path: root/docs/umich/w24_fairy.md

# Winter 2024 Course Review: GERMAN 386

2024-05-07

Course Title: Fairy Tales

Rating: 3.5/5

## Instructor (Laura Okkema)

I took her [GERMAN 103 last semester](f23_wrapup.md#german-103), and wrote
a review there.

I align with a lot of her opinions, including the appeal of physical
books, the danger of generative AI, and how the culinary value of the
rich. (Last semester when I asked her what the plural of "der Reiche" is,
she replied "die Reichen. Essen Sie sie.")

This semester I needed a 300-level humanities course, so I looked up the
catalog and bang, Laura's teaching this one. Instant yes.

## None of this is proven (a rant on humanities)

Up front, I will state the problem I have with this course and most of
humanities. The things we learn are very often factoids and theories, not
laws and axioms. And it's impossible to get to the latter; otherwise it
would not be humanities. So, for the majority of the course you'll see us:

- Read fairy tales A, B, and C
- Read some work some guy wrote in the year of our lord X
- The guy argues that a common thing in A, B, and C is someone did Y, and
  they argue it's because of Z
- We are now expected to know that Some Guy said Z causes Y on the test

Is it true that Z caues Y? No one cares! Except those who make the test,
those who take the test, and both of those scholars who still study this
topic.

(One of these people is Jack Zipes, who wrote our textbook. Less of
a textbook than an English translation of KHM. The book is _The Complete
Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm_, 3rd edition, Bantam 2003.)

Of course, I take all ideas with a grain of salt, and mentally I always
preface the knowledge with a "Some Guy said" tag, no matter how likely it
is true. And when I tell it to a friend on a party, I'll always make sure
to make it clear that it's a _theory_, not a known fact like someone dug
the Grimms' graves and interviewed them.

One exception, though, is obvious differences in the multiple versions of
the KHM. The changes are certainly intentional. But the reasons behind
them are subject to speculation.

Sometimes we see contradicting takes on a certain topic, and that's cool
because an unsettled debate means someone's out there in the depths of
JSTOR looking for evidence and hopefully will keep their job for a while.
(I sometimes wonder why we as a society set out a place for academia in
the humanities, other than "cultural heritage" and other buzzwords. Then
I remind myself that CEOs exist, and I find it pretty easy to justify.)

## Course topics

When I told my family I wanted to take this course, they thought I was
joking. A university? Teaching nursery rhymes?

This is not a "hey children sit down and I'll read you a bedtime story"
type of course (although Laura did this type of thing on GERMAN 103). It's
an academic approach to primary sources, including Grimm's fairy tales
(_Kinder- und Hausmärchen_, or KHM), and analytical articles, by a handful
of people who study (studied) them. And it's certainly not for children.

We first discussed what everyone knew was coming.

- Origin of the KHM (it's hard to pin down what the Grimms actually did)
- Ownership of fairy tales (spoiler: no one owns them) and different
  versions of the same tale
- Sex, violence, eroticism, and pedagogy of fear (yes we get to learn this
  sort of shit on the second lecture)

Then things got tense.

- Antisemitism, racism and colonialism (wow 19th century Germany was
  racist? who knew)

Here are some guys' ideas that may or may not make sense just read it and
remember what they said

- Propps's morphology (the idea that all fairy tales are built on a subset
  of these 32 functions)
- Freudian and Jungian psychology (to Freud, a pen is what he thinks a pen
  is)
- Walter Benjamin's idea of fairy tales providing "good counsel"
- And whatever Bruno Bettelheim has to say about "Hansel and Gretel".
  I made the best joke of the semester on the discussion session:

> They had dinner. It's on the house.

And we're back on coherent theories I understand.

- The "liminal stage", rites of passage, and the "hero's journey"
- Overthrowing tyrants, and how one single tale hints socialism
- Spinning and a "woman's job"
- The "angel woman" and "monster woman"

And finally we extended beyond the corpus of Grimms' works.

