Autorentext

Anton Holzer is a media historian and exhibition curator. His work focuses on the cultural and media history of photography, and he has published several monographs and exhibition catalogues on war photography, photography and exile, and the history of photojournalism.

Edit Király is a scholar of literary and cultural studies and a member of the PhD-School for Literary and Cultural Studies at ELTE Budapest. Her main research interests include the semantics of space, travelogues and river narratives. She is author of the monograph Die Donau ist die Form. Strom-Diskurse in Texten und Bildern des 19. Jahrhunderts (Böhlau, 2017).

Christoph Leitgeb is a senior research associate at the Institute of Culture Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His work focuses mainly on 19th- and 20th-century Austrian literature and literary theory, as for instance in his monograph Unheimliche Erinnerung - erinnerte Unheimlichkeit (Fink, 2020).

Olivia Spiridon is a research associate at the Institute for Danube Swabian History and Regional Studies and a lecturer at the German Department of the University of Tübingen. Her research and publications focus on the literature of German minorities in Southeastern Europe and the imaginary of the Danube in text and film narratives.

Klappentext

This book explores how the River Danube has been imagined, narrated, and contested across various media from the nineteenth century to the present day. The authors consider how political borders, technological projects, and cultural perspectives shape the river's significance, and examine the interaction between dominant narratives and local, regional, and ecological deviations. Drawing on literary texts, travelogues, photographs, postcards, films, and unpublished archival sources, the study explores the Danube as both a physical waterway and a medium of cultural communication. It traces changes in landscapes, infrastructure, and sites of memory, revealing how visions of modernisation, heritage, and identity are negotiated along its course. Integrating literary, visual, and performative perspectives, the book presents the Danube as a dynamic space where diverse histories converge, overlap, and confront each other.