It is an understatement to say that North Americans are familiar with Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Their names and work have long been an integral part of American culture: from the first English-language edition of their fairy tales published 200 years ago to numerous Disney adaptations, from the 2005 Hollywood adventure fantasy film The Brothers Grimm to the recently founded Brothers Grimm Society of North America. And yet, as Jakob Norberg notes at the beginning of his new book, such acknowledgment has focused almost exclusively on the Grimms’ collection of tales and not on their myriad other philological and political contributions. To be sure, linguists are well aware of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik (1819–1837), and scholars from many fields refer to the Deutsches Wörterbuch begun by the Grimms in 1854. Yet, of the four English-language biographies written about the brothers, only one, written fifty years ago for a popular audience, focuses on anything beyond the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Murray B. Peppard, Paths Through the Forest [1971]; notably, this work is not listed in Norberg's bibliography). Even if scholars of the nineteenth century know that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were among the seven professors fired from the University of Göttingen in 1837 for protesting the revocation of the new Hanoverian constitution by Ernst August I, they might not be familiar with the Grimms’ views about the German nation. Norberg has written this book to address those gaps. In the process, he also expands our understanding of nineteenth-century German nationalism.
His approach involves a careful reading of the Grimms’ published writings, lectures, and correspondence. His argument also rests on wide-ranging secondary sources about the Grimms, their contemporaries, and key historical events. Additionally, Norberg's notes provide a wealth of references to political theory, including historical and contemporary theories of nationalism. Each of the book's six chapters presents the specific intellectual or political context for the Grimms’ work about the German nation, including Jacob's speech at the first convention of Germanists in 1846, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–1858), Wilhelm's study of ancient Germanic literature, the work of both brothers as civil servants for various governments, Jacob's role in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, his thoughts about education, and his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1848).
The notion Norberg drives home is that the task of the philologist in all of these endeavors was not political in the sense of advocating for a particular form of government or even for any specific policies regarding the lives of a state's subjects. He points out that Jacob Grimm claimed to have no theory of the state and was not interested in the “social question” (135) that motivated some of his contemporaries. Rather, Norberg's innovative contribution is proposing the concept of the “philologist king” to describe the Grimms’ goal. This is an allusion to Plato's “philosopher king” (2), but with a specific historical twist. In the context of the national awakening during and after Napoleon's occupation of Germany, the Grimms’ extensive research into the history of German culture (including linguistic, legal, literary, and grammatical topics) was intended to advise a German ruler about his nation. Rather than present a reading of the fairy tales or the details of Jacob's theory of the First Germanic Sound Shift, Norberg digs into the implications of the Grimms’ wide-ranging philological scholarship to uncover their concept of the Volk. That work enabled them, so Norberg's argument, to articulate and promote a nationalist ideal of the German people as “determinate rather than undefined, natural rather than fabricated, historically deep rather than recently conjured” (37). In other words, their philological work provided their contemporaries “the image of an already existing people, enclosed in its own cultural life” (80).
In the process of uncovering this philological project, Norberg alerts us to the contradictions inherent in it, as in most nationalist dogmas. For instance, as philologists who studied particularity, the Grimms had to acknowledge its tension with the emergence of a national culture. In his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache Jacob condemned foreign rule as unacceptable yet celebrated the historical incursions of the Germanic tribes across Western Europe. And complaints about specific rulers or advocating for a constitution and the primacy of the people did not prevent the Grimms from insisting on the necessity of monarchical government. But there are a few topics Norberg touches on which could benefit from further explanation. For example, did Jacob's role as censor include having to ban written calls for national unity that he otherwise supported? How did his use of the term “fatherland” that initially referred to Hesse, change in his later years to refer to “Germany”? But perhaps most importantly, how did he reconcile his deep dedication to a national cause with his long-term service to Prussia? In other words, what becomes of Austria and the German-speaking parts of Bohemia and Moravia in his commitment to unifying a philologically defined German nation? Or was he simply silent on the matter of the so-called kleindeutsche Lösung? Finally, Norberg presents substantial evidence that Jacob Grimm believed that philological knowledge qualified him to influence the future of Germany, but did this idea catch on? We read that Theodor Fontane viewed one of his speeches as vacuous; it would be interesting to hear more about contemporary opinions from within the broader nationalist movement about the Grimms’ faith in the authority of the philologist.
In sum, this well-written and carefully researched book offers much food for thought for historians of Central Europe. The Grimms’ scholarship addressed the history of language, legal traditions, literature, myth, and folk culture. Jakob Norberg's detailed examination of their published work provides new insights into its implications for nationalist thinking in nineteenth-century Central Europe. It also raises important questions that are worth pursuing further. In the process, it challenges us to reflect on the role and contribution of scholarly work from a range of historical disciplines in the project of defining the nation and advocating for its political consequences.
