ABSTRACT
Regardless from which perspective one looks at the region on the northwest German coast known as the ‘Marsch’—whether from an historical or a present-day perspective, from the sea or from inland, from the north or from the south—one characteristic element stands out above all, impossible to ignore: the dike. Today, the so-called main or sea dikes can be up to nine meters high and as much as seventy meters across at their base. They separate the floodplains (or ‘Vorland’) and the intertidal mudflats (the ‘Wattenmeer’) beyond on one side from the agricultural estates on the other side. Further inland, numerous low, so-called middle or sleeping dikes make a honeycomb-like pattern. They were once themselves outer dikes on the sea’s edge, but with the enclosure by new dikes of areas of land which had formed through sedimentation outside the existing dikes, new cells of land (‘Köge’ or ‘Polder’) could in turn be won from the sea, with the result that over the centuries the now older dikes have moved far inland.
