Vetta d'Italia

At an elevation of 2911 metres, the summit of Vetta d’Italia stands at the northernmost extremity of present-day Italy on its border with Austria. The mountain’s name – which translates into English as ‘Peak of Italy’ - has been in use since 1905, when it was christened thus by Ettore Tolomei, an Italian nationalist, who claimed to have made its first ascent. However, this was no mere peak-bagging exercise: Tolomei was standing on the great Alpine divide, extending a thousand and one hundred kilometres, from Nice in the west to Rijeka in the east, which marked what he believed were the limits of the Italian realm. Today, this might not seem entirely implausible: after all, the current boundaries of Italy follow this crescent-shaped watershed – more or less – all the way from the Ligurian to the Adriatic coast.

Significantly however, up until 1905 the mountain had never had an Italian name. It had always been known as Klockerkarkopf and lay at the centre of the County of Tyrol which extended 70 km northwards to Bavaria and 120 km southwards to Trentino. It was very much part of the German-speaking world and formed part of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. In fact, the very first ascent of the Klockerkarkopf was documented as having been achieved 9 years previously by two Austrian climbers, Franz Hofer and Fritz Kögl. At the turn of the 20^th century, Italian linguistic and cultural influence in the region was almost non-existent: 90% of the population in that part of Tyrol south of the Alpine watershed was German-speaking, the remaining 10% being divided almost equally between Italian and Ladin speakers. 

Since the time that Italy became united in 1866, a movement known as Italian irredentism had evolved whose aim was to annex territories which were deemed to be ‘Italian’, however flimsy these claims may have been. The irredentists set their sights on areas such as the County of Nice, Corsica, Ticino, Dalmatia and Malta, but also all the territory that extended as far north as Vetta d’Italia and the continental divide. Tolomei was one of the most fervent advocates of this territorial expansion. 

When Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in Sarajevo a hundred years ago, it sparked off a chain of events that led to the Great War of 1914-18 and ultimately to the break-up of the Hapsburg Empire. Initially, Italy entered the war on the side of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire). As part of a strategy to get the Kingdom of Italy to change sides, in 1915 a secret pact known as the Treaty of London was signed by the Triple Entente (United Kingdom, France and Russia) which pledged that Italy would, on cessation of hostilities, “obtain Cisalpine Tyrol with its geographical and natural frontier (the Brenner frontier)”.  

In the intervening years between his ascent of the Klockerkarkopf and the start of the First World War, Tolomei had been hard at work developing arguments for the Italian annexation of the southern half of Tyrol. Even before 1915 Tolomei had conceived a plan to Italianise its place names. By 1916 he had published the Prontuario dei nomi locali dell'Alto Adige, a translation into Italian of over 10,000 names for villages, hamlets and geographical features in the region, the vast majority of which had hitherto had only German toponyms. But to add real substance to his pretensions for Italian expropriation of the region, he presented this list as the ‘re-Italianisation’ of names which, he claimed, had been Germanized not many generations before. Legend has it that Woodrow Wilson, the American president, was so convinced by these claims that this was one of the key determining factors in the future of the territory.

In 1919, after the war had ended, the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was signed by the victorious Allies (including Italy) on the one hand, and by the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian powers on the other. Significant territorial losses were suffered by Austria, not least the southern German-speaking half of the County of Tyrol south of the Brenner Pass, known as South Tyrol (German: Süd-Tirol). The promises made in the Treaty of London had been kept.

When South Tyrol was ceded to Italy in 1919, self-determination and the preservation of linguistic and cultural institutions were still firmly on the agenda. In 1921, free and democratic elections were held, with the Deutscher Verband winning close to 90% of the votes in the newly formed Provincia di Venezia Tridentina. Nevertheless, events were overtaken in 1922 when the fascists came to power in Rome. One of the first actions of the new government was to withdraw the special privileges that had been given to the South Tyrolese and an Italianisation programme for the region was started in earnest by none other than Ettore Tolomei. This went much further than the ‘mere’ Italianisation of place names and included 32 measures, such as the introduction of Italian as the official language, dismissal of German-speaking officials, the use of Italian only in trials and courts and the establishment of Italian-only schools throughout the region. An assimilation programme was introduced by Mussolini who established an industrial zone on the outskirts of the capital of South Tyrol, Bozen/Bolzano, which led to the influx of thousands of Italians into the region. By 1939, their numbers had risen to 25% of the overall population.

With the rise of the Third Reich and the annexation of Austria by Germany (Die Anschluss), Hitler surprisingly did nothing to assuage the concerns of the German-speaking population of South Tyrol and he made a pact with Mussolini in which they were given the “option” of either leaving their 1300-year homeland to resettle in the Reich, or staying and accepting complete assimilation (=Italianisation). And although 80% opted to leave, most of them returned at the end of the Second World War.   

