Please excuse my google translate german: I came to Wangerooge on a whim from Australia - where we have just had the hottest January since records began! Wangerooge has given me the weather I wanted (cold but not too cold) and sun, snow, a little bit of rain. This apartment is (as everyone reading this knows) perfectly placed to access everything on the island (although almost every part of the island is perfectly placed for every other part of the island...) my advice to first-timers: don't miss the wooge keks! (My inscription in the Guest book for my airbnb apartment - only it was translated into german)
When I step out onto the verandah of my apartment (number 20 of the Marina building, Strandpromenade) on a Saturday morning – Saturday being a day no quieter at all than any other in Wangerooge as far as I can tell – I wish I could bottle the fresh clean coldness coming straight off the North Sea, and I mean straight off, I can see it and hear it and if I had the notion I could race down there and in less than two minutes be in it. That’s not going to happen, it’s 1 degree.
Decades ago a friend who had not previously travelled outside of Australia sent me a postcard from Amsterdam explaining it in terms related to Melbourne’s inner city. I didn’t need that explanation, I knew what the big cities of Western Europe were, generically speaking, ‘like’. However I recognize the compulsion to see a place in terms of its similarities to the familiar: you seize on those similarities. So, Wangerooge – coldness aside – reminds me a lot of Rottnest (admittedly a place I’ve only been once) because it has no cars, it’s easy to orient yourself to it, it has a contained history (albeit a veiled one) and glorious beaches. Similarly it reminds me of Venus Bay: those big, empty beaches once again, the sand dunes, the old people, the possibility of dark secrets but on the other hand, maybe nothing of note ever happened here and maybe it all comes out in the wash.
I came to Wangerooge on the most incredibly concerted whim you could imagine. My father gave me a book one Christmas – Christmas 2017, I suppose, or perhaps it was my birthday – about shortlived or imaginary (by a stretch of the imagination, i.e. they existed for short-term pragmatic purposes, most of the time – no Chechnya or anything controversial) nations. Helgoland was one of them, and it got me thinking, not about Helgoland much, but about the Frisian islands, which up to that point had meant nothing more to me than the Frisian language, which I had heard once on the radio and it sounded like English you couldn’t understand. Or perhaps that was Flemish. This is how vaguely uncommitted and disengaged I was from Frisian life and peoples. I imagine I thought there was something mildly self-righteous about not knowing about some happy white people, anyway (and maybe I still do think that, not sure).
Yet somehow the Frisians seemed like a place to make good my ambition, avowed in January 2018, to spend at least some of each Australian summer in a cold place, taking advantage of the fact that no-one wanted to do that except the people who lived there, and getting a little respite from the horrors of extreme temperature, sweat, sleeplessness and fatigue.
I settled on Spiekeroog, primariliy because it had something called the Kurioses Muschelmuseum. I thought a Muschelmuseum was a fun kind of museum, and then I had to go and do some research and discovered that in fact it was a museum relating to mussels. I don’t want to see that, I thought, and my eye strayed a little to the right, only to find Wangerooge. It was the easternmost of the inhabited German Frisians, and it had a ferry, a café called Café Pudding, and a curiously shaped tower which, somehow, had travelled by itself across the island or which, rather, had stayed still while the island travelled through it. Neither of these explanations made sense to me but both added up to something intriguing.
Travelling to Wangerooge was a hell of a journey. I flew to Perth, where I was doing some research and meet ’n’ greet with people I had work situations with; then to Dubai airport; then to Hamburg, where I hung out with Steve, a man I still call ‘my publisher’ although I doubt he’ll publish anything by me ever again, being essentially retired (though to his credit he denies it). Thank god I had Steve there, who became Steve ‘my translator’ who took me to the appropriate travel authority and translated my wishes to travel hugging the earth’s surface to Wangerooge, from English into reality, for a nice woman who bashed out a ticket for me for the seven-hour trip. Essentially, two trains to Sande, wherever that is; a bus from Sande to Harlesiel, which is a place; and a ferry to Wangerooge ferry terminal, thence a train to Wangerooge the Village. Some of these lengths of the journey, you really just had to hang on and be confident you were going to be OK; in the case of the train from the ferry I suppose in hindsight, now I feel so comfortable in Wangerooge I’m basically saying Moin to every person, dog and bird I see, it was obvious you got off the ferry and got onto the train, but… no-one actually said that was what you were meant to do. I did it and I think I did the right thing.
