The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  In common with tens of thousands of Amrum men before him, Hark had spent most of his adult life abroad. The habit of emigration had begun around the middle of the nineteenth century (coinciding with the influx of tourists) and continued into the 1960s. Most headed to California and became chicken farmers, or New York, where they ran German-style delis, selling pickles, rye bread and sausage. It isn’t unusual for elderly Americans born on the islands to return on vacation for the first time in decades to be able to recal smatterings of Frisian and Plattdeutsch, but no High German.

  Now aged seventy (‘I’ve survived; I can do whatever I want’), Hark had taken the ship from Hamburg to New York more than five decades ago. His father had died, leaving Hark with a worthless farm, and there were no jobs on Amrum or even in Hamburg. Decades in the Bronx had taken the edge off his consonants, but he pronounced each slowly and carefully and without a twang. First he had worked as a ship’s engineer and then run a delicatessen, and sometimes he had done both, slicing wurst one day and sweating in an engine room the next. ‘I had citizenship and everything, but then I wanted to come home.’

  When I found Hark he was silently sinking large glasses of bright orange sparkling Apfelwein with half a dozen friends. He beckoned me to join them, his big noble head sunk between his shoulders like that of a resting vulture. ‘This is how we celebrate Father’s Day, with a Herrenpartien. Today we drink. Tomorrow we talk.’

  A maudlin fug enveloped the drinking. For all its poppy sweetness and alarming orange hue, the Apfelwein had wrapped its subjects in a wreath of dark and silent thoughtfulness, although some diplomatic mention of football was made on my account. ‘Seventy years old. Lucky to be alive.’ The company nodded. More Apfelwein came. Hark was clearly torn between his innate hospitality and the desire to drink freely and silently, and we settled on meeting the next morning. In between I would head off to explore Amrum by foot, beneath a sun which, I hoped, might dispel the ciderish vapours that clung to my befuddled head.

  Like Sylt, Amrum faces the North Sea on its west side, and the Wattenmeer, the inshore waters between the mainland and the islands, on the east. Thus the sun rises over mudflats and sets over a broad white dune-fringed almost untraversable beach called the Kniepsand, which resembles more than anything I have ever seen a salt pan. In between there are fields, some forest and a handful of sanatoria, the oldest established as a rest home for Prussian cavalry officers recuperating after the 1871 war with France. Architecturally Amrum’s point of interest is not the modern town of Wittdun, where the ferries arrive, but Nebel, halfway up the island on the Wattenmeer side, upon which on high days and holidays visitors converge in a jangle of bicycles and knapsacks.

  Nebel exemplifies a kind of Disneyfication of Friesland: a hollow shell of whitewashed thatched cottages, tea rooms, a picture-perfect church with fascinating merchants’ gravestones. I felt distinctly uncomfortable and antsy, somehow, for all the cake and coffee on offer. The thrust of my disquiet, I realised as I chewed my way through a Matjes Brötchen (a rollmop in a bap), was that Nebel was nothing more than a kind of heartless theatre set, its ghosts – of salty fishermen and whalers and wreckers – long fled, leaving only the bricks-and-mortar skeletons of their former presence encrusted with wisteria and a kind of Tyrolean tweeness. To the island’s credit, it has eschewed courting the uber-rich who descend on Sylt, and yet in Nebel there were sufficient Porsches in the driveways of its chocolate-box homes to signify that a week’s rent in the season was probably considerable.

  On Sylt, Hark had said, property prices were now so inflated that the locals were forced to live on the mainland, commuting each day to service the needs of wealthy outsiders. Nobody wanted to see that happen on Amrum; nonetheless the island was entirely dependent on tourists, producing nothing, no longer engaged with the sea. I asked Hark if there was much social interaction between the local people and the tourists, and he shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Not really very much.’

  Recently the islands have been portrayed by the German media as backward places where bad things happen. In the past decade a stable of writers has collectively created a new crime genre, Nordzee Krimi, using the Frisian Islands (Amrum especially) as the mis en scène for a fairly predictable litany of sex crimes and murders, equally predictably solved by a formerly alcoholic divorced detective manqué. The island’s candy-striped lighthouse – the Nordzee Krimi ‘stamp’– adorns the cover of each, reassuring readers that each volume will be much the same as the last. In 2008 German television broadcast a film called Mörder Auf Amrum, which the locals took in their stride despite being cast as scarcely intelligible yokels. Not surprisingly, they tend to keep their language to themselves.

