28/12/2024

What Happens to the Natural World when People Disappear?

 

 


 Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria.

Abandonment, when it came, crept in from the outskirts. Homes at the edge of town were first to go, then the peripheral grocery stores. It moved inward, slow but inexorable. The petrol station closed, and creeper vines climbed the pumps, amassing on the roof until it buckled under the strain. It swallowed the outer bus shelters, the pharmacies, the cinema, the cafe. The school shut down.

Today, one of the last institutions sustaining human occupation in Tyurkmen, a village in central Bulgaria, is the post office. Dimitrinka Dimcheva, a 56-year-old post officer, still keeps it open two days a week, bringing in packages of goods that local shops no longer exist to sell. Once a thriving town of more than 1,200, Tyurkmen is now home to fewer than 200 people.

On a warm spring afternoon, Dimcheva stood in the town square. “The weddings took place here, all of the folk dances, the volleyball. There were lots of young people. A pool,” she said. She gazed around, pointing to ruins or now-empty spaces where buildings once stood, remembering. There, the building that housed a small cinema. Behind it, the space for a school that burned down, was rebuilt, then closed. “Life was bubbling.” Now, she said, “life in the villages is dying”.

Thousands of similar villages are scattered across Bulgaria. After the fall of communism, people flocked to the cities in search of work, and over the next 30 years many villages emptied to the point of obliteration. As of the 2021 census, almost 300 villages were completely abandoned, and more than 1,000 had populations below 30 – most of them very elderly. With its low birthrates and high rates of emigration, Bulgaria has been emptying out for decades. Its population has dropped from close to 9 million in 1989, to fewer than 6.5 million  – one of the worst peacetime population declines  in modern history.

Bulgaria lies at the extreme end of this kind of demographic change, but the forces reshaping it are acting everywhere. Over the past half century, the global portion of people living in rural areas has decreased by almost a third. Farming is becoming increasingly industrial and concentrated. More than half of all people now live in and around cities, and that figure is expected to rise to 70% by 2050. In many countries, birthrates are dropping steadily, and while the global population is projected to keep  growing until 2080, around half of that growth is being driven by fewer than 10 countries.

As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.

Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world. A team of scientists recently calculated that roughly 30m hectares of farmland had been abandoned across the mainland US since the 1980s. As the climate crisis renders more places unliveable – too threatened by flooding, water shortages and wildfires to build houses, soil too degraded and drought-stripped to farm – we can expect further displacements.



This world-altering shift has drawn remarkably little attention. “It has been there all the time – but we did not really describe it,” says Prof He Yin of Kent State University, one of the scientists now using remote sensing to create global maps of abandoned land. “We talk about expansion,” he said, referring to development of land. “Yes, absolutely that’s important. But there’s this other side – abandonment – that people don’t really talk about.”

Alongside this story of depopulation is another story – of what happens to the land left behind. To preserve a livable planet, it is crucial to preserve and expand forests, grasslands, healthy ecosystems and wild places. Huge expanses of abandoned land represent an opportunity but also a question, an ongoing experiment without clearly predictable outcomes. For thousands of years, humans have dramatically shaped the places where they live, transforming the Earth’s face. So what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

It was this puzzle that drew ecologist Gergana Daskalova to Tyurkmen. On a hot, quiet morning in May she walked down the main street. It was empty of people, but lined by papers that fluttered in the early summer heat, tugging at their staples on the fences, gates and power poles. When a member of the household dies in Bulgaria, it is traditional to mark their passing with a notice. The A4 printouts featured a name, photograph, date of death and a brief tribute. Each noted how long ago the loved one had died: six months, a year, a decade, 22 years. In villages across the country, these posters often also mark the end of human habitation. “If you walk around, you’ll see it’s like this clock that’s ticking, measuring the time since those people have left us,” Daskalova said. “On a human level, that’s very sad. But that clock, it’s also measuring the end of human impact, and the onset of environmental change afterwards.”

Daskalova specialises in global change ecology: how large-scale human activity is reshaping the natural world. She is in the middle of an ambitious research project, studying 30 villages across the Bulgarian countryside in different stages of abandonment. Along with collaborators and students, she is gathering a huge range of data: using aerial drones to map the return of forests, block-by-block botany surveys to see what plants are growing, audio recorders on trees to capture shifts in the density and volume of birdsong. Over time, she hopes to compare the ecology of derelict villages with those where some people remain, providing a comprehensive picture of how nature responds when humans leave.

Daskalova, is in her early 30s, with a chatty warmth and patient knack for breaking down scientific theory, possibly honed by a year of explaining to curious shepherds why she’s out strapping microphones to trees in remote fields. She recently gave birth to her son, and on some days he watched from her hip, swaying and serious-eyed, as she strode around research plots.

Tyurkmen was not a randomly selected research site – it is the place she grew up. Like many of her generation, as a young child Daskalova was largely raised by grandparents while her parents went to work in the nearest city. Eventually, she left for university. “For a decade, I was one of the people who left the village and only returned occasionally, and every time I came back, there were less and less people living on my street,” she said. When she was younger, Daskalova would track the creep of abandonment in the wintertime, watching to see whether smoke emerged from a chimney down the street, or light shone from one of the windows. “Instead, one by one, the lights get turned off,” she said.

For the first few years of her career, Daskalova worked in far-flung places, including the arctic tundra. But she remembered the great depopulation she had lived through, and recognised that it was part of something wider, with scope to reshape the future of thousands of species.

Today, she lives and works in the home in Tyurkmen that once belonged to her grandparents. All around her, homes stand empty. Across the street, one house has crumpled inward, like a cardboard box left in the rain. Inside, that morning, nesting barn swallows orbited a bedroom. The front door had been knocked off its hinges, still carrying an enamel plaque: an award dispensed by communist-era local authorities, reading “exemplary home”.

Abandoned places are not the most alluring research sites: “They’re not the rainforests, not the gorillas,” said Daskalova. Individually, each research site is just a village, like thousands of others. “But in a way that’s what makes it special,” she continued, “because depopulation is happening at a really big scale.” And what comes after abandonment is often not what we expect.



  News that great swathes of our planet are being abandoned can excite visions of a rewilded Eden in the ruins of humanity. In the absence of humans, nature will come roaring back. Deer will roam the streets of crumbling cities, vines will crack the concrete, football fields will give way to forests. The skies will clear and species will flourish. In 2020, lockdowns gave many people a taste of what semi-abandonment might look like. As humans were forced indoors, wild creatures returned to some urban streets and suburban gardens. “Humans are the virus,” observers declared, in a mixture of earnest commentary and internet punchlines. In their absence, “nature is healing”.

Visions of humans as a pox upon the natural world – and of paradise sprouting in our absence – are intertwined with some of ecology’s oldest ideas. In the late 19th century, botanist Frederick Clements helped popularise succession theory, the idea that left to its own devices, any disturbed landscape will follow a step-by-step progression. A ploughed field, for instance, will be overtaken first by fast-growing grasses and weeds, then shrubs, which finally thicken into trees and forest. Clements argued that any place would move through succession to a “climax” state of stable equilibrium. The final result could differ according to climate and geography, an alpine forest being different from a swamp or desert. But the essential trajectory was always the same: a “universal law”, Clements wrote, of ecosystems climbing toward climax like an animal progressing through infancy toward adulthood.

The idea gained traction through the early 20th century, coinciding with a period of explosive growth in human cities, populations and industry. It had a kind of simple, elegant beauty. As people watched human activity transform the earth around them, it also offered a certain comfort. No matter how dramatic the disturbance – whether the retreat of a glacier or the razing of a forest for farmland – nature’s capacity to return remained. That ideal climax state would rest like a substrate beneath the soil, lying dormant even as the land above was tilled or excavated or burned or paved. To return, all it needed was time and benign neglect.

Over time, Clements’ more sweeping theories were picked apart by fellow botanists. The stable, permanent climax communities he had theorised proved elusive: field studies continued to find ecosystems passing through unpredictable cycles of collapse, regeneration, divergence and stasis. Today, this deterministic version of succession theory is seen as widely debunked. But Clements’ vision endured in the popular imagination – sometimes to the frustration of ecologists. “Many popular ideas about the environment are premised on the conviction that nature is … capable of preserving its natural balance more or less indefinitely if only humans can avoid disturbing it,” ecological historian William Cronon wrote in 1995. “These stories are ours, not nature’s. The natural world does not organise itself into parables.”

