Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature

Rap battles, wrong ravens and Ragnarök

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:12:18 +0000

Rap battles, wrong ravens and Ragnarök Rachel Sauer Fri, 08/21/2026 - 10:12

Clay Bonnyman Evans

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Mathias Nordvig publishes new book on Old Norse mythology

Ponding the plethora of introductory texts on Old Norse mythology, Mathias Nordvig had an epiphany.

“There are so many set up like dictionaries of myth, so you can look up (the god) Odin, you look up Asgard,” home of the Norse gods, says Nordvig, associate teaching professor in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures at the �鶹��Ѱ��. “I realized there wasn’t really a book that introduces Old Norse mythology from the vantage point of the literature itself, the sources. I wanted people to know the texts and stories where we get this information.”

Mathias Nordvig is an associate teaching professor in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures.

The results of that epiphany — and a lot of hard work — have just been published: Old Norse Mythology: An Introduction to the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda (Routledge, 2026; 166 pages with black-and-white illustrations).

Nordvig, who is proficient in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic, presents works and exegesis of the two major sources of Old Norse mythology: the Poetic Edda, a collection of alliterative verse and narrative poems recorded by anonymous authors based on centuries of oral and written tradition; and the Prose Edda, an assemblage of tales written by the Icelandic Christian scholar Snorri Sturluson around 1220 CE.

He describes the Poetic Edda as “complicated,” due to its origins as a collection of verse remembered and composed by unknown authors from verse from ancient folk material — “grand poem” about such things as Odin challenging a giant about wisdom, the creation story and Ragnarök, a kind of Old Norse apocalypse — and subsequently assembled as a single work.

“When they were written down, they were already centuries old. They were reinterpreted and misunderstood in the later context,” says Nordvig, who is proficient in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. “They are written in different meters and different translators made different choices.”

One poem, “Hindla’s Song,” taken from a book that includes the tales of Viking travel to North America — Christopher Columbus was centuries behind it turns out — is one of the few works in which the female deity Freya “does the walking and talking,” Nordvig says. It recounts the story of Óttarr, who summons Freya to help him identify his ancestry to win an inheritance. She turns him into a boar and rides to the underworld to retrieve the sorceress and seer Hindla, and the two women recount his pedigree in detail.

“Óttarr just happens to be related to every famous Viking that ever existed,” Nordvig says.

In Old Norse Mythology: An Introduction to the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Mathias Nordvig presents works and exegesis of the two major sources of Old Norse mythology.

He cites “The Song of Hárbard” as a favorite. In the tale, Thor and a snarky ferryman who just might be the hero’s father Odin in disguise, “have a kind of rap battle,” he says. They trade barbs and boasts about their respective sexual and magical feats as they traverse a flood-swollen river.

“It’s hilarious,” Nordvig says. “There are some wonderful insults in there.”

He describes Snorri’s Edda, as the Prose is also known, as a “more comprehensive presentation of Old Norse mythology to go to when you want to know something or look it up.”

The historian and politician Snorri wrote from his 13^th-century Christian perspective, so he is at pains to inform readers that he doesn’t really believe this stuff. In one section, he shores his position with a frame story in which the gods are merely humans duping a foolish king of Sweden.

“The other is the same kind of setting, only everyone is really drunk,” Nordvig says. “That was the only way he could present the stories.”

Snorri quotes from poems unknown in any other source, and modern scholarship has found that Snorri didn’t always get it right.

“There is this famous idea that Odin the god-king and warrior-king is accompanied by two ravens and two wolves. But he based that on his own extravagant interpretation of poetry. There is no mention of ravens and wolves closely connected to Odin,” he says.

Nordvig also notes that there is crossover between Old Norse mythology and material from the British Isles and Ireland, where Vikings raided and established settlements for 300 years, beginning in the late 8^th century.

“Some of that old Irish charm, the old English charm, shows up in western Norway,” he says.

While published as a textbook, Nordvig says he also wrote with lay readers in mind.

“I tried to make it as accessible as possible, somewhere between academic and popular language,” he says. “I’m trying to open it up for readers, to scratch the surface off and present this wealth of fascinating, sometimes confusing, information.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Mathias Nordvig publishes new book on Old Norse mythology.

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Top image: "Der letzte Kampf" by Johannes Gehrts, 1888

What happens after ‘Once upon a time’?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:35:15 +0000

What happens after ‘Once upon a time’? Rachel Sauer Fri, 06/12/2026 - 15:35

On The Ampersand, Professor Ann Schmiesing explores the elements of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale and how these stories illuminate deeper truths about being human

Listen to The Ampersand

Ann Schmiesing came to fairy tales almost as a matter of academic necessity.

Growing up in Oregon, she loved stories—for their detail and as vehicles of discovery—but initially pursed them as a scholar through theater and drama. Then, in one of her first professorships, she and a colleague were tasked with analyzing the department’s curriculum for possible gaps. They discovered that the department didn’t offer a course on Germany fairy tales, so Schmiesing offered to develop one.

