In one of his letters, Clemens Brentano, a hero of German Romanticism, chided his sister, Bettina: "For heaven's sake, don't become a Seeress ... If you knew that ... witches of former centuries were none other than the victims of constipation, you would take more care." Later he married her off to Achim von Arnim, another poet, a man of little money but some property: He had three villages in Brandenburg (lower Flaeming) working for him. Marrying Bettina was not bad business, either. Although orphaned, she had inherited a great deal of money, which her husband was too proud to use. Therefore their castle was cold in the winter, and Bettina's money paid for an apartment in Berlin, not far from the Tiergarten.

She did not like her life in the castle and preferred on occasion to flee with her children to Berlin, some 150 kilometers to the north (as a friend wrote to me: "She wanted to live in the city, he wanted to live among his potatoes"). But he had his heart set on his agriculture, and she wrote to her husband: "I married a poet." Still, her husband remained committed to hard work.

Bettina wrote many letters. She corresponded with Goethe, among others. She exchanged letters with Beethoven, and even intended to write a book about the poor. Every great composer of the age dedicated at least one song to her (Brahms, Schumann and, of course, Beethoven). Some of the great figures of German Romanticism - Wilhelm Grimm, Humboldt - were guests at the lovely castle she shared with her husband, with whom she had seven children, and sometimes she set his Romantic poems to music. In the living-room overlooking the beautiful garden, they sat discussing current affairs, and maybe poverty as well. One can imagine that when a peasant woman came by with a sack of potatoes, they did not invite her to sit with them and have a glass of schnapps; she waited, naturally, in the kitchen.

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Just how romantic Goethe's letters to Bettina were is a matter of some debate. Some claim that she published the letters after having edited them. In either case, however, whether Goethe indeed loved her, or whether she built herself up as the object of his adoration, she deserves the title of a heroine. Goethe had been in love with her mother, or perhaps was only one of her admirers; how can we know? Orphaned at a young age, Bettina yearned to be like Mignon in "Wilhelm Meister." She met Goethe when she was 21 and he was already 58. Some call this the perfect age gap for reviving love.

In one of Bettina's letters, she wrote of the women in his poetry: "Don't forget, Goethe, how it was I learned to love you, I have been jealous and sometimes I have felt myself to be the subject of your poems - and why shouldn't I dream myself into happiness?" Her admirers may take offense at Milan Kundera's novel "Immortality," which mocked her attempt to get ahead in life by exchanging letters with famous people. He exaggerated the case, that misogynist. And so Bettina won the honor of adorning the German five-mark bill before the euro took over. She died in 1859, many years after her husband, and is buried next to the masters of her dynasty outside the evangelical church in the castle courtyard. Her gravestone does not bear the word "writer." Her husband's tombstone, however, is inscribed with the word "poet." It was the daughter, actually, who was responsible for this discrimination. Bettina never entered the ancient church, rebuilt several times (the Lord's name is written in Hebrew, in golden letters, on the altar). She was Catholic.

The castle itself has a little museum, containing books she authored, pictures and letters that she wrote and received. One of her letters to her brother is worth quoting, just to show how much Bettina von Arnim deserves our admiration today: "It is no use telling me to be calm; to me that conveys sitting with my hands in my lap, looking forward to the broth we are having for supper ... My soul is a passionate dancer; she dances to hidden music which only I can hear ... Whatever police the world may prescribe to rule the soul, I refuse to obey them." Yes, this is German Romanticism, but German Romanticism was written by men, and she was perhaps the first woman to write such a beautiful text.

Disappearing graves

Bettina is not really the heroine of this column. That honor is rather reserved for the village that lies outside the castle, Wiepersdorf, and for Little Red Riding Hood. First, about cemeteries: The Germans have a law that solves the problem of graveyard expansion. Maintaining a headstone for longer than 20 years costs a lot of money. Anyone passing through village cemeteries nowadays discovers that even where death is concerned, the poor have had to bite their lips. The oldest graves are from 1986. They will eventually disappear, as will the graves of their descendants. Only the graves of the masters will endure, outside the castle churches.

