The Danube Transformed: From River of Blood to River of Hope (For Germany at least)

DONAUESCHINGEN, Germany — It begins here — or at least the people here say it does — as a spring bubbling up from beneath a stone urn beneath the walls of the white and yellow St. John's Church. After flowing for a short distance under the garden of the Fürstenberg Castle it pours, at a rate of about 20 gallons per second, into another stream, the Brigach, flowing nearby.

Or perhaps it does not begin here. "There exists envy on the part of other locations," the Donaueschingen Web site declares, referring to the nearby town of Furtwangen, where residents say their river, the Breg, is the true source of the Danube.

For the traveler embarking on a journey down the Danube, from here to the Black Sea more than 1,750 miles away, there is a lesson here in the disappearance of contentions worth going to war over.

Rivers are symbols. You can not think of the Mississippi without also thinking of the American drama of race. The Seine is Parisian elegance; the Rhine, German national identity. The Yellow River is China immemorial.

The Danube is the quintessential European river, not the longest — that honor goes to the Volga — but the one that runs through the most countries and the largest number of different nationalities. And for that very reason, until perhaps just yesterday, the Danube was the symbol of a kind of the European tragedy of the last 100 or more years.

The Danube is beauty and sadness, the river of exquisite, stricken cities of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, the river of the Blue Danube Waltz of Johann Strauss, which, as always, is now being played in Vienna at the summer concerts for tourists.

But it was also along the Danube that the most terrible events of the 19th and 20th centuries occurred: the rise of ugly nationalisms in the late 19th century, the two World Wars, the Holocaust, the clanging into place of the Iron Curtain, the transformation of the eastern countries into poverty-stricken police states, and then, when the major issues seemed to have been resolved with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the outbreak of yet more ethnic savagery in the former Yugoslavia.

The Danube, arguably, has flowed past more savagery and brutality than any other river in the world.

The Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, where more than 100,000 died, is near its banks. In 1805 Napoleon defeated the Austrians in a colossal battle on the river near Ulm, where a monument still marks the French victory. The Austrians then defeated Napoleon in 1809 at the Battle of Aspern, also on the Danube.

In 1942 Jews and Serbs were dragged to its banks in Novi Sad, in present-day Serbia, and massacred there. In 1999 the bridges there were destroyed by allied bombing during the Kosovo war.

And yet, if you can still almost hear the screams of the countless victims of the violence that has taken place along its shores, perhaps now the Danube is changing, becoming a different sort of symbol, no longer of European division but of a tenuous but promising European unity, where the wars of the past become inconceivable.

After all, Romania, where the Danube empties into the Black Sea, not far from the border of Ukraine, is to become a full-fledged member of the European Union next year, having reached the standards of democratic process and individual freedom required.

The same is true of other countries along the eastern portions of the Danube: Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria.

Not every place on the Danube is like Donaueschingen and Furtwangen, whose little quarrel will never make the history books. The Central and Eastern European countries emerging from Communism still struggle with the heritage of the past in a way that Germany and Austria do not. But the fact that Romania will join the same European Union that has Germany, Italy and France among its charter members seems to be the event of overriding importance to the future symbolism of the Danube.

Some basic facts: the Danube runs for 1,775 miles — counting Donaueschingen as its source — and descends a total of about 2,100 feet. It is Donau in German, Duna in Hungarian, Dunaj in Czech, Dunav in Serbian, Dunaw in Bulgarian, Dunarea in Romanian.

A small stream in Donaueschingen, it broadens to a width of about 55 yards in Ulm, a two-hour drive from here, where it becomes navigable, and then widens to almost a mile on the border of Romania and Bulgaria.

It figures in a lot of history. For the Romans it marked the border between what they saw as the civilized world and the frightful, impenetrable forests of the barbarian Germanic tribes who eventually defeated them.

The Danube is dammed up and down its entire length, and it is polluted, especially in the countries of the former Soviet empire that are on its banks.

"The river absorbs raw sewage from cities, pesticides and chemicals from farmers' fields, waste from factories and bilge oil from ships," a report of the Trade and Environment Database says.

