Status Updates From The Rhine: Following Europe...

Basle and Erasmus, which has inspired to me buy a book called Cathedral because it’s set during the Reformation. Of which more, no doubt, later…

Franco-German relations. I hadn’t considered the tricky nature of relations between two big countries right alongside each other at the heart of Europe. Maybe an economically united state of Europe is never going to work whilst separate statehood exists within it. The French gotta be the French and so the Germans…

Into France. Beautiful passage where French and German soldiers commemorate their joint losses in Strasbourg. Hard to see this kind of humanity first thinking being popular around Europe today, sadly.

Mainz and Gutenberg. Hit me how marvellous the book must have been pre printing press. No wonder scholars went on pilgrimages to great libraries. There was no other way of learning what was in other men’s minds. We can’t comprehend a world without fast information today. It would be an alien existence to us.

Bacharach the town sounds nice. The whole stretch of the Romantic Rhine is somewhere I’ll have to visit. Again, the spectre of nationalism haunts it. Difficult.

Much struck by the concept that nation building is a construct - there was no ‘Germany’ until an elitist few deemed it so. The ‘culture’ that knitted together its diverse people was built around a sense of shared history - a nonsense really - of which the Rhine (and surrounding forests) was a crucial factor. But a construct.

Bonn - forgotten capital city. Sounds all right to me. I wonder how powerful Germany can be? And what sort of power it might yield? I’d love it to be a genuine balance to the US of A. I wonder if it’s tainted past is enough to maintain its liberal stance in this day and age?

Bonn - nuclear bunkers, Beethoven in the ‘Capital Village’

Cologne - ironic that the city was famed for its shocking stink. And beer. Must order a Kolsch whilst I’m there…

Tolerance and intolerance in Cologne - a microcosm of Western Europe’s swing from progressive Left to conservative Right. Once again, I wonder why middle ground is so hard to hold…

Düsseldorf. It is a great escape for the mind, to journey with someone as an observer, not a protagonist, through cities built on rivers, past metal towers and to watch darkness fall and electricity glow on the Rhine… for a few moments I am away and I can smell the air, hear the bustle, watch the rich and the not so rich co-exist…

Duisburg - somewhat grim but enlightening to hear about how it has been at the heart of Germany’s Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century. Bit like many English cities, Brum being a good example.

The border. How an arbitrary line on a map can mean that people can consider themselves so different is strange. But then, humans are strange.

Arnhem - can’t help but think of Anthony Hopkins. Strange that in a natural feature like the Rhine should have such impact on modern war.