Wengen, Kanton Bern, Switzerland, May 2015 - Guidebooks

If I were to undertake another PhD I think I would like to study the ways in which guide books determine the views that foreign visitors have of the places and countries they visit.  It would need to be a comparative study, looking at guides written for a wide variety of national groups, because it seems to me that there must be huge differences in what is suggested as worth visiting, and in the presentation of places, to different tourist constituencies.

I can think of no explanation other than guide books and the related offerings of travel companies for the fact that tourism in the Swiss village of Wengen and the surrounding Jungfrau region has a remarkable proportion of Indians.  I have never experienced such a preponderance of tourists from that origin anywhere else in Europe.  But then, thirty years ago when I first came to the Bernese Oberland, I was surprised to find, in Grindelwald, menus in Japanese for the first time in Europe.  I have since got used to seeing large parties of Japanese tourists in many other parts of the continent - along with increasing numbers of individual Japanese travellers who are not in groups.  But big Indian groups are a novelty to me.

Grindelwald, Wengen and the Jungfrau region certainly count as some of the top European destinations for tourism  - and I can willingly confess that I have been drawn back to the area many times over the years. The Jungfraujoch is the highest railway station in Europe, and a journey up to it on a fine day is a memorable experience (as is the hole burnt in the wallet by the price of a ticket). But something that surprises me (observing from a comfortable room next to the railway line in Wengen) is how on days of dismal weather Japanese and Indian groups still crowd the trains. They will see little other than snow at Kleine Scheidegg where they have to change trains for the last section; they will emerge into the observation tunnel cut half way up the north wall of the Eiger to be surrounded entirely by mist; and at the very top they will doubtless find themselves in freezing cloud, with no views down to the glaciers, and little to take their minds off the altitude sickness that a proportion of  them will feel.  Yet I guess their guidebooks have told them that this is an absolute 'must' in all circumstances.

Wengen is  perched on an alp, several hundred metres above Lauterbrunnental, and is accessible only on foot or by rail.  There are no cars in the village, which is almost entirely dependent on tourism. The importance of Japanese visitors is seen in the fact that they have their own tourist information office.  But is  this so surprising?  When tourism started in this region of Switzerland it was the British who led the way and were the predominant group right into the post-war period.  There is an English church in Wengen (and another down in Interlaken at the gateway to the Jungfrau region). And why did the British come here? Because the John Murray guide told them to.

What would also be interesting in a study of guidebooks would be an analysis of places they do not cover. A few years ago I was in the Dolomites in Italy and was surprised to find that my fellow hotel guests were dominated by Americans who hardly featured elsewhere in the region.  They all seemed to be following a similar itinerary and one evening I asked to look at their guidebook - by Rick Steves.  It purported to cover the whole of Italy.  Yet about 50 pages were devoted to five tiny villages in Liguria which Steves obviously regarded as a 'must see'. (I agree that these five - the cinque terre - are interesting, but 50 pages seemed rather a lot). The only place recommended in the Dolomites was the hotel I was staying in - apparently because the owner was very friendly and spoke good English. And Steves made no recommendations whatsoever for anywhere south of Rome.  For him, and those using his guide, Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Vesuvius, Sicily, Sardinia, Apulia and so on didn't exist. (I note that his web site does now include mention of some of these - but the cinque terre still take up a remarkable amount of space.)

And Steves didn't exactly educate his readers either.  One evening I commented to one of  the American guests that the peacefulness of Castelrotto / Kastelreuth (the Dolomite village in the now-bilingual Alto Adige / Süd Tirol region where we were staying) was gratifying after the conflicts of the past.  She looked alarmed - "Has there been a war round here recently?" she asked.  It became clear that her guide book hadn't even led her to realise the language(s) used in the village, or anything of the fascinating cultural and political history of the area.  To her she was in a comfortable, safe environment where Rick Steves told her exactly what to do, and where she could live in an American bubble.

Yesterday I caught the Swiss postbus down from the Trümmelbach Falls to Lauterbrunnen - to then take the train back up to Wengen.  I would guess that about 90 of us jammed on to a bus designed to take around 30.  Most on the bus were Indian.  I asked the Swiss man next to me whether this was usual.  His answer - "Yes, it's always like this.  It must be something in their guidebooks."

