PROJECTS AND PARTNERSHIPS

“The Grimms and I go way back. I was born in 1980 in Hanau, Germany, and thus share the same birth place as the infamous Brothers Grimm. I like to imagine that I was meant to become a fairy-tale scholar and make a career of “Märchen” (fairy tale in German) because of it. I vividly remember my grandmother Ingrid reading me the Grimms’ fairy tales whenever I had a sleepover at her place. She had a wonderful reading voice and I especially loved listening to her narrating the tale “The Fisherman and His Wife.” In 2017, when she turned 96, I asked her to read me a short snippet of that fairy tale again, which I recorded on my phone. Her storytelling voice, saved now as an artefact in the form of an audio file, is my personal “golden key” that I hold dear. I realize now that it opened for me that little chest full of wonderful things as described by the Grimms because it granted me access to the world of fairy stories. Ingrid passed away in 2022 at the remarkable age of 101. Besides listening to fairy-tale audio plays, attending fairy-tale theater plays, and visiting fairy-tale theme parks (you are exposed to the Grimms’ fairy tales quite a bit when you grow up in the vicinity of Hanau), I was fascinated with the television show The Storyteller by Jim Henderson and fairy-tale retellings in the form of Japanese animated television series. When I was asked later to pick a research field for my PhD studies at the University of Florida, I knew it could only be fairy tales. I wrote my doctoral dissertation about Orientalism in German literary fairy tales or “Kunstmärchen” and attended my first fairy-tale class taught by Dr. John Cech. I was an absolute novice to the academic field of fairy-tale studies. In 2012, it was the 200th anniversary of the Grimms’ fairy-tale collection and, encouraged by Dr. Cech, I gave my first presentations on German fairy tales at Harvard University and at the University of Lisbon, Portugal."

By Claudia Schwabe