Towering rebel hero Grote Pier's Frisia is like a cyclist's paradise, or like a rural version of Manhattan at least, where you can improvise routes junction to junction on a sort of grid covering cross-border territory.
I was camped in Berlin late June revisiting memories and catching up with my friends. The weather was a bit rubbish, one day sizzling, the next life threatening thunderstorms. That was also the deal much of the way there, Frisia and nearly all of Denmark. Those paths are generally paved and flat and looked easy-peasy and fast on paper when in fact the headwinds were nonstop and totally utterly unacceptable!
Check the timetable I counted on following EuroVelo 12 to reach The Hague via Hook of Holland but left taking the Hoeksveer ferry to chance and missed the last one across from Rozenburg as well. Lesson learned but pleased to report this industrial frontier is home to incredibly many free roaming little hares.
I wanted to go sooner, keen to collect pictures and to experiment with planting markers for my project, but the days would have been smaller. The extra sunlight certainly helped after being caught in the labyrinth of Maasvlakte and Europoort outside Rotterdam for example. Not the merriest of places to be passing through at night. But if you happen to, singing works: Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Ooh La La, Da Da Da, or Dennis Wilson frankly ime.
NGL I feel silly to not have recognized from the start that, thanks to geocoding, pictures and markers can be one.1 Once that was decided however, a couple or so weeks into the trip, there could also be less work and more fun exploring. As expected in a world sharply defined by harmony and stability, commonly found against beautiful scenery and architecture across the continent are stories of migration and conflict. Because, no secret, prior to European integration, war, tribal, holy, tactical, or total, had been considered normal here too like in other lands still.
Hot take Experimentation is like taxation. A tricky balance between the inertia of absolute caution and the slippery slope of overindulgence is necessary to hit the sweet spot of peak delight. Stop short, you lose. Push too hard and the dividends are bound to start shrinking. Pay no mind either way and they may evaporate completely.
Besides Frisia, I was glad to eventually tour more border regions favored by unification being linguistically distinct or mixed like Istria and Alsace and Silesia, no more split or contested, but which may have typically suffered, occasionally claimed by neighboring states apparently having to gain from engaging in hostilities no matter the outcome.
One of those is surely Pomerania, some of which I saw next cycling along the Baltic Sea and Amber Routes (EuroVelo 10 and 9). Over a period of roughly two hundred years, the religious fundamentalists of the Teutonic Order fought nine wars against a Kingdom of Poland around there conclusively winning only the first? Such dedication!
Incidentally, when I moved to Berlin a decade ago there had been hints of fighting as well, for the modern era, ministerial. The European Union or EU, formerly the European Community or EC, formerly the European Economic Community or EEC, formerly the European Coal and Steel Community or ECSC was experiencing chills of incohesion triggered by the 2008 banking crisis creating fiscal emergencies in Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, and Spain aka PIGS.
I had to clear out for personal reasons but the situation in Athens where I was based until then could have been less intense. There was a lot of confusion and a loss of center. There was misery and anger. There was civil unrest and grassroots organizing. There were shops closing down and bars springing up, multiple snap elections, cash shortages and sorry ATM queues due to a referendum gone wrong. People would be discussing the news in terms of cooking and of being cooked.
World stage Previously part of ECHELON, Teufelsberg's old NSA listening station and might-have-been Transcendental Meditation resort featured in e.g., Hito Steyerl's Factory of the Sun (2015) is now officially a street art sanctuary.
It was meant to be a textbook spiel of one side disrupting the other to their future electoral benefit by handing over systems stretched thin. Annoyingly yet, this was the rare gift of a small country faced with negative perceptions of undeservedly assuming a marginally invented identity linked to past greatness. One burdened by not just antiquity, but by divisive ideological traditions fostering shallow remodeling efforts, by theocratic tendencies, by xenophobia and intolerance towards minorities, and by violent extremism. Not to mention faring poorly on press freedom and environmental protections and having a questionable record of police brutality and of human rights abuses.
