This post marks a decade since I attended the commemorations of the 100th anniversary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination. Much has changed since then, like Putin's invasion of Ukraine. I have learned much, such as Russian intelligence officials' knowledge that Serbian nationalist groups were preparing to do this deed. I've grown as a musician (just played my first wedding as both organist and reception entertainer). I've imbibed much of Freud's writings, giving me deeper clues into the culture of turn-of-the-century Vienna. 

Most importantly, at least for these pages, is the publication of my book on the trip around the former Austria-Hungary, the full experience of which Sarajevo was only one part.

​Read it for yourself and see!

I didn't get to be there as it happened, but it fulfilled expectations dating back to my years in East-Central Europe in the 1990s. In fact, I only missed being there by a few months, having spent July-December 2003 in Olomouc in the Czech Republic.

On 1 May 2004, ten new countries joined the European Union. I like to group them as follows:
           The Visegrád Four, named after a Hungarian town where an important early-                      1990s agreement was signed: Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

           The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.

            Slovenia - the only Yugoslav successor state to join at that point.

            Two Mediterranean Islands: Cyprus and Malta.

I happened to be in Slovakia in October-December 2008, just before that country joined the Euro currency.

In some sense, getting former parts of Austria-Hungary to join became a major project of Otto von Habsburg, last Crown Prince of that empire, toward the end of his life. He came to congratulate Slovakia that June at a meeting of the Pan-European Union in Banská Bystrica. From there, he left en route to Sarajevo for the 90th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He was already 91 at that time and doubtless not counting on being there for the centennial. As it turns out he passed away in July 2011.

As it happens, my friend Alexander Daško, a primas, or violinist band leader, was providing entertainment for Habsburg's meeting. I write about this reincarnation of the old Empire as the EU in my book, Travels with Ferdinand, which recounts my travels around Otto's family's former realms for the centenary of WWI's outbreak. The book, a very timely look at aspects of European history and culture related to today's Ukraine conflict, may be purchased at the link below - just click on the image!

This will be just a brief post for holiday wishes. And memories of Easters spent abroad in the past. Those include 1991 in Martin, Czechoslovakia, where I marked the occasion in the town's main Lutheran church, historically the site of the Meeting of the Slovak Memorandum of 1861. The following year, I took a week to see Berlin and attended a service at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. That modern building was built next to the ruins of the old church of the same name, hollowed out by bombs near the end of WWII and left as a reminder of the horrors of war. 

Other Easters abroad include singing in the choir for the Easter Vigil at the Catholic parish in Radvan, part of Banská Bystrica, Slovakia, in 1995, and in the St.  Cecilia Choir of St. Elizabeth Cathedral in Košice, SK two years later. That Easter Sunday we sang Handel's "Allelujah Chorus," among other compositions.

While my last post on the phenomenon of fear in Russia was an emotional response to a the death of activist Alexei Navalny and the dastardly regime behind it, I don’t want to continue in that vein. We must hold firm to the hope for decency in political life. And while this blog has been devoted to travel, history and culture, sometimes politics is unavoidable.
 
In the epilogue to my book Travels with Ferdinand, I emphasized that culture and the arts can help us rise above politics. And the Ukrainian people have shown their drive to keep their culture alive, from theatrical performances to opening a large new bookstore in Kyiv, as shown on Amanpour and Company earlier this week.

There are other heartening signs.
 
Although activists in Russia have expressed the sentiment that hope for democracy in their country had died with Navalny, protest movements have taken off in the Federation’s regions, such as Bashkortostan. There has been a similar wave in authoritarian Hungary, following the controversial resignation of the president. And support for Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is waning, according to the latest independent surveys in Russia.
 
I am not going to indulge in a long post, as there is little I can add at the moment to vast discussions in major media. But I feel compelled to say something on the second anniversary of the outbreak of Europe’s largest conflict since WWI.
 
I will simply close by encouraging freedom-loving people to keep their chins up, speak the truth, and, in the words of one of my favorite hymns, “Be Not Afraid.”

