Translated from the Italian by
Patrick Creagh
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Epub ISBN 9781446433805
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The Harvill Press, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
The Harvill Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Garzanti editore s.p.a., 1986
Translation © Harvill and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989
Claudio Magris has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published with the title Danubio in 1986, by Garzanti editore, Milan
First published in Great Britain by Collins Harvill in 1989
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Praise
About the Author
Also by Claudio Magris in English translation
MAP
1. A Question of Gutters
1. A Plaque
2. Donaueschingen Versus Furtwangen
3. The Report
4. Moralists and Geometricians at the Sources of the Breg
5. Mitteleuropa: Hinternational or All-German?
6. Noteentiendo
7. Homunculus
8. The Railway-Lines of Time
9. Bissula
10. The Source of the Brigach
11. The Sacristans of Messkirch
12. The Guide at Sigmaringen
2. The Universal Danube of Engineer Neweklowsky
1. Believing in Ulm
2. Two Thousand One Hundred AND Sixty-Four Pages and Five Kilos Nine Hundred Grammes of Upper Danube
3. The Engineer Caught Between Conviction and Rhetoric
4. The Little Black Girl of the Danube
5. The German Idyll
6. The Capture of Ulm
7. With Their Bare Hands Against the Third Reich
8. A Funeral
9. A Pound of Bread
10. At the Pig Market
11. The Archivist of Affronts
12. Grillparzer and Napoleon
13. Deambulatory Therapy
14. From Lauingen to Dillingen
15. The Kitsch of Evil
16. An Empty Tomb
17. Marieluise Fleisser of Ingolstadt
18. The Roman Limes
19. A Walhalla and a Rose
20. Regensburg
21. In the Chamber of the Reich
22. The Six Points of Nothing
23. The Palm Sunday Ass
24. The Great Wheel
25. Eichmann in the Monastery
26. The Double Chins of Vilshofen
27. In the City of Passau
28. Kriemhild and Gudhrun, or the Two Families
29. The "Blue Inn" Waltz
3. In the Wachau
1. An Obituary in Linz
2. Suleika
3. A.E.I.O.U.
4. By Cut and Thrust
5. A Puff of Smoke
6. Mauthausen
7. A Drop of Oblivion
8. Ducks at Grein
9. A Cake for the Archduke
10. Kyselak
11. The Vineta of the Danube
12. Twenty Past Ten
13. Two-Headed Eagle and White-Tailed Eagle
14. Kierling, Hauptstrasse 187
4. Café Central
1. The Poet’s Dummy
2. Wittgenstein’s House
3. St Stephen
4. The Little Baroness Who Did Not Like Wagner
5. The Strudlhof Steps
6. Dorotheum
7. The Lies of the Poets
8. The Turks Before Vienna
9. Bloodstains
10. Among the Other Viennese
11. A Worthwhile Job
12. Gentzgasse, 7
13. Lukács in Vienna
14. I Was Only Asking
15. The Usual, Sir?
16. Josephinum
17. A Cabaret of Reality
18. Rembrandtstrasse, 35
19. On the Brink of Reality
20. Wiener Gruppe and Striptease
21. Karl-Marx-Hof
22. Uncle Otto
23. At the Crime Museum
24. "Happily Lived and Lightly Died"
