Ludwig Bechstein
1801–1860
Biography
Ludwig Bechstein (1801–1860) was a German writer, librarian and collector of folk tales. He was born in Weimar to a poor family, and his father left before he was born. His uncle, the naturalist Johann Matthäus Bechstein, took him in at Meiningen, where he went to school and then trained as a pharmacist. A ducal grant paid for his later study of philosophy and literature at Leipzig and Munich, and afterwards he worked as a librarian for the court of Saxe-Meiningen, a steady post that left him free to write.
He wrote poems, historical romances and travel works, but he is remembered mainly for his collections of German folk tales. His German fairy-tale book, first published in 1845, was widely read in its own day, and contemporaries often set it beside the collection of the Brothers Grimm. He gathered stories from oral and printed sources and retold them for a middle-class reading public, so his books are literary retellings rather than word-for-word records of village storytelling.
The Ludwig Bechsteins Märchenbuch held on this site is an illustrated edition with 176 woodcuts after drawings by Ludwig Richter, a painter who specialized in scenes of domestic life. The pictures and the tone of the retellings reflect the taste of German families in the nineteenth century, and the book shows how the old tales were reshaped for the children and parents who read them then. Read it as a window onto that period as much as onto the tales themselves.
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Books
Ludwig Bechsteins Märchenbuch: Mit 176 Holzschnitten nach Originalzeichnungen von Ludwig Richter
by Ludwig Bechstein
Ludwig Bechstein's collection of German fairy tales, for a long time more popular in German homes than the Grimms'. Nearly eighty stories of brave tailors, enchanted princesses, the seven Swabians, the land of Cockaigne and clever animals, many told with a light, humorous touch.…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.