A Cruise on the Rhine Part 5

Friday
Our final day on the Rhine. Brilliant sunshine once again. We take the bus to Cologne. We were due to moor there but because a berth wasn't available our ship was forced to remain at Bonn. (We had a letter about this before we sailed. It is a tremendous pity. To have arrived by river and be berthed in this great city, to be able to walk from the ship to the Cathedral and round the old town, all this would have been unforgettable. And convenient.)

Köln is Omummy's city, my grandmother. She was born here in the 1890s (nobody is quite sure exactly when) and only moved to Düsseldorf when she married my grandfather. I recall that she spoke proudly of her home town, even though by that time it had been flattened by allied bombing. (Memorable quip from a fellow cruiser later on: "Yes, the Cathedral's very fine, but there's not much else to see or do in Cologne: Bomber Harris saw to that!") I think she regarded it as a cut above Düsseldorf (Cologne being a Roman town, a centre of the Holy Roman Empire, the seat of catholic Germany and all that). She may even have thought of it as "trade" though it was precisely a successful upper middle class trade family she had married into (Otto Leyser owned a factory that made leather goods).

The Cathedral is a huge black apparition which, when you have once set eyes on it, you can never forget. It dominates the skyline for miles around, these two enormous spires fingering the sky. Although it suffered in the war, Bomber Harris deliberately spared it, not out of love for medieval gothic architecture but because it was such a useful landmark on the river in guiding his air crews to their destinations. I doubt if the stonework will ever be cleaned up (though the sculptures are being conserved): the blackness of Cologne Cathedral is part of what gives it its emblematic quality. I had not realised that it was only completed in the nineteenth century, after a pause in building operations of a full four hundred years. The medieval crane remained in position on the unfinished north tower throughout those centuries, and there was discontent among citizens when this endearing icon of their cathedral was finally removed when the towers were being finished.

Crowds swirl about inside, but unlike at Strasbourg you can sit quietly in the nave to take in the immensity of this building. It is extraordinary as a masterpiece of soaring gothic. The light streams through the clerestory windows picking out people sitting in nave and imparting to them a transcendent beauty (or maybe I mean binging out the beauty they already have as human beings). Artists have long noticed how human hair acquires a striking delicate translucency when lit by direct light against a dark background.

There is so much to notice and admire: the sculptures on the piers, not only exquisite in their own right, but positioned at exactly the right height to accentuate the scale; the altars; the tombs, the glass, the paintings, the shrines, the stalls in the quire. The shrine to the Magi behind the high altar is a rare treasure. There is an exceptionally beautiful fifteenth century sculpture of the Blessed Virgin on one of the piers that you could spend hours contemplating as you recite the Glorious Mysteries and sing Regina Coeli. Everything here is magnificent, nothing shoddy or second rate. It ranks with the very finest of the gothic cathedrals of northern France. Indeed, modelled as it is on Amiens, you could say that Cologne is an outlier of that great French tradition, as Westminster Abbey is.

Then we visit the treasury. This is one of the most important cathedral treasuries in Europe, like Sens, and it should not be missed. It is built into the Roman and medieval fabric that lies underneath the cathedral, not only its own foundations but the Wall of the Roman city as well. That already makes it a remarkable space in its own right, two entire levels beautifully yielded up by the substrata to create a museum that it would be hard to equal among cathedrals. In it there are vestments, episcopal insignia, sacred vessels, shrines, monstrances, stones, sculptures and manuscripts. I suppose that if you didn't know what all these artefacts were for, you might find it a trifle perplexing, but even so, there is exquisite beauty everywhere and it would be a dull soul who was not inspired by it.

We go back into the Cathedral. Stewards are clearing the nave because a midday prayer service is about to begin. The announcement tells us that we do not need to leave if we wish to join the service. I am sensitive about how people are handled when religion and tourism collide. It is not managed badly here, though it's a pity that a thousand people all leave just when a service is about to begin. I wish we didn't have to be among them. But we have a bus to catch back to the ship. We walk round the outside of this great building. Rounding the east end we come across the railway station with its beautiful wrought iron train shed and the great Victorian girder bridge that carries the railway across the Rhine. This exciting proximity of a great station and a great cathedral, the intersection of the technologies of different eras is hard to parallel anywhere else (though Newcastle is another example, and I suppose St Pancras is also an attempt romantically to imagine medievalism in the context of a railway). I remember that I once changed trains here on my way to Bavaria. I only had an hour and recall how I wished I could have gone inside the Cathedral to have a look. Now I have, and it has made a memorable climax to the cruise.

