Wrong turn at Koblenz: the Moselle valley

Victor Hugo was very fond of rivers. He wrote about them. He painted them. "Of all rivers, I prefer the Rhine," he wrote in 1845. But what of the Rhine's most prominent left bank tributary, the Moselle? It tumbles down from the Vosges highlands in eastern France, runs north through Lorraine and touches Luxembourg before meandering through a deeply incised valley to reach the Rhine at Koblenz.

Victor Hugo, travelling upriver from Cologne, might have faced a painful dilemma at Koblenz. Should he continue up the Rhine towards Switzerland or turn right and follow the Moselle valley upstream towards Trier?

Hugo lingered a day or two, but held no great truck with Koblenz. The place is more a Moselle city than a Rhine one. The Old Town and most elegant buildings turn their back on the Rhine and face the Moselle. Victor Hugo wasn't impressed. He found an interesting pink Protestant church and a stone bridge over the Moselle, the latter funded by a local bishop through the ample sale of indulgences. But Victor Hugo wrote off the town for having no public library. The Scottish publisher John Murray was altogether more tolerant of Koblenz, forgiving the city for being deficient in library provision, and commending to travellers the shop of one Karl Baedeker, whom Murray described as "a very intelligent bookseller." Baedeker went on, of course, to develop a guidebook series that was to become even more illustrious than that of John Murray.

Victor Hugo stuck to the traditional Rhine route upstream of Koblenz. Almost everyone did in those days. The Rhine gorge running south from Koblenz towards Bingen and Mainz exemplified for the nineteenth-century traveller the ideal of the romantic picturesque. A landscape laden with history and legends, brooding crags and castles, and the sure knowledge that all fairminded souls, even if tempted up the Moselle towards Trier, would most surely return to Koblenz to follow the Rhine route southward. Mary Shelley even commended a Moselle excursion as a device to enhance still more "the prouder and more romantic glories of the Rhine". The Moselle landscape, averred Shelley, possesses "an inferior beauty".

Victor Hugo travelled slowly, stopping off for days at a time at little wayside villages that lie under the shadow of fierce castles. “A week can be profitably employed at St Goar,” said Hugo of the village that clings to the west bank of the Rhine opposite the Loreley.

But what if Hugo had forsaken the Rhine at Koblenz and instead followed the Moselle? The whole course of literary history would have changed. Hugo’s classic text The Rhine might never have been. Few were the writers of Hugo’s generation who attended to the Moselle.

John Murray was one of those few. “Those who have a week to spare may make from Coblenz the tour of the beautiful Moselle to Trèves,” wrote Murray, using the old French name for the Moselle city now more commonly known as Trier. “A most agreeable excursion” he advised, noting that the Moselle was “a valley of exuberant richness.” In John Murray’s day the traveller in a rush could make the journey by river steamer from Koblenz to Trier in a couple of days. It was only in 1838 that some modest engineering works along the valley had tamed a little the erratic flow of the Moselle, allowing the introduction of a commercial boat service the following year. Nowadays, the traveller making haste can take the train and hop from Koblenz to Trier in less than two hours. Which would be a pity, as the Moselle valley deserves more.

A European waterway

There is a lot to be said for taking a wrong turn at Koblenz. For the Moselle might well lay claim to being the most European of rivers. It crosses boundaries; its management is a model of international cooperation, and it even has, on its west bank, a village whose name is now known through the continent: Schengen (see box). The Moselle’s lazy sinuous course, occasionally rocky and wild, sometimes densely hung with forests and often gently clad with vines, makes for one of the most seductively beautiful waterways in Europe. Mary Shelley may have judged it to be “an inferior beauty” but it was good enough for the fourth-century poet Ausonius whose poem Mosella is one of the masterpieces of Latin verse. The poem is a wonderful example of early travel writing, laced with lyrical descriptions of landscape and perceptive observations of the surroundings: the fish in the river, vineyards, riverside villas and watermills. Travel the Moselle valley today and you will find verses from Mosella inscribed on a thousand lintels. Mary Shelley doesn’t get a mention!

While the Rhine gorge from Koblenz up to Bingen has become a major thoroughfare, choked by cars and with main railway lines on both sides of the river, the German section of the Moselle remains something of a backwater. True, the tourists flock to the four principal towns which, progressing upstream from Koblenz, are Cochem, Traben- Trarbach, Bernkastel- Kues and Trier. Yet along the German stretch of the Moselle river, there are dozens of quiet communities that seem somehow to have avoided the mainstream of modernity.

