EX LIBRIS
VINTAGE CLASSICS
CLAUDIO MAGRIS
Claudio Magris, scholar and critic, was born in Trieste, Italy, on 10 April 1939. After graduating from the University of Turin, he lectured there in German Language and Literature from 1970 to 1978. He holds a chair in Germanic Studies in the University of Trieste, and was for a period a member of the Italian parliament. He is the author of works of literary criticism and plays and has translated works by Ibsen, Heinrich von Kleist, and Arthur Schnitzler.
In 1998 Magris won the Strega Prize for his remarkable study of middle Europe, Danube. He was also awarded the Erasmus Prize in 2001 and a Prince of Asturias Awards for Literature in 2004. In 2006, Magris was awarded Austria’s annual State Prize for European literature. He lives in Italy.
OTHER WORKS BY CLAUDIO MAGRIS
A Different Sea Microcosms
Inferences from a Sabre Blindly
CLAUDIO MAGRIS Danube
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY Patrick Creagh
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Richard Flanagan
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA
Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © Garzanti editore s.p.a. 1986
Translation copyright © Harvill and Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1989
Claudio Magris has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published with the title Danubio by Garzanti editore, Milan in 1986
First published in Great Britain by Collins Harvill in 1989
This edition first published by The Harvill Press in 2001
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784871314
Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.
Introduction
The literature of rivers is small but not without significance. As well as inventing American literature and with it an idea of America, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn invented a new literary form that metamorphosed over the ensuing century into the road novel, in which the older form of the peripatetic novel was united with a modern idea of freedom. This mashup gave such books the force of yearning, an animating hope that at some point acquires the power of myth.
River books are forever about ‘lighting out for the territory’, as Huck puts it. And there comes a moment in every river book where we are confronted with a great question: what is the price of our soul? Huck must decide whether to turn in Jim, the escaped slave, or damn his soul – by which Twain really means save it, by defying the conformity to rules and society that otherwise cripple and deform us.
To the small list of great river books I would add Claudio Magris’s Danube, which, like Huckleberry Finn, seems to be slyly inventing something profoundly new, while all the time pretending to be simply retelling stories that gather along the course of a river.
Danube was originally published in Italian in 1986, the same year Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the Soviet Union to two new concepts: glasnost and perestroika. Written during the final efflorescence of the Cold War – when, as we now
know, the world came the closest it has ever been to a nuclear war – the countries of what was then called Eastern Europe had become, after four decades of isolating Soviet rule, terra incognita to many in the West.
Ignorance always summons greater ignorance in its defence. On English publication of Danube in 1989 the influential American Kirkus Reviews called the book ‘heavy-going’ in its description of what it termed ‘this little-known (at least to most Americans) corner of Europe.’ The New York Times reviewer tellingly declared his preference for the Rhine as the river of civilisation, ‘closer to our Western world and to our history . . . It only sends its Nibelungen to the East to get them massacred by the hordes of Attila.’
In the purportedly barbaric backwaters of the Soviet imperium there was a rising ferment of dissent and discussion about what society and politics should be, and what their countries could be, as voiced by groups ranging from Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 to Poland’s Solidarity movement. As the left wing’s belief in the old verities of Marxism disintegrated, a new vision of Europe was growing. Five weeks after the New York Times dismissed Magris’s work, the first sections of the Berlin Wall fell, and it became apparent that their river of history was also ours.
Founded not in ideology but in life and art, Magris’s book was an oddity: not history nor politics, obeying neither chronology nor theme, and only roughly observing geography. It happily mixed high literature with stories of friendship, family history, and the ironies of everyday life. And yet, somehow, it spoke powerfully to both the old world that was dying, and the new being born.