The South Tyrolese had hoped that the borders would be redrawn at the end of the Second World War and the region returned to Austrian control, but this was heavily contested by Italy in the negotiations that followed. Ultimately, it was agreed that South Tyrol would be given much greater autonomy within Italy. Amongst other things German speakers were granted the right to elementary and secondary teaching in their mother-tongue. The degree of self-government was limited however, not least by the fact that South Tyrol became conjoined with Province of Trentino to the south to form the Region of Trentino-Alto-Adige, with Italian being the majority language of the combined provinces. With regard to education, for instance, German schools were obliged to make Italian-language teaching compulsory, but not the other way round. And Italian remained the de jure language of public office.   

In 1972 a new autonomy agreement was signed which virtually severed the administrative links between South Tyrol and Trentino. The province would be given a greater degree of self-determination within the region and Austria would not interfere in its internal affairs. Nowadays, South Tyrol - in terms of GDP per capita - is one of the richest provinces of Italy. The majority of its citizens are quite happy to enjoy the special status they have with Rome rather than waste their time demanding a return to Austria. An importnat bone of contention today remains the language however. Whilst 60% of the province's current population have German as their mother tongue, the vast majority of Italian speakers in the region are concentrated in the major urban centres such as Bozen/Bolzano and Meran/Merano. This means that cultural and linguistic fabric of South Tyrol is still overwhelmingly ‘German’.

Surprisingly however, the topographical names for settlements and geographical features which - to all intents and purposes - have been German for a thousand years or so are still not officially recognised, but simply ‘tolerated’. Only Italian place names are accepted by the authorities, this having been laid down in law by decrees in 1923 and 1940. For the greater part, these Italianised place names date only as far back as the time of Tolomei, the inventor of ‘Alto Adige’, whose contrived contention was that since the Italians were the direct descendants of the Romans who conquered the region in the first century BC, it was only right for Italian names to hold precedence. So today, the hundreds of thousands of tourists crossing the Brenner every summer might be forgiven for thinking that they had entered a truly ‘mixed’ language region.

Of course, sizeable settlements (such as Bozen/Bolzano, Brixen/Bressanone, Meran/Merano), major lines of communication (Eisacktal/Val d’Isarco, Pustertal/Val Pusteria), and prominent geographical features (Die Drei Zinnen/Tre Cime di Lavaredo, Rosengarten/Catinaccio) would have always had their Italian equivalents. The vast majority of Tolomei’s Italianised toponyms however, were simply made up or given a literal translation. Villages, isolated valleys and mountain peaks (including Vetta d’Italia) which had been untouched by Italian culture suddenly found themselves with an Italian name.

Take Bletterbach, for example. In Italian the name is Rio delle Foglie or ‘river of leaves’, since ‘leaves’ is a direct translation of Blätter, the German equivalent. However, Bletterbach has nothing to do with leaves: the hydronym (river name) comprises the Tyrolean verb ‘plettern’, which means ‘to flow swiftly’. The example here is just one of countless which are highlighted on toponomastik.com, a site which lays bare the illogicality of Tolomei’s Prontuario.

Since the mid-nineties there has been a movement in South Tyrol to redress the balance. The aim of the Arbeitsgruppe der Vereine für Ortsnamengebung – a mix of German-speaking community-based and cultural organisations – has been to repeal the decrees of 1923 and 1940 which stipulate that Tolomei’s Prontuario is the only valid register of place names in the province. What the Arbeitsgruppe wants is for toponyms to reflect the historical character of the places they represent. This means that place names should only be bilingual where there is a truly bilingual community with a significant linguistic minority. It is based on a internationally recognised system which is applied in bilingual regions throughout Europe, such as Catalonia, Wales, Belgium and Friesland.

Be that as it may, the movement has only met with limited success. One organisation that supports the initiative, the Alpenverein Südtirol (Alpine club), has been replacing waymarking signs for hikers in mountain areas to reflect the local and historic toponomy. But this has led to counter-protests, since Italian-only speakers - so the argument goes - might conceivably get lost in the hills because the names on the signposts no longer tally with the names on the topographic maps.

As it happens, Rome seems dead set against making any concessions. As far as the government is concerned, Tolomei’s Prontuario dei nomi locali dell'Alto Adige remains the toponymic be-all and end-all for South Tyrol and any challenge to demean Italian national integrity is likely to fall on deaf ears - at least for the time being.

Farewell Eredivisie

After 41 years in the top flight, my local football team, Roda JC Kerkrade, was relegated to the second tier of Dutch football last weekend. With it the province of Limburg disappears from the Eredivisie soccer map. The article below, which I have translated into English, recently appeared in the national daily newspaper, NRC Handelsblad: 

Roda relegated:  Football in Limburg and the battle to survive 

When the Netherlands was powered by coal, Limburg had more than enough money to spend on football. The relegation of Roda JC now means that the province is no longer represented in the Dutch Eredivisie. NRC correspondent, Paul van der Steen, gives us a potted history. 

