1989 and of the old East-West divide in Europe have been on my mind a lot lately, thanks to watching The Same Sky on Netflix. The series depicts characters in both parts of Berlin in 1974, showing how their lives were affected by the Cold War. Having viewed Goodbye, Lenin in the 2000s, I found this 2017 series to be a welcome antidote to nostalgia for a time that was not really so good. The Same Sky starkly portrays the deep reach of the Stasi regime into every corner of society, in particular the cunning of secret police in getting ordinary citizens to turn informant on their closest friends and relatives. One might miss East German pickles, a recurring image in Goodbye, Lenin, but the Wall and the regime deserved to die.

As a college student finishing up at UVA in autumn 1989, I eagerly watched network news coverage of East-Central Europe’s protests. Fraternity brothers and I cheered for the freedom trains bringing East Germans to the West, and cried “Tear down the Wall!” I came home from my bellman’s job one November Thursday evening to hear a frater exclaim, “Mark, the Wall came down!” The next night, I bought champagne for a bunch of us to celebrate.

But, oh, how I wished I could have been in Berlin to see it all firsthand. I’d missed my generation’s Woodstock.

I did what I could, though, to get to the former East Bloc, and by the next October was teaching English in Slovakia. And that November, I was on Prague’s Wenceslas Square celebrating the first anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution with thousands of Czechs, Slovaks and international visitors to the capital, an event presided over by the country’s dissident-turned-president, Václav Havel, and U.S. President George H. W. Bush.

It was yet another year and a half before I got to travel to Berlin. By that time the Wall had been largely dismantled. Still, I’ll make that trip the subject of this blog entry, my personal tribute the 30th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall - and to all those who suffered from Stasi oppression, and to all who fought and overcame it.

So, here is my take on the “New Berlin Feel.” (It is taken from a memoir, Slovakian Rhapsody, for which I am seeking publication.)

 
At breakfast the morning after checking into a Berlin hostel, I joined a dark-haired student named Dieter. He had a few hours before he had to return home to Bielefeld, so he offered to show me the center of town.

It was chilly and breezy, but sunny, on the Strasse des 17. Juni. June 17, he explained, had been the national holiday in West Germany, significant for a 1953 uprising of East German workers against the increasingly oppressive regime.

He pointed to the Siegessäule, or “Victory Column,” four massive sandstone columns, each about twenty feet tall, stacked end-to-end and topped by a gold-plated, winged Victoria. Completed in 1873, it celebrated Prussian victories over the Danes, French and Austrians, all part of von Bismarck’s project of uniting Germany, which for centuries had been a loose collection of hundreds of principalities with their own laws, customs and dialects.

Closer to the old East-West boundary, vendors, probably in their forties but with leathery, prematurely aged faces, sat at card tables hawking ushaki, those fuzzy black Russian caps with huge earflaps, Lenin pins, and Soviet army caps and jackets. I’d seen such shady operations in Prague and wondered how much stuff had been pawned by departing soldiers.

“So all the Soviet troops have left, right?” I asked Dieter.

“No, there are still a half million.”

My jaw dropped. “In Czechoslovakia they all left last year.”

“By treaty they’re supposed to leave Germany by 1994.” He pointed at the marble colonnade behind the makeshift souvenir stands. “It’s the Soviet War Memorial. Even though it was in West Berlin, Soviet honor guards marched out every day from the Brandenburg Gate to change shifts. The West allowed it because, well, it pays homage to
Red Army fighters who died defeating Hitler.”

What irony! To think that Soviet soldiers would march along the “Street of June 17,” which, since it abutted East Berlin, must have been an annoyance to the East German government.

As we passed through the Brandenburg Gate, I recalled the images of the crowds in late 1989. Now, people strolled through, elderly folk on canes, a mother pushing a baby carriage, but most people were at work. No vestiges of the Wall remained. I simply couldn’t relive the euphoria of its collapse.

Inside the former East Berlin, Dieter stopped at the entrance to an S-Bahn station. “This line is mostly in the West, but there are three stops in the East.”

