Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Hello, Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Mallory's Weird World Adventures, the podcast. I'm your host, Mallory, and I'm here to show you just how weird this world of ours really is. For those of us joining us for the first time, Weird World Adventures is a brand with a focus on travel. Overall, though, our specialty lies in featuring the strangest and most unusual places around the world. We highlight myths, legends, belief systems, and weird people living weird lives in a very celebratory way. As a proud weirdo myself, I'm happy to see the brand come to life. Watch Weird World Adventures on Amazon prime, our TV show, or visit mallorysadventures.com for more. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. On Instagram, we're alloriesadventures. On Facebook, we're eirdworld adventures. And on TikTok, we're @ Mallory's Adventures as your guide and host. I'm a board member in the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Explorers Club. I am a journalist with a specialty in mythology, folklore, and the occult. And I'm on a road trip filming Weird World Adventures Season 2. So for this episode, we're going to continue our coverage of the fairy tale route in Germany. The fairy tale route is celebrating its 50 years, so we're here filming Weird World to celebrate it. You might remember in the first episode of us covering the fairy tale route in Germany, we went to Hanau, which is where the Brothers Grimm were born, and then to Steinau, which is where they grew up as children.
[00:01:40] Then we moved through to Ausfeld, which is a nice little stop on the way that has a fairy tale house and very, very beautiful, beautiful architecture. And then we continued more into Marburg, which is where they lived as adults, and they spend a lot of time there at university.
[00:01:59] Now we're going to continue on to Kessel. Now, Kessel is where they spend a lot of their adult lives as well. This is where they moved once they were grown adults and they worked in the library in Kessel. So the Brothers Grimm lived there again for a long time at many different apartments. They kept moving around, and they liked to be in places where they were up high and they got to look down on the water and peaceful parks. So there was this beautiful structure that was like a road with all these apartments that kind of overlooked this gorgeous park and water, and that's where they lived through a lot of their time in Kessel. So we got to go and see that firsthand. There's also a wonderful museum there dedicated to the Brothers Grimm. And I got to stay day in an old monastery turned into a hotel, which was really cool.
[00:02:50] But first I'm going to tell you a little bit more about my experiences on the autobahn. Ooh, I got to ride the autobahn or drive on it, I guess. And it's funny because it wasn't quite what I expected. You know, it's just the highway system there and in Germany. And if you go on it, there's not always no speed limit. There's just parts of it that don't have a speed limit. So you have to. You still have to kind of pay attention to what's going on because you will all of a sudden get these notifications like, hey, there's a speed limit now, slow down. And sometimes it's a pretty drastic slowdown. So it's not just a full no rules, no speed limit situation there. There are parts that don't have a speed limit and parts that do. I tried to get as close to 200km an hour as I could. Just once, just once, because I don't know, you have to do it for the experience, right? But I could only do it once because I was in an electric car. And we're going to talk about that another time. But that was a.
[00:03:54] It was an experience that electric cars are not made for road trips. But we'll talk more about that later.
[00:04:01] So this beautiful structure that I stayed in looked like an old church. And part of it was the old church, and then part of it was like the building kind of built off from it from the old monastery that has now been turned into a gorgeous hotel. And funny thing, my first stop upon meeting my guide was to meet at the tourist registration office.
[00:04:24] And I get there and there's just all of these raccoon stuffed animals everywhere. I'm like, raccoons? That's interesting. I wonder why the mascot of Kessel is a raccoon.
[00:04:37] And come to find out, during the Nazi regime, the Nazi party decided that raccoons were very cute and they might be a benefit to have them out in the area. They wanted to integrate them into the German countryside there, which the they were not native to. So they brought a bunch of raccoons over and now they effectively have a raccoon infestation. There's just many, many, many raccoons everywhere.
