The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  It was the size of the larger boats – ships even – that scared the archaeologists. If true representations the vessels would have been of enormous length. It was safer to conclude that, like the phalluses, their size had been exaggerated to the point of absurdity, and the boats were figurative, perhaps illustrating some mythical otherworld where boats and men assumed impossible proportions. Further reassurance for that hypothesis lay in the fact that the structure of the boats looked so unorthodox, with two prolongations from the bow, one running out from the keelson, the other extending from the gunwale.

  However, in 1921 at Hjortspring on the Danish island of Åls fragments were found of a lime-wood ship, twenty metres in length, buried with an accompanying treasure trove of weapons and shields. The Tanumshede carvings had been dated to the Bronze Age, and the boat fragments to the Iron Age, but the match between them was otherwise close. Evidently, the images ground into the granite slabs in those dark forests represented very much more than aspirational thinking.

  Being so unique and such an important clue for the reconstruction of pre-literate Europe, the Hjortspring Boat has been the subject of rigorous forensic examination and fanciful speculation. Several replicas and reconstructions have been made so as to better understand her handling and the purpose to which she would have been put. There is a consensus that she and similar vessels had carried a hundred or so raiders up the creeks and channels of Als for a surprise attack on the island, but that the islanders had repulsed the assault, breaking up the boat and sacrificing its remains by placing it in the bog where it would be found two millennia later. But the origins of her builders remain shrouded in conjecture. All that can be said for certain is that her discovery breathes life into the carvings at Tanumshede and its surrounding forests and fields.

  The Vitlycke Museum at Tanumshede (which serves excellent meatballs with mashed potato and lingonberry sauce) has reconstructed a Bronze Age village complete with smoky wattle-and-daub longhouses, pig pens and animal skins. The vision it conjures up of ancient life is convincingly dour, sooty and unhygienic but seems at odds with the lean figures prancing on their boats, apparently unbowed by the assumed miseries of pre-modern life.

  Aside from the great chasm of time, the quest for ‘authenticity’ faces other impediments; for while the dark stillness of the forests feels ancient and unaltered, that impression is misleading. The present coastline is five miles from where it was at the time the carvings were made, when the artists’ stones rang out within earshot of the sea. And, for all their solemnity, these forests are relatively recent. In the Bronze Age this part of Europe was enjoying a post-glacial bounce in temperature: where now the trees are evergreen they were then deciduous. It is quite possible that in addition to enjoying a sunnier climate the people were of a sunnier disposition than their modern counterparts. Either way, by failing to divert their attentions toward the creation of a written language, they left little of themselves but their clever flirtatious pictorial extravagances, with which they have taunted us for so many centuries.

  *See http://sacred-texts.com/atl/olb/index.htm

  9

  A Postcard from Atlantis

  Shrimps are like human beings, sensitive creatures who scuttle away into the sand if the water is disturbed by an exploding bomb.

  Delegation of German shrimp fishermen writing to the UK authorities, 1952

  It juts from the German Bight, out of kilter with the other islands stretching along the coast from Belgium to Denmark. Appropriately anomalous and alone, for if the North Sea were to possess a holy of holies, it would be this former British outpost, rough-cut from rare red granite and garlanded by shoals, fog and sinewy currents.

  Heligoland has connotations of mouldering almanacs and elephant guns, of a memory hurriedly packed away in a mildewed sea trunk. Some believe it to be the original Atlantis and claim that there exists a mysterious connection with the pharaohs. Less improbably the pagan god Forseti is said to have had his shrine here until it fell victim to the zeal of a Belgian saint. And the Heligolanders – in whose veins the North Sea is supposed to course – still insist there is something special about their island, that it possesses magical powers like Ayers Rock or Glastonbury Tor. They also describe themselves as the smallest nation on earth.

