Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  One of my purposes in coming to Regensburg was to add to my bag of encounters with high society, and the prospect of meeting Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis was more mouthwatering than the smell of grilling sausages or frying onions. The Thurn und Taxis family is one of Germany’s richest, and Gloria’s son, the young Prince Albert, in his early twenties and studying at Edinburgh University (another German aristocrat who values a British education), is the world’s youngest billionaire, valued at $2 billion. I knew the prince was unlikely to be at home, but I’d been communicating with Gloria’s staff and the princess hadn’t said an outright ‘no’ to granting me an audience. In the mind of an optimistic travel writer, spending a lot of his day on a bicycle with plenty of time to speculate, that lack of a ‘no’ had mutated into a strong possibility that we would meet. But a couple of days before I finally broached the city walls, the message came through that Gloria would not be in town after all. Instead I was offered a complimentary palace tour.

  It was a poor substitute for meeting the Lady Di of the German aristocracy. She’d married Johannes von Thurn und Taxis when she was twenty and he was fifty-four. Although she was titled – her mother had been one of the Hungarian Széchényis – she’d also been a modern day Cinderella working as a waitress. He, meanwhile, had spent most of his adult life having a good time, particularly with his own sex. There was plenty of gossip about the relationship, no doubt much of it instigated by those who would have liked to have married one of Europe’s richest men and who considered themselves eminently more suitable for taking him in hand than Gloria. And it was, by all accounts, an unconventional marriage; when Johannes celebrated his sixtieth birthday, Gloria had had his cake decorated with sixty confectionery candles sculpted in the shape of penises. There were all manner of rumours about how the relationship worked, but aristocrats I spoke to further downriver were generally of the opinion that Johannes and Gloria had loved each other. They’d certainly managed to have three children in fairly quick succession.

  Johannes had continued his extravagant lifestyle until his death in 1990, and the children grew up with parties attended by rock musicians and film stars. Meanwhile the glamorous Gloria had pretty much free rein in self-expression, altering her appearance and her hair colour with every breeze of fashion. Her exuberance and her appearance made her the darling of the gossip columns, which christened her the Punk Princess or Princess TNT, and she was forever being photographed out on the town, spending money.

  On Johannes’ death she’d shocked Germany’s aristocratic community by deciding to hold auctions of some of his possessions, including his Harley-Davidson – a decision which wasn’t considered dignified. But since then she’d sobered up and proved herself a very astute manager of the family’s immense wealth. Mind you, she continued to hold fairly outspoken views, famously declaring on a TV chat show in 2001 that AIDS had spread through Africa not because of lack of education about safe sex, but because ‘the blacks like to schnackseln a lot’.

  Much of Johannes’ and the Princess TNT’s fast living took place in a former monastery, St Emmeram Palace, close to the heart of the city. The Thurn und Taxis home is not just a palace: it’s a town, with the outlying areas given over to museums, galleries, a brewery and restaurants. In the shop I stood in front of a rack of postcards of Gloria as she is today, with and without her good-looking children, thinking how elegant and competent she seemed, not in the least bit racy or unconventional. A few moments later I heard her voice inside my head (via a headset) ‘cordially inviting’ me into her home and asking me to try to keep to the carpets; she was the last person I’d expect to go round tut-tutting at dirty footprints.

