Goebbels' love nest to be torn down if it cannot be sold
Today, however, it has proven to be a real estate agent's nightmare, standing deserted and weatherworn, with flaking white facades and weeds growing among uneven flagstones.
The steep-gabled 'Waldhof', or forest manor, on the shore of Lake Bogensee outside Berlin boasts floor-to-ceiling terrace windows that could be automatically lowered into the ground. It still has the original wood-panelled walls, marble window sills, brass fittings and fine wrought-iron front door.
'All alone. I'm so happy,' Goebbels wrote in his diary of his time staying at the villa. 'Surrounded by woods, withering leaves, mist and rain. An idyll of solitude.'
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The Sun
a day ago
- The Sun
I visited the European city where ‘fairytales began' with beautiful mountain parks and cheap Ryanair flights
WE all know our Disney fairytales and their happily ever afters, right? Well, the original versions of favourites such as Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood and Rumpelstiltskin were a lot darker, as I found out on my visit to Hanau, Germany, the birthplace of the Brothers Grimm. 5 5 The city marks the start of the German Fairytale Route, stretching 372 miles through the country to the maritime city of Bremen. Along the way you can explore quaint towns, medieval castles and ancient forests — and imagine you, too, are in the middle of a fairytale. The main focus for my adventure was the life of the Grimm Brothers, credited with devising the opening line 'Once upon a time' and the concluding 'lived happily ever after'. In Hanau, I learned that in their early years, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm scoured the surrounding countryside for authentic folk tales that had been handed down over generations. Then, in 1812, they decided to publish a compilation of all they had heard on their travels, including Cinderella and Rapunzel. But the violence in some of the stories meant that the book was not particularly well received, so the brothers had to rely on their creative skills to tone down the explicit elements. And with that, the modern day fairytale was born. But it's not this collection of stories I'm here to uncover on my four-day trip, it's the story behind the Brothers Grimm themselves. Strolling through the main square of Hanau, I could not miss the huge statue of the pair which commemorates the fact they were born here. This city is understandably proud and has erected a trail of artworks depicting various characters from their stories, including King Thrushbeard, Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood. Martin Lewis warns about strict passport rule that could see you board your flight - only to get sent home on arrival About 30 minutes from here by car sits my favourite stop on the trail, Steinau an der Strasse. With higgledy-piggledy houses surrounded by lush trees, I immediately fell in love with the beautiful little village, which is as chocolate box as something from a fairytale. And it turns out the brothers loved it, too. This is the place where they are said to have spent the happiest part of their childhood. And you can get a sense for that in their former home. Now open to the public, the house-turned-museum hosts interesting exhibits about their work, as well as the works of their younger brother, Ludwig Emil, a talented artist who created the illustrations in the brothers' book. Cascading water Their grandfather had been the priest in the local church in the marketplace for 47 years and their father was born here. After a brief stint in Hanau, he returned to the village in the early years of his marriage to become a magistrate. While here, check out Die Holzkoeppe, a theatre that puts on regular puppet shows. And for a flavour of traditional Germany, head to Cafe Restaurant Rosengarten, which serves classic schnitzels in various forms, including a Little Red Riding Hood version that comes topped with tomatoes and mozzarella. The following day, my journey continued a little over an hour north to the hilly and historic market town of Marburg, where the Brothers studied. It is a charming destination full of beautiful half-timbered houses. 5 5 The brothers have certainly left their mark on the town, with visitors now able to follow the 'Grimms Path', which takes you on a mile-long fairytale-themed walk through the old town. The final stop on my fairytale adventure took me even further north to Kassel, where the Brothers eventually became librarians so that they could support their family while they searched for fairytales. Today, the city is home to the largest museum dedicated entirely to the Grimms. Called Grimmwelt, it has a trail of original exhibits as well as state-of-the-art installations and hands-on activities. The city is also a great place for ramblers as it is home to a Unesco World Heritage park and Europe's largest mountain park, filled with cascading water features. With gorgeous green and woodland landscapes like this around, I can see how the brothers found the inspiration to adapt their fairytale stories.