  When Hark came to meet me the following day he looked glum. The weather was bad; his wife wasn’t speaking to him, and his head was sore. We had coffee and drove slowly north, parting the drizzle and family groups of cyclists in rain cloaks. He showed me around the slippery decks of an enormous buoy-laying vessel that he’d worked aboard after returning home from his years in America, and we dropped in on the lifeboat moored alongside it, a beautiful vessel with leather couchettes and French-polished woodwork. By dint of half a dozen years in Cardiff, the skipper spoke English with a German-Welsh accent. He liked to cook Welshcakes, he said, on the beautiful Neff range recently installed on the vessel.

  Nebel had looked almost tarty the day before, when the sun had shone. Now, dowdily girdled in rain, all the pernicious thoughts I’d had about it dispersed. Also I sensed that there was something Hark wanted to say, perhaps to apologise for being incapacitated the day before – not that I minded at all.

  ‘Ascension Day is what we call Father’s Day,’ he said. ‘A very special day, of course.’

  Hark asked me about my children, and I in turn asked about his. Two, he said, were lawyers, one in California and another in Kiel. (We slowed to let another cyclist past.) ‘And then my eldest, my daughter,’ he said in his strange, careful, burred way, ‘she died. Of cancer. Six years ago.’

  And I saw what a terrible day the day before had been for Hark.

  Where the road slewed to an end in the wet sand we walked across to where Rainhard Boyens sat in one of the two dozen Strandkorben – the all-enveloping carapace-like wicker chairs endemic to Germany’s seaside resorts – from which he endeavoured to make a living. Beyond the beach the sea was grey, spumy and unappetising. The few people to brave it weren’t lingering. Rainhard had hired out the chairs in the summer season for fifty-two years. His father had been the Strandkorb man before him. ‘But with this weather,’ he said, raising his hands to the unsympathetic skies, ‘what’s the point.’

  He seemed in good humour. He and Hark had been at school together, albeit separated by a year, but whereas Hark had left the island when his father died and the family farm was sold, Rainhard had stayed, supplementing the beach business with odd masonry and carpentry jobs. Years on the Kniepsand had tanned his skin to a rich creased acorn brown, through which protruded joyful cobalt eyes. He and Hark spoke in the Amrum dialect, Oomrang, and given that they were two of its 700 remaining speakers I felt privileged to be within earshot of its trills and diphthongs, and generally to be in the company of Hark, erstwhile engineer, keeper of delicatessens and buoy layer, and Rainhard Boyens, a name synonymous with the Strandkorben of Amrum.

  Later I told Hark that it was touching that they had spent their childhoods together but despite decades of separation had remained friends. ‘Yes,’ said Hark. ‘Yes. I suppose it is. Poor Boyens. He has had his ups and downs.’ He left me to wander the dunes on the North Sea side, which I did, trudging the ankle-grinding Kniepsand and trying to see in its all-encompassing featurelessness the patterns of my own ups and downs while fretting about needing to check the departure time of the next day’s ferry.

  Some days later I arrived unannounced at the rather grand-looking Nordfriisk Instituut in Bredstedt (in Frisian, Bräist) and asked if I could spend the day in its a
rchives. Anne Paulsen, the librarian, made tea and plied me with children’s books in Oomrang and Sol’ring. She told me about Alastair Walker, a Scottish academic who speaks five dialects of Frisian fluently, and Marron C. Fort, an elderly American who remains the only fluent speaker of one of Frisian’s rarest strains, Saterfrieschisches, and became its champion, exhorting its natives to preserve their own language.

  Anne herself was from Fohr, and thus spoke Fering. Curiously, she said, she was the rare product of a marriage between a man from the island’s west and a woman from the east, and so was pretty much fluent in both dialects.

  ‘Are they very unalike?’ I asked.

