by Nick Thorpe
The fish are divided by age – the youngest a year old, then three years, then five. There are small windows on the tanks, and you can watch the fish swimming past, like visitors to the opera. Ten years have passed since he last ate one, Josef confesses. He can't bring himself to eat them any more; he loves his fish so much. Each year he puts several hundred, sometimes several thousand, back into the Danube. As he works we sip first his white wines, then his rosé. If Leopold the Virtuous had treated Richard the Lionheart like this, he might never even have wanted to return to beery, blustery Albion.
Hermann Miedler is a fisherman on the left bank of the Danube. You can't miss his house – he's built a red model lighthouse in his garden – ‘so I can find it when I come home late!’ he jokes. And he jokes a lot. The lighthouse is surrounded by large, polished rocks he has dragged from the Danube – ‘my wife complains that there are so many stones here, there's no room left for flowers … I've been living by the Danube for fifty-seven years, and fishing for all but the first seven. As children we were always down by the water. In those days you could say to your parents, “I'm just going down to catch a fish”, and you did. You can't say that any more – though I'm a better angler than I was then, and have better equipment. It has become a real achievement to catch a single fish in this great river.’ He welcomes the work of ecologists and local councils in the Wachau to restore the lost meanders of the river. One project has been completed at Rossatz, close to Josef Fischer's salmon breeding garden. A new one is underway at Grimsing, just upriver.
Hannes Seehofer walks me over a rocky path, past bulldozers digging out, rather than filling in, an oxbow. It's a deconstruction, rather than a construction site. As at Orth, before Vienna, a tough deal has been struck with local landowners to allow the Danube a little more elbow room, to benefit fish and wildlife. The Count of Schönbühel, who lives in a castle opposite and owns the land, insisted that if his island was to be allowed to flood, he wanted a bridge at least, to be able to reach it at lower water. Half the project is already completed, and the Danube flows through a meander to which it was denied access for a hundred years. Nearly forty fish species were noted in the water here within six weeks of the reopening – including carp and Nase, two fish on which the salmon feed. Danube salmon enter the river from the tributaries, but a much longer migration route upriver would need to be restored for them to become a sustainable population in the river again.21 Work is now almost complete on another meander, just upriver from the first. ‘When they built the big hydroelectric dam upriver at Melk, the river fell two metres, so it could no longer enter the meander. The willows suffered, and other trees, hardwoods took their place – beech and ash.’
We stop to examine a black poplar – not quite as big as the one I visited with Georg Frank in Orth, but just as tall and craggy. There are just forty or fifty left in the whole Wachau. Biologists have discovered a rare red beetle living in this tree – long thought to be extinct in this part of Austria. Out in mid-stream, between the island and the Schönbühel castle, two rocks protrude from the water, known affectionately by locals as the cow and her calf. These are the bane of many ships’ captains lives – especially those travelling upstream.
This is the narrowest stretch of the Danube in the Wachau. When the river is in full flood, in early summer, it can reach as deep as ten metres. In periods of drought it can be as low as one and a half – preventing all large shipping for several weeks. ‘Between the dams here, we have only thirty-five kilometres of running water,’ says Hannes. ‘The next power station is another twenty kilometres further on, but its storage lake stretches back at least twenty kilometres upstream. The fish need sheltered places, like the new meander we are making, in which to breed. One of the main problems for them in the main stream is the ships, especially the cruise liners, which are in more of a hurry. Their bow-wave washes away any eggs that the fish have managed to lay along the gravelly shores.’ Two ways exist to create new habitats for fish-spawning: opening meanders and putting down new gravel banks beyond the main shipping lane, to give the fish places to shelter behind. He points out piles of gravel, dredged from the shipping lane, then carefully put back into the river closer to the banks. These look like ungainly heaps, but the next high water will flatten them out. Their ecological value is enormous. Not only can fish spawn behind them but birds like the little tern like to lay their eggs in the gravel.
Melk Abbey stands powerfully orange and white above the confluence of the Melk river and the Danube, like an apricot ripple ice cream. The green dome and twin towers of the baroque church of St Peter rise out of the largest courtyard.
