Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: On Germany's Fairytale Trail

There are some fairy tales I really like but there are others that I consider almost unsuitable for children as they seem somewhat disturbing.

Or is it perhaps that there is no "and they lived happily ever after ending"?

For example I really don't like "The Red Shoes" by Hans Christian Andersen but I like others by him, for example "The Ugly Duckling". I don't like all of the stories written by the Brothers Grimm either,but there are some very good ones!

Like many nursery rhymes some fairy tales are rooted in social conditions that existed at the time they were written and have a much deeper and possibly even a more frightening meaning.

For example was "Ring a Ring of Roses" about the Black Death or plague?

I have always liked "Sleeping Beauty" and "Cinderella", especially the versions by Charles Perrault.

Below is the Walt Disney version of "Cinderella" which I grew up with.

Looking at references on the Brothers Grimm and Perrault it gets a bit confusing as to who wrote what!

Perrault lived in the seventeenth century so perhaps he deserves more credit?

The Brothers Grimm came somewhat later.

Perhaps many of these tales and rhymes simply reflect the human condition - good and bad?

PUSS in Boots strides towards me, a handsome fellow with a walrus moustache and a rapier on his belt. Next comes Red Riding Hood, a blonde girl with clogs that tap on the floorboards of the stage. Behind her slinks the Wolf, his eyes dark, his haunches quivering with power and desire.

Jasmine the puppeteer looks up from her marionettes. "I like the Cinderella puppet best, she is so beautiful. But at night it's scary in here. If you're rehearsing, there are shadows in the corners and things creak."

She folds the wolf away into the box where he lives and whispers in his ear: "Good night."

We are backstage at the puppet theatre in Steinau, central Germany. It's the town where the Brothers Grimm grew up and heard their first fairy stories. Even today, it's a magical place of half-timbered houses, a stone fountain in the cobbled square carved with fairytale figures. I am here - with my two children - to enter that world of childhood stories on which we all grew up, in the places they were found.

This year, the region of Hesse is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the death of Jacob Grimm, the elder of the two remarkable brothers who collected German folktales and published them in a series of books from 1812 to 1857. Steinau is the start of Hesse's Fairytale Route, which follows the places where Jacob and Wilhelm lived, and where the tales were set.

Their journey, and ours, starts here, at their childhood home - a half-timbered manor house where they lived in the 1790s. Inside, it shows displays on their lives, and the garden has a wooden cage with Hansel trapped inside. My daughter Sarah, 11, pokes a stick through the bars to see if he's fat enough to eat. Benjamin, 12, shakes an apple out of the tree above: luckily it is not poisoned.

I scoop them up and drive them off to a farmhouse in a forest. The Brathahnchenfarm Hotel is up a narrow track in a wood. Its ground floor is a series of low tavern rooms, rough walls lit by lanterns hanging from blackened beams. A fireplace crackles at one end, where spits of meat turn and smoke. It's the kind of place where stories might be told on a winter's night; or where a scullery maid might sweep cinders from a hearth and earn herself a nickname.

We enter the fairytale world more formally next day, 96km north, at the Marchenhaus in Alsfeld. A cathedral bell clangs above a tangle of 16th-century lanes. The Haus has "1628" etched above its wooden door and a well with a frog perched on its rim. Its white walls and brown timbers look like icing sugar and gingerbread. We tiptoe in.

The rooms of this museum are decorated with life-size tableaux from the tales. Statues of Hansel and Gretel creep up to a cottage where an old woman leers by an oven door. Rumpelstiltskin weaves gold thread from sweet-smelling bales of straw. A witch's kitchen features a black cat and a row of herbs above an iron stove. A storyteller eyes us up. "I am a herb woman," she announces. "I grow them in my garden. Stories come from them."

We leave fairly hastily and head for the safety of Snow White's cottage. It's an hour's drive away, in a village called Bergfreiheit. The cottage fails to impress Benjamin, who says it is a fake. But Sarah is amused by its seven bunk beds, the seven chairs around its kitchen table and the photo we take of ourselves in dwarfish hoods.

But on the edge of the village is a piece of real folklore.

The Kupferbergwerk mine is all that's left of an industry that may explain those seven dwarves. Off to work they went, with picks and shovels to dig copper and gold in the wooded hillside here, which is riddled with copper mines from the 16th century. These were often worked by children, whose short stature gained them a local nickname: dwarves.

You can go inside a disused shaft that dates back to 1552. Wooden pitprops frame rough walls as you descend its long dark tunnel. "This is copper," says the guide, pointing at a smear of green, "and this is fool's gold," by a wall of glittering crystals.

