by Tom Blass
Ornithologists had been appalled at the prospect, although some concessions had been made to the birds, including an elaborate warning system to clear them off the cliffs. The Heligolanders themselves were more distraught. They had lobbied Clement Attlee hard and reminded him of their British links. The fact was, they were only accidentally German and they had suffered too during the war. As the Foreign Office debated (internally and interminably) the niceties of international law, entirely unconvinced that the British government had the right to deprive the islanders of their island, the Air Ministry demanded to be allowed to bomb Heligoland for at least another fifteen years even if this meant it ‘being rendered uninhabitable for ever’, which, the man from the ministry hinted darkly, ‘will depend on the use to which it is put for the trial of certain types of weapons likely to be developed during that period’.
Heligoland did not become an H-bomb test site. Britain aligned its nuclear programme with that of the United States and transferred its attentions to the Pacific. By 1950 an Air Ministry apparatchik would confess that he was ‘rather ashamed that very little bombing had been done recently on Heligoland’, that he had tried to get more done, ‘but without success’. Britain would now consider handing Heligoland back – on condition that Germany gave it something else to bomb, which wasn’t straightforward. That Britain should still be bombing Germany at all was a cause of great resentment ‘stoked up by the Communists’, many in the British government believed. Months before the transfer, the high commissioner had received a delegation of shrimp fishermen, who told him their prey were ‘like human beings, sensitive creatures who scuttle away into the sand if the water is disturbed by an exploding bomb’.
Eventually the German and British authorities identified a sandbank as the least bad choice for man and prawn alike, which meant the Heligolanders could return – first the men, to build houses (not reproductions of what had been destroyed but modern replacements now universally regretted) and then the women and children. The tourists began to come back too, and with them a semblance of the old way of life.
Erich-Nummel Krüss ordered me to wear a hat as I left his house. It was limb-judderingly cold. Down in the dock dollops of white water came over the quayside, and up in Überland the wind was persistent and strong. There was still time to take the long way around back to my hotel.
In summer the birds had been the main feature of the island, spilling up from the cliff edge like the foam in the quay, but in early December the island was at its most birdless. With the exception of stragglers, the gannets and guillemots which had so animated the cliff tops were wintering in Morocco and Tunisia. (The nests were bereft. So also, in some small measure, was I.) There was another marked change. The grass, which had been abundant and long, now did little to conceal the rubble extruding through the turf like shards of broken bone.
Erich had said the old Heligoland was now dead. Here, underfoot, lay the remnants of his island. A whole way of life had been taken – by emigration, by the loss of traditional livelihoods, ‘and by this’. He had pointed to one of the two computers on which he was assembling the island’s family tree. ‘Nobody even knows their neighbours any more.’ Though this last observation I had found difficult to believe.
There is a curious German habit of drinking outside in the winter, keeping the frost at bay with sausages and glühwein. At one such gathering I joined a small knot of hardy souls, mostly women of a certain age. I’d already met Judy, who owned the shoe shop and was the linchpin of a group of eggnog-quaffing friends. At another table stood a grim-looking group of men in dark blue uniforms – not, it turned out, policemen with no crime to fight but bomb-disposal experts. They looked worn out. Earlier in the day they’d uncovered two just waiting to go off. British bombs, one pointed out. He added that he’d send me the bill, which had Judy and her girls in fits.
The next day I ate a slow and potentially limitless Frühstuck and watched, safe and warm from behind the window in the breakfast room of the Hotel Panorama, a sea building as white-headed waves galloped towards the island. Then I prepared myself to meet Frank Botter, the Bürgermeister, a big man, a busy man, who burst (glancing at his watch, mobile phone hot in hand) into the office where I waited for him. The (Bavarian) director of tourism condescended to act as our makeshift interpreter, and we talked about the difficulties of ‘keeping this ship afloat’.
