Hansel and Gretel
01
At some point in the time before Communism or electric vehicles, there was a gentleman named Felix. I refer to him as a ‘gentleman,’ because I have the luxury at this point in history to refer to him as such. There is no potential that Felix Gesserwassenscheschen would have been called a gentleman in the early 1800s, as this term was not reserved for poor German woodcutters such as himself.
One of the problems with researching this happening is that the first accounts began appearing in the very early 1800s. These accounts appear to reference a time period roughly in what (we now call) The Late Middle Ages, or somewhere possibly in the 1200s. Of course, if you lived in this time, you wouldn’t call them that. It would be like a teenager in 1917 calling The Great War “World War I,” because World War II had not yet happened, so The Great War did not become World War I until after World War II had come on the scene. You don’t really know what era you’re living in until you’ve been dead for a while, which is why I’m interested in researching more about time travel into the future.
In writing this account, I have used both the 1800s accounts, as well as delving into all available Germanic material from the 1200s through 1500s that provided background or documentation on the matter of Herr Gesserwassenscheschen and family. Here is what I’ve gathered so far:
Little is known about Herr Gesserwassenscheschen, gentleman woodcutter, before this story begins. There are certain lives that uncoil to history on the basis of a singular incident, and Herr Gesserwassenscheschen‘s is one such one. He is neither hero nor villain in my understanding, though he leans toward the latter. He is a poor, tragic person to whom unfortunate things happened, and he, in turn, paid these unfortunate things forward. In this case, he paid the unfortune ahead to his children.
The point at which history introduces us to Herr Gesserwassenscheschen is where we learn that he is poor. Has he always been so? Perhaps not. Perhaps at one point he was a successful merchant, or a successful baker, or a successful anonymous itinerant executioner. Something happened, and whatever happened left him almost destitute, with a family and an axe.
It is unknown the precise region where he wielded his axe. It’s clear he was not a successful woodcutter, particularly as historians note it was likely somewhere in the Black Forest, a region famous for still having many trees, as well as possibly being home to another famous German figure, colloquially familiar as ‘The Girl in Red,’ or ‘The Red Riding Hood.’ We don’t know. Regardless, he was an axe man, a wood cutter, a not very good one, because the Black Forest still stands. Or perhaps he is an unknown hero to history, perhaps he was an early pioneer in reforesting strategies and did, in fact, chop down much of the forest, but replanted the areas he had cleared. We don’t know. Perhaps he was a very good wood cutter, but a terrible businessman, and had little ability to negotiate prices for his timber harvesting.
Whatever the case, he did not make enough money to provide for his family, which means he didn’t have enough money to buy food, which leads me to conjecture that he probably had not previously been a baker, a farmer, a gardener, or anyone involved in the food industry. I don’t know.
So he had a house and a family. But no family to feed them.
02
‘What do we do?’ Herr Gesserwassenscheschen asked his wife, Helgory Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen. I include her surname for the purposes of historical accuracy, as well as to differentiate her from other Frau Gesserwassenscheschens or Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschens in this time period. Historical research indicates that there were no other women bearing the surname Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen at this time, although there were dozens of Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschens and (at least) hundreds of Frau Gesserwassenscheschens. So for the sake of simplicity, I’ll simply refer to her as ‘Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen’ throughout, so as to avoid confusion.
Bettenvessenschellenschuschen was her family name previous to marrying Herr Gesserwassenscheschen. It’s my focus with this piece to simply share the facts as we know them, without getting bogged down in genealogy and who-begat-who, et cetera. I want to simplify history for those who think it’s boring and grumble that it’s all a bunch of dates and names. In short, Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen was the stepmother of Herr Gesserwassenscheschen’s two children, Hansel Veggersschansonbellenboton and Gretel Smith. Hansel was the product of Herr Gesserwassenscheschen’s first marriage to Frau Gretle Schutenschelehvottenmorten, and Gretel was his daughter by his second marriage to Frau Shusche Scheschenshoffer. He loved both these woman greatly, but sadly they both passed away in natural childbirth. By the time Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen along, he was (probably) desperate for companionship and help raising Hans and Greta (his nicknames).
Unfortunately, the lovely Fraulein Bettenvessenschellenschuschen was not so lovely once she became Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen. It leads me to believe that she and Felix must have married while he was still somewhat successful. Her character, or lack of (as we shall learn) does not fit someone who would have married a poor destitute widower with children. So I surmise she married him when he still had money to his name.