Among those who were born or grew up on or near it are Einstein at one end of the spectrum of character and achievement and Hitler at the other. Elias Canetti, the Nobel Prize winner in literature, was born on its banks; Franz Kafka died on them.

Speaking again of rivers as symbols, the Danube has never been a German river, even though it runs for some 420 miles through southern Germany, or at least it has never been the German river.

That river is the Rhine, which flows north past France and into the North Sea in the Netherlands. Claudio Magris, the Italian scholar whose book, "Danube," is an indispensable literary companion for anyone traveling on along it, puts it this way:

"The Rhine is Siegfried, symbol of German virtue and purity, the loyalty of the Niebelungs, chivalric heroism, dauntless love of the destiny of the Germanic soul. The Danube is Pannonia, the kingdom of Attila, the eastern, Asiatic tide which at the end of the song of the Niebelungs overwhelms Germanic values."

"The Danube," Mr. Magris continues, "is the river along which different peoples meet and mingle and crossbreed, rather than being, as the Rhine is, a mythical custodian of the purity of the race."

Traveling to Donaueschingen from Strasbourg just on the other side of the French border presents scenes right out of German cliches.

Wisps of clouds spill over thickly forested steep hills where large barns are planted on sloping fields that rise high above the valleys. The towns are made of dark wood and have steeply sloping roofs, and many of them also have at least one cuckoo clock factory.

But of course Germany is not the Germany of the Niebelungs and the racial myths of the Rhine. Germany years ago became, culturally and ethically, a Danubian country, if the Danube symbolizes diversity and the commingling of peoples.

"We are near the watershed here, and it might be that minds go with the watershed," Hans-Henning Petershagen, who writes about culture and history for the Südwest Presse in Ulm, said. "On the Rhine the minds go up to the North Sea. On this side of the watershed the minds go toward the east."

This has always been illustrated by the history of Ulm, a medieval-era free imperial city, the first town of any substantial size on the Danube, whose cathedral happens to have the tallest spires of any church in the world.

These days Ulm is a quiet place that echoes only faintly of what must have been a bustling past. It was from here as early as the 12th century that flat-bottomed boats known as Ulmer Schachteln — Ulm Boxes — carried wine, ore and salt to the towns in the east, connecting the German tribes with those on the Black Sea.

The cathedral, with its soaring towers, marks the pride of the people of Ulm, who achieved the height of their prosperity in the 14th century.

The last of the Ulmer Schachteln was rowed down the river in 1897, Mr. Petershagen said, and then, in about 1906, an professor of economic geography from Berlin named Eduard Hahn arrived in town with a group of scientists, built a replica of one of Ulm's famous flat-bottomed boats and rowed it to Vienna.

There have been other efforts over the years to revive Ulm's riverine tradition of connections with places and peoples downstream, and today an association that owns a motorized version of an Ulm Box takes it to a different town downstream each year.

"For Ulm traveling down the Danube is very important," Mr. Petershagen, who belongs to the association, said.

Three years ago in Ulm a museum opened that illustrates the importance of, and a tragic dimension to, the town's riverine identity. It is the Donauschwäbisches Zentralmuseum, dedicated to showing the history of the thousands of Swabians, as the Germans from this part of the country are still called, who left their homes to settle in the east and then, after World War II, were forced to return to Germany.

Today, the flow of immigrants comes from east to west, with poorer people in the former Eastern bloc countries arriving in Germany. From the 17th to the 19th century the flow went in the other direction. Maria Theresa, the 18th-century empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire played a key role, offering Swabians free land, homes and exemption from taxation if they would build farms in the sparsely populated parts of the empire.

In the late 19th century some 13 percent of the population of Hungary was German, and Hungary was far bigger than it is today. But many Germans went as far as Serbia, Romania, Ukraine and Russia, where their ancestors lived sometimes for centuries.

This is a complicated history. One exhibit in the museum shows how Germans in Hungary and Serbia, who suffered discrimination themselves, welcomed the Nazi conquerors of those countries as liberators.

In response to the Nazi years, after the war the governments of the previously occupied countries expelled the Danube Swabians, and for a time Ulm became the scene of refugee camps for people of German nationality who long ago had stopped speaking German.