25. Berggasse, 19
26. Space Odyssey
27. The Look Behind
28. Words, Words, Words
29. Eckhartsau
30. Carnuntum
31. A Minority that Wants to be Assimilated
32. When Haydn’s Around, Nothing can Go Wrong
33. More Gloomy and More Glorious
5. Castles and Huts
1. At the Red Prawn
2. Where are Our Castles?
3. That Obscure Object of Desire
4. To Each his Hour
5. A Working-Class Danubian Sunday
6. Roadside Cemeteries
7. On the Tatras
8. Old Books, Life and Law
6. Pannonia
1. At the Gates of Asia?
2. The King in Disguise
3. Kocsis
4. Tank-Tracks in the Snow
5. In the Mud of Pannonia
6. Sadly Magyar
7. An Imperial Bust Under the Stairs
8. The Innkeepers of Vác
9. Szentendre
10. An Ice-Cream in Budapest
11. The Tomb Among the Roses
12. The Epic, the Novel, and Women
13. Mitteleuropa and Antipolitics
14. Two Telegrams
15. Curvaceous Enlightenment
16. The Library on the Danube
17. A Bit of Stalin
18. Kalocsa
19. Epilogue at Baja
20. The Wine of Pécs
21. The Fake Czar
22. A Violin at Mohács
7. Grandma Anka
1. Thinking "With the Mind of Several Peoples"
2. A Green Horse
3. The Wise Councillor Tipoweiler
4. A Polyglot Parrot
5. Beneath the Bust of Lenau
6. Evergreen Vitality
7. Timişoara
8. A German Destiny
9. The Tomb of Octavián
10. An Ambiguous Jove
11. The City in the East
12. Transylvanismus
13. On the Clock-Tower
14. On the Brink of Silence
15. Hypothesis About a Suicide
16. Subotica, or the Poetry of Falsehood
17. Novi Sad and Neighbourhood
18. Frontiersmen
19. A Stalinist Werther
20. A Saga of Belgrade
21. At the Iron Gates
8. Doubtful Cartography
1. “They Scorn the Turks”
2. Autobiography of A Haiduk
3. Manuscripts in the Danube
4. Tartars and Circassians
5. Agent Rojesko
6. The Wave and the Ocean
7. The Macedonian Question
8. Green Bulgaria
9. The Tales of Čerkazki
10. The World Created by Satanail
11. The Bible of the Goths
12. Ruse
13. A Stentorian Museum
14. Graffiti at Ivanovo
15. The Stork and the Lamp-Post
16. The House of Elias Canetti
9. Matoas
1. On the Road to Evil
2. Gods and Pancakes
3. A Displaced Conference
4. The Marshal’s Window
5. Mahalá and Avant-Garde
6. The Slot-Machine of Poetry
7. At the Village Museum
8. Hiroshima
9. The Triumph of Trajan
10. Black Sea
11. The Thracian Horseman
12. The Dead City
13. At the Frontier
14. At the Delta
15. “Into the Great Sea”
Copyright
To Marisa, Francesco and Paolo
Praise for Danube
“Danube is not simply a masterpiece of travel; it is an odyssey. From Heraclitus to Baudelaire the river has appeared as a metaphor for life, winding safely from its source to the sea … A splendid book, beautifully translated by Patrick Creagh”
IAN THOMSON, Independent
“Erudite and original”
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF, New York Review of Books
“A work of great originality, which builds up to a mosaic of spectacle, incident and reflection from which the personalities of the narrator and the Danubian lands gradually emerge. Subtle introspection, wide knowledge and brilliant perception are mingled. This is the best introduction to the culture of central Europe, its genius and its tragedy”
ANTHONY HARTLEY, Daily Telegraph
“A uniquely stimulating and individual portrait of the heart of Europe”
COLIN THUBRON, Sunday Telegraph
“A testament to one man’s extraordinary learning and intellectual curiosity, and a moving tribute to the glories of a central European civilisation which, in many ways, has disappeared … Magris proves a most gracious, erudite, engaging and fair-minded companion on a journey no reader will forget”
EILEEN BATTERSBY, Irish Times
“The book is full of wonders and delights … This graceful, learned book is, I believe, a kind of masterpiece which will live … Since the war, we in Europe have lost our nerve and lost our way; what Danube offers us is a cultural map on which we may trace the ancient paths and find, however distantly, the feel of home”
JOHN BANVILLE, Irish Times
“A wonderful meditation on the borders of Europe and the passage between Europe and the East”
MALCOLM BRADBURY
“Like the river itself, Magris carries all along with him. Philosophy, war, natural history and politics are blended together with a mixture of curiosity, stylishness and all-encompassing knowledge”
CHRISTIAN JENNINGS, Observer
“He has a penchant for what is unique, unexpected, unknown, bizarre … Danube is a tour de force of packaged erudition”
JOHN LUKACS, Boston Globe
“His forte is a wealth of literary and historical allusions from Austrian, French, Italian and German sources, which makes this book not only a treasure chest but also a profoundly perceptive study of central European history … Magris’s approach, wonderfully stimulating and constantly surprising, is especially valuable because it offers a truly European sensibility, struggling to get back to the old heartland of the central Europe, from its displacement to the west”
ANNA BRAMWELL, The Times
About the Author
CLAUDIO MAGRIS, scholar and critic specialising in the field of German literature and culture, was born in Trieste in 1939. After graduating from the University of Turin, he lectured there in German Language and Literature from 1970 to 1978. He now teaches in the faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Trieste. He is the author of many books of literary criticism and has translated works by Ibsen, Kleist and Schnitzler.
PATRICK CREAGH has brought to an English language readership many Italian writers including Vitaliano Brancati, Sebastiano Vassalli, Gesualdo Bufalino, Marta Morrazzoni, Salvatore Satta, Anna Maria Ortese and Antonio Tabucchi. He won the John Florio Prize for this translation of Danube, as also Gesualdo Bufalino’s Blind Argus. He is also a considerable poet in his own right.
Also by Claudio Magris in English translation
MICROCOSMS
Fiction
A DIFFERENT SEA
INFERENCES FROM A SABRE
They ride and ride until they come to the Danube …
The Flight of King Matthias, Slovenian folksong
“Dear friend!
Sig. Maurizio Cecconi, alderman of the city of Venice, has proposed that we organize an exhibition based on the enclosed prospectus, entitled ‘The Architecture of Travel: Hotels, their History and Utopia’. The proposed location is Venice. A number of institutions and organizations appear willing to underwrite it. If you are interested in working with us …”
This cordial invitation, which arrived a few days ago, is addressed to no one in particular, and does not name the person or persons apostrophized with such rapture. The affectionate outburst sponsored by the municipality transcends the individual to embrace the general: humanity at large, or at least a vast and fluid community of the cultured and intelligent. The proposal attached has been drawn up by professors at the universities of Tübingen and Padua, drafted according to a rigorous logic, and furnished with a bibliography. It aims to reduce the unpredictability of travel, the intricacy and divergence of paths, the fortuity of delays, the uncertainty of evening and the asymmetrical quality of any journey, to the inexorable order of a treatise. The whole scheme is a first draft of a Statute for Living – if life is a journey, as they say, and we pass across the face of the earth as guests.
