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The Rhine: Following Europe's Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps

de Ben Coates

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"The Rhine is one of the world's greatest rivers. Once forming the outer frontier of the Roman Empire, it flows 800 miles from the social democratic playground of the Netherlands, through the industrial and political powerhouses of Germany and France, to the wealthy mountain fortresses of Switzerland and Liechtenstein. For five years, Ben Coates lived alongside a major channel of the river in Rotterdam, crossing it daily, swimming and sailing in its tributaries. In The Rhine, he sets out by bicycle from the Netherlands where it enters the North Sea, following it through Germany, France and Liechtenstein, to where its source in the icy Alps. He explores the impact that the Rhine has had on European culture and history and finds out how influences have flowed along and across the river, shaping the people who live alongside it. Blending travelogue and offbeat history, The Rhine tells the fascinating story of how a great river helped shape a continent."--Amazon.com.… (mais)
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Exibindo 4 de 4
I like following rivers myself and so this travel book about the River Rhine was right up my street. I have read his other book, Why the Dutch are Different and enjoyed his style of writing in that. This book is similar but also more of a challenge. Ben Coastes follows the Rhine from the Netherlands through Germany, France and into Switzerland, Austria (briefly), Liechtensten and back into Switzerland. He fills the book with interesting facts that I didn't know and his own observations. While the information he passes worked well, his observations about how people behave and what they say sometimes say little about the place. I think it is fair to say that his interests are economy and industry, rather than culture and although he does mention some cultural highlights along the river, it is the economy and industry that dominate. If you are interested in the Rhineland (and who knew this is where rhinestones originally came from) then you will enjoy this book. ( )
  CarolKub | Aug 18, 2022 |
It has been one of the key trade routes for over 2000 years now with a history going back before the Roman Empire. However, it was in the 1800s that the rise of Germany nationalism meant that the Rhine grew in significance in that country and was seen as a source of German Strength. I had always considered the Rhine purely a German River, and that is probably why. Until reading this book I hadn’t even thought any more about it. It turns out that it also flows past and through a number of other European countries. Starting in his new home country of the Netherlands, Coates will take us on an 800-mile ride and run from the mouth at Hoeck van Holland where it flows into the North Sea all the way to the source in the Alps.

This river now has 50 million people living along its length and as he passes through notable cities then we are told some of their histories with a little on what he thinks of the place at the time. It is full of relevant snippets of information, for example, I didn’t know that Basle had a port and access to the sea via the Rhine and there is actually a Swiss merchant navy!

I did wonder when reading it that if he had undertaken the journey in stages. Sometimes he seems to have his dog with him and other times not, as well as switching between running and cycling. It did feel a bit disjointed because of this. He does occasionally come up with the odd amusing moment, but he is no Bill Bryson. It is a reasonable blend of travel, history and personal experience and a reminder that sometimes you don’t need to travel far to discover things. 3.5 stars ( )
1 vote PDCRead | Apr 6, 2020 |
Having taken a cruise halfway down the Rhine in August, I was intrigued when, just a few months later, “The Rhine: Following Europe's Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps” by Ben Coates was published. It's a book I would have loved to have read before my own excursion, but I probably would have found it less interesting then. Travel writing about places you've been always seems more compelling, for some reason.

My trip went in the opposite direction, and only from Basel to Trier, while Coates traveled upriver all the way to its source. Much of his trip he took by bicycle, which may seem an odd way to follow a river, especially when going uphill. Yet Coates was less interested in the river itself — there's not much here about how deep it is or what kinds of fish swim in it — than in what is found along the river and the significant role the Rhine has played in both peace and war over the centuries. A bicycle, among other forms of transportation, worked just fine for his purposes.

The author, an Englishman who now lives in The Netherlands, keeps coming back to World War II, for the river, in virtually every country it passes through, played a significant role in that war. By now most of those who remembered the war have died. ""By the early 2000s," he writes, "when I first started visiting Germany, it had finally become a normal country, where the young were not expected to account for the failings of their grandparents, and history was generally just that: history."

