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The Danube topoi in Central European national anthems provide a good illustration of the changes in the symbolic content identified with this river and carried with it. We are talking about the same river and about our common past, but we have not yet told each other the full story

(Un)common past

 

Poetry and folklore reflected in the Danube form a complete story about the past of nations and countries. The symbolism of the river shows a richness of meanings, ensures eternal transformation and a continuous possibility of purification and renewal, provides a source of fertility, and carries the threat of a devastating tide. As if the river transmitted signals from cosmic forces. It connects and divides landscapes, cities, and states. In the Central European culture, the Danube assumes an infinite variety of forms. It has inspired many literary, visual, and musical representations, with scholars and writers showing its historical role and mythical image in diverse ways. This time I will focus on just one element of the Danube’s meaning, resulting from the sacralisation and mythologisation of selected geographic spaces, naturally leading towards a nation in its modern sense.

 

The Danube in the sequence of Central European symbols

 

Accidentally, or perhaps not quite, the Danube appears in four national anthems, and actually in five. In the case of Austria it is mentioned only as a “river”, but there is no doubt which river is meant here. In each of these songs it carries a different message, enriched with specific symbols. It is worthwhile to look at them all and find out which features of the colourful Danube region can be perceived in the image of the river emerging from these texts. Could this common space be a “a sad lightning rod / For half-people, semi-nationlets”, as Endre Ady bitterly wrote,[1] or perhaps an area favouring mutual recognition of the common past and building the future together? The fact remains that particular nations are not especially familiar with state symbols of their neighbours. The reason is that they are alien to our own symbols and carry completely different meanings. But it would be a peculiar illusion to attempt to build mutual understanding here for the price of overshadowing your own symbols and weakening your own national identity. We probably have to accept the fact that symbols of other nations are as important to them as our symbols are to us. When we juxtapose them, their features are more clearly outlined, which allows us to see the differences and commonalities better.

The Danube occupies a unique place in the world of Central European national symbols. The main reason for that is that it could never become a “national river”, a metaphor of your homeland, like the Polish Vistula or the Czech Vltava crossing the whole country and connecting almost all native regions. The Danube has its source in a different state than most of the ones it crosses, and its course takes it to yet other countries. So it had to remain only a national microcosm, part of a bigger whole defining a fragment of the country or its borders. As one of the biggest rivers on the continent, for centuries the Danube has been an element of the imaginative world of the various peoples in our region. For example, in the Slovak folklore, as the historian Ľubomír Lipták notes, even in the provinces remote from its banks it has become a much more widespread geographic emblem than the Tatras, regarded as the national symbol.

 

The role of the Danube in national mythologies

 

In all five anthems, the Danube carries important symbolic content with it, although diverse meanings flow from them. The topos of this river has played a similar role in creating national mythologies, but it appears in differing historical contexts. In the Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Austrian anthems the river is one of the meaningful, inseparable geographic elements of the emblem of the homeland. In the anthems of Croatia and Romania it invokes the unity of the national universe, but it also transmits another fundamental content.

Ferenc Kölcsey (1790–1838) invokes the Danube in one of the verses of the anthem (1823) along with another important Hungarian river: “wherever flow the rivers of Tisza and Danube”. Putting Tisza first probably resulted from the fact that the poet had been born in the North Eastern district of Szatmár – one hundred years later, under the Treaty of Trianon, a large part of it was transferred to Romania, although the town of Szatmárcseke, where the anthem had been written, remained within the borders of Hungary. Together with the Carpathians, the two “national” rivers signify the whole country and express its geographic unity:

 

You brought our ancestors up

Over the Carpathians’ holy peaks

By You was the beautiful homeland won

For Bendeguz’s sons

And wherever flow the rivers of

Tisza and Danube

Árpád our hero’s descendants[2]

 

According to the ancient tradition of Hungarian literature, the Danube and Buda – as pars pro toto – are also symbols of the homeland. For example, Dániel Berzsenyi (1776–1836) wrote in the poem “To Hungarians” (1807): “As the eagle descended on the steppe of our country / So Árpád the conqueror disembarked on the Danube shores[A1] .”

Antun Mihanović’s (1796–1861) poem entitled “Croatian homeland” was published in 1835 in Zagreb. The text became popular thanks to its first verse (“Our beautiful homeland”) and then became the national anthem. In the penultimate stanza two rivers appear, in a way set against each other: “Flow, fast Sava, flow, Nor you Danube, lose your power.”[3] The reason is that the Sava could be treated as a metaphor of Croatia and the Danube of Hungary. This motif is strongly present in Croatian literature. In Pavel Štoos’s (1806–1862) epic poem Kip domovine vu početku leta 1831 (A picture of the homeland from early summer 1831) the Danube is presented as a catfish threatening the Sava. The subtle, though unambiguous allusion in Mihanović’s ode clearly refers to the antagonism between Hungarian and Croatian national movements.

