Hello Gentle Reader
A previous blog post was a discussion of walking as both an exercise and a tool for authors and writers to relax and free their mind. A physical meditation of exercise that allowed them to enter their inner world. However what was failed to mentioned was that two of this year’s Booker Prize Long listed authors, are about walking. “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,” by Rachel Joyce, as well as “The Lighthouse,” by Alison Moore. Both these novels deal with journeys. One recounts the physical journey of a man. Who decides to put on his shoes, and hand deliver a letter himself to a friend. The other is about a man now separated who travels to Germany for a walking holiday, and whose life and choices come back to haunt him. “Danube,” by the Italian author Claudio Magris is at once a travelogue but also a creative piece of non-fiction. It is a piece of literature that recounts history of Eastern Europe, where the Danube runs. Familiar characters pop up throughout. E.M. Cioran, Elias Canetti, Franz Kafka, even Baudelaire, Herta Müller, and other dreadful characters like Ceaușescu whose megalomania is placed on display with such open disgust and contempt. Tito and Stalin are also mentioned. For this piece of work takes place back in the eighties when the author himself had traversed the Danube, and when still most of Eastern Europe was nothing more than a group of satellite states that had all been consumed with such delight by Soviet Communism, like a house wife eating bon-bon’s.
Part philosophical discussion, historical account, journey and travelogue Claudio Magris has traced the Danube from its disputed source, to its final end. His journey at times appears disoriented and disorganized. Yet each place visited is brought to life by his eloquent prose. Magris is not a sloppy writer, by any means. Each word is chosen with surgical precision. Each area, village, town, or city is shown through the many facades of history. Like an optometrist changes the lens for a patient to find the perfect prescription for glasses – Magris switches the lenses of the present and the past to show how both collide, and how each country and each culture is so different, each one speaks a different dialect, each one even may even have certain prejudices against another, but each one is connected by the simple fact that the Danube runs through them.
Johann Strauss II was an Austrian composer, who wrote a composition called “An der schönen blauen Donau,” which translates into English as “The Blue Danube.” It was composed in eighteen-sixty six, and had been originally performed on the fifteenth of February of eighteen-sixty seven. It is one of the most consistently played classical songs. However at its initial performance and life time it was only a mild success. The first bit of this waltz in its choral version are as follows:
“Danube so blue,
so bright and blue,
through vale and field
you flow so calm,
our Vienna greets you,
your silver stream
through all the lands
you merry the heart
with your beautiful shores.”
With these Viennese sediments it has become a unofficial national anthem of Austria, rivaling the official national anthem “Land of Mountains, Land of Rivers.” However in classic Austrian tradition which has been the love/hate homeland of many authors including but not limited to Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek – Thomas Bernhard had even called Austria “a brutal and stupid nation … a mindless, cultureless sewer which spreads its penetrating stench all over Europe.” – which allows one to see no surprise that the national anthem is not above a parody, where the first lines of the National Anthem of Austria is:
“Land of mountains, land by the stream,
Land of fields, land of cathedrals,
Land of hammers, with a promising future,
Home to great daughters and sons,
A nation highly blessed with beauty,
Much-praised Austria,
Much-praised Austria!”
Where the parody mocks these lines as follows:
“Land of the peas, land of the beans,
Land of the four zones of occupation,
we sell you on the black market,
Much beloved Austria!
And up there over the Hermannskogel
gladly the federal bird flutters.”
Germany and Austria is the first stop. The first opening is about the disputed origins of the river. Donaueschingen and Furtwangen are to villages/towns, which battle over the right to say that the Danube starts at their respective towns. From this dispute one can see the foreshadowing of the troubled countries to follow. Each one melancholic. From shifting countries of shifting hands. To the backwaters, of Europe where discrimination from Western Europe is abound. These following countries are places that one likes to toss ignorance, and jokes. A boiling cauldron of oppressed people, shadows of communism and now shaky democracies. Some devote believers in democracy. Others disillusioned with it as a concept, and feel or see no change in the shift of power. The rich now former Soviet supporters, have become the capitalistic pigs that they preached against for so long.
In this book about the Danube, Claudio Magris has read everything. He has met everyone. Recorded their personal tragedies, and moments of fleeting happiness. Grasped their stories and has told them here. No one is above his curiosity. Nothing is below his wonder at the world. From cuckoo clocks, and the clock museum to Heidegger to the Josef Mengele the infamous Nazi doctor known as “The Angel of Death,” to a prostitute who mourns her still born child. All of them are curiosities and oddities. Each one a small particle in the world of mitteleuropa.
History is made up of some interesting characters. Notable villains that not anyone is going to take credit for. Linz the hometown of Adolf Hitler the most recognizable moustache wearer and dictator of history is located in Austria. It is here that Adolf Hitler, who considered Linz his hometown, planned numerous architectural plans and schemes. Hitler had planned that it would become the cultural center of the Reich. In the end the only one to have seen and made competition was the Nibelungen Brücke. However Linz is also notorious for housing Adolf Eichmann in his youth. But it also was a place of Ludwig Wittgenstein as well.
