The Danube

by Nick Thorpe

  Not far from Jutta's house, huge meadows of black solar collectors tilt towards the sun like sunflowers. I can almost imagine them turning to follow the sun all day, but not even the Germans have thought of that yet. Or perhaps they have, but these look rather static. And beyond the meadows, the arch-enemy of the solar panels: a nuclear power station. I see it first in double, its cooling towers reflected in what might be a lake, or flooded fields between pollarded willows. The vast, concave concrete towers look almost beautiful, four of them rather than two, in the still waters fringed by trees. But I am still under Jutta's spell.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Tailor of Ulm

  Und er predigte ihnen lange durch Gleichnisse … – And he taught them many things by parables …1

  ULM IS the last city before the source of the Danube. I arrive in the evening with nowhere to stay, and wander enchanted through this old town of fishermen and boat-builders. Down by the water's edge is a labyrinth of houses leaning into the River Blau. I ask for a room in the most ancient, most beamed, most leaning house I can find, which looks like the stern of a battleship from the Spanish Armada. No space. I would probably need to book it years in advance. But Ulm is so beautiful, I wouldn't mind if I have to sleep on the riverbank. These three-letter German towns, Ilz and Ulm, have a certain power, like words in an incantation. I find a room in a clean, more modern place, eat pikeperch in a leaning pub washed down with local beer, and fall asleep to the music of water. Wherever you go in Ulm, you can hear the rivers flowing. And the bells of the Minster chiming.

  The next day I make my way to the ancient church. The massive Bible on the pulpit is open at Saint Mark's Gospel: ‘Und er fing abermals an, zu lehren am Meer. Und es versammelte sich viel Volks zu ihm, also daβ er muβte in ein Schiff treten und auf dem Wasser sitzen; und alles Volk stand auf dem Lande am Meer. Und er predigte ihnen lange durch Gleichnisse …’ ‘And he began again to teach by the sea side: and there was gathered unto him a great multitude, so that he entered into a ship, and sat in the sea and the whole multitude was by the sea on the land. And he taught them many things by parables …’

  Along the choir stalls, in oak reddened by age, are the heads of women on one side, men facing them on the other. Carved by Jörg Syrlin between 1469 and 1474, they represent the wise women and men, philosophers and oracles of Greek and Roman times. All are magnificent, but the Cumaean Sibyl has the best bonnet, a sort of horned construction sprouting from her head, with a diadem in the middle. In a side chapel are stained glass windows from the 1430s, their colours as bright as the day they were made. My favourite is of Noah, climbing up through what looks like the big white chimney of his ark to greet the returning dove, white on a deep blue sky. Noah himself, bearded and patriarchal, wears a purple jacket that Mick Jagger would be pleased to be seen in, and what looks like a heaven-blue kippa on the back of his head. His chimney protrudes from a house with rather medieval-looking roof tiles, while the faces of his sons gaze out of the windows below. The house is the centrepiece of his ark, golden-coloured with a fine prow which looks like a pulpit, on a stormy, light blue sea.

  The young woman selling postcards at the entrance to the cathedral is big with child, and her face angelic enough to inspire another Jörg Syrlin. She seems aglow like a stained glass figure in astonishment at her precious cargo. The cathedral boasts the tallest cathedral spire in the world, at 161.53 metres, 534 feet. Begun by several generations of master builders from the Parler family, who also built the St Vitus cathedral in Prague, the spire was only completed in 1890, 513 years after the then mayor, Lutz Krafft, laid the foundation stone.2 It towers over the marketplace, which swarms with stalls selling all the fruits of Bavaria, Baden-Wu¨rttemberg and beyond. Ulm is a town that, like Passau, grew rich as a river trading post on the Danube. It has kept that sense of prosperity, though today it is a quiet backwater compared to cities it must once have considered its inferiors. In the excellent market I count fourteen different kinds of potato on one man's stall, and buy cheeses and salads for a picnic by the river.

