How to Tame a River
Should the Rhine be for poets, industry, or tourists?
Happy holidays! For the next few weeks, we’re focusing on how humans shape rivers and how rivers shape human history. First up, the Rhine.
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Edmund Burke called it “the sublime.” Here’s how he explained it:
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it... Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.
Burke was trying to say that the sublime was fundamentally beyond reason, but that didn’t stop philosophers — always eager to analyze something to death — from trying to pin it down. Kant thought that the sublime broke our ability to reason but taught us the limits of that rationality. Hegel thought it helped humans understand the presence of God in the world. Nietzsche believed that it might allow us to embrace our Dionysian side.
All of these writers were trying to describe what it’s like when you encounter something so beautiful, or terrifying, or huge, that your brain scrambles for a minute. The experience of the sublime was a driving concept of the Romantic movement in art and literature, many of whose practitioners went out into the world in an attempt to come up against the limits of their reason and senses.
For many Romantics, the best place to find the sublime was in nature. The natural world, wild and unruly, was the antidote to the cramped, orderly urban environment that Europeans were building in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. It was capable of making you feel things that you couldn’t feel in the city.
Few places saw more pilgrims in search of the sublime than the Rhine River, and the Rhine exemplified the paradox at the heart of the search for the sublime. Because as people came to the Rhine in search of wildness and beauty, they tamed that wildness out of it.
There’s a place along the Rhine where a massive rock towers over the river; the noise of the current and a waterfall bounces off the rock, creating an echo. Germans call it Lorelei, the murmuring rock. Lorelei sits over a notoriously treacherous part of the river, where rocks and rapids have sunk countless boats.
People told folktales about the sounds they heard at the Lorelei. By the early 19th century, the most famous story was a variation on the myths of Echo and the sirens; the murmur was the song of a young woman who, having been abandoned by her lover, was trying to lure sailors to their death. Heinrich Heine wrote a famous poem — later turned into a ubiquitous song — about the way the siren overpowers the minds of men:
The loveliest young maiden sits
So beautifully up there,
Her golden jewelry gleams and glints,
She combs her golden hair,
She combs it with a golden brush
And while she combs she sings;
The tune is both miraculous
And overpowering.It grips the sailor in the ship
With a wild and aching woe;
His eyes are only looking up,
Not at the rocks below.
I believe that in the end the waves
Devoured ship and boy,
And that is what the Lorelei
Accomplished with her voice.
The spot — and the myth associated with it — features in many paintings, like this 1874 work by Theodore Kaufmann:
And this one by Albert Pinkham Ryder:
But the very qualities that made this spot such an example of the sublime — the rocks, the waterfall, the rapids, the meandering twists and turns, the mystery, the danger — weren’t great for the people who actually used the river for commerce. Though poets might have liked a raging, unpredictable river that claimed boats and flooded farmlands, engineers, merchants, and farmers saw things differently.
The engineer Johann Gottfried Tulla, who grew up along the Rhine, did not see a beautiful, meandering river. He described the Rhine this way:
It is an impenetrable jungle. Creepers and climbing plants, grass a metre high, ferns and reeds of all kinds wind between the dense trees. The river meanders through the area, looping several times, flowing out into hundreds of different arms, forming thousands upon thousands of islands that nobody could survey, or even count. Where the water retreats, it leaves areas of deep swamp where every step becomes dangerous, and putrid, poisonous fumes rise from below: They kindle a deadly fever in humans. Swarms of gnats and other vermin breed in the humid heat and plague anyone who ventures here, eager for their blood.
Sounds bad! Luckily, it was the industrial age, and Tulla believed that man did not need to accept nature as it was:
But we, Mesdames et Messieurs, are now living in the 19th century!
We no longer have to bow to the whims of nature. Today we have the technical capability and, I would like to say, therefore also the moral obligation to control such raging currents.
We will create a whole new bed for the river! A straight course, based on our own predictions and calculations. This is the only way to tame the river, to transform it from an unpredictable destructive force into a lifeline.
