German Fairy Tale Route

Once upon a time, two brothers from the small Hessian town of Hanau collected the folk tales of the German countryside and published them as 'Kinder- und Hausmärchen' — and changed world literature forever. The German Fairy Tale Route (Deutsche Märchenstraße) follows the lives and stories of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm from their birthplace in Hanau south of Frankfurt to the city of Bremen, 600 kilometres north, passing through the landscapes that inspired Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow White, and dozens of other stories that have shaped childhood imagination for two centuries.

The route begins in Hanau, where a bronze monument of the Brothers Grimm in the market square marks the starting point. The brothers grew up here before moving to Steinau an der Straße — a perfectly preserved small town in the Spessart forest with a Grimm family house museum (the Brüder Grimm-Haus) and a moated Renaissance castle. The surrounding Spessart forest, one of Germany's largest areas of continuous ancient oak woodland, has the unmistakable character of fairy-tale forest: dark, dense, full of deer tracks, with occasional clearings where the light breaks through in perfect beams.

Marburg is the route's first major city stop and an extraordinarily beautiful university town: medieval lanes climbing a steep hillside to the towering Gothic Elisabethkirche (the first pure Gothic church in Germany, completed 1288) and above it the Landgrave's Castle commanding the valley. The Grimm brothers studied law here at the university, and the brothers' student room is preserved in the university collection. Marburg's market square, with its Renaissance Town Hall, is one of the finest in Hesse.

Kassel is the cultural centre of the route and the city most associated with the Grimm brothers' scholarly work — it was here that they collected tales from local informants (many of them women of the middle class, contrary to the popular image of peasant storytelling) and edited them through seven editions until the final form we know today. The Grimmwelt museum (opened 2015) is a genuinely world-class cultural attraction: an architectural cascade of buildings set into the hillside below the famous Baroque park of Wilhelmshöhe (itself a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a legendary water cascade that runs only on Sunday afternoons in summer). Do not miss the Hercules monument at Wilhelmshöhe's summit.

The route continues north through the Reinhardswald — the largest contiguous forest in Hesse, home to the Sababurg (Sleeping Beauty's Castle), a ruined medieval castle surrounded by the oldest wildlife park in Germany. Wild boar, deer, and aurochs (the ancient ancestor of domestic cattle, reconstructed by back-breeding) roam free in the castle's grounds. From here the route traces the Weser River through Hameln (Hamelin of the Pied Piper legend) to Bremen, where the famous Town Musicians statue stands in front of the rathaus.

For van drivers, the Fairy Tale Route is comfortable. The road from Hanau northward to Kassel involves some gentle climbing through the Spessart and the Knüll Hills, but nothing severe. North of Kassel, the route follows the flat Weser Valley. Campgrounds are plentiful throughout Hesse and Lower Saxony. The route passes through excellent wild camping territory in the Reinhardswald.