[00:05:08] So, yeah, so raccoons, you can see lots of raccoons in castle. And that is why their animal is a raccoon. So you can buy cute little animal statues. And then we started on our journey to see Just, you know, the traditional market hall of the area and. And also the apartment where the Brothers Grimm lived for a while. Now, none of the structures in Kessel are original dwellings in which they lived in, like, the spot is there, but they had been, you know, destroyed and were rebuilt. So there are multiple places you can go and go, ooh, the Brothers Grimm lived right here in this spot. Oh, but, you know, the building that's there is not the authentic building. It's just the spot in which, you know, the building was. And like I said, it's on a beautiful water system. So there's this, you know, really nice, serene waterway that goes through Kessel. And the Brothers Grimm, again, used to have an apartment on that side overlooking the water, because they really liked that. I mean, who doesn't?
[00:06:06] And it was. It was interesting to see the library where they worked. And so, I guess back in the early times of university, I guess early, really subjectively, but in that, in the Brothers Grimm time of university, you could only study medicine, theology, law and philosophy. Those were the things you could go in that region to school for. And that was it.
[00:06:38] And so, you know, they were very focused on language, and they actually went into school for law for a while and just hated it.
[00:06:47] Dropped out and did not continue. And they began working at this books, at this library, submerging themselves in the books and organizing the books, and really kind of found themselves just in that world. And something that's interesting is they were commissioned to write a German dictionary early on, and something they signed up for, and it just consumed a lot of their lives and apparently was not a great experience to have to go through that tedious, tedious work of writing the dictionary, because back then, you know, you did it by hand, and it was very. It had to be perfectly thought out, so you don't, you know, miss a word. And apparently, it was just a very hard thing that they wound up doing and working on. And I think we had mentioned last time that many of the fairy tales are not actually their stories that they wrote, but they are instead a collection of stories from. They loved hearing people's stories and hearing the myths and legends of different places. So they collected these stories to tell in a collection, and they perfected the words and the verbiage in German language. So they really became these just wordsmiths of the German language.
[00:08:05] And that was what they're really famous for. And, hey, writing a dictionary for falls right in there, even though it was not a happy time in their lives. And there's this beautiful, beautiful like, palatial just park that has these gorgeous, ornate yellow buildings and the sprawling field, and it has the sun painted on it. And it was right outside of where they used to live, kind of down where they could oversee it and go look at it. And it's just a beautiful park. So we took a stroll through that park and you know, the architecture of it, and then got to go to the Brothers Grimm Museum.
[00:08:44] It's called the Grimmwelt. And it's a really interesting, fantastical, immersive experience. From what I understand, it's won a lot of awards because it's not your typical museum about the Brothers Grimm. You go in, in the top part, and it has a letter of the Alphabet, and each letter of the Alphabet has some fact or cool art display or interesting thing about the Brothers Grimm. And so, you know, it just. And it goes in this line, and it's not even exactly in the. In like alphabetical order. So it's very interesting, very subjective. They have this wall of letters that they wrote to people, so you can kind of see, you know, who they wrote to and what they wrote over the years, and just the mass amount of writing that they did just personally for personal stuff. And then there is a. Like a chart that you can play with and set on the. On that's like digital on this pad, where then you can start to see where the letters were sent to and who they communicated with around the world. And, you know, the footprint they had just in their personal life and how far that reached.
[00:09:56] And then there's a photo wall of all the people that they had written to.
[00:10:00] And then it goes to. Yes. So demon. The demon for D. The Grimm's Dictionary project, originally expected to take seven to 10 years, is still unfinished today.
[00:10:15] Fruitful was the last entry Jacob Grimm completed before his death in 1863. Willem had been working on words that started with the letter D when he died four years earlier. Not until 1971, over a hundred years later, did the published dictionary include words from A to Z and the list of sources cited. But by then, the Grimm's entries and others by later contributors were outdated, and the editors began working on a revised edition.
[00:10:46] Yeah, so Froatful recounts the history of the Grimm's German dictionary in 14 scenes. So there's this beautiful, interesting shadow box kind of art display there under the word demon for D in the exhibit that shows just the absolute distress that they were caused by this dictionary, which, as we can see now, from what I just read, they didn't even finish. And it just consumed their lives and was not a happy part of what they did. It was too technical. There's too.