  The Emmeram Palace is one of the largest in Germany, with over five hundred rooms, more than Buckingham Palace. Between them these rooms amass 14,000 square metres of parquet flooring, several Gobelin tapestries and a crystal ballroom chandelier, which weighs more than a ton, above a photograph of the whole family sitting demurely with Cardinal Ratzinger before he was Benedicted. But despite the size and grandeur of their home, the Thurn und Taxis family does not have an immensely long tradition in Germany, with the current prince only the twelfth in the line. The family were originally Italians, the Thurn being a corruption of the Torrianis (towers), and the Taxis were the Thassis (badgers). Their wealth emanates from their status as postmasters for the Holy Roman Empire, which all came about because their own extended family was so widely spread back in the late fifteenth century – towers here, badgers there – that the head of the family devised a communication system to further their mutual business interests. He’d set up staging posts every 25 kilometres on key routes, each ready with its own horses, where approaching messengers would sound their horn so that the next horseman could be saddled up and ready to go. Using this method, messages could be sent from Innsbruck to Brussels in just over five days, which was unprecedented speed in those days, and the service quickly attracted other users. Thus the Thurn und Taxis became the CNN of their day, because whenever messages were carried, news travelled too. The family had a monopoly on the Holy Roman Empire’s postal system for nearly four hundred years until Bismarck finally placed it under state control in 1867, and Deutsche Post still bears the symbol of the postmaster’s horn.

  The elevation of the Thurn und Taxis to the nobility, fairly late in the day, gave them responsibilities in which the Emmeram Palace played an essential part. They had to do their bit in entertaining the emperor and his ministers on a regular basis, which meant a suitable diet of music, dancing and dining in grand palace rooms – and providing a bed for Empress Maria Theresa, a bed that was suitably supported by gilded swans. The princess’s own bedroom was rather less showy, but it did have a connecting staircase to the prince’s chambers, and if the prince wanted to ‘see’ the princess he would send a manservant down with a poem and a rose. If the princess was willing to ‘see’ the prince, she’d send the man back with another poem, perhaps a rhyming couplet or two about the benefits of a good wash, and fifteen minutes later the prince would arrive, having given the princess time to empty the ashtray, turn off the TV and take her curlers out.

  I couldn’t imagine the whirlwind Princess TNT making assignations in such an old-fashioned way, but the sex life of nobility is always a source of fascination. These days Gloria appears to spend an awful lot of time with her best friend, an unmarried Italian princess, so she continues to keep the gossip columnists on the go. Gloria’s reaction? In a magazine interview in 2006, she said this: ‘If you tell people that you live in chastity they think you’re crazy. I don’t really care what people think, because I’m going to be Alessandra’s best friend anyway. I would be terribly lonely otherwise.’

  8

  Passau: Learning the River’s Rules

  From Regensburg the Danube, which had hitherto shown every intention of making a break for the Baltic, changed tack as if somebody had whispered something alluring in its ear about the Black Sea. It swung its bows to point at Vienna and ran full-bellied before the wind. I had appointments to keep, so I put my head down and pedalled with it, grateful for the wind assistance, while around me the rain stopped and the sun came out, steam-cleaning the farmland, polishing the greens and turning dirt to dust for the hoovering breeze. The season seemed to speed up before my eyes. A cuckoo in the woods repeated its insistent note, ‘Global-warming, my-arse; global-warming, my-arse.’ Blunt lapwings mewed and chuntered as I cycled past, the bolder amongst them like mortar-boarded headmasters, heckling and scolding, and others screwing through the air like poorly made paper darts thrown repeatedly by some invisible hand.

  The Danube plain was carpeted in young flannelette romper suits of corn, newly stencilled with tractor tracks, and it smelled freshly laundered. In a couple of months’ time it would be wearing flowery prints of yellows and reds, heavily pregnant and perfumed, and two months later it’d be into another season of long skirts of ochres and russet greens, frayed at the edges, fruitily pungent and past its best. But
for now the infant year was still bouncy, fresh and rosy-cheeked, and every now and then the wind would trail its invisible fingernails across the corn, rippling it this way and that, tickling its belly until it sighed with pleasure.