The Romanian anthem, originally entitled Un răsunet (An echo), was written in 1848. Its author was Transylvanian-born Andrei Mureşanu (1816–1863), and it was dedicated to the Moldavian poet Vasile Alecsandri (1819 or 1821–1890), who called upon his fellow countrymen to arouse Romanian national awareness. The first words of the poem – “Wake up, Romanian!”[4] – stirred Transylvanian Romanians to take up arms against Hungarian rule. This popular patriotic poem was also sung in December 1989 in Timișoara (Hungarian Temesvár) during demonstrations of support for the Calvinist clergyman László Tőkés. His critical assessment of the situation of the Church and protest against the so-called systematisation of the countryside (which in practice meant destroying houses and mass resettlements of the population, including native Hungarians) met with a sharp reaction from Church and state authorities. By the decision of the bishop of Oradea (Hungarian Nagyvárad) Tőkés was relegated from his parish, which was later validated by the court. When government officers arrived to evict him, city residents stood up for their priest. The song, poetically conveying the idea of the Romanian nation driven into slumber by a cruel tyranny, became an expression of anti-Communists sentiments, which soon turned into an all-national revolution.

After the collapse of the dictatorship in 1990, the song became the national anthem of Romania, and until 1994 it also served as the anthem of the Republic of Moldavia. One of its most important messages is the call to cultivate the integration of the regions which previously had not formed a national unity, and also the call to the members of the nation to always shake each other’s hands wherever they meet. In the eleventh stanza the poem calls for the unification of all Romanians in the world, and there is also the complaint that “the Danube is stolen”, which refers to the provisions of the Bucharest Peace Treaty from 1812. Under this treaty, Bessarabia became part of the Russian Empire, which thus acquired access to the Danube delta, which was a strong blow to the homeland Romanians had dreamt about. Analysing Romanian national myths, Lucian Boia wrote:

 

Uniform history supposedly […] assumes a uniform geography. In the case of the Romanian nation, such a geography, a product of the 19th century, is valid until today and takes the form of an almost perfectly round area, delimited by three large watercourses: the Danube, the Dniester and the Tisza, supported on the skeleton of the Carpathians, their lines crossing the entire area. In the Romanian variant the mountains connect, while the rivers divide.[5]

 

The text of the Bulgarian national anthem was written in 1885 by Tsvetan Radoslavov (1863–1931). The poem Мила Родино (Dear Motherland), also known by its incipit “Proud Balkan Mountains”, praises Bulgarian landscapes and love of your country. Besides Thrace and the Pirin mountain range, it is the blue Danube which serves as a symbol of national unity, at the same time marking the border with Romania.

Since we touched upon the colour of the river, we might as well mention Johann Strauss’s (1825–1899) waltz composed in 1866. It is regarded by many as a “secret” Austrian anthem, and just like the Hungarian anthem, it is often heard during the New Year’s Eve toasting. But according to legend, the title “The Beautiful Blue Danube” does not refer to the Viennese stretch of the river, but to its fragment flowing through the Hungarian town of Baja, the birthplace of the German poet Karl Beck (1817–1879), the author of the poem, remembered by Hungarians also as a translator and promoter of Sándor Petőfi’s works.

The end of the Austro-Hungarian era gave rise to the problematic question of what “Austrian identity” could mean. After the Second World War, the revived Republic of Austria announced a competition for the text of the new national anthem. It was won by Paula von Preradović (1887–1951), an Austrian of Croatian origin, granddaughter of the poet Petar Preradović and author of the poem “Land der Berge, Land am Strome” (the land of mountains, the land on the river). And probably no one is in any doubt that this “river”, the geographic symbol of the Austrian homeland, can only be the Danube.

 

Translated from Polish by Tomasz Bieroń

 

The text was originally published in the História magazine (2011). and in Herito magazin in 2018 

 

 

 

Csaba Gy. Kiss – is a historian of literature and culture, essayist, and expert on Central Europe. He is a professor of history of culture at Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest, and a lecturer at the Central European Seminar, part of Slavist and Central European Studies at the Philosophical Department of the Charles University in Prague. In 2009 the International Cultural Centre published a volume of his essays entitled Lekcja Europy Środkowej (The lesson of Central Europ