In practice, scientists have found that humanity’s relationship to the natural world is far more complex than we often assume. This is one of Daskalova’s more counterintuitive findings: rather than always being antithetical to nature, human presence can help make life possible for a vast array of species. Even more surprisingly, total abandonment can sometimes have worse consequences for biodiversity than landscapes where some people remain.

To show how this could be possible, Daskalova drove me to a village buried in vines. Kreslyuvtsi lies in semi-mountainous regions of central Bulgaria. For years now, most of the village has been completely abandoned. In the spectrum of villages that Daskalova is studying, it offers a case study of what something approaching absolute human absence brings.

Standing at the edge of a hillside, Daskalova gingerly took a step off the path and out into space. When her foot landed, she bounced ever so slightly, held up by the latticing of thousands of bramble vines, woven tightly enough to create their own buoyant elasticity. Somewhere beneath was a steeply sloped bank of land, and out a few metres in front was one of the long-abandoned homes of Kreslyuvtsi village. Its form was slowly collapsing as the stone walls crumbled. Brambles had surged up over the house until only an upper corner of the tiled roof was fully visible, jutting above the vines like the prow of a boat in its final stages of sinking. “They will swallow this place whole,” Daskalova said.

The brambles illustrate the first force that abandoned land faces: when humans leave en masse, new dominant species can make a clean sweep. The worst offenders are not brambles, but imported, invasive species. In Poland, where about 12% of farmland was abandoned after the fall of communism, the fields have turned thick mustard yellow, blanketed by the bright pollen cascades of Canadian goldenrod. This species has colonised about 75% of the country’s abandoned fields, and where goldenrod grows, little else thrives. Scientists studying this abandoned land found that wild pollinators  decreased by 60% - 70%, and the number of birds halved. In Bulgaria, an emerging threat is the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), a hardy, fast-growing, disease-resistant tree from northern China, with bitter-smelling sap that repels other plant, animal and microbial life.

These monocultures can create “biological deserts”, where just one species grows. The need to diversify them is not only an aesthetic, human preference. Monocultures are associated with soil degradation and nutrient depletion, extinctions of other species, difficulty purifying water, catastrophic wildfires, vulnerability to drought and the rapid spread of disease.

In some cases, a monoculture’s dominance is temporary. Even virulent invasive species can sometimes act as “nursery” environments for a variety of plants and creatures that might eventually outgrow them. Other times, an ecosystem may stall, failing to recover or diversify. “It is widely believed that once destroyed, forests can recover naturally from grassland or shrubland within a few decades in a process known as forest succession, and that tree planting can help,” scientists discussing the process on Hong Kong plantations wrote in 2023. “Our study shows that forests do not recover as much, or as rapidly, as people think they do.”

 

 


Humans are often responsible for creating monocultures. But there is also a surprising, unacknowledged role that people can play in holding them back.

Out among the brambles in Kreslyuvtsi, Daskalova turned, carefully dragging her gumboots back toward the path winding up the hillside. Reaching the path, she crouched in the grass and began to name species around her feet: grasses, ivy, but also buttercups, purple flowering vines, a tiny yellow orchid. “I can’t imagine many people walk up this road, but every once in a while some do,” she says. In the process, they have held back the rising tide of brambles, and opened up space for this small flurry of species, a scatter of colour against the flat green opacity of vines.

From where Daskalova stood, the path led up to an opening in the trees, where long grass and wildflowers grew in a clearcut meadow. Here, again, a small island of fragile blooms revealed the history of this land. Buttercups and agricultural weeds signalled that humans were here in the not-too-distant past, as did the clearing itself. Daskalova pointed to the thick-woven darkness of trees around the space, arranged like an audience in an amphitheatre, their network of branches already forking into the precious light of the clearing. “They’re right at the edge, ready to move in when that opportunity arises,” she said. “If there’s no grazing or mowing, it could only be something like five years until it’s all in the shadows of a denser canopy.”

When people imagine ecosystems recovering, this return to forest is often what springs to mind. But forests only represent a small sliver of possible habitats. For other species, the currency of life is light, and a dense, closed canopy of forest is impossible to survive. A swallow is perfectly adapted to vast, open fields: the curve of its wings and distinctive forking tail designed for fast pursuit of insects hovering above meadows. A starling murmuration, moving across the sky like spilled pepper over a tablecloth, is an adaptation to open fields: repelling predators, protecting the roost. Vast numbers of species adapted and co-evolved with these open places – plants, mammals, insects, grazers, species like wildflowers, that relish disturbance and light. The rich biodiversity of open grasslands can be even greater than that of temperate forests.

Once, many of these kinds of environments were created by megafauna. Mammoths, giant water buffalo, bison and cave bears were large enough to reshape forests, toppling trees to create steppes and prairie. Scientists have estimated that megafauna were responsible for keeping about 30%   of South America’s forests at bay. Almost all of them are now extinct, the timing of their demise usually linked  to the arrival of humans. In many places, humans are the only remaining creatures that can consistently reshape landscapes in these radical ways, pushing back the shade of the trees for other creatures to take root.

For millennia, all across the planet, humans have been using fire and tools to open up land for agriculture, gardens, grazing and hunting. In the process, we created ecological “mosaics”, or “patchworks”: landscapes that hold a mixture of habitats, like meadows, gardens and forests. These places were not designed as nature reserves, but they often catered to hugely diverse animal life. In her book Nature’s Ghosts, Sophie Yeo details research  indicating that European hay meadows cultivated for animal feed were actually more successful at preserving a vast array of species than meadows explicitly cultivated for biodiversity. Looking back over the early Holocene – beginning 11,700 years ago – researchers have found that human presence was about as likely to increase biodiversity as reduce it.

Not all human-created landscapes have the same value. A paved subdivision with astroturfed lawns is very different to a village with diverse vegetable and flower gardens. A traditional hay meadow is radically different from a pesticide-drenched plantation of soya beans. But scientists continue to find evidence that the old idea of humans as antithetical to nature is also wrong-headed, and that rosy visions of thriving, human-free environments are more imaginary than real. “People are still imagining [nature as] this kind of pristine place that’s going to be saved from people,” says US environmental scientist Erle Ellis. “That is definitely a misunderstanding.”

In 2021, Ellis published new research that looked back 12,000 years. He and his colleagues found that nearly three-quarters of Earth’s land was occupied and shaped by human societies. Other researchers have pushed even further back. Examining human-biodiversity interactions in the Late Pleistocene – back as far as 120,000 years – scientists concluded that across most of the planet, “‘Pristine’ landscapes simply do not exist and, in most cases, have not existed for millennia”.



Many of the landscapes people now tend to think of as untouched, from the savanna lands of equatorial Africa to the deep Amazon rainforest, have already been deeply transformed by human presence. “The essential role that people play in ecology is the critical thing, and it’s been ignored,” Ellis says. “The most biodiverse places left on Earth – this is almost universally true – have Indigenous people in them. Why? Well, they conserve a lot of that biodiversity and actually produce it. They maintain that heterogeneous landscape.”

There is no question that recent human activity – particularly the massive clearing of ecosystems and industrial consumption of fossil fuels – has been an ecological catastrophe. But for nature to be restored to a past version of itself, the question might be less one of human absence, than what form human presence can take.

In the small communities riding out abandonment in Bulgaria, you sometimes see patches of gentle human presence that might offer paths for the future, as well as glimpses of the past. Off Tyurkmen’s main street, a dirt road leads to a stretch of scrubby meadowland. On the day I visited, Slavcho Petkov Stoyanov, who is 56 years old, stood watching as his sheep grazed among the shrubs. “Years ago, nobody would have let me graze here,” he said. “All this was used for growing vegetables.” His is the last flock in the village and he usually employs shepherds to watch them – but recently those young men left town and he was back out in the fields himself, sitting in a patch of shade to dodge the midday sun.

Stoyanov is one of the few remaining people here who help to maintain a diverse, “mosaic” landscape: in some empty blocks, the canopy of trees is expanding, but others are cleared by grazing and littered with wildflowers. He offers an example of how some forms of human occupation can be a protection against environmental damage rather than a source. As rural places like Tyurkmen depopulate, they become vulnerable to new forms of exploitation: land prices drop, and there are fewer people around to oppose projects like mines and quarries. “What you can get is depopulation as a stepping stone to industrialisation,” Daskalova told me.

