The Danube (46 page)

His mention of the Rhine reminds me how close I now am to the end of my own journey. It is as though, as one reaches the source of the Danube, the Rhine comes closer, and the two rivers compete for every word, as well as every stream. ‘I was rather lazy,’ Volker Enseler says, ‘and never changed jobs in my life – which gave me a rather good pension.’ He calculates he needs about a hundred Euros a day for his walk, for accommodation, food and wine. Forty to sixty for a room for the night, twenty to thirty for a good evening meal, and the rest on his lunch, entry tickets for museums – ‘or a second glass of wine or beer in the evenings – after sweating all day!’ His job at the nuclear power station was safety – workers’ safety, plant
safety, nuclear safety – ‘to make sure the whole thing didn't fly up into the air!’ Given that it still appears firmly fixed to the ground, he regards his work as a success. He thinks he'll make it to Budapest in four or five years’ time, at this rate. We trade addresses. A few days later, I get an elegant, humorous email from him: he's had to cut short his journey. His feet were giving him grief. But not to worry; his journey downstream will continue.

The Danube winds upstream through the lowlands of Bavaria, or so it seems to me, with so many mountains at my back. The landscape is overcrowded with houses, with roads, with progress. This is small-town Germany. I pause in Niederalteich, in search of girls in short skirts. According to my cyclists’ travel guide, a church commission to investigate why so many children – one in six – were born out of wedlock here, concluded that it was because the local women wore such short skirts; the men could not restrain themselves.
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I spot only some Turkish girls, wearing decent long dresses and pretty headscarves. No doubt the bishops would be much relieved.

In Bogenberg, on the left bank of the Danube – the right-hand side on my journey – I find a hill at last, and drive up to the Maria Himmelfahrt pilgrimage church. I prefer the German word
Himmelfahrt
(‘sky-journey’) to the English ‘Ascension’. It reminds me of the Prophet Mohammed's ‘Night Journey’ from Mecca to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem to Heaven, on his famous mount Buraq. This, in turn, reminds me of Marko Kraljević's journey on his famous horse Sarac (‘dappled’). The pilgrimage church has a fine octagonal tower, but feels dark and oppressive inside. I soon find what I'm looking for: the statue of Mary. In 1104 a statue of Mary was found on the Danube shore at the foot of the hill, rather like the crosses all the way downstream at Dervent in Romania. The local villagers took this as a sign of grace, and when the local lord installed the statue in a chapel in his castle a steady flow of pilgrims arrived to see the miraculous Madonna. In 1679 Father Balthasar Regler had the statue undressed ‘for scientific purposes’ and discovered that it depicted a pregnant Mary. From then on, women hoping to conceive, or praying for a safe pregnancy, flocked to the Bogenberg.
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During the Thirty Years’ War, when Swedish troops swept through Bavaria, they targeted all ‘Catholic’ objects in their Protestant religious zeal, and the poor pregnant Mary was hurled back down the steep hill into the Danube below. Here the stories diverge. According to one version, the statue was caught on the branches of trees – a completely
logical conclusion, even for a blond, strong-armed Swede – and returned to the church. But the statue just inside the doorway to the right, according to my guidebook, is not the original. Loyal Catholics have done everything they can to make it seem so. A rather chubby-faced, sad Mary, wearing an elaborate crown, rests her hands on her distended belly, which has a window in it through which one can see an embryonic Jesus. If this is not the original statue, where is that now? Might the Swedish throw have been effective after all? Might the Madonna still be making her watery way down the river, fertilising the fields and maidens on her way?

As statues go, I prefer the little wooden musical box, a model of a village church at the back of the building, with the inscription:
‘Beim Kirchlein wirf ein Zehnerl ein, dann wird's Dir Aug' und Ohr erfreun’
– ‘throw ten pfennigs into this little chapel, to make your ears and eyes delight …’ A fifty-pfennig coin would bring the same pleasure, the text continues, while those who are ‘strong in sacrifice’ are invited to put a whole German Deutschmark in (someone has kindly changed this to ‘Euro’) – ‘for this you will be amazed by the sweetness of the song, and the glory of the light!’ Such an invitation is hard to refuse. After a few seconds of clunking and whirring, a simple tune begins and the doors of the church swing open. A little priest comes out, smiling, looks around, and goes back inside.

The sun sets into the Danube at exactly ten minutes past seven. I still have an hour's drive ahead to reach Regensburg in the dark.

