by Andrew Eames
Ulm had been one of the Holy Roman Empire’s first free towns, and one of the richest towns in Europe in the fifteenth century, which was why its cathedral had been endowed with the highest church spire (161 metres) in the world. Much of the town centre was pedestrianized, and although it looked old, it had actually been largely rebuilt after a severe pummelling during the Second World War. Allied bombers had theoretically been targeting Ulm’s giant fortress and barracks – one of five Federal Fortresses in Germany, with a resident fighting force of 10,000 men – but the bombing ended up being pretty indiscriminate and most parts of the old city were destroyed.
The intriguingly translated city brochure I picked up in the tourist office was determined to look on the bright side. The net result of the bombing, it said, was that the city had become ‘an Eldorado of modern architecture’, which made it sound far worse than it was. The same translator described Ulm’s most famous son, Albert Einstein, as being ‘at the very top of the list of go-getting Ulmites’ – ah yes, that list of go-getting Ulmites; I wonder who filled positions two and three? And he (or she) went on to characterize the city’s various cultural offerings as ‘extremely pleasant alternatives to twiddling one’s thumbs’. Wrong choice of language, or taking the piss?
The translator’s post-modernist take softened the sense of alienation I was feeling on my arrival in Ulm, which was essentially the result of the stark contrast between my rural ride through pastoral Baden-Württemberg, where I was a monarch of the path, and the altogether faster, dirtier, noisier city streets, where I was cannon fodder for cars. I’d felt like a figure in an artist’s landscape in Baden-Württemberg, a figure that belonged, but in Ulm I was an anachronism, completely out of step with the urban pace. Cities diminish their visitors, and foreign visitors are the easiest targets. Only once you are sure of where you are going to sleep, earning you a little bit of belonging, can you start to feel braver again. Confidence begins with a bedroom of one’s own.
In Ulm, the place I found to stay was rather different to the quiet guesthouses I’d frequented upriver. Mind you, I had had a couple of unlikely overnights even in the countryside, and on my very first night on the road out of Donaueschingen I’d ended up in a Gasthof frequented by lorrydrivers, a twenty-four-hour place with a giant car park attached in which the 40-tonners were lined up in rows. The drivers assembled here in the evenings like sparrows on a wire, seeking community amongst other habitual migrants, even though they spoke little of each others’ languages.
‘You don’t need to worry about your bicycle,’ the proprietress had said to me as I parked it amongst the behemoths, hoping they’d notice it in their rearview mirrors when they reversed out in the morning. ‘We don’t need to have guard dogs – our drivers all sleep in their cabs.’
Inside, the Gasthof smelled of deep-fat frying, ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ played endlessly on the sound system, and the drivers had beer and cigarettes with dinner, beer and cigarettes with breakfast, and beer and cigarettes with midnight snacks. I’m not sure how alert they’d be to anything by the time they’d staggered back out into the lorry park, unless perhaps you tried to steal their cigarettes.
I had woken to a dawn chorus of Volvos clearing their throats of diesel phlegm, to realize that nicotine had prematurely aged everything around me: tablecloths, curtains, wall colour, skin. The woman who served breakfast looked like a cross between a bullfrog and a dragon, and the breakfast coffee tasted like it had been made by adding boiling water to last night’s ashtrays.
The place I found in Ulm was not dissimilar. It was called the Schwarzer Adler, which coincidentally happened to be the name of Leigh Fermor’s first hotel in Germany, and it too was a largely male doss-house that stank of old cigarettes, with a shared bathroom at the end of each corridor. The manager was a Brazilian called Mrs Herring, and she ran the place single-handed while Mr Herring (not Brazilian, but not German either) sat out on a small first-floor terrace with his ghetto-blaster and worked his way steadily through a crate of beer. In the evenings he would be joined in this activity by other longterm residents, presumably after they’d finished work, and they’d light candles and get maudlin together, singing along to Mr Herring’s CDs. How long you’d have to be resident in the Schwarzer Adler to qualify for this elite karaoke club I don’t know, but you couldn’t come or go from the hotel without passing the Herring Stammtisch, exchanging greetings as you went.
