Journey Across the Alps: From Germany to Italy

“When I went from Constance, it was on a small steamer down the Rhine to Schaffhausen.” So wrote DH Lawrence in 1913. While his lover Frieda Weekley was trying to explain their love affair to her family in Germany, Lawrence decided to walk south across the Alps to Como and Milan, about 230 miles, using steamers on the rivers and lakes where possible.

In 2022, I followed his path with an idea for a novel. I took the train to Konstanz and found a pretty town of stone courtyards and half-timbered houses. But my reenactment hit a snag: drought. It was August, the Rhine was unusually low, and the steamers couldn’t reach Schaffhausen, only Stein am Rhein. Half the distance.

Lawrence used his walk to observe the encroachment of industrialization in the Alps. He was fascinated and appalled by the people’s age-old intimacy with the land being replaced by “the mechanical money principle.” Now, climate change adds to our anxieties. As I boarded my paddle steamer at 9 am, it was already too hot. One of my novel’s protagonists would be an expert on ecocriticism.

Lake Constance has Austria to the east, Germany to the north, and Switzerland to the south. The steamer headed west into the Rhine, which was wider and bluer than I imagined. Bathers bobbed near the banks; men in small boats sat hunched over fishing rods. We chugged along from one fairytale village to the next for a couple of hours. On deck, people were constantly jumping to take photos. “The poignancy of the past,” Lawrence writes, “was almost unbearable, floating there in color upon the haze of the river.”

Stein am Rhein was another masterpiece of kitsch and quaint, with a cobbled marketplace and old stone fountain. The grey and pink frescoes were recently restored, thronging a grand facade and including a sundial where the light is always at the zenith. Tourists took selfies with their backs to the scenery. “Not very real,” Lawrence commented. Along the river, as I carried my pack the 12 miles to Schaffhausen, bathers floated downstream on the sluggish current, calling and waving to each other, creating a dreamy atmosphere of pleasure and denial.

Beyond Schaffhausen, you have to negotiate a tangle of motorway access roads before reaching Rhine Falls, where the majestic river plunges 23 meters, reputedly the most powerful waterfall in Europe. All vantage points have been fenced off, so you have to pay for a good view. It’s well worth it, yet some things should be free.

“Ordinary,” was Lawrence’s complaint about the next stretch of the journey, marching south. “A horrible, average, vigorous ordinariness,” he says. Carefully cultivated fields, neat rows of vines, and a well-swept Swissness marked the villages. I enjoyed all this but understood what he meant. Trees had tags indicating their species and date of planting. Vineyards displayed certificates of insurance against hailstorms. Everything was bureaucratised. Each farmhouse bore a date, or dates (1670, restored 1993), and there were numerous plaques telling about a mill here or an old winepress there. It felt like life was a museum.

Lawrence slept in the village of Eglisau. “A small forgotten wonderful world,” he described it. It was indeed a fabulous place to eat trout and sip fizzy Apfelschorle from a wooden balcony with views of the blue-green river in the gorge below. My main character, I’ve decided, takes this walk to recover a romantic past; he has made the trip before with a lover. But to what end, if, as Lawrence frequently feels, the past is so unreal when preserved in the present?

Leaving the Rhine, you pass through an endless wood managed by the Schweizerischer Forstverein. There’s one track for hours, arrow straight, with logs stacked at intervals. “Mile after mile, to Zurich,” Lawrence writes, “it was just the same … utter soulless ordinariness.” Zurich itself was “like a most ordinary, average, usual person in an old costume.” Though he couldn’t bear to spend a single night in the town, I noticed the Swiss habit of arranging consumer products in neat little rows: cakes and chocolates, pipes and pocketknives, herb teas, jewels, jams, all rigorously aligned, neatly labeled, and clearly priced. There was even a Condomeria, with condoms and vibrators in pink and purple ranks. My character’s reaction to this would be interesting.

The next day began with a steamer trip on the Zurichsee, then a climb through dense woods from Adliswil to Felsenegg, where the terrace cafe at the top offered a vast panorama – “Zurich and its lake laid out before me like a relief map,” Lawrence says – and the first sight of the mountains to the south: a delicate white silhouette above blue hills promising, at last, something quite out of the ordinary.

The long climb toward the Gotthard was the climax and challenge of this trip. First, you have the hike to Lucerne, which Lawrence described as “irritating as ever,” then a magnificent three-hour lake trip down to Flüelen in a steamer built in 1906, possibly the very boat Lawrence sailed in. The water was luminous under heavy cloud which opened up on glimpses of dizzying crags, giving the impression of being transported to a world ever more rugged and remote.

But this is an illusion. Lawrence was glad to be in a landscape no longer entirely in thrall to mankind: “I set off up the valley,” he says, “between the close, snow-topped mountains, whose white gleamed above me as I crawled, small as an insect, along the dark, cold valley below.” He could walk on the main road, as there were no cars, only the occasional cart or carriage, and though “railway sidings and haphazard villas for tourists” irritated him, as soon as he was away from them he heard nothing but the river Reuss.

Not so today. “The Gotthard autobahn was completed in 1986,” one of the information panels along Swiss National Trail 7 informed me, “making the upper Reuss valley accessible for day trips.” The babble of the river mingled with the rumble of heavy vehicles. Lawrence had no idea. You raise your head and look for remote paths high up on the mountainside. Here I saw the chance to inject drama into my novel.

My trek suddenly became more dangerous than Lawrence’s, climbing higher, pursued by noise. On the second day, I lost myself in thick raincloud; my phone battery died and I was in trouble, saved only by the wraithlike appearance of the Maria Hilf Kapelle, a tiny church clinging to a bank of granite. Inside, two boxes of matches and a money box invited me to make a donation and light a candle.

Climbing the Devil’s Gorge to Andermatt or descending the Ticino valley into Italy is not for everyone. But those who do it get a powerful sense of how radically the Earth has been wounded for rapid communication and industrial growth.

It’s different to know something intellectually versus feeling it in the flesh, though there were unexpected consolations: small towns marooned in a charming past, free from kitsch, precisely because the autostrada had destroyed tourism. Or moments of blistering heat when I could strip off and lie naked in the river beneath the motorway.

By the time Lake Como shimmered before me, I felt confident I had my novel. I would call it Mr. Geography.

Source: The Guardian