As it transpired, the train is cool (there are train tracks all over this island. Whoever decided that they’d put a train on here, really went to town, no joke. There is totally a railway presence, even though the only train I actually saw was just going from the ferry to the town; you will just be walking around and suddenly – tracks). There are no private cars on Wangerooge; like a lot of things (to the point that you almost think – is it none of my damn business?) it’s mysterious when and how this decision was made, though of course you only have to be here an hour and you realise how it’s a key thing that makes it what it is. The Wikipedia entry for the island says the no-cars rule was instituted to maintain amenity (it doesn’t say it in those words, by the way) but I also sort of wonder if it’s in recognition of the incredible fragility of the place.
Until, I would say, the beginning of the last century Wangerooge was just basically blowing along like a purposeful slug with no-one doing anything about it except watch it go by. The best example of this is the curious case of what is now the jugendherberge (youth hostel) which was I think once known as the Westen tower, which is a most elegant building apparently (Wikipedia tells us) built in 1597 for no apparent purpose except possibly to gauge the craziness of the Wangerooge drift/slide/squirm to the east. It’s around eight storeys high before you get to the roof (which has a few more storeys in it) and must have been a remarkable construction in 1597 when there weren’t many buildings that high. It has a role to play in Wangerooge society which seems a little like the Devils Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. More on that anon.
Meanwhile, the island’s terrain. Yesterday (Sunday) I decided I would take advantage of a sunny day and the warmest of all I’ve experienced here (4 degrees) to circumnavigate it, only on land, not in my sloop. I had already, it has to be said, walked a good part of the land so I was really just doing the neatness part of my colouring-in, not setting out boldly for parts unknown. The exciting and scary bit was, however, the eastern end of the island, a long thin peninsula known as… not having a name, from which one could see Minsener Oog, the most eastern (but essentially uninhabited) German Frisian island.
Instantly after leaving, I realised I was an idiot, as I was walking straight into the sun. However, being an idiot, I kept walking on the assumption that once I turned the corner on the peninsula, I would be walking away from the sun anyway. The sun didn’t move. The village, which I was leaving behind and kept turning back to look at, didn’t seem to move either. I felt like I was moving but I apparently made no traction at all. It was remarkable. I pressed on.
After a while, the sun had done nothing (I eventually left the built environment behind me however) and I had something else to worry about – I was being followed. An individual, probably a man (dressed ‘like a man’ or at least not dressed ‘like a woman’) was about five minutes behind me and keeping apace. It was blustery, but I was pretty sure s/he wasn’t yelling ‘Hey, du hast deine Brille verloren ‘ (‘hey, you’ve lost your glasses’) and anyway I hadn’t – they were in my pocket. S/he was just following me, same kind of pace, same kind of unhurriedness I’m-an-idiot-walking-into-the-
I wanted instead to savour the triumph of my conquest of the eastern peninsula, and also to get a great shot of Minsener Oog. It didn’t help that the seagulls were everywhere in the most Hitchcockian manner imaginable, that the sun was beating down as only a 4 degree sun can, all was peach-coloured drama, and I couldn’t really even see what I was photographing. Soon I turned westwards, relieved to have the perilous sun at my back and to be progressing towards a perceivable goal: the Westen tower is actually visible from that far away, only because really it is not that far away.
