This interdisciplinary, multilingual and transnational project explores literary and filmic narratives of crisis around the geographical, historical and cultural entanglements between the rivers Danube, Drava and Drina. The project is located at the interface between German and South Slavic studies and explores these three liminal waterways as both demarcating and permeable places that connect Austria and the Western Balkans in the cultural imagination, along with their different challenges and approaches.

By analysing literary and cinematic sources, rivers will be examined as identity-forming entities that not only represent international trade routes, but also shape collective affiliations and national cultural heritage. In their function as liminal points of contact for different linguistic, ethnic and religious populations, they represent competing discourses of power in which notions of purity and ownership are always in conflict with the hybrid and transnational characteristics of these natural sites. Despite repeated efforts to control (through straightening, dam building, deforestation, etc.) and monitor (through barriers, surveillance technologies, patrols) these rivers over the last centuries, they remain unpredictable sites of ecological and man-made crises such as floods, droughts, pollution, human trafficking and migration.

The project thus examines the ways in which Austrian and (ex-)Yugoslavian prose, travelogues, folk tales, poems and films from 1918 to the present negotiate ecological, economic and political crises through the motif of rivers (with the Danube, the Drava and the Drina as central case studies). The aim of the project is to use a transnational map of literary and filmic river narratives to work out how historical experiences of crisis connect these three river landscapes, but also what clues they offer for individual and collective resilience.