Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  In the years since the war, plenty of Danube Swabians had returned to Ulm, the river port where the original migration had started, and I’d arranged to meet one of them in the museum.

  Franz Flock turned out to be a rumpled, tufty-haired, whiskery and twinkly seventy-year-old, so keen to tell his story to an interested party that he greeted me like a long-lost friend. I wouldn’t have picked him out from the crowd as being any less German than anyone else in Ulm, but one of the first things he did was to declare that he was not German at all, but Donau-Schwabe, Danube Swabian. It was, he said, something very different.

  Herr Flock’s ancestors had left the Rhineland back in the 1780s, originally emigrating as farmers, although his grandfather had been a dyer of cloth, specializing in indigo. The family had completed the water-whipped journey, bumping downriver on the Ulmer Schachteln and eventually settling in a region he called the Batschka, now the north-eastern region of Serbia. (This area is better known today as Vojvodina, a region riven with ethnic difficulties following the recent disintegration of Yugoslavia. I was to find myself stumbling through it later in my own journey.)

  As a boy Franz had grown up on the Danube riverbank in Palanka, between Vukovar and Novi Sad, both familiar names from world news in the late 1990s, when they were hard hit by NATO bombers. During the difficult years of the Second World War his parents had moved across to what they hoped might be the relative safety of the Sudetenland, now in the Czech Republic but at that time another region of Europe that had been settled extensively by three million Germans. But when the war ended with no obvious sanctuary for Danube Swabians – the Sudetenland was reclaimed by Czechoslovakia and Germany itself didn’t look like a good prospect – the ten-year-old Franz and his family set off by train to travel back home across Czechoslovakia and Hungary to Yugoslavia.

  It had suddenly become a very dangerous thing to be a German-speaker in Central Europe. ‘In Hungary we had to pretend to be Yugoslavs returning home from forced labour camps,’ Franz recalls. ‘I could only speak German then, but my mother spoke good Croatian and my father could manage Hungarian.’

  They got as far as the Yugoslav border (at the same location where I was to find myself making an on-foot crossing in the weeks ahead), but the border guards were not so easily fooled by their stumbling second languages and the labour-camp cover story, and refused to let them across to go home.

  They had no plan B. Like many millions of ethnic Germans living outside the borders of Germany, they found themselves homeless, stateless and distrusted, thanks to the outcome of a war started by a nation with which they’d only had long-distance cultural ties. In another time and another set of circumstances, their plight might have been labelled ‘ethnic cleansing’, and a United Nations might have come to their rescue.

  ‘We didn’t have anywhere else to go, so we had to camp out under open skies, waiting until the border guards changed their minds,’ said Franz. In the event it was lucky they didn’t. Partisans turned up on the southern side of the border, partisans who’d fought against the SS troops, and they weren’t going to treat them well. The families fled back north into the relative safety of Hungary, where Hungarian Swabians took them in. The mayor of the village where they ended up told every household to help, and the eight-member Flock family were given two rooms in another family’s house. But Franz was clearly not inclined to dwell on difficult times.

  ‘My parents were teachers and they got work, doing private lessons. Then my mother founded a school for Croatian minorities who were also isolated in Hungary.’ The language spoken at home swiftly became Hungarian, and German was relegated to the language of his grandparents.

  ‘Those ten years in Hungary were very happy ones, probably the happiest of my life,’ continued Franz. Hungarian communism was a liberal strain that persecuted intellectuals, not minorities, and although the Swabians were regarded as strict, precise and mean, always with money squirreled away, they weren’t persecuted. So he was able to complete his education in Budapest without difficulty.

  The mid-1950s was a good time to be a Hungarian. The nation had moved steadily away from Stalinism. Writers were becoming increasingly bold, and anything and everything was being discussed in the press. László Rajk, a leader who’d been hung years earlier as an arch-criminal, had been reburied as a hero, and there was a call for more democracy, more independence. As for Franz, he’d qualified as an electronics engineer and in 1956 he’d just got a good job with the Hungarian postal service when the nation’s slow waltz towards democratization came to a sudden crunching halt.