I walked some minutes, probably about twenty, examining the various posts hammered into the shore at odd angles which do seem commensurate with an island that’s been slipping around for centuries, when I thought to look at something on my phone. Like everyone else in 2019 I do this constantly so I’m almost proud it took me a while to do it for the umpteenth time that day. This was when I discovered I had lost my glasses. Backtracking I saw that curiously there was a huge amount of different types of footprint on the ground, some of them probably mine but it was about 9 am and there had been heaps of people around here already. It was hard to pick my footprints out, and in fact I didn’t, and instead figured I’d just head for the easternmost point and try to find my tracks from there. Instead at that point I found my glasses (and some slow trombone music) in the surf that is, the tide was coming in and getting ready to wash them off to some desert island in the Canaries. If this is the narrowest escape I’ll have in 2019 then, well, I’m glad I’ve had it (but I guess I welcome narrower, if they are actually going to be escapes, who cares).
So I set off again westwards. This time I found something that I hadn’t previously known about: there was at some point a structure on the south-eastern coast of Wangerooge known as the Ostbake. ‘Ostbake’ in Frisian means ‘cheese bake’ which anyone would have to admit makes fuck all sense, considering this was a wooden platform a short way out into the water. A sign nearby says, and I google translate:
The Ostbake was built in 1909 here in the east of the island Wangerooge as a cardinal Schiefffahrtszeichen (marking of Hindemissen or shoals). Official name: South Cardinal Place.
The original wooden beacon was 17.34m high and had a square footprint of about 900m2. The top mark was referred to as an hourglass or in Volksumnd "egg timer", because it was similar to an hourglass.
The originating beacon of 1865 in the east of the island Wangerooge served as an adjuster of the "Blue Balje" (Seegaatt between Wangerooge and Minsener Oog). In addition, the beacon was used by shipwrecked as a vanishing point. The beacon was damaged in the following years several times by storm surges and rebuilt. Their final location and their final form received the bake in 1909 as a wooden construction with accommodation barbs for hydraulic engineering work, the so-called "Schlengenarbeiten". During the two World Wars, soldiers were housed in the Hozbaracken. From 1947, the simple accommodations of the children's rest home of the Bünder Volks- und Mittelschule e. V. initially leased, later bought and modernized. In 1990, accommodations were dismantled. The Ostbake initially remained as a day sight and in 1999 placed under monument protection.
As part of a construction site inspection in 2012, the Water and Shipping Authority Wilhelmshaven found that a renovation of the 103-year-old structure was no longer possible. The weather left irreparable damage to the building fabric. Since the Tagessichtzeichen was no longer needed as a cardinal navigation sign, a new building was not justified. On 13 June 2013, the dismantling of the Ostbake took place.
I think I can make this relevant later, so bear with me or don’t. Let it be known that the wooden supports for the Ostbake are still visible in the water, and also that I claim the moral right to a throwbake (ha ha) later on.
Pressing on: birds, sand, an embankment to the left and water to the right. After a while, as much as you want to keep going coastally, it gets tougher: the side of Wangerooge that faces Germany proper is a lot more like the underside of a slug, and a chicken/logical person might start to wonder, particularly after getting stuck in that smoosh of sand-mud that has all the consistency of wet concrete, whether it’s altogether safe to be so close to the water which is, after all, real sea with a tide important enough to control, for instance, the efficacy of the ferry. So I finally started compromising, following the deich as it’s known (yes, so it’s a dyke, but it’s not like it holds back a huge body of water; it’s more like a major embankment, which I assume is the chief earthwork instituted to stop the island slipping round the globe; it usually has a smallish drainage canal on the inside). Most of the time, you can walk or ride your bike on the top of the dyke, but at this point in time the path up there on the eastern side was under construction – I already knew this because I had tried to walk eastwards on the south side of the airport a few days previously. What I found was it wasn’t impossible to walk alongside the drainage canal, where there was a kind of dirt path. By this time, I was on the south edge of the airport.
