![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Claudio Magris’s revisitation of the idea of Mitteleuropa in the essay-novel Danubio is often read as a contribution to the imperial nostalgia inherent in the Habsburg myth, the process of transfiguration of Austrian history that Magris himself observed and theorized. This reading, however, suggests that in the context of the Cold War, Magris’s emphasis on the non-national legacy of Mitteleuropa, conceived as a strategy of resistance against the totalitarian reaches of authoritarian regimes, resists the allure of a straightforward and easy nostalgia. The narrator of Magris’s extended travelogue takes the reader on a textual journey through local narratives and literatures along the Danube, where a palimpsest of discarded and overwritten histories reveals neglected and almost forgotten paradigms. These rhetorical dockings on the banks of the Danube, located at the intersection of fiction and essayism, reflect upon the legacy of Mitteleuropa and attempt to chart a possible postnational future for Europe.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The question of genre remains one of the crucial issues raised by Danubio, a text defined by Luca Pocci in “Il fiume della scrittura” as a hybrid “novel-essay” (91), and by Simone Rebora in Claudio Magris as an “essay-story-reportage” (38). Ever since its publication in 1986, Magris has thwarted the attempts of straightforward taxonomic categorizations, suggesting that novelistic and essayistic elements intersect and overlap in it. When asked by Gabriella Ziani to define Danubio, Magris answered that the text is undoubtedly an “essay” with several levels of meaning that include “a sort of submerged novel” (Ziani, “Magris,” 4–5). This submerged novel is also, in Magris’s own view, a “sentimental journey in the style of Sterne” and “a sort of Danubian Decameron” (Magris, “Danubio e Post-Danubio,” 28).
2 Magris quotes György Konrád’s Antipolitik, specifically “Der Traum von Mitteleuropa,” originally a speech given in Vienna in 1984, two years before the publication of Danubio.
3 Magris, “Danubio e Post-Danubio,” 22.
4 Ibid.
5 Kundera lamented in “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” published in the New York Review of Books two years before the publication of Danubio, that the postwar division of the continent, ensuing from the Yalta Agreement, had artificially split Europe in two parts. Later, in the collection of essays The Curtain, Kundera grounds Central European cultures in a pan-continental context, arguing that the historical and literary traditions of countries such as the former Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary are genuinely European: “I explained that while there is a linguistic unity among the Slavic nations, there is no Slavic culture, no Slavic world; that the history of the Czechs, like that of the Poles, the Slovaks, the Croats, or the Slovenes (and of course, of the Hungarians, who are not at all Slavic) is entirely Western: Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, close contact with the Germanic world; struggle of Catholicism against the Reformation. Never anything to do with Russia, which was far off, another world. Only the Poles lived in direct relation with Russia—a relation much like a death struggle,” 43–44 (italics in the original).
6 For the role of Danubio in Magris’s literature and criticism, see Dupré’s work, especially Per un’epica, 29–30. For Magris and the idea of Europe, see Pireddu, Temporary Homes, the first monograph in English dedicated to Magris, and the work of Parmegiani, in particular the special issue of the Journal of European Studies on Magris and European identity.
7 With later novels such as Alla cieca and Non luogo a procedere, Magris confronts more directly the racism and antisemitism that have marked the history of Europe. In Non luogo a procedere, Magris ties the deaths at the Risiera di San Sabba to the responsibility of his hometown Trieste in the Holocaust. As Ziolkowski has pointed out in “Thomas Bernhard, Italo Calvino,” “Magris’s work is part of a current move in Italy to discuss how Italians contributed to the tragedies of the Second World War” (202).
8 Pappalardo, Modernism in Trieste, 1–45.
9 Pellegrini, Epica sull’acqua. The element of water runs through many of Magris’s works, from the Danube to the Adriatic Sea, and includes the global navigations of the sailor in Alla cieca and the emigrations across the Atlantic in Un altro mare.
10 Magris reminds us that the cultural and political imagination inherent in literary representations of Europe and the retrospective evaluation of a mission of mediation among different cultures does not necessarily or exclusively imply an attitude of imperial nostalgia. Relevant to Magris’s writings in the context of Trieste and Habsburg nostalgia are Ballinger, who in “Imperial Nostalgia” appropriately cautions historians against projecting contemporary concerns about cosmopolitanism and multicultural societies onto readings of Habsburg Trieste, and Bialasiewicz, who emphasizes in “Europe as/at the Border” that literary and political concepts of Europe are powerful metaphors of a certain vision of society. In Triest, Lunzer reconstructs the intellectual milieu in which young Magris grew up, namely in the postwar Trieste of many disillusioned Irredentists.
