The “land between the seas” is influenced by both the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, and yet these two couldn’t be more different. The Baltic stretches from Travemünde, Lübeck’s port, which touches on Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania, to Flensburg, at the Danish border. Thomas Mann loved it, and his alter ego Tonio Kröger aptly describes it in the short story of the same name: “The sea lay idle and smooth, in stripes of blue and russet and bottle-green, played all across with glittering silvery lights. The seaweed shrivelled in the sun and the jelly-fish lay steaming.” Of course, this description of the Baltic in summer does not always apply; in winter, it can be grey and stormy, but as an inland sea it has neither high nor low tide.
The North Sea is quite a different matter. Anyone who has taken a walk along the beach on the island of Sylt and seen the waves dashing on the shore and listened for hours to the uniform but interminable melody of the wind, will recall Theodor Storm’s famous story The Rider on the White Horse, in which the waves of a stormy North Sea are described as having white crowns and emitting a howl as they roll in that seems to contain the cries of all the frightful predators of the wilds.
Is it the archaic aspect of this landscape that continues to attract the rich and beautiful? In any case, they like to come here at weekends in their private jets to enjoy the sun on the beach, the wellness services in the hotels or seafood in one of the fancy restaurants. Shopping in the towns of Westerland or Kampen is like shopping in Paris or London – and not at all like on Germany’s most northerly island.
In Nordfriesland, the most northerly part of Schleswig-Holstein, things are a bit more reserved. Not many people live here, and often they still farm the land or work as sheep farmers. They also speak dialect and respect their traditions. It is the small rural towns, like Bredstedt, Heide and Meldorf, that best express the character of this region on the North Sea. And although clocks here tick a little slower than in the rest of the country, some of the more recent developments are altogether future-oriented. These are manifest in the state’s numerous wind farms; Schleswig-Holstein already covers more than a quarter of its energy needs with wind power.
