Tales from another land
Martin Elrodt
When I first fell in love with storytelling in 1990, at the age of 24, and in the following years migrated from my previous profession as actor to being a storyteller, it was still quite common to be greeted by organizers and audiences alike with statements such as: “You are a storyteller? Why, you don’t have a long grey beard, and there’s no rocking chair…!” or, after the performance: “But you didn’t tell the story as it is written in the book!”
Since the Brothers Grimm published their collection of folktales, storytelling in public German consciousness has stood for “grannies or grandpas telling wonder tales.”* This nexus between an activity (storytelling) and a genre (wonder tales) has been so strong that in German speaking countries – including Austria and Switzerland – the majority of storytellers would not call themselves Geschichtenerzähler, which is the adequate and exact translation of storyteller, but Märchenerzähler (fairy tale tellers/wonder tale tellers). As far as I know, this doesn’t happen in any other language on this planet.
In order to understand these still prevailing ideas about storytelling and its strong connection to wonder tales, one has to take a closer look at the past, and especially at the time before and after the Brothers Grimms’ activities.
The past
There is not much evidence of what kind of stories have been told in Germany before the 19th century. Storytelling has always been considered a minor art, if art at all, performed rather casually in private and informal spaces: travelling craftsmen, merchants or soldiers would pass down a mixture of folktales, anecdotes and real news from one place to another; stories would be gathered and retold by village people on long winter nights when tedious chores were to be done by the family or even the whole village, e.g., spinning or mending fishing nets. Neither literature nor the scarcely developed sciences cared for this part of popular culture. There is nothing comparable to the works of Charles Perrault (France) or Giambattista Basile (Italy), although motive (as in the Aarne-Thompson Index of folk tales: elements of plot, characters or places that would come up in different stories all over the continent) and text research proved later that in Germany as well there must have been an exchange between literary works and the oral tradition.
Then, in the early 19th century, Germany found itself going through a crisis of identity, neither the first nor the last. Having been affected strongly by both French culture and politics, German artists and scientists were frantically searching for their roots and at the same time felt inclined to oppose the rationalism of the enlightenment: consequently, the last universal culture before enlightenment, the Middle Ages, was glorified. Romanticism was born, popular forms of literature and poetry like folktales and folksongs were rediscovered and often rewritten according to the romantic ideas of their collectors and publishers about true, original folklore. The collectors found stories that researchers would afterwards classify either as Zaubermärchen (wonder tales), Schwänke (comical tales), Sagen (local legends) or Legenden (saints’ legends). Neither myths nor epics had survived within the oral tradition.
The most famous collectors were Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Linguists by profession, they felt themselves obliged to preserve and publish folktales: this is how the collection of Brothers Grimm came into being. It is the work of German literature that found more translations and editions all over the world than any other German book, and has been exerting a strong influence on public opinion about storytelling even today.
The seven editions of “Kinderund Hausmärchen” between 1812 and 1857 had great success and may have prevented some traditional stories from vanishing, but there were two adverse effects too. For one, folktales were from now on conceived as book-tales, as a literary genre. More and more people learned to read and write when compulsory school attendance was introduced, and the traditional social and cultural structures were torn apart by industrialization and migration towards cities. The traditional spaces for storytelling diminished, while at the same time the literary language of the Grimm collection with its indisputably high quality influenced the idea of how folktales have to sound.
Secondly, by having eliminated any supposed impurities from the stories and calling their collection “Children’s and Household Tales”, the Brothers Grimm claimed folktales to be part of the children’s sphere, which met the need of the Biedermeier age for escapist pedagogic literature.
Nevertheless, the influence of Grimms’ Fairy Tales was so strong that it defined the idea of the sound of a folktale in terms of lexis, rhythm, formulae, and content. Their fascination remained unchallenged in the following decades, as the rise of the mass media and the ongoing change of social structures were further weakening the position of traditional storytelling.
Thus, the printed collections of fairy tales and legends gained more and more influence as primary sources of traditional stories; they would be read rather than told, mostly only within the bounds of the family. The technical and cultural environment of stories froze at the level of a feudalistic land before the industrial revolution: windmills, rifles and deluxe coaches were permitted, cars and telephones were not.
This development reached its low point towards the end of the 1960s; the knowledge of traditional lore was scarce with the younger generations, and even the elder ones referred to books as primary sources.
In former West Germany, the aftermath of the so-called “revolution of ’68”, where social and cultural ideologies changed all over the Western world, nearly put an end to traditional stories even in their printed form, as they were blamed for the perpetuation of conservative and out-dated values.
East Germany followed a different path. As in socialism, folktales were considered a genuine expression of the ordinary people’s longing for justice, happiness, and peace. Socialist cultural institutions tried to reconcile them with modern mass media: their transposition into movies, theatre plays and radio productions was strongly pushed ahead by the state. On the other hand, there was no live storytelling on a bigger scale.
As a reaction to the ever decreasing importance of traditional stories in Western Germany, the Europäische Märchengesellschaft (European Fairy-tale Association), abbreviated EMG, was founded in 1956. Its main interest was the academic study of wonder tales in a literary and later, psychological context. From the beginning, people interested in telling stories also joined the association. The influence of Grimms’ Fairy Tales and printed sources in general had become so strong that nearly all tellers opted for reproducing them word-by-word after having learned them by heart, which in a technical sense corresponds to recitation rather than telling. This concept left scarcely any room for improvisation and shifted the telling into a kind of lecture. The dialogical element vanished. The tellers following that fashion chose to call themselves Märchenerzähler (fairytale teller) instead of Geschichtenerzähler (storyteller).
