On the night of March 23-24, 1919, Austrian Emperor Charles I took a train to Switzerland. It was to be a permanent exile. The stop at the border station of Feldkirch was to be the last time he would see his native land.
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While Charles had stopped short of a formal abdication, he “signed a carefully worded statement granting the German-Austrian people the right to form a new state” and relinquished the reins of power (as I noted in a series of posts in November on the break-up of Austria-Hungary, beginning here). But he was eventually pressured to leave. Although he returned to Hungary twice to retake power there, he died in exile on the Portuguese island of Madeira in 1922, at the age of 34. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004.
 
His last moments in Austria are poignantly recorded in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, a memoir of growing up in Austria-Hungary and witnessing its downfall, as well as seeing Europe plunged into two world wars. The author was returning from Switzerland and happened to be in that station of Feldkirch, Austria when the emperor was travelling the other direction. Some have doubted the factuality of this account, and it would have been quite a coincidence. Nonetheless, he captures the pathos of the moment.
 
A partial version of Zweig’s narrative of the scene is found on the English-language Wikipedia:

“Upon returning to Austria via the border station at Feldkirch an unforgettable experience stood before me. Even getting out I had noticed a strange unrest in the border guards and policemen. A bell tolled to signal the approach of a train. The policemen stood, all railway officials rushed out of their boxes. Slowly, majestically, the train rolled in, a special kind of train, a Salon train. The locomotive stopped. A motion was palpable through the ranks of those waiting, I still did not know why. Then I saw behind the mirror glass of the coach an erect Emperor Karl, the last Emperor of Austria and his black-clad wife, Empress Zita. I was startled: the last Emperor of Austria, heir to the Habsburg dynasty, which ruled the country for seven hundred years, was leaving his kingdom! As he had refused formally to abdicate, the republic had forced his departure. Now the high serious man stood at the window and saw for the last time the mountains, the houses, the people of his country.”

Zweig writes that upon seeing the banished Karl, memories of the previous emperor, Franz Joseph, came flooding back into his mind: so many of his public appearances, thousands of schoolchildren singing Haydn’s “Gott erhalte,” Austria-Hungary’s state hymn (which only later became the German national anthem), and various stately ceremonies.

The author continues, “It was only in this moment that the nearly thousand-year monarchy had truly come to an end. I knew that it was another Austria, another world, to which I was returning.”
 
I vaguely recall sitting in my train seat, staring out the window at the small Feldkirch station when I travelled from Vienna to Switzerland and Liechtenstein in the summer of 2000. I didn’t realize the significance of the location at the time. One of these days, I tell myself, I will make the journey again, perhaps step out in Feldkirch, and then continue to, say, Zurich. Then I’ll visit the ruins of the original Habsburg castle. 
 
 
Other related travel sites:

Schloss Eckartsau in Lower Austria, where Karl spent his last four months as doubtful emperor.   
 
Schloss Wartegg, on the Swiss edge of Lake Constance, Karl’s first place of exile. 

This time 14 years ago, I got to take part in a ritual called the “drowning of Marzanna.” Since I’d taken a year of Polish language instruction (as a grad student in Ohio State’s Slavic Department), was singing in a Polish folk group, Lajkonik, and was a member of the Polish American Club of Columbus, it seemed only fitting, even though I have no Polish ancestry.

The name Marzanna comes from an old Slavic pagan goddess associated with death and winter. Although she lost that religious significance in Christian times, she became the center of a spring equinox celebration. In the Old Country, villagers would process out of town with a straw effigy and throw her in the nearest stream, sometimes after lighting her on fire.

The crowd that I joined in the tradition drove to the outskirts of Columbus, to Highbanks Metro Park. Rather than setting her ablaze and letting her drift downstream, we just dipped Marzanna in the Olentangy River, so as not to get her too wet, then threw her in a fireplace at a little clubhouse we rented.

The rest of the afternoon was spent drinking Polish beer, eating grilled sausages, and singing Polish folk tunes from a songbook of several hundred pages.

Although I lived in Slovakia for six years, and they have very similar traditions – which like most vary from region to region – I never got to take part in one of their “Morena” rituals. So thanks to the Polish American Club of Columbus for letting me experience this Slavic fest!

