Europe

by Jan Morris

  20 From Baedeker’s Southern Italy, 1893

  The WIRE ROPE RAILWAY (Ferrovia Funicolare) is 900 yards long, and the upper end is 1300 ft. higher than the lower. The gradient varies from 34:100 to 63:100. The ascent or descent in the train takes 12 minutes. At the upper station guides with numbers on their caps are in waiting (others should be dismissed).

  The thanks of tourists are certainly due to Messrs. Thomas Cook & Son for the energy with which, in face of serious difficulties, they maintain order and discipline among the guides and others, who have been accustomed for generations to practise extortions upon travellers.

  21 Achtung! Comes the tram!

  ‘Achtung!’ several Viennese ladies screamed at me. ‘Achtung! Stop! Comes the tram!’ Trams are essential to the nature of Vienna – hefty, responsible vehicles, with flags on their roofs, and Cyclopean headlights, and sundry pipes and couplings connecting their carriages – but there are some places in the Ringstrasse where they run against the direction of the traffic, and are all too likely to murder you. They once almost murdered Dr Kurt Waldheim himself, although that was, so several people hastened to assure me, before he became President of the Republic.

  After the Second World War several shattered tram systems of the continent were re-equipped with discarded streetcars from the United States, but I always think of trams as quintessentially European things, especially trailer-trams. It was while sitting in a tram at Berne in Switzerland that Albert Einstein, one of the greatest of Europeans, is supposed to have conceived his theory of relativity; and it was only proper that perhaps the most celebrated photograph of the Second World War, showing a Soviet soldier raising the Hammer and Sickle above the ruins of the Reichstag in Berlin, should include in its background a couple of burnt-out streetcars in the rubble-strewn street below. European cities without trams (like those foolish English municipalities which gave them up in the 1940s and 1950s) seem to me somehow incomplete: ‘Bremen without trams,’ says one book about that eminently sensible city, ‘would be like Venice without gondolas,’ and the same is true of many another place. Is there any sensation more absolutely of this continent than the sudden jerky lurch, accompanied sometimes by a clanging bell and a shower of sparks from the lines above, which happens when a tram embarks upon a corner? Some of my fondest memories of London concern the antique open-topped trams, garish with advertisements, which used to run along the Embankment there, carrying me shivering but expectant on the upper deck towards some happy youthful rendezvous. Nowadays, of course, many trams are streamlined, modern and computerized; in some Swiss and German cities they seem downright cybernetic, and accelerate with thrilling whining noises; but they are still often colourful with publicity, and slide through their city streets with all the old matronly assurance. Amsterdam is a great place for trams – psychedelically painted, as often enough, and apparently running every other minute; when I first went there some of them had postboxes beside their doors. One of the most delightful of tram-scenes is offered at Riga, in Latvia, where little pairs of trams trundle neatly, like toys, across the immense modern bridge over the Daugava, often all alone upon its great span. But Vienna is my tram-city par excellence. There used to be a Vienna city tramline which ran all the way to Pressburg, now transformed into Bratislava and the capital of a different country! I think the Vienna trams impress me most because they are so proudly at odds with the character of the city itself. It is a place of endless pretension: they run not only against the flow of the civic traffic, but against the flow of the civic temperament too, being stolid, plain-spoken, down-to-earth kinds of mechanism. When I nearly lost my life to one of them that day in 1983 – ‘Quick! Comes the tram the other way!’ – they seemed to me to play an almost metaphorical role in the city of Freud. As I stepped back from the track just in time to avoid extinction I looked up at the passing tram and distinctly saw there, just for a moment, my own face in its slightly steamed-up window. We exchanged distant smiles, as between Id and Ego.

  22 An allegory

  Once when I was driving through Sofia, in Bulgaria, I saw a woman step directly into the path of a tram – not on purpose, but simply in a hurry. She was heavily loaded with bags and parcels. The tram was probably full of passengers, but through the city’s morning smog I could see none of them, nor a driver either. It was like an allegory. The woman was the very essence of humanity – loaded with burdens, flustered, anxious, hurried: the tram looked blankly mechanistic, a hefty iron thing moving mindlessly along its tracks. There was a peculiarly metallic kind of noise, half scrape, half skid, as the two collided and the prostrate woman was pushed in a litter of shopping-bags fifty yards or so along the track. A moment of dead quiet followed, as the tram stopped, the woman lay there unconscious, and the bystanders looked on silent and appalled.

