11- THE END OF AN ERA
RUMOR HAD SPREAD THROUGHOUT KASSEL THAT KING Jerome, fearing a sudden attack on his sovereignty at any moment, had given orders for a carriage and horses to be held ready round the clock in case he needed to make a quick escape. It was also known that, since as early as the spring of 1813, the Pallais Bellevue, Jerome's residence in the city, was being emptied of its most valuable articles, which were then transported secretly to France.
The inevitable did come to pass. On September 28, 1814, Chernichev, a great Russian general, leading an army of Cossacks, opened fire on the city in a battle against French troops commanded by General Allix. In the blink of an eye, a mass of Hessian citizens rose up and joined the Russians, successfully forcing the French to relinquish the city. "On that morning," Ludwig Grimm's future wife wrote in her diary, ''three people were killed by cannon balls: (1) a porcelain mender, (2) a shepherd woman, and (3) gardener Meiss's son." Jerome Bonaparte immediately fled to Marburg. One month later, he attempted to regain control of Kassel, but failed; and by October 26, he had been permanently removed from Hesse, his seven year reign now at an end.
Jacob wrote to his friend Arnim about the long-anticipated evacuation of the French from his city. "You'd hardly believe how [they] have withdrawn from us," he exclaimed, "so effortlessly and with nearly no sensation." The only Frenchman in Jerome's court who was "a loyal and especially kind man" was nowhere to be found in the final days. "Other than he," Jacob wrote, "I know of not one soul, among all the high and low ranked people, that I ever respected or that I might pity now." His service to the French king "had become ever more meaningless" in the final year. He went on: "The library was packed up and moved out. I attended the meetings of the City Council only twice or three times in a single year, and not only I, but other colleagues as well, remained aloof without reprimand, so little did our superiors have an eye on order in the whole matter."
Jacob wrote to his friend Arnim about the long-anticipated evacuation of the French from his city.
In the same letter, Jacob described the banished king as vain and foolish and "caught up in a constant, doubly debauched game of aping the Emperor," his brother Napoleon. Jerome's biggest mistake as king, however, was his inability to show a serious "love and understanding" of his people.” In all his seven years in Hesse, the king had never learned to speak the German language, a true embarrassment from Jacob's standpoint, for his scholarship with Wilhelm had brought him to the conclusion that language had the power to transcend national differences and, in doing so, to bring people together. The fairy tales themselves, with their long oral tradition, their narrative malleability, and the ease with which they seemed to move across borders in a variety of tongues and dialects, were proof of this.
In less than a month after Jerome's departure from Kassel, Hesse's former regent, Elector Wilhelm, returned from exile to the city with his wife, Wilhelmine Karoline. They arrived in grand display, moving in procession through the center of the city as the townsfolk ran into the streets and rejoiced. Jacob, Wilhelm, and Lotte were especially jubilant, for their beloved Aunt Henriette had returned home to them again.
Jacob, Wilhelm, and Lotte were especially jubilant, for their beloved Aunt Henriette had returned home to them again.
Wilhelm I immediately set to work assembling a Hessian army that would join the Allies against Napoleon in a march on Paris. Jacob was assigned to join the campaign as secretary to Count Keller, the Hessian representative to the Grand Allied Headquarters. Though he did not relish the idea of traveling in such chaotic times because it would significantly interrupt his research, Jacob felt it was his duty to serve in the German war of liberation against those who had encroached upon his home, his language, and his daily way of life for so long. Meanwhile, Ludwig and Karl Grimm were serving in the Hessian army, and Wilhelm offered the proceeds of a second edition of his publication of Poor Henry to assist in outfitting newly recruited volunteers to the forces.
Hessian women prepared their husbands, sons, and brothers for the war by knitting warm clothing and sewing and repairing garments. On a cold winter day in 1814, just after the New Year, Lotte Grimm packed her brother Jacob's bags for his long journey into enemy territory. Aunt Zimmer did her bit, too, sending her nephew into the field with a satchel of supplies she had made and purchased, including a pair of woolen galoshes.
"One speaks of peace," he wrote gloomily to Wilhelm from the road.