​They’re doing it again this year on Saturday, March 23. See the current post on their website: http://www.poloniacolumbus.org/, and that of Ohio State's Polish Club, and if you're in the area, maybe you can join in. Wish I could be there!

Back in January, I marked the 50th anniversary of Czech student Jan Palach’s self-immolation in reaction to the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968. The impact of this protest has been far-reaching, as attested by the list of cultural references on his Wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Palach#Posthumous_recognition), ranging from East European dissident poets to Salman Rushdie.
 
At the time, I failed to mention the film, called simply Jan Palach, directed by Robert Sedláček. It premiered last August 5 at the Uherské Hradiště Summer Film School, and was released in Czech cinemas on August 21, the anniversary of the invasion. It covers the title character’s life, including scenes from childhood, but mostly the time from the invasion until his death. Curiously, he took part in student work trips to Kazakhstan and Leningrad, and another to Paris in October 1968, after the invasion, something I just learned. Witnessing student protests in Paris led him to more radical actions, and upon returning to Czechoslovakia he marched in several demonstrations against Soviet occupation.

Since that January post, I've also learned that Charles University, which Palach had begun attending the previous autumn, unveiled a plaque/tile in his honor on the anniversary. It lies in the courtyard of the Carolinum, where thousands filed by his coffin in 1969. (Please see photos in the slideshow above.)

I also recently discovered vintage pics of events concerning Palach from the French magazine Paris Match. I’m reposting one of those pics, as well as providing links to video on the recent commemorations.
 
It has also come to my attention recently that Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland directed Burning Bush for HBO, but it has been criticized for lacking realism, as in this Czech commentary for British Letters (in Czech only, sorry), calling the film “incredibly weak.” The opinion is seconded by Miroslav Prokeš, who worked closely with Palach in 1968-69.


FOR FURTHER READING/VIEWING

Here is a review and trailer for the 2018 film.
 
You can find footage of the memorial march in Prague on this page. (Trust me - if I could have embedded it, I would have.)
 
And it’s not just Prague Palach has been remembered widely, like this exhibit in Spain. 

Another good Czech source of info and images is http://www.janpalach.cz/, compiled by students at Prague's  Charles University. Also, see the university's article on its commemoration.
 
 And here is the Paris Match article.

This comes to us courtesy of Land of the Leopard National Park. It's in Primorsky Krai in Russia's Far East, not far from Vladivostok.

While these are tigers, the park is so named because it was created in 2012 as a merger of three refuges in order to save the Amur leopard, whose population had dwindled to 30. Its numbers are now back up to over 100.

Much of the territory is common habitat for the tigers and leopards.

​He was born on “27. Jänner 1756,” as the plaque outside his birthplace on Salzburg’s Getreidegasse says, using an Austrian form of January.
 
I had the fortune to be there between just after Christmas in 1990. As I’d just spent my first two months in Czechoslovakia, my parents had come to meet me in Munich. From there I showed them around Central Europe, including my lodgings in Martin, Slovakia, finishing off with Bratislava and New Year’s Eve in Vienna.
 
The one-night stay in Salzburg included a concert of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” probably the composer’s most popular piece. Though I knew his work fairly well, this was the beginning of a relation with his music that was to go deeper during my years in Europe.
 
I sang his sumptuous “Ave Verum Corpus” with several choruses in the region – and have sung it with groups in the U.S. as well. The pinnacle of my Mozartiana was learning the bass part to his Requiem, which I was blessed to perform with the St. Cecilia Choir of St. Elizabeth’s Cathedral in East Slovakia’s Košice.
 
Please see the video of a rehearsal with that chorus below, as well as memorabilia including the 250th anniversary of his birth in Columbus, Ohio, part of the slideshow above.

This is a sad but worthwhile follow-up to my August posts on the 1968 Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the self-immolation of Jan Palach, whose memorial on Prague’s Wenceslas Square attracts political/historical pilgrims to this day.