  23 Through the linings

  Even the passage of the trams, though, is not so utterly of Europe as the coming and going of the water-traffic along its rivers and canals, flying the flags of half a dozen venerable States, taking vast quantities of materials and manufactures from quay to quay of the continent – from the North Sea clean to the Black Sea, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. I love to watch the boats go by: so did Mendelssohn – ‘I came here with great plans to work,’ he wrote from his room beside the Main at Frankfurt in 1836, ‘but now a week has passed and I have done little else …’

  Powerful big craft roam the waterways of modern Europe. Tremendous engines heave vessels from one level to another. Down the Rhine the barges surge, one after the other, at high speed between the bluffs, their engines echoing, their flags streaming. On the Danube strange white tourist craft surge and circle, like big water-insects. Almost anywhere in France you may come across a barge chugging down one of a hundred unsuspected water-routes. Even in the England of the 1990s, where commercial barge traffic had nearly all given way to tourist pastiche, there were visionary proposals for a commercial canal to link the Irish Sea with the North Sea; in the meantime one of the curious sights of northern England was that of a barge loaded with rolls of newsprint regularly making its way up a little waterway to the offices of the Yorkshire Evening Post in the medieval heart of York. Nowhere else has water-traffic quite like Europe’s, at once so formidable, so varied and so homely – for often, as a mighty barge ploughs its way across the hundreds of miles to Rotterdam or Hamburg, Budapest or Marseille, you may see the captain’s wife hanging out her laundry on the poop, watering the massed pots of geraniums which ornament the wheel-house, washing the family car that is carried on the foredeck, or making the coffee as at Maastricht.

  The boat-people of the inland waterways form an inner community of Europe, for ever on the move, crossing the old frontiers constantly and meeting colleagues from all over the continent at the big river ports and junctions. At my home in Wales there is a German businessman who, having come to Britain as a prisoner-of-war, married a Welsh girl and has spent the rest of his life in Wales. He was born into a barge-family of eastern Germany, and one afternoon he spent half an hour with me tracing on my atlas his childhood journeys among the waterways of Silesia and Brandenburg, and out to the west into the Elbe and the Mosel. He had seen much of the continent, but from an altogether different perspective from mine. As he talked about those immense half-hidden voyages of long before, far from the railways and motorways, through countryside most travellers seldom see, he reminded me of the Venetian epithet for backstreet walking: per le fodere – ‘through the linings’.

  24 Father Rhine

  The supreme European river is the Rhine – far more than a mere frontier, as we considered it earlier, but a majestic communication. Rüdesheim in Germany is one of the most famous towns along its banks, being an archetypal half-timbered, tourist-frequented, vineyard-backed German beauty spot just upstream from the Lorelei, but it is also one of the best (or worst) places to gauge the importance of the river and its valley as a conductor of traffic. Try sleeping a night in a hotel somewhere on its outskirts, and the geog
raphical meaning of the Rhine will be made horribly plain to you. Every quarter of an hour or so a distant angry murmur, like a wind rising, warns your poor nerves that in a few moments another freight train will shortly come rushing down the east bank on its way to Mannheim. When it has passed you may hear the echoing clatter of its opposite number on the west bank, speeding northward to Rotterdam or Hamburg. And in the brief spells when a train is not passing, one way or another, or a truck driving by on this bank or on that, ceaselessly sounds the deep chug-chug of the barges, swiftly downstream, laboriously against the current. There is seldom a silent moment on the Rhine at Rüdesheim, scarcely a moment without the plod, hurtle or judder of the river’s purpose. The Rhine is the busiest of all waterways. As a highway it begins at Konstanz, on the frontier between Switzerland and Germany, where a large figure 0 on a riverside board tells the barge-captain that he has 1,165 kilometres to go to the North Sea. By the time he gets to Rotterdam he will have passed beneath some 150 bridges, sailed along the littorals of six nations and helped to define a continent. The Rhine, said Thomas Carlyle, was his ‘first idea of a world river’, and a world river it is, because the goods it carries across Europe to the sea are distributed across all earth’s oceans.

