DANUBE
A Journey Through the Landscape, History,
and Culture of Central Europe
Claudio Magris
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989
401 pp. $22.95
Trieste looks out over the shimmering waters of the Adriatic Sea. Today it belongs to Italy, but for more than five hundred years it formed a part of the Austrian Empire. In fact, during the Italian revolutions of 1848 the city was so loyal that the emperor rewarded it with the title Citta Fedelissima. Small wonder, then, that it is now a center for the study of the imperial past. Claudio Magris, the author of this lyrical and often profound book, specializes in German literature, especially that of Danubia, at the University of Trieste. He is therefore well positioned to join Milan Kundera (Czech), Gyorgy Konrad (Hungarian), Eugene Ionesco (Romanian), Milovan Djilas (Yugoslav), and others who have begun to revive the idea of an interdependent Mitteleuropa in the pages of Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture and other publications.
Rather than attempt an academic history of Central European culture, however, Magris decided upon a more adventurous, and allusive, strategy. He would travel the length of the Danube, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, stopping off in cities and towns along the way. Taking his cue from local historical and literary events, he would interrogate the Danubian tradition concerning problems that continue to bedevil our century--particularly the nature of reality, the enigmas of personal identity, and the burden of history.
Reality or Illusion?
Magris begins at the beginning, the Danube's source. Officially, he reports, the mighty river rises at Donaueschingen, at the confluence of the springs Breg and Brigach. But the citizens of near by Furtwangen dispute this and advance a plausible claim of their own. They insist that the Danube commences at the source of the Breg, which lies farther than the Brigach from the Black sea. With mock seriousness, Magris traces the Breg's source to a sodden meadow, a pipe jutting from the ground, and a hollowed-out log that forms a kind of gutter. According to a friend's theory, he says, "That gutter is the source of the Danube, is the Danube itself."
When, much later, he arrives at the Danube's mouth, Magris encounters a similar ambiguity and controversy. Where does the river really begin and end? No one can say with any assurance, for as always "reality" proves to be elusive, slipping through our fingers just when we think we have it firmly in our grasp. It never submits itself to our ready-made categories because it does not exist. Such a recognition, according to Magris, is central to Danubian culture, as exemplified by Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, a sprawling, uncompleted masterpiece in the form of a novel. Living in post-World-War-I Austria, Musil imagined for his purposes plans to celebrate the seventieth anniversary (1918) of Franz Josef's accession to the imperial throne, plans that called for a committee to promote the founding principle of Austrian civilization--which, to its dismay, it failed to discover. The empire, it turns out, rested on no foundation
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