The Moselle villages boast a higher density of timber-framed buildings than almost anywhere else in Europe. There are mighty fortresses too. Some, like the ruins of Grevenburg above Traben-Trarbach, hint of former glories. The grandest are secluded, like Burg Eltz, hidden away in a tiny side valley above Moselkern. And then there are the enigmatic silhouettes, like Burg Thurant above Alken with its double keep. Did one side of the family fall out with the other, one wonders! There are fabulous town gates, like the Roman Porta Nigra in Trier, the decorative Brückentor in Trarbach and the elegant Graacher Tor (Graach Gate) in Bernkastel. But this is no mediaeval landscape preserved in aspic for the traveller’s camera. The Moselle was and is an industrial river. The ironworks at Alf were opened in 1824, and with the opening of the river to steamers in 1839, the Moselle quickly developed into a great industrial thoroughfare. True, the boatbuilders who once populated the banks of the river have long since turned to other trades, but still the walnut trees flower just as they did in Ausonius’ day.

The Romans brought walnuts and vines to the valley, and two millennia of careful cultivation have given the Moselle region a premier position in German viticulture. Chapels and crosses dot the steep vineyards, and the names of streets and buildings are a constant reminder that this is Catholic Europe. In Ürzig there is the Mönchhof (Monks’ Court) and Jesuitenhof (Jesuit Court); in Alf a little alley that climbs steeply up towards the vineyards is called Himmelsleiter (Ladder to Heaven); and in Kraach there are vineyard names that recall Heaven’s Kingdom (Himmelreich) and the dean of the cathedral (Dompropst). The Bishop of Trier made sure that those who laboured in the vineyards paid their due to the local ecclesiastical authorities. Elaborate sundials set into the hillsides allowed the workers in the vineyards to track the hours of the passing day, while bells tolled from elegant Gothic steeples to call the faithful to church. Yet Moselle life was not always so idyllic. Karl Marx came from Trier, and in his early writings he exposed the exploitation of vineyard workers. A century later, synagogues burnt along the entire length of the valley as the Jewish communities of the Moselle fell victim to Nazi terror.

The post-war reconstruction of the Moselle valley brought a peculiar opportunity to the waterway. West Germany and France both had an interest in using the river for exporting products from the heavy industrial areas of Saarland and Lorraine. On the very same day that the two countries signed the Saarland Treaty (which agreed that the Saar region would become part of West Germany from January 1957), they also signed the Moselle Treaty. Luxembourg was a signatory to the latter treaty too. The agreement provided for the upgrading of the Moselle into a major international waterway. Twenty-eight locks were constructed, regulating the flow of the river, and nowadays the Moselle carries a great stream of massive barges transporting coal, steel products and other industrial goods. That perfect quality of Moselle serenity, as the river gently loops around quiet meanders, is a new-found thing: the result of the construction of those locks in the mid-twentieth century. The waterway opened to traffic in 1964, and for those living in this part of Europe, it came to symbolise the new-found spirit of cooperation that prevailed in the early days of the European Economic Community (EEC) — which was of course later to develop into the European Union.

But Ausonius’ river cannot be tamed completely. The spring snowmelt on the Vosges can still bring terrible flooding to the Moselle valley, and autumn rainstorms wreak havoc too. Vast waves of water rush downstream, engulfing the locks and all river traffic comes to a halt. In villages all along the river, the high water marks of yesterday record past flood levels, sometimes even higher than the door lintels inscribed with lines from Mosella.

Travellers with a week to spare (as John Murray so nicely put it) might do worse than take a wrong turn at Koblenz and head up the Moselle to Trier. That takes two days by boat, with one overnight stop. A couple of extra halts along the way, and the journey may easily and profitably be extended to four days. Continue upstream beyond Trier to the French border. For a stretch of some forty kilometres, the west bank is in Luxembourg and the east bank in Germany. The last village before the French border is Schengen, a wee slip of a place that surely punches well above its weight. Yes, there is something about the Moselle. The river celebrated by Ausonius and the valley that nurtured both Marx and Schengen still cuts a dash in the modern world. And who knows. If Victor Hugo had made a different decision at Koblenz, he might even have opted for the Moselle as his preferred European river. Ausonius was in no doubt. “All other rivers,” he wrote of the Moselle, “will cede to the primacy of your waters.”