Читать книгу The Rhine Cycle Route. From source to sea through Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands онлайн

13 страница из 56

Many of the towns, villages and castles along the German part of the river have local legends, some of which are related in the route description. Perhaps the most famous is the song of the Loreley maiden. First appearing in 1801, the story was rewritten by the author Heinrich Heine in 1824 and set to music in 1837.

The Rhine provided the inspiration for two great patriotic songs. La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, was written in Strasbourg in 1792 as a ‘War song for the Army of the Rhine’ to honour troops defending post-revolutionary France from Prussian and Austrian invasion. On the German side, the poem/song Die Wacht am Rhein (‘The Guard on the Rhine’) was written in 1840 as a call to arms following French political moves to extend French territory. During the Franco-Prussian war (1870–71) it became an unofficial German anthem and remained popular until the Second World War, although it is rarely heard nowadays.

The commercial Rhine

Although used from Roman times as a freight transport route, medieval use of the river was limited by rapids, shallows and local tolls collected at over 200 toll stations. These toll stations were swept away by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, while a series of river improvements throughout the 19th and 20th centuries have removed barriers to navigation on the Mittelrhein and canalised much of the Oberrhein. Steam navigation commenced in 1840 as far as Mannheim, but it was nearly 100 years before improvements allowed commercial operations to reach Basel. Today, thousands of boats and barges carry approximately 250 million tonnes of merchandise annually, including coal, oil, ore, chemicals, building materials and manufactured goods. Major flows are from the huge ports of Rotterdam and Europoort to Duisburg, Köln, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg and Basel. Canals linking the Rhine with the neighbouring river catchments of the Elbe, Danube, Marne and Rhône enable trans-European waterway transport. All along the Rhine, large black-on-white number boards show kilometre distance from Konstanz bridge where the river leaves Bodensee.