Abstract
Jack Zipes's books on fairy tales are well-known to all fairy-tale scholars and never fail to keep their promise, revealing stimulating new texts and authors as well as the passion of a ‘fairy-tale junkie’ (p. 3) for disregarded literary treasures. Professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Zipes focuses in Buried Treasures: The Political Power of Fairy Tales on nineteenth- and twentieth-century more-or-less forgotten writers and artists. Many of them were exiles, political refugees, often of Jewish origins, and firm believers in communism or socialism. As Zipes contends, these writers and illustrators all produced folk or fairy tales in one form or another (the term includes here even some children's stories), and used the fairy tale to denounce, condemn and criticize contemporary society or imagine utopian futures. The thirteen chapters, organized chronologically, include biographical elements, substantial quotes as well as descriptions and summaries of the artists’ and writers’ works. Their length varies; many of them had originally been published as articles or book chapters and are now reunited in one single volume.
This (re-)collection of fairy tales and fairy-tale artists and writers enables Zipes to recollect his own academic career and production, propose a portrait of a ‘scholarly scavenger’ (p. 1) who has spent his life collecting, studying, reading, translating and writing fairy tales, in order to explain why his ‘obsession with fairy tales might be a sane response to a sick world’ (p. 3). For Zipes, indeed, because fairy tales ‘speak to crucial questions of human struggles and social conflicts’ (p. 7), they enable us to ‘gain distance from our experiences’ and ‘sort them out’ (p. 6).
The first of these neglected political writers is Édouard Laboulaye (1811–1883). Laboulaye's fascination with American democracy was reflected in several of his historical publications and essays. His fairy tales, on the other hand, overtly criticized the French political institutions. Laboulaye was also known to rewrite and adapt folk and fairy tales from other nations (from Africa to Greece and Turkey). Zipes looks at three of his longer works – Abdallah, or the Four-Leaf Clover (1859), Paris in America (1863) and The Poodle Prince (1868) – summarizes their main arguments and quotes at length from the texts themselves. He uses as well Laboulaye's introductions to his collections of fairy tales to point out the artist's belief in the political power of fairy tales and his utopian perspective.
Charles Godfrey Leland's stories are discussed in the next chapter. Author of The Gypsies (1882), The Algonquin Legends of New England (1884), Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling (1891), Legends of Florence (1895–6) and The Unpublished Legends of Virgil (1899), Leland may not be regarded as a writer of fairy tales per se and was even ‘a marginal figure in the American Folklore Society’ (p. 43). But Zipes contends that his many travels in North Africa and Europe informed his ‘folkloric philosophy’ (p. 49) and, although forgotten today, the tales and legends he collected and reworked are still useful to people interested in witchlore and witchcraft. In chapter 4, Zipes looks at Kurt Schwitters, following his evolution and condemnation of bourgeois conservatism, especially after the outbreak of World War 1. Schwitters's poems, such as ‘To Anna Bloom’, which rewrote conventional love, just like his involvement with avant-garde painters and writers and his stories and fairy tales, published in the Merz journal, reflected the artist's shift from Dadaism to cubism, constructivism and later artistic experiments. His fairy tales, penned both in English and in German, reflected his pessimistic political views, as in ‘He’, ‘The Fish and the Ship's Propeller’, ‘The Two Brothers’ and ‘The Scarecrow’, hinging as they did upon sadism, condemning authority and foregrounding rebellion. Zipes also draws comparisons between Schwitters's writing and his artistic collages, both suggesting parallel worlds and a ‘condemnation of the instrumentalization of rationality’ (p. 80).
Béla Balàzs (pseudonym for Herbert Bauer), known for writing the libretto for Béla Bartok's opera, Bluebeard's Castle, in 1911, was a Hungarian Jew. A prolific fairy-tale writer and political activist, he was also as a collector of Hungarian folk songs and tales. Balàzs wrote both in German and Hungarian. His first success in fiction was a fairy tale, ‘Die Stille’ (‘Silence’). Zipes examines Balàzs’ involvement with women and belief in free love, and uses Balàzs’ biography to explain his adaptation of Charles Perrault's ‘Bluebeard’, since the mystery play reinterpreted the serial killer, turning the latter into a mysterious lover. Balàzs’ other works are also of interest, such as The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales (1922) (later translated into Hungarian with a new title, The Book of Marvels (1948)), informed by Taoist philosophy. Even when he became a film critic, Zipes argues, Balàzs never stopped producing fairy tales which expressed his feelings of alienation and revealed his utopian dreams.