The fifties

In the early fifties, the Dutch football association (KNVB) was determined to keep the sport an amateur one. Players who went abroad for money met with disfavour. In 1954, the Geleen-based businessman, Gied Joosten, defied the ban and founded the first professional football team in the Netherlands, Fortuna ’54. It was a side of local talent, augmented by top players who had been lured back from abroad, including, Cor van der Hart (from Lille), and goalkeeper, Frans de Munck (1 FC Cologne), nicknamed the ‘Black Panther’. The club from Geleen would later attract Bram Appel (from Lausanne) and Faas Wilkes (who had previously played for Inter Milan and FC Torino).
At the time, the Dutch economy ran on coal and the coalmining regions of Limburg were amongst the most prosperous in the country. Joosten became chairman of the NBVB, an alternative football association that represented professionals. It wasn’t long before the KNVB realised that the tide of professional football could no longer be turned and the rival associations merged. Fortuna ’54 never achieved a position higher than second place in the newly formed Eredivisie, but this was primarily due to their congested fixture list, since the club had a proclivity for accepting lucrative offers to play against top European opposition. 

The sixties 
 In the mid-1960s, the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs, Joop den Uyl came to Heerlen to announce to the world that the coalmines in Limburg would be phased out. There was no future in coal and South Limburg would have to reinvent itself.
This was no less true of the Limburg football clubs during the decade. Kerkrade-based club, Rapid JC, finished bottom of the league in 1962 and merged with local rivals, Roda Sport, who were then playing in the second tier. In the following season, the club that now represented the Oostelijke Mijnstreek (Heerlen, Kerkrade, Landgraaf) in Dutch football was relegated to the second division. It was only in the early seventies that the team from Kerkrade managed to gain promotion back to the top flight – and this is where they have stayed ever since.
In the Westelijke Mijnstreek (Sittard and Geleen), Fortuna ’54 (seventeenth) and Sittardia (eighteenth) reached their lowest ebb in the 1967-68 season. Both teams, in financial disarray, were relegated. As a result, they decided to join forces and form a new club, Fortuna Sittard. Because the Rotterdam-based club, Xerxes/DHC, went bust, Fortuna Sittard was allowed to play in the first division, only to be relegated again the next season. Fortuna Sittard only returned to the top flight again in 1982. 

The seventies 

Two contemporaries, both called Willy, were amongst the best footballers that Limburg ever produced. Willy Dullens, born in Sittard in 1945, was proclaimed footballer of the year in 1966, and that as a second division player. Johan Cruijff once said that, from a technical point of view, he perhaps had more footballing talent than himself. However, Dullens' career was ended in 1968 by a knee injury.
Willy Brokamp (born 1946) came from Kerkrade and from an early age he had been targeted by a number of major Dutch clubs. Nevertheless, for a long time he chose to play for MVV Maastricht, where he was able to combine his football with running a cafe on the main square there, the Vrijthof. In 1973, Brokamp won the golden boot award in the Dutch first division and the next year plumped for a move to Ajax. The Limburger, who was not picked for the World Cup squad in 1974, supposedly because of an attitude problem, had a taste for the night life in Amsterdam too. Against the wishes of his employers, he moved into an apartment on the Leidseplein, in the capital’s entertainment district. In the two seasons he spent with Ajax he scored a total of twenty goals. He later spent another two seasons with MVV. 

The eighties 
VVV Venlo fans too have had their ups and downs over the decades: they won the cup in 1959, finished third in the first division two years later, experienced relegation to the second and third division, whilst also having intermittent periods in the top flight. A few years ago, these fans could have been excused for thinking that their stay in the top tier of Dutch football would be extended, thanks to the signing of Japanese hotshot, Keisuke Honda, and there were plans for the development of a new, larger stadium on the banks of the River Maas.
The proposals were shelved however, and VVV stayed in De Koel, the ground where the club had enjoyed their most recent glory years. Twice – in 1986-87 and 1987-88 - they finished fifth, with players such as Stan Valkx and Remy Reinierse. Top clubs would arrive at De Koel quaking in their boots. In those two seasons Feyenoord lost 2-0 and 3-0, and Ajax 3-1 and 3-0. The trainer of VVV at the time, Jan Reker, kept a log of players’ penalty habits (known ‘Reker’s little book’) and so helped contribute to the international success of goalkeeper Hans van Breukelen with PSV (European Cup) and the Dutch national team (European Championship). 

The nineties 
These were the last golden years for professional football in Limburg. With the Nigerian striker, Tijjani Babangidam, and a string of local players (including Eric van der Luer, Maurice Graef, Mark Luijpers and Ger Senden), Roda JC – under the management of Huub Stevens - finished second in the 1994-95 season. The club also won the Dutch cup in 1997 and 2000.
In the same year that Roda JC finished runners-up, Fortuna Sittard took the second division title. In the years that followed, Fortuna enjoyed a stable period in the top flight. Their best season was in 1997-98 when they were ranked seventh in the table. The squad that year was full of talented young players, such as Kevin Hofland, Fernando Ricksen, Patrick Paauwe, Wilfred Bouma and Mark van Bommel.
In the season that followed, when Fortuna finished tenth, the coach who would eventually lead the Dutch team to the 2010 World Cup final made his management debut with Fortuna in the first division: Bert van Marwijk. 

The noughties 
Roda JC had two narrow escapes in the end-of-season play-offs, managing to stave off relegation in 2009 and 2013. This season there was no miracle and the club went down in the last game of the season without even securing a place in the relegation play-offs.

Many fans will look back at the sacking of their trainer Ruud Brood in mid-December on account his ‘disappointing results’. Under Brood, the Kerkrade-based club accumulated eighteen points and under the leadership of his successor, the young and inexperienced Jon Dahl Tomasson, just eleven.
Others will point to the constant unrest within the club, for example, the discontent surrounding the performance of managing director, Marcel van den Bunder, or the unfulfilled promises of a cash injection by Roda’s former sugar daddy, Nol Hendriks.
For the first time in the history of professional football in the Netherlands, the likelihood is that there will be no place at the top table of Dutch football for a team from Limburg next season. The chances of VVV or Fortuna Sittard advancing from the promotion play-offs in the second division are slim. MVV, which scrapped its youth set-up this year, missed out on qualification for these play-offs. And, in addition to the poor performances on the field, all four clubs are fighting a constant battle to keep their finances afloat.

--

It’s clearly not a good time for football in Limburg.

The original Dutch article can be found here.

Other articles on Roda JC that have appeared in this blog:

Danke, aber nein danke

Danke, aber nein danke (part II)

De geur van kolen*

Let’s face it, Heerlen is not going to win any beauty contests. Mention the name of my adopted home town to most people in the Netherlands and you will receive a look of disdain. It’s not that many of those people will have actually been there, but to be honest, the statistics don’t do it any favours. Of the 50 largest local authorities in the country, Heerlen regularly brings up the rear in terms of social and economic indices of well-being. High unemployment, a disproportionately large ageing population and an exodus of young talent are not helping to improve its prospects. In the eighties and nineties it gained notoriety nationally for its drugs problem, not least due to its close proximity to neighbouring countries, which caused large numbers of ‘tourists’ to take advantage of the country’s liberalised drugs policies. The plain fact is, most outsiders only see the city from the motorway as they speed towards the purpose-built Woonboulevard on its outskirts with its abundance of home-furnishings outlets. The best thing about Heerlen, you will hear people say, is IKEA.

A couple of weeks ago we had one of those glorious December days when the sun struggles to lift itself above the horizon as it makes its brief passage across the midwinter skies. I found myself in between projects, so not wishing to waste such idle moments indoors, I decided to stretch my legs and enjoy some rarefied sunshine. Just fifteen minutes away by foot from my front door is Imstenraderbos, a secluded place where I can find solitude and time and space to think. This extensive deciduous woodland occupies steep hillsides overlooking the bowl of land in which Heerlen nestles. With the sun almost at right angles this afternoon, the contours and undulations of the land were accentuated. There were patches of white left on the grassland where the morning frost had been protected from the sun by the long shadows of the trees. The landscape is one characterised by ancient beeches, hedgerows and thickets, sunken tracks, pastures and old orchards. If you climb out of the forest, you are eventually rewarded with a breathtaking view of the valley and the town below. Returning home, you pass though the tiny settlement of Benzenrade, which - with its hotch-potch of half-timbered cottages, stone-built farmsteads and modern-looking residences – still retains an old village charm.

This too is Heerlen.   

This is very much what the town and its surroundings must have been like 150 years ago before it was overtaken by industrialisation. In 1880, an Amsterdam-based reporter from one of the national dailies was sent down to Limburg to cover an agricultural show in Heerlen. In those days it wasn’t a particularly easy journey to make, but he was more than pleasantly surprised by what he found, writing of the bucolic idyll and its friendly people (even though their dialect may have been somewhat difficult to understand!)

This description is how Joep Dohmen, a close friend and journalist for the NRC Handelsblad, opens his recently published book on Heerlen, De Geur van Kolen. In it he traces the history of the town over the course of several generations of his own family and tells of the tumultuous times of a sleepy market town which discovered coal, suddenly became the heartbeat of Dutch industry, and - equally as suddenly - found itself blighted by the pit closures of the 1970s. 40 years on, Heerlen is still recovering and struggling to reinvent itself.

Industrialisation came late to Heerlen and almost without warning, even though the abundance of black gold under the ground was known. Around the turn of the century mining concessions were awarded, collieries opened and thousands of workers from near and far poured in to the area to take advantage of the burgeoning employment opportunities. The infrastructure to cope with the new influx was slow to follow. In the early years, inadequate housing and a disparate population helped fuel an increase in crime, drunkenness and moral decay. Between 1914 and 1938, the population of Heerlen exploded from 6,646 to 50,581, the greatest surge occurring between 1909 and 1920. This level of industrialisation led to a growing politicisation amongst the workforce, seen as a challenge by the deeply conservative, devoutly Catholic leaders who held sway in Limburg. There was an implicit understanding between the church and the mine-owners to stem the socialist tide. New housing estates, or colonies as they were known, were developed around the church, part paid for by the mines. At work, mineworkers who openly championed socialist or communist ideals received short shrift from management and were threatened with dismissal and, in turn, the loss of their home.

Nevertheless, it was against this background of industrial development that Heerlen flourished. Its civic wealth and pride was reflected in modernist buildings, such as the Glaspaleis (Glass Palace), designed by one of the Netherlands leading architects of the age, Frits Peutz. The Bauhaus construction was commissioned in 1935 for use as a department store (Schunck). It now serves as a centre for arts and culture in Heerlen and is widely recognised throughout the Netherlands as being one of the defining buildings of its era.

Successive generations of Dohmens bettered themselves too: great-grandfather Hub, the fourth in a family of seven, found work underground like many of his cohorts around the turn of the century. Thanks to good schooling, his son, Jozef - one of eight children - eventually ended up working in the offices of the Dutch state mines in Heerlen. Joep’s father, Hub (b. 1923), was destined for an academic career, but his formative years were affected by the Second World War and he later found a vocation working in a senior position for the town council.

The war years had a profound effect on Heerlen. German troops entered the town on 10 May 1940. The mines were seized and coal production siphoned off to boost the Nazi war machine. The municipality’s democratically elected council was stripped of its powers and replaced by an administration rubber-stamped by the occupying forces. The post of burgemeester during the years of occupation was held by Marcel van Grunsven, who had functioned as Heerlen’s mayor since 1926. This was unusual because most pre-war mayors in the Netherlands, either resigned or were deposed after the invasion. In De Geur van Kolen, van Grunsven is painted as a compliant burgemeester. On the one hand, Heerlen had its collaborators and Nazi-sympathisers and on the other, there were those that offered resistance, both active and passive. In any one street there may have been families offering hideaways to Jews and other oppressed minorities, whilst a few doors further along others would be openly encouraging the German war effort. What should also be remembered is that many families in the region were the product of intermarriage between Germans and Dutch, so loyalties would have been divided. The allegations against mayor van Grunsven are that he cooperated too closely with the Germans and openly mixed in social circles frequented by protagonists of the Nazi regime. One charge, for example, is that he deployed municipal workers to construct sniper holes for the Germans when the Allied forces were advancing on the town. Dohmen quotes many other examples of purported collusion, both factual and anecdotal. Nevertheless, after the war van Grunsven was given nothing more than a light rap on the knuckles and continued as mayor of Heerlen until 1961.

By the 1960s coalmining was on the wane because of cheaper imported supplies of coal and significant reserves of natural gas which had been discovered in the North Sea. In 1965 a decision was made by the government in The Hague for a gradual and coordinated closure of the mines. The last mine was closed in 1975. The government put into effect a long-term plan whereby money would be poured into the region to help cushion the effects of the closures and to bolster employment opportunities. 

Between 1965 and 1990, the Dutch government ploughed more than five billion guilders into the region in an effort to stave off economic stagnation. In the immediate aftermath of the closures, there was a massive clean-up operation. (By the time I arrived in Heerlen in 1984, barring a few pitheads, which were kept as listed buildings, and landscaped slagheaps, all trace of the mining industry had been wiped out.) Whether the money for rejuvenation was used wisely and effectively is debatable. Maastricht, the capital of the province, whose associations with the coalmining industry were highly tenuous, acquired prestigious projects: its university was established in 1976; in 1984 a new international exhibition centre (MECC); and in 1991, the famous Maastricht Treaty was signed by the 12 member states of the European Community. In the meantime, Heerlen and its satellite towns, had to make do with the relocation of government agencies from The Hague, whose office jobs unemployed miners were ill-equipped to fill, and retail parks, such as the Woonboulevard to the north of the town with its flagship IKEA store. It didn’t help that in the period following the pit closures Heerlen was saddled with unimaginative city fathers who lacked vision.

In just three score years and ten – a human lifetime – the coalmines came and went leaving indelible scars behind. After 40 years of makeovers and aborted attempts to kick-start a thriving economic base, the town is still trying to find its way. In many ways Heerlen’s dilemma is its geography. On the one hand, it lies on the periphery of a country whose economic heartland lies 250 kilometres away. On the other hand, historically and culturally, it has always had close ties to the Rhineland. If no border existed, by now Heerlen would have been subsumed by Großraum Aachen. In effect, the border acts as an artificial barrier to economic development. Aachen – a short bus-ride away - has a population which exceeds that of all but the 4 major cities of the Randstad and, with its university, the RWTH, it has more students (over 40,000) than any other comparable institute in the Netherlands, and over the years it has given birth to many hi-tech, spin-off industries in the region.Yet despite being designated one of Germany’s leading centres of academic excellence, it can only manage to attract 150 (yes, just one hundred and fifty) students a year from the Netherlands: every year, the brightest school-leavers in Heerlen and the region are encouraged en masse to follow university courses hundreds of miles away in places like Delft, Amsterdam and Utrecht.

For those who are quick to turn their noses up at Heerlen, perhaps I can reassure them from personal experience that life here is really not that bad at all. Heerlen is surrounded by no less than three nature reserves (Imstenraderbos, Terworm and Brunssumerheide) and is on the doorstep of the Zuid-Limburgse Heuvelland, the German Eifel and the Belgian Ardennes. Maastricht, Liège and Aachen (and three distinctive linguistic cultures) are just a short car-drive away without having to worry about traffic congestion, and if I want to venture further afield, I can be on a high-speed rail link to places like Brussels, Paris, London, Cologne and Frankfurt in half an hour. 
And of course, we have IKEA as well.    

* the smell of coal
Read also:  
Living on the edge 
Der Gute Einstieg
    

Vietato attraversare i binari

I seem to have spent an inordinate time travelling on railways in recent weeks. Not that this bothers me in the slightest: those who are familiar with me will know that this is my preferred mode of transport. Some people see a train as merely a means of getting from A to B, but for me, jumping on a train, however long the journey, instils a sense of adventure. Some may find the prospect of a long train journey daunting, even intimidating, but rail travel invariably provides me with a sense of freedom and relaxation that no other form of travel gives. Unlike a flight where - to all intents and purposes – you step out of one time warp into the next, the train journey delivers you to your destination across a seamlessly overlapping but ever-changing succession of landscapes and cultures.

I can’t pinpoint an exact moment in time when my weakness for trains was germinated.

It could have been the thrill of boarding a train hauled by Britannia class 70026 (‘Polar Star’) to our family's holiday destination on the North Wales coast, or perhaps standing on the parapet of a bridge on my way home from school with my head in a cloud of smoke billowing from a Class 9F Crosti-Boiler as it passed underneath. It probably didn’t help that I had a wider family fuelled with the same enthusiasm. At Christmas, my elder cousins would appear with their ‘Combined Volumes’ comparing the locos they’d copped on their trainspotting outings. My parents would even take us on rail excursions, on one occasion as far north as Kyle of Lochalsh. So my predilection for things on rails was sealed at an early age.

It’s not even as if I’m a habitual user of trains, but when I’m in a certain state of mind, I can fantasise about rail travel in much the same way as a person consumed by a craving for chocolate can hanker after a truffle. And if I’m not dreaming about trains, after half a century of travelling on them, I can look back on some fulfilling journeys. Like the childhood excitement of being pulled by Polar Star, some of my most memorable moments have taken place on trains or in railway stations. I’d say seeing the Matterhorn loom into view as the Brig-Visp-Zermatt train reaches its destination at the head of the valley is pretty high on the list. Sharing a journey with a crate-load of durians on the ‘jungle line’ from Kota Bahru to Kuala Lumpur runs it close. So too the crossing of the mighty St Lawrence into Montreal after being hauled up the Hudson valley through the Adirondacks into Quebec. Just three of many.

One of the great things about trains is that you can read, sleep, take a meal or enjoy a beer in the buffet car, engage in conversation with complete strangers, or just simply stare out of the window at the changing scenery. Rail travel is particularly conducive to reading, and if you can combine it with books about rail travel, then even better! One of my greatest pleasures was reading Paul Theroux’s wonderful Old Patagonian Express on an interrailing trip down to the south of Italy and back.  

For my last birthday, I was given a copy of Italian Ways by Tim Parks, which bears the subtitle On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo. I think the friend who gave me the present had tipped Tim Parks off beforehand, because it’s a book that could have been written specifically with me in mind. Ever since my early twenties, when I was studying Geography at university, on and off, for work and pleasure, I’ve been travelling the Ferrovie dello Stato. For someone arriving at Milan’s magnificent Central Station for the first time, the significant role that railways play in Italian culture is plain to see. The Italian rail network runs to 24,000 kilometres and, after Germany (which has 41,000 km), it has the highest density of track in Europe. After the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy in 1861, ambitious plans were put in place to link the Alps to Sicily by rail to connect the hitherto divided peninsular.

Parks is an English writer and novelist who has lived in Northern Italy since 1981 and who has been writing about his adopted country on and off for much of that period. With Italian Ways he attempts to describe Italy through the windows of a train, travelling the peninsula from top to toe. He does so by making use of all categories of train, from regional trains and interregional trains to the high-speed Freccia Rossa. As the jacket on the book states: through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians – conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants – Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive. 

On my first visit to Italy I recall how passengers walked across the track at stations despite the omnipresent Vietato attraversare i binari signs. 35 years later, they are still doing it. The 1970s and the early 1980s had been a turbulent time in Italian politics with many radical groups on the left and right committing terrorist atrocities, such as the bombing at Bologna railway station which killed 85 and wounded a further 200. Bomb scares were common in the eighties and on that same interrailing trip our train got stuck for two hours in the baking heat of Calabria at the small station of Nocera Terinese after a warning of a possible bomb on the line ahead. The town’s gelataio, who’d got wind of the delay and had turned up pronto at the station with his ice-cream cart, made a pretty penny that day, whilst passengers seemed totally unfazed by the hold-up. Excited yet unflappable, the Italians simply congregated on the platform eating their gelati, engaged in animated conversation until the danger had passed.

In his book, Parks often alludes to the lost romance of rail travel. For example, he talks about how Milano Centrale’s concourse has been turned from a rail terminus into a shopping mall, where ubiquitous advertising and uniform shop frontage detract from the marble and granite grandeur of the building. Many grand stations, not just in Italy, have sadly suffered the same fate.

Neither should buying a ticket and jumping off on and off trains be taken for granted by happy-go-lucky train travellers anymore, with many operators in Europe only offering cheap-rate tickets if you book well in advance. Nowadays you might have to venture further afield to enjoy the pleasures of low-cost train-hopping.

Fortunately, Italy is still one of those places. On its regional lines it may run rolling stock which is far past its sell-by date and nowadays there is large-scale investment in semi-private high-speed initiatives which charge premium prices for reserved only seats, such as the Italo and the Freccia Rossa, but admirably, the Ferrovie del Stato still operates affordable services and rates on its normal regional lines between the main centres. Buy a ticket today and it will still be valid two months later for the same price.  

My latest flurry of rail activity involved assorted journeys criss-crossing the Alps, the most notable of which was the ‘switchback’ ride from Cuneo(in Piemonte) to Ventimiglia (on the Italian Riviera). The track starts in Italy and rises 500 metres before burrowing its way under the Colle di Tenda, descending 1000 metres into France and thence back to the Ligurian coast in Italy. In between the tunnels and loops which enable it to bridge this height difference, there are some breathtaking views. If you’re a train buff who the likes the sensation of disorientation, this is the trip for you. And all this for a preposterous € 7.10 with a ticket bought on the same day. Now that’s what I call pampering to my tastes.

The Selfkant

Proof once again that I shouldn’t toss my local freebie onto the waste paper pile the moment it lands on the doormat. Hidden away on page 15 of my Zondagsblad the other week – amongst mind-numbing reports of minor road-traffic incidents, local fêtes and sponsored cycle rides - was an article that actually held my attention for a change. It was an account of a joint research project recently carried out by students of Maastricht University and RWTH Aachen University. The investigation centred on the effects that annexation had had on the identity of the Selfkant, a small territory of land which, for a little more than 14 years, had been expropriated from Germany by the Netherlands in 1949 as part of war reparations.

The Selfkant today marks the most westerly point of Germany. It occupies an area of 42 square kilometres and is bordered on three sides by Limburg, the Netherlands’ southernmost province. For 15 years, the Selfkant formed part of the Netherlands and was eventually handed back to the Federal Republic on 1 August 1963, just over 50 years ago.

The annexation of the Selfkant formed part of originally much wider plans for the expropriation of German territories which had been dreamed up by Dutch zealots seeking recompense for war damage suffered by the Netherlands during the years of Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1945. Even before the end of the war, it had been established that financial remuneration would be out of the question, given the ruinous state of its eastern neighbours, so concerted plans were devised on various fronts for land annexation. Some fanatics proposed grand schemes which entailed the takeover of land as far east as Hamburg, including the expulsion of German nationals to create new land for an already overcrowded Netherlands. Other schemes carried more credibility, such as a detailed plan advanced by Frits Bakker Schut, who was director of the National Office for the National Plan (Rijksdienst voor het Nationaal Plan) and secretary of the Dutch Committee for Territorial Expansion (Nederlands Comité voor Gebiedsuitbreiding). The Bakker-Schut Plan envisaged expropriation (and complete ‘dutchification’) of land up to the River Rhine, including seizure of major cities such as Cologne, Aachen, Münster and Osnabrück. The plan would have enlarged the size of the country by between 30 and 50 percent.

In the end, such ambitious annexation plans were dismissed by the Allied High Commission on the grounds that 14 million refugees had already been displaced on Germany’s eastern limits as a result of border revisions there. In particular, the Americans felt that destabilisation of the western half of Germany would have an adverse effect in view of the impending Cold War. In the end, these large-scale plans were diluted to the annexation of just 69 square kilometres of German territory, the largest slice of which was the Selfkant, and involved 10,000 inhabitants, who on 23 April 1949, became Dutch citizens.

