It’s easily the oldest house I’ve ever lived in—known in Kassel, until I moved into it in August 2015, as the Brothers Grimm Museum. The address is Schöne Aussicht 2, hence the building’s “official” name: Palais Bellevue (the palace with the beautiful view). The study looks east and is gorgeous indeed: ex oriente lux. I mostly see trees now: the primeval-looking forest of Grimm lore.1 The palace was built in 1714 by Paul du Ry, a Huguenot architect lured to Kassel by Landgrave Charles I in the late seventeenth century with promises of a key role in turning the middling Hessian town into a cultured metropolis; it is Charles I, in fact, who gave Kassel its totemic Hercules monument as well as the Orangerie set in the Karlsaue park, the meadow (Aue) named after him, which I can likewise see from my study window. Du Ry’s grandson Simon Louis du Ry was the architect of choice of Charles I’s grandson, Friedrich II—with Kassel’s Fridericianum, continental Europe’s oldest purpose-built museum, being the foremost fruit of their collaboration.

Sometime in the late eighteenth century, the Palais Bellevue, which had originally been conceived as an observatory, enjoyed its first spell as a museum, housing the royal painting collection of Friedrich II—now on view in the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe built by du Ry the younger and Heinrich Christoph Jussow. (Jussow’s best-known building locally is the diminutive Temple of Apollo, technically known as a monopteros, in the Schlosspark, known today as Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe. It was recently renovated in a round of restorations paid for by the Deutsch-Griechische Gesellschaft, the German-Greek Society, whose Kassel branch convenes its meetings in said structure.) Following its period as a museum, the Palais Bellevue was briefly occupied by Jérôme Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleon who reigned as King of Westphalia from 1807 until 1813; and it is as Jérôme’s private librarian that Jacob Grimm, the older of the two brothers, might have first set foot in what is now my home—with a great deal of reluctance and barely concealed contempt to be sure, for the Grimm brothers, no Francophiles, were passionate supporters of the dream of a unified German nation. (Jacob died second, in 1863, just seven years before that dream finally came true. In 1848, he was elected to the newly founded National Assembly in Frankfurt am Main, the first freely elected parliament of the confederation of German states: the same year, fittingly—the confluence of nation building, lexicography, and linguistics being at the heart of our concerns here—that he published his Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache [History of the German Language].)

The Palais Bellevue remained in the hands of the landgraves of Hesse after the establishment of the German Empire in 1871 and well into Germany’s traumatic twentieth century; it was in the 1930s that the palace was gradually turned into a public art gallery (from 1878 until 1908 it had already been the temporary home of the Art University Kassel under the directorship of Louis Kolitz, in whose middling proto-impressionist paintings it occasionally appears). The building survived the destruction of World War II almost unscathed and was turned over to the city of Kassel in 1956, a year after the first edition of documenta took place. Finally, in 1972, the year I was born (welcome home!) and the year of documenta 5, a documenta for the ages, it became the Brothers Grimm Museum. Today, however, it is no longer a museum—the Grimm brothers never lived here anyway2—and a year on from writing this, it will most likely be serving as an exhibition venue for the fourteenth edition of documenta, which will be organized concurrently in Kassel and Athens—the latest chapter in a long history of German-Greek relations that began on the upbeat note of that German philhellenism that gave us art history as we know it, so to speak.

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Jacob Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm Carl Grimm were born in the Hessian town of Hanau in 1785 and 1786, respectively, the children of a lawyer named Philipp Wilhelm Grimm and a city councilman’s daughter named Dorothea (née Zimmer). But they were inevitably also the children—if not more so—of the rapidly and radically changing sociopolitical climate ushered in by the French Revolution of 1789: the permanent display of Kassel’s recently opened Grimmwelt, as the city’s new Brothers Grimm Museum is called, includes, among other gems, a drawing by Jacob and Wilhelm (children at the time!) depicting the guillotining of Louis XVI on the Place de la Concorde in 1793—a forceful reminder, in fact, in these times of ISIS-authored public mass beheadings, that decapitating people does not necessarily denote a return to barbarous dark ages but might rather symbolize being modern, or (in this particular case) the abrupt advent of modernity as such; a point that was not lost on Georges Bataille when he decided to name his renegade Surrealist journal and secret society Acéphale (Headless) back in 1936. There is plenty of dismembering to be enjoyed in the Grimms’ collection of fairy tales, of course, and only a little less beheading. In 1985, in conjunction with the nationwide celebrations of the bicentennial of the Grimm brothers’ births, the German writer and literary theorist Carl-Heinz Mallet published a study titled Kopf ab! (Heads off!) considering, as the subtitle had it, Gewalt im Märchen, or “violence in fairy tales.”

