Left of Sunrise: The Beautiful North | free press

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What is the fascination with the north? It started late and is intense to this day. A little history of this direction.

Johann Gottfried Seume called the Swedish capital Stockholm “paradise of the north” and not only raved about it in the highest tones. 200 years ago he imagined himself there, in the north, on an island of the blessed. At that time, the fascination with the north had just begun, but Seume knew it compared to many others. He had traveled on foot from Grimma in Saxony to Sicily before turning to Scandinavia. While the south had long fueled longing, the north remained a mystery for a long time. And even when interest in it arose , that was because of its mythical touch and not because of the beautiful weather.Basically, that’s still true today, regardless of whether you’re looking at stone circles in the Scottish landscape, heading for Hammerfest on the Hurtigruten or the castles of the Hidden People in Iceland.

Even the Indo-European word “north” means something mysterious. It means “to the left of sunrise”. The more one deals with it, the more obvious it becomes that there is no such thing as one North. It consists of different ideas, some of which contradict each other, and as a flexible concept consists of projections of desires. That’s wonderful when you’re looking for a holiday destination, but becomes dangerous when you draw political conclusions from it. That is why, especially from a German perspective, the history of the North is also one of its appropriation. When interest in “up there” began throughout Europe in the 18th century, it was soon exalted in Germany as the cradle of an actual Aryan culture. Before that, however, people here were also particularly anxious at the thought of the northern regions, which have shifted geographically several times in history.

Classical culture was born in the Mediterranean region. For the Greeks, the Alps and the Black Sea formed the border. Behind it was assumed to be the dark land of Hyperborea, inhabited by giants, named after the god of the north wind and the bringers of winter. The son of the sun god is said to have fallen from the sky here at the end of the world, the ambers spread are tears of his grieving sisters. Linked to the north is the obsession of Thule, which a Greek astronomer claims to have sighted on a voyage around 400 BC. The legendary island kingdom in the pack ice has been identified with Norway, Iceland or the Scottish Orkneys. The place soon acquired mythical traits – similar to Atlantis – and the further north one explored and settled, the greater the horizon shift. Some assumed Thule was Greenland. Goethe dedicated a fairy tale ballad to fiction, and the anti-Semitic Thule Society, founded at the end of the First World War, dedicated itself to “promoting the German way”. The Nazis took over the swastika from her as their symbol.

In the course of the Enlightenment, German scholars were fascinated by the fresh discovery of the Edda and the sagas with the Viking heroic stories, even if they could actually be of Christian origin. The Nordic heaven of gods, for example, attracted the attention of Johann Gottfried Herder, who called the Edda the “armoury of a new German genius”. And thus opened up dangerous waterways. In contrast to Greco-Roman culture, he glorified the north as a fountain of youth from which new strength could be drawn. He was never there though. His successors took this distortion and veneration of Nordic warrior communities further into folkish nationalism and formed a racial concept from it.

Apart from Thule as a positive reference to the north, in other traditions it was considered the place of the devil. According to the Bible, peoples bringing evil would come from this direction. “Arctic”, a synonym for the north, derives from the visible constellation in the northern sky: the Great Bear. He, too, a bad omen. Mystic Hildegard von Bingen feared that “the bear growling menacingly in anger” would bring storms and catastrophes. The landscapes were considered cold and sunless, which is why the people there were considered barbaric and rough. Think of the wildlings beyond the Wall in Game of Thrones, which are a reproduction of these ancient notions. The Vikings in particular, erroneously called the North Germans in earlier times, acted as a catalyst for fear of the North. Starting in the 8th century, they scoured the British Isles from Scandinavia, then the continent, besieging Paris and devastating Aachen. But they also spanned the North and Baltic Seas with a trade network, as did the Hanseatic League and later made the areas usable. The ivory of the walrus teeth was coveted for centuries. Whale fat, called “polar oil”, served as fuel in lamps until the 19th century. There was a whole industry clustered around whaling. Of course, fishing was intense. They were particularly interested in cod. Because Portuguese sailors shipped the fish en masse to their homeland, it became a national dish there. Until 1900, many European countries sent twelve expeditions to the Arctic to explore mineral resources and to find a northern trade route to Asia. All failed. It was only discovered in 1909 – together with the Arctic – that the belief in an ice-free polar sea was misguided.

The freedom from ice is just a myth that has been around for a long time. Some of the expedition members were prepared for the cold, harsh climate, but had to struggle with annoying mosquitoes in the summery tundra. In the north, according to the imagination, the giant whirlpool Malmstrom drew sailors into the depths. There should be a magnetic mountain that holds ships and seas of amber. And the aurora borealis proved to be particularly puzzling – did they really emanate from the earth’s interior, as one theory said? Sea monsters roam the first map of this latitude. For example, a scarlet snake ensnares a sailing ship that threatens to break apart. You could get an idea, and the map shaped people’s ideas for a long time. All of this echoed reality. In fact, there is a strong tidal current between two Norwegian islands, the compass needle points north and amber has been a coveted commodity throughout Europe for thousands of years.

The explorer Francesco Negri traveled to the “Land of the Midnight Sun” for three years in the 17th century and recorded: “I am here at the North Cape on the edge of Finnmark and thus also at the very edge of the world, because there are no more places further north inhabited by humans.” Lonely forests and mountains also inspired the aforementioned Seume. After hiking in Italy, he traveled to Scandinavia in 1805 and saw beeches there that were found in “such perfection and beauty” neither in the Thuringian Forest nor in Italian Latium. Cities were also second to none: “Stockholm is one of the loveliest places I’ve seen, and if the Mälar (lake west of Stockholm, ed.) had the sun of the Arno, there would be more Elysium here than in Florence.”

Of course, artistic activities fueled the northern euphoria intensively. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy paid homage to the Scottish islands in his overture “The Hebrides”. Richard Wagner’s interpretations of Norse myths not only promoted the exaltation of the Norse Teutons – his operatic costumes characterized the image of the Viking helmet with horns and wings – but also aroused serious interest. In “Ring des Nibelungen” he processed the world of legends, he moved the “Flying Dutchman” from the Cape of Good Hope to Norway. Later, Heinrich Böll’s “Irish Diary” as well as Maj Sjöwall’s and Per Wahlöös’ Swedish crime novels published in the GDR also contributed to the fascination. Today it’s a crime genre in itself. Björk created a fantastic piece of music that is forever associated with Iceland, dozens of books, films and video games later, everyone probably knows a bunch of Nordic clichés. The cult of hygge, that Nordic happiness, also appeals to the idea. You can only find out what’s going on with a visit. Or you just keep dreaming of the beautiful and mysterious realms to the left of the sunrise.

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