The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands

Literary and Historical Imaginaries

Katie Ritson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429955518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Global seawater levels are rising and the low-lying coasts of the North Sea basin are amongst the most vulnerable in Europe. In our current moment of environmental crisis, the North Sea coasts are literary arenas in which the challenges and concerns of the Anthropocene are being played out.

This book shows how the fragile landscapes around the North Sea have served as bellwethers for environmental concern both now and in the recent past. It looks at literary sources drawn from the countries around the North Sea (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and England) from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, taking them out of their established national and cultural contexts and reframing them in the light of human concern with fast-changing and hazardous environments. The six chapters serve as literary case studies that highlight memories of flood disaster and recovery, attempts to engineer the landscape into submission, perceptions of the landscape as both local and global, and the imagination of the future of our planet. This approach, which combines environmental history and ecocriticism, shows the importance of cultural artefacts in understandings of, and responses to, environmental change, and advocates for the importance of literary studies in the environmental humanities.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the Environmental Humanities, including Eco-criticism and Environmental History, as well as anyone studying literature from the Germanic philologies.

1 Against the tide

Living with the North Sea

A legendary event recounted by the medieval chronicler Henry of Huntingdon tells us that King Canute (Cnut), ruler of the North Sea Empire in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, had his advisors carry him on his throne to the seashore so that he could command the tide to turn back. The tide did not turn, but kept on coming: the power of kings was not greater than the power of God or nature; all men, however exalted, were part of a dependent relationship with the natural world around them (Huntingdon 1753). The veracity of this story is less important than the fact it is still often invoked (Westcott 2011): the longevity of this metaphor shows the power of this imagery—humans on the edge of the shore, at the limits of their agency—on our imaginations.

On the North Sea coasts, regional identities have long been built around proximity to the sea and the power of the tides, and the metaphorical richness of communities living “on the edge” between land and sea has been used to convey ideas about national character and construct national identities. Littoral ways of life and adaptive strategies could easily be extended to serve as metaphors for the successes and failures of human culture more generally, and the boundary between land and sea provides a clear spatial representation of the boundary between culture and nature. Literary texts have the ability both to exploit the figurative potential of this littoral world and provide critical reflection on it.

The perception of the North Sea coast as a hazardous landscape is integral to how it is evoked in literary form. Memories of the great storm surges that have affected communities around the coasts at different times are a key part of this sense of a North Sea history: the current shape of the coast is a direct product of many of these extreme events, and the names of the great floods are remembered in communities along the shores. Understanding of these storm surges has shifted over time, from them being interpreted as divine punishment for human wrongdoing, to natural disasters that could be explained in scientific terms, and, latterly, to symptoms of global environmental crisis, although these viewpoints have also existed alongside one another to a certain extent, and still overlap and contradict each other today (see e.g., Leydesdorff 2000 on the religious responses to the 1953 flood in the Netherlands; for contemporary discussions on the causes of climate change, see Hulme 2009). Historians of risk and disaster studies have analysed patterns and strategies in the way that extreme events are remembered, and how memories of such extreme events aid the management and mitigation of future floods (Bankoff 2013, 8; Mauelshagen 2007; Kempe 2007). The recurrence of these large-scale flooding events is an important part of North Sea cultures: “Repetition … becomes a key concept in historical research on disasters. It is the link between past experiences and future societies. Prevention and management, because they require prediction, rely on the future of the past” as Mauelshagen (2009, 45) puts it. The act of remembering or memorializing flood disasters, or indeed forgetting or suppressing memories, is an engagement with future successes or failures, and thus takes on a particular role in political and cultural discourse.

Literary explorations of the North Sea floods are an important part of this process; literary texts can be repositories for such cultural memories, but can also reflect critically on flood events and the discourse on risk and disaster. In the introduction to his edited volume Criticism, Crisis and Contemporary Narrative, Paul Crosthwaite has pointed out the relationship between literary criticism and crisis, noting that “the interface of narrative dramatizations of life under conditions of global uncertainty and instability and the practices of literary and cultural criticism yield forms of knowledge—experiential, affective, libidinal—not readily accessed via the objects of study or methodologies of other disciplines” (2011, 5). The crises invoked in this chapter are both the immediate crises of storm surges and the more abstract crises of collective national identity and understandings of risk, both of which reaffirm certain ideas about the North Sea landscape, its history and its future.

