Grimm scholar’s big find

Renowned NZ Germanist, Professor Alan Kirkness, who retired from Auckland University in 2004, played a key role in the discovery of nine new books by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. The hand-annotated volumes of the German dictionary, begun but never completed by the Brothers Grimm, have been missing since WW2. Kirkness and his German colleague Berthold Friemel have been writing letters and emails to Eastern European libraries since the 1970s. The works finally turned up in Cracow, Poland, where Kirkness has long expected to find them. “It’s not an earth-shattering discovery,” he says in the NZ Listener. “But in Grimm research it would have to be the most significant find in half a century or more. It is more unknown material that has come directly from the pen of these two leading German intellectuals.”