The brothers Grimm changed not only the course of her scholarship, but in many ways her life. In their tales, she saw not only mirrors of her personal experiences, but of human experience. Fairy tales, she discovered, could hold truths that transcend time and culture.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Ann Schmiesing is author of The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, published in 2024 to wide acclaim and reviewed in publications from The New Yorker to The Times of London.

Now, Schmiesing is nationally and internationally recognized for her fairy tale scholarship. Her book The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, published in 2024, was recognized by The New Yorker as one of the best books of the year.

A professor of German literature in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and the senior vice chancellor for strategic initiatives, Schmiesing recently joined host Erika Randall, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder dean and vice provost of undergraduate education and professor of dance, on "The Ampersand,” a College of Arts and Sciences podcast. Randall and guests explore stories about ANDing as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

ANN SCHMIESING: I started out writing about 18th-century German drama. I also did 19th-century drama and theater history. So, my background, my dissertation work, all that, it's not fairy tales and folklore.

I got into fairy tales because a colleague of mine, years ago, we were tasked by our department with looking at our curriculum and seeing what are the courses that other programs have that we don't have. And it was a, ‘Hey, we don't have a course on German fairy tales.’ And so, I was one of the ones who did some of the older stuff—18th, 19th century. I also happened to have two young daughters at the time, so I kind of volunteered to develop this course, never thinking that I would get into writing about fairy tales.

I think there was a part of me that was probably a little bit disdainful. I was excited to do the course, but what is there really to write about?

ERIKA RANDALL: So, you thought maybe it was lower art.

SCHMIESING: It wasn't the 18th-century drama, all of that. And then I started teaching the course, and I was blown away. Just blown away. I mean, first, just the enthusiasm of my students that they brought to the subject matter and everything that they brought, I think, coming from Disney and pop culture, then really delving into the tradition of German fairy tales and other fairy tale traditions.

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Ann Schmiesing is the first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose first names (and life stories) are less well-known than their usual moniker, the Brothers Grimm.

And then at the same time, incidentally, I was losing my hearing.

RANDALL: In the moment of working on it.

SCHMIESING: That's right. So, I was going deaf. And one day I was prepping for a class, and I was going to be teaching this tale in which there is this wicked stepmother who hears all these noises that others can't hear. And it's kind of describing her descent into madness, if you will. But for me, I was losing my hearing, and I was having all of these bouts of tinnitus, roaring noises in my ears, all of that.

And so for me, reading that passage, it really resonated. Then I started paging through, in that moment, paging through the collection, realizing there's tale after tale after tale that depicts characters with disabilities, with deformities, with disease. And there's been so little written about this. So, that really became the impetus for my book on disability in the Grimms' fairy tales.

RANDALL: I did not know that. Did it feel at all like you were being cast in the role? You were a mother. You were a woman. You were an assistant professor at the time. Were you resisting it all, too, because there's this hyper-feminization of storytelling or the bedtime tale? Did it feel lesser from a feminist perspective? Did you go in that space? And then when you started to crack it open and go, wait, this is actually the opposite, there's so much room to give trouble from a feminist lens and from a disability studies lens.

SCHMIESING: Yeah, I think there was a part of that. I mean, I was really excited to develop the course, so it wasn't something that I was thinking as, oh gosh, I have to develop this new course, or anything like that. But I think there was a part of that. And one thing that is just really important to name is so many of the canonical fairy tales that we teach, they are sexist, misogynistic, they have racist components, anti-Semitic, on and on and on. And it is really important not to sweep that under the rug, but to address that head on.

As much as fairy tales have been so normative in their own way, they've also, throughout the history of the fairy tale, they've been a space to subvert those norms. I think that's what's really powerful, too, is how you make fairy tales your own through this process of interpretation but also telling and retelling.

RANDALL: Producer Tim and I were talking before the interview today about the 150th at CU, and thinking about fairy tale and myth and how critical it is to look at our stories, and to have them be open enough that others could see themselves in them to tell their story moving forward. And I think as academics, but also as administrators who are looking at our dream for the university, the dream for academia, the dream for education, how do we put those golden keys in the hand, not knowing what doors they may open?

SCHMIESING: That's right. And I look at the 150th celebrations and, for me, I do approach this through a fairy tale folklore lens. For the Grimms, they really saw their collecting of fairy tales, of legends, of various folk texts—they saw this as a process of exhumation, of exhuming these long-buried treasures that have been forgotten and making sure that they don't die out, making sure that they're told, that they are retold. I see something similar in how we tell our story.

I mean, humans, we gravitate towards storytelling because we want to make sense of our experience. We want to make sense of this thing we call life. We want to make sense of the world around us. And often we're doing that through storytelling. What I think is important is that there's no one story.

RANDALL: There's never one story.

