A Proletarian Fairy Tale in Children’s Literature of the Weimar Republic: On the Specificity of the Genre

Abstract

The article focuses on the history of a proletarian fairy tale in German children's literature of the 1920s and 1930s. Analyzing the fairy tales written by one of the most popular socialist-democratic writers of the time period, Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Balina investigates common stylistic trends of this genre. The narrative centers around the discussion of tendentiousness as one of the leading devices of this new fairy tale form. While “the fairy tale war” in Russia prohibited the spread of the proletarian fairy tale in soviet children's literature, the socialist and communist children's writers in the Weimar Republic worked successfully in employing this genre to serve the ideals of the new socialist / communist education. The fairy tales written by Zur Mühlen were successfully adapted by the soviet children's press. The primary texts that illustrate major points in the development of the proletarian tale are taken from German originals, as well as their Russian translations.

Keywords: proletarian fairy tales, tendentiousness, “fairy tales war”, children's literature of the Weimar Republic, social democratic children's periodicals, Hermynia Zur Mühlen.