His role, he said, was to cajole, hustle, plead and bully for more funds from the government to make good the shortfall from declining tourist revenues. Tourist spending makes up 90 per cent of the island’s revenue, but the interests of the duty-free shops conflict with those of the hoteliers and restaurateurs – the first want short-stay visitors to stock up and go, the others want them to stay, and visitor numbers have dropped anyway, leaving a very small but significant black hole.
‘Every year we sell thirty-four million cigarettes,’ the Bürgermeister boasted. I quipped that Heligoland might not be such a healthy place to visit after all. He laughed (wheezily) and carried on talking about his plans for extending the tourist season, exploiting the seals and possibly offshore wind power. Perhaps, I suggested, Heligoland could become an offshore banking haven like the British Virgin Islands or the Isle of Man? He pooh-poohed the notion. But he gave greater consideration to the next: what did it mean to be a Heligolander in the twenty-first century?
Bürgermeister Botter exhaled thoughtfully before answering. It was important to understand that a true islander owed his loyalty to Heligoland first. Schleswig-Holstein came a distant second, and the emotional connection with Germany was very weak indeed. He narrowed his watery blue eyes and added, ‘To be a Heligolander, it is not sufficient to live on the island for twenty, thirty, forty or even eighty years. You have to be born here.’
Anywhere else in Europe such a statement would have been incendiary. Even on Heligoland it was inflammatory enough to make the director of tourism wince; who, it was rumoured, had his own pretensions to the Bürgermeistership. But then the incumbent hedged his bombshell with a flurry of diplomatic concessions. Anyone could even be Bürgermeister if they possessed the right attributes for the job. And only half of the current members of the island’s parliament met the criteria he’d just outlined. In any event, Heligoland would probably cease to exist as a separate cultural entity in a century; it would eventually be fully assimilated into Germany. But for the moment, he seemed to be saying, a true islander could feel Heligoland’s hurt in his very bones.
Many islanders have left in search of jobs (or driven out by gossip or boredom), but it also has its share of incomers, escaping the city, drawn by the sea, by love, or just because things happen that way. They were keen to talk, even if not openly, as if by explaining their decision to settle they might understand it better.
In Pinkus, a tiny bar just around the corner from the tiny Sparkasse, the tiny supermarket and the Unterland–Überland elevator, I met one such woman. In her late thirties, originally from Essen, she gave a shrug to the question as to why she’d moved to Heligoland, as if she’d hardly ever given it much thought; it had just come to pass. The island was lovely, she said. Everybody had been so friendly. The cliffs . . . the clean air. But she would only respond to questions by writing on the back of a beer mat and then scribbling over it as though erasing a thought crime. Not that anything she said was scandalous or incriminating. I had asked if it was expensive living in Heligoland. How did rental prices compare with Essen? What was the worst thing about the island? ‘Neugierig,’ she scribbled. Nosy. People talk.
Possibly she was right to be circumspect, particularly in Pinkus, where, she said, the Bürgermeister hangs out with his Heligolandish-speaking cronies, who keep all the best jobs for themselves and make sure the island runs their way – at least according to those outside the clique of ‘true-bloods’.
Walking along the quayside I struck up a conversation with another woman who had moved to Heligoland. Two years ago, she said, she had never even seen the sea, but then
fell in love with it and wanted to live as close as was possible. Away from the straining ears of Pinkus she divulged her thoughts freely, without resorting to a biro. Yes, she said, there were gay couples on the island, but not many, and no prostitutes because the men went to Hamburg on the ferry if they needed that kind of thing. The islanders were very close; once they’d accepted you as their own, you had made friends for life.
And yet there was a dark side. The day after she arrived to take up a post in a clinic a man came to say there was no job for her and she would have to find somewhere other to live than the room she thought she was renting. The room and the job were to be given to someone else. ‘Who told you this?’ I asked.
‘I cannot tell you. Someone from government. Pinkus people.’ Other bugbears of island life were that the men were in a constant state of sexual arousal, and – she repeated the word I’d seen written the night before – the neugierig-ness of everybody. When there’s nothing to gossip about, she said, they make up some. ‘You go for a drink with a friend and insist you only want a glass. They ply you with more and in the morning people look at you strangely – they’ve been told you’re a dipsomaniac.’ It was like living with the KGB.