SCHMIESING: That's right. There's always another story. There's always another perspective. There's always another way of telling the same basic story. What I really like about the 150th celebrations is this participatory aspect, this call to tell your story. Let us know about Buffs that maybe have been forgotten. And this is everything from things we should be celebrating to things that we should have done better or could do better. I see in that, again, this same pattern that I see in fairy tales and folklore, this notion that we're never done, we're always retelling, we're always reshaping.

Click play to hear the rest of the conversation!

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On The Ampersand, Professor Ann Schmiesing explores the elements of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale and how these stories illuminate deeper truths about being human.

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‘Every novel is an experience’

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:30:51 +0000

‘Every novel is an experience’ Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/22/2026 - 06:30

Clay Bonnyman Evans

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels

Helmut Müller-Sievers has an idea to help reignite students’ interest in taking literature courses: Rather than teaching novels as a source of knowledge, academics should encourage young readers to pay attention to the experience of reading.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says Müller-Sievers, professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literature at the �鶹��Ѱ��.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers.

In his new book The Novel Experience (Cornell University Press, 2026), Müller-Sievers follows the lead of three thinkers with “radical” notions about experience—the third-century Mahāyāna Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna;19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James; and19th-century German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche—and draws on his own experiences of reading.

“Fewer and fewer people are taking literature courses. We foolishly try to counter this loss by emphasizing what kind of knowledge students get from reading,” he says. “Because we are so focused on knowledge, we eliminate and, in a sense, prohibit the expression of the experience of reading novels.”

What was it like to read the book?

Rather than presenting a novel as something to be interpreted and or critically examined, the idea is to encourage readers to observe and communicate what it was actually like to read the book: Why did they choose the book? How difficult was it? How long did it take? Under what conditions—place, time, surroundings—did they read the book? Were they drawn to or distanced from the different characters? Did they enjoy it? Did anything stick with them when finished? How did the protagonist’s experience relate to their own?

In emphasizing knowledge to the exclusion of experience, the Western academy has promoted “an atrophied, mutilated sense of what experience is,” Müller-Sievers says. “We think there is a self . . . that is predicated on a division between the experiencer and what is experienced. James, Nāgārjuna and Nietzsche are radical critics of that idea.”

“The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers.

Where Western thought from time immemorial has argued that there exist stable, individual human “selves” that go through life almost as if watching a movie, distinct from their own experiences, Buddhist thought argues that separation between consciousness and experience is a delusion.

Müller-Sievers doesn’t dispute that there is knowledge to be found in literature or that it requires knowledge to understand and teach it in certain ways. But focusing almost exclusively on knowledge ignores the primary motivations most people who read novels: experience and entertainment.

“When people who are not academics read a book, they are not primarily interested in knowledge, but rather in partaking of an experience,” he says. “The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human.”

Müller-Sievers sees no contradiction in reading for both knowledge and experience and argues that sharing the experiences of reading with others increases interest and enjoyment.

“So, rather than say, ‘Hey, let’s learn about Thomas Mann,’ it’s ‘Hey, let’s talk about the experience of reading about an experience. We can find common language that makes it exciting,” he says.

Müller-Sievers also sees reading for experience as a “civic virtue.” Humans can never have the experiences of another in the real world, but they can by reading novels. Reading novels can help students become more aware of their singular distinctness from others and their experiences.

And at a time when artificial-intelligence continues to insinuate its way into nearly every aspect of modern life, he detects a clear, inviolable distinction between human and machine intelligence.

“Only humans can have experiences. AI can only imitate experiences by looking back. It always looks back; it has to look back,” he says. “There is no way to distinguish between human and AI knowledge. But we can distinguish between deep human experience and the retroactive intelligence of AI.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels.

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Top photo: Bhautik Patel/Unsplash

Renowned German-Jewish scholar to speak at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Sept. 2

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 20:44:14 +0000

Renowned German-Jewish scholar to speak at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Sept. 2 Rachel Sauer Thu, 08/28/2025 - 14:44

Michael Brenner, an American University distinguished professor of history, will present ‘When Democracy Died in Darkness: German-Jewish Responses to Hitler’s Rise’

A pre-eminent scholar of German-Jewish studies will present a lecture Tuesday focusing on democracy and the German-Jewish responses to Adolf Hitler’s rise.

Michael Brenner, a distinguished professor of history and the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at American University and the Chair of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, will present “When Democracy Died in Darkness: German-Jewish Responses to Hitler’s Rise” at 5 p.m. Tuesday in the Norlin Library’s Center for British and Irish Studies Room; tickets are not required. The presentation will also be streamed on Zoom. For more information, email Eli Sacks.

Brenner’s visit is co-sponsored by the �鶹��Ѱ�� Center for Humanities and the Arts; the departments of German and Slavic Languages and Literatures and History; the Program in Jewish Studies; the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization; �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Hillel; and the Louis P. Singer Chair in Jewish History.

His lecture will address the different ways in which German Jews of all shades responded to the revocation of their equal rights of being German citizens, answering the questions: What were their expectations as 1933 began; how did they react to the rapidly changing circumstances after Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933; and what is the relevance of these events in the light of present threats to American democracy?