Jacob traveled with the Grand Allied Headquarters first to Frankfurt, then on to Karlsruhe and Rastadt. With each mile, the trip became more demanding and dangerous. The Allied delegation often had to separate into small groups of traveling parties to avoid enemy gunfire and attacks, and the frigid winter air cut to the bone during the long hours of carriage travel. Jacob wore the woolen galoshes that Henriette had given him, but, to his dismay, he accidentally left them behind in Frankfurt. Even worse than the cold was the blinding reflection of the sun on the snow-covered fields in the long stretches of countryside they traversed. It made Jacob fearful of losing his vision.
If the physical discomforts weren't enough, Jacob also witnessed countless acts of petty thievery and violence among their own Allied forces, and, when the delegation had reached enemy soil, he was appalled to learn that Allied soldiers had raped and abused French women in many of the small villages they had encamped in. Ruffian soldiers who had suffered long years at war felt justified in treating the French in this way; but, unlike the soldiers' harsh morality, which was comparable to that of some of the fairy tales, Jacob's perception of justice was not the Biblical revenge that calls for an "eye for an eye." "One speaks of peace," he wrote gloomily to Wilhelm from the road. "I only wish that [we] could be true to [ourselves] and positively liberate everything that Germany is." After that, he wrote, the Allies should simply let the French be. Otherwise, he warned, the Allies would simply "do the same to them" that they had "suffered from them.”
The paradox of serving Count Keller, an aristocratic minister of high privilege, when poverty and destruction awaited them in every small town they traveled through, also weighed upon Jacob's conscience. High-ranking officials in the delegation held extravagant parties and dinners, which Jacob desperately tried to avoid attending. Surrounded by the decadence, he was beginning to feel isolated and homesick. From Basel, he reported that he had gone to the theater "to forget [his] loneliness," but the plays and the actors were "sincerely poor." The only thing that had made an impression on him were the Russian officers in the audience who "clapped incessantly, either because they didn't understand a thing or because they wanted to make a bit of fun for themselves." How very strange that so many foreigners would come together in an effort such as this, the liberation of Europe from the Bonapartes.
Back at home, Wilhelm attempted to keep pace with their research projects and efforts on the fairy tale anthology, but there were too many interruptions during the day. Troops from various European armies moved in and out of Kassel in a constant flow, and they took up quarters in citizens' homes, including the Grimms' apartment. Alone with only Lotte for company, Wilhelm was beginning to miss Jacob, too. "It's morning, and as usual, the tea machine is boiling," he wrote, reminding Jacob of their cozy domestic routines. "Beside me is your table with its papers, and your chair [is standing] before it." As was true of the separations between the brothers in the past, this was a painful time. The long years of collaboration on the fairy tales had bound Jacob and Wilhelm together in every aspect of their lives. "After I sadly watched your lantern travel up the street like a star until it disappeared around the corner," Wilhelm wrote of his brother's departure from Kassel, "we [Wilhelm and Lotte] sat quietly" together in the house.
In his daily activities, Wilhelm was now surrounded entirely by women. Aunt Zimmer had moved into her new quarters in the city: "The house is very well appointed and the Electress is thoroughly satisfied." As she unpacked her things, Henriette brought out many "marvelous flannels" and "silk fabrics for vests" for Jacob and Wilhelm. "She is far too good, how she has always thought about and cared for us," Wilhelm wrote. Henriette was now sixty-six years old and still faithfully serving her lady, the electress. Wilhelm visited his aunt devotedly, every other day, and though he had asked Lotte to do the same, she disregarded his wishes. Little had changed in the brothers' domestic opinion of their sister. Lotte's distance regarding Henriette aggravated Wilhelm to no end, and when she had packed his bags for the journey to France, Jacob complained in a letter from Rastadt that she had not included his good silk pants.
Dortchen Wild was nineteen years old now and a true and constant element of the Grimm family. Her name came up in the brothers' letters with more frequency than Lotte's. "Send Dortchen my warm greetings," Jacob would often write. "Dortchen says hello," Wilhelm would answer in return. On one occasion, Wilhelm reported that Dortchen had bought them a newset of knives for the kitchen. On his birthday, she had baked him a cake and had given him some lovely flowers. He always mentioned when she had taken ill and detailed to Jacob how long she had needed to stay in bed. Her health had deteriorated since the recent death of her mother, whom Dortchen nursed to her dying day. Now Dortchen's father, Rudolf, had fallen ill with dropsy. With "old man Wild" so sick, Wilhelm wrote to Jacob, Dortchen had a lot to do. As the only daughter left in the household - the others had married and moved out-she often stayed up until one or two in the morning so that she could catch up on the day's work.
