Reading the Danube (Resubmission)

I have always been attracted to water. That sentence was written in 1995 by the Austrian-American photographer Inge Morath looking back on her first journey along the Danube in 1958, in the middle of the Cold War. In May 1958 she hired a Volkswagen and set off from Donaueschingen. At first, she says, she felt a certain panic: How many ways are there of photographing water, and what can the result communicate? Then I calmed down again: Rivers are more than water; they have a history, written by the generations living on their banks. This multilayered and ambivalent aspect, which Morath ascribes to her Danube photographs, and which she after some initial hesitation sees as a boon, is also a leitmotif of this transnational research project. The Danube, the second longest river in Europe, flows past or through ten different countries. In the 19th century, for example, the idea of the Danube stabilised as a ribbon connecting a variety of peoples and the West with the East. This overarching transnational metaphor declined for some time throughout the 20th century; and other metaphors replaced it that expressed the relationships of only a limited number of Danube countries. The narratives of the river as the great integrator (Esterhzy 1992) for a European macro-region in the 20th century have been consolidated especially at times of radical transformation, e.g. in the years after the First and Second World Wars, around 1989 at the time of the collapse of the Communist system in Europe, and also during the wars in Yugoslavia. The aim of the research project is to analyse (trans)national, identity-forming narratives relating to the Danube. The investigation focuses on image and text media in which the Danube assumes a certain shape and reality for social communities and becomes a vehicle of their identification, i.e. in literary texts, photographs and films. Those narratives are to be analysed for both their inherent narrative logic and their cross-media interrelationships and transcultural translations. The transnational and transdisciplinary approach is reflected in the composition of the research team and in the organisational structure of the project. Two research institutions are collaborating on the project (Austrian Academy of Sciences/Institute of Cultural Sciences and Theatre History, Vienna; Institute of Danube-Swabian History and Regional Studies, Tübingen) and cooperating with several international partners along the Danube. In addition to its many implications for a cultural history, the project has significant impacts on our understanding of modern developments in Central and Eastern Europe. It shows how important a critical, scientifically founded discourse on the Danube and its narratives can be, as the river and its landscape have long been and are still being instrumentalized in support of a wide variety of identities at the regional, national and transnational levels.

What makes the Danube special is not its size, but the diversity of the characteristics attributed to it. The second longest river in Europe, it touches or flows through ten states. Many of these states have repeatedly changed in number and name over the last two centuries. Nevertheless, since the 19th century, the Danube has been relatively consistently portrayed as a coherent landscape that connects not only peoples but also regions of the world. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, this portrayal has been used to negotiate the position of communities, nations, as well as an entire large European region and its center-periphery relations. The Danube first took on its distinctive narrative form in media: Literary texts, travelogues, photographs, and films have given the river its cultural structure, form, and contour. The river has become a recognizable (and often contested) surface of identification through the interplay of intertwined narratives. Our research analyzes how these narratives emerged, reshaped, and evolved over the 20th and 21st centuries. We have therefore elaborated on: 1) The Danube's most important narrative forms of representation in visual, film, and textual media, their variations, combinations, and deviations. 2) the technical reconfiguration of the river and its insertion into utilitarian contexts, on the one hand, and the progressive stylization of e.g. the Danube floodplain into a "pristine" landscape on the other. 3) the consequences of the imperial development of the Danube region through the expansion of the "Danube waterway" in the 19th century, the slow victory of the nation-state paradigm, and the decline of supranational empires during the late 19th and 20th centuries. We particularly examined how various national codifications and recodifications engross the same landscape (e.g. the Iron Gate). 4) how river metaphors shape imaginaries of time and history: The metaphor of the Danube as a "stream of history" accompanied the notion of a uniform course of progress, as assumed by the idealistic philosophy of history. Yet the river also repeatedly appeared as a motif in which this progress was called into question: Its banks display the traces of violence committed by totalitarian regimes. 5) the hypothesis that the whole of the river, from source to mouth, is brought forth through the prism of various medial lenses and translated into the logic of various media. We analyze topoi like the delta and the bridge to illustrate specific, interdependent relationships between river and communication, river and translation. Our research was more about the narratives of the Danube than about the river itself. Its results, most of them published open access, analyze a broad spectrum of technical and ecological discourses, spatial concepts, and memory-political scenarios along the river which have decisively shaped European imagery.