The Name of the Danube | Danube River The Name of the Danube The Name of the Danube What's in a name? "A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet.." The Danube river passes through Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Moldova. Its name in each of the countries languages is: German: Donau Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian: Dunav/ Дунав Romanian: Dunarea Ukrainian: Дунай The name of the river originates from the a mythological source, from a Latin Roman river god, known as Danubius, or Danuvius. Additionally, the meaning can actually be derived from the ancient indigenous Slavonic tribes who called it the Great Water. Legends have it that Danubius was very keen to colonise the places and peoples who lived along the Danube and to extent the boundaries and influences of the Roman empire to encompass this great watercourse. In an allegorical name. Both in the past, as well as presently, it represents a major source of trade and connection, transporting people and goods across mainland Europe, and connecting the middle and northern countries with the south, the Balkan peninsula, and the Black Sea.

His vision was to exploit the different cultures and regions from which the Roman empire could prosper and annex the various riches that the basin possesses. Was it a name that was given to the river because of its potentials, or because the people wanted it to represent, or evoke, its divine nature? The geopolitical structure of the region has significantly changed over times, and it significantly reflected on the economic changes in the region as well. Although names do tend to remain untranslatable, the form and terms under which dialects take on a certain name makes linguistic sense. In the geography of languages, it is a rule to see that linguistic varieties have a dialectic continuum, in which case the language spills across geo-political and cultural dividers, as bordering regions take on dialects that transcend those limits. Further down the course, where it meets the Black Sea it is known as Istros, which is also based on a mythological river god, as he was known in Ancient Greece. "The largest of the rivers of Europe, the Istros, rises from only a few springs and moves in a direction facing the first assaults of the sun.

Later, many Rivers rise with one accord as though they were escorting him--for he is the King of the Rivers of that country--and flow perpetually, and those who live on their banks know each one by name. But as soon as they discharge into the Istros, the name which they had at their birth ceases to be used, they surrender it in his favour, all are called after him, and together pour their waters into the Euxeinos". - Aelian, Greek natural history C2nd to 3rd A.D. It is not uncommon to name natural splendours using mythological or divine function, in order to instil protection, guardianship, but mostly the magnificence of the setting by equating it to divinity and sanctity of legends. The Greeks put these practices to good use with their geographical entities and the renowned mythological figures. If looked more in depth, one can find that the root of the word Istar, in ancient Greek, means flow, or flowing, and so on. One can see how these names take shape. Moving along the way, linguistically and geographically, one can find an entire variety of meanings.

It is said that Celts have given it a name Danuvius, based on their derivatives of the word danu, which means strong, or loud, ie. a loud river, or a river which makes noise. On the other hand, In the Germanic languages, dune means wind-swept sand or sediment which have formed a bank, or a sandy bank. This could also be one of the possibilities. For example, the gradual transformation of the name along the different cultural and linguistic regions signifies this language continuum. From German Donau to Hungarian Duna, and the Slavic languages Dunaj/ Dunai/ Dunav. This shows the variation of phonetics and how they are mutually intelligible. It is interesting to note that the English designation, Danube, bears the closest resemblance to the actual root of the name, Danubius. The Romanian, the closest to Latin idiom, is the farthest from the root: Dunarea. And, just as the river links other major waterways and a variety of regions which all have their own unique characteristics and appeal, so does the language along all the geographic and linguistic points.

The name has possibly changed and developed, just as the languages and dialects to, as generations modify their communication through cultural and geo-political development. It often represents the relation between several factors: regional, social, and time variables. The results become quite obvious when the economic pursuits come into play, in particular in the past. Overall, as it can be discerned, the variation is quite subtle. It manifests the separate languages developed from distinct dialects in the area, due to socio-cultural state of the region. The most pronounced difference is the use of either Cyrillic or Latin alphabet and the variation of scripts, in accordance with religion and ethnicity. It is evident that past settlers and colonizers of the region have left marks on cultural, social, and linguistic activities, in particular major powers - the Roman Empire, the Ottoman and the Hapsburg rules and eras. In addition to the main forces, regional differences in culture and tradition, along with social implications, all tend to powerfully shape the use of language and variables. These idiom continua can contribute to creating geographical continua in cases when no geographical or geo-political boundaries matter, and the Danube is the perfect example of this.