In the year 1012, Colomann, an Irish – by other accounts Scottish – pilgrim on his way to the Holy Land, was caught by local people who mistook him for a spy and, as the poor man could not explain himself in any language they could understand, hanged him on a barren elder tree. The body failed to decompose, to the wonder of his tormentors. A year and a half after his death, according to the account of Matthaeus Merian the Elder, one Rumaldos hacked a piece off the body to treat his sick son. When he did so, fresh blood flowed from the corpse, and the barren tree grew fresh leaves – final proof of a miracle. Even his son felt better. The body was taken down and given a decent burial in the church in nearby Stockerau, and when the following year the Danube burst its banks and flooded the whole countryside, the river steadfastly refused to pour into this particular church. Poor Colomann's mortal remains were finally reinterred in St Peter's church at Melk when the Benedictines founded their monastery on a steep cliff top overlooking the confluence of the Melk and the Danube. The monastery also boasts a splinter of the cross on which Christ was crucified, and a lance which belonged to the martyr Mauritius. The wealth of the monastery is partly thanks to the Babenberg family which owned it for many centuries, and were one of the first ruling families of Austria, and partly to the frequent visits of members of the aristocracy, who never paid for their accommodation, but brought gifts instead.
Some of the nine hundred pupils who attend the school in the monastery cross the Danube each day by ferry. I walk through great hallways with baroque frescoes on the ceilings, where ladies have taken out the windows to clean them. In the famous monastery library there are books in fifteen languages, including a Navaho–English dictionary and two huge globes by the famous Venetian astrologer Vincenzo Coronelli: one of the earth and one of the heavens.22 Built in 1693, he used the forty-eight ‘constellations’ identified by Ptolemy, and supplemented them with knowledge brought back from the southern hemisphere by European seafarers. The ancient Greek version included the constellation Argo, named after Jason's ship. If the mythological story is true, the Argo must have sailed past this very spot, long before the monastery was built on the hill. The constellations are depicted concave rather than convex. I would dearly love to gently spin the globe, but have to content myself with the vision of Aquarius the water-carrier, lugging his giant frame and dressed in an animal skin, around the sky.
A more recent miracle runs parallel to the huge hydroelectric dam that blocks the Danube just upriver from the town. A fast flowing stream – melk actually means ‘slow-moving stream’ in Old Slavic – meanders through the woods on the left bank of the river, carefully dug to allow fish to migrate upstream. The meanders are there to slow the flow down and give the fish more chance to succeed. Regular monitoring proves that it is much used. The water level upstream of the dam is ten metres higher than downstream, so the design had to accommodate that difference. A similar stream is being built at the next dam at Ybbs, but construction has been slowed by the rocks on either side of the river. One day, if every Austrian dam has such a fish bypass, the salmon will be able to migrate long-distances up river again. Then Josef Fischer can cheerfully go back to his vines.
The town of Grein on the left bank of the Danube is the place where ships tied up and took on river pilots before attempting the treacherous onward river journey. By a hotel on the river front I ask a woman
cleaning windows the way up to the castle, and note from her accent that she is as much a stranger as I am. She's from Chechnya, she says, a refugee with her husband and small child, recently granted asylum. Could she tell me her story? She hesitates, and asks her husband. No way! He is polite but firm. There is another family of Chechens, however, a little up the valley. Maybe they will talk.
