THE RHINE:
INTO THE HEART OF GERMANY
IN the cold December of 1933, 18year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on a walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople. In 1977, he published his acclaimed trilogy about that walk, and the first book, A Time of Gifts, starts with his journey along the Rhine through The Netherlands and Germany, just before Europe was to be changed irrevocably by war.
As I set out from Amsterdam on a cruise up the Rhine on the luxurious SS Antoinette, his journey was with me — I had taken my copy of the book. From Dusseldorf to Heidelberg, we were, roughly, following his route.
As we sailed on canals out of Amsterdam, the light, the big sky and the flat landscape were both distinctive and familiar from Dutch paintings. Leigh Fermor had noted the same but there the similarities ended, for Europe is now a very different place. The neatly industrialised banks slipped past and by morning we woke on the Rhine itself, near Rotterdam.
The river is still plied by barges laden with coal and other goods, as it has been since Roman times 2 000 years ago, the banks around Dusseldorf lined with coal bunkers, landing bays, and sometimes luxurious villas and apartment blocks. The entire length of the river has markers on both banks indicating the distance from the source, Lake Constance in Switzerland, in 1km, 500m and 250m marks. Incredibly, it is 80km shorter than it was in the 19th century, thanks to canals cutting corners or rapids.
Luxury trains once carried tourists along the valley of the Rhine in the golden age of rail. Since the 1970s, luxury cruise boats, low enough to glide under bridges and just wide enough to slip through massive locks with inches to spare, have been à la mode. Still, in the middle reaches of the great river, the landscape looks like nothing more than a giant model rail set: villages, castles, mountains and trains speeding up and down both banks day and night. Villagers complain about the noise made by the outdated rolling stock of the endless freight trains.
The SS Antoinette slid past them so silently and smoothly that it was hard to tell whether we were moving as we slept in our comfortable cabins with floor-toceiling windows, or tucked into a staggering quantity of excellent food morning, noon and night, along with excellent German riesling wines. These activities were only interrupted by daily shore excursions or entertainment at night, including lectures on World War 1 and the history of the Rhine. Cruises are always perfectly tailored to keep you busy without being too demanding, and you can always opt out of the organised distractions and lounge on the sundeck with a cocktail, watching the scenery pass by.
It was the first cruise of the season in early spring, so the banks were mostly bare of leaves, but the towns and villages were filling with spring blossom and bulbs. The days may have started with frozen rain or frost on deck but soon warmed in the sun: cruising weather is always a matter of luck.
Leigh Fermoy had encountered the beginning of German fascism in the ’30s: Brownshirts in Koblenz, a Nazi picking a fight in Heidelberg. I knew there would be no trace of that — the Rhine is now almost a symbol of the borderless and peaceful continent — but I was eager to see why it played such a huge part in the German Romanticism of the 19th century that led to German nationalism and the unification of the state in 1871.
The Rhine is full of history and it is deliberately romantic. Tour director Hildegard Peiker told me it had begun with Goethe, who, when cruising on the Lahn River, had looked up at Lahneck Castle and seen the ghost of a knight, and had written the poem Geistesgruß about it.
On the Middle Rhine between Koblenz and Rüdesheim, there seems to be a castle or three around every bend, and scratch anywhere and you will find
legends of Teutonic knights and Knights Templar, of alluring maidens and rival brothers. English Romantics swooned over it and its castles, which had been sacked and burned by the French at the end of the 17th century. In the second half of the 19th, there was a rush to restore and rebuild many of them and even Queen Victoria holidayed in the newly built Gothic fantasy of Schloss Stolzenfels, near Koblenz.
“Painters and poets took up the theme and tourists, including the English, started coming,” Peiker said. Many of the castles were defensive, some were little more than river tollgates collecting tolls by slinging a chain across the river and extracting a fee before allowing free passage. Princes grew rich from the river. Nothing is new.
Above all, for me the Rhine conjures Wagner’s sublime operas of the Ring Cycle, which start and end with the Rhinegold, guarded in the river by the Rhinemaidens. You won’t see them as you gaze into the swirling brown waters, but you can hear the strains of their leitmotif if you listen well.
