WATCH on the RHINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 277, 13 October 1944, Page 8

WATCH on the RHINE

Why Their River Means So Much to the Germans

(Written for "The Listener’ by

A.M.

R.

O ,the Allied publics the possibility of their armies spending next winter watching the Wehrmacht across the Rhine -. so far it is a possibility only — will be a disappointment after earlier hopes of "being right inside Germany itself." But to the Germans the probability of Allied advance to the whole length of the river is horrifying. For they think of the Rhineland as the Heartland of Germany. Militarily, it will doubtless be an enormots relief to them if the Allied armies can be halted at the river until spring. But psychologically, enemies along the Rhine will mean to the Germans much what a foreign occupation of London would mean to us, or what having Hitler’s headquarters in Moscow would have meant to the Russians. For historically and culturally the Rhine, with its territories along both banks, is Germany.

To understand what the Rhine means to Germans we must go back to the centuries (400-800 A.D.) when there was neither a France nor a Germany in Europe but the Kingdom of the Franks, occupying all the land between the Rhine and the Channel. After Charlemagne, this kingdom split into an East-. ern or Older, and a Western or Newer, section. Neustria, centred round Paris, kept the name Frank-whence France and the French-but lost its language and the capital of Aachen or Aix. Austrasia was the Rhineland. It took in inland Belgium and that good third of : what is now Northern France where the ‘Tivers run north to the Rhine delta. (Joan of Lorraine only scraped into France by a matter of miles. Crossing her country to-day by any means slower than motor or tank one can still tell, in the attitudes of the people, where this, Europe’s stablest frontier in the Middle Ages, used to run.) On the other side of the. Rhine the East Frank kingdom faded away into newly conquered Saxons and Bavarians. There Was no

Prussia. Heathen Wends were performing strange forest rites where Berlin now stands. Quite literally, right through the Dark and Middle Ages the Rhineland was Germany. The Fabulous Age Centuries before, under the Romans, the left bank of the Rhine had been planted with orchards and vineyards. Towns had risen-Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensis (Koln, or in the French spelling, Cologne), Confluentes (Koblenz; Coblence), Moguntiacum (Mainz, Mayence), Civitas Treviorum (Trier, Treves) and Stratisburgum (Strassburg, Strasbourg). Christianity had been introduced, But the arrival of the Franks had dissolved this prosperous civilisation in blood and intrigue. The invaders? Nibelungenlied, shorn of its miraculous elements, descriges their life — Siegfried’s slaughter of the Nibelungs, his feats of strength and cunning, his’ treacherous murder, his wife’s wholesale revenge. The Siegfried Line runs along the very ranges where his adventures befell, That was the fabulous age of the Rhine. Englishmen brought it to an end -Saxon freelance missionaries,. following earlier Irishmen sometimes to spectacular success, as often to martyrdom, But Germany, once it had been Christianised, set out crusading. The Tiver was the highway, the only highway, from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean. Accordingly, Peter the Hermit made Cologne the mobilisation. centre of the original (and disastrous) People’s Crusade. The Children’s Crusade (even more disastrous) set out from there a century later. And through 200 years, most of the regular crusaders were rowed or towed up the river.to reach Genoa over the St. Gothard Pass, or Venice over the Brenner. Trade Followed the Cross Trade followed the Cross, as ever; and Empire, in the persons of the Lords of (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Hohenzollern, cashed in on the Gospel. Soldiers from the wars returning brought home to Norway and Scotland new tastes and new ideas of comfort. Italian shipmen who had made fortunes conveying and provisioning the crusaders, now met at Suez and Rostov, the caravans from China and India, and delivered into Lombardy their oriental goods to merchants from Mainz and Koln, who sent them to Britain and Scandinavia down the Rhine, All such traffic ran risks of Turkestan robbers and Mediterranean pirates. Buf it was only on the Rhine that robbery was certain. For these 250 years of Rhineland prosperity-the Golden Age of Germany, when her towns grew strong and cathedralled and her people rich and cultured — were politically a period of anarchy. While Germany was pouring men south to Palestine, she was also sending them east to less romantic but ultimately more rewarding conquests. In the first years of the 13th century a "Teutonic Order’ of Knights was founded to advance as armed missionaries before the colonists, who were making a New Germany among the heathen Borussi. Prussia is by derivation "Borussi-land," and Berlin shows its origin as a colony of the Rhineland in the name of its suburb Neukoln, But "Little Germany in the East" became subject to the Poles after the "Dark Day" of Tannenberg (1410). A South German princeling who had gone into trade thereupon foreclosed his mortgage over the almost worthless Electorship of Brandenburg. One successor secularised the Teutonic Order, ie., made its lands private property. Another got free of the Poles as "Duke of Prussia." And finally, only 70 years ago, a still later Hohenzollern united all Germans. In the Rhineland scale these dates are modern. More Innocent Glories When Germans think of the Rhine, it . is of their earlier and more innocent glories, First there are the epic legends of their crude cradle days, with the songs and the natural beauties of the region. And then there is the Golden Age, before the Turkish stoppering up of Mediterranean trade drove Europeans to seek sea ways to the spices and fabrics of the East, and reduced the

Highway of Europe to a trickling backwater. While the Rhineland barons fought, the Rhineland cities throve. They drove out their temporal and ecclesiastical overlords; and even established "foreign concessions" in the main ports abroad, precisely as the 19th Century Powers did in China. Minstrels passed freely from town to town, and the merchant and trade guilds found satisfaction in culture as well as wealth. The Black Death, the shifting of the trade routes, the wars of religion, all contributed to the decay of this original Germany. But it was the "realist" policy of Louis XIV. that completed it. The first Churchill certainly stopped him from rounding off centuries of French nibbling into the Rhineland’ by making the river his boundary. But it was not before systematic destruction of all military and productive installations had given France the "security" of a Germany so weak that it could not resist Prussia. ‘ It is no wonder that the Allied advance to the Rhine must shake Germany psychologically as nothing yet has

or nothing else could. However, it will cost the Nazis material advantages also. Not only is the world’s most highly industrialised region (Belgium, Northeast. France, Luxembourg) already transferred to their opponents, but guns along the Rhine will blast the blast-furnaces of the Ruhr, the mills of Frankfurt and the factories of Karlsruhe-all of which lie close to the opposite bank. The Rhine is, of course, a defence. North and south of Strassburg it runs fast with many islands down a fertile 20-mile-wide ditch, the sides of which are the pine-clad Vosges and Black Forest ranges respectively. In its middle course it negotiates difficult gorges. Its last third to the sea is over placid plain. But by this time it is half a mile wide and.in Holland, not one river, but four parallel branches, However, only once in history has the Rhine proved a permanent barrier. This was when an army of many United Nations (including Germans), fused: into the Roman Empire, watched the wild forest tribés across its waters for 450 years. It will not be so long this time.