The Jew in the thornbush: German fairy tales and anti-semitism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Musaus, Naubert and the Grimms'

Abstract

This essay looks at a particular time and place of the tale-telling tradition, namely the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Germany, at tales recorded or written by the well-known brothers Grimm and by two of their less famous precursors, Johann Karl August Musäus and Benedikte Naubert, with a view to seeing how these writers use violence in their stories. The narratives studied are all Märchen – that is, folk or fairy tales. They do not aspire to the cosmology of myth or saga, for example; they are meant for sheer entertainment, whatever underlying messages or revelations about cultural values one may find in them