In this world administered and organized on a planetary scale, to be sure, the adventure and mystery of travel would seem to be dead and done for: even Baudelaire’s Voyagers, who set out to look for the unheard-of and were ready to face shipwreck in the attempt, found in the unknown, and in spite of every unforeseen disaster, precisely the same tedium that they left at home. To be on the move, however, is better than nothing: one stares out of the window of the train as it hurtles into the countryside, one raises one’s face to the breezes, and something passes, flows through the body. The air creeps into one’s clothes. The ego dilates and contracts like a Portuguese man-of-war. A little ink overflows from the bottle and is diluted in an ink-coloured sea. But this gentle loosening of the bonds, which replaces the uniform with a pair of pyjamas, is more like an hour’s break in the school timetable than the promise of the great demobilization. Vain fancies, says Benn, even when one feels the pitiless azure break open beneath a debatable reality. Too many self-satisfied, peremptory soothsayers have taught us that the “all-inclusive” clause in the price-lists of tourism includes even the rising of the wind. But luckily we are left with the adventure of classification, the thrill of diagrams, the allure of methodology. The professor from Tübingen engaged by the alderman may be aware that the world is humdrum enough to threaten the Odyssey, the real, unique experience of the individual; but he cheers himself by adorning page 12 with a quotation from Hegel, that great product of the theological seminary in his university town, and echoes him in asserting that method is the construction of experience.
This wooden bench, overlooking the narrow strip of water, prompts me to feel kindly towards the orderly plan which I found in the post-box shortly before leaving – towards the miniature Art of Fugue hidden beneath the bowstrokes of those logical passages. The wood of the bench has a good smell to it, a manly toughness reminiscent of the Rider of the Lone Valley, while the Breg – or the Danube? – is a flowing bronze ribbon, brown and shining; and, thanks to a few patches of snow in the woods, life seems cool and fresh. There is promise in the sky and in the wind. A happy conspiracy of circumstances and a benevolent state of relaxation – aided perhaps by the cordiality of that “Dear friend!” – prompt me to have faith, and even to accept the synthesis, formulated beyond all reasonable doubt by our German colleague in the Venetian project, between Hegel’s Science of Logic and the various categories of hotel.
It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes – for that is a sedentary task – than like one who destroys them. This was the manner of Hoffmann’s Baron von R., who travelled the world collecting views and, whenever he thought it necessary in order to enjoy or create a fine panorama, had trees cut down, branches stripped, humped surfaces smoothed, entire forests flattened and farms demolished, if any of these obstructed a fine view. But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order. When a wall of foliage suddenly fell, opening out a vista towards a distant castle in the light of sunset, Baron von R. remained for a few minutes gazing upon the spectacle that he himself had staged, and then hurried away, never to return.
Every experience is the result of stringent method, even the transparence of a distant sunset for Baron von R. or the snow-fresh air that visits this bench in the Black Forest. It is in classifications that life flashes through so tantalizingly, in the registers that attempt to catalogue it and in so doing expose its irreducible residuum of mystery and enchantment. In the same way the project drawn up by these two effusive scholars, set out like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1.1, 1.2, 2.11, 2.12 etc.), affords us in the truly minimal gaps between one number and the next a glimpse of the unlimited vicissitudes of travelling. It divides hotels into the classes of luxury, middle-class, simple, working-class, local, dockside, “charabancs welcome”, peasant, princely, monastic, charity-supported, aristocratic, as well as hotels of the trade-guilds, the customs and excise, the post office and the carters’ union. Only scientific tables really succeed in placing adequate stress on the metaphysical humour of everyday things and events, their connections and sequences. For example, in Section E, devoted to Scenes – such scenes, of course, as are likely to take place in hotels – at a certain point we read: “2.13. Erotica: – courtship – prostitution. 2.14. Ablutions. 2.15: Bedrooms. 2.16. Alarm-calls.”
I have no idea which category of hotels would include the one at Neu-Eck in the Black Forest, only a mile or two from this bench; a hotel in which, twenty-three years ago, as I sat reading a small coaster, advertising Fürstenberg Beer (it was a cardboard disk with a sort of red dragon on a gold background rimmed with blue), the course of my life was decided. Departure and return, “le voyage pour connaître ma géographie”, as that Parisian madman put it. The plaque, only a few steps from this bench, indicates the source of the Danube – or one of them. In fact it stresses the point that this is the principal source. River of melody: that is what Hölderlin called it: the deep-hidden parlance of the gods, the thoroughfare linking Europe and Asia, Germany and Greece, along which poetry and the word, in the times of myth, ascended to bring the sense of being to the German West. For Hölderlin there were still gods on the river-banks, hidden and misunderstood by the men of the night of exile and the alienation of modern times, but nonetheless living and present. Deep in the slumber of Germany, dulled by the prose of reality but destined to reawaken in some Utopian future, slept the poetry of the heart, of freedom, of reconciliation.