It is useful in expressing the individuality of the geographic entity, but more so, its greatness and contribution to the communities it flows through. Thus, it approximates the locales and makes for a moor integrative exposure, no matter the point in its course. Danube | Define Danube at Dictionary.com Danube noun 1. a river in central and SE Europe, flowing E from southern Germany to the Black Sea. 1725 miles (2775 km) long. Expand Examples from the Web for Danube Expand Commercial Geography Jacques W. Redway On the 30th Bernadotte entered Salzburg, on his way to and down the Danube. Commercial Geography Jacques W. Redway It is a little village on the Danube river—the mighty Danube, which bears the fleets of the world on its ample breast. British Dictionary definitions for Danube Expand noun 1. a river in central and SE Europe, rising in the Black Forest in Germany and flowing to the Black Sea.

Length: 2859 km (1776 miles) German name Donau Czech name Dunaj Hungarian name Duna Croatian and Serbian name Dunav (ˈdunaf) Romanian name Dunărea Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012 Word Origin and History for Danube Expand major river of Europe (German Donau, Hungarian Duna, Russian Dunaj), from Latin Danuvius, from Celtic *danu(w)-yo-, from PIE *danu- "river" (cf. Don, Dnieper, Dniester). Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper Germany drops its longest word: Rindfleischeti... - Telegraph Germany Germany drops its longest word: Rindfleischeti...

Germany's longest word - Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz - a 63-letter long title of a law regulating the testing of beef, has officially ceased to exist. Germany's longest word - Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz refers to the 'law for the delegation of monitoring beef labelling' Photo: ALAMY Comments The word - which refers to the "law for the delegation of monitoring beef labelling", has been repealed by a regional parliament after the EU lifted a recommendation to carry out BSE tests on healthy cattle. German is famous for its compound nouns, which frequently become so cumbersome they have to be reduced to abbreviations. The beef labelling law, introduced in 1999 to protect consumers from BSE, was commonly transcribed as the "RkReÜAÜG", but even everyday words are shortened to initials so Lastkraftwagen - lorry - becomes Lkw.

Professor Anatol Stefanowitsch, a linguistics expert at the Free University of Berlin, told the German news agency dpa that the beef labelling law was the longest "authentic" word in the German language. The law was considered a legitimate word by linguists because it appears in official texts, but it never actually appeared in the dictionaries, because compilers of the standard German dictionary Duden judge words for inclusion based on their frequency of use. Related Articles Scrabble: 60 facts for its 60th birthday 15 Dec 2008 The longest word with a dictionary entry, according to Duden is at 36 letters, Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung, motor vehicle liability insurance. However a 39-letter word, Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, insurance companies providing legal protection, is considered the longest German word in everyday use by the Guinness Book of World Records. In theory, a German word can be infinitely long. Unlike in English, an extra concept can simply be added to the existing word indefinitely. Such extended words are sometimes known as Bandwurmwörter - "tapeworm words".

In an essay on the Germany language, Mark Twain observed: "Some German words are so long that they have a perspective." The Teutonic fondness for sticking nouns together has resulted in other famous tongue-twisters such as: Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän - Danube steamship company captain - which clocks in at 42 letters. It has become a parlour game to lengthen the steamship captain's name, by creating new words such as Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänswitwe, the captain's widow. And, Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitänsmütze - the captain's hat. At 80 letters, the longest word ever composed in German is Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, the "Association for Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Danube Steamboat Electrical Services". The longest word in the Oxford Dictionary of English is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis - at 45 letters.

Its definition is "an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease casued by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust. The longest word to be found in Britain is the Welsh place name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Danube river | Define Danube river at Dictionary.com noun 1. a river in central and SE Europe, rising in the Black Forest in Germany and flowing to the Black Sea. Length: 2859 km (1776 miles) German name Donau Czech name Dunaj Hungarian name Duna Croatian and Serbian name Dunav (ˈdunaf) Romanian name Dunărea Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.