11 Naumann, Mitteleuropa, 58–101.
12 In the preface to Fiatti’s Le sponde del crepuscolo, Magris explains: “Mitteleuropean culture is a culture that is attentive to difference and to what represents discrepancy and deviation from totalizing concepts; it is the attention to the marginal, to the fragment, to what the journey of history leaves unresolved behind” (ix).
13 Ibid., vii–viii: “Mitteleuropa is a term that has been alive especially as the metaphor of a protest: during the two interwar years, as a protest in the name of a supranational vision against various nationalisms and fascisms, in particular the German one; after the Second World War, in countries under the hegemony of the Soviet Union, as the individual and humanist protest against Communist totalitarianism; later, but also during these decades, as the protest of an ironic individual humanism against the growing prevalence of an Anglo-Saxon and in particular American lifestyle.”
14 In Temporary Homes Pireddu suggests that “Magris’s characterization of the Mitteleuropean culture of irony as an instrument of moderation can hence be read as a counterdiscourse to the Eurocentrism of the past but also as a warning against the persisting risks of discrimination and hegemony within Europe itself… a metaphor for the broken unity of the Western world and the remedy to this fragmentation because its intrinsic pluralism substantiates the possibility of cohesion within multiplicity” (52). She continues to describe Magris’s view as follows: “Aiming to transcend both the acritically celebratory approach to the Mitteleuropean search for order and unity and the equally tendentious denigration of its discovery of fragmentation and chaos, Magris presents the Hapsburg world as the symbol of a crumbling totality, and its literature as an odyssey among those fragments” (53).
15 Ibid., 56.
16 Magris, Danube, 264: “The Danube flows broad, and the evening wind passes through the open-air cafés like the breath of an old Europe which may already be at the brink of the world and no longer produces history but only consumes it … Europe also means this café, at which we no longer find the Managing Directors of the Weltgeist, but at the most the functionaries of one of the lesser branches, who do not make decisions but carry them out …”
17 In his interview in 1995 with Stelio Vinci, Magris claimed he felt “he is Europe when… at the Caffè San Marco” (Vinci, “Interview with Magris,” 161).
18 Magris, Danube, 265: “We should not take it for granted that Europe is irreparably destined to play this role of operatic confidante… In Budapest, certainly, one can discern this feeling of a Europe ‘after the show,’ but the city is not, as Vienna is, just a setting for the remembrance of past glories. It is also a robust, full-blooded city, which suggests the strength which Europe could and should possess, if it found a way of making use of all its multiple energies, and unified its forces, instead of wearing them away in a perpetual annulment, a state of permanent stalemate. In Budapest one thinks intensely of the decline, or the feared or decreed decline, of Europe, and simply because Europe is still there: its sun is still high above the horizon and gives good warmth, but at the same time it is veiled by clouds and curtains, which imperiously remind us of its declining phase.”
19 Ibid.
20 Urzidil, Prager Triptychon, 12.
21 Magris, Danube, 43: “To acquire a new identity does not mean betraying the first one, but enriching one’s own self with a new soul.”
22 For Pireddu, Magris’s Europe is constructed upon itinerant identities and provisional homes that presuppose a “temporary domesticity” (Pireddu, Temporary Homes, 62).
23 Magris, Danube, 31: “Writers almost always tend to see only the “hinternational” Danube, while historians also take account of the German-ness of Danubian Austria.”
24 Ibid., 32.
25 Ibid., 252. At least this is valid for the historiography that was available to Magris in the mid-1980s. Since then, studies such as Pieter Judson’s Guardians of the Nation and Kirchner Reill’s Nationalists have uncovered an attitude that was largely undetected or read as the remnant of a lost world.
26 Magris, Il mito absburgico, 299.
27 In his conversation with Alloni, Magris stated: “I believe that The Habsburg Myth expresses a negative view on that world, but through which passes also a very strong current of fascination. In the end, yes, even unwittingly, it is an autobiographical book because what I recognized in the Habsburg Empire is, to a certain extent, a process, an attempt to keep together unity and fragmentation. It is a problem that concerns my own existence” (Alloni, Se non siamo innocenti, 47).
28 Magris, Danube, 332.
29 In Temporary Homes, Pireddu rightfully sees Magris’s idea of Europe as closely related to Habermas’s idea of the postnational Europe. She describes Magris’s Europe as “a polycentric and non-hierarchical conception which can be explained in terms of Jürgen Habermas’s post-national constellation… a network of parallel horizontal allegiances in a self-steering, democratic European configuration” (55).
