Grimm sibling revelry

The mahogany table was gleaming with a veneer; the knight dapper in a velvet cloak and powdered nose; the castle as ancient as a fairytale. And I, hungry. I looked at the empty table and waited. And waited. For food. Ah! Why kill time? I thought. I had the magic three words that Grimm Brothers wrote 200 years ago: Tischlein Deck Dich . I imagined the fork as a magic wand, twirled spiritedly, gestured animatedly, and muttered a throaty Tischlein Deck Dich . Food and drink should have magically appeared on the table. That’s what happens when you say Tischlein Deck Dich . It happened in a Grimm fairy tale called The Wishing Table . I peered hard at the table. Nothing happened. The table lay bare, the goblets empty and the decanters unfilled. “This is the Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The Wishing Table does not come alive here. Here, the prince kisses the sleeping beauty,” Joachim Schadendorf, the guide, scuttled my fairytale dreams in his guttural German brogue. In Dornröschenschloss Sababurg, tales were getting addled and characters scrambled. Forgive me for all the fairy-and-elf swaps. Don’t call me loopy. The Grimm Brothers wrote — hold your breath — 200 fairytales and I read them many a summer ago. Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel…. I was in Germany to trace the footsteps of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm on a 600-km Fairytale Route from Hanau to Bremen. The occasion was special: 200 years of the first publication of Grimms’ Tales on December 20, 1812.

Once upon a time… Fairytales are wont to begin with that ageless once-upon… The Fairytale Route’s opening sentence (read step) instead is writ in stone. Literally. In Hanau, a nondescript town nearly 30 km east of Frankfurt. A memorial stone at No.1 Paradeplatz (now called Friheitplatz) marks the house where Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in 1785 and 1786 respectively. The house — and almost all of Hanau — was flattened to rubble by British bombers on March 19, 1945. Poplars and willows now arch over the cobbled pathway where the Grimms pranced around as toddlers. Time has erased their tiny footsteps from the sidewalk. Amble a few steps and you can almost hear their crackling yelp from the house of Aunt Schlemmer, the maid-in-waiting of a Landgravine (Duchess). The corner house with yellow paint has Aunt Schlemmer’s silhouette painted in black and sorrel — it was this aunt who looked after the Grimms after the death of their lawyer father. Hanau evidently breathes the Grimms for its existence — the reminiscence of their childhood, the stories of their tales, narratives about their pastor great-grandfather, the generosity of their widowed aunt, their lawyer father... And, of course, the 1896 copper statue of the brothers that lords over the town’s Main Square.

The Grimms’ real story soon moved to Steinhau. In Amtshaus, where they lived from 1791 to 1796. The Grimms’ horse sure hobbled on the stone pathways; I vroomed on the Autobahn at 110 mph. In the manicured lawn, a sculpted princess leans coquettishly to kiss the frog, daisies prop their heads out of blades of green grass and the half-timbered house still looks lived in. Now a museum, the house smells of a bygone age. In the kitchen hang pewter pans and muffin moulds; in the stone sink lie spatulas and ladles; another room houses three-dimensional snippets of the fairytales stacked behind glass panes. Locked in a chest with a glass top is one of the oldest English editions of the Grimms’ Tales (1820).

“In Marburg, one must move one’s legs, and climb upstairs and downstairs!” Jacob Grimm lamented the topography of Marburg, where he moved to study. Marburg’s landscape is undulating. And I joined Jacob in bewailing the steep incline as I huffed uphill to the room where the Grimms met the Romantiks, took lessons from Freidrich Karl von Savigny and first got acquainted with minnesingers. It was in Marburg that the brothers found the “first fairytale impulse”.

Kassel would be their next destination. And mine. Jacob rented an apartment, slipped out of his flamboyant Parisian suits, slipped into stiff uniform and pigtails and took up a job as King Jerome Bonaparte’s librarian. In Expedition Grimm, there hangs an embroidered coat and waistcoat of Jacob, a leather bag, his handwriting digitised, his books safe behind hardened glass. There are letters from Wilhelm, a lock of hair snipped off Wilhelm’s son, paintings by Ludwig Earl Grimm, the younger artistic Grimm, coins from the era, and antiquated Grimms’ Tales sepia with age. Inside the high walls of Documenta Hall, you can almost hear the whispers of the Grimm brothers as they collated the antiquarian fairytales heard from storytellers and hunched over their wood desk to unravel the half-revealed mysteries of the German language.

Bremen was still far away. In Kassel, my feet were sore and my knees wobbly. All I needed was a prince charming to sweep me off on his white steed. On the Fairytale Route, knights and princes are aplenty, but no such luck in real life.