ABSTRACT
Jacob Grimm (1785–1836) is justifiably held to be the father of Germanistik – the academic study of German language and literature. With the famous words – ‘was ist ein volk? ein volk ist der inbegriff von menschen, welche dieselbe sprache reden’ – Grimm accepted the presidency of the inaugural Congress of Germanisten to whom not just lawyers (as the term originally implied) but also historians and philologists had been invited, and thus became a powerful figurehead in the symbolic grounding of a discipline. Along with the text editor Karl Lachmann (see ch. 12), he could also be considered as a founder of the historical-comparative method in German philology. In his Deutsche Grammatik (1819–37) and Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1848), he formed rules for the 1SS and 2SS (building on the work of the pioneering English amateur William Jones and the Dane Rasmus Rask), umlaut and ablaut; coined the terms for weak and strong declensions and conjugations, and the tripartite periodization of the German language (alt-, mittel, und neuhochdeutsch); and – along with the Neogrammarians who followed in his footsteps – set the agenda for German linguistics well into the twentieth century. The essence of his highly prolific and varied output can be captured in the spirit of the age, a literary-academic romanticism that strove for unity and freedom in the present by searching for these in works of the German(ic) past: Deutsche Sagen (1816–18), Deutsche Reichstümer (1828), Deutsche Mythologien (1835), Weistümer (1840–63), as well as the historical grammar (above) and the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–15) for which he and his brother Wilhelm are world-famous as ‘story tellers’, but which were primarily collected to capture the style and motifs of age-old oral transmission.
