The Danube Swabians seen in
Claudio Magris' book "Danube"
Review by Nick Tullius
Published at
DVHH.org Sep
2006 by Jody
McKim Pharr.
I read this book
last year, in preparation for a
river cruise on the Danube. The
French newspaper Le Monde
describes the book as “a
synthesis of history, geography,
literature, political philosophy
and intelligent tourism”. I was
hoping that the story of the
Danube Swabians would not be
missing from such a work. And I
was not disappointed.
Early on in the
book, the author writes “…the
latter days of the Hapsburg
Empire, a tolerant association
of peoples understandably
lamented when it was over, not
least when compared with the
totalitarian barbarism that
replaced it in the lands of the
Danube between the two World
Wars1….
“
An interesting
episode in the Swabian
settlement of the lower Danube
regions is reflected in the
story of “….the “Moidle-Schiff”,
the merry vessel bearing the 150
Swabian and Bavarian girls whom
Duke Karl Alexander of
Württemberg sent in 1719,
following the Peace of
Passarowitz, to the
non-commissioned officers who
had stayed behind as German
colonists in the Banat, so that
they could marry and thereby
establish that Swabian presence
in the Banat which did indeed
become one of the central
elements in the history and
culture of south-eastern Europe2….”
According to the author, the
source of this story is the book
“Navigation and Rafting on the
Upper Danube” by the engineer
Ernst Neweklowsky. It is
interesting to note that the
story of the
Moidle Schiff is also found
in the novel “Der große
Schwabenzug” by Adam
Müller-Guttenbrunn.
The main
colonization efforts are
described as follows:
“….Others who set off from Ulm,
on the old longboats known as
“crates from Ulm”, were the
German settlers on the way to
populate the Banat, those
“Donauschwaben”, Swabians of the
Danube, who for two centuries,
from the time of Maria Theresia
until the Second World War, were
to make a basic and important
contribution, now erased, to the
culture and life of the Danube
basin3….”
The situation of
Hungary-Germans during the years
of the Dual Monarchy and during
the Third Reich is described as
“….very complicated. The
German-National movement of the
German-speaking group in
Hungary, led by Jakob Bleyer,
did not identify itself with
Nazism, in spite of Bleyer’s
ideology of the Volkstum; while
Hitler, on his part, watched
after the interests of the
German minority, but made no
attempts to annex the area in
which it lived. At the same time
Hitler’s ally Horthy, leader of
the Fascist (or para-Fascist)
regime in
Hungary pursued a nationalistic
policy which came down hard on
all minorities in Hungary,
including, of course, the German
one4….”
An interesting
example of banditry is presented
in the story of the false Czar
Ivan (or Iova), the “terrible
black man” who with his army of
600 bandits had terrorized the
area between the Temes and the
Tisza around the 1520s. Ivan,
whose real name was Ferenc
Fekete, switched his allegiance
between Emperor Ferdinand of
Hapsburg and John Zápolya, the
Voivode of Transylvania, both
pretenders to the Hungarian
crown, following the loss of the
battle at Mohács (1526) against
the Turks5.
The author goes
on to describe the settlement
process after Passarowitz:
“It is a fact that after the
reconquest of Temesvár, which
Prince Eugène took from the
Turks in 1716, General Mercy, a
wise and enterprising governor,
drained swamps and repopulated
deserted plains by bringing in
immigrants from many countries.
In 1734 the town of
Becskerek was full of Spaniards,
who had there founded a New
Barcelona. The largest group of
colonists was German, summoned
in the eighteenth century by
Maria Theresia and Joseph II.
Most of them came from Swabia,
the Palatinate or the Rhineland,
descending the Danube on the Ulm
barges. They were tough,
hardworking peasants who
transformed unhealthy marshlands
into fertile soil. Swabia, one
of the heartlands of old
Germany, was thus transplanted
to the Banat; and even today, in
the areas now in Rumania, one
can in certain villages hear the
Swabian or Alemanic dialects, as
if one were in Württemberg or
the Black Forest6….”
The crucial issue
of nationalities living together
is not ignored: “….At
Pancevo, even at the end of the
nineteenth century, there were
Székely villages, while
Becskerek does not remember that
it was once a Spanish town.