We don’t know what people will do for survival. I personally have once gone almost eight hours without eating, and I was close to complete physical and moral disintegration at that point. The point is, i have been close to the edge too, so we cannot know what led her to say the words she next said to her husband (I paraphrase this quote):
‘On the morrow, we must take your children to the woods. And leave them. That is the only way you and I will survive.’
Herr Gesserwassenscheschen was emphatically against this. But an empty stomach will do unfortunate things to one’s head. I can attest to this, though I have never yet abandoned young children in the woods for a fairly-long length of time.
In the end, Herr Gesserwassenscheschen did the same thing that many do today in justifying why they would vote for certain political figures that violate their conscience and all norms of human decency: he equivocated, he rationalized, and he invented reasons why it was better than the alternatives.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I guess so.’
03
The notion of civil disobedience is one that sounds good, as long as its in the past. If you’re a parent, or the government, or a powerful company like Tower Records once was, then the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ sounds like a euphemism for ‘breaking the law.’ Technically speaking, that is correct. But what about the breaking the law, when the law is not just? Ah, that is the question, and that is likely the question on most childrens’ minds when they’re breaking the law within their family and a priori building a defense for why their law-breaking is justified. Hansel and Gretel were like most children of the time, which is to say that we know very little about what they were like, as our records are erratic when it comes to longitudinal studies detailing the mindsets and internal psychologies of children at this time period. And in fact, let us remember that at this undetermined point in history, the idea of ‘childhood’ did not really exist; children existed in order to grow into productive and helpful adults. The idea that children should have ‘a childhood’ filled with play and joy and skipping and bubbles and ice cream did not really exist. But back to this particular dark night: Hansel and Gretel engaged in civil disobedience as they disobediently listened in on the conversation between their father and step-mother, Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen.
Imagine that you have just heard your guardians, including your own father, just say that you’re going to be abandoned and left for dead. One time I eavesdropped on my parents and after a while, I realized they weren’t talking, they were watching a film called Masada which is about a group of Jewish people who held off the Romans for a long time, but in the end they all died, and if you aren’t familiar with that story, then I’m sorry for telling you the ending, but it really is one that you should know, and now perhaps you’ll be interested in researching more about it. It’s really quite sad. It’s also sad to hear about how your parents are going to abandon you. To clarify, when I was eavesdropping long ago, it was not my parents discussing whether to abandon me, it was Jewish parents trying to figure out how to escape the Romans, which they didn’t, and if the children were looking for inspiration on how to escape a difficult circumstance with a horrific ending, then Masada is not a story they should be familiar with, so it’s a good thing they probably didn’t know about it, although we don’t know for sure.
Hans quietly burst into tears. Gretel pinched her older brother hard, very hard, which goes to show that sometimes violence is the answer. Because if she hadn’t, then he would have continued crying louder and louder, and their father and step-mother would have heard, and then things might have gotten very ugly right then and there, and there might be a tragic ending to this story.
You might be irritated that I just implied that this story has an un-tragic ending, and I am fully aware that I have done so. I felt that since I already gave away the ending of Masada, in which everyone dies, then I could balance it out by letting you know that at the end of this happening, Hansel and Gretel survive and are just fine. That is a spoiler, and if it takes away some of the suspense, then I apologize. If you’re not one for happy endings, then I can also tell you that in the end, Hansel and Gretel both die. But of course what I mean by that is that in the end end, we all must die. Memento mori.
Some might take umbrage with the description of Hans as ‘bursting into tears.’ Most versions of this account refer to Gretel being the one to break down, but as I’ve sifted through the documentation we have, it becomes evident that at this juncture, it’s Hans who is having the most trouble processing their guardians’ betrayal. He does step up later, but at this point, it appears that younger sister Gretel is the strong one.
She grabs him roughly, yet affectionately. ‘Hush!’ She whispers. ‘Shut up! We’ll figure something out.’
This is what some might call ‘tough love.’ ‘Tough love’ is a phrase like ‘shy,’ or ‘nice,’ that get used far too much, and often in irrelevant or inaccurate contexts, but occasionally they still hold value in describing a particular dynamic. Tough love is right what Hansel needed at the moment.