1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012 Word Origin and History for danube river Expand Danube major river of Europe (German Donau, Hungarian Duna, Russian Dunaj), from Latin Danuvius, from Celtic *danu(w)-yo-, from PIE *danu- "river" (cf. Don, Dnieper, Dniester). Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper Danube River | river, Europe | Britannica.com Danube River Alternative Titles: Donau, Duna, Dunaj, Dunărea, Dunav, Dunay Related Topics István, Count Széchenyi Danube River, German Donau, Slovak Dunaj, Hungarian Duna, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian Dunav, Romanian Dunărea, Ukrainian Dunay , river , the second longest in Europe after the Volga .

It rises in the Black Forest mountains of western Germany and flows for some 1,770 miles (2,850 km) to its mouth on the Black Sea . Along its course it passes through 10 countries: Germany, Austria , Slovakia , Hungary , Croatia , Serbia , Bulgaria , Romania , Moldova , and Ukraine . The Danube River basin and its drainage network. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Boats along the Danube River, Belgrade, Serbia. Jon Arnold/SuperStock The Danube River links the countries of the Balkan Peninsula to each other and to the rest of … Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The Danube played a vital role in the settlement and political evolution of central and southeastern Europe. Its banks, lined with castles and fortresses, formed the boundary between great empires, and its waters served as a vital commercial highway between nations. The river’s majesty has long been celebrated in music. The famous waltz An der schönen, blauen Donau (1867; The Blue Danube ), by Johann Strauss the Younger , became the symbol of imperial Vienna.

In the 21st century the river has continued its role as an important trade artery. It has been harnessed for hydroelectric power, particularly along the upper courses, and the cities along its banks—including the national capitals of Vienna (Austria), Budapest (Hungary), and Belgrade (Serbia)—have depended upon it for their economic growth. Central Budapest, looking north along the Danube River, with the Parliament Building on the east … Jean S. Buldain/Berg & Assoc. Physical features Physiography The Danube’s vast drainage of some 315,000 square miles (817,000 square km) includes a variety of natural conditions that affect the origins and the regimes of its watercourses. They favour the formation of a branching, dense, deepwater river network that includes some 300 tributaries, more than 30 of which are navigable. The river basin expands unevenly along its length.

It covers about 18,000 square miles (47,000 square km) at the Inn confluence , 81,000 square miles (210,000 square km) after joining with the Drava , and 228,000 square miles (590,000 square km) below the confluences of its most affluent tributaries, the Sava and the Tisza . In the lower course the basin’s rate of growth decreases. More than half of the entire Danube basin is drained by its right-bank tributaries, which collect their waters from the Alps and other mountain areas and contribute up to two-thirds of the total river runoff or outfall. The confluence of the Sava (foreground) and Danube rivers from the Kalemegdan fortress, Belgrade, … Jean S. Buldain/Berg & Assoc. Opium Wars The river carries considerable quantities of solid particles, nearly all of which consist of quartz grains. The constant shift of deposits in different parts of the riverbed forms shoals.

In the stretches between Bratislava and Komárno and in the Sulina Channel, draglines are constantly at work to maintain the depth needed for navigation. The damming of the river has also changed the way in which sediments are transported and deposited. Water impounded by reservoirs generally loses its silt load, and the water flowing out of the dam—which is relatively silt-free—erodes banks farther downstream. The temperature of the river waters depends on the climate of the various parts of the basin. In the upper course, where the summer waters derive from the Alpine snow and glaciers, the water temperature is low. In the middle and lower reaches, summer temperatures vary between 71 and 75 °F (22 and 24 °C), while winter temperatures near the banks and on the surface drop below freezing. Upstream from Linz the Danube never freezes entirely, because the current is turbulent. The middle and lower courses, however, become icebound during severe winters. Between December and March, periods of ice drift combine with the spring thaw, causing floating ice blocks to accumulate at the river islands, jamming the river’s course, and often creating major floods.

