Already, my brothers have arrived in Warnemunde, a tourist enclave on the German Baltic coast. And sixty five more will descend on Pomerania, like flies from the past. This whole thing, set up by Uncle. He wants all his closest friends and relatives to get a glimpse of his own childhood.
Uncle took me around Brussels once, where he lives now. Talking the whole time about this European Union thing and that Common market thing. He is half-history book, half joker. And when he laughs at his own jokes, he pauses for just a minute to make sure you got it. He loves history, but here in Pomerania is his chance to show his own. Uncle has always stood out as this guy that might have inhabited a 1920's expat novel. An elegant bloke; a business traveler and a connoisseur bent on enlivening conversation.
Jane and I are hunched over the lunch menu, half asleep. The waitress offers us a dish of herring in a brown mustard and dill sauce. Its saltiness, the way it tastes like ocean and preserves, transcends the taste of the Southern Baltic coast in its prehistory.
We think of Europe itself as part of that early prehistory of the world. But Pomerania's civilized history begins late. Even as the ancient new world civilizations of Mexico and Peru were crumbling, Pomerania was a quiet place. Just lowland moraine forest and the scattered settlements of the most wayward Germanics and Slavs.
Both groups originated as distinct cultures in their long journeys northwest from India – the origin of a people linguistically united by their common ancestral language. Both groups migrated to, and inhabited present-day Pomerania beginning from between 4000 and 600 B.C. Other distinct groups, such as the Goths, probably came south from Sweden around 100 A.D., mixing and muddying the water ever more.
Life from then until the rise of the Vikings remained quiet. Herring - prepared much like the dish facing us now - was the wheat of the Northern Seas. It provided a bounty of protein to distant landlocked towns for hundreds of years. We know that herring was being fished north of Pomerania, in the Baltic Sea since at least 800 A.D. and probably for hundreds of years before that.
The herring migrates over two thousand miles - in the case of the Atlantic herring, along the shelves of the northern seas, in unbelievable numbers that blacken the sea.
The Baltic itself was a trading route for Vikings from the west - instigators of the earliest vast trade routes of the northern world. While the Danes and Norwegians sought trade to the west, the Swedes were comfortable in the Baltic, trading and setting up fiefdoms as far east as present day Russia. Russia, actually, is named after these Swedish Viking traders, ‘the Rus.’ A class of noblemen who extended their routes from the Rus to as far as Baghdad and Afghanistan.
They traded in furs and falcons, amber, iron and timber, but also the herring. The Baltic traders surmised that you could gut the fish ship-side, pack it in barrelled brine, also on board, and begin its preservation process, all at sea.
The process meant the barreled and preserved fish could cross the seas, and roll along the slow roads that were just growing with population and the fresh word of God in the form of Catholicism. Fish - fish was important for any Catholic about to enter the time of lent. And herring had the good faith to swarm into the Baltic just before lent.
The next day, we meet at a fish and beer house on the harbor in Warnemunde for salted cod and Bitburger beer. Warnemunde is part of the former communist East Germany, although unlike much of the quieter, agarian Western Pomerania, it is a lively and bustling place.
Cod was being fished in these waters around the same time that Pomerania was populating. But not just by Vikings. Basque whalers roamed the Northern Seas, following their prey at the turn of the first millenium. These whalers from Northern Spain and Southwestern France had discovered that the cod would approach northern coasts – Norway, Iceland, Scotland – to spawn. By 1000 A.D., these fishermen would be fishing for cod along the shores of Europe, specializing in a salted and dried fish that would be transported across the region. Eventually, they would find that present-day Canada had the largest cod spawns in the world. While we call Columbus the man who discovered the new world, some people believe Basque fishermen had already been roaming the St. Lawrence River for long before Columbus landed in the West Indies.
Warnemunde Harbor, Germany
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