The airport takes up a lot of space on Wangerooge, and also has a fair bit of attendant industry, a hotel for instance and a café. None of these were open when I was there (nothing much was. More on this later). As I went past, one plane landed and two took off; they’re tiny planes and for all the extensive space at the airport, they have very little room to become airborne, but they make up for all the smallness by making a massive amount of noise (maybe I’m just sensitive to noise now after a week on the quietest place on earth). Walking around the airport, and looking on my phone, and having learnt from my mistakes, I decided that while I would never, on my honour, give up my vow to walk the entire periphery of Wangerooge, I was also going to go back to my apartment and have the rest of the soup I’d made. It was minestrone. I did this and I also had a powernap and a coffee, in that order.
There was another reason to take this break. I had neglected, through a lazy week of never-never, to visit the inselmuseum which is located in a big red lighthouse near the railway station. I knew it opened on a Sunday afternoon and never on a Monday and that if I didn’t see it on Sunday I never would; also that if I was off traversing the west of the island after 2 I wouldn’t get back in time and might be too buggered to do it anyway; and that… and so on, I don’t have to justify myself to you. So, that was how I played it.
The inselmuseum costs €3 and it’s really only the bottom of the lighthouse, because – I feel I hear the people of Wangerooge saying – there’s not much to say, it just is. Indeed, a la The Shining, there is a rather nasty sensation that for all its skittering around the actual population of the island haven’t changed a lot, and you can check out anytime etc… Café Pudding, for instance, seems to have always occupied the old Frisian burial mound at the t-section of Zedeliusstraße and Obere Strandpromenade. The phenomenon of weird little beach tenty-chairy things which appear a lot in pictures but must be stored in a huge bizarre bunker somewhere because I have no idea where they are, is also older than time. Similarly, the Westen tower is a kind of god to these people and features on all their artifacts. The Dorfplatz, a park between the Parkhotel New Hampshire (!) and the St Nikolai Kirche, has been there a l-o-o-ng time, the main change being it once had a tennis court in it. And so on.
The most interesting thing in the museum, like all museums, is of course the bit they don’t want to discuss, which is the years 1933-1945. I gather that this bad shit is something German institutions everywhere, all the time, are forcing themselves to face and of course there’s no mystery why no-one wants to go there and yet everyone knows they have to. These years are dealt with in the Inselmusuem – a very non-linear (indeed, it’s circular) and hotch-potchy museum room – with two frames of pictures just as you blink and miss them going out the door, wherein otherwise context-less photographs of various officials and random people are bunged together captioned with their names. Personally, I feel that there is a lot more to this than meets the eye (i.e. it’s not just a bunch of people from the time; there are stories to be told, and the curation of those pictures means a lot to the very few people still alive and local; soon no-one will really know).
I went up the tower, fighting mild claustrophobia as usual in such situations (and yes, someone was following me. I don’t know who he was, but at the fourth or fifth level I stopped to look out the window so he would go on up, which he did). Getting to the top made it OK, and I noted that luck was on my side as regards my decision to take this break from the traversing of Wangerooge, as rain hit just as I came out on the observation deck; had I been out in the wilds of west Wangerooge it would have been just enough to soak. By the time I came down again – feeling brave enough to proffer a confident ‘danke’ to the sour woman in the ticket booth – the sun was out again. I hit the road.
That Westen tower is very prominent, because the island is very flat and the tower is very tall (and as previously mentioned, nothing is that far away). The museum shows some rather disturbing images of the tower’s original placement – on the east side of the island’s western promontory – disturbing because it is now on the west side (Wikipedia claims it has moved entirely across the island, which seems to be completely wrong and I will probably have changed that by the time you read this). The museum has a crazy image of the tower in the water, crazy because it is now fairly confidently surrounded by land. I have to stop thinking about land reclamation as crazy – it’s as sane as anything. So, the tower is your fixed point and you move towards it: simple. I walked along the top of the deich mainly.
