The Danube (47 page)

Because the level of the lake is constant, unlike that of a normal river, the managers of the project have to imitate Nature, periodically allowing the water through the sluice gates to flood the forest. Studies carried out by researchers from the University of Munich already show excellent results: forty-two kinds of fish breeding in the flooded forest out of the forty-seven which used to be found here before the dam was built in the 1970s, and using the new system of waterways to migrate upstream. Siegfried sees the region, in its healthy state, as a game of give and take
between the river and local inhabitants. The last big, natural flood was in 1999, and he's hoping the next will come soon. ‘Within a couple of years, people forget about floods and the problems they cause, and look for ways of using the land for industry, or for building houses. The Danube was until recently an Alpine river here, full of gravel, with three or four branches flowing through it, five or six kilometres wide, changing dynamically all the time. This must have been a wonderful place a hundred years ago!’

All the electricity created by the four power stations on the Danube, Bertholdsheim, Neuburg, Bergheim and Ingolstadt, is used by the German railway system, the Bundesbahn. ‘Is it not better that that power comes from hydroelectric, than from nuclear or coal?’ I ask. He's very glad, he says, that Germany has just decided to phase out nuclear power – the result of thirty years campaigning by the Greens. But the downside is that it has increased pressure for more hydropower. He is convinced, however, that the great workhorse of German industry can be fed with renewable energy alone – more efficient, less environmentally harmful hydropower, biomass from the woods, wind-power and solar energy. ‘We should use the woods more efficiently – and not sell them to Canada for toilet paper! If we can fuel Germany, as a heavily industrialised country, with renewable energy forms, then anybody can – we could be a model for the whole world! We are talking about the return of the Danube – but there's still a lot of work to do.’

We stand for a while in silence, breathing the river. That contrast of the dead mud of the storage lake and the living gravel of the shallow, unharnessed, or restored shores of the river, resonates through my journey. In the distance I see pine trees, near the shore, and remember them from the previous summer, between Ram and Golubac in Serbia.

Siegfried smiles. ‘The river brings the pinecones downstream, from the Black Forest.’ Nature recovers. Beavers were reintroduced into the wild here some years ago. Now there are so many of them they are exported all over Europe, to forests wherever they are needed. ‘There were some left in the wild in Poland, and in the eastern part of Germany on the Elbe, but all the rest of the beavers in Europe come from here.’

I drive on main roads, then, weary of the heavy, relentless traffic, return to the river. Near Lauringen on the south bank I see strange wooden
sculptures beside the road. There is a strong scent of wild garlic through the open window. It grows everywhere along the roadside, among the sculptures. I stop and ring the bell of a house with a garden full of carved wood. A woman comes to the door with intense, sparkling eyes. Jutta is delighted to have a visitor – ‘Come in, come in!’ I hesitate, suddenly scared by the staring eyes of the sculpted wood. Fairy stories from my childhood encroach along the edges of my minds, of witches in the woods. But there is something reassuring in her tone and generous in her welcome, so I follow her through her house. The walls of each room are woven with some soft, organic matter – wasps’ nests she tells me proudly. They are like a cross between a honey‐comb and a snowflake. On another wall are the curving crusts of snake skins. ‘They watch me from the forest,’ she says, ‘then they lead me to where they have left their old skins, in spring.’ There is one particularly huge one, almost cobra‐like. She laughs like a little girl – ‘Well, that one I got from the zoo!’ In her living room she unwraps for me her latest, and greatest, treasure: a crystal human skull. This she uses for prophecy. She tells fragments of her story as we walk among her art. She was a successful trainer of racehorses, but gave it all up to come and live and work here. She inherited land from her father, and some of the wood she works with is bog oak, or moor oak, dug up on her own land. Before I leave I ask if I can write about her in my book. She consults her spindle, which she produces from a pocket and dangles in mid-air from a thread. The thin wooden object like a spinning top starts to revolve, clockwise. ‘Yes!’ she says happily. She gives me her card, handmade, with a four-leafed clover carefully mounted on the top.

