Following the Fairy Tale

This summer my family and I have revisited the inner world of our childhoods by travelling Germany’s legendary Fairy Tale Road. The Fairy Tale Road is one of the oldest, which runs 600 km through the lands once traversed by the Brothers Grimm as they gathered examples of local folklore for their iconic Children's and Household Tales ; stories told over many generations, myths woven into a landscape dotted with castles such as Sababurg, where Sleeping Beauty and her family are said to have been cut off from the world, or Trendelburg where Rapunzel may, or may, not have been sequestered in a towering turret.

Having obtained a map from the tourist information centre in rather non-descript town of Hanau, we began our journey in Steinau and were immediately transported into another world. As we wandered down the quiet cobble-stoned high street of timber-framed houses painted in jaunty blues, red and ochres, I felt as if I had stepped into the film set for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

This is the town where the Grimm brothers Jacob, Wilhelm and as well as Carl, Ferdinand and Ludwig Emil (who provided the first illustrations of many of the tales we know so well) spent most of their childhood. Their home is now an enchanting museum dedicated to the folklore that they researched from the ‘The Musicians of Bremen’ to ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’ to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.

After Steinau, we turned off the main road and meandered our way up through Freiensteinau and Herbstein, past impossibly manicured fields of maize and dark forests. As I travelled through the exquisite landscape, I began to realise how much of the subconscious development of my childhood had been shaped by images from this region. Every retelling of a fairy tale, every illustration, and every animation, portrayed the landscape that unrolled before us - thickly forested lands, where sun struggles through the foliage. A glimpse of a cottage through closely gathered tree trunks still conjured up a frisson of terror as I recalled the tale of children abandoned by their father only to be taken by in by a cannibalistic witch. Around every tree trunk seemed to lurk a dark, shapeless object of dread.

I began to grasp how profoundly the inner world of my childhood has been shaped by German folklore. Having been raised on a diet of Grimm’s fairy tales, it seems that my inner world is fundamentally Germanic and when I envisage the archetypal battle between evil and good, it is this landscape that provides the backdrop.

Every now then we came upon a neat, pristine Disney-like village nestled in a valley; terracotta roofs and grey slate turrets rising up around a well-ordered Markt of exquisite timber framed houses and colourful wooden carved shop fronts and barns with towering timber doors. I almost expected the birds of the air to burst out singing and a red hooded figure to skip into view with a basket, followed by a wily old wolf.

In Alsfeld, we stumbled on the Marchenhaus, an old timber-framed town house which had been turned into a kitsch treasure trove; each room containing a series of dioramas using disturbingly child-size dolls to depict various fairy tales - a wolf surveying a grandmother in her neatly made bed, a magic porridge pot drowning a small town, gnarled witches and wild animals. Leaning out of a window, Emily spotted Rapunzel’s hair hanging down from the roof top.

In the exquisite half-timbered Markt, we came on the Warlpurgis church with its strange associations with the Halloween-like celebration of Walpurgis Night. The name Warlpurgis refers to one of the early saints of the church the 8th century abbess Saint Walburga, whose relics were said to have healing powers and were removed to Bavaria on the night of April 30th – a night which has since been celebrated as the time when the forces of summer and light banish those of darkness, and pagan and Christian traditions collide as townspeople seek to ward of the powers of darkness with their celebrations.

Leaving Alsfeld, we camped high on a hill overlooking the Edersee, a great inland reservoir at the bottom of which lie church steeples and the former homes of residents of the Waldeck region. High on a hill, on the other side of the water, lies the Schloss Waldeck, the ancestral home of Margarethe von Waldeck.

In the 16th century, Margarethe was apparently sent to live in the court in Brussels with the widowed Queen Mary of Hungary and Bavaria. While there she is reputed to have fallen in love with Phillip II, the future king of Spain, but was poisoned at the age of twenty, giving rise to the tale of Snow White. In the nearby village of Bergfreiheit, the Schneewittchenhaus (Snow White House) recreates the home of the ‘dwarfs’ who are said to have worked in the copper mines founded by Margarethe’s brother, Count Samuel.

