Copenhagen to Stockholm

From Copenhagen to Stockholm the journey is a little over five hours by direct SJ X2000 tilting train. Rather than buy the ticket as a separate stage, I had actually bought a ticket from Hamburg to Stockholm. Booking with DB allows one to select a stop over of a number of hours for no extra cost - in this case twenty-four. As this journey would entail changing trains at Copenhagen anyway, by stopping overnight in Copenhagen I broke what would have been a rather long day on trains (around ten hours) by staying overnight. The Copenhagen to Stockholm train crosses the Öresund link - the bridge and the Drogden tunnel leading to it. Perhaps this is the future of the Puttgarden to Rodby route - almost but not entirely seamless crossing of borders. Between Copenhagen Airport Kastrup and Malmö, Swedish customs officers board the train. Having taken this route three times now, the customs officers only seem to ask passengers to indicate which bags are theirs. The SJ X2000 trains are generally very comfortable, ideal for a five hour journey (by contrast, the Eurostar trains are now looking a bit tired after twenty years), with free wireless internet, a good buffet car, with free refills on hot drinks. The only aspect that consistently seems to let the trains down are the toilets, which become quite messy and smelly as the journey time progresses: boarding the train at Copenhagen, it had already come from Fredericia a couple of hours away. It strikes me that the train does not contain enough toilets for the amount of passengers or the length of the journey.

One Hundred Years

Passing through north-western Europe on the Eurostar from London to Brussels, the train crosses the front line of 1915 a short distance east of Armentières. At school thirty years ago we were taught the song Mademoiselle from Armentières for a play about the First World War, possibly for the then seventieth anniversary of the conflict. For contemporary sensibilities, the lyrics - of which there are a few variants - would perhaps now be considered risque for ten-year-olds.

In May 2001 I travelled from London to Paris by train for the first time, and then on to Luxembourg. The train from Paris left on a late Spring afternoon, travelling east as the evening approached. At the time I thought about the fact that somewhere on this route the train would be passing through the sites of the First World War. It's a commonplace observation to make much of how the internet has changed lives in the developed world; once aspect of which has changed definitively is travel. In 2001 I went to the Air France/Rail France offices in Piccadilly to book my train tickets to Luxembourg, something not then possible online. Although I probably could have obtained detailed information on the stations that I passed through, and the route the train took, it was sufficient that I could get to Luxembourg in an afternoon. The long train stopped and divided at Metz. The time taken for this operation meant that I took a little more interest in the station than some of the others that we had passed through. The station had very long platform and imposing architecture which suggested it was of great importance. Only later did I discover that Metz was a station on the Kanonenbahn - the 'Cannons Railway', a strategic military route across Germany to France including areas annexed after the Franco-Prussian war, anticipating the next conflict. Now, thanks to online archives, it is possible to see trench maps from the First World War, and overlay these with the current rail routes (which are often the same lines as a hundred years ago) to see where front lines would have been.

Although the First World War was studied at both primary and secondary school I attended, there were no trips to see the battlefields and cemeteries of Northern France and Flanders. These school trips are seemingly rather more common now: my brother, sixteen years my junior, did do so, for example. After the cessation of hostilities, while the landscape of north-western Europe was still devastated, the first tours began:

"In 1919, only months after the end of the First World War, the first tourist guides to the battle fields were published. Both the French railway companies and Michelin, the motor-touring company, produced guidebooks full of maps and photographs of key landmarks. Strangely however, these publications refer to the same 'sights' as normal tourist guidebooks-churches, chateaux and town halls- albeit with the repeated caveats 'all that remains of...' or 'ruins of...'

Conflict Time Photography, eds. Simon Baker and Shoair Mavlian

At the time, the proximity of the war to the urban populations of Paris and London, and the scale of industrial destruction created a perfect spectacle. For non-combatants, any understanding of the nature of the conflict could perhaps only be realised by seeing the battlefields themselves. The Austrian writer Karl Kraus satirised these trips by mimicking the language of one actual prospectus in his Promotional Trips to Hell: the particular object of his satire is 'Battlefield Round Trips by Automobile organised by the Basel News':

"You leave from Basel on the evening express in second class carriages.
You are picked up at the Metz railway station and taken to the hotel by car.
You stay overnight in a luxury hotel - service and gratuities included.
You enjoy an ample breakfast.
You leave Metz in a comfortable automobile and are taken through the battlefield area of 1870-81
You are taken on a guided tour of the very interesting blockhouse at Etain [...]
You ride through destroyed villages to the fortress area of Vaux with its enormous cemeteries containing hundreds of thousands of fallen men.
You view with a guide the subterranean casemates of Fort Vaux.
You visit the Ossuaire (charnel house) of Thiamount, the continual depository of the remains of fallen men.
You get free admission to Fort Douaumont."