- Modern adaptations of "Bluebeard" and "Snow White" (where everything
  goes wrong)
- Romanticism, e.g. "The Sandman" by ETA Hoffmann
- Kunstmärchen, by e.g. HC Andersen 
- Animation by e.g. Lotte Reiniger, Tex Avery and Walt Disney's team

Let me expand on some of the more interesting ones.

(Disclaimer: what I write below is what I remember two weeks after the
course is over, on a 15-hour flight and I don't wanna cite sources I don't
know at the top of my head. If you're reading this as a student, please do
NOT use it as an exam guide. Just imagine a huge [citation needed] hanging
on the end of the page.)

### Who wrote the KHM?

Nobody.

The Grimms, Jacob and Wilhelm, set out to collect German folktales to
preserve German culture just as printing press was hitting the market. So
they went ahead and collected tales from the Volk — before Hitler
destroyed that word — to tap into that authentic Volkspoesie. Except it
was not the Volk and some of it was not German.

Linda Dégh says the Grimms collected tales from middle-class women they
knew, such as KD Viehmann, who had French ancestry. So the Grimms did not
create the tales from scratch.

The 1812 edition is geared toward fellow scholars like themselves, and was
intended to be an archive of some sort. But it was massively popular (by
19th century standards), unexpectedly among children, whose guardians had
one criticism about the book: it was too profane. Not the violent type of
profane (in fact, the Grimms added more of it), but the mentions of:

- premarital pregnancy
- incest
- evil biological mothers (hence the abundance of evil _stepmothers_)
- and anything that goes against the Catholic patriachy

So the Grimms did it faithfully — faithfully betraying their original
intention to stay authentic. Now in their 1857 edition, they had these
somewhat family-friendly, somewhat authentic tales, and they were
criticized by both parties.

I would hate to be in their shoes. Partly cause it's hard to hit
a compromise between the public and academia, and partly cause _have you
tried 1800's shoes?? They're not good_.

So, to put it down, for the KHM we ought to credit the Grimms, the
Germans, the French, the other European people who happened to live near
the Grimms, and angry Karens.

### Assorted racism

It was one of the more uneasy lectures, as you people get tense and Laura
herself becomes visibly uncomfortable as we described what today we would
call the Fucking Nazis.

KHM was banned in Germany in the years following Moustache Massacre Man's
death, who used it for propaganda. The Grimms regained their reputation
a few decades later, but these tales were… still racist.

Some publishers (not Bantam) received complaints about the depiction of
Jews in the KHM, so what they did is `s/Jew/miser/g`. Familiar? The Grimms
edited complaints into their 1857 edition. Now publishers are doing the
same thing.

Of course, they did it out of good intentions, and honestly what's the
alternative? Expose unsuspecting children to antisemitic stories and
embarrass guardians who never knew there was racist stories in KHM? Delete
these tales and deny racism? Both sound horrible. I believe we should
quarantine these tales — don't let children read them unsupervised, but
let scholars read them all they will.

The status quo in 1800s Germany was Christians hated Jews, because they're
"obsessed with money" and stuff while Christians wrote themselves a Bible
that forbade them from the banking industry. So they did shit like blood
libel and wrote some horrible stories that stereotyped the Jews to the
extreme. There was one tale ("The Clear Sun Will Bring It To Light") that
wasn't actively antisemitic, but was "anti-antisemitic" at best.

I was cautious not to assume that every single soul was racist, so in
a discussion post I defended the author of "The Clear Sun" — hey, what if
they were innocent? We do not have enough evidence to get a small enough
p value, so we cannot reject the hypothesis that they're racist. However,
racist or not the author may be, the society was.

Apparently the German hated Black people as well. Except there were
practically no Black people in Europe at that moment. So the Europeans
were just clinging on to their own beauty standards: white == beautiful
because they look like us, black == ugly because they don't.