Brenner was born to Holocaust survivors in Germany shortly after the war and genocide. He has received many prizes and fellowships, including the Baron Award for Scholarly Excellence in Research of the Jewish Experience. He is the author of 10 books that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. His latest are In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism and In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea.

Brenner also will present a special research colloquium for students and faculty on various aspects of his work at 8 a.m. Tuesday in E250 at the Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE). For more information email Thomas Pegelow Kaplan.

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Michael Brenner, an American University distinguished professor of history, will present ‘When Democracy Died in Darkness: German-Jewish Responses to Hitler’s Rise’

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Prof focuses on the brothers behind the fairy tales

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 21:37:22 +0000

Prof focuses on the brothers behind the fairy tales Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/25/2025 - 15:37

Clint Talbott

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, publishes first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

What makes a Grimm Brothers fairy tale? Hear more.

Once upon a time, a professor volunteered to develop a college course on German fairy tales. She did as she promised, but that was not the end.

“Once I prepared the course and began teaching it, I was just smitten,” says Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian studies at the �鶹��Ѱ��, now a world-renowned scholar of the Brothers Grimm.

Schmiesing has written two books on the Brothers Grimm. The most recent, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, was published last year to wide acclaim and reviewed in publications from The New Yorker to The Times of London. It is the first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose first names (and life stories) are less well-known than their usual moniker, the Brothers Grimm.

Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) are widely known as collectors of fairy tales, but they were also mythographers, linguists, librarians, civil servants and philologists who, among other things, strove to preserve key elements of German culture.

They produced a vast body of work on mythology and medieval literature, launched on a monumental German dictionary (which they had completed through the letter F by the time they both died), and made groundbreaking linguistic discoveries.

“By and large, people don’t know a whole lot about the Brothers Grimm, and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book,” says Schmiesing, who is also the senior vice chancellor for strategic initiatives at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder.

While teaching the course on the Grimm fairy tales, she noted that students were often familiar with some version of the tales, principally through Disney versions or other contemporary retellings of stories like Snow White.

Teaching moral lessons

The Grimms released seven complete and 10 abridged versions of the tales, and the brothers revised the tales over time. Starting with the second edition, for instance, doves peck out the evil stepsisters’ eyes in Cinderella as a punishment for their wickedness. Violence in the tales is rarely gratuitous, Schmiesing says, but in Cinderella and other tales, the Grimms sometimes added violence to teach a moral lesson.

As they edited and revised the tales, she adds, they mediated among different versions and revised them to reflect 19th-century bourgeois norms. For instance, female characters in some tales contribute less dialogue in later editions, Schmiesing says: “Their thoughts are simply paraphrased.”

Similarly, the Grimms adjusted “Hansel and Gretel” to reflect then-contemporary notions of women. In an earlier version, the culprit was their biological mother but in a later version of this tale, a stepmother abandons the children.

“They change that because they feel like they can’t possibly suggest that a biological mother would abandon her children,” Schmiesing says, adding, “Again, that's playing into their 19th-century ideas of women and motherhood.”

Additionally, some female characters are initially more independent than they appear in later editions, “so the Grimms kind of lessened their independence and increased their dependence on male characters,” Schmiesing says.

Over time, the Grimms also made the tales folksier, adding rhymes and idioms. And the Grimms did not think the tales were just kid stuff. They saw the tales as being interesting to all ages and relevant to German culture, Schmiesing says.

Germany in the Grimms’ lifetime was not politically united, and it was wracked by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Their own part of Germany was occupied by the French for a time, and “so they see collecting and publishing fairy tales and other texts . . . as a way forward for Germany,” Schmiesing says.

In the Grimms’ view, if Germans could appreciate their cultural heritage, perhaps they’d be able to assert themselves as a politically united entity: “So it might seem to be naive, but they really thought that their scholarly works, their collections, would also be a path out of the wars,” Schmiesing says.

Asking deep questions

Their scholarship was even broader, however. The brothers were interested in deep questions, such as how languages developed over time, how customs developed over time, how literary texts developed over time, “and that to them is all interwoven.”

Jacob Grimm, in particular, devoted much of his scholarly life not only to literature, but also to legal customs, linguistic study and his German Grammar, which includes his discovery of what is now called Grimm’s Law.

“It’s been said that Grimm’s Law was as important to the humanities as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is to the sciences,” Schmiesing says.

They did all of this on top of full careers as librarians, university professors, and, in Jacob’s case, a civil servant.

“It’s just extraordinary, the volume of scholarship that they produced,” Schmiesing says, noting their “sheer accomplishments” of “incredible breadth.”

Of the tales themselves, Schmiesing says Rumpelstiltskin is among her favorites. “It is one of the most enigmatic tales in the Grimms’ collection.” The tale can be viewed as being about the forced labor of female characters, disease and disability, or the meaning of spinning straw into gold.

