by Tom Blass
Perhaps what happened at Borkum is the extreme of a kind of equivocality that I can’t help associating with the beach – disinhibition en masse can lead to terrible things. Doesn’t that ambivalence always accompany the determination to seek pleasure in the company of the many? And is not the beach, shot through with ambiguities (it is after all the point at which the land meets the sea, and the earth the sky), the place to find it?
Nowhere else is it possible to engage and disengage from the throng with such swift liquidity, at one moment so comfortably naked among strangers and the next tuned out from the clamour of crowds; from the ‘bif-baf-sorry-I-dropped it’ of beach games and the jarring cries of happy children, squinting at oblivion, comforted or discomforted by the sublime vastness of everything that lies beyond the shore, and then turning to re-embrace ourselves and our companions, whomsoever we choose them to be.
*But even seawater wasn’t infallible. Noted Granville, ‘[At Schevening] in 1836 I beheld invalids who had come from distant parts of Germany for the benefit of sea-water, and who were dying of ennui.’
7
Mare Frisium, Fris Non Canta
It was in the third decade of the present century, on an October afternoon . . . when I rode along a North Frisian dyke in fierce weather. For more than an hour the desolate marsh, now cleared of all cattle, had been on my left, and on my right, uncomfortably close, the North Sea tidal flats. The Halligen and the other islands were normally to be seen from the dyke; but I now saw nothing but the yellow-grey waves beating continuously against the dyke as though bellowing with rage, from time to time spraying dirty spume over my horse and me, and further out, a bleak half-light in which it was impossible to tell earth from sky.
Theodor Storm, The Rider on the White Horse
When the Romans discovered the North Sea, the Frisian peoples’ gift for seafaring was sufficiently accomplished that the great Pliny called it the Mare Frisium. He added that ‘the Fris don’t sing’, and it’s true they tend toward the taciturn, as does in its own way the archipelago of the Frisian Islands, strung out along the Dutch and German coasts. For the most part the delights of the Frisian Islands are subtle or heavily disguised. They are flat, expansive, blasted by winds, and the sands of which they are composed are in a state of constant rearrangement. But Texel, Terschelling, Ameland, Juist, Schiermonnikoog, Borkum, Fohr and the others are not without a subdued, exotic charm. Here are to be found some of the whitest and highest dunes, the bluest seas and even one of the most glamorous holiday resorts in Europe.
There is an elusive quality about Friesland – the word refers both to the islands and to the fringe of mainland historically occupied by the Frisian people. Its seas are so dangerous to the deep-keeled and the unfamiliar, and its landscapes so sunken, that if outsiders know the waters at all it is likely as not on account of a nautical mishap or by association with Erskine Childers’s spy yarn, The Riddle of the Sands. Set among a labyrinth of shoals and treacherous currents, the novel’s reluctant protagonist Carruthers, a bored government clerk, sets out to join a pal for some duck hunting in the German Ocean but discovers an invasion force of landing craft so formidable as to pose an existential threat to Britain and Britishness.
It caused a stir in 1903, for Childers had a reputation as an oracle on such matters. The North Sea had become the silent fulcrum upon which the balance of power between Britain and Germany rested, and the book inspired both imaginations and imitations. In 1910 two British yachtsmen, Lieutenant Vivian Brandon and Captain Trench of the Royal Marines, were arrested in Borkum and Emden respectively. They and their yacht were found to be bristling with photographs of the coastline and its military installations. The German authorities tried them for espionage, the more extreme elements of the German press calling for them to be subjected to ‘appropriate mental treatment so that upon their release they may not retain too clear a memory of what they had seen’.
In all probability it was a freelance Boys’ Own affair. Childers himself was dismissive of their efforts, noting that if as charged they had been attempting to measure the depth of the water ‘while bathing at Amrun’, then ‘that is within the right of all bathers . . . For my part I should be content to rely for my measurements on the extraordinarily accurate and detailed large-scale charts of the German North Sea coast published by the German Admiralty and obtainable at stationers in London.’ Accurate maps notwithstanding, this is a hard landscape and the Frisians are a hard people to read. Some of Friesland’s dialects are unintelligible even to each other. Frisian is a kissing cousin of English – as they say, ‘Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Fries’ (‘Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Frisian’), but only as it was spoken many centuries ago.
