The Low Countries 1999-2000 [antikvár]

landscape and Space in the Low Countries Reflecting the Differences between North and South The 'Afsluitdijk'. This dike turned the Zuiderzee into the IJsseltneer: from sea into lake. It is no coincidence that the first part of Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean (La méditerranée, 1966) is entitled 'The Role of the Environment'. In this work he describes the physical geography of the area: geological development, coastlines, mountains and flatlands, soil and basins. But he pays much more attention to physical geography and how people deal with their physical environment; how and why they started to engage in fishing and agriculture in a particular place; how, why and where they drew political and cultural frontiers across the landscape and at the same time organised cross-border transport; where and why they built towns and cities and how they catered for the surrounding countryside. In short: how a physical landscape became a cultural landscape. For Braudel and many other historians, sociologists and philosophers, the cultural landscape is the point where mankind and the tiatural elements come together; the scene of the battle between man's urge to civilise and nature's unruliness. A landscape therefore reveals history as well as geography. Landscape lends history a spatial dimension because it bears the traces and impressions of the past, and those traces and impressions of a past civilisation are precisely what give the landscape a historical dimension. The landscape of the Low Countries is no different. Flanders and the Netherlands both bear the marks and scars of the past. All along the coastline from Diksmuide to Delfzijl and far inland, especially in the Netherlands, the landscape is defined by the struggle against the sea, while the political, cultural and economic history of the Flemish towns is set in stone in towns and cities such as Bruges and Ghent. Deventer and The Hague breathe the Hanseatic mercantile spirit and the spirit of early political citizenship. The former coastline of the Zuiderzee and the mining regions of Belgian and Dutch Limburg bear witness to a closed chapter of economic history. The Westhoek and Breendonk, the Waalsdorpervlakte and Westerbork show the scars of a recent military past. Landscape, according to Ton Lemaire, is therefore an explicatio cidturae: the history of a culture and the culture of a people are stored and 'laid out' in the cultural landscape.' The landscape lays bare our cultural history -a history which is more than a fossilised and silent past. We remember that