 

After lunch I walk along the river to Bonn's "Museum Mile". The Museum of the History of Federal Germany where I am first headed is closed. So I go on to the fabulous Museum of Modern Art. Before I even step foot inside the place I know this is going to be a great experience. It is housed in a building of real quality and power designed by Axel Schultes and completed in 1992. It's a beautiful succession of spaces and artfully placed stairways and corridors that create a real sense of unity in diversity. The interplay of light and shade is wonderfully managed as the different rooms flow into one another; and on this sunny day, the effects are especially magical. I just can't stop photographing this building (which is allowed without flash).

 

There are hardly any visitors. Museum staff in uniform stand to attention as soon as I come into a room, and follow me round at a discreet distance. There is no eye contact: in this silent, quasi-sacred space, visitors are regarded as contemplatives who must be left to themselves to experience the museum in our own way. There is something quaint about their studied but watchful politeness, their wish not to get in the way while at the same time being aware of each visitor's every move. Maybe all Museum attendants, like cathedral vergers, are educated in this art, but I've not seen it done to such perfection before. One man looks for all the world like Einstein with his hair cut. I long to photograph him but it would be obtrusive.

 

So I concentrate on the art instead. The top floor is avant garde, much of it interesting and enjoyable, but it isn't where my heart lies. That is on the first floor where there is an impressive survey of Rhineland expressionism, including a large body of paintings by August Macke. He was the leading light of Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) movement, a friend of Kandinsky, Klee and Marc who lived much of his life in Bonn. He was killed at the front in 1914 at the tender age of 27. Such a loss - what might he have produced if he had lived another 50 years?

We enjoy our last supper and start saying farewells. We spend an hour on deck as the sun sinks. A Victorian brick church on the opposite bank glows fiery in the Pentecostal light. The river is ultramarine. Upstream the tall twentieth century buildings belonging to Bonn's era as capital of the German Bundesrepublik throw a reflected light on to the wine dark Rhine. Youngsters throng the promenade enjoying a Friday night out. A breeze stirs and the air is suddenly cool. We are not as young as all these teenagers. It is time for bed.

 

Saturday

Up at dawn and ready to disembark at 7 o'clock. We get to Brussels with over two hours to spare. We check in, go through security and sit down for a coffee and a final chat with some of the people we have got to know on the cruise. Soon our train is rushing towards England. The sun continues to shine.

A Cruise on the Rhine Part 4

Wednesday
I don't have high hopes of Rüdesheim. But we make a good beginning at the Jacobi Church. It was gutted at the end of the war but has been beautifully rebuilt in a contemporary idiom behind the original facade. Original sculptures have been reinstalled in this new setting and it works to perfection. We are struck by the contemporary bronze stations of the cross. This is a pilgrim church of the Camino and it feels well used for prayer and reflection.

By contrast, the rest of the town (almost) has sold its soul. In the Drosselgasse you can buy cuckoo clocks (real and fake), hear Edelweiss pumped out of loudspeakers (this song beloved by the Austrians in defiance of Hitler - see The Sound of Music), buy lederhosen, marzipan and Riesling, be served beer by a girl in peasant costume, and at either end, board the ubiquitous Noddy trains. We stop for a drink. Coffee and tea for two costs us nearly €9. At the far end of the town things improve with a ruined castle, a wine museum and lovely views up to the vineyards. But Rüdesheim did not require a stopover. I doubt we shall ever come again.

We enter the Rhine Gorge. Here it is fairy tale Germany straight out of Wagner, the Grimm brothers and a thousand scenic postcards. But while the risk of parody exists, this is an undeniably beautiful stretch of the river with pretty villages, churches and castles at every loop of the river. You feel you are the centre of both history (the Holy Roman Empire) and - in the strict sense of the word, myth. We pass the rock of the Loreley and I imagine Rhine Maidens playing beneath our feet. It calls for the opening of Rheingold to be played through the ship’s loudspeakers. A fierce northerly wind is funneled through the Gorge. We arrive at Loreley Stadt (is it really called that?) and St Goar. After lunch we board the coach again.