Besides me, there were a couple of genuine tourists who flitted like ghosts along the Schwarzer Adler’s corridors, bemused by where they’d ended up, but the rest of the clientele were plainly regulars, mostly from Eastern Europe, and by the look of their footwear mostly here to work on construction sites. At the weekend they all disappeared over the side, including the Herrings, and the Schwarzer Adler became like a ghost ship.
Early that Sunday morning, to celebrate my first actual path-crossing with Leigh Fermor, who’d walked over the Danube at Ulm en route for Munich, I climbed the Münster (minster) spire as he had done, all 768 steps of it, the only time I could be sure of putting my feet exactly where he’d put his. From the outside, the spire was not particularly beautiful to look at, knobbled as it was with decorative excrescences and patched with repairs from different eras, which all contrived to make it look rather gaunt and threadbare. Inside, there was no warning about quite how narrow, winding and claustrophobic the stair would become. It was something of a human experiment in a medieval capillary – an experiment where you’d embark a normal cross-section of people at the base, people who obviously thought they were up to climbing a tall, tapering cathedral tower, and then watch to see how far they percolated upwards and what kind of excuses were deployed as they realized they couldn’t go any further. The interest in the experiment would lie in which nationalities would push on, doggedly, and which individuals would turn back, and how the increasing physical demands would affect the dynamics of a family or a group of friends.
If I hadn’t already spent many days on a bicycle, I would have struggled to reach the top myself. At around step number four hundred I was grateful to feel a breeze begin, and a little beyond was a scrawled message suggesting I had ‘just passed the best bit’, but I wasn’t going back to look. Not far short of the top the Münster’s bells started to toll, thankfully not from anywhere in the immediate vicinity, but the sound swam around the spire obliterating all other noise, coming from all angles at once as it reflected upwards off the Eldorado of modern architecture spread out below. I regretted not bringing the city brochure up with me; the author would no doubt have had some encouraging bon mots about the health benefits of twiddling one’s legs up the spire. When I finally reached the ledge below the peak I felt nothing but admiration for the people who’d actually built this Gothic rocket back in 1377. Many of them must have died so that future generations could twiddle to their hearts’ content.
The Münster has an organ concert every Sunday, which was a good opportunity to get my breath back, swallowed up once again by the womb of the building. Inside, the nave was too tall to be beautiful, but it made a great echo chamber for the organ. This was not twiddling; the sound was mighty enough to make the flagstones rumble and vibrate my bones inside my flesh.
Afterwards I was reunited with the Danube over a pike and chips on the city’s riverside ramparts, in a part of town that Leigh Fermor described as ‘containing nothing later than the Middle Ages’, but which now boasted a heavy concentration of very un-medieval Internet cafés. Just along the wall was the Eagles’ Bastion where the Tailor of Ulm, another go-getting Ulmite called Albrecht Berblinger, had attempted to fly the first ever hang-glider, back in 1811. ‘The Ulm tailor attempted to fly on a whim/But the devil led him into the Danube to swim’ runs the local rhyme, making fun of the poor chap quite unnecessarily. Berblinger’s plan had been to cross the width of the river, but the reality was that he’d barely managed halfway, and compounded his failure by doing so in the presence of the king. There was nothing wrong with his design,
which was well ahead of its time, but what he hadn’t allowed for was the descending column of cold air above the river, which is particularly chilly in Ulm thanks to its union with the Iller (as in Iller, Lech, Isar, Inn fliessen rechts der Donau hin), which brings meltwater from the Alps. Afterwards, the discouraged inventor moved on to make artificial limbs for the war-wounded, which counted as a more productive use of his time.
