The language I use is lacking, its grammar is the dual necessary to conjugate and inflect the continuous substance of life without misinterpretations.
If one would like to summarize in one single sentence this work by the author Claudio Magris, native of Trieste, these would be the exact words I would personally use.
What is the Danube? This is the leading question – the Leitmotiv – which guides the narration though out this book. What kind of world sprouts around the Danube? Which horizon of existence is born along its banks? Is the Danube a German river? Is the Austro-Hungarian Empire a German empire? This is a book of questions, which in the most cases receive ambiguous answers, dual answers: there is always a “yes, but”, a “yes, but not exactly” or a “yes, but not only”. The Danube – along with everything that inhabit its banks – is ambiguous, uncertain, dual when things are fine, or an inextricable chaos when the situation is at its worst.
The book presents itself almost like an aerial flight that follows the great river’s itinerary, and the narration casually stops to tell the stories connected to the places which the river flows through. Like every good story, the narration starts from the beginning, from the uncertain sources of Danube: perhaps its water flows out from a faucet or a gutter, perhaps it comes from a tributary, perhaps from something else. In conclusion the Danube, like many other things, comes out of nowhere, of uncertainty and randomness. In relation to the origin of the Donau one could grasp an almost ironic fatalistic disposition, something typically Austro-Hungarian, as one can perceive a fatalistic note in the history of Donaumonarchie, especially in its last moments of existence.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire is a German empire, but not exactly. It is a strong empire which however tragically collapses under its differences – and only in the moment when those differences, quite rapidly, become significant, when Catholicism and Donaumonarchie are not sufficient anymore in order to keep together nations with different lineage. One of the many contradictions that this book offers is the struggle between one and multiple, one and dual, which then becomes politics, or better geopolitics. It is the contradiction between the strong and encyclopedic thought of the XIX century and the weak one which grows at the end of the same century, giving start to the tragic awareness of vacuity of the ‘900, that will cause the falling of empires and the upheaval of the First World War – legitimately considered more like a civil war by the eyes of XIX century’s protagonists.
Along the Danube some of the greatest elements of our history come to life, from the On the Blue Danube to Heidegger, from the dream of a peaceful Empire, multinational and fraternal, to the horrors of a war, the First, which leads to the dreadful supremacy of nationalism and ideologies – supremacy that will color with hatred a great part of ‘900; from the Ancient Regime to its death under cannot shots.
Danubio by Magris offers both an obsessively complete and a totally fortuitous painting of Danube’s world: a randomness which is intrinsic feature of this world, essential to comprehend its origins, growth and death.
Nato negli USA, da sempre vivo in Friuli. Laureato in Lettere Classiche, sono laureato in Filologia Classica presso il Collegio Superiore dell’Università di Bologna e in Studi Interdisciplinari Europei al Collegio d’Europa, campus di Natolin. Fieramente europeo, le mie giornate son in perpetua oscillazione tra Omero e il Manifesto di Ventotene. Opero giorno per giorno per costruire una nazione, un continente, una comunità che riconoscano il valore della cultura e che in essa si riconoscano.