In spite of her responsibilities at home, Dortchen managed to knit six pairs of socks for Ludwig Grimm to take with him to the field. Ludwig and Karl had just arrived in Kassel with their new regiment. "When it came to the swearing in," Wilhelm wrote of the church service held in honor of the Hessian army the day before his brothers marched into battle, "all the farmers solemnly and reverently raised their hands," while ''the finer people looked as if they were ashamed of themselves." The following morning, Wilhelm marched through the streets of Kassel side-by-side with Ludwig and his unit as it made its way for the city gates. They walked all the way to Poplar Alley together, he told Jacob, where they kissed each other goodbye. Wilhelm also managed to find Karl in the throng and bid him farewell. "God keep them both," he wrote, hoping their youngest brothers would return home safely.
Arriving in Chaumont on March 19, Jacob's letters began to show signs of depressing fatigue for the unending horrors he was presented with. "One must take a closer look at what the soldier must endure," he wrote to Wilhelm. Illness, hospital, and imprisonment were the most horrible things a common soldier suffered in the ugliness of war. Recently, he had seen a young officer lying in the middle of the thoroughfare while carriages and marching troops simply maneuvered around him. Some passed by indifferently, and no one stopped to help the boy, leaving Jacob to wonder whether later that night he had died right there beneath the open sky without being buried.
The previous summer, Dorothea Viehmann had added an unusual tale to the brothers' anthology titled "The Three Army Surgeons." It is one of the few stories that make reference to the theme of war, and it involves gruesome amputations. But unlike the amputations the heroine who loses her hands in "The Maiden with No Hands" suffers, those in "The Three Army Surgeons" are not symbolic of a higher moral purpose. Instead, they are meant as burlesque commentary on the kind of class differences that Wilhelm perceived in the church before the Hessians had marched into battle, the hard truth being that it was far more likely for a common foot soldier, and not an army surgeon of the higher social class, to run the risk of losing an arm, a leg, or his life, in service to his country.
"Three army surgeons went out into the world thinking they had learned everything they could about their art," the story begins rather unassumingly. Arriving at an inn, the men decide to spend the night there. Upon hearing that they are surgeons, the innkeeper grows curious about their art and asks them to show him what they can do. The first surgeon boasts that he can cut off his own hand, then heal himself the following morning. The second claims he can rip his own heart out, then put it back the next day. The third promises to poke out his own eyes, then restore his vision. But little does the innkeeper know that the three men possess a magic ointment. Wherever the strange salve is applied, the body heals instantly.
So, the story continues, the army surgeons "cut their hand, heart, and eyes from their bodies, just as they claimed they would." Then, putting everything together on a plate, the innkeeper gives the body parts to his kitchen maid and tells her to put them in the cupboard for safekeeping. The girl, we learn, has a secret lover who happens to be a soldier. That night, when everyone is sleeping, the soldier-it's a given that he is poor and without means-sneaks into the inn for a free meal. When he arrives there, the maid unlocks the cupboard and fetches something for him to eat. But her passion for her man makes the maid a little forgetful, and she doesn't close the cupboard door behind her.
Sitting down beside him at the table, the girl watches her beloved eat, and soon the two lose themselves in conversation. Just then, the house cat comes slinking into the kitchen and finds the cupboard door wide open. Snatching up the hand, the heart, and the eyes on the plate, the bad cat dashes out of the house. When the maid goes to clean up after her boyfriend's meal, she discovers, to her dismay, an empty plate in the cupboard. "Ach! Poor maid that I am! What will I do?" she cries.