The natural regime of river runoff changes constantly as a result of the introduction of stream-regulating equipment, including dams and dikes. The mineral content of the river is greater during the winter than the summer. The content of organic matter is relatively low, but pollution increases as the waters flow past industrial areas. The river’s chemistry also changes as city sewerage and agricultural runoff find their way into the river. The economy The Danube is of great economic importance to the 10 countries that border it—Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany—all of which variously use the river for freight transport, the generation of hydroelectricity, industrial and residential water supplies, irrigation, and fishing . The movement of freight is the most important economic use of the Danube. Among the major ports are such cities as Izmayil , Ukraine; Galați and Brăila , Romania; Ruse , Bulgaria; Belgrade, Serbia; Budapest, Hungary; Bratislava, Slovakia; Vienna, Austria; and Regensburg, Germany. Since World War II , navigation has been improved by dredging and by the construction of a series of canals, and river traffic has increased considerably.

The most important canals—all elements in a continentwide scheme of connecting waterways—include the Danube–Black Sea Canal , which runs from Cernovadă, Romania, to the Black Sea and provides a more direct and easily navigable link, and the Main–Danube Canal , completed in 1992 to link the Danube to the Rhine and thus to the North Sea . Boats along the Danube River, Belgrade, Serbia. Jon Arnold/SuperStock The Danube has been tapped for power, mainly in its upper course. The process, however, has spread downstream. One of the largest hydroelectric projects—the Ðerdap (Djerdap) High Dam and the Iron Gate power station—was built jointly by Yugoslavia and Romania. Not only does the project produce hydroelectricity, but it also makes navigable what was once one of the most difficult stretches on the river. Industrial use of Danube waters is made at Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, and Ruse. The main irrigated areas are along the river in Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria.

The river has nearly become unfit for irrigation as well as for drinking water, however, because of the tremendous increase in pollutants; pollution has also diminished the once-rich fishing grounds, although some of the fish have moved to side lakes and swamps. History During the 7th century bce, Greek sailors reached the lower Danube and sailed upstream, conducting a brisk trade. They were familiar with the whole of the river’s lower course and named it the Ister. The Danube later served as the northern boundary of the vast Roman Empire and was called the Danuvius. A Roman fleet patrolled its waters, and the strongholds along its shores were the centres of settlements, among them Vindobona (later Vienna), Aquincum (later Budapest), Singidunum (later Belgrade), and Sexantaprista (later Ruse). During the Middle Ages the old fortresses continued to play an important role, and new castles such as Werfenstein, built by Charlemagne in the 9th century, were erected. When the Ottoman Empire spread from southeastern to central Europe in the 15th century, the Turks relied upon the string of fortresses along the Danube for defense.

The Habsburg dynasty recognized the navigational potential of the Danube. Maria Theresa , queen of Hungary and Bohemia from 1740 to 1780, founded a department to oversee river navigation, and in 1830 a riverboat made a first trip from Vienna to Budapest, possibly for trading purposes. That trip marked the end of the river’s importance as a line of defense and the beginning of its use as a channel of trade. Maria Theresa, portrait by W.H. Mote, 1861. The Print Collector/Heritage-Images Regulated navigation on the Danube has been the subject of a number of international agreements. In 1616 an Austro-Turkish treaty was signed in Belgrade under which the Austrians were granted the right to navigate the middle and lower Danube. In 1774, under the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca , Russia was allowed to use the lower Danube.

The Anglo-Austrian and the Russo-Austrian conventions of 1838 and 1840, respectively, promoted free navigation along the entire river, a principle that was more precisely formulated in the Treaty of Paris of 1856, which also set up the first Danubian Commission with the aim of supervising the river as an international waterway. In 1921 and 1923, final approval of the Danube River Statute was granted by Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Great Britain, Italy , Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Greece. The international Danube Commission was thus established as an authoritative institution with wide powers, including its own flag, the right to levy taxes, and diplomatic immunity for its members. It controlled navigation from the town of Ulm to the Black Sea and kept navigational equipment in good repair. During World War II, free international navigation along the course of the river was interrupted by the hostilities, and a consensus concerning the resumption of navigation was not reached until the Danubian Convention of 1948.

