by Jonathan Lorie
Puss in Boots strides towards me, a handsome fellow with a walrus moustache and a rapier on his belt. Next comes Red Riding Hood, a blond girl with pigtails and clogs that tap on the floorboards of the stage. Behind her slinks The Wolf, his eyes dark, his haunches quivering with power and desire.
Jasmine the puppeteer looks up from her marionettes. “I like the Cinderella puppet best,” she smiles, “she is so beautiful. But at night, you know, it’s scary in here. If you’re rehearsing, there are shadows in the corners. Things creak.”
She unhooks the wolf and folds him away, laying him down in the box where he lives. Then she whispers in his ear: “Good night.”
We are standing backstage at the puppet theatre in Steinau, central Germany. It’s the town where, two centuries ago, the Brothers Grimm grew up and heard their first fairytales – actually old folk stories – which they would spend their lives collecting, transcribing and publishing for everyone to read. Along the way, they changed the culture of childhood forever. From their work we get Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel and many other favourites that continue to inspire books and movies to this day.
Steinau today could be a setting for their tales, its streets cobbled, its houses half-timbered, its square complete with a stone fountain carved with fairytale figures: a witch beside a cottage in a wood, a prince climbing up the gilded tresses of a girl in a castle, an ugly little man dancing around a fire. And I have come here, with my two children, to enter a shared world of fables.
Steinau is the start of a waymarked Fairytale Route through the province of Hesse. It follows the places where Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm lived and where their tales were found. Our journey starts here, at their childhood home, a half timbered manor house where they grew up in the 1790s. Now a sort of shrine to them, it displays information about their early lives, and in its garden is a life-size statue of Hansel trapped inside a wooden cage. That was always my favourite tale. My daughter, aged 11, pokes a stick through the bars to see if Hansel is fat enough to eat. My son, 12, shakes an apple out of the twisting tree above: luckily it is not poisoned.
I scoop up the kids and drive them off to a farmhouse in a forest. The Brathahnchen Farm Hotel lies up a narrow track in a spiky wood. Its ground floor is a series of low tavern rooms, their rough white walls lit by lanterns hung from blackened beams, their wooden benches softened with raw sheep’s fleeces. A huge fireplace crackles at one end, where spits of meat turn and smoke. It’s the kind of place where stories might be told on a winter’s night: or where a scullery maid might sweep cinders from a hearth and earn herself a nickname. We sit down for supper at a long trestle table shared with local countryfolk.
Next morning we drive north through the rich farmlands of Hesse to the picturesque town of Alsfeld, to visit a museum of fairytales. The town is a tangle of sixteenth-century lanes, filled with the sound of cathedral bells clanging. Somewhere in the maze we find the Marchenhaus, its white walls and brown timbers looking like icing sugar and gingerbread. In front is a well with a stone frog perched on its rim, wearing a golden crown and waiting to be kissed. We tiptoe in through a dark wooden door etched with the date ‘1618’.
The rooms of this museum are decorated with life-size tableaux from the tales. Statues of Hansel and Gretel creep up to a cottage where an old woman leers by an oven door. Rumpelstiltskin weaves gold thread from sweet-smelling bales of straw. A witch’s kitchen features a black cat and a row of herbs above an iron stove. A real-life storyteller in a green cloak emerges from a corner and stares at us. “I am a herb woman,” she whispers. “I grow them in my garden. Stories come from them.”
My children are thrilled and also terrified, a response you would expect from the best of these tales. Often criticised as too strong for young readers, they were increasingly sanitised by the Grimms in their series of books from 1812 to 1857. But the core of horror remains, offering stories in which children and other innocents are put at mortal risk by evil adults – but resist and triumph thanks to goodness, loyalty and, quite often, sheer cunning. There is sex, murder, cannibalism and crime in these stories, the dangers of the adult world and the possibility of a small person surviving them.
We slip away from the herbalist and head for the safety of Snow White’s cottage. It’s an hour’s drive away, across gentle hills and woods, in a village called Bergfreiheit. The white-washed cottage fails to impress my son, who announces that it’s a fake. But my daughter is amused by its seven bunk beds, the seven chairs around its wooden kitchen table, and the photo we take of ourselves in emerald-coloured dwarvish hoods. I am not quite transported to childhood by this costume.
But on the edge of the village is a piece of real folklore. The Kupferbergwerk Mine is all that’s left of an industry that may explain the seven dwarves of the tale. The wooded hillside here is riddled with copper mines from the sixteenth century and the low tunnels were often worked by children, whose short stature gained them a local nickname: ‘dwarves’.
You can go inside a disused shaft from 1552, with a hard hat and a guide. Wooden pitprops frame rough walls as you descend its long dark tunnel. “This is copper,” says the guide, pointing at a smear of green, “and this is Fool’s Gold,” by a wall of glittering crystals.