Kraus:

"You receive your newspaper in the morning.
You read how comfortable survival has been made for you.
You learn that 1 1/2 millions had to bleed to death in the very place where wine and coffee and everything else are included.
You have the decided advantage over those martyrs and dead men of first-rate accommodation and food in the Ville-Martyrs and at the Raven de la Mort.
You ride to the battlefield in a comfortable automobile, while those men got there in cattle cars.
You hear about all that is offered you by way of compensation for the sufferings of those men and for an experience whose purpose, meaning, and cause you have not been able to discover to this day.
You understand that it was organised so that some day, when nothing is left of the glory but bankruptcy, that there might at least be a battlefield par excellence."

Karl Kraus, Promotional Trips to Hell

Seven years later, Stefan Zweig approached the subject in an essay on Ypres. One assumes that he must have known Kraus' piece of invective, and the tone is occasionally similar:

"For ten marks you have it all: the entire four years of war, the graves, the huge guns, the shelled cloth-hall, with lunch or dinner, all comforts and a nice strong tea, conforming to the information displayed on every placard. Not a shop exists where they don't profit from the dead. They even offer curios made from shell splinters (perhaps these very same shells tore out the entrails of a human being), charming souvenirs of the battlefield,"

Stefan Zwieg, 'Ypres', in Journeys

For Zweig, the commercialisation of the the war seems to be the most troubling aspect, whereas with Kraus, it becomes an object of taste primarily. By the time Zweig wrote 'Ypres', the devastation of the war was already being brought into some kind of order, codified as a series of sacred landscapes, and he writes approvingly of the Menin Gate, the first of the Imperial War Graves Commissions monuments to missing soldiers. In 1919, to mark the first anniversary of the armistice in London, the Cenotaph was first constructed: there was felt the need for a focus for the ceremonial occasion. However this first Cenotaph was made of plywood, as a temporary memorial prior to the current one of stone. In recent years, since around 2000, memorials, mostly for aspects of the Second World War have proliferated in central London, partly to rectify perceived omissions in official remembrance, but, like recent events that have commemorated the outbreak of the First World War, these appear to be symbols whose importance is invested in their symbolic qualities themselves, rather than their referents: it feels the less a particular society believes in anything in common, the more need there is to bring it together for largely empty rhetorical gestures.

Writing seven years after Karl Kraus' Promotional Trips to Hell Stefan Zweig reaches a more generous conclusion in the section of the essay 'Ypres', titled 'Jamboree upon the Dead':

"Nevertheless: it is good that, in some places on this earth, one can still encounter a few horrifying visible traces of the great crime. Ultimately it is something good too when a hundred thousand people, comfortable and carefree, clatter through here annually, and whether they care for it or not, these countless graves, these poisoned woods, these devastated squares still serve as reminders. And all remembering for the most primitive, the most blasé natures, is somehow visual. All that recalls the past in whatever form or intention leads the memory back towards those terrible years that must never be unlearned."

 Stefan Zwieg, 'Ypres', in Journeys

Writing on trains

Although a number of the pieces on this blog were researched and drafted before leaving London, many were written or edited during the five days of travelling around on trains. At hotels, all of which had wireless internet, I was able to post using a Kindle, although its 'experimental browser' meant that these were written in HTML rather than 'compose' mode. The X2 542 train from Copenhagen to Stockholm also had free wireless, and the five-hour journey could be spent working on this blog. The majority of the actual writing was done initially by hand - on whatever came to hand, which meant tickets and schedules and maps.