  Certainly the island is small – just a mile at its longest and a quarter of a mile at its widest. It is remote for a North Sea island, thirty miles from the north German coast but well protected by sandbanks and wrecks. Geologically it is one of the strangest features of the North Sea. But it is its story which makes it truly unlike anywhere else. Parchments, ledger books, secret memos and telegrams attest to the island’s exaggerated footprint on history, belying the simple truth that it is no more than a heft of rock struggling to support 1,600 people. They’re deceptive, these bundled old documents. The island they describe seems lost in time – and provide little help in answering the question, ‘What does it mean to be a Heligolander?’

  A first trip made in June proved no use. Whatever the island possesses of a soul lay submerged beneath the tramping feet of day-trippers, and the natives were too busy selling ice creams to take time out to talk. But returning in December, ferried across a flat sea alongside half a dozen tourists and a prospective bird ringer, it seemed tongues had been loosened by loneliness and island fever. The old island came a little more into view. Heligoland tucks history beneath its starchy cuffs. As do the islanders, gruff on the surface, true to the Frisian reputation, but warm and engaging beneath.

  For the first hour of the outbound leg a pearly fog rubbed up against the bows of the ferry like a lovesick ghost. The captain sounded the foghorn, which wailed mysteriously over the water, and told me that he couldn’t talk. It was too dangerous. Then the fog broke and I knocked shyly on the door of the bridge. The fog, he said, was very deceptive. The sea’s mood could change in minutes. And he showed me a photograph of his ferry in a sea so heavy two-thirds of her bottom showed as tumultuous crests broke high above the bridge.

  Captain Ewald Bebber’s unremarkable features (medium height, mousy hair, indeterminate age) belied Heligoland’s famous maritime skills, which once gave the island its reputation as the home of the finest pilots. Other North Sea communities could turn their backs on the waves when the land offered richer pickings. The North Sea diet reflects the fecundity of the land as much as that of the sea: fish soup lathered with Sahne (cream), sole baked in cream and butter, Labskaus – corned beef and herrings and beetroot. But save for a smattering of potatoes, half a dozen cows and some sheep, Heligoland lacks space for grazing or growing. All the islanders collectively possess is their commanding position near the mouths of Germany’s great northern rivers and a mastery of the sea.

  The day trippers disembark bewildered and a little underwhelmed. The great red cliffs are invisible from the dock, and the only immediately apparent feature is the island’s radio mast. Not a single one of the island’s clutch of buildings – suburban, two-storey, dark brick, modern – is of architectural interest, and there is no town to speak of, more a village split, as it has always been, between Unterland at dock level and Überland on the plateau, joined by a staircase and an elevator. The whole island can be walked in the space of an hour.

  Few outsiders had visited Heligoland before 1807, although the islanders were well known as the ‘nomads of the North Sea’ for their knowledge of the tides and shoals, their curious dialect of Frisian and their distaste for both meat and warfare. Then the British made a gentlemanly, bloodless conquest at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, and Heligoland was on the map. Despite teething troubles (the first harbour master complained the islanders were ‘little short of robbers’ and quite probably wreckers) the British came to see it as something of a Shangri-La, a vision of what they wanted their own nation to be but in miniature.

  There were no satanic mills on Heligoland, nor scarcely any crime. The first ever travel guide wonders that the jail possessed only one cell, which had lain empty for a
s long as anyone could remember. No less stirring, its crimson-cloaked maidens were comely and ‘went without stays’. And in summer the island buzzed with couples ‘walking together about the cliffs or in the corn fields’ or dancing ‘a curious dance’ while their elders looked on drinking beer, tea or an ancient infusion called Pompompfl. When the mercury dropped they all came together on the frozen ponds to ‘skait most gracefully . . . skimming over a surface smooth as glass, the air crisp and nipping in the strong frost, and the clear blue sky gemmed with innumerable and sparkling stars’.

  Heligoland became a resort. Tourists mixed the ‘exhilaration of sea-bathing’ with the pleasures of an island culture which bordered on the licentious; it was rumoured that the girls took to the waters ‘wearing no more than they had on the day they were born’. And it acquired a bohemian edge alongside less cerebral attractions: German writers and activists, including the visionary poet Heinrich Heine, escape the censor. Strindberg came to marry here. The theatre flourished, and periodicals banned in repressive German states could circulate freely.

