The True Story of Hansel and Gretel?(Shirley Smothers) The story of Hansel and Gretel was first written by the brothers Grimm in 1812 and has been translated into 160 languages since.

One of the most famous fairy tales of all time. Except, it wasn’t a fairy tale, it was a tragedy. And it was true.

If you don’t know the story, it goes something like this…
Once upon a time there was a poor woodcutter who lived with his wife and two children. They were starving, because it was a famine. In the now famous Fairy Tale the wife was Stepmother to the children. But most likely she was their Birth Mother.

The Mother suggested they abandon the Children in the woods.
The Woodcutter protested that she must not love them the way he does. No, she said. It has to do with us starving. They don’t even have enough food for two people, much less four.

If they sacrifice the children, they might live to have other children when the famine is over. So the Wood Cutter and his wife led the children into the forest the next morning, and abandoned them for neither could bear to lift a hand to hurt the children.

What they didn’t know was that little Hansel was awake and heard them. The boy filled his pockets with tiny rocks and dropped them along the way.
A few days later, the parents tried again. Pockets were checked and each child was given a piece of dry bread. But alas, the birds ate the crumbs and the children were truly lost.

To make a long story short, the house Hansel and Gretel found was owned by a wicked witch who threw Hansel in a cage to fatten him up to eat him and made Gretel her slave. Gretel pushed the Witch into the fire. They were saved and returned home to live happily ever after.
The Grimm brothers were not story tellers. They would have laughed at the idea. They were scholars and historians. They collected over 200 stories.

When the first book was published, it had no illustrations. The text was dense like a text book and crammed with scholarly footnotes and references.
It was not a book for children. It was a book written to save the oral history and folktales of the region in case France took over. But Children began to read these stories. The Grimm Brothers revised some of the stories to soften the harshness of these true stories.

As the years went by and the stories were rewritten by many different writers, the truth of which were folk tales and which were oral history based in real people and true stories.

In 1963, Hans Traxler published Die Wahrheit über Hänsel und Gretel — The Truth About Hansel and Gretel.

The book said the two were siblings, but they were adults, not children, Bakers, he said. They murdered the witch, who had been an ingenious confectioner, he said, to steal her secret recipe for lebkuchen, a gingerbread-like treat.
It was about profit, he said. Hansel & Gretel were villains, not victims. The book went wild. Nationally, then internationally.

It turned out to be a literary prank. Traxler said it was, after all, sold as a novel not a Historical truth.

How interesting that the man who’s prank an entire literary community spun his story around the one element of the story that was never true.

Some people think Hansel and Gretel is a Holocaust story, too. Because another author did the same thing. She rewrote the story as a fictional novel that occurred during the Holocaust.

Both of those books were called “the truth” — but they weren’t.

When Wilhelm and Jacob were creating their famous book, they collected stories told directly to them by members of the middle class of the region. Stories like The Pied Piper and the true story of Snow White.

Henriette Dorothea Wild was a neighbor of the brothers Grimm. She told them many stories, often assisted by older family members for detail.
The woodcutter and his Family were real.

The story of Hansel and Gretel dates back to the Great Famine of 1314-1322 when crop failure and mass starvation devastated parts of Europe. One Scholar estimated the famine impacted around 390,000 square miles and killed up to 24% of the population.

During the famine, elderly people chose to starve to death to allow the young to live. They simply stopped eating, and died.

One newspaper said the famine was so bad that “people were so destroyed by hunger that they extracted bodies of the dead from cemeteries.

A harsh but true reality.

You’ll notice that the woodcutter didn’t have a name.
Only his children did.

Hansel and Gretel were the most common names of the region in that era. Their story was not the story of two specific children, but of many children.
Children, led into the forest and abandoned. Perhaps ancestors of Henriette, since she brought the story to the brothers. But others, too. So many. Too many. People forced to resort to cannibalism to survive.

Imagine, for a moment, wandering through the woods looking for something to eat. Something. Anything. Because there has been no food for days, weeks and months and you are dying of starvation.

You have watched your parents die rather than eat what little food there was. If you buried them, you know what happened to them. You just can’t think about it. You pray it didn’t. But you know. And you know if you don’t find food, your days are numbered.

There, in the forest, you find food. Tiny bodies, abandoned by families who would rather abandon children than consume them for survival. Like the woodcutter and his wife. Forced to choose who survives.

Could I or anyone consume a child to keep myself or my own child alive? I don’t think I could. Witches, that’s what they called those who could. Wicked witches in the forest, snatching up children to eat them up.

Can you imagine the guilt and shame those people must have felt, decades later, whispering the horrific stories of how they survived the famine.

How do you tell your children or grandchildren they are alive because their ancestors resorted to cannibalism?

Passing those stories down, in whispers and tears, saving the oral history of how they survived the famine. Generation after generation until 500 years later, one woman told the story and two men wrote it down.

There was no gingerbread house

There was no gingerbread house, except perhaps in the minds of little ones dying of hunger in the woods.

It wasn’t their stepmother.

It was their own mothers. Perhaps some were stepmothers. But it wasn’t wickedness, but an edict that mothers were to consume their children so they might live to have more babies after the famine was over.

As they realized children were reading their stories, they changed them. Wilhelm had become a father. He and Henriette had four children together. So the stories were softened. Just a little.

In Hansel and Gretel, gruesome details were removed and a wicked stepmother appeared to soften the blow of the children’s fate.

It is still one of their most popular stories,

Hansel and Gretel remains one of their most told and retold stories. Still today, we blame the witch and tell a happy ending. I can’t help but wonder what effect this tale might have had if we’d told the truth.

A GRIMM REALITY

---