Among the myriad cultural, political, and social shock waves sent across the Western world by the momentous events of 1789, two concern us in particular with regard to the legacy of the Brothers Grimm: the birth of modern nationalism on the one hand, and the attendant deepening of intellectual, scientific interest in folk cultures and vernacular traditions on the other. Primarily this impulse was concentrated in linguistic research, of the kind that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm would go on to pioneer, to a large extent invent, even—a convergence perfectly crystallized in the coincidence of Jacob Grimm’s legislative election and the publication of the History of the German Language both taking place in 1848, but most magnificently realized in the Brothers Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, still the most comprehensive dictionary of the German language in existence. The Grimms’ contributions exploited to the fullest their privileged position as citizens of a realm, i.e., early-nineteenth-century Germany, in which the aforementioned two paradigm shifts converged to such fateful, nation-building effect: from tongue to state.

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When Jacob Grimm’s tenure as librarian to the French king of Westphalia began in 1808, nearly all German-speaking lands were in Napoleon’s hands: only two years before, the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire, the first of three Reichs, had been unceremoniously dissolved by the Emperor following the French imperial army’s decisive victory over the Prussians at the battle of Jena. As is well known, among the event’s impressionable witnesses was one Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, thirty-six years old at the time, whose diary entry of October 13, 1806, reads: “I saw the Emperor—this world-spirit—go out from the city to survey his realm. It is a truly wonderful experience to see such an individual, on horseback, concentrating on one point, stretching over the world and dominating it.”3 (One year later, still in Napoleon’s thrall, Hegel published his Phänomenologie des Geistes, forever changing the course of Western thought.) As the cradle of the so-called Frühromantik—the first of many specifically German responses to the French Revolution’s sociopolitical and cultural legacy, of which the Brothers Grimm’s project is likewise a part4—Jena was a major crossroads of intellectual trade routes and a site rich in philosophical symbolism, personified above all in the achievement of the Schlegel brothers and their short-lived but hugely influential Athenaeum journal, so named, of course, in honor of the spirit of classical Greek antiquity they so passionately sought to emulate.5 After Friedrich Schlegel’s departure from Jena and the subsequent collapse of the Athenaeum project, the younger Schlegel went on to found another literary journal, much less highly regarded and successful, this time named (oh, irony) Europa.

(Though this is neither the time nor the place to recount the well-worn story of the Jena Romantics in any more detail, it is worth pointing out that one of the coterie’s founding members was Friedrich’s wife, Dorothea von Schlegel, née Mendelssohn, the eldest daughter of the great Jewish Enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn. Dorothea’s first marriage was to the banker Simon Veit, a union that produced, among others, the German Romantic artist Philipp Veit. Veit is perhaps best remembered today for his monumental painting Germania, made during the heady days of the 1848 Revolution and conceived for the short-lived National Assembly in Frankfurt, where Jacob Grimm must have faced her steely, rousing stare a hundred times and more. Germania now hangs humbled in a thoroughfare of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.)

The Athenaeum journal—an eighteenth-century South as a State of Mind, if you will—stands halfway between the fantastical Greece of the art-historical, archaeological imagination (primarily that of the German renaissance man Johann Winckelmann, the father of art history and modern philhellenism, who, in the fashion of the true fantasist, never actually set foot on Greek shores) and another, more modern and real Greece, only half-emerging, which acted as a screen onto which the editors’ wildest dreams could be projected, leaving the nostalgic fingerprints of nineteenth-century German Sehnsucht all over the project.