I noticed much the same thing when I was in Germany. Most of our tour guides were Germans, and the war came up frequently, as when guides discussed the destruction of cities by Allied bombing raids and how, in most cases, an effort was made to rebuild them in the same way they had looked before the war. They spoke of Hitler, the Nazis in general and the persecution of the Jews in negative terms, much as American or British guides might have done, but without a trace of guilt, even by association. The war was, as Coates observes, truly history.

I was also reminded of my own trip when Coates observes "a large riverbank park contain(ing) dozens of brick-like white holiday caravans -- filled, no doubt, with Dutch families happily barbecuing imported Dutch food and spending as little money as possible." We saw many of these caravans along the river throughout Germany. A guide told us Germans knew the war was really over when the Dutch started spending summer weekends in Germany in their caravans along the Rhine.

Coates packs his book with information, as well as some personal commentary about his adventures along the way. One doesn't need to cruise the Rhine to enjoy the book, but it probably helps. ( )
1 vote hardlyhardy | Feb 11, 2019 |
This delightful and entertaining book, part history and part travelogue, was written by a British transplant to the Netherlands who decided to follow the Rhine River along its 800 [ish] mile-route from its mouth on the North Sea coast at Hoeck van Holland to its source in the Alps. Along the way, Coates imparts interesting bits of history and local anecdotes, and shares his “contributions to the economies of cities along the route” by eating and savoring local delicacies. I laughed out loud throughout his guide to the Rhineland region.

As Coates points out, some 50 million people live in the Rhine watershed. It has served as a key artery of Europe’s trade system since the time of the Roman Empire.

The Rhine and the Danube formed most of the northern inland frontier of the Roman Empire. Coates tells us that the Limes Germanicus (Latin for Germanic frontier) was a line of frontier (limes) fortifications that bounded ancient Roman provinces and divided the Roman Empire and the unsubdued Germanic tribes from the years 83 to about 260 AD. At its zenith, the limes stretched from the North Sea outlet of the Rhine to near Regensburg at the confluence of the Danube, Naab and Regen rivers.

Much of Coates’ insights on Roman times comes from his use of The Germania by Tacitus (c. 56 - c. 120 AD), the great Roman historian, as a source. Written around 98 AD, The Germania was a historical and ethnographic work on the Germanic tribes outside the Roman Empire. [You can read an English translation online, here.]

Beginning in the 1800s, the Rhine took on cultural and political significance with the growth of German nationalism. The Rhine was adopted as the symbol of German purity, strength, and unity. In this way it inspired some of history’s most famous writers, poets, artists, diplomats and statesmen. In particular, Coates observes, “the movement known as Romanticism took the Rhine as one of its major recurring themes.”

Of course, the notions associated with Romanticism and the Rhine, such as "purification" and a mythical quality corresponding to "ethnic group" attributed to the German "Volk," had some deleterious consequences as well, to put it mildly.

Thus does Coates expound on one of his themes, which is exposing how the Rhine shaped - and continues to shape - the countries it flows through, and the people who live there.

To that end, as indicated above, he not only shares history, but scores of fascinating anecdotal stories related to the Rhine, from the development of Baedeker’s guide books for rich young travelers making “Grand Tours” down the Rhine, to the fact that Dutch women along the river were employed at one time by herring companies to lick the eyeballs of “any colleagues who were unfortunate enough to get fish scales lodged there.”

Some of the other things I learned about in this book include:


  • When Bonn served as the capital of Germany (1949 - 1990), the defense ministry built on the banks of the Rhine became known as the “Pentabonn.”


  • John le Carré worked and wrote in Bonn for a while. His description of of the city “helped establish many of the tropes of the modern espionage thriller: gloomy bridges and thick river mists, lamp-lit cobbled streets and morally dubious heroes.”


  • The national anthem of France, "La Marseillaise," was written in 1792 by a Rhinelander after the declaration of war by France against Austria, and was originally titled "Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin" ("War Song for the Rhine Army").


