Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  I left him in Aschach, contemplating his disaster of a holiday. Jed was coming to pick him up, he said, and take him to that evening’s four-star hotel for his rendezvous with ‘the girls’ in the hotel’s spa. And although it was sad to meet someone who was so plainly not getting much pleasure from the Danube cyclepath, the encounter nevertheless made me feel good about travelling alone, free-willed and completely independent. The decisions I made were all mine, as were their consequences. No one had set my agenda, no one had to suffer my mistakes. I could start or stop wherever and whenever I pleased, and I could abandon the whole project and go home tomorrow if I wanted to, without having to justify the decision to anyone except myself. The success or failure of my journey was all mine; it was my own little work of art, my creation. Its motivation came from somewhere deep within me, it had assumed a momentum of its own, and it depended on no one else. Mind you, it could have been useful to have someone around at meal times, if just to warn me that I had food stuck to my face.

  Crossing through strawberry fields and cherry orchards after Aschach I eventually reached a small and instantly likeable town called Ottensheim, and although it was still 10 kilometres short of Linz I immediately decided to stop overnight. The town had a wonderfully simple ecofriendly car ferry suspended from a cross-river cable that used the power of the current to push it sideways to and fro; the skipper spun the wheel, the ferry’s nose poked out into the stream, and it was off, crabbing sideways along the cable, eventually settling against the pontoon on the opposite bank like a faithful dog returning to its master’s leg. No engine required.

  At the centre of the town was a market square no bigger than a football pitch which would have been swamped with cars had it not been for someone’s innovative idea to dig out a car park directly underneath it, leaving the square free for restaurant terraces and extra stalls to set up for a big wine and cheese party on Friday evenings. There was also another Schwarzer Adler, this one rather more upmarket than Ulm’s and run by a welcoming elderly couple who unfortunately hadn’t passed on the knack of hospitality to their thirty-something children, who were in the process of taking over. And there was also, bizarrely, an international multi-lane rowing course tucked into a pocket at the side of the Danube.

  Many of these initiatives were the work of a forward-thinking former mayor of Ottensheim called Walter Steiner. And it was Steiner who had seen the potential in the suggestion of a young regional tourism executive called Manfred Traunmüller of earmarking the defunct Danube towpath, once busy with those teams of horses hauling salt barges, for use by cyclists. The two of them erected home-made signs along a short section around Ottensheim on a Friday afternoon in 1981, and the first-ever long-distance cycle route in Europe was under way.

  I met Traunmüller in his office in Linz, from where he now ran Donau Touristik, his own tour operator specializing in cycle holidays, which was offering twenty-eight different ways of doing the route between Passau and Vienna in various combinations of hotel grade, boat assistance and need for speed. He’d have probably had a men-on-bikes, girls-in-spas combo for the Canadians, if they’d only known. Despite a long association with cycling, he turned out to be a gnome-like, unathletic-looking man who bounced disconcertingly as he spoke, like a member of the Jedi Council, chiefly because he was sitting on a giant yoga ball instead of a chair. He recalled how he and Steiner had had to resist the objections of government in Vienna to the cycle route: ‘So take us to court.’ And how they had had to fund the first insurance cover themselves, in case anyone had an accident on the towpath and blamed them for it. Needless to say, government in Vienna now looks after that particular bill, now that many thousands use the cyclepath every year and it has become such a huge earner for the nation.

  We ended up talking about Adolf Hitler, whose connection with Linz is deeply ingrained. He’d been born nearby and educated in the city, and Traunmüller knew someone who’d been in the same class at school. ‘He was a loner even then. Not bright, but not stupid, and no friends. When it came to public speaking, though, he knew exactly what he wanted to say, even as a child.’ Hitler had had great plans for Linz, seeing it as the city of his retirement years with Eva Braun. He’d wanted to build a grandiose metropolis, with giant pharaonic buildings, a front door on the Danube to rival Budapest. At its back door he’d initiated the giant Hermann Göring Reich Works that was to become the centre of the armaments industry during the Second World War, turning this city, too, into a major bombing target. It was the centre of Austrian industrialization thereafter, although you’d never guess such heavy industry existed in Linz today.

