Misreading the Cross-Writer: The Case of Wilhelm Hauff's Dwarf Long Nose

Abstract

Misreading the Cross-Writer:The Case of Wilhelm Hauff's Dwarf Long Nose Maureen Thum (bio) The grotesque . . . discloses the potential of an entirely different world, of another order, of another way of life. It leads men out of the confines of the apparent (fahe) unity of the indisputabk and stable." M. M. Bakhtin (Rabelais, 48) In their appeal to a dual audience, the literary fairy tales of Wilhelm Hauff (1802-27) epitomize the problematic nature of cross-writing. Hauff 's three cycles of literary fairy tales, The Caravan (1826), The Sheik of Alexandria and His Slaves (1827), and The Inn in Spessart (1828, posthumously published), are directed at two seemingly disparate but by no means mutually exclusive readerships: an overt audience of bourgeois children, the "sons and daughters of the educated classes" (Hinz 112) to whom Hauff dedicated the three fairy-tale "almanacs,"1 and an implied audience of aesthetically and politically sophisticated adults, whom he expected to be alert to his strategies of ironic reversal and indirection. In the history of the Kunstmärchen, Hauff has been seen as an unusual and even a puzzling case. Insufficiently known to English-speaking readers, Hauff 's tales, from the time of their publication, have nonetheless enjoyed an unabated popularity in German-speaking [End Page 1] countries, where they continue to rank just behind the Children and House Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Klotz 210).2 German critics have taken at face value Hauff 's dedication of the tales to the offspring of the educated classes, as well as his claim, made in a letter to his publisher, that the tales are exclusively aimed at an audience of "girls or boys from twelve to fifteen years of age" (Pfäfflein 15). They have therefore dismissed Hauff 's tales as inconsequential children's fantasies, ascribing his "juvenile popularity" (Koopmann 491) and "puzzling" success to his production of a presumably superficial and inferior product designed to cater to the tastes of an uncritical and aesthetically naive audience.3 In rejecting the tales as puerile fantasies, Hauff's German critics have disregarded the satirical and subversive intent expressed in the poignant allegory "Fairy Tale as Almanac," which Hauff deliberately placed at the beginning of The Caravan, the first of his three cycles. They have thus greatly underestimated the author's craft—and his craftiness—as a cross-writer who wishes both to explore and to test the shifting relation between the child and the adult reader. Hauff assumes the role of children's author precisely because it allows him to question the norms that an audience of children—prospective adults—are expected to adopt in order to fit into the world of their elders. During a period when severe sanctions were imposed on those who transgressed strictly enforced censorship laws, donning the mask of the children's writer allowed Hauff to conceal his critical stance from adult view, and thus to evade the vigilance of censors. Disguised as a writer for "mere" children, he could undercut the contemporary status quo with relative impunity.4 Still, precisely because Hauff's tales consciously transgress generational boundaries by engaging the child on one level while undertaking an ironic and satirical dismantling of societal norms on another, critics have been at a loss to categorize his works either as children's or as adult literature. Dismissing Hauff's tales as inferior "juvenile" fare, commentators have failed to look beyond their seemingly conventional and innocuous surface. Thus, the German editors of two relatively recent scholarly editions of Hauff's collected works, published in 1962 and 1970, have characterized Hauff's writings as the productions of a hack writer whose mental horizon was circumscribed by the petty bourgeois prejudices of a literary and cultural philistinism. In full agreement, Volker Klotz, a respected German literary critic, sums up the prevailing consensus [End Page 2] when he professes to be dismayed by Hauff's failure to vanish from the literary and popular scene. "Nowhere else in the history of the literary fairy tale," states Klotz, has such "dubious literary quality" been accompanied by such "an immense and continuous popularity among the reading public" (210).5 Viewing Hauff's literary fairy tales from...