The Göttingen years of the Brothers Grimm

The quiet contentment of the years at Kassel ended in 1829, when the brothers suffered a snub—perhaps motivated politically—from the Elector of Hessen-Kassel: they were not given advancement following the death of a senior colleague. Consequently, they moved to the nearby University of Göttingen, where they were appointed librarians and professors. Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, written during this period, was to be of far-reaching influence. From poetry, fairy tales, and folkloristic elements, he traced the pre-Christian faith and superstitions of the Germanic people, contrasting the beliefs to those of classical mythology and Christianity. The Mythologie had many successors all over Europe, but often disciples were not as careful in their judgments as Jacob had been. Wilhelm published here his outstanding edition of epigrams by the 13th-century poet Freidank.

But again fate overtook them. When Ernest Augustus, duke of Cumberland, became king of Hanover, he high-handedly repealed the constitution of 1833, which he considered too liberal. Two weeks after the king’s declaration, the Grimms, together with five other professors (the “Göttingen Seven”), sent a protest to the king, explaining that they felt themselves bound by oath to the old constitution. As a result, they were dismissed, and three professors, including Jacob, were ordered to leave the kingdom of Hanover at once. Through their part in this protest directed against despotic authority, they clearly demonstrated the academic’s sense of civil responsibilities, manifesting their own liberal convictions at the same time. During three years of exile in Kassel, institutions in Germany and beyond (Hamburg, Marburg, Rostock, Weimar, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) tried to obtain the brothers’ services.

The Berlin period

In 1840 they accepted an invitation from the king of Prussia, Frederick William IV, to go to Berlin, where as members of the Royal Academy of Sciences they lectured at the university. There they began work in earnest on their most ambitious enterprise, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, a large German dictionary intended as a guide for the user of the written and spoken word as well as a scholarly reference work. In the dictionary, all German words found in the literature of the three centuries “from Luther to Goethe” were given with their historical variants, their etymology, and their semantic development; their usage in specialized and everyday language was illustrated by quoting idioms and proverbs. Begun as a source of income in 1838 for the brothers after their dismissal from Göttingen, the work required generations of successors to bring the gigantic task to an end more than a hundred years later. Jacob lived to see the work proceed to the letter F, while Wilhelm finished only the letter D. The dictionary became an example for similar publications in other countries: Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. Jacob’s philological research later led to a history of the German language, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, in which he attempted to combine the historical study of language with the study of early history. Research into names and dialects was stimulated by Jacob Grimm’s work, as were ways of writing and spelling—for example, he used roman, rather than black-letter, type and advocated spelling German nouns without capital letters.

For some 20 years they worked in Prussia’s capital, respected and free from financial worries. Much of importance can be found in the brothers’ lectures and essays, the prefaces and reviews (Kleinere Schriften) they wrote in this period. In Berlin they witnessed the Revolution of 1848 and took an active part in the political strife of the succeeding years. In spite of close and even emotional ties to their homeland, the Grimms were not nationalists in the narrow sense. They maintained genuine—even political—friendships with colleagues at home and abroad, among them the jurists Savigny and Karl Friedrich Eichhorn; the historians Friedrich Dahlmann, Georg Gottfried Cervinus, and Jules Michelet; and the philologists Karl Lachmann, John Mitchell Kemble, Jan Frans Willems, Vuk Karadžić, and Pavel Josef Šafařik. Nearly all academies in Europe were proud to count Jacob and Wilhelm among their members. The more robust Jacob undertook many journeys for scientific investigations, visiting France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Denmark, and Sweden.

Jacob remained a bachelor. Wilhelm married Dorothea Wild from Kassel, with whom he had four children: Jacob (who was born and died in 1826), Herman (literary and art historian, 1828–1901), Rudolf (jurist, 1830–89), and Auguste (1832–1919). The graves of the brothers are in the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof in Berlin.