Why Germany Has No Major Cities On The North Sea

Comments · 1.7K

• GE

  @GeographyByGeoff · 5 months ago · pinned

  Try Mammouth AI now at <a href="http://mammouth.ai/">mammouth.ai</a>

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• DE

  @Depipro · 5 months ago

  As a Dutchman who also knows something about the surroundings of his country, I have a few issues with this video. It started off alright, but the more it went on, the more &quot;Well, actually...&quot; moments started piling up. Here are a few that jumped out to me, without trying to be exhaustive; you can dive further into each of these (with many different dives for the 2nd one):<br><br>1. When you talk of the danger of floods, almost the entirety of Schleswig-Holstein colours red. However, there is a long range of (foot)hills stretching from Jutland in Denmark, following the southern coastline of the Baltic Sea (interrupted by a few major rivers) all the way to southeastern Estonia. Something to do with the glacial maximum during the last Ice Age of the Pleistocene, when, roughly speaking, modern-day Sweden was one massive glacier. This provides a lovely old watershed line, roughly through the middle of Schleswig-Holstein, North to South.<br><br>2. You mix modern state boundaries into historical analysis, creating a jumble of anachronisms. When the Holy Roman Empire mattered politically, the modern-day Netherlands were a part of it, albeit a border region. We only started to form a nation in the more modern sense during the Eighty Years&apos; War (1568-1648). Especially when it comes to water management, when you delve into it, you&apos;ll find that the organization of Holland (modern-day North and South Holland provinces) and that of Friesland and Groningen differs strongly until the 19th (Groningen) and 20th (Friesland) centuries, respectively. There are also huge geographic differences between these regions; in one word: Dunes. Friesland has them, but only on the islands. However, North Holland had to deal with the Zuiderzee for much of its recorded history, and the last major flood that took a toll on what is now northern Amsterdam took place in 1916; it prompted the plans for the Enclosure Dam to actually go through. But back to the disunited states of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance periods: there were no &quot;Germans&quot; back then, just as there were no &quot;Dutch&quot;; people identified with smaller geogaphic and/or state entities. But they did migrate between those entities, with a lot of people moving both from modern-day German areas to modern-day Dutch ones, as the other way around, for all sorts of reasons. Also dialects varied throughout both countries; they still do, but back then there was no &quot;official state language&quot;. Someone from Cologne would have had less trouble speaking with someone from Venlo than with someone from Munich, for example. So this whole idea of having a hinterland to move into versus not having one looks quite arbitrary if you take away modern state organization.<br><br>3. Also arbitrary are the comparisons you make between German and Dutch cities. The Hague is not a port: it sits cozily behind the dunes, while the old fishing village of Scheveningen became a part of it only in modern times (and that is still not a commercial sea port). Also, historically, it is not a city; it is the village where Count Floris V of Holland (1254-1296) built his court, precisely so that no single city would dominate his county. Meanwhile, Amsterdam&apos;s historical waterway approach was from the East, rather than the West, while Rotterdam sits on the New Meuse at a similar distance from the sea to Bremen and Hamburg (the length of this distance in practical terms got longer through history as which part of the delta was navigable shifted over time, and was shortened only in modern times with the construction of the New Waterway in 1872).<br><br>4. When you call the modern-day coastal area of Germany on the Wadden Sea empty, Wilhelmshaven and Emden would like a word.<br><br>5. When you mention the Dutch drainage mills, you are showing footage of the Zaanse Schans. Those are industrial mills (a few oil mills and sawmills and one paint mill), which have nothing to do with draining the land. Those moments in the video will make any Dutch person who actually knows something about their own country facepalm hard. Come on, there are still many drainage mills around, there is zero reason to show industrial mills when you talk about drainage mills. Next time, try searching for &quot;Kinderdijk&quot; or &quot;Schermer&quot;, and try looking for the actual indications on those mills that they were/are, indeed, doing water management, which are absent on the industrial mills you showed now (they, too, have a great history, it&apos;s just not connected to this particular tale). Also, while you&apos;re at it, look up &quot;Ditzumerhammrich&quot; and note that the northern Germans, too, used drainage mills, albeit not on such a large scale.<br><br>So there you go, - after seeing the video, I have the impression that it is construing a &quot;history&quot; based on modern-day dividing lines, which are largely unrelated to how the history of floods and (attempts at) water management actually took shape. A criticism of the widely used AI tools of our time coming from scientists, is that they quickly paint a story, but as soon as you actually know something of a subject, you can immediately see that story falling apart in front of your eyes. Current-day widely available AI simply cannot replace good old-fashioned human homework. Not even close.

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• OP

  @opalyankaBG · 5 months ago

  To be precise, Rome, Amsterdam and Rotterdam aren&apos;t quite on the seaside either.

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• SH

  @shaynegelfond8289 · 5 months ago

  no AI is better than &quot;light&quot; AI

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• DO

  @doguigmc · 5 months ago

  Either Hamburg AND Rome are not at the sea or they’re both at the sea. You cannot argue one it is and the other is not.

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• TR

  @tracethorngren3584 · 5 months ago

  Rome is like 20 kilometers away from the ocean. It’s not a coastal city

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• MI

  @minktvissen · 5 months ago (edited)

  You talked about Bremen being further inland just like Hamburg, but Bremen also has the city Bremerhaven, almost directly on the North Sea, because its own port started to get too sandy.

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• TR

  @TroyDowVanZandt · 5 months ago

  He&apos;s presuming in deeper history a German nationality that did not exist until relatively recently, and posits that greater Germany, which also did not exist until relatively recently, had an engineering problem that it failed to address. &nbsp;He also overlooks that the modern states of the Netherlands and Germany share the Frisian ethnicity. &nbsp;The Early Medieval Frisians did develop an effective system of water management. &nbsp;Early on, they relied on terpen--artificial mounds--for protection. &nbsp;When you see in the Frisian cultural zone a place name that ends in -warden (as in Sengwarden), this refers to a naturally raised area not vulnerable to flooding. &nbsp;The Frisians made extensive use of these. &nbsp;They did adopt dikes and sluices, the latter providing drainage. &nbsp;The East Frisian Peninsula in modern Germany has had for centuries a complicated sluice system, as evidenced by place names like Greetsiel (Great Sluice), Hooksiel, Horumersiel, etc.

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• SI

  @simonstark2948 · 5 months ago

  You failed to notice that the big Dutch cities start exactly where the Mudplains end (Southwest of Den Helder). East of it the population is just as sparse as at the German coast. <br>Also historically Germany was very fragmented - thus moving away from the coast wasn&apos;t as easy as one might imagine. There was no Germany - just Hanover of whoever owned the coast at that time.

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• PA

  @parmentier7457 · 5 months ago

  The funny thing is that Amsterdam is not located on the North Sea. In 1876, a 21-kilometer-long canal was dug between Amsterdam and the North Sea. This canal was dug by hand at the time and features the largest lock in the world. Despite this, Amsterdam is now the fourth largest port in Europe. <br><br>Rotterdam, the largest port in Europe, is also not located on the North Sea, but 30 kilometers inland. However, the port of Rotterdam has grown from the city towards the sea. The only major Dutch city located on the North Sea is The Hague. This political capital of the Netherlands has only a small fishing port.

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• GR

  @grimzadi2480 · 5 months ago (edited)

  &quot;Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.&quot; Monty Python and the Holy Grail 🤣🤣🤣

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• FR

  @frankie137137 · 5 months ago

  No mention of Bremerhaven or Wilhelmshaven?

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