The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales. By Hermynia Zur Mühlen. Edited and Translated by Jack Zipes for the series, Oddly Modern Fairy Tales. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Hermynia Zur Mühlen, born into the Austrian upper class in 1883, earned the sobriquet ‘The Red Countess’ by rebelling against her upbringing and embracing a left-wing outlook. She did, however, marry an Estonian/German baron and tried to convert his estates into a cooperative enterprise under the control of the workers. The project failed, but illustrates her acceptance, common amongst many left-wingers, that socialism is something brought to the workers.
A member of the German Communist Party, Zur Mühlen began to reflect on how children’s literature could change their socialisation. In 1921, her first book of radical fairy tales, What Little Peter’s Friends Told Him, was published. Many more followed, including the one that lends itself to the title of this collection, The Castle of Truth.
The first impression on reading these tales is the didactic nature of them. The rich are greedy and careless of the lives of their workers. Meanwhile, those workers are portrayed as being too dumb to see how they are being done down.
In The Carriage Horse (1924), militant unionism is expressed through the eponymous horse coming among the exploited farm horses and organising them to strike for better fodder. The strike is undermined by dumb oxen who take on the tasks of the horses, until they agree to stop doing so, but only through the threat of violence. The horses win their fodder rise, but remain essentially in the same situation they were at the beginning. The oxen remain dumb.
This theme runs through the stories. Even when a worker acquires the wherewithal to become a capitalist in Ali, the Carpet Weaver (1923), he quickly transforms into rapacious employer. The bloated plutocrat beloved of Bolshevik posters was an obvious model.
Another element becomes apparent when Ali gains that wherewithal through a good deed supernaturally rewarded. His eventual comeuppance also comes via the ‘Good Spirit’ who will return at some unspecified future point to judge all exploiters.
Although Zur Mühlen was a lapsed Catholic, perhaps, as is often claimed, Catholicism is never entirely set aside. Come the 1950s she was a lapsed communist, having parted company with the KPD during the rising Stalinism of the 1930s. She turned back to religion, if not Catholicism, which perhaps provides an alternative understanding of her tales.
Zur Mühlen does deal with a variety of political issues: the absence of concern for workers’ wellbeing (The Coals, 1921), critical thinking (Why, 1922), ideological myopia (The Glasses, 1923), technology (The Servant, 1923), nationalism (The Troublemakers, 1923), persistence of radical ideas (The Castle of Truth, 1924), religion (The Fence, 1924) and others exploring similar themes.
Twenty years later Zur Mühlen was writing in a more traditional mode of fairy tale. The Crown of the King of Domnonee (1944) involves an innocent younger prince betrayed by malevolent elder siblings that all resolves to a happy, royal, ending. The Story of the Wise Judge (1944) revolves around a poor but wise young woman who solves a number of riddles to prosper. The radical tropes have largely disappeared.
The politics of the 1920s stories are those of idealised Bolshevism, liberation being brought to the working class by the enlightened, or a reformed, more benign capitalism. Society is still one in which money plays a crucial part, just more fairly. There is no sense that capitalism, state or moderated, remains capitalism.
These tales, illustrated by George Grosz, John Heartfield, Heinrich Vogeler and Karl Holtz in the spare pen and ink style of the 1920s, were written for children. It is difficult to see the appeal in them for the young who would have to be old enough to appreciate the language and concepts, making them too old to be interested in fairy tales. A story read to two children aged 7 and 9, voracious readers both, did not make it to the end. Different times maybe, but were children more receptive a century ago?
That this collection comes from the Princeton University Press declares its academic interest. This it has in abundance for the insights it gives into Communist political thinking of the time, the identification of state capitalism with Soviet Communism and the issues outlined above. It sits within the ‘Oddly Modern Fairy Tales’ series edited by Jack Zipes, who has done a commendable job of translating Zur Mühlen’s tales.
If you are looking for a collection of fairy tales for children, this is not it. Should your interest be in the literary expression of political and historical ideas, then it is.
Dave Alton
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