Helgoland-Heligoland – a day trip

The German North Sea island of Helgoland, on the surface at least, shows no sign of being burdened by its glamorous and turbulent past. Almost all the physical evidence of its glory days as a fashionable summer resort for Northern Europe’s aristocratic families was erased, first by the Kaiser and later by the Third Reich. The spa, the luxury hotels with their casinos (Spielbanks), the aquarium and the grand villas were supplanted by military installations through two world wars. Anything still standing at the end of the conflict in 1945 was destroyed two years later by the British forces who detonated a mountain of captured explosives and ammunition in what was claimed to be the greatest ever non-nuclear explosion. A noisy and brutal exercise in finger wagging directed at German militarism.

The entire settlement had to be rebuilt after Germany regained control of the island in 1952. An architectural competition produced these vaguely modernist designs with pitched roofs, the islanders having campaigned without success, for a historically accurate reconstruction. The best aspect of the reconstruction was the specially devised colour scheme that draws on the tradition of Bruno Taut in Berlin. What would otherwise appear bland and repetitive is enhanced by the application of a bright and attractive colour palette. Elsewhere, retail activity is pressed into dreary shopping pedestrian precincts that wouldn’t look out of place in Stevenage. Nevertheless, there’s a thriving trade in duty-free goods, making use of the islanders’ longstanding privileged exemption and a regular flow of day-trippers from the mainland. And it seems to be an attractive destination for holidaymakers, a small army of whom were to be seen disembarking from the catamaran and piloting their wheelie suitcases toward their overnight accommodation. Guesthouses and small hotels all seemed to be doing good business.

The island is notoriously windswept with frequent, fierce gales battering the coastline in winter and summer alike. This served to intensify the Romantic sensibility that the island aroused in the hearts of 19th. century Germanic nationalists. It stood in defiance of the elements, immovable in the face of stupendous forces – a perfect analogy for the sentimental nationalist. In June of 2018 when I visited, high pressure seemed to have settled over the entire North Sea – immobile air sweltered under an overcast sky while nothing disturbed the flat, calm sea. At most, it’s a thirty minute walk from one end to the other along a coastal path that follows the craggy cliff top. The cliffs are high and host vast colonies of seabirds but there is no prospect that doesn’t include the concrete remnants of enormous coastal defences. On a hot and humid day with hundreds of visitors tramping the length and breadth of the island it was difficult to recapture any sense of the island’s turbulent past – the louche glamour of the vanished casinos, the luxurious indulgence of life in the grand hotels, the disruptive presence of massive military construction, the thunderous impact of serial detonations – all evaporated into the North Sea air.

There’s much to learn about this fascinating island. Jan Rüger’s 2017 book, Heligoland, tells the story lucidly and objectively with a keen eye for the multiple ironies and absurdities that run through the island’s history.

Helgoland – Heligoland in Vintage Postcards

The small North Sea archipelago of Helgoland is a place of great fascination – it is remote, historically contested and serially despoiled. Forty miles from the German port of Cuxhaven, it has been successively Danish, British and German. The indigenous population is Frisian by language and tradition and for centuries subsisted on its local herring fishery while outsiders squabbled endlessly over its ownership.

Since these postcards were published in the early 1900s the islanders have twice been evacuated (1914 and 1945) while the topography has been irreversibly transformed by militarisation in two world wars and finally barely survived a series of RAF post-war bombing raids culminating in April 1947 when British bombs only just failed to utterly destroy the islands. Their role as a theatre for Anglo-German conflict is explored in Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea by the German academic, Jan Rüger and reviewed by Neal Ascherson in the current London Review of Books (17 August 2017).

Prior to 1714 when Denmark took possession, the island had switched control between the Danes and the Duchy of Schleswig. Danish rule ended in 1807 (formalised in 1814) when Britain swagged it for its strategic value. During the 19th. century the island developed as an upper-class spa-resort attracting visitors from all over Europe, especially Germany and England. In the era of German unification and nationalism, a view formed that the bracing climate, rugged geography and sturdy self-sufficiency of the islanders represented the essential Germanic virtues and a political campaign for the islands to be part of Germany floated on this wave of popular sentiment.

In the same casual manner that the British would separate territories by the action of drawing a line across a map of the Arabian desert it was decided there was no great advantage in retaining Heligoland and it was agreed to swap it for the German interest in the East African archipelago of Zanzibar. After Germany took charge in 1890 the tourist industry continued to flourish alongside a massive programme of public works designed to transform the island into a defensive structure for the protection of the German Bight and the Kiel Canal. This is the period during which these postcards were produced – they show nothing of the militarisation that was taking place. Instead they show some modest vernacular buildings, fishing boats drawn up on the beach, a church spire and lighthouse and an electric lift connecting the ‘high town’ with the ‘low town’. By the time that British bombing had rendered the island uninhabitable in April 1945, it’s safe to say that not a single one of these buildings would still be standing.