At the water's edge: Germany's Wadden Sea

The beach at Sankt Peter-Ording is shrouded in mist. As we walk, ghostly figures emerge at the water’s edge. Restaurants built on stilts to lift them up above the tides appear out of the gloom. In the shallows, a sanderling skips along in search of something to eat just below the surface. For now, the small bird is occupying the space where the land of northern Germany meets the North Sea. But only for now. To walk on the beaches and mudflats of the Wadden Sea (as it is called here) is to know that sometime soon, where you walk will inevitably become the seabed.

A boardwalk links the beach with the hotels, guesthouses and apartment blocks, all tucked away behind the dyke that protects Sankt Peter-Ording from the highest of tides and storm surges. To reach the town, the boardwalk passes over a wide expanse of dunes and salt meadows, the latter criss-crossed with tidal creeks, channels and narrow footpaths. One of these trails is marked out as a Naturpfad, a nature trail which gives visitors a chance to experience this special and protected landscape without doing too much damage.

The mist hovers just above the tall grass that waves in the wind between clumps of sea lavender and sea wormwood. As we wander along the trail we spy reed buntings and bearded tits. A kestrel flutters in place, perfectly balanced and poised in search of lunch. More than fifty bird species call these salt marshes home. Two thousand varieties of insect. South of the marshes the mudflats stretch out towards the blurred and fuzzy horizon. Even if the mist were to lift, one suspects, it would be hard to work out where the land truly ends and the sea begins.

A protected landscape

This is the Wadden Sea, a coastal region that stretches from the Netherlands to Denmark and is home to the largest tidal flats in the world. For some, it’s simply where the North Sea meets the European mainland. But that overlooks that the shifting shallows of the Wadden Sea have their own very special marine ecosystem, underpinned by distinctive geomorphology and hydrology which have profoundly affected human settlement in this region.

Inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2009, the Wadden Sea National Park and its surrounding region is a place where balances have long needed to be struck. Between the water and the land. Between cultivation and protection. Between the needs of those who live here all year round and those who are passing through.

Along Schleswig-Holstein’s North Sea coast, about two fifths of the region’s income is from tourism. In the last year before the pandemic, there were some 19 million overnight stays and 13 million day trippers. They come for the landscape and the light. The fresh air and the big skies. For the resorts that string out along the Wadden Sea shore.

At Katinger Watt, a nature reserve between Sankt Peter-Ording and the Eider estuary, a young ranger greets us while standing waist deep in a small pond. It is the last day that the centre will be open before its winter hibernation, and he has a few tasks to finish. Still, as he continues with his work, he tells us what we can expect when we make our way to the hides, for it is not only human travellers who can be found passing through this area. In any given autumn, the Wadden Sea plays host to countless migrating birds who join the year-round residents.

Some of the numbers we hear are staggering, almost impossible to imagine. 150,000 common shelducks, 60,000 curlews and 110,000 barnacle geese. On the short drive from Sankt Peter-Ording we’d seen fields covered in lapwings. Later, from the hides, we’ll spot egrets and snipes, spoonbills and even a white-tailed eagle. That the birds are drawn here is no surprise, for they are often attracted to places where the boundary between the water and the land is most blurred.

Life by the dyke

A few hundred metres from the nature reserve is the Eider Barrage, where the river meets the sea and the place to truly make sense of the local saying that while God created the sea, it was the Frisians who created the coast.

Up on the bridge across the barrage, with the mist slowly lifting, it is possible to get a sense of how people live in the land behind the dyke, a landscape of fields criss-crossed by drainage channels; of homes and farmsteads built on raised mounds beneath heavy, thatched roofs; a place where roads are lifted up against the threat of flood waters.

The Danish writer Dorthe Nors, as she travelled the North Sea coast, recognised what it is like to live behind the dyke: “The people I meet have traumas,” she writes,“inherited as well as current. They know loss, and they know that everything that is won can be forfeited again. If it isn’t storm surges it’s time: all this is only borrowed unless you fight for it.”

