Fluvial Migrations: The Ethics of Comparison in Péter Forgács’s The Danube Exodus

The Danube Exodus is a 1998 film created by Hungarian film and video artist Péter Forgács. The film consists almost entirely of amateur footage made by Hungarian Captain Nándor Andrásovits on two of his consecutive voyages on the Danube. On the first voyage, in the summer of 1939, his ship carried a group of Slovakian Jewish refugees from Bratislava to the Black Sea, from where they would continue their journey to Palestine. The next year, sailing upstream, he was tasked with taking a group of Bessarabian Germans uprooted from their homeland in the Danube Delta and relocated to Nazi-occupied Poland. Forgács’s film sets the Jewish and the German exoduses in a comparative relation to each other, challenging lingering taboos on discussing German suffering in relation to the Holocaust. This article examines the editing techniques that Forgács employs to renegotiate the distinction between victims and perpetrators through the lens of memory’s relation to identity. The article demonstrates that the ethical stance Forgács embodies in The Danube Exodus resonates with the ethics of multidirectional memory in Michael Rothberg’s sense (2009)