by Andrew Eames
One of his main areas of interest was the level of water in the river. It wasn’t something that had struck me as significant till now, although it was to become dramatically more so later on in my journey. He showed me an internet-based program that gave exact water levels, measured in pegel, every few kilometres through the whole German Danube system. The program was updated automatically, and drew attention to rising levels in tributaries and calculated resulting estimated future levels downstream. Clever stuff.
‘Do all the captains have this?’
He nodded. ‘Those that have the Internet. They need to know if the water’s rising and whether they’ll get under the bridges. And if it’s low, they need to know if they’re going to go aground. Sometimes they ask us, and if they give us their weight, draft, etc., we’ll tell them if they need to get a move on or to wait.’
Trying to second-guess the water level played a big part in a captain’s decision about how much to load. A barge captain taking on cargo at the docks in Rotterdam with a shipment bound for Austria or even further downriver had to take a punt on how much river depth was going to be available to him. Bigger loads produced more profit, but gave much less room for manoeuvre in the shallows. It could be a costly gamble.
‘You can no longer rely on seasonal rain. These days, with climate change, it’s hard to tell when the floods are going to come.’
I nodded. ‘So what would happen if he got it wrong? If rain didn’t come and the river level sank in the two weeks it took him to get down here from Rotterdam?’
‘He must stop. If he goes aground, he has to face us. And to pay a fine, because it is illegal to travel when he knows he shouldn’t. Otherwise, he waits until it rains, somewhere in the system. We had one last week, a Romanian with animal feed, 1.93 metres of draft but on ly 1.86 metres of river water. So he waited until the level rose. The alternative is for the company to send another barge to take off some of the load, but that costs money. And time.’
I had had no idea that freight ships were like salmon, waiting for a surge of fresh water before they moved.
‘Isn’t it worth dredging the shallows a bit deeper?’ I ventured.
Captain Fenzl scratched behind his ear and explained that for most of the river the water level was controlled by hydroelectric dams, which effectively turned the Danube into a chain of long, thin lakes. There, the levels weren’t usually a problem, but not in the stretch just upriver from Passau. ‘Vilshofen to Straubing. In the last two years we have had sixty boats going aground here, and a few of them have lost all control, swinging out to block the main channel. Now that’s a big problem. That’s what makes the Danube so much harder than the Rhine.’
I remembered that scene I’d seen on Google Earth of the barges surrounded by stains of mud. It must have been on this stretch.
‘So why don’t they dredge it deeper?’
‘The Greens. The Green lobby is very powerful in our government, and this section of river has been designated a nature reserve. It’s pretty much the only piece of original, free-flowing Danube left in Bavaria.’
‘Ah.’ Now that I knew the reasoning I felt a great deal of sympathy for the Green point of view, but given that it made more work for Captain Fenzl, I didn’t think I should voice it.
‘So what do they think of you, the barge captains? Are they scared of you? Fining them and telling them not to move?’ I said, with one eye on the liqueur chocolates.
‘Not at all. Sometimes they rely on us to protect them from their bosses, who want them to continue even in low water. Most of them take great pride in doing what they do, and doing it properly. Particularly the Eastern Europeans. Although you wouldn’t believe it if you listened to the Dutch and Belgians. Here, help yourself.’
Conversation turned to the other aspects of policing. Occasionally what he called the ‘Danube telegraph’ would tip him off about a vessel that shouldn’t be on the water. ‘Those older captains, they don’t like to see a dangerous boat.’
His officers checked captains’ log books to make sure the sailing hours were commensurate with the crew numbers and qualifications. ‘To do twenty-four-hour working, they need at least four crew, and two captains with the right papers. The captains need to have the Strecken certificates for each stretch of water. If not, we keep them here until other crew arrive.’
It seemed very little, just four people in charge of the equivalent of two hundred articulated lorries, day and night.
‘And what about stowaways, people-smuggling? East to West?’