Stoyanov pointed to the reservoir below the fields. His grandparents helped dig it themselves. Then, a few years ago, a company was granted cheap contracts by the municipality to take fish from it. The process followed a brutal, short-term logic: they installed pumps, drained the reservoir, and scooped the fish out. Almost everything else died. “They got about 20 tonnes of fish,” Stoyanov said. The remaining villagers were furious, and mounted a successful campaign to have the contract ended. The reservoir has slowly refilled, with water, fish, birds. Over time, he hopes parts of the village will refill, too. They have new opponents now, including a limestone quarry proposed at the village boundary.

To harness the full environmental possibilities offered by the great abandonment will require changing our conception of humanity’s relationship to nature, and understanding how our species can benefit ecosystems as well as harm them. It will also require human intention: neglect alone is not enough. Around Slavcho’s herds, the backdrop of Tyurkmen was transforming. Patches of forest thrust outward, vines demolished villas, chemical-smelling invasive thickets occupied meadows. The march of nature seemed inexorable, but its future was still uncertain, contingent on the remaining people: what would they allow to grow? What would they keep at bay?

This point about uncertainty recurs again and again in conversations with scientists studying abandoned land. For biodiversity to thrive it needs time. The same forces that drive people from a place – pandemics, wars, shifting economic tides – can send them flowing back. He Yin, working with a group of scholars, found that millions of hectares of abandoned land were recultivated within a few decades. Their neglect was “too ephemeral” to translate into true gains for nature.

At one of Daskalova’s longest-abandoned monitoring sites, she had seen the trees grow thick and steady, undisturbed since the last occupants left. “Nobody had stepped on that plot in nearly half a century,” she said. Then, this year, a new set of owners appeared. They had plans for a guesthouse, transforming the isolated plot into a sanctuary for holidaymakers. “The first thing they did was to clear every single bit of vegetation – they just bulldozed the whole thing,” she said. The forest was shorn back and ploughed into dirt, the plot left dotted with a few invasive weeds.

After clearing the land, the buyers realised their new project would not be profitable. “They gave up on the guesthouse idea,” Daskalova said. “Now it’s abandoned again.”



The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear? By Tess McClure. The Guardian,  November 28, 2024.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

25/12/2024

The Case of Gisèle Pelicot

 


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The French word​  for rape is viol. It signals the violence and violation inherent to the acts it names. Since early September, Dominique Pelicot, a 71-year-old Frenchman, has been on trial in Avignon for repeatedly drugging his wife, Gisèle, and raping her as she slept. He is also charged with inviting at least 72 other men into their home to do the same, on 92 occasions between July 2011 and October 2020, an average of about once every five weeks (Pelicot has admitted to raping her two or three times a week during this period, roughly 1400 times in total). Fifty men stood trial with Pelicot.

The involvement of the other men came to light because Pelicot filmed every act of abuse – this is the word he used to name the folder in which he stored the footage on his computer. The individual files had titles such as ‘fucked on the back 2’, ‘3rd anal’, ‘magnificent close-up from behind’. Among the more than twenty thousand images and videos Pelicot had saved, several were of his current and former daughters-in-law, Céline and Aurore, and two were of his daughter, Caroline, when she was thirty. In them she is asleep, lying on her left side dressed in underwear she does not recognise. She has no recollection of when or how the photographs were taken. Pelicot has admitted to almost everything, including that his motive was to ‘control women’, but he denies he ever ‘touched’ his daughter. The verdicts are expected to be handed down on 20 December.

We know these details because Gisèle Pelicot insisted on a public trial. She had the choice to seek justice anonymously and behind closed doors, but she wanted, among other things, to raise awareness of ‘chemical submission’, so that ‘one morning, when a woman wakes up and can’t remember what she did the previous day, she will say to herself: “Well, I heard Mme Pelicot’s testimony.”’ Indeed, women speaking out set this process in motion. Police inspected Pelicot’s computer after he was caught ‘upskirting’ several women in a supermarket in 2020 and one of them, Nathalie, decided to file a complaint. ‘Luckily,’ she said, ‘I didn’t just say to myself, “Ah, it’s just some old guy,” despite the fact that he played the victim.’

Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t conceive of her now ex-husband or the other men who raped her as ‘bad apples’, aberrations from the norm, but as products of what she has called a ‘macho and patriarchal society’ which ‘trivialises rape’. Her hope – and in this she is not alone – is that by publicising the behaviour such a society produces, the trial will be a step towards changing it. Her decision is astonishingly brave, not least because the culture she is condemning also produced the lawyers who have been questioning her and the journalists covering the case. The Telegraph did not disappoint, describing her choice of an open trial as an act of ‘public revenge’. The Daily Mail issued obsessive updates on the atrocities of the man they will only call ‘The Monster of Avignon’.

The defence tried to insist on closed hearings, but their arguments were ultimately self-defeating. The videos of Gisèle Pelicot’s abuse were, they said, too ‘nauseating’, too ‘indecent and shocking’ for public view; they would disturb the need for ‘serenity and dignity’ in the court. Her willingness to allow the videos to be seen must, they argued, either be an act of revenge (that word again) or evidence of her ‘exhibitionist tendencies’. They tried to conjure her as a patriarchal grotesque: at once a woman who enjoys sex too much and a woman who speaks out against the men who wrong her. A woman who must expect humiliation, who gets what she deserves.

One by one the accused were questioned, a process that went on for weeks. Gisèle Pelicot sat through almost all of it. The footage of the rapes was only broadcast in court when, after questioning, defendants maintained their innocence. One man insisted that he did it ‘pour satisfaire le couple’ (the only occasion Gisèle Pelicot walked out). The video was screened, the first time the accused had seen it. ‘I think I pleased the husband, not the couple,’ he conceded afterwards. Meanwhile, Gisèle was charged by the defence with not appearing sad enough (she cried only once in court). Can the exhibitionist not provide a little more drama?

Much has been made of how many of the accused were normal men living ordinary lives: a journalist, a plumber, a nurse, a soldier, a councillor, a lorry driver, a prison warden, a carpenter. One was quite literally the bloke round the corner: he and Gisèle would exchange greetings at the local bakery. Only two have a previous conviction for sexual violence, six others for domestic violence. Friends and family members of several of the men acted as character witnesses, including the partner of Cyril B., who testified that he is not ‘macho’ and that he had never forced her into any unwanted sexual encounters. Caroline, Pelicot’s daughter, says in her memoir that her father was ‘the one who took me to school, encouraged me in my sporting activities, my studies, my plans and later on in my career choices’. When the police first contacted her, Gisèle Pelicot recalled that they asked how she would describe her husband. ‘Un super mec,’ she said – a great guy.



Perhaps there is some underlying tendency that links these men, some pattern only experts can see. (Though perhaps not – the psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco argued in Le Monde that this was not ‘the trial of masculinity or patriarchy’ while also insisting that we must scrutinise the ‘education of young children’, as if these things could be untwined.) Reading reports of the testimony, patterns are hard to find. Many, certainly, experienced abandonment, parental alcoholism, neglect and abuse in childhood (Dominique Pelicot was raped by a nurse in hospital when he was nine), but others did not. The men described sadnesses and setbacks – a child dying, a business lost – tragedies that mark the lives of many people who will never rape. A number come from modest backgrounds; some are well off. One attributes what he called a ‘hatred of women’ to a single historic act of infidelity, but many more talk of building their own contented families. They all watch pornography, like at least 55 per cent of French citizens.

Only fourteen of the accused men have pleaded guilty to rape. Most of the rest claim that they, too, were the victims of Dominique Pelicot. Christian L., once a volunteer firefighter, said he must also have been ‘chemically subdued’. ‘It’s my body,’ he said of the video evidence, ‘it’s not my brain.’ Others said that they were manipulated by, even terrified of, Pelicot, the ‘seriously ill person’ under whose spell they were caught. For these men, the idea that Pelicot is a singular monster is a welcome reprieve. One defendant explained that the question of Gisèle’s consent was irrelevant: ‘She’s his wife, he does what he wants with her.’ A frequent defence – the one I find most chilling – was, in the words of Simone M., that the men believed Gisèle Pelicot was merely ‘pretending to be asleep, waiting to take part’. Some elaborated that they thought they were there to re-enact a scenario popular on porn sites: ‘sleeping woman’. At least one said that Dominique Pelicot told them that he and his wife would enjoy watching the video afterwards.

