| THE RIVER DANUBE, like a siren, has seduced at least three authors over the centuries. The first was Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli from Bologna, in the 17th century. His work grew into six wonderfully illustrated volumes, published in Latin in 1726. The second was Claudio Magris, from Trieste, in the 20th century. A professor, scholar and novelist, he completed a journey to the Black Sea in 1986, just before the fall of the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Like Marsigli, he had no very clear idea of what kind of book he wanted to write, yet in the end, Magris produced "Danube," a masterpiece. In his hands, the river is not just a majestic force of nature but becomes the silent hero of the book. Like Laurence Sterne with Tristram Shandy, Magris discovered the unlikely circumstances of the Danube's origins, at least in folklore. It was a stream of water gushing from a tap, which no one had managed to turn off. For a moment he mused on what might happen if someone did manage to turn the great river off at its source, and Bratislava, Belgrade and Budapest were left "completely waterless." Now, in the 21st century, there is a third author, Simon Winder, from London. But he is the first historian of the Danube to try knockabout humor. The British have enjoyed the ridiculous in history ever since two humorists, survivors of World War I, published "1066 and All That" in 1930. A sample: "King Edward's new policy of peace was very successful and culminated in the Great War to End War. ... It was the cause of nowadays and the end of History." Audiences loved it, especially when it was made into a play. Magris's "Danube" is a great work of literature, but it is without much levity. Winder's inspiration, by contrast, is to create history as English pantomime. He had already experimented with this approach in the splendid "Germania" (2010), where he clowned about, telling jokes. It worked perfectly. Yet for all its comedy, "Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe" would have to be, as he says, "a less sunny book than 'Germania'" because the peoples of the former Hapsburg Empire have had a dark history; even now, the scars still show. In the English-speaking world, Central Europe has been as strange and alien as the Gobi Desert or the Arctic. In 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, in a broadcast to the British nation about a confrontation with Hitler over Austria and Czechoslovakia, referred to the irrelevance of "a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing." He emphasized "we" and "nothing." Such isolation continued even after 1945. Vienna was under occupation until 1955, and before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, only Yugoslavia, among Communist-controlled countries, developed international tourism. Winder's "Danubia" describes what is still an unknown world for many people, but early on, he must have made a crucial decision. Unlike Marsigli and Magris, he has taken as his subject not only the Danube, but Danubia. Just two letters different, but an ocean of new meaning: Unlike the river, Danubia does not exist. It is simply an idea, immaterial, the product of a fertile imagination. Winder covers the entire sweep of the old Hapsburg lands, taking us from the far north, Cracow and Lviv, to Ragusa (Dubrovnik), in the south. To the west this area includes Braunau (with its minatory boulder outside the birthplace of Adolf Hitler), while Ruse on the Danube, birthplace of the writer Elias Canetti, is the significant outpost far away to the east. For four years, Winder roamed Central Europe like a tonsured mendicant on a mission, hunting down relics. He counted off the sanctuaries where something unusual could be found - the Abbey of Melk, the monasteries of Carinthia and Slovenia, small towns, abandoned corners in museums. His tales are spellbinding because he does not just sit in an archive or a library, but takes the reader out into the real world. And he does not stop with the end of the Hapsburgs in 1918 but rolls on into the 21st century. Winder's book is more demanding than either of its predecessors. His personal history is performed by a chorus of different voices, each one telling part of the story. It begins with laughing-out-loud, in the provincial Hungarian town of Pecs, where "the cappuccinos are a bit hard-won." Then Winder becomes the soft-spoken man-who-knows, explaining in a few sentences what happened in Pecs around A.D. 400, when everyone "either fled or was killed or enslaved by Hun raiders." If you get frustrated with any one actor in Winder's drama, another soon comes along, though most captivating of all is the author's own worried, defiant tone. "The longer I have spent thinking about this book the more horror and disgust I feel for nationalism, which seems something akin to bubonic plague." This was as true after 1945 as before 1914. In Lviv/Lemberg/ Lemberik/Lwow/Lvov "almost the entire population was killed or expelled - for being Jewish, for being Polish, for being German, for being wealthy, for being proNazi or pro-Communist." With its many parts and its cast of thousands, "Danubia" is less a narrative than a giant mosaic. The incidents Winder describes are the mosaic's tesserae - the touchstones that carry the story forward. Just one example: In the Natural History Museum in Vienna, he walks past prosaic modern displays to find "tucked into a corner ... a small glass jar containing a basilisk preserved in spirits." It's a fake, but it provides Winder with a perfect segue to Prague and to Emperor Rudolf II, one of the few Hapsburgs to excite him. A "personal history" is necessarily unpredictable and idiosyncratic in this way, and anyone who wants a solid, middle-of-the-road trudge through the Hapsburg lands might pass on this book. That would be a major mistake. Behind the pantomime flummery there is an acute and agile intellect at work, allowing Winder to move effortlessly from the Big Picture (related in a gravelly, Dr. Kissinger-like voice) to pointillist detail. He writes of Fafner, a particularly scary dragon, that it is "the nationalist critique of Habsburg monarchy, ... but it is quite interesting." Yes, it is, but only because Winder then manages to explain Emperor Franz Joseph's complex and shifting policies in a few decisive lines. "The Habsburgs are universally viewed as the stupid giant ... To be fair, Franz Joseph does try to use the Tarnhelm" - a magic, shape-shifting helmet - "to improve his situation, switching from absolutism to bits of democracy, from activism to inertia, from centralism to federalism, but almost always in ways that appear too late, cynical and incompetent. He keeps changing shape under his magic helmet, but you can still see the side-whiskers." Winder is the best-read cicerone imaginable. He never stops talking and rarely pauses for breath. Even then, however, you want to tell him: Forget about breathing and just go on talking. "Danubia" is a long book, yet this reader would not mind if it were longer still. Unlike the river, Danubia does not exist. It is simply the product of imagination. ANDREW WHEATCROFT'S cultural history of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy will be published later this year. |