[00:11:22] I don't think they really thought about the work that it would entail when they signed up for it.
[00:11:27] And then it. So there's these beautiful shadow box images, like I said. And then the museum also, of course, has just the crown jewel, where it just has original collections of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales from over the years. There's many different versions, very, very old, which of course excited me because I just love old books. And then, you know, after you go through the exhibit from, you know, A to Z, not in that order, you can go down and there's like this immersive, childlike area. And as you go down the stairs, it even has, like, trap, a trap, a trip trap, a trip trap, a trap written on the stairs, like your footprints. So it's a very interesting thing. And then you just. You go down into this room and there's this strange sculpture garden of all this weird subjective stuff that was inspired. Bry, the Brothers Grimm. And then they have these immersive experiences. So you can go in and one of them and look in the mirror from Snow White, the mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? And they see you in the mirror and, oh, this person's the fairest. Like, it's very visually interactive. And then you can go into Little Red Riding Hood's hut, the grandmother's house, and the wolf will talk to you and then eat you. Like, it's like a. Like a hologram y kind of projection. And then there's one you can sit at a table and it videos you and it projects it onto a screen that you're looking at of you eating with the seven dwarves. So it's. It's very fun. It's a great place for kids. You can skip through the. One of the forests, like the Black Forest. And it's fun. I mean, it's. It's artsy and it's interesting and it's something that adults could admire and have fun at. I had fun at it. But then it's also so interactive for kids, too. So it was a really interesting thing. And then there's this vacation roll. I have to tell you my story about the vacation role, because it's funny. Maybe it's not, but it was. It was a highlight of my trip that kept reoccurring. So when we were in Steinau, we toured the museum where the Brothers Grimm, you know, grew up. It was their old Childhood home. And the caretaker there was so lovely. She was very, very wonderful. And they had this scroll that you could scroll through of their other brother, who was an artist. So he did a lot of the drawings for some of their later editions of their fairy tales. And the brother had drew this vacation roll of the family vacation, you know, just all the way through on this long scroll of paper. It's like a long, thin. Almost like what you would expect a roll of toilet paper to be rolled up, except it's like drawing paper. And so he drew, you know, like a panel by panel situation of this vacation. And they had a digital version of it. You could scroll through digitally at that house. And then she goes, oh, I have a copy of it, but it's not the actual vacation roll. It's just a copy of the vacation roll. So someone had copied it in this long, drawn out, you know, piece. And you're like, well, that's interesting. So she, you know, she's like, well, this is really cool. And she's showing us, and they're treating it like it's an authentic original, but it's actually a copy. And then they start. Her and my guide start having a conversation of, well, where's the original? I don't know where the original is. So it kind of became a question. Well, I don't. Where's the original? Then if this is just a copy? And it was a conversation that lasted for a while, so it stuck with me. And then when I was in Kessel, in this Grimwelt, the museum, the original was there, and I saw it, and I'm with a different guide, and I'm like, oh, my gosh, it's the vacation roll. And she's like, what? Why do you care so much about this vacation roll? You know, like, she just. Just no context. Like, so I got to see the authentic vacation roll that was drawn by the Brothers Grimm's brother when I was in Kessel at the Grimwelt. It was pretty cool. They have it completely unrolled for you to kind of, like, follow and see. And then when you're all done in the museum, you go through all the exhibits and you get up on top of the museum. There's just this breathtaking view on the roof of Kessel. And it's funny, too, because I. I was curious. They have a statue, unfortunately, I didn't get to see because it was just so far away. But on the other side of the city from where I was staying and where all the Brothers Grimm stuff is, there was a giant Statue of Hercules on this, like, waterworky part. It's like, it's the park with like this whole water system and all this cool stuff and a giant statue of Hercules. And I even asked, why Hercules here? Is there a significance? And I think it was just, well, the person that designed the park went to Greece and saw Hercules and wanted to bring Hercules here. So it's. But it's interesting. So there's this giant Hercules of Kessel.