The fantastic figures of Christian Bärmann (1881–1924), German painter and story-teller, are briefly mentioned in the following chapter, while Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) and Mariette Lydis (1887–1970), both Jewish, are introduced in chapter 7. As Zipes explains, Bloch and Lydis believed in the power of art and day-dreaming to combat the traumas they experienced, from World War I and anti-Semitism to the Great Depression of 1929 and the rise of fascism. Balàzs's The Cloak of Dreams (1922) is cited again in this chapter, since Lydis illustrated it, although the chapters seem to have been intended to be read independently and no mention is made here of chapter 5; the case is similar in chapter 10, which mentions Balàzs again. Lydis also illustrated The Amorous Letters of the Prince Salamund and The Oriental Book of Dreams (which contained her own texts), using the collotype process, a technique Zipes sees as related to surrealistic dreams, as well as wrote children's books. Famous for his novella Jean sans pain (Johnny Breadless) (1921), Paul Vaillant-Couturier (1892–1937), as explained in the following chapter, enlisted in the French army in 1913 to defend liberty and kept denouncing contradictory war policies. While he wrote extensively about his war experiences for adults, his stories for children (fables, rather than fairy tales) revealed as much his (communist) political views as his articles, just like his plays, pamphlets, and poetry.
As shown by chapter 9, Hermynia Zur Mühlen's (1883–1951) major work in the field of fairy tales was What Little Peter's Friends Tell Him, published in German in 1921, which featured animated objects evoking the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Hans Christian Andersen. Her following fairy tales, published in the 1920s, were both addressed to children and adults. Moreover, in The Castle of Truth, a collection of tales, the open endings, which dramatically revised classical fairy tales’ endings, had, for Zipes, a view to inciting readers ‘to political action’ (p. 163). The tales’ ‘socialist bent’, typical of the interwar period between 1919 and 1939, dealt with social injustice and tyranny, highlighted the ‘significance of solidarity among the members of the working-class’ (p. 157), and always reminded readers that the world is no fairy tale.
Chapters 10 and 11 look at Lisa Tetzner and Felix Salten. Tetzner (1894–1963), director of the children's hour for the Berlin public radio station from 1927 to 1933, was another children's writer who was active in the period of the Weimar Republic. He also collaborated with Béla Balàzs to write the play Hans Urian Goes in Search of Bread (based on Vaillant-Couturier's Johnny Breadless). Animal-right advocate and author of Bambi (1923), Felix Salten (originally Siegmund Salzmann) used children's stories and animals to talk about the fate of minority groups and people ‘born on the wrong side of the tracks’ (p. 179) while suggesting that acting more like animals would make humans more humane. Writing during the worst period of anti-Semitism, Bambi may be read, as Zipes posits, ‘as a response to anti-Semitism’ (p. 184) and is much more politically relevant than what Disney's adaptation suggests.
Emery Kelen's (1896–1978) political fables (Yussuf, Aesop's Fables, Calling Dr. Owl) are examined in chapter 12 while chapter 13 looks at The Grammar of Fantasy (originally published in Italian in 1973 and translated into English by Zipes in 1996), by Italian children's writer Gianni Rodari, and reviews his views on education and the uses and significance of popular culture. The chapter closes on Zipes's participation in the Neighbourhood Bridges programme, a storytelling/creative drama project carried out in the Minneapolis public schools, which used some of Rodari's binominal games, ultimately inviting children to question the world and ‘build and cross bridges to discover other worlds’ (p. 217) through storytelling.
Zipes’ exploration of ‘political’ fairy tales adds to the discussion carried out in fairly recent publications focusing on interwar publications for children, albeit not necessarily as fairy tales, such as Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo and Mark Lipovetsky's Politicizing Magic: an Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales (2005), Mathilde Lévèque's Le renouveau du roman et du récit pour la jeunesse en France et en Allemagne pendant l’entre-deux guerres (2007), Julia Mickenberg and Philip Nel's Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (2010), Kimberley Reynold's Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Publishing for Children in Britain 1910–1949 (2016), Kimberley Reynolds, Jane Rosen and Michael Rosen's The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Writing for Children 1900–1960 and Zipes's own Fairy Tales and Fables from Weimar Days (2018). The 13 essays gathered here provide an overview of writers and artists of the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century who used fairy tales, defined broadly, to reflect upon society and offer insights into human nature. Demonstrating the political power of fairy tales, Buried Treasures shows therefore how fairy tales and fantasies may provide keys to understanding the world and why unburying them remains more than ever essential today.