04
Thanks to Gretel, their eavesdropping was not discovered. They all went to bed, and to sleep. Except for Hansel.
He slipped out into the night and gathered a number of objects, all of which he put carefully into his pockets. This is a good reminder to always wear clothes with plenty of pockets, because you never know what you might need to keep in there. I’m not going to tell you what he put in there, because I don’t want to spoil this account, even though I already inadvertently told you about Masada and the sad circumstances surrounding.
05
They awake the next morning. Their dreams must certainly have not been pleasant, although I don’t know. We won’t digress from the story to conjecture whether either - or any - of them dreamed about Masada, although I doubt it, as the information about this terrible tale was probably not available to them in this region at this point.
It’s convenient in many of these accounts to villainize early on. Is Herr Gesserwassenscheschen a villain? Or is he like the the protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1953 short story masterpiece All the King’s Horses, in which captured Colonel Bryan Kelly is forced to play a life-and-death chess match with the Communist enemy, using his men, wife, and sons as game pieces? Of course that’s a work of fiction, but perhaps we should have a certain sympathy for the difficult decisions that caregivers can be put in, like Colonel Kelly, Her Gesserwassenscheschen, and the Masada parents.
Today’s children might frequently grumble about going to school, but this is a grumbling reeking of privilege. At this point in the Late Middle Ages, children were expected to produce something of value, to earn their keep. Things would go on this way for hundreds more years for children. But this is not about all children. This is about the children Hansel and Gretel.
They headed out to hunt for mushrooms or forage for edible plants or collect firewood, or something of the sort. Step-mother Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen sent them each with a piece of bread, which is possibly sign of a woman who was not entirely devoid of compassion? She could have sent them with nothing. Perhaps she merely did so to salve her conscience for what she was doing.
And Herr Gesserwassenscheschen, their father? Or vater, in German? Perhaps he felt that he had raised them to be self-sufficient and resilient, and that they’d better survive on their own in the deep dark forest, than with him and his demanding (third) wife. We don’t know.
They set off down the thick woods. Hans reached deep into his pockets, and surreptitiously began dropping the objects behind him. What were they?
Pebbles. White pebbles.
06
Eventually, they reached a small clearing. Father pulled out his axe and began looking for timber. Now, I realize this part may seem paradoxical: why is Herr Gesserwassenscheschen going to look for timber when they’ve been tromping through a deep thick forest?
The answer is I don’t know. Normally, I’m unwilling to conjecture or postulate, but my guess would be that at this time in the 1200s - our best approximation - there were cathedrals and castles being built, and there were possibly certain specific types of trees that were needed for construction. Perhaps specialty hardwoods? I don’t know. Historical research supports the curious juxtaposition of there being both a famine and a cathedral-building boom at this time. Whatever the case, the market drives demand, and the market demanded wood that must be hunted down. So off Herr Gesserwassenscheschen went to hunt down the wood. He hugged his children extra hard and set off into the night while his wife, Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen, made a fire and tucked the children into their dirt-floored, blanketless bed in the meadow.
Gute nacht, kinder, she said brightly. Often we’re used to hearing wicked people described as speaking in ‘a cackle,’ or ‘a sneer,’ or other some such tone, but the reality is that all people possess the capacity for both good and evil within them, so pleasant people can sometimes sneer and mean people can sometimes be jolly. And bright.
She stoked the fire, and headed into the night forest, saying, ‘We’ll come get you in the morning.’
And she headed into the night to follow her husband and his quest for hard wood.
07
Hansel and Gretel ate their bread. Even with heavy thoughts on their minds and empty stomachs grumbling for nourishment, they eventually fell to slumber next to the fire.
The next morning they awoke and waited. We don’t know what thoughts went through their heads, but if they were ‘good’ children - which is an ephemeral and ridiculous term - then they would know the advice that parents and law enforcement have told children for centuries: “If you get lost, stay where you are. We will find you.”