It doesn’t turn out as planned. We are promised a trip to the Loreley rock. When we get there we find ourselves put through the "experience", i.e. a visitor centre complete with an audio-visual presentation. This consists of a stereoscopic film featuring the Rhine in its various guises. The film is fuzzy, the stereoscopic spectacles are irritatng, the light levels of the film are too low and there is no commentary. Is this a grumpy old man speaking? Anyway, we learn nothing about the Loreley myth, how the poet Heinrich Heine elaborated it, and how romantic writers and painters latched on to it. We are ushered into the cafe for tea and cakes. Then we are told that because the normal path to the rock is impassible owing to big development works, and the alternative route will take half an hour, we won't be able to visit the rock after all! This is a big disappointment as the Loreley was billed as a highlight. I was looking forward to indulging in Wagnerian thoughts about the Rhine and its gold. This experience feels like an enacted parable of tourism-in-our-time. You go to the visitor centre, watch the presentation, enjoy your cake, and hey! - there’s no need to see the actual attraction at all!
 

We drive on to the Niederwald which we have seen from below at Rudesheim. The monument is a celebration of the unification of the German Reich after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It is on a huge scale, full of imperial rhetoric about pride in the fatherland, the virtues of taking up arms for your country, the heroic ideals for which we should live and die. The enormous figure of Germania dominates the composition while the personifications of War and Peace that have placed her on her throne are depicted at her side. It strikes me that like the Loreley which we did not see, this heady nationalism is directly inspired by romanticism. Archaic and absurd it may be, but we mustn't underestimate the hold nationalistic ideas have on people today. The unification of Germany has been an immensely powerful idea and cast a long shadow over European history ("Deutschland über alles" meaning "stop thinking provincially or city by city. Think Germany, think the Holy nation before everything else.")

We dock at Andernach where there is a wonderful sunset over the river. Yet again my camera falls for it. Then we go for a walk in the pretty medieval town and enjoy meandering among its medieval walls, towers, bastions, houses and churches in the gloaming.

Thursday
Ascension Day. We explore the ancient and interesting city of Andernach on the right bank. It is an intimate place with a strongly enclosed feel thanks to its walls and bastions. The town is silent, Ascension Day being a public holiday. We visit the Romanesque Cathedral, climb the Round Tower, wander the streets enjoying the old buildings and the churches. The city authorities have taken a lot of trouble to interpret their history to visitors. There are information plaques in three languages at all the sites, and maps to guide you from place to place. It is exemplary.

The bells of the Cathedral and of the Protestant parish church ring out for services on this feast day. We go back to the ship through one of the medieval gates. We look up and there, above our heads, are two hives with bees buzzing round them. It is not a place to linger. But we recall the story of the medieval baker boys who, when invaders were at the gates, dropped bee-hives from above the gate on to the luckless enemy heads.

We glide down the sunny river to Bonn. We join the walking expedition into the city-centre. Our guide is fluent, knowledgeable, knows how to condense information into digestible chunks and above all, keeps us moving. After a tour of some of the principal locations, we go to Bonn’s great shrine, Beethoven's birthplace. It's moving to know for a certainty that my grandmother will have brought my mother here in childhood from their home downstream in Düsseldorf, possibly many times. She (my mother) always used to say when I was young that Beethoven was her favourite composer. Perhaps she felt an affinity with him because of their common Rhineland origins. Later on she turned more to Mozart and Haydn, but she never lost that first love.

The house is the only one of several associated with Beethoven in Bonn to have survived. It's a fine museum that displays many key documents, paintings and artefacts associated with Beethoven such as his pianos (one is an early Broadwood, so we have that in common), his manuscripts, the letter in which he confesses to his brother that his deafness is driving him mad and he intends to commit suicide, and his ear-trumpets and other devices with which he desperately tried to stave off his deteriorating condition. We see his life-mask as well as his death-mask, his will and a painting of the crowds who gathered for his memorial service in 1827. It is impressively done and touches me deeply in much the same way as visiting Haydn's mausoleum at Eisenstadt in Austria did.

