Sites of Imagination and Memory: Museums and the Remediation of Grimms' Märchen for the Twenty‐first Century

Abstract

In the two centuries since their first publication in 1812, the Grimms' Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen have become multi‐faceted prisms for cultural production and memorial processes; in short, they function as sites of memory. Over time, the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen have generated culturally entangled narratives that demonstrate a palimpsestic intertextuality in their numerous adaptations. This essay argues that these fairy tales have become realized and remediated not only as sites of memory but also as projects of imagination in two twenty‐first‐century museums. The Nibelungenmuseum in Worms (2001) exploits fairy‐tale resonances from German Romanticism to Walt Disney in order to interrogate the role of the Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen in propagating a toxic medievalism that the museum in turn cross‐examines. The Grimmwelt museum in Kassel (2015) re‐historicizes and engages these fairy tales in the context of the Grimms' entire oeuvre.