I’ll leave the description of the scene to William Shawcross’s well-informed biography of Alexander Dubček (titled simply Dubček) whose reforms were quashed by the Soviet intervention:

 At 3:30 on the drizzling afternoon of 16 January 1969 a battered Škoda drove up Wenceslas Square, past the [equestrian] statue [of St. Wenceslas, saint of Bohemia] and the trams and stopped for a moment below the [National M]useum. A boy of about twenty climbed out of the car and said something to the driver. A young man in the back seat passed him a small can. The boy took it from him and gazed, rather vacantly, at the car as it drove away….

The area where the boy stood had been destroyed by tanks; no effort had been made to repair it because it was to be the site of the main station in an underground railway that was slowly being built in Prague. Blocks of stone lay untidily in the mud, and flimsy metal barriers surrounded the debris in order to stop people tripping over.

The boy stepped past the barriers and over to a fallen block of stone. He set down the can and took off his coat which he laid carefully on the stone. He picked up the can and poured most of its contents over his head and shoulders. The rest he splashed against his chest and trousers. He then flicked a lighter and set his clothes on fire.

Palach left a letter claiming that "further torches will burst into flames" if certain demands for political freedom were not met. There were supposedly thirteen other young people ready to burn themselves for their cause; however, none of them every materialized. It appears, however, that there were a considerable number of other independent self-immolations in protest of the Soviet occupation and the politics of "normalization," and similar acts were carried out in other Soviet Bloc countries in the next few years, apparently in imitation of Palach.

 The young protestor died three days later of his wounds. Afterwards, his body lay in state at the Carolinum of Charles University while some 350,000 mourners filed by to view the coffin; all the policing was performed by students while official security forces remained in the back ground. The funeral – apparently allowed by the state as another pressure release valve – was attended by about 800,000.

It is difficult to estimate how much difference Palach’s act of desperation made. One former dissident, Tomáš Halík, has said, “when, during interrogations in the eighties, they made promises here and threatened me there, I always remembered Palach and gained the strength to say no.”

The twentieth anniversary of Palach’s act in January 1989 helped set in motion the Velvet Revolution of that November. Dissident playwright Václav Havel turned up at a protest held on Wenceslas Square, apparently only to watch, and was uninvolved in organizing the event, but was nonetheless arrested. This was his last detention under the regime, and calls for his release, helped build the movement that eventually forced the communist government to resign in December 1989.
 
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IF YOU GO TO PRAGUE
Palach was initially buried in Prague’s Olšany Cemetery, but in 1973 his remains were skirted away by authorities and cremated, with the ashes given to his mother for burial in a discrete location that would not attract a cult following. They were finally returned to his original grave in 1990. There is a memorial to Palach and another student who burned himself in February 1969 on Wenceslas Square. Jan Palach Square was established in December 1989, right after the Velvet Revolution. It lies at the foot of the Manes Bridge on the Old Town side of the Vltava River.
 

“Prosit Neujahr” is an expression combining “Cheers” and “New Year” used in various regions of the German-speaking world. The instrumentalists in Vienna’s Musikverein shout this toast at their famous New Year’s concerts.
 
2019’s event, broadcast by PBS, celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the network’s coverage from the Austrian capital. Host Hugh Bonneville commended the State Opera for currently holding its 150th season. The program also explained the relationship between the Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic. You’ll have to watch it here, as I can’t embed it.
  
The concert opened with the overture to Johann Strauss, Jr.’s operetta The Gypsy Baron, which Bonneville aptly called a piece full of “Hungarian spice, dripping with Viennese schmaltz.” The tempo moves from fiery to languid to flowing. Much the same could be said of the czardas from Strauss’s opera Knight Pasman, which came half-way through the program. Some passages evoke an air of mystery found only in Hungarian (or Magyar-inspired) music, rather like the lingering phrases of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody number 2. In any event, Knight Pasman is representative of the multi-ethnic influences in the old Austro-Hungary. It’s based on a narrative poem by Janos Arany, a leader of his nation’s Romantic movement, and the libretto was written by Jewish-Hungarian Ludwig/Lajos Doczi.
 
That’s the sort of thing I widely remark on in this blog – for examples, see posts on The Czardas Princess and the breakup of Austria-Hungary.
 