He shook his head. ‘Not one of our problems. There are too many controls on freight ships, at every border. And for the average stowaway, a freight ship is far too slow.’
Otherwise, his team verified the proper operation of bow-thrusting propellers, particularly important for boats about to enter the shallow stretch. They also checked the height of the cargo above deck. ‘We had a Bulgarian with cargo piled so high it left just a narrow canyon for visibility down the middle. Crazy.’
‘So do you get collisions?’
‘Not often. Two German ships collided a while ago. It was one of the captains’ birthdays, and he was down in the mess having a cup of coffee, so there was no one on the bridge. Except the autopilot.’
‘And what about the passenger ships?’
Captain Fenzl said his team didn’t have much to do with them. Most passengers were elderly Americans, unlikely to get up to much. Sometimes they reported a theft, but usually it hadn’t happened in German waters, and mostly they were just after the insurance money anyway.
‘Crew is a different matter, though.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Particularly towards the end of the season. There are thirty to forty of them on most of the cruise boats, and all sorts of nationalities, Chinese, Eastern Europeans, Asians, with some prettier single girls amongst them. They’ve been going up and down the river without a break for months. It’s like a prison camp on board. If truth were told, some of them go a bit mad. Cabin fever. You are with people who are not your friends, twenty-four hours a day, week after week, so there is bound to be friction. Hatreds grow, and there are lots of jealousies over the women.’
It sounded like hell on earth. Captain Fenzl went on to explain that these problems were usually for the captains to deal with, and that made the latter particularly frustrated because, unlike on freight barges, they hadn’t recruited the troublemakers in the first place. So they felt they were untangling messes that were not of their making.
When all the chocolate liqueurs were finished, I said it was time to make a move. The captain gave me a lift in his police BMW up to the Veste Oberhaus castle so that he could show me where the Inn and the Danube met. The difference in colours was remarkable: the Inn a jade green because of the meltwaters it brought from the Alps, the Danube a dirty brown thanks to upriver slurry and factory outlets. Had he ever seen it blue, I asked?
‘Very rarely. And only when the water is very low.’
I didn’t find much to relish in Passau. It’s a favourite of the cruise-ship companies and looks something of a baroque cruise ship itself, steaming downriver into the V between the Inn and the Danube, with Italianate belltowers, decked colonnades and steeples masquerading as masts, funnels and lifeboats. But the bishop’s palaces and cathedrals of this Bavarian Venice were just empty scenery when I was there. Like some of the abbeys further downriver, they had no life of their own without tourists to rouge their cheeks, and it was midweek, early season and raining. Even the daily concert on the largest organ in the world, a 17,794-piper, seemed passionless and perfunctory, with the cathedral’s interior flat and drab in leaky wet light. Amongst the tourists, you could easily pick out the couples off the cruise ships with their matching rainwear; the wet weather forced them to surrender their autonomy, welding them together at the hip under one umbrella and turning them into slow-moving, two-headed beasts that wheeled slowly and indecisively in Passau’s pedestrian streets, never quite able to get both sets
of eyes pointing in the same direction at the same time.
The biggest life force in Passau was in fact the Inn, not the Danube, and the confluence of the two rivers, at a point as sharp as a pencil, sounded like the sotto voce ripping of thousands of telephone directories. The river had at last become a proper highway, and lying in what amounted to a ship’s cabin in a purpose-designed cyclists’ hotel called a Rotel on the quayside, I could listen to the clattering of marine diesels as barges chewed their way upstream. There I waited for the forecast to change, and my clothes to dry, before crossing my first Danube border and shoving off into Austria.
9
Austria: Hitler’s Home Ground
There’s no great cultural leap on crossing from Germany into Austria. Street signs and car numberplates change, for sure, but the true differences are far harder to spot.
