Leerssen Rhine
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© SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without The symbolical and political investment of the Rhine A Dutch perspective Joep Leerssen The Rhine disappears in Holland. Immediately after crossing the Dutch border, near Nijmegen, it begins to branch out into what is known as the Dutch Delta. Its main branch changes its name to Waal ,while a side branch flowing past Arnhem is called the Nederrijn or “Lower Rhine”. The Waal mingles its waters with those of the Maas or Meuse and, after changings its name to Merwede between Dordrecht and Rotterdam flows into the sea through many mouths and under various names. The Nederrijn for its part changes its name to Lek near Utrecht and reaches the Rotterdam harbour by a different bed. Along the way, various small side rivers are fed from this delta, such as the Vecht flowing from Utrecht to Amsterdam, and no less than two rivers called the IJssel (one in the east, the other in the west of the country). And a number of old, minor branches keep the name of Rhine, such as the Kromme Rijn the Vaartse Rijn , the Leidse Rijn and the Oude Rijn . The Rhine dissolves in the Netherlands, it is everywhere and nowhere. For that reason, perhaps, the Rhine never became an identity focus for Holland as it did for Germany. 1 To be sure, the nation’s greatest poet, Joost van den Vondel, wrote a baroque-metaphysical ode to the Rhine (1620), apostrophizing it in terms like these: You tireless millwheel-driver City-builder, ship-carrier Realm’s frontier and guardian in peril, Wine-spender, ferryman, bank-gnawer Paper-miller, give me paper For me to write your glories onto: Your waters spark my fire. 2 1 merely mention in passing the long meditative poem “Aan den Rhijn in de lente van het jaar 1820” by Elias Borger, which had some popularity in the nineteenth century as a recitation piece but only uses the riverbank setting for what is in fact an elegy on the death of his wife and child. 2 O onvermoeide molenaer, / O stedebouwer, schepedraeger, / O rijxgrens, schermheer in 1 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without Vondel then celebrates the river, which he surveys from Basel (where Erasmus lies buried) by way of Cologne (where he himself was born) to Holland, praising it as the fount of Holland’s historical glories and present-day affluence, and praying for an end to the violence of the Thirty Years’ War. But ah! I cry my eyes out and shall myself turn into a stream because of this Hydra that proliferates from religious strife and dynastic hatred a hellish Hydra full of venom poisoning the Rhine’s sweet and wholesome banks and tearing all of the German Empire and thriving in unpardoned murders. May a long-awaited Deliverer sweep the Empire clean of the Empire’s damned plague. Even in 1620, Vondel is thematizing the river as something that both unites and divides, a line of communication and a battle frontier; following the enumeration of side rivers contributing to the Rhine’s mighty sweep, from Main and Moselle to Lippe and Ruhr, the ramifying “Hydra” image evokes the river’s branchings and divisions before it reaches the sea. 3 When Vondel wrote this poem, Holland was a contested borderland on the outer edge of Germany: Charles V had begun to loosen the ties between the “Burgundian Circle” and the Holy Roman Empire by stressing its status as a Habsburg dynastic lordship, and, on his abdication, by entrusting its suzerainty to Philip II, King of Spain. In the Treaty of Westphalia (1648, 28 years after Vondel’s poem), the northern half was gevaer, / Wijnschencker, veerman, oeverknaeger, / Papieremaecker, schaf papier, / Daer ick uw glori op magh schryven, / Vw water dat ontvonckt mijn vier. (Vondel: “Aen den Rynstroom”, 1620; full text online at the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren , www.dbnl.org). 3 Maer, och! ick schrey mijn oogen uit, / En sal noch in een' vliet verkeeren, / Om datter sulck een Hydra spruit / Wt kerckgeschil en haet van Heeren; / Een helsche Hydra vol vergift, / Die 's Rijns gesonde en soete boorden / Vergiftight, en gants Duitschland schift, / En groeit in onversoenbre moorden. / Een lang gewenst Verlosser vaegh / Het Rijck van 's Rijcks vervloeckte plaegh. 