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© “East – West”
There were not two, but five. They also had a sister. And one of the brothers separates from the family and dies alone. The Grimm family secret is related to him.
© The other library
The text was republished by Deutsche Welle.
Everyone knows their stories. And everyone knows the names of the two world-famous Grimm brothers: Jacob and Wilhelm. In fact, there are five brothers: Jacob, Wilhelm, Carl, Ferdinand, and Ludwig. They also have a sister, Lotta, who is known to have lived with her brothers until their marriage, to take care of the house, after which they happily married and had six children. Also with Karl and Ludwig everything went well: they both became artists and engravers, and their illustrations adorn many of the first editions of famous fairy tales. However, Ferdinand’s fate remained a mystery for a long time.
Who is Ferdinand?
The German Wikipedia gives you only a dozen lines. To this day, only one portrait of him has survived: a drawing by his brother Ludwig shows him at age 20. Researchers of the works and biographies of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm also wrote sparingly about their brother Ferdinand. It is known that he helped them collect stories, for which Jacob and Wilhelm thanked him in his first volume. It is also known that Ferdinand died in poverty and loneliness; in recent years only Jacob helped him, while Wilhelm broke off his relationship with Ferdinand and did not even visit him on his deathbed.
What did he do so much? His older brothers often criticized him for being lazy, for spending money recklessly. Berlin publisher Georg Reimer, with whom his brothers found work, also complained about him. But this can hardly be a reason to break up the relationship. Also, it is known how important family relationships were to Jacob and Wilhelm.
Famous Writer Stories: Brothers Grimm – Bilingual
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The scandal
Now the curtain raises a book just published by German authors Heiner Bionke and Hans Zarkowitz, entitled The Foreign Ferdinand. After a careful study of the correspondence between the brothers, the authors conclude that on Christmas Day 1810 at a gala dinner at the Grimm family home, attended by not only family members but also guests, a scandal broke out. , provoked by Ferdinand. It was then that the relationship between the brothers seriously deteriorated.
After this scandal, the correspondence between Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is no longer about Ferdinand’s lazy lifestyle, but about his “unnatural”, “foreign”, “perverted” nature. By collecting all those statements, the authors of the book found that at the Christmas party in question, Ferdinand, who dreamed of becoming an actor in his youth, apparently admitted his homosexuality.
Jacob and Wilhelm were very conservative in this regard. And although the family guessed Ferdinand’s sexual orientation, the public confession surprised everyone. That is why Ferdinand was excommunicated.
The secret
The Grimm family’s secret remains a secret for a long time. Jacob and Wilhelm don’t mention it at all in their letters. Ferdinand’s family doctor, who was paid by Jacob and who periodically reported on Ferdinand’s serious health, also did not know.
German tales
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It is impossible to imagine how successful Ferdinand would have been if he had worked with his brothers Jacob and Wilhelm for many years. Under various pseudonyms, he published various collections of fairy tales and legends collected during his travels in Germany. Later, however, these books were criticized for their “unscientific” nature, because Ferdinand Grimm did not cite the sources and subjected the collected stories to significant literary processing. By the way, his famous brothers do the same in their first two-volume story.