The hour-and-a-half show also introduced a Turkish march by showing the “Turkish Room” in the Hofburg imperial palace complex. It was decorated in this style by Crown Prince Rudolf following a visit to Upper Egypt shortly after the Suez Canal was opened in 1869. Although I’ve been inside the Hofburg three times (and passed by scores of times), I’ve not actually managed to see that room, so I’ll be looking for tours that include it in future visits to Vienna. But back in 2014, I did see a good selection of artifacts Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand brought home after his round-the-world tour.
 
One other travel tip from this PBS production is Castle Grafenegg in Lower Austria, which holds the Grafenegg Music Festival every summer and hosts a composer in residence each year.

This post concludes a year full of anniversaries, for Europe generally, and for Central Europe more specifically. I have written this year about the Leonard Berstein, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Czecho-Slovak centennials, the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the bicentennial of 'Silent Night.' Since I consider it such a momentous event, I did a 3-part piece on the End of World War I and of Austria-Hungary, which begins here. So I thing it appropriate to close 2018 with a reflection on anniversaries. 

My obsession with Czech and Slovak anniversaries began the first time I saw Václav Havel. It was in Martin, Slovakia, where I’d been assigned by Education for Democracy to teach English in a secondary school in the autumn of 1990. I’d graduated college in May and had been inspired by Havel’s example of protest unto imprisonment to live in the country of this playwright-dissident-president. Martin was a far cry from the glamor of Prague, a little disappointing initially, but at least it’s the historical capital of Slovak culture. Then, within two weeks of my arrival, Havel came to town.
Seventy-two years earlier, on 30 October 1918, the Slovak National Council had agreed to the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic. This was their day of independence from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, though the Czechs had declared it two days earlier.
The declaration had been passed in a bank building on Martin’s town square. For this occasion, to emphasize the kinship between the country’s two leading nationalities, a federal flag and a Slovak flag were draped from the wrought-iron railing of the balcony from which the original proclamation had been read. Ropes cordoned off the viewers who trickled in during the cool, overcast mid-afternoon, awaiting the playwright-president. I stood a mere fifty feet from the speakers’ platform.
            Soon Havel ambled to the stage flanked by a meager security detail. This hero I’d come to admire was the shortest of the five men on stage, wearing an unimposing dark-olive parka. The crowd of three hundred, mainly pensioners old enough to remember the First Republic, chanted “Nech žije Havel! Long live Havel!”
            A bit embarrassed, he made short nods, saying “Děkuji.” Thank you. That much I understood. I had to rely on a colleague to interpret the rest.
“When I was in prison I read a novel by Slovak author Martin Kukučín. I recently received a letter from Kukučín’s niece, who now lives in Canada. She said, ‘the return to democracy was exceptionally joyful and hopeful.’”
            Another round of “Nech žije Havel!” Exactly the euphoria I’d come here for. But it quickly subsided.
            “Now this lady is concerned that certain people don’t want Czechs and Slovaks to live together.” He recalled a Kukučín story about two poor brothers who inherit a farm. “If they try to understand and tolerate each other, they will have a prosperous future. But if they are not mature and wise, then argument will break out.”
            Back then I would’ve preferred a glowing oration on the accomplishments of the past, yet Havel insisted on warning of dangerous current trends. Still, I could understand the philosopher-president’s concern for his country’s future, his preference for sermonizing over self-flattery.