The river has many names. Among some peoples the words Danube and Ister were used respectively for the upper and lower courses, but sometimes for the entire length. Pliny, Strabo and Ptolemy wondered where the one ended and the other began: maybe in Illyria, or at the Iron Gates. The river, which Ovid called “bisnominis” or double-named, draws German culture, with its dream of an Odyssey of the spirit, towards the east, mingling it with other cultures in countless hybrid metamorphoses in which it finds its fulfilment and its fall. The German scholar who travels fitfully along the whole course of the river carries with him his baggage of fads and quotations; if the poet entrusts himself to his bateau ivre, his understudy tries to follow the advice of Jean Paul, who suggested that on the way one should gather and record not only visual images but old prefaces and playbills, railway-station gossip, epics and battles, funerary and metaphysical inscriptions, newspaper clippings, and notices pinned up in taverns and parish halls. Souvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages pendant un voyage en Orient, announces a title of Lamartine’s. Reflections and impressions of whom? one may ask. When we travel alone, as happens only too often, we have to pay our way out of our own pocket; but occasionally life is good to us, and enables us to see the world, if only in brief snatches of time, with those four or five friends who will bear us witness on the Day of Judgment, and speak in our name.
Between one trip and the next we attempt to transfer the bulging files of notes onto the flat surface of paper, to get the bundles of stuff, the note-pads, the leaflets and the catalogues, down onto typewritten sheets. Literature as moving house; and as in every change of address something is lost and something else turns up in a “safe place” we had forgotten about. Indeed, we go almost like orphans, says Hölderlin in his poem on the sources of the Danube: the river flows on glittering in the sunlight like the current of life itself, but the feeling that it reflects back is an illusion afflicting the dazzled sight, like the non-existent luminous spots on the wall, the neon dazzle.
A tremor of nothingness sets fire to things, the tin cans left on the beach and the reflectors of motorcars, just as sunset makes the windows blaze. The river adds up to nothing and travelling is immoral: this is what Weininger said, as he was travelling. But the river is an old Taoist master, and along its banks it gives lessons on the great Wheel and the gaps between its spokes. In every journey there is at least a smattering of the South, with hours of relaxation, of idleness. Heedless of the orphans on its banks the Danube flows down towards the sea, towards the supreme conviction.
Here rises the principal branch of the Danube, states the plaque by the source of the Breg. In spite of this lapidary claim the centuries-old dispute over the sources of the Danube is still raging, and is in fact responsible for heated contention between the towns of Furtwangen and Donaueschingen. To complicate matters, a bold hypothesis was recently set forth by Amedeo, highly esteemed sedimentologist and secret historian of red herrings. He proposes that the Danube is born from a tap. Without wishing to summarize the age-old library of publications on the subject – they stretch from Hecataeus, predecessor of Herodotus, to the issues of Merian magazine, on news-stands now – we should at least mention the aeons for which the source of the Danube was as unknown as that of the Nile, in whose waters it is in any case reflected and mingled, if not in re at least in verbis, in the comparisons and parallels between the two rivers which for centuries tread on each other’s heels in learned commentaries.
The river’s sources were the object of the investigations, conjectures or information of Herodotus, Strabo, Caesar, Pliny, Ptolemy, the Pseudo-Scymnus, Seneca, Mela and Eratosthenes. Its sources were imagined or located in the Hercynian Forest, in the land of the Hyperboreans, among the Celts or the Scythians, on Mount Abnoba or in the land of Hesperia, while other hypotheses mention a fork in the river, with one branch flowing into the Adriatic, along with divergent descriptions of the Black Sea estuaries. Whether it be from history or from myth – which has the Argonauts sailing down the Danube as far as the Adriatic – that we pass to prehistoric eras, our reconnaissance is left groping in the dark and lost in vastness, in geography on a titanic scale: the Urdonau in the Bernese Oberland, with its springs, where the peaks of the Jungfrau and the Eiger now rise, the primordial Danube into which flowed the Ur-Rhine, the Ur-Neckar and the Ur-Main, and which towards the middle of the Tertiary, in the Eocene Age, between sixty and twenty million years ago, had its mouth where Vienna now stands, flowing into a gulf of Thetis, primal mother of ocean, in the Sarmatic Sea which covered the whole of south-eastern Europe.
Not particularly sensitive to the archaic and its Indo-European prefixes, Amedeo skips the Urdonau and joins in the present dispute between Furtwangen and Donaueschingen, two Black Forest towns standing 35 km apart. Officially, as is well known, the sources of the Danube are at Donaueschingen, the inhabitants of which guarantee their originality and authenticity in their by-laws. Even in the times of the Emperor Tiberius the little spring that bubbled out of that hillside was celebrated as the source of the Danube, and apart from this it is at Donaueschingen that we find the confluence of two rivers, the Breg and the Brigach; and according to the current opinion, confirmed by guide-books, Public Authority and proverbs, this meeting of the waters constitutes the beginning of the Danube. The start of the river that creates and encloses what is known as Mitteleuropa is an integral part of the ancient domain of princes, along with the Fürstenberg castle, the court library which contains the manuscripts of the Song of the Niebelungs and Parsifal, the beer also called after the local princes, and the music festivals which created the reputation of Hindemith.