It is unclear whether any of the defendants were really proposing that they thought they were involved in the production of homemade pornography, but there are drearily practical reasons why this argument is not exculpatory. In pornography, the point is that things are not as they seem – the ‘unconscious’ woman is in fact conscious, and consents to pretending otherwise while having sex. In consensual porn, however amateur, the participants all know this; ‘non-consensual porn’ is just a synonym for rape. Since November 2022, OnlyFans has required that creators provide proof of consent from everyone in their content. The actors might meet beforehand, exchange names, confirm they’ve been tested for STDs. That none of this happened in the Pelicots’ house – that these men, on their own admission, never once met or spoke to the woman they claim was willingly involved, nor saw or asked for any proof of consent; that one of the men who came back six times was HIV positive; that at least one other man, probably more, was responsible for the four STDs with which Gisèle Pelicot was diagnosed after she learned of her abuse – debunks the fantasy that they were simply involved in consensual pornography. (Though it reminds us that the conditions of production for so much contemporary porn are conducive to exploitation. A recent Reuters investigation revealed multiple cases of men finding ways round the OnlyFans consent requirement, coercing women to film themselves while holding on to the proceeds.)

There is other evidence that the men in the Pelicot case knew exactly what they were doing. They all met in a chatroom called ‘without her knowledge’ (‘à son insu’, suggesting manipulation and a lack of consent), on a website that had, before it was closed down last June, long been tied to the co-ordination of sex crimes. One 37-year-old man had extended conversations with Dominique Pelicot on Skype, but chose not to participate after concluding that the plan clearly amounted to rape. There is the testimony of those who have confessed, like the former soldier who said he knew that Pelicot ‘was drugging his wife, who had not agreed to have sexual relations with other men’. When he took the stand, Pelicot testified that each of the participants knew the terms of the arrangement; he even said that he had warned some of them that it might get them arrested. Despite flimsy and misogynistic attempts by the defence to suggest otherwise, Gisèle Pelicot herself clearly had no idea about any of it; a decade of rape and dangerously high doses of sedation led to memory lapses, disorientation and gynaecological pain so severe that she went to see multiple specialists. When her husband accompanied her, she took it as an ‘act of kindness’.

Some of the defendants seemed to claim that pornography made it difficult, if not impossible, for them to distinguish between real life and the screen. The argument that porn can lead men to do bad things, perhaps even unwittingly – precisely because it encourages its viewers to suspend the distinction between fantasy and reality – is usually associated with conservatives or anti-porn feminists, not with the people who consume it. A court psychiatrist was reported as testifying that Charly A., who admitted to being addicted to pornography, ‘wanted to participate in a script’ and ‘was able to go from screens to an inert body’. It is one thing to think that porn shapes many people’s sexual expectations. It is another to think that porn is entirely constitutive of men’s sexual agency. This sort of vulgar determinism gives up on men as ethical agents capable of distinguishing between wanted and unwanted, and choosing accordingly. It also trivialises the deep phenomenological differences between the purely imaginary and the reality of engaging with another human body.

Recounting the details of the video evidence risks prurience. But precisely because rape culture is so successful at producing excuses for its perpetrators – and because our own imaginations are shaped by patriarchy and the porn it produces – the details become crucial, as both Gisèle Pelicot and the defence who tried to suppress them knew.

Each of the accused entered a bedroom and saw a woman lying still on the bed. None bothered to check whether she was, as they would later claim, playing along. Does a feigning body not betray itself in ways that even an accomplished actor cannot contain – a flickering eye, a tense arm? Husamettin D. initially refused to touch Gisèle because she was so still that he thought she was dead. The men, by this point, were already naked: Dominique Pelicot had them remove their clothes in the kitchen, one of several precautions to ensure they didn’t rouse his wife, including parking well away from the couple’s home, warming their hands and avoiding smoking beforehand or wearing cologne. (He didn’t, however, require they wear condoms.) More than once the court heard, on the videos, Dominique issue a rebuke: ‘Shh: you’re going to wake her up.’ The men persevered, getting onto an unfamiliar bed and manoeuvring Gisèle into position, her limbs heavy and uncooperative from the sedation. She never said a word, nor moved an inch to make herself more comfortable – in some cases, her husband arranged her body for the men. Experts testified that the amount of sedative Gisèle Pelicot was given meant that her state would have been more akin to a coma than traditional sleep. In multiple videos, she was snoring. This did not stop more than one of the defendants from putting his penis in her mouth, in some cases prompting her to choke. Some clips show Dominique holding her mouth open for them; in others, there is toilet paper over her eyes. ‘No violence,’ he reminds them, as they penetrate her orally, vaginally, anally, as they ejaculate on her face, her body. Some of the men leave the moment she stirs. One is seen gripped by surprise and panic as Gisèle showed signs of waking. Florian R. admitted on the stand that Gisèle Pelicot ‘did not move like someone who is having sex or who wants to’. Each of these men chose to ignore the testimony of her motionless body. ‘When you saw the lifeless body,’ she challenged the defendants in court, ‘did it not occur to you that something seriously wrong was happening in that room?’

When​ the Pelicot trial started, I had just begun reading Kate Atkinson’s bestselling series of murder mysteries, the sixth and most recent of which, Death at the Sign of the Rook, was published in August. The first book in the series, Case Histories (2004), quickly makes clear that the comfort on offer here is wry recognition. The story concerns three unrelated cold cases, two missing girls and another who was murdered, though we do not know by whom or why. As each case unfurls, the book becomes a study of the way women, for better and for worse (often much worse), adapt and accommodate to, are shaped and hardened by, male power and its familiar, sometimes devastating cruelties. Some of Atkinson’s women are both the victims of misogyny and its conduit. She is interested in what we don’t know about ourselves and one another, and her plots work in part because her characters – and her readers – are misled into thinking they know more than they do.

Hired to solve these cases is, as the blurbs say, the ‘beloved’ private investigator Jackson Brodie. The first time we meet Jackson he is listening ‘to the reassuring voice of Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour’. It’s 2004 and he is 45, ‘that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they’re going to die’. Where others choose Springsteen, motorcycles and ‘shagging anything that moves’, Jackson, though he wouldn’t say no to a BMW, dreams of retiring to rural France. His ex-wife, Josie, once the source of impulsive lust and dutifully obeyed orders, is ‘shagging some poncy guy with a goatee’. Jackson manages his sadness, and his bruised ego, by spraying some of her perfume in his tiny, new, bachelor bathroom (‘it wasn’t the same’) and listening to music compilations of ‘women in pain’.

A matter-of-fact, Thatcher-loathing Yorkshireman, ‘brought up on prudence and thrift’, Jackson’s likeability is due in part to the fact that he isn’t sanitised: he thinks about sex, even when he suspects he shouldn’t. He fancies his dentist, though the erection he gets while lying in her chair is, so he reports, a result of thoughts of plump French vegetables. He is not without flashes of masculine entitlement, but we forgive him because of what we could call his nascent feminist consciousness. (A phrase Jackson would think typical of ‘academic types’.) Years as a detective inspector investigating murders and sex crimes means he thinks it is hard to sift the ‘good guys’ from the ‘shitty little perverts’. ‘No woman,’ he concludes, ‘was ever truly safe.’ He is haunted by ‘lost girls’, especially those dismissed by a system that prefers ‘nice middle-class’ victims. And he makes clear what he would do to anyone tempted by the view that a woman ‘had somehow invited what had happened to her’. Jackson is the kind of guy who ignores it when friends ask if he’s ‘pussy whipped’, who wishes his 8-year-old daughter’s T-shirts weren’t emblazoned with phrases like ‘so many boys, so little time’, who sheds a quiet tear when the ‘racist old boot’ he worked for leaves him her estate, then worries to his (black) best friend about whether the cash might have originated in slave labour and should be given back. Atkinson offers up Jackson as the kind of decent guy we can all get behind – not a saint, not an angel, but a walking, talking, smoking, swearing personification of #NotAllMen.

