In addition to the numerous literary adaptations of fairy tales in the form of prose works, poems, and plays, there also exists a tradition of reducing well‐known tales to short aphorisms of a few lines. These aphorisms allude to fairy tales in general or to specific tales and their individual motifs. These allusions can be found not only among the aphorisms of highly intellectual authors but also among the anonymous one‐liners of modern graffiti. They represent remnants of the original fairy tales and form a small sub‐genre of the aphorism and might be labelled as fairy‐tale aphorisms.
One of the earliest aphorisms of this type is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's somewhat paradoxical text ‘Fairy tale: indicating to us the possibility of impossible occurrences under possible or impossible conditions’. The reactions of later authors to fairy tales in general or specific motifs reflect this ambiguity between the wishful world of the fairy tale and the reality of everyday life. The dreams, hopes, and fulfilments expressed in fairy tales appear impossible in an imperfect world, but by relating our problems and concerns to the possible solutions in fairy tales, we tend to be able to cope with our sometimes desperate conditions. Gerhart Hauptmann expressed this thought quite similarly to Goethe's statement in his aphorism ‘The teller of fairy tales gets people used to the unusual, and it is of great importance that this happens because mankind suffocates from the usual.’
How much the universal nature of fairy tales is also of relevance to people of the modern age was summarized by Elias Canetti in 1943: ‘A closer study of fairy tales would teach us what we can still expect from the world.’ But people are not to use fairy tales as escapist literature, as Stanislaw Jerzy Lec warns: ‘Don't believe the fairy tales. They were true.’ Fairy tales, after all, also express cruel aspects of the social reality of the Middle Ages, and once one looks at some of the individual scenes of cruelty and fear, fairy tales can in fact reflect the anxieties of the present day as well. Thus Lec claims that ‘Some fairy tales are so bloody that they actually cannot be regarded as such.’ Little wonder that Gabriel Laub concluded that ‘Fairy tales definitely belong to realistic literature. They promise fortune and joy—but only in the fairy tale.’
Looking at the technological world and its seemingly insurmountable challenges and problems leads aphoristic writers to question the hope for any fairy‐tale future for humanity. The Austrian author Zarko Petan thus changed the introductory formula into the future tense to state his view that ‘All socialist fairy tales begin with: “Once upon a time there will be …” ’And a reader of a German tabloid newspaper submitted the following saying which contains a similar ironic twist regarding the socio‐economic differences between capitalism and socialism: ‘ “Once upon a time there was”, so begin the fairy tales in the West. “Once upon a time there will be”, so they start in the East.’ Aphorists with socio‐political concerns also exploit the traditional closing formula of the fairy tale. For those people who are sick of waiting and hearing yet another promise from their leaders, the following poster parody might be an appropriate cynical remark: ‘And if they haven't died, then they are still waiting today.’ Such pessimism is commonplace in these modern fairy‐tale aphorisms. Politicians are seen as liars by Werner Sprenger: ‘Most politicians are nothing but occupational swindlers who with dignified faces tell those fairy tales which happen to be the most popular.’ And very aggressive against the ‘haves’ of society is Nikolaus Cybinski's cynical aphorism: ‘Fairy tales are the digestive medicine of those who are full and who try to completely digest their old utopias with their help.’
Those aphorisms based on individual fairy tales and their motifs usually lend an ironic twist to the well‐known original formulation. Sometimes the authors of these parodies are unknown, as for example in the new American proverb ‘You have to kiss a lot of toads (frogs), before you meet your handsome prince’, which clearly refers to ‘The Frog King’. An anonymous graffito takes the sexual implications of this fairy tale one step further: ‘Better one night with a prince than a whole life with a frog.’ It should come as no surprise that quite a few anonymous graffiti and slogans based on ‘Snow White’ also enter the sexual sphere: ‘Better once with Snow White than seven times with the dwarfs’, or ‘Did you know that Snow White had no rest on any day of the week?’ And among German students the slogan ‘Oh, how good that nobody knows that I shit independently’ has become a popular take‐off on the popular verse, ‘Oh, how good it is that nobody knows that I am called Rumpelstiltskin’. On the more serious level of sexual politics, there are Edith Summerskill's ‘The housewife is the Cinderella of the affluent state’, Mae West's ‘I used to be Snow White … but I drifted’, and Lee Miller's ‘I'm not Cinderella. I can't force my foot into the glass slipper.’ Mention must also be made, of course, of Colette Dowling's ‘Here it was—the Cinderella Complex’ out of her best‐seller The Cinderella Complex (1982).
The modern German author Werner Mitsch is the most prolific creator of fairy‐tale aphorisms, of which a few might serve as examples here: ‘The Brothers Grimm awakened our fairy tales from their Briar Rose sleep’, ‘Fairy tales are called fairy tales because you only have to pass a total of three tests in fairy tales’, ‘There once was a young woman [Rapunzel] who lived in a tower and who one day got a permanent. Much to the dismay of the Brothers Grimm’, ‘Hansel and Gretel got lost in the wolf. There Snow White played golf with Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Feminism. Better blood in the shoe than a prince around the neck [referring to “Cinderella”]’, ‘All good things come in threes, said the wolf and took the huntsman as his dessert’ [‘Little Red Riding Hood’], ‘Seven hills don't make a mountain and seven dwarfs don't make a prince’, and ‘What good does it do a person if he/she can spin straw into gold and still remains his/her whole life long a Rumpelstiltskin?’;
This last interrogative aphorism illustrates clearly that fairy‐tale aphorisms for the most part question the positive nature of the traditional versions. Power, crime, violence, selfishness, greed, materialism, sex, and hedonism are the subjects of these aphorisms. This is the case because many people never quite attain their full potential as social beings. Instead they hide behind a makeshift façade of deception like the emperor in Hans Christian Andersen's popular tale ‘The Emperor's New Clothes’, which the American poet Idries Shah reduced to the telling aphorism ‘It is not always a question of the Emperor having no clothes on. Sometimes it is, “Is that an Emperor at all?” ’ The questions of identity, character, and truthfulness are all addressed in the old fairy tales, and when modern aphoristic and graffiti writers present laconic antipodes based on them, they quite often express a deep moral commitment to bringing about a change towards a more fairy‐tale‐like existence. To every humorous, ironic, or satirical fairy‐tale aphorism belongs a seriously positive fairy tale, and it is the juxtaposition of the long tales with the short aphorisms which makes for meaningful communication of basic human needs and desires.
Bibliography
- Jones, Steven Swann, ‘Joking Transformations of Popular Fairy Tales’,
Western Folklore , 44 (1985). - Mieder, Wolfgang, ‘Sprichwörtliche Schwundstufen des Märchens’,
Proverbium , 3 (1986). - ——“‘Fairy‐Tale Allusions in Modern German Aphorisms’”, in Donald Haase (ed.), The Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales (1993).
- Röhrich, Lutz, Der Witz (1977).
— Wolfgang Mieder
