Fairytale Germany
Once upon a time there was a fair, young(ish) content writer who was sent away to a far off land full of green hills, dark forbidding forests and fairytale castles. When she arrived, she was taken to the beautiful, medieval city of Marburg and sent on a cobbled road up to the biggest castle on the highest hill in the district to learn about the legendary Brothers Grimm and their famous volumes of stories, many of which they collected here.
This was the theme of my trip to ‘fairytale Germany’, an area made up of places associated with the Grimm Brothers – where they lived and where their stories are set. You can travel the whole ‘Fairytale Route’ from Hanau (near Frankfurt) up to Bremen but with only four days, we discovered just a small part of the route between Marburg and Kassel which is, funnily enough, full of green hills, dark forbidding forests and fairytale castles.
The first thing I learnt about Grimms’ Fairy Tales on this tour was that they didn’t actually create the fairytales themselves. They collected them from local people and transcribed them into a written form; sometimes tweaking them a bit to make them more suitable for children, since the original tales were not only quite dark but also fairly erotic. I found this fascinating. Not just because the Grimm Brothers were making a record of an oral tradition but also because it became apparent that the tales had been passed down through generations and subsequently came from all over the world (despite the Brothers’ intention to find German cultural identity in local folklore).
So that was my inner literature student happy. As for the castles, they were generally more like our idea of a stately home rather than the standard fairy tale image of a turreted fort with a moat and drawbridge. The grandiose Wilhelmshöhe Palace (in Kassel) for example, dates back to the 18th century and was used as a summer residence for Kaiser Wilhelm II. The most impressive sight here was the palace’s Baroque grounds, the largest hillside park in Europe with an amazing, complex series of water features. Every Wednesday and Sunday throughout the summer, 350,000 litres of water are released from behind a huge statue of Hercules at the top of the hill and run down through a fabulous series of waterfalls and cascades, eventually emerging in a lake at the bottom where, as the grand finale, a huge fountain erupts 50 metres into the air. The park and palace has been awarded UNESCO World Heritage status this year and everyone seems to agree that the water features were what sealed the deal.
Finally the food. On my penultimate evening we went to Sababurg, the most conventionally castle-like castle of any we visited. This stunning fortress, surrounded by acres of forest, is believed to be the most likely candidate to have inspired the fairytale home of Sleeping Beauty. We had drinks in the garden, served in rose glasses (complete with green, thorny stems), wandered through the grounds, past the deer paddock and into one of the turrets where there are luxurious hotel rooms with four poster beds. We then had dinner in a private room, with Baroque music playing softly in the background and dishes adorned with edible flowers. At the end of the meal, Sleeping Beauty herself, accompanied by Prince Charming (of course) and a cellist (naturally), gave us a performance of the traditional fairytale, after which Prince Charming, hedging his bets a tad too obviously I felt, presented me with a rose.
Once all of us had made our way back through the winding streets of fairytale Germany (and Terminal 1 of Frankfurt airport), we arrived home safe and sound and everyone lived happily ever after. Until I woke up at Heathrow.