The soldier comes to her rescue. "Just give me a sharp knife," he tells her. "There is a thief hanging in the gallows. I'll go and cut off his hand. Which [hand] was it, then?" he asks. "The right one," the maid replies. And so, the soldier runs off to the gallows and cuts the hand off ''the poor sinner" and brings it back to his girlfriend. Then the soldier spies the cat slinking about, and he makes a grab for the animal and gouges its eyes out. Now all that's left to drum up in this bizarre scavenger hunt isa heart. "Didn't you do your butchering today?" the soldier asks the kitchen maid, "and have you not some pork in the cellar?" The girl answers yes. "Well, that's good," he replies, and off he goes to find the pig's heart. Once all the body parts are assembled, the kitchen maid puts them onto the plate, locks them up in the cupboard and, after kissing her beau goodbye, rests easily through the night.
As one might expect, the plot of the missing body parts in "The Three Army Surgeons" begins to thicken. The next morning, the innkeeper brings the three doctors the plate with their alleged belongings on it. The first surgeon puts the thief's hand to his wrist, rubs it with the magic ointment, and, lo and behold, the hand fuses itself to his arm. The second man stuffs the cat's eyes into his empty sockets, applies the ointment, and, miraculously, his vision is restored. Finally, the third surgeon puts the pig's heart inside his chest. In wonderment, the innkeeper says he's never seen such a thing in all his life and promises to spread the word and make the three surgeons famous.
The doctors, however, begin to behave quite strangely. The one with the pig's heart, we read, wanders off to a corner and, unable to help himself, "sniffles around [there] as pigs do." Then he scurries off to the thickest mud he can find and rolls around in it. Things don't go too well for the second surgeon, either. Rubbing his eyes in puzzlement, he says, "Comrades, what is it? These aren't my eyes. I can't see a thing. Show me the way, so that I don't stumble." Thus, the three strange invalids depart and walk, with great effort, almost like injured foot soldiers on a long march in the field, until they reach the next inn. Inside, they see a rich man counting his money at a table in the corner. The surgeon with the thief's hand begins to feel a twitching in his fingers and makes a grab for the man's money. His companions are astonished and scold him bitterly. "Oh," he pleads with them, "I can't help it!"
That night, when the three men lie down to sleep, we finally learn about the third surgeon's (the one with the cat's eyes) unlucky fate. The room they're sleeping in is "so dark," the story puns, ''that you couldn't see your own hand before your eyes." Suddenly, the man cries out to the others. "Brothers, look! Can you see the little white mice scurrying around?"
By now, the surgeons are beginning to realize that something is not right with them. Hoping to find answers, they return to the inn where everything had gone so awry. When they tell their story to the innkeeper, he blames the kitchen maid and calls out for the girl. The maid, however, sees trouble brewing and slips out the back door, never to return. To make up for the surgeons' losses, the innkeeper must give the three men all his money and everything he owns. It's enough wealth to last their entire lives, but the story concludes, ''they would have rather had their right parts." As we saw in "Doctor Know It All," a man of medicine is always a cut above in the given social strata. In "The Three Army Surgeons," a commoner, the poor soldier, rises above the army doctors by a comical twist of fate.
The story of "The Three Army Surgeons" strangely reflected the rising incidence of organ transplants that had begun to take place in experimental medicine in Europe. With a war going on, it was far easier for corpses to move through the black market. Even Jacob, who by now had reached Paris with the Allied Headquarters, expressed a deep fear of dying far away from home, terrified as he was about what might happen to his body with no family member there to cart it off. A grave digger, he wrote to Wilhelm, could easily sell off parts of it to doctors who experimented in the dark arts.
By the time the Allied Headquarters had reached Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte had abdicated. With Jacob far away in France for an indefinite period, Wilhelm tried to resume work on the second volume of the fairy tales. He wrote to Jenny von Droste-Hulshoff because he had heard from the von Haxthausens that Jenny had found and transcribed more fairy tales.After all the "anguish and joy" of the final days of the war, and with peace restored to Europe, he wrote to her, he was "using these quiet hours" to ''bring some order to what has been collected thus far." He asked Jenny to send him her new discoveries and told her that he hoped to come to Bokerhof again that summer, where he would have ''the pleasure of thanking [her] in person." Despite all his gentility when it came to Jenny von Droste-Hulshoff, Wilhelm still seemed to harbor a grudge toward her sister Annette. Closing his letter, he sent regards to "Miss Nette," but with a caveat: "... [only] if she still wants to hear from me (just as we, now that the French have been chased away, do not wish to be mean to anyone else either).”