The book was a defence of the marginal and ephemeral. It was as sympathetic to the fate of Jews of Bukovina as it was to the destiny of the Sudeten Deutsch. It was also honest in its depiction of the horrors and costs of the reduced ideas of ethnic nationalism that were to increasingly define Europe in
the succeeding decades, as neighbour once more turned on neighbour in the Balkans in the 1990s, and the hope of the revolutions of 1989 gave way to the increasingly repressive, authoritarian politics of countries such as Hungary and Poland. Still, to reread this book is a shock. What seemed to me –when I first read it in the early 1990s – a charming celebration of literature and place, now, thirty years after its original publication, emerges as something more poignant and powerful: an elegy for a now irretrievably lost world, that of polyglot Mitteleuropa.
This is only one of Danube’s many themes, but it is striking in its prescience. The world may exist, as Mallarme wrote, to live in a book. The genius of Danube is to remind us that a book can exist to invent a world. Mitteleuropa is, in Magris’s dreaming, finally not a place, but a vision of a common humanity glimpsed at a moment of imminent danger; an idea which, when granted the authority of that universe which is a reader’s soul, knows no borders.
Regarded as one of Italy’s foremost writers, Claudio Magris is a celebrated novelist, sometimes spoken of as a favourite to win the Nobel Prize, at various times an Italian senator, a literary scholar of German writers such as Joseph Roth, and Italian translator of Ibsen and Schnitzler.
In a not irrelevant detail, Claudio Magris was born and lives in Trieste, a town possessed of the autumnal melancholy that descends upon boom towns of other eras; a place enshrouded in its decline by a dream of a long-ago cosmopolitan world, the multi-faith, multi-lingual, multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire. Perhaps for this reason Trieste never quite seems an Italian town, but a city belonging to a hope always on the verge of vanishing. It is, as one of its many biographers, Jan Morris, called it, ‘the capital of nowhere’.
The modern novel may be said have begun in Trieste with James Joyce writing Ulysses there. (Magris’s uncle was
taught English by Stanislaus Joyce.) The city also gave the world Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno. A one-time Austrian port in an Italian hinterland populated by Friulians and seen by Slovenians as part of their lands, home of several languages and three scripts including the now near-lost Glagolitic, Trieste’s history speaks to the riches of a cosmopolitan world that today, in the ever more mannered streets of Trieste itself, is a receding memory.
Variously ruled by Illyrians, Romans, Byzantines, Franks, and Venetians, Trieste flourished from the eighteenth century when the Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa made it the port for the great multi-national Viennese empire. It became both a city of contested identities – Italian, Slovenian, Friulian, German, and, for a time, Yugoslav – as well of ideologies – imperialism, nationalism, Fascism, Communism and Titoism. It was where Churchill declared the Iron Curtain ended, and was briefly occupied by Tito’s partisans at the end of World War II. Today Slovenia is only seven kilometres from the city centre, Croatia less than twenty kilometres away.
After the war, the Italian side of the border was cleansed of its Slovenian past, while the Yugoslav (now Slovene and Croat) side was cleansed of its Italian. In these absurd convulsions of national identity, the complexity of humanity counted for little. Magris’s own wife’s family were part of 300,000 Italians forced post-war to flee Slovenia and Dalmatia, areas in which Italians have resided since the time of the Romans. Later she discovered her family had Slavic roots. A book with such a generous canvas as Danube could, perhaps, only have been written by one from a place where the ironies of life, place and the past are so deeply etched.
And so, on his raft made of Mitteleuropean literature, Magris sets off down the Danube, the river he has said he chose as
‘a symbol for life and death and disappearance’. Beyond its quickly submerged subject – a journey from headwaters to delta – and floating concerns – literature, politics, history – is a deeper current of mood: whimsical, melancholic, loving, occasionally stern, ever curious, that finally amounts to a world that Magris has invented for the reader to lead them to certain truths.
Danube is at one level a medley of many famous and –to the Anglophone reader – not so famous writers, and thereafter many writers even forgotten in their own cultures, and after them the writers of cultures themselves forgotten even in the places of which they wrote. Thus the one time avant-garde Hungarian language poet Robert Reiter is rediscovered many decades later as the conservative German language poet Franz Liebhard, who now writes in the Swabian dialect of the vanishing German-Rumanian minority. Liebhard observes that he had ‘learnt to think with the mentality of several peoples’, an attitude that sums up the mentality of many Magris meets and memorialises on the river.
