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Taking the Waters: The Danube’s Reception in Austrian and Central/Eastern European Cinema History Robert Dassanowsky

With the emerging nationalism of the early nineteenth century, two major waterways began to signify particular ideological values in German-speaking Europe. The Rhine, which had for so long represented the division of French and German territory, had, with the founding of the German Empire in 1871, become a "German river." As Carl Cherubim announced in his pioneering anthropological-geographical text from 1897, Flüsse als Grenzen von Staaten und Nationen in Mitteleuropa (Rivers as Borders of States and Nations in Central Europe), "the Rhine has become the most beautiful example of an internal union of the river's banks in political economy and transport."1 Further, Cherubim underscored that the Danube, with its more complex geopolitical and historical role as the symbol of borderlands than the linear north/south flowing Rhine, had ultimately become the uniting river of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.2 The evolution of both rivers in the development of Central European statehood demonstrated to Cherubim the value of culture in overcoming nature and the "primitive dividing force of the river."3 A century later, Lothar Zögner's study, Flüsse im Herzen Europas. Rhein-Elbe-Donau, relates how Cherubim's vision of cultural change in understanding the roles of the Rhine and the Danube was more idealistic than factual. Zögner explains that these rivers were assigned identifying qualities in the nineteenth century that more or less continued to represent them despite geopolitical changes. The Rhine was considered a conduit of "border and travel," while the Danube would reflect many "peoples and states." The Rhine has, however, developed into a river of integration since 1945 and later, with the creation of the European Union, whereas the Danube lost its unifying value and became a symbol of division following 1918.4

2 In his analysis regarding the dividing and unifying values of the Rhine and the Danube from the post-Napoleonic era onward, Rainer Guldin points to the equalizing fact that "division always suggests unification and unification always implies division."5 The specific "values" ascribed to these rivers during the past two centuries were thus more mythic and nationalistic than realistic. With the eastward colonization of the Habsburgs, and following the creation of the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary in 1867, the Danube clearly resembles the role of the Rhine as internal geopolitical and cultural unifier. The concept of the Danube as having grown into Austria-Hungary's lifeline (as Cherubim understood it) among "peoples and states," is one shaped by the idea of the nation-state and by German nationalism in particular, and not by cultural-historical reality of the transnational entities that built and mixed their cultures around the river for centuries. The difference between the cultures divided by the Rhine and the Danube in ancient history were colonial rather than national.6 The understanding of the Rhine as a representation of a semi-homogenic culture ultimately made concrete and official, and the Danube as both a river of historical division and unity of "peoples and states," stems from the strict nationalist categorization of the river and its ethnic geography, which the structure of the Habsburg monarchy always contradicted. Claudio Magris reaches back to the heroic epic Middle High German poem Das Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs) to demonstrate that the Danube has always been a far greater unifying than dividing force throughout its history. And although it begins in and flows through a portion of Southern Germany, it is as the only major eastward-flowing river on the continent, with the second largest catchment (after the Volga), that it marks the eastward movement of historical Habsburg imperialism. This enforces the river’s role as the geographical marker of Mitteleuorpa and Vienna as its symbolic "source": The Danube is often enveloped in a symbolic anti-German aura. It is the river along which different peoples meet and mingle and crossbreed, rather than being, as the Rhine is, a mythical custodian of the purity of race. It is the river of Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Belgrade and of Dacia, the river which – as Ocean encircled

3 the world of the Greeks – embraces the Austria of the Habsburgs, the myth and ideology of which have been symbolized by a multiple supranational culture. […] The Danube is German-Magyar-Slavic-Romanic-Jewish Central Europe, polemically opposed to the German Reich.7 In principle, Magris enforces the idea that it has been the Danube that has created identities (Danubian rather than specifically national) and not the identities that have shaped it as a divider or unifier of territory. Both Magris and Guldin suggest that the Danube-as-core-identity has become more overt in European culture since the fall of Cold War division. Nevertheless, the strong mythos of the Danube's "ownership" by the Habsburg monarchy may have been a compelling reason that Sovietized Europe, which lay claim to a great portion of the Danube between 1945 and 1990, never utilized its potential as a basis for Marxist-Leninist non-nationalist unity in Europe. The exploitation of Danubian ethnic regions as historically linked identities might have actually given communism the more organic face it desired in fostering a Bloc bond in significant parts of Eastern Europe. The creation and validation of the "nation" – whatever it might necessarily be – as couched in historical myth or cultural imaginary were among the important messages of early patriotic film. This is very clear in the cinemas of states that had to deal with vast and transferred multiculturalism as theoretical nation (United States) or those of late unification (Italy and Germany). Being a polyglot mix of regions and ethnicities rather than the melting pot that was the U.S., AustriaHungary avoided the impossible monolithic patriotism of nation in favor of loyalty to the dynasty and by underscoring a bond of strong cultural sympathy. Particularly after the 1848 revolutions, great and "universal" Germanophone figures in its arts such as Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven (as adoptive Viennese), Grillparzer, Raimund, Nestroy, and later popular and regional/other ethnic cultural figures were elevated to "patriotic" representatives of the entity. The Danube was linked to the most lasting popular cultural celebration of the Habsburg or "Danubian" monarchy's cultural imaginary, the music of Johann Strauss II (and secondarily his father and brothers), which came to represent all of Austria-Hungary. Aware of this, Strauss would

4 integrate various ethnic and regional musical styles into his dance and operetta compositions. The waltz, "An der schönen blauen Donau" (On the Beautiful Blue Danube) Opus 314, the most famous piece of music composed by the prolific Strauss, would undeniably come to represent Austria's cultural ownership of the river. Composed in 1866, the year of the Austro-Prussian war which was contrived by Bismarck to push Austria and its non-German crownlands out of the unification of the German Empire, it suggest the transcendental beauty of the entire Danube, thus offered an aesthetically based statement of idealized Habsburgian identification. On the other hand, the composition also symbolized particular Viennese possession of the Danube, beyond even its dualist partner Budapest, and above other Danubian cities/regions of the Monarchy, which did not claim it as much as understand it as an organic link to the "center." To this day, the waltz has helped to continue Vienna's symbolic claim to the river and its culture, although since the fall of communism, and the emergence of the concept of EU regional identity, other Danube cities have begun to claim their share of ethnic/cultural representation by the river. Rather than mimic the nationalization and division of the river, which was an aspect of communist rule, Danube cities now tend to understand it as a conduit of transnationalism. More than musical enshrinement, the reception of the Danube in Austrian and Central European narrative film, provides a unique geopolitical and geocultural barometer regarding the perceived ownership or exploitation of this river. Enforcing or even emblematizing the Vienna-Danube popular culture connection in early Austrian film was problematic from the start. An attempt to meld melodrama, documentary, and operetta in Johann Strauss an der schönen blauen Donau/Johann Strauss on the Beautiful Blue Danube in 1913, was a misfire despite its lavish conception and its premiere, which coincided with the unveiling of the Johann Strauss Jr. Memorial in Vienna's City Park. Imperial Court Theater star Carl von Zeska, who directed the 2,000-meter film, overloaded it with performances and cameos by prominent names from Viennese theater, opera, and operetta, but the fictionalized Strauss biography ultimately failed due to the too recent presence of Strauss in Viennese cultural life. More pertinent to the image of the river itself, this signaled the saturation point of Austria and Vienna’s romanticized