2 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without taken out of the Empire as an independent Republic, the southern half confirmed as a Habsburg fief - first under the Spanish branch, later under the Austrian branch. Under Napoleon, the Low Countries were caught up in France’s drive for a natural Rhine frontier. A puppet Kingdom of Holland was established in 1806, similar to the Kingdom of Westphalia and similarly governed by a Bonaparte brother, and the entire country was annexed in 1810 as “a sediment of French rivers”. Meanwhile, however, the Prince of Orange-Nassau, heir to the dynasty’s near-hereditary Stadholdership of the Dutch provinces, was already plotting for a return in power following Napoleon’s downfall. Prince Willem had the ear of Castlereagh and was preparing for a restauration of his erstwhile possessions. With the support of his English allies, 4 Willem developed claims on practically the entire Burgundian circle. He envisaged for himself a country (bumped up to the status of Kingdom) bordered in the South by the line Dunkirk-Luxemburg-Trier- Koblenz, and in the East by the Rhine from Koblenz to Kleve and thence north along the 1648 frontier. The Rhine was to become for much of its course a Dutch border river; and all this rationalized partly by geopolitics - to create a strong middle-sized power containing France from the Ardennes to the Channel - but based largely on dynastic delusions of grandeur. In the event, Willem was to get much, though not all, of his Middle Kingdom. He obtained the territory of what is nowadays the Benelux, but had to share military control of the Luxemburg citadel with Prussia. Prussia itself gained the Rhineland Province. Like most compromises, this arrangement provided for an equal distribution of dissatisfaction. Holland now acquired a large southern extension which it wanted to govern but with which it was not prepared to merge, and entered upon an uncomfortable marriage of convenience that failed disastrously in 1830. And its control over the Rhine delta created sore feelings both in France and in Germany. In France, the drive for a natural Rhine frontier was, together with the metric system of weights and measures, one of those things which survived the country’s regime changes intact. The Bourbon minister Polignac was as firm in his ultimate desire for the Rhine frontier, even in the 1820s, as Vauban, Danton and Napoleon had been; and indeed it is to be stressed that the Rhine crisis of 1840 did not appear out of nowhere, 4 For most of what follows, I am indebted to N.C.F. van Sas, Onze natuurlijkste bondgenoot: Nederland, Engeland en Europa, 1813-1831 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1985). 3 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without but was the manifestation of a long-standing tension. Two episodes in that tension need to be highlighted here, because they involve the Netherlands: the period 1813-1815 and the Belgian Secession of 1830. The former saw the geopolitical tug-of-war around the various frontiers of a Restored Europe, with the Rhine as one of the bones of contention. It was in this context that Ernst Moritz Arndt wrote his fateful Der Rhein, Teutschlands Strom, nicht Teutschlands Gränze . While the main focus of Arndt’s vehement insistence on German claims to the Rhineland concerned the Alsatian situation and Strasbourg, there were already hints that the lower reaches of the Rhine were as important to him as the rover’s upper parts. The Empire’s loss, in 1648, of both the Swiss Cantons and the Dutch Provinces, was equally irksome to him, and he also claimed (like the Prince of Orange) a Luxembourg-Dunkirk borderline, albeit not for a new Netherlands, but for a reconstituted Germany. There are statements by other Romantic Germanists of this generation, men such as Hoffmann von Fallersleben and Jacob Grimm, indicating that he was far from alone in these views. 5 Holland, in this view, was a German border province which owing to regrettable historical accidents had drifted away from the heartland but which the course of history should reconnect to its true appurtenance. The hegemonic attitude from Germany saw this state (astutely enough) as an artificial contrivance doomed to failure. While France coveted the Rhine for its eastern frontier, certain German circles saw the Meuse as the ideal western frontier (a view echoed in the “Von der Maas bis an die Memel”, in Hoffmann von Fallerslebens “Lied der Deutschen”), and Holland was wedged in amidst those overlapping irredentisms. The border between the Netherlands and the Prussian Rhine Province had been designed expressely, in certain places, to keep Prussia away from the Meuse by the length of one cannon shot; and Holland’s control of the Rhine irked Germans no less than the French. For, as a compromise, the river, even if it had not become “Teutschlands Strom” altogether, had been internalionalized by forbidding any tolls along its entire length, thus opening its potential as a pan-German shipping artery. However, the Dutch argued that indeed the Rhine disappears in Holland, and whereas the Rhine toll treaty stipulated toll 5 Ulrike Kloos, Niederlandbild und deutsche Germanistik, 1800-1933. Ein Beitrag zur komparatistischen Imagologie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995); my own De bronnen van het vaderland: Taal, literatuur en de afbakening van Nederland, 1806-1890 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2006).