The new convention provided for the Danubian countries alone to participate in a reconstituted Danube Commission; of those countries, only West Germany did not join the convention. Eurozine - What colour is the Danube? - Lï¿½szlï¿½ Fï¿½ldenyi Lï¿½szlï¿½ Fï¿½ldenyi What colour is the Danube? Blue, muddy yellow or blood-red: the colour of the Danube varies according to history and geography. Never able to truly form the countries through which it runs into a single political entity, it nevertheless connects peoples and regions reconcilable only in dreams or poetry, writes Lï¿½szlï¿½ Fï¿½ldenyi. As a child I once bathed in the Danube. It was on a mild spring evening in 1967. I'd come to Budapest from a town where there was no water far and wide – neither still nor flowing. Not even a puddle. On top of that, in the middle of the Hungarian plain I'd never even seen a hill, let alone a mountain. No water, not a mountain.

So when I jumped into the water in northern Budapest with a view of the not so distant mountains, I was almost beside myself with joy. Like someone who has opened the door onto a new and unimagined world. Via Danube: Literature in flow Lï¿½szlï¿½ Fï¿½ldenyi's text is the opening speech at this year's Literatur im Herbst literary festival, taking place in Vienna from 28 to 30 October. Over three days, 23 authors from ten countries will be reading from and talking about their work, under the title Via Donau: Literatur im Fluss (Via Danube: Literature in flow). "Blue Danube, red Danube, grey Danube, white Danube... The names for Europe's longest river with a length of 2900 kilometres are almost as various as the number of the countries through which it runs," writes Erich Klein in his introduction to the festival. More on Literatur im Herbst 2011. What seemed to me then as a huge novelty turned out to be anything but that.

My experience might have been new, but as I swam around in the Danube I was overcome by almost atavistic sensations. Moreover, that northern part of Budapest where I experienced the Danube for the first time is called "Romans' beach" – after the Romans who used to live here and who, through the ruins, are present to this day. They also built the first bridges over the Danube, for example at Aquincum in the north of Budapest, near to Romans' beach, whose foundations, built with wooden stakes, were surveyed in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was as if I was submerged in a kind of common past. Unconsciously, I was experiencing the same thing as millions and millions of others before me. On that evening in May 1967 I still knew nothing about the Danube, had no idea about its history, about the blossoming cultures along its banks, didn't know the fantasies, ideas, hopes entwined around it. But my senses refused to be tricked. They knew very well that I wasn't bathing only in the Danube, but also in the myth of the Danube. That was also perhaps why I took such pleasure in the powerfully surging river.

I was submerged in a myth. "Now and forever": that could be the motto of all water. Especially of rivers, which are eternally changing, assuming new forms, whose drops find themselves in permanent exchange – although from its source to its estuary the river is a single, constant whole. Back then of course, in 1967, such thoughts didn't pass through my mind; I simply enjoyed plunging into the fast moving, powerfully surging current. It was only after I'd lived by the Danube for several decades that I understood why one has such thoughts particularly when looking at rivers – though of course it doesn't do any harm if the river is also big and powerful.

In around 170 BC the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote the following words, albeit not at Romans' beach in Budapest but in Carnuntum, east of Vienna: "So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing." I'm convinced that the sight of the Danube helped Marcus Aurelius attain these insights. After all, in the summer of 1936, almost two millennia later, it inspired similar thoughts in the great European poet of the century, Attilia Jï¿½zsef, who was born in Budapest and grew up in Hungary. By his time the banks of the Danube in Budapest hadn't been sandy for ages; by the end of the nineteenth century the water had already been coerced between elegant stone walls. But even the modern quays, which were able to tame the physical strength of the water, couldn't eradicate the archaic, ancient character of the river.

Attila Jï¿½zsef's poem "By the Danube" begins with the words: "As I sat on the bottom step of the wharf / A melon-rind flowed by with the current; / Wrapped in my fate I hardly heard the chatter / Of the surface, while the deep was silent." The juxtaposition of permanence and transience is varied a few lines later: "[a]nd the sprightly waves / In playful gaiety laughed at me again, / Like a child on his prolific mother's knee, / While other thoughts were racing through her brain. / They trembled in Time's flow and in its wake, / Like in a graveyard tottering tomb-stones shake." But at the end of the poem the opposition between life and death is dissolved in all-encompassing time: "In the Danube's waves past, present and future / Are all-embracing in a soft caress." (Trans.