Not far from Jutta's house, huge meadows of black solar collectors tilt towards the sun like sunflowers. I can almost imagine them turning to follow the sun all day, but not even the Germans have thought of that yet. Or perhaps they have, but these look rather static. And beyond the meadows, the arch-enemy of the solar panels: a nuclear power station. I see it first in double, its cooling towers reflected in what might be a lake, or flooded fields between pollarded willows. The vast, concave concrete towers look almost beautiful, four of them rather than two, in the still waters fringed by trees. But I am still under Jutta's spell.

CHAPTER 14

The Tailor of Ulm

U
LM IS
the last city before the source of the Danube. I arrive in the evening with nowhere to stay, and wander enchanted through this old town of fishermen and boat-builders. Down by the water's edge is a labyrinth of houses leaning into the River Blau. I ask for a room in the most ancient, most beamed, most leaning house I can find, which looks like the stern of a battleship from the Spanish Armada. No space. I would probably need to book it years in advance. But Ulm is so beautiful, I wouldn't mind if I have to sleep on the riverbank. These three-letter German towns, Ilz and Ulm, have a certain power, like words in an incantation. I find a room in a clean, more modern place, eat pikeperch in a leaning pub washed down with local beer, and fall asleep to the music of water. Wherever you go in Ulm, you can hear the rivers flowing. And the bells of the Minster chiming.

The next day I make my way to the ancient church. The massive Bible on the pulpit is open at Saint Mark's Gospel: ‘
Und er fing abermals an, zu lehren am Meer. Und es versammelte sich viel Volks zu ihm, also daβ er muβte in ein Schiff treten und auf dem Wasser sitzen; und alles Volk stand auf dem Lande am Meer. Und er predigte ihnen lange durch Gleichnisse
…’ ‘And he began again to teach by the sea side: and there was gathered unto him a great multitude, so that he entered into a ship, and sat in the sea and the
whole multitude was by the sea on the land. And he taught them many things by parables …’

Along the choir stalls, in oak reddened by age, are the heads of women on one side, men facing them on the other. Carved by Jörg Syrlin between 1469 and 1474, they represent the wise women and men, philosophers and oracles of Greek and Roman times. All are magnificent, but the Cumaean Sibyl has the best bonnet, a sort of horned construction sprouting from her head, with a diadem in the middle. In a side chapel are stained glass windows from the 1430s, their colours as bright as the day they were made. My favourite is of Noah, climbing up through what looks like the big white chimney of his ark to greet the returning dove, white on a deep blue sky. Noah himself, bearded and patriarchal, wears a purple jacket that Mick Jagger would be pleased to be seen in, and what looks like a heaven-blue kippa on the back of his head. His chimney protrudes from a house with rather medieval-looking roof tiles, while the faces of his sons gaze out of the windows below. The house is the centrepiece of his ark, golden-coloured with a fine prow which looks like a pulpit, on a stormy, light blue sea.

The young woman selling postcards at the entrance to the cathedral is big with child, and her face angelic enough to inspire another Jörg Syrlin. She seems aglow like a stained glass figure in astonishment at her precious cargo. The cathedral boasts the tallest cathedral spire in the world, at 161.53 metres, 534 feet. Begun by several generations of master builders from the Parler family, who also built the St Vitus cathedral in Prague, the spire was only completed in 1890, 513 years after the then mayor, Lutz Krafft, laid the foundation stone.
²
It towers over the marketplace, which swarms with stalls selling all the fruits of Bavaria, Baden-Wu¨rttemberg and beyond. Ulm is a town that, like Passau, grew rich as a river trading post on the Danube. It has kept that sense of prosperity, though today it is a quiet backwater compared to cities it must once have considered its inferiors. In the excellent market I count fourteen different kinds of potato on one man's stall, and buy cheeses and salads for a picnic by the river.