“Hier entspringt die Donau,” this is the source of the Danube, declares the plaque in the Fürstenberg park at Donaueschingen. But the other plaque, which Dr Öhrlein, who owns the land where the Breg rises, has displayed at the source of the Breg, explains that, of all other possible sources, this is the stream that starts farthest from the Black Sea – 2,888 km away to be precise – 48.5 km further upstream than Donaueschingen. Dr Öhrlein, whose river-source lies a few kilometres from Furtwangen, has brandished all manner of certified documents in his battle against Donaueschingen. This is a minor and somewhat tardy repercussion of the French Revolution in the backwoods of “German wretchedness”: an example of the middle-class professional man and small landowner rising against the feudal nobility and its coats of arms. The good burghers of Furtwangen have backed Dr Öhrlein in a body, and everyone remembers the day when the Burgomaster of Furtwangen, followed by a swarm of his fellow-citizens, disdainfully poured a bottle of water from the Breg into the spring at Donaueschingen.
Amedeo’s report, contained in a minutely detailed letter – which I have brought with me in order to do a spot-check before talking to him about it when he joins us, which should be soon – accepts the Furtwangen claim, albeit with a few variants, according to which the source of the Danube is the Breg; and that therefore the Breg is the real Danube, while the Brigach, being less far from the Black Sea, is a tributary of the Breg. The report takes the form of an incisive epistle, the scientific exactitude of which is garnished with humanistic elegance and threatened by melancholy. In it we recognize not only the author of studies on landslides and vast shifts of terrain, milestones of sedimentology, but also the most retiring and elusive author of less well-known texts, such as the Encomium of Absent-Mindedness, and of troubled yet punctilious translations of German Romantic poetry.
One realizes from the report that what first attracted him must have been the inn, that Gasthaus with sloping roof and wooden walls which stands near the source of the Breg. There are many hostelries in his report, which is the true account of an expedition, like those made by explorers hunting for the sources of the Nile, and he therefore notes all the stages of the journey; there are inns with stone dwarves in the garden, or leafy branches above the door, or ancient pianolas, or wooden ladders leading to the loft. Between the lines of the report, written by a man otherwise so amiable and reassuring, there is a marked attempt at flight, the corrupt excursion of someone apparently in search of a hiding-place, a place in which to vanish. Those inns are cheerful spots for chatter and tippling, but in the somewhat darker corners of the Stube or in the bedrooms with their sloping ceilings the author is seeking something quite different: the witch’s hut in the woods, the retreats of our childhood. But unlike Tristram Shandy, who feared he would never manage to catch up with himself, it is as if the author of the report wanted to lose himself and provide himself with misleading directions.
He arrived at the source from Furtwangen, where he had paused to visit the Clock Museum, and wandered about for a couple of hours among thousands of clock-faces of every shape and size, cogwheels and hands, robots and pianos set in motion by the passing of the hours, and “forests of pendulums”, as he mentions with particular stress. In his letter, that isochronous movement that surrounded him on all sides seems the secret rhythm of life, the automatic scansion of a time that is perfectly pure and perfectly empty. Existence, in that letter, appears to be a motion self-contained and forever returning to the beginning, as if between the two extreme and recurring points of the pendulum’s swing there were nothing at all, nothing other than the abstract oscillation itself and the force of gravity that draws it down; so that in the end, when the wear and tear of the years has done its work, the body attains an irrevocable state of quietude.
His little excursion to the springs was almost certainly a means of escape from that feeling of stalemate, a subterfuge used to skirt round his own tortuous depths with a good brisk walk in the open air. To distract your gaze from your inmost being, to apply it to analysing the identity of others or the reality and the nature of things – there is nothing better.
How is it that phenomena appear on the horizon of the world and of the mind? “This book is blue and this ashtray is a Christmas present,” writes Paolo Bozzi in his book Unity, Identity, and Chance (1969). But he immediately stresses the difference between the two predicates, between the visible property of that blue – which reaches the cerebral cortex by way of electromagnetic waves and the impulses of the optic nerve – and the quality of being a Christmas present, which exists solely in the mind of the person who received it and simply does not exist for an uninformed observer coming into the room at that moment.
Is that water bubbling up on Dr Öhrlein’s land really the source of the Danube? Or is it merely that it is known (thought, believed, claimed) to be the source of the Danube? Amedeo, clearly, wanted to go back to the things themselves and their initial impact on the consciousness. He therefore set out from Furtwangen determined to describe the sources of the Danube as they offer themselves to observation, so as to grasp them in their pure form, having already put brackets around all preconceived theories.
His report begins scrupulously and convincingly. The water of the Breg issues from the ground in a small dip in the hillside, the slope of which continues to rise above the spring for several dozen yards. Amedeo follows the upward slope, along with Maddalena and Maria Giuditta, and all three end up with sopping wet shoes, socks and trouser legs. The grass in that meadow is steeped in water; the whole surface of the soil is sodden and flooded by countless little rivulets. In those circumstances the two sisters move, and are drenched, with more grace than Amedeo, whose charm consists largely in his reassuringly massive bulk, much like that, for example, of Pierre Bezukov. His pen, however, is fully capable of such grace, settling lightly and precisely on details as a butterfly settles on flowers. Phenomenology is right: the pure appearance of things is good and true, and the surface of the earth is more real than its gelatinous inner hollows. St Augustine was partly wrong in exhorting us not to step outside our own selves; for anyone who remains constantly within loses himself in daydreams, and ends by burning incense to some genie arising from the refuse of his fears, as vacuous and insidious as the nightmares warned off by evening prayer.
