Tainted Sources: The Subversion of the Grimms' Ideology of the Folktale in Heinrich Heine's Der Rabbi von Bacherach1

Like Germanistik, the nascent discipline of Volkskunde played a central role in shaping the discourse of German nationalism.2 No one contributed more to defining the parameters of both disciplines than Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, most popularly known both in their own day and in ours as the compilers of the Kinder- und Hausmarchen (KHM). Not only were the Grimms' Marchen themselves widely disseminated, but so were their accompanying remarks on folktales as a form of what they, following Herder, call Volksdichtung or Volkspoesie. While the writings of the Brothers Grimm articulate various theories to explain how folktales are transmitted, their preface and introduction to the second edition of the KHM of 1819 advance the influential concept of a pure German folktale tradition passed down to their time. Over the last thirty years, scholars have underscored this strong nationalist current in the Grimms' writings on folktales and other forms of folk expression.3 Surprisingly, though, they have neglected what is arguably the most trenchant critique of the Grimms' nationalist ideology of the folktale: Heinrich Heine's fragmentary novelDer Rabbi von Bacherach, the first chapter of which was composed in 1824, two years after the completion of the second edition of the KHM. The present study explores the terms of Heine's critique, and in the process maps out the discursive field of the folktale in the first half of the nineteenth century as a highly contested terrain. I begin by delineating the Grimms' ideology of folkloric purity as it is distilled in the second edition of the KHM, the edition in which, according to Heinz Rolleke, "die 'Gattung Grimm' erst recht eigentlich geschaffen wurde" (Rolleke, "Zur Biographie" 522). I then document Heine's reception of this ideology in Die Harzreise, which he drafted in the same year as the first chapter of Rabbi. Next, I show how the opening chapter of Rabbi depicts the translation of this ideology of folkloric purity into practice, with devastating consequences for the Jewish community of Bacherach. I claim that Heine's text radically subverts this ideology by showing folktale traditions to be always already exposed to what Jack Zipes has termed "original contamination" from exogenous traditions (Zipes, "Cross-Cultural" 869). While Rabbi is primarily concerned with the dynamics of diasporic folk culture, that is to say, with the ways in which the Jews of Bacherach intermingle folktales from the dominant community with their own to create hybrid forms, Heine's text suggests that the wellsprings of the host community are indelibly tainted as well. Examining this contamination will lead us both to employ and to question key theoretical assumptions of current diaspora studies. In their preface ("Vorrede") and introduction ("Einleitung") to the second edition of the KHM, the Brothers Grimm envision a pure stream of folkloric transmission running down to their day, or what Jacob Grimm, in the preface to his Deutsche Mythologie, terms "der nie stillstehende Flus lebendiger Sitte und Sage" (cited in Bausinger, Formen 24). As they depict it, this stream issues from a purely German source; it carries exclusively German content; protected from outside influences, its course from one generation to the next remains unbroken; finally, it is faithfully preserved by the Brothers Grimm themselves in their KHM. Taken together, these stages amount to a comprehensive ideology of a pure German Marchen tradition. The attribution of a nationalist ideology to the Grimms' writings on folktales has been disputed by Heinz Rollecke, whose critical editions of the KHM have paved the way for contemporary research into the Grimms' collection. In an article on the "Marchentheorien der Bruder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm," Rollecke argues that the Grimms counterbalance any nationalist tendencies with a far stronger internationalist bent (67). He goes so far as to read the absence of the adjective deutsch from the title of their folktale collection as an indication of the extent to which they were aware of the internationality of their tales (68). …