The Danube

by Nick Thorpe

  Mauthausen opened as a concentration camp in August 1938, just five months after Austria was annexed by Germany. Walking above the granite quarries, I take refuge in my mind in the worn, granite hills of Dobrogea, two thousand kilometres downstream. There is no railway here. None could have achieved the stiff climb up into the hills above the Danube. Images of railway tracks and cattle wagons, packed to the roof with human beings, are so closely linked to Auschwitz and its particular machinery of death that Mauthausen seems appalling in a different way. That inmates were marched here on foot, one by one, under the watchful eyes of gun-toting guards. Or driven in trucks, each with a driver who knew what he was taking his prisoners to. The hardness of the human heart that made Mauthausen possible seems harder than any ancient rock, chipped away by human hands. They could have brought granite for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games from here, presumably. But granite from Dobrogea, from a different, albeit still active dictatorship, was safer.

  The bored, intelligent expression of Adolf Eichmann looks up at me from the shelves through his ungainly spectacles in the concentration camp bookshop. It is a photograph taken at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, from an exhibition on display at the County Court in Linz. The designer of the brochure has drawn a red square on the black and white picture around Eichmann. Oak-man. One hundred and ninety five thousand people were sent to Mauthausen over a seven year period. One hundred and five thousand of them died, worked to death in the quarries, in the armaments factories, or at satellite camps set up throughout upper Austria. Half of those who died did so in the last months of the war, crushed by the death-throes of the German war machine. Hundreds more died after liberation by US soldiers on 5 May 1945, three days before the last German soldiers and civilians died, fighting the Red Army near the town of Stein.

  ‘O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter,’ reads the final verse of a poem by Bertolt Brecht, engraved on the wall of remembrance outside the concentration camp:

  O Germany, Pale Mother!

  How have your sons arrayed you

  That you sit among the peoples

  A thing of scorn and fear!4

  The poem was written in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power.

  The forty countries whose nationals were killed at Mauthausen each have their own memorials. The statues from eastern Europe, erected in the 1950s, display the same lock-jawed brutality that State Socialism and National Socialism had in common. But Germany's statue is shockingly tender – sculptor Fritz Cremer's portrayal in bronze of Brecht's ‘Pale Mother Germany’. A seated, more than life-size figure, her breasts barely distinguishable beneath a crumpled shawl, her hair short, her head straight, her right hand in her lap, her left hand dangling beside her, as she half turns on her bench. Someone has placed a small red carnation between the fingers of her large right hand. Her chin is raised. It is the position a mother might take at a kitchen table when one of her grown-up sons appears unexpectedly in the doorway. Two copies of the statue exist, one on the grass next to the Berlin Cathedral, another at the cemetery in Magdeburg in eastern Germany at the site of more victims of fascism. Below the road and the memorials is a tall, weeping willow tree, beneath which the ashes of Russian inmates are scattered. The tree is magnificent in its late March colours, turning from grey to green. Its wands absorb the last light. It must have stood here when Mauthausen was a prison camp. The German-speaking peoples always understood trees.

  I drive down through the valley in the gathering gloom, back to my comforting river. Hungarian Jews on their way here must have wondered how the same river could flow beneath the fine bridges of Budapest, past their homes, and so close to their doom. Did old Mr Weiss, the fish-merchant who travelled up and down beside the Danube each day in his cart and bought the fish the Zsemlovics family caught to sell in the market in Bratislava, die here?

  The River Ilz is black in aerial photographs of Passau as it flows into the Danube and the Inn. Passau is the city where the three rivers meet and their waters jostle for position. Though it looks slightly narrower than the Inn here, the Danube wins, as it always does, but the others lose none of their power and prestige in the process. It is as if they continue to flow, independently and unmixed, like hidden garments beneath the Danube's heavy overcoat.

  I find a room in a small hotel overlooking the Ilz. Elderly gentlemen and their spouses from the Kameradenbund, the Association of Former Soldiers, are drinking beer in the restaurant downstairs, and devouring great plates of meat, pickles and potatoes. I join them at a long table. Hilda tells me how she married an American soldier, stationed in Germany after the war, and how she went back to live with him in the US for thirty years. Her American accent is perfect. When her husband died, she returned to her own people. She hands round small, black-and-white photographs of herself as a child, and of her husband. She is accepted by the company as a soldier's wife, and therefore one of them. The lines between rival armies, between victors and vanquished, occupiers and occupied, dissolve on the banks of the Black Ilz so many years after the Second World War.