One of the things I have noted about Wangerooge is it’s heavily populated by dogs and people (every kind of dog imaginable; mainly the people are old and white, unless they’re about two, but then they are still white). (I noted earlier today by the way that when I struck a momentary wifi glitch that one of the nearby networks was called WLAN Allah, which felt refreshingly but probably deceptively multicultural). At one moment however walking along the top of the deich I saw what seemed to be a duck without a head swimming rapidly along the drainage canal. That wasn’t possible so I moved towards it and it disappeared into the water. It was, I’m fairly sure, an otter. It stayed underwater a preposterously long time then reappeared a little further away, now swimming with purpose. I could still keep pace by walking, so I did, and it disappeared again. This felt like harassment on my part so I let it go on. I can’t let go of the feeling I had, though, that it had been having a really nice stroll all by itself and enjoying the solitude and sun, and that I’d kind of ruined that, and also I had to tell myself that I think that if only an otter could talk it’d be a cheery, ruminative and humorous fellow, but in fact it could just as easily be a bore or a prick, and I have no right to take those options away from it.
Getting to the tower was a blast, though oddly once you’re there you get no context or recognition that this is the Westen tower built in 1597. There’s a sign about the wildlife in the area, and there are a few other buildings nearby that are clearly there because the tower’s there (one is a café bar, closed in winter, which had a police car children’s ride out front apparently blown over in the wind; I put it up on its stand, half expecting someone to come out and yell at me because they laid it down on its side for the winter damn it; but there was actually no-one anywhere around). One of those buildings has a picture of the tower in its logo.
Now at this point things get difficult. I had already walked the beach on the northern side of the island, and in this instance I couldn’t remember how I’d done it and every pathway seemed to be telling me it was forbidden to go over the dune. So either I’d done it illegally previously, or, I’d missed the right pathway. Instead I decided to walk on the inside of the dune on the special pedestrian path, and take the opportunity to see another lighthouse, a groovy seventies one. The glint in its light made it feel like it was warming up for action but I think it was just the reflection of the setting sun.
The land on this western side is very flat and completely, it would seem, unused. I am not sure what it could be used for, but the point is, it’s currently sandy wastes with grass on it. That’s OK. As with much of Wangerooge, the roads are made of elegantly and simply but diligently placed bricks, and you feel like someone now dead has put a lot of work into making it easier to get around. After a while I found a path to the sea and started walking the rather tapered-off Strandpromenade. A quick stop into the Diggers bar for a celebratory brandy and back to my third-floor airbnb apartment with a view of the sea and a big bowl of pasta. Triumph! I was incredibly sore from the walk but of course unspeakably smug.
The iconography of Wangerooge is pretty pervasive. It almost feels like teams: are you a lighthouse person or a Westen tower person? I have even come across, extraordinarily, an ostbake person (well, to be fair, they had models of both the ostbake and the Westen tower in their garden, so probably appeasing the spirits of both). A ruined and seemingly rat-inhabited (though perhaps it’s the island’s otter) Westen tower can be found in a garden close to the airport, alongside a suite of dilapidated windmills, and models of rabbits, sheep and something like a meerkat.
The Westen tower is probably the winner, though it might be its distinctiveness that makes it jump out; there’s a local liqueur in the shape of the lighthouse for instance; perhaps the solidity and awkward roofline of the Westen tower makes it a difficult proposition for souvenir alcohol providers. The building I’ve been staying in, for instance, was built in 1986 but has a foundation stone (of sorts) declaring its date of construction and featuring the image of the Westen tower. You can buy tower fridge magnets and badges; of course, postcards; I came across a house with an adjoining arch revealing a frieze on the property’s back fence of a prancing horse – which distracted me for some seconds from the fact that the arch itself included an image of the Westen tower. Just as the Wangeroogeans’ habit of apparently not ascribing any purpose or function to the tower gives it an air of redundant mystery, so too shall I allow my discussion of it to peter out. I will say however that I feel one of its major problems – if problem be the right word – is that it is not in the town, but about as far from the town as you can be and still be on Wangerooge. Certainly if you take the train you go past it (though you might not see it, as the train goes so close) but there is little chance to incorporate it into the general sphere of everyday Wangerooge life. Indeed, the tower has been trying to get away from the village since 1597, and they keep reconstituting Wangerooge to keep it on the island.
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