30 Magris, Danube, 243–44.
31 Menasse’s essays are published in German under the title Der europäische Landbote and Heimat.
32 Menasse, Heimat, 11.
33 Ibid., 16.
34 Menasse, Enraged Citizens, 18–19.
35 With a critical reference to Stefan Zweig’s naïve world of yesterday, Magris’s narrator in Danube explains that Grandma Anka, “[t]o love her world of yesterday, she has no need to idealize it” (303). She is one of the figures described by Magris when he writes in “Danubio e Post-Danubio”: “In the book many characters do not exactly know to which nationality they belong. They can only define themselves by negation: they can only say what they are not” (23).
36 Dupré, Per un’epica, 172.
37 According to Pellegrini, Magris sees Austria-Hungary as “a dilated projection of his Trieste”
(Pellegrini, Epica sull’acqua, 165). Characteristic of Magris’s writing is a blending of literature and politics, which she sees as originating in the generation of Triestine Vociani like Scipio Slataper, a group described as “the endogenous component of a certain Triestine tradition” (21). Dupré, however, correctly emphasizes how Magris approaches these issues in ways that depart from other frontier writers of the region. Magris is indeed both an insider, an author fully inscribed in the Triestine tradition of political writers, but simultaneously also an outsider, having written with scholarly detachment about the same issues. In his scholarship, Magris has described Triestine authors as intellectuals who anticipate and embody the sense of loss and fragmentation of the splintered subject of modernity. In his own postmodern fiction, then, Magris ponders how to make sense of this legacy.
38 For a history of these alternative paths, see also Zanou, who in Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean explores the checkered path to national identity, described as “stammering the nation,” in the Adriatic border lands, where “there is a whole world in the margins of the various territories, an entire universe of the ‘in-between,’ which goes missing if we stick to conventional national and state divisions of historical writing” (7).
39 Stuparich, Trieste nei miei ricordi, 55.
40 Einaudi’s article was first published in Il Corriere della sera on 6 May 1919, and then reprinted in Lettere politiche di Junius. For a recent history of Fiume in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, see Reill, The Fiume Crisis.
41 See Spinelli and Rossi, Il Manifesto di Ventotene, and Hirschmann, Noi senzapatria. Hirschmann locates her federalist commitment at the intersection of Marxist internationalism and Jewish Europeanism. After Colorni died in 1944 while fighting in the Italian Resistance, Hirschmann married Altiero Spinelli, with whom she continued their work on the unification of Europe. She later founded the movement Femmes pour l’Europe.
42 Magris, Utopia e disincanto, 53.
43 Ibid., 52–53: “The border has a dual and ambiguous nature: sometimes it is a bridge to meet the Other, sometimes it is a barrier to reject them. Often it is the obsession of placing someone or something on the other side…. The border is both bridge and barrier; it stimulates or stifles dialogue.”
44 Ibid., 57.
45 Even a novel like Alla cieca, whose plot has a global reach, grounds the story of the protagonist in what Magris calls in “Narrating History” the “composite Italo-Slavic world on the eastern borders of Italy” (326).
46 Salvatore himself is both helpless victim but also cruel perpetrator of the most horrific crimes in history. According to Pireddu, “Blindly stages the tragic loss of home and homeland to plunge us into a destabilizing globality that reinstates with a vengeance the vital need for an abode as the space of the human and of humanitas in the very act of mourning for its destruction” (Pireddu, Temporary Homes, 73). For a discussion of Alla cieca, see also Coda.
47 Magris, Alla cieca, 26.
48 Magris, Utopia e disincanto, 58.
49 Ibid., 61.
50 Magris, Danube, 389: “It may be that Danubian culture, which seems so open and cosmopolitan, also creates these feelings of anxiety and shutting things out. It is a culture which for too many centuries was obsessed with the dyke, the bulwark agains the Turks, against the Slavs, against others in general.”
51 The narrator of Danube emphasizes the connection between borders and historical transience when she describes the Roman limes, fortified frontier, and psychological barrier between two world systems: “The despised barbarians became the artificers of the new Europe” and “Our history, our culture, our Europe are daughters of that Limes” (98).
52 Magris, Utopia e disincanto, 64: “Furthermore, in our future looms the specter of migration of countless people who, driven by pain and hunger, will probably abandon their roots and their borders, causing hatred and fear, which in turn will lead to the erection of new barriers. It is upon the quality of the response to these epochal shifts—a response that should be free from hatred and sentimental demagogy—that the existence or at least dignity of Europe will depend.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Salvatore Pappalardo
Salvatore Pappalardo is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Towson University, USA. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature, Italian and Austrian modernism, and Mediterranean Studies. He is the author of the monograph Modernism in Trieste: The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870–1945 (Bloomsbury, 2021).
![Supercharge Your Next Research Paper: Research and write your next paper with Jenni AI.]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/112444/Skyscraper-humanities.png"})