Hamburg to Copenhagen

Indirectly, what prompted my visits in search of Wim Wenders was looking for an alternative route to Stockholm. Eighteen months ago, I had travelled with my partner from London to St Petersburg, and the route had taken the now-discontinued City Night Line sleeper service from Cologne to Copenhagen. This route can be taken on ICE trains during the day, but, with many overnight services being cut back, I was looking for something as unusual. This was how I found the Puttgarden to Rødby train ferry, via The Man In Seat 61 website, which serves the Hamburg to Copenhagen ICE 33 route. There are many fewer such services than there used to be, and there have been plans to replace the ferry with a fixed link for more than thirty years, initially with a bridge, more recently with an immersed tunnel; the current projected date for this is 2021. This will cut journey times by an hour and a half. However, since the end of the Cold War, it has been argued that such a huge civil engineering project could better serve important routes further East, such as from Rostock to Gedser.

The ferries which serve this route cross the 18-kilometre Fehmarn Strait of the Baltic in forty-five minutes, from the German island of Fehmarn to the Danish island of Lolland; these are connected to either mainland by a bridge and tunnel respectively. There are six train crossings each way daily, although the ferries themselves run twenty-four hours a day, departing every half an hour. After stopping at Puttgarden station, the four carriage train is driven straight onto the bottom deck of the ferry, across the roadway and a lowered ramp, sharing this deck with lorries and coaches. Cars have the deck above. There are four actual ferries: the one I was on was the Prins Richard.

Once the train is loaded on the ferry, passengers are required to disembark and the train is locked for the duration of the crossing, meaning that bags can be left on board. The ferry has a couple of decks for passengers above those for vehicles, with all the amenities one might expect: duty free shops, a cafe, a 'Trucker's Lounge', a 'Panorama Lounge' at the front for views of the crossing. Having been on the train while the ferry was loading, I didn't get a sense of how many vehicles were on board (I could see the cars driving up the ramp to the deck above as we rolled on), and on the train deck, the train itself forms one side of a corridor with a service core containing stairways and lifts on the other, so there wasn't much to see when disembarking. I spent most of the crossing on board the decks outside. With a strong wind and the remnants of the weather system that had provided all the rain I'd experienced the past three days, there was a little roll to the ferry's forward motion, slight, but deceptive. Most of the passengers outside were either taking photographs or smoking. As the ferry docks, passengers are required to return to the train - or their vehicles - and the train rolls into Rødby Faraege station for the onward journey.

As Euroroute 47, this important transport corridor is also known by a name that reflects its position on a route for migrating birds: the Vogelfluglinie, or 'bird-flight-line'.

Baedekers

One of the set texts that I studied for A-level English Literature was E. M. Forster’s Howards End. I have a distinct memory of the silence that was the response when the class was asked what a Baedeker was. Having recently re-read Howards End, I cannot find such a reference to the eponymous guidebooks published by Karl Baedeker and his sons. It may have come up in discussion of the context of the book, an Edwardian ‘state of the nation’ work after the previous two ‘Baedeker’ novels, Where Angels Fear To Tread and A Room With A View, both of which have significant sections set in Italy, an essential part of the education of certain English classes at the time - and both of which mention Baedeker by name.  Although one of the main characters leaves England in Howards End, the action in the novel firmly remains in England. In Where Angels Fear To Tread, Forster creates a fictitious entry for the town of Monteriano in Baedeker’s "Central Italy" (looking at examples online, the Baedekers for Central Italy are titled specifically Central Italy and Rome).

During the summer after my A-levels, I spent most of my time either reading or drawing. Early summer had been hot and sunny, but July turned rainy, and, having studied Howards End, I read all of Forster's other novels, a couple of them in a day, and his short stories (other readings were Conrad's short stories in their hardback Everyman editions, and a large volume of Edgar Allan Poe). In Howards End, published in 1910, Forster's perspective on Germany feeds into a history for the Schlegels: their father left the Germany he loved through seeing it becoming distorted as a result of Bismarck's unification: "It was his hope that the clouds of materialism obscuring the Fatherland would part in time, and the mild intellectual light re-emerge".