Why then did she stay? Well, she said, the upside of the nosiness and the cliquishness was that you were never alone, never experienced the alienation which could creep up on you in the city, where nobody knows each other. And there was something special about the place. Never before had she decorated her home with images of the town or city in which she lived. In her old apartment in Stuttgart she had had no images of Stuttgart. But now something compelled her to decorate her tiny studio room with postcards depicting the cliffs, the quay, wicker beach chairs and gannets . . .
My suspicion – that Erich-Nummel Krüss’s belief that nobody knows their neighbours reflects the sorrow of the elderly that they are no longer in the thick of things more than it does any real shift – was confirmed. It was surely true that the island was in a state of flux, with new people coming and old families leaving, and the loss of traditional livelihoods had taken its toll on the cohesiveness of society. But people still knew each other and cared, in both good ways and bad. And without stressing the point too much, Forseti and his magical powers were still at large in the imagination of a new era of pilgrims – though many more come for the birds.
Seabirds are almost unique among the avian population in being entirely unconcerned by the prospect of having their bleak, squalid and precarious-looking homes inspected by unwinged interlopers. It is for this that so many visitors come, to look down (not figuratively, but from a height) upon the cacophonous tiers of birdlife huddling on their rocky nests.
Island lore dictates that if an outsider makes a native pregnant and looks as though he’s about to hotfoot it to Hamburg, the boats stay in harbour until he has ‘done right by her’. This apparently explains the lack of other crimes. Almost everyone will tell you that there hasn’t been a murder since 1800 – it is just impossible to make good your escape. It also accounts for one of the earliest (and greatest) books on the migration of birds ever written.
Heinrich Gätke was a wandering ship’s painter when he turned up on Heligoland in the 1840s for a brief sojourn, but took to the island, fully embracing its holiday atmosphere – and not to say the future Mrs Gätke. By the time of his death in the early 1900s he was renowned as a great ornithologist and the devisor of the Heligoland trap, neither a chess gambit nor the heading of an early chapter in his own history but a means of catching migrating birds which is still in use today.
Gätke and his assistants diligently observed, shot, netted and described Heligoland’s permanent residents, regular migrants and storm-blown oddities for half a century, allowing him to produce a magisterial work of natural history, invaluable to ornithologists measuring shifts in bird populations and plotting migration routes.
In the introduction to The Birds of Heligoland Gätke suggests that the island has little to recommend it to most species other than that it offers respite from the sea. It is no more than a pit stop for those birds that need it. Those that have the energy just pass it by. Only, he says, ‘those grotesque members of the bird world, the auks and guillemots, find an inapproachable dwelling on its steep and surf-beaten cliff; where on narrow crags and ledges amidst the fury of the storm they hatch their eggs unsheltered by a nest, while their harsh, unmelodious voices mingle in manifold discords with the roar of the never-resting waves’.
Since 1895 things have changed. The guillemots remain but they’ve literally been pushed down the pecking order by the relatively recent arrival of the gannets, which Gätke had lamented ‘unfortunately occurs only in solitary instances’. Now, by dint of sheer muscle and size, they occupy the best spots on the cliff faces, and in the summer are easily the most conspicuous residents, soaring disconcertingly just a few metres above the lip of the cliff on the airstream, their eyes blue and jewel-like and fixed upon your gaze. The guillemots by contrast (which deserve a stanza in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘Pied Beauty’) are squashed together like tenement dwellers further down. They are not grotesque, as Gätke says. I expect he didn’t really think they were either, but played to a Victorian gallery which valued the sleek and strong over the small and strange.