No wonder the issue turned from financial to political to societal to long standing disaster. Understandably, as if by knee-jerk reaction, there was a healthy need to narrate raw. But it was joined by a rush to preempt history that was maybe not super helpful in retrospect. Those my age were being written off as The Lost Generation® and told to live with it. Nice slogan, except kind of rich coming from the gentle souls responsible for our misfortune. Talk about adding insult to injury.
There was a time the Eurozone was said to be crashing and burning and on the brink. In the absence of immediate remedy for weak data by some constituent economies threatening the class image of others, provisional relief came in the form of shock therapy "no ifs, ands, or buts" so as to appease the offended parties.
The out of control rhetoric surrounding the adjustment that resulted from this mess, public discourse flooded with frightening references to warfare, sacrifice, or torture and with vicious reminders that resistance is futile, was only matched by the bitter spectacle of European negotiated solidarity and strained consensus.
Casual geopolitical commentary settled in. The EU was on the defensive about economic governance and judged against academic potential, which gave rise to all sorts of nutty theories. Basically, depending on whom you asked, this could be either an Anglo-American plot to damage the single currency or a German show of force aiming to reconstitute the Holy Roman Empire? The UK ended up leaving, sensational…
Can confirm Originally a Celtic settlement, Esztergom was capital in an earlier version of Hungary's between 972 and 1249. Its cathedral sitting above this Dark Gate is the biggest in the country and its basilica is visible miles up the Danube.
The noise seems to have died away, but the whole affair was too wild to forget. On the one hand, parochial policies of austerity were blindly and aggressively pursued without end. On the other hand, national disgrace was billed as collective punishment as if there ought to have been no apology for seeking successive bailouts.
In any case, given the very many populations really seriously tested elsewhere outside the EU and because of the EU even, would it have hurt had the conversation around the promise and the good of Europe focused on peace some more instead of persistently on monetary headaches and accounting? How much peace though, any… figures to quote?
Parenthetically Lindow (Mark), stuck between two lakes a lazy three to four hour ride north of Berlin, attached to the ruins of a Roman Catholic nunnery restyled Lutheran women's convent, devastated by Swedish and Danish as well as Imperial Army troops during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), is where last German Emperor and King of Prussia Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941) close friend and advisor, anti-Catholic conspiracy theorist, and member of the Wagner cult Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg and Hertefeld, Count of Sandels (1847–1921) began his career as judge.
Regarded as a power broker, he was outed in the press for hosting decadent homoerotic meetings of the so-called Liebenberg Round Table. Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code had made gay sex illegal in 1871 and was only fully repealed in 1994, same year that Erich Ernst Paul Honecker (1912–1994) leader of the German Democratic Republic or GDR or DDR passed away but who shortly after being ousted in 1990 had tried a government guest house in the area for retirement and was unable to stay long because of protests by locals in Lindow (Mark).
According to Wikipedia, there were 575 conflicts in Europe during the millennium minus change a Kingdom of Hungary was in existence (1000–1946), top level, not counting individual battles. Since the Schuman Declaration of 1950 that inspired the ECSC and anticipated the EU, there have been 99 already. Finger in the air at a rate of 1.32 a year, there could be parity as soon as 2386.
Not soon enough Too soon, which is why, if and when that happens, this twisted <audio> element flirting with controversy is prepared to switch from silencing to the cymbal crash in Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 in E major, WAB 107, II. movement performed by the Berlin Philharmonic with Herbert 𝔳𝔬𝔫 Karajan conducting (1971).
Until then, like Hungary is isolated today but once brought together a Sacra Ligua (1684) that included Tsarist Russia, like Bruckner kept proposing to teenage girls but without any luck, like Wagner whose death is believed to have prompted that cymbal crash was probably thoroughly racist not exclusively an antisemite, and like Karajan did fine professionally in Nazi Germany but was cleared as a Mitläufer, the EU is no heaven on earth but could be a war zone, so come on take a deep breath maybe and sing (or not)!
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