5 identification with the Danube.8 This is ironic when one considers that Vienna was the only European metropolis that was not truly intersected by its major waterway. The city had risen on only one side of the Danube until late imperial expansion considered the development of new working class districts on the other bank and elements of the annexationist Nazi "Greater Vienna" survived the regime. As this chapter will demonstrate, the symbol of the Danube would be used as both support of and opposition to Old Vienna nostalgia by Austrian and other "Danubian" national cinemas, even while Vienna’s primary association with it remained a general reflex after 1918, 1945, or even 1989. The Danube in Interwar Austrian and Nazi German Cinema Twenty years after the Strauss-Blue Danube film debacle, in a post-imperial First Republic Austria wrestling with its identity and survival among the new states of Central Europe, two films by Paul (Pal) Fejos, a Hungarian director working in Vienna, gave a new direction to the contemporary Austrian musical film beyond the silent film translation of the operetta. His two Vienna-based films are also significant for their use of the Danube as an image positioned against the traditional or clichéd cultural imprint. Fejos had studied medicine and had worked in minor positions in film in Vienna, Berlin and Paris after the war until he managed to find employment in the U.S. in 1926 as a research assistant in chemistry for the Ford Foundation in New York. He nevertheless abandoned science and moved to Hollywood to direct low-budget films for Universal. His 1928 film Lonesome, a socially critical love story about two alienated New Yorkers, which anticipates his first Austrian film, Sonnenstrahl/Ray of Sun (Austria 1933), brought him attention and he followed up with the lavish 1929 art-deco sound musical Broadway, which utilized early Technicolor in its finale. His prediction of what would become the Hollywood Golden Age musical spectacle moved him to MGM, but his unsatisfying tenure there turned him briefly to productions in Paris and Budapest before he found a more comfortable site of creativity in Vienna. There he followed in the cinematic footsteps of the successful Austro-Hungarians before him (Michael Kertesz aka Michael Curtiz, and

6 Alexander Korda), that under the tutelage of leading silent-era producer Sascha Kolowrat, created a more internationalist Austrian film style, even as it was anchored in Central European multiculture. Fejos subsequently directed two music films in Vienna that rejected not only the nostalgic Viennese operetta but also the frothy, elitist escapism of Hollywood's Busby Berkeley or the Rogers and Astaire dance films. Old Vienna nostalgia (the Danube included) was the accepted international image of Austria in early sound film, and even Alfred Hitchcock tried his early filmic hand at a fictionalized musical based on Johann Strauss II and his particular tribute to the Danube in Waltzes from Vienna, aka Chant de Danube and Strauss' Great Waltz (UK 1934). Fejos, instead, concentrated on modern Vienna, and devised simple contemporary fables about achievable dreams for an Austrian audience that had to rebuild identity and stability amid sociopolitical trauma and for an international audience dealing with the fallout of America's Great Depression. French star Annabella, with whom he had worked in Paris, and German leading man Gustav Fröhlich were Fejos' choice for his socially critical Viennese musical film of 1933, Sonnenstrahl/Ray of Sun.9 Shot mostly on location and pre-suggesting the neo-realism of the late 1940s, the film anchors its story firmly in the poverty of the day. Opening with a newsreel on world events that concludes with a report on unemployment and financial depression in Austria, the camera spots the male lead, Fröhlich, as the unemployed chauffeur Hans Schmidt, standing in an unemployment line and attempting to avoid the camera's gaze. The introduction breaks the audience's expectation of cinema as escapist fantasy or as protective of the spectator. Here, the audience must sympathize and even identify with the character of Hans, and the film's immediate "realism" dissolves notions of the conventional cinematic romance or comedy in favor of involving the spectator in a more socially critical experience. In the following scene, Hans discovers he is locked out of his room because he owes on the rent and his belongings have been taken in lieu of payment. Dejected, Hans makes his way to the Vienna Danube Canal intending to end his life by drowning there and attempts to write a note to the police that he has committed suicide. He is interrupted in this task by another figure with similar plans. A young woman jumps into the canal and Hans attempts to save her from the dark,

7 cold water. Finally rescued, she sits with his arms wrapped around her freezing body in the atmospheric chiaroscuro lighting that suggests this ought to be a romantic moment. But it cannot be, just as the Danube becomes a site of hopelessness rather than transcendence that inspires a waltz. When he berates her for wanting to throw her life away, she finds his note. The failed double suicide attempt becomes an introductory catharsis for the audience, which assures the audience that the film understands true despair, and that Hans's rescue of the woman which then also rescues him, provides a rebirth that might make life worthwhile after all. The hope conveyed by the narrative, even somewhat fancifully in its semi-musical genre, stems from this moment of gentle intimacy that without sentimentality underscores the value of life. Covered with blankets in the police wagon, we witness their wet and tired faces, a bold rupture of the convention of cinema romance during the era. The film falls silent as if to say one does not need the crudeness of the new sound technology to bring the universal point across. In what should be regarded as one of the classic scenes in Western cinema, Hans writes "Das Leben ist schön" [life is beautiful] with his finger on the frosted window. These words serve as an appeal to reject the power of the film's opening shots of poverty and misery. Fejos positions human suffering against the false "positive" myths and clichés of culture, and it is in spite of the Danube–or because of the shock of its cold water--that the couple survives, and not because of its waltzing blue waves. Rather than echo the contrived Hollywood escapism he had known, Fejos' Sonnenstrahl transforms social criticism into a poetic realist musical. The film begins with a disaster that other melodramas use as conclusion and the inversion makes typical musical film convention or fantasy impossible. Film historian Christine Brinkmann maintains that this opening sequence becomes central to all his sound work, which continues a love for the silent, the atmospheric, and the rapidly altering emotions of the characters.10 His narrative too, prefers the clarity of realism and its irony without the convoluted sub-plots usually found in either the era's romantic or urban melodrama films.

8 At the police station, Hans discovers that saving Anna's life earns him a small reward, and so they pass beyond the other pathetic figures in the station until they see the sun rising and Hans points out the "Sonnenstrahl" [ray of sun]. A new day has arrived and it has promise. The very modest, but still hopeful upward social spiral of Hans and Anna becomes a wry reference to the downward civilization spirals of philosopher Oswald Spengler and other pessimistic social critics of the era. It is one that attempts to empower the audience with practical goals, rather than impossible romantic dreams. Although called "eine Apotheose proletarischer Solidarität im Roten Wien" [an apotheosis of proletarian solidarity in Red Vienna] at the time by Leftist critic Fritz Rosenfeld, the film's narrative can also be understood through the Catholic/reactionary political ideology of Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss' new Austrofascist state which began to assert itself that year. Examined through its tenets, the Danube is a quasi-mystical waterway for its iconic connection with the lost monarchy, and thus also signifies traditional social standards. Cleansed of their unfortunate pasts in a "baptism" in the Danube, and thus understanding the sin of suicide, the couple's faith in their eventual marriage also articulates Fejos' "ray of sun" along Catholic familial values. Metaphysically, the Danube here represents a border between life and death, but it is also a conduit of human unification. The director's second film in Vienna, the 1933 Frühlingstimmen/Voices of Spring approaches the very core of the Vienna-Danube connection again through the Strauss waltz.11 Fejos reworks Straussian melodies and offers new music by operetta composer Robert Stolz to frame but also undermine cliché in his urban petit bourgeois comedy, which focuses on the values of the modern aspirant artist—the young singing students of Vienna's famous Academy of Music and Performing Arts. Fejos again maintains a "modest dreams" concept here, and uses the chubby Austro-Hungarian character actor, Szőke Szakáll (S.K. “Cuddles” Sakall of Hollywood fame) to be the through-line that keeps the large ensemble cast and its subplots of mistaken identity less an operetta fantasy and more a comedy of contemporary mores. In the role of Krüger, the Academy's porter, Szakáll establishes himself as one of the most popular comic actors in what would become the Austrian transnational/ independent or Emigrantenfilm [emigrant film] after such mainstream film stars as

