Germany's fairy-tale road

Once upon a time in the fairy-tale country of Germany, in a village too small to appear on the map, lived a little boy...."

So began the stories I used to tell my children about the grandfather they barely had a chance to know. If I encroached on the Brothers Grimm, well, when you have been raised with their tales, it happens. Confidently I promised they would someday see the castle of Sleeping Beauty, hike in the woods where Hansel and Gretel lost their way, and visit Welferode, my father's rural Hessian village, which wasn't in our atlas.

Thus, on our first family trip to Europe, we climbed the tower of Sababurg and followed the forest paths west of Marburg, the ancient university city where Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm studied. We also looked for Welferode, but in vain.

"Perhaps a witch made it invisible," our daughter said.

"Maybe it got blown up in a war," our son suggested cheerfully.

In the town hall of Kassel, capital of Hesse and site of the Grimm Brothers Museum, no one had heard of it. Nor did it appear on the map of the Deutsche Märchenstrasse, the 400-mile Bremen-to-Hanau Fairy Tale Road laid out by the German Tourist Office.

My single photograph of the house where my father was born showed a large half-timbered dwelling with a pair of young linden trees by the door. The architecture was early-storybook, beloved by illustrators and typical of the region.

The Brave Little Tailor had stitched before a similar doorway in Wahlsburg. The giantess of Trendelburg leaned upon a like roof. Rapunzel looked out on black-and-white houses when she let down her hair in Steinau. Cinderella's coach passed them on her way to the ball at Ronneburg Castle.

In Hanau, where the Brothers Grimm were born in 1785 and 1786, castles still frown from hilltops and forests are dark and deep, but the last wolf met his huntsman in 1846. Today's restored castles are hotels, restaurants, and museums; and the woods are full of hiking trails. Nevertheless, believing in fairy tales goes with the territory, and wolves are reported again chasing deer in the forest.

Enchanting though the countryside may be, yet Wilhelm and Jakob never called it "Fairyland," even in their first collection of tales, published just before Christmas 1812. While studying literature they had grown interested in folk music and gone on to collect cautionary tales, the bedtime stories of that pre-video day. They also picked up robber yarns spun by the fires in coaching inns and monster legends as old as the spooky places that spawned them.

"Don't tell her those stories," my mother would say to my father. "She'll sleep with the covers pulled over her head."

Nor were the scenes without factual base. In the Grimms' time, unmarried women of the Schwalm River valley still wore red caps to signal their eligibility, so a little girl might logically wear a junior version as she set off for her grandmother's house.

Today the towns along the fairy-tale road have put up statues of the brothers in remembrance of their stories.

Medieval Alsfeld has the figure of a grown-up Red Riding Hood topping the fountain outside a 13th-century church. In Bremen you can see the donkey, dog, cat, and rooster who became the official town musicians when they frightened brigands with their bellowing.

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