Jack David Zipes is an American retired Professor of German at the University of Minnesota, who has published and lectured on the subject of fairy tales, their evolution, and their social and political role in civilizing processes. According to Zipes, fairy tales "serve a meaningful social function, not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society." His arguments are avowedly based on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and more recently theories of cultural evolution.
Jack Zipes started off received a B.A. in Political Sience (1959), and a M.A. in English and Comparative literature at Columbia University, (1960). From there, Zipes studied at the University of Munich in 1962 and the University of Tübingen in 1963. He completed a PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University in 1965. Zipes taught at various institutions before heading the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch at the University of Minnesota. He has translated the complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
The Brothers Grimm (German: Brüder Grimm or Die Gebrüder Grimm), Jakob Grimm (January 4, 1785 – September 20, 1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (February 24, 1786 – December 16, 1859), were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who together collected folklore. They are among the most well-known storytellers of European folk tales, and their work popularized such stories as "Cinderella", "The Frog Prince" (Der Froschkönig), "Hansel and Gretel" (Hänsel und Gretel), "Rapunzel", "Rumpelstiltskin" (Rumpelstilzchen), and "Snow White" (Schneewittchen). Their first collection of folk tales, Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), was published in 1812.
The brothers spent their formative years first in the German town of Hanau and then in Steinau. Their father's death in 1796, about a decade into their lives, caused great poverty for the family and affected the brothers for many years. They attended the University of Marburg where historian and jurist Friedrich von Savigny spurred their interest in philology and Germanic studies—a field in which they are now considered pioneers—and at the same time developed a curiosity for folklore, which grew into a life-long dedication to collecting German folk tales.
Hermann Hesse (German pronunciation: [ˈhɛɐ̯man ˈhɛsə]; July 2, 1877 – August 9, 1962) was a German poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi), each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality.
Hermann Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in the Black Forest town of Calw in Württemberg, Germany. Both of Hesse's parents served in India at a mission under the auspices of the Basel Mission, a Protestant Christian missionary society. Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, was born at such a mission in India in 1842. In describing her own childhood, she said, "A happy child I was not..." As was usual among missionaries at the time, she was left behind in Europe at the age of four when her parents went to India. In her teens she attempted to rebel against her authoritarian father, Hermann Gundert, but finally submitted.
Béla Balázs (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈbeːla ˈbɒlaːʒ]) (4 August 1884, Szeged – 17 May 1949, Budapest), born Herbert Bauer, was a Hungarian-Jewish film critic, aesthete, writer and poet.
He was the son of German-born parents, adopting his nom de plume in newspaper articles written before his 1902 move to Budapest, where he studied Hungarian and German at the Eötvös Collegium.
He is perhaps best remembered as the librettist of Bluebeard's Castle which he originally wrote for his roommate Zoltán Kodály, who in turn introduced him to the eventual composer of the opera, Béla Bartók. This collaboration continued with the scenario for the ballet The Wooden Prince.
The collapse of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic under Béla Kun in 1919 began a long period of exile in Vienna and Germany and, from 1933 until 1945, the Soviet Union. György Lukács, a close friend during their youth, became a bitter enemy during the ordeal of the Stalinist purges.
In Vienna he became a prolific writer of film reviews. His first book on film, Der Sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man) (1924), helped found the German "film as a language" theory, which also exerted an influence on Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. A popular consultant, he wrote the screenplay for G. W. Pabst's film of Die Dreigroschenoper (1931), which became the object of a scandal and lawsuit by Brecht (who admitted to not reading the script) during production.