9 Paul Hörbiger and Hans Moser. His blustery character here is responsible for everything from distributing piles of sheet music and cleaning instruments to assisting the music professors and students in their work. His character clearly parodies Paul Hörbiger's theater porter in Max Ophüls acclaimed cinematic treatment of Arthur Schnitzler's bourgeois tragedy, Liebelei/Flirtation (Germany 1933). Hörbiger's porter has to contend with one willful daughter, but Szakall's character is given two: Hannerl (opera star Adele Kern) and Olly (Ursula Grabley), as well as the unrelenting men who want to marry them. They do not represent, however, the helpless and exploitable süßes Mäderl [sweet girl] character of the German-language bourgeois tragedy theater tradition, but are self-aware and often headstrong young women who intend to become music stars and find love with the men they desire. The skeletal, even parodic operetta structure of the film allows Fejos to hang fresh and even provocative commentary about the younger generation, poverty, the agency of woman, the self-importance of the creative man onto a form the audience trusted. His Vienna is a modern urban site in which we hardly see anything iconic or recognizable. Even the trip down the Danube in which the music students sing Johann Strauss is given the "different" feel of a working class youth outing. What little traditional nostalgia for Old Vienna it recalls in the Danube setting and its music is ultimately toppled by a comedic scene in which part of a stack of Blue Danube Waltz sheet music is blown from Szakall's hands and into the water. In a fit of exasperation, he then also dumps the rest of it into the Danube. It is a truly droll symbolic farewell to romantic Danube clichés. Given such a jaundiced view of the 'romantic' Danube in Austrian film at the start of sound film, the river never regains its emblematic strength in cinema under Austrofascism (1933-38). But its value as a symbol which connects and thus defines Central Europe, remains a strong ideological weapon in Nazi German filmmaking, which intends to break not Vienna's symbolic hold on the river, but its independent Austrian association (anathema to Nazism's pan-German ideology), and thus shift its geopolitical values. Carl Boese's Eine Nacht an der Donau/A Night on the Danube (Germany 1935), a romance shot with all the local color of Budapest and "their" Danube, was an attempt to move German production into the success that Austrian/Hungarian themed films enjoyed, even in

10 Nazi Germany. The following year, Willi Reiber's German Donaumelodien/Danube Melodies (Germany/Hungary 1936) presented a mixed genre of Viennese Film, melocomedy, and musical film, in which the setting is contemporary and the narrative is directly focused on the Danube. It manipulates nostalgia for the Austrian-Hungarian past found in the Viennese Film genre, by replacing the Austrian characters and actors with Bavarians. They speak with an idiom similar to that of mainstream Austrian dialect in order to fuse the identities of both and allow Nazi Germany to coopt Austria’s historical cinematic relationship with Hungary on the basis of the Danubian connection. The film also intended to undermine the production partnerships between Vienna and Budapest in the Emigrantenfilm industry, which was composed of German Jewish and Austrian/Hungarian anti-Nazi talent, producing internationalist style films that were forbidden export to Germany.12 Donaumelodien, which from its very title suggests the romantic musical and a representation of the Old Vienna topos, simply shifts that Viennese association to Germany and with its story about the relationship between two shipping families --Bavarian and Hungarian – suggests Hungary’s potential economic and political alliance with Nazi Germany. The film underscores the Danube as a German sourced and dominated waterway of Eastern European expansion, an artery of "pure blood" cleansing the non-Germanic spaces.13 After the 1938 annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany, the "Aryanization," and centralization of its film industry resulted in Wien-Film, a studio that would be specifically responsible for Viennese-type musical and comic entertainment film for the Reich and its occupation or allied audiences.14 Yet some of the early productions of Wien-Film were hardly the escapist fluff the studio was charged by Propaganda Minister Goebbels to create. Two productions even foreshadowed stylistic and socially critical aspects of early Italian neorealism. Frau im Strom/Woman In The River (1939), was a curiously gritty film for the period, which echoed the Austrian silent socially critical and proletarian melodramas of the 1920s. Written by Gerhard Menzel and directed by Gerhard Lamprecht, it borrows from Fejos’ Sonnenstrahl to create the story of a suicidal woman rescued from the Danube Canal by a working-class man who becomes involved with a band of smugglers

11 from Southeastern Europe. The Danube is here understood to be a waterway that ties the two ideological opposites of Europe together: the Nazi German source and the anti-Nazi Eastern/Soviet mouth. The symbolism of the eastern flow of the river from Germany, the source that would wash away the corruptive racial taint of the Slavic East is the obvious message of this film. In Donauschiffer/Danube Navigator (Austria/Germany 1940) directed by Robert A. Stemmle, leading man Attila Hörbiger, newcomer Hilde Krahl, and actor Paul Javor provide the love-triangle center for the Grand Hotel-style melodramatic vignettes on a steamship en route to the Black Sea. The Danube is the one constant of the narrative and relativizes the supposed social (and even ethnic) differences between the passengers. These unusual lapses in providing lavish musical entertainment and overt political propaganda were, nevertheless, geopolitically motivated and display Wien-Film's secondary mission -- to reach an audience in the Nazi allied or conquered lands of Southeastern Europe.15 The Danube remained an indelible representation of a romanticized Central Europe and its cultural and popular artistic associations even when it was mostly part of the Nazi Reich, as the 1940 French film Le Danube bleu/The Blue Danube by an Austro-Polish director active in France and Britain, Emil E. Reinert demonstrates. The exotic mystery-romance set among a clan of "gypsies" and featuring the Alfred Rode and the music of his "Tzigane Band," would have been impossible to film in German-occupied France three months later. "Gypsies" or correctly, members of the Roma and Sinti communities, were open targets of the Nazi genocide policy.16 The Danube in the Cinema of Allied Occupation and Austrian Nation (Re-)Building The first color film of Austrian postwar cinema was the socialist-tinged working class musical, Das Kind der Donau aka Marika/Child of the Danube (Austria 1950), with its comeback role for Nazi German cinema’s most popular singer/dancer, the Hungarian Marika Rökk.17 The film was directed by her husband, Georg Jacoby, who had made several Austrian silent pictures and had directed the first color film for Berlin's megastudio UFA, Frauen sind bessere Diplomaten/Women are Better Diplomats (Germany 1942), which also launched Rökk to stardom. Shot at the Sovietoccupied former Wien-Film Studio, now also referred to by its location as the Rosenhügel Studio,