Miners here were given special freedoms and the village became a haven for runaways. Bergfreiheit translates as "freedom mountain". It's the perfect setting for a tale of escape and transformation such as Snow White's.

But there is more. A display at the cottage suggests the model for Snow White was Margarete of Waldeck, the beautiful daughter of a local count who fled from a jealous stepmother and died in 1554 - of poisoning. Her brother owned these mines. About then, a scandal spread of a father who had poisoned his children with bad apples. So this is how the tales emerged, from histories and scare stories woven together.

Margarete's castle of Waldeck is nearby, and that is where we'll stay tonight. These days it's an elegant hotel. Its towers and battlements rise above a glittering lake and we enter through a gothic hall. This is the world of princesses and kings, which fairytale figures might tame through marriage or success, but which also oppresses them - like Snow White or Cinderella. The heroes of the tales are seldom grand: more often they are woodcutters, peasants, fishermen and their fates impart the wisdom of the common folk.

Next day we descend to the dungeons. "Creepy or what?" says Sarah with a thrill of fear. Among the stone vaults is a torture chamber, a reminder of the world of power around the tales. There's a whipping bench and an executioner's block, a woodblock map of noble estates dated 1575, and a hand-drawn family tree with several Margaretes. I wonder which one she was.

To get a firmer grip on our history, we drive north to the city of Kassel, where the Grimm brothers moved from Steinau in 1798. They seem always to have lived close to each other, sharing a mission in life. In Kassel, they worked as librarians and published their classic book of Kinder- und Hausmarchen - tales for children and households - in 1812. This was a time of revolution and nationalism. Napoleon had occupied then abandoned the region, leaving behind new ideas about the power of the people and inspiring resistance to invaders. These would coalesce in the brothers' work, with its search for the soul of a people through their stories, and its wish to establish a German identity.

The city houses an elegant museum to the brothers and an exhibition to mark Jacob's anniversary year. We ramble through the latter, past manuscripts and portraits and first editions of their books. Then we head to the edge of town looking for an 18th-century roadside inn, the Brauhaus-Knallhutte. Here Jacob and Wilhelm gathered stories from the innkeeper's daughter, Dorothea Viehmann, who heard them from travellers. Still it is a roadside place - next to a ring road, behind a carpark, on an industrial estate. But inside it's a delight. There's a brass bar, a long dining room with dark beams and red banquettes, and soft light falling through stained-glass windows of huntsmen and barmaids.

Our final stop may or may not have a Grimm connection. But if it doesn't, it should. Sababurg claims to be Sleeping Beauty's castle. Its pepper pot towers from 1334 are surrounded by thickets of roses and magnificent beech woods that would deter many a prince. Inside the ruined great hall, we catch the daily performance of Sleeping Beauty. A young man in red velvet is wooing a pretty blonde, pink roses woven in her waist-length hair.

Walking on to the battlements, I spot a herd of deer on the slope below, like the strangely met animals of myths. Then we unlock a door at the foot of a tower and clamber up a spiral stair. On a landing is a spinning wheel. At the top are our rooms for the night, each with a four-poster bed. For the castle has been transformed into a wildly romantic hotel.

But that night, as we hop into the great carved beds, the children are spooked by the ruins and moonlight. We have stepped too far into the imaginative power of the tales. It's a long night, with every creak of ancient wood a fright. I read them the tales, where every ordeal leads to a happy ending.

In the bright light of the morning, we walk around the grounds, which claim to be Europe's oldest zoological gardens, dating from 1571. Roaming free are herds of deer, muskox and wild boar. At the far end we spot a creature that haunts the tales, as once he haunted the untamed woods of Europe: a wolf. He stares at us. His eyes are black and burning. He is the fear we meet in fairy stories and learn to overcome.

Driving away from the castle, we stop in an endless stand of fir trees. There are wild blackberries among long grass, pine needles on raw earth, and rows of trees stretching away forever. We seem tiny in this world. The branches are crooked fingers, clutching out at us. We are children among dark powers.

Once these forests stretched across northern Europe and Asia, and they figure still - in fairytales, in Shakespeare, in Hollywood movies - as a place of challenge and change. Then Sarah picks a blackberry and Benjamin lobs a pine cone at me, and we are innocents once more, protected by the joy of our journey and the wisdom of what we have seen.

Jonathan Lorie was a guest of the Hesse tourism board.

hessen-tourism.com

grimms.de

With thanks to The Australian