The Rhine would be made more predictable, more obedient, and more rational. Tulla envisioned dredging the riverbed to deepen the channel while cutting off the river’s meandering twists and turns. This would allow the water to move more quickly to the sea, making flooding less likely and draining the swamps where malaria festered. He also wanted to rid the river of the pesky islands and outcroppings of rock that caused navigators to lose their bearings and damaged so many ships.
The new river would be tamer and more useful. It might even, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s conquest of German lands, serve as a unifying conduit between previously divided states. You can see how the river cut through many of the German states as it made its way from central Switzerland to the North Sea:
Though Tulla died of the malaria he was trying to eradicate in 1828, his project lived on after his death. It would take over 50 years to “correct” the Rhine.
Nineteenth-century maps give a sense of the scale and impact of Tulla’s project. Here we see the straightening project cutting off the inefficient oxbows of the “Old Rhine:”
And this map shows the project on a larger scale, in Bavaria:
The project worked: over the course of the 19th century, people tamed the Rhine. It was deeper and shorter — boats had 82 fewer kilometers (51 miles) to travel — and 10,000 hectares (almost 25,000 acres) of former wetlands and floodplains were now available for farming. In some areas, the river basin went from being 12 kilometers wide to just a few hundred meters.
The new Rhine was under human control; it flooded a lot less often and was much easier to navigate. This, ironically, made it easier for people to travel there in pursuit of the sublime.
The project of taming the Rhine coincided with the invention of the boats that would come to dominate it. The first steamboat on the Rhine, the Prince of Orange, arrived from Rotterdam in 1816, the year before Tulla began his project. As the Rhine opened up to navigation, steamboats pushed farther inland, reaching Basel by the 1830s. De Rijn, a Dutch steamboat that traveled its namesake in the 1830s, is typical of the boats that conquered the river:
These steamboats moved grain and coal, but they also moved people. Tourism of the Rhine region exploded in popularity, as it was now possible to enjoy a pleasant cruise down the river to gaze at its scenic bluffs and crumbling castles. The Rhine soon became an important stop on the Grand Tour (which I wrote about a while back):
This was the Rhine that captured the imagination of people around Europe. It appeared in paintings like those of the Lorelei above, along with illustrations like these from “Views from the Banks of the Rhine,” published in 1830:
This one from “Views of the Rhine,” published in 1840:
And this painting by William Callow:
Perhaps the most famous images of the Rhine were produced by J.M.W. Turner, the British Romantic painter who captured the Rhine in stately moods:
And wild ones:
Writers like Victor Hugo wrote travel narratives that doubled as paeans to the river. Hugo, in his 1840 book, said that
Of all rivers, I prefer the Rhine. It is now a year, when passing the bridge of boats at Kehl, since I first saw it. I remember that I felt a certain respect, a sort of adoration, for this old, this classic stream. I never think of rivers—those great works of Nature, which are also great in History, without emotion…
Yes, the Rhine is a noble river—feudal, republican, imperial—worthy, at the same time, of France and of Germany”. He further elaborates on its unique characteristics: “The Rhine is unique: it combines the qualities of every river. Like the Rhone, it is rapid; broad, like the Loire; encased, like the Meuse; serpentine, like the Seine; limpid and green, like the Somme; historical, like the Tiber; royal, like the Danube; mysterious, like the Nile; spangled with gold, like an American river; and like a river of Asia, abounding with phantoms and fables.
Hugo’s Rhine was “violent, but not furious; wild, but still majestic.”
Guidebooks attracted tourists to the river:
Soon, the Koln-Dusseldorfer Line’s steamboats were carrying tourists up and down the river in search of an experience that became less likely the more the river came under human control.
The travelers steaming past the Lorelei in the middle of the 19th century came in search of a feeling. Their passengers wanted to be awed by the dramatic natural beauty and crumbling ruins of the Rhine they’d read about or seen in books. But, as so often happens, the changes that made it possible for them to visit in such numbers changed the nature of the place they were visiting.
By the end of the 19th century, the Rhine was no longer an “impenetrable jungle.” Its unpredictability had been replaced by efficiency and human control. It was more useful for commerce and tourism, and many parts of it were still quite beautiful. But it no longer astonished its visitors with its wild mysteries.
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