[00:16:21] And then I got to stay the night in my little monastery room, which was cool. The.
[00:16:29] This hotel, it was quite. It's called Renhof. It was. It was quite beautiful. The downstairs, it's just this gorgeous, like, stone structure for the monastery that you can sit in this old beautiful room and just, you know, hang out with this hanging chandelier and just this nice ambiance. And there's a bar there and then a restaurant. And it was really just peaceful place to sit. And I liked it a lot. My room was a little small because they did have, like, single rooms and there were birds all over the wall. I need to research this because I need to know why there were birds everywhere, but there just were birds all over my wallpaper. So that was fun. Like wallpaper covered in birds.
[00:17:18] And.
[00:17:20] Yeah, from there I kind of got to record some podcast, catch up. My last ones came from there in Kessel, and then I was on the road again the next day to Trendelberg Castle, which is by far one of the greatest experiences of my life I've ever had. But we're not going to talk about that right now. We're going to talk about Trendelberg in the next podcast because it warrants its own podcast instead. I'm going to fast forward to Gottingen. I really hope I'm saying that right. I know I wasn't great at saying Gottingen, but Gottingen was another part of the Brothers Grimm journey. It's part of the fairy tale route and it's where they taught at university later in their life. So something else that was very interesting and exciting. As I had mentioned, you could only study law, medicine, theology, philosophy. And the Brothers Grimm actually broke that system and for the first time taught something else. And they actually taught language and links to the German language, linguistics at the university in Gottingen.
[00:18:32] And they had a little plaque on the house that used to be their house. Again, it was something that had been demolished, but it was the space where they had lived. It's known exactly where they live, but it's not the same structure because the structure was destroyed.
[00:18:48] And yeah, there's some interesting displays in Gottingen because, you know, again, it's a university city. So there was. There's a fun block that's like a. It's like a slab. That's a statue that has in. In every. Not every language, in a lot of languages. Why don't you call home right away, tell them that you are exactly in the right place in Gottingen, where the first electromagnetic telegram communication took place in 1833, and that you may have just tried it out yourself and experienced how difficult it was in those days. So this is that. This is, you know, the little statue commemorating that. And then that single phrase is written in many, many, many, many, many, many languages.
[00:19:39] And it's funny because it goes through a bunch of actual languages. And then one side it has Vulcan. It literally has it in Vulcan.
[00:19:50] Yeah. So Star Trek fans, you can experience that for yourself if you can read Vulcan.
[00:19:56] And, you know, it's another very pretty city that, you know, it was restored. So a lot of it is. Was destroyed during the war. And I did get to see this was fascinating too.
[00:20:10] Firewalls. A lot of the old cities in Germany have these stone walls built in between every four or five houses. And so Gottingen had that so that if there was a fire, because back when people use candles, there was always a huge risk of fire. It would only go through so many houses before it would stop. So they actually had. It was like a precaution to keep the whole city from burning down, was to a big stone firewall in between, you know, X number of houses. And so you can still see some of them. You know, a lot of them are hidden, but they have a few where you can actually see them, which is pretty cool. And there is this huge tower in one of the churches there. And all the way up at the top, it used to be where the person who would watch for the fires lived. So they'd have someone, you know, live up in the top of the tower with his family to watch for the fire. And their whole job is to, you know, alert the town if there happens to be a fire.
[00:21:09] And of course, that kind of, you know, became an irrelevant job in modern times.
[00:21:14] So instead they rented it out for students to live in for a while. And I'm like, man, that would be amazing. Except there are, you know, you have to go all the way up those stairs, you know, with your stuff to move in. And it's. I mean, it's the very top of a church tower. And then you, you know, have to go up and down every day. And there's no bathroom up there, so also have to come up and down every time you need to use the bathroom. So maybe it doesn't sound so great anymore. Now they just do tours there. But they had university students staying there for a while, which is crazy. There's a lot of famous people, too. They had a lot of Nobel Prize winners that went to Gottingen University. It was actually very, very big in the realm of Nobel Prize winners who knew George Christoph Lichtenberg was one of them.
