The Danube (42 page)

The road out of Vienna to the north-west follows the tram tracks, out through the city towards the village of Nussdorf. It was here in September 1683 that the first clashes between the Saxon and Imperial Dragoons on the Austrian side and the Ottoman defenders took place. By nine in the morning the Austrians had taken Nussdorf. Meeting nothing more frightening than trams and buses, I head out of the city with the Danube clearly visible on my right, and down to the shore at Klosterneuburg. Legend has it that Duke Leopold III (1351–86) was walking in the vicinity with his wife when the wind off the river caught her veil and blew it into a tree.

Looking up into the branches the emperor had a vision of the Virgin Mary, and ordered a monastery to be built on the spot. The town has grown up around it. A later story of Klosterneuburg concerns a certain rat-catcher – a slightly different version to that of the better ‐known Pied Piper of Hamelin.
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Here, too, a reward was offered by the city authorities to anyone who could rid the city of a plague of rats. Here, too, a piper appeared and led the rats out of the city, down to the river to drown. When the mayor refused to pay the agreed fee the piper refused the pittance in the purse thrown down at his feet. When he returned, some weeks later, he played a different tune, and all the children of Klosterneuburg followed him down to the Danube. There they boarded a strange, brightly painted, ship. They sailed away downstream and were never seen again – except for two children: one because he was deaf and had not heard the wonderful music; the other because she had gone back home to change her skirt.

Looking back towards Vienna the Danube here is silver, and black trees bend low over it as if in blessing. There's a row of tables and benches on the shore outside the Uferhaus café with a sign chalked up on a blackboard – ‘Sorry [in English] – opens circa end March.’ Across the road are three brightly painted Tibetan prayer-wheels, oil drums mounted on their ends
that one can spin as one prays, and a line of prayer-flags, blue, white, red, green and yellow, brightening trees still in their winter greys. ‘Dear visitors,’ reads the sign, ‘please take care of yourselves and your children when you enter this prayer-construction. We are not responsible for your safety! May all sentient beings be happy. Thank you for your visit.’
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The road reaches a ridge, overlooking the dam and power station at Greifenstein, a concrete wall across the river, and just one of the forty-nine dams that block the Danube in Austria.

Caesar Augustus (23
BC
to
AD
13) was the first Roman emperor to send soldiers across the Danube, as part of his plan to enlarge the Roman empire as far as the River Elbe. When that proved too ambitious, the Danube became the naturally defensible frontier. Hostile tribes gathered on the far shore, and the Danube became a war zone. Grateful archaeologists are still reaping the benefits – a row of excellent museums has replaced the Roman fortresses all along the river in Austria.
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In Tulln, a statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback stands on the riverbank. In the first years of his reign, the Langobards crossed the Danube in the north, and the Sarmatians further south, to attack the Roman empire. Roman troops, many of them seasoned veterans of the Persian wars, drove them back successfully across the river. A pattern was established that would last until the Romans finally retreated under a rain of blows two hundred years later. The tribes across the Danube alternately fought and struck deals with the Romans, and the Romans incorporated the tribesmen and their weapons into their own ranks.
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Ballomar, the king of the Marcomanni, was temporarily at peace with the Romans, and acted as a mediator between the empire and other tribes. But by the late
AD
160s, the empire had been severely weakened by the plague which Roman soldiers had brought back with them from Persia. Seeing their chance, the Marcomanni and other German tribes based in Bohemia massed for a new assault. Marcus Aurelius spent almost the entire last thirteen years of his reign fighting the Germans. On his horse on the shore at Tulln, Aurelius looks more certain of victory than in the bust found at Dunaszekcső. Or perhaps the sculptor of the latter was more interested in the philosopher king, and the former in the war-seasoned commander of the imperial army. Around the year 170, Ballomar led a huge German force across the Danube, defeated a Roman army twenty thousand strong at Carnuntum,
(near the modern Hainburg) and pressed on towards Aquileia near the Adriatic coast in northern Italy. Marcus Aurelius led the counter-attack in person, Aquileia was relieved, a new command was established in northern Italy, and the Roman Danube fleet was reinforced. By 171, the Marcommani had been thrown back across the Danube, Marcus Aurelius had added the title Germanica to his collection, and coins were minted to celebrate the victory in 172, with the inscription ‘
Germanica capta
’ – subjugated Germania. With the Marcommani at a safer distance, the emperor moved the Legio II Italica up to the Danube, based first at Albing (Krems) then at Lauriacum (Enns). The history of this period is one of constant probing by the tribes on the northern bank of the Roman defences on the southern bank. In the summer of
AD
173 the Quadi attacked across the river from the territory of modern Slovakia. The Legio XII Fulminata was ambushed by a larger Quadi force and appeared to be on the verge of disastrous defeat when a sudden downpour of rain reinvigorated the Roman troops, who had run out of drinking water. At the same time, according to two contemporary accounts, lightning struck the Quadi. According to Tertullian, the ‘miracle of the rain’ was due to the prayers of Christian soldiers in the Roman ranks; according to the rival account of Cassius Dio, to the prayers of an Egyptian magician to the god Mercury.
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The story illustrates the gradual penetration of Christianity into the Roman army, brought back by the regular movement of Roman soldiers between the different borders of the empire in East and West. Traders and troops also brought with them other gods and cults. At the museum in Tulln is a fine marble relief of Mithras ritually spearing a bull, while a scorpion attacks its testicles. At the top of the image are Cautes and Cautopates, the torch-bearers of Mithras, and the sun and moon shine down. The Romans took care not to displace the gods of the tribes they conquered, but rather to co-opt them and dress them in Roman tunics. Mars, the Roman god of war, was identified among the Latobici tribe as Mars Latobius; the Celtic goddess of light Epona and the tribal goddess Noreia with Minerva, or perhaps with Fortuna. Many of the first Christian martyrs were Roman soldiers. The only known Christian martyr of the Roman province of Noricum was the Holy Florianus, who was tortured then thrown into the Enns river, near its confluence with the Danube at Krems on 4 May 304.
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Poor Florianus, had he survived only a few more years, could have taken advantage of the decision
of Constantine I (
AD
306–37) to tolerate Christianity. The Christians helped soften the blows which rained down during the last years of the empire in the fifth century as it buckled under renewed tribal attacks.

