So, I always thought Disney was the worst thing to happen to fairy tales (Sorry, Jen’s Quill Pen!). Then I read this book:
image from Google Books
As it turns out, the Nazis may have been worse when it comes to nefarious use of fairy and folk tales. According to Zipes, in the Nazi era “folktales were considered to be holy or sacred Aryan relics. Therefore, the classical fairy tales of the Grimms, Anderson, and Bechstein were promoted as ideal on recommended reading lists for children.” Yikes. He goes on to quote Christa Kamenetsky, author of Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany, “The innocent folktale was transformed into an ideological weapon meant to serve the building of the Thousand Year Reich. Thus party official Alfred Eyd announced in 1935, “the German folktale shall become a most valuable means for us in the racial and political education of the young.”” Those bastards.
Now we are getting to the part that makes me a little uncomfortable (instead of righteously indignant, which is a pretty comfortable feeling for me):
If I understand Zipes correctly, to accomplish this they did not rewrite the tales stressing Aryan features and so forth, rather there was “an enormous effort made by educators, party functionaries, and literary critics to revamp the interpretation of the tales in accordance with Nazi ideology and to use those interpretations in socializing children.” The most popular tales of the time were used to stress the importance of large families and fertility, purity, an authoritarian male at the head of each family, and a young woman seeking salvation through her modesty, industriousness, and virginity. Likewise, for the male protagonist to achieve his goal he must demonstrate strength, loyalty, and at times the ability to kill that which threatens the stability of the “rightful” order. There was absolute loyalty to the state, at the expense of even the family unit if need be. This socialization through interpretation was an explicit policy of the Third Reich.
Here’s the problem. This mutable ability of the tales, this capacity to be analyzed, interpreted, reinterpreted, to mean different things to different people at different times in their lives is one of the things I love about fairy tales. It is a question of what the tale is essentially about. Is Red Riding Hood about not talking to strangers, not straying from the path, staying true to yourself, the danger of being consumed by some elemental force in the woods, be afraid of the wolf, or sexual maturity, or something else all together? The discussion is endless and fascinating. Who decides?
The fact is it’s the storyteller. Every storyteller takes the tale, combines it with some social aspect of self and audience and produces something new. Even the Grimms did this. When you look for it you can see evidence of their desire for German unification and self-determination all over the place. Frankly, this is the fun of telling stories. When the storyteller is controlled by the state, or by the market, we have a problem. Because every storyteller has an agenda.
I guess I would rather the agenda be an individual one, rather than an institutionalized one.
I think what makes me uncomfortable about the Nazi agenda is that their interpretation of the tales that I love was based on the text, which has always been my defense as well — and ultimate question: Can it be supported with evidence from the text? It bothers me that their answer to that was “yes.” They didn’t rewrite anything, just looked at them through a different lens. The Nazis put themselves into the history of the discourse surrounding these tales, and the stories feel all tainted now. Yuck.
Anyway, I guess the Nazis were worse than Disney. But that doesn’t let Disney off the hook, especially when they do things like this.
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