Times
3 days ago
- Times
Bella Venezia hotel review: a character-packed Corfu Town stay
Spacious, laid-back and yesteryear in feel, this 19th-century mansion — with its smart terracotta-painted walls — is the ideal unfussy spot to retire after a hot day wandering the streets of the buzzy old town. There's a little lobby bar, but the star attraction is a paved garden that wraps around two sides of the property. Its pergola is smothered in trailing wisteria and bougainvillea, making it the perfect place to relax with a book and a cocktail and to enjoy a fresh breakfast sourced from local produce. Service is faultless, catering to guests who prefer a smaller, quieter hotel with some grace to its architecture. This article contains affiliate links that will earn us revenue Score 7/10The neoclassical mansion has taken on various guises over the years, serving as a bank in the early 1900s and as a school for girls after the Second World War; it was the only building on its street to remain after the Germans bombed it in 1943. It started life in the 19th century as the private residence of a wealthy family, when luxurious balls hosted here were attended by leading figures of the time, and there remains a smattering of bygone opulence in the airy lobby, with its chequered flooring, plush cream chairs and marble-topped occasional tables. There's a hint of this in the 30 bedrooms too: high ceilings, textured gold-toned wallpaper, smart green shutters and bathrooms with marble-effect panels, elegant bowl-shaped basins and gold taps and shower heads. They're all average-sized; if you get the choice, opt for one of the rooms with a Juliet balcony overlooking the villa's garden. Score n/a There's a glass-walled breakfast room in the garden, but most choose to sit in the garden itself to enjoy a breakfast of local cheeses and olives, traditional Corfiot fig pie, breads with homemade marmalade, bacon and sausages, and omelettes or fried eggs cooked to order. While there's no restaurant for lunch or dinner, there's no shortage of places to eat nearby, among them Porta Remounda (also known as Barbas, a lovely taverna specialising in mezze and other traditional dishes) and the ever-popular Pane e Souvlaki (serving grilled meat dishes at a motley assortment of tables arranged on the sloping pavement outside). • More of the best hotels in Corfu• Best family hotels in Corfu Score 6/10The facilities don't come thick and fast here — the listed status of the building doesn't allow for a pool or spa — but you're likely to be out and about in Corfu Town during the day anyway. The hotel's calling card is instead that wraparound garden, a restful area with a soothing lion's-head fountain and air thick with the bouquet of the wisteria and bougainvillea that blanket the pergola. You can laze in a wicker chair or have a game with the oversized outdoor chess set. Score 7/10It's ideally positioned on one side of a quiet and leafy square just to the south of the old town. You can walk to the main hub of shops and restaurants in three or four minutes, while there are also two beaches easily accessible on foot: it's three minutes to Naok, the beach at the nautical club of Corfu, and just over ten minutes to Faliraki bathing beach. Price B&B doubles from £127Restaurant n/aFamily-friendly YAccessible N Adrian Phillips was a guest of Bella Venezia ( • Best all-inclusive hotels in Corfu• Best things to do in Corfu
The Sun
3 days ago
- The Sun
BBC broke TV's golden rule with much-hyped Destination X – a lost cause that feels like Hezbollah hijacked Coach Trip
SOMETHING odd happened about halfway through episode one of BBC1's heavily trailed new reality show, Destination X. One of the contestants, Mahdi, simply got up and left. 6 He wasn't angry, or upset, let alone put off by the fact, 30 minutes earlier, he'd told everyone: 'I come from Tottenham, da trenches. You know what I'm sayin'.' He just seemed a bit bored. And you know what? I couldn't entirely blame Mahdi. Both of us had probably seen enough, by then, to know we were on to a loser with Destination X, which sees the BBC breaking one of television's golden rules: If you've got a hit as big as The Traitors or Race Across The World, you leave it well alone. Let ITV and Netflix tie themselves in knots with hopeless rip-offs like The Genius Game, Hotel Fortune and Million Dollar Secret. The very last thing you should do, in the Beeb's position, of course, is weld those two famously successful formats together in one pan-European charabanc, with a 'games-master, guide and guru' who looks like he's been styled by Basil Brush. No prizes for guessing then exactly what they've done with Destination X, hosted by the unfortunate Rob Brydon who takes an eternity to explain what's going on to the 13 contestants at Baden Baden airport, inauspicious starting point for both this 'magical mystery tour' and England's bid to win the 2006 World Cup. The nuts of it is, though, a 'guess where the f*** you are in Europe?' contest, with the furthest away contestant being eliminated at the end of each show. Low-level cunning An idea that probably sounded great at the first meeting. The practical issue here, though, is one road sign or chance encounter with a local could blow the entire project out of the water. And so, apart from the brief moments when the contestants are allowed to gawp at a location clue, via an electronically controlled blindfold called the X Goggles, they're just thundering around the continent in two blacked-out coaches, staring at nothing more scenic than each other. Result? Not only does the show look more like Channel 4's Coach Trip has been hijacked by Hezbollah, during the Beirut leg, it sounds like it as well — especially when Ben and Saskia are left discussing on- board bathroom arrangements. 