The subject at hand, however, is not the cemetery, but rather the particular grave of a man named August Biekerel, nicknamed, on the gravestone as well, "The Wolf." Biekerel was a forester, that is, a hunter - a prestigious occupation in the local culture. His grave is a kind of stimulus for a story circulating in the area, a story about Little Red Riding Hood. And now we have come to the real tale.

Well, according to the story, the hunter known as "The Wolf" was an unscrupulous man. Not only did he rape one of the women in the village, he also raped her grown granddaughter (who, as was the custom in those days, wore a red hood to mark the change in her body). The scandalized villagers castrated the hunter, and in order to hide the horror from the children ("so the children won't know" is an important educational concept, even in Germany, especially in Germany), they made up a pretty tale about Little Red Riding Hood, who went to visit her sick grandmother in the forest, where the wolf ate them both, until the good hunter came along, cut open the wolf's belly and set them free.

Really, a lovely story. That's what Bettina's famous guest Wilhelm Grimm thought when he came for a visit, and she urged him to write down the fairy tale as her village had invented it, including the happy ending. Bettina had a lot of male guests. She was certainly no Little Red Riding Hood, and they loved to come and stay. Beethoven, too. The true story, like the fairy tale, was very distant from her own life.

And yet Little Red Riding Hood became a local heroine. She gives her name to the East German version of the sparkling, dry white wine known in Germany as sekt. However, the forest near Wiepersdorf also holds the dying remains of a small park, the Little Red Riding Hood Park. It is a kind of relic of the economic hopes that were harbored in the region during the first few years after East Germany became West Germany's shortchanged stepson. A naivete of "unification." The park is a sorry sight now, and the hope of making a small tourist paradise flourish over the ruins of socialism is also fading. And like the fields, many of which are no longer cultivated, like the elementary schools closing one by one (an unthinkable possibility in the socialist days), like the vanishing public transportation that is leaving the elderly stranded at home - in the park, too, all the vivid color is peeling away.

In Wiepersdorf they are none too fond of the story about the rapist-hunter known as "The Wolf," perhaps because his family still lives in the area, perhaps because the story is unfounded. Roswitha Karbaum, who lovingly runs the small museum in honor of the von Arnim family, says that it could not be true. After all, Wilhelm Grimm had visited the castle in 1816, and "The Wolf" was not born until four years later. Bettina actually heard the fairy tale from a French acquaintance, and the rape may have taken place elsewhere, not here. And why is the grave of "The Wolf" still standing in the cemetery, even though he has been dead for 86 years? It was decided in the village, she says, that the grave would be preserved because the man known as "The Wolf" lived to be 100 years old, longer than anyone else here. Karbaum has also written an article, which is pasted up at the local bus station and at the entrance to the park. The rape story has no foundation in reality. It is inappropriate to link beautiful Wiepersdorf to such a tale of sex, cruelty and passion.

And she's probably right. In any case, "The Wolf" was born in 1820 and died a century later, even before the German feudal lords bid farewell to the world. The last master of the von Arnim dynasty was not a Prussian officer in the Wehrmacht. Nevertheless, following a report made by a local peasant, he was arrested by the Red Army and died in a Russian prison camp in 1946. He was, as a marble plaque above the grave declares, the last lord (Freiherr). At the far end of the burial plot lies an anti-Nazi member of the family. Shot to death in 1941, he was brought to the estate and buried there in secret.

Now feudalism and Nazism and communism are all gone, and no one knows what will become of these lovely villages in 20 years. Under the East German regime, the Wiepersdorf castle was turned into a house for artists. It is still a very pleasant place for writers, musicians and painters, who create art here in the spirit of German Romanticism - that is, in utter isolation from the world. You can talk to the workers in the yard, just before the meal is served, about the local dialect or about the communist regime. They have interesting things to say on the subject, not all of them negative. Because the grand illusion, after all, is dead. And then you can say good-bye and go inside to eat where Bettina and her guests once dined. The employees from the village eat at a table in the kitchen, because history carries on: The masters disappear and are replaced by others, and the working people continue to eat near the kitchen. And, most importantly, the artists remain on the side of the masters, whatever their nature may be.