Marburg: In the Footsteps of the Brothers Grimm

Today's place to daydream about is Marburg, Germany, a place that remains wonderful because nothing dramatic or violent has ever happened there.

Marburg is a medieval town, first mentioned in 822. It sits on a hill overlooking the ford where two ancient trade routes shared a crossing of the Lahn River. 

Its first famous resident was St. Elizabeth, who was born a princess of Hungary. As a girl Elizabeth was captivated by stories of St. Francis and wanted to become his follower, but her family wasn't about to discard the valuable diplomatic card of her marriage and wed her to the Landgrave of Thuringia, a top German noble. Who died after only eight years, leaving Elizabeth a young widow. After a legal struggle Elizabeth got her dowry back from her late husband's family and used it to set up a hospital in Marburg where she cared for the poor and sick, taking particular delight in bathing lepers. Miracles were attributed to her in her lifetime, and after her death in 1231 stories flooded into the Vatican, which canonized her in very short order.

The two images above show St. Elizabeth's Church in Marburg, which was built by the Teutonic Knights starting immediately after her canonization in 1235. It was consecrated in 1283 and essentially complete by 1340. Pilgrimage to this church helped the town to grow and prosper.

In 1264, St Elizabeth's daughter Sophie of Brabant, who inherited her mother's legal skill but not her piety, somehow wrangled the Landgraviate (=Duchy, more or less) of Hesse for her son Henry. Marburg became the capital of the new state, a status it held off and on until 1605. The famous castle that looms over the town was built by the landgraves over a fortress of the early 1200s.

Closer view of the castle.

View of the town in 1572.

Despite the importance of St. Elizabeth's shrine, Marburg was an early convert to Protestantism. Its new leaders decided that Germany needed a new, entirely Protestant university, so they founded one in 1527. Marburg has been a university town ever since.

During the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) this region was fought over bitterly and changed hands several times. Marburg was never sacked but the economy was so depressed by war and the decline of trade that it lost two-thirds of its inhabitants.

But it came back, and then it had a sort of blossoming in the Romantic period of the late 1700s. Gloomy poets loved the gothic atmosphere, narrow streets, etc., and quite a few of them flocked to the university. Including two famous brothers and heroes of mine, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Not only did the Grimms hang around the university from 1802-1806, they did their first folklore collecting in nearby villages. The Grimms came from a genteel family that had fallen into poverty and they had to keep taking jobs as research assistants and the like, so they never finished their degrees and were not able to work full time on their own researchers until decades later.

But now they are so famous in this part of Germany you can take a guided tour of "Enchanting Marburg", walking the "Grimm path", which the same ad from the state tourism authority also calls "on the tracks of the Brothers Grimm," which sounds like something I would get a big kick out of. I promise I wouldn't correct the guides when they got stuff wrong.

Marburg was also home to Otto Ubbelohde, who did the illustrations for a famous edition of the Fairy Tales.

In 1866, Marburg became part of Prussia, which made it an administrative center and enlarged the university, and the town prospered. Among the landmarks of this period is the Kaiser Wilhelm tower, which you can climb to get a good view of the old town.

During World War II the Nazis made Marburg into a hospital town, with beds for 20,000 patients. Not having any industry to speak of, the town escaped allied bombing and emerged from the war unscathed. Physically, anyway.

Now it looks like a delightful place to explore, poking into shops and alleys and imaging the Grimm brothers and other doom-besotted poetic souls spending their student days in its cafes.