Günzburg is home to another infamous villain of history who never paid for his crimes. A man who strung eyeballs like pearls, and hung them on his bedroom wall. Though his collection went beyond simply collecting eyes. As a medical physician he certainly must have been intrigued by the human body and all medical oddities. He called gall stones and dwarf corpses. He was known for a fascination of injecting chemicals and dyes into Jewish children brown eyes in order to try and change them blue, in order to make them more ‘Nordic.’ Though there is no doubt that Mengele throughout his ghastly surgical operations were not serious medical practices. They were sadistic torture for the sheer enjoyment of himself, and also for another fact – the exercising of power. Mengele himself never went to trial. He escaped persecution and had evaded authorities. He eventually died a pathetic death befitting the angel of death. He died while going out for a swim at sea, and suffered a stroke, drowning in the sea, and being pulled a shore.
Other characters that are unfamiliar to English readers will also appear. Adalbert Stifter a very popular German writer, though utterly allusive and unknown to English readers. He himself had lost his daughter to suicide. She had drowned in the Danube. In eighteen-sixty eight he had slashed wrists, by the same river. His funeral was the conducted by Anton Bruckner, who was the Cathedral Organist of Linz. Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek make appearances, as both their deaths changed history. Franz Ferdinand was a man who had an almost compulsive desire to hunt. Two thousand seven hundred and sixty three seagulls in a single day. If that is not impressive or horrifying enough he killed six thousand stags during his entire lifetime. While his wife was on the other hand was doing her best to fend off the commercial advances of a pastry baker Oskar Pischinger who wanted her to endorse the newly invented torte.
It is also in Austria that at a cemetery that the country who wishes to control everything in some way or another – or at least place some order on the chaos of the world, that a sniper is hired to kill rabbits in a cemetery for disturbing the peace of the graves and the slumber of the dead. Only in Austria can such an occupation exist, where one is hired to place order on a place of peaceful quiet mourning and celebration of death, and where death lingers on the edges and corners.
Kafka makes a famous appearance – and what would Central Europe be without the darkly comic and absurd writer who understood the human condition so well? Claudio Magris takes a trip to Kierling were Kafka died, and meets the old man who now takes care of the grounds.
As the book continues we learn about minor poets – unknown authors, common residents and extraordinary but not famous people. Magris discusses the Ottoman Empire’s rule over parts of the Central Europe. The yoke, in which Magris describes has been released for so long, that once its rule was over thrown, and the countries had the first taste of freedom, and the sweetness of their own identity not a smaller identity in a larger whole, they began systemically giving names that fit their own country to those that had Ottoman or Turkish names. It is in Bulgaria that one learns of the tragicomic accident of the Bulgaria’s first modern poet Petko Slaveykov falling into the water, and losing his manuscripts.
There is a Romanian saying in this book “who has ever seen a green horse or an intelligent Serb?” This saying best sums up Grandma Anka. She is by one of the most intriguing characters of this book, and is my favourite part of this book as well. She crass, but not necessarily rude. Abrasive, yes – and there is just a helping dose of ironic hypocrisy. Such as her views on Serbians and she herself having quite the pride in her own lineage of Serbian ancestry that goes back through time. One cannot say she is anti-Semitic. Though many would, in today’s politically correct and sterile environment. Where once people were afraid to say something offensive or confrontational out of fear of being sent to a Serbian labour camp or gulag, now people are afraid to form an opinion or reasonable argument out of fear of offending a minority or someone. Grandma Anka stands in shaky ground, at times. But she stands nonetheless as a Eastern European, as a hard woman who has had four marriages, and has lived under Soviet rule. She is also a stance defender for Freedom of Speech, and of course the freedom of the individual. Regardless of feelings or offending or people demanding an apology, she is the person who with ironic and sarcastic words shows the diversity of the real world, and of Central Europe.
Claudio Magirs prose is lush. It is wonderful. It is poetic, and sensual. He is an amazing story teller. The ability to evoke each town and each individual with such atmosphere is a gift of his. This book does not become tiresome, it becomes increasingly informative. On a grand scale, it took almost twenty years to write, and with those years Magris has polished and refined the work. From conception to completion this book must have been quite the task. To read it was a joyous pleasure. An enlightening and informative experience. What is admirable about Claudio Magris is he knows human limitations. He does not bother to waste time, on long winding sentences or long winding chapters that’ll continue over a hundred pages. He cuts the chapters short, and places them in edible and well prepared pieces. In larger sections. Each chapter is titled, allowing one to understand exactly what the essay is going to entail, usually. This allows for a great sense of movement within the book. One does not feel tired or bored with it, because there is a new story just around the corner. A new town. A new individual. A new piece of history. Be it a battle. Be it an execution. Be it a wedding or a funeral. Be it a museum dedicated to clocks. Claudio Magris pays equal amount of attention to the details as he would to any other subject in this book.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
*And Remember: Downloading Books Illegally is Thievery and Wrong.*
M. Mary
