The Danube (48 page)

By now the Danube is barely more than a stream. There are outcrops of limestone cliffs, capped by the castles of Wu¨rttemberg dukes. Rocky crags sprout whiskery pine trees, forerunners of the Black Forest. The last museum dedicated to the Romans on the Danube is at Mengen-Ennetach.

On a map showing the disposition of Roman troops, I understand for the first time the relationship of the Danube to the Rhine. The Rhine forms an L-shape around the Black Forest, out of which the two-prongs of the Brig and Bregach rivers flow, to become the Danube at Donaueschingen. A little to the north, also in the Black Forest, the River Neckar rises, to flow northwards to join the Rhine. Another map shows the wine route, for barrels of the precious liquid from southern France, Italy and Spain, from the sea coast near Marseilles, northwards to southern Germany. Little wonder that so many vines were planted in the fertile soils of southern Germany to avoid the need for such expense. The final exhibit in the museum is a relief from a gravestone from around
AD
200 of two oxen pulling a cart loaded with barrels of wine, on which a hungry-looking dog perches, his ribs showing through his coat. The driver wears a hooded jacket from the region of Gaul.

Gerhard Obstle remembers when the meadows beside the Danube were blue with wild flowers –
bauernbu¨bchen
as they are called in the Swabian dialect. He shares a little of that pride; he won a prize two years ago for the flowers on his own land. He farms ninety-five hectares beside the Danube at Scheer, slightly bigger than the average size farm in Wu¨rttemberg, slightly smaller than the German average. Half he ploughs, half is meadow. He switched to organic farming after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, and has never regretted it. Conventional farmers, he says, constantly face the dilemma of ‘
wachsen oder weichen
’ – to expand, or disappear. They use more and more chemicals on their fields to increase the yield. He didn't want to take part in that race any longer. As the German government turned away from nuclear energy after the Fukushima disaster, many farmers in Germany began growing maize as a biofuel. But Gerhard hasn't been tempted. ‘There's nothing “organic” about the
process – just the fermentation of the mass of the crop, until it turns to gas. I don't like maize because it cannot tolerate weeds – its growth suffers. It's not so competitive, and it's hard to grow without chemicals. But there are organic farmers in the Rhineland, where the soil is more fertile, who are doing it well.’ There would be no point in ploughing more land as it would be under water when the Danube floods. Climate change he notices very exactly. In his childhood, a temperature of 32 degrees Celsius in July was unusually hot. Nowadays it is often 35 degrees in July. I drink cool, home-made organic apple juice with Gerhard and his wife, watched by their peaceful oxen. The walls of the barn have been painted by their daughter, with a huge mural of the same brown and white cows on one, of a little girl blowing dandelion-seeds in a meadow in the other. Gerhard breaks into song – the ‘Blankenstein Hussar’:

The Hussars were the light cavalry of the Hungarian army, famed for their courage and gallantry. Young men from across central and western Europe were drawn to serve in their ranks, to fight the French in the early 1800s.

In Sigmaringen the castle rises steeply from the Danube and is reflected in its still waters, sailed over by swans, a majestic white against the vigorous, dark red shoots of the new bushes along the banks. I sleep in the attic room of an old inn and drink wine from the Kaiserstuhl, the Emperor's Seat, a long, low hill between Freiburg in Germany and Coburg in Alsace. When I was a student in Freiburg we would pass that hill when we hitch-hiked to France, in search of disorder and laughter when German orderliness got too much. The
spätlese
, late-harvested grapes from the Kaiserstuhl, make the most delicious, orange coloured wine.

I reach Donaueschingen at dusk, dump my bags at the hotel, and rush down the hill in search of the source of the river before it gets dark – just as I went in search of its mouth at Sulina exactly a year earlier. I find the Fu¨rstenberg park first of all, through which the Brigach flows. Expecting at any moment to reach the point where the Breg flows into it from the south, I strike out on foot, but the walk gets longer and longer. At one point, the ‘Danube Temple’ appears on the far shore, at the spot where the spring, regarded by many as the true source of the Danube rather than its two-parent tributaries, flows down to the Brigach. The temple was built in 1910 by order of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was a frequent visitor to the Fu¨rstenberg palace. I pass a riding stable, a dog-kennel, a playground and a sports club. Just before a concrete bridge leads traffic on to the ring-road, I come across the Breg flowing, small but vigorous, into the Bregach. It is my journey's end.

There's a large marble statue of a stern matriarchal figure: Mother Baar – the name of this region of the southern Black Forest – holding a child in her lap, the young Danube. The child, in contrast to his mother, smiles with delight, and pours the first waters of the river from a small bucket, with all the rapt attention of childhood. Beneath the statue are the words: ‘For our beloved hometown, Donaueschingen, Irgon and Max Egon, to commemorate our golden wedding anniversary, 19 June 1939.’ There's a simple bench for young lovers to sit on, and a couple of spindly silver birch trees. The leading edge of a cloud blocks out the sun, and a high foreheaded, youthful male face appears – Danubius himself.

I take off my socks and shoes and wade out into the start-waters of my river. I was afraid that Donaueschingen might be an anticlimax, a patch of sleepy suburbia after the spectacular sights of the journey, but it is far from that. The water is deliciously cold. The row of beech trees along the Breg shore give a certain dignity to the scene. The freshly mown grass, the statue, the people dotted about, each with their own relationship to this enormous river, add to the nobility of the Danube. Even the plain concrete bridge, the traffic passing over it, and the electricity pylons cannot rob the source of the Danube of its grandeur. A sign offers a choice of 2,840 kilometres, 2,845 kilometres or even 2,779 kilometres to the mouth. It's a long way to Sulina.