“So it was all built before the war?”

“Right. After the war, trains ran through the eastern sector but didn’t stop. A few people tried to jump onto them as they passed through the stations, to escape to the West. But soon the government sealed them off.”

Now it was back in full operation. Passengers entered and exited as if it were nothing new. I wondered how fast the scars of the barriers that had deformed the heart of the city until so recently were healing.

I thanked Dieter.

“My pleasure.” He shook my hand graciously, wished me a good stay and disappeared into the station. My trip was not turning out so bad.

Not far away, I found a remaining section of the Berliner Mauer next to an abandoned lot—the dusty remains of the no-man’s-land between the inner and outer walls, where Honecker’s shoot-to-kill orders had long threatened potential escapees.

On an old section of the Wall, “Total Demokratie” in ten-foot white letters on a green background stood out among anarchic, multi-colored squiggles. A handful of tourists, the only people in a stretch of land several hundred meters, took pictures and wandered among the ruins.

The Museum at Checkpoint Charlie displayed a multitude of devices for smuggling Ossies to the West: a hot-air balloon, a gas tank partitioned to hold an adult human and just enough fuel to cross the border. Another room showed the mechanisms to deter – or kill – escapees, such as trip wires that set off projectiles. On another wall was a life-sized black-and-white of a young East German border guard, before the Wall was actually built, taking advantage of a moment’s distraction among comrades to make a dash for the other side—a picture that had made front pages worldwide in 1961. Finally, I watched a documentary which showed, after the grim history, the crowds dancing atop the Wall, shaking champagne bottles and spraying the jubilant masses with bubbly. At last, I could enjoy my Berlin Wall moment, but I was nearly alone in the museum’s tiny screening room – and there was no complimentary glass of champagne.

I’d also come to see “Degenerate Art,” paintings and sculpture that the Nazis had displayed as objects of derision in 1937. Since then, the works had dispersed to various corners of the earth, but curators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had managed to track down and borrow a fifth of those items for an exhibit there. Finally, with impetus from German organizers, the collection was making a three-month appearance here. I’d read about the original in my college German textbook. After learning of this new display in the International Herald-Tribune, I’d added it to my checklist.

It began with samples of Nazi sculpture, idealized Aryan bodies exuding vigor and military prowess. Avant-guard pieces, some depicting human subjects with deformities, were offered as examples of material repugnant to Hitler. An impressionist painting of ordinary farmers had been labeled, in the 1937 show, as “a mockery of the German peasant family.” A book cover, Degenerate Music, featured a drawing of an African-American sax player, a monkey in a tux—and oddly with a star of David on a lapel. The caption explained that Nazi theorists considered jazz an offense to the Germanic soul, a “Negro-Jewish-Free-Masonic” influence debasing American society. I’d heard Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theories in present-day Slovak circles, and I wondered how deep these streams ran in the European imagination.

I visited the permanent collections on Berlin’s Museum Island, took in ancient Egyptian sarcophagi, Roman jewelry and coins, Greek artifacts. Since it was Easter weekend, I watched an Ostermarsch on Sunday, a protest march through the center of the West. That year a lot of Kurds were clamoring for their rights, a sign that Germany’s liberal emigration laws had altered the character of such public meetings, and also a reminder of events in the Middle East following the First Gulf War.

Then I bought a Sunday paper and hopped onto an S-Bahn train in the Friedrichstrasse Station, with no goal but a broader view of the city. I took the line all the way to the east, passing the typically socialist architecture, as well as the splashy stuff like the TV tower – which the regime had also used, with little success, to jam broadcasts from the West. On the return trip across the West, the glitziness struck me as overdone, but preferable. There was also more green space, much to my liking. I opened my newspaper to a column, “Das neue Berlin-Gefühl”—“The New Berlin Feel,” the author opined, “is above all the S-Bahn Gefühl,” the sensation of riding across town.

I was living it, here and in Central Europe generally.


Related posts:
Genscher's Tear Down the Wall Speech - from last month, recalls the German foreign minister at the Prague embassy and other 1989 events leading to the Wall coming down.