Gätke’s book showcases accretions of knowledge built up in layers. Had it been written on the back of even a decade’s or two decades’ observations it would have been too slim. ‘In the middle of January,’ he reports, ‘the starlings and skylarks make their appearance . . . [and] present however a very sorry appearance and appear to have but little foreboding of the joys of Spring.’ By March ‘large swarms of Snow Buntings make their appearance, and depart again after a brief and restless stay’; and later in the same month ‘the Fire-crested Wren appears in limited numbers; the Chiff-chaff may be seen in every shrub, and the White Wagtail is found in company with the Pied Wagtail’. And then in May ‘arrivals must be classed by preference the three species of Totanus – the Common Sandpiper, the Greenshank and the Spotted Redshank. Of these, crowds of the first frequent the rocky shore of the western coast of the island.’
Then as now the real crowd-pleasers were the raptors, which start to arrive in August, first the Hobby, then ‘a week later, young Sparrowhawks, Peregrines, Common Kestrels and Merlins, and young Ospreys, and Honey Buzzards’. Gatke reports that once ‘a perfectly white eagle was spotted, but unfortunately not shot’, although the island’s best ‘gunner’ Jan Auckens ‘had already levelled his gun at it a few paces off, and was in fact in the very act of pulling the trigger’ before it rose loftily and disappeared like the mythical beast it may well have been. Jan was one of three Auckens brothers – island legends both for their love and knowledge of birds and their unerring aim. The oldest, Oelrich, was known to everyone as Old Oelk.
Ornithology was different then, involving very much more shooting and stuffing. But while modern ornithologists have a different attitude from their predecessors they’re still grateful for the collections left in their wake. His own enabled Gätke to make valuable hypotheses about how, for example, some birds were able to change colour without moulting: ‘In regard to the Spotted Redshank, I have, I am sorry to say, only limited material at my command; still, such as I have affords me sufficient proof that in this case also the regeneration of colour is accompanied by a single regeneration of the white triangular marginal spots of the posterior flight feathers.’
For most species he gives the British common name, the Latin name, the German name and the Heligolandish name, revealing both the latter’s similarity to English and its archaic, picturesque attractiveness. The Red-Legged Falcon becomes the Road-futted Falk in the local tongue, Bonelli’s Warbler the Gru-hoaded Fliegenbitter, Leach’s Petrel the Storm-swoalk med uttklept stjertt (‘storm swallow with forked tail’) and the Osprey the Fesk-Oadlear (‘fish eagle’).
The fact that such a book was possible to research and compile conveys calm and continuity, but by the time
Gatke’s tome was published Heligoland had become a part of Germany. He had previously been a loyal public servant in the employ of the British administration and in 1890 was private secretary to the governor, Arthur Barkly. Barkly was given less than six weeks’ notice of the swap for Zanzibar, and in the best (though not only) tradition of British governorship cared deeply for his staff and subjects. Desperately, and without a great deal of support from the Colonial Office, which had as good as given up on Heligoland, he tried to secure assurances of employment for his staff, including Gatke. And what was to be done with the Union Jack? Bring it back, said the Colonial Office. And the portrait of the Queen? ‘Leave it on the island – she is the Kaiser’s grandmother after all . . .’
The burst of correspondence which accompanied the swansong of British rule is infused with dark uncertainty. Barkly describes how the islanders ‘hope against hope’ that the House of Commons will reject the bill; how the Heligolanders are perplexed by the presence of the world’s press, which had gathered to report on this remarkable change in the political geography of the North Sea. But with the kind of sigh that might accompany the end of a love affair grown tiresome, Britain disposed of its only North Sea colony with something verging on relief.
Many things have changed. But the youth are still courting, if not in the Spring Hall or on the cliff tops. On my last night in Heligoland Judy’s son Sven dragged us to Krebs Disco, a tiny place above a pub with a dance floor the size of a biscuit-tin lid, and the mise-en-scène for a drama revolving around Iris, thin-lipped and self-appointed island drama queen, and her long-standing relationship with the son of Klaus the lobster man. This feckless youth of thirty had still not proposed despite them having been together for six years. The fact that ‘everybody knew’ he was doing exactly what ‘everybody knew’ his father had done back in the 1970s – Klaus was, it seemed cast from the same mould as Tom Conti’s character in the film Shirley Valentine – was, one could not help think, because Iris had told them.