Life is a series of sentences and paragraphs that sort of make sense when they’re put together, but life can also be like a James Joyce novel, which is to say, almost indecipherable, or like a David Foster Wallace book, which is to say, full of footnotes and asterisks,
And what asterisks are, asterisks are a way of saying, ‘there’s additional information you need to know in in this situation that shines relevant light on this sentence,’ and in this situation, the asterisk was telling the children: ignore the main paragraph and pay attention to the footnote, and the footnote is an outlier to the rule, and if the rule is ‘stay put,’ then the outlier is ‘go,’ so in that way an asterisk can help you find your way out of Ulysses, which was written by James Joyce but bears little relationship to the ancient hero I thought it did when I first started reading as a child, but at the same time, Ulysses as a protagonist is the Romanized version of the Greek hero Odysseus, and Odysseus, of course, is one of Greek literature’s great conflicted heroes, alongside Theseus, which is the main point I wanted to get to: that what Hansel did was pull a Theseus. Theseus, with the help of Ariadne, unrolled a length of rope behind him mark the path to find his way out of the labyrinth of Daedalus, and Hans, in similar fashion, dropped white pebbles from his pocket to help him mark the path to find his way out of the forest labyrinth planted by anonymous farmers and nature many centuries before.
As a footnote, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on his successful voyage home, which is not a very heroic thing to do. Also, his father died as he was coming into sight, in what we can consider an unfortunate miscommunication mixing up colors of a ship’s sail.
But Hans, Hans was a loving and loyal brother (at this point), and because of his wits, they were able to follow the trail of white pebbles home the following night. I do not know why they waited all throughout the day in the meadow. Perhaps they were giving their father a chance to do the right thing and come rescue them.
But he didn’t come. So they made their way home.
08
Imagine the look on Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen’s face when her step-children opened the door?
But even better, imagine the feelings of Herr Gesserwassenscheschen as his lost children returned home? Imagine the leap of his heart, the joy of his soul as his beloved children came back to him? At least momentarily, gone were the thoughts of famine and starvation and unpaid bills.
Momentarily. For a minute, there was happiness. Mostly happiness. What were the children thinking? How did Herr Gesserwassenscheschen explain away their abandonment? Sadly, like much of the last moments of Masada, I don’t know precisely how these things were conveyed or what accusations were leveled. Perhaps the exultation of reunion carried them through a dark night and they chose to save tough conversations for the next day.
But the next day did come, yes, it did dawn, and it dawned grim. Like the Biblical figure King Saul, who fell mightily from grace and power and became increasingly manic, erratic, and irritable, Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen’s frustration became greater by the minute. She ordered her husband to take them out again. This time deeper.
What did she have over him? How can we imagine the desperation he must have faced to be in this situation? We have the wonderful tale of Les Miserables and its wonderful protagonist, Jean-Valjean, to compare half a millennium later; a man who stole a loaf of bread out of desperation to help his family, and we want to say: ‘why couldn’t you have stolen bread instead of sending your children out into the woods to die?’ But he didn’t know this story, because it hadn’t happened yet, and besides, they had some bread, because that is what Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen sent her step-children out with this time…and this time, Hansel had no time to get pebbles together. Just an crumbly piece of dry bread.
He crumbled them up further and surreptitiously dropped them from his pocket as they whacked their way through the forest again…
09
We want to believe all will be well. Hans thought on his feet, they’ve got a way to get out of things again, a little patience should carry them through this again…
…but this time, there’s a problem. The birds. Birds don’t eat pebbles. But what do they eat?
Bread.
The bread was gone.
No trail. No way home.
10
The children wander through the woods. For three days they wander. They are familiar with certain plants, so they are provided slight nourishment. But it is truly a labyrinth, a labyrinth of foliage and trees rising to the heavens and the forest stretching infinite in all directions save the ground.
Their spirits must have been wearing thin. This is where the character trait of resilience comes in. Resilience is ploughing ahead with fortitude and resolve, instead of giving up when things are difficult.
Sometimes there is a light ahead, and sometimes that light is metaphoric, and sometimes that light is real, and the light they eventually saw ahead was real, but if they could see into the future - which they couldn’t - they would know that this light represented something beyond hope. Something worse than hope, if they could have forged ahead in time. But they couldn’t. So they forged ahead on the trail they made as they trampled on wildflowers and extinct German birds’ baby egg homes.
And they came to the light. The light coming from the house.
The house.