I arrived on the island of Schiermonnikoog on a late-summer evening as barnacle geese clucked in the fields and little stirred besides the odd cyclist and heath-hovering owl. Rooks and woodsmoke weaved through the rain, and the crash of the surf was just audible on a distant beach.
Schiermonnikoog means ‘island of grey monks’, after the sheep-tending friars who, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, brought their flocks across from the mainland each summer to graze on its salt marshes. They left nothing of substance behind them but the island’s name and a roaring trade in the sale of cowled and tonsured figurines, routinely placed on the windowsills of island houses amid flowerpots and duck decoys. The most desirable of these dwellings are seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cottages with roofs shaped like witches’ hats, each one with its own gossiping stool in the porch and a front yard immaculate and tasteful even when the weather is vulgar and foul. And as often as not their inhabitants are wealthy retirees from Amsterdam, Groningen and Rotterdam whose links with the island scarcely extend beyond being able to afford to buy its property.
Arend Maris’s house was easily distinguished by its unkempt lawn, peeling paintwork and the jumble of books (lots of Conrad), papers and model ships visible through its front window. Here, among the clutter, he laboured with quotidian regularity on his life’s work, a history of the nautical college of Schiermonnikoog, describing how it was established in the late nineteenth century to prepare local boys for careers in seafaring and closed in 1934, by which time steam had made obsolete much of the curriculum.
Arend had also retired and was from the mainland, where he had practised as a forensic psychologist. But he had acquired an islander’s tanned face, bright blue eyes and a craggy, friendly smile, wiry hair and a big voice. He was incredulous when I told him about my own project. ‘Oh my God!’ he said, face conveying pity, elation, avuncular concern in one all-consuming stare. ‘It is impossible. There is so much. You will drown in it. Drown in the North Sea. It will be your suicide!’
‘Quite possibly,’ I said.
He pointed out that his own book, ‘a history of one tiny, lousy little navigational school’, had already taken him ten years, and he would be surprised if he finished it in his lifetime. ‘So let me help you!’ he said and made some calls. Unfortunately, everyone he spoke to was indisposed. One man in particular I would have loved to have met had just completed the definitive dictionary of the island’s old dialect. But, approaching his hundredth birthday, he had no strength or desire to entertain strangers.
Later, at the end of a long cold walk across the dunes, I rang the doorbell of the lighthouse. A small painted sign relayed the information that it had been built in 1853, was powered by a 200-watt bulb and was usually closed for visitors. I rang anyway. Sometimes saying that you’re writing a book opens doors. But not to lighthouses. ‘I’m sorry, I’m very busy,’ said a crackling voice through the intercom. ‘Please go away.’
That night I dined alone at the Café Bernsdorff, a glorious pre-war gem where each exquisitely brewed coffee is served, and steaming bowl of consommé ladled, with a surety of execution that betokens the height of civilisation before ‘civilised’ Europe destroyed itself so many decades ago. To dine at the Café Ber
nsdorff is to discover that a thing for which you long since learned not to grieve still lives.
The Prince of the Netherlands was a habitué of the Bernsdorff in the inter-war years, fond of coursing hares on the dunes. Their saddles, smothered in brown sauce and accompanied by claret and sautéed potatoes, would be served up to him each evening. In those halcyon days the café organised seal-hunting sorties for its distinguished guests. And though the sepia tint is blurring to beige, the trophy photographs that line the corridors are still gruesome, piquing one’s interest on the way to the sturdy, pompous latrines. Bernsdorff is the kind of place that appears to be single-handedly holding aloft old standards of decorum, a starched napkin draped over its figurative forearm. Here’s what I wrote in the bar before supper.
Brown, oak-panelled walls, brown furniture, brown linen tablecloths. A proper Dutch tiled fireplace. A stuffed buzzard (brown) moulders menacingly on the mantelpiece. Little lace curtains hang from a brass rail placed 18 inches above the window sill. The two waiters are comedic in the correctness of their handling of customers and napkins. In 1943, the hotel was hit by a bomb from a Wellington bomber, freezing the entire establishment into a parody of recidivism.
