*Or, My Quest To Find the Brothers Grimm
An autumn leaf collection, with dates and places written on each one in black ink. Paper cut into the shapes of hearts and animals, then gifted to a little nephew. A silver tin full of baby teeth.
This is not the opening of a joke, a riddle, or even a fairy tale (though that would be appropriate), but just a few of the things I saw at the museum dedicated to the Brothers Grimm in Kassel, Germany. The famous story collectors lived in this city for much of their lives — though they did move often, and central Germany is dappled with the remains and effects of their lives and work.
For five years, I’ve wanted to travel there and find them.
Not literally, of course — they’ve been gone, unfortunately, for over a century-and-a-half — but to find the heart of them. To learn, by going to just a few of the places that shaped them — especially in their earliest, most formative years — who they really were.
And recently, I did just that.
If you remember characters like Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, or the Frog Prince (and the list goes on), you have these two Romantic-era German scholars to thank.”
Most of us know of the Brothers Grimm from the time we’re small, whether we realize it or not. It happens through bedtime stories, books in the library, Disney films , any number of ways; but somehow or another most children encounter the Grimms early on.
If you remember characters like Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, or the Frog Prince (and the list goes on), you have these two Romantic-era German scholars to thank.
The older of the pair was Jacob, born in 1785; 13 months later, Wilhelm came along. For the next seven decades, they were rarely ever apart. They shared a home without interruption, and Jacob, who never married, lived with Wilhelm and his wife and children, acting as a second father to them (he left them everything when he died). It was Jacob and Wilhelm against the world. As someone who has always placed so much of my identity in being a sister, I feel a deep resonance and connection to their story and their bond.
They worked together on almost everything, from the study of literature to the writing of the German dictionary. But their most famous team effort, of course, was the fairy tales.
With the aid of a wide social network — almost all women: friends of their sister Lotte, neighbors, maids, midwives, mothers — they collected traditional stories that had been passed down orally for generations, but largely never written down.
So, to keep these stories from disappearing, and to make sure future generations of children could enjoy them, Jacob and Wilhelm — just 22 and 21 when they began work on the project — put them to paper.
That house is a museum now . . . The upstairs, which was the town courthouse and where their father worked, is now dedicated completely to fairy tales.”
But long before that well-known collaboration, the boys collaborated on other things: drawings of lizards and butterflies, birthday cards for family members, games where acorns stood in for powerful armies. When they were 6 and 5, they moved to a small village called Steinau, and because their father was town magistrate, they moved into arguably the nicest house there.
That house is a museum now. The bottom floor, where the boys shared one bedroom with their parents and all four of their younger siblings, tells the story of their lives in Steinau and beyond.
The upstairs, which was the town courthouse and where their father worked, is now dedicated completely to fairy tales. Different rooms highlight different stories, with dolls, books, films, local artists’ work, and beautiful interactive displays. Though that part of the house may have been off limits to the Grimm children while their papa worked, it’s one big playground now, meant both to entertain and to teach.
Jacob and Wilhelm would love that.
When I visited the museum in Steinau, the wonderful staff member behind the ticket counter looked at me in amazement when I shared where I’m from (and that I’d walked over from where I was staying, in the mountain village an hour away).
“You came here just for the museum?” she asked, and I said “mostly!” — which was mostly true. But really, I was there not just for those four walls, but to roam the lush hills the Grimm children loved to explore, to walk the same cobblestoned streets they did to get home, to watch water trickle from the town well where they liked to play. The place where two small brothers, who then dressed alike and were never seen without the other, created for themselves a rich imaginary and insular world.
All children have fears, and for Jacob and Wilhelm, there was a lot to be afraid of.”
Because the real world can be a scary place. In fact, whenever folks decry fairy tales as too frightening for little ones, the common counter argument is that the real world is far scarier — especially for people as helpless as children.
Stories give them a safe way to process the fears and anxieties that they experience anyway — gives them a place to put them. (This, by the way, is not a new phenomenon courtesy of our modern, “more enlightened” world: outrage over the dark nature of some of the tales began as soon as the first volume came out in 1812, leading the Grimms to cut a few entirely from subsequent editions.)