Attila the Hun was the most successful of the Hunnish kings. He ruled from 438 until his death in 453, allegedly as a result of a nosebleed on his marriage bed, in the arms of his new wife, Ildikó. At its greatest extent, his empire reached as far west as the Rhine.
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According to the Hungarian writer Mihály Hoppál, he was buried in three coffins, one gold, one silver and one iron, was because a shaman said he should be buried ‘in a ray of sunlight, in a ray of moonlight, and in the dead of night’.
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According to legend, his grave was dug at a point where the River Tisza was diverted. Horses then rode to and fro over the place to conceal it. The river was then allowed to flow back over the place. All those who had taken part in the burial were killed. Mihály Hoppál traces the legend through Hungarian history, all the way to the present day. When Sándor Petőfi, a poet and young leader of the 1848 war of independence against the Austrians, died on the battlefield, his grave was similarly disguised by the passage of horses’ hooves. The commander asked which of the hussars could remember where it was. The two men who said they could were immediately shot. In June 1958, Prime Minister Imre Nagy was executed by the Hungarian puppet government of János Kádár, installed by the Soviet Union after the Red Army crushed the Hungarian revolution. Buried face downwards, wrapped in tar-paper, in Plot 301 of the Rákoskeresztúr cemetery on the outskirts of Budapest, his grave and those of others executed after the revolution were trampled on by police horses. Relatives bribed the grave-diggers to tell them who was buried where, and in 1989 the bodies were exhumed and the martyrs reburied with dignity.

Severinus, whose name means ‘from the north’, was originally a hermit who arrived in the region at about the time of the death of Attila. By then, the small- and medium-sized towns along the Danube were under constant attack from the tribes. Severinus hurried between them, gathering donations of food and clothing further inland and transporting them to Roman outposts such as Comagena (Tulln). He maintained good relations with the tribal leaders – to ensure safe passage for his charity work. Severinus died in 482, and when the Roman garrison finally withdrew in 488, never to return, they took Severinus's remains with them.
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He was finally laid to
rest at Frattomagiore, north of Naples. He would have appreciated the inscription, taken from Book VI of Marcus Aurelius's
Meditations
, on the plinth of his statue: ‘Life is short, with but a single fruit: a pious disposition, and social acts.’

