ABSTRACT
Each July, and then for only four days, Nijmegen, a city of 150,000 located on the
Dutch side of the border with Germany, swells to over one million inhabitants.
During these heady days trains and buses enter Nijmegen’s central station from
every conceivable direction in Europe and elsewhere, disgorging hundreds of
thousands of visitors, young and old, who in turn occupy what appears to the
local Nijmegenaar1 as every last piece of available open space. If you look closely,
these visitors, having traveled from afar, have a special gleam in their eyes, a
purposeful ‘something’ one doesn’t come by very often these days, certainly not
among such a varied and motley cross-section of Europeans. What briefly unites
such a disparate group is participation in a four-day walk-a-thon, or more
properly, a march (colloquially referred to in Dutch as de Vierdaag), on the terrain
of a wide inter-city loop demanding between 30 and 50 kilometers per day,
depending on level of fitness. Not a particularly spectacular event on the face of
it, compared, say, with the Boston or New York marathons, or currently
fashionable expressions of ‘extreme sport’, but one with a particularly deep
resonance for Nijmegen – and indeed Europe’s – recent past: for many, still, the
lived experience of wartime and devastation, that has catalyzed in part Europe’s
will to govern cooperatively.
