2024-03-21 21:57:06
Danube, the masterpiece of Claudio Magris, came out in 1986. An era very far from the present. Think about it: in 1986 there was still the Iron Curtain, separating the countries belonging to the liberal-democratic fold from the socialist ones.
Magris’ book achieved resounding success with critics and the public. “A book that defends the historical memory of Europe”, the author defined it. So many years later, what are the reasons that can push us to read it again, apart from the obvious one of increasing our erudition?
First, I would say the style lesson. “Danubio” is a highly cultured travel novel, which in some respects prefigures certain contemporary autofiction. If Magris had put aside the role of the academic in a more decisive way, if he had talked more about himself, his companions in adventure, the way in which he was going, making a bit of a Carrère of the situation, in short, his current relevance would have been even greater.
Then there is the charm of the places. In these pages we pass from Sigmaringen to Regensburg, from Vienna to Belgrade, from Sighisoara to Bucharest… In short, from the Black Forest to the Danube Delta, a river that Magris travels from West to East, while more recently Nick Thorpe has traveled it in the opposite direction , from East to West, in the direction also followed by migrants along the “Balkan route”. The journey is therefore through a multiple and multifaceted geopolitical entity, which at the time of the publication of the book had already changed profoundly compared to the “golden times” of the Habsburg monarchy, and which the great Germanist revives without misplaced nostalgia, but with affection and sometimes admiration. This entity is Central Europe, obviously. On its ashes, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, new states were born in the meantime, later devastated by wars, dictatorships, and then divided by the barrier that separated the communist world from the capitalist one. A barrier which in its turn would have collapsed in a few years, even if Magris is more interested in literature and culture in general than in current political events, which in fact emerges only at times, for example when he expresses some fear for the future of Yugoslavia (which would soon “explode”) or when he confesses a curious admiration for the social conquests achieved by Bulgarian socialism.
On the other hand, on every page we discover something: authors whose existence they were unaware of, together with other more well-known ones, from Céline to Kafka, from Celan to Heidegger, from Stifter to Grillpanzer and so on. And then events, peoples, places whose contours fade into legend, which could populate a song by Battiato (the Saxons of Transylvania, the holiday resorts in the Tatras, even the side of the hill soaked in water from which it was born, or so it seems , the Danube).
In short, we are at the heart of our identity as Europeans. At the same time, however, the Central Europe that Magris talks about today seems even further away, even if the European Union has brought many of the realities mentioned in the book under the same umbrella. Those who, like myself, visited Ceausescu’s Romania in the same year in which “Danube” was published can attest to this. Communism, by limiting contacts to a minimum with a West that traveled at 200 per hour, had put certain countries under glass, sometimes giving the traveler the feeling of being on a journey in time, not just in space (a journey backwards). This sensation, today, in the era of Globalization, no longer exists with the same intensity. But of course this doesn’t mean that every place has become the same as every other, that it has lost the power to surprise us.
2024-03-21 21:57:06