When you get older, you sometimes feel the need to do something, just like you did in your youth. So the idea was born to travel again with no other purpose than to ‘get on the road and see where you end up’. We threw some suitcases in the trunk, collected old road maps and had only a vague sense of direction and destination. The only premise: to go somewhere we hadn’t been before.
Therefore, on the first day, we more or less accidentally ended up at an airport near Norddeich, where a Pipercup regularly takes nature lovers to the German Wadden Island of Juist. There we stayed for a few days in a dune landscape that, in terms of beauty, can compete with that of Vlieland and Schiermonnikoog. Then it went to Lübeck, where we casually walked into the famous cathedral, just as the dress rehearsal of Bach’s Messe in B minor. It was hard to keep our eyes dry and we weren’t the only ones. When the singers left the church in their usual clothes, they were accompanied in the street with applause.
We took the ferry to Ystad, which reminded us that IJ means ‘water’ in West Frisian. We ended up in Gotland, where the Swedish government has sent extra soldiers because of the Russian threat, but where you can cycle for hours without meeting anyone. In Stockholm, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, we visited the Nobel Prize Museum and suddenly I found myself in front of the display case of Linus Pauling, who – I believe – is the only one to have been awarded the Nobel Prize twice. I once had the opportunity to interview him (together with Rob Sijmons) and I remember that he also took vitamins during the interview, because he was convinced that you get older as a result. I can still picture his face when Rob said you were just pissing off those vitamins again. Linus Pauling turned 93, despite or because of it.
Those who travel on the spec will come to the strangest places. In Denmark, for example, we drove along a deserted, kilometer-long beach, where you are expected to drive your car to the high tide line if you want to swim. I didn’t know such places still exist in Europe and I understand even less why people yearn for the Côte d’Azur.
Unforgettable was our visit to Peenemünde, another millstone in German history. We had never been there either. Peenemünde is ‘the home of the V2’, the rocket that Wernher von Braun helped develop for Nazi Germany and which caused quite a bit of destruction in London. Von Braun was ‘abducted’ by the Americans at the end of the war and made a career as the mastermind behind the American space program. He himself said that he had only done ‘scientific research’ in Peenemünde. From Adolf Hitler to John Kennedy – von Braun shook hands with them all. Older readers may remember the song Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer with the immortal lines: ‘Once the rockets are up/ Who cares where they come down?/ That’s not my department/ Says Wernher von Braun.’ It seems to me to be the motto of many Russian bombing raids on Ukraine.
Much rocket technology is still based on the ideas of Wernher von Braun. The Russian Scud, for example, with which Saddam Hussein terrified the surrounding countries, seems most similar to the V2, but the American Himars systems that have to stop the Russians in Ukraine also owe a lot to Wernher von Braun. . No more war without missiles and no missiles without von Braun.
Today, the Peenemünde rocket factory is turned into a museum, where the history of the V1 and V2 has been reconstructed. The V1 is a kind of airplane that was launched from an ascending runway, the V2 is the first series-produced rocket. As you approach the museum, you can already see it in the distance: an exact replica of the V2. He does indeed look like the rocket Tintin to the Moon. Comics artist Hergé was also inspired by Wernher von Braun.
The factory has been hit by Allied bombings several times, but never completely destroyed. The remnants now form one of the most poignant industrial monuments in European history. Thousands of forced laborers worked here, thousands of forced laborers died here. This is not a ‘guilty landscape’, as Armando called it, but a guilty building. At the beginning of this year, Jaap van Zweden gave a concert with the New York Philharmonic in the space where the rocket turbines were once tested. There was a long round of applause for him.