Rotkäppchen

• What does the wolf represent in German folklore?

• What is Das Unheimliche (the uncanny), and how can it be used as a lens to interpret the tale?

The wolf

• In European folklore, the wolf symbolises both the dangers of the wilderness and fears about the breakdown of civilised behaviour. During the medieval period, wolves threatened livestock and sometimes people, making them powerful symbols of predation and disorder beyond the safety of society.
• According to Maria Tatar, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood developed alongside widespread fears of both real wolves and werewolves. After the Thirty Years' War, abandoned rural land allowed forests and wolf populations to expand, likely intensifying these anxieties.
• Medieval werewolves represented the loss of self-control and stood in opposition to the ideal of a disciplined, morally conscious person. Marina Warner compares the wolf to the witch, describing him as a male counterpart who, like the forest-dwelling crone, devours both grandmother and granddaughter.
• By the seventeenth century, Charles Perrault had transformed the wolf into a metaphor for sexually predatory men, shifting the threat from the wilderness to the deception and abuse of power found within society itself.
• In the early nineteenth century, the Brothers Grimm retained the wolf as a figure of danger but refocused the story on obedience and the moral discipline of young girls, rather than Perrault's more direct warning about manipulative men.

The uncanny

• In his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny as the unsettling feeling that arises when something is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It occurs when something that should feel safe or “at home” instead becomes strangely disturbing.
• Freud argues that the uncanny often emerges when repressed fears, desires, or memories resurface in disguised forms. One common example is the “double” or doppelgänger, where a second self mirrors or repeats the original in an eerie way, making the familiar seem unsettling.
• In Little Red Riding Hood, where the grandmother and her home may initially represent safety and familiarity. The wolf’s disguise creates an unsettling moment in which someone who appears trustworthy is actually a hidden threat, revealing that even the domestic world can conceal danger.
• Freud’s theory of the uncanny had a lasting influence on German culture, offering a psychological explanation for why ordinary experiences can feel deeply unsettling. It shaped early twentieth-century German-speaking literature and Expressionist cinema, including works such as The Trial and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

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