A hazard for low-flying hang-gliders it may be, but the Danube’s union with the swollen Iller at Ulm is enough to render the river officially navigable for the first time, and over my pike and chips I watched a smattering of leisure and pleasure boats struggling to hold their own against the stream. For the first time on my journey I felt that I was sitting alongside a mighty, trans-European waterway, a transport artery which the EU has prosaically designated as ‘Corridor VII’, and as such I felt connected to the cities and nations that lay ahead of me. But reading The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube), I found that Peter Esterhazy felt no such connection in Ulm. On the contrary, it was his belief that the German Danubians didn’t look any further east than the ends of their noses. ‘An Ulmer can only see as far as Regensburg, a Regensburger only as far as Passau, and as for the good people of Passau: they’re blind.’
Certainly over the centuries various points of the river have viewed themselves as the last bastion of Western civilization, believing that barbarism began at their eastern gate. As recently as 1815, at the Congress of Vienna which was to set the template for modern Europe, Austro-Hungarian Chancellor Metternich declared, ‘East of Vienna the Orient begins.’ At the time, the concept ‘Europe’ referred to everything west of Vienna, while countries to the east were for guest appearances by semi-mythical entities like Attila the Hun, Mongols, and empires called Byzantine and Ottoman, whose cities had exotic names like Constantinople. To most minds these names could as easily belong to Greek legend as to relatively recent European history. These days, however, Western civilization goes all the way to the Black Sea, or so the EU concept suggests. But many cities on the upper reaches of the river nevertheless stick to the Esterhazy line, and show little interest in what happens on their downriver side.
Ulm, however, is an exception, and that week the city was hosting a festival of modern music from eastern Danubian countries, with a particular emphasis on love songs from Bulgaria and the Balkans. Not that I needed to attend any official concerts, given what was taking place on the Schwarzer Adler’s terrace every night.
Mr Herring’s soirées aside, the Ulmite institution that peered downriver with the most intensity was the new Danube Swabian Museum, close to the Fishermen’s Quarter in one of the giant barrack buildings that hadn’t been destroyed by Allied bombs. The story of the there-and-back migration of Danube Swabians, as narrated within its walls, is one of the lesser-known dramas of Central Europe, and one which doesn’t yet have a proper happy ending.
From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, 200,000 economic migrants set off from Ulm to float down the Danube to new lives in a promised land in Central Europe, just as in later centuries the Irish would head off across the Atlantic or the Greeks would set off for Australia. Except that, unlike the Irish or the Greeks, huge numbers of their descendants reversed the process two hundred years later and came back again in a hurry, with nothing but the shirts on their backs. The net result for the likes of Baden-Württemberg is that a quarter of the state’s population today comes from behind the Iron Curtain. It’s a back-and-forth migration that Germans have been reluctant to talk about.
The story starts at the end of the seventeenth century, when the Austro-Hungarians had finally driven the Ottoman Empire out of Central Europe. Although their passing was a huge relief for the oppressed locals, it created something of a vacuum in whole swathes of what is now Hungary, northern Serbia and eastern Romania (then just Greater Hungary). Management and manpower in these areas had been swept away when the Turks were evicted, so at the instigation of Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa, administrators set about refilling the vacated spaces so that good arable land could be put to work.
Much of this land had been given to Austro-Hungarian aristocrats as a reward for contributing their soldiers to the imperial army, and it was those aristocrats who sent their beadles to Germany’s market squares to recruit the craftsmen, labourers and farmers for this supposed new Eden in the East. Their efforts were particularly successful in southern Germany because people were ready to listen. Crop failures, combined with the effects of the Thirty Years War, and an inheritance system that subdivided property into ever-smaller plots, meant that many families were very interested in the talk of free and fruitful land that lay downriver, and the Danube was there on their doorsteps to deliver them.