We leave the group and go round some of the principal churches. The former Jesuit church is now Old Catholic whose bright cheerful interior speaks of a church that is loved and prayed in. The Münster is a grand Romanesque church with rather too much baroque furnishing and decoration inside, but is still a noble building. The church has a lovely pure Romanesque cloister with a fountain in the middle, a bit like Fontenay in Burgundy, but more intimate. Then we go to Saint Remigius, a church of the Friars Minor, where we see the font at which Beethoven was baptised in 1770.

J goes off into town for a walk. I sit on deck for a while and then decide it's time to listen to The Archers on the iPlayer.
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A Cruise on the Rhine Part 1

We are cruising on the Rhine, upstream from Cologne to Strasbourg and back down again, some 700km of river for the round trip. The theme is Cathedrals and Castles of the Rhine. I am looking forward to boarding at Cologne, my grandmother's city, in the shadow of the mighty Cathedral we shall visit on the return leg. Unfortunately it doesn't turn out as planned. A catalogue of incidents on the coach journey between the Brussels Eurostar terminal and the Rhine delays our arrival until late in the evening. By then our ship, Rex Rheni, has had to leave the berth at Cologne and begin the voyage. So we join her (him? this is a Rex) at midnight on the quayside at Bonn. It sounds romantic until you have to do it.

 

By morning we are berthed at Linz-am-Rhein (not to be confused with the big Austrian Linz on the Danube through which sailed on our last cruise). It's a pleasant, uneventful little town whose half-timbered houses clamber up the hillside. The church crowns the summit. Not a lot is stirring as we stroll the pretty pedestrianised streets. In one of the squares underneath a great lime tree there is a captivating sculpture of an old woman going about her daily work. She has a lovely face. It's endearing that the vernacular is captured in this central spot, rather than the heroic. It goes with the place somehow.

J asks me what I am feeling about being back in Germany and in the region of my mother's birth. I find I don't really have an answer to this. I love Germany, and I like the thought that when my mother was a child my grandparents might have brought her to some of these ancient Rhineland towns and villages that would have been an easy day's drive from their home in Düsseldorf. (But then I don't even know if they have a car, though I guess that an upper middle class Jewish family like theirs would have done.) I'm also aware of my personal journey towards establishing my identity late in life. The German Embassy is unsure if I qualify for dual German citizenship on the grounds of my mother's German-ness, And while I want at all costs to retain my European citizenship after Brexit, towards which this could be one route, am I really trying to honour a part of my personal history as well, the part for which I eel a much deeper cultural affinity than I do for my father's unquestioned Englishness?

We sail upstream. Kilometre and 100 meter posts chart our progress, like railway mileposts. The countdown is to the limit of navigation around Basel, not to the source. The thickly wooded valley sides steepen. Other cruise ships pass by, mostly bigger and smarter than ours. There is a lot of cargo traffic on this river (as there is on the railway that runs alongside the river). Castles sit proud among the trees, though none of them looks particularly ancient.

We arrive at Koblenz. The name is from the Latin Confluentia, that is, the confluence of two rivers, the Moselle and the Rhine. I feel I ought to have known or guessed this, but didn't. We berth alongside the old town on the Moselle. A guided tour departs for the imposing castle that crowns the right bank of the Rhine. We have already decided that in cities, it's far better (and cheaper) to create our own itinerary with the help of a good guide-book. So we set off to explore what is called the Deutschen Ecke, the "German Corner" of the triangle defined by the meeting of the rivers.

We stand on what feels like the prow of a ship. You can watch the waters mingle. The faster-flowing Rhine is muddier, seeming to pollute the cleaner Moselle. I think about the contrasting origins of these two great European rivers: the one from the forested uplands of eastern France, the other from a glacier in the distant Alps. It reminds me of home and the confluence of the North and South Tyne a few miles from our village. There too the rivers bring different geographies and different histories: the North Tyne out of the Cheviots and the South Tyne rising on the slopes of Cross Fell in the North Pennines. I must go to Warden where the two rivers meet, and check which water is the clearer.

