The chapter reconstructs the biographical and political background to the most widely known project of the brothers Grimm, the Children’s and Household Tales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began the collection when they were in their twenties and Jacob worked as a civil servant in Kassel, partly under French rule. By surveying the larger repertoire of genres preferred by leading nationalists reacting to Napoleon’s occupation, such as propagandistic pamphlets and war songs but also collections of folk narratives, the chapter uncovers the specific ideological function of the folktale collection as literary proof of cultural nationhood. Influenced by the volatile geopolitical situation during the Napoleonic wars, the brothers believed that the state should coincide with the German nation as defined by linguistic and cultural criteria, and they thought that the independent existence of this cultural unit was authentically demonstrated by collections of materials such as their folktales. Nationalism emerged as an ideology crucially dependent on scholarly documentation, which the brothers thought they could supply.

Chapter 2 discusses the history of the critical study of the New Testament, with a focus on the era of German Romanticism.By tracing the development of the concepts of Geist and Volk, one can see how notions of oral tradition, cohesive Christian “communities,” and the gospel writers as literate spokespersons for these communities was inculcated in the field. A discussion of literary theory and the “death of the author” further demonstrates the category mistakes those who study the so-called origins of Christianity have made by uncritically treating the subject of ancient authorship.