from the Hungarian by John Szekely.) Looking at the Danube, Attila Jï¿½zsef experiences something similar to Marcus Aurelius: there's something inherent to this river that relativizes the antithesis between surface and depth, transience and permanence, life and death. The Danube: a seemingly unheeding, deeply natural force. And yet it offers deeply human insights to all those who listen to its message and understand it. As William Wordsworth put it in his sonnet "The source of the Danube" (1820), it inspires the imagination ("fancy"), which follows its "track of silver light" from its innocent, infant source to the terrifying Black Sea. And Hï¿½lderlin, in his poem "At the source of the Danube", written in 1801, professed in connection with the same river: "She comes to us / As a stranger, the awakener, / The human-forming voice." The Danube gives the inhabitants of its banks their humanity – by bestowing upon them insights that enable them to exceed the narrow seeming limits of the human. A paradoxical river. But let's leave the mythical and return to the everyday.

What colour is the Danube? "Once you have heard the rushing of river, abandon forever forging plans for the future." These words were written by the Hungarian author Gyula Krï¿½dy in his Dream Diary, which appeared in 1925, precisely a quarter century after Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Not happy lines for the Danube basin, whose countries at the time had the First World War behind them, without suspecting that an even greater evil lay before them. It connects South and North, East and West, but also day and night, dream and waking. It flows through very different cultures, connects opposites, yet never subsumes them. The Danube, whose source for many centuries was just as mysterious as that of the Nile in Egypt, was never able to form the realm into a truly single entity – and yet it remained the sole and exceptional river for the residents of Ulm or Passau just as for those of Vienna, Budapest, Novi Sad and Nikopol, not to mention Braila or Sulina. It connected peoples and regions that seem irreconcilable. Perhaps only in dreams or poetry could they have been brought together.

Maybe one explanation for why it was here, by the Danube, that two important books about dreams were written. A river, then, whose course somewhat resembles psychoanalysis, which not coincidentally was discovered on the banks of the Danube and reveals unexpected layers of the soul. "Happy is he who forgets what cannot be altered." These words are all too familiar to us all: joy and melancholy exude from the lines of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus, which was first performed near to where we are now, in the Theatre by the Wien, on 5 April 1874. One can sense the longing for the carefree suppression of memory, but also sadness about the inexorability of fate. These lines also arose on the banks of the Danube – the Danube that, in his waltz composed a few years earlier in 1866, the same Johann Strauss called blue (The Blue Danube). Spellbound by the sweet Danube, he wrote another waltz twenty-two years later, this time with the title Danube Maidens. It was based on a familiar legend about a merman king and his daughter.

They all lived in the depths of the Danube in a castle made of blue-green crystal. The mermaids were indescribably beautiful and the earthly young men that caught a glimpse of them were forever devoted to them. One of the mermaids, the Danube Maiden, warned a young man and his father one winter about an impending storm, thus saving all the people who lived on the banks of the river. However the young man was unable to save himself: the following spring, enchanted by the Danube Maiden's beauty, he went out into the river in the hope of seeing her again. The next morning his empty canoe was found. The Danube Maiden Fountain, inspired by the legend, was unveiled in the city park of Vienna in 1865, followed a little later by the aforementioned waltz. The Danube Maiden had two faces, like the river itself: picturesque on the one hand, dangerous on the other. As it did for the German poet Heinrich von Kleist after the battle of Aspern on 21 and 22 May 1809.

His friend and regimental comrade, the military writer Rï¿½hle von Lilienstein, later recalled that the Austrians would have been defeated by Napoleon at Aspern on the Danube, "had the ripping current unfortunately not torn apart the bridges before half of his army had crossed over to the Lobau." (Unfortunately, wrote Rï¿½hle, because he later fought on the side of the French.) Thus the Austrians were victorious, and Kleist wrote the next day a short couplet entitled "The Rescue of the Germans": "The Gods had all deserted us, but the Danube Maiden / had mercy on us, and I confer upon her Mars's temple." And how did Kleist know this Danube Maiden, which in the form of a flood destroyed the French pontoons, though it was only during the battle that he first set eyes on the Danube? He'd learned about her from the quill of the Austrian dramatist Karl Friedrich Hensler, whose romantic-comical musical The Danube Maiden premiered in Vienna in 1799 and was staged in Dresden in 1802.

