A Fairly Tale it Ain't

On Saturday we went to Hanau, a sleepy German town 30 km East of Frankfurt. Hanau is famous for being the birthplace of the Brothers Grimm, Wilheim and Jacob. The brothers were academics and writers who collected some of Germany's most famous folk stories into collections of novellas, including Snow White, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. Thanks to the Grimm brothers, children in the Western world develop phobias of wolves, getting lost in the woods, stepmothers*, and the repercussions of famine.

I thought a town with this sort of cultural significance (the Grimms collected and printed over 800 tales in the early 19th century) would be a mecca for a cultural history buff. And if not a mecca, at least a sort of kitschy Paul Bunyon-land. I pictured flaxen-haired members of the local children's theater running around with wooden baskets and breadcrumbs. I thought maybe there would be mechanical wolf, and red candy apples being sold by street vendors... was this too much to ask?

Instead, Hanau was a model of uninspired postwar construction. Turns out, like most of Hesse, Hanau was hit pretty bad by the RAF, and besides the platz and a few half-timbered houses, the city bears no resemblance to the town were Wilheim and Jacob entered the world.

There were, however, a few marks of the Grimms' presence, and we documented them. (Note: I have no idea who that German girl is.)

* This is so freaky... but the reason there is always an evil "stepmother," is because in the original versions the Grimms collected it was simply an evil mother. The Grimms thought this would disturb children, so they decided to remove the mother figure from a blood relation.