I follow their directions, and find a courtyard awash with clothes on pegs, and children – from Somalia and Afghanistan. The Chechens live upstairs. Seda Atsaeva is eighteen and speaks the best German. She lives in two rooms, with her father Umar, mother Hava, two younger brothers and a sister. They fled Grozny in 2004, because of the war, she says. They got as far as Poland overland, through Russia and Belarus, spent ten weeks in a refugee camp, then decided to move on – on foot. They walked into Germany carrying rucksacks – her mother pregnant with Adam. Seda was ten, her brother Djochar six, and her sister Rayana four. They walked at night, at 2 a.m., through a river, the water up to her father's chest, as he carried the children across one by one on his shoulders. Then they walked through a forest, and finally reached Austria. ‘My husband has a very good sense of direction,’ Hava says proudly. ‘When I was a child at school in Grozny,’ she explains, ‘I had one lesson of German a week. So when we decided to flee Chechnya, I decided we should come to either Germany or Austria.’ Hava has already passed one German language exam, and has started on the higher level. Seda is in her first year at business school and wants to work in a bank. The other children are at school in Grein. The six of them live on 720 Euros a month, and anything their Austrian friends give them. ‘I can hardly believe how kind people have been to us … They help us so much,’ says Hava. But their existence balances on a knife-edge. After seven years of paperwork, their application to stay in Austria was finally turned down, and it looked as though they would have to leave. ‘But how can we go back to Chechnya? Our house was destroyed, and my children don't speak Russian – they don't even know the alphabet!’
Within two months of our meeting, they expect to hear the result of their appeal. Apart from the uncertainty, life is not easy for the Chechens, even beside this idyllic river. ‘Three months ago, my sister sent me a text message that our father had died. I had not seen him for eight years, since we set out. That was very hard. I went down to the banks of the Danube and cried. After a while, the river took away my sadness. My heart felt lighter after that.’ Each evening the family walks beside the river. As a treat, they occasionally take the ferry to the other side and back. Her hope is to work as a teacher, in a kindergarten, or as a carer in an old people's home. Umar, who was a policeman in Grozny, could work in construction she says – but they will only be allowed to work if they get their papers. ‘I would like to look after people,’ says Hava, ‘because I have been through so much myself. I know how much help people need in their lives.’
In the early morning, 6 a.m. at Ottensheim, the first sign of life on the old cable ferry is a thin column of smoke from a chimney as the church bells peal out across the river. Then I see movement on the bridge of the boat.
Captain Hermann Spannraft speaks stylish, almost aristocratic, English, and loves his job, shepherding his ferry to and fro across the Danube. He's been doing it for twelve years. The cable ferry has been in operation at Ottensheim since 1871, and the first model lasted a modest ninety-one years, until 1962. The ‘new’ one was built in the shipyards in nearby Linz, and has been in service since 1963. It uses no external power, just the force of the current in both directions. ‘Not quite in all weather conditions – but almost,’ says the captain, puffing on a freshly stoked pipe, and spinning the huge polished wheel through his hands. ‘The steering of the ferry depends on the height of the water – the more water there is, the faster the ferry, and it's a little problem when the water is low …’ On the rare occasions when there is not enough strength in the Danube, he has a small, ninety-horsepower outboard motor to push the ferry the last stretch towards the right – Wilhering – bank. The current is stronger on the Wilhering side, and that can also cause problems if the wind is blowing from the west. Once or twice the ferry has been blown on to the bank when the outboard motor was not enough. Then the ferry had to be pulled off by another boat, though no harm was done.
Crossing on a Sunday morning, with only a couple of cars and cyclists, our progress across the Danube is almost completely silent. I lower the window on the bridge in search of sound. Just the distant chimes of the Sunday churches, and the lapping of the water against the steel hull. ‘There used to be more cable ferries of this type, in the days when there was not a single bridge between Linz and Krems. Now just four are left, at Ottensheim, Spitz, Weissenberg and Korneuburg.’ Each weighs ninety tonnes, and can carry twelve normal-sized cars. It might look quiet now, he says, but on a busy weekday they can hardly satisfy demand, as drivers try to dodge the morning rush-hour traffic on the way into or out of Linz and schoolchildren queue to get to and from school. ‘Very occasionally, we have to admit that Nature – the water and the wind – is stronger than the technology and the knowledge of the captain, and then we have to suspend the ferry for a while,’ says the captain. He steers, while his mate Refik keeps an eye on the passengers, ties up the ferry, and lets the cars and passengers on and off the boat. Refik is tall, with big hands and wrinkles of laughter round his eyes. He was a soldier on the Bosniak side at the start of the Bosnian war, and came as a refugee to Austria in October 1992. ‘We must think positively, and just look forwards, not back now,’ he says. ‘This job is very peaceful and beautiful. It's the best job in the world!’