[00:22:04] And then the count, the actual count. So 47 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with Gottingen University, 14 of them having been awarded the prize for research conducted during their time at Gottingen. So they very much are proud of that. And that's something that you'll hear a lot about in Gottingen. And they have little plaques for all the important people that got to stay there and won Nobel Prizes. And then, of course, you know, I love my myths and legends. And so one of my favorite things that I got to see in Gottingen, there's a fountain of a goose girl. It's this cute little girl, and she's holding geese. And she.
[00:22:49] First, she has a. This, like, dome of flowers kind of over her, all in this metal stone structure. And it's a fountain. It's very pretty. And then you'll notice that she's draped in all of these real flowers. So she's been draped by all these flowers. And it's because university students, when they want good luck to pass their exams, will come over and give her flowers and give her a kiss. And that's supposedly good luck when you kiss the goose girl, local legend, which is really exciting. Then you'll pass your exams.
[00:23:25] And she's very pretty. A lot of people go there to photograph her specifically. And then we saw the new hall of the university, this beautiful new hall that was built by one of the town officials and donated in a kind gesture to the university, to the city. And he's like, we're gonna go look inside a little bit, and there's this beautiful banquet hall, but we can't see the banquet hall. I just want to show you a few other rooms. And I'm like, okay, sure. Why not?
[00:23:53] Well, come to find out, he showed me the student prison. Now, I'm sure I talked a very long time ago about the student prison in Heidelberg, because student prison is one of my favorite places of all time. But if I didn't, or if you didn't hear it, I'm going to right now read to you a little bit about student prisons, because you Definitely need to hear this amazing piece of anthropological history.
[00:24:22] So we're calling them, it's a student prison. We're going to call it a karzer. A karzer was a designated lockup or detention room to incarcerate students as a punishment within the jurisdiction of some institutions of learning in Germany. And the American writer Mark Twain actually wrote about this in the Heidelberg one, specifically in A Tramp Abroad. Now I've been to the Heidelberg study student prison. It is absolutely amazing. I'm sure I've mentioned it to you before, but we're gonna explain. So apparently there, this was like a tradition in German university. There are still roughly 10 that remain that people can visit today that still are kind of were kept alive for people to come see because they're just too wonderful to get rid of. And I have now kind of personally made it a mission to see all 10 of them because I've seen two. So I'm like, all right, well there's 10, I've seen two. I go back to Germany enough, I'll just make sure every time I go to Germany I stop in a new student prison gonna check them off the list.
[00:25:24] So karzers existed at both universities and at gymnasiums which were similar to grammar school in Germany the beginning of the 20th century.
[00:25:34] Marburg's last Karzer inmate, for example, was registered as late as 1931. Responsible for the administration of the karser was the so called pedal or during later times, carcerwarter warden. While a carcer arrest was originally a severe punishment for students, the respect for this punishment diminished over time, particularly in the 19th century as it paradoxically became a badge of honor of sorts to have been incarcerated at least once during one's time at university.
[00:26:07] At the end of the 19th century, the students in the cells became responsible for their own food and drinks and the receiving of visitors became permitted. So the punishment would also into a social occasion with the excessive consumption of alcohol. So I'm going to explain a little bit about what I learned when I was in the student prison in Heidelberg. So these go back as early as the late 1700s through the 1800s, into the early 1900s. And they're especially in the earlier days of the student prison there were still societal hierarchies and laws and class systems.
[00:26:44] So the kids at university are rich and spoiled and the people a lot of times that would have to come and arrest them were of a lower station than them. So they didn't really have to follow those orders. So you know, oh, I Don't want to do that today. Maybe not. No. I'm going to. You can come arrest me tomorrow. It was a very loose structure. And it did supposedly start out like a punishment. And it's a detention house where they would be taken and they would be locked up in this little house in whatever room, like usually in the cell in a room for X amount of time overnight, whatever, you know, to pay for whatever crime they have committed.
[00:27:25] And it was things like unleashing pigs around the, the university and, you know, stealing like traffic signs or official signs.