By the end of Case Histories, Jackson is in a relationship with Julia, the client with whom he has spent much of the book flirting. The two were brought together by childhood trauma and a shared scorn for people who use the term ‘interfering’ when what they really mean is rape. I had become such an Atkinson fan that after finishing it I turned immediately to One Good Turn (2006), the next book in the series. Jackson seems a little darker here, no doubt because things are tricky with Julia. Unable to sleep, and absorbed in the plot, I found myself still reading at 3 a.m. Chapter 37 sees Jackson also lying awake at night, Julia asleep next to him. Usually, she sleeps naked but not tonight. ‘Jackson knew the pyjamas were significant, but he didn’t particularly want to think what that significance might be.’ Despite this,

“He fitted himself into the familiar curves and cambers of her body, but instead of pushing back and settling into his shape, she shifted away from him ... He moved closer to her again and kissed her neck, but she remained steadfastly asleep. It was difficult to wake Julia up, short of shaking her. Once, he had made love to her while she slept, and she’d hardly even twitched when he came inside her, but he didn’t tell her about it afterwards because he wasn’t sure how she would react. He couldn’t imagine her being particularly put out (this was Julia, after all). She would probably just have said, ‘Without me? How could you?’ Technically it was rape, of course. He had arrested enough guys in his time for taking advantage of drunk or drugged girls. Plus, if he was honest, Julia was such a sound sleeper that there had been a touch of necrophilia about the whole thing. He’d put a necrophiliac away once: the guy worked in a mortuary and didn’t ‘see where the harm was’ because ‘the objects of my affection have moved beyond earthly matters.’

What? I read the passage again. A woman asleep in the safety of her own bed, next to a partner she trusts. A partner who knows, as we do, that she is ‘a heavy sleeper’ (this is one of the first things we learn about Julia), a partner who also knows that when Julia’s father once tried to ‘stick his hands down her knickers’ she had ‘screamed the place down’, a partner who once stood next to her as she wept over the bones of her little sister. A man, having sex with a woman without her consent, knowing that what he is doing is ‘technically’ rape, convincing himself – as so many of Gisèle Pelicot’s abusers did – that she would have wanted it anyway, redescribing what he did as ‘making love’.

A writer of Atkinson’s intelligence and subtlety must be up to something, I told myself. And so, sleeplessly, I read back and I read on, trying to work it out. Perhaps Atkinson was taking aim at the comforting notion she spent much of Case Histories setting up: the idea that amid the perverts and the rapists, the shitty men and the sex pests, there really are some decent men out there. Isn’t the crushing disappointment we feel at Jackson’s blasé revelation familiar? Don’t many women know the experience of being let down by one of the ‘good’ guys, the man we admire for resisting what the world wants him to be, until, often without warning, he turns into that very thing? ‘You were a good husband and a good man, and I trusted you,’ Gisèle Pelicot said, on the one occasion she cried in court. ‘I never doubted you.’

Maybe there were warnings, clues laid down. Should I have paid more attention in Case Histories to what had seemed Jackson’s complex and interesting relationship to manliness – his worry, for example, that by being in touch with his feelings he was ‘turning into a woman’? Was Atkinson beginning an indictment of our tendency to pathologise sexual abuse rather than recognise its ubiquity and its connection to other manifestations of misogyny? As the books continue, Jackson sinks deeper into an embittered and fragile masculinity. At one point in Case Histories, he is challenged by a pervy teacher to admit that, in the same position, he too would sleep with his students: ‘At the end of the day you’re just a man.’ Back then, Jackson disagreed. But by the third book, When Will There Be Good News? (2008), he is sleeping with a woman fifteen years his junior, one who ‘hadn’t yet lost the glow of youthful enthusiasm’. ‘He was a man,’ he tells himself, ‘and he had taken it where he found it.’ Perhaps rape was a rite of passage.

After he and Julia separate at the end of One Good Turn, Jackson’s belief that he is a victim of deceitful, nagging women deepens. The possibility never occurs to him that she might have suspected what he did, might even have woken up during it, might have realised what kind of man she was lying next to, that her ‘infidelity’ (the cause of their break-up) might have been a way of getting out. In the latest book, Death at the Sign of the Rook, Jackson regularly stops himself from finishing sexist thoughts because he imagines himself ‘up before the Court of Women, Judge Julia, his ex, presiding’. Judge Julia, Judge Gisèle; all these men haunted by the fear of a woman’s vengeance.

As I read every interview I could find with Atkinson, it became clear that this wasn’t a six-book performance piece on rape culture and the evolution of the beta-creep. In the publicity for the fifth book, Big Sky (2019), in which Atkinson takes on #MeToo with a parade of women meting out justice to various men, she described Jackson as ‘the last good man standing’, who always tries ‘to behave like a gentleman’. ‘He knows,’ she said, ‘he’s got to protect women and children,’ even though he has a ‘strain of darkness’ himself. How’s that for a euphemism?

When Jackson first met Julia, ‘she made offering a cigarette seem like an invitation to sex.’ During a period of ‘enforced celibacy’, she insists she must ‘wank every night’. Does Atkinson think that Julia’s sexual appetite excuses, if not justifies, Jackson’s rape? Is she assuming the same slut-shaming logic offered by the defence in the Pelicot trial: that a woman who enjoys sex too much should expect men (and the rest of us) to presume that she is always up for it? Or does Atkinson, like some partners of the men charged with raping Gisèle Pelicot, think he just made a silly mistake? Either way, I didn’t want to believe it.

It’s not only Atkinson who seems to think there is nothing to see here. I started googling: ‘Jackson rapes Julia Kate Atkinson’; ‘Kate Atkinson Jackson Brodie rapist’; ‘“Jackson Brodie” sexually assaults Julia “One Good Turn”’. But all I could find was a short complaint on an obscure blog. A scholarly essay on ‘gender violence’ in the Jackson Brodie series doesn’t mention it. Google’s ‘AI Overview’ reassures me that ‘Jackson Brodie does not assault Julia.’ Book after book, reviewers respond with an often breathless admiration and excitement. ‘Be still, my heart,’ Marilyn Stasio wrote in the New York Times in 2019, ‘after nine long years in the wilderness, Jackson Brodie is back on the job.’ Don’t the Pelicot trial and the Jackson Brodie novels show, from different ends of the culture, that an essential feature of male power is being allowed to choose not to listen – to reason, to conscience, to evidence, to a woman’s testimony, whatever its form? And don’t they also suggest that essential to that power, too, is what women – what all of us – are expected to ignore?

Throughout​ my childhood, before my parents divorced, my father, when he was around, would read to me at bedtime. This was a privilege and there is no doubt a connection between this fact and what I now get to do for ‘work’. Sometimes, when I was a young girl, he would stroke my naked back, something he said he had enjoyed as a child, as he made up the stories I adored about the animals – foxes, badgers, rabbits, wise old owl – who played and misbehaved in our garden. This continued even after I found, in a drawer of his things, photographs of me lying asleep in my bed, propped up on my right side, naked. I had no idea how or when they had been taken. I was ten or eleven. I put the pictures back in their cardboard Ritz Camera carton and told no one.

Over the next couple of years, as my parents’ marriage imploded, my father continued to come up at bedtime. The animals became anachronisms, but it was clear he liked the ritual, and I liked that he hadn’t left us yet. So, I lay there on my front, my arms tight at my sides, useful barriers between his probing fingers and the breasts I wished I could send back to wherever they were coming from. I thought I’d pulled off a brilliant compromise. I didn’t have to be touched where I really didn’t want to be (my back was sacrificed territory) and his feelings wouldn’t be hurt. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I thought about what a 13-year-old girl lying face down on her bed, pyjama top off, arms clamped and rigid, must have looked like to a man in his early fifties. What was the testimony of her body?

I sometimes wonder about my father’s own childhood experiences. Did he know the songs reluctant bodies can sing? I haven’t spoken to him in more than fifteen years, and he hasn’t tried to contact me. The last time we saw each other – I can’t remember how it came up and the fact that it did seems barely believable – he shared his view that women who wear short skirts on nights out were ‘asking for it’. I have heard since that he, too, plays the victim, telling anyone who will listen that my mother turned me against him. I sometimes wonder if there is anyone else my silence failed to protect.

