In the Thicket of Inner Emigration

I would like to begin with one of Grimm’s fairy tales. The text, however, is from the year 1943—(and from Munich, the “capital of the movement” as it was then known, for which reason Brecht later dubbed it the “urban gravestone of Germany” (Stadt der deutschen Grabsteinlegung, Brecht, 10: 947)—and is a contemporaneous version of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood figures here as “a little BDM-girl” (Bund deutscher Mädel, the equivalent of Hitler Youth for girls), whose grandmother resides for purposes “of rest and recovery in a National Socialist home for mothers.”