Ideal for philology student, counter-indicative to everyone else. There's a fine line between vast erudition being conducive to book's purpose and counter-productive graphomania. Fine examples of the first kind are F. Wilson's "The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture" and Pyotr Vail's "Genius Loci", of the latter - alas, this book.

Ik ga heel eerlijk zijn: de overdadige eruditie van Magris, zijn onmogelijk te volgen zinnen, de voortdurende zijsprongen, …, het werd me op de duur wat te veel. Ik heb dit boek niet uitgelezen, en ga het dus ook niet quoteren. Magris heeft zeker interessante dingen te vertellen (over de fictie van het ‘Midden-Europa’- begrip bijvoorbeeld), maar hij verzwelgt het in een bombardement van stellingen over alle mogelijke facetten van de Europese cultuur. Zijn postmoderne aanpak, met een voortdurende vermenging van genres, en zijn pedante toon, geven een erg verouderde indruk. Dat het oorspronkelijk in 1986 werd gepubliceerd, dus nog voor de val van het IJzeren Gordijn, helpt natuurlijk ook al niet.

A parasite of hardship, he takes refuge in absolute negation, splashing about comfortably among the contradictions of existence and of culture, and flaunting the frenzy of them, instead of trying to understand the far more arduous contest between good and evil, truth and falsehood, which every day brings with it.

This is a most episodic erudition, a heartbeat of time through the prism of a lifetime in a chair (recalling Gass) pondering the endless flow of a river, across Europe, across history, eventually allowing the sediment to afford upper case status-- History. My own time by the Danube has seldom been "Blue" as it were but one instead of marvel. I was there once on the Chain Bridge with the woman I love. We were not married then and I was left most mortified at making a move. (I had just read Prague by Arthur Phillips where the protagonist attempts to kiss a woman on the bridge and is rejected).

The quest of Magris along the river does appear solipsistic--but that isn't a complaint. He initially puzzles over the what constitutes the source of the river. There is incredible debate and contention regarding the location. Such assertions have considerable baggage. What do they preclude, what jingoism is evoked? Each page both crackles and groans under the weight of its references: Goethe, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal.

The book inspires its own echoes -- go see Ister (2004) by David Barison, snuggle up with [b:Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts|262762|Cultural Amnesia Necessary Memories from History and the Arts|Clive James|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1439871720s/262762.jpg|1126436]

The book proceeds down the river, known of course in Ancient Greece as Ister. There is a melancholy of absence--not only of times and traditions, but tongues and manners of grace and civility. I myself was on the banks just a short while back. Looking about at the vineyard my wife's family are cultivating near Sremski Karlovci, or Carlowitz as it was known under the Hapsburgs or Karlofça as it was known by the Ottoman Empire. There is a Roman ruin on a hilltop and down below a 15C church, in the waning light of day the church betrayed a menace and my imagination flinched at the possibility of a Lovecraftean cult of river evil.

Serbia doesn't appear prominent in the book. Magris deliberates on Vienna and its poetic silence.

Silence is not Marx, it is Wittgenstein or Hofnannsthal: it is Viennese.

The Ottomans failed in their siege and back in Beograd someone had to answer for the defeat. It would have been so simple to tweet the succession. The book was penned in 1986 before Glastnost led to a change in format. It also predates the Yugoslav Civil War and the NATO destruction of the bridges at Novi Sod. The EU eventually paid for the removal and restoration: trade must prevail!

It may be that the moment is approaching, when the historical, social and cultural differences will reveal, and violently, the difficulties of mutual incompatibility. Our future will depend in part on our ability to prevent the priming of this time-bomb of hatred, and the possibility that new Battles of Vienna will transform brothers into foreigners and enemies.

Strange how the subterranean rifts in the YU throughout the 80s are ignored in favor of concerns about Bulgaria. Maybe the Brexit can be read into such, if it happened along those storied banks? ( )