I feel, though perhaps I am deluding myself, very little about all this. I don’t remember the pictures being taken and the bedtime accommodations were not so different from strategies I’ve adopted to deal with other men whose anger or hurt I’ve wished to avoid. My father found so many other ways to make life miserable that this seems, in retrospect, the least of it. What interests me more are the reactions of two people, both of whom I’ve known since childhood, both of whom I told about this only recently. Each offered up episodes – of which, again, I have no memory. One told me that their partner had always found something a little off about my father. Indeed. He always wanted to cuddle a bit much, and I always gave in because I felt sorry for him, and because I loved him. I didn’t know this wasn’t the way a child should feel but also, somehow, I did. I just didn’t know how to talk about it. And neither did anyone around me.

Gisèle Pelicot’s family didn’t know how to talk about it. On the witness stand, Dominique Pelicot’s former daughter-in-law, Aurore, reported once hearing him say to his grandson: ‘But you never want to play doctor.’ Abused as a child, she worried she was reading too much into it, so said nothing. The Pelicots, she said, always seemed ‘a bit the ideal family’. Florian Pelicot recalled his father’s strange unease when he borrowed his computer, and the way he would take pictures of Aurore ‘from every angle’ at family events. Whatever signs there were, Gisèle Pelicot said, they only became apparent in retrospect.

What are we​ taught not to see? What do we see and are taught not to talk about? If we want to understand the logics of a ‘rape culture’ that produces the ‘Monster of Avignon’, the scores of men he convinced to join him, the website on which they all met, the terms in which they made their excuses, the porn they and millions of others consume, the desire that this porn both writes and represents, the desire of men to get from women what they know they don’t want to give, the getting it because they can, the fantasy that the women they took it from wanted it anyway, the women who are taught to stay quiet, who are kept quiet, and the ones who are ignored, defamed or humiliated when they do not – if we want to understand this ‘culture’ (or rather, this way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the ‘monsters’, but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and forgive, the guys who are ‘not like that’, for whom we silence small anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are so relieved they are not monsters? And perhaps also because we are worried that if we do speak up they might leave us, exclude us, react with the infantile fury we are taught so carefully to contain? Are we not, when we look closely, surrounded by these small acts of accommodation, denial, repression, evasion?

But speaking up isn’t easy and the hard distinction between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’, makes these conversations even more difficult. Patriarchy does not mean that men cannot act decently, and kindly, indeed that the men in our lives may not sometimes be better and more reliable than the women. But it does mean that there are no men, no people, who can ever claim to be entirely beyond its reach. It is always there in the background, incentivising, rewarding and giving cover to good men who decide, however briefly, not to be.

The point here is not that all men are rapists-in-waiting, nor that all women who put their trust in men are at risk. The point is that patriarchy puts women in a sceptical scenario, making the distinction between the men you can and can’t trust difficult to draw. (It is not just women who suffer here: consider the man who really does just want to read to his daughter.) How many women have wondered whether a behaviour should be interpreted as a warning or instead as something they can safely ignore – perhaps even participate in and enjoy? Women in this situation are not helped by the tendency of men to get defensive, to use their comparative ‘goodness’ (‘I’m not that guy’) to shut down these conversations. (Many French men have expressed fury at the attempt to use Dominique Pelicot to start a national conversation about sexism.) It is certainly possible that the man who gets off on ‘sleeping girl’ porn or who sleeps with much younger women is not a creep. But if he is not to be, then might he need to be the guy who takes this sceptical scenario seriously, who is open to a conversation about where these desires might come from and what they might mean? If the price of a relationship is silence, is that not a sign that something isn’t right?

The other side of a culture of silence and silencing is one of not listening. Because, of course, many women do speak up, have always spoken up, and it is not only ‘bad’ men who ignore them. A group of researchers at the University of Cambridge recently reported on a study in Northern India where remotely operated drones were meant to be used to monitor wildlife. They found that the technology was used instead by local government and male villagers to surveil and humiliate women. Some women who worked together in the forest felt so intimidated that they softened the singing they used to deter attacks from predators. One was subsequently killed by a tiger. The lead researcher, who I have no reason to think is anything other than a very good guy, commented: ‘Nobody could have realised that camera traps put in the Indian forest to monitor mammals actually have a profoundly negative impact on the mental health of local women who use these spaces.’ Really – nobody?

The poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?’ ‘The world,’ her poem responds, ‘would split open.’ Gisèle Pelicot also believes that her testimony – her body on the screen, her words in court – might be enough to change society. Do we believe it too? Her decision means that some women will realise, as she did not, that they have been the victim of drug facilitated sexual assault. Some doctors will consider diagnoses and offer tests that they otherwise might not have. Recognition and the solidarity it can produce have always been central to feminism’s power. But what of society more broadly? Will men see themselves as implicated in the culture that produced Dominique Pelicot and his accomplices, and seek to transform that culture, and themselves? And if not, will we at least create the conditions that allow women to leave abusive men with dignity and in safety, investing in specialist support services, public housing, childcare provision, adult education? Or will we simply continue to ask underfunded justice systems (something France and Britain have in common) to prosecute bad men out of existence? In 1968, when Rukeyser wrote her poem, it was possible to think that the world might change if only women told the truth about their lives. But the last several decades, decades during which women around the world have challenged male power, have shown us otherwise. Even as we learn to talk, we find that talk alone won’t stop the world from turning much as it did before.

 

 

 

Sleeping Women.By Sophie Smith. London Review of Books, December 26, 2024. 



Sophie Smith teaches history and politics at Oxford University











23/12/2024

The Brothers Grimm

 



Once upon a time, a family by the name of Grimm carried on a life that was anything but. In the wooded German state of Hessen, Philipp, a town clerk, lived with his wife, Dorothea, and their children in a quaint cottage. Its exterior was an inviting light red, and its doors tan, as if made of gingerbread. The drawing room had been wallpapered with pictures of huntsmen, onto whose faces the two eldest boys, Jacob and Wilhelm (born in 1785 and 1786, respectively), would cheekily pencil in beards. Soon, Philipp was promoted to serve as the magistrate of a town nearby, and the Grimms moved into a stately home staffed with maids, a cook, and a coachman. Every Christmas, the family decorated a tree with apples, as was the German custom. In the summer, the children ventured into the surrounding woods to collect butterflies and flowers, confident they could find their way back home.

Then, one day, a dark cloud appeared, as if summoned by a witch jealous of their domestic idyll. In 1796, Philipp, only forty-four years old, succumbed to pneumonia. Jacob later recalled seeing his father’s body being measured for a coffin. Dorothea and her children were ordered to clear out. Without Philipp’s income, they were forced for a time to shelter in an almshouse just next door—cursed with a view of their former home and the courtyard where they once played, happily, until what came after.

Jacob and Wilhelm, the Brothers Grimm, experienced the kind of sharp reversal of fortune characteristic of the genre that became synonymous with their name: the fairy tale. A prince turned into a frog; a beloved daughter reduced to a scullery maid. Where the French rendition of “Cinderella,” by Charles Perrault, opens with Cinderella already in tatters, laboring away for her stepmother, the Grimms’ version, “Aschenputtel,” begins with the heroine’s mother on her deathbed. Ann Schmiesing, the author of 'The Brothers Grimm, A Biography'  (Yale), observes that the change transforms a “story of ‘rags to riches’ to ‘riches to rags to riches’—a trajectory, incidentally, that parallels the Grimms’ experience.” The Grimms’ version hacks away at the French tale in other ways. When the prince shows up with the fateful slipper, Aschenputtel’s stepsisters slash at their heels to make their feet fit. Each makes it to the gates of the castle before the prince notices blood gushing everywhere.

The dark tenor of the Grimms’ fairy tales is almost a punch line at this point, and their surname, which means “wrathful” in German, hasn’t helped. Even in their lifetime, the brothers were subjected to the obligatory punning. Jacob, an accomplished philologist, thanked a friend for resisting the urge to crack the obvious joke after he published his book “German Grammar”: “I do so appreciate that you have not chided my Grammar as a Grimmer.” In truth, there’s an almost comical severity to their tales, among them ““How Some Children Played at Slaughtering,” in which a pair of siblings, having just seen their father butcher a pig, try out the act on each other. In “Briar Rose,” the Grimms’ version of “Sleeping Beauty,” suitors trying to reach the slumbering maiden become snagged on the briar hedge surrounding her castle, dying “miserable deaths.”