Hensler's play was the inspiration for Ludwig Tieck dramatic fragment The Danube Maid (1808), and also had an impact on Kleist's fantasy. The Danube maid is seductive: she is beautiful, while also being equipped with the weapons of Mars. (A few days before the Battle of Aspern, the French marshal Lannes tripped and fell into the Danube; his friend Napoleon immediately jumped into the water and saved the marshal, who was later fatally wounded in the battle.) Her beauty makes the Danube a blue river, however she is also foreboding. Like a picture by Egon Schiele that bears the title "City on the Blue River", but whose subtitle is "Dead city"; in it, the painter allows the muddy yellow, the grey and even the black to shimmer through the blue of the Danube. For Strauss this river is blue, for Schiele black; after the battle of Aspern, Heinrich von Kleist probably found it red. And some find it muddy yellow, others steely grey. Does it even have a colour? A single colour, I mean? No.

If I again ask the question, "What colour is the Danube?" what comes to my mind is a palette of colours, in which alongside blue there also appear gloomy, dark, even foreboding colours and tones. Because I'm from Budapest, what occurs to me for example is the muddy yellow colour that predominated during the catastrophic floods which struck Pest on 13 March 1838; even today countess small marble plaques on Pest walls recall this flood. The deluge, which made a deep impact on the collective Hungarian memory, was also the harbinger of the other great, political deluges of 1848, the revolution that began with the arrival of the latest political news from Vienna – news which of course came via the Danube, on a boat. This revolution, although defeated, was also the start of the subsequent development of the middle class in Hungary – an exceedingly contradictory process that repeatedly had recourse to the symbol of the calm yet dangerous Danube. It is no coincidence than it was in Hungary that the first stable bridge over the Danube – Chain Bridge – was inaugurated in 1849 as a symbol of the modernization process.

Yet by the time the second bridge – Margaret Bridge – was inaugurated in 1873, the residents of Pest and Buda were plagued with worry. This inspired the great Hungarian poet Jï¿½nos Arany to write his ballad "Consecration of the Bridge". For him, Margaret Bridge was a symbolic construction: it opened not only the route from East to West, bit also the route from life into death. If I think of the Danube in Budapest, the term "dance of death" comes to mind. Why? Because in this poem the bridge is swarming with suicides – victims of modern society that cannot find a way out. The development of the middle class was always a paradoxical process in most countries of the Danube basin. Hungary too. Two years after Jï¿½nos Arany's poem was written, Alfrï¿½d Hajï¿½s (1875-1955) was born, an important Hungarian architect of the twentieth century. Among his buildings is the Hungarian National Swimming Stadium, which still stands today on the most beautiful of all the islands on Danube, the Margaret Island. It was 1930.

Hï¿½jos was originally called Guttmann; like the majority of important contemporary Hungarian architects he was of Jewish origin and, like his fellows in fate, did a great deal towards giving Budapest a modern architectural face in keeping with the times. Both the Swimming Stadium and Leopoldstadt, a new city district on the Pest bank of the Danube opposite the island, are influenced by the spirit of the Bauhaus. Between the wars, the residents of Leopoldstadt were predominantly Jewish, and today it is still the most homogenous looking part of Budapest. When I look at the Swimming Stadium on the Margaret Island or the buildings of Leopoldstadt on the quay on the Pest side of the river, it's not only the modernization process that comes to my mind, but inevitably also the emergency of autumn 1944 and winter 1945, when the Danube became a theatre of horror for Budapest's Jewish population. Not only did this sector of the population do the maximum for the civil development of Hungary, it also suffered the greatest.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English poet William Bake described in his prophetic poem "Jerusalem" the impending apocalypse with the following words: "The Rhine was red with human blood, / The Danube rolled a purple tide; / On the Euphrates Satan stood / And over Asia stretched his pride." As far as the Danube was concerned, Blake's prophecy was borne out; at the beginning of 1945, as one survivor remembered it, the Danube "wasn't blue, wasn't brown, the Danube was red, from the blood of the Jews". When the Arrow Cross took over on 16 October 1944, they indiscriminately rounded up the Jews and drove a part of them to the banks of the Danube, where they shot them en masse, so that the dead fell into the river. The river carried away the first body on 23 November, and after that hundreds upon hundreds of new victims; around 3600 people were shot into the river over the course of the winter.