12 the production demonstrated the extent to which Stalin's representatives were willing to utilize the cinema icons of the Nazi past and the nostalgia for Central European unity represented by the Danube to influence their future sphere of control in Europe. The narrative’s proletarian aspect dispelled both the elitist Austro-Hungarian imperial mythos and the expansionist German notions with a naturalistic setting. In reclaiming the star Hungarian actress from Nazi German cinema for a film shot in the re-established Austria and depicting her as a "child of the Danube," the river becomes transnational, and the lead character specifically non-national (in the Marxist sense). Rökk's role as "artistic nature girl," a dancer living on a small barge on the Danube who begins a relationship with a homeless writer, may tie music and culture to the river once again, but it consciously disassociates the waterway with earlier cinema tropes and geopolitical identities. This was also among the first Austrian films of the postwar-era to utilize spaces of nature and provincial towns to revitalize and de-Nazify the Heimatfilm (provincial melodrama) genre of German-language cinema as a virtual vacation for the impoverished populations tired of Allied occupation and rebuilding cities in ruin. Yet, even in this Marxist interpretation of its defiance of national boundaries and identities, the Danube’s association with the carefree Old Viennese imaginary remained a strong emotional subtext for Central and Eastern Europe audiences, and the film apparently ran for years in cinemas in the Soviet Union and its occupied territories.18 In the wake of the immense critical and popular success of the British film noir treatment of war-torn Vienna in The Third Man (UK 1949), Hollywood apparently understood the value of an exploitative twist of phrase in the title of its own more propagandistic look at occupied Vienna in Red Danube (U.S. 1949).19 The narrative, which re-visions the repatriation subplot of Alida Valli's Czech actress character in The Third Man, focuses on a Volga-German ballerina who falls in love with a British Major when they meet in the Vienna convent where she is hiding from the Soviet authorities who insist on the repatriation of all war refugees from the East. The Danube’s red color of the title suggests both blood and communism, and enforces Cold War geopolitics through Johann Straussian mythology, in which blue is inferred to be the color of the anti-Soviet, hence "free" and

13 "normal" Danube. The river here becomes symbolically truncated at Vienna, the Eastern flow into Soviet controlled Europe is seen as a waterway of imprisonment. With the solidification of the Bloc system and Austria's return to sovereign nationhood in 1955 with the retreat of Soviet forces and the country's declaration of permanent neutrality, the Danube once again become more closely linked to Vienna and Austria (and thus its old associations) in the Western world. Although the Wachau Valley on the banks of the Danube between the towns of Melk and Krems has always been known for its natural and baroque architectural beauty,20 the Agfacolor Austrian dolce vita of the late 1950s early 1960s Wachau lifestyle was something wholly invented by Austrian director Franz Antel's films. Beginning with Vier Mädels aus der Wachau/Four Girls from the Wachau (Austria 1957), his transformation of the Heimatfilm into youthful Vespa scooter adventures was a shrewd calculation intended to meld the traditional village story with casting that might keep up with the import of Hollywood’s teen film stars and popular musical fare.21 Although the critics dismissed it, the original film proved so successful at the box office that subsequent Austrian and German productions shot on the great river's Wachau banks to continue to underscore this suddenly modern, carefree, and sexy image of the Danube. It was a far cry from the imperial romance that had been sutured to the Danube since the nineteenth century, or even from the postwar cinema that used the Danube in Heimatfilm as a mythical aspect of cultural continuity and nation building for the Austrian Second Republic. Oddly, rather than bring an end the Heimatfilm, which was traditionally set in the Alpine region, the Wachau youth films contributed to the brief regeneration of the genre. That same year, German-born director Hans König offered Die Winzerin von Langenlois/The Vintner of Langenlois (Austria 1957), a Heimatfilm set on the Danube with a more dramatically adventurous plot that focused on the difficulty of women attempting independence of thought and action in male-dominated social and economic structures. 22 Unfortunately, the film's conflict resolution returns to clichés found in the very traditional gender role-playing of the classic Heimatfilm. Herta Staal portrays a vintner's widow Elisabeth Teky, who attempts to make a success of a failing wine business with the help of her manager (Paul Hörbiger)

14 who suggests a marriage with a rich man. Instead, the widow loves a similarly impoverished teacher (Gunnar Möller) and adopts several children. The deus ex machina arrives in the form of the wine distributor Köster (Susi Nicoletti), who solves all her financial woes. Elisabeth's motherhood is still presented as the appropriate female role, despite the fact that Nicoletti's intelligent, emancipated, and cigar smoking character has resolved the crisis.23 Die Lindenwirtin vom Donaustrand/On the Danube Stands an Inn (Austria/W. Germany 1957), a Danube-based Heimatfilm directed by German filmmaker Hans Quest, was intended to feed the Wachau craze that had captured West German audiences. This co-production had its premiere in Kassel rather than in Vienna, and in retrospect, signaled the end of Austria’s 1950s film boom in local production and national export. The West Germans were also creating their own "Austrian" films on the Danube, such as Dort in der Wachau/In the Wachau (1957), which employed famed Austrian character actor Rudolf Carl as director. The popularity of the Heimatfilm and its often absurd ended with the collapse of the entertainment film industry in Austria in the mid-1960s. An der Donau, wenn der Wein blüht/When the Grapevines Bloom on the Danube (Austria/W. Germany 1965), by veteran Austro-Hungarian director Geza von Cziffra, was the last representative of these various Danube-associated subgenres that had outlasted the postwar era in Austrian and West German cinema. The story about a son attempting to match up his widower father with a new wife is a variation on patterns of modern romantic comedy that ran through most Western cinema in the 1950s and 60s. The Danube, however, which ties this Austrian/Bavarian narrative together, is still clearly the film's major attraction.24 One forgotten romantic comedy and popular music revue film, Tanze mit mir in den Morgen/Dance Me into the Morning (Austria 1962), directed by Peter Dörre, takes on the city's lopsided establishment on the western and southwestern bank of the Danube and river's role in the more contemporary social and cultural "division" of Vienna. Portions of the northeastern district of Floridsdorf and most of the eastern district of Donaustadt [Danube City] distanced from the crowded and iconic center of Vienna on the other bank of the Danube, were still underdeveloped as late as the

15 1950s.25 Mirroring the postwar concept of an old and new Vienna embracing the Danube rather than being divided by it, the film's narrative attempts to bring together the trendy "twist" dancing Viennese teenagers and their pop stars with cinematic symbols of classic Vienna. Comedy veteran Paul Hörbiger plays Johann Ebeseder, an actor whose ramshackle theater entertains a small audience with nineteenth century Austrian folk plays in the semi-rural Donaustadt district on the "other" bank of the canal. It is distanced from the traditional center of the city and the dense western and southern districts not only by space, but also seemingly by time. The impetus for the film was the selection of Vienna as host of the 1964 International Garden Festival. This was a major coup for the city, which utilized it as motivation to develop the Donaustadt district with the creation of the vast Donaupark [Danube Park], complete with new housing and its now famous 250-meter high Donauturm tower and panoramic view restaurant. The film blends film of the actual urban development plans and sites with the fictional Ebeseder theater and its neighboring pub, which, according to the plot, are to be razed to make way for the new Donaupark. Protests emerge and loyal patrons even enlist the help of famous pop singers to perform at the theater to attract a large audience and prove its importance. Ebeseder rejects this as the simplistic manipulation that it is, insisting that his theater stands or falls on its own artistic and cultural validity. His granddaughter Franziska (Guggi Löwinger) and a development contractor from the mayor's office (pop-singer Rex Gildo) attempt to save Ebeseder's theater, only to discover he had never secured legal rights to establish it after the war. When the theater mysteriously burns down one evening, the detectives that weave in and out of the story are revealed to be in the employment of a wealthy Austrian woman, Frau Werner (Marianne Schönauer), who has lived in the U.S. for many years as the second wife of Franziska's purportedly war victim father Franz Werner. An actor in Ebeseder's earlier Wandertheater, or touring company, Franz had married his daughter, but learning she had died in the war and not knowing they had a child, he emigrated to the U.S. following his release as a prisoner of war. Frau Werner has now come to give Franziska her share of her late father's money. The mayor subsequently issues a special decree to give Ebeseder the right to operate

