Goronwy Rees (1909–1979)

Goronwy Rees was a Welsh academic and journalist. He was something of a household name in the 1960s and 1970s, partly for his writing, but mainly because he had a tangential role in exposing the Cambridge spy ring and Anthony Blunt's role in it. He died in 1979.

On the strength of this book, though, it's difficult to understand his ubiquity. For the most part, the style is fairly turgid. The first two-thirds of the book is mainly about the geography of the river from its source in the Swiss Alps to its mouth where the river becomes one of the major trade waterways of Europe. This section is dull and appears to consist of a catalogue of place names and geographical features, with an astonishing litany of repetition. There are occasional asides about notable people, history and events connected with the places under discussion, but these are few and far between, and add little to the narrative. It should also be noted that Rees took his remit to include the tributaries of the Rhine, as much (I suspect) for padding reasons as anything else. So we get a longish section on Karl Marx because of his birth in the city of Triest, on the Moselle, the major tributary of the Rhine.

Only when we reach the last two chapters, one on art and the other entitled "War and peace", that the book really comes to life (and even then, short lists of place names keep cropping up). Indeed, the last chapter is quite valuable for going into some considerable detail on the political history of the Rhineland in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Production values are those typical of books in the 1960s; photographs are put into a section of 'plates' in the middle of the book, and bear little relationship to the rest of the book; they feel very much like the selection of some editor rather than of the author. There is a simple map, again in line with the graphic and printing abilities of the time; and like many books of this nature, it suffers from the fault of mentioning places in the text not shown on the map and vice versa.

Of course, the book is of interest now because it was written within the context of a divided Germany and a Cold War mentality; Rees makes a number of allusions to the Cold War and to the Second World War, then only twenty years in the past.

The insights into the history of the Rhineland are the book's main strengths; but a casual reader without a burning interest in German history coming across a copy of this book would really be best advised to leave it on the shelf.… (más)