Badenweiler, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, May 2015 - Speaking German

I failed German O Level the first time I took it.  I think we all did - the whole class.  And that includes someone who went on to study German at Cambridge.

Our teacher, nearing retirement, had decided to adopt a new and untried way of teaching.  By the time of the exam we could recite by heart a long passage about two soldiers during the Second World War, but we couldn't either translate it or do anything else.  We were saved, in the first term of the sixth form, by a brilliant new teacher who got almost all of us through the resit exam in November of our first year sixth - and we then asked to continue being taught by him alongside our A levels, although we were not doing any further exams in German.

I have always been grateful to that teacher - for it is through him that I have become one of that small minority of people from the UK (a 2012 Eurobarometer Survey put it at 6%) who have the ability to have a simple conversation in German.  German is certainly not my best foreign language (without a doubt that would be French), but it also illustrates the law of comparative advantage.  That law states that it is better to do what you have the greatest advantage over other people in, rather than what you are best in.  Throughout my academic career I have been amongst a significant number of UK social scientists who speak French - but I believe that for some years I was the only UK geographer who spoke German.    Actually, I never exploited that as much as perhaps I should, although I did produce some research papers on Vienna and Berlin and had a research project with a German colleague comparing Japanese communities in Düsseldorf and London.  I also organised a couple of British-German seminars to bring students and researchers together from the two countries - and at one of them found myself having to give a speech in praise of the chef's cooking.

German is the mother tongue that is most spoken in Europe west of Russia, far more so than English.  Add Austrians and Swiss Germans in to the population of Germany and around 90 million Europeans speak German at home.  The figure for English is around 70 million.  Shortly after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 it looked as if German might vie with English as the lingua franca for the continent as a whole.  I was at a migration conference in Vienna in the early 1990s where the official language was English but where a whole range of new colleagues from Eastern Europe, attending their first major international gathering, found it much easier to use German.   But the moment passed and English has become even more dominant.

The Eurobarometer survey I quoted earlier suggested that in contrast to the 6% of UK citizens who can hold a conversation in German, 56% of German citizens could chat to someone in English.    I am currently in south-west Germany - on the edge of the Black Forest - and those figures seem a little surprising to me. My experience over the last couple of weeks has been that a much higher proportion of Germans, even in occupations where they are likely to come into contact with foreign visitors, are monolingual than the data suggests.  The waitress in my present 4 star hotel, widely advertised in foreign guides; the train conductor on a tourist train; shopkeepers - none of these seemed to have any language other than German.

But tourist arrival statistics provide some reasons for this.  World Bank data show that, despite its size, Germany receives only about  one third as many foreign tourists each year as France - the world's premier foreign tourist destination - and is way behind Italy and Spain as well, and on a par with the UK.  Many of those tourist arrivals in Germany are from the Netherlands, simply passing through, and another significant group are from Switzerland and are German-speaking.  And by far the biggest tourist region in Germany is Bavaria - which I have not been visiting.  Finally, a lot of Germans holiday within their own country.

Badenweiler, where I am writing this, is a small spa town with no real equivalent in the UK.  The Romans knew the waters here, and there are superb remains of their bath house, wonderfully displayed. There are big hotels for those 'taking the cure', and a beautiful and well-managed park around an old castle which has views stretching across the Rhine into Alsace.  Chechov, dying of tuberculosis, came here but it was too late and he died here in 1904. Below the town there are vineyards with paths that invite a morning or evening stroll. All told it's a very German setting - and none the worse for that.

So I am enjoying being in parts of Germany that are surprisingly monolingual, and I am grateful to that teacher for enabling me to function here. But there is one interesting contrast between my monolingual hotel here and establishments of a similar level in the UK: in the latter a variety of languages are these days spoken - by the foreign staff they have to hire to overcome the shortages of trained British employees.