These stories amount to wish fulfillment for people who want to believe stereotypes about German austerity, which may be a measure of the Grimms’ success. Their aim in collecting such folklore—alongside the fairy tales, the Grimms published legends, songs, myths—was to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers. It’s why the brothers, especially Jacob, also wrote books on German philology and began what was intended to be the most comprehensive dictionary of the German language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch. (Toiling into their final years, they got as far as frucht, fruit.)


The Grimms were Germanists before there was a Germany. When they were born, “Germany” contained what the historian Perry Anderson describes as a “maze of dwarfish princedoms,” and they died not long before the country’s unification, in 1871. In between, the outlines of their homeland shifted again and again, with the Napoleonic invasion of Hessen, in 1806, the Congress of Vienna and post-Napoleonic redivisions of Europe, and, eventually, the rise of Otto von Bismarck. Amid such geographic disarray, the Grimms believed that shared language and cultural traditions could be the connective yarn of a people, their people. All that was needed was a fellow, or two, to come along with a spinning wheel.

Though posterity has conjoined them, Jacob and Wilhelm were two rather disparate men. Wilhelm was the bon vivant to Jacob’s introvert. The elder was the more accomplished scholar. Jacob’s research on phonetics established what is still known today in linguistics as Grimm’s law. (He had noticed patterns by which consonants from other Indo-European languages altered as they made their way into German.) When, in their mid-fifties, the brothers accepted appointments at the University of Berlin, Jacob spurned any honors and illustrious positions that would take him away from his desk. “I would happily don a homespun smock of the coarsest material and strive for nothing other than that,” he joked to a friend. Meanwhile, Wilhelm’s diary from that period shows him watching a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” strolling through the botanical gardens, and taking in the Cabinet of Art, where Napoleon’s hat was on display. A “rare day without any visit,” he noted in one entry.

And yet a joint biography is the only kind that feels appropriate; posthumously disentangling one brother from the other seems tantamount to desecrating a corpse, for Jacob and Wilhelm were ardently inseparable. When, during their undergraduate years, Jacob briefly worked abroad for one of their professors, Wilhelm wrote to him, “When you left, I thought my heart would tear in two. I couldn’t stand it. You certainly don’t know how much I love you.” Jacob pledged that it would never happen again, and sketched out what he hoped their life would look like after they completed their studies: “We will presumably at last live quite withdrawn and isolated, for we will not have many friends, and I do not enjoy acquaintances. We shall want to work with each other quite collaboratively and to cut off all other affairs.” When Wilhelm married, Jacob lived with his brother and new sister-in-law. A friend once addressed the brothers in a letter as “My dear double hooks!”

Their bond was forged through their shared history of loss and social isolation. After Philipp’s death, Jacob and Wilhelm no longer enjoyed the status that came with being the sons of a magistrate. Matriculating at the University of Marburg, in their late teens, they had to pay their own way; stipends were typically reserved for the sons of aristocrats and landowners. Jacob saw his situation at Marburg as akin to the slights that the German people—lacking the political and economic advantages that came with being part of a nation-state—suffered on the European stage. He wrote in his autobiography, “Sparseness spurs a person to industriousness and work, keeps one from many a distraction and infuses one with noble pride that keeps one conscious of self-achievement in contrast to what social class and wealth provide. . . . A great deal of what Germans have achieved overall should be attributed to the fact that they are not a rich folk.”

While at the university, the brothers came under the influence of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, a young law professor who maintained that laws should not be imposed upon a people but, rather, be derived from them. A legislator, then, must be a kind of historian, or, better yet, a philologist, alert to a people’s desires as expressed in their language and storytelling. In a study of the Brothers Grimm and German nationalism, the scholar Jakob Norberg argues that, if Plato prescribed a “philosopher king” to rule the city-state, the Grimms envisioned a “philologist king” to lead the nation-state.

It was also at Marburg, and through Savigny, that the Grimms fell in with Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, two wellborn writers who had begun to amass German folk songs, aiming to capture the Volksseele—the soul of the people—that predated the European Enlightenment and French neoclassicism. Arnim and Brentano were founding members of what became known as Heidelberg Romanticism. If early German Romanticism, which flowered in Jena, in the seventeen-nineties, prized the “individual, subjective worldview,” Schmiesing writes, “the Heidelberg Romantics celebrated folk and heroic literature because they saw in it the collective experience of a people.”

Savigny’s dictum situated the national will in the hearts, or, more precisely, on the tongues, of common folk. Though the Grimms began by helping Arnim and Brentano, they came to see themselves as uniquely fluent, by virtue both of their family’s impoverishment and of the lore surrounding their home state of Hessen. They would gather many of their fairy tales there, convinced that the region’s relative remove from commercial roads preserved its authentically German character.

Hessen also had a touch of myth to it. The land had been settled in ancient times by the Chatti people, described by the Roman historian Tacitus as being brawnier than other Germanic tribes. With much of its rugged terrain a hindrance to agriculture, mercenaries became a primary export. Twenty-five per cent of British land forces in the American Revolutionary War were Hessian. (Washington Irving’s headless horseman was rumored to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper.) The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a father of German nationalism, even accused Europeans of deliberately keeping German lands fragmented—the better to enlist German valor for their own conquests. It was on this embattled landscape that the Grimms set about stitching together a cultural heritage that they could raise as a flag.

A foe for the ages had appeared. Napoleon’s conquest of Germanic lands was a watershed moment for German Romanticism. “Soon everything changed from the ground up,” Wilhelm recalled, of French troops occupying his home town of Kassel, in 1806. “Foreign people, foreign customs, and in the streets and on walks a foreign, loudly spoken language.” Hessen was subsumed into the Kingdom of Westphalia, led by Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s hapless brother, who had scarcely learned more than three words of German: those for “tomorrow,” “again,” and “jolly.” (This earned him the moniker King Jolly.) Jérôme was rumored to bathe in red wine, which, Schmiesing writes, “underscored his foreignness in a region accustomed to white wine.”

Jacob actually served as Jérôme’s personal librarian, but his real vocation was as a kind of foot soldier-folklorist amid the Napoleonic Wars. He later assembled a group of folklorists who took an oath to “honor the fatherland” through the “rescuing of our folk literature.” The tales they gathered were bread crumbs that would guide the German people to their cultural home.

The first volume of the Grimms’ “Children’s and Household Tales” was published in December of 1812. It contained eighty-six stories, including classics like “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Briar Rose,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” along with extensive footnotes. Critics weren’t sure what to make of a collection of “children’s tales” that came with scholarly addenda and randy animals. “Mrs. Fox,” where a fox with nine tails, which scan as furry phallic symbols, tests his wife’s faithfulness, was not the kind of bedtime story that parents had in mind. The same went for “Rapunzel,” in which the fairy (not the witch) realizes that her long-tressed prisoner has been receiving visits from the prince when, one day, Rapunzel asks, “Why are my clothes becoming too tight?” For the Grimms, what mattered was to be authentic, not appropriate, and fairy tales, across many literary traditions, weren’t always intended for children. According to the scholar Maria Tatar, these were folktales shared among adults after hours, while the children were asleep. She cites a French version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which the big bad wolf has designs on the little girl that are not gastronomical. In that version, she does what amounts to a striptease, peeling off her clothes as the disguised wolf watches from the bed, giving fresher context to “What big hands you have!”

Then, there was the matter of the Grimms’ language—sparse, hectic, visceral, unfiltered. In the preface, the brothers boasted of the collection’s fidelity to their sources: “No circumstance has been poeticized, beautified, or altered.” Well, that much was clear, complained the Grimms’ old friend Clemens Brentano, who thought they went too far. “If you want to display children’s clothes,” Brentano wrote, “you can do that with fidelity without bringing out an outfit that has all the buttons torn off, dirt smeared on it, and the shirt hanging out of the pants.” But the Grimms wanted to preserve the culture of the common folk, not to make the folk sound cultured.


Schmiesing’s biography of the Grimms is the first major English-language one in decades. It can be dense with details, but when I read Murray B. Peppard’s 'Paths Through The Forests'(1971), a more approachable biography of the Grimms, I found myself missing Schmiesing’s unrulier thickets of Prussian bureaucrats and long asides about German grammar. Hers is hearty German fare. It also presents findings that complicate the brothers’ image as ethnographic purists.

