*Heinrich Heine.
From Blue River, Black Sea (2009), by Andrew Eames:
“(Claudio Magris) was by no means the first to have furrowed his brow over the Danube’s origins. The German poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) wandered over the source territory in the 1880s, and although he came to no definitive conclusion he clearly felt sympathy for the victimized B rivers. As he wrote in a letter to Karl Marx (1818-83), ‘clearly it would be easy to adhere to the thesis that there is no Danube at all, only Breg and Brigach. Thus the Danube becomes a fiction.’…
[“The steady growth of Heine’s fame in the 1820s was accelerated by a series of experiments in prose. In the fall of 1824, in order to relax from his hated studies in Göttingen, he took a walking tour through the Harz Mountains and wrote a little book about it, fictionalizing his modest adventure and weaving into it elements both of his poetic imagination and of sharp-eyed social comment. “Die Harzreise” (“The Harz Journey”) became the first piece of what were to be four volumes of Reisebilder (1826–31; Pictures of Travel); the whimsical amalgam of its fact and fiction, autobiography, social criticism, and literary polemic was widely imitated by other writers in subsequent years.” (Britannica)]
…I did the journey digitally, with the help of Google Earth. Without budging from my front room I swooped down on Donaueschingen, where the palace and its parkland had obviously been captured in the early morning, even before the vitamin-powered pensioners were up, when the railed-in button of the Donauquelle was all but invisible and the embryonic river was still hidden by a curtain of heavy shadow created by the trees. When it finally emerged, the Danube was a thin, weedy thread snared in a bushy beard and where it became more substantial it was regularly blocked by barriers which I later discovered were hydroelectric dams. Plainly they wouldn’t have been circumventable in anything bigger than a canoe.
The first rivercraft I spotted were two speedboats looking like a pair of feather-tailed swifts below Kelheim, where the Main-Donau Canal joined from the north. And here was my very first barge, followed by several more down below Regensburg, where there was big drama on the river. A barge had got stuck, and there were others skewed around it like woodlice chewing on bark, surrounded by a giant stain of mud as their propellers churned at the riverbed. Several skippers were evidently working their engines hard, unaware that their efforts were being captured by a passing satellite.
Then came Passau, whose most noticeable feature was a big railway yard and the luminous green river Inn, filled with meltwater from the Alps, which joined the jade-green Danube. And despite the Inn being the dominant partner and completely recolouring the combined waterway, it suffered from the same unwise marriage as the Breg and Brigach had done, because it too was forced to surrender its name and its bed.
Google Earth’s detail continued as far as Vienna and then, where the river changed from Upper Danube to Lower, it went impressionistic, turning to Van Goghian swirls and Klee-like spangles of colour. Instead of mucky green it became a deep, idealized blue, as if someone in Google’s Politburo had given the command that, in the absence of other info, it should be coloured to match the waltz. Occasionally details would resolve themselves out of the mist, such as the barge clusters below Belgrade, and it looked as if only one of Novi Sad‘s three bridges – all destroyed by NATO warplanes in the strikes against Serbia – was functioning normally when the Google camera had been overhead. Below Moldova Veche the banks were plainly steep and inaccessible, and then it all flattened out again and the Romanian side was covered in tiny strips, a carpet of rectangles in leftover colours of heather, russet and rust, offcuts from a lino factory. For hundreds of kilometres there was very little sign of substantial settlement anywhere near the river.
Eventually my mouse passed the point where the Black Sea Canal struck off out to Constanta, on the sea coast, but the river itself turned north, started to lose its composure and to stray distractedly into subsidiary channels. Finally it sprawled, exhausted and disintegrating, into the Delta…”
Julia Upton 