Strasbourg, Alsace, France, May 2015 - Identity Issues

I can think of only two major cities in Western Europe where, at some point in the last 150 years or so, 'ownership' of the city has changed hands in such a way that individual inhabitants have had to change their language use. Those two are Nice (which only became French instead of part of a nascent Italy in 1860) and Strasbourg.  Of course, other places in Alsace have undergone the same fate as Strasbourg.  There is a smaller city - Bolzano - where such a change has also occurred, although Bolzano / Bozen is now recognised as bilingual Italian / German.  And of course there are many cities in Eastern Europe that have witnessed a similar fate.

But Strasbourg seems to me an interesting case - part of France until 1871, then part of Germany until 1918, reverting to France until 1940, reincorporated into Germany then until 1945, and finally resolutely part of France ever since.  Someone born in Strasbourg in, say, 1865 who survived to their ninetieth year  would have seen their required official language switch four times, spending 38 years living in France and 52 in Germany - possibly without ever moving house.

Unfortunately I don't know any Strasbourgers well enough (or old enough) to probe what this sort of history means to them.  I suspect there are a series of different narratives used with different audiences.  Many years ago I went to a son et lumière performance in Strasbourg cathedral.  It was given in French, and the things that were said about Germany and the Germans in that performance could surely not have been reused in direct translation in the German language performance an hour later - perhaps I should have paid again to attend that as well.

This time I sat in a café opposite the cathedral and looked up (the wonders of having the internet in one's pocket) the short story by Alphonse Daudet entitled La Dernière Classe (The Last Class), set in 1871, where the teacher announces that today's classes will be the last held in French because tomorrow a new teacher will arrive from Berlin and all future classes will be in German. (Daudet himself was from Nîmes and mostly wrote about the south of France, but the story is a strong one with a political message).

France doesn't actually have a very good record on minority languages, officially refusing support for Breton, Basque and other languages spoken as native languages within its territory.  It is ironic that Strasbourg is the seat of the Council of Europe, yet France is one of a tiny handful of European countries that has refused to sign that Council's convention on the rights of minority language speakers.  French official rhetoric holds to the view that there is only one way of being French.  Yet unofficially  things seem to be changing. There are now some broadcasts made in Alsatian (the Germanic-based but French-inflected language traditionally spoken in the region).  The regional train network has the Alsatian 'Elsass' proudly proclaimed on the carriages as well as the French version.  And tourist commentaries sign off with an Alsatian greeting. The language is clearly still used - an older couple at a restaurant table next to me had an animated conversation in Alsatian.

Some years ago I gave a seminar at the University of Strasbourg and found myself in a very Germanic building, constructed during the late 1890s.  The period of German dominance between 1871 and 1918 brought a whole new architectural  style to a key area of the city - almost creating two separate cities. The German area, to the north-east of the old French city, feels very different with its imposing, and almost oppressive, Wilhelmine architecture in a range of public buildings and in private houses. But whilst the buildings may be heavy the culture of the period was perhaps more liberal - Albert Schweizer, the Nobel peace laureate, taught at the university during this period, and the city's main concert halls and the opera house were built under German rule.

Today the German influence in Strasbourg seems to lie largely in its tourists - vast numbers of German groups thronging the older parts of the city. Most seem to speak no French, and restaurants can keep them out by not offering German translations of their menus.  But get into the main shopping streets, out into the residential areas, the parks, or suburban zones and Strasbourg reverts to being a French city. On the other hand, those Strasbourg shopkeepers and restaurateurs who do want German clientele speak better German than I have heard from any other French. A car park attendant lamented to me that he now needed to concentrate on his English - the language for the future - and had signed up for evening classes.

Brussels, Belgium, May 2015 - A Surreal City

I have always had a soft spot for Brussels - a quirky city that seems appropriate as the home of surrealism.  It was the first European city I explored independently when I started travelling in my teenage years.  A few days after receiving my A level results I arrived in Brussels, with a friend, as part of a hitch-hiking tour that took us through to the Rhine Gorge.