El Danubio, que ha sido calificado como «un maravilloso viaje en el tiempo y el espacio», enlaza con el «tourisme éclairé» de un Stendhal o un Chateaubriand, e inaugura un nuevo género, a caballo entre la novela y el ensayo, el diario y la autobiografía, la historia cultural y el libro de viajes. En palabras de su autor, el libro es «una especie de novela sumergida: escribo sobre la civilización danubiana, pero también del ojo que la contempla», y fue redactado «con la sensación de escribir mi propia autobiografía». Paisajes, pasiones, encuentros, reflexiones: El Danubio es, pues, el relato de un «viaje sentimental» a la manera de Sterne, en el que el narrador recorre el viejo río desde sus fuentes hasta el Mar Negro atravesando Alemania, Austria, Hungría, Checoslovaquia, Yugoslavia, Rumanía, Bulgaria mientras recorre al mismo tiempo la propia vida y las estaciones de una cultura contemporánea, sus certezas, sus esperanzas y sus inquietudes. Un viaje que reconstruye en forma de mosaico, a través de los lugares visitados e interrogados, la civilización de la Europa Central, con la inmensurable variedad de sus pueblos y de sus culturas, captándolas en los signos de la gran Historia y en las mínimas y efímeras huellas de la vida cotidiana, e identificando las nervaduras precisas: la presencia alemana, el peso de las minorías étnicas y de las culturas negligidas, la huella dejada por los turcos, la vigente presencia hebraica.
Claudio Magris (Trieste, 1939), catedrático de literatura germánica en la Universidad de Trieste, prestigioso germanista, ensayista y traductor de Ibsen, Kleist y Schnitzler, entre otros, es una de las figuras mayores de la literatura italiana contemporánea. Ha sido galardonado con varios premios: El Erasmus Prize y el Leipzig Book Award en 2001, la medalla de oro del Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid en 2003 y el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras en 2004. ( )

There are certain books that are sui generis and this is one of those books. In part, it reminded me of the cultural stories that the first historian, Herodotus, included in his original work , The Histories, that provides the foundation for the idea of written history. While he focuses on the mind of men who have lived and ruled and dreamed on and about the Danube, ultimately Magris's work is different and as a result unique in its aspect. Danube is both a catalog of histories and myths about a place over time. The place is a river that begins in a geographic region but also begins in a time and continues to exist through generations of changes to this day.

Included in the journey down the Danube through history are stories of people and places and times; stories that are both historical and fictional, mythical and real. These stories complement a travelogue that highlights places and times and people and more. Most interesting and important for this reader were the stories of literature that derives from the residents and the being of the river. The names are familiar and include: Kafka, Freud, Wittgenstein, Marcus Aurelius, Musil, Ovid, Celine, Von Rezzori, and others, some of whom I encountered for the first time in this work.

The book begins with a discussion of the sources of the Danube -- sources of the river which "were the object of investigations, conjectures or information of Herodotus, Strabo, Caesar, Pliny, Ptolemy, the Pseudo-Scymnus, Seneca, Mela and Eratosthenes." These sources and the river that they feed have been the subject of history, politics, philosophy, mythology, and geography for millennia during which the Roman and the Holy Roman Empires rose and fell along with subsequent cities and countries into the twentieth century.

Early in the book the Danube is described as "a sinuous master of irony, of that irony which created the greatness of Central European culture," and as such it is the central conduit of Mitteleuropa and all that it implies. The river encompasses many great cities such as Ulm "of the old Germany of the Holy Roman Empire", yet also the birthplace of Albert Einstein. And of course there is Vienna which is in some ways at the center of the Danube journey if for no other reason than its cultural impact that extends to the new world and to this day, decades after the documentation of the journey of the Danube.

Another highlight on the journey is Passau where we are reminded of the literature and art inspired by the Danube. The author narrates the story of Siegfried from the Song of the Niebelungs ( a story also found in the Nordic saga the Edda) and shares the love and loyalty that is rendered there. Yet it is also a region that inspired the twentieth-century literature of Kafka. The juxtaposition of Kafka with the ancient legends leads to an even stranger one when moving on to Linz one finds the journey progressing (regressing?) through a city that Hitler once planned to recreate into a "refuge of his old age, the place he yearned to retire to after consolidating the Reich that was to last a thousand years". Yet, fortunately for lovers of literature Linz was also the home of the novelist Adalbert Stifter who, even if you have not heard of him (and I had not), was capable of prose comparable to that of Flaubert's Education Sentimentale. It is this same river that also inspired works by Musil and Svevo. It is this literature that inspires Magris to comment as follows:

"Men without qualities, those landlocked armchair explorers, have their contraceptives always in their pockets, and Mitteleuropean culture taken as a whole is also a large-scale process of intellectual contraception. Whereas on the epic sea is Aphrodite born, and there--as Conrad writes -- we conquer forgiveness for our sins and the salvation of our immortal souls; we remember that once we were gods."(p 137)

The stories of the Danube continue to abound in this epic work. Included are the names like Hegel and Canetti and Roth; the historical figures like Eichmann and Princess Elisabeth and Vlad the Impaler; the music of Schubert and Mozart and Strauss. All are epitomized for this reader by Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy and Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz. Even the geography of the river itself begins and ends in myth.

There is more and it flows from the richness, the depth, and the historical grandeur of this book. It is one whose deepness reaches realms that make the challenge of reading it (it is not an "easy read") worthwhile. Finally it is one of the most erudite and intelligent books I have read and that makes it also one of the most enjoyable and interesting. ( )