Up (and down) the Rhine

Having taken a cruise halfway down the Rhine in August, I was intrigued when, just a few months later, The Rhine: Following Europe's Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps by Ben Coates was published. It's a book I would have loved to have read before my own excursion, but I probably would have found it less interesting then. Travel writing about places you've been always seems more compelling, for some reason.

My trip went in the opposite direction, and only from Basel to Trier, while Coates traveled upriver all the way to its source. Much of his trip he took by bicycle, which may seem an odd way to follow a river, especially when going uphill. Yet Coates was less interested in the river itself — there's not much here about how deep it is or what kinds of fish swim in it — than in what is found along the river and the significant role the Rhine has played in both peace and war over the centuries. A bicycle, among other forms of transportation, worked just fine for his purposes.

The author, an Englishman who now lives in The Netherlands, keeps coming back to World War II, for the river, in virtually every country it passes through, played a significant role in that war. By now most of those who remembered the war have died. ""By the early 2000s," he writes, "when I first started visiting Germany, it had finally become a normal country, where the young were not expected to account for the failings of their grandparents, and history was generally just that: history."

I noticed much the same thing when I was in Germany. Most of our tour guides were Germans, and the war came up frequently, as when guides discussed the destruction of cities by Allied bombing raids and how, in most cases, an effort was made to rebuild them in the same way they had looked before the war. They spoke of Hitler, the Nazis in general and the persecution of the Jews in negative terms, much as American or British guides might have done, but without a trace of guilt, even by association. The war was, as Coates observes, truly history.

I was also reminded of my own trip when Coates observes "a large riverbank park contain(ing) dozens of brick-like white holiday caravans -- filled, no doubt, with Dutch families happily barbecuing imported Dutch food and spending as little money as possible." We saw many of these caravans along the river throughout Germany. A guide told us Germans knew the war was really over when the Dutch started spending summer weekends in Germany in their caravans along the Rhine.

Coates packs his book with information, as well as some personal commentary about his adventures along the way. One doesn't need to cruise the Rhine to enjoy the book, but it probably helps.