200th Anniversary of Publication of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales”
They were linguists and authors, legal scholars and librarians, university professors and occasionally politicians – and they are counted among the founders of German philology. But multifaceted brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are world-famous today above all for their collection of Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen). Two hundred years ago, on December 20, 1812, the collection was published for the first time. Today, the collection of fairy tales, more commonly titled Grimm’s Fairy Tales in English, is one of the best-known works of German literature.
Jacob, born in 1785, and Wilhelm, born in 1786, were the oldest of six children of Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, a lawyer in the Hessian town of Hanau. The elder Grimm died in 1796. Until her death in 1808, their mother, Dorothea had to raise the family without a breadwinner. She found support in her older sister, a lady of the court in Kassel, who not only ensured the livelihood of the family, but also took on the educational costs of her nephews, who both went on to study in the university town of Marburg after finishing their schooling in Kassel. /"Germany.info"/