11
In fairy tales and folk stories that have been told about this happening many times, the house is described as being made of bread and cake. As a skeptic who is simply trying to determine the verisimilitude of this incident, I have to resoundingly pronounce that I find unlikely that the house itself was made of bread and cake, although like me, you’re probably chuckling too at the idea of Marie Antoinette stumbling through the forest 500 years later: ‘Let them eat cake and bread!’ I can hear her triumphantly cackling, and perhaps that might save her neck from being disassociated from her body, an action referred to by medical experts as ‘decapitation,’ which comes from the Latin caput, meaning head. But this is not about Ms. Antoinette. It’s about Hansel and Gretel and the person who lived within the cottage, the cottage that I emphatically reject having been built out of bread or cake or candy or any other organic matter.
There are any number of structural reasons why a house made of cake and bread would not work, but aside from that, there’s the obvious one: why wouldn’t birds have eaten the house up?
Although I am loathe to conjecture, I can only conjure up the idea that perhaps the owner of this cottage had some sort of veneer painted on portions of the exterior, that coupled with dimensional paint and the deluded minds of lost children wandering in the woods, might lead anyone coming upon the cottage to hallucinate across senses and actually believe that it was made from…cake.
But this is what they believed. So they ran in. ‘Stop!’ I want to say. ‘Assess the potential threat first!’
But they did not. I wish they had. I really do.
12
Inside, however, I am fully convinced that the historical narrative has been recorded accurately. The living space was filled with treats. Breads, pastries, candies, cakes, muffins, cupcakes…I like to think of it as a Late Medieval Age Wonka Outpost. That is a reference to Willy Wonka, the fictional character in the novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which Wonka runs a factory that also has much of the same imagery, though in an urban, industrialized setting, and, of course, in a universe we recognize as being imaginary.
Hansel and Gretel dove in. If I may reference another Roald Dahl novel - my apologies, he was the author of the aforementioned book featuring The Chocolate Factory. Dahl wrote another book, Matilda, featuring a precocious young titular heroine, and in the fabulous filmed version of this novel, there is a scene where one of Matilda’s classmates, Bruce Bogtrotter, is forced to eat a mammoth chocolate cake, and it doesn’t appear that it’s humanly possible, but with the support of Matilda and his classmates, he eventually does so, in an amazing display of what humanity can achieve, and it is his adorable, grubby, messy, chocolatey face smeared with food that makes me think of Hansel and Gretel and how they must have appeared within these minutes; stuffing their faces of all delights from this mysterious house in the forest.
I am certain there will be calls for my cancellation, due to revealing plot points of Masada and Matilda to those who may not be familiar with their stories. They are both worth exploring, and remember that one of them is true and one is not. I felt that to provide an accurate image of Hansel and Gretel’s predicament, I needed to provide some context and relevancy from other literary and historical sources, and that is what I have done, and if you don’t like it, then invite you to take a long walk with me into some dark woods. Go run on ahead. I’ll catch up.
So the kids are stuffing their stomachs and they don’t hear someone come in.
Then: ‘Who’s nibbling my food?’ They hear.
They turned around. It’s an elderly woman. She is wearing a red bandana over her gray hair. People can be beautiful on the outside or the inside or both, and sadly, sometimes someone can be the opposite of that on both the inside and the outside.
This woman was such a person. It’s quite sad, really. I want to believe that someone whose physical appearance does not match up to any worldwide minimum standards for physical beauty would offset that with a beautiful soul and beautiful heart.
But this woman was not such a person. How did she become this way? We have diagnostic manuals and psychotherapeutic tools and sociological studies to help us understand, now, how genetics and environment and experience can contribute to a person’s identity…but these things were not present then.
So we know, in a moment of dramatic irony, something that the characters do not: that she is a bad person. And she is about to do something bad. But they don’t known that then.
‘We’re sorry!’ Gretel says, ‘we’re lost and quite hungry!’
‘Not to worry, dears,’ the old woman says brightly, ‘not to worry. Let’s make you a proper meal.’
She laughs quietly in satisfaction at her cleverly-phrased last sentence, and honestly, she deserved to laugh, because it’s a good line, and foreshadows the horror to come.
13
They discover her name is Mermyn Gruutzenbujtem, and originally had come (generally) from the Dutch territories. They’re less interested at this point in the story of her life and how she landed in this area. They eat and eat and eat, and she is so nice, and showed them around the house, and made up two comfortable, fresh-clothed beds for them, where they quickly fell to slumber.