Regensburg is the northernmost point of the Danube, arching up all the way from Passau, then down again through Ulm towards Donaueschingen and its mysterious source. The hotel I have chosen proves disappointing. It's overpriced, and the sheets smell of cigarette smoke – presumably from the laundry room where they were hung to dry. But there's a fine Italian restaurant in the old town, and the magnificent stone bridge, built between 1135 and 1146 by Duke Henry the Proud, is the oldest on the whole of the Danube. It is built of rectangular blocks of yellow sandstone, each column resting on a hull-shaped island, with twelve arches which slope gently to a peak in the middle. It is both simple and austere, like a crusader's helmet, with none of the baroque flourishes that later infected Germany and Austria.

I escape my hotel room in the early morning to watch the sun rise over the river. The cathedral is closed, but I find
Laugenbrötchen
– alkaline rolls,
so named because of their peculiar orange-white glaze – and take them down to the bridge for my breakfast. Pigeons coo loudly under the arches and in the tall towers, and the cobblestones are already peppered with people cycling to work or walking to school. The bridge, reads the plaque, was blown up on 25 April 1945, but subsequently restored. The astronomer Johannes Kepler came from Regensburg. I imagine him crossing and recrossing this bridge, gazing up at the stars. The clock tower at the south end of the bridge has a particularly beautiful weather vane, of a quarter moon attached to a silver sun emerging from leaves, as though the sun is a head of thistledown. The Danube is dark green here, like jade, and the bridge makes intricate, filigree patterns in its waters.

Close by, on the Marcus Aurelius bank, the diesel tug
Freudenau
is moored. Built during the Second World War, she was withdrawn from service in 1993 after fifty-one years’ work on the Danube, the last spent manoeuvring barges in the harbour in Linz. Next to her is another museum ship, the
Ruthof / Érsekcsanád
, built in Regensburg in 1922. Launched as the
Ruthof
, she was sunk in the Danube in southern Hungary near Érsekcsanád by the Royal Air Force in 1944. Raised from the riverbed by the Hungarian Mahart shipping company in 1956, the year of the Hungarian revolution, she was restored and put back into active service. In 1979 the Hungarians sold her to the city of her birth, and the ship has housed a shipping museum since 1983.

Kelheim is the highest navigable point on the Danube. From here the Altmuhl river forms the final section of the Danube–Rhine–Main canal, which connects the Danube waterway to the North Sea. Completed in 1993, this makes it possible to cross Europe from north to south by boat, without ever going ashore. This was much heralded by the transport lobby, and feared by the ecologists, as the precondition for a massive surge of river transport – a breakthrough in efforts to turn the Danube into a watery motorway. That has not happened, partly due to the blow all shipping received from NATO in 1999, partly due to the falling water level in the Danube as a result of climate change.

The high ground between the Danube and the Altmuhl at Kelheim was the site of an important
oppidum
or urban settlement of the Celts. The archaeological museum has a rich collection of Celtic and Roman finds.
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It is still shut for its winter break, but the staff are already preparing
for the first exhibition of the new season and let me in to look around. While the kilns found at Vinča and elsewhere in the Lower and Middle Danube were for smelting copper and possibly gold, of the Celts excelled at extracting iron. ‘Kelheim ramparts’ are known by archaeologists the Celtic world as ramparts of earthworks around hill fortresses, with protruding wooden poles for the defensive walls that were also made of thick wood. The
oppidum
at Kelheim is enormous, with ramparts all along the Altmühl river and to the west, eight kilometres long, linking the Altmühl to the Danube. No ramparts were necessary on the Danube side of the triangle – the tall, limestone cliffs along the left, northerly bank form excellent defences. Inside the ramparts iron ore was mined. These now appear like dimples in the thickly forested plateau. Twenty-one ovens and slag heaps have been found where iron was smelted. Kelheim (Alcmoenna to the Celts) was a centre of weapons production. In the grave of one warrior his full military equipment is buried with him: lance, spear, shield, bow and arrows. The jewellery found in the women's graves is particularly beautiful – necklaces of polished glass beads of red, blue, green and yellow, Bernstein pearls, fritte and millefiori.