The mode of Danube, as befits a river book, is digressive and rambling. Along the river’s course cafes, pawnshops, inns, cemeteries, and battlefields are visited by Magris, sometimes in company, finally alone, and all of which spark playful thoughts that belie a more fundamental seriousness. Sometimes these reflections amount to a short story passed off as an aside, or, as with the paragraph below, what reads as the beginning of a lost Joseph Conrad novel:
The bulk of the Circassian territory formed a strip along the Danube, near Lom. In that little town there was an agency of the Imperial Steam Navigation Company of the Danube, under the direction of Agent Rojesko, who for weeks on end opened none of his windows overlooking the river, to keep the house free from the stench of
the sick and the corpses arriving on ships laden with Circassians suffering from typhus. Records and reports, as well as the testimony of travellers, show Rojesko toiling away tirelessly and courageously to prevent and forestall contagion, to help the refugees, to find them food and shelter, provide them with medicines and work.
These meditations on places and moments of history, are studded with startling vignettes about writers. Of Paul Celan, Magris writes, ‘His poetry leans out over the brink of silence. It is a word torn from wordlessness . . . the gesture of one who puts an end to a tradition and at the same time erases himself . . . One of his lines reads, “I shed light behind me.” Poetry is that dazzle which shows where he, with his poems, has vanished to.’
In the light shed from Magris’s miscellany of writers and writings there slowly comes into focus the vanished peoples, the lost tribes of Europe, history’s jetsam. Describing the mud of the great Pannonian plains ‘and the blood-filled footprints which have been left in the course of centuries by migrations and the clash of conflicting civilisations’ Magris might also be offering a deeper description of his book. The reader hears of the melancholy fate of the German speaking Swabians of the Banat, as well as stories of the Wallachians, the Bulgars and the other dozen nations who made up what became Vojvodina, in present day Serbia, along with the long lost Spanish settlers who in 1734 founded a New Barcelona in the town of Becskerek.
We meet along the way Ragusans, Nogai, Wallachians and Lipovenians, and also older peoples again, proto-Bulgars, Avars, and Thracians, to say nothing of Dacians and the Sarmatians and the unexpected sight of the Lebanese Druze, who an eyewitness remembers as being ‘shut up in cages like birds of prey’.
We learn that the word Bohemian ‘is – and was to remain for at least a century – an ambiguous term, which can refer to the Czechs, but also to the Germans of Bohemia, so that above all it indicates an identity that is hard to define, like all those borderline cases lacerated by contention.’ Danube is at once a record, a vast exploration and a celebration of those lacerated wounds. It rises above a chronicle of nation states to a homage to the endlessness of human beings that is also a question and an accusation about the limits of nationalism and ethnic identity.
In this spirit Danube glides within a few pages from a meditation on Joseph Mengele and evil (‘Even someone who can kill another man for fun, and force the man’s son to watch is capable of loving his own father,’ Magris writes, ‘. . . . if there is no law, no fear, no barrier to prevent one doing what in Auschwitz could be done with impunity, not just Dr Mengele, but perhaps anyone at all could become a Mengele.’) to a moving homage to a woman friend from his school days he calls the Marshall. His description of visiting her in Regensberg manages to somehow also encompass an argument on the philosophy of acceptance (an idea derived by Magris from viewing carvings at the Regensberg cathedral); along with a short essay on the Christian universe and his observations on the Marshall’s nature, and all of this in just two pages. It as if you are overhearing Magris in conversation in the Trieste café where he writes, traversing high and low, jokes and gravity, gossip and erudition, wonder and laughter, all in a flow that manages to be charming and fascinating at once.
