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Lighthouses have an infinite amount to tell from their long life.
From countless ships that guided them safely through storm and night.
About nameless seafarers, whose light promised long-awaited shore leave.
Of the lost souls who once lacked a hand's breadth of water under their keel.
A few lighthouses shine with an encore, a very special episode.
Rubjerg Knude Fyr in North Jutland is one of them.
In 2019, the 23-meter-high and 700-ton colossus was hoisted into the air with monstrous hydraulic presses, and then moved at a snail's pace on rails a good 70 meters inland.
One of the most important landmarks on the Danish mainland was saved from disappearing, at least for the time being.
A video from 2019 shows the spectacular move:
120 year old lighthouse is moving
In the north-west of Denmark, a 120-year-old lighthouse has been moved inland due to the erosion of the North Sea coast.
The lighthouse is located on a cliff 60 meters above sea level.
Source: WORLD / Mick Locher
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The abyss yawned dangerously close to the foundation at the time.
An unstoppable alliance of wind and waves had eaten almost two meters into the scarred cliff year after year and carried away millions and millions of tons of sand and clay.
And she still does.
The old walls, which had been erected in 1899 as a precautionary measure 200 meters from the demolition edge, threatened the much-cited “inevitable fate” of plunging 60 meters into the depth.
Just as it had happened to hundreds of Wehrmacht bunkers before him.
But things turned out differently.
Because for the Danes, Rubjerg Knude Fyr is not just a lighthouse, but the guardian of the most dramatic landscape in Jutland.
A landscape whose changeability bears witness to the fact that destruction can also be creation.
The lighthouse protrudes from the Rubjerg Knude dune
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The tower sits enthroned on the highest point of Lønstrup Klint.
The cliff was pressed out of sand and clay by the last ice ages, and since then dozens of meters of loose drifting sand have been deposited on it.
The result is the most visited shifting dune in Denmark.
A piece of the Sahara in Jutland, from which an almost surreal lighthouse protrudes.
The dune grew and grew until it made even its beacon impossible to shine.
All planting and excavation did not help, on August 1st, 1968 the tower shone for the last time.
Rubjerg Knude is the most visited shifting dune in Denmark
Source: pa / Bend Thissen / Bernd Thissen
It was man himself who sealed his premature end.
He arranged the landscape and submitted it to his needs.
Large oak and beech forests were cut down in order to be burned and their areas plowed.
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The palace and shipbuilding of the Renaissance then devoured the rest of the forest.
The times when giant trees could honorably collapse after a long life were finally over.
The forest area shrank to a vanishing two percent land area.
Flugsand took over the direction.
The huge sandpit called Rubjerg Knude wanders unstoppably a few meters further year after year, rolling over green salt marshes, pink flowering wild rose bushes and bright orange sea buckthorn bushes.
But the Jutlanders wouldn't be Jutlanders if they didn't try to make the best of the past in a very pragmatic way in the here and now.
The lighthouse threatened to crash - so it was transported inland in 2019
Source: pa / dpa / Ritzau Scan / Hans Ravn
In the meantime, forests are being planted again with persistence, renewable energies are being promoted, the Himmerland raised bog is being renatured, in which peat has been cut for decades without considering losses.
Or a whole lighthouse is moved.
North Jutland is everything, just not hyggelig
There is a very special breed of people up there at the top of Denmark's mainland.
The overused term “hyggelig” cannot be applied to the North Jutlanders.
Everyday life on the flat, windswept land is often anything but comfortable.
When the Rubjerg Knude lighthouse was built stone on stone, life here was even more challenging than it is today.
The writer Johannes V. Jensen (1873–1950), born in Farsø in northern Jutland, describes the poetry of this barren coast and its silent people with touching sensitivity.
An alliance of wind and waves gnaws inexorably on the cliff near the lighthouse
Source: pa / dpa / dpa-Zentral / Patrick Pleul
His protagonists are often “tall, thoughtful people” who “usually do not lack external conspicuousness”, with “attentive eyes that made people shiver when they looked at them”.
The Nobel Prize winner for literature portrays heirs to the court, maidservants or the blacksmith in straightforward storytelling.
People who find their place in rural village society with the “helpful limited horizon”.
Children, in whose hands "the barren drifting sand becomes a valuable treasure of tiny, tiny jewels in many fine and, as it were, distant colors".
Parents who “plow double ground, so to speak”, because this very sand has settled on their black topsoil, “in the knowledge that conditions could well be better, but that the possibilities are buried under their own feet”.
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People who break out, or at least try to.
Who dream of distant Copenhagen or even America.
Neighbors who leave and are never seen again.
Because "the sky over this land is so quiet and it sounds so lonely when a tern roams through it and screams high up".
A truth beyond the vacation homes in the dunes
No, Jensen's North Jutland is everything, just not hyggelig.
It catapults the reader into bygone days, gives them goose bumps, and at the same time lets them breathe audibly that the world seems to be different today with all its comfort and security.
And yet you get the feeling that the virtuoso stories could be much more topical than you might like.
Anyone who embarks on a trip to Jutland with these books - Jensen's "Himmerlandsgeschichten" from 1989 appeared in German in 2020 - will recognize a truth beyond the neat holiday homes that gently crouch down in the dunes.
It fits in with the austere beauty of nature, which flatters the soul and starts a flirt with her.
Once touched by the rough charm, many visitors come back year after year.
Also to her lighthouse.
Lønstrup Klint is never the same cliff on which you find it again, because the surf is constantly tearing new wounds in the rock.
Rubjerg Knude is never the same dune.
Because the wind has an infinite amount of space on the open sea to take a deep breath and carry the sand to the northeast in order to create a new, dramatic coastal landscape there too.
And Rubjerg Knude Fyr?
The guardian of impermanence is now expected to be granted 30 years of rest.
Then the elemental forces that he was trying to curb caught up with him again.
Source: WORLD infographic
Tips and information
Getting there:
Usually by train to Aarhus, then by rental car or bike. Holidaymakers can find current information on entry options at: Auswaertiges-amt.de
Accommodation:
Holiday homes are available from 360 euros / week (feriepartner.de).
For families: “Lønstrup Camping”, pitch with electricity from 9 euros and 11 euros fee per person, bungalows from 54 euros / day (campingloenstrup.dk).
Further information:
visitdenmark.de;
visitnordjylland.de
Participation in the trip was supported by Visit Denmark. You can find our standards of transparency and journalistic independence at axelspringer.de/unabhaengigkeit.