A set of radical fairytales, written by an Austrian aristocrat in the early 20th century to promote social justice, will be published in English for the first time.
Hermynia Zur Mühlen was born in Vienna to a wealthy Catholic family in 1883, but rebelled against her upper-class life to become a prolific left-wing author. Next month, Princeton University Press will publish a selection of her stories, which focus on equality and the plight of the working class.
Zur Mühlen hoped to raise the political consciousness of children and adults. In her 1924 story The Monkeys and the Whip, a monkey who has lived with humans returns to the jungle with a whip. He tries to control the other monkeys, but eventually is overthrown. In The Carriage Horse, published in German the same year, a group of horses organise a trade union. Just two of the 17 fairytales in The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales, which were published in German between 1921 and 1944, have previously appeared in English.
Princeton University Press called the author “one of the great female practitioners of the genre”, and said her fairytales were “candid, forthright [and] innovative”.
According to the book’s editor, the fairytale scholar Jack Zipes, many authors wrote political fairytales during the Weimar Republic, but Zur Mühlen was the “most prominent”. “Her books were very popular among the social democrats and communists,” Zipes said, “and of course, the fascists were upset by them.”
Zur Mühlen explored the depression, turmoil and corruption of the Weimar period in stories such as The Glasses, Zipes added, which was first published in 1923.
The story opens with an evil magician who realises that “poor people would not let themselves be treated like animals forever”. So he sits in his laboratory and makes spectacles for poor people that show their brothers and sisters as “small, helpless, inferior creatures” while wealthy people seem like “powerful, clearly godlike creatures who deserved all of the best things in the world”. For the rich he makes glasses that make workers seem to be “machines for the exclusive use of the wealthy citizens”, while the king’s glasses are dipped in blood to reveal “whatever kings are accustomed to seeing”.
With the entire kingdom forced to wear these glasses at all times, there was “never a word of complaint to be heard, much less gripes and threats”, Zur Mühlen writes, until the sun melts a young poet’s lens and he is confronted with reality.
According to Zipes, who is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, this story reflects Zur Mühlen’s era, adding that “the Germans did not take off their glasses during the Weimar period, and their glasses prevented them from opposing Hitler and the Nazis”. And the stories remain deeply resonant today, he continued, “because millions of people are being blinded to the forces behind poverty and exploitation”.
“It is time that they take off their glasses as they do in this tale.”