Maria Tatar, a renowned scholar of children’s literature and folklore at Harvard University, reflects on her early life as a World War II refugee from postwar Europe. In a recent Harvard Gazette conversation, she discusses how her early experiences shaped her academic path and why fairy tales continue to help people navigate a difficult world.
Her family was initially housed in the cluttered attic of a rambling mansion donated to a church, a space filled with relics including a World War I German helmet and an edition of the Grimms’ fairy tales printed in German.
From Germanic Literature to Folklore Scholarship at Harvard
Tatar completed undergraduate studies at Denison University and the University of Munich before earning her doctorate from Princeton University. She joined the Harvard faculty in 1971 and today serves as the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Folklore and Mythology, Emerita, alongside her role as a Senior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows. During her graduate work at Princeton, she found herself surrounded by bookish souls in the Gothic Revival dining hall, before encountering the academic hiring freezes and rejection letters that marked the end of her studies. Reflecting on her early academic environment, she noted that German departments at the time operated under a strict code of silence regarding the Holocaust and did not take fairy tales seriously.
Growing up in America in the shadow of the Holocaust instilled in her a profound need to return to her Hungarian roots and investigate the path that led Germany toward National Socialism, motivations that eventually drove her abroad to study in Munich and later at the Free University in Berlin.
Disney Created Global Narratives That Replaced Local Variants
The twentieth century introduced a new portal for these stories, as Disney took Cinderella
and Snow White
and created global master narratives that drove out local variants. Once these stories migrated into the nursery, they were bowdlerized, shifting them away from grand historical collections of folk tales and legends.