Politics and Poetics: Narratives of a (Central-)European River

Abstract

The Danube, along with Galicia and Bukovina, was the landscape most commonly associated—between 1955 and 1989—with a widely understood lost Austrian identity and with Austrian Central Europe. The article examines two books on the Danube which are based on a combination of geographical and historical perspectives and establishing a correlation between the Habsburg tradition and the wider Central European space. Both authors had personally visited the places they write about, but their works are not reducible to mere travel descriptions or trip reports. Ernst Trost’s book Die Donau. Lebenslauf eines Stromes was published in 1968, a few years after the Habsburg heritage study Das Blieb vom Doppeladler, which also contained a description of the Danube journey. Claudio Magris’s book Danubio can in turn be seen as a continuation of a dissertation written twenty years earlier (Der Habsburgische Mythos in der modernen österreichischen Literatur) on the literary “afterlife” of the Habsburg Monarchy. If Trost’s book bears the hallmarks of the Cold War, Magris’s is a product of the new discourses on Central Europe that emerged in the 1980s. Both books are not only embedded in the political discourses of their time, but practically “reinvent” the Danube as a political and poetic theme. In a comparative analysis of the two books, the starting point is the central theme of both texts, each of which is a Danube master-narrative. The paper then considers how the two Danube books structure spaces and set boundaries; then general questions of genre affiliation are treated.