  The builders were in at Walhalla, a giant Danubian Parthenon that jutted out of the hillside not far from Regensburg, and an unmissable monument for anyone moving along the Danube valley. That day the massive frowning forehead of stone was flanked by scaffolding which looked as if it was giving the pillars builderly acupuncture, and indeed billboards suggested the restoration was to ‘make Walhalla better’, which itself sounded like an oxymoron. The original Valhalla of Norse mythology had contained the statues of heroes gloriously slain in battle, but this one was a vast vault completed in 1842 at the behest of King Ludwig I to celebrate the great and the good of the German-speaking world, all the way from Friedrich Barbarossa, emperor, to W. A. Mozart, composer, and added to subsequently by committee. There were kaisers and writers, artists and composers, field marshals and scientists, all mixed in, not in any evident logical order. Accordingly Bismarck, Wagner and Bach looked very grumpy at being placed together, having long since exhausted all topics of bombastic conversation. Anton Bruckner looked vaguely stoned, Einstein was suppressing a chuckle, just having thought of something particularly interesting – that no one would ever know now that he was dead – and Schubert looked as if he’d had a good breakfast and was now looking forward to his lunch. Many of them were half turned towards the vast door, beyond which lay a fabulous view of the river basin, now stretching out luxuriantly under unaccustomed sun. But that door opened only once while I was there, to admit me, so they didn’t get much of a view, and as I left I could have sworn I heard whispering and the rustle of paper darts as I closed the door behind me.

  By now the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal had doubled the size of the river, and bridges no longer looked bridgey, up to their ankles in water, but had been reborn as giant stalking creatives of concrete. The flat blade of water they spanned wasn’t so rivery, either, but it was no longer empty. The susurration of my tyres on tarmac and gravel was occasionally joined, in harmony, by the heavy bass of a pusher-tug or the clattering of a barge’s old diesel engine, its pistons playing pingpong back and forth. I overhauled the Buda, a pusher from Hungary, heavily laden and easily overtaken, and exchanged waved salutations with a mechanic leaning over the rail. Poor devil, he was probably having a short break from a lifetime in the engine room with a grease gun.

  Despite the link with the likes of Rotterdam and Hamburg provided by the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, Danube traffic is a fraction of what it used to be. The exception are the river cruise ships, unseaworthy things whose bow and stern top-and-tail a medium-sized block of flats. I’d seen my first one tied up in Regensburg, and it only served to confirm that I’d made the right decision in opting to travel beside the river rather than on it. Cruise ships on the Danube have increased in quantity far more than any other form of shipping since the canal opened in 1992, but their clientele is mainly elderly, and their itineraries stick to the big cities, with on-board lectures and flower-arranging classes to fill the gaps between meals. I’d cycled past one alongside the quay at Regensburg, smelled the venison and chips, and seen the human cargo lingering on the threshold, halfway between ship and shore, uncertain whether it was worth stepping on to the land or whether it’d be better to stay aboard to be fattened up by more free food and wine in preparation for another hard day of watching cyclists slip astern.

  These ships represented the latest evolution of river traffic that had started back in the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the Crusaders had used crude boats to travel downriver towards the Middle East. They in turn were followed by rafts that floated downstream carrying lime, charcoal, cut wood and building stone. At much the same time the Danube started to be used by salt-traders keen to connect mines in the northern Alps, near Salzburg, with lucrative markets to the south and west, and thus began the first serious traffic upriver, against the stream. At their peak in the eighteenth century these Danube salt convoys involved as many as forty horses hauling strings of five barges at a time. The first rider, at the head of the convoy, carried an axe, ensured the towpath was clear and shouted the commands. Then came the marshaller, in charge of 58-metre-long ropes, followed by the horses, with one rider for every two beasts, producing the power. Behind them walked two rope-handlers who made sure that the tows didn’t get snagged unnecessarily on shore, and who were ready to tie off round any available rock or tree in the event of emergency. Out on the water, the first boat handled the tows and lined up the three barges behind it, and each of the latter had a steering oar and high prow manned with boathooks and poles to keep out of the shallows. The last of the barges carried horse-feed as well as salt, and at the tail of the procession came a small cook’s boat, which also carried the fleet’s quartermaster, whose job it was to record all the purchases of provisions and pay out for all work done in the course of the expedition. It was a whole village on the move.