Just over a dozen survived the execution; those who were shot into the water but managed to reach the shore alive were given the nickname "Danubers" by the inventive Budapesters. The Danube proved to be destructive and life-saving at the same time. As the Hungarian writer Istvï¿½n ï¿½rkï¿½ny put it, in winter 1944 Budapest was a "bloodbath city". But this bloodbath on the Danube wasn't the first. Two years previously, in January 1942, Hungarian units carried out a mass murder upon the civilian population in the region of Novi Sad: 3340 people, predominantly of Serbian and Jewish origin, were shot down, most of them ending up in the icy waters of the Danube. Budapest's magnificent bridges also suffered the war. During World War Two, the Germans first blew up Margaret Bridge (4 November 1944) and then, in January 1945, Franz-Josef Bridge, Chain Bridge and Elisabeth Bridge. This signalled the end of a fateful chapter of Hungarian history.

The Danube was once more uncrossable – thus symbolically pre-empting the barbed wire put down shortly afterwards that was to make the passage between east and west impossible. There is, however, another bridge that ought to be mentioned in this context: the Nibelungen Bridge in Linz. It was dreamed up by Hitler, who grew up nearby and whose intention it was to develop Linz into a metropole. The first step was to build the bridge, over which the first traffic crossed in 1940. The monumental urban architecture, which even in the designs appears terrifying, was prevented by war from being completed; had it been realized, not only would the Danube have been violated, its colour would have been changed to brown for ever. The spectre of the brown Danube also haunts us nowadays, by the way: one of the most disgusting websites on the Internet is the Austrian neo-Nazi site called "Alpen-Donau", whose server is located in the US. * Allow me once again to refer to Jï¿½nos Arany's poem "Consecration of the Bridge". In the poem the bridge is crowded with suicides.

It doesn't lead from one bank of the Danube to the other, but becomes in effect a cul-de-sac. A paradox that has its roots deep in the history of the Danube. After all, the Danube was always a boundary, a limes, and whoever dared to overstep it always had to reckon with danger. Even the Romans conquered only the western part, Pannonia – and Diocletian organized his empire on the western bank of the Danube. The Danube was the boundary that shielded the southern and western civilizations against the East and the North. The Danube thus became a dividing line between civilization and barbarism, between radiant reason and unbridled instincts. For the first Hungarians it was the bridge between Christianity and paganism – let's not forget that bishop Gellert, the missionary from Venice, was thrown into the Danube by the pagans from the cliffs of what is today Gellï¿½rt hill. And as late as 1817, the German writer Achim von Arnim referred to the Danube in his novel The Crown Watchmen as a river that contains "the arch enemy of Christendom, the Turks".

It is precisely because it is also a limit that the Danube fills the Hungarians not only with pride but also with fear. This river is like a wound, wrote Sï¿½ndor Petï¿½fi in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, comparing it with a broken heart: "How often oh Danube are you split and stirred / by the raging storm and the ship's course! // And as mighty long and deep the wound does gape, / so your heart beats not with passion." What is the origin of this sense of woundedness? Perhaps because the Danube is impossible to conquer. This mighty river has no consistent visage. It comes from afar – from the Black Forest, where, as a stream, it is perhaps still blue, and dies far away, in the Balkans, in the Black Sea, where it is impossible to see from one bank to another, and where all waters are said to be black. In order to master the Danube, in other words to feel at home on the banks of the Danube, you have to be able to balance between west and east, south and north, blue and black, between past and future.

To again cite Attila Jï¿½szef's poem "By the Danube": "In the Danube's waves past, present and future / Are all-embracing in a soft caress." This is the English translation of the speech Lï¿½szlï¿½ F. Fï¿½ldï¿½nyi will be delivering at the opening of the Literatur im Herbst literary festival 2011, Vienna, 28-30 October

Question: What is the German name for the Danube?
Answer: DONAU