Over the succeeding years I have visited Brussels many times, for a whole variety of purposes - lecturing at the universities, meeting EU officials, visiting local friends, spending weekends here visiting the museums and historic sites (Magritte's house, the wonderful museum of musical instruments, the art gallery), passing through en route to somewhere else, or just enjoying the city itself. I've already been twice in 2015 - some years it has been three visits in 12 months, although rarely more than a few days in length.

I have seen a lot of changes in the city.  On my first visit, and several subsequent ones, I was hitch-hiking around Europe as a student and Brussels was an essential stopping off point en route to Germany - then the friendliest country in Europe to hitch-hikers.  It was the period of language tensions in Belgium - there were frequent student riots in Leuven over what should be the dominant language in the university before a new French-speaking institution was created just across the language frontier at Louvain-la-Neuve, allowing the ancient university of Leuven to revert to Flemish.  I used to stay in the French-speaking youth hostel in rue Verte, but just a couple of blocks away was the Flemish-speaking equivalent where non-Flemish-speakers were made to feel unwelcome.  That whole area uphill from the Gare du Nord (the North Station) was, at that time, a working-class Belgian district, before the arrival of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants that has turned it into a very cosmopolitan area.  But the tram route out from Ste Josse to place Meiser is still the 90, as it was when I used to set off from Meiser in a queue of often 50 or more young people all seeking lifts to Liège or beyond into Germany and south from there to Italy. Many of them were British, during the period when there was a limit of £50 on the export of currency - my aim was to spend less than £1 a day in order to spend as long as possible travelling (a night in a youth hostel, with evening meal, generally came to just over half of that).

The linguistic oddity of the city remains.  It is technically bilingual, yet I have been with a Flemish-speaking friend in the past who has insisted on ordering in his language in bars and restaurants and has deliberately (he speaks perfect French) got very irate when he has not been understood.  This afternoon the Belgians at the table next to me in a bar were initially French-speaking but were then replaced by three Flemish-speakers for whom the waiter hesitatingly changed language - although a colleague who served them later could only address them in French.

Another quirky feature of the city is the juxtaposition of characterful old buildings, often in local brick, against modern concrete monstrosities - a reminder of the fact that until recently Brussels had no planning restrictions and no conservation zones so that, in architectural terms, 'anything goes'. It is only a few years ago that a solution was found to a joint architectural / linguistic problem in the shape of what to do with the place des Martyrs.  The imposing civic buildings on this square commemorating events at the foundation of the Belgian state in 1830, itself a controversial episode in the relationship between French and Flemish speakers, had fallen into a state of disrepair - with trees growing out of their roofs - because of a lack of agreement between the two linguistic communities about renovation.  Happily that has been resolved more recently and the square, although tucked away and not receiving the tourist attention it deserves, at least now looks smart and well-maintained.

I don't want to make Brussels out to be too odd, but one final feature to mention is the 'pre-métro'.  In addition to building a couple of real metro lines, they also envisaged converting some existing tram routes into metro lines by taking them underground through the city centre.  In doing so they created full metro stations to take long trains - bit they never did convert the tram lines so that today short tram cars stop at cavernous underground stops.

Too much rhetoric in the UK sees 'Brussels' in a negative light - as the seat of European bureaucracy and somewhere to be fought off.  It is the metaphor for all that a eurosceptic press and populist politics dislikes (without understanding how small that bureaucracy is - I recall a Lord Mayor of Sheffield returning from a visit to the European Commission to note that it had fewer employees than Sheffield City Council).

To me Brussels is a city of parks; of rows of little terraced brick houses; of art nouveau architecture; of interesting museums; of beer, mussels and chips.  And it has the finest square - the Grand Place - that I know in any city.  When I first came there was still traffic in the square, and a daily market.  At Christmas I have enjoyed the live crib with real animals (donated by another of Belgium's linguistic groups - the German-speaking communities of the far east). Today it is thronged with tourists from all parts of the world, but with a particularly strong contingent of Japanese.  But every time I am in Brussels I try to undertake one small personal ritual - a glass of wine and a slice of fruit tart in the 'Chaloupe d'Or' bar on the western side of the square.  And I have just fulfilled that for this visit (as I also did for my previous visit six weeks ago, and for many more before that).