16 a theatrical venue on the basis of his long cultural services to Vienna. With the theater demolished and the area marked for the redevelopment, Frau Werner suggests a showboat on the Danube (in imitation of those she experienced in the U.S.), to house both the theater and its adjoining pub. The battle between the generations and music styles are resolved, and the various romances are solidified as the cast unites in celebration on the Danube theater showboat apparently paid for by Franziska's inheritance. The film can be understood as a slyly constructed propaganda work encouraging the modernization and expansion of Vienna, which also exploits the development of Vienna's Donaustadt district and the International Garden Festival, trendy pop music and personalities, and nostalgia for veteran performers. To integrate change into the Old Vienna cinema topos, the film both begins and ends with a montage of Vienna's most important historical and touristic sites, but it also displays an impressive model for the future Donaupark, along with stylishly photographed elements of contemporary Viennese architecture (mostly public housing) already built. This suturing of the new onto the mythic is also accomplished by character constellations. The traditionalist pub owner allows his daughter and her friends to have a "Danube Fan Club" in his extra room, so they can listen to records of their favorite singers and dance the twist, to the chagrin of the neighboring theater owner Ebeseder, who considers the music to be noise that disturbs his Viennese theatrical art. Although he apparently established the theater after the war, Ebeseder's character represents an even earlier, interwar generation, and this is metafilmically portrayed by Paul Hörbiger, whose career as the most popular Austrian comic film actor after Hans Moser originates in early sound film. The character is a doubling of his own status as emblem of traditional Vienna and his association as an actor of Vienna's nineteenth century theater art. The missing generation of Franziska's parents, victims of the war in different ways, add gravitas to what is a reductive allegorization of Vienna's development in the twentieth century, without assigning responsibility for Nazism or the Second World War.

17 Following the trauma of the theater fire, Ebeseder literally wakes up as from a bad dream in Frau Werner's hotel room, and the audience is able to share in the examination of his past. He directed a travelling theatrical troupe "before the war" when Werner had married his daughter. In his simplistic statement that "everything could have been so beautiful, but then came the stupid war and Franz had to serve,"26 there is no suggestion of Austria's 1938 annexation or Nazism, only a depoliticized and highly subjectified indication of a destructive war, the memory of which seems almost akin to a natural disaster. But with the Nazi-era generation (Franziska's parents) gone, as narrative "punishment" for the unspoken Nazism, a tribute to financially successful Austrian postwar emigration to the U.S. (Frau Werner), and America's positive relationship with Austrians, the "new" can be connected to the traditional with a sense of purpose and seeming continuity. The Danube itself has a weak visual presence in the film and functions more as a mythological reference that has reemerged as the unifier of the traditional districts of "Ringstrasse Vienna" with what would become the modern other half of the city to return Vienna to the status of a relevant international metropolis: "the object of the exercise [development to suit the hosting of the International Garden Festival] … was to gradually clean up the existing site: a rubbish dump, a former parade ground that was a notorious site of executions during the Nazi years, and the 'Bretteldorf' squatters' settlements."27 The apotheosis of this feature film's marketing of the extension of urban Vienna to both sides of the Danube is the concluding celebration on a beautiful white riverboat festooned with international flags. It represents integration of the "good" past with a new global identity. By embracing both banks of the Danube and thus recalling Viennese "ownership" of the river in a new context, the preserved imperial city of the Alpine Republic might become a significant venue of contemporary European life, ready to host the world in a demonstration of newly grown beauty, while bringing together old and young. Time has proven the 1962 film correct in its urban development assumptions if not in its lasting entertainment. Vienna has expanded widely on both sides of the Danube and the Donaustadt district is now the setting for Vienna's United Nations complex, eco-friendly and architecturally progressive housing and business center projects, a

18 planned community surrounding a large artificial lake known as the Seestadt [Sea City], and provides Old Vienna with a postmodern high-rise skyline. The Fragmented Danube as Cinematic Symbol of Nazi Past and Cold War Division The Danube's wartime East/West division, solidified by the Bloc system, made it an unstable signifier in the postwar European order. It became a venue in film treatments about war and shifting cultural definitions, particularly in counties that had previously only used the river in its romantic Austro-Hungarian context, or not at all. Director Liviu Ciulei's Valurile Dunarii/Waves of the Danube (Romania 1959) attempts to blend a neo-realistic war film, similar to those from East Germany and Poland at the time, with Hollywood's 1940s noir melodrama to recontextualize the river's identity. A communist partisan captured by the Nazis is forced to act as minesweeper on a Romanian barge loaded with German arms floating on the Danube. He also becomes involved with the captain's young wife. The title's ironic allusion to a famous waltz is however not to one by Johann Strauss II. Instead, this propagandistic thriller attempts to reclaim the romantic past of the river for Romania along with establishing a monument for its wartime valor by utilizing the 1880's composition by Ion Ivanovici, whose Danube tribute ranks as one of the most famous melodies associated with the country. The film also attempts to wrest an anti-Axis image for Romania. "Given Romania’s shifting positions during WWII, it was a bit tricky setting a Communist-era propaganda film during that time, but … Liviu Ciulei managed to do just that…. The renowned theater director combined Casablanca with Wages of Fear, adding a pinch of Party propaganda for seasoning."28 Hungarian cinema did not find the need to reclaim the Danube in the postwar era, since it had always essentially shared the Austrian or Viennese dominance of the river, even in the postimperial and interwar periods. The nation had promoted it as one of the natural beauties of Hungary, which is particularly associated with Budapest and its long culture and history. The use of the Danube in postwar Hungarian narrative film, however, suggests that it was an aspect employed in nation building and geographical identification, given Hungary's loss of significant territory following World War II. An example is György Révész's Négyen az árban/Danger on the Danube (Hungary

19 1961), a popular village adventure-drama which focuses on the Danube-as-central-space, albeit in its flooded and iced-over state. Instead of a “new wave” that would incorporate critical narratives and progressive production values into old entertainment genres as the Italians, French, British, and West Germans were creating, Austrian performance art experimentation in the form of Viennese Actionism, turned violently and provocatively against narrative film form. More traditional film moved to Austrian television or the floundering West German mainstream production landscape. A Canadian filmmaker in Vienna, John Olden, directed an ORF (Austrian National Broadcasting) television production that eventually moved to cinemas on the then still taboo subject of Austria's brief civil war and the introduction of Chancellor Dollfuss' authoritarian Catholic-corporate state or "Austrofascism" in 1933-34. The ironically named film, An der schönen blauen Donau/On the Beautiful Blue Danube (Austria 1965) skewered the romantic idealism of the Danube (and the waltz dedicated to it) as a cultural tool also used in Austrian fascist manipulation.29 Continuing the negative Austrian re-conceptualization of the Danube symbolism, Austrian-born international actor Maximilian Schell moved behind the camera in what became one of the first examples of a new phase in Austrian filmmaking that attained a measure of global attention. His 1979 Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald/Tales from the Vienna Woods (W. Germany/Austria 1979) with Birgit Doll, Hanno Pöschl, and Helmut Qualtinger, was based on the 1930 Ödön von Horvath play and scripted by Christopher Hampton.30 Although the title suggests a Viennese Film or an imperial epic again named after a Johann Strauss II waltz, it is wholly ironic. Schell's film examines the tattered social fabric of interwar Austria, a small republic beset by political polarization and economic crisis, and locates its identity in nostalgia for Empire or even escape into looming Nazism. Geschichten specifically focuses on the world of the Viennese petty bourgeoisie during the 1930s. The bleakness of existence and the brutality of relationships, particularly the objectification and abuse of women, make Schell's film drama, which many criticized had ventured too far from the original play in cinematic approach, a universal statement on outmoded gender roles and the

