The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales by Hermynia Zur Mühlen

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales by Hermynia Zur Mühlen Anna Kérchy (bio) The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales. By Hermynia Zur Mühlen, edited and translated by Jack Zipes, Princeton University Press, 2020, 187 pp. The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales was published in Princeton University Press's Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series dedicated to exploring unusual, uncanny, unjustly forgotten early twentieth-century literary fairy tales. These stories are historically significant as genuine innovators of the genre and still strike a chord with contemporary readers a century later as vanguardist practitioners of postmodern narratological strategies well ahead of their time. After intriguing collections of tales by an impressive range of international artists, including Kurt Schwitters, Béla Balázs, Édouard Labouyale, and Naomi Mitchison among others, editor-translator Jack Zipes introduces readers in the tenth volume of the series to a curious corpus of radical political fairy tales—some available in English for the first time—authored by an extraordinary woman writer, a free spirit and a socialist, and a humanitarian activist rescued from obscurity via this important gesture of canon revision. Zipes's informative introduction traces Hermynia Zur Mühlen's unconventional artistic career. Born in Vienna in 1883 to an aristocratic Catholic family, she rebels from her early childhood against the arbitrary social codes of her elitist upbringing. At age eleven, she founds with her friends a political group called the Anchor Society that sets the ambitious goal "to improve the world" by fighting hegemonic oppression and speaking the truth in the face of hypocrisy. After her despotic father prevents her from becoming a schoolteacher, she marries an Estonian baron from Germany against her parents' will, but the relationship is embittered by ideological differences and her worsening tuberculosis. Eventually, at a Swiss health clinic, she meets the politically likeminded Austrian translator Stefan Klein who becomes her lifelong partner and collaborator in changing the world through writing literary texts (excelling in many genres from political fairy tales to mystery novels and social problem novels), nonfiction pieces, and translating political works to propagate the cause of the German Communist Party. It is by Klein's side that Zur Mühlen [End Page 319] matures—amid poor living conditions, rejected by her family, often persecuted by the police, and against all odds—into the artist-activist who boldly abandons her class to become an outspoken, prolific left-wing author driven by the agenda to share revolutionary ideas with both adult and child readers of her provocative fairy tales. In her analytical essays, Zur Mühlen criticized the trivial and demeaning literature for girls and emphasized the role of children's literature in socializing youngsters, in educating social sensibility, and in functioning as an instrument for the intergenerational discussion of significant social problems. Her first major pioneering efforts in the realm of fairy tales were governed by the pedagogical intent to renew the genre of children's literature, yet the discussion of serious themes—like social injustice, discrimination, tyranny, class struggle, or solidarity—implies that she strategically addressed a dual readership. She assumed that fairy tales were meant for the collective education of parents and children, for the building of empathetic bonds between different generations and different social classes. The volume contains a selection of Zur Mühlen's seventeen fairy tales. The first three from her What Little Peter's Friends Told Him (1930) belong to the genre of the "it narrative"—popularized by Hans Christian Andersen and E. T. A. Hoffmann—in which different household objects—the coal, the matchbox, and the water bottle—tell stories to poor little Peter, whose leg is broken and is left at home alone while his mother is busy working in the factory. Through their tales, which shed light on the difficult lives of working-class people, the talking, anthropomorphized objects act as witnesses and critics of the objectification of the exploited people, and the dehumanizing strategies of the oppressors. Contrary to the conclusions of today's postmillennial, posthumanist or object-oriented ontological theories, the blurring of the distinction between subject and object, human and thing is more tragic than liberating in Zur...