The river front in Tulln smells powerfully of pine woods, but there are no pines to be seen. I track the scent to the bark arranged thickly by diligent gardeners around the flower beds that dot the lawns. A statue of the artist Egon Schiele, born in Tulln in 1890, stands in front of a museum dedicated to his work, his fingertips just touching. The sculptor has portrayed him as a brooding, somewhat dissolute youth, mindful of his nude portrayals of young girls, and his time in prison on charges, never proved, of laying those same hands on them. Today, the young girls of Tulln walk past in jeans and trainers, more interested in the mobile phones in their hands than in their bronze alleged pornographer. They pass the floating Danube stage, moored just offshore for summer performances of rock bands and theatre groups, and the last stone Roman tower, which once oversaw the western gate of the town. In the Middle Ages it was used as a store for weapons and gunpowder, and in the nineteenth century for salt. Local people still know it as the Salt Tower, not the Roman or Powder tower. A Dutch registered barge, the
Regenboog
(Rainbow) from Landsmeet passes downstream in the sunshine. The Danube is a rare blue.

I pause briefly at Zwentendorf, to see the nuclear power station the Austrians built then stopped, heroically, by popular demand, when it was almost ready to go on line.
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Two white flags fly outside, as if signalling the surrender of the nuclear lobby. Everything is clean and tidy, with hardly a car in sight, like a child's scale model. A single chimney has bands of red, white and red around the top, the colours of the Austrian flag. Birds perch along the railings where steam was supposed to gush out. A long goods train passes, carrying cereals to the city.

I drive inland for a while, to explore the hills sloping down towards the river, turn a sharp corner and stop suddenly at the sight of a single column with a globe on the top. ‘From 15th April to 8th May 1945,’ reads the inscription, ‘this was the front-line between German and Soviet troops. In this place the Second World War ended, on 8th May 1945. Twenty-eight German soldiers and eleven civilians lost their lives here’. Could they not just have laid down their arms? Didn't they know the war was already lost?
What motivates men to fight to the bitter end? A little tower, almost like a minaret, but with an over-proportioned tiled roof like a pixie's hat, surmounted by a cross, stands beside the track. The vines are freshly pruned, and the early spring paints the valley in browns and greys and ochre. The marble ball on the top of the column is inscribed in Gothic script with the words
Freiheit in Frieden
– Freedom in Peace. No one can argue with that. ‘The Austrian Association of Comrades wishes you a pleasant rest,’ reads the plaque on the bench next to the monument.

In Stein I find another war memorial. So long after the Romans, such a short time after the great conflagration of the Second World War, this is still a martial landscape. Up a steep stairway from the river, a whole church is dedicated to the dead of both wars. ‘The Tears of the Homeland, and the Mercy of God, for our fallen comrades from Lower Austria at Stalingrad, 1942/3.’ In the Minorite church in Stein, a different installation is on display rather than the ritual flowers and crosses of Christian remembrance. Sixteen loudspeakers are mounted with magnets on nine square steel plates on the floor of a side-chapel in the cloisters, beneath Gothic windows, arched in prayer. Hans Peter Kuhn's sound installation ‘Out of the Depths’ features a large industrial-sized halogen lamp suspended over the bass speakers.
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The sound emitted from them is almost too deep for the human ear, so the viewer sees rather than hears the trembling of the membranes of the speakers, like the skins of drums. ‘On and off, little sounds become audible, yet in principle, the installation is silent. Since each of the membranes vibrates independently and unpredictably, the impression of a strange, autonomous entity is created.’ The Minorite church was built in the thirteenth century and dedicated to St Ulrich. When the monastery was closed in the 1790s, the church became a storeroom for tobacco, another of the gifts, such as coffee, which the Turks first brought up the Danube. Since 2004 the church has been used for exhibitions and concerts. On the night of my visit, a concert by the Ethiopian harpist Alemu Aga and the Saint Yared Choir is taking place as part of a series dedicated to the Image of God.
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The vibrant silence of Hans Peter Kuhn's exhibit clears my mind for the rich tones of the
beguena
, the tall Ethiopian harp that King David played in the Old Testament when he wearied of dancing. The voices of the choir coil among the pillars and the harp strings cast their own light in this ancient church.