[00:27:37] I don't know if they would be considered traffic signs back then, but signs, things of that nature.
[00:27:45] It became a rite of passage where everybody wanted to be locked up at least once so they could get an official slip that said they were in student prison. And then it also became more of a game between fraternities. So they would compete to see who could have the worst crime, who would be arrested for the longest time. And they would, they would try to one up each other on, well, I did this. Well, I did this. And it became a very big badge of honor. Then they started letting visitors and ladies into the student prison with them and they started having alcohol and then they started graffiti ing. Writing and graffiti on the walls, their fraternity colors, ridiculous sayings. I think my favorite one at the Heidelberg prison was, was a bunch of cats. Like, we're all beasts here.
[00:28:36] Yeah. And I think it started out with them actually taking candles and burning with ash the ceiling into graffiti. And then they, you know, when the rules got more lax, they started bringing in these different, like outside paints and things. So they. So it's authentic Victorian time graffiti. Graffiti that's been preserved to today all over the walls, from ceiling to floor on the ceiling. Everything is covered in this crazy graffiti. And it's authentic Victorian graffiti. It's so wild. And it's just a very cool experience to see. And the Karzers, as I said, have been preserved at the universities of Heidelberg, which I went to, Jenna Bonnie Marburg, Fribourg, Thunberg, Fribourg Greifwald, Gottingen, which is the other one. I went to Friedrich Alex University in Erlangen and Tartu, Estonia. The Karzer and Gottingen was known after the Petal Bruckenbach as the hotel of Bruckenbach. It was moved in the 19th century because of the extension to the university library. So a cell door was preserved from the old carser and is on display now that shows graffiti by Otto von Bismarck bearing witness to how students spent the time in the Cell and the many memorable accounts they have on the wall, the tables and doors, graffiti by students in the cells. And today it's a tourist attraction and it is wonderful to see. And I mean, it's. They, you know, they'll say what they did to get incarcerated and it's there, there's pictures. Go to MallorySadventures.com and search for student prison and pictures will come up. One of, one of them is an artist. I mean, one of them at the Gottingen one painted this, like, sexy photo of a lady on the wall. I mean, it's just, it's a really cool experience to get to see. And I want to see all of them now because it's really just exceptionally bizarre. And so the fact that I got to see that was really exciting because I had heard that there was one you could visit in Gottingen and I was gonna ask my guide about it and I kind of spaced and he just surprised me and we went there. So I'm like, yes, perfect. And with that, it finished my Brothers Grimm fairy tale route trail. Now, I still owe you a podcast on Trendelberg Castle, which I will give you because it's too unbelievably wonderful not to tell you about it. It's an incredible experience. But first I wanted to take the time to tell you about the fairy tale route and kind of give you that footprint. Now it goes all the way up to Bremen. And I was in Bremen a few years ago. That's where they had the Bremen town musicians, one of the Brothers Grimm tales.
[00:31:27] But this time again, Hanau, which is where they were born. Steinau, which was incredible, which is where they grew up. And then over to Ausfeld, which is just beautiful fairy tale like village. Then continuing on to Marburg, which is where they went to university. And then to Kessel, which is where they spent most of their adult life and where they worked in the library. Then over to Gottingen, which is where they taught at university. So it was kind of following in their actual footprint through Germany. It was a wonderful experience. I can't recommend it enough. It turns 50 this year. So make sure you check out the fairy tale route in Germany, starting around the Frankfurt area and go going all the way up north to the water at the top of Germany.
[00:32:16] Anyway, that's all for this week.
[00:32:20] Next week we will continue talking about Germany and gtm, because I had an incredible experience on gtm. Then I'm going to get Michael back in here and we're going to talk about Trendelberg Castle.
[00:32:32] Alrighty. Until next time. Everybody. Make sure you check out Weird World Adventures Season 1 on Amazon Prime now and tune in for Season 2 this fall.
[00:32:43] Head to MallorySadventures.com for any additional updates. And again, until next time, stay weird.