 

Rearing up at this "corner" of Koblenz is a gigantic equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I. He stands on a monumental basalt temple-like structure with sweeping stairs rising up to it on both sides. It demonstrates the unbridled confidence of the unified German Empire energised by the Prussian spirit. In this heroic monument with dragons and serpents sculpted into its base, there is not a trace of self-doubt. Later in the day I venture up the staircase. The interior of the temple is a marvellous grid of basalt columns and narrow aisles. You peer out of these dark alleys at the framed church towers of Koblenz. Incongruously it reminds me of the Romanesque crypt chapel of Durham Castle, or perhaps more in tune with the subject matter, of the pyramids in Egypt. At sunset, the volcanic stone glows magnificently in the sinking red light. More associations, this time of the Whin Sill and the Roman Wall that strides along it. Roman imperialism, Egyptian deification - Wilhelm would have liked that.

 

We visit the medieval churches in the old town. All have been rebuilt after severe allied bombing. They are fine, but have that scraped look of heritage that has been painstakingly restored. For us the ecclesiastical highlight is the Jesuitenkirche, the Jesuit church hidden away behind the shops and offices of the busy city-centre. The facade is original, but the interior is entirely new. The cool restful nave is a beautiful space with a strong spiritual sense of place. 20th century windows depict both biblical scenes such as the Prodigal Son, and events from the life of St Ignatius of Loyola. There is a touching sculpture showing Ignatius being embraced by Jesus, a tender piece that is a world away from the militaristic depictions of him as the fervent soldier of his Lord.

After a day of varied weather we walk back to the meeting of the waters in glowing evening light. I am tempted to take scores of photographs of this glorious epiphany, but know that it's a seduction to capture what is sentimentally beautiful rather than artistically interesting or in any way new. The exception is the way the basalt of the Wilhelm Monument responds to this light, so I do allow myself a few images of that, to be entitled "Studies in Black and Red", or, in Stendahlian mode perhaps, Le Rouge et Le Noir.

Next morning, it is raining. The ship sets off up the Rhine. This section of the river, the Rhine Gorge, is exceptionally lovely. I sit in our cabin by the window, camera at the ready. I can get Radio 3 on my phone so Rob Cowan keeps me company with Essential Classics. Chateaux pass by, and below them, villages with half-timbered houses and church spires. The cloud wraps round the highest of the wooded summits. Vineyards stripe the hillsides, each one a subtly different shade of green from the next. Working them must be challenging, given the steep gradients. At the foot on both sides of the river, trains hurry along what must be one of Europe's most scenic railways. I glimpse cyclists on the road entrapped in plastic, heads down against the driving rain.

 

We berth at Boppard. We set off in pouring rain. When you only visit a place once in your lifetime (probably), you know you'll always remember it and imagine it in that day's weather. The sun always shines in Sorrento. It always rains in Boppard (and Prague and Buxton and Limoges and a thousand other places we've landed on once in our lifetimes). It's full of riverine charm with beautifully cared for medieval and Renaissance buildings. We visit its two churches. Carmelite St Margaret's which is full of splendid art including 15th century carved collegiate stalls and baroque altarpieces, and Romanesque-Gothic St Severus whose twin spires give the town's skyline spreading horizontally along the river a necessary vertical accent at just the right place. Both these churches feel more rewarding than yesterday's at Koblenz.

Then we go shopping. A nice man in an outdoor shop sells me a waterproof jacket and Jenny some trainers. He compliments me on my German (which is all accent with no grammar or vocabulary). And he throws in a pair of socks for Jenny as his gift. We head back to the ship and it rains on and on.

Back on board, I start writing this blog, read my novel and look out over the river. The rain intensifies. On the right bank, goods trains pass by, hauled by cheery little red DB electric locos Another cruise ship has berthed alongside ours. Our two craft oscillate to different rhythms, so when a passing ship creates a backwash, they gently bump against each other like a well-behaved couple tapping each other on the shoulder. A succession of low-slung barges pushes upstream against the current. Some carry coal or minerals, some containers, some machinery. Every barge carries a car or two on deck to give the crew mobility at their destination. Living accommodation looks comparable to ours on this human cargo ship, though it may be grander and better equipped for all I know. I speculate about life on board these freighters, this river-bound existence for - I suppose - weeks on end. "In-land" yet not of it - it must be a curious liminal state for these quasi-mariners to inhabit.

That night I discover that I can get The Archers here on the BBC iPlayer. So although it's raining, all's right with the world. 

More to follow.