When the Mirror Starts to Sing: Teaching German with Märchen in Music Videos

Abstract

German fairy tales have an established history of appropriation in popular media, from oral traditions to mobile media. The mimetic quality of fairy-tale motifs and tropes provides ideal conditions for intertextual adaptation. In this article, I demonstrate that German fairy-tale themed music videos are powerful vehicles for culture, parody, and subversion that can be utilized as rich teaching tools in the German classroom. Artists using the German language draw on the genre of the fairy tale in their music videos in innovative and humorous ways for social critique and commentary, but they also resort to the form of the metafairy tale to question the pedagogical values of the Grimms' fairy tales.