14
It’s difficult to know how to describe Mermyn Gruutzenbujtem. She is generally identified as a witch, but in no literature does she refer to herself as such, so I am loathe to apply that descriptor to her simply out of convenience, and because she has the appearance and mannerisms of a traditional fairy tale witch. Sometimes the truth is much worse, and honestly for the children, it might have been better if she was a witch, because at least then she might have been driven by some sort of genetic or biological need to capture and eat them.
Yes, eat them. That was her plan. Because I am detailing this story with a minimum of melodrama or suspense or extraneous sub-plots, I will skip past the terrifying realization Hansel and Gretel must have had as they suddenly realized they were being held captive by a lunatic…
…for the lunatics who can smile, who can talk brightly, who can make something beautiful and delicious and appear nice…those are the ones of whom to be wary and worry.
They should have been worried. But that is the problem when you have too many worries, like the worry of being abandoned by your parents in a deep dark forest, and the worry of being hungry, and the worry of being very cold, and then the worries pile up like that then it’s more challenging to make good decisions and know what else to be worried about. So unfortunately they were not as worried about Mermyn Gruutzenbujtem as they should have been.
Again, I’ll dispense with any vivid descriptions of how they responded when she locked up Hansel in a small shed, and then used his lock-up as an emotional lever to force Gretel into helping her cook.
15
One thing that is unclear in all the research I’ve uncovered is what Gretel knew throughout the days following Hansel’s imprisonment. The commonly-accepted version, contained in the factionalized narratives, is that Gretel knows from the beginning of Hans’s lock-up that Frau Gruutzenbujtem is planning to eat him. But this doesn’t entirely make sense - from a motivational standpoint, it’s unlikely that Gruutzenbujtem would have wanted her to remain (relatively) free, knowing that she was assisting in her brother’s eventual demise. But what lie, what motivation would Gruutzenbujtem have needed to secure Gretel’s assistance? Perhaps a promise that she would be released, if she assisted in helping get her brother fattened up for a feast? I really don’t know.
Fortunately and for whatever reason, Mermyn Gruutzenbujtem misjudged Gretel Gesserwassenscheschen.
Place yourselves into the minds of these children. Think of of Gretel, forced to keep baking food so her beloved big brother can be plump enough to eat.
Consider Hansel, locked away in a small shed, helpless to help himself or his sister, knowing what’s coming, and perhaps pondering his life’s choices and the unfairness of existence.
What about their father, Herr Felix Gesserwassenscheschen, and the anguish he must have felt over his missing children, and the role he played in their circumstances?
And their step-mother, Frau Bettenvessenschellenschuschen Gesserwassenscheschen, a woman who also was once a young girl, but whose life has turned ugly and is focused only on self-preservation; does she have regrets over what she forced her husband into doing?
You can only conjecture, and that I will not do. We can only live in the present, and in the present, Hansel is stuck in a cage, and Gretel has just been ordered to boil water.
‘Why?’ She may have timidly asked.
‘Because we’re going to cook something,’ Frau Gruutzenbujtem may have said, cackling. ‘or rather, we’re going to cook someone.’
To Gretel’s credit, she kept her cool. She also kept a sense of situational awareness, in other words, she paid attention to where everything and everyone was in physical relation to her at every moment.
Gruutzenbujtem continued: ‘Every good entree needs a good dessert to follow. We’re going to bake something very special after our Hans Stew. Check the oven to see if it’s warm enough.’
In modern times, we would call this ‘pre-heating.’ This was likely a wood-fired stove, which are popular in modern times, but more difficult to precisely control the temperature. So when Gretel asked her next question, it really does make sense in the context of the Late Middle Ages.
‘How do I make sure it’s warm enough?’ She asked.
Gruutzenbujtem’s response is up there with ‘Call me Ishmael.’ What does she reply?
‘Crawl in.’ She says. ‘Crawl in the oven. That’s how you tell.’
In a strange way, this might be a lovely little moment. Frau Gruutzenbujtem is passing along her skills, her baking skills, something she’s really good at, to someone else. This has to feel good, to know that your legacy can live on. But also, Frau Gruutzenbujtem is a cannibal. There I said it. That’s what she is. A cannibal. It doesn’t mean that the word ‘cannibal’ completely defines her. She clearly has other attributes that are defining as well. She’s a very good baker, for example, and she had to have some level of ingenuity to build her cottage out in the woods. In modern times, if she could dial down the cannibalism, there’s’ a good chance she’d be featured on some sort of Food Network reality show, or off-the-grid documentary series, or such. But the problem is, ‘cannibal’ is what, in modern times, we consider an overwhelming identity. Sadly for Frau Gruutzenbujtem, that is what she is reduced to, in spite of her other skills and attributes.
