This is on Beings on Hert Cuts. I'm Christa Tippett. You're listening to my

unedited conversation with Maria Tatar. She is John L. Loeb, professor of Germanic languages

and literatures at Harvard University. I spoke with her on February 14, 2013, from the studios of

APM in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was in a studio at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Download the MP3 of that produced show with Maria Tatar at onbeing.org.

I'm just, well, there's so many things I want to start talking about, but I think I'll tell you that I...

I'll tell you that I...

Tell me about you. I will tell you that one thing that actually flows into this, that I don't,

you know, have any need to talk about in the interviews, that I spent almost 10 years in Germany

in my 20s and the 1980s. So I've read those German fairy tales in German and also just

have my own personal experience of that culture and, you know, so the drama, the dramatic extremes

that that that also come through in those stories in a way. So that's, so there's a, that's one of my

access points to what you're describing. Interesting. And did you learn German while you were there?

You know, I had a really interesting way into that. I grew up without any German connection or

learning languages, but then I went to Brown in the early, in the early 80s. Brown had created this

exchange program with East Germany. There was nothing else like it. It was completely bizarre.

And remember that. And, you know, it was just incredible. And so I was one of the first

semesters of kids who went and at that point it wasn't even very organized. And it was really like

landing on Mars. I mean, for us and for them. So we were in East Berlin. We were in a

Rostock on the Baltic. Rostock. And these were people who had never imagined that they would

have even meet in America. And my German, you know, I'd been studying it a couple of years. My

grammar was good. I'd done the good to institute. But it was the perfect immersion experience, you know,

...