This chapter will explore the crises of living with the North Sea by means of literary texts spanning more than 100 years that show how the history of the hazardous landscape is entangled with narratives of nationhood and national development. Hans Christian Andersen’s novel De to Baronesser (The Two Baronesses) from 1848 advances the then-contested province of Schleswig at the heart of a resurgent Denmark with strong ties across the North Sea; this is compared with Arthur van Schendel’s historical novel De Waterman (The Waterman) from 1933, which depicts the struggles of the Netherlands during the nineteenth century as seen from the crisis of interwar Europe. The final part of the chapter explores literary responses to the catastrophic storm surge of 1953, and contemplates the way that the discourse on this “natural disaster” engages with late-twentieth-century ideas about environmental resilience in the North Sea. (The term natural disaster is rightly criticized by scholars of disaster, as “natural forces become disastrous only within social and cultural frameworks” (Mauelshagen 2009, 42), and for that reason I have avoided using it in this book.)

De to Baronesser (1848)

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75) is generally remembered for his fairy tales and travelogues rather than his novels, of which he wrote only six during his life. These novels are more clearly rooted in Denmark’s geography and society than his cosmopolitan fairy-tale output, and the geographical is an important component of the text itself (Behschnitt 2006, 392). De to Baronesser has a complicated plot, involving an orphaned baby girl who is brought up as a ward of four young gentlemen of Danish society, one of whom is himself orphaned and whose upbringing is the charge of his idiosyncratic grandmother. The baby girl, Elisabeth, and the grandmother are the two baronesses of the title, the irony being that both were born into poverty and made baronesses by twists of fate; more importantly, they are united by their strength of character. The story thus deals with lost, mistaken, and created identities, and the way these are formed in Danish society in the nineteenth century.

Denmark during this period was in the process of redefining itself as a nation; the earlier part of the nineteenth century had seen Denmark suffer defeat in the Napoleonic wars, and 1848, the year this novel was first published, saw the outbreak of the First Schleswig War (Three Years’ War). Schleswig-Holstein was a contested region throughout the nineteenth century; although Denmark retained control of the area at the end of hostilities in 1851, this proved to be little more than a ceasefire. Following the Second Schleswig War of 1864, the territories fell under German control. Andersen’s choice of location was thus a political one, even if, as Behschnitt asserts, his primary motivation was to exploit the exotic landscape for literary purposes (2006, 408).

Denmark’s political difficulties in the nineteenth century came on the heels of an “ecological crisis” that reached its apex in the eighteenth century, when the intensive exploitation of the landscape for agriculture, coupled with deforestation to provide wood for shipbuilding, led to severe sandstorms and wind erosion; in other areas, the deforestation caused agricultural land to be waterlogged (Sörlin and Öckerman 1998, 33–7). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, techniques to bind soil and sand were improving resilience but perceptions of landscape instability and change had left their mark. Hans Christian Andersen wrote about the shifting sand dunes in “En Historie fra Klitterne” from 1860 (published in English as “A Story from the Sand Dunes”).

There is thus a parallel between the shifting fortunes of Andersen’s protagonists, the unstable landscape, and the nation struggling with its recent history and sense of itself on the European stage. The two baronesses and the grandson, Herman, who is seemingly the bastard son of an Italian highwayman rather than the high-born orphan he believes himself to be at the outset, are each implicitly trying to make good their history of poverty and low birth. The old baroness’s successful recreation of herself is dependent on her victory over the baron who oppressed her parents; she avenges cruelty by acts of peculiar kindness to the peasantry around her estate, and ultimately the old baroness is successful in raising herself morally as well as in terms of social mobility. Herman’s search for his identity leads him for a long time to reject his Danish birthplace and seek solace abroad. Elisabeth’s identity is formed by her foster parents on the bleak Danish hallig (tidal island) of Oland, in Schleswig—defiantly Danish at the time the novel was written—and it is her pious and innocent character, shaped by this wild natural outpost of Denmark, that make her the perfect Danish bride for Herman. At the end of the novel he returns to his own Danish homeland, marries Elisabeth, and takes up his pre-ordained role managing his grandmother’s and his own estates.

