German Fairy Tales (hansel and Gretel)

We all know Snow White and Sleeping Beauty from the early child hood Disney movies, but these actually originate from the Brother’s Grimm stories. The Grimm Brothers wrote many of the famous stories that Americans know today, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and many others. Hansel and Gretel was used to warn children against being easily tricked into a stranger’s house, much like today how parents warn their kids not to take rides from strangers. The point being that kids are naïve. The Germans took it to quite an extreme with this story. It starts out with children being purposely abandoned by their parents in the middle of the woods with nothing to eat but bread. To a young child this would be shocking since children rely on their parents for everything. Keep in mind that this story was directed towards young children in Germany. The clever children left stones to mark the way that they got into the forest and therefore were able to avoid their parents’ plot of leaving them in the forest to die. However, the parents again tried to abandon them in the forest so this time the children left a breadcrumb path. The forest creatures ate this and so they could not find their way back home and had no food. Eventually after days of wondering the children found a house made out of candy. To an audience of children this would be especially enticing because when these stories were written sugar was quite rare because there was no corn syrup in candy to sweeten it. SO children could sympathize with Hansel and Gretchen in why they would want to eat the house, because no doubt they would want to as well. Then the gruesome part of the story comes, which German fairy tales are notorious for. The witch of the candy house reveals that she wants to eat the children, something that would never be in a children’s movie in America now (picture Barney trying to eat some of the kids). Gretel however is too smart for the witch and pushed her into the oven in which she intended to cook Hansel. There she is burned alive. This is something that still deeply frightens me; so imagine a 4-year-old learning how great it is to burn alive people who are evil. Then the children find lots of treasure, steal it, and bring it back to their parents who abandon them. To make the story even better the mother is dead, which leads to children and the father to rejoice. They rejoice at their mother’s death! Since America tends to be Christian, this would have been shocking to be happy when a mother is dead. Even though Germany was Christian, for some reason hundreds of years ago extreme methods for reprimanding those that did evil deeds was encouraged through propaganda in children’s stories. It is so interesting that even today when blissful movies like Pooh Bear’s Great Adventure are around (the worst thing that happens in that is Pooh gets lost in a cave for a couple minutes), the story of Hansel and Gretel is still well known. No one dies in children stories any more, let alone is burned to death. Nobody would dare try to eat a child, even attempt to eat one.