  ‘In subtle but important ways,’ she said.

  To my embarrassment, I told her I had yet to visit Fohr, though I had heard it was very pleasant. She was flattered to hear me say it, and it was a cue for her to ask if I’d heard the island’s anthem, ‘Leew Eilun Feer’.

  lhuar ik henkem üüb a eerd,

  alhü uk het det lun:

  at jaft dach man an ian eilun Feer,

  det leit mi boowen uun.

  An kaam ’k uk hen uun ’t lokelkst steed,

  huar surgen goor ej wiar,

  toocht ik dach äeder an uk leed

  am di, min eilun Feer.*

  I hadn’t, I said. It sounded like a very beautiful place.

  Fohr, she said, is perhaps the most traditional of the Frisians and, if such a thing was possible, increasingly so. At her First Communion in the 1970s she had been one of only a very few girls to wear the native costume, a black bonnet and waisted jacket, white pleated skirt, large breast piece made of silver filigree. But at her own daughter’s recent Confirmation more were wearing costume than weren’t. And other old island customs were coming back into currency.

  ‘Like what kind of thing?’ I asked.

  ‘Like Hualarjunkengonger,’ said Anne. The ‘dusk walking youth posse’ is an old courtship ritual in which young men go in a group with a suitor to the home of the object of his wooing.

  ‘Even now? In the Facebook age?’

  ‘Even now,’ she said. ‘My sister met her first husband through Hualarjunkengonger, and she is very much a part of the Facebook age . . . and divorced,’ leaving hanging the question as to whether Facebook or Hualarjunkengonger was the culprit for the break-up.

  The more Anne extolled the virtues of Fohr, in particular its museum devoted to the works of the artists Emil Nolde and Edvard Munch, the more I felt the pangs of its absence from my itinerary. But I also knew that the very mention of the island makes some shudder.

  Some days earlier a Dutch academic, Herman Vuijsje, had told me about Friedrich Christiansen, a native of Fohr, an air ace in the First World War awarded the Iron Cross for bombing English south coast holiday resorts, who served in the Second as Wehrmachtsbefehlshaber in den Niederlanden – supreme commander of the Netherlands. Christiansen was closely associated with German atrocities, Vuijsje told me, but nevertheless in 1951 the inhabitants of Wyk, the capital of Föhr, had named a street after him, a decision that was only revoked thirty years after.

  Whether it is or isn’t true that the natives of Schleswig-Holstein were particularly well disposed towards Hitler is an open question, but it is well documented that in the early 1930s there was general German Frisian support for the Nazis. While the origins of the Schleswig-Holstein Question were, as Palmerston observed so loftily, obscure and complex, the issue was ultimately whether Denmark or the confederation of states that became Germany in 1871 should possess the area. In 1920 a plebiscite had been held to determine once and for all the Danish–German boundary. The resulting changes traumatised inhabitants on both sides and stranded communities on the wrong side of the line so that even today the border is a terrible muddle of tongues.

  So it was no great surprise, as the Nord Friisk Instituut’s deputy director Fiete Pingel pointed out to me, that the Nazi slogan ‘Ein Volk’ had particular appeal to those in the area who felt themselves to be German. Naively, Schleswig-Holstein’s Frisian speakers were convinced that Hitler would encourage the use of Frisian dialects; after all, Nazi ethnological quackery, especially as espoused by some of the more esoterically minded SS bigwigs, had identified the Frisians as being among the purest of the Aryan races. However, the party became paranoiac about the notion of a people speaking a language they couldn’t understand, purged the Frisian Nazi associations of potential fifth columnists and flooded the islands with Gestapo spies. Pingel said that when he attempted to research his master’s dissertation on the origins of Nazi support in Schleswig-Holstein he met with ‘sullen resistance and hostility – it was very difficult’.

  In some ways the Schleswig-Holstein Question has yet to be solved, as has the Frisian Question. Perhaps the formulation of the first has been forgotten and that of the second still not properly structured. Some ten thousand people are thought to speak Frisian in Germany, but nobody has counted. And many people consider themselves to be Frisian without speaking it. Frisian is especially rich in dialects, but this also splinters the resources available to preserve it, and nobody thinks it a good idea to create a standard Frisian orthography because such artificiality would be self-defeating. In any event, it would be impossible to reach a consensus on what such a language should look like.

