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
