Abstract
This book – a thorough description of the vicissitudes of diking history at the Elbe river mouth in the surroundings of Cuxhaven – is the result of a multi-year scientific project. It is the seventh and final volume of a set dedicated to the history of coastal defence on the marshlands bordering the south and east banks of the Elbe and Weser rivers. Previous publications of the author were dedicated to the diking history of adjacent Hadeln, the Oste marshes and Kehdingen south of the river Elbe. In these littoral lands between Bremen and Hamburg, Cuxhaven and surroundings basically form a stable Pleistocene promontory, fringed however by a small band of often imperilled marshes. By means of a lot of primary sources, among them maps and drawings, Fischer sketches the hardships and conflicts of coastal defence and its ultimate success. Well-known icons of Cuxhaven, such as the Alte Liebe and Kugelbake, turn out to be the result of the battle against the sea. A special and very useful chapter is dedicated to the recent efforts made by archaeologists in trying to determine the age of the Hadelner Seebandsdeich, the medieval dike east of Cuxhaven, before it was sacrificed to industrial activities.
Dikes belong to the oldest large-scale technical works. Before 1900 they as a rule were wholly built of clay, whereas nowadays they have a clay cover over a sandy heart, the clay being covered with grass and grazed by sheep, a familiar view of all dikes in the Wadden Sea region. Quite rightly Fischer stresses the lack of written sources as far as mediaeval diking is concerned. Archaeology has to give an answer to these questions. Mediaeval dikes nevertheless were seldom higher than two to 2.5 metres. At the end of the sixteenth century some Dutch sea-dikes reached heights up to five metres. The slopes of the dikes were gradually levelled to lesser declivities to make them more resistant to severe floods by breaking down the energy of the waves. In the Netherlands, at least from the sixteenth century onwards, palisades at the foot of the dike and groynes (made of parallel lines of wooden poles, filled with reed, straw, earth and stone) were built. Even more important perhaps was the gradual shift from segment diking to apportioned or communal diking, their management and maintenance ultimately being entrusted to ever more professionalized dike and water boards. The building of sea-walls implied extra risks of flooding and drowning in case a dike would breach. On the other hand, marshlands sealed off from the sea were far more profitable. Fischer rightly stresses the relation between initiatives in creating new land and the relative autonomy of the people of the marshes and their self-willingness; members of dike and water boards forming a social and economic elite of the coastal regions.
The area at the Elbe river mouth – formerly called Amt (bailiwick) Ritzebüttel – was acquired by Hamburg in 1386 more or less as a result of this Hanseatic town’s policy to control shipping and wipe out piracy. The bailiffs usually served for four years and were recruited from the Hamburg elite. Until 1937 Ritzebüttel-Cuxhaven belonged to the city-state of Hamburg when it was exchanged for a.o. Harburg and Altona, becoming part of the Prussian province of Hanover (now Lower Saxony). Attention too is paid to the coastal defence of the isle of Neuwerk (a sort of hallig lying in front of the Elbe mouth, diked from 1556 onwards), originally a part of Ritzebüttel too, but together with nearby Scharhörn, returned to Hamburg in 1961 with a view to a never executed construction of a seaport, now forming the Hamburg part of World Heritage area Wadden Sea.
Coastal defence and a growing importance of Ritzebüttels harbour Cuxhaven, not only as a landing place for ships, but from the nineteenth century onwards as a seaside resort as well as a front port of Hamburg, ultimately lead to its consolidation. As a result, present-day Cuxhaven is basically a couple of different settlements on marshland as well as on the sands and heaths wearing out towards each other at this southern ness of the Elbe estuary. Some four centuries ago (1618), Hamburg decided to build an emergency as well as winter port in Ritzebüttel. The port was named Cuxhaven – literally Cux = Koog = polder and haven = harbour – and the building of it was accompanied by a large scale embankment (Neufeld, c. 1400 hectares) after a previous plan (1570) had failed. The dike was assumed by Dutch contractors, where entrepreneurial diking already developed since the fifteenth century in Holland. Soon however, nearby parishes of Groden and Döse, east and west of Cuxhaven, were saddled with new land and a dike the original entrepreneurs no longer considered profitable, whereas the existence of both villages depended on the maintenance of this sea-wall. Ultimately (1652) Döse had to give up land, by abandoning the dike and laying the sea-wall more landward, ending with less land than before the great project of 1618 was initiated.
During the eighteenth century further ‘outbankments’ proved necessary and in 1733 Hamburg installed a so-called Stackdeputation, literally a committee on groynes and stacks, responsible for the coastal defence and buoyage in Ritzebüttel. The appointment of Reinhard Woltman (1757–1837) as responsible hydraulic engineer in 1783, who was to become famous as one of the technical pioneers of Hamburg’s pre-eminence as the main port of Germany, proved decisive in coastal defence. He guided the abandonment of the eastern part of the Neufeld and introduced stone embankments, a material he also used in filling up and extending (wooden) groynes.
In 1816 the bailiff of Ritzebüttel proclaimed Cuxhaven as one of the first bathing resorts on the German coast. At the end of the century Cuxhaven became an important port of emigration, a so-called free port, as well as a fishing harbour. The nineteenth century also saw a partial replacement and rebuilding of the two drainage locks in Cuxhaven. The cover of one of these locks was used to carry a railway built to serve four newly built Panzer-forts west of Cuxhaven. The effects of the gradual expansion of its harbours for the purpose of fisheries (Fischereihafen 1892, 1922) and trans-ocean passenger transport (Neuer Hafen 1901, extended to Amerikahafen 1914) on the coastal defence remain somewhat underexposed, in contrast to the relation between beach life and coastal defence. In view of sea-level rise, a concrete sea-wall with two new barrages has been built recently. The book concludes with a chapter on Gedächtnislandschaft (memorial landscape), both in accordance with the interest of the author, who has published quite a lot on this subject, as with a much stronger fixation on coastal disasters in Germany than, for example,the more pragmatic, sometimes even opportunistic, approach in the Netherlands.
Fischer gives an excellent overview of coastal defence practices in this part of northern Germany. It is precisely its exposed position as a more or less battered bastion that necessitated early coastal defence measures. Cuxhaven’s strategic position, however, arises curiosity about the political and military dimensions. To name but a few: what, for instance, was the influence of Sweden and Denmark, whose sovereigns exercised rights in the bishopric of Bremen south of the Elbe, respecting the Duchy of Holstein to the north of it, that is to say on both sides of the river. The 1618 embankment took place in the same year that Hamburg was appointed a free imperial city by the Reichskammergericht (Imperial German Law Court), though this was only recognized by Denmark through the 1768 Treaty of Gottorp. The relation with Hanover – taking over adjacent Land Hadeln in 1731 – must have had further implications than the tense personal relationship between the aforementioned Woltman and his Hanoverian colleague, dike-reeve Georg Ludewig Martens. Given the strategic importance of the place the imperial government (since 1871) presumably must have increased its influence at the expense of the Hamburg authorities, if only considering the military redoubts erected west of Cuxhaven. The author hardly enters into this matter. However, apart from these marginal criticisms Norbert Fischer has succeeded in delivering an important contribution to our knowledge of coastal defence around the German Bight. Thorough, illustrated properly, and what’s more, highly interesting.