Two and a half weeks later, I stood among thousands, pouring through openings in crowd-control barriers onto Prague’s Wenceslas Square. It was November 17, the first anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. Helicopters chuff-chuffed overhead as sharpshooters prowled the terra cotta rooftops. Security for the guest of honor: George H. W. Bush. As he and Havel arrived, spectators in front waved little Czech and U.S. flags, thrown out from trucks by the armload just minutes before. Nice P.R.
            Havel, now in a trim dark business suit, began his speech more forcefully than he had in Martin. “A landslide was set in motion by students who decided last year to recall the memory of Jan Opletal.”
Another anniversary. Opletal’s murder for protesting Nazi occupation in 1939. Also International Students’ Day. A solemn occasion, but exultant cries broke out at “landslide,” meaning the communist government’s resignation. I added my voice, almost feeling one with the locals.
            Then suddenly, like a schoolteacher dressing his pupils down when the headmaster drops in on class, Havel unreeled a list of his countrymen’s bad behavior during the past year: “spitefulness, envy, mutual defamation, hatred, naked ambition.”
            The locals shifted their feet, some looking down, as if to say, Yeah, some kids are like that, but not me.
            I was perturbed at Havel for not piling on the triumphalism. I’d missed the big celebration in Prague the year before and now wanted to make up for it. But no one could recreate that initial fervor when the Communist Party ministers announced their resignations.
            Havel resumed his earlier positive tone, next lauding American influence on the free world, concluding, “I believe that reason, decency and tolerance will prevail over envy, selfishness and intolerance.”
            At this, the crowd roared enthusiastically, “Ať žije Havel!” I felt relieved the whole thing hadn’t been a lecture on civility.
Bush came on and opened jubilantly. “There are no flowers in bloom, and yet it is Prague Spring. The calendar says November 17th, and yet it is Prague Spring.”
            The ovation was deafening. This was what I’d come for, a pep talk for democracy.
Still, danger loomed. “It is no coincidence that appeasement’s lonely victim half a century ago should be among the first” to condemn Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
Some in the crowd clapped approval, but the overall reaction was lukewarm. I wasn’t so sure about the Munich Pact reference, either – or his using the occasion to sell a war.
Bush, quickly buoyant again, assuring onlookers of America’s commitment to helping them through the upcoming transitions.
The event closed with Spirituál Kvintet playing guitars, standup bass, and tambourine, as the crowd joined in the bilingual “We Shall Overcome/Jednou budem dál.” But not “We have overcome.” Fukuyama’s “end of history” was still nowhere in sight.
            The following June, the city of Martin commemorated 1861’s Memorandum of the Slovak Nation. A hundred and thirty years before, leading figures had gathered on the humble square in front of the town’s Lutheran church to demand linguistic and cultural autonomy from the Hungarian policy of Magyarization.
Slovaks had admirably survived the attempt at assimilation. But with only a ten-percent Hungarian minority now living on their soil, slogans like “Na Slovensku, po slovensky! In Slovakia, in Slovak!” sounded just plain vengeful.
Matica slovenská, an institution founded in Martin in 1863 to safeguard Slovak interests, was the main sponsor of events. But they’d developed close ties to the Slovak National Party since 1989, which was unnerving to me.
            The streets were filled with banners, booths, food stands, and colorful folk costumes. Quaint, in the town of fifty thousand nestled between the Greater and Lesser Fatras. Quaint, that is, until Slovak National Party rowdies marched into the square, shaking their fists. “Dosť bolo Prahy! Enough of Prague!” Later that weekend, a visiting friend and I happened upon a stick-wielding mob. On their way to lynch some Roma. Was this ugliness inspired by the nationalist political fervor? Or just coincidence?
At any rate, Havel’s fears had been well-founded. And I was beginning to see that anniversaries could be co-opted, their significance distorted – or downright perverted.
 