In the course of the last century the Germans have come to regard the Austrians as more backward cousins, and certainly there was something a bit more unkempt about the villages, although that also meant a few more wild flowers in the hedgerows. And yet Austria has had a far longer history of European domination than the Germans, having been the senior partner (with Hungary) in an empire that was far larger than the Holy Roman effort had ever been, a big Austro-Hungarian octopus that had managed to cling on to its territory for several hundred years in various configurations, stretching and shrinking, letting its tentacles have first more freedom, then less, depending on the danger. When threatened from the east, by Turkey, it was quite prepared to let Budapest go, and even to abandon Vienna if need be; when threatened from the west, by Napoleon, it temporarily abandoned Vienna once more. The empire forged alliances and made concessions in ripples and waves, and was always ready to sacrifice some far-off territory in order to preserve the core, the aristocracy. Hierarchy and heredity were society’s pillars, and etiquette was its moral code.
That aristocratic core has survived, right up to the present, in the small nation that still carries the ‘Austria’ name. This remains the country in Europe which most highly prizes status and titles, with the K&K (Kaiser und König) symbol of imperial monarchy still much in evidence. And back in the mid-twentieth century, while nations all around it were turning to communism, Austria stuck unswervingly to its hierarchical system, an island of tradition, a respecter of privilege. Accordingly I was to have more luck here with my aristo-hunting than I had had in Germany.
Austria’s class-ridden society partly explains why it seems less accessible to the transient visitor. It is a closed, conservative community, with undercurrents and pecking orders that are hard to appreciate as an outsider, and it has a worrying recent history. There was, for example, a higher rate of Nazi Party membership here than in Germany itself; 99 per cent of the population said ‘yes’ to Anschluss (effectively annexation) with Nazi Germany; there was no partisan resistance during the war, and no government-in-exile, unlike in any other occupied country. It voluntarily provided more than the required 10 per cent of concentration-camp personnel, and after the war there was little in the way of internal de-Nazification. The only Austrians found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg had committed those crimes outside Austria and even today there are strong right-wing Austrian movements which produce documents suggesting that there was no such thing as the Holocaust and that death camps never existed. No doubt the young generation of Austrians reading this will cast their eyes to the heavens at the reiteration of such old chestnuts, but as individuals the Austrians don’t do much to change their image; they tend to be guarded and not particularly forthright, so you can never be absolutely sure what they’re thinking. And then there are the Kampusches and the Fritzls, the secrets in the cellars, symbolic of a society that stays in its boxes.
The country is, however, extremely pretty and has two of the loveliest bits of the Danube. In Austria the river surges along, brimming with enthusiasm, dropping 150 metres in 300 kilometres. Once it gets to the other side it loses interest, taking a further 2,000 kilometres to drop 150 metres more.
The banks first close in at Burg Krämpelstein, originally the site of a Roman watchpost, perched right up on the cliff. According to legend, a poor but greedy tailor lived up here along with his goat. When the ageing goat started to produce less milk the tailor beat it; and when the goat didn’t improve, he lost his temper and threw it off the cliff into the Danube. But as he did so the goat’s horns got tangled in his braces and took him down too, so in the end it was the tailor who drowned while the goat swam safely to shore.
Stories like this one were being told and retold at lots of Radlertreff – bike meeting places – along the shore, big sunny courtyards where you could get coffee and cake at any time of the day, and most people helped it down with home-made schnapps. I had now entered on the most popular stretch of the Danube for cyclists, and although it couldn’t be called busy this early in the year, there were plenty of organized groups on the route and many of them were doing more schnapping in Treffs than sitting on saddles. The bonhomie generated in these places intensified as the day wore on, often turning to song, and they would become quite intimidating for anyone not part of a group. On one occasion I was venturing into one such sunny courtyard when one of the group members shouted something by way of greeting, and all the others laughed, turning towards me expectantly for my reply. Unfortunately I hadn’t understood – I was struggling with the Austrian accent – so all I could do was shrug, smile and ask for it to be repeated. ‘Ach, a foreigner,’ said another member of the group, and they all turned away as one, while someone else made another comment which I also didn’t understand but which had everyone roaring with laughter again. Needless to say, I slunk away.
