The most famous collection of fairy tales, but a long way from being the best. The stories and their messages are weird and unbalanced - not just by the standards of the day - and there are also a couple of antisemitic stories that spoil the whole thing.
When I point something like that out, someone inevitably makes a "it was normal back then" argument, but I've never seen antisemitic stories in any other old folk tale collections and, according to one of the world's top experts, Maria Tatar, no other German collection from the 19th century has any similar stories. Besides that, story books like this are one of the first things to define what normal means for people, and should be held to a very high standard. I'd bet you bottom dollar that most people involved in implementing the Holocaust were introduced to the existence of Jews through this very book. A stain on the genre. A piece of garbage that's best left forgotten.