I walk back slowly to the gardens of the Fu¨rstenberg palace, my head in the clouds, overwhelmed with happiness. The river turns black and yellow
and blue in the dying light. Steps lead down beside St John's church to a circular pool. It's almost dark now. The twin towers of the church are reflected in the deep, blue-black water. The statue of another mother, holding her daughter close, oversees the pool. Her left hand is suspiciously close to the girl's young breast, suggesting a particular interest of the sculptor. The mother's right hand points the girl's way, eastwards. The daughter-Danube gazes innocently downwards at a shell she holds in her right hand. At the foot is a small, cherubic boy, blowing on a conch. Both the girl and her mother have garlands in their hair.

I throw a Hungarian twenty forint coin into the pool, watch it spiral downwards, to join thousands of others at the bottom. Bubbles rise from the source of the Danube. Then all is still.

AFTERWORD

A Kind of Solution

The next morning I wake early in the Hotel zur Linde, walk out into the sunshine, and buy a local newspaper to devour with my toast, in the black and white breakfast room. A headline in the
Stuttgarter Zeitung
announces the centenary of Karl May's death, at the age of seventy, on 30 March 1912.
²
May was the German poet of the American Wild West, without ever going there in person. He taught himself to write during spells in prison for petty theft, and created two of the most endearing characters in German fiction: Old Shatterhand, the German emigrant to America, and Winnetou, the Apache Indian chief he befriends.
³
When US troops occupied western Germany at the end of the Second World War, they were
astonished at the romantic vision of the United States entertained by their hosts, faithfully learnt from May's novels. In central and eastern Europe, children in playgrounds to this day choose to be Indians, largely thanks to Karl May, while their peers in western Europe mostly want to be cowboys. His detractors like to remind readers that Adolf Hitler loved his novels, while his defenders point out that Albert Einstein did too. The books have never really taken off in English translation. May confused readers, and quite possibly himself in later life, by identifying so closely with Old Shatterhand, that the two characters rolled into one. ‘And so I found myself in a new and strange life,’ writes Old Shatterhand, ‘and beginning it with a new name, which became as familiar and dear to me as my own.’

‘The paths we really took are overlaid by the paths we did not take,’ wrote the East German novelist Christa Wolf, ‘I can already hear words that we never spoke.’
⁴
Eastern Europe is a kind of mirror image of the Wild West in the west European imagination: the Wild East, where priests crucify nuns to exorcise them, where factories smoke like chimneys, and from whence swarthy Gypsies emerge to slaughter swans in the parks of London or Vienna. That is the tabloid version, but there is also a more intellectual variety, of various peoples caught up in a kind of eternal hostility to one another. But the Danube washes all of them, reminding them of other lands, from which visitors arrive – to trade, or rest or settle. The Danube offers solace, and preaches tolerance. And in countries far from the sea coast, the river reminds people of the power of nature.

Just as I found no barbarians in the east, I didn't find any in the west either. The east Europeans come to the west to work, not to steal, at what are often the most menial jobs. The care with which the river environment, in its tamer or wilder fragments, is protected in Austria and Germany, offers a model of civilised behaviour from which many in the East could learn.

The traveller puts her, or his best foot forward, and comes not to speak, but to listen. By accident I left my tape recorder by the source of the Danube, recording the waters of the Breg and the Brigach flowing together. When I came back, hours later, I found it still there, in the darkness, recording every cry and whisper.

Notes

Introduction. The Lips of the Danube

1.
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, from
Four Quartets
, Harcourt, New York, 1943.

2.
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843),
Sämtliche Werke
, trans. Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover, Berlin, 1846. See .

3.
Andrei Ciurunga,
Canalul
, trans. Mihai Radu and Nick Thorpe, from the booklet available at the memorial at Poarta Albǎ to those who died building the canal.

4.
See . For a background to the archaeology of the Dobrogea region, see Valentina Voinea and Glicherie Caraivan,
Human-Environment Coevolution in Western Black Sea Coastal Region (5th Millenium
BC
)
, Proceedings of an International Conference, Alexandria, 3–5 November 2010, Editura Renaissance, Bucharest, 2011, pp. 49–60.

5.
The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000–3500
BC
, ed. D. W. Anthony, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2011, pp. 179–89.

6.
John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska, ‘Colour in Balkan Prehistory’, in
Early Symbolic Systems for Communication in Southeast Europe
, ed. L. Nikolova.
BAR Intern. Series 1139
, Archaeopress, Oxford, 2008, pp. 31–56; John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska,
Spondylus gaederopus / Glycymeris exchange networks in the European Neolithic and Chalcolithic
, Durham University, Department of Archaeology, 2011.

7.
Philip L. Kohl,
The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia
, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 23–56.

8.
L. Séfériadès, ‘
Spondylus
and Long-distance Trade in Prehistoric Europe’, in David Anthony, ed.,
The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000–3500
BC
, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University and Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2010, pp. 179–90.

9.
Kingdom of Salt, 7000 Years of Hallstatt
, ed. Anton Kern, Kerstin Kowarik, Andreas W. Rausch and Hans Reschreiter, Natural History Museum, Vienna, 2009.

10.
Marija Gimbutas,
The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe
, Thames and Hudson, London, 1982.

11.
See
The Lost World of Old Europe
, ed. Anthony.

12.
The Danube Script, Neo-Eneolithic Writing in Southeastern Europe
, Exhibition Catalogue, Brukenthal Museum. See especially Harald Haarmann and Joan Marler, pp. 3–9.

13.
See 〈
www.viminacium.org.rs
〉.

14.
Herodotus,
The Histories
, Book II, Ch. 5, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1954.