Magris once described his masterpiece as a ‘drowned novel’. In its openness to the strangeness of experience and its delight in paradox, the book cleaves to the world of the novel where freedom and humour are frequently indivisible. After telling of the Italian journalist Alberto Cavallari’s experience
reporting the failed 1956 Hungarian uprising, Magris notes, ‘One has to draw breath and look around and, before replying to any question, one would like to give the answer, proposed by the Hungarian Primate to Cavallari’s request for a statement: “I will reply on Friday,” said the newlyliberated Cardinal, “when I understand how the world is made.”’ As with a novel, Danube is inconsistent in its views on how the world is made, and sometimes contradictory. But in this it simply resembles life, rather than pretending to exist beyond it.
Writing of Emil Cioran, Magris flails the Rumanian misanthrope in order to put what seems to be a case for his own literary ambition: ‘A parasite of hardship, he takes refuge in absolute negation, splashing about comfortably among the contradictions of existence and of culture, and flaunting the frenzy of them, instead of trying to understand the far more arduous contest between good and evil, truth and falsehood, which every day brings with it.’
Such an arduous contest doesn’t preclude a wry humour. Visiting Timisoara, Magris, after reminding us Johnny Weissmuller, the original Tarzan, was born here, notes that on 13 October 1716 ‘Prince Eugene made his entry into Timisoara, liberating it from the Turks. When requested to surrender, the pasha who was defending the place replied that he knew perfectly well that he couldn’t win, but that he felt it his duty to contribute to the renown of Prince Eugene by making his victory more arduous and glorious.’
One of Magris’s favoured writers is Joseph Roth. A character in Roth’s story ‘The Bust of the Emperor’, Count Morstin, finishes his days in the interwar on the Riviera ‘playing chess and skat with ancient Russian generals.’ The Count concludes that national virtues are ‘even more questionable than human virtues. For this reason, I hate nationalism and nation states. My old home, the [Hapsburg] Monarchy, alone, was a great mansion with
many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men. This mansion has been divided, split up, splintered. I have nothing more to seek for, there. I am used to living in a home, not in cabins.’
Like Roth, a man who at one point in the mid-1930s was involved in a ludicrous plan to forestall the rise of Nazism in Austria by restoring the Hapsburg monarchy (‘I am his only subject,’ Roth observed of himself and the Hapsburg pretender), Magris finds in the idea of the Austro-Hapsburg mansion – its cosmopolitanism, its tolerance, its perceived success – an antidote to the poison of nationalism. The Habsburgs were, he writes in a passage poised between pity and absurdity; ‘the symbiosis of inadequacy and wisdom, the inability to act translated into shrewd prudence and far seeing strategy, hesitation and contradiction elevated to the level of normal conduct, the yearning for peace and quiet mingled with the strength to accept interminable, insoluble conflicts.’
Such is the sustaining humour of Magris’s Mitteleuropa, a paradox where courage is tolerance, and wisdom is the acceptance of enduring failings.Writing at a time when no one could foresee the collapse of Communism, or the rise of global terrorism, Magris was remarkably prescient about the more distant future and the new forces that were then only embryonic.
‘It may be that the moment is approaching,’ he wrote, ‘when the historical, social and cultural differences will reveal, and violently, the difficulties of mutual incompatibility. Our future will depend in part on our ability to prevent the priming of this time-bomb of hatred, and the possibility that new Battles of Vienna will transform brothers into foreigners and enemies.’
What then is the price of our soul? Three decades after it was first published, after 1989, after Srebenica, after Greece, after terrorism attacks too numerous to list, after the refugee
crisis, after the Brexit vote, Danube has an altogether different resonance, speaking not only of the virtue of tolerance of difference, but its vitality and necessity. Claudio Magris may be the work of Mitteleuropa, but his invention of Mitteleuropa in Danube is the greatest of Magris’s works. In an age when razor wire is once more being run across the borders of Europe, Danube seems not only an important but a strangely timely book. This, though, is not to suggest the limits of the book but rather its true measure. Italo Calvino described a classic as a book to which one can return and always find something new. Such a book is Claudio Magris’s Danube. In another thirty years we will find the same words and yet another book, fresh revelations divining a different world, a river that never ends, forever lighting out for the mythical territory of freedom.
Richard
Flanagan Tasmania, June 2016