The Glory and the Agony of Central European Anniversaries - about my experience of the 1st anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.

Happy Hundredth, Leonard Berstein - recalls Bernstein's New Year's Eve 1989 concert at the Berlin Wall.

I have no video so you’ll have to take my word for it: I was once on Slovak television. As one of eight basses in a 40-member choir squeezed onto a small tribunal, very much secondary to the nearby reviewing stand with generals and presidents.

It was the 50th anniversary of the Slovak National Uprising (29 Aug.-28 Oct., 1944), a guerilla resistance effort against Nazi occupation and the collaborationist government of Jozef Tiso. Because the rebel forces first entered Banská Bystrica and made it their headquarters, that town is considered the epicenter of the SNP (Slovak abbreviation). So that’s where the SNP Museum has been for decades, and where the main celebrations took place in 1994.

I’d been living there for a year, teaching English, as I’d already done for two years in another Slovak town, Martin. I’d left Martin to return to the States for a master’s degree, then signed up with the Soros Foundations – yes, that Soros – which had assigned me to a prominent lycée in Bystrica. For an expat at the time it was probably the hippest place to be outside Bratislava, with its very active British Council, a plethora of choices for nightlife, and new cafes and restaurants sprouting up practically every month.

The curious thing is that when I’d left town at the end of the previous school year, the main square was littered with large chunks of asphalt. The sound of jackhammers everywhere made café life unbearable. All a preface to large-scale reconstruction – to beautify the town for the SNP’s 50th anniversary.

I’d spent half the summer in Provence teaching English in a program for French and American teens, then gone back home to Virginia to visit family and friends.

I returned to Bystrica in late August, relieved to find that the renovation project had been completed on time. I went to the regular Tuesday-evening rehearsal of a chorus, called Hron, that I’d been singing in since the previous October. Only then did I learn of our invitation to sing at the SNP anniversary.

So it was luck, not virtue, that got me there. Total serendipity.

Still, I faced one hurdle: during my two-month absence, a list of our choir’s participants had been sent to event security for background checks. I didn’t want to miss out, but how was I even going to get in?

“Don’t worry,” a fellow baritone said. “Somebody’ll be a no-show, and you can get in on their pass.”

Who knows what laws that might have been breaking, but it was worth a shot.

On the big day, in a music room in an elementary school down the street from the grandstands, we held a warm-up beforehand. At the end, Hron’s secretary handed me a badge with the name of a luke-warm chorister who hadn’t turned out (indeed, rarely came to practice).

“Today, you’re gonna be Milan.”

Fortunately, our passes had only names, no pictures. I trudged along with the other guys, dressed in dark suit just like them, carrying only a black music folder, just like them. There’s anonymity in numbers. I’d left my camera home to avoid any hang-ups at the gate, any body searches, any questions from security I’d have to answer in accented Slovak, which would raise further suspicions. We rounded a corner and found ourselves backed up behind hundreds of other participants. Soon, the sheep-herd narrowed down to single-file at the “gate” – the metal detector leading to the VIP area. As I passed through, I flashed the card at a guard, who waved me on to keep the line moving at a reasonable clip. I was in! Still, I pushed another twenty feet through the crowd before breathing a sigh of relief that he hadn’t demanded photo ID.

And soon I found myself on a platform some 100 feet from a much larger reviewing stand with about seven heads of state, five vice presidents, and a dozen top brass: from Germany, Austria, Romania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary. And Russia, of course, representing the Soviet Union. A crowd of twenty thousand had gathered on the grassy field, large enough for football, in front of the SNP Museum/Memorial. For the opening, a military band played during a five-plane flyover, complete with red, white and blue jet trails. TV cameras were poised in scores of locations to capture the scene live. My nerves were still calming from the ID thing. Thank God I didn’t have to sing a solo.

