Art fairy tale

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Adelbert von Chamisso - Peter Schlemihl's wondrous story ; Etching by G. Cruikshank, 1827

Art fairy tales ( more recently also: modern fairy tales ) are a special form of the fairy tale literary genre . In contrast to folk tales , the authorship of art fairy tales can be assigned to a specific poet or writer .

Generic characteristics

Art fairy tales, like folk tales, use metaphors and often also take up the style, themes and elements of folk tales, but are usually neither one-dimensional in their narrative form , nor do they exhaust themselves in stereotypical abstraction of place, time and characters, i.e. they often provide additional detailed ( re) Descriptions of people and events. Unlike in folk tales, the characters are sometimes "broken" and their problems psychologized so that they also carry out "inner" changes. Instead of a black and white scheme, such as For example, that of "good and bad" including a clear moral positioning, moral gray areas are also dealt with in art fairy tales , and they do not always end happily (cf. Hans Christian Andersen : The Little Mermaid ).

Art fairy tales also often use a nested structure (fairy tale in fairy tale) and are often more extensive and literarily more ambitious than folk tales. As with the original folk tales, the art fairy tales often have or had the adults as the first addressees. In the foreword to the fairytale-like story The Little Prince , however, it is emphasized from the start that the book is aimed at both children and adults.

Some art fairy tales were adapted or designed as fairy tale drama or fairy tale opera centuries ago . In addition to more or less extensive narratives, fairy tale novels have also been presented, but most of them also have characteristics of fantasy literature and are therefore difficult to distinguish from them.

Literary history

Art fairy tales have been widespread since ancient times ( Apuleius : " Amor and Psyche ", 2nd century AD). The first modern art fairy tales can be found in the collection Le piacevoli notti (German The delightful nights ) of the Italian Straparola . The French fairy tales of the Rococo were in Germany at the time of the Weimar Classics in particular by Christoph Martin Wieland in the collection Dschinnistan taken. Wieland's Lulu or the Magic Flute inspired Emanuel Schikaneder to write the libretto of Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte . By Johann Wolfgang Goethe three Kunstmärchen come: The Tale (in conversations German emigrants ) The new Paris (in Poetry and Truth ) and The New Melusine (in Wilhelm Meister's Travels ).

Most of the authors of German Romanticism wrote art fairy tales, such as Ludwig Tieck ( Der blonde Eckbert , 1797), Novalis (the fairy tale stories in the story Die Lehrlinge zu Sais , 1798–1799, and in the fragment of the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen , 1800), Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué ( Undine , 1811), ETA Hoffmann , who thematized the opposing relationship between poetic fairy tale and prosaic everyday reality ( Der goldenne Topf , 1814), Adelbert von Chamisso ( Peter Schlemihl's miraculous story , 1813) and Clemens Brentano ( Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeleia , 1838). The imaginative fairy tales by the French romanticist Charles Nodier also show contrasting moments between the bizarre and the wonderful.

The politicized poets of Vormärz refreshed the genre with a drastic breach of the convention of the comforting end or compensatory justice. Georg Büchner's anti-fairy tales are integrated into his dramas. The best known is the anti- fairy tale from Woyzeck , in which the grandmother tells her granddaughter the fairy tale Sterntaler with a terrible outcome.

The literature of the restoration epoch (1815–48) is rich in art fairy tales. Many of them achieved the popularity of folk tales, so in Biedermeier Germany Wilhelm Hauff's The Story of Kalif Storch , The Dwarf Nose , The Story of Little Muck and Eduard Mörike's History of the Beautiful Lau . In Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen wrote a large number of art fairy tales that are now part of world literature ( The Emperor's New Clothes , The Little Mermaid , The Ugly Duckling ). Some art fairy tales were also aimed exclusively at adults, such as the brown fairy tales of Alexander von Ungern-Sternberg , which are characterized by undisguised eroticism .

Even poets who are considered realism wrote art fairy tales, for example Theodor Storm ( Die Regentrude and Bulemanns Haus ) and Gottfried Keller ( Spiegel, das Kitten ) in the German-speaking world . Towards the end of the 19th century, in the epoch of neo-romanticism , the fairy tale poems by Oscar Wilde ( The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales and A Pomegranate House ) were written in England .

