Snow White Town?

Lohr am Main, Snow White Town? 

Once upon a time  there were three men sitting in a wine bar in Lohr am Main (drinking and good ideas seldom go hand in hand) one of them Dr Karl Heinz Bartels, a local historian and chemist, decided after a couple of glasses of plonk to prove that a girl from Lohr was in fact Snow White and wrote a historical treatise to prove it, the result was to change Lohr am Main forever, it became Lohr, Snow White town. Looking at it cynically, it was a great move to promote tourism but I digress. 

The idea isn’t as bonkers as it sounds, the story of Snow White in a written version is accredited to the Brothers Grimm who lived only 35km from Lohr in Hanau, their written version has their Snow White running away through a forest, the Spessart forest surrounding Lohr is one of the largest in Germany not only that but it also has the seven mountains that Snow White crosses before she meets the Dwarves.

Now according to Dr Bartels, our Snow White was Maria Sophia Katharina Margarethe von Erthal, born in the Lohrer palace (in my sketch) in 1725, Maria's mother died and her father remarried, and presented his new wife with a beautiful mirror! Lohr was famous for manufacturing top quality mirrors and glass, the mirrors''speak'' too, there are mottos written into the glass surroundings of the mirrors, like ''true love''or '' as beautiful as light itself''.

In my mind Snow White looks like the Disney version (that wee Snow White on the right is my daughter in her home made Snow White costume) but the real Snow White can be seen in this tiny miniature with the ''pouf'' hairdo. Maria was treated badly by her stepmother and fled into the forests, Dr Bartels suggests she fled to the area around Bieber and would have passed orchards, glass manufacturing (think of the glass coffin), and mines, ore has been mined here for centuries. As the mine shafts were narrow children and men of small stature were necessary to labour in them, or perhaps growth was stunted due to poor nutrition and hard physical labour and so the legend of the Seven Dwarves is born, the metal statue in my sketch is outside the Lohr palace. 

Dr Bartels treatise was very tongue in cheek and Maria von Erthal didn’t end up as a princess, theoretically she remained  single and died in Bamberg, with male siblings who became bishops. 

Who knows, I'm sure behind every fairytale there is a true story, maybe the origins of Snow White lie in Lohr but one thing  is for certain, you can’t avoid Snow White in Lohr! There are statues, tourist merch, tours, B & B's, talking benches, exhibits in the Lohr palace (which houses the Spessart museum) and hiking trails. Dr Bartels did a lot to put Lohr on the map! 

My daughter’s lasting memories of the Snow White exhibition in Lohr was Snow White's shoe, hmmmm losing shoes is in another fairytale, who knows maybe Cinderella comes from Lohr too!