From the second half of the 80s till the end of the 20th century, several developments unfolded simultaneously: the fairy-tale movement carried by the EMG members managed to spread into regional culture as Märchenkreise (fairy-tale circles), where folktale enthusiasts could meet. Because of their regional reference, the frame of topics widened to include local legends in some of these circles.
Secondly, immigrants mainly from Arab countries successfully introduced their idea of storytelling. This unfortunately did not help storytelling become a perfectly normal branch of the performing arts, as, due to the specific background of these tellers and their willingness to benefit from cultural stereotypes, their art continued to be considered as exotic by the majority and matched an already existing concept of storytelling being an oriental art form.
And finally the arising esoteric movement of the 90s created a storytelling school of its own. Parting mainly from originally anthroposophic ideas, its followers started to run Märchenzentren (fairy-tale centres) all over the country. As their name makes clear, these centres again deal with wonder or comical tales exclusively. The tellers call themselves likewise fairy-tale tellers and tend to recite word-byword. The stress is not so much on the scientific aspect of folktales, as is the case with the EMG, as on the promotion of fairy tales as therapeutic or counselling aid in life. This however, is not in a classically psychological sense: fairy tales are combined with anthroposophic puppetry, dance, meditation, and other esoteric practices.
These rather separated worlds began to connect with the turn of the century, when the World Wide Web facilitated communication across spatial and ideological gaps, and an increasing number of contacts with storytellers from abroad opened up new horizons. Since then, storytelling festivals have sprouted all over the place (with an equal or bigger number of fairy-tale festivals). The networking culminated in a first transnational meeting of storytellers in Aachen 2008, which has since been repeated annually and in 2012 led to the creation of the transnational storytellers’ organisation VEE (Verband der Erzählerinnen und Erzähler) – its members being professionals mainly from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
The present
In light of the development described above, it should not be surprising that the thematic focus of current storytelling in Germany lies on folktales/wonder tales, with Brothers Grimms’ stories having a fair share of attention, and that storytelling as such is mainly understood as a stage activity, belonging to the performing arts and entertainment being its main purpose. Audiences are either children, often in schools or preschools, families – mainly on weekend afternoons – or adults with a soft spot for folktales
(evening sessions). Apart from that storytelling mainstream, there’s a growing range of applied storytelling finding its way into social, cultural, and pedagogic contexts:
- As a means of community building. The biggest storytelling festival in Germany (Feuerspuren, about 3,000 spectators) is actually run by the inhabitants of a neighbourhood in Bremen who for the whole year prepare the stories they are going to tell, and perform them in all kinds of venues of daily life, such as at the hairdressers, the mosque, the library, the pharmacy, the laundry, etc.
- As a tool for first, second, and foreign language acquisition. Municipalities in Berlin, Frankfurt, Freiburg (among others) have recognized its potential and subsidize weekly visits of storytellers to primary schools.
- As a method in environmental and museum pedagogics. Storytelling is used, for example, in Wuppertal on guided tours through a nature protection area to emphasize its significance and explain its function (WupperTell). Ethnological and art museums use storytelling tools for their guided tours too.
The range of themes and genres that storytellers see fit to tell has luckily also broadened considerably in the last decade, and includes stories completely invented by the teller, epics, improvised stories, myths, biographic stories, and world literature. As for figures, there are an estimated 100 persons who operate as semi-professional and professional storytellers (roughly one storyteller per 800,000 inhabitants, as compared to the United Kingdom with one storyteller per 100,000 inhabitants), and an unknown number of amateurs performing regularly.
The future
In spite of all these positive and heartening developments, even now the existence of storytelling as a performing art or applied method is still unknown to great parts of the population. People will still ask the storyteller “And what kind of stories do you read?” or answer them, “You’re telling for children surely.”
This clearly shows that there’s still much to be done and improved. With the VEE as a transnational organization picking up steam, some promising initiatives are on their way. Storytelling is to be included in Germany’s share of the UNESCO List of Immaterial Cultural Heritage. The VEE, together with other national and transnational storytelling organizations in Europe, promotes the proclamation of a European Year of Storytelling in 2017 or 2018. As to an artistic and methodological agenda, it is the author’s point of view that we should try hard to catch up with the – subjectively perceived – generally higher quality of stage storytelling in some Western European countries (e.g. France, Netherlands, U.K., and Scandinavian countries). To achieve this, it will be necessary for German storytellers to develop the tools for constructive dialogue and feedback, thus daring to lead a discussion about individual quality and challenges.
A look at the practice in other countries should encourage us to further extend the range and impact of applied storytelling to storytelling in business (e.g., USA), stories in curriculum (e.g., India, Canada) as well as storytelling as a general communication skill that can be used in virtually every field of professional or social activity.
With this essay, I hope I’ve been able to show that the storytelling movement and its protagonists are striving relentlessly to find its place in 21st century society, as a contrast to and a completion of massive multimedia offers, and hopefully will have found it before the beards have grown long.
The author was an actor and puppeteer by profession until he discovered in 1991 that his true vocation was storytelling. Currently the coordinator at the “Red Internacional de Cuentacuentos” (RIC, International Storytellers’ Network), www.cuentacuentos.eu, the author also runs the website www.erzaehlen.de as a platform for the storytelling community in German speaking lands. He can be reached at jme@ellrodt.de.