  That October some 300,000 people had set out on a great march, arm in arm, through Budapest. Initially it had all been good humoured, and how the fighting started is still not universally agreed. It is thought that the AVO, the Hungarian secret police, had machine guns posted on the tops of buildings and started to fire over the marchers’ heads to disperse them. The marchers, however, were incensed; they seized weapons from friendly troops on the ground and fired back, and for a while they were successful. The AVO melted away and the Soviets withdrew their troops, allowing the brief establishment of a new, liberal government. A real mood of exhilaration swept through the city. People power had been honoured, the Soviet juggernaut had been faced down, and freedom was in their grasp. But future Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, on a state visit at the time, had been caught up in the demonstration’s traffic and he was determined not to let a satellite state like Hungary slip the Soviet leash, lest others might want to do the same.

  That November the city exploded under an onslaught from heavy artillery, bombers and tanks as the Soviets returned. They reduced to rubble every building from which a shot was fired, killing up to 50,000 Hungarians, while a further 20,000 fled abroad. After eight days of fighting there was no more resistance, and the inquisitions began, neighbour against neighbour. Budapest felt violated, its people in despair. There was no food, no money, no hope, and living conditions were appalling.

  The brutal way in which Hungary’s 1956 Revolution was suppressed shocked Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe into another three decades of submission, and without it the communist experiment might have ended far earlier. But it also destroyed communism’s image in the rest of Europe, where the ideology had had plenty of supporters until then. In Britain, the Communist Party lost one third of its membership almost overnight.

  As for Franz and his friends, they could see there was no future in staying where they were.

  ‘Hungary was full of Russians. The towns, the villages. Full of Russians. Everything stopped, the trains, everything. We could see no hope.’ So along with eight others, he crossed the border back into Yugoslavia, where he was picked up by the Red Cross and transferred to a camp in Italy. From there the other escapees went on to settle in Canada, but Franz’s eventual destination was Germany, a village where his uncle lived, and it wasn’t what he’d expected.

  ‘In my youth Germany had been glorified – just to set foot in it was regarded as a privilege. But since then it had become the starter of disastrous wars, and suddenly nobody wanted to go there at all. The place my uncle lived was a real Kuhdorf – cow village. Food was basically just potatoes and more potatoes. It was such a disappointment.’

  Still, he’d knuckled down, relearned his German and got a job with Siemens before eventually changing careers to become a teacher, just like his parents. For their part, his parents had stayed behind in Hungary, and for decades Franz had returned twice a year, crossing difficult borders as regularly as clockwork in order to visit them. It was enough to bring him to the attention of the CIA, then still a force in reconstructing Germany, who’d sent an agent to recruit him.

  Herr Flock had had no desire to get involved, and told them so. ‘I was just visiting my family. They would have been wasting their time.’

  And now, a half-century after leaving, he still went back to Hungary every year, even though his parents had long since died. ‘I find it hard to rationalize the affection I feel for
that country. I’m seventy years old and I only spent ten of those years in Hungary, but it is still the place where I feel most at home. My biggest emotional connection. I suppose those ten years were at a very crucial stage in my life. And every year I go back to Palanka, now in Serbia, too, with a busload of others like me. I just walk around. If people ask me what I’m looking for, I’ll just say history. Homesickness tourism, we call it.’

  Now that he was retired, he organized a troupe of Danube Swabian dancers and musicians who went on tours of the Danube Swabian diaspora, particularly the 250,000 Danube Swabians who’d resettled in America and Brazil. In doing so he was preserving a satellite culture that had twice been uprooted from its origins and was now scattered to the winds. ‘Which is why when you ask me what I am, I still say I am not a German, no matter what it says on my passport. No sir. I am an international Donau-Schwabe.’