20 reactionary values of a financially imperiled lower middle class. The film evolves its multi-layered character development and relationships at the then popular outing spot on the left bank of what appears here to be a slightly ominous Danube. The site is near the Stadtlauer Ostbahnbrücke [Stadlau Eastern Train Bridge], which spans over the river and the Danube Isle “like a spiders web...the traverse and longitudinal bracings of the Stadtlauer Bridge [slicing] away any clear view of the horizon – narrowing the scene[s] and threatening [them].”31 By the early pre-phase of what would become New Austrian Film in the late 1990s, the Danube would provide a metaphor for the limitations of contemporary Austria in the Cold War division of Europe. Xavier Schwarzenberger's 1984 West-German/Austrian television film co-production, Donauwalzer/Danube Waltzes, uses the very obvious romantic title as an ironic metaphor for the changing of "dance" partners— geopolitically, socially, and romantically.32 The narrative written by Susanne Philipp and Ulli Schwarzenberger offers a complex story about relationships formed and broken by the division of Europe. An Austrian woman, Judith (Christine Hörbiger) and her Hungarian lover Taddek, plan to escape Hungary during the 1956 uprising with the help of an Austrian press photographer. Judith escapes but Taddek is left behind and disappears. Fifteen years later, Taddek appears in Vienna. Judith has long since remarried the photographer, but Taddek reminds her of their lost relationship. Schwarzenberger intended it as a tribute to classic Viennese Film director Willi Forst, but it is more a postmodern pastiche of genres, as Thomas Kuchenbuch observes, with elements from the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the Nazi past) film, the Heimatfilm, the social critical film, the Hollywood woman's picture, and the feminist emancipation film. There are also suggestions of a visual style reminiscent of the early G. W. Pabst as well as from Italian neorealism. Moreover, the film has an anecdotal narrative structure similar to Schlöndorff's Die Blechtrommel/The Tin Drum (W. Germany/France 1978), quotes from Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity (USA 1953), and offers correspondences with Richard Brooks's Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (USA 1958), particularly in the framing and blocking of Christiane Hörbiger.33 It can be understood as an allegory on Austria's distanced relationship with its former

21 imperial partner, Hungary, in the way Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Die Ehe der Maria Braun/The Marriage of Maria Braun (W. Germany 1979) presents the history of a divided postwar Germany and the dangerous projections of reunification through a married, but forcibly separated couple. The flow of the Central European river is symbolically hampered in Schwarzenberger's film by frustrated, overloaded cultural coding, and by the reality of border guard installations. Hungarian filmmaker and media artist Péter Forgács later attempted to deconstruct these cultural imaginaries with his found footage video installation The Danube Exodus: Rippling Currents of the River (Hungary 1998). The work pieces together the surviving personal films of Hungarian Captain Nándor Andrásovits, who sailed the Danube in the 1930s and 40s, recording what became significant historical events: the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938, the re-annexation of disputed Slovak territories to Hungary, and the Jewish and German transports during the war.34 New Austrian Film and the Waterway to the East The Danube haunts Andrea Maria Dusl's Austrian new wave feature film debut Blue Moon (Austria 2002) as a reminder of its transcultural past as seen from the decade following the fall of Soviet Europe. A mystery/romance, it moves from Vienna to Slovenia and to the Black Sea in its tale about a money courier caught between his fascination for a missing woman and her mysterious sister in Ukraine. Building on the meanings of a more timeless and transnational post-communist Danube than specific nostalgia, however, is Serbian-Austrian filmmaker Goran Rebic's elegiac 2003 Donau, Duna, Dunaj, Dunav, Dunarea /The Danube (Austria 2003).35 His cinematic fable re-visions the 1939 Donauschiffer film in reiterating Vienna's Danubian connection with the emerging post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Rebic manages to capture the myriad representations and nationalities of the Danube from the mourning found within the cliché of its romantic Viennese image to its associations with the more recent communist and Balkan War pasts. The filmmaker's neo-realist narrative traces the journey of a grizzled Austrian captain of a rusty Austrian freighter and hotel, the "Donau," and its vivid Ship of Fools-like collection of transcultural passengers down the river to the Black Sea and

22 with it into an emotional collision with the indicators of the past and the present that line the long Danube.36 The journey is one of tangible space and the voice over suggests that a ship on the Danube is even a “time machine,” as the river keeps its passengers insulated from the real which only reconnects upon disembarkation. Rebic's film is one that stresses the artificiality of the division of the Danube and of the Danube as divider and embraces its "natural role" of unifying and stabilizing. Nationalities (but not ethnic cultures) ultimately appear to be illusory here, and it is the Danube that gives Rebic's passengers their lives and deaths, their reasons and desires, and ultimately their true identities as Danubians. The film borrows from Fellini’s stylized shipboard microcosm of 1914 Europe, E la nave va /And the Ship Sails On (Italy 1983), where a cross-section of Europeans accompany the ashes of a great opera singer to be dispersed near the island of her birth, signaling both the end of Old Europe and its pre-nationalist Central European identity.37 Rebic’s saga begins in Vienna, where Bruno, a young German boy asks Franz, the Austrian captain of the "Donau," to transport a coffin down the Danube to burial near the Iron Gates, the monumental gorge between Serbia and Romania. It is the last wish of his late mother, Mara, a former Romanian Olympic star who is someone from Franz’s past as well. His refusal, however, forces Bruno to hire a boat to take him to his destination. But Franz ultimately agrees, and his ship sets sail with Ukrainian assistants as well as Mathilde, a lonely and suicidal young Afro-Austrian who has no set destination, and Mircea, a battered Romanian man Franz rescues from his hopeless attempt to swim across the river to return to Germany, which has expelled him as an illegal worker. Rebic divides the film into chapters of port, beginning with Vienna at 1,927 km and passing through Bratislava (Slovakia), Budapest (Hungary), Dunaszekszö (Hungary), Bezdan (Serbia), Vukovar (Croatia), Beograd (Serbia), Iron Gate (Romania), Turun Magurelle (Romania), Ruse (Bulgaria) and finally arriving at Sulina (Romania) close to the Black Sea coast at 0 km. With each stop, the architecture and surroundings tell a different story of the past and present – and the progress from capitalist into former communist and war torn territories. Vienna is hypermodern, Budapest

