The Hansel and Gretel Code

The Hansel and Gretel Code spends its time on one fairy tale and treats it less as a bedtime story than as a piece of evidence. The working question is what changed when the Grimms got hold of it. That means setting the tale's wording against Wilhelm Grimm's revisions, often a single line at a time. Frau Holzhacker's words to the children, Wartet, bis wir wiederkommen, wait here until we get back, are one example. The narrator argues that Wilhelm's rewrite of that line made his complaints far more explicit about a monarch the show nicknames Fritzi-Willi, whose promises of political representation were still unfulfilled by 1819. A tree-branch contraption in the story gets similar treatment and is read, through the literary device of metalepsis, as a lampoon. By its own account the show sometimes leaves the story behind for a run of episodes, a detour into the history the Grimms kept grumbling about, and one recap covers the years 1756 to 1812. An episode titled 'The Grimms Meet a Bond Villain, or Game of Dominos' covers the death of William IV in 1837, Victoria's succession in the UK, the Salic Law that barred her from Hanover, and the crown that went instead to Ernest Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland. The research is dogged. In 'The Revenge of the Grimms, or: An Episode That’s Best Served Cold', the narrator, speaking as an independent researcher, traces an often-quoted remark to a letter from Wilhelm Grimm dated April 23, 1842, then has to read the handwriting from a scan posted by the Grimm Archive. Wilhelm's line from the introduction to the 1840 edition of the tales, about feeling youthfully invigorated in love and in hate, is flagged as peculiar too. Other material turns inward. A moment where the family is reunited is read as the recollection of a healing dream, which leads on to the ancient practice of dream incubation and to Asclepius, Parmenides and Peter Kingsley. In the narrator's framing, dream work is a way to counter the cultural repression of intuition and feeling, and listeners are greeted as intuitives. Tears come up more than once. One episode closes by promising to explain why Gretel does little but cry until she saves the day; another lingers on a visionary named Veronica, whose tears were reportedly collected by the jug. None of it is delivered with a straight face. Cold opens stitch together borrowed audio, church bells, and spoof ads claiming the podcast burns fat, relieves constipation or unclogs arteries. A mock confession counts the months since the last episode, and one exchange flatly denies that this is a family-oriented podcast. Interjecting voices heckle the lectures, the profanity is constant, and a warning that the presentation is intended only for immature audiences turns out to be accurate. Transcripts, links and what the narrator calls philologic surprises are posted on the show's website, and sign-offs tend to land on a cheerful ciao a tutti. What the show offers is a contrast: patient work with German text and archival letters, performed as a rowdy sketch show.