  Not surprisingly, this laborious and slow form of river transport lost out when the railways arrived, but it wasn’t long before the technology used in steam locomotives was transferred to the water, bringing some of the trade back again. Paddlesteamers became a big force on the river from the 1830s and 1840s, initially powered by boilers built in Glasgow, a city which at that time was making steam engines for the furthest reaches of the British Empire. In fact it was two Englishmen, Andrews and Pritchard, who started the Danube’s first major steamship company, the Erste Donau Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft, or DDSG, which had seven seagoing and ten river ships in 1829. Fifty years later the fleet had grown to over two hundred vessels and given the German language its longest word: Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenab-zeichen, which means the ‘badge on the cap of a captain employed by the Danube Steam Navigation Co’. Badges, caps and uniforms were a matter of great pride on the river, and agents and captains all wore bow ties when attending meetings on shore.

  As for their boats, they were living beasts, the old steamers. Sixty or 70 metres long and 20 metres wide at the paddles, they bounced, quivered and bumped their way upriver like giant sea lions crossing ice, paddles flapping, funnels belching. They had double windlasses in the bows, ever at the ready, so that some sort of foothold could be grabbed in the river if the beat of the engine should ever falter. The crew kitchen, complete with Aga, sat above one set of paddles, and its kettles were forever being bounced off the hotplate on to the floor below. The smokestacks, built especially tall to minimize the potential rain of smuts and steam on to the deck, had to be mounted on giant pivots with balancing weights so they could be easily lowered to navigate the bridges. Down below, in a cacophonous ribcage of valves and ventilation, mechanics scurried about checking dials and pipes and surrounded by rushing water, some of it cold and some of it very hot, but all of it dangerous.

  The steamship companies ran scheduled passenger services as well as freight. Of course they were slower than today’s boats, but not that much slower. It would take a paddlesteamer two days to complete the 150-kilometre upriver journey from Passau to Regensburg, where today it takes one. But with average crews of twenty-five, the old steamers were very labour-intensive, so when technology moved on after the Second World War they were soon supplanted by diesel tugs trailing fleets of barges. Eventually that too proved too manpower-intensive, because each trailing barge required a crewman to watch over the steering oar, so now the latest evolution is the push-tug, where the barges are chained to the bows and controlled from the pusher’s bridge. With this configuration, crews can be as small as four or six.

  Given the power and the economy of these pusher-barges, with the largest shifting loads equivalent to a couple of hundred articulated lorries, it comes as a surprise to learn that the Danube runs at only a fraction of its freight capacity. One of the reasons for that under-performance was the very same stretch of river I cycled past that day, out of Reg
ensburg, although I was unaware of it until I met up with Captain Josef Fenzl, Hauptkommissar of the River Police in Passau.

  Captain Fenzl was a kindly, thorough, slight man whom I reckoned to be in his early fifties. An administrator, a man who knew the rules and regulations, with none of the repartee and the street-smart swagger of a frontline policeman, he had fifteen officers to cover 55 kilometres of river. He knew his business back to front and inside out, and for every topic we discussed he had a box file full of documents, most of them yellowing with age.

  We met in his office on the waterside just outside Passau, the last Danube city before Austria, on a blustery day of squally showers. The weather had deteriorated again. My hope had been to persuade him to take me out on patrol in one of his River Police cruisers, but Captain Fenzl regretted that his main boat was broken, and the temporary replacement was too small for bad weather. I was surprised at this news, which seemed rather ill prepared for a German police force, and my surprise must have registered in my expression.

  ‘We do much of our policing on shore anyway,’ the captain reassured me, offering me a chocolate liqueur from a fancy selection a doctor could have been given by a grateful patient, but which seemed rather frivolous for a police station at ten o’clock in the morning. ‘If we want to go aboard a boat, we just ask the lock-keepers not to let him through. It is not as if a freight ship can easily get away.’