In between speeches, our chorus sang Slovak patriotic songs. My favorite among them was Ferko Urbánek’s poem “Hoj, vlasť moja” in an early twentieth-century setting by Mikuláš Schneider-Trnavský, Slovakia’s most renowned composer. Trnavský had earned his compatriots' adulation by compiling the main Slovak Catholic hymnal, still used today. His skills at arrangement show on this song as well. (Please, see/listen to the video below.) Simply sublime, how the voices move subtly in the beginning, then undulating voices come to a fervent crescendo/rallentando at the end of each verse.

Oh, my mother country, thou dearest land, I love thee will all my heart. I want to be thy faithful son, to live in labor for thy welfare.

Oh, my mother country, thou earthly paradise, thou beauteous bliss, eternal month of May. I want to be thy faithful son, to live in labor for thy salvation.

Tears crept to my eyelids at the notion of the faithful son. Could I possibly be a Slovak patriot? With no Slovak ancestry? When we got to the third verse, our director opened her arms extra-wide to signal a crescendo even more dramatic than on the previous two verses.

Oh, my mother country, thou holy land. I honor thee with all my soul. I want to be thy faithful son, and someday dream in thy bosom.

Yet dream here means sleep, and bosom and land suggest a grave. As much as I enjoyed the mountainous landscape here, the folk melodies and dances, the warmth of the local population, I wasn’t sure I wanted to die in Slovakia. And then I thought of all those memorials, the mass graves of the partisans who died fighting the fascists in the SNP.

What am I doing here?

It was just one of those occasions when you accept strange, undeserved fate. With gratitude.

Famous Czech crooner Karel Gott died at 80 in his Prague home on 1 October. 300,000 lined the streets of the city to pay their last respects on Friday 11 Oct. Gott was popular in (West) Germany as well as the former Soviet Bloc, as he frequently toured both sides of the Cold War division.
 
I’ve only sung one of “his” numbers, Když Milenky Pláčou (When Lovers Cry), a Czech version—not so much a translation—of John Denver’s “Annie’s Song.” Among other international cover material he performed was Rot und Schwarz (Red and Black) a German-language version of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.” Remarkably, it starts off with a string section sounding like Pablo Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen or a Brahms/Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody/Dance, adding to the already “orientalist” vibe of the original. Gott’s light Slavic accent, the final touch of exotica, made it a smash in the German-speaking world.
 
I saw a Czech interview with a publicist recently, saying Gott was determined to be wildly successful from at least his early twenties, and he did everything to hone the skills and the image, down to clothes, hair, and poise and movements on stage, to project the confidence and aura of a pop star. Gott was often criticized for signing the “Anti-Charter,” a Communist Party-led declaration condemning Charter 77 (a 1977 petition for the regime to respect human rights, in particular to abide by the terms it had agreed to under the Helsinki Accords of 1975). But in 1989’s Velvet Revolution he sang alongside dissident Karel Kryl from a balcony overlooking Wenceslaus Square. His career continued unabated until his recent bout with acute leukemia.

It was 30 September 1989 when then-West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher announced from a balcony at the Prague embassy that East Germans would be granted permission to travel to West Germany by five special trains arranged for transport. This was the beginning of a mass exodus which resulted in the Berlin Wall finally coming down on 9 November.

It followed Poland's first free post-war elections in May of that year and the cutting of barbed wire along the Hungarian-Austrian border in summer. In August, large numbers of East Germans camped out near Lake Balaton, a resort and spa area in the west of Hungary. It was so common for East Bloc denizens (as well as Austrians and Germans) to vacation there, it didn't really even look all that suspicious, but they were biding their time, having heard rumors of border openings. As Deutsche Welle notes in recent reportage, many of the locals told them which lookout towers were likely to go unused.

The breakthrough was the Pan-European Picnic, in the woods near Sopron, Hungary, an event co-sponsored by Otto von Habsburg, the last crown prince of Austria-Hungary, and reform-minded Communist parliamentarian Imre Pozsgay. There were rumors, once again, of a border opening: according to the Deutsche Welle article, Hungarian guards checked the documents of Austrian citizens, while ignoring the East Germans pouring through into Austria - about 700 in number.