  One of the side streets off the cathedral square leads down towards the Bread Museum. I spot a small tailor's shop and go inside to negotiate emergency repairs to the increasingly precarious button which holds my trousers up. The Turkish tailor gallantly offers to sew it back on immediately, then gets into deep conversation with one customer after another. Meanwhile I sit, trouserless and rather self-conscious, behind a curtain. The bells chime noon and I put my head round the corner. ‘Are you still there? A thousand apologies!’ Turgut comes from Erzurum, in the far east of Turkey, where his father ran a coffee shop. He moved first to Ankara, then to Germany in 1964 at the age of twenty-six. He came for better work and better money than he could earn at home. First he got a job as an interpreter, in Hanau near Frankfurt, because his German was rather good. Then a friend told him there was a shop to rent in Ulm. He's been here ever since, for forty-four years. The Danube dilutes his homesickness. ‘I'm glad that I live so close to a river which flows all the way to the Black Sea.’ Turkey, he reminds me, is sandwiched between the Black Sea and the White Sea – the Mediterranean. Then he teaches me some Turkish Black Sea dialect. In everyday Turkish ben gidiorum means ‘I go’, but on the Black Sea coast they say ben jideirum. He has two sons and two daughters. The two sons stayed in Germany when they married, and each has a three-year-old child, but both his daughters went back to Turkey. One teaches German in Ankara – to inspire another generation of Turguts, perhaps, to come west up the Danube to seek their fortune. His workshop is spick and span, but crowded with the tools and finished items of his trade. There are Pfaff sewing machines mounted on the tables, clothes on hangers all around the room, and yellow and orange tape-measures like strands of spaghetti. Turgut wears a grey suit, black cardigan and a light orange shirt. On one window ledge is a vase full of fresh roses and carnations. In the window is a big sign – ‘We alter and repair all items!’

  At the bottom of his road, the Bread Museum reminds me of the Paprika Museum in Kalocsa, but without that intense burning sensation in the eyes.3 ‘Documentation of the great famines of history, and of the current food shortage in the world is a special task of the museum,’ reads the sign at the entrance. ‘What is not put on display, however, is bread, because bread is not the stuff of museums, but of everyday nourishment.’ A little didactic, I think, but true enough. There is a reconstruction of an Ulm bakery in 1910, with great vats for the dough and mannequins shaping loaves with their bare hands. There are oil paintings of people returning from the fields after a long day harvesting wheat. There is a model of a rotating stone mill from 4000 BC, and a sign that once hung outside a local baker's shop, of two wolves rampant supporting a magnificent golden pretzel. Ulm Minster is mounted on the top with the date 1657.

  Back on the shore of the Danube there is a monument to the Danube Swabians, who boarded their boats here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and rowed and sailed downriver in search of a better life in the East.4 The Habsburg Queen Maria Teresa offered them hard work and rich rewards to replace a Hungarian population devastated by war and disease. A hundred thousand Germans emigrated to the Hungarian kingdom between 1740 and 1790, and most set out from the landing-stage in Ulm. They settled in five main areas, in the south and west of Greater Hungary, and in Transylvania. Their diligence in draining the marshes beside the Danube and its tributaries transformed the landscape, and laid the foundations for the agricultural prosperity of many districts. But the chance for younger generations to enjoy that heritage was undone in eight brief years during the mid-twentieth century. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, they were expelled from their lands, abused, and, in Yugoslavia at least, starved to death in the years following the Second World War. Two girls and a boy perch on the steps of the monument, watching the river go by. Theresa and Geraldine are both aged eighteen, born in Ulm, and thinking of moving on. Geraldine has a job for the summer in the café of a swimming pool, Theresa isn't working at t
he moment, but prefers not to say why. She dreams of going ‘somewhere up-river … maybe to Stuttgart’, to start a new life. Erdem has a dark, Turkish complexion, compared to the pale German girls. He wears a black and white woolly hat from Guatemala, and talks about leaving too. But he would go further north, to Hamburg, if he gets the chance. We talk near the Schwal, a small island with a backwater just off the main Danube. From the landing stage here, from 1570 onwards, the flat-bottomed barges known as Zille, or ‘Ulm-boxes’, carried people, animals and goods all the way down the Danube as far as the Black Sea. It was on the Zille, too, that the famous clay Ulm pipes were carried to market, while the tobacco to fill them came upstream, from the warmer lands to the south. The last freight barge left here in 1897, bound for Vienna. Erdem, Geraldine and Theresa pose for a photograph. Erdem puts his arms around the girls. The Danube flows behind them, with a weeping willow glowing almost fluorescent on the bank and seagulls diving in the dark waters. The horse chestnuts are just coming into bud. Three kids, just starting out. An image of a harmonious, modern Germany.