  Much, but not everything, has changed. The grandstand view of a mercurial sea remains sublime. Nothing else in Germany, whose coast is flat and generally unspectacular, compares. Tax-exempt alcohol and tobacco softens the blow of high prices for food and lodging – as it did in 1840, when the British reduced tariffs as an inducement for tourists. And there are the peculiar powers attributed to the island’s geology. Asthma sufferers report their symptoms to be entirely alleviated by the pollen-free atmosphere. Others just find it a great place ‘to be’.

  History has robbed the natives of such existential ease. They are fiercely loyal to the island; it is the one steady thing around which they have been able to construct an identity otherwise chipped away by war, evacuation and economic uncertainty. Given what it’s been through, it’s curious that anyone still lives here at all. Pilotage has long been in the care of the state; there is little of a living to be made in fishing or lobsters, and tourist numbers are nothing like those in the island’s heyday. But somehow they cling on.

  I had been in correspondence with Erich-Nummel Krüss for some weeks before my return. He was the curator of the museum and, he said, ‘knew a little about the island’. Like Captain Bebber he had begun work on his father’s lobster boat before roaming the seas as a ship’s captain, returning in later life to become the harbour master. Since retiring he has devoted his time to the collection and assiduous collation of island mementoes, fragments of a glorious past.

  He welcomed me into his quiet, neat house, Haus Zanzibar, on the corner by the church and the mini-market. His home office was well ordered and arranged like a captain’s cockpit (which he appreciated me noticing), shelves lined with books about the sea, the island, and albums containing a century and a half’s worth of photographs. The thronging seafront in 1864. Bathing carriages and bloomered swimmers. Craggy fishermen ferrying tourists to their wicker beach chairs in round-bottomed rowing boats. Tiny fishermen’s cottages, fish strung out to dry between them like laundered smalls. The shops, hotels and restaurants were distinguished and well mannered in a hybrid style incorporating municipal German and Home Counties English vernaculars.

  Tourists and natives alike were having a very nice time, the former relieving the latter of their reliance on their ancient, noble but dangerous means of subsistence. Revenues from tourism were such that when, in the 1880s, a British visitor asked how the locals occupied themselves in winter he could be truthfully told ‘by counting the fortunes made in the summer’. But the British had taken Heligoland for strategic reasons, not as a plaything. By now they were wondering quite what purpose it served, while in Berlin the Kaiser wanted it very much.

  Lord Salisbury was recovering from the Russian flu when in a moment of lucidity he saw how, if carefully played, Heligoland could be given up for a larger prize. Salisbury, ponderous, bushy-bearded giant, simultaneously prime minister and foreign secretary, had an astute understanding both of Germany’s grievances and of the way to give the impression of alleviating them to his own advantage.

  In May 1890 the German empire was new and still finding its feet as one of the great powers, and Kaiser Wilhelm II was anxious to make his mark. Wilhelm had been at loggerheads with Otto Von Bismarck almost from the day of his coronation, and a power struggle between the two led to the Iron Chancellor’s resignation. (Wilhelm had accused Bismarck of being trigger-happy in his treatment of socialists and agitators.) As a colonial power Germany lagged way behind France and Britain. It had ambitions in East Africa, but these constantly chafed against the British presence, with the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which lies off the coast of today’s Tanzania, a hotbed of intrigue, schemes and mutually held suspicions. Nearer home, Heligoland had become an all-too-visible symbol of Britain’s imperial reach. Most painfully of all it threatened to neuter the strategic advantage which would be gained by the planned Kiel Canal, which would link the North and the Baltic Seas and was thought by Germany’s admiralty to be essential in the event of a naval war.