  • In the early 1800s, there was a shortage of horses (for reasons ranging from the Napoleanic wars, to lack of food because of disruption of global weather after the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora). People still wanted to get around, however, and it was an inventor from Mannheim along the Rhine who, in the summer of 1817, came up with a new invention to replace the horse: a bicycle. Later in the same area, Karl Benz (with significant but rarely acknowledged assistance from his wife Bertha) came up with the world’s first car.


  • Rhinestones actually began from the use of sparkly stones near the Rhine in Alsace. While the riverside rock collection business died out, the production of fake crystals soared worldwide, and became “beloved of low-key dressers like Elvis and Dolly Parton.” Coates writes: “The Rhine link was lost, but the original name of the shiny river stones stuck: rhinestones.”




Airships were another Rhine invention. Count Zeppelin was born in Konstanz along the Rhine and spent a great deal of time “tinkering with flying technology on, next to and over the waters” of Lake Constance (a lake on the Rhine at the northern foot of the Alps). Of most interest, however, was the fact that each dirigible made by Zeppelin was constructed with the intestines of 250,000 cows. In fact, the U.K. Independent reports that during the First World War:

“Cow intestines used to make sausage skins were such a vital component in the construction of Zeppelin airships that the Kaiser’s military chiefs were prepared to sacrifice bratwurst and other types of sausage in the pursuit of victory.

Rather than permitting the intestines to be eaten, they were used to create special bags to hold the hydrogen gas used to keep Zeppelins aloft.”

Well, who knew?

And indeed, while reading, voicing that expression was my most common reaction besides laughing.

It is also worth noting that although the book is literally studded with metaphors, they are almost all well-done - both entertaining and evocative:

“The riverbanks were so thickly forested that they looked as if they could have been knitted from bright green wool.”

“. . . . a cluster of thick chimneys smoked like cigars thrust upright on the riverbank.”

“. . . walls of shipping containers [were] stacked like cereal boxes in the supermarket.”

“High-rise towers stretched away from the water like a bar graph.”

“At sunset, the old quarter [in Strasbourg] was . . . spectacularly lit, the ancient townhouses reflected in the river like dolls’ houses on a mirror.”

And then there are his descriptions, also entertaining and evocative:

Gentrification in Rotterdam: “areas where it had once been impossible to buy a croissant were now seething with kale and quinoa.”

Rhine cruise ships are “essentially mobile retirement homes.”

Evaluation: The Rhine is a quirky book that could hardly be classified as serious history, although it contains a lot of factual information on an important topic, i.e., the culture of Germany. Perhaps “travelogue with historical and sociological background” might be a more apt description. The writing is sprightly and entertaining, and the book presents an often delightful and decidedly unique guide to the region.

Heartily recommended both for those planning to travel abroad, and those who just enjoy learning about food and customs around the world. (Most humorously, the author frequently reports buying gifts of local delicacies for his wife and friends, and then eating them himself instead, practically before he leaves the stores, as he “rolls on” to the next place.) ( )
  nbmars | Jan 23, 2019 |
Exibindo 4 de 4
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"The Rhine is one of the world's greatest rivers. Once forming the outer frontier of the Roman Empire, it flows 800 miles from the social democratic playground of the Netherlands, through the industrial and political powerhouses of Germany and France, to the wealthy mountain fortresses of Switzerland and Liechtenstein. For five years, Ben Coates lived alongside a major channel of the river in Rotterdam, crossing it daily, swimming and sailing in its tributaries. In The Rhine, he sets out by bicycle from the Netherlands where it enters the North Sea, following it through Germany, France and Liechtenstein, to where its source in the icy Alps. He explores the impact that the Rhine has had on European culture and history and finds out how influences have flowed along and across the river, shaping the people who live alongside it. Blending travelogue and offbeat history, The Rhine tells the fascinating story of how a great river helped shape a continent."--Amazon.com.

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