Thankfully the landscape and the exercise had their usual palliative effect. The rain had gone, and there were fruit trees and fishponds in the villages, clover and speedwort in the hedgerows, and river eddies with ducks, goslings and warblers. The steepening banks were clad in shaggy coats of deciduous and conifer trees. The conifers were dark, tall, military and sombre whatever the weather, while the deciduous were more frivolous and exuberant and far more responsive to changes in wind and sun. Aspen and birch in particular tossed their glossy heads like teenage girls, keen to catch the attention of passing youth. For me, a hoary old cyclist, pedalling through these woodland areas did no favours to my complexion; it was hard to pick up detail when moving from sunlight to shade, and time and again I plunged into pillars of insects swarming in the shade, emerging with skin like flypaper, lightly acned with gnats stuck on with perspiration.
Where the banks steepened and the valley narrowed, the river clenched its buttocks and thrust hard, accelerating with a sucking sound and forcing barges to labour upriver. Where the banks relaxed again, the river slowed, fattened and sprawled like a Swiss lake in the mountains and I knew there’d be a hydroelectric dam somewhere around the corner, propping it up. I found I could ascertain these changes in water speed by measuring my progress against the downriver boats, who given a good stream were usually a little faster than me. When the stream lessened, it was as if their keels were suddenly dragging through mud, and I found myself overtaking them again.
The most dramatic of the steepenings was the Schlögen Schlinge, a giant scything bend with a name that sounded like a speech impediment, where the river arched its back and thumped its tail and shook off all roads, railways and practically all houses, too. I found myself all alone in a great canyon of green, like a Scottish landscape that had been stripped of its austerity and garishly redecorated. For a while the north bank became virtually sheer into the water, and I was forced to catch a foot ferry across to the other shore, banging a metal sheet with a hammer to attract the attention of the ferryman – and of an outraged peacock somewhere further down the valley.
Some kilometres later the dappled corridor relaxed again and I crossed the river at Aschach, a true riverside resort with a proper riverside promenade. Guesthouses had terraces with fountains and flowerbeds, and lime trees p
rovided shade to anyone who wanted to sit out on the prom with an ice-cream from the likes of the Gasthof zur Sonne or the Promenade Café Konditorei.
I stopped to read the town noticeboard.
‘So, the Hot Pants Road Club is coming to town,’ said a transatlantic voice from behind me; a cyclist in his mid-sixties was reading over my shoulder. ‘I feel like I’ve got pretty hot pants myself.’
He turned out to be Canadian, and very pleased to bump into someone who spoke English. ‘You travelling alone?’
I agreed I was.
He shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know how you handle it.’
He explained how he had started the journey with his wife and their two best friends. ‘I came here with my tennis buddy Jed three years ago and we had a great time, so this time we persuaded the girls to come too.’
‘And they didn’t like it?’ I could see no tennis buddy, nor any ‘girls’.
He grimaced. ‘What a mess! I guess I should have known with all those discussions beforehand about how far we could go in a day. But everything was wrong, right from the start. The girls didn’t like the hotels, didn’t find them comfortable. They didn’t like their bicycles, particularly the saddles. They had problems with everything.’
I said it wasn’t everyone’s idea of a holiday.
‘But it turned sour. They clubbed together, the girls. They said we had no concern about our spouses. That they didn’t belong on bicycles, at their age. That it wasn’t dignified. And that they’d earned the right to a bit more comfort. So in the end they just refused. You know, to go on.’
‘You mean they’ve gone home and left you here?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. We hired a car and Jed and I are taking turns escorting them. It’s not a good result, and I’m not sure what’s worse, being in the car or on the bike. I am not going to pretend I am enjoying cycling by myself. I don’t know how you manage. I mean, look at that lot,’ he indicated another group of cyclists laughing heartily over glasses of schnapps. ‘They’re having a jolly time. Why couldn’t we?’
