The Fischerviertel, the fishermen’s quarter in Ulm, is enchanting indeed with its friendly, beckoning little alleyways, the inns so liberal with trout and asparagus, the open-air beer-houses, the promenade along the Danube, the old houses and the wisteria reflected in the Blau, the little “home” stream that makes it modest contribution to the great river.
Sweet and fresh is the air, and Amedeo has taken Maddalena by the arm, while Gigi is busy weighing up the merits of the various hostelries. Francesca’s face is reflected in an old window-pane overlooking the canal, and life seems to be flowing on quietly and gently, as do these waters through the mystery of evening. The town is charming, the 548 beer-houses mentioned in the 1875 statistics seem in an ideal sense to reconcile Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, the rebel poet, with Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, the famous tailor who was determined to fly and who fell like a stone into the Danube; also with the New German Cinema, which to a great degree originated in Ulm, and with the celebrated College of Design. Further proof of this courteous genius loci was furnished by the most illustrious of all the sons of Ulm, Albert Einstein, when in a polite little rhymed quatrain he writes that the stars – heedless of the Theory of Relativity – proceed to all eternity upon the paths laid down for them by Newton.
On the Town Hall there is a plaque to commemorate the fact that it was in Ulm that Kepler published the Rudolphine Tables and invented a weight-scale which was publicly adopted by the city. In the pig-market square there is another plaque. This one, in a tone of some arrogance, celebrates the German victories of 1870 and the foundation of Wilhelm’s Reich, and adds:
“Auch auf dem Markt der Säue
wohnt echte deutsche Treue”
—even in the pig-market beats a loyal German heart.
The rhyme between Säne (sows) and Treue (loyalty) is already, though unwittingly, a malignant caricature of what in a few years’ time was to become the vulgarity of the wealthy, powerful Second Reich. How different and more gentle a spirit it was who in 1717, on the Fishermen’s House in the square of the same name, painted a view of another city: Weissenburg, which is to say Belgrade. It was the aim of the painter, Guildmaster Johann Matthäus Scheiffele, to immortalize the ferries carrying troops from Ulm down the Danube to fight against the Turks. Belgrade, already captured and lost, was a strategic point in that war. Others who set off from Ulm, on the old longboats known as “crates from Ulm”, were the German settlers on their way to populate the Banat, those “Donauschwaben”, Swabians of the Danube, who for two centuries, from the time of Maria Theresa until the Second World War, were to make a basic and important contribution, now erased, to the culture and life of the Danube basin. My own journey down the Danube is first and foremost a journey towards the Banat, in the wake of an expansion now vanished, and in fact reversed; for ever since the end of the Second World War there has been a withdrawal, and indeed an exodus, of Germans from the south-east of Europe.