Danube, a journey through the landscape, history, and culture of central Europe. By Claudio Magris. ISBN: 0374134650
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Nashville, Tennessee (1989);translated by Patrick Creagh. 1st Edition HC Fine in near fine DJ. 416 pp. Claudio Magris, an Italian professor of German literature. From the inside cover: " In this inexhaustible archaeology of a great river's lore and literature, Claudio Magris ventures, with boundless and encyclopedic enthusiasm, into the heart of the Middle European civilization, Beginning with the controversies about the sources of the Danube-a faucet near Furtwangen, Germany, or a roof, the runoff of which is said to constitute, on one side, the Danube and, on the other, the Rhine- and travelling finally to its several mouths, Magris takes up all that lies between: the river, its region, its culture. Danube is a catalogue of histories and beliefs that is both panoramic and specific. It's a travelogue and a joyous act of scholarship, including "not only visual images, but old prefaces and playbills, railway station gossip, funerary and metaphysical inscriptions, newspaper clippings, and notices pinned up in taverns and parish halls. And everywhere he travels-from Heidegger's boyhood home in Messkirch to Hitler's beloved city of Linz to Bistrita, Rumania, whose most celebrated inhabitant was Bram Stoker's Count Dracula- magris raises the spirits of the literature to which this fertile breeding ground has given rise: Kafka, Freud, Wittgenstein, Marcus Aurelius, Ovid, Celine, and a host of others". A major best seller in Europe.