The popular perception of how the Grimms collected their tales was captured in an illustration that appeared in an eighteen-nineties German magazine: Jacob and Wilhelm are shown visiting a humble cottage, listening to an older peasant woman. “This rustic scene did not actually take place,” Schmiesing writes. The Grimms’ informants tended to be well-educated women from affluent families who retrieved stories from villagers and servants in their employ. The woman in the illustration, Dorothea Viehmann, was indeed one of the Grimms’ poorer informants, but her tales were not as “genuinely Hessian” as the brothers once described them. She was of Huguenot extraction on her father’s side, accounting, scholars have speculated, for the French influence on some of her stories.

Schmiesing also revisits the scholarship on Wilhelm’s change in editorial policy. Possibly in response to critical disapprobation, he updated the second version of “Children’s and Household Tales” to satisfy nineteenth-century gender norms. In the first edition, the story of Hansel and Gretel begins with their mother telling their father to abandon the siblings in the woods. In the second edition, the father’s wife—the archetypal evil stepmother—makes the order, because it was unseemly to suggest that a biological mother would dispose of her children so coolly. (The father going along with it all—just fine!)

Although their legacy may be as German Mother Geese, the brothers regarded their fairy-tale volumes as one project among many, and hardly the most important. In 1829, the Grimms, then in their forties, took jobs as librarians at the University of Göttingen, in the kingdom of Hanover. There, Jacob published “German Mythology” (1835). He believed that, just as etymologists could identify features of ancient languages through modern descendants, he could approximate ancient German mythology through folklore. He scoured ballads, fairy tales, and legends for references to heroes, wise women, dwarfs, giants, ghosts, cures, magic, and more.

Unlike “Children’s and Household Tales,” “German Mythology” was a national, and nationalist, sensation. The book positively rejuvenated the composer Richard Wagner. In his autobiography, “My Life,” Wagner wrote of encountering “German Mythology”: “Before my mind’s eye, a world of figures soon built itself up, which in turn revealed themselves in such unexpectedly sculptural form and so primordially recognizable that, when I saw them clearly before me and heard their speech within me, I finally could not comprehend whence came this almost tangible familiarity and certainty of their bearing. I cannot describe the effect of this on the disposition of my soul as anything other than a complete rebirth.” With “German Mythology,” Jacob had hoped to defend his ancestors—the Germanic peoples who invaded the Roman Empire—against allegations of barbarism. It’s a defense that, Schmiesing writes, “was at times overtly racialized.” Though Wilhelm praised the fairy tales of Sierra Leone, Jacob once wrote an article in which he called fetishism “a descending into dullness and coarseness, like that which rules the wild Negro,” and insisted that it was “essentially foreign to a people like our ancestors, which as soon as it appears in history, acts worthily and freely and speaks a finely wrought language that is closely related to that of the noblest peoples of antiquity.”

The Grimms’ professional lives were as unstable as the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1837, a new monarch dissolved Hanover’s legislative assemblies and cast aside its constitution. Jacob and Wilhelm, joining five of their colleagues, signed a statement in protest. The dissenters—who were ordered to leave Hanover within three days—became known as the Göttingen Seven, and their act of defiance was later enshrined in German history as a banner moment in the nation’s path to democracy. Wilhelm even revised a fairy tale with the episode in mind. In an earlier version of a story titled “The Blue Light,” a man leaves the military because he is too old to fight. In the new version, the protagonist is a wounded soldier who is discharged by his sovereign with the words “You can go home now. I no longer need you, and you shall receive no more money from me. I give wages only to those who can serve me.”

The detail of wages withheld spoke to the financial straits in which Jacob and Wilhelm now found themselves. In 1840, Arnim’s widow implored the Prussian prince, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, to find positions for two of her friends, whom she did not name. After doing some digging, the Prince learned their identities, and wrote back, “The fruit of my grim researching was—two researching Grimms!” Alexander von Humboldt, the celebrated geographer and naturalist, arranged for the brothers to pursue their scholarship in Berlin on a combined salary of three thousand thalers, to be divided as they pleased “since they live like man and wife.”

Two years later, Humboldt came to Jacob with a question. The Prussian court was announcing a new honor for achievements in the arts and sciences. Could Jacob advise on how a specific word in the statute should be spelled? The word in question: deutsch.

The project that would preoccupy the Grimms for the remainder of their lives was the Deutsches Wörterbuch—the German dictionary. A publishing house in Leipzig had pitched them the idea in 1838, but Jacob hesitated. He had concerns about the systematizing of language, and about German-language classes in schools—he cherished the idea of the mother tongue being imparted by actual mothers. Still, the Grimms had models for a different kind of lexicon. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, from the mid-eighteenth century, had been part of a movement away from rigid language textbooks. Entries featured texts drawn from various periods, giving a sense of how language changed over time. Johnson and others believed that dictionaries could record, and not merely dictate, the expressions of a people, in a version of what Savigny, the Grimms’ old professor at Marburg, had preached about the law.

Just as they had worked with informants on their fairy tales, the Grimms solicited dictionary entries from more than eighty contributors, including professors, philologists, and preachers. The results could be enchanting. The first entry was for the letter “A”:

       "A, the noblest and most primordial of any sound, resounding with fullness from the chest and throat, first and easiest sound that a child will learn to produce, and which the alphabets of most languages rightfully put at the beginning."

The men worked twelve hours a day to meet publishing deadlines, but they managed to sneak in some fun. In the complete first volume, which appeared in 1854, the Grimms included Wilhelm’s affectionate nickname for his wife, bierlümmel (beer lout). It took them sixteen years to finish that first section—which ended with the entry for biermolke (beer whey)—but the quibbles rolled in almost immediately. Catholics complained about the preponderance of word-usage examples from Martin Luther, and about the tone of certain entries. The one for ablass (indulgence) read, “Principally the ecclesiastical remission of sin for money . . . against which the Reformation victoriously inveighed.” Jacob believed that the capitalization of common nouns was an inorganic import and did away with it, a choice that inspired parodies in the German press.

Despite their critics, the Grimms carried on. In their hands, the dictionary was a form of political speech, the only kind that ever worked for them. In 1848, amid the wave of nationalist revolutions across Europe, Jacob was invited to serve as a representative at the Frankfurt National Assembly, a body convened in an effort to create a unified German state. But the meeting descended into factionalism as competing class and geographical interests revealed the country to be far more divided than Jacob had fantasized. The brothers retreated to their study to work on the dictionary. Every letter was a step toward the goal—if not a unified Germany, then at least a unified German people, connected by words, and by familial bickering about their meaning.

On December 16, 1859, Wilhelm died, at the age of seventy-three, following complications from back surgery. Jacob sat by his bedside and counted each of his brother’s last breaths. Four years later, Jacob followed. Stricken with an inflamed liver and then a stroke, he lay in bed conscious but unable to speak. He reached for a picture of Wilhelm and brought it up to his face, and died not long afterward. The two are buried in Berlin as they lived, side by side.

In 1871, Kaiser Wilhelm ascended to the throne of a newly unified Germany. In Goslar, a northern town in the Harz Mountains, an imperial palace was renovated to include a fresco drawing of “Briar Rose,” symbolizing a long-slumbering, finally awakened German identity. It was the fairy-tale ending the Grimms had dreamed of, and, as in many of their stories, there was no happily ever after.

The Grimms’ stories, with their promise of bodying forth an authentically Teutonic spirit, were so sought after during the Nazi years that Allied occupying forces temporarily banned them after the war. Scholars have since stressed that their nationalism was rooted in a shared cultural and linguistic heritage, not blood and soil. Still, the task of narrating the lives of Jacob and Wilhelm remains as thorny as the hedge that trapped Briar Rose’s suitors. As Schmiesing writes, it “entails navigating between too naively or too judgmentally presenting the nineteenth-century constructions of Germany and Germanness to which they contributed.”


In truth, this ambivalence existed for Jacob, too, who worried that the standardization of German in schools might downgrade dialects and the very folk speech that their lives had been devoted to capturing. The brothers knew better than anyone that every story of enchantment is also a story of disenchantment, and their lifelong cause was no exception. The nation has proved to be humanity’s most cherished fairy tale, and its grimmest.


The Brothers Grimm Were Dark For A Reason. By Jennifer Wilson. The New Yorker, November 4, 2024

 

 The Brothers Grimm, A Biography.   Yale Books