  By now the Danube is barely more than a stream. There are outcrops of limestone cliffs, capped by the castles of Wu¨rttemberg dukes. Rocky crags sprout whiskery pine trees, forerunners of the Black Forest. The last museum dedicated to the Romans on the Danube is at Mengen-Ennetach.

  On a map showing the disposition of Roman troops, I understand for the first time the relationship of the Danube to the Rhine. The Rhine forms an L-shape around the Black Forest, out of which the two-prongs of the Brig and Bregach rivers flow, to become the Danube at Donaueschingen. A little to the north, also in the Black Forest, the River Neckar rises, to flow northwards to join the Rhine. Another map shows the wine route, for barrels of the precious liquid from southern France, Italy and Spain, from the sea coast near Marseilles, northwards to southern Germany. Little wonder that so many vines were planted in the fertile soils of southern Germany to avoid the need for such expense. The final exhibit in the museum is a relief from a gravestone from around AD 200 of two oxen pulling a cart loaded with barrels of wine, on which a hungry-looking dog perches, his ribs showing through his coat. The driver wears a hooded jacket from the region of Gaul.

  Gerhard Obstle remembers when the meadows beside the Danube were blue with wild flowers – bauernbu¨bchen as they are called in the Swabian dialect. He shares a little of that pride; he won a prize two years ago for the flowers on his own land. He farms ninety-five hectares beside the Danube at Scheer, slightly bigger than the average size farm in Wu¨rttemberg, slightly smaller than the German average. Half he ploughs, half is meadow. He switched to organic farming after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, and has never regretted it. Conventional farmers, he says, constantly face the dilemma of ‘wachsen oder weichen’ – to expand, or disappear. They use more and more chemicals on their fields to increase the yield. He didn't want to take part in that race any longer. As the German government turned away from nuclear energy after the Fukushima disaster, many farmers in Germany began growing maize as a biofuel. But Gerhard hasn't been tempted. ‘There's nothing “organic” about the process – just the fermentation of the mass of the crop, until it turns to gas. I don't like maize because it cannot tolerate weeds – its growth suffers. It's not so competitive, and it's hard to grow without chemicals. But there are organic farmers in the Rhineland, where the soil is more fertile, who are doing it well.’ There would be no point in ploughing more land as it would be under water when the Danube floods. Climate change he notices very exactly. In his childhood, a temperature of 32 degrees Celsius in July was unusually hot. Nowadays it is often 35 degrees in July. I drink cool, home-made organic apple juice with Gerhard and his wife, watched by their peaceful oxen. The walls of the barn have been painted by their daughter, with a huge mural of the same brown and white cows on one, of a little girl blowing dandelion-seeds in a meadow in the other. Gerhard breaks into song – the ‘Blankenstein Hussar’:

  Dort drunt im schönen Ungarland,

  Wohl an dem schönen Donaustrand …

  Down there in the lovely Hungarian lands

  Along the lovely Danube strand

  There lies the land of the Magyar.

