The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Kunstmärchen 

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

One of the literary reactions to the rationalism of the Enlightenment was the Gothic novel. An associated response to Enlightenment rationalism was a heightened interest in supernatural folklore, especially märchen, or German fairy tales. In Germany, scholarly interest led the publication of significant collections of märchen from 1782-1786 (Johann Karl August Musäus’ German Folktales [original: Volksmärchen der Deutschen]) and from 1789-1793 (Benedikte Naubert’s New German Fairy Tales [original: Neue Deutsche Märchen]), with the Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales (original: Kinder- und Hausmärchen) following in 1812 and 1815.

Popular interest and scholarly interest in the märchen were matched by the interest in them shown by artists and writers. The German Romantics were particularly taken with märchen, with the poet, author, and philosopher Novalis (1772-1801) saying that “the fairy tale is as it were the canon of poetry.”1 The Romantics saw in the volksmärchen (common folktale) the core elements of poetry and art, and were especially inspired by the final story in Goethe’s Entertainments of German Immigrants (original: Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, 1795), which was an allegorical märchen. The Romantics saw the possibilities in the märchen:

Created largely by bourgeois writers of the eighteenth century, the fairy tale transcended the folk tale in Germany by showing how autodynamics could give rise to a new world that breaks radically with the norms of an older, more confining social order. In this respect the fairy tale corresponded to the growing needs of an audience which was becoming more literate, enlightened, emancipated, and assertive. In its early phase the fairy tale reflected conflict, in other words, the lack of room in society or the lack of real possibilities for social participation desired by talented members of the bourgeois intelligentsia who wanted to create something new and questioned all existing institutions. Out of this conflict or chaos, the Romantics sought to open up society, to develop ideas and lines of motion based on a progressive Utopian notion and the longing for non-alienating conditions of existence. Thus, the aesthetic design had its point of departure in the gradual formation of a new social configuration stamped by the Enlightenment, particularly by the awareness and attitude that human beings had the free will to rationally determine their destinies.2 

Especially inspired by the literary approach Goethe applied to it, and imitated him, writing fairy tales which had literary qualities including psychological depth and narrative experimentation. These literary fairy tales, or kunstmärchen, became one of the most popular and widely used forms for the German Romantics, who saw in them an opportunity to create their own myths using motifs familiar to most Germans, and to poetically mix the supernatural and the mundane.

The kunstmärchen differed from the volksmärchen in that the former subverted the latter, “as though it were a classical form against which they were rebelling…the alienation of the hero in the kunstmärchen is directly opposed to the universal integration of ‘interconnectedness’ which Lüthi hails as one of the hallmarks of the volksmärchen.”3 Most of the kunstmärchen “do not much resemble oral tales but instead construct eerie dreamscapes and wandering narratives of loss and transformation…perhaps because the dissociation of modern life is not so easily banished, the mood of most Kunstmärchen is not consolatory but uncanny.”4 

The most prominent practitioners of the kunstmärchen were the Germans, followed by the French. The English generally treated the literary fair tale with scorn until the 1823 English translation of the Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales, which gained a wide readership and whose scholarly approach appealed to the English intelligentsia.

Kunstmärchen appeared as plays across Europe in the 1820s and influenced European and American writers as various as Washington Irving, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, and Rudyard Kipling.

For Further Research

Jack Zipes, “Breaking the Spell: Politics and the Fairy Tale,” New German Critique no. 6 (Autumn 1975): 116-135.

Jack Zipes, “The Revolutionary Rise of the Romantic Fairy Tale in Germany,” Studies in Romanticism 16, no. 4 (Fall 1977): 409-450.


1 Qtd. in Kari Lokke, “The Romantic Fairy Tale,” in Michael Ferber, ed, A Companion to European Romanticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 142.

2 Jack Zipes, “The Revolutionary Rise of the Romantic Fairy Tale in Germany,” Studies in Romanticism 16, no. 4 (Fall 1977): 418.

3 Jason Marc Harris, Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 39.

4 Brian Attebery, Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (Oxford: Oxford University, 2014), 26-27.