More and more "Ossies" attempted the escape into Austria, and in September many others went to Prague - entering West German territory by jumping the fence into the embassy compound. These are the people Genscher is addressing.

The Pan-European Picnic and the events at the Prague Embassy were two crucial leadups to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. 

I posted last year on the Feast of St. Wenceslas, Patron of Bohemia. Since I have so many ties to the Czech Republic, I'm doing it again. This time I’ve got new info, on a church built in the saint’s honor for the millennium of his death in 1930. As many times as I’ve been to Prague, I must confesse I’ve not visited it - so, new bucket list item!

The Tres Bohemes website, a good source for all things Czech – and some Slovak – does a better job than I can, so I’ll refer you to them here.

Also, September 7 was the four-hundredth anniversary of the deaths of three priests executed during the uprisings led by Gabriel Betlan in what was then Hungary, in today's East Slovak city Košice, the second largest municipality in the country. They were canonized by John Paul II during his visit to Slovakia in 1995. (I was living in the country at the time, but did not see the pontiff there, though I did see him in the Vatican the year before while traveling with a Slovak chorus.)

There were several special Masses for the occasion. The St. Cecilia choir I sang in from 1996-97 performed at one of those events, held in the "Premonstratensian" church which was built on the site of their martyrdom. I've sung with the group in that church in several concerts there, as well as for the wedding of one chorus member.

​Curiously, none of the three martyrs was Slovak: Marek Križin was Croatian, Štefan Pongrác Hungarian, and Melichar Grodeckzý Polish. As a spokesman for the diocese recently pointed out, this fact symbolizes the supranational position of the Church. And in another sense, all three were Košice people, so all the town's citizens can be proud. 

Even with last year’s 50th anniversary commemorations over, it’s worth adding a few points about the tragedy that befell the Czech and Slovak people’s – the country’s Hungarian, Roma, Rusyn and other minorities.
 
So I’m featuring a few shots from a late-August 1968 edition of Life, which capture both the air of freedom that preceded and the frustration and desperation that followed.
 
Please allow me to refer you to my posts from last year:
 
The Tanks of August  
 
The Invasion at 50 – which includes video of me performing my translation of Karel Kryl’s heartrending song Bratříčku, zavírej vrátka, as well as an embedded clip of the Moody Blues performing in Prague on the very eve of the invasion - 
 
50 Years Since the Tanks of August – with more pics and commentary –
 
Finally, the Moody Blues were not the only celebs caught in Czechoslovakia at the time. This post on Tres Bohemes covers the topic thoroughly (better than I can), so I’ll leave you to visit their site. Shirley Bassey was filming songs from Goldfinger, while Shirley Temple Black was doing charity work, and George Segal and other were filming The Bridge at Remagen.
 

Fields of lavender, the buzz of cicadas, siestes from the summer heat, canoeing down the Gard river - all these are images from my month-long stay in Provence. And the laughter and chatter of French and American kids, ages 12-16, in a bilingual program called "Young Pilgrims in France/Jeunes Pèlerins en France."

As I see scenes from this year's Tour de France, the memories come back. Our summer camp, which had rich offerings in languages, culture, art, and recreation, was run by The American School in Switzerland, and housed in the dorm-style accommodations of the Prieuré du Christ Roi, in a town called Uzès. 

The Tour route for one July day ran right under the retaining wall separating the property from the street. I joined the camp counselors and kids waiting for the cyclists, but all I got to see were the endless promotional vehicles riding through. At least I got a nice tee-shirt and humongous fold-out map of the route for 1994. Then lunch was ready, and we adults did our best to get the kids to the table. Half-way through the meal, someone shouted "They're coming through." BOOM! Twenty-some kids leaped up at once and ran to the scene. Recognizing the futility of imposing discipline at this moment, we instructors got up slowly and ambled to the street. Ah, but it was all over. 

So if you want to see a leg of the race, just remember: blink and you miss it. The competitors speed by in a cluster. That's it. Unless, perhaps, you secure a spot on a long up-hill grade.