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Following the French Revolution’s unleashing of patriotic passions across the European landmass, and the subsequent heightening of nationbuilding fervor in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and their apotheosis in the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), continent-wide revolutionary enthusiasms for the (putative) people’s rights to self-governance first visibly converged around the Greek independence cause and revolt against Ottoman dominion, which inevitably resonated with the familiar echo of Europe’s ancient us-versus-them rhetoric. German efforts like the Athenaeum notwithstanding, the cause’s most famous supporter from the Republic of Letters was Lord Byron, whose sympathy with the Greek plight was triggered by the Ottoman massacre of the Greek inhabitants of Chios in April 1822—an event widely broadcast, in post-Enlightenment Europe, as yet another showdown between Christianity and barbarism. Here it is perhaps worth noting that most of the aforementioned leading lights of the early Romantic movement, many of whom were raised in the Protestant faith, later in life—the 1820s, 1830s—sought salvation in a theatrical embrace of the Catholic Church and similar symbols of the forces of reaction.6 This obviously contributed significantly to the later equation of the postrevolutionary romantic temperament with certain unsavory, regressive impulses in the German political unconscious.

It is right around the time when the European infatuation with the mirage of Classical Greek antiquity reached its apogee, intoxicating the minds of the nationless German intelligentsia more than anyone else’s, that a very different modern Greece saw the light of day—shaped, in many different ways, by German hands first and foremost. Even though Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire had been made possible primarily by the three great powers of Britain, France, and Russia, it was the Bavarian prince, Otto, son of the art-loving King Ludwig I and a scion of the House of Wittelsbach, who was made the first monarch of Greece. Still a minor at the time of his ascension to the Greek throne as Otto I in 1832, his first years in power (the so-called Bavarokratia period) were effectively administered by a cabal of robustly Bavarian grandees. It is during King Otto I’s reign, and partly at the instigation of the Bavarian philhellenes (doubtless with Ludwig I in the lead), that the capital was moved from the unassuming Peloponnese port of Nafplio to Athens. As a historian of modern Greece has noted, “The choice of Athens as capital, a town dominated by the imposing ruins of the Parthenon and with its associations with the glories of the Periclean age but in the early 1830s little more than a dusty village, symbolized the cultural orientation of the new state towards the classical past”7—i.e., away from either the Ottoman or Orthodox present and toward a past, once again, that had cast its spell on mildly delusional “Western” imaginations first and foremost. (This was not just a time of increasing East-West, North-South anxieties but also an era that saw these anxieties cast in the newly scientific mold of a novel type of Euro-racism.) And so it happened that, egged on by Otto I’s no-doubt authentic enthusiasm for his newly acquired subjects—after being deposed in 1862, he is known to have spent the last years of his life wandering the royal palace in Bavarian Bamberg dressed in the traditional fustanella made famous by today’s Evzones of the Hellenic Army—no effort was spared to transform the former dusty village of Athens, home to little more than five to six thousand souls at the beginning of the nineteenth century, into a modern metropolis—as it turned out, one of impeccably German classicist design.