  5

  Donauwörth and the After-Effects of War

  The villagers in Battle of Blenheim country were raising their maypoles and preparing themselves for a day of heavy drinking. The first of May was just around the corner, and council elders were gathering in squares and summoning up others with their mobile phones. It was one of those rare occasions in the country diary where pure manpower was still required, and where the farmers held sway, because they had the knowledge and the equipment necessary for raising and decorating the maypoles. For the rest of the year agricultural workers railed at the inadequacy and the stupidity of the village’s other menfolk, who were barely worthy of the title ‘man’ and yet who still had big houses and fine cars. Now it was their chance.

  This was Bavaria – I’d left Baden-Württemberg behind at Ulm – and it was proving surprisingly rural. What with high-tech Munich, right-of-centre politics and the headquarters of Audi and BMW, I’d always assumed it to be a wealthy, sophisticated place, but along the cycle way I’d encountered genuine shepherds spending whole days with their sheep and moving them along the banks of the Danube through grazing that was still community-owned. With a combination of well-aimed stones and browbeaten dogs they kept their flocks gathered in tight bunches around them like rippling woollen skirts, decorated with blizzards of flies and perfumed with ewe’s milk. These were scenes I was expecting to see in Hungary and Romania, but not in a land of high torque and robot production lines.

  As for the maypoles, they were very low-tech, and the technique of hauling them upright hadn’t changed for hundreds of years. They were giant fir trees, sometimes as much as 50 metres tall, stripped naked of any sideways branches and festooned with streamers, wreaths of flowers and bunches of tinsel. Carved figures of local tradesmen such as the carpenter, the bricklayer, the farmer, the notary, the blacksmith and the tailor were distributed up the pole. This whole confection would be towed into the village square by a farmer in a pork-pie hat, who would cast a critical eye over the mayor’s deodorant-wearing assistants, mutter something disparaging to his dogs, and instantly take charge. He was, after all, the only person left in the community who still had his image carved on the pole; it is not so easy to represent, in wood, an assistant director of marketing services.

  The process of raising the pole itself was laborious and longwinded. The first step was to slide the tree’s base into a pre-prepared slot in the ground, rather as a pole-vaulter anchors his weapon before launching himself upwards. Then pairs of staves joined at the neck with rope, like giant chopsticks, were distributed through the groups of men, and as the tractor’s mechanical forks did the initial lifting, so more and more of those staves were wedged between the trunk and the ground. Eventually thirty men were deployed, all under the supervision of the fat farmer in the pork-pie hat, three or four of them to each set of staves. They looked like Lilliputian figures in a Chinese restaurant, using chopsticks to stop a giant bling-covered noodle from falling on their heads.

  Eventually the angle became such that the tractor could no longer do the main lifting, and it was down to manpower alone. Then it was a matter of hauling the staves down the trunk and repositioning the taller ones closer and closer to the base, until eventually, after a lot of shouting, gibing, sweating and swearing, the farmer adjudged it to be nearly upright. He filled the hole around the base with giant wooden wedges, thumped them into place with his tractor, and it was this wedge-hammering that finally brought the whole operation to the last vertical fullstop.

  The maypole had taken thirty men over two hours to erect, and as a reward they gathered round a barrel of beer that one of the mayor’s deodorant-wearing assistants unloaded from the back of his BMW, showing some usefulness at last. The fat farmer in the pork-pie hat was in the thick of the celebration, a man’s man, the hero of the moment surrounded by wellwishers, and he was intent on forgetting all those solitary days in the fields, just him and his entombed asparagus. His tractor was unlikely to be moving again that day, unless his wife came out to tow him home.