ONLINE STATMENT HONORING NAVALNY'S COURAGE:

Strakh, in Cyrillic Страх, is the one-word title of the next-to-last chapter of a Russian-Ukrainian memoir I happen to be finishing up now. It describes the atmosphere of the early 1930s in the USSR and is taken from a play of the same name by Aleksandr Afinogenov. It means quite simply FEAR.

The concept of fear as an ever-present Russian reality is relevant once again in our time of High Putinism, for it is fear that rules, from Moscow to the Donbass to Vladivostok. And with the ever-present chance of more missile attacks on civilian infrastructure and housing, Vladimir Vladimirovich has extended terror’s reign, to some degree, to Ukraine as well.

So it’s uncanny that just as I’m reading and thinking about Strakh I learn of the death earlier today of Aleksei Navalny, the last leader of any significant opposition in Russia. He faced his own fear – and an almost-certain premature death, which finally came at the age of 47 – when he returned from Germany in 2021 after being flown there for treatment for poisoning.

Navalny himself had demonstrated the complicity of Russia's secret services in that act against him by calling one of the apparent FSB agents involved, pretending to be a fellow officer, and coaxing the toxic substances specialist to say over the phone that all traces of the poison had been cleared up. Yet despite the evidence, and even if Russians know deep down that it's true, no one dares say it.

Take the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya - who'd already been poisoned in 2004 after her reporting on the Second Chechen War. Gunned down in Moscow on October 7, 2006. Which just happened to be Putin's birthday. Coincidence? "There is no direct evidence," the fear-filled Russian dutifully retorts, "linking Putin to this or other deaths of journalists." 

Navalny’s fate is representative of the intimidation faced by opposition activists, or artists and academics. Those people are inakomyslyashchie, to use another Russian word, one that translates concisely as “dissidents” but whose full meaning is “different-thinking people.” One might say “those who dare to think differently,” adding the word dare, because in Russia, it requires a level of audacity little known in the West. And that is why, the more I learn about Russia, the more I feel its darkness, the more I pity its average citizens, and the more I admire those who refuse to conform.

The worst display of conformism in Russia – and similar societies – is parroting official lies. And this is where the memoirs I’ve been reading come in, as their author was an academic historian suffocating under the onus of censorship for decades before finally emigrating to Israel in the early 1970s.

Nikolai Poletika had been one of the Soviet Union's foremost authorities on the outbreak of WWI. His memoirs, published shortly after his arrival in his new country, are called simply Videnoe i Perezhitoe – “Seen and Experienced.” To my knowledge, they have never been translated into English. I’ve found them an eye-opening read, from his witnessing 1905’s Kiev Pogrom as a child, to the succession of governments who forcefully took over Kiev during the Civil War – and how he kept a low profile under each one for the sake of survival – and into the Stalinist Era. He could read all the leading Western news periodicals during his time as a journalist in 1920s Leningrad – though he had to be very careful about what he filtered through as a "foreign correspondent." Like other academic historians, he struggled to get his research published in an atmosphere in which it was easy to run afoul of the powers-that-be. Finally, he recounts the fate of those who overstepped the bounds, ending up in internal exile, or sometimes dying in labor camps.

None of this was entirely new to me, nor was the extent of the horrors of Stalinism. I’d already read, for instance, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Yet I felt as though I was overcoming some old naivete as I came upon Poletika’s Strakh chapter, which followed all his personal ordeals. Suddenly I could name the gloom that for me had so long hung like a thick, dank fog over all my impressions of Russia – from three and a half months spent in language courses there, from copious study and teaching of Russian culture in the States, and from conversations with friends and acquaintances from the former Soviet space.

The gnawing pain I associated with Russia hadn't come from seeing dirty streets or drunks passed out on sidewalks, though these things were symptoms of the greater ill. Nor did it come from knowing about short lifespans or that you couldn't trust the police. Nor was it the overblown monuments to Soviet greatness – which were, it is true, effective at dwarfing the individual. It was the feeling that you had to pay fealty to this grandiose view of the Russian state, even as it belittled your worth as an individual and mocked any desire for truth-telling. You might recognize its hollowness and decay, but to point them out was unthinkable, because it still had the power to control your tongue and your pen. Even your mind. And that power was fear.

