RUTHFULLY YOURS

The real adventure of travel is intellectual. Heart-stopping landscapes invite research into their history and culture, and books pile up in one’s library. Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1940) and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “Mani” (1958) and “Roumeli” (1966) are memorable travel books in large measure because they celebrate erudition. But arguably the supreme example of this category is Claudio Magris’s “Danube: A Sentimental Journey From the Source to the Black Sea,” published in Italian in 1986 and translated into English by Patrick Creagh in 1989. Mr. Magris is an academic from Trieste, that quintessential Central European city, although located on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Every spot along the Danube provides an opportunity for him to unleash a lifetime of encyclopedic learning on the page. Mr. Magris is periodically mentioned as a possibility to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: It is primarily because of this one book, which is not even a novel.

Whereas the Rhine, he writes, “is Siegfried, symbol of Germanic virtus and purity, the loyalty of the Niebelungs, chivalric heroism,” the Danube “is Pannonia, the kingdom of Atilla, the eastern, Asiatic tide.” More pointedly, the Rhine is about the “purity” of one race; while the Danube, with its link to the Austrian Habsburg Empire, evokes a “supranational culture” beyond ethnicity. In this way, he explains, the German language forever maintains the possibility to connote universal values. This Austrian mind-set, both imperial and cosmopolitan, rooted as it is in a specific landscape, recognizes the “stupid nonsense” that is postmodernism, “while accepting it as inevitable.”

It doesn’t take much for Mr. Magris to challenge the reader with abstractions, yet this is what encapsulates the beauty of the book, which is a bold experiment in taking the travel genre to another level of introspection. Indeed, the Danubian landscape evokes the past, which leads him to reflect thus: “Life,” paraphrasing Kierkegaard, “can be understood only by looking backward, even if it has to be lived looking forward…” So begins Mr. Magris’s journey into the darkest precincts of modern history—all while still debating the source of the river.

At Messkirch, in Germany, he spots a plaque announcing the boyhood home of Martin Heidegger, one of the 20th century’s great philosophers and also a committed Nazi. Mr. Magris connects Heidegger to Adolf Eichmann, the logistician of the Holocaust, both of whom, he explains, lacked the ability to imagine cold, abstract statistics as flesh-in-blood people. The contrast with Mr. Magris himself couldn’t be more telling. For this book seamlessly weaves the details of landscape and personalities into revealing abstractions, even as the abstractions themselves refer back to real events and people. “At Ulm,” he tells us, “there bloomed a great flower of German inwardness. Hans and Sophie Scholl, the brother and sister arrested, condemned and executed in 1943” for their activities against the Nazi regime. Today a local university bears their names. “Their story is an example of the absolute resistance which Ethos opposes to Kratos,” writes Mr. Magris. He quotes the historian Golo Mann about how the Scholls fought with nothing but “their bare hands” and a “cyclostyle” against everything and everybody around them.

Ulm is also “the heart of German Holy Roman Empire nationalism, that of the old Germany based on the law of custom, which sanctioned historical traditions and differences, opposing any central power, all forms of state interference,” the author notes with a tinge of nostalgia. The Danubian landscape evokes a plethora of associations with a traditional, almost romantic world, even as it is spoiled for him by the terrible ghosts of modernity, which started with Napoleon but progressed, albeit indirectly, to Hitler.

The shadow of the Holocaust stains the baroque and Gothic splendor of Danubia, providing this travelogue with its moral power. To wit, the cupolas of Sankt Florian and Melk in Austria, precisely because of their beauty, become “accomplices” in hiding the memory of the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp. Mr. Magris, after all, has recently come from Gunzburg in Germany, in whose “tidy, hospitable streets” Josef Mengele, the doctor-torturer of Auschwitz, was born; Eichmann, moreover, had spent a week on a spiritual retreat at the monastery of Windberg in Bavaria, for “the technocrat of massacre loved meditation.” This travelogue is designed neither to shock nor to score points, though, but to elucidate. Mengele’s mind is a “farrago of gibberish” as he practices “the kitsch of evil.”

Relief from such total abasement comes not in any majestic form, but from mundane, even grotesque points of light that the traveler meets along the way. In Regensburg, they kept the tradition of the “Palm Sunday Ass”: a procession carrying around an image of Jesus on a wooden ass, in memory of his entry into Jerusalem. For Mr. Magris, the ass symbolizes the “humble, indomitable constancy” of the heroes of antiquity. This leads him to reflect on Elias Canetti’s “Voices of Marrakesh” (1967), in which an ass’s sudden erection after having been “beaten to the point of collapse” by his master symbolizes the resistance and “vitality” of all who have suffered pain and humiliation. Mr. Magris’s ability to link such awkward associations without interrupting the journey is at the heart of his narrative magic.

There is “the lethargy of Pannonia,” whose low houses in the plains are “like sleepy eyelids.” The “mighty towers and robust symmetry” of Bratislava “combines the rough, indestructible loyalty of a sentinel with a fairy-tale remoteness.” He talks about the dissident Hungarian writer Gyorgy Konrad, who defines Mitteleuropa as “the defense of the particular against any totalitarian programme.” A key to this Mitteleuropean sensibility, Mr. Magris says, is the “tenacious virtues” of German bourgeois craftsmen, the veritable Romans of the region, who, in a city like Brasov in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, stave off social chaos by love of home, of family, of friendships, “and the rhythm that pulses out” of their tightly ordered lives: from copulation and birth to the Bierhaus, the games of cards, and the church service.

Mr. Magris writes about a Central Europe that is whole even though the fall of the Berlin Wall lies in the future. Imagining the post-Cold War between the lines, the text, nonetheless, reflects the nuances of the Communist 1970s and 1980s: how the Slovaks suffered a lesser fate than the Czechs following the Soviet repression of the 1968 Prague Spring, and how Hungary’s internal political detente in the final decades of the Cold War allowed for a relatively freer climate there.

As the Danube enters the region of Bulgaria and Romania, Mr. Magris explains the Thracian and Turkic origins of the Slavic-speaking Bulgarians and the way in which the Byzantine tradition filters into Romanian folk art. Standing near the Black Sea, the Danube splits up and spreads out “like wine from a broken krater, as the poem says when a wounded hero falls from his chariot.” Here is the art of travel: classical associations in place of vulgar contemporary ones, contemplation in place of conversation, because the most profound journeys are interior in nature.

—Mr. Kaplan, a contributing editor at the Atlantic, is completing a travel book on Romania and Moldova that will be published in 2016 by Random House.