The Danube     by Claudio Magris, Translated by P Creagh Original title: Danubio Original language: Italian Published by Harvill Press, The Pub. Date: 2001 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.96 x 7.74 x 5.01 ISBN: 1860468233 List Price: $13.50, £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.19 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.17 Published by Collins Pub. Date: 1989 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering Published by Collins Pub. Date: 1990 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £8.99 Not available for ordering

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Danube is not exactly a work of fiction but the story of a great river and of a major civilisation. It’s also, more modestly, a book that speculates about how it might be possible to tell such a story, one that has to travel through so much geography (from the Black Forest to the Black Sea) and so much history (from just before the Romans to just before the fall of the Berlin Wall).


It’s a fabulous journey made by a scholar and writer who is himself fabulously erudite on the German-led culture of Central Europe. This is a journey through space and time with a guide rather different from our familiar Anglo-Saxon travel writers who proudly parade their ignorance and are therefore always discovering things. Magris in contrast is always finding things he already knows a great deal about, and can shed the light of his learning onto them. This is not a package tour of Central and South-Eastern Europe but a journey full of meetings with the remarkable men of a whole millennium.


Magris makes his journey in the company of a great list of famous and lesser-known artists and scholars who have some connection with places along the great river basin. He picks up the scent of Louis-Fernand Céline, the genie maudite of modern French literature, author of Journey to the End of the Night, in the Castle of Sigmaringen where, in the last days of World War II he stayed with Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist French government-in-exile, awaiting the Götterdämmerung of total defeat. Magris also wanders down many minor, and charming, by-ways of German and Austrian literature where it is doubtful if many readers will follow him — accepting that a Professor of German Literature like Magris has a rather special idea of what constitutes interesting reading. On the other hand, further down river in Austria we hear about Franz Kafka’s last weekend on earth.


This is a history in footnotes, a delightful thing, full of extraordinary news of Captains and Kings, of great and lesser writers but also of Jewish umbrella-makers and a plump schoolmaster who showed the young Magris the meaning of right and wrong. In there too is something about the Shamanistic religion of the Early Hungarians and the strange story of the German cities of the East...


Reading all this one ends with the feeling that more than having read a book one has made an investment, and acquired the sense of an almost suffocatingly rich history and culture; a Viennese pastry laden with cream and liqueur, an elaborate street façade in Old Budapest, a week in Balkan politics.


Mitteleuropa was once another great melting-pot and from one of its corners (Claudio Magris’ home city of Trieste, formerly the port city of Austro-Hungary) it has found a worthy spokesman and interpreter. This is a wonderful introduction to its riches.

‘German culture, side by side with Jewish culture, has been the unifying factor and germ of civilization in central Eastern Europe. The town squares of Sibiu-Hermannstadt and Brasov-Kronstadt, images of a German tradition that may well no longer exist in Germany itself, are like the ancient Roman arches and aqueducts: the seal and stamp of an integrated culture which bestowed a face on Central Europe.’ p309