  25 Pilgrims to the sea

  I once joined a Dutch barge for the last phase of its journey down the Rhine, through the Low Countries to the river’s mouth. I had lately made a voyage on a towboat on the Mississippi, and I thought this might be the same sort of experience – the Germans, after all, speak of Old Father Rhine rather as the Americans talk of Old Man River. It was not at all. The Mississippi voyage had been above all purposeful and calculated, but in my memory at least the Rhine voyage had an exaltatory feel. It was like the end of a pilgrimage. For most of the time I sat on the open deck of the barge, and all around me other vessels streamed with us towards the ocean, as to a shrine. The further we went, the thicker the traffic, and the faster we seemed to sail, and the more feverish the beat of our engines, and the fiercer our bow-wave, until at last we burst into the sanctuary – the port of Rotterdam, the greatest port on earth, where a hundred deep-sea freighters loomed all around us, tugs scurried, sirens blew, lock-gates opened and closed, trucks hurried along the quaysides, and we took our string of barges in as though we were bringing tributes out of the East for the water-gods.

  26 Should I have genuflected?

  The River Maas joins the Rhine not far from Rotterdam, and is another great channel of Europe’s water-trade. At Maastricht, where the barges sail by night and day, I walked one morning to the St Servaas Bridge, the oldest bridge across the river and the city’s raison d’être. As I crossed its footpath a tall-masted tug approached, and beneath my feet I felt the bridge begin to move to let it pass. With a discreet shudder of mechanisms the structure levitated horizontally into the air, taking me with it; and so stately and gently was this motion, so priest-like the figure of the bridge-master in his cabin above, that there too I felt I was taking part in some immemorial ritual of the waterways, and ought perhaps to genuflect as the tug sailed below me.

  27 To the East

  The Rhine is a Western river, but the Danube looks to the East, and undergoes many a metamorphosis on its journey to the Black Sea. Sometimes it is a busy thoroughfare, sometimes it runs lonely through desolate wastelands. It is called the Duna here, the Donau there. Three hundred lesser rivers join it on its course, and nine European States stand upon its banks. It formally begins at Donaueschingen in the Black Mountains of Germany, where two small streams unite below a symbolic statue in a park: I thought it very apt that when I asked a man there which of them was more properly the original Danube, he plucked a small branch from a laurel bush and explained the hydrography by means of its tributary twigs.

  The Danube can let one down, especially at Vienna, the home of its romance and reputation, where it is not visible at all in the city centre, having been canalized to the north in 1875 – a circumstance which does not prevent the waltz orchestras of the city from playing Johann Strauss’s serenade to the stream several hundred times in every working week. Elsewhere it is full of surprise and excitement. In Bucharest, which stands on a Danube tributary, I found on a second-hand bookstall a booklet about the Romanian Danube Flotilla, which was full of marvellous images of antique river gunboats fighting their way up and down the river in the course of one war or another, desperately low in the water and sometimes so weighed down with camouflage branches that they looked like floating piles of brushwood. Upstream at Bratislava, forlornly on the Danube waterfront stands a memorial to the river boats of the Soviet Navy which, now forgotten by all, helped to drive the Germans back to Germany in the Second World War. One of the strangest of Danubian sights is an enormous empty space of reclaimed land, on a bend of the river near Esztergom in Hungary, which is all that remains (at least as I write) of an abandoned dam: the Hungarians and the Czechoslo-vakians had embarked upon a monumental joint project to exploit the river, but in 1994 the Hungarians pulled unilaterally out of the enterprise, aborting what had already been done at astronomical expense, infuriating the Slovaks, upsetting the Austrian building contractors, embroiling themselves in endless international litigation, and leaving only this desolate memorial to mark the spot.