The Danube gorge runs six kilometres between Kelheim and Weltenburg, with cragged limestone cliffs eighty metres high, like a baby version of the Iron Gates between Serbia and Romania. The lime was valuable to the Celts in their smelting work. The cliffs have been given nicknames through the ages because of the faces which appear to travellers by boat, especially if they've had a bottle or two of the dark beer of the Weltenburg Abbey which claims to be the oldest brewery in the world, dating back to 1050. The ‘three brothers’, the ‘stone virgin’, and the ‘two kissers’ gaze down on me. I park my car as close to the abbey as I can and cycle beside the Danube. On the river bank is a monument to three US servicemen, ‘who lost their lives at this spot in the Danube on September 16th 1975. They met their deaths on active service for our freedom’, reads the inscription on the white stone plinth. According to American War Memorials Overseas Inc., Lucky J. Cordle, Robert S. Adams and Dennis M. Reihan drowned in a training accident. ‘They were in a rubber dingy with twelve other soldiers attempting to cross the Danube in a manoeuvre using a rope by pulling the boat across hand over hand. The current plunged the boat into the rope, flipping it over.’ The conflict they died in is listed as the ‘Cold War’.

The city of Ingolstadt is dedicated to the motorcar. Driving along the highway, I pass parking lots of new Opels – huge meadows of them, all different colours like fields of mechanical corn. All major towns in Germany have their own vehicle registration plate, so you can work out where they come from. In October 2006, the socialist government in Hungary invited heads of state from around the world to take part in celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution. Unable to find enough smart cars in Hungary to take them around, or for some other reason, they ordered fifty identical Opels from Ingolstadt, some of them armoured. The convoy into town from the airport all had ING number plates. On the day – 23 October – the show was stolen by a single Hungarian protester who hijacked a museum exhibit – a Soviet T-54 tank – and drove it crazily at police who were firing rubber bullets into a peaceful crowd.
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Siegfried Geissler waits for me at the entrance to the hunting lodge at Grünau, between Neuburg and Ingolstadt. The castle is in thick woods between the main road and the Danube on our right. It was built as a wedding gift of Duke Ottheinreich for his wife Susanna in 1530, and is rented by environmentalists as an exhibition space. Hunting lodges
(Jagdschlösser)
and pleasure palaces (
Lustschlösser
) are rather interchangeable words in German. As the danger of war passed the aristocracy emerged from their fortified castles and started to enjoy themselves. The lodge at Grunau has white, rounded walls and a steeply sloping red-tiled roof. Our footsteps echo on the cobblestones as we enter the inner courtyard. Inside one of the rooms there is a model of the whole Danube river laid out on a long table. I trace my journey so far with my hand.
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The palace stands alone in the woods, next to the long-distance cycle path. We drive down a sandy track into the wetlands towards the Danube. This is the only national park in Germany that is part of the network of wetland forest restoration projects along the Danube. Hannes Seehofer in Grimsing gave me Siegfried's number. He's in close contact with Georg Frank in Orth in Austria, Jaromír Šibl in Bratislava, and the ecologists in Hungary, Croatia and all the way to the mouth of the river – guardians of the last flood plains, restorers of kinks and twists in the river, which earlier generations had devoted themselves to straightening out. The woods are mostly oak and ash and maple with some young elm, survivors of Dutch elm disease. But the elms rarely survive beyond their twentieth year, and the ash are
also threatened by disease. The whole landscape is pregnant with the expectation of spring. There are boxes on the ground and high among the trees, collecting beetles and bugs, evidence of the impact of the work being done to restore the forest to something closer to its natural state.

Siegfried has a bushy beard and hair turning grey from his drawn-out negotiations with landowners to persuade them to let the Danube return to their lands. If the environmental organisations can drum up enough money, they buy the woods from them. If they can't, they try to rent them, on behalf of the river. The negotiations are tough, and he is often dispirited. ‘Many people see the forests purely as a source of income from timber, to be milked dry.’ We stand on a sandy bank in the pale March woods, studying a foaming, blue marble stream gushing between deep banks. Closer examination reveals that this river is actually flowing over a creek, on a specially built bridge. It is the first water flyover I have ever seen. ‘Two years ago there was no river here at all, there was no water flowing through the floodplains. Only the canalised Danube, with no connection to its surroundings. So we have created a new river! The first four kilometres we cut from the Danube bank, so that section is new. Then we reconnected it to the old meanders.’ For the first time in a hundred years, water flooded the area. It was the highpoint in a project which took Siegfried and his colleagues ten years to prepare, five years to carry out, and which will affect the landscape for hundreds. When the sluices are opened, six hundred cubic metres a second flow through the new side-arm, to flood 250 hectares of forest. The old oaks have been saved from cutting. Just upstream of the Bergheim hydropower station we come to the Danube, less a river here than the storage lake of the power plant. The bed of the lake is thick with mud, while most species of fish need running water, and gravel to spawn in – which the new system facilitates.