There were tales where the hero tries to "save" some women who were
"cursed" to be covered in black skin. He fails and the women are stuck
with half-white, half-black skin, and they blame him for not completing
their transformation. They shouted my favorite sentence of this course
(to the best of my memory):

> You cursed dog, our blood shall cry in vengeance!

The German for "you cursed dog", "du verfluchter Hund", will forever be
stuck in my head.

This is kinda similar to how Christian missionaries went to Africa, tried
to convert locals to the religion of the Fish And Bread Man, but were met
with resistance.

### Propp's "Morphology of the Folktale"

Vladimir Propp studied hundreds of Russian fairy tales, and extracted 31
"functions" (32 if you count 8 and 8a as different ones), which are
surprisingly similar to a mathematical function in that they map
characters to a plot.

An example: the 7th function is "The victim submits to deception and
thereby unwittingly helps his enemy." It could be modeled as a function
with four arguments, `victim, villain, deception, help`. You can fill in
the blanks and make part of your own fairy tale!

What Propp argues, is that if you take a subset of these 32 functions, in
the order they appear, and piece them together with your own characters,
premises and events, you can reconstruct every fairy tale in existence!

Now, what's the problem?

The problem is I think it's bullshit. I mean, some fairy tales have a lot
of in common, yes. And I respect Propp for bringing forth his reductionist
theory. But it's like somebody left a mathematician in the literature
department. And I can defeat his argument with math.

First, his argument implies that there is a finite amount of fairy tales
that could exist before you run out of ideas. In this case, the upper
bound would be 2^32, or around 4 billion. But keep in mind there's
a substantial difference between infinite and 4 billion. We thought
4 billion was enough; now we have the 2038 problem.

Consider if someone found an unpublished book of fairy tales in their
basement. Inside of the book is a fairy tale where something happens that
doesn't easily fit in any of the 32 functions (which, if you look at
today's bookstore, is pretty likely). What does Propp do?

Does he:

1. disqualify the tale from being a "fairy tale"? (i.e. gatekeeping fairy
   tales)
2. loosen one of the 32 functions?
3. add a 33rd function?

If he does any of 2 and 3, then by induction, if you give him a 34th
function, he'll have no choice but to do it again, and by induction,
eventually the list will either be infinitely long, or just a vague list
that applies to every story ever.

So, if I were to add one function and one function only, it would be "none
of the above".

### The Hero's Journey

Campbell wrote about how every great story goes the same way: someone goes
on a quest in an unfamiliar realm, does something (e.g. defeats a dragon),
gets something (e.g. chests of gold) , and brings it back where they came
from, and everyone's happy, forming a cycle. The interesting part is the
how the hero navigates the unknown, growing up in the process.

Sounds familiar? It's just like Propp's morphology idea, but better. But
at least it makes sense to me. Instead of insisting that _every_ tale is
built upon these functions, what Campbell says is all _good_ tales follow
the hero's journey. That's why pretty much every Disney movie is like
that.

### Angel woman and monster woman

Gilbert and Gubar wrote that, in a patriarchy, woman fight against each
other for men's attention. The angel woman is a beautiful virgin, sought
for by all men. The monster woman is jealous and tries to sabotage the
angel woman's ascension to power.

In "Snow White", the titular character is an angel woman and the queen is
the monster woman. Contrary to popular opinion, G&G argue that the monster
woman, namely the queen, was the more interesting of the two, precisely
because her evilness propels the plot. It was not the passive doll as is
Snow White. If you count the things Snow did, she:

- was born beautiful af and made queen jealous af
- was sentenced dead by the queen but spared by the hunter
- did some housework for the dwarves
- was deceived by the queen a few times, but saved by dwarves
- finally ate an apple and went comatose
- was laid in a coffin
- was kissed by a prince
- married the prince

Not many of these were in active voice. I think it is an interesting way
to look at how 1800s Germany treated genders. Would make an awesome dating
show, "Angel or Monster".

