She looks like just a girl, but she is the queen. Dressed in a red lace dress that reaches to her feet and wearing a crown of flower figurines, the young woman blushes while a middle-aged man with graying hair solemnly thanks him for the honor of receiving her at the tennis club he presides over. . The girl, who looks on with the expression of an animated figure, seems not to dare to step out of her role and only blinks. We are in Naurod, in a small valley in the Taunus Mountains located in the heart of the Hesse region of Germany. Fruit trees in bloom here and there paint the intensely green valleys white. The young woman, whose youth embodies the awakening of spring, is today the person that everyone wants to have around; she the queen of the fertile and abundant; the one that brings luck. There is no king here, the center of it is she.
“Where does this custom come from? I don't know very well. It has always been like this. This year it was my turn,” he tells me shortly after, already at the firefighter club, the entire room has stood up to welcome him. “This custom began in the fifties, after the war. I was very little and I remember,” notes an elderly woman. Now the court of the queen of the flower, which is mostly male and is made up of club directors or City Hall staff, has indulged in eating deer or wild boar steaks, sausages and delicious sauerkraut with pretzel and apple wine.
Flower festivals take place throughout southern Germany since the arrival of spring. First the blooming of the almond trees is celebrated, then the apple and cherry trees. They all have music, dance, traditional food. And his own queen. But in this region and in this town they bring to mind fairies and princess stories. Even more so when the young queen of Naurod walks with her long red dress and her shining crown between the tables followed by her entourage, and it is impossible not to associate her image with that of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, the Handless Maid or Rapunzel, stories all collected by the Brothers Grimm especially in this area.
It is no coincidence that Jacob and Wheim Grimm were born just a few kilometers from here, in Hanau. Very close to the place where, also in spring, it has been celebrated since 1985 the festival in honor of his stories at Philippsruhe Palace. There children's stories become musicals and you can also visit the museum that bears his name. Inside the palace there are stories written on the wall that take you back to your childhood, objects that belonged to the brothers such as a very old leather wallet, pens, and inkwell. A story illustrated with the drawings of another of the brothers, Ludwig Emil Grimm, who was one of the most well-known and respected illustrators of the time in Europe. It is in this place and in spring when the imprint of the Brothers Grimm sculpts everything, the moment in which the fairy-tale character that their own life achieved becomes evident.
Grimm's True Tale
It all started less than half an hour from Hanau like a fairy tale. It was a place full of water, flowers, lilacs and vines. The town is called Steineau an der Strasse, and today it only has about 10,000 inhabitants. There, around the stately tower, lived a rich and apparently happy family with six children. The father, Philipp, was a highly respected man who worked as a bailiff and enjoyed the privileges of a great lord, while the mother, Dorothea, who grew up in a highly respected family in Hanau, lived together with her six children in a house surrounded by trees. , flowers and nature. The heat of the fire, the walks in the countryside, the fountain in the square were the places that the children kept in their memories as they grew up. In spring they gathered branches from the blossoming almond and apple trees, although Jacob, the eldest brother, used to accompany his father to work and learn from him. But one day her father died of pneumonia and her mother, incapacitated for the simple fact of being a woman, fell into misery with her six children.
“It was a sad story that they lived here, but for them this city represents their childhood and they never forgot it. I can imagine how bad their mother must have felt, and they,” says the guide of the small museum of the Brothers Grimm, located at the entrance to the small German town.
“As soon as he arrived here, his father became an important sheriff between 1791 and 1796. Afterwards, his mother and her six children had to go to a shelter for the miserable. The fact of being a woman at that time incapacitated her. For example, she could not make arrangements or handle money. The woman at that time was treated like a child and legally she could not do almost anything,” explains the guide in simple but easy to understand Spanish. “My father was an architect and he fixed up this house that is also part of me. “I feel very close to the story of his mother,” adds the woman in the kitchen reconstructed to reproduce the customs of the time in which the brothers lived. There is a large fireplace, copper pots, ceramic dishes, stone floor. Upstairs are the rooms in which his stories are reproduced, rooms in which to read. “Snippets of their lives and words,” the woman adds as a reminder when we reach the door of the house.
Already on the street there is a corral, a fountain, straw that transports you to another time. There is also the Steinau Museum opposite, where you can see the work of the Brothers Grimm's father, who was vital in his education in communion with nature.
Two years after their father died, their aunt Juliane Charlotte took care of them.
The spring route through the Hesse region continues to the city of Kassel, home of the Documenta festival every five years. It is dominated by the large hill with the Wilhelmshöhe park, Unesco world heritage since 2013, whose flowering explodes in spring. An immense waterfall descends from the top. When you sit next to her you see Bellevue Palacefrom the 18th century, with a museum dedicated to the Grimms and their great legacy, including the first German dictionary.
When someone visits Kassel in spring they tend to think that there must be a type of magic for those who dedicate themselves to life as the Brothers Grimm did. After all, Jacob and Wilhem collected humble stories, myths, legends or different versions of well-known tales. His stories enchanted the lives of all those who were once children.
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