In his pages about that meadow on the hillside our sedimentologist strikes a mighty vein. He finds the classical fertility of the epic writer who, in dealing with details, grasps the presence of a universal law binding them all into a single harmonious unity. The sciences help us not to lose our heads, to travel forward, and to find that the world, after all, is good and securely constructed. Anyone with a solid education in science eventually feels at home, even among things which change and continually lose their own identity.
Perhaps a little reluctant – maybe anxious – to belong to this category, Amedeo (as he says in his report) set himself to answer the question: “Which is the real continuation of the river uphill from the spring?” Ever since Heraclitus the river has been the image for the questioning of identity, beginning with that old conundrum as to whether one can or cannot put one’s foot in the same river twice. Descartes, too, with his famous bit of hard, cold, white wax which, held near the fire, changed in shape, size, compactness and colour, while remaining a piece of wax: it was on this very river, on the Danube at Neuberg on November 10th 1619, in a room heated for the winter thanks to the generosity of the Duke of Bavaria, that he began to think in clear and distinct terms.
The water that emerges in the little hollow of the spring quite clearly comes from the sodden meadow a few steps further up the hill; evidence of this is a photograph showing Maddalena leaning on Maria Giuditta’s shoulder and holding up a finely-proportioned, sopping wet foot. The soil digests the innumerable tiny trickles, filters them, and renders them back to the broad light of day where the spring itself rises, immediately beside Dr Öhrlein’s plaque. The scholar Amedeo thereupon questioned himself about the source of the water which saturated the meadow, and which was therefore the Danube. He followed the course of the rivulets that trickle down the slope, and within a hundred yards he found that he had arrived at an eighteenth-century house, flanked by a woodshed. Also before his eyes was “a long, projecting gutter, or maybe even a pipe, which passes close to the woodshed and gushes out abundant water in the direction of the hollow”, which is, of course, situated lower down. “There is no question about it,” he continues, “the water that runs down the slope into the hollow where the spring is comes from the gutter, which is uphill from it. Water can only flow downwards; it cannot flow up a slope or a pipe (or is that the only place in the world where the most straightforward law in classic physics fails to function?).”
If the river is visible water, exposed to the sky and to the eyes of humanity, that gutter is Danube. So far the report is above criticism. If one goes to the banks of a river at different places and at different times, pointing one’s finger at the water each time and saying “Danube” – we owe this theory of definition by demonstration to the logician Quine – we eventually arrive at the identity of the Danube. The Danube exists, there is no doubt about it. If Amedeo clambers panting up the slope, pointing his index finger and saying “Danube” over and over again, indicating the source of the Breg, the rivulets in the meadow which feed it, and the gutter which feeds the rivulets, then that is the Danube.
But who supplies the gutter? What invisible fluvial divinity? It is at this point that the report takes a tumble, because the scientist yields to a gossipy approximation: he makes use of hearsay. Maria Giuditta, he tells us, with her long legs, was the first to reach the house at the top. She looked in at a window on the ground floor and questioned the grumpy old lady of the house. From her she learnt that the water reaches the gutter from a basin, and that this basin is constantly full because of a tap that no one ever succeeds in turning off; and that this is in turn connected to “a lead pipe, which may well be as old as the house, and which ends up God knows where.”
No need to comment on the rank amateurism of such language. It reminds one of the publications on the sources of the Nile penned by the reckless Captain John Speke, which – according to his rival Richard Burton, as well as James M’Queen, an authoritative and biased member of the Royal Geographical Society – were a downright discredit to geography. Our scholar, though perfectly accustomed to checking hypotheses by experiment, did not even take the trouble to check up on the existence of this tap; indeed, he only came to learn of it from someone else, who in turn had only heard it mentioned in passing by a third party, and one whose reliability is impossible to judge. Even Herodotus, all that time ago, trusted his informants only if they were eye-witnesses. It may be that Amedeo was put off the scent by a question shouted out by Maddalena, who was following along behind, lily-white and beautiful: “And what do you suppose would happen if the tap were turned off?” The mental image of Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade completely waterless, of ancient objects and skeletons and the immense bed of the empty river, must surely have carried his mind towards metaphysical dimensions of causality. What will happen there if something happens here? Needless to say nothing will happen at all; but all the same …
In the first place, that tap does not exist. It is not difficult to follow Amedeo’s itinerary. I take the few steps from my bench downhill to the source of the Breg, then, sousing my shoes and socks, climb up through the meadow towards the house. The water glitters in the grass, the spring flows quietly out, the green of the trees is good, and so is the smell. The traveller feels rather clumsy and small, aware of the superior objectivity in which he is framed. Is it possible that all those little trickles in a field are the Danube, the river of superlatives, as it has been called, with its basin of 817,000 square kilometres and the two hundred thousand million cubic metres of water which it pours out into the Black Sea every year? A few hundred metres further down the valley the stream is fleet and swiftly shining, and already merits the epithet of “sweet-flowing”, which Hesiod applies to the Ister.
My steps towards the house are like sentences on a sheet of paper; my foot tries out the waterlogged soil and avoids a puddle as the pen encircles and crosses the blank spaces of the page, circumventing a clot in heart and thought, and carries on. Writing ought to be like those waters flowing through the grass – full of spontaneity, fresh and timid but inexhaustible. Such a humble, bashful song of life resembles the absorbed, profound expression on the face of Maddalena, not the dryness and vexation of writing, a watercourse where the flow is often mismanaged.
