Imagine Alan Montanaro or Edward Merceica being made to dance to their deaths on stage. Or being put in a nail-studded barrel and rolled down the street.
The town of Ziegenhaln near Kassel claims to be Red Riding Hood land because the local girls still wear caps with red topknots
Imagine making a former kids TV presenter or an ex-soap actor wear red hot iron shoes for the curtain call.
Imagine another panto favourite having his eyes plucked out.
So everyone can live happily ever after.
It won’t happen. But that’s what really should happen in pantomimes. Traditional pantos should be X-rated. Or carry PG recommendations. If they were true to their gruesome roots and Grimm sources.
Following in the footsteps of Brothers Grimm along the Fairy Tale Road (Marchen Strasse) is an eye-opener. Germany is the original Panto-land. It is where all that booing and hissing rather sadistically began.
Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Kinder und Hausmarchen) was published in 1812. It is still the most successful book of all time. It has been published more times than the Bible and Harry Potter.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scholars and originally collected their Children’s and Household Tales to preserve and define German cultural identity at a time when their country was under the suppression of Napoleon.
The Brothers Grimm collected over 200 stories. Only 40 are well-known.
Originally, they were for adults. They were violent and contained sex scenes. Rapunzel had it off with the prince. Snow White (Schneewitchen) was stripped naked by the dwarves and given a bath after she had bitten the poisoned apple.
Her stepmother had her feet set on fire and the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella had their eyes gouged out. The Frog in the Frog Prince was repeatedly thrown up against a wall.
When the stories were sanitised for children as ‘a manual for good manners’ they emphasised the virtues of thrift, loyalty and rustic simplicity. But even the toned-down versions were banned after World War II as Nazi propaganda. Through revision and translation, the story-lines have been dumbed down and made more age-appropriate and politically correct.
In the original story, Gretel is the only one who gets tired walking through the woods. There are still more evil female villains than men.
Such things and more you learn if you follow the Fairy Tale Road, which connects 70 villages over 400 miles through the Hessen region.
“The books have appeared in over 120 languages,” said Herr Kling, the curator of the Bruder Grimm Haus in Steinau, an hour north of Frankfurt.
Jacob (born in 1785) and Wilhelm (1786) moved there after their father, the son of a clergyman, became a local magistrate.
Their birthplace in Hanau was destroyed in World War II. On its site there is a statue of the two brothers looking very scholarly, or just bored from having to look so serious and so very scholarly for so long.
Serious academics, they wrote 40 books between them, including a German dictionary and the seminal book on German grammar. They were the founders of German linguistics.
“The book on grammar is the greatest book in our language,” said Herr Kling, his laugh echoing around the stone walls of the half-timbered Fachwerkhaeuser burgher-house where the Grimms lived from 1871 to1876. It is the only Grimm home still standing. The brothers went to school in Kassel. They are buried in the Alter St-Matthaus-Kirchof cemetery in Berlin.
“Come upstairs,” said Herr Kling, leading me up a dark spiral stone staircase in the Grimm family home. “I want to show you my etchings.”
In the shadows he looked like the huntsman in Snow White.
The etchings he wanted to show me were by younger brother, Ludwig Emil Grimm (born 1790), who illustrated his sliblings’ books. “Most of our ideas of fairy tales come from the early printers and illustrators,” he said, showing me early dust-jackets and front-pieces as well as several foreign collections of the fairy tales.
“The Grimms blended oral with literary traditions. They read the classics and listened to locals.
“Local washerwomen and spinners chatting away in the Spinnstrube were great sources for their stories. One of their biggest inspirations was publican daughter Dorothea Viehmann who was the source of Aschenputtel or Cinderella. Marie Hassenpfug, a friend of their sister Caroline, was another source of plots.
“A lot of the stories like Sleeping Beauty were French. The Grimms lived in a French land. They once swapped some trousers for a scary story!”
The famous fairy tales did not become popular until the first English translation (German Popular Stories) appeared in 1823. The Disney cartoon of Snow White was released in 1937.
Cinderella was first performed as a pantomime at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in 1905.
Kassel on the Fulda river was the site of the country’s first observatory, now a National History Museum. Its Wilhelmshohe Palace has Germany’s second-largest collection of Rembrandts.
The city also has a Grimm museum, full of Grimm things like the brothers’ original hand-written annotated first edition, which is worth millions.
The route passes Gothic castles like Trendelburg and a lot of dark forests
“The stories are not localised. They are largely placeless and timeless,” said museum director, Dr Bernhard Lauer. “Rapunzel may have let her hair down in Steinau Castle. Hansel and Gretel may have walked in the Psessart woods. The Travelling Musicians may have left from Pyrmont.”
The town of Ziegenhaln near Kassel claims to be Red Riding Hood land because the local girls still wear caps with red topknots. But there are no concrete connections. In the original English version, Little Red Riding Hood was called Biddie. Although the places and landscape must have had a big influence on the brothers Grimm, the Fairy Tale Road is make-believe, apart from Baunatal and Niedenstein, the birthplace and home of Frau Viehmann.
Opened in 1973, Germany’s Fairy Tale Road, less well-known and therefore less commercial than the Romantic Road, from Wurtberg to Schwangen, winds through the Fulda Valley, Gottingen, where the brothers taught, and Marburg, where they studied law.
It passes Gothic castles like Trendelburg and a lot of dark forests. The only elves to be seen are in Lauterbach, which is the centre of the German gnome manufacturing industry.
“We do have hungry wolves,” said Gunther Kopeck, whose family owns the world’s only official Sleeping Beauty castle.
The Dornroschenschloss in Sababurg, 32km northeast of Kassel, has been associated with the Sleeping Beauty story since the early illustrations of the 1850s. Walt Disney’s castle was based on the one in Neuschwanstein in Bavaria.
“Sleeping Beauty may have been based on a true story; of a noble girl with an evil step-mother who was befriended by a group of iron ore miners,” my host told me with a straight face. Her father was a mirror manufacturer. The original talking mirror is on display in Lohr am Main.
He led me up another spooky staircase into another spooky turret to my room.
“But we are not make-believe! We have briar roses and a thorn hedge. And woodcutters working in the Wald!”
He smiled as we looked out over the countryside.
The hotel is open from February to December and boasts the oldest animal park in the world, going back to 1571.
On the way down the winding staircase I spotted a spinning wheel standing by a large locked door.
A voice inside my head said, “Oh, no you don’t!”
“Please don’t touch it,” said: Herr Kopek. As if no one in 100 years would ever want to kiss me awake.