Hanau

Hanau gave Germany its storytellers and one of its great composers — a double birthright for a modest Main-side city. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born here in 1785 and 1786, sons of a town clerk, and Hanau opens the German Fairy Tale Route in their honour: the national Grimm monument on the market square shows the brothers over their books, and the Brothers Grimm Festival stages their tales each summer in the moated Philippsruhe palace's park — Cinderella and Snow White returning annually to the founders' address.

A century later, in 1895, Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau: the century's great musical craftsman, violist, theorist and composer, whose objective modernism made him — after exile and return — one of Germany's defining twentieth-century voices; the city honours him with a prize and keeps his cradle-place in its musical memory.

Hanau's own craft was precious metal: Huguenot and Walloon refugees, welcomed in 1597 into their own "new town", built a goldsmithing tradition that still defines the city — the German Goldsmiths' House in the timbered old chancellery exhibits the jewellers' art, and Hanau remains a European centre of precious-metal industry. Rebuilt after near-total wartime destruction, the city bears its scars and its resilience openly — a place that knows, like the Grimms' tales themselves, that darkness and treasure share the same forest.