The Jew in the Thorn

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Jew in the Thorn is a fairy tale that is in the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm at 110 (KHM 110). In the first edition the title was Der Jud 'im Dorn . On the one hand, the fairy tale depicts the power of music, but it also has anti-Semitic traits.

First edition

The servant is playing on the gallows. Illustration by Hermann Vogel

A good servant gets from his miserly master after three years only three Heller paid and is content because he does not understand money. He meets a little man who asks him for the money and, when he sees his good heart, grants him three wishes. He wants a bird's reed that hits everything, a violin, to whose music everyone has to dance, and that nobody can refuse a wish. He meets a Jew whom he shoots a bird from a tree with a bird's cane. But when the man crawls through the thorns to fetch the bird, the servant lets him dance until he receives a large sum of money from him, which he - but only in the first two issues - had just cheated off a Christian . The Jew runs to the judge who has the servant caught and sentenced to death. On the scaffold , the servant asks himself to be allowed to play his violin again, whereupon the whole market square has to dance so long and so wildly until he is acquitted. Under the threat of the servant that he would play again, the Jew shouts that he has stolen the money and is hanged.

On the swear word “bear skins” cf. KHM 101 The bearskin , on “a stone on the ground wants to have mercy” KHM 1 The Frog King or the Iron Heinrich and KHM 80 On the death of the chicken .

Later editions

Wilhelm Grimm especially provided the text from the small edition of 1825 with coarse popular idioms. He characterizes the servant as hard-working ( every morning the first out of bed and in the evening the last in ), the Jew as greedy: "You miserable musician, you beer fiddler: wait if I catch you alone! I want to chase you so that you should lose the soles of your shoes: you rascal, put a penny in your mouth that you are worth six hellers "

On the one hand, the third edition in 1837 has been significantly expanded. The title character is also described as the “Jew with a long goatee”, his clothing is a “shabby skirt”, and his speeches, as well as those of the servant, are elaborate. On the other hand, the exact amount of money and its origin are no longer given.

origin

The Grimm Brothers 'fairy tales for children and households contain the fairy tale since the second part of the first edition of 1815 (since No. 24, title: Der Jud' im Dorn ) as No. 110. According to the Brothers Grimm's comments, it is based on the comedy Historia from a Bawrenknecht by Albrecht Dietrich (there the servant is called Dulla and the Jew is a monk ) and a carnival game by Fritz Dölla von Ayrer . They bring him in connection with Till Eulenspiegel . They also used a very simple story from Paderborn (the von Haxthausen family ) and one from Hesse . The latter begins like the fool's tale , the youngest wants a hat that leads astray on the right path, a wishing ring, a violin that makes everyone dance , and in the end makes everyone rich.

“The legend of dancing in the thorns” is “very common”, they mention KHM 56 The Dearest Roland . For the magical male see also GHM 97 The Water of Life , for the last saving wish in the execution KHM 116 The blue light .

criticism

The fairy tale was accused of spreading the stereotype of the "greedy", "deceitful", "defamatory" Jews. The Jew in the fairy tale fulfills a negative cliché from the Grimm brothers' lifetime. The fairy tale is the product of a prejudice for which there is no concrete evidence in the story itself. Theodor W. Adorno establishes relationships between the fairy tale and Walther's rehearsal song in Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and bases his canonized suspicion of anti-Semitism on this.

swell

  • Brothers Grimm: Children's and Household Tales. Complete edition. With 184 illustrations by contemporary artists and an afterword by Heinz Rölleke. 19th edition. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf / Zurich, 1999, ISBN 3-538-06943-3 , pp. 534-541.
  • Brothers Grimm: Children's and Household Tales. Last hand edition with the original notes by the Brothers Grimm. With an appendix of all fairy tales and certificates of origin, not published in all editions, published by Heinz Rölleke. Volume 3: Original Notes, Guarantees of Origin, Afterword. Revised and bibliographically supplemented edition. Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-15-003193-1 , pp. 203-204, pp. 488-489.

literature

Web links

Wikisource: The Jew in the Thorn  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lothar Bluhm, Heinz Rölleke: “Speeches of the people that I always listen to”. Fairy tale - proverb - saying. On the folk-poetic design of children's and house fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. New edition. S. Hirzel Verlag, Stuttgart / Leipzig 1997, ISBN 3-7776-0733-9 , pp. 124-126.
  2. ↑ Viktoria Luise Gutsche: Between demarcation and rapprochement: Constructions of the Jewish in the literature of the 17th century. de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-035381-5 .
  3. ↑ Grimm expert Holger Ehrhardt looks at the darker side of the fairy tale brothers. In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. March 16, 2012.
  4. ↑ Lothar Bluhm in: Comics with Brothers Grimm . Cultures of the comic The blog for the Colloquium on Cultural Studies at the University of Koblenz. Retrieved March 4, 2019
  5. ^ Lothar Bluhm: Jews and Judaism in German-language literature. In: Judaism and Anti-Semitism in Europe. Edited by Ulrich A. Wien. Mohr / Siebeck Verlag, Tübingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-16-155151-2 . Pp. 187-221, especially pp. 197-202.
  6. ↑ Christine Shojaej Kawan, quoted in Hans-Jörg Uther: Handbook on the "Children's and Household Tales" by the Brothers Grimm. de Gruyter, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-019441-8 . Page 238
  7. ↑ The Jew in the Thorn or: How anti-Semitic are The Mastersingers of Nuremberg? German quarterly for literary studies and intellectual history June 1995, vol. 69, number 2, pp. 271–299
  8. ↑ In a hedge of thorns, consumed by envy and grief, he had to hide there. Libretto, first act