  These days the Führer connection is not something the tourist office likes to dwell on, and the city has developed a strong arts and culture programme to bury bad memories under good. A big event in its cultural year is the Pflasterspektakel – a rotten name for an international festival. Hard to say and even harder to spell, it translates literally as ‘cobblestone entertainment’, and dates back to the time when all sorts of traders would gather in the market square. The giant Hauptplatz is still there, despite the bombing, and still surrounded by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses. It was designed back in the thirteenth century to be the biggest square in Austria, with the idea of turning Linz into a multinational trading crossroads on the Danube, and over a weekend in late July it looks as though the medieval traders have returned, as a very odd-looking collection of Belgians, Estonians, Slovaks, Bohemians, Spaniards, Britons et al. gather around the rococo central pillar. There they ply an age-old trade, a tradition of trying to please the mob in any way they can in return for a few tossed coins. And the mob plays its part, hissing, booing and cheering like medieval urchins.

  The festival mechanics are simple, user-friendly and inexpensive. The town hall sends out invitations to street performers from all over the world – as many as five hundred of them – in advance. It tries to ensure that there are not too many clowns, for example, and that no one nationality dominates. It then subsidizes the artists’ travel and accommodation and pays them a small daily allowance to make sure they turn up – because they’re an unpredictable lot, street performers. Then, when they’ve checked in, a daily schedule is published distributing them around the venues, most of which are in the pedestrian heart of the city. Shows begin in the early afternoon and run on until 1 a.m., but there are no tickets sold, and there is no obligation to remain as part of any audience for any longer than the performer can keep your attention. The only financial pain comes if you are still amongst the audience at the end, when the performer passes his hat.

  A typical afternoon’s entertainment starts with a strange, gothic-looking group from Belgium who enact an odd parable of the search for a suitable bride for their make-believe king, using stilts, drums and a wheeled metal chariot, a sort of Boadicea meets Mad Max. Following them come two Hungarians dressed as bumblebees, but with old-fashioned bellows for wings. They run through a surreal selection of ballads, including ‘Bara-bara-bara’ (about ‘the delight the shoemaker gets from smelling his leather’) and another which they introduce as ‘A lot of songs are about nothing – but this one really is about nothing,’ and it comes complete with a groaning, yowling solo from a pair of yellow leather bellows.

  Then there’s an Indian magician who does rope tricks, a Slovakian jazzband, a balalaika band from Russia, bagpipers from Estonia and an Argentinian called Hugo who provokes howls of laughter when, after a seemingly accidental collision with an old lady making a determined beeline for a nearby church door, he reels away clutching a lacy black bra.

  If they are good, the performers can earn well here, unlike in Britain, where street performance is regarded as a pastime for the work-shy, and barely a step up from begging. It doesn’t seem very Austrian, either, and I suspect that Hitler might have taken an even more dismissive approach than the British. There would never have been a place for anarchic cobblestone artists in his perfect city.

  I was haunted by Hitler’s vision
for Linz for some kilometres. It started with the docks, which once had the reputation as Austria’s largest. They’d been developed after Austria–Hungary had been forced to give up its only seaport, Trieste (now in Italy), as a result of the First World War. Thereafter the Danube became the focus of the nation’s shipping and the Linz shipyards became extremely busy with orders for rivergoing ships from the Soviet Union. These days they are boomingly, echoingly empty. The only vessel I saw was the lonely and forlorn Schönbrunn, a 79-metre paddlesteamer which had been built in Budapest in 1912 and which still did occasional river trips.