One of the side streets off the cathedral square leads down towards the Bread Museum. I spot a small tailor's shop and go inside to negotiate emergency repairs to the increasingly precarious button which holds my trousers up. The Turkish tailor gallantly offers to sew it back on
immediately, then gets into deep conversation with one customer after another. Meanwhile I sit, trouserless and rather self-conscious, behind a curtain. The bells chime noon and I put my head round the corner. ‘Are you still there? A thousand apologies!’ Turgut comes from Erzurum, in the far east of Turkey, where his father ran a coffee shop. He moved first to Ankara, then to Germany in 1964 at the age of twenty-six. He came for better work and better money than he could earn at home. First he got a job as an interpreter, in Hanau near Frankfurt, because his German was rather good. Then a friend told him there was a shop to rent in Ulm. He's been here ever since, for forty-four years. The Danube dilutes his homesickness. ‘I'm glad that I live so close to a river which flows all the way to the Black Sea.’ Turkey, he reminds me, is sandwiched between the Black Sea and the White Sea – the Mediterranean. Then he teaches me some Turkish Black Sea dialect. In everyday Turkish
ben gidiorum
means ‘I go’, but on the Black Sea coast they say
ben jideirum
. He has two sons and two daughters. The two sons stayed in Germany when they married, and each has a three-year-old child, but both his daughters went back to Turkey. One teaches German in Ankara – to inspire another generation of Turguts, perhaps, to come west up the Danube to seek their fortune. His workshop is spick and span, but crowded with the tools and finished items of his trade. There are Pfaff sewing machines mounted on the tables, clothes on hangers all around the room, and yellow and orange tape-measures like strands of spaghetti. Turgut wears a grey suit, black cardigan and a light orange shirt. On one window ledge is a vase full of fresh roses and carnations. In the window is a big sign – ‘We alter and repair all items!’

At the bottom of his road, the Bread Museum reminds me of the Paprika Museum in Kalocsa, but without that intense burning sensation in the eyes.
³
‘Documentation of the great famines of history, and of the current food shortage in the world is a special task of the museum,’ reads the sign at the entrance. ‘What is not put on display, however, is bread, because bread is not the stuff of museums, but of everyday nourishment.’ A little didactic, I think, but true enough. There is a reconstruction of an Ulm bakery in 1910, with great vats for the dough and mannequins shaping loaves with their bare hands. There are oil paintings of people returning from the fields after a long day harvesting wheat. There is a model of a rotating stone mill from 4000
BC
, and a sign that once hung
outside a local baker's shop, of two wolves rampant supporting a magnificent golden pretzel. Ulm Minster is mounted on the top with the date 1657.

Back on the shore of the Danube there is a monument to the Danube Swabians, who boarded their boats here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and rowed and sailed downriver in search of a better life in the East.
⁴
The Habsburg Queen Maria Teresa offered them hard work and rich rewards to replace a Hungarian population devastated by war and disease. A hundred thousand Germans emigrated to the Hungarian kingdom between 1740 and 1790, and most set out from the landing-stage in Ulm. They settled in five main areas, in the south and west of Greater Hungary, and in Transylvania. Their diligence in draining the marshes beside the Danube and its tributaries transformed the landscape, and laid the foundations for the agricultural prosperity of many districts. But the chance for younger generations to enjoy that heritage was undone in eight brief years during the mid-twentieth century. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, they were expelled from their lands, abused, and, in Yugoslavia at least, starved to death in the years following the Second World War. Two girls and a boy perch on the steps of the monument, watching the river go by. Theresa and Geraldine are both aged eighteen, born in Ulm, and thinking of moving on. Geraldine has a job for the summer in the café of a swimming pool, Theresa isn't working at the moment, but prefers not to say why. She dreams of going ‘somewhere up-river … maybe to Stuttgart’, to start a new life. Erdem has a dark, Turkish complexion, compared to the pale German girls. He wears a black and white woolly hat from Guatemala, and talks about leaving too. But he would go further north, to Hamburg, if he gets the chance. We talk near the Schwal, a small island with a backwater just off the main Danube. From the landing stage here, from 1570 onwards, the flat-bottomed barges known as
Zille
, or ‘Ulm-boxes’, carried people, animals and goods all the way down the Danube as far as the Black Sea. It was on the
Zille
, too, that the famous clay Ulm pipes were carried to market, while the tobacco to fill them came upstream, from the warmer lands to the south. The last freight barge left here in 1897, bound for Vienna. Erdem, Geraldine and Theresa pose for a photograph. Erdem puts his arms around the girls. The Danube flows behind them, with a weeping willow glowing almost fluorescent on
the bank and seagulls diving in the dark waters. The horse chestnuts are just coming into bud. Three kids, just starting out. An image of a harmonious, modern Germany.