The Oedipal horrors—incestuous desire, abuse, and mutilation—are too obvious and frightening to make for entirely agreeable reading. Both stories end well: The Handless Maiden gets silver hands and then grows new ones, and both heroines marry kings—perhaps new father figures. But the happy endings seem unconvincing—especially the new hands!—and not fully adequate to the anxieties aroused by the original situations.

In another version of the Handless Maiden story, considered more authentic by the Grimms themselves, the girl’s father asks for his daughter’s hand in marriage and, when she refuses, has her hands and breasts chopped off. As usual, the most shocking details were deleted from the published version by the Grimms. In the words of the critic Peter Dettmering, “Faced with monstrously cruel mothers and with fathers driven by incestuous desires, they sought their salvation in the editing of texts” (quoted in Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, p. 37). Going back to the earlier versions of one of their tales is rather like the process Freud describes in interpreting a dream: The edited text, like the manifest dream remembered in consciousness, conceals a repressed forbidden content, often an unedited account of cruelty and incest.

Abuse of children is presented more openly where there is no explicitly sexual element. In dozens of tales children are starved, beaten, persecuted, or abandoned, mostly by their own fathers or (step)mothers. These tales do not always reach a hopeful resolution like that of “Hansel and Grethel,” which Bettelheim reads as an account of the “difficulties and anxieties of the child who is forced to give up his dependent attachment to the mother and free himself of his oral fixation” (p. 170). Oral needs could also be said to figure in “The Poor Boy in the Grave,” where a starving orphan boy, beaten and abused by his master, betrayed by the judge who might have protected him, gorges himself on stolen honey and wine in a last desperate effort to gratify his hunger before dying. The fire that destroys the home of the cruel master is no consolation to the reader of this bitter tale, which could have been taken from a real-life account in the newspaper, in the Grimms’ time or our own. Although a psychoanalytic interpretation in terms of children’s oral needs and fears could be worked out, it would serve only to minimize the real-life horror depicted here.

In “The Juniper Tree,” one of the most celebrated and moving tales, a little boy is killed by his stepmother, who tries to blame the crime on her daughter and then cooks the boy in a stew and feeds it to his father. The motif of the child fed to the father has a past in Greek mythology and could also be analyzed in psychoanalytic ways, like “Hansel and Grethel,” in terms of the child’s fears of its own unconscious cannibalistic impulses. But despite the fantastic ending, in which the mother is killed and the child resurrected, the acutely observed details of the mother’s behavior and feeling—her momentary remorse, her attempt to blame the daughter—give it a chilling realism and suggest the horror of adult malice rather than childish fantasy. Bettelheim does not comment on this story, perhaps because it fits less well his paradigm of the tales as representations of children’s unconscious conflicts and their resolution. His optimistic view works better with the more positive tales than with the darkest and most tragic ones, just as classical psychoanalytic theory works better with children’s typical sexual and aggressive fantasies than with instances of actual abuse. The tales, like all genuine works of art, are rooted in reality as well as in fantasy, and the reality of life among an impoverished peasantry meant that children were abandoned, abused, and murdered, even more frequently than in our own time and place.

Bettelheim scarcely mentions another disturbing aspect of the tales, evoked in the prefaces by the romantic idealization of the “pure” German folk and the concern with screening out “foreign” influences. This vocabulary suggests the racist strain in German nationalism, later to become murderous obsession. Of the three tales with Jewish characters in the Grimms’ collection, two—“The Jew Among Thorns” (included in this selection) and “The Good Bargain” (not included here)—are frankly anti-Semitic. In the third tale (also not included here), “The Bright Sun Brings It to Light,” a man who murders a Jew is actually brought to justice.

Sad to say, Nazi ideologues enshrined the Kinder- und Hausmärchen as virtually a sacred text, a special expression of the spirit of the Volk, as Maria Tatar points out, and even came up with a reading of “Little Red Riding Hood” as an allegory of the menace to the German people from the Jewish wolf (The Hard Facts, p. 41). The Grimms, long dead by then, were obviously not responsible for this interpretation, but they undoubtedly did real harm by including the two anti-Semitic stories in their collection and even, as Ruth Bottigheimer notes, in Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys (p. 140), reprinting them in a short edition for children. Thus the tales should not be idealized. They do enrich the mental lives of children, as Bettelheim shows, yet some of them evoke not universal psychological conflicts but dangerous prejudices in the culture from which they came.

There is a whiff of perverse cruelty in many tales, not only in the frightening ordeals undergone by heroes and heroines, but also in the inventively sadistic punishments meted out to villains, who have to dance in red-hot shoes, get their eyes pecked out by birds, are rolled down hills in barrels studded inside with nails, or are thrown into vats containing boiling oil, poisonous snakes, or both. Adults tend to be more unnerved than children by these elements of the German Gothic imagination; at one public reading an audience of children found “The Juniper Tree” not horrifying but “hilarious” (Tatar, p. 21). In any case the grisly cruelty in the tales comes out of the same amoral source that generates their vital narrative energy and imaginative richness, and the pleasure they afford is not entirely innocent. The sense of an unacknowledged darkness beneath the surface is part of what makes them both disturbing and compelling.

This mysterious and somewhat perverse vitality may also prevent the tales from truly fulfilling the function of moral instruction, for either good or ill.