Yet there's more to the specifically Russian/Soviet type of strakh - which is probably why it took me all those years to make the connection. (Though when I comes short life expectancies or corrupt, violent cops, I might have put more thought into the fear Blacks in the Jim Crow South must have felt.)

Afinogenov’s protagonist, Professor Borodin of the Institute of Physiological Impulses, describes the nature of that peculiarly totalitarian strakh: 

“The dairy-maid fears the confiscation of her cow, the peasant, forceful collectivization … the technical worker, accusations of sabotage… The individual becomes mistrustful, shut off, unscrupulous, slovenly, and unprincipled… Fear begets absence from work, trains running late, disrupted production, and general poverty and hunger… The rabbit, upon seeing a constrictor, becomes frozen to the spot, its muscles rigid. It waits in ignominy until the coils of the constrictor squeeze and asphyxiate it. We are all rabbits. After all this, can one work creatively? Of course not!”

And in Poletika’s view, the Communist Party waged war on one group of people first and foremost: the intelligentsia. Not only on the professoriate, but also on writers or others inclined to think independently.

Fortunately, not all are paralyzed by strakh. Here's to all those, like Navalny and Politkovskaya, who are not afraid to speak the truth. 

Since I first visited Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg, while showing my parents around Central Europe during the 1990-91 holidays, I've been unable to forget his birthday.
 
I can also never forget that it's International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on this date because it's the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz - and I was there for the 50th anniversary in 1995. This year it happens that just in the last couple of days by old client from Israel has come up with some more Czech material on his great-grandfather, the one mentioned in the epilogue to my book. His ancestor, a rabbi, perished in Treblinka. On another occasion, about 15 years ago, I worked on a list of Holocaust victims for Columbus, Ohio's Beth Israel Synagogue. That congregation had "adopted" one from Dobříš, less than an hour outside Prague. Practically all its members  died in the Holocaust. Part of my job was to get information on their deportations and so forth from the Jewish Museum in Prague, as well as to get their names together with all the diacritics in place for a silver Torah breastplate.

There's not much reason to associate the composer and the Polish town which has become so symbolic of the Holocaust. One might think of their historical connection to the Habsburg Empire - the town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz) was annexed by Austria in the First Partition of Poland in 1772. Salzburg was technically a Prince-Archbishopric of the Holy Roman Empire, which in my understanding means it owed fealty to the Habsburg rulers...

Another reason the date of 27 January comes up in my mind so often is that Mozart's Cafe in Columbus, Ohio holds yearly celebrations of the composer's birthday, which I attended as religiously as possible during my grad school years in that city.

Anyway, I don't have that much to add to the subject. Please do check out my posts from this date in years past: 

2019 - Happy 263rd, Wolfi!       
2020 - Remembering Auschwitz: 50 + 25 
​

 Reflecting on 2023 fills me with gratitude for things achieved and experienced. Here are some of the highlights.
 
Most important is the publication, in April, of my first book, Travels with Ferdinand! Related posts can be found here, here and here. The book may be purchased at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble or Amazon. 
 
While I’ve kept busy as keyboardist in two churches, and have done much good from week to week at keeping things “humming,” I’ve not had as much time as I’d have liked for writing music. Still, I came up with two compositions this past year. One was a Psalm setting for the Prayers for Peace, called for by Pope Francis in October in light of recent violence around the world. Our congregation, at St. Peter the Apostle in Onley, VA, made its own impassioned plea. As part of that event, I was also asked to deliver a few facts on casualties, abductions, and forced internal or external migration from the conflict in Ukraine. Others spoke, in English and/or Spanish, on situations in Venezuela, Honduras, etc.

In November, I also wrote the words to a prayer, a reflection for the Feast of St. Cecilia, Patron of Musicians AND Thanksgiving. The two are very close, and sometimes coincide. I’ve had a particular devotion to Cecilia since singing in the St. Cecilia Choir at the Cathedral of St. Elizabeth (of Hungary) in Košice, Slovakia in 1996-97 and briefly in 2011.
 
Taking it slowly in the original German, I read All Quiet on the Western Front cover-to-cover, something I’ve wanted to do for years. Especially since taking my trip – the one that led to Travels with Ferdinand – examining the origins of the First World War. I also gave two talks on WWI, one on the war’s relation to the “Slavic question,” the other on representations of the conflict in lit and film.
 
