Rivers
are all about life. Not only because they provide life-giving
water to plants and animals and people but because,
for the humanity that settles on their banks, they become
the flowing repositories of their history and culture,
the streams of their changing consciousness, the constant
yet varying locations of their anxiety, grief, hope
and joy.
This is what makes books about rivers so attractive,
because the good ones can never be just about the river
that is the ostensible subject: they have to deal with
the society and culture of the settlements around it.
But Claudio Magris’ wonderful book on Europe’s most
famous river goes far beyond that. “Danube: A sentimental
journey from the source to the Black Sea” (Collins Harvill
1990) is more than a magisterial treatise or even a
valiant attempt to capture the social history of the
human habitations in all their richness and complexity.
It is a cornucopia of gems that derive some inspiration
or relevance from that great river: literary, biographical,
historical, political, philosophical.
Maybe it was the dry and dusty heat of a Delhi summer
that made me turn to this book again after many years.
Or maybe it was just the need to seek relief from the
increasingly mindless and apparently endless media speculation
about post-election political configurations in India.
Whatever it was, there is no doubt that Magris’ acute
perception and profound scholarship have created a masterpiece
that transcends the particular focus on the river itself
to act as both a spiritual balm and an invitation to
introspection.
The book is structured as a journey, beginning with
its origins and meandering or moving forcefully with
the river along its prolonged course through central
and southeast Europe to the Black Sea. Different points
along the banks generate different types of discussion,
ranging from little anecdotes to longer sympathetic
accounts to broad philosophical expressions.
Throughout, there is irony and wry humour. Consider
the very start of the book, at the purported source
of the Danube. One theory holds that the source of the
ultimately mighty river is no more than a gutter in
the south of Germany, itself fed by a leaking tap that
no one ever succeeds in fully turning off. In any case
the actual source is inevitably disputed, as borne out
by the evidence of the various plaques at different
points, which have become the source of continuous discord
between the competing village claimants.
But even more than emotional geography, this is a book
full of people, both historical and created: they spring
out from the pages in often startling detail, but always
with empathy, discernment, even passion. And their personalities
suddenly illuminate for the reader the major and minor
events that they were involved in.
Consider just some of characters ebbing and flowing
from this account: the engineer Neweklowsky, who spent
most of his life producing the “definitive” tract on
navigation and rafting on the upper Danube, in 2164
pages weighing just under 6 kilos; Marieluise Fleisser
of Ingolstadt, the playwright whose complex relationship
with Bertolt Brecht both elevated and consumed her;
Ferdinand Thran, the 19th century architect and restorer
of Ulm Cathedral who devoted considerable energies not
only to his detailed published guide to the Cathedral
but to a meticulous and even more detailed “File of
Rudenesses Received” in which he recorded all the insults,
outrages and affronts that life had offered him; Agnes
Bernauer, the lovely daughter of an Augsberg barber
who had to be drowned by tying her long hair down with
weights in the Danube, on a charge of witchcraft, because
she had married the son of the Duke of Bavaria and threatened
the policies of the dynasty and the state with this
misalliance; the mathematician Kepler who wrote a little
treatise on “Six points of nothing” dealing with the
properties of snowflake, and sent it to his mentor with
the words “I know that you like Nothing, not because
of its minimal value, but because one can play with
it in a light, witty way, like a garrulous sparrow,
and I therefore think that a gift will be more welcome
to you and be more appreciated the more it approaches
zero”; Marianne Jung Willemer, the unacknowledged creator
of some of the most beloved poems in the German language,
the poems of Zuleika in Goethe’s West-eastern Divan,
who wrote these in the midst of her passion for Goethe,
and who never wrote anything again; Herr Baumgartner,
whose job is to shoot the excess hares that destroy
the flowers and other memorials on the tombstones at
the central Cemetery in Vienna; Maria Vetsera, the little
teenage baroness who avoided a performance of Wagner’s
Ring at the Vienna opera to have a secret meeting with
Rudolph of Hapsburg, thereby setting in motion the events
leading to their tragic double suicide in Mayerling
in 1889; Robert Reiter, the avant-garde Hungarian poet,
who disappeared from the fashionable literary scene
in Budapest only to be tracked down years later as the
German lyric poet Franz Lebhard in Timisoara, Romania,
having changed his name, nationality, language and literary
style....
Even places develop personalities in Magris’ account:
the clock museum in Furtwangen that calls forth meditations
on the ambiguity of contemporaneity; the room in a little
two-storeyed house in a small town near Klosterneuberg
where Kafka died; the marshy woods and meadows around
Tulln where the naturalist Konrad Lorenz developed his
uncomfortable theories; the tranquil city of Linz, beloved
of Hitler, to which the Fuhrer wished to retire after
creating the most grandiose city along the river; the
sterile geometry of the house Wittgenstein designed
in Vienna; the old pharmacy “The Red Prawn” in Bratislava
the shows the history of the herbalist’s art; the tomb
of Gul Baba, a 16th century holy man buried in on a
hill of roses in Budapest; the improbable city of Subotica,
whose very existence is based on fascinating falsifications
and infractions...
The historical and geographical details merge and coalesce
to transcend this particular river, this particular
geography, to encompass all rivers and all humanity.
At the end of the book, Claudio Magris is in Sulina
on the Black Sea, trying to establish the mouth of the
river. But there is no mouth; he cannot see the Danube.
It turns out that his mistake was to look for the mouth
of the river in the open undefined spaces of the dunes
and the beach, the horizon and the sea, by following
the trails and dispersals of the little rivulets. Instead,
Magris finally discovers that the Danube ends in a regimented
canal, and so reaches the sea in a harbour reserved
for dock personnel, and under the surveillance of officialdom
in the form of the Harbour Master.
Is that all there is to conclude this splendid riparine
journey? Not really, because “the canal runs, runs on,
calmly and confidently into the sea, and it is not longer
a canal, a limitation, a Regulation, but a flowing outwards
that opens and abandons itself to the all the waters
and oceans of the entire globe, and to the creatures
living in their depths.”
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