  The Frisians have disagreed with each other for more than a century as to whether they should pursue the goal of Frisian nationhood or merely seek greater autonomy and language rights. The potential for internecine bickering is, as Fiete Pingel acknowledged, ‘all too real’. Thus the Frisian language, so evocative of the sea, of rich dark brooding landscapes and a kind of collective existential loneliness, may one day disappear under the tide of change. But it is resilient.

  Frisian intellectuals have a roll-call of martyrs and heroes at their disposal. There is Albrecht Johanssen, who spent decades researching the definitive North Frisian dictionary (still a work in progress 250 years after commencement); Bende Bendsen, the author of a late-eighteenth-century grammar of Mooring Frisian; of course Theodor Storm, who though he wrote in German captured so completely the dark plains of Frisian fields, landscapes and emotions; and there is Jens Emil Mungard.

  Mungard was always stubborn. He wouldn’t accept money for his poems, lived most of his life on Sylt in dire poverty and was deeply distrusted by the Nazis, not least for his refusal to allow the translation of his work into German. His verse is simple, symbolic and rich with the fragrance of the dunes, and as I left Bredstedt – or Bräist – for the next stage of my journey I tongue-rolled a one-stanza verse, the easiest to remember for a non-Frisian speaker, no doubt doing it any number of injustices, but enjoying it all the same.

  Ströntistel

  Ströntistel es min bloom,

  Ströntistel neem’s uk mi.

  Jü gröört üp dünemsön,

  Ik üp de leewents-strön

  En proter haa wat bið!*

  Mungard died of disease at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, thirty-five kilometres from Berlin, during the war.

  Erskine Childers, my introduction to the Frisian Islands, had also died a martyr’s death, albeit a long way away and for a different cause.

  In awakening the British public to the extent of German naval expansion and suggesting that the militarisation of the German coast was as much for offensive as defensive purposes, Childers was hailed as both a patriot and a prophet. Speaking through Carruthers’s sailing companion Davies, Childers says presciently, ‘“Here’s this huge empire, stretching half over central Europe . . . They’ve licked the French, and the Austrians, and are the greatest military power in Europe. I wish I knew more about all that, but what I’m concerned about is their sea-power. It’s a new thing with them, but it’s going strong, and that Emperor of theirs is running it for all it’s worth.”’ Three years later Britain launched the Dreadnought, the largest and most formidable battleship ever to have been built, signalling the beginning of an arms race with Germany.

  In May
1910 the United Services Magazine had commented, ‘Those who have read Mr Childers’ brilliant book The Riddle of the Sands will not be surprised to learn that one of his predictions has been fulfilled. Germany has strongly fortified the Island of Borkum, ostensibly to guard against invasion but in reality for offence purposes . . . This new development upsets the balance of power in the North Sea, and our own government must meet it by a corresponding increase in our naval strength.’

  Childers came from a Protestant Anglo-Irish background and his wife Molly was the daughter of wealthy fervently pro-Irish parents. As a nod to The Riddle of the Sands their wedding present to the couple was a yacht, the Asgard. By 1914 Erskine and Molly both passionately supported Irish Home Rule, and when it became apparent that guns were being run to the Ulster Protestants in anticipation of a Unionist rebellion against Irish independence, they hatched a plan to level the playing field.

  With money raised from equally privileged and committed friends, Childers ordered 1,500 Mauser rifles, old-fashioned but highly effective, and 45,000 rounds of ammunition from a Hamburg arms dealer. It had been a difficult negotiation. The British government had persuaded the Germans to ban the export of weapons to Ireland, and it was only by persuading the dealers, Moritz Magnus, that they were destined for Mexico that an agreement could be reached. The guns were transferred from a German ship off Terschelling on the Dutch coast to Asgard and another yacht, and Erskine, Molly and a handful of companions sailed hard and fast across the North Sea, through the Channel and on to the Irish coast, close to the town of Howth, where they unloaded their contribution to the cause of free Ireland. The very next day Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo.