BALTIC BEACHES AND BEECHES

Caspar David Friedrich was never one of my favorite landscape painters.  I’ve seen quite a few of his canvases at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and they never much appealed.  Yet, after a recent getaway on the German island of Rügen on the Baltic Sea (which the Germans refer to as the Ostsee), where we saw the magnificent chalk cliffs he painted (above), his work took on a new resonance. 

On Friedrich from Wiki:

Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. …

Friedrich was born in the town of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea in what was at the time Swedish Pomerania. ... He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality. This shift in ideals was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization".

Channeling Friedrich’s love of landscape, my primary interest in a holiday on Rügen was twofold:  the contemplation of Nature’s divine creations—the Baltic Sea and the UNESCO World Heritage Jasmund National Forest, set against the artifice of human civilization—Binz, the charming, old-fashioned seaside resort. 

Binz, today the largest resort town on Rügen, was a sleepy little village until 1875, when sea bathing became all the rage.  From Wiki Binz:

The first guests arrived in the small town of Binz, took a liking to it, and recommended it to others. That same year the first road was built connecting the village to the beach (Putbuser Straße). Ten years later, Binz officially became a bathing resort, which meant that building took off: the beach promenade, the pier, the spa house (Kurhaus), a new network of paths and a narrow-gauge railway connection were built. Around 1870, 80 bathers were counted in one year. No large hotels were built in Binz and other resorts on the Baltic coast in the late 19th century; instead lodging houses in a villa style were built in a style known as resort architecture. They were given names associated with the Zeitgeist: nationalistic names like "Germania" or names of family members – often the first name of the wife of the builder. In 1876, the first hotel was built. In 1880, Wilhelm Klünder had the first hotel near the beach built: the appropriately named Strandhotel.

Here are a few examples of resort architecture in Binz,

including the Kurhaus, by day

and by night.

 

This is Binz today,

 

but it you can easily imagine it in the last century, with men in woolen bathing suits wading out into in these shallow waters,

 

a grandmother sitting in the shade of a Strandkorb, watching her granddaughter

build a sand castle on the wide beach,

ladies with white parasols floating along the strand promenade at dusk,

 

or couples listening to music at the band shell.

The 19th-century, however, gave way to the 20th, and this romantic Baltic idyll was co-opted by the very unromantic National Socialists.  In 1936, the party began constructing a KdF ("Strength Through Joy") resort at Prora, a stretch of beach just north of the Binz town center.  The complex is a prime example of Albert-Speer-style architecture.  According to Wiki Prora:

The Colossus of Prora, commonly known as simply "Prora", is a building complex … built by Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1939 as part of the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude or KdF) project. It consisted of eight identical buildings and was 4.5 km (2.8 mi) in length parallel to the beach, with the surviving structures stretching 3.0 km (1.9 mi).

Although the buildings were planned as a holiday resort, construction was not completed and they were not used for this purpose. After World War II, the complex found various military uses, first by the Soviet Army, then by the East German Volksarmee….

It wasn’t only Prora (above) that came under the East German beach umbrella.  Binz itself was also commandeered by the socialist cause.  From Wiki Binz:

In 1953, the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), in which Binz was then situated, initiated "Action Rose". This was the name of the programme under which privately owned hotels, and guest houses were taken into social ownership. These businesses were transferred to the FDGB (the federal body of the East German trade unions), and included in their program of cheap holidays for union members.

Today, thankfully, both the barracks at Prora and the resort buildings in Binz have returned as holiday accommodations. From Wiki Binz:

Following the reunification of Germany, Binz underwent substantial change. Many of the villas were returned to their previous owners, and the town was restored and modernised. The former FDGB holiday centres were privatised and renovated.

 

Even better, in 1990, just before the reunification of Germany, the last GDR government did a very good deed:  it designated Jasmund National Park, created in 1934, as a nature reserve.  In 2011, the beech forest located in the park was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as an extension of the Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and the Ancient Beech Forests of Germany. 

Located along the coast at Sassnitz, northeast of Binz, are the magnificent chalk cliffs Friedrich painted. 

As much as the chalk cliffs are breathtaking, the beech forest is also like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  The trees are ancient, many at least 250 years old.  They can grow up to 150 feet tall; their bark is smooth and thin; and their trunks are ramrod straight.  

The canopy is dense and the leaf pattern is delicate and lacy, dappling the paths with pools of light.  The leaf litter blankets the forest floor, inhibiting undergrowth and making the forest remarkably open. The visual effect is that of a hypostyle hall.  The quiet feeling is that of a cathedral. 

Within the beech forest are bogs and fens carved into the earth by ancient ice flows, ponds, lakes, and long vistas stretching endlessly to the Baltic horizon.

 

This is the divine creation of Nature that Caspar David Friedrich sought to convey in paint. 

Like Friedrich and the 19th-century German Romantics before us, we live in an age of growing disillusionment with garish materialism and splashy consumerism.  There is a metaphorical (if not psychological) depression in our 21st-century lives that cannot be filled with more stuff.  We seek, consciously or not, something that Friedrich would have called "spiritual" to quench our thirst for meaning and slake our parched spirits.  My wellspring is the natural world and on Rügen, I drank deeply. 

 Keep it real!

Marilyn