  And then the industrial district began, once the Hermann Göring Reich Works. Its chimneys were like a ragged piece of stitching on a raw, open wound between earth and sky, and amongst them I could see gasometers and what looked like a couple of pitheads, although I knew there were no collieries here. The chimneys came in all shapes and sizes, steaming, gently smoking, or emitting that distinctive piccolo wisp of wasp-coloured smoke that no one likes to see. It was easy to imagine them as a distant orchestra, those chimneys. A dirty steel band, playing a tune that wasn’t meant for human ears, with reedy fluted chimneys, tall dark bassoon chimneys, short fat euphonium chimneys, and squirly multi-stopped horn chimneys. The string section was provided by the pylons: the small violin pylons, the larger cello pylons and the giant double bass pylons, using the wind as their bow. And every now and then one of the big fat chimneys would let loose a brassy note which was instantly visible as a great harrumph of smoke, making a huge mess on the stave. I could hear the percussion, the rattle of slag down chutes, the beat of cylinders, the thrum of spinning drums, because these were sounds that were within my register. But no doubt there was a lot more that I couldn’t hear, particularly up at sparrow level, too high for my ear. An industrial descant inaudible to humans but which warned all other living creatures to stay well away. All I could get was a distant rumble, and an occasional tumbling clank followed by a screech, as if someone returning from a party early on a Sunday morning had stumbled into a blind dustbin alley and fallen over the neighbour’s cat.

  Hitler had developed his perfect city with forced labour, and much of the stone for the building work came from the Wiener Graben quarry up in the hills to the east, where it had been quarried by inmates of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Today the camp rises out of the crown of a hill which has rolling views and high skylarks, looking from a distance like a reconstructed Roman fortress amongst innocent grasslands. This innocence is misleading. Originally built by inmates of Dachau, Mauthausen ultimately housed 200,000 prisoners, a mixture of ideological enemies of National Socialism (the majority of them Jews), plus Polish and Soviet prisoners of war. In the course of its seven-year existence 123,000 of them died here, either from execution or extreme physical or psychological abuse, and each morning would start with a new batch of dead prisoners stuck in the wires atop the perimeter walls, ragged with struggling, shredded like polythene bags blown in the wind.

  The big task of Mauthausen’s inmates was initially that quarry works in the Wiener Graben, adjacent to the camp, and then as the war developed the decision was taken to move Linz’s armaments manufacturing underground, out of range of Allied bombers. So the prisoners were set to work in the surrounding countryside to create forty satellite sub-camps, digging a total of 7 kilometres of tunnels into the rock. Mauthausen became the central distribution point for these sub-camps, sorting out new batches of human moles and sending them out to where they were needed.

  Although a large proportion of inmates’ deaths were work-related, Mauthausen also had its gas chamber, tiled and lined with pipes to look like a shower room to alleviate the panic of those being herded in. The dead bodies would end up, ten at a time, in the cremation furnaces next door to the gas chamber, but only once they’d been through the dissecting room first to have their gold teeth removed.

  Of those allowed to stay alive, the Russians in Block C had been treated particularly badly. They were only fed every third day with five spoonfuls of food, and if they dared ask for more they risked being beaten to death. There were no tables or beds in their block, so everyone slept on the floor, and in wet weather they were made to lie down on the ground so that the SS could walk over them without getting their boots dirty. The torment was unending. ‘If there is a God, he’ll have to beg my forgiveness,’ one of them had scratched on the wall.

  Most able-bodied camp members worked in the quarry, down a steep slope beyond where the modern monuments to the dead have been placed. In those days the descent to the quarry was rough and difficult, down steps of varying height. At the end of the day the workers were forced back up these steps carrying heavy stone blocks, and they were made to do so in tight formation. For the guards, it was a game; they would wait with amused anticipation for a weakened prisoner to stumble and fall, and when he did so he would invariably knock others down with him, creating an avalanche of people and stone. If the weight of falling co-prisoners didn’t injure them, then the blocks would. And if nobody looked as if they were going to stumble of their own accord, then one of the guards would contrive to ‘help’.