The border ‘corrections’ in the Selfkant were effectuated on Saturday 23 April 1949 when a column of Dutch military police vehicles crossed the border near the Dutch town of Sittard. Six villages and several smaller communities were placed under Dutch administration, known as Drostambt Tudderen (≈ bailiwick). According to the government in The Hague, the primary reason for annexation of the Selfkant was to relieve traffic congestion in the heavily industrialised region of South Limburg. The physical westward incursion of the Selfkant into the Dutch province meant that the corridor separating South Limburg from the rest of the country was just 4 kilometres wide at this point.

The Selfkant was put in charge of a local administrator, the Landdrost, who was appointed by and directly accountable to The Hague. All local powers were vested in the Landdrost, which meant that German administration was disbanded entirely. Key figures from the latter were appointed to an advisory council, but this council had no decision-making powers whatsoever. Despite losing their German franchise, residents enjoyed all the rights accredited to Dutch citizens. The German education system was left intact, except that now, children would receive two hours’ schooling in Dutch per week.

In the immediate post-war years, the Selfkant was positioned somewhere between a rock and a hard place. A recovery programme was not forthcoming initially. In anticipation of the border revision, little had been done on the part of the German authorities to improve an already underdeveloped infrastructure that had also suffered badly from war damage. Solicitations to the Dutch government after annexation to expend efforts to redress the situation also fell on deaf ears to start with: necessary work would only be carried out when the border revisions were ‘more permanent in nature’. One Dutch newspaper reported that the roads were so dire that it was almost impossible to drive from one village to the next.

The situation changed when the Landdrost brought the seriousness of the situation to the attention of the various ministries in The Hague and an investigation was instigated by the Dutch Ministry of Home Affairs. The outcome was that money and resources were made available for the restoration of homes and improvement of roads.

Despite the privations, reports suggested that the local populace were not unhappy with their lot. Initially they enjoyed favourable currency exchange rates, were able to buy some provisions at cheaper Dutch prices and farmers were able to take advantage of the more auspicious markets in the Netherlands whilst simultaneously ‘exporting’ produce free of excise to Germany. The social security system in the Netherlands was also seen as a bonus. The work ethic amongst the Selfkanters was such that their skills were a desirable commodity in the Dutch coalmining and other industries. There was hardly any language barrier to speak of, since locals on either side of the border spoke each other’s dialect.

Over the years, the situation improved enormously. There were new housing developments and schools were renovated. Instead of 13 kilometres of poorly tarmacked road at the beginning of the annexation, the Selfkant had 63 kilometres in 1959 and a 8-kilometre transit route across the Selfkant linked up South Limburg with Central Limburg (a road which remained Dutch until many years later). Money was pumped into the Selfkant from both sides. The population had the best of both worlds.

Whilst the Selfkant prospered, the debate rumbled on about the territory’s future. Of course, there was a hard core of German patriots who canvassed for the unconditional return of the Selfkant, but given that its citizens were enjoying sweeteners from both sides of the border, most people were probably happy to keep the post-1949 status quo.

The question of a referendum on the matter was mooted several times between 1957 and 1960, but this was never effectuated, on the grounds that it would probably open up unnecessary rifts in the population, even within families. Against the background of ongoing rapprochement at an international level, embodied by the creation of the European Community, an agreement was eventually reached by the two countries whereby the Selfkant would be returned, in exchange for war reparations (Wiedergutmachung) of 280 million Deutschmark, on 1 August 1963.

In the weeks leading up to the handover, there was a lot of commotion. Having got wind of the repatriation, it is said that dealers from as far away as Rotterdam and Hamburg had moved in to the Selfkant to trade in commodities like tea, coffee, butter, tobacco, detergents and textiles. With the big price differentials, it would be possible to make handsome profits because at the moment of transfer, goods would be tax-free. It was reported that these speculators had commandeered as much empty storage space as they could in the Selfkant to hoard their goods before the transfer of power.

At 7 p.m. on July 31, the Landdrost handed over the civil registers to the newly installed Oberkreisdirektor and at midnight on 1 August, the Dutch military police retired to behind the pre-1949 lines where new barriers and customs posts had been erected. Meanwhile, when the barriers were raised on the ‘German-German’ border, a convoy of trucks loaded with thousands of tons of produce and livestock headed eastwards.

Appropriation of territory didn’t end completely there. The N274, the north-south transit road bisecting the Selfkant between Koningsbosch and Schinveld, remained in Dutch hands as perhaps the most lasting reminder of annexation, until this was eventually handed over to the German authorities in 2002. The Selfkant is overwhelmingly rural in character and its close proximity to the heavily urbanized region of South Limburg, means that it is an attractive area for many Dutch people to settle. It is said that around 25% of residents have Dutch nationality.

Further reading (in Dutch):

Wanneer grenzen worden gecorrigeerd: Selfkant en Elten onder Nederlands bestuur 1949-1963

Landjepik: www.haansmits.nl 

Nederlandse annexatie van Duits grondgebied na de Tweede Wereldoorlog

Selfkant vijftig jaar Duits