16
What happened next is right up there with the great gambits in history. Moses climbing Mount Sinai. Julius crossing the Rubicon. Jane boarding with chimps. Put it on the line. That’s what the bold do. They see an opportunity, they take it.
Few know the story of Gretel, outside of the children’s books, so her impact might not seem as powerful, but I’d like to think the manner in which she bravely, quickly, assertively, seized a moment, grabbed destiny, and recklessly rammed it home was inspiring to the Harriet Tubmans, the Marie Curies, the Eleanor Roosevelts to come long after. I’d like to think. But I don’t know.
This is what she did next. But first, this is what she said next: she said:
‘Show me.’
Now we have the luxury now, of saying dubiously: yeah right, there’s no way that old hag cannibal would fall for something that dumb. But here’s the thing. We live in a post-post-modern world, in which we collectively feel like we’ve seen everything, and examined everything, and experienced everything, and if we haven’t, we sort of remix it to fake our way through making it seem like we’re familiar with it. It feels like everything has been done, like all the stories have been told, and all the risky gambits are obvious to see through. But that’s the problem with looking at history through that lens. There were people who were very very smart in those days, they just didn’t have the accumulated access to information or knowledge like we do now. But they weren’t dumb (see: cathedral-building minus heavy equipment).
Frau Gruutzenbujtem had not only not experienced this situation before, she did not feel like she had experienced it.
She climbed in.
17
She climbed in. Why?
Why indeed. We know little of Frau Gruutzenbujtem’s childhood, but I suspect that whoever was responsible for her upbringing did not have the ability to focus on her development in key areas. A key area of development would be in the area of character. Many centuries later, there would be a notorious psychology experiment where a child was sat at a table and offered two choices: they could have either one chocolate immediately, or they could have two chocolates if they waited five minutes.
Frau Gruutzenbujtem was the kind of child who would choose Option 1, but then figure out where the rest of the chocolates were stored, and stuff them under her cloak and walk out, thus choosing Option 3: all of them. This is an example of another important character trait called initiative. It’s a very good one to have, but it’s also one of those complicated traits that’s hard to understand in childhood. Is a child taking initiative by erecting a homemade ladder to help themselves to cookies stored up high and out of reach? Yes, that takes a certain initiative. But there’s a context, like when you’re a child, you’re supposed to be honest, all the time. But then you get older, and you’re supposed to be less honest, like when someone asks what you think of their new haircut. Character development is tricky, and it’s interesting that I use the word “tricky,” because Frau Gruutzenbujtem was certainly a trickster. The irony here is that in this case, she wasn’t tricky enough, and this is the point I’m getting to: Frau Gruutzenbujtem had character traits of initiative and cleverness, but she didn’t possess the character trait of patience.
If she had simply been a little more patient, then what happened next might not have happened. But it did happen, because she got impatient.
If she had been more patient, she would have realised, being a trickster herself, that Gretel was attempting to out-trick her. But her impatience got her dead. To rewind a few moments, Gretel said: ‘Show me.’
The tragic part of this story is that effective teachers are good at showing. Not just telling, but showing. Modeling, demonstrating, getting hands-on. Perhaps in a different set of circumstances, Frau Gruutzenbujtem could have been a wonderful teacher, like Miss Honey in the afore-mentioned Roald Dahl classic tale of Matilda.
That’s what Frau Gruutzenbujtem did. She showed. With most likely a gigantic sigh of disgruntlement, and perhaps a giant toot as she fluffed her apron and dress up, she crawled into the oven. This is where it gets even darker. Concretely, it would have gotten brighter, much brighter for her, as the oven was extremely hot. There are fragments of interviews with Gretel’s acquaintances after the fact, and they recalled her later on describing the furnace as being “…seven times hotter than a normal hot furnace.’ This is likely exaggeration on her part, due to what a later psychologist by the name of Carl Jung would describe as ‘the collective unconscious.’ In other words, Gretel probably was aware, without realizing it, of the Biblical encounter of three God-fearing youth who were condemned to be executed in a fire, and the King was so enraged at their insolence in not worshipping him that he ordered it stoked ‘…seven times hotter than ever before.’
