter, wenn wir sie in unserem christlichen Sprachhaushalt brauchen wollen, klingen unedel und schmutzig: sie rühren aus dem gemeinen Umgang  mit dem schachernden, wuchernden, trödelnden, fleischschächenden Volke her. ... all Jewish words, if we want to use them in our Christian linguistic household (vocabulary treasure chest), sound ignoble and dirty: they stem from the common interaction with the haggling, usurious, dawdling, Shechita-practicing people. Ich bemerke nur, dass die Juden immer mehr üb

Why the NAZIs liked Fairy Tales Family Goebbels visited Hitler, Obersalzberg 1938 Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1987-0724-502 / Heinrich Hoffmann / CC-BY-SA 3.0 It is scary to know that Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda , demagogue and mass-murderer, liked to read fairy tales to his children. On April 10, 1937 he wrote in his diary: I read fairy tales to Helga and Hilde [two of his six children]. Oh, these fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm are just so gorgeous. And it is even scarier to know that at the end of the war, he and his wife killed their 6 children, followed by their own suicide. Goebbels himself once tried to write a [kitschy] fairy tale (1918). So, what was it that he liked these fairy tales so much? As we will see later, his favorite writers were the Brothers Grimm and some of their collected (and re-written or polished) fairy tales became very useful for his antisemitic purposes and NAZI propaganda.                     Jacob Ludwig Karl Gri

NAZI Broadcast to the Islamic / Arabic World It is interesting (I should better say: embarrassing) that I never heard of it before. Not in school, not in my neighborhood where I grew up, not elsewhere. And it never crossed my mind either. I’m talking about the influence, NAZI Germany had (or tried to have) on the Muslim / Arabic world before and during   WWII.   Why didn’t I hear anything about this? I don’t know. Maybe, that nobody I knew, had ever heard of it, or may be   no one wanted to raise a sour subject? I was born 10 years after WWII and no one cared to educate their children about what happened just some years before. Maybe it was too disturbing, maybe silenced by guilt, maybe a PTSD syndrome sealed their minds and mouths, or maybe the Great Amnesia set in. Be it as it may. It is widely known (I assume) that the relationship between the Arabic/Muslim world and the Jewish one (and vice versa) is not the easiest. Hitler NAZIs knew this and wanted to ignite and increase