  Occasionally the quarry was also used as a method of extermination for Jewish new arrivals, in order to terrorize the rest of the workforce. The SS forced them to push each other off the edge of what they called the ‘Parachutists’ Cliff’ (an SS joke, because of course there were no parachutes) and they would come crashing headfirst down amongst other prisoners working in the quarry below. If they didn’t die from the fall then they were left to drown in the quarry pond. Sometimes desperate prisoners who couldn’t take the suffering any more chose the same escape route, cheating their jailers by jumping voluntarily from the Parachutists’ Cliff on their way to or from the day’s work.

  The camp’s multimedia archive narrates all of this, and has some particularly difficult eyewitness accounts. A local potato farmer described how he’d had to deliver potatoes to the camp every day and sign a document declaring he wouldn’t repeat what he saw to anyone outside. Even when he did, he said, people didn’t believe such inhumanity was possible: ‘They thought I was drunk.’ Apparently the Germans told the locals that Mauthausen was for dangerous criminals, which the locals were pleased to believe. And yet in one particular mass breakout, when five hundred got away, several were taken in and hidden by local families whose compassion overwhelmed their fear. One family described the anxiety of taking in one of these prisoners as stemming not from any danger of what he might do to them, but because their own son was out with the police searching for escapees. They’d had to live with this deception, at the heart of their own family, for many days until the escapee moved on.

  As for the camp officers, there were some who were good husbands to their wives and good fathers to their children, and others who were plainly out of control. On one occasion a group of drunken SS officers had appeared in the middle of the night and demanded that the camp orchestra assemble and play for them until dawn. As a grand finale, after the performance, one of the officers strangled one of the musicians with his bare hands.

  Mauthausen was the last concentration camp to be liberated at the end of the war. In an almost unwatchable video, an ex-marine described what the US army had found when it arrived. ‘We couldn’t believe what had happened here. We couldn’t believe that people could do that to each other,’ and he stood in front of the camera and cried, emoting on behalf of all of us as he related how he and his colleagues had had to bury 1,200 people the first day and 300 a day for the succeeding three weeks, digging a trench and saying a few words over the bodies as they shovelled the soil.

  Initially the liberators had kept the detainees in the camp to control disease and to restore their health until they were ready for freedom and family, but large numbers had elected never to go home. They chose instead to go for onward resettlement in Allied countries, leaving their families to believe they had died.

  Some of that overseas resettlement was reflected in the nation
alities in the visitors’ book, which had the predictable ‘never again’ message in several languages and handwritings. But what most caught my eye was a simple entry from ‘A survivor, with his daughter Judy’ who’d been there the previous day, possibly the last visit of a long life. This survivor hadn’t needed to add any words of his own to his daughter’s simple entry. No doubt what everyone else had written seemed puny to his eyes, but perhaps he simply hadn’t wanted even to come here at all until his daughter had insisted. I wondered whether he felt that guilt that survivors are meant to feel, believing that he should have died too, along with his colleagues. Or possibly he felt another form of guilt, because sometimes survival depended on something that survivors have never ever been able to mention to anyone: co-operation with the enemy. Hard to have to live with that.

  * * *

  For a while after Mauthausen the river crossed a flatland of fruit orchards and deer woodland until the hills of the Mostviertel came surging over the landscape, pushing a bow wave of forest ahead of them. By now the dandelions were shot and poppies were beginning to appear, the first hay crop had been cut and marshalled under a drying sun and farmers were bashing along back roads taking a shortcut to the next job, trying to keep a handbrake on spring. Up on the crests of each of the advancing hills stood either a church or a schloss, statuesque surfers of the slopes, and down by the river the shoulders of land flexed their muscles narcissistically at their reflection in the water and started to bully it again. The barge captains knew they were in for a slog because this was the Strudengau, a stretch of the Danube once infamous for whirlpools that could suck a small boat under, but whose bite had since been blunted by a downriver dam. Now its submerged rocks could only claw in frustration at passing barges like a cat trying to swat a fly from the wrong side of a windowpane.