  Over the course of a long hot summer Salisbury planted the idea of swapping Heligoland for Zanzibar, and did it so adroitly that the German Foreign Ministry became half convinced they had thought of it first. Negotiations – secret and unminuted – took place at Windsor Castle between Salisbury himself and the Kaiser’s ambassador, Count Leo of Caprivi. Queen Victoria was not amused when she found out. She had not visited Heligoland but liked the idea of it, the Heligolanders being her only non-British northern European subjects. She told Salisbury that the transfer was ‘a very serious question which I do not like. The people have always been very loyal . . . and it is a shame to hand them over to an unscrupulous despotic government like the German without first consulting them.’ It also set a bad precedent. Salisbury would next be ‘proposing to give up Gibraltar, and soon nothing will be secure, and all our Colonies will wish to be free. I very much deprecate it and am anxious not to give my consent unless I hear that the people’s feelings are consulted and their rights are respected. I think it is a very dangerous proceeding.’ In short, the loss of the tiny island undermined the entire empire.

  Difficult questions were asked in Parliament. Opposition MPs condemned Salisbury’s blithe lack of concern for British subjects, his imperialist horse-trading and the lack of attention to detail – what, for example, would happen to British fishing rights? Who would man the lightships? One peer suggested that Britain had ‘too good a deal’ and it wouldn’t take long before the Germans noticed. But Salisbury argued that at stake was a settlement of the East Africa question, and thus control of the headwaters of the Nile. The Nile was the key to Egypt and the Suez Canal, and Suez was the key to India, which Britain could never give up. When the MPs finally entered the division lobby, the overwhelming vote was ‘Aye.’ The official transfer, it was agreed, would happen on 9 August 1890, and the governor of Heligoland was duly ordered to start packing his things in readiness to go home.

  Erich Kruss’s photograph collection records what happened next: the governor’s wife raising a leg-of-mutton muslin sleeve to dry a tear as the Union Jack is lowered and the imperial eagle raised; the first visit of the gloating Kaiser welcoming his new subjects into the fold of the Fatherland. The images become more personal from this point: Erich’s father and grandfather, chisel-featured, lean-jawed, sea-forged men among men; his mother as a child in an island pageant. The family home. And then the submarines and big guns.

  During the Great War Heligoland was evacuated of civilians. By 1917 U-boats based in its dock were taking a devastating toll on Allied shipping and threatening to lose the British the war. The islanders were housed in camps on the mainland and suffered discrimination by the German authorities on account both of their recent British links and their Frisian origins. When they returned, they found their island had been transformed into little more than an island-sized gun platform. Their homes, in which the military had been billeted, were for the most part ransacked and despoile
d.

  The next bout would take a much greater toll. On 18 April 1945 thirteen-year-old Erich sheltered in a bunker deep in the rock as almost a thousand British bombers reduced the island to dust. He and the rest of the islanders emerged into a smouldering moonscape and were whisked back to the mainland, whence not a single one would return to live on the island for seven years. It was what the British did after the war that was extraordinary. ‘The bombing in 1945, that was in war. And war is war,’ Erich-Nummel Krüss said. ‘But there was no war in 1947. And there were still Heligolanders alive who considered themselves British; they even had British passports.’ He breathed the sigh of an old man still trying to rid himself of a sense of betrayal.

  VE day found Britain once again caught up in the affairs of Heligoland. The terms of the German surrender permitted the British to destroy its defensive structures, in particular the U-boat pens. The force required would have to be on a gargantuan scale and, given the looming Cold War, there was a great deal of interest in everything to do with large explosions. And the Air Ministry was on the scout for a new bombing range. What was codenamed Big Bang saw the bowels of the island packed with some 6,800 tons of explosive (4,000 warheads, 8,971 depth charges, 1,250 tons of TNT, 200 tons of cyclonite, 2,834 beach mines, 51,566 shells of various calibres and 9,400 cartridges). Two years to the day after Erich Kruss entered the air-raid shelter in 1945, the explosives were simultaneously detonated, sending a mushroom cloud 8,000 feet into the sky.