  The Danube is all it ought to be at Budapest, big, brassy, consequential. It is gloomy at Belgrade. It is suitably thoughtful as it passes under the Stone Bridge at Regensburg, beneath the city’s fabled hundred towers. It seems to me properly suggestive at Passau, where, reinforced by the Inn and the Ilz, it assembles itself to leave the German world for the lands of the Slavs and Magyars. It separates the Bulgars from the Romanians in a calm judicial manner, moving in wide curves between wooded banks. It subsides mysteriously and gloriously into the Black Sea through the waterlands of the Danube marshes, amid the squawks of a thousand seabirds and the splash of fishermen’s nets. I enjoy it most through the windows of one of the numberless hydrofoils, mostly Russian-built, which run scheduled passenger services here and there along its course. Then one swooshes exuberantly along the river, past castles and fishing-platforms and monasteries, overtaking barges, swerving around shallows, from one ancient city to the next.

  28 Flops and ’istory

  Sometimes, like the Danube at Vienna, the greatest rivers of Europe can be sadly disappointing. They can be romantic enough at their sources, and imposing at their estuaries, when they turn into majestic ports or shipping channels. But the supreme episodes of their passages, when they arrive at the famous capitals and metropolises to which they have given birth, often turn out to be anticlimactic. Setting the river of the capital on fire has been a proverb in several European countries for the excitement of achieving a great ambition, becoming celebrated, powerful, or at least notorious, but all too often the river turns out to be non-combustible. ‘What!’ I can still hear myself exclaiming, when I first went to Rome. ‘That’s the Tiber!’ That was the river which flowed with blood, whose bridge Horatius guarded, which Popes and emperors and conquerors had been proud to survey, and poets and painters since the start of history anxious to immortalize – the river which, ‘sung so often in poetic lays,’ as Addison put it, ‘with scorn the Danube and the Nile surveys’! What a flop to find it was no more than a sluggish stream, lovelessly dyked and foully polluted. Then there is the Seine at Paris, which tourists conventionally gush over, and excursion boats sail expensively in the twilight, but which always looks to me less like a real river than a not very beautiful segment of a canal (and which, as a matter of fact, geographers now say is not really the Seine at all, but only some undistinguished tributary). The Rhône is not half so memorable at Lyon as it is when it passes under the bridge at Avignon, or meanders to its fate beside the grasslands of the Camargue. As for the Spree, which has given its name to several languages as a synonym for a good night out, even in the 1990s nothing could be much less festive than its course through the heart of Berlin, viscous with fearful memories, past the great gloomy hulks
of museums and dead palaces, under bridges decorated with the faces of mercifully extinct emperors and the crests of fortunately vanished Powers.

  Still, on the right day the broad Tagus, sweeping under its magnificent suspension bridge, provides a glorious boundary and belvedere for the city of Lisbon; the Guadalquivir still speaks of great navigators and treasure fleets as it says goodbye to Seville; the Arno is lovely but does not count, because all that anyone knows about it is the fact that it flows through Florence and Pisa; the river which apparently provides a stately centre-line for the architecture of Edinburgh, dividing the medieval from the Georgian, does not count either, because it turns out on closer inspection to be a railway track; the Vltava at Prague honourably reflects the stately buildings all around; the dear old Liffey is all one could ask for Dublin – a river of Guinness, along whose quays James Joyce forever shortsightedly strolls, together with Mr Bloom, the Yeats brothers, Dean Swift and several intoxicate poets. Best of them all, though, to my mind, is the River Thames as it strides through London. English people constantly reproach themselves with having neglected the London river-banks, but I do not agree. I love their piecemeal mixture of the consequential and the trivial, the squalid and the luxurious, the old and the new, and I think Europe still has few things to show more fair than the view of the Thames at night from one of its bridges – the dazzle of the West End lights, the great glow that is the dome of St Paul’s, the dark patches that suggest the old and mighty consequence of the place, the clumped blocks of the financial quarter, the tower of Big Ben like a sentinel – which even then, if you are lucky, resonantly booms out the time across the water. ‘Liquid ’istory’, as the politician John Burns famously put it, looking out from the terrace of the House of Commons.