In a dining room that could have seated three hundred princes of the Netherlands I ate steak, creamed spinach and potatoes roasted with bacon and parsnips – prefaced with mushroom soup that arrived in a silver tureen the size of a baby’s bath. The potatoes alone would have satisfied a family of six, and somehow the prevalence of brown in all its glorious shades dampened all extraneous sound. Even when the local billiards club met to play in the bar, as it does on Wednesdays, the very occasional clack of balls and the screech of moving chairs only underscored the sense of comforting and marmoreal quietness. When I moved on from Schiermonnikoog, taking the cosy ferry with its red banquettes and apple cake slices back to the mainland, and then headed by train towards Germany, I did so contemplatively and with a full stomach.
Half a million people speak Frisian in the Netherlands (confounding Pliny, some sing in it too, like Nynke Laverman, who also sings Portuguese fado, and Elske DeWall, who made her name with a Leonard Cohen cover), but ironically it was in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, home to only around ten thousand Frisian speakers, that I prised open the lid on the Frisian world a little. It was, of course, of the Schleswig-Holstein Question – which led to two bitterly fought wars in the second half of the 1800s – that Lord Palmerston said, ‘[It] is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.’
In Schleswig-Holstein lie the most far flung of the islands, Amrum, Sylt and Pellworm (pronounced ‘Pvoorm’). In the midst of these is the still stranger archipelago of half-islands or Halligen. Even on a psycho-political level the area is difficult to locate, for three flags fly over it, those of Germany, the state of Schleswig-Holstein and the province of Nord-Friesland, all demanding some kind of recognition of their respective sovereignty, a situation further complicated by the interplay between the islands’ five local languages: Hochdeutsch (High German), Plattdeutsch (Low German), Frisian (in numerous dialects), Danish and Jutish – the latter so derided by all the other language speakers that they tend to call it Potato Danish. People switch between languages according to situation and interlocutor, and there’s no exemption for animals: a man who has bought a horse from a Plattdeutsch speaker might talk to it in Plattdeutsch, but speak Frisian to his cows (which is natural) and use Hochdeutsch – the natural tongue for the giving and receiving of commands – with his dog.
For all this linguistic richness, the train heading north to the heart of German Friesland reveals from its windows a landscape so monotonous and apparently bereft of inhabitants that it accrues a kind of grandeur by virtue of its scale. The train goes on and on, and so does the plain, an unending vista of pastures and dykes, sprinkled with bunched-together livestock fending off the sameness of the all-enclosing fields. Nowhere in Friesland is the terrain much above sea level, so you never know that you’re close to the sea until you’re right on top of it. But as the plain unfolds, the eye searches out nuances: a singularly ancient farmhouse with a white-painted finial in the shape of a double-necked swan, a harrier levitating above a field, a horse silhouetted against a brooding sky.
While The Riddle of the Sands painted the definitive picture of Friesland’s fog-bound treacherous islands for the British, Theodor Storm’s novel Schimmelreiter (The Rider on the White Horse) best captures the cultural and emotional contours of Friesland for the Germans. Storm was born in the town of Husum in 1817 and died there in 1888. Through a series of stories within stories the novel tells how a lost traveller riding along a dyke in a deeply rural Frisian backwater of a fearful night encounters a dark figure mounted on a ‘high-boned, haggard horse’.
Taking shelter in an inn, the traveller hears how the vision presages the breaking of the dykes and learns the tragic story of the great Hauke Haien, raised in a village held to ransom by the ever-present possibility of being overwhelmed by the sea. The son of a surveyor, Hauke learns Euclidean geometry from an old textbook he finds in a trunk, and being prodigious in every possible way soon stands out as a man of talent and prospects. Once apprenticed to the gluttonous and stupid dyke master he makes himself indispensable, and when the dyke master dies Hauke marries his daughter, the beautiful Elke. Hauke’s upward trajectory in the face of local prejudice and jealousy is the triumph of reason over the fug of superstition and conservatism but fails to avert the return of the Schimmelreiter, or the tale’s heart-breaking conclusion.
The Theodor-Storm-Haus in Husum is one of those quirky little literary museums that smell of mothballs and encourage speaking in whispers. Elegant and writerly, it is tenderly curated with diaries, letters, manuscripts in cabinets with cartes de visite and tickets for subscription balls. Storm’s own image – bearded and as stern and glowering as his name – is everywhere. But I was impatient both with the ticking long-case English clock in the corner of the dining room and the other visitors, clearly bored and wiling away an afternoon. Storm himself was only polite about Husum, describing it as ‘a small ordinary town, my birthplace; it lies on a flat treeless coastal plain and its houses are old and grey. Yet I’ve always thought of it as a pleasant place.’ In a poem called ‘Der Stadt’ he described it thus:
Am grauen Strand, am grauen Meer
Und seitab liegt die Stadt;
Der Nebel drückt die Dächer schwer,
Und durch die Stille braust das Meer
Eintönig um die Stadt*
Husum has some well-preserved old houses and a yacht basin but otherwise is as humdrum as Storm left it. Most visitors are only passing through on their way to the islands. And those with the most money are heading to Sylt, a T-bone of sand possessing the reputation of being the Riviera of the North Sea, which is tenuously joined to the mainland by a causeway.
I found little in the British Library about the island of Sylt. W. G. Black, a nineteenth-century chronicler of the Frisian Islands, noted that in Norse days the island was famous for the quality of its lawmakers, and that according to the statutes of the Ancient Thing or law makers’ assembly: ‘If a maiden or a wife were shamefully assaulted, she must stop the first man she met and tell him how she had been outraged; then together they went to the nearest church, the bell was rung, the neighbours gathered, and with loosened hair the woman demanded the justice of the Thing court.’ He continued: ‘If her injury was provided against the man accused, then at the third full tide his hands were tied behind his head, a heavy stone tied to his neck and he was flung into the sea or thrown into the current, “that he not do it again”.’ The sentence of death by drowning – Quabeldrank – was, said Black, ‘especially exercised upon strangers . . .’ Another book, Artur Schultze-Naumburg’s Sylt- The Dream Island (1966), celebrated the island’s naturist potential, hinting that nude volleyball
was a must for its local beauties.
Yet there’s an unspoken rift unsettling Sylt. Frisians from across northern Germany and even the Netherlands perceive it as a wellspring of their identity, and its dialect, Sol’ring, as the purest incarnation of their language. But tourism discovered its white sands, sweet-smelling marram grasses and rolling dunes in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1960s it had become a summer playground for Hamburg media barons, industrialists from the Ruhr and Frankfurt bankers. (Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the Baader-Meinhof Group, would holiday on Sylt with her publisher husband Klaus Rainer Rohl.)
That it is a very desirable place is undeniable. My memory of arriving on the landing stage at its southern point is of being bathed in warm evening light and a breeze that sang and zinged with effervescence, pleasant odours and golden smiles. At a place called Kampen in the north of the island, that niceness has been distilled into an enclave of unimaginable wealth. I had headed there for no other reason than that I ignorantly imagined I might find a campsite. Soon, any hope of reasonably priced accommodation had died. Thatched Frisian-style cottages leading to the beginning of the beach turned out to be not the cosy bed and breakfasts and cafés that I’d imagined but retail outlets for luxury goods and jewellery watched over by muscular men in Ray-Bans with sand in the turn-ups of their black trousers. Closer to the sea, a champagne bar, almost a beach shack, rang with the laughter of the sleek cashmere-clad super-rich. I was almost transfixed but couldn’t possibly afford to stay.
I hadn’t expected to find such wealth in the Frisian Islands, and I expressed my surprise to Hark Martinen on the neighbouring island of Amrum. Hark (pronounced ‘Urk’) and I had been in touch before I’d set out for the Frisians. He’d said he would show me around and introduce me to everybody, but when I came off the ferry there was a message waiting for me at the quayside. Hark apologised, but it was Ascension Day, which brought with it the national obligation to spend the day drinking, which he was doing, though I could join him if I wanted.