That tragedy is little talked of, but one exhibit suggests its fullness. It is about one Anna Gräbeldinger from the Banat region in Romania, who instead of being deported to Germany was deported to the Soviet Union, where she was forced to work in a coal mine for five years as a kind of reparation in labor rather than money.

In a glass case there is a memento of her experience. It is a single lump of coal that she brought with her when she finally got to Germany, an emblem of the time until almost literally yesterday, when the Danube was the river of European suffering rather than of European hope.

Tributaries of the Danube flow northward not far in kilometers from my house and on both sides of it. A bottle containing a message, thorown into a stream here could reach the Black Sea and from there the Med. Stretch the imagination, and it could negotiate Gibralter and cross the Atlantic to home.

What the message should say is quite another matter.

When I first came to Germany I was struck by the fact the interior of Germany contained so many custom houses. As I became educated about the river systems here I learned that for centuries, before autobahns, this part of the world travelled and traded on fresh water. This explains, for example, why Hitler grew up where he did in Branau along the Danube river system: His father was a customs agent stationed there.

In the middle ages, articles of value were humped over the alps to Innsbruck (Inn river bridge) and loaded on barges or those flat boats described by the author. Salt and silver were also produced in this region just north of the alps and were moved by ingenious sloughs to be rendered into pure salt, then barged northward.

If you love horses as I do, you will be interested to know that a scow often accompanied the Barge north and west (downstream)loaded wth draft horses tethered head to tail until the end of the voyage. At this point the horses were used to drag the freshly loaded barge back home.

So the shape of the Donau (Danube) shaped trade and travel. For example, the distinctive onion domes on the churches here in Upper Bavaria (Upper means south and has to do, like the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, with up stream, down streaam, rather than north south)are said to come from Russian influence. So the shape of the river system, north then east and then south east, defined the culture of the region. For example, the traditional womens' costumes follow the river more than modern political boundaries.

The river also explains to a degree why Bavaria is called the Freistaat (Free state.) When my neighbors come to America and are asked where they are from they usually do not answer "Germany" but "Bayern" (Bavaria.) So you will see the bumper sticker that says, "Its nice to be a Price but its higher to be a Bayer" (Its nice to be a Prussian but its higher to be a Bavarian.) A sentiment which goes back, no doubt, to 1869 when the Prussians crossed The Donau and incorporated Bavaria forceably into the reich. The ancestors of our neighbors lost three sons in that war. When the Prussians sought the next year to draft the fourth and only surviving son to invade France in the Franco-Prussian war, mother pled for an exemption which was granted. In gratitude, a "Denkmal" (monument - in this case a crucifix) was erected and maintained to this day by the family.

The author refers to the Rhein. It headwaters are quite close to the Danube's but its course ramains on its side of the watershed to empty into the atlantic basin. Yet the two rivers in places are quite close and a dream of centuries has been recently realized when the canal of the Rhein was connected to the canal of the Danube. Now it is possible to barge from the atlantic to the black sea. You can read an interesting tale of portaging between these canals written by a fablous charlatan named Tristan Jones.

If this connection had been accomplished earlier it is manifest that the history of all of the world would be quite different.

As with the history of early America, "how the west was won" cannot be understood without reference to its river systems, so it is here.

I still have not thought of an appropriate message for the bottle. Perhaps, "drink more beer" is the most profound.

Except for the Mississippi crack, I thought the article was good.

Spending most of 1997 in and around Stuttgart, I travelled on weekends mainly into and across the Black Forest to places like Donaueschingen, Freudenstadt, Freiburg im Bresgau, Strasbourg, and Baden-Baden. Here's a pic of Heather taking her life in her hands <]B^)

Sometime later, I travelled up the hillside of a small valley on a tiny road that was just about wide enough for one car. I got to a spot where there was a chalet-style restaurant and inn halfway down the hill. Walking on a footpath down the hill past the inn, I came to the point where the valley began. It was uphill to the north, west, and south. At the foot of this valley was a small stone, like a grave marker, set upright against the bottom of the west hillside. From under this stone flowed a little rivulet from a natural spring: In fact, the source of the Brech. I dipped my hand in but neglected to fill an empty film can with it.

I guess I'll have to go back.

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