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For its part, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Kassel was home to some twenty thousand inhabitants. (Substantially bigger, in other words, than Athens at that time.) Though there exists no record, to my knowledge, that such a meeting ever took place, at some point or other Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm must have crossed paths with Leo von Klenze, who was just one year older than Jacob and had been hired as Jérôme Bonaparte’s court architect in 1808, the same year Jacob had been made the king’s chief librarian. (We do know of a letter the elder Grimm wrote to Clemens August Carl Klenze, Leo’s younger brother and a legal scholar of some renown, but we do not know with regards to what.) It was in Bonaparte’s service, in fact—an association he would do much to downplay, for obvious political reasons, later in his career when he became one of the foremost representatives of Neoclassicism in the German-speaking realm8—that von Klenze saw his very first building go up: the little Ballhaus next to the Schloss in Kassel’s Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, which over the years, decades, centuries has hosted dances, the theater performances for which it was initially intended, and princely tennis matches.9 Klenze’s stint in Kassel was brief, and the only other lasting architectural enterprise he was involved in during that time (his monumental royal stables, once sited opposite our Palais Bellevue, were demolished in the late nineteenth century to make way for the Neue Galerie, itself in turn modeled after Klenze’s own Alte Pinakothek in Munich) concerned the expansion of the Fridericianum to accommodate the institution of a proto-parliament of sorts—I am referring here to the Ständehalle, or Ständesaal, the semicircular structure in the back of the museum so familiar to veteran visitors of documenta, codesigned by Klenze and Bonaparte’s chief court architect Auguste Henri Victor Grandjean de Montigny. (Countless museums around the world are housed in buildings originally constructed to either house or represent political authority: royal palaces and the like. It is quite telling that in the unique case of Kassel’s Fridericianum, this well-established pattern was reversed: it was originally built as a museum, only to be transformed into a house of worldly power, however briefly, later on—the Stände, or “estates,” to which its name refers, conjuring the ghost of Enlightenment thought that animated Louis Bonaparte’s brief Hessian reign.)

After Bonaparte’s flight from the Prussian and Russian armies crossing into the German lands, the ambitious architect moved south, to Munich, where he was quick to work his way up within Ludwig I’s entourage. As the architect of choice to Ludwig’s quasi-pathologically philhellenic Bavarian court, Klenze was able to establish his reputation as one of the leading neoclassicist architects of his time, building everything from the Alte Pinakothek and the Ruhmeshalle in Munich to the Walhalla in Donaustauf and the Befreiungshalle in Kelheim, with momentous excursions to Tsarist Saint Petersburg (where he designed the New Hermitage, complete with its famous Atlas-like caryatids), as well as the newly founded Kingdom of Greece. Indeed, as a tireless promoter of the Greek aesthetic in art and architecture, Klenze’s first voyage to Greece in 1834 marked a high point in his career; his twenty-one-year journey from Kassel to the alleged cradle of Western civilization culminating in a city plan for an anesthetized new Athens.10 Klenze’s mission to the Greek kingdom of Otto I, undertaken at the urging of Otto’s father Ludwig I, was first and foremost a diplomatic one. One of his tasks was to dissuade Karl Friedrich Schinkel from building a new, doubtlessly neoclassical royal palace on the Acropolis. As a whole, Klenze’s time in Athens proved to be instrumental for raising art-historical awareness concerning the fate of the city’s decaying classical monuments, and his Athens city plan must be lauded for its attempt to integrate the Acropolis in particular into the planned fabric of the coming modern city.11

Not surprisingly, back home, Klenze’s sojourn in Athens made more than a merely theoretical impression. Less than a decade after returning from his first visit to the Parthenon, in 1842, he was able to open a carbon copy of this emblematic architectural marvel on a wooded hill on the banks of the Danube just east of the medieval market town of Regensburg, the wholly incongruous neoclassical oddity that is the Walhalla. A personal obsession of Ludwig’s, this hall of fame dedicated to famous speakers of the “teutsche Zunge”—celebrating the union of all German peoples in a single tongue at a time when such unity seemed politically unattainable—was in fact years in the making, its first plans drawn up as early as 1815, only months after Napoleon’s decisive defeat at Waterloo. The Walhalla’s festive opening in October 1842, handsomely immortalized by none other than J. M. W. Turner, also entailed the unveiling of ninety-six busts representing Germanophone celebrities, anyone from Albrecht Dürer to Joseph Haydn and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—and including a seated full-body portrait of Ludwig I himself, of course. Dozens more were added in subsequent decades (the most recent inclusion a 2010 portrait of Heinrich Heine). Oddly enough, however—or perhaps not so oddly, seeing as who’s there and who’s not12—the Walhalla, this shining white fortress on a hill, does not include busts of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the very architects of the German tongue’s most daunting edifice.