In addition to these and other possible meanings, the tale changes significantly between versions, she notes. In an early version, the woman despairs not because she can’t spin straw into gold, but because she wants to spin yarn but can spin only gold.

“Also, who is Rumpelstiltskin, and what does he represent?”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, publishes first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

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Top illustration: by Walter Crane from "Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm" (1886).

Are modern politicians really making a deal with the devil?

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Are modern politicians really making a deal with the devil? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/23/2024 - 00:00

Chris Quirk

In an election season when accusations of ‘Faustian bargains’ are flying, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers reflects on what that really means

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted that “every notable historical era will have its own Faust.”

The current election season seems to have an abundance of them, judging by the frequent cries of “Faustian bargain” made by media pundits, candidates in races across the country and members of the opinion class. With the term so commonly used as Election Day approaches—generally as an accusation of having made a deal with the devil or of selling one’s soul—it seems fair to ask: Is this what Goethe meant?

Is claiming that a candidate made a Faustian bargain if they aligned themselves with a certain politician, voted a particular way or made certain stump-speech promises true to what the German author envisioned two centuries ago?

Helmut Müller-Sievers, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder professor of German, notes that “the Faustian bargain always has to do with the value of our conscience.”

“The Faustian bargain always has to do with the value of our conscience,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers, a professor of German in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature. “You're basically saying, so long as I have created advantages for my family, created advantages for my political ideology, created advantages for my short-term goals in life, it will not bother me. I will be able to sleep.”

Müller-Sievers—whose academic focus includes the intersections of literature, science and engineering in the 18th and 19th centuries and the history of technology—teaches a course on Johann Goethe’s tragic play Faust, in which he also examines the motif of the Faustian bargain as it appears in literature.

A deal with the devil

According to Müller-Sievers, the mythical idea of the Faustian deal with the devil as we understand it today originated in Germany sometime around the beginning of the 16th century. Likely the first literary treatment is by Christopher Marlowe late in the 1500s.

“But already Marlowe situates the play in Germany,” Müller-Sievers explains. “There seems to be a sense that the Reformation might have emboldened people to make their own relationship with God and the devil, so there’s a little bit of polemics going on there.”

In Goethe’s rendition, Faust is a bitter academic who has been seeking truth and failing in his pursuit. “Nothing gives him satisfaction, and he falls into what we would today call a depression. He is a cynic,” Müller-Sievers says.

Faust meets the devil, who is in the form of a dog that soon transforms into the demon Mephistopheles, and they begin a debate over the price for Faust’s soul. “It's the banter of super clever people who have no values and are too highly educated. That was already a common criticism at the time—intellectuals who want to show their brilliance but have no inner core.”

The two soon agree to a contest: Mephistopheles will win Faust's soul if he is able to entice Faust into wanting to hold on to some experience or aspect of the world that he finds desirable or fulfilling. Faust is convinced at first that he can resist, but soon succumbs.

The story of Faust has inspired artists for centuries, including the etching Faust by Rembrandt van Rijn (left, ca. 1652) and a lithograph of Mephistopholes flying above the skyline (right) by Eugène Delacroix for an 1828 translation of Goethe's Faust.

“We use the term Faustian bargain, and we think there must have been some kind of decision, but it might well be a gradual sliding—small bargains you make along the way, and then can’t go back,” Müller-Sievers says.

“It is basically a question of whether we are able to push aside our moral qualms when we act. At a certain point, will they come and bite us, and make us change? Will our conscience ever rise up and force us to denounce compromises that we've made?”

Müller-Sievers cites the example of German actor Gustaf Gründgens, whose career is portrayed in the Oscar-winning 1981 film Mephisto by Hungarian director István Szabó. “It’s bizarre. He was one of the great actors of his time, and maybe the greatest actor ever to play Mephisto on the stage,” he says.

“But he made a deal with the Nazi regime so he could continue to work in theater.” Gründgens continued playing Mephisto in performance in Germany in the run up to and even during World War II.

Sometimes, as in Gründgens’ case, one makes a deal with a reigning power rather than an individual, Müller-Sievers notes, and sometimes a large percentage of a population makes a deal.

“In the former East Germany, the GDR, you had an oppressive regime, and many people thought, ‘Well, I have to cut a deal with this system to get a job or get ahead,’ and they started snooping on other people,” Müller-Sievers explains.

“There were conscientious objectors, but it was embarrassing that so many people consented to this, and it was embarrassing later when all the documents came out, and you could read all the terms of the bargains people had made.”

Top image: Faust und Mephisto beim Schachspiel (Faust and Mephisto Play Chess), artist unknown

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In an election season when accusations of ‘Faustian bargains’ are flying, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers reflects on what that really means.

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Professor Mary Rippon led a secret, separate life

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 21:31:39 +0000

Professor Mary Rippon led a secret, separate life Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/17/2024 - 15:31

Silvia Pettem

In book, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumnus Silvia Pettem details a little-known chapter of the trailblazing faculty member's story

As a student at the University of Colorado, I often passed through the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater on the way to my classes. I had assumed Rippon was a woman associated with the theater department, but that was not so. I later learned that she had arrived in Boulder in 1878 and became the university's first female professor. After her death in 1935, then-President George Norlin named the theater (then under construction) in her memory.