All children have fears, and for Jacob and Wilhelm, there was a lot to be afraid of. They grew up in the uncertain and tumultuous Age of Revolutions, when old orders were being overthrown all across the globe. Jacob was eight years old when he learned that France’s king had been guillotined, and he was both fascinated and terrified by the event. In the museum in Kassel, you can see a boyish watercolor that he and Wilhelm did together of the execution.
They came of age during Napoleon’s occupation of much of the continent, including all the towns where they lived. And when they were 11 and 10, their father died unexpectedly. Their whole world fell apart.
Their father was the sole reason they had the nicest house in Steinau; the bottom floor was designated for the holder of his position. The Grimms were evicted immediately from their home, and before a more permanent move could be arranged, they spent the next few weeks in the house just across the road.
Today, that house is not a museum, but a restaurant; so of course, I went inside. There, I thought about all the confusion, the pain, the grief, and the fear that must have been felt those few weeks in 1796.
In this same exact room, where I was enjoying a cappuccino without a care in the world, six children could look out the window and see the house they’d been forced to leave — their home for five years, the only home most of them remembered.
Having also lost the servants that came with it, they were suddenly without the group of women who, likely, had more of a hand in raising them than their parents. Their father was dead; Jacob and Wilhelm, as the oldest sons, were now the “men of the house,” expected in that era to be there emotionally for their mother and, as soon as possible, become financial providers for the family.
So they were both sent away to school, with instructions to become lawyers like their father (which, much to their mother’s disappointment, of course did not happen). In the carriage that carried them from home, Wilhelm sobbed for his mother.
For them, childhood was over; no more would they play in the hills or by the well in Steinau. That evening, while the sun set and I walked back up the mountain to my guest house, I thought about them — two little boys, so full of imagination — and, right along with them, it seemed, I mourned for that loss of innocence.
I don’t exaggerate when I say that Grimmwelt (or Grimm World, in English) is one of the most exceptional museums I have ever visited.”
The house in Steinau is the only one of the Grimms’ homes still standing after the ravages of two world wars; but the largest and most significant museum dedicated to them is in Kassel, where, after leaving university, they lived for nearly three decades.
I don’t exaggerate when I say that Grimmwelt (or Grimm World, in English) is one of the most exceptional museums I have ever visited. To use a tired but spot-on cliché, I was like a kid in a candy shop there, smiling relentlessly, hardly able to silence exclamations of thrilled disbelief every time I turned a corner and saw what incredible artifact I was face-to-face with now.
It’s a wealth of information about Jacob, Wilhelm, and their large social and professional network, which included several other prominent Romantic scholars of the day; and I learned so much about their lengthy careers in not only story-collecting, but anthropology, literary criticism, linguistics, and more.
And yes, of course — we must return to the leaves, the paper animals, the baby teeth to which I alluded.
Wilhelm Grimm, I learned, love to collect fallen leaves, so much so that people began to gift them to him. The museum displayed a small portion of them, and he wrote the dates and places they were collected on each one (the gifted ones were often dated with his birthday).
In a glass case near Jacob Grimm’s personal scissors were meticulously cut pieces of paper: all hearts, squirrels, clouds, wolves. These were homemade presents for Wilhelm’s son Herman, his second child; the first, named Jacob, had died at a year old, sending the entire family into deep shock and despair.
Perhaps unsurprisingly after such a loss, Herman seems to have been especially precious to his uncle Jacob. He went on to become a scholar, like his papa and “apapa” (the children’s special name for Jacob, who was so much more than just an uncle).
And, yes: one of the last things I saw during my tour of Grimm World was a silver tin, holding the tiny milk teeth of Jacob Grimm. This entirely unexpected artifact, I felt, provided me more insight into who he was than anything else on my entire pilgrimage. Through 78 years of life, and many moves (several of them sudden, like the one in Steinau), he always kept his baby teeth — something I don’t think many of us can say. Maybe my mom has mine safely stored somewhere, but I certainly haven’t paid them any mind since the tooth fairy spirited them away.