Looking at Baedekers from the period before the First World War, when Forster wrote all his novels except A Passage To India, among the books' notable approaches is the way that they are laid out: they are written in routes. Prior to air travel fundamentally changing an appreciation of physical space, travel could not escape contiguity: the only way to reach a destination was by moving through the landscape from one's point of origin. Therefore, a guidebook to one particular place - even though this might be the destination -  made less sense in a world confined to surface travel in a linear fashion. Travellers would naturally have an interest in negotiating the spaces and modes of transport in between, and before faster trains, reaching cities in the continent from England would entail several days' duration, so places to stay at nodal points along these linear routes were also of interest. Thus, tracing the routes in Baedeker's The Rhine and Northern Germany (1870), my journey to Wuppertal encompasses:

[Route] 1. From Brussels to Cologne.

By Express in 6 1/2 hrs.; fares 27 fr. 75, 20 fr. 50 c. Custom-house formalities at Cologne (or at Aix-la-Chapelle , if the traveller proceeds no farther). Finest views between Louvain and Liège to the right. District between Liège and Aix-la-Chapelle replete with interest. 

[Then Route 42 from Cologne to Düsseldorf.] 

[Route] 47. From Düsseldorf to Cassel.

Express in 8 3/4, ordinary trains in 13 hrs.; fares 7 Thlr. 25, 5 Thlr. 18, 3 Thlr. 25 Sgr. District as far as Dortmund and beyond Paderborn picturesque and industrial; structure of the line itself an object of interest. From the convent of Gerresheim (first stat[ion]., fine church of the 12th cent.), Archbishop Gebhard of Cologne abducted the beautiful Countess Agnes of Mansfeld. After passing Erkrath (hydropathic estab.), the train ascends to Hochdahl (large iron-foundry of Eintracht), 494 ft. higher than Düsseldorf.

[...]

Vohwinkel (see above) is a junction of the Prince William line (Steele-Vohwinkel), principally used for the coal traffic.

From Vohwinkel to Steele in 1/4 hr.; fares 27, 20, 13 Sgr. —
Beyond stat[ion]. Aprath the line crrosses the watershed between the Wupper and the Ruhr, and then follows the valley of the Deile. Stat[ion]. Neriges, a resort of pilgrims, with an old chateau; stat[ion]. Langenberg possesses several thriving silk factories. At stat[ion]. Kupferdreh the Ruhrthal is suddenly entered, presenting a striking and picturesque contrast to the narrow sinuosities of the Deilethal. Numerous coal-mines are passed. Where the train crosses the Ruhr, a pleasing glimpse of the valley is obtained. 

[...]

At Sonnborn the train suddenly enters the valley of the Wupper, traverses it, then skirts the hill-side, commanding a view of Elberfeld below.

Elberfeld [...], pop. 65,321 (12,000 Rom. Cath.), and the adjoining town of Barmen [...], with 64,945 inhab., together form a series of streets nearly 6m. in length, intersected by the road, railway, and the Wupper, which is the principal source of the industry of this district. With the exception of some English towns, there is probably no spot in the world so densely populated. Its principal manufactures are cotton, silk, ribbon, and turkey-red dyed goods. Some of the churches and public edifices are handsome, but, like the towns themselves, of very modern date.

Elberfeld and Barmen, already physically joined at this date, would become Wuppertal ("Wupper-Valley") in a referendum of 1930. I haven't calculated how long the whole journey would have taken, but in 1870, Brussels to Cologne - by express - took six and a half hours. My train was 1 hour and 47 minutes. Wuppertal's principal 'manufacture' is now pharmaceuticals: the giant Bayer factory spreads the distance of a few stops of the Schwebebahn.

Forster's characters embody differing perspectives on the ubiquitous Baedeker. In Where Angels Fear To Tread it is seen as an essential source of information, as it is also seen by Lucy in A Room With A View: “Taking up Baedeker's Handbook to Northern Italy, she committed to memory the most important dates of Florentine History. For she was determined to enjoy herself on the morrow”; meanwhile Eleanor Lavish, the novelist, is dismissive: "I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy—he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation." and:

"Lucy, who wanted to see Santa Croce, suggested, as a possible solution, that they should ask the way there. 'Oh, but that is the word of a craven! And no, you are not, not, NOT to look at your Baedeker. Give it to me; I shan't let you carry it. We will simply drift.'"

E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

Eleanor Lavish, who, by drifting, in this scene effects another meeting between Lucy and the Emersons, is a Situationist avant le lettre.