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Red Fairy Tales and Non‐Anthropocentric Solidarity: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer
Author(s) -
Powers Michael
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
the german quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.11
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1756-1183
pISSN - 0016-8831
DOI - 10.1111/gequ.12177
Subject(s) - solidarity , context (archaeology) , literature , art , marxist philosophy , folklore , art history , philosophy , history , politics , law , archaeology , political science
Hermynia Zur Mühlen (1883–1951) authored several socialist fairy tales during the Weimar Republic, including the collections Was Peterchens Freunde erzählen (1921), Märchen (1922), and Das Schloss der Wahrheit (1924). In many of her tales, inanimate objects come alive, following an age‐old trope common in folklore and fables. Unlike traditional Märchen , however, Zur Mühlen's texts acutely politicize the magical animation of things. This essay explores the solidarity between humans and nonhumans in the writings of this underrepresented author within the context of contemporaneous neo‐Marxist revaluations of the fairy‐tale genre by Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer. Drawing especially on their reflections on the capacity of the fairy tale to politically disenchant, the nonhuman objects in Zur Mühlen's tales—both natural and manufactured objects—are read in the context of her aim to mobilize the fairy tale as a tool in the quest to create a more egalitarian society.