Publicly, "Miss Rippon" was highly respected by students and faculty. However, unknown to Norlin and the others, she had a secret private life that would have been considered scandalous, had she not hidden her husband and daughter behind a Victorian veil of secrecy.

The long-concealed truth was revealed in 1986 when an elderly man donated Rippon's diaries, account books, and journals to the university's archives. He was Rippon's grandson and revealed that she had had a romantic relationship with one of her students, became pregnant in 1888, secretly married, and took a year's sabbatical in Germany to give birth.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumnus and historian Silvia Pettem (left) wrote Separate Lives about a little-known chapter in the life of influential �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Mary Rippon, namesake of the campus theater.

At the time, there was no rule concerning teacher-student relationships, as it never occurred to anyone to implement one. Rippon was 37, and her husband, Will Housel, was 25. When the baby, Miriam, was born, Housel was still at �鶹��Ѱ��in his senior year.

After graduation, Housel joined his wife and daughter in Europe before Rippon returned to Boulder and continued to teach as if nothing in her life had changed. Housel and Miriam remained in Europe, where he attended graduate school. Initially, Miriam was placed in a series of orphanages. At the age of 4, she was taken to Rippon's extended family in Illinois.

At the time, Victorian-era society expected women with children to be supported by their husbands. If a professional woman married, she would have been accused of taking a job away from a man with a family to support. Rippon had to completely separate her public and private lives in order to keep her job. She continued to teach for 20 more years.

As a revered pioneer woman educator, Rippon appears to have valued career over family, but she may have, instead, realized that she needed to work to financially provide for her daughter's care.

Eventually, Rippon and Housel divorced. Housel remarried when Miriam was 8 years old and provided his daughter a home, but he lacked an adequate income. On a salary less than her male colleagues, Rippon continued to support her daughter, as well as her divorced husband, his second wife, and, eventually, their four children!

Meanwhile, Rippon was a role model for her female students, a full professor, and even chair of the Department of German language and literature. Except for confiding in two close friends, she took her secret to her grave in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery.

For decades, the only tangible evidence on the �鶹��Ѱ��campus of Rippon's secret life was ivy that Housel had planted outside of Old Main, where Rippon held her classes. His sentiment was obvious in a poem he penned his senior year that read in part, "But the ivy is for friendship and it seemeth best of all; 'tis the rose of love and petals that will never fade or fall."

Silvia Pettem’s In Retrospect column appears once a month in the Daily Camera, where this first appeared. She can be reached at silviapettem@gmail.com. She will be signing copies of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon (Lyons Press, 2024) at the Boulder Bookstore on Oct. 22.

In book, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumnus Silvia Pettem details a little-known chapter of the trailblazing faculty member's story.

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Understanding the Brothers Grimm beyond princesses and magic

Anonymous — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 17:57:52 +0000

Understanding the Brothers Grimm beyond princesses and magic Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 04/07/2024 - 11:57

Blake Puscher

In her Arts and Sciences Honors Program Distinguished Lecture, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Ann Schmiesing offers a detailed look at the famous fairy tales and their collectors

Best known for their fairy tale collection that history has either sanitized and Disney-fied or reframed as a violent bloodbath, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm—known collectively as the Brothers Grimm—are misunderstood, at least in the popular imagination, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder expert notes.

More than just collectors of German folk tales, the Brothers Grimm were also passionate scholars, linguists, librarians, supporters of the arts and intellectuals who strongly opposed censorship. They also made jabs in their collected fairy tales at those who had wronged them, fudged the truth about the sources of those tales and rewrote some of them to make them morally acceptable.

The depths and contradictions of the Brothers Grimm make them much more fascinating than mere collectors of tales, Professor of German and Vice Chancellor for Academic Resource Management Ann Schmiesing noted in her Arts and Sciences Honors Program Distinguished Lecture Thursday evening.

Ann Schmiesing, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder professor of German and vice chancellor for academic resource management, discussed the Brothers Grimm and their legacy in her Arts and Sciences Honors Program Distinguished Lecture.

In her lecture, titled “Misunderstood Ever After? The Brothers Grimm and Their Legacy,” Schmiesing explained the parts of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s lives that are unknown outside of certain scholarly circles, explored the brothers’ contributions to literature and linguistics, and detailed their legacy beyond the fairy tale collections for which they are famed.

Unfamiliar origins

The Brothers Grimm are best known for the German folk tales they collected and preserved in writing: classic stories about Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel and Rapunzel. They’re so well known for these fairy tales, in fact, that UNESCO cites them as the two most frequently translated German authors of all time. “Not only that,” Schmiesing said, “they are in tenth and 11th place respectively on UNESCO’s list of the top 50 most translated authors in the world,” underscoring the global popularity of their fairytales.