There’s something strangely profound about the fact that, with all that he went through in his own childhood, he kept safe that eternal symbol of infancy and innocence.
I believe you could find perhaps a dozen or two people, all throughout human history, who have made an impact on children and childhood as lasting and extensive as the Grimms did. They recognized, better than most (especially in their time), just how crucial those early years are, when our brains are still forming, and we’re learning every day, and we just need to play and be safe and feel unconditionally loved.
When we’re still losing our baby teeth.
Their headstones are simple, almost shockingly so when compared to the elaborate memorials and mausoleums all around them.“
In Berlin, I visited the cemetery Alter-St-Matthäus-Kirchhof, where Jacob and Wilhelm are buried. They died in Berlin, where they spent the last years of their lives working on the first German dictionary (they got up to the letter “F”).
They didn’t like the city as much as the countryside where they grew up, but loved taking walks in a large park, the Tiergarten, where Jacob always lapped his brother (Jacob was a notoriously fast walker, while Wilhelm had asthma and so had to take it easy). Onlookers often saw the famous brothers pass each other on their strolls, acknowledging the other only with a little smile and nod.
Their headstones are simple, almost shockingly so when compared to the elaborate memorials and mausoleums all around them. “Here lies Jacob Grimm” and “Here lies Wilhelm Grimm,” they say, with the dates of birth and death, and that’s it. I can’t even be upset about this lack of pomp and circumstance — because not only did I see the design by Jacob himself, drawn in his own hand, at the museum in Kassel; it’s also just so indicative of who they were. Unassuming, humble, quiet. And, of course, always together. Always side by side.
Having pried so rudely last week into the lives and souls of these men, I feel I owe it to them, at least, to learn the language they studied and loved so much.”
The woman working at the Steinau museum was so kind and helpful, giving me all sorts of materials about the house and the village, telling me little tidbits about which places the Grimms liked to play.
“We have a virtual reality tour of the town,” she said, explaining that it would reveal what it was like when the boys lived there. “But,” she added, “it’s only in German for now.”
She said perhaps, by the time I come back someday, they will have the tour in English. I told her perhaps I’ll know German by then. Having pried so rudely last week into the lives and souls of these men, I feel I owe it to them, at least, to learn the language they studied and loved so much.
My Germany trip beyond Berlin:
KASSEL
Where I stayed: Hotel Teatro (lovely and quiet hotel, right off the main square).
Activities: Grimm World (largest Brothers Grimm museum; great for adults, and with interactive fairy tale displays and games for children; info on their lives, career, and fairy tales), Orangerie (18th century palace, originally a greenhouse for orange trees and now a museum; gorgeous grounds and walking trail around a pond that are free to visit).
STEINAU
Where I stayed: Gästezimmer Weinberg (guest house, where the hosts were incredibly kind and thought of everything to make the stay comfortable and fun; in Marborn, small and peaceful village about an hour from Steinau’s Old Town).
Activities: Old Town (the medieval village; like stepping right back in time), Grimm House Museum (in the Old Town).
HEIDELBERG
Not directly related to the Brothers Grimm, but included on Germany’s “fairy tale route” because it looks like it belongs in a fairy tale.
Where I stayed: Lotte-The Backpackers (hostel, commonly called the best hostel in Germany, with wonderful staff and a common living room and kitchen for everyone to hang out in).
Activities: Heidelberg Castle (built in the 13th-16th centuries; a favorite place of inspiration for Romantic writers like Goethe; free to visit the terrace and grounds with a stunning view of the town, Old Bridge, and river; you can pay a small fee to visit inside the castle as well); Philosopher’s Walk (strenuous uphill walk to a trail where Romantic writers and philosophers loved to stroll and ponder; breathtaking views of the town, bridge, and castle); Zeit für Brot (bakery recommended to me by my hostel hostess, with the most delicious sweets I had my entire trip; many vegan options, and coffee).