In the town of Kassel, we sought out the wonderful new Grimm Brothers museum, an abstract feat of imagination designed to confound and inspire. In the minimalist Fantasy section, a holographic frog jumped into my path before hopping its way back to a vast ceramic sprawl of fairy-tale creatures, worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

As we squeezed our way through a symbolic briar hedge, disembodied voices whispered into our ears and as we made our way deeper into the woodland, we were accompanied by sinister music. The whole experience was remarkably disconcerting and as I tried to make my way out from the ‘forest’ I recognised that powerful combination of childhood dread and curiosity.

Beyond the briar hedge, lay a small white cottage. As I bent down to open the door, the room was illuminated revealing deep blood red walls and a truckle bed with a checked counterpane. Beside the bed sat a small three legged stool. As I sat down, I was startled by a projected image of what appeared to be an old woman in a head scarf and furs tucked into the bed. As the head turned towards me I realised, with a start, that the face was that of an old man’s. When he spoke to me, I felt a familiar knot of fear in my stomach. I wanted to get up and walk out but mesmerised sat still while he became increasingly agitated until with a shout, the room was plunged into darkness. In the blink of an eye, I propelled myself off the stool and out of the door.

I found the rest of my family in a larger structure, the interior of which was stark white and completely empty apart from what appeared to be a large leather posterior intruding into the room. The kids, who cottoned on quickly, pushed the ‘witch’s bottom’ and were rewarded by her screams as she was thrust in the oven. I actually felt quite sick. The whole experience was extraordinarily immersive.

Almost all of the Grimm brothers’ tales speak to something base in our nature and of profound dysfunction in family relationships. They remind us of the worst that humanity can be. What the Grimm brothers captured was the darkness of our own imagination and a reminder that evil is real and can overtake the human psyche.

The story of ‘Red Cap’ or ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ reminds us that life’s paths are not straight and that if we ignore parental warnings, that we will be overtaken by the forces of evil (a metaphor for the fate that awaits us if we ignore our Father’s advice on how to protect ourselves from the enemy).

On the northern stretches of the Fairy Tale Road, we came upon the legendary town of Hamelin where fact and fiction interwove most overtly. Records show that on 26 June 1284, 130 children over the age of four years old disappeared from the town of Hamelin never to be seen again. There are various theories as to fate of the children, but over time a story developed about a stranger, a rat catcher dressed in many colours, who came to the town that year. The tale tells how he agreed for a price to rid the town of its rodents, luring them out to their deaths in the river by playing a tune on a pipe. However when he returned for his payment, the towns people made various excuses and having failed to be rewarded, the Pied Piper left the town in anger only to wreak his revenge by luring 130 of their children out through the town gates and into oblivion.

The fact that this town had actually lost these children was tragic and haunting. Records of their loss were everywhere including an inscription on the side of the ornate Rattenfanger House(the Rat Catcher’s House). Everywhere images of rats abound.

In a museum in the centre of town, the children’s loss was commemorated with racks of dust covered children’s shoes - a poignant reference to the Jewish children lost to parents in the Holocaust – and a haunting mechanical theatre. Inside a darkened room a robotic piper cames to life drawing out holographic rats followed by the ghostly images - old fashioned children’s nightdresses - floating through the air towards the town gate like apparitions: ten, twenty, thirty … a 130 souls all lost; until all that is left is wail of bereft parents, ‘Kinder, kinder.’

At Hamelin, we made the conscious choice to leave the Fairy Tale Road although there were still many kilometres before the road’s end at Bremen. The journey had been indescribably beautiful, the landscape and towns exquisite and archetypal, but the whole experience had reawaken the child within me in a way that I had not expected. It was time to step back out into the light.