The Brothers Grimm and Wagner

The Brothers Grimm, Goethe and later Wagner answered that call. And 90 years later the first unified German state was created.

Source: Our Disinfolklore Universe (Munich Speech)

The Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmarchen (1812-1857) was not merely an anthology of fairy tales. It was a political project: demonstrating a shared German culture from which a nation could be wrought. Wagner’s operas made the same case through music and spectacle. The pipeline from folk song to nation state took ninety years.

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