'I think we have to make a rule. Everyone has to sit down when they go to the toilet.' 'As opposed to what?' If, from that question, you've guessed it's not exactly the Brains Trust BBC1 has assembled here, then I should point out they seem to be a pleasant bunch with a relaxed, happy-go-lucky attitude to life. What they don't appear to have is a second language between them. Nor do they even possess the sort of low-level cunning that would realise, given the BBC is the most snootily middle-class institution in Britain, that Benidorm, Torremolinos, Hamburg's Reeperbahn or anywhere else serviced by EasyJet is probably off limits, but they'll be all over France and Italy like scatter cushions in an Islington townhouse. 6 If this process wasn't already disorientating enough, a whole new level of confusion is added by the clues, which are either so vague as to be pointless — 'This was one of the first places in the world to adopt street lighting' (relax, you're not in Tower Hamlets) — or they're questions which offer only two possible responses: 'How many times did Taylor Swift perform her Eras tour in the country you are now in?' A) Don't know. B) Don't care. Ungrateful gesture Occasionally, Rob will also offer to show one of them something 'at the back of the bus', and they can either tell another contestant or BBC1's head of HR, which seems to have been Mahdi's cue for making his excuses and leaving. A spectacularly ungrateful gesture from the lad, no matter how bored he got, if I'm honest. The one person I do actually feel sorry for, though, is Rob Brydon, a huge talent who's one of the very few people left on television capable of transforming a format and making you believe the medium is still some sort of meritocracy. The show may gather some momentum as it proceeds, obviously, but the only real comfort I've got for him at the moment is that Destination X could still make for one hell of a celebrity spin-off, with Terry Waite. Ella is having a giraffe 6 BBC2'S grand new anthropology series Human marks ground-breaking territory for television. The first time the entire history of mankind has been told via the medium of bucket list holiday locations. You can only marvel then at the luck of presenter Ella Al- Shamahi who starts this series, like mankind itself, in east Africa, where the scale of our development and migration cannot be fully understood unless you go on a safari and stare at some giraffes, apparently. From there, Ella wafts her way round the globe via a waterfall in Sri Lanka, Morocco, Botswana, France's Rhone Valley, the Alps and a beach on the paradise island of Flores, in Indonesia, where our ancestors may (or may not) have first set off for Australia. Because these great milestones in evolution never seem to take place behind a shopping precinct in Grimsby, do they? Whatever exotic resort Ella wafts into, though, someone else has done the leg work for her already. In Flores it's Dr Thomas Sutikna, who discovered the 70,000-year-old skeleton of 'an adult woman, the size of a child, with a very small brain', yet somehow resisted the temptation to name her Homo Jimmykrankieus. For all the BBC's breathtaking extravagance, though, the most annoying thing about Human is the underlying political agenda of Ella, who was gazing into some beautiful European mountain valley, this week, wondering if the first homo sapiens to leave Africa, thousands of years ago, were driven by 'the same forces that drive migrants today?' A four-star hotel, Universal Credit and an Uber Eats bike? It seems unlikely, Ella. So just crack on with your gap year and spare us the lecture. Random irritations CHANNEL 4 giving the cold, dead eyes of Bonnie Blue the oxygen of publicity. Any show involving a QR code. Mastermind featuring the most clumsily worded questions on television. And a single caption on Good Morning Britain probably revealing exactly how much of a toss its rictus-grinning presenters and a lot of other people really gave about 'our Lionesses' at 8.21 on Monday morning. It's spelt Wiegman, not 'Weigman'. Lookalike of the week 6 THIS week's winner is Attorney General Lord Hermer, the right-on cretin who helped land Britain with a multi-billion- pound bill for handing the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and Corrie's Norris Cole. Emailed in by Steve Davis. EXCUSE of the week? Nigerian-born Ade Adepitan explaining his reluctance to get in the water on ITV Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters: 'When black people were taken as slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and the West, they were taken on boats and they saw people die on those boats. They saw people thrown into the ocean and they saw the ocean as a bridge taking them to hell. 'This trauma goes on through generations from family after family after family. 'It's stayed with us and we have to overcome it.' Which reminds me. Due to the Highland Clearances of 1750 to 1860, I am unable to review episode four, series 22, of Escape To The Country (Perth and Kinross). It's just too raw. LORRAINE, Tuesday, Nicola Thorp: 'What does it say to women that our PM is going to meet Donald Trump, considering what he thinks of women, rather than meet the Lionesses?' It probably says ending the war in Ukraine, signing international trade agreements and establishing a ceasefire in Gaza are a bit more important than a ball-kicking contest. Unless they're all as imperiously thick as yourself, Nicola. Hull and Hornsea, the suspect's quite prolific, so we need to get a grip of it.' I wouldn't.