  The rampant red wolf of Passau bares its claws on the city's coat of arms.5 As a major production centre of swords throughout the Middle Ages, a simplified version of the wolf was engraved on every blade, to give the warriors who wielded them the courage and invincibility of a wolf. In the museums of Belgrade and Novi Sad, of Budapest and Vienna, I have studied Passau swords marooned in glass display cases, their dull blades itching for the taste of blood. The sword-makers at Solingen, the rival sword-producer in Germany in the Middle Ages, began putting wolves on their own blades when they realised how popular they were with fighting men.

  In 1803 Passau lost its much prized independence and was incorporated into the State of Bavaria. In 1847 the last German wolf was killed in Bavaria, perhaps in the forests near the source of the Ilz on the border with Bohemia.6 There are no known wolves left in Austria, less than fifty in Hungary, three to four hundred in Slovakia, a thousand in the former Yugoslavia, while Romania – high in the horseshoe-shaped Carpathians – has two thousand five hundred, according to a study commissioned by the Council of Europe. ‘Animals were considered admirable according to the extent to which they accepted human domination, and those considered rebels such as the tiger or wolf were often demonized. This led to a moral crusade for the extermination of wolves and other large predators …’ wrote Boria Sax of the Victorian Age. But their rehabilitation was at hand.7 ‘The Nazis were constantly invoking dogs and wolves as models for the qualities they wanted to cultivate: loyalty, hierarchy, fierceness, courage, obedience, and sometimes even cruelty. Hitler's code name was “the wolf”.’ He was also fond of telling people how his name stemmed from the Old High German words – adal – meaning ‘noble’, and wolf. Baby Adolf was born in a pub, the Gasthof zum Pommer, in the hamlet of Ranshofen near Braunau on the Inn river, just upstream from Passau, in April 1889. He moved with his family to Passau at the age of three, then to Linz at five, so his formative years were spent near the Danube. There is little doubt that the symbolic wolf of Passau made its mark on the young boy's imagination. ‘For the cult of the wolf seemed to offer the Nazis a promise of the discipline sometimes associated with “civilisation” without its accompanying decadence. Of nature without anarchy. As an animal which had been extinct within Germany for almost a century yet lived on in figures of speech, folk tales and iconography, the wolf suggested a sort of primeval vitality that had been lost.’8

  In 1934 Germany became the first nation in modern times to place the wolf under protection. This was a symbolic act, a nod in the direction of an extinct beast, since there were actually none left to protect. But there were dogs. King Michael of Romania, whom I interviewed on his ninetieth birthday in October 2011, told me that while playing with his favourite dog as a teenager, he discovered that its former, Nazi owners had tattooed the letters ‘SS’ inside its ear.9 Hitler's admiration for the wolf did not encourage him to share its diet – he was a committed vegetarian. A plaque set up outside his
birthplace in Ranshofen in 1989 was made, fittingly, from dark Mauthausen granite.

  After its swords and its wolf, the other product for which Passau is famous is salt. The salt was mined in the Austrian Alps in Salzburg, and in Hallstein, Hallstatt, Reichenhall, Bad Ischl and Altausee.10 Hall was the Celtic word for salt, and can be found in many places associated with the salt trade. Like the Vinča and kindred people along the Lower and Middle Danube five thousand years earlier, the Germans grew rich on salt. Batava – the Celtic name for the settlement – changed over the ages to Passave, and then to Passau. Salt was brought down the Inn to Passau, where it was kept in warehouses for at least three days, by law. It was then either loaded onto ships to take it up, or down, the Danube – upriver the ships were pulled by horses – or loaded on to carriers and their pack animals for the long trek up the banks of the Ilz into Bohemia, and all the way to Prague. This route became known as the Goldene Steig (Golden Steps), because of the wealth of goods that flowed along it through the eastern Bavarian woods. The ‘white gold’ of salt, quarried from beneath the earth, was exchanged for the yellow-orange gold of wheat that grew on its crust. On their journey north from Passau, the first major town the Säumer (carriers) reached in Bohemia was Prachatitz, now Prachatice in the Czech Republic. In the other direction, many Bohemian goods, especially grain, grown in the rolling hills of south Bohemia, were carried back to Passau, stored, then shipped on.

