Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban, Illustrations for “Die butcher der Chronika der drei Schwestern: The Books of the Chronicles of the Three Sisters”
“The Books of the Chronicles of the Three Sisters” is a German fairy tale translated by Johann Karl August Musäus, The illustrations from the 1900 edition were done by Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban who were set designers as well as illustrators. The publisher was Verlag von J. A. Stargardt in Berlin, Germany.
Johann Karl August Musäus (1735-87) was part of the extraordinary flowering of literary culture that characterized the court of the Duchess Anna Amalia at Weimar, a court that included Wieland, Goethe and Herder among its luminaries. Musäus had himself written two satirical novels before he published in 1782-86 his “Volksmährchen der Deutschen (Folktales of the Germans)”. Irony, critical spirit and linguistic virtuosity make Musäus’s tales one of the brilliant, unsung achievements of eighteenth-century German literature.
Musäus has suffered at the hands of folklorists because he did not treat his material like the Grimms. Most literary historians have neglected him because his more serious attitude towards the folktale was quite different from that of the Romantics. Nonetheless, his tales have survived, sometimes revised or abridged and made suitable for children, who were certainly not the readership that Musäus first intended.