The action moves from the island of Langeland (where the weather drives Herman and his friends to take an unplanned detour) to Funen (Fyn) to Copenhagen, and thence to the halligs, and then back to Copenhagen and finally Funen again; Oland, which is the most marginal space geographically, is thus structurally at the heart of the novel. Wolfgang Behschnitt has noted a correlation between the narrative structure of the novel and the movement through the geographical space, a symmetrical and cyclical journey in a space that extends from the Danish capital city to the outmost periphery of the nation, echoing Elisabeth’s tempestuous journey to adulthood (Behschnitt 2006, 414). It is Oland where Elisabeth is raised from a small child to a young woman, before she returns to Denmark proper to marry Herman and fulfil the will of the old baroness. This flat and windswept hallig is shown as being pivotal to Elisabeth’s maturing into a pious and upstanding adult. Oland is defined by its distance from Danish society and its exposure to the forces of nature. Whereas Funen is shown in the text to be the cradle of Old Norse culture in Denmark (see Andersen 1866, 26–7; 1870, 24–5),¹ the North Sea coast of Jutland is the cradle of geopolitical allegiances, those of the North Sea countries, in particular Scotland. When Elisabeth accidentally stows away in a carriage on her way from mainland Denmark (Jutland) to Föhr, she meets innkeepers on the North Sea coast who have gained a new piece of land overnight:

En faaer Godt og En faaer Ondt af Natten! I fik inat en Unge og jeg fik forleden Nat et Stykke høit Marskland, der drev op paa min Grund.

(One had got a good bargain, and another a bad one at night! You got a young one last night, and I got the other night a piece of high Marskland, that was driven up on my ground.)

(110; 104)

The innkeeper continues:

“I maa see mit Stykke høie Marskland; det kommer lige fra Skotland eller Island.”

Den Vinding af Land, Havet havde givet ham, var hans Tanke og Stolthed. “Das hohe Moor,“ som det kaldes, to svømmende Øer, var lagte til hans Grund. Efter Folketroen kommer dette fra Island eller fra Skotlands Kyst, men det er simplere at forklare, og dertil det eneste Rigtige, at det er Dele af det undergaaede Friisland, som af Havet selv er løftet fra dets Bund, hvor det laa, og som komme drivende op og blive siddende paa Sandbankerne.

(“You must see my piece of high Marskland; it comes straight from Scotland, or Iceland!”

This piece of land, which the sea had given him, was his continual thought and pride. Das hohe Moor, as it is called—two swimming islands were added to his land. According to the belief of the people there, they came from the coast of Iceland, or from Scotland; but it is more easily explained, and also more correctly, by supposing what is the only just opinion, that these pieces of land are part of Friesland, which has sunk, and, lifted up by the sea itself from its bottom, where it lay, drives about and settles on the sand banks.)

(111; 105)

This is the first mention of a folk belief in the contiguousness of culture and indeed of actual land between Scotland (and Iceland) and Denmark. This is picked up again a little later, when the protagonists on Oland read the novels of Walter Scott:

Det Læste blev overført paa hvad de selv kjendte og havde oplevet; det Beslægtede mellem Skotterne og Friserne laa saa nær, ikke blot i Sproget, men i gamle Skikke og Brug.

(The descriptions were transferred to what they themselves knew and had experienced: the connection between the Scotch and the Frisians was so close, not alone in the language, but in old habits and customs.)

(126; 120)

And a later visitor to Föhr from Scotland finds himself on familiar ground:

Han havde i ung Alder bereist hele Europa, men i det sidste Aar var det især Tydskland, Holland og det skandinaviske Norden, som havde hans hele Interesse; det Beslægtede i disse Nationer, Familiebaandet mellem dem, var hans Studium.

(He had in his youth travelled through the whole of Europe, but of late years it was Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian north that had especially interested him; the relationship between these nations and their family ties were his study.)

(137; 131)

The sense of community that Hans Christian Andersen creates amongst the nations that border the North Sea belie the recent history of northern Frisia as German, rather than Danish territory, and present the history of the halligs as part of an ancient North Sea culture in which Denmark has as much stake as any other coastal nation. The two ways in which the cultural alliance across the North Sea is articulated—textually through the novels of Scott, and physically through the floating island—underline the reciprocity of landscape, something constituted by both environmental and imaginative processes.

The nature theology that is woven through Elisabeth’s experience of Oland also shows the way in which landscape can be read as text, and vice versa. Elisabeth is brought up from the age of five by her foster parents: Moritz, a pastor, whose young bride died before she could accompany him to his parish on the hallig, and Moritz’s widowed sister Hedevig. Moritz supplies the perfect example of the nature theology that had become popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the hallig of Oland is the perfect landscape for his under...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: on the edge of the North Sea
• 1 Against the tide: living with the North Sea
• 2 Conquest and control: engineering the Anthropocene on the North Sea
• 3 A sense of place in the Anthropocene: W.G. Sebald and East Anglia
• 4 Landscape as palimpsest: East Anglia in British “new nature writing”
• 5 Causeways to the past: Anthropocene and memory in contemporary novels
• 6 Under the North Sea: “petrospectral” futures
• Conclusion: the literary imagination in the environmental humanities
• Index