Ludwig Bechstein
Bechstein, Ludwig (1801–60), German writer. His two widely popular collections of fairy tales, the Deutsches Märchenbuch (German Fairy Tale Book, 1845) and the Neues Deutsches Märchenbuch (New German Fairy Tale Book, 1856) dominated the German fairy‐tale market from their initial appearance until the 1890s, a period during which they far outsold the Grimms' tales. Bechstein borrowed many fairy tales from the Grimm collection, but retold them, with very few exceptions, in a manner that suited the taste and norms of Germany's educated classes. In the rich German wall‐poster tradition, it was usually Bechstein's editions of fairy tales from which publishers preferred to excerpt tales such as his ‘Gestiefelte Kater’ (‘Puss‐in‐Boots’) and his ‘Aschenbrödel’ (‘Cinderella’).
As a young man trained as an apothecary, Bechstein gained his prince's favour by a well‐crafted volume of poetry and won a stipend to study at the university, after which he became a librarian and a Hofrat (court adviser) at the court of Sachsen‐Meiningen. The security of his lifetime appointment allowed Bechstein to continue to write and eventually to turn to fairy tales.
Bechstein had honed a popular literary style in scores of semi‐scholarly books before undertaking his best‐selling German Fairytale Book. After only a few years his publishers changed the volume's name to Ludwig Bechstein's Fairytale Book, reflecting the extent to which his own name played a part in stimulating sales. Its popularity persisted abroad, where it was published numerous times for the children of German immigrants in America.
Any discussion of Bechstein's fairy tales must necessarily refer to the Grimms and their collection of fairy tales. Bechstein's tales, illustrated with delightful, often humorous pictures, and without scholarly notes, addressed an adolescent readership; the Grimms' tales, initially unillustrated but extended by copious scholarly notes, anticipated a dual audience—young children on the one hand, and the German people on the other. Bechstein, like Wilhelm Grimm, reworked his tales stylistically, introducing ever more exuberant nouns and adjectives specific to 19th‐century experience: ‘[It was a pity that Rupert] wasn't allowed to make himself nice and neat, with either a cropbeard or a pointbeard, all blackwaxed, and that he didn't have coifed locks and slender sides and smooth fingernails or Eau‐de‐Cologne or any first‐class Havana cigars’ (from ‘Rupert Bearskin’). Grimm, on the other hand, smoothed his fairy tales' vocabulary until it achieved a transcendent timelessness.
Bechstein gave his characters memorable names like Käthchen, Abraham, and Christinchen, whereas Grimm preferred generically German names like ‘Hans’, ‘Hänsel’, or ‘Heinrich’, ‘Liesel’ or ‘Gretel’. Bechstein introduced irony throughout his tales, especially in connection with the intrusion of magic; his heroes and heroines, like those of Musäus, know the ‘rules’ of magic and often comment on them. He also both accepted and propagated the view of his fairy tales as book‐tales, whereas the Grimm œuvre excludes irony and maintains the fiction that their tales are quintessentially oral in nature and in transmission.
Bechstein's presentation of characters is striking for its gender‐egalitarianism. The numbers of wicked men equal those of evil women, and stepmothers do not form a self‐evident well of iniquity, both of which depart distinctly from the gender‐specific distribution of malevolence in the Grimms' fairy tales. Bechstein's mothers typically survive to the happy end of his stories, which are marked by joyously reunited families. Brothers and sisters love and help one another; and his child heroes and heroines exhibit self‐reliance, imagining solutions to their problems and often implementing them independently.
In thematic terms, Bechstein treated work as an effort that would reliably lead to rewards in the here and now. He faulted anti‐Semitism as a sin of community; did not ascribe danger to woods and forests in and of themselves; neither silenced nor inculpated girls and women; avoided prohibitions whose only function was to test obedience; rewarded initiative; and generally stayed clear of gruesomely violent conclusions. In the worst of cases, he had a malicious crone who tried to drown a heroine thrown into prison, her accomplice whipped out of the castle. Euphemism dealt with the rest: at the end of ‘The Witch and the Royal Children’, a stag hooked the witch together with her magic ring on his antlers, leapt into a pond, and emerged ‘free of his burden’.
Bechstein established a jocularly familiar relationship with his readers by gently poking fun at the adult world, irreverently setting authority on its head, and forging solidarity with them through playfully satirizing language. None the less, Bechstein's tales remain socially conservative, ultimately accepting the validity of contemporary social values like demonstrating gratitude, prospering through work, and maintaining the status quo.
The overall social and moral system exemplified in Bechstein's tales was appropriate for bourgeois children who expected—generally speaking—to be in control of the course their lives took, an aspect of Bechstein's fairy‐tale collection that provoked violent attack. In 1908 Franz Heyden used Jugendschriften‐Warte, the leading teacher's journal of the day, to revise the public's perception of Bechstein's tales ‘in the interest of our folk fairy‐tale writing and of our children’. A generation after Prussia had instituted a broad‐based welfare system for its working poor, proletarian ‘folk’ values collided with and vanquished a value system inherited from the Enlightenment. With a reprieve during the Weimar period when Bechstein's tales regained fleeting popularity, they gave way to the Grimm corpus almost entirely during the 20th century.
Bechstein used many published sources, including the Grimms' edition of 1840, and expanded his corpus notably by incorporating numerous animal fables. Translated into English as The Old Storyteller in 1856, Bechstein's tales were also published under other titles, such as Pretty as Seven (1872) and The Rabbit Catcher (translated by Randall Jarrell, 1972).
Bibliography
- Bottigheimer, Ruth B., ‘Ludwig Bechstein's Fairy Tales: Nineteenth Century Bestsellers and Bürgerlichkeit’,
Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur , 15.2 (1990). - Fiedler, Alfred, ‘Ludwig Bechstein als Sagensammler und Sagenpublizist’,
Deutsches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde , 12 (1966). - Schmidt, Klaus, Untersuchungen zu den Märchensammlungen von Ludwig Bechstein (1935; 1984).
- Schneider, Rolf‐Rüdigger, ‘Bechsteins “Deutsches Märchenbuch” ’ (Diss., Gesamthochschule Wuppertal, 1980).
— Ruth B. Bottigheimer