In all likelihood, the fire was probably slightly hotter than a hot fire. My intent in providing these details is to separate what we know from what we think we know. So we know that the fire was hot. We think it might have been seven times hotter than a really hot fire. But we don’t know that. So we’ll just say it was a hot fire.
The problem was that Frau Gruutzenbujtem was what is called in some cultures ‘a full figured woman.’ The oven was large, but the girth of Frau Gruutzenbujtem was such that as she crawled in to demonstrate how to crawl in, she got stuck. In the fairy tales of this incident, we think of Gretel quickly slamming the oven door on her, but the facts bear out that Gretel actually had to push, repeatedly, to get her all the way in, before finally managing to close and latch the door. What happened inside that furnace over the next few minutes is not something we shall dwell on. What we know is that Frau Gruutzenbujtem, as the Good Book says, started as dust, and returned to dust, as all humans do. Or in her case, ashes, plus teeth. Teeth do not burn, unless the fire is at least seven times hotter than the temperature of an average hot fire.
18
If this was a Fiction Writing Master Class for which I was receiving large sums of money, I would tell you that we are now into what literature analysts call Falling Action. The exciting part is over, the villain is dead, and our heroes have a happy ending. We are now free to breathe easier and enjoy a few minutes of seeing our protagonists enjoy a life of happiness ahead…
…except I am not getting paid a large sum of money to write or teach fictional storytelling, and unfortunately Hansel and Gretel don’t have a lifetime of happiness ahead. That’s a different part of their story and journey, and sad to say, it’s not all happy.
But let’s just say that for the next short while, they were jubilant. It is of course, an awful thing to take another’s life, but there are, of course, situations where jubilance is appropriate. This is one of them. Gretel released Hans from captivity, they grabbed a sack of food and gold lying around, and took off to find their way home.
Remember how we were talking about character traits a little while ago? Another character trait that’s important is the trait of strategic planning and tactical preparation. This is a character trait that every adult knows well, but in the heat of the moment (I am engaging in some mirthful word-play; I use heat as a reference to the furnace fire they are leaving behind), so in the heat of the moment, they neglected to draw a map or track their trail through the dark forest back to civilization.
What this means is that eventually they found their way home, but they never found their way back to Frau Gruutzenbujtem’s cottage. No one was ever able to find it. Did it burn? Unlikely, as the furnace was extremely well-designed. So what happened? I have a few theories, but I will save those for later volumes.
19
I will skip a great deal of their journey home. Although it was filled with intrigue and danger, an actual witch, and a human-eating wolf, they are not of primary importance in this historical situation, so I will neglect them for now. Eventually their old home came in sight, and they saw their precious papa, Herr Gesserwassenscheschen, out splitting wood.
Words cannot describe the happiness they all felt at being reunited. Again, Herr Gesserwassenscheschen is a man who made a terrible decision, and that terrible decision began with marrying the wrong person, so if there’s one thing you take away from this incident, it’s that: consider with great wisdom and thoughtfulness who you will marry, and how it might impact those you love most.
20
In the moment, all was bliss again. There was a great deal to unpack over the coming months and years, and there were many, many difficult ongoing conversations. The diary of Hans reveals that there was a two-year period where he did not speak to his father.
With the gold they brought back in their sack, they were able to live in moderate comfort for a number of years. They tried many times to find their way back to the cottage and its bounty of treasure. This would have made them rich beyond measure. But perhaps it was to their benefit that they did not. Not enough money can bring unhappiness, and too much money can bring unhappiness, but the right amount? The right amount can let you focus on making memories and experiences you love most and not being distracted by debauchery or envy or having to work 20 hours a day. So perhaps it was a gift in a certain sense.
So this is one of the rare accounts from this time period where everything ends up happy in the end. You can stop reading right here, with this sentence, and you can be assured of imagining that everything ended up quite well for everyone.
But the truth has a few more layers to it, so if you’re interested in truth over story, then read on for a few more sentences.
Gretel eventually passed away never having again found the cottage, which had become a very important quest to her, and eventually became an obsession which led her to pursue it with monomaniacal vigor, sadly at the expense of some important friendships and her one true love.
But aside from that, they all lived happily on for a while.
The End.
Fantastic Tales : Table of Contents
Hansel and Gretel