[HN Gopher] The Brothers Grimm: A Biography
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       The Brothers Grimm: A Biography
        
       Author : benbreen
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2024-11-07 06:46 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (theamericanscholar.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (theamericanscholar.org)
        
       | cafard wrote:
       | For those interested:
       | https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB&lemid=A00001
        
       | MaxfordAndSons wrote:
       | Parsing "Magic: The German" made my brain glitch
        
       | mandevil wrote:
       | I've really been fascinated with how explicitly people set out to
       | build nations in the 19th Century. I read Christopher Krebs' _A
       | Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to
       | the Third Reich_ and it traces a different lineage in the same
       | process- the process of turning someone who, say, lived in Mainz
       | and thought of themselves as Hessian in 1800, into the person who
       | lived in the same building in 1900 and thought of themselves as
       | German.
       | 
       | In some ways, I've long suspected that there was a lot of freedom
       | in that to build a culture ideally suited for the then present
       | situation. "Fuenf minuten vor der Zeit, ist des Deutschen
       | Puenktlichkeit" (1) in particular always struck me as something
       | invented because it made the factories and the trains run better.
       | It was first written down in 1880, attributed by a Silesia
       | newspaper to Pomerania, and I really don't know that many people
       | 100 years earlier, say, would have had a conception of what a
       | "German" was in that sense. And before trains and factories, in
       | an era when time is primarily told by the bells of the town clock
       | tower and looking at the angle of the sun, no one would have had
       | a real conception of what five minutes meant. So it couldn't
       | really have been some ancient saying, carried down for hundreds
       | of years. It had to be invented right around 1880.
       | 
       | 1: German "on time" is five minutes before it starts.
        
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