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Fairy Tales and Forests: The Grimms and Caspar David Friedrich

Neil MacGregor examines how the tales of the Grimms and the art of Caspar David Friedrich re-established an identity for the German-speaking people after their defeat by Napoleon.

Continuing a week of programmes with a focus on the things which bind Germans together, Neil MacGregor reveals how the fairy tales collected by the Grimms and the landscape art of Caspar David Friedrich played a vital role in re-establishing an identity for German-speaking people who had been defeated by Napoleon.

While the Grimms were studying the German language and the inner German-ness present in the folk-tales they collected, Friedrich used landscape as the external vision of being German.

Producer Paul Kobrak.

Available now

15 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Tue 7 Oct 2014 09:45
  • Tue 7 Oct 2014 19:45
  • Wed 8 Oct 2014 00:30

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