But this reality of the Tour shouldn't stop you from going there, getting a glimpse of the race, and - most importantly - enjoying the scenery all around.

Two of this week's legs went through areas I visited that summer of '94: Nîmes and the Pont du Gard. One of my fondest memories was canoeing down the Gard river, finishing up at the famous three-tiered Roman aqueduct, passing right through its shadow, then walking across the structure and looking down at the turquoise water and people swimming and boating in it.

And so I present a small slideshow sampling that summer's delights. Enjoy!

Also, there are only two days left of the tour. You can find out more at the official Tour de France site.

What befits a travel & music blog more than a song about flyin' to the moon. Enjoy this 50th anniversary tribute to the Apollo moon landing!

See ya next week for some pics from a Tour de France from years past...

After autumn 1989’s street-protest-driven rejection of East Bloc Communism, which I’d viewed euphorically on CNN, and a sublime, sunny graduation on the University of Virginia’s colonnade lined Lawn the following May, I spent the summer of 1990 studying ESL pedagogy at Georgetown. The idea now was to go to Eastern-Central Europe to teach English, a language quickly rising in demand after forty years of pupils being force-fed Russian.

I considered the Baltics, thanks to a UVA dean and Rīga native who’d encouraged me through my toughest times in college. With a mind to repaying her kindness by teaching English in her home country, I phoned the Latvian legation, the unofficial, émigré-run “embassy” of a nation still under Soviet rule. The gentleman who answered described Stalin’s cynical annexation of the Baltic States, a move never recognized by the West, and his nation’s desire for independence. But he advised against going there: “Things are too unstable.”

Romania and Bulgaria were out for the same reason. I called the Yugoslav embassy – they didn’t need English teachers, I was told, as they’d been learning plenty of English rather than Russian ever since Tito broke with Stalin. A stark, blotchy red and white Solidarity poster in my Georgetown linguistics professor’s office reminded me of the struggle of the Polish shipyard workers and, indirectly, of John Paul II’s motivating role. So I considered going there or to East Germany, which was about to merge with the West.

But I’d never thought about Czechoslovakia until that July 4, sitting cross-legged on a friend’s picnic blanket amidst the crowd of 400,000 who’d come to hear the symphony on the Washington Mall. As blackness swallowed the last purple of twilight and the final cymbal crash of Sousa’s “Washington Post March” faded, the emcee announced that we had just received a special call. Václav Havel, phoning by satellite from Prague. His gravelly voice came over the P.A. system.

“I would like to congratulate you on your nation’s birthday,” he said, haltingly, in his strong central European accent. “Your country was a beacon of hope to those of us suffering behind the Iron Curtain. And so, I am honored to address you tonight as president of a free Czechoslovakia.”

The crowd bellowed in response, clapping their hands above their heads in a display of good-natured American boisterousness.

“Oh. Well, thank you.” He sounded a bit embarrassed. “You have been an inspiration to oppressed peoples everywhere. And now it is my privilege to introduce the next song, the final movement of the New World Symphony, which my compatriot Antonín Dvořák composed while living in your wonderful country.”

After another spasm of cheering, the conductor raised his baton. The low strings played two notes a half-tone apart, like the “Jaws” music; slowly at first, then gaining tempo and volume. Violins joined in with piercing glissandos, building the tension towards an explosion of brass and tympani. The music was soon accompanied by the boom of fireworks, whose red, white and blue streams – equally valid as U.S. or Czechoslovak colors – illuminated the Washington Monument behind the orchestra.

The display of American-Czechoslovak friendship made up my mind for me.

The next morning, I called the Czechoslovak embassy and learned of Education for Democracy. I applied as soon as I got the paperwork. I got the news of my acceptance in August, after I’d already signed a short-term contract with a language school near DC’s Dupont Circle. So I had to put off the move until mid-October.

A mere two weeks after arriving, I got to see Havel from a distance of 50 feet in the Slovak provincial capital to which I’d been assigned. It felt like destiny.


I related my experience of that Havel speech in a post last October. There are pictures from the event (though the text is mostly about the history that was being commemorated).