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A gratifying aspect of visiting the Grimmwelt on Kassel’s Weinberg—yet another fortress on a hill13—is its attempt to present a far more balanced and kaleidoscopic portrait of the Grimm brothers’ achievement than is likely to be expected from a museum that must welcome hundreds of visitors every week presumably raised on a steady diet of the more “suitable” 1818 through 1858 editions of the Grimm-authored Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). Indeed, a concerted effort has been made to shift the emphasis away from the Grimms’ folktale-gathering activities, so easily infantilized or spectacularized, toward their work on the mammoth enterprise that was the Deutsches Wörterbuch; their share in the densely networked intellectual culture of nineteenth-century Germany (their correspondence consists of some thirty-thousand letters divided among some 1,400 letter writers); and their political activities, which were of a kind that may accurately be called radical—not exactly a quality easily associated with the picture of Biedermeier wholesomeness the brothers have come to embody in the popular imagination. Of these many achievements and activities, it is the mighty fortress of their dictionary that deserves most attention—the project for which the Grimm brothers effectively retired back to Kassel after being ousted from their posts at the university in nearby Göttingen on political grounds in 1837. They were part of the so-called Göttingen Seven, a highly regarded group of university professors who protested against the King of Hanover’s trampling of its kingdom’s infant constitution—a dress rehearsal, in fact, for Jacob Grimm’s later involvement in the National Assembly after the revolutions of 1848. Around the same time, the elder Grimm also finished his influential treatise Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology), and here one is reminded of the story, recounted earlier, of Philipp Veit’s Germania, whose steely, rousing stare Jacob must have faced a hundred times and more.

The story of the Deutsches Wörterbuch is well- known, but worth repeating regardless: begun in 1838 under the assumption that it would take just ten years of their lives and be contained in seven volumes—and undertaken, in no small measure, for financial reasons—the dictionary was only completed more than a century after Jacob’s death in 1863, at which point his work had come to a standstill at the entry “Frucht” (Fruit). The final, 1970s-era product sprawled out across thirty-three volumes and contained more than three hundred thousand entries listed across thirty-three thousand pages; its endless conclusion a perpetual source of inspiration for the artistic imagination (evinced most notably in Ecke Bonk’s documenta 11 installation Book of Words: Random Reading [2002], now a centerpiece of the Grimmwelt’s permanent installation). A sprawling citadel of speech, Deutsches Wörterbuch’s Byzantine-build is a true reflection of the motto under which the Grimm brothers worked all those years: die Sprache ist allen bekannt und ein Geheimnis (Language, though spoken by all, remains a mystery). Its mystery is perhaps primarily one of belonging, of what constitutes a speakers’ community. In their Deutsches Wörterbuch, the Grimm brothers found language before, and founded language as, “nation.”

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Let us leave behind the trampled paths of the nation-building nineteenth century and return to present-day Kassel to conclude, then, on the notion of nationhood and the entanglement of “nation and narration” (to borrow the title of a landmark study on the subject authored by Homi K. Bhabha). As Jack Zipes has noted in his discussion of the “German-ness” of the Grimm brothers’ literary and lexicographical project: “The obsession with fairy tales in the nineteenth century—and perhaps today as well [my emphasis]—expressed a German proclivity to seek resolutions of social conflicts within art.”14 This proclivity endures most definitely today as well, if we consider the mighty fortress of documenta to be part and parcel of this psychosocial history and think of the quinquennial mega-exhibition—from its founding in postwar, Cold War–era West Germany (and in deep Grimm brothers territory to boot), via its transformation in the globalizing 1990s, to its present-day anchorage in the unlikely coupling of Kassel and Athens—as one more expression of that unnerving German inclination “to seek resolutions of social conflicts within art.” Why such resolutions are sought in the realm of art, and how exactly they are found there are questions that must remain unanswered for now—another time, another essay perhaps?—but suffice it to say that, as far as this resident of an erstwhile Grimm brothers haunt is concerned, one could think of a great many worse ways of “resolving” social conflict in crisis-ridden contemporary society.