Our first excursion was into Cologne, where the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe still soars above the city: it’s impossible not to be thrilled by the sight of it. But it was not always so. Started in 1248 to house the relics of the three Magi (it still does), it was unfinished for centuries and only completed to the original plans between 1842 and 1911, after Cologne came under Prussian rule, as a symbol of German unity.
Shore excursions are all too brief but cruise ships must move and that night at 11pm I stood on deck as we pulled away from the quayside and watched as we passed under bridge after bridge, while the mighty twin spires of the dom receded into the dark. Eventually it was gone and the cold breeze drove me below deck to read Leigh Fermoy’s account of leaving the city on a cement barge, eating fried potatoes, lumps of cold speck and a garlic sausage. I had just enjoyed a gala dinner of lobster Thermidor. I felt guilty.
Arriving in Koblenz, one is greeted by the Deutsches Eck (“German Corner”), a prow-like headland where the Moselle joins the Rhine. It has long been a symbol of German unity, but the original 1897 equestrian statue of Wilhelm I, damaged during World War 2, was only replaced in 1993.
Although 87% of the town was also destroyed during the war, much has been rebuilt and I found the Romanesque
Liebfrauenkirche or the Church of Our Lady, also damaged and restored, where Leigh Fermoy had attended a service and noted the Brownshirts just before Christmas in 1933.
We did not pause at Bingen, where Leigh Fermoy had spent Christmas Eve that same year, but rather over the river at Rüdesheim, where he had only paused for a glass of the famous wine. He didn’t name the vineyard but I like to think it was from Schloss Johannisberg, where we went to taste the riesling wines and listen to the claim of how late-harvest wine was accidentally invented by monks in 1775. They delayed harvesting as they waited for permission from the bishop to start — the messenger having been waylaid.
Rüdesheim itself is full of souvenir shops: when I saw one full of Christmas decorations and another full of cuckoo clocks, I fled onto a chair-lift to glide silently over the budding vineyards to the top of the Niederwald Landscape park, above the town. Here the massive
Niederwalddenkmal looks over the river to Bingen. I’d seen the monument in a recent BBC programme on German art, and it’s massively vainglorious. According to the inscription — in German, of course — it was built “In memory of the unanimous victorious uprising of the German People and of the reinstitution of the German Empire 18701871”. It is 38m high, including a 10m statue of Germania holding up the crown of the emperor. The whole thing had just been restored.
Hildegard von Bingen, a 13th-century abbess, founded an abbey nearby which still functions and I was reminded of her beautiful choral music. This, surely, is another heart of Germany.
In Speyer, we visited the red sandstone Romanesque Kaiserdom or Imperial Cathedral, once the burial site of the Holy Roman emperors. Built before the Gothic fashion perfected in Cologne, it is both ancient and very modern in its simplicity.
By the time we reached Heidelberg, as German as Oxford is English and just as romantic, I had had enough of churches and wandering around quaint villages. So, after a tour of the castle, I settled down with local guide Johanna Hein in an old coffee shop to discuss the elusive German Romanticism.
“It began in the early 1800s because people wanted one nation,” she said. “There were 340 states in the First Reich, including parts of France and Italy. People do not realise that Germany is one of the youngest countries in Europe. The First Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, lasted from the 9th century to 1805. But it was never a nation: it was not holy, it was not Roman and it was not an empire. The second or Hohenzollern Reich lasted from unification in 1871 to 1918. The Third lasted from 1933 to 1945.”
Modern German unity may be symbolised by the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, but its roots lie on the Rhine.
Our last stop was Strasbourg, in France, now the seat of the European parliament. The city and its province of Alsace has changed hands between Germany and France a number of times, and you cross no border over the Rhine to reach it.
Now, some argue that the Chancellor of Germany rules Europe. It can be hard fathoming Europe’s complex history, but the Rhine runs through the heart of it.
Unsworth was a guest of Uniworld Boutique River Cruises