I began penning these words while sailing up the Moselle River, moving southwest from the Rhine River where the principal part of our voyage from Basel to Amsterdam has taken place. As you may know, lack of rain in Europe is threatening the flow of the Rhine. This may not sound important until you consider that such rivers are the equivalent of our interstate-highway system. Unlike highways, though, rivers are unstable. The dreaded fluctuation between too much water in certain years (epic flooding and ships too high to pass under bridges) and water levels that are too low in others (ships scraping the bottom) brings the same difficulties we would have if our highways shut down.
Still, when poets, painters, or composers turn to rivers like the Rhine, their artistic vision rarely expresses this reality. Instead rivers are painted as sublime, mystical forces, abounding with the lifeblood of creatures who dwell within them and along their banks.
Rivers both shape and reflect the spirit of each region through which they flow. As I’m fond of sharing quotes, here is a good one from Victor Hugo:
Rivers, like clarions, sing to the oceans about the beauty of earth, the cultivation of fields, the splendor of cities, and the glory of humans.
And then he added:
Of all rivers, I love most the Rhine.
It seems he really did, for he wrote often about it, joining a host of voices in the 19th century who focused on the Rhine as it began to undergo massive engineering changes that fell under the banner of “river rectification.” Long the goal of emperors and dreamers, rectification (mechanical restructuring) of river beds became possible in the 19th century. Rectification aimed to create a single, ostensibly more manageable channel for shipping, to achieve flood control, and to regulate water levels. The mastermind of the Rhine’s rectification, Gottfried von Tulla (1770-1828), encapsulated his intentions in one famous sentence:
No river needs more than one bed.
Yet every river, in its natural state, has many beds. Rivers are living, breathing entities, comprised of twisted skeins of rivulets, oxbows, braids, waterfalls, islands, and marshlands. Rivers are dynamic, constantly changing. The Ancient Greek historian Heraclitus wrote most aptly:
No man ever steps into the same river twice.
Technically, Heraclitus’s statement is still true about the Rhine, although more difficult to observe. In certain unpopulated stretches, you can still feel or imagine the Rhine’s ancient, shifting topography. But for most of the sailing, we glide along a rectified river—an engineered channel defined by graded, rock-bedded, at times cement-formed banks, and girded by man-made features, starting with the impressive system of locks.
I generally devote one of my talks on this tour to the Rhine. While rivers are a bit of a stretch from my usual themes, they connect with the arts more than you might expect.
The impending consequences of the Rhine’s rectification were no secret to 19th-century poets, painters, even composers, not to mention the countless citizen who embraced the natural state of this iconic river. People realized that the proposed changes, while benefitting some, would deprive others (like fishermen along the Rhine’s oxbows) of their livelihood. Villages outside of the rectified channel could disappear. The Rhine’s flow would change and its wild beauty would be dampened. And drastic consequences waited the Rhine’s flora and fauna, starting with its sturgeon and salmon.
Within this talk, I offer a fraction of the paintings and poems about the Rhine that proliferated in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. I refer to the rash of writings that both extolled the potential benefits of its rectification and predicted what we now call severe environmental damage to the Rhine Basin. All of this activity led particularly British travelers, as well as many Dutch and Americans, to visit towns and cities along the Rhine. In fact, the influx of visitors to the Rhine became a key factor in creating the modern industry of tourism (complete with guidebooks in several languages!).
This same momentum led well-funded speculators and a few local governments to undertake expensive restoration of ruined castles that dotted the Rhine, particularly in the section known as the Mittel-Rhein (Middle-Rhine) from Bingen to Koblenz. The goals behind these restorations ranged from national pride to commercial plans to create hotels for those longing to experience Romantic fantasies about medieval knights and their courtly ladies.
As often happens with travel, people on my Rhine tour have prepared themselves beforehand, but now express eagerness to dive, once home, into books that would elucidate what they are seeing. That’s one of the joys of travel: realizing the discovery isn’t over on the day of departure! Also, this is my second tour of 2022. Do I need to state how fabulous it feels to be meeting fellow travelers once again, sharing the adventures of our itinerary, and making new friendships?
I hope this summer is bringing you similar experiences—not necessarily travel, but opportunities to restore the things that had disappeared from your daily life, be it camping or hiking, family visits or back-yard barbeques with neighbors, visiting local spots that now are reopened, or simply having the pleasure of dreaming up what you might plan for the coming school year.
For as those poets and painters knew, our imagination is where everything starts. And those imaginations were frozen far too long by limitations never before seen, overwhelmed by floods of worry and fear, and darkened by low waters we could not navigate. Yet, in reality, the Rhine was still flowing, waiting for us to greet it again.