  As a young lad I set out there

  Leaving neither wife nor child at home

  to be a Blankenstein hussar …5

  The Hussars were the light cavalry of the Hungarian army, famed for their courage and gallantry. Young men from across central and western Europe were drawn to serve in their ranks, to fight the French in the early 1800s.

  In Sigmaringen the castle rises steeply from the Danube and is reflected in its still waters, sailed over by swans, a majestic white against the vigorous, dark red shoots of the new bushes along the banks. I sleep in the attic room of an old inn and drink wine from the Kaiserstuhl, the Emperor's Seat, a long, low hill between Freiburg in Germany and Coburg in Alsace. When I was a student in Freiburg we would pass that hill when we hitch-hiked to France, in search of disorder and laughter when German orderliness got too much. The spätlese, late-harvested grapes from the Kaiserstuhl, make the most delicious, orange coloured wine.

  I reach Donaueschingen at dusk, dump my bags at the hotel, and rush down the hill in search of the source of the river before it gets dark – just as I went in search of its mouth at Sulina exactly a year earlier. I find the Fu¨rstenberg park first of all, through which the Brigach flows. Expecting at any moment to reach the point where the Breg flows into it from the south, I strike out on foot, but the walk gets longer and longer. At one point, the ‘Danube Temple’ appears on the far shore, at the spot where the spring, regarded by many as the true source of the Danube rather than its two-parent tributaries, flows down to the Brigach. The temple was built in 1910 by order of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was a frequent visitor to the Fu¨rstenberg palace. I pass a riding stable, a dog-kennel, a playground and a sports club. Just before a concrete bridge leads traffic on to the ring-road, I come across the Breg flowing, small but vigorous, into the Bregach. It is my journey's end.

  There's a large marble statue of a stern matriarchal figure: Mother Baar – the name of this region of the southern Black Forest – holding a child in her lap, the young Danube. The child, in contrast to his mother, smiles with delight, and pours the first waters of the river from a small bucket, with all the rapt attention of childhood. Beneath the statue are the words: ‘For our beloved hometown, Donaueschingen, Irgon and Max Egon, to commemorate our golden wedding anniversary, 19 June 1939.’ There's a simple bench for young lovers to sit on, and a couple of spindly silver birch trees. The leading edge of a cloud blocks out the sun, and a high foreheaded, youthful male face appears – Danubius himself.

  I take off my socks and shoes and wade out into the start-waters of my river. I was afraid that Donaueschingen might be an anticlimax, a patch of sleepy suburbia after the spectacular sights of the journey, but it is far from that. The water is deliciously cold. The row of beech trees along the Breg shore give a certain dignity to the scene. The freshly mown grass, the statue, the people dotted about, each with their own relationship to this enormous river, add to the nobility of the Danube. Even the plain concrete bridge, the traffic passing over it, and the electricity pylons cannot rob the source of the Danube of its grandeur. A sign offers a choice of 2,840 kilometres, 2,845 kilometres or even 2,779 kilometres to the mouth. It's a long way to Sulina.

  I walk back slowly to the gardens of the Fu¨rstenberg palace, my head in the clouds, overwhelmed with happiness. The river turns black and yellow and blue in the dying light. Steps lead down beside St John's church to a circular pool. It's almost dark now. The twin towers of the church are reflected in the deep, blue-black water. The statue of another mother, holding her daughter close, oversees the pool. Her left hand is suspiciously close to the girl's young breast, suggesting a particular interest of the sculptor. The mother's right hand points the girl's way, eastwards. The daughter-Danube gazes innocently downwards at a shell she holds in her right hand.
At the foot is a small, cherubic boy, blowing on a conch. Both the girl and her mother have garlands in their hair.

  I throw a Hungarian twenty forint coin into the pool, watch it spiral downwards, to join thousands of others at the bottom. Bubbles rise from the source of the Danube. Then all is still.

  AFTERWORD

  A Kind of Solution

  Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?