The soul is a stingy thing, as Kepler chided himself, and takes refuge in the little corners of literature rather than inquiring into the Deity’s design for Creation. Those who entrust their being solely to paper may discover in the end that they are mere silhouettes cut from tissue paper, likenesses that quiver and shrivel in the wind. It is this wind that the traveller longs for – adventure, the gallop to the hilltop. Like Kepler Mathematicus, he wants to fall in with God’s plans and the laws of nature, and not just follow his own idiosyncrasies; and he would also like the short climb to the house to be some glorious advance, like the Tigers of Mompracem scaling the heights under enemy fire, to conquer and to free their native land. The wind, however, does not blow in our faces but at our backs. It thrusts us away, far from the house where we were born, and from the Promised Land. And so it is that the traveller plunges deeper into his own allergies, his own imbalances, hoping that through those chinks slashed in the back-cloth of daily living, there might be at least a puff of wind or a draught coming from what is truly life, though concealed by the screen of reality. Literary manoeuvres then become a strategy to protect those badly patched tatters in the stage-curtain of distance, to prevent those minimal chinks from closing up altogether. A writer’s existence, said Monsignor Della Casa, is a state of war.
I climb the slope and reach the house. I climb it? I reach it? The use of the first person singular is decidedly questionable, and a traveller, faced by the objectivity of things, is especially hampered to find himself tripping over the personal pronoun. Victor Hugo, strolling along the Rhine, would willingly have thrown the thing away, fed up with this Stinking Egowort that sprouts and spreads from one’s pen. And yet, another traveller no less illustrious, nor less hostile towards the egotism of words and pronouns (Stendhal touring France), said that it is, after all, a convenient way to tell a tale.
So I look at the house, I walk all round it, I scrutinize it, and I compare it with the description in the letter. The problem confronting any branch of knowledge is that of making the Southern Seas, the endless heaving extent of them, fit in with the blue map the “Southern Seas”. Little inclined to exactitude, your man of letters prefers to ramble on a bit, to come up with a few moral critiques of the supposed exactitude of science. “We are perpetually moralists,” said Doctor Johnson, “but we are geometricians only by chance.”
The truth is, there is no tap in the house. It’s an old enough house: the kitchen bears the date 1715. An old crone, springing into view on the doorstep, rather snappily warns us not to steal, but to listen rather (for two and a half marks per head) to a tape describing the blackened fireplace, the eighteenth-century implements, and the customs and usages of days of yore. We place five marks in the pit of her hand, which resembles the bark of a centuries-old tree and demands a certain respect, not to say awe. The kitchen is black all over, a cavern odorous with bacon-flitches and with the past. The voice on the tape-recorder is the voice of the woman herself, who thus saves herself the trouble of telling the same old story over and over again. In fact she confines herself to making authoritative gestures to put finishing touches to the discourse. She is old, irascible, lonely, and accustomed to her solitude, indifferent towards that passer-by called life and to the dark of the blackened kitchen where she has always lived. It is only when her own recorded voice mentions Sulina, the infinitely distant mouth of the Danube on the Black Sea, that her expression softens a little.
There is no tap, no tap at all, either in the house or outside. The water that drenches the meadow in which rises the source of the Breg comes out of a pipe stuck upright in the earth. Slightly higher up are a few patches of white, and it may be that the melting snow, along with other local rivulets, contributes to the volume of water which keeps the meadow sodden. In any case, the water rises through the pipe and overflows. The old girl has put a hollowed-out log under the outlet of the pipe, forming a kind of gutter. The tube pours water into this primitive gutter, which in turn empties into a bucket. Here the old woman collects what water she needs. The bucket is always full, and the excess water, pouring in unceasingly, streams down the slope, floods and inundates the meadow, and drenches the land from which, in the hollow down the hill, springs the source of the Breg, which is to say of the Danube.
This is not a new discovery at all. In his great work of 1785 the Danubian Antiquarius (pseudonym of Johann Herm. Dielhelm) speaks of a house on Mount Abnoba, from the roof of which one gutter pours water into the Danube, and the other into the Rhine. He also mentions, further, an inn at the highest point of the Freiburg road, known by the name of Kalteherberg, Cool hostel, the roof of which slopes two ways, one side pouring its water into the Rhine, the other into the Danube. So the matter of gutters has from ancient times been a Leitmotif in the debated question of the sources of the river. Certain it is that in the profoundly erudite discourse of the Antiquarius the gutters pour their water into a Danube that was already in existence, whereas according to Amedeo’s theory, apart from his blunder about the tap, that gutter is the source of the Danube, is the Danube itself. We know so very little, and before getting on our hind legs and spouting about the truth, we ought to debate problems at least twice, as did the Goths who for this reason, so appealed to Laurence Sterne; that is, once when drunk and again when they had slept off their hangovers. Anyway, the Goths also took their oaths on the god Ister, and in some inscriptions in Rhaetia the god Danubius is put on the same level as Jupiter Optimus Maximus.
