BERLIN — For his new book about the Working Methods of the Brothers Grimm (published in German by S.Hirzel Verlag), German language and literature scholar Philip Kraut has studied the estate that the Grimm brothers left behind, which due to war and family reasons is spread between Berlin, Kassel, Krakow and Haldensleben.
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It is a treasure trove of manuscripts that had never been printed, on which other academics could build lifelong careers.
The Grimms, who are best known for collecting and publishing folktales such as Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, came from a Reformed Evangelical family, in which hard work and a simple life were seen as godly. The Protestant work ethic was essentially a scientific “ethos,” which Kraut sums up in three key terms: “material poverty,” “professional discreetness” and “meticulous study of the matter at hand.” Pleasure was mainly to be found in the “scholarly enjoyment of having established facts or proven a theory.”
After the death of their father, Jacob had to take on responsibility for looking after his mother and younger siblings. This existential plight meant that his work ethic was formed early. One can only guess how much energy he drew from what Sigmund Freud called “sublimation”: Jacob never married, and nothing is known about whether he ever had a sexual relationship with a man or woman.
But leaving aside psychological speculation, there is one concrete area where today’s students, academics and researchers can definitely learn something from the Grimms.
Lesson Number 1
Lesson Number 1: Teamwork is only successful when everyone adopts the same standards and methods. We can see this from the many word cards that an army of the Grimms’ collaborators produced for their most ambitious project, the German Dictionary. These cards featured quotes from literature, newspapers and other documents that were used as examples to determine the meaning of a word.
The Grimms received 600,000-word cards from linguistically inclined helpers, and supplemented these with their own research. Using this approach, Wilhelm and Jacob created 50,000 dictionary entries before their deaths in 1859 and 1863 respectively. The last was the definition of “fruit.”
Jacob compared these word cards to “snowflakes,” like a blizzard of definitions raining down on him and his brother. But while every snowflake has its own individual shape, the Grimms took care to ensure that the word cards followed a set form. In one guide sent to collectors, for example, they asked for quotes to be the precise length necessary to “fully elucidate the meaning.”
The Grimm estate includes 166 notebooks and bundles of documents, some of which have many thousands of pages. The pages are organized by theme, stored in different folders, or in one case a cardboard chocolate box from Paris. This contains word cards for entries under the letter F, so it most likely dates to the last years of Jacob’s life, although he was a young man when he spent time in France. The word cards are sometimes only the size of a postage stamp, because they were cut up after they were written. At the time, paper was a material that had to be used sparingly, so the word cards often show signs of use — fragments of addresses, letters and postage stamps.
Lesson Number 2
When making notes about their reading, the Grimm brothers adopted methods that were common at the time, and even laid out in books. A good example of this is Christoph Meiners’ 1791 book Instructions for Young People in their own Work, which advises school children and students, when reading, “to note down the interesting thoughts and facts that they find.” And that brings us on to the second lesson that we can draw from the Grimms’ approach: the technique that Meiners advocated is still much more useful than the random underlining that we sometimes find in library books or the indiscriminate highlighting in ebooks.
Their private library comprises 7,038 volumes.
You should mark the important text with a pencil dot so it is easily erasable and note down the relevant page number. The work of writing out the interesting passages should be saved for later, when you are too tired for more demanding intellectual work.
This is similar to the method used by the Grimms to gather definitions. In 1809, Jacob wrote to Wilhelm that he wanted to “read through and write down extracts from the Old German novels.” They also adopted more targeted projects of noting down excerpts on specific themes: in 1809, Jacob wrote to his brother, “Don’t forget to write out everything that Plato says about the legend of Atlantis, as he is the main source for this.”
It is clear why writing down excerpts is superior to today’s study methods, as it involves evaluating and reflecting on the text and selecting the most important material. After reading the English academic John Horne Tooke’s 500-page treatise on linguistic particles, Jacob wrote in 1813, “You could easily sum the book up in four pages and it would be clearer and more succinct (I have cut it down by half myself).”
Jacob also applied this technique to his own work, distilling his own excerpts down further. Grimm expert Kraut describes it as a process of evaluation and selection in multiple stages, which transforms the raw material into the systematic order of the manuscript. And it also served as a way of memorizing the information, as assessing and writing out the material so many times ensured it stuck in the memory.
Lesson Number 3
But, of course, their enormous body of work was not only based on manuscripts. Books played a prominent role too. Kraut calls them “bookworm prototypes.” Their private library comprises 7,038 volumes. In the 19th century, Wilhelm’s son Hermann Grimm actually found 8,141 books, including many multi-volume works, when he looked through the estate. Even in the early days, the brothers’ library grew from one bookcase in 1805 to nine or ten in 1814.
It was important to both of them to have primary sources to hand, i.e. “anything immediately rare,” as Jacob noted about his acquisition preferences. This is where students find the third lesson for the present: secondary literature was excerpted and then no longer needed and returned. Jacob justifies this: “You go through a book more diligently if you have excerpted it from a stranger than if you have it there yourself.”
The Grimms also reworked the printed books by hand. Not only with the usual pencil marks, but also with comments and mini-excerpts in the extra-wide margins or on the empty pages that were sometimes bound into books (“interleaved” copies). There are often summaries of the text written on the end papers and inside cover.
The fact that the Grimms managed to achieve all this when their eyesight was failing, at a time without glasses, laser eye surgery or cataract treatment, is down to a specific tool: Jacob Grimm’s reading glass. Kraut writes, “Instead of a long wooden handle, the glass was held in the hand with a short, curved metal loop. The magnifying glass is splintered and smudged around the edges.” This glass gives us a sense of the endless toil that characterized the Grimms’ academic life. For them, possibilities that we take for granted, such as easily enlarging the font when reading on screen, would have been seen as a gift from God.