I’ve read most of a memoir of a Russian-Israeli historian, published in the 1970s. A. N. Poletika was born in a small town in Ukraine and moved to Kyiv for secondary-school studies, where he witnessed the Kiev Pogrom of 1905 and was later well aware of the public commotion surrounding the Beylis Trial of 1913 and the acquittal of the defendant on charges of ritual murder. He also reflects on various pogroms that took place during the Russian Civil War, the umpteen different “governments” that ruled Kyiv during this time, as well as crimes again humanity committed by the Bolsheviks. He later got by as a correspondent for a Leningrad paper and had something of a career as an academic historian, though he was quite limited in what he could research or say. Never translated into English as far as I know, its Russian title is Videnoe i Perezhitoe (“Seen and Experienced”). It also contains little-discussed info about the Sarajevo assassination, one of Poletika’s chief topics of investigation.

And of course, I’ve read numerous books in English, among them Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.
 
I have almost completed a large translation project involving 50 years worth of correspondence from my client’s Slovak grandmother to her daughter (client’s mother). It begins when the girl emigrated to the U.S. in 1921 at the age of 17 and ends at the grandmother’s death in 1971. I’ve done thirty years worth of the letters – another translator covered the 1930s and 1940s. My client is now looking for a publisher. The work has given me great insight into the effects of political and economic events on the daily lives of ordinary folk, as well as the “immigrant experience.”
 
Now for a really quirky one…
I’ve come to realize that bats are not really creepy, but actually cool. This came after a nighttime encounter with two of them in my bedroom. I learned to relax and trust their sonar when they fly around my head. Also realized that Strauss’ overture to Die Fledermaus (literally “the mouse”) is meant to suggest the fluttering motions of a bat’s wings, or the rhythm thereof. At least, the operetta will always be imbued with greater significance for me.

And now that 2023 has passed, it has also come to my attention that the year marked 250 years since the creation of the hymn "Amazing Grace." Despite that belated realization, I can say that I've played the song several times this past year at Masses and funerals.

And I’ve had lots of other realizations and, really, paradigm shifts. Too many to mention, too subtle to describe sometimes. Maybe I’ll get into more philosophical writing in 2024!

The politician who helped negotiate an end to WWI, little known outside Central Europe, figured prominently in the new film version of All Quiet on the Western Front.


I'd like to take the occasion of this 105th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice to recall a largely unsung hero of the conflict: Matthias Erzberger. Born in 1875 in what is today the federal state of Baden-Würtemberg, he joined the Catholic Centre Party and was elected to the Reichstag in 1903.

Though he’d advocated annexing Belgium and other territories at the start of the Great War, Matthias Erzberger began openly arguing for a negotiated settlement in July 1917, in part because he could see that the stalemated position of both sides in the conflict meant that further loss of life would have been useless. He shared Austro-Hungarian documents related to the fruitless of continued military campaigning with the German military, which helped shatter their illusions that their war aims were achievable.

Eventually, when Imperial Germany found itself in a totally losing position, Erzberger was sent to negotiate with the Allies in the Forest of Compiegne. It was felt that he, as a Catholic from the southwest region of his country, would be more amenable to his French than a Prussian officer. According to the Wikipedia entry on him, he was also seen as an “unassailable man of peace.” (He was one of the few statesmen from the Central Powers who had earlier attempted to dissuade their allies, the Ottoman Turks, from engaging in the Armenian genocide.)

While based on the original book version of All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929 by Erich Maria Remarque, the 1922 film version directed by Edward Berger adds scenes of the final negotiations for the Armistice. The young soldiers in the book (German title Im Westen Nichts Neues), discuss the politicians’ approach to the war, as opposed to that of those fighting in the trenches, but nowhere does that work actually depict the higher-ups. Berger decided to show Erzberger negotiating in a train car, and at one point the politician is even represented as accusing his fellow Germans of acting out of “a false sense of honor.”

Erzberger was assassinated by German nationalist terrorists, who viewed him as a traitor, the Organization Consul, in 1921. He is widely regarded today as having spared Europe from further senseless death by preparing Germany for its inevitable defeat.