Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea (FSG Classics)

This is an excellent book, far from conventional travel writing, a combination of travelogue and philosophical essay, a personal appreciation of the cultural and literary landscape of the Danube. Written with a slightly melancholy tone and extensive knowledge and sensitivity, it is erudite and learned but not academic. With short chapters a few pages long (some are only a paragraph or two), the book is more like a series of thoughts or tableaux than a single essay. This format might reflect how we acquire cultural knowledge in bits and pieces and is well suited to conveying a subject so nuanced and many-layered. Places along the Danube inspire reflections on history, identity, nationalism, fascism, the confrontation between the West and Islam, the abuse of power, ethnic and racial prejudice and hatred, artistic creativity, the nature of time, and our human condition and mortality. Along the way we encounter Goethe, Grillparzer, Napoleon, Kepler, Kafka, Heidegger, Celan, Marcus Aurelius, Ovid, Eliade and other luminaries, as well as a Serbian grandmother and Trieste resident who revisits her home in the Banat and provides insights on the relationships among the many nationalities there. As a professor of German literature, Claudio Magris is especially attentive to the vanished or vanishing German communities of southeastern Europe. Any journey along the Danube inevitably raises unanswerable questions: What is Europe? Where does it begin and end? While Magris might not answer these, he looks beneath shifting borders and changing regimes; since the book was written, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union have been replaced by other political entities. He is able to find beauty (or at least food for thought) in unlikely places and lends credibility to the idea of a shared Danubian culture or civilization. Several place-names are misspelled, no doubt the fault of the editor/publisher, not the author; observations on life under communism are now happily out of date. Many of the intellectual and literary figures Magris discusses may be obscure, but if you have spent time in this part of the world you will find his book meaningful. Anyone seriously interested in the Habsburg Empire or Austria-Hungary should read it. One wants to say thank you to Professor Magris for taking us along.

Claudi Magris's work is simply the best travelogue that I have ever read: it is a work of imagination, erudition, and deeply-felt culture, and has been beautifully translated: I have never encountered English prose that better captures the cadence and rhythm of Italian!

Throughout history, the Danube has meant many different things to many different people: a highway, a playground, a barrier against the Turks, a symbol of eternal life or of life's melancholy. Magris structures this book as a travelogue, following the Danube from its source(s) in Germany through its debouchment into the Black Sea in Rumania. But in every place he visits, from a humble bench on the riverbank to the major cities of Vienna and Bucharest, he paints a vivid picture not only of the place itself, but of the people who have shaped its character and history. I already knew that this region (for which he uses the shorthand term Mitteleuropa) had a complicated history, but I didn't realize how incredibly complicated it was until I read this book. Magris doesn't always untangle the complexities clearly enough for a non-European (and, from living briefly in the region as well as having family roots there, I'm probably better informed than most). On the other hand, his portraits of the people he meets are vivid and memorable -- from the old woman who presides over the 18th-century farmhouse where the Danube (possibly) rises, to the fisher-folk who live at the mouths of the river, to the functionaries and innkeepers who punctuate his journey and the friends who accompany him for parts of it. Writers, living and dead, are evoked as much as politicians and historians; one persistent theme of the book is how literature has reacted to, preserved, and in some instances shaped the history of Mitteleuropa. All in all, the book is a magnificent achievement and well worth reading, even if some of Magris' observations have been rendered obsolete by the breakup of the Soviet Union. The translation is generally fluid and readable, although one can quibble with it here and there (I found a few minor inaccuracies in the sections that describe places I'm familiar with). And, as for the complaint that the regions traversed by the Danube are "too different" to be treated in one book, that difference *is* part of the story.

In this fascinating journey, Magris takes us from the very -and much disputed- sources of the Danube in the Black Forest, in Southern Germany, to the mouth of the river in the Black Sea, in Romanian territory. Along the way, Magris recreates the legends, stories and historical moments of every village and city he visits. The Danube area is, of course, full of history, since most peoples who ever set foot in Europe seem to have crossed it one way or another. Princes, wars, writers, lovers, many interesting and even fascinating stories illuminate for the reader the waters of the Danube. It really makes you want to make the same trip. It would be interesting to read an update by Magris, especially about those places who were then under Soviet rule, now that almost 20 years have passed since the publication of the book. Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia all pass before your eyes like a dream. Every town and story motivates in Magris deep reflections on history, memory, the passage of time, politics, and many other subjects. Magris's prose is dense in the best sense of the term: it is rich and deep, with a poetic quality to it. Very much recommended, it discovers for us many writers from that area who seem worth to read.

Claudio Magris's Danube is special to me first of all because I spent 8 years living and working in the Central European area described in the book. But it is more than just another travel book because it manages to capture the mood and feeling of Central Europe: its complex overlapping history, the melancholic pensiveness of so many of its writers and artists, the sense of hidden mystery in so many of its places. Danube manages to combine the travel narrative with philosophy, history and real sense of place. It is essential reading whether you go to Central Europe or are just interested in its complexity.