### Modern adaptations

KHM has been in the public for a long time, and it's as well known as
cheese. As such, it's an open door for parody writers and serious writers
to reinterpret them.

What Coover did in "The Dead Queen" is to imagine that it was Snow White
who ordered the queen to dance to death in hot iron shoes, and after the
queen's death she becomes the monster woman, while being in an angel
woman's body who will perpetually remain a virgin ("hymen intact"),
despite a night with the prince and the seven dwarves (a… ninesome??)

Just… read it for yourself.

### Romanticism

Laura reveals Romanticism to be one of her favorite topics, because of how
much she relates to the idea of melancholy, alienation, and human emotion
in general. The texts we read both involved people in disturbed mental
states, or the Nachtseite, like depression and childhood trauma. The
depressed guy got a girlfriend at the end and was healed; the PTSD guy
leapt off a tower and killed himself.

On the discussion session, Laura shared her experience of being alienated
at a gathering at her in-law's. "I wanted to talk about books and music,
and I really don't care how Aunt Sue is doing." (paraphrased)

Would be awesome if a whole family was into RATM though.

What I did not expect though was to experience first-hand symptoms of the
Nachtseite just that evening. For more, read
[2024-04-05](../random/2024-04-05.md#the-nachtseite).

### Animation

Lotte Reiniger was coerced to make a few paper cutout animations for the
Nazis. If you look at that, it's completely understandable why Hitler
didn't get into the art school. She set the bar so high.

Tex Avery made cartoon shorts like "Swing Shift Cinderella", who is
actually a grown up Little Red Riding Hood and drives a Cinderella-mobile
in that the magic disappears when the clock strikes twelve. It's about how
the wolf (from "Little Red") flirts with Red but attracts her granny
instead. So you see him wooing Red and getting hit by granny with a hammer
conveniently stowed in her purse. Red rushes home by twelve and boards
a shuttle bus to "Lockweed". The bus is full of wolves.

Help did Tex Avery invent furries?

Walt Disney was another one to tap into the oil rig. But Zipes argues he's
pretty egoistic and refused to credit his team initially. It's just
a giant "Walt Disney Presents", no one else. Like bruh. I credit all my
teammates and instructors on my PCB. I enjoy giving people the credit they
deserve. It's not like they'll take my cut or anything.

## Assignments

Lots of reading. Prepare for 50 pages per week, and most of them isn't
even fairy tales, but secondary texts by Some Guy. You can skim them, but
there's either a quiz or a discussion on Canvas for each of the lectures.
They're pretty easy though. Some PDFs are scans of physical books and OCR
may or may not work, so "I'll open the quiz and just Ctrl+F" is a bad
idea.

Heaviest assignment is an essay, which requires you to choose a topic,
make an argument, and find evidence in KHM that supports it. You cannot
make speculations ("it seems to me that…"), because it's a closed reading,
meaning deductions can only be based on the original text. You can also
cite secondary sources to make it stronger. The requirements are >1400
words.

In my essay I defended violence in KHM. At one point, I mentioned how Red
in "Little Red" was complicit in the wolf's death by carrying stones to
the hunter. That's how closed the closed reading is.

If that's the kind of job a humanities student does, I'm glad I'm in
engineering. At least we can look at an oscilloscope and go "yup, that's
a sine".

## Verdict

Really extensive, but comes at the cost of superficiality. I knew
everything and knew nothing. But at least I might be more fun at parties.
Or less boring. Either way helps.

I like it when a course changes the way I look at the world. The lectures
on racism and sexism made me better informed whenever I am involved in
such discourse. However, in the face of fascists, try punching.

The last time I did humanities was in academic writing in 2021. this
course brought back that memory of going through papers without graphs or
tables in search of noteworthy sentences that's not there for the page
limit.

The course probably adds two to three hours of workload per week, except
the week the essay's due.

I grew up in a culture not dominated by KHM and managed the course, so you
can take it regardless of how much you know about KHM.