Even though the stories in the brothers’ collection of fairy tales are well known, the tales’ origins, original contents, and editorial history are unfamiliar to most readers, Schmiesing said, especially since audiences worldwide have become used to sanitized 20th and 21st century retellings like those created by Disney.

One prominent example is the story of Cinderella: In the Brothers Grimm version, the stepmother instructs her daughters to cut off their big toe and heel, respectively, so that the shoe will fit, and the prince notices the blood.

“Some readers are shocked by the violence and darkness in many Grimm tales,” Schmiesing explained, “but others, having heard of this violence, wrongly assume that each and every Grimm tale is saturated with blood-curdling gruesomeness.”

There are also misconceptions about the origins of the stories that the Brothers Grimm collected, she said. “Some readers erroneously believe that the Grimms authored their tales from whole cloth, but the more prevalent misconception is that the Grimms journeyed into the fields and spinning parlors to interview peasants firsthand and record their tales word for word. In fact, scholars have established decades ago that the vast majority of the Grimms’ tales came from educated young townswomen, and then the Grimms significantly edited many of those tales.

“To my mind, dispelling these and other misconceptions opens a path to better understanding the Grimms’ remarkable achievements and the social, cultural, and political context from which these achievements arose,” she said.

More than just stories

However, fairy tales weren’t the sole focus of the brothers’ careers. They also pursued groundbreaking work in linguistics, literary history, mythography, runology (the study of runes), folklore, medieval literature, lexicography and more, Schmiesing said.

Some readers are shocked by the violence and darkness in many Grimm tales, but others, having heard of this violence, wrongly assume that each and every Grimm tale is saturated with blood-curdling gruesomeness ... To my mind, dispelling these and other misconceptions opens a path to better understanding the Grimms’ remarkable achievements and the social, cultural, and political context from which these achievements arose"

Seven years after the first edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales was published, Jacob began working on German Grammar. According to Schmiesing, the most notable part of this text was his groundbreaking “Grimm’s law,” also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift.

While the details of this theory are arcane, Schmiesing said that it allowed him to explain why words for the same thing in different languages descended from the Proto-Indo-European language, such as Greek, Gothic and Old High German.

“The significance of Grimm’s law to the humanities has been compared to the significance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to the life sciences,” Schmiesing said.

Shortly after the completion of German Grammar, the Brothers Grimm made history again by protesting the annulment of the constitution of Hannover with five other professors from the university where they worked, a group now known as the Göttingen Seven.

“The King of Hannover not only terminated all seven professors, but he further decreed that three of them, including Jacob, had three days to leave Hanoverian soil,” Schmiesing noted. “As news of the terminations and banishments spread, students poured into the streets in protest.”

According to some scholars, the Göttingen Seven contributed to the development of liberalism in Germany.

A disputed legacy

The Grimms’ legacy, though, is not as straightforward as history has made it out to be. For several decades after World War II, Schmiesing said, the Grimms were viewed in intellectual circles as “quaint, old-fashioned and even dangerous, largely because their constructions of Germanness were too easily appropriated by Nazi ideology.” Relatedly, some of their correspondences reveal anti-Semitic attitudes, she noted.

However, there are several distinctions between the brothers’ views and Nazism, some scholars have argued. Schmiesing explained that “whereas Jacob regarded a people or a folk principally as the embodiment of people who speak the same language, later 19th century and early 20th century figures took this a step further to mean ancestry, such that folk becomes a biological category with racial overtones.”

More importantly, Schmiesing said, the Grimms’ nationalism existed in the context of a culturally united but politically divided Germany that was dominated first by the Holy Roman Empire and later by the French under Napoleon. In fact, Schmiesing added, after the Revolutions of 1848, “Jacob was called to be a representative at the Frankfurt National Assembly, which was the first freely elected parliament for the German-speaking lands,” demonstrating that he was invested in creating a unified Germany.

Ultimately, the Grimms sought to study the past as a way of bettering the present, Schmiesing concluded. “What is often overlooked in the popular consciousness of the Brothers Grimm is that they passionately believed in the power of humanistic study to contribute to and foster civic discourse, and they vigorously challenged attempts to censor academic and political expression.”

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In her Arts and Sciences Honors Program Distinguished Lecture, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Ann Schmiesing offers a detailed look at the famous fairy tales and their collectors.

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Democracy is bound to get ‘rough,’ scholar says

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 19:40:23 +0000

Democracy is bound to get ‘rough,’ scholar says Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/14/2024 - 12:40

Bradley Worrell

German historian Paul Nolte discusses what populist movements in the United States and Europe mean for liberal democracies during �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder colloquium

Is democracy in crisis?

It’s a question Paul Nolte, an eminent German historian, has been ruminating on for more than a decade.

“I’ve been concerned with the history of democracy since about 2010. And it was about that time when (I had) the first idea that something was going in the wrong direction,” Nolte noted Tuesday afternoon in a research colloquium titled “Crisis or Transformation? From Good-old Democracy to Rough Democracy, ca. 1970-2020.”