I notice a small blue and yellow Bosnian flag on the bridge, and a copper pot for brewing Turkish coffee, beside the stack of firewood – the source of the smoke I saw rising from the chimney in the early morning. Thanks to Refik and his family's presence here, Ottensheim and Vinac, near Jajce in central Bosnia where they come from, have become twinned towns, with numerous visits between the two. Hermann himself is just back from a trip there.
By this time we have crossed back to the Ottensheim side of the river, and a frequent traveller, Julia, comes up on the bridge to see her old friends. She used to cross on the ferry every day to the gymnasium on the other side. Today she has just been across for extra maths tuition. ‘We make so many friends among the regular passengers,’ says the captain. A rather smart woman with four little girls comes aboard, and her daughters rush excitedly from side to side in their Sunday frocks. The captain blows the ship's horn in farewell, and Refik stands with Julia on the deck, waving goodbye.
CHAPTER 13
Oh Germany, Pale Mother
Somewhere within me, dearest, you abide forever – still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death or a beetle inhabiting the heart of a rotting tree.
MIKLÓS RADNÓTI, Postcard 1, 19441
I HAVE to reach the concentration camp before it closes at five, and as I drive up the road from the Danube past the granite quarries, I realise I'm not going to make it. The irony is not easily dismissed; I'm rushing to get to a place which 200,000 people would have given anything to get out of. I want to see Mauthausen in Austria before I reach Germany.
Digging through the past or present of any people is like sifting through the garden of a house in a small provincial town. One finds jagged edges of glass and concrete, fragments of bone, traces of lives destroyed and loves lost. Each newspaper I buy in each country I travel through is full of tales of perverse adults and abused children, corrupt politicians and gruesome traffic accidents, of human stupidity and cruelty. Nevertheless, after the beauties of the Wachau valley, after the tentative buds of the apricot blossom and the garish glory of last year's fruit, after the solemn dignity of the war memorials to Austrian and German soldiers, it is hard to grasp the enormity of Mauthausen.2
In Budapest I have met Hungarian Jews who survived the forced marches to Mauthausen in the dying months of the Second World War. The Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti w
as on a death march from a concentration camp in Bor in Serbia, the site of the copper deposits which gave birth to the Vinča culture, towards Mauthausen. Some of his saddest poems were found in the sweat-stained pocket of his jacket after he was shot in November 1944, unable to keep up. He has contributed – in German – one of the most memorable lines of Hungarian poetry, ‘Der springt noch auf’ – ‘That one will get up again’ – a line used about him by a German guard, as he lay, three-quarters dead from exhaustion, in a ditch by the roadside just inside Hungary after three months on the road.
I dropped alongside him, his body rolling over,
already tightening, a cord about to snap.
Shot in the neck. You'll be finished off like this –
I muttered to myself – so just lie still.
Patience flowers into death now.
Der springt noch auf, spoken over me.
Mud and blood drying on my ear.3
He did ‘spring up’, as it turned out, but not for long. He died, shot in the head, at Abda, near Győr, three days later. There's a small monument to him, and the twenty-one others who died in the same ditch beside the Rábca river.
It's too late to tour the camp, but a friendly girl lets me into the bookshop and gives me time to buy a map and a booklet. There is even a sense of relief, that I don't have to visit the gas chambers, the crematoria, or look at photographs of the gas van that travelled between Mauthausen and the satellite camp at Gusen, killing people as it went along; that I don't have to ask what happened in the inmates’ brothel, or what card games the SS guards played in their pleasant guardrooms. It will be enough to listen to the wind whistling through the hedge which grows where the ashes from the crematoria were dumped. I will not be able to see the two surviving ovens, where people, not figurines, were baked. The March twilight seems an appropriate time to visit a place where time has stopped. I look down at my watch. Only the second hand moves, round and round.