Stepping in the Same River Twice: Péter Forgács and the Revisiting of the Danube Exodus

Media artist Péter Forgács’s 1998 documentary The Danube Exodus is a one-hour film compiled from footage taken by river captain and amateur filmmaker Nándor Andrásovits on two of his journeys on the Danube. On the first journey, Andrásovits was tasked with the illegal transportation of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in Bratislava. On the second one, his ship was deployed in facilitating the forced migration of ethnic Germans from the Danube Delta to the Third Reich. In The Danube Exodus, these two voyages unfold as one another’s uncanny mirror images. In 2000, Forgács turned his film into an interactive exhibition titled The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River. Both the film and the installation ran the risk of offending the Jewish community by inviting viewers and visitors to compare Jewish and German suffering in a Holocaust-related context. This chapter focuses on the techniques Forgács employs in revisiting The Danube Exodus to negotiate this ethical dilemma. By focusing on Forgács’s revisiting of the film, I problematize the subject positions that these two projects invite us to take, as well as the way in which Forgács conceives of his own responsibility as an artist who brings Andrásovits’s footage to today’s audience.