Ben Coates (1) (1982–)

A quick overview of the most distinctive features of modern Dutch society, as seen by a young British professional who settled here a few years ago. Despite the "hidden heart" bit in the subtitle, it doesn't go beyond the obvious things — the Golden Age and colonialism; World War II; football; bicycles; the Zwarte Piet crisis; Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders; euthanasia, soft-drugs and prostitution; carnival; etc. — but what it says about them seems to be show more sensible and well-researched.

Nothing much about the arts, except Rembrandt and Vermeer, and not much about places other than Rotterdam (where Coates lives) and Amsterdam (where he works). Maastricht, Eindhoven and Breda appear in the Carnival chapter, and there's a trip to Westerbork in the WWII section, but that's about it for geography.

Coates isn't the most exciting writer: he has learnt one trick, building chapters by breaking up passages of objective background material with short passages of mildly funny subjective experience, and he applies that scheme doggedly throughout the book. But he is clearly good at condensing an argument to the essentials, and doesn't take up more of the reader's time than he needs to.

Obviously I'm not the target audience for this book: I've been living in the Netherlands a lot longer than Coates, and there is little in what he says that was in any way new to me (except the stuff about football, which is something I have even less interest in than he claims to...). But it all seems to be reasonably fair.

One minor caveat I had was that the external baseline Coates typically compares the Netherlands to is his experience of a few years in a very high-pressure job in London, which is scarcely "normal" by anyone else's standards. Perhaps because of that he sometimes picks out characteristics as "typically Dutch" when they could equally well be called "typically German" or "typically Swedish", for example. But I still think this would be a valuable starting point for someone visiting the Netherlands or considering coming to work here. show less

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 show more 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.) show less

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, show more 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. show less

When my best friend of almost 30 (gasp!) years and I were at university, she met a Dutchman who was spending a year studying abroad. In the way of such things, she married him and moved to the Netherlands. It took me about 5 years to get over that curiously American reluctance to travel overseas (so decadent!) to see her (time warp: that first non-stop round-trip ticket on KLM was $250), but once I did I was hooked and she was stuck with my not-infrequent visits until my move to Australia, show more where the sheer number of hours involved put a damper on my spontaneous visits.

Maybe because it was my first European destination, but I love the Netherlands best and Amsterdam is my favorite city in all the world. I'm forever quizzing my poor BF and her husband about all things Dutch ("what's the word for this? How do you say that again?) and I constantly gush about most of it: the architecture, the bike lane system, the flowers!!! So when MT saw this at the bookshop, it was a no-brainer. If you asked him, he'd probably say it was the easiest present decision for me he's ever had to make.

I devoured it and moderately tortured both him and my BF by quoting and exclaiming over particularly fascinating facts (people used to use windmills to send messages! NL actually invaded England in 1688/89!). At 297 pages the book is densely packed with information yet very readable. Coates uses Dutch history - both the good and the bad - to create a context for the liberal and tolerant culture they have today and muses over how and why that liberalism and tolerance is being tested.

Coates has done his research and includes a selected bibliography at the back with further reading and sources. He covers the gamut of what makes NL different, including the most sensitive topics and he makes frequent mention of how verboten some topics were with the normally open Dutch, making it awkward at best to objectively discuss these issues. While it was obvious to me that he tried to represent the largest cross-section of Dutch society he could and strived for objectivity, this remains a cross-section. I'm sure my BF's husband would find a few things he'd disagree with, but largely, I thought it just perfect: well-written, well-edited* and relatively objective; if you find Dutch culture interesting, this would be an excellent overview.

*The only editing errors I ever ran into was a handful of missing words. Oddly enough, it was actually the same word "to" every time. show less