Do we raise our hands and swear on the deity Danube that the gutter is the Danube? Well, what is missing in this business is the most basic factor of all. The gutter which feeds the spring is itself fed by the spring. So we find ourselves at once in the very midst of Danubian Culture, in the world of Parallel Action, the committee invented by Robert Musil. In order to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Francis Joseph’s reign it sets out to sing the praises of the founding principle of Austrian civilization – and indeed that of Europe tout court – but fails to find any such thing, thus discovering that the whole reality of the matter has gone up in smoke, that its elaborate edifice is built on thin air.
The gutter which bathes the soil from which it is fed may be the captious deduction of scholars taking the day off, but what is certain is that at Donaueschingen, the accredited source, the Danube flows into the Brigach, that is to say, into one of its own tributaries. In the round bowl which collects the waters of the spring there is a plaque which states that at one time the real Danube, the tiny original rivulet, ran parallel with the Brigach, after two kilometres joining the Brigach itself and the Breg, forming a single stream known, in fact, as the Danube. But it adds that since 1820 there has been an underground conduit which taps the waters of the primary source and channels them into the Brigach. The real Danube is therefore two hundred metres in length, a minute tributary of the Brigach, though the official Danube starts a little further on, at the above-mentioned confluence of the Brigach, the Breg and (strictly speaking) also the trickle of the Musel, a mere streamlet running down from Bad Dürmheim, that one can jump across. Moreover, 20 or 30 kilometres downstream, at Immendingen, the Danube disappears, at least in part: it falls into fissures in the rocks and re-emerges 40 kilometres further south, where it is called the Aach, and flows into Lake Constance and therefore into the Rhine (the sources of which are as disputed as those of the Danube). The Danube is therefore, in some measure, a tributary of the Rhine, flowing not into the Black Sea but into the North Sea – the triumph of the Rhine over the Danube, revenge of the Niebelungs over the Huns, predominance of Germany over Central Europe.
Ever since the Song of the Niebelungs the Rhine and the Danube have confronted and challenged each other. The Rhine is Siegfried, symbol of Germanic virtus and purity, the loyalty of the Niebelungs, chivalric heroism, dauntless love of the destiny of the Germanic soul. The Danube is Pannonia, the kingdom of Attila, the eastern, Asiatic tide which at the end of the Song of the Niebelungs overwhelms Germanic values: when the Burgundians cross it on their way to the treacherous Hunnish court, their fate – a Germanic fate – is sealed.
The Danube is often enveloped in a symbolic anti-German aura. It is the river along which different peoples meet and mingle and crossbreed, rather than being, as the Rhine is, a mythical custodian of the purity of the race. It is the river of Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Belgrade and of Dacia, the river which – as Ocean encircled the world of the Greeks – embraces the Austria of the Hapsburgs, the myth and ideology of which have been symbolized by a multiple, supranational culture. It embraces the Empire in which the sovereign addressed himself to “my peoples” and the national anthem was sung in eleven different tongues. The Danube is German-Magyar-Slavic-Romanic-Jewish Central Europe, polemically opposed to the Germanic Reich; it is a “hinternational” ecumene, for which in Prague Johannes Urzidil praised it; it is a hinterworld “behind the nations”.
The Danube-Aach version of the story appears, on the other hand, to be the symbol of that all-German ideology which viewed the multinational Hapsburg monarchy as a branch of Teutonic civilization, a stratagem or an instrument of Reason for the cultural Germanization of Central and Eastern Europe. Such a thesis was maintained, for example, by Heinrich von Srbik, the great Austrian historian who sang the praises of Prince Eugène of Savoy, was averse to Frederick the Great and Prussianism, and ended up a National Socialist.
This “hinternational” Central Europe, nowadays idealized as the harmony between different peoples, was without doubt a very real thing in the latter days of the Hapsburg Empire, a tolerant association of peoples understandably lamented when it was over, not least when compared with the totalitarian barbarism that replaced it in the lands of the Danube between the two World Wars. All the same, the Central European mission of the Hapsburgs was in some measure a makeshift ideology, arising from the failures of Austrian policy in Germany. The wars between Maria Theresa and Frederick II of Prussia severed what Heinrich von Srbik, in a book published in 1942, called Deutsche Einheit, German oneness. The split between Austria and Germany widened increasingly during the period which followed – from the Napoleonic Wars to the Austro-Prussian War of 1866; a period that witnessed the decline of Hapsburg power and above all of its leadership in Germany. Incapable of bringing about the unity of Germany, an ideal now headed by Prussia, the Austria of the Hapsburgs sought a new mission and a new identity in the supra-national empire, the crucible of peoples and of cultures.
At the root of the Hapsburg myth, which contrasts the Danube with the Rhine, there lies this historical wound, and as the wound grows worse, the myth grows more elaborate. During the First World War, at the beginning of the end, Hofmannsthal extolled “The Austrian”, praising his traditional ability to laugh at himself and his sceptical attitude towards history, and contrasting him with the state-worshipping Prussian, apostle of dialectical thought and virtuously fanatical. In the 1920s and 1930s the identity crisis of the tiny, newborn Austrian Republic, orphan of the Empire, stimulated and intensified categorical theory-mongering about “Austrian-ness”, and dissertations on “The Austrian Man”, everlasting and utterly distinct from your German.