The empire designated the upriver port of Ulm as the embarkation point and commissioned the building of Ulmer Schachteln (literally Ulm Crates), ponderous and heavy wooden rafts with a cabin and four steering oars, whose only motive power was the river current. In those days climbing aboard was a bit like setting off for the moon knowing that your spacecraft didn’t have enough fuel to come back again. Whole families embarked on these craft on the promise of houses and land in villages and towns which were mostly drawn up on paper but had not yet been built (as happened a century later in North America). The land, however, was good, and although they had a hard time initially, the communities prospered as one generation succeeded the other, as the saying goes:
Dem Ersten der Tod
Dem Zweiten die Not
Dem Dritten das Brot
which roughly translates as ‘First death, then hard living, then prosperity.’
The original 200,000 migrants multiplied rapidly, and by the turn of the nineteenth century there were some two million ethnic Germans living in pockets of Central and Eastern Europe, in chessboard urbanizations which had been planned in Vienna. Their children were educated in schools founded by the empire, and although they were bilingual, these communities rarely intermarried with the Hungarians, the Serbs or the Romanians they lived amongst. They maintained their own language and folk traditions, but they didn’t see themselves necessarily as Germans, because Germany per se hadn’t yet come into existence; their main identity came from the village to which they belonged, as it did for a lot of other ethnic groups around them.
But a hundred years later they were being forced by pan-European change to think again. In the late nineteenth century most of these ethnic Germans found themselves in a land now called Greater Hungary, where the Hungarians were going through a strongly nationalistic phase as part of a power struggle with the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The nationalists were putting pressure on all ethnic groups to think of themselves as Magyar, forcing them to speak Hungarian, and eradicating German-medium schools. If you accepted this Magyarization, you could have a good career, but if not, your community was effectively ignored. Of course this attempt to eradicate ethnic minorities had the opposite effect, as it regularly has done throughout history all across the globe. Forced to choose between host country and origin, the two million Danube Swabians suddenly found themselves looking back to the distant fatherland for cultural input and support. They realized they were not just villagers with different traditions: they were German.
Not long afterwards the ugly face of nationalism began to show itself in Germany, too, in the shape of national socialism, aka Nazism, and the Nazi message to those German communities out there in Central Europe was simple: ‘You are our bridgehead.’ The implication was that allegiance and loyalty to the fatherland would be rewarded, never mind that they had left that fatherland 150 years earlier. Hitler made no secret of the fact that he saw the East as Germany’s Lebensraum, as his chance to create an empire through what he called his Drang nach Osten, desire for the East. All the other major powers had overseas dominions in the form of colonies, but his would be right under his nose. He saw countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary as easy meat, already pre-tenderized with their st
rong Germanic content, and he was surprised that anyone in the West actually cared about them. Especially when they cared enough to fight.
When war came, Hitler made an agreement with his ally, Hungary, that the Danube Swabians would not be conscripted into the Hungarian army but into the German army instead. Moreover, they were expected to join the SS, the supposed protective force originally created as a personal guard for Hitler, but which became the most aggressive element of the whole army. So when the war ended badly for Germans everywhere, these satellite Swabian communities found themselves branded as the breeding grounds of extremism. Many of those whose homes had been on Romanian soil, and were therefore now Soviet-controlled, were taken to labour camps in Russia and never seen again. Those in what became Yugoslavia had their citizenship removed and were gathered together into designated villages which were surrounded by fencing to become concentration camps. The best treated were the 550,000 in Hungary, of whom 240,000 fled, mostly back to Germany, before the Iron Curtain closed the door.
Communism was tough on ethnic minorities, so for the next fifty years the remaining isolated Danube Swabians (an estimated 500,000) kept their heads down, and many of them eventually gave up on the idea of German identity altogether to be absorbed into mainstream life. Tens of thousands didn’t, however, and longed to go ‘home’, spurred on by Germany’s gradual post-war economic revival and by the German government’s eventual declaration that anyone who could prove German parentage, no matter how long ago, had a right to German citizenship. When the Wall collapsed in 1989, many thousands of these Aussiedler (settlers outside) flocked back to ‘their’ country, and had full claim to pensions and benefits. Meanwhile the seven million Ausländer (foreigners) living in Germany, including two million Turks, were denied the privilege.