Stories like The Fairy Tale of the 672nd Night by Hugo von Hofmannsthal continue the genre of the anti-fairy tale and enrich the art fairy tale with a metatextual tendency. Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1912), Alfred Döblins Blaubart and Robert Musils Die Portugiesin (1923) belong to the genre of the meta-fairy tale. In the 20th century Manfred Kyber became known for his animal tales, Richard Hughes 'imaginative and grotesque fairy tales are also noteworthy (e.g. Gertrude and the sea girl illustrated by Nicole de Claveloux and the fairy tales from Hughes' collection The Wonder Dog ). Hermann Hesse often wrote satirical fairy tales. Also JRR Tolkien wrote several humorous tales (z. B. Farmer Giles of Ham ). The line of development extends to the "enlightened fairy tales" by Peter Rühmkorf ( The Keeper of the Dungheap ).

The apparent fading out of external reality in the fairy tale makes it possible to convey socially critical content, e.g. E.g. in Goethe's fairy tale (1795) the symbolically conveyed criticism of the social conditions in post-revolutionary France and in Gerhart Hauptmann's fairy tale (1941) of National Socialist racial hygiene and so-called euthanasia .

From around the 1980s onwards, the alternative movements found their expression in art fairy tales, in which the focus was then less on literary qualities than on the introduction of "alternative" or content that stands in contrast to the "established" social majority. The Lucy Körner Verlag in Fellbach, with its author and publisher Heinz Körner, was the first publisher to achieve bestseller successes with fairy tales and fairy tale anthologies (including Die Farben der Reality , 1983), which under the motto “Books for a Better World” was esoteric-alternative Topics dealt with. In addition to Kristiane Allert-Wybranietz , Roland Kübler was also one of the co-editors and authors of Lucy Körner Verlag , which had published its own fairy tales and anthologies with similar success with its Stendel publishing house in Waiblingen from 1987 onwards . The Metta-Kinau publishing house in Hamburg, on the other hand , relied within this spectrum for the series of fairy tale anthologies opened in 1984 with The Little Fairy Tale Book , rather on ecological-emancipatory content and a special design. The equipment was characterized by an elaborate hardcover binding and environmental protection paper as well as the illustration of the handwritten text contributions with graphics by different illustrators. Authors were u. a. Robert Habeck , Ulrich Karger and Konrad Lorenz . Despite high editions of his seven fairy tale anthologies, the publishing house went bankrupt in the mid-1990s, while the first two publishers still exist.

For the turn of the millennium, Walter Moers deserves particular mention, who among his very successful Zamonia novels, which can be attributed to fantasy, also published a volume such as Ensel and Krete , which is a fairy tale parody in the tradition of the art fairy tale.

Examples of transitional forms and adaptations

The following chronological list shows the various possibilities of appearance, adaptation and expansion of the genre of art fairy tales.

literature

  • Friedmar Apel: The magic gardens of the imagination. On the theory and history of the art fairy tale. Carl Winter, Heidelberg 1987, ISBN 3-533-02748-1 ( Siegen 13 series ).
  • Volker Klotz : The European art fairy tale. Twenty-five chapters of its history from the Renaissance to the modern age. Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-423-04467-5 ( dtv 4467).
  • Manfred Grätz: Art fairy tales . In: Enzyklopädie des Märchen 8 (1995), Col. 612–622 (not evaluated)
  • Mathias Mayer, Jens Tismar: Art fairy tales. 4th edition. Metzler, Stuttgart et al. 2003, ISBN 3-476-14155-1 , ( Metzler collection. Gattungen 155).
  • Paul-Wolfgang Wührl: The German art fairy tale . 3. Edition. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren 2012, ISBN 978-3-834-01061-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Richard Hughes: Gertrude and the Meermaid. Middelhauve, Cologne 1971, ISBN 3-7876-9330-0 .
  2. ↑ Richard Hughes: The Wonder Dog. Diogenes, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-257-00618-7 .