23 iconically traditional, the Balkans show contemporary structures but also the ruins of recent war. The farmlands on the banks seem unchanged over centuries; geese, grasslands, onion domed baroque churches in the distance, and shipping ports with rusty boats as well as modern ships. It is the melancholic detritus of more than a century of Central European culture and clashing ideologies, of war and unstable peace. The different languages and different experiences of the passengers and the characters they meet at their ports of call are categorizations that seem to dissolve into a greater truth, a shared identity based in the indivisible Danube, beyond the illusory national self-definitions. Rebic creates a meta-myth on the Danube as the literal artery in the heart of Europe, while suggesting that the pre-twentieth century image of the river as the great transcultural connector that manifested itself in the Austro-Hungarian imperial or colonial imaginary was not so incorrect. He also recalls that the postwar adversity of Central and Eastern Europe is to be found in the segmentation and control of the river in communist and post-Soviet nationalist (e.g. the Balkan wars) attempts at regional hegemony. It is the rusty memory of Vienna’s so-called cultural “ownership” of the Danube represented by the ship that reconnects with the remnants of various layers of the past, and that functions as the enabler for the abandonment of the troubled status quo and the reassemblage of its passengers and their ethnic-social connections. Bruno discovers he is not really Mara’s son and therefore Franz cannot be his purported father, but they nevertheless become "father and son" through their shared grieving for Mara. Petrovic attempts to return to his Serbian home after abandoning it and his family during the Bosnian war, and is blocked by officials who inform him that his Yugoslavian passport is no longer legal. The other passengers are also found to be under-documented: Mircea has no papers and Mathilde has an Austrian passport but no visa. The ship is ordered to return to Vienna. The Danube remains segmented and divisive, but the humanizing, or rather Danubianizing explanation, as the filmmaker would have it, that the ship is carrying the coffin of the famous Romanian Olympic star Mara Popescu to her resting place breaks through the bureaucracy and the petty nationalisms. Petrovic is allowed to enter Serbia and hears of the breakup of Serbia and Montenegro on a taxi radio, but is ultimately reunited with his wife and

24 children. As the ship sails on, national concepts and ethnic divisions and antagonisms fall to the power of a regional reemergence of the river. Mathilde and Mircea find comfort with one another, and a young girl from a group of Roma passengers abandons her baby at the door of Mathilde’s cabin. They couple decide to adopt the baby and become a family, complete with Austrian "birth" and marriage certificates made out by Franz as captain, whose blue-eyed, bearded grisliness offers a hint, nothing more, of the grandfatherly image of Emperor Franz Joseph. The performance of this Christic "Holy Family" union overlays the power of the pagan Danube, the "Ister's" call for a river-based identity, but Rebic insists that both and even more spiritual ideologies have always coexisted here, intertwined in the flow of human myth and experience. The Captain toasts this "child of the Danube"—Rebic's allusion to the 1950 film expressing a postnational Danube, but also to this new Danubian symbol of a mixed ethnic family with a baby symbolically associated only with the river. The illusion of different Danube(s), is at once suggested and denied by the many translations of the same name in the films' title and by Mara’s collection of jars containing "different" Danube water from every port. Franz had saved these as a reliquary of the woman he loved, but learning that he is not her son, Bruno pours them back into the Danube. It is an indelible metaphor on the cultural, political and emotional impulses through history to divide or unify all that this river represents. Ultimately, Rebic’s post-"Ostalgic" film replays tropes of classic mythology – heroes who return to an unfamiliar landscape; long waiting wives and families; orphans of the storms; memories of great empires and even greater wars; identities found, lost and reconsidered, and the power of humanity and love in bringing the most unexpected unions. There is a happy ending created by the Danube ex machina of Mara’s writings about the traditions of a tribe from the Caucasus on the Black Sea that Franz shows to Bruno to explain his life with her. It also speaks of the "pull" of a Danubian identity, the willingness to reconsider it after two World Wars, fascism and communism, division and revolution: “after blood feuds, sons of former enemies are adopted….”38 Bruno finds the embrace of Mara's family once he reaches his destination.

25 Rebic’s Danube film summarizes the history of Central European films that have focused on the river. It is accessible here in all its cultural imaginaries and geographic connotations: as living ancient symbol; as a source of romantic adulation and geopolitical desire; as a cleanser of the artificial and the illusory. As Rebic’s final shot suggests, the Danube is a body wide as the film screen and yet one that cannot entirely be captured on film.

1

Carl Cherubim, Flüsse als Grenzen von Staaten und Nationen in Mitteleuropa: Ein Beitrag zur Anthropogeographie (Halle: 1897), 22. All English translations from the German by the author. 2 Cherubim, Flüsse, 24. 3 Cherubim, Flüsse, 24 4 Lothar Zögner, Flüsse im Herzen Europas: Rhein-Elbe-Donau (Berlin: Kartenabteilung der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, 1993), 5ff. 5 Rainer Guldin, "Trennender Graben und verbindende Band. Zur Topographischen Ambivalenz von Flüssen" in Dieter A. Binder, et al, eds. Die Erzählung der Landschaft (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011), 31. 6 Here Guldin (29) bases his argument in the analysis of the Rhine as culture by Lucien Febvre, Der Rhein und seine Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006), 65. 7 Claudio Magris, Danube, trans. Patrick Creagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 29. 8 Robert Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema: A History (Jefferson: McFarland, 2005), 17-18. 9 Sonnenstrahl/Ray of Sun, directed by Paul Fejos (1933; Vienna: Honazl/Der Standard, 2011), DVD 10 Christine N. Brinkmann, "Sonnenstrahl, Paul Fejos (1933)" in Der österreichische Film von seinen Anfängen bis Heute, eds, Gottfried Schlemmer and Brigitte Mayr (Vienna: Synema, 2000), 3. 11 Frühlingsstimmen/Voices of Spring, directed by Paul Fejos (1933; Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria archival holdings, 2012), DVD. 12 See Armin Loacker and Martin Prucha, eds. Unerwünschtes Kino: Der deutschsprachige Emigrantenfilm 19341937 (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2000). 13 The partially initiated and then abandoned project of creating a Danube-Oder canal in the Lobau basin of Austria (1939-1943) as a grand transport waterway into Nazi-annexed Eastern Europe, was also a way to dislodge the transculturalism of the "Habsburg" river and establish a "Germanic" Danube-Oder associated with Nazism. A Czech group is currently promoting a new Danube-Oder-Elbe-Canal project as a beneficial plan for Central Europe. See: http://www.d-o-l.cz/index.php/de, accessed September 18, 2013. This canal concept is opposed by the unified voice of the Daphne Institute of Applied Ecology, Slovakia, the WWF Brussels, and the BUND-Berlin for its potential "massive negative impact on invaluable nature areas and the environment more generally across Central Europe. It would cost a fortune, while yielding very uncertain economic benefits." See: "Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal: An International Threat for Europe’s Rivers," http://www.bund.net/fileadmin/bundnet/pdfs/wasser/lebendige_fluesse/20111108_Wasser_DonauOderElbeKanal_Fl yer_englisch.pdf. 14 The film center of the Reich, UFA studios in Berlin, would be responsible for epic films, political and social documentary, overt propaganda and prestige projects. The third studio in Propaganda Minister Goebbels' cinematic structure was Barrandov in Prague, which was to create films for the occupied or allied South and Eastern European market. 15 Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 81. 16 Le Danube bleu was released in France on 20 March 1940, followed by releases in Sweden (which some sources relate has having been the actual first release, predating the French premiere by two days) and Portugal, prior to the German-Occupation of France in June 1940. Later releases seemed timed with attempts to free the country from Nazi alliance (Finland 1943) or with the approaching Allied liberation (Denmark 1944). The film was not released in The Netherlands until 1946 and Spain until 1947. The film never received an Austrian or Hungarian release. See: IMDB, Le Danube blue (1940) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203436/releaseinfo?ref_=tt_dt_dt. 17 Das Kind der Donau aka Marika/Child of the Danube, directed by Georg Jacoby (1950; unknown: Euro Video, 1997), VHS.