Miners here were given special freedoms, and the village became a haven for outlaws and runaways. Bergfreiheit means ‘freedom hill’. It’s the perfect setting for a tale of escape and transformation, like Snow White’s escape from the evil Queen.
But there is more. A display at the cottage suggests that the model for Snow White was Margarethe of Waldeck, the beautiful daughter of a local count, who fled from a jealous stepmother and died in 1554 – of poisoning. Her brother owned these copper mines. Sometime around that time, a scandal spread of a father who had poisoned his children with bad apples.
This may be how the folktales emerged, from histories and gossip and local scares, retold through generations and slowly merging together.
Margarethe’s castle of Waldeck is nearby, and that is where we will stay tonight. These days it’s an elegant hotel, a far cry from the humble village. Its towers and battlements rise above a glittering lake, and we enter through a gothic hall. This would have been a world of princes and kings, who fairytale figures might tame through marriage or success, but who also oppress them, as in the stories of Snow White or Cinderella. Interestingly, the heroes of the tales are seldom grand: more often they are woodcutters, peasants, fishermen, and their actions convey the survival skills of ordinary folk.
Next day we descend to the castle dungeons. “Creepy or what?” says my daughter with a thrill of fear. Among the stone vaults is a torture chamber, a grisly reminder of the real world of power surrounding the tales. There’s a whipping bench and an executioner’s block, a woodcut map of noble estates dated 1575, and a hand-drawn family tree showing several Margarethes. I wonder which one she was.
To get a firmer grip on the history, we drive north to the city of Kassel, where the Grimm brothers moved from Steinau in 1798. They seem always to have lived and worked close to each other, sharing interests and ambitions. Here they worked as librarians and published their first book of ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’ (Tales For Children And Households) in 1812.
It was a time of upheaval. Napoleon had occupied and then abandoned this area, leaving behind revolutionary ideas about national identity and the power of the people. These would coalesce in the brothers’ work, with its search for the soul of a people through their stories and its wish to identify a common German identity.
Their historic mission is described in Kassel’s Grimmwelt, a modern museum of pale stone and elegant displays commemorating their lives. We wander through it, past manuscripts and portraits and first editions of their books, the children slightly bored by so much history. Then we head to the edge of town, looking for a building that the brothers knew: the Brauhaus Knallhutte, an eighteenth-century roadside inn where Jacob and Wilhelm gathered stories. More than 40 came from the innkeeper’s daughter, Dorothea Viehmann, who had heard them from passing travellers.
The tavern is still a roadside place – next to a ring road, behind a car park, on an industrial estate. But we persevere and inside it is a delight. There’s a brass bar, a long dining room with dark beams and red banquettes, and soft light falling through stained glass windows of huntsmen and barmaids. We order sausages and munch them contentedly.
Our final stop may or may not have a Grimm connection. But if it doesn’t, it should. Sababurg claims to be Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and its pepperpot towers from 1334 are surrounded by magnificent beech woods – some of Europe’s largest – which would deter all but the boldest knights. Inside its ruined great hall there is a rough wooden stage where we watch the daily performance of Sleeping Beauty. At the end, a prince in red velvet wins a pretty maiden, her blond hair woven with pink roses.
Walking onto the battlements, I spot a herd of door on the slope below, like the strangely met animals of myths. Then we unlock a little door at the foot of a tower and clamber up a spiral stair. On a landing sits a spinning wheel. At the top are our rooms for the night, each with a four-poster bed. For the castle has been transformed into a wildly romantic hotel. Our lancet windows are edged with climbing roses, in case a prince might want to visit.
But that night, as we hop into the great carved beds, the children are spooked by the ruins and the moonlight. We have stepped too far into the imaginative power of the tales. It’s a long night, with every creak of ancient floorboards a fright for them. To keep out the dark I read them the tales, where every ordeal leads to a happy ending.
In the bright light of next morning, we walk around the castle grounds, which claim to be Europe’s oldest zoological gardens, dating from 1571. Herds of deer, musk ox and wild boar are roaming free. In a remote enclosure we spot a creature that haunts the tales, as once he haunted the untamed woods of Europe: a wolf. He stares at us. His eyes are black and burning. He is the fear we meet in fairy stories – and learn to overcome.
Driving away from the castle, I stop the car in an endless stand of fir trees. The kids tumble out to explore. They giggle and shout, free at last. There are wild blackberries among long grass, pine needles on raw earth, and rows of trees stretching away forever. We all seem tiny in this place. The branches are crooked fingers, clutching out at us. We are children among dark powers. Once these forests stretched across all of northern Europe and Asia, and they figure still – in fairytales, in Shakespeare, in Hollywood movies – as a place of challenge and of change.
Then my daughter picks a blackberry and my son lobs a pine cone at me, and we are innocents once more, protected by the joy of our journey and the wisdom of what we have seen.