Until the middle of the
nineteenth century one cannot
think of nationalism or
nationalistic movement. When
Governor Mercy called in those
German farmers, he did not
intend to “Germanize” those
lands, but simply to populate
them with skilful peasants and
artisans who would come to the
aid of enlightened progress. As
Josef Kaltenbrunner observed,
these German immigrants could
well be Rumanians or Slavs, just
as long as they had learned, and
were therefore in a position to
broadcast and diffuse, the
industry and diligence which was
typically German6….’
The great poet
Nikolaus Lenau is characterized
as “….an outstanding poet of
solitude and suffering. His
character was at one and the
same time charming and eaten
away by nothingness, by a cosmic
sadness experienced throughout
every fibre in a sensitive
nature that was ultra-musical,
neurotic and self-destructive.
His Faust, negative and
desperate as it may be, is one
of the great Fausts written
since Goethe, when the
classicism of Goethe, loyal
despite everything to the notion
that human history had some
meaning, was subverted
throughout European culture by a
profound crisis, the conviction
of meaninglessness and nullity.
His Faust, who kills himself
because he feels that he is no
more than a vague dream dreamt
by God, or rather by an
Everything that is as indistinct
as it is wicked, is a work of
great poetic merit, in which the
errant multi-nationality of
Lenau overflows into a
universality innocent of any
Danubian local colour7….”
The ambiguous
attitude of the Danube Swabians
during the revolution of 1848 is
discussed in connection with the
process of Magyarization that
got underway at the same time.
“….In the upheavals of 1848 the
Swabians of the
Banat [….] did not know how to
act: they did not know who they
were. With a leaning towards
loyalty to the Hapsburgs, and
surrounded by Hungarians, they
were on the face of it
threatened by the Hungarians,
and therefore their enemies8….”
“In Temesvár
there were in 1902 twelve German
newspapers, twelve Hungarian,
and one Rumanian. However, the
process of Magyarization made
deep inroads into the German
presence. Adam
Müller-Guttenbrunn describes the
increasing loss of nationality,
the shrinking of the German
schools, the Magyarization of
first names and surnames, and
the way that portraits of
Francis Joseph gradually
vanished from the walls of
Swabian houses. [….] In an
amusing controversy in 1916, the
burgomaster of Temesvár
challenged Müller-Guttenbrunn
and his claims for the rights of
the German minority; but the
burgomaster who championed
Magyarization was a Swabian9.”
About the
post-WWII years, the author
notes that “….In 1972
Ceausescu himself officially
condemned the forced
transportation of Serbs and
Germans and the expropriation of
their lands – measures decided
on by the Rumanian government
years before10….”
In the following years, there
was what turned out to be a last
flourishing of German writing in
Romania: “….More than a
hundred works of literature were
published between 1944 and 1984,
and poetry in dialect has taken
a new life11….”
Part of this literature were the
works of Herta Müller. In
closing this little book review,
here are the comments of Claudio
Magris on these works: “….
Herta Müller writes about the
village, like so many earlier
writers of the Banat, but her
village is the place of absence,
in which obscure things, strung
out senselessly in sentences
lacking in predicates, speak of
the oppressive alienation of the
world and also of the individual
from himself. Owing to the new,
alienating “village literature”
flourishing in
Austria with Bernhard, Handke or
Innerhofer, Herta Müller
explores its dark, sensitive
roots in an original manner.
When she theorizes about it, she
occasionally falls (like her
models) into a stereotyped
attitude not without a dash of
arrogance12….”
The book was
written before the fall of
Ceausescu, so that the
subsequent exodus of Banat
Swabians from Romania is
obviously not covered. Should he
ever consider a new issue of the
book, I am sure that Claudio
Magris would deplore that course
of events as much as the writer
of this short review.
Magris, Claudio:
Danube; Collins Harvill, London
1990; ISBN 0-00-272074-4:
|
1
p. 30 |
|
2
p. 65 |
|
3
p. 74 |
|
4
p. 281 |
|
5
pp. 283, 284 |
|
6
pp. 294, 295 |
|
7
p. 300 |
|
8
p. 307 |
|
9
p. 307 |
|
10
p. 305 |
|
11
p. 306 |
|
12
p. 306 |
Biographical Note
Claudio Magris
is a scholar and critic
specializing in German
literature and culture, who has
been teaching at the University
of Turin and the University of
Trieste. He has published works
of literary criticism and
translations of works by Ibsen,
Kleist, and Schnitzler. His book
“Danube” has been translated in
every major European language.
NT