Nolte was the invited scholar for the event that was jointly organized by the �鶹��Ѱ�� Program in Jewish Studies, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and the Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington in cooperation with the Gerda Henkel Foundation. His visit was co-sponsored by the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Center for Humanities and the Arts; the International Affairs Program; and the Departments of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, History and Sociology.

At a Tuesday colloquium, attendees listen to German historian Paul Nolte discuss the outlook for liberal democracy in the 21st century. (Photo: Bradley Worrell)

During the colloquium, Nolte noted that while it’s not possible to predict the future, it seems unlikely that democracies will return to what some might call the “good-old democracy” days of the 1970s through 2020—what could be called the Liberal Age for democracies in Europe and the United States.

“The good old times for many European countries, in which there were just three or four political parties, center left and center right … the classical Westminster model, they’re probably gone for good. It’s not a very likely expectation that this will return,” he said. “There is a broad understanding (among historians) that we’ve entered a new period of history where things are not as they were in the 1970s.”

Specifically noting democracy in the United States, Nolte cited the work of author Daniel Rogers, who wrote the 2011 book Age of Fracture, detailing the disintegration of shared American values.

“The (book) title speaks volumes,” Nolte noted. “If we’re in an age of fracture economically, and also in social rifts, and the old working class does not exist, why would we expect anything else for the state of democracy?”

Nolte also said people need to understand previous developments in “rough politics” in Europe and the United States during the late 18th and 19th centuries and the “new roughness” in recent years as politicians on both the political right and left have embraced populism.

“Will we spend two more decades lamenting a persistent crisis, or even conjuring up the imminent downfall of democracy, somehow yearning for the good old days that never return?” Nolte asked in a paper shared ahead of the colloquium. “Or will we take up the challenge, academically and politically, of democracy not being steady-state, but changing in larger historical contexts? Welcome, then, to the old-new rough democracy.”

Top image: Paul Nolte (left) and Thomas Kaplan, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and interim director of the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Program in Jewish Studies (Photo: Bradley Worrell)

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German historian Paul Nolte discusses what populist movements in the United States and Europe mean for liberal democracies during �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder colloquium.

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Research colloquium addresses ongoing crisis of liberal democracy

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 20:04:30 +0000

Research colloquium addresses ongoing crisis of liberal democracy Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/12/2024 - 13:04

Eminent German historian Paul Nolte will discuss whether the golden age of democracy is over or whether it can escape collapse and recover

One of Germany’s leading contemporary historians will present a research colloquium addressing the stage of crisis that liberal democracy has entered in the early 21st century—asking whether the golden age of democracy over and is on course for eventual collapse, or whether it can recover.

Historian Paul Nolte will present the colloquium, titled “Crisis or Transformation? From Good-old Democracy to Rough Democracy, ca. 1970-2020,” which is jointly organized by the �鶹��Ѱ�� Program in Jewish Studies, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and the Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington in cooperation with the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Historian Paul Nolte will discuss the crisis in liberal democracy at a research colloquium Tuesday.

It will be from 2-3:30 p.m. Tuesday in Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE) E422. To receive the pre-circulated text on which the discussions will be based, please RSVP by email to cujewishstudies@colorado.edu.

At �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, the visit is co-sponsored by the Center for Humanities and the Arts; the International Affairs Program; and the Departments of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, History and Sociology.

As one of Germany’s leading contemporary historians, Nolte holds a chair in modern history with a special emphasis on contemporary history and international relations at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin. His research areas include social, intellectual and political history of the 18th to 20th centuries, especially post-1945 Germany and the United States; transatlantic history of democracy; public intellectuals and social, economic and political concepts and mentalities; urban history and metropolitan cultures; religion and civil society in Western societies; and public history and cultures of memory.

Research colloquium

What: Crisis or Transformation? From Good-old Democracy to Rough Democracy, ca. 1970-2020

When: 2-3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 13

Where: CASE E422

More information

Nolte has written more than a dozen books and has served as a fellow or guest professor at Oxford University, Harvard University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Among his many transatlantic undertakings is chairing the academic advisory committee of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, which brings American PhD candidates to Germany.

His colloquium will focus on the current state of crisis in which liberal democracy exists, when they are under attack from neo-authoritarian ideas, movements and regimes, externally as well as from within. He will address what a potential recovery could look like, asking, “What if we were not witnesses to a crisis of democracy, but rather to its transformation, with the current predicaments being the new normal?”

Nolte will discuss how, from a historical point of view, “pre-crisis” democracy corresponded to social structures, cultural milieus and technological environments that will never return. Further, this longing often projects a relatively short period in the trajectory of democracy, participation and liberal society as an ideal state, while it was in itself full of shortcomings, rigid structures and privileges for the few.

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Eminent German historian Paul Nolte will discuss whether the golden age of democracy is over or whether it can escape collapse and recover.

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