Winner of the 2023 “Best Article Prize” from the Brothers Grimm Society of North America

This article looks at adaptations and retellings of the fairy tale “Rapunzel,” beginning with the Grimms' own edits obscuring Rapunzel's sexuality, to expose how adaptations of this tale echo the evolution of societal attitudes toward gender roles and sexuality. Retellings of the tale are analyzed as “new originals” in their own right. Adaptations and remediations from the Grimms' first and second editions, including translations and film adaptations such as Rapunzel oder Der Zauber der Tränen (1988) and Tangled (2010), are used to explore how these new versions build on originals while injecting their own “flavors” and carrying the social values of their times and places. Reading fairy-tale retellings as a continuous process of adaptation from “new originals” provides insight into social norms and values while discerning relevant, recognizable, and universally adaptable aspects of a tale.

With Melissa Sheedy, PhD—Irmtraud Morgner’s fairy tale “Bennos erste Geschichte” introduces her famous Trobadora Beatriz, a reimagined Sleeping Beauty who embarks on a magical flight from the patriarchy. Along with tales by Kerstin Hensel and Stefan Heym, Morgner’s story represents a body of new and retold East German fairy tales. As part of the “fairy tale wave” of the 1970s GDR, the production of new fairy tales along with renewed interest in the Grimms marked a renaissance of the Volksmärchen. Couched within seemingly innocuous children’s literature, fairy tales functioned both as state-sanctioned ideological vehicles and as platforms for political critique. Through psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives, this essay explores retellings of familiar tales as well as new creations for children (and adults) of the GDR. In examining three tales by Morgner, Hensel, and Heym, we investigate the role of the fairy tale at the crux between reality and the fantastic, the didactic and diverting, and between children’s and adults’ literatures.

This contribution explores the work of the Brothers Grimm and their worldwide influence from the nineteenth century to today. Focusing primarily on the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales, also referred to as the KHM), this chapter provides biographical information on the Grimms' lives in the context of how their history and political standing influenced their work. Because of their dedication to the Germanic culture and traditions, the KHM was originally meant to record and preserve the cultural goods and oral history of the German‐speaking people. However, in the past 200 years, the tales have grown beyond that initial purpose, influencing research in history, linguistics, anthropology, and psychology while also being repurposed and redistributed through modern translations, Walt Disney Studios, and other film adaptations. These retellings and translations serve as reflections of the cultures into which they have traveled and reemerged as world literature.

In these times of political disturbance, war, and massive numbers of displaced peoples searching for a way to live, Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children becomes particularly poised to comment on the plight of those who must migrate due to factors they cannot control. Fermat’s Last Theater, a free public theater, aims to thematize issues of social justice in all of their staged works. Their workshop, titled Mother Courage Alone, portrayed the injustice brought upon the “small fry of the world,” echoing the Mother Courage’s comment that “victory and defeat don’t mean the same thing to the big wheels up top as the small fry,” shortly before her younger son is executed. In the game of war, wins and losses mean nothing to the generals who stay at the back of the regiment away from the action. The majority fulfills the whim of the minority, and the deaths of the common soldiers mean little to their superiors. Today, the movement of refugees continues to grow, and with it the amount of “small fry,” those with no power over their situation, those who are moved and housed like livestock and whose deaths seemingly mean just as little to those in charge as the deaths of soldiers meant to the generals in Mother Courage.

In the summer of 2020, Walt Disney Theme Parks announced plans to reimagine the popular attraction “Splash Mountain” in the theme of the 2009 feature-length animated film The Princess and the Frog. As only the third Disney feature-length animated film to showcase Black characters prominently, The Princess and the Frog seems perfectly poised to replace the Song of the South—critiqued for its romanticization of race relations after the American Civil War—in the Disney parks. This essay explores the intersection of gender, race, and class in Disney’s adaptations of the classic fairy tale “Der Froschkönig” from the Grimms’ 1812 variation and the plans to reimagine it for Disney theme parks. In conversation with adaptation studies, narrative theory, and feminist theories, this contribution interrogates the underlying messages of prejudice and -isms in The Princess and the Frog that reinforce twentieth- and twenty-first-century prejudices against people of color, women, and the working class, rendering the proposed update of the “Splash Mountain” attraction into a modernization of the problems already recognized in the current ride.