Wer nicht deichen will, muss weichen…

If you’re not willing to build and maintain your dyke, be prepared to lose everything. This is a motto that has shaped life in these parts for centuries. It is the preoccupation of the characters in Theodor Storm’s novella Der Schimmelreiter (The Rider on the White Horse), a classic of 19th-century German literature that tells the story of those who live and maintain the dykes. A tale of the power of the sea. Of the work needed just to maintain things as they are.

The mainland dyke, on which we are standing now beside the Eider Barrage, is part of a 300-kilometre line that marks the main defence against the devastating storm surges that have taken hundreds of thousands of lives over the centuries. In 1362, the Grote Mandrenke or St Marcellus’ Flood destroyed communities from the British Isles to North Frisia. On the Suffolk shore of eastern England, Dunwich harbour was lost to the waves. On the Wadden Sea coasts, the flood was devastating, claiming the lives of tens of thousands. Islands were formed that are now popular tourist destinations. The coastline was redrawn.

It is a fight to maintain the sea defences. The dykes began low but were developed over the centuries to further protect the hinterland. Rivers were a weak point in the defences, which was why the barrage was built across the mouth of the Eider. Today, the gap in the huge sea wall can be closed by five massive, steel sluice gates, while a shipping lock allows boats to move between the river and the open water.

The Eider Barrage, built across the mouth of the river to protect the hinterland from flooding (photo © Travelpeter / dreamstime.com).

Since the Eider Barrage was completed in 1973 it has faced down more than sixty storm surges. From the top of the sea wall, looking inland to the villages and farms in the distance, it is possible to imagine that people sleep far easier now than they did before the barrage was completed. But still, the German word for mainland is Festland, land that is fest or fixed in place. But despite the dykes and the channels, the locks and the sluice gates, nothing here feels particularly fixed in place.

A changing coastline

In Büsum, old maps on the harbour wall further illustrate how the coast of Schleswig-Holstein has been shaped and reshaped by the North Sea and its storm surges. A map from 1240 shows the coastline leading up from Büsum to what is today the border with Denmark. By 1651, the coastline was much further to the east. The sea had claimed land that had once been settled and farmed. The bits that survived were now islands, notably Pellworm and Nordstrand.

The cause was the Burchardi flood of 1634, also known as the second Grote Mandrenke. This storm surge overwhelmed the dyke and other coastal defences, killed approximately 15,000 people and completely reshaped the coastline once more. Local eyewitnesses described scenes of absolute devastation after the waters receded, a desertlike landscape scoured from the map. Half the buildings had been lost to the sea, the other half damaged almost beyond repair. Even the churches weren’t spared, and for those that survived, there were neither the priests nor the parishioners to worship in them.

It was the damage to the churches that was particularly troubling. What message was being sent? For the poet Anna Ovena Hoyer it was a symbol of the coming apocalypse. But nearly 400 years later and the warning signs are still there. Another map on the sea wall at Büsum speaks not to the past but to the future. A very different coastline indeed, and one shaped by the rising sea levels of climate change. The dykes are holding. But for how long?

Tucked away behind a dyke or a wall, it is perhaps tempting to pretend the sea isn’t there. Rising and retreating, full of beauty and power, life and death. For these communities it has long been a source of opportunity and hope as well as devastation and despair. But as with so much in the relationship between these communities and the sea, it always pays to be vigilant.

As we stand on the sea wall at Büsum, the tide rising and the wind blowing in sharply from the north, the earlier mist has long lifted to offer clear views across the turbulent waters. We watch the fishing fleet make for shore, the boats rocking and rolling as white horses break against the bows and seagulls trail behind. The sky darkens as the last vessel makes it into the calmer waters of the harbour. But then, as we are about to turn towards home, we see that sometimes it is simply not possible to get in behind the dyke and wait out the storm. Somewhere out there, a distress signal has been sent. Waves crash against the wall beneath us as, moving beyond the beacons that mark the line between the harbour and the sea, a lifeboat manoeuvres out into the maelstrom.