  The Veste Oberhaus is a fortress on a hill overlooking the confluence of the three rivers. Built in 1219, it was the seat for most of its existence of the Bishop of Passau, who owned the lands far and wide, and controlled the trade. A lithograph from 1830 shows the banks of the Ilz, close to my hotel. In the foreground is a ship-building workshop and two completed Zille, the standard transport boat on the rivers. The shores of the River Ilz, before it reached the Inn and Danube, were ideal for ship-builders. Fifteen workshops were registered at the mouth of the Ilz in the late sixteenth century. The journeys took their toll on the boats – a single boat was expected to survive thirty return journeys to Hallein. The museum has a rich collection of ship-builders’ tools, their picks and chisels, and chests used to carry and store the salt. One of darkened wood is painted with the date 1540 above the Passau wolf, who is prancing in the same direction as a worker, bowed under the weight of the sack of salt on his shoulder. He's carrying it towards a warehouse where other sacks are neatly stacked. The salt trade in Passau suffered several disasters over the centuries. In 1594 Prince Maximilian established a monopoly of the trade in salt at Hallein and redirected it downstream to Linz. The powerful kingdoms of Bavaria and Austria took it over and Passau was sidelined. Salt and the goods it was exchanged for still passed in large volumes through Passau, but the wealth that went with it flowed like salt through the fingers of the citizens. Passau never quite recovered, and sank from being a capital to a provincial city. A feather pen-and-ink drawing from the late eighteenth century shows a convoy of salt-laden ships being pulled upriver from Passau to Regensburg. According to the text, the convoy comprised thirty-nine horses and their riders, six main ships, and eight smaller boats, twenty-eight riders, eight servants and twenty-one ship's crew. One of the captain's tasks was to regularly measure the depth of the river with his stick.

  In another room of the museum is a sketch for a wall painting to celebrate the wedding of Emperor Leopold I to his third wife Eleonora Magdalena von Pfalz-Neuburg in December 1676. His previous wife, Claudia Felicitas, had died in April of the same year, and it was felt inappropriate to celebrate his new nuptials in the same city, Vienna. An opera was staged downriver in Linz for the wedding with the title ‘The immortal Hercules’, in the hope that the house of Habsburg would be blessed at last by offspring to continue the family's already three-hundred-year grip on power. The opera succeeded, and the family kept the throne for another three hundred years.

  The old city of Passau feels like an island, an illusion created by the confluence of the Inn and the Danube. At the very tip is a small park, with a labyrinth, a playground, and a large anchor, fixed to a rock with an inscription: ‘Dedicated to the martyrs of the Danube’ all those who died, by accident or design, in its dark waters. It was erected by ‘The Friends of the Rivers and the Seas’ in 1971. On the iron handle of the anchor someone has left a handwritten clue to a treasure-hunt: ‘You are still far from the goal. You must go next to a small art gallery, and fulfil a task. Tip: the gallery is near a Greek restaurant.’

  Young girls chase each other round the labyrinth. Fathers push their sons self-consciously on the swings. Nearby on the wall of a church I find a plaque in Hungarian, engraved in stone. ‘Within the walls of this church rests the Blessed Gizella, Princess of Bavaria, wife of Saint Stephen, first Hungarian queen, and nun of the Niedernburg convent.’ King Stephen converted the Hungarians to Christianity in the year 1000, and was rewarded for his efforts with a crown from Pope Sylvester in Rome. The crown was lost and found many times, rescued by American soldiers at the end of the Second World War,11 and finally returned to Hungary by US President Jimmy Carter in 1977. When I first moved to Hungary in 1986, I used to visit it in the National Museum. Power and the right to property in Hungary lay not with the monarch but with the crown. Hungary was known historically as ‘the lands of the crown of St Stephen’. On 1 January 2000, the Fidesz government moved the crown, with a lavish ceremony, from the museum to the parliament, where it has stood in a glass case ever since, exactly beneath the main dome. Beautifully decorated with Byzantine kings and saints, it has a peculiar, sloping cross. For many Hungarians it is the symbol of their country's dogged survival through the centuries, against the odds. For others, it should have stayed in the museum – of no more consequence, as one liberal philosopher commented, than ‘a Swiss cap’.

