upstream journey

Some thoughts on

The Danube: A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest
Nick Thorpe
Yale University Press 2014

I have spent 6.5 years living at Regensburg less than 250 metres from the banks of the Danube. For the first three years, it was so close that its waters came up to our front door once. And yet, much of its watershed still feels exotic to me - as my family history typically drains into the North Sea or rarely into the Baltic. I can think of only two Danubian links, the Black Sea migrants and an elusive Austrian soldier who came to Baden in the 1790s, but his past remains obscure. I have visited Vienna and Budapest but not much else.

Anyhow, as a balance to obsessing about the river Rhine, I felt obliged to read this Danubian travelogue when I discovered it. In the process, I learned a lot about the complex history of the Balkans and the Ottoman influences travelling upstream into Europe, including coffee, tobacco and paprika. I guess this cultural drift from East to West (along with the movement of modern day migrants) was what motivated the author to travel against the flow. Otherwise, most travellers, especially if they use bikes or boats, will prefer to go downstream, from Donaueschingen to the Black Sea, like my ancestors did back in 1806.

The author is a BBC journalist who has been based at Budapest for several decades, so the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and Eastern Bloc histories are his strength. Upstream of Passau he loses interest a bit - for instance he misses out completely on everything that makes Regensburg special (much like Alexander McCall Smith whose novels allegedly set there have no sense of place whatsoever). And some of the information on German things appears to be confused. For instance he mentions Ingolstadt as a car manufacturing city and then goes on about Opel which is based elsewhere. The famous Ingolstadt car manufacturer is of course Audi.

Also, at the very end, he discusses the work of German adventure writer Karl May (1842-1912), dwelling on his Old Shatterhand persona in the Wild West (with absolutely no connection to the Danube), but forgetting to mention the book "In den Schluchten des Balkan" (1892), which describes an itinerary probably not all that far from the Danube.

So I guess I would recommend it for the stretch of Belgrade to Vienna. For the Black Sea, I prefer Neal Ascherson's eponymous book, and Germany is much more vividly represented in Simon Winder's Germania (incidentally, Winder also has a book about the Danube region which I haven't got yet). Still, it might become handy for a feature on Danubian ecosystems one day. Watch this space.

Blackwells