Wilhelm also announced to the von Haxthausen sisters his intention of pushing forward with publication of the scores of stories they had contributed over the past three years and asked for new additions they might have. The response was swift. By the end of May 1814, he had received another package from B6kerhof. "Through your gift, madam," he wrote in thanks to Ludowine, "you have brought me unexpected joy." The stories, he wrote, were "doubly invaluable ... in part because of their lovely, fairy-tale like content" and also because the sisters had delivered them in Plattdeutsch, a northern German dialect. For him, dialects imbued the stories with a naivete and innocence that conjured up the true spirit of the Volk. He praised the sisters' fine work and added that their tales were "so well told," that he didn't "want to change a thing." Compared to the process of collecting for volume one of the fairy tales, which had been an arduous six years of "isolating and lonely" work for him and Jacob, this new volume "was developing much better" and, thanks to Ludowine and her sisters, would be published more swiftly. Their tales, he promised, would be "a decoration to volume two."
That summer, Jacob returned home to Kassel to find the manuscript nearly complete. It was just as well, for soon he would depart again to join the Hessian delegation to Vienna, where the future of Europe after Bonaparte would be determined by all the powers of the Continent at the Vienna Congress. During his brief stay in Kassel, Jacob took time to visit their fairy tale queen, Dorothea Viehmann. Ludwig Grimm was also in Kassel, home from the war and suffering minor wounds; he, too, visited Viehmann so that he could draw her portrait. His rendition of the storyteller appeared as the frontispiece of the 1819 edition of the Children's and Household Fairy Tales.
Because of his new diplomatic duties to Elector Wilhelm I, Jacob's involvement in the fairy tale anthologies was waning. Indeed, developments in Kassel following the war seemed to imply that the brothers' eight years of collecting from their women friends were coming to an end. The Grimms' landlord raised the rent of the family apartment in the Marktgasse exorbitantly high, which forced them to find a new home in the city. They took up quarters near the Pallais Bellevue so that Jacob could be in steady contact with the court, but the distance to the Wild household was much greater. Lotte was unhappy that she could no longer be in close proximity to Dortchen, though the families still remained in constant contact.
Many of the original contributors to the fairy tales were married now, busy with their husbands and households, giving birth, and adjusting to the new peace that had arrived in Europe. By the time Jacob left for Vienna in early September, the weekly reading circle was inactive, and the time for telling fairy tales had passed. Nearly overnight, it seemed, the new Europe was making new demands for new projects.
Volume two of the Children's and Household Fairy Tales was published in December 1814 and included seventy new stories. This number, however, in no way reflected the true magnitude of the contributions of the van Haxthausens, the van Droste-Hillshoffs, and Dorothea Viehmann, for some of the tales that had been shared would appear in later editions or as fusions of two or more versions. The women's total contribution was staggering: Seventy-five texts were submitted by the van Haxthausens and the van Droste-Hillshoffs at B6kerhof, and an additional forty came from Dorothea Viehmann.
In February 1815, Wilhelm was finally able to deliver a copy of the book to the ladies of B6kerhof. In a letter to Ludowine, he spoke highly of Dorothea Viehmann, but, he added, the "poor woman ha[d] been very ill ... and ha[d] experienced great misfortune." Wilhelm sent a copy of the tales to Jenny van Droste-Hulshoff that same day. "Finally, madam," he wrote, "I can thank you for your lovely contributions to our collection of fairy tales, which gave me so much pleasure and which arrived in the perfect moment." He added a few anecdotes about the final dramatic days of editing, saying that he would never forget when "some 7 or 8 Russian guardsmen," who had been quartered in the Grimm home for a few days while all of Europe waited for news of Napoleon's defeat, "were singing in the next room” as Wilhelm prepared the manuscript for printing. Such memories of the great wars that had raged for more than a decade and through the strong years of their youth would remain with the fairy tale collaborators for the rest of their lives.
Paradiz, Valerie. "The End of an Era" Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Kindle.