  The Blessed Gizella married her prince at the age of eleven in the year 996, and anchored the Hungarian kingdom firmly in Europe. Until that time the country had been seen by west Europeans as a wasp's nest of dangerous central Asian nomads. The coronation of Stephen as king in 1001 completed the process. Five hundred and fifty years after the death of Attila the Hun, the Hungarians presented themselves as allies of the West, of the Holy Roman Empire; Gizella's older brother was Henry II, the Holy Roman Emperor. As the king credited with converting the Hungarians to Christianity, Stephen and his wife toured their dominions, founding new churches. When he died in 1038, Gizella quarrelled with his court and took refuge as a nun at Niedernburg, where she died in 1045. Her tomb in the quiet church is wrapped in the tricolour emblems of Hungary. There is an exhibition of photographs showing two nuns carefully cleaning the skull of Gizella after it was exhumed. In a little side-chapel of the church dedicated to her, the tomb is on display, at knee height. The skull inside is clearly visible and is mounted with a golden crown, while her bones are wrapped in costly silks and pearls. Prayers and pleas to Gizella, in Hungarian and German, are carefully recorded in a visitor's book:

  ‘Dear Gizella, grant our family the strength to hold together, look after our two daughters, accompany them on the ways of their lives, strong in faith, and prepare us for the world to come.’

  ‘Dear God, make my grandma well again – Your Victoria.’

  ‘My Dear Gisella, please, please help me to be happy once again in my life. And to be healthy again. I love you. Angela.’

  ‘Dear Gisella, I'm here again. I beg of you, listen to me. Please help my son, in his great troubles. Maria.’

  Down on the Danube bank, the big passenger ships have warning signs in English on their steps. ‘Attention. Stairs slippery because of ground frost.’ The Kilian, a barge flying the German flag, pushes upstream. In silhouette against the bright sunlight on the wall behind, I can distinguish the short beard and glasses of the helmsman, motionless on the bridge.

  Volker Enseler has come a long way from the Biblis nuclear power plant where he worked for forty years of his life. I bump into him by the Danube at Hofkirchen, on a less than picturesque stretch
where bulldozers are working to improve flood defences. His long, easy gait, and the small rucksack on his back, mark him out as a fellow long-distance traveller, coming the wrong way, as usual, down the Danube towards me. He is a tall man with a sun-tanned face etched with the determination of the post-war generation in Germany. He wears a bright red raincoat, despite the warmth of the day, and matching baseball cap, a yellow scarf at the neck, and has a good laugh, which softens his rather stern, punctual demeanour. Before he retired, he explains, he noticed a sign near his home in Flensburg, on Germany's northern border: ‘Genoa 2,700 km’. He determined to walk it, and did so, in ten stages over about six years. He walks about thirty kilometres a day – just before his seventieth birthday. How much does his rucksack weigh? ‘Six point nine kilos,’ he replies, so precisely that we both laugh. ‘But I bought two tangerines this morning, and I've drunk my half litre of water, so it's probably up to about seven!’ He walks for the joy of it, and the sense of freedom it gives him. He thought once that he would like to make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela – the Way of Saint James. When he heard that one million people walk it each year, he chose this walk instead – ‘where there's just me – and a few old people with dogs.’ He always asks to stroke them. Sometimes they let him, sometimes they don't. When he got to Genoa, he bought a bottle of red wine, sat down in the main square, and wrote forty-five postcards. Then he walked to the railway station and took the train home to Flensburg. On this trip, he set out from the Weltenburg monastery near Kelheim and has been on the road for seven days so far. He appreciates the modest prices, compared to places he has walked in northern Germany, especially on the Lower Rhine.