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Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 137. The Red Danube, directed by George Sidney (1949; Burbank, CA: Warner Archive 2012), DVD. See also: Michael Burri, "The Red Danube (1949)" in World Film Locations Vienna, ed. Robert Dassanowsky (Bristol: Intellect, 2012) 38-39. 20 The Wachau was inscribed as "Wachau Cultural Landscape" in the UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites in recognition of its architectural and agricultural history in December 2000. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/970. 21 Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 169-70. 22 Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 169-70. 23 Gertraud Steiner, Die Heimat-Macher: Kino in Österreich 1946-1966 (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987), 208. 24 Steiner, Die Heimat-Macher, 246. 25 Tanze mit mir in den Morgen/Dance Me into the Morning, directed by Peter Dörre (1962; Leipzig: Kinowelt, 2006), DVD. 26 Tanze mit mir in den Morgen 27 Vienna Municipal Government, Donaupark, http://www.wien.gv.at/english/environment/parks/donaupark.html. 28 J.B. Spins, "Romanian Film Festival ’11: Danube Waves," http://jbspins.blogspot.com/2011/11/romanian-filmfestival-11-danube-waves.html. 29 Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 191. 30 Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald/Tales from the Vienna Woods, directed by Maximilian Schell (1979; Vienna: Hoanzl/Edition Der Standard, 2007), DVD. 31 Arno Russegger, "Tales from the Vienna Woods/Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (1979)," in World Film Locations Vienna, ed. Robert Dassanowsky (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 76-77. 32 Thomas Kuchenbuch, "Gesellschaftskritische Dimensionen in melodramatischer Form: Donauwalzer von Xaver Schwarzenberger," in Der neue Österreichische Film, ed. Gottfried Schlemmer (Wien: Wespennest, 1996), 169-81. 33 Kuchenbuch, "Gesellschaftskritische Dimensionen," 169-81. 34 See: Péter Forgács and the Labyrinth Project, The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River– Library http://www.danube-exodus.hu/. 35 Donau, Duna, Dunaj, Dunav, Dunarea /The Danube, directed by Goran Rebic, (2003; Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria archival holdings, 2012), DVD. 36 The allegory of a ship populated by deranged or oblivious passengers headed towards an unknown or a fanciful direction begins with Plato and later appears across Western literature. It is, however, the 1494 satirical text on the concept, Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) by German humanist Sebastian Brant (1457-1521), that has become the most well-known, particularly as it served as the as the inspiration for Hieronymus Bosch's painting of the same name (circa 1500). Although it parodied the Catholic Church as "ark of salvation" in an ambiguous manner, it also managed to criticize the "directions" of state and society. Rebic's work also references the Hollywood film Ship of Fools (1965), based on the novel by Katherine Anne Porter and directed by Stanley Kramer, about several passengers of diverse ethnicity and class who must confront their self-delusions, prejudices, social and political expectations on an ocean liner bound for Nazi Germany in 1933. 37 See: Robert Dassanowsky, "A Familiar Difference: The Image of the Austrian in the Films of Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini and Cavani," in Austro-Italian Encounters: Modern Austrian-Italian Cultural Relationships, ed. Saskia Ziolkowski. 38 Donau…/The Danube. 19

Bibliography Brant, Sebastian. Das Narrenschiff. Wiesbaden: Marix, 2004. Brinkmann, Christine N. "Sonnenstrahl, Paul Fejos (1933)" in Der österreichische Film von seinen Anfängen bis Heute, edited by Gottfried Schlemmer and Brigitte Mayr, 1-26. Vienna: Synema, 2000. Burri, Michael. "The Red Danube (1949)" in World Film Locations Vienna, edited by Robert Dassanowsky, 38-39. Bristol: Intellect, 2012.

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Cherubim, Carl. Flüsse als Grenzen von Staaten und Nationen in Mitteleuropa: Ein Beitrag zur Anthropogeographie. Halle: 1897. Daphne Institute for Applied Ecology Slovakia, WWF and BUND-Berlin. "Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal: An International Threat for Europe’s Rivers." Accessed October 24, 2014. http://www.bund.net/fileadmin/bundnet/pdfs/wasser/lebendige_fluesse/20111108_Wasser_DonauOderElbeKanal_Fl yer_englisch.pdf. Das Kind der Donau aka Marika/Child of the Danube. Directed by Georg Jacoby. 1950. Unknown: Euro Video. 1997. VHS. Dassanowsky, Robert. "A Familiar Difference: The Image of the Austrian in the Films of Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini and Cavani," in Austro-Italian Encounters in Modern Literature, Film, and Culture, edited by Saskia Ziolkowski. In Progress. ------. Austrian Cinema: A History. Jefferson: McFarland, 2005. Donau, Duna, Dunaj, Dunav, Dunarea /The Danube. Directed by Goran Rebic. 2003. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria archival holdings. 2012. DVD. Febvre, Lucien. Der Rhein und seine Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006. Forgács, Péter and the Labyrinth Project. The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River-Library. Accessed September 13, 2013. http://www.danube-exodus.hu/. Frühlingsstimmen/Voices of Spring. Directed by Paul Fejos. 1933. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria archival holdings. 2012. DVD. Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald/Tales from the Vienna Woods. Directed by Maximilian Schell. 1979. Vienna: Hoanzl/Der Standard. 2007. DVD. Guldin, Rainer. "Trennender Graben und verbindende Band. Zur Topographischen Ambivalenz von Flüssen," in Die Erzählung der Landschaft, edited by Dieter A. Binder, Helmut Konrad, Eduard Staudinger, 19-33. Vienna: Böhlau, 2011. Internet Movie Database. Le Danube blue (1940). Accessed September 18, 2013. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203436/releaseinfo?ref_=tt_dt_dt. Kuchenbuch, Thomas."Gesellschaftskritische Dimensionen in melodramatischer Form: Donauwalzer von Xaver Schwarzenberger," in Der neue Österreichische Film, edited by Gottfried Schlemmer, 169-81. Vienna: Wespennest, 1996. Loacker, Armin and Martin Prucha, eds. Unerwünschtes Kino: Der deutschsprachige Emigrantenfilm 1934-1937. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2000. Magris, Claudio. Danube, translated by Patrick Creagh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Russegger, Arno.“Tales from the Vienna Woods/Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (1979),” in World Film Locations Vienna, edited by Robert Dassanowsky, 76-77. Bristol: Intellect, 2012. Ship of Fools. Directed by Stanley Kramer. 1965. Golden Valley, MN: Sony/Mill Creek. 2003. DVD. Sonnenstrahl/Ray of Sun. Directed by Paul Fejos. 1933. Vienna: Honazl/Der Standard. 2011. DVD. Spins, J. B. "Romanian Film Festival ’11: Danube Waves." Accessed September 18, 2013.

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http://jbspins.blogspot.com/2011/11/romanian-film-festival-11-danube-waves.html. Tanze mit mir in den Morgen/Dance Me into the Morning. Directed by Peter Dörre. 1962. Leipzig: Kinowelt. 2006. DVD. Steiner, Gertraud. Die Heimat-Macher: Kino in Österreich 1946-1966. Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987. The Red Danube. Directed by George Sidney. 1949. Burbank, CA: Warner Archive. 2012. DVD. UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites. "Wachau Cultural Landscape. Accessed September 18, 2013. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/970. Vienna Municipal Government. Donaupark. Accessed September 18, 2013. http://www.wien.gv.at/english/environment/parks/donaupark.html. Vodní koridor Dunaj–Odra–Labe. Danube-Oder-Elbe-Canal Project. Accessed September 18, 2013. http://www.d-o-l.cz/index.php/de. Zögner, Lothar. Flüsse im Herzen Europas. Rhein-Elbe-Donau. Berlin: Kartenabteilung der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, 1993.