  For me, cycling from one village to the next became a join-the-maypoles experience. I could visualize my progress on the map, a little inky line linking the dots. I was doing the journey surprisingly quickly. It was an easy landscape, barely troubled by the slightest of slopes, and I’d just invested in some ludicrously expensive chain oil that worked like magic drops, curiously not on the chain, but on my legs, which just went faster and faster all day. Around me, the spires of churches and lines of poplars became the ingredients of a moving jigsaw that required creative assembly; what I needed to do was line them up with the shoulders of hills and corners of cornfields to compose the perfect picture. A tree here, a church there, a red roof, the glimpse of a river, the curve of a road, wait … wait, that’s it! Kerrching! Cut and wrap. But then one element in the composition would elude me at the very last moment, the church spire would slide behind an unexpected factory, the road would smother the river, or a vulgar, puffed-up cherry-blossom tree would appear in the foreground shouting ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ My image would disintegrate, and I’d have to start again with a whole new set of ingredients. Just occasionally a perfect picture would come together by accident without my looking for it, but then as soon as I’d noticed it, I’d moved on, and it was gone. Transient art.

  Now that we were no longer crowded together in a small valley I couldn’t see a great deal of the Danube, but I could guess where it was thanks to the industry that had colonized its banks, elbowing the cyclepath out into the fields. I glowered at these installations. However gleaming they were at the front, I knew that they were pissing dirty stuff into the river out the back, and occasional patches of froth gave away their guilty secret. The river had behaved badly out of Donaueschingen, for sure, but it didn’t deserve to be adulterated by man. At that stage I didn’t realize I was nearing a stretch where it had swallowed up some 3,000 horsemen.

  Other people might have been alert to the imminence of a big story as they approached Blindheim, but I didn’t recognize the name. I’d been lulled into a semi-hypnotic state by the steady ticking-off of -ingens across the plain. There was Offingen and Lauingen, Gundelfingen and Dillingen, like the tolling of bells, but then suddenly there was Blindheim – or Blenheim, as British historians prefer to call it – a real surprise in the midst of the Bavarian cornfields.

  For me, the name Blenheim belongs to a country house in Oxfordshire, and I didn’t begin to make the connection until I’d deciphered the inscription on a statue of two men shaking hands at Blindheim’s crossroads. The inscription talked of the Herzog (aka Duke of) Marlborough, and how, for England, his victory in the fields around Blind-heim in 1704 represented ‘der Aufstieg der Weltmacht’, the rise of a world power.

  My sense of history is pretty crap so I’m not usually disconcerted by discovering something I didn’t know before, but the idea that British puissance had its origins in the cornfields of Bavaria was a new one on me. As I read on, I learned that the British Queen Anne had been so impressed by his victory that she had rewarded Marlborough with ‘a very fine castle in Woostock [sic]’ c
alled Blenheim Palace. Was that misspelling of Woodstock revenge for our adulteration of Blindheim? If so, we deserved it, although you could forgive a British soldier for getting it a little bit wrong. After all, the Tommies couldn’t handle the multisyllabled Mesopotamia (now Iraq) when they were stationed there in the 1950s, so they had rechristened it, endearingly, as ‘Messpot’, and Messpot it remains.

  The battle of Blindheim, aka Blenheim or even Höch-städt (the name of the nearest big town is used in many European history books), was a turning point in the War of Spanish Succession, a war whose name has provoked volleys of yawns in schoolrooms across Europe. The details are long and complicated, but suffice it to say that this was one of the largest battles in European history, where the British were fighting with the Prussians, Austrians, Dutch and Danes in the so-called Grand Alliance. Their enemy was the old foe, France, under Louis XIV, who was threatening European domination. The Bavarians had come along for the ride.

  The Franco-Bavarian army consisted of 56,000 men and ninety guns and was well used to victory; the Grand Alliance army had 52,000 men (a third were British) and sixty guns and its command was shared by Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy, a colourful character in his own right who’d played a big part in the undoing of the Ottoman Empire. Prince Eugene was gay and slightly built, and a most unlikely figure for a military leader, then or now. Based partly on his appearance, and partly on his original inclination towards becoming a priest, he’d been refused a military commission in France, the country of his birth, and so he’d ended up joining the Austrians. Initially he’d defended Vienna, very successfully, against the Turks, and it must have given him considerable satisfaction to turn his leadership skills against France, the country which had behaved so dismissively towards him in the first place.