The Fairy-Tale Road Places

Hannoversch-Münden

This delightful town, seemingly untouched by the modern age, shouldn't be missed. You'll have to travel a long way through Germany to find a grouping of half-timber houses (700 of them) as harmonious as these. The town is surrounded by forests and the Fulda and Werra rivers, which join here and flow northward as the Weser River.

Much is made of the fact that the quack doctor to end all quacks died here. Dr. Johann Andreas Eisenbart (1663-1727) would be forgotten today if a ribald 19th-century drinking song ("Ich bin der Doktor Eisenbart, widda, widda, wit, boom! boom!") hadn't had him shooting out aching teeth with a pistol, anesthetizing with a sledgehammer, and removing boulders from the kidneys. He was, as the song has it, a man who could make "the blind walk and the lame see." This is terribly exaggerated, of course, but the town takes advantage of it.