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As I spent five more years in Slovakia, I became increasingly wound up in the cycles of the culture, from seasonal festivals to name days. As a member of local choral groups, I often sang at anniversary commemorations. Largely uncontroversial ones: four hundred years since the birth of Jan Amos Comenius, the polyglot Protestant clergyman and educator. Forty years since the Slovak National Uprising. One hundred seventy-five years from the birth of Lutheran poet and pastor Andrej Sládkovič.
Round anniversaries, quarter centuries. What makes them so special, other than the mystique of numerology? Or our Western way of marking time. After all, Mesoamericans had a sophisticated calendar, a base-twenty numeral system, and counted fifty-two years as a “century.” Even with our highly accurate Gregorian calendar, we still calculate Passover, Easter, and Ramadan by the lunar method.
            I’ve become steeped enough in Czech history by now to develop the obsession with the final digit “8.” 1618 – the Second Defenestration of Prague. 1848 – Europe’s Revolutionary Year, which saw the first Slav Congress in Prague. 1918 – the birth of the Republic. 1938 – the Munich Pact. 1948 – the Communist Party putsch. And of course, 1968, the year of the Prague Spring – and the Warsaw Pact invasion.
I find a certain charm in the double-rounded “8.” If you turn it on its side it becomes the infinity symbol. It also suggests that, while history moves in linear fashion, it also repeats itself. It may be straight as an arrow, but our memory of it keeps coiling back to bygone events. Melding past with present is key to making sense of how we arrived here.
During the 2000s, back in the States and busy with grad school, Czechoslovak anniversaries turned for me into quiet home rituals, like listening to Karel Kryl’s “Bratříčku,” his solemn, one-man, guitar-and-vocal elegy on August 1968. But I, like so many others, have used these occasions too much for the sake of indulging in euphoria about the Velvet Revolution. Or the gloomy mood of Kryl’s songs about tanks and executioners. They’re important events to remember, but have I actually learned from them – or just repeated the same themes?
            If one single event led to all the other catastrophes of the twentieth century, it was Francis Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914, which led to World War I – and the formation of the First Czechoslovak Republic. So, in 2014, I made a tour of the old Austria-Hungary, to recall the momentous event. It was the largest single impetus for starting this website.
            My first stop was Benešov, famed for the Archduke’s castle, Konopiště. That year, a special exhibit for the centenary, “Together in Life and Death,” honored the marriage of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek. Among the artifacts was a Czech grammar book used by Ferdinand and his boyhood tutor. Frequent reference was made to his wife’s deep Bohemian roots. The denizens of Benešov were quite carried away with the Archduke’s apparent affinity for Czechs. Two weeks before I visited the town, they’d honored his memory with over two hundred reenactors, including a Franz Ferdinand imitator, in period costume. Ironically, the musical group that played afterwards was called the “Švejk Band,” a reference to Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical novel that was anything but flattering toward the Habsburg Monarchy. An academic discussion might have pondered the Archduke’s plans for “trialism,” adding Slavs as a third entity to the dualism of Austria-Hungary. Would it really have benefitted Czechs – or was it a scheme to strengthen Vienna?
In Sarajevo the conflicting interpretations were more obvious. Ethnic Serbs unveiled a statue to assassin Gavrilo Princip in their neighborhood. Downtown, hundreds from all over the world flocked around a replica of the car the imperial couple were riding in when they were shot. Monarchists handed out fliers denouncing nationalism and regretting the breakup of Austria-Hungary, while peaceniks laid wreaths at the plaque to the slain couple. The Vienna Philharmonic performed at the town hall, crowning their concert with Beethoven’s paean to humanity “Ode to Joy.” A noble call for peace, surely. Still, a handful of Serbs found reason to protest, wearing Gavrilo Princip masks and complaining that two million Euros had been “wasted” on the event.
            After circling back to Prague at the end of my journey, I noticed an exhibition in the National Museum contained an awful lot of display items borrowed from Russian collections. It seemed like a Moscow attempt to influence Czech perceptions of the events, to remind them of their affinities as brother Slavs – at a time when the Ukrainian Crisis was boiling.
            The fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion was a mix of contention and celebration, in particular the commemoration at the Czech Radio station. In one particularly pitched, if asymmetric, battle in 1968, Czechs set Soviet tanks ablaze with Molotov cocktails on the street outside, in an attempt to maintain control over the airwaves – essential for coordinating resistance. I was expecting a solemn ceremony with the Czech president, but Miloš Zeman declined to speak there, apparently to avoid upsetting comrade Putin, for whom he has a disturbing fondness. The crowd jeered Czech prime minister Ivan Babiš, (https://www.rferl.org/a/czech-leaders-silent-or-spurned-as-country-marks-50th-anniversary-of-crushing-of-prague-spring-/29445518.html) who at least showed up for the occasion but has also downplayed the tragedy of the occupation. One Czech group protested outside the Russian embassy, associating the 1968 invasion with the territorial ambitions of the Ukraine annexation. I’d like to know the reaction of the tens of thousands of ethnic Russians now living in Prague. Many of them still perceive the intervention as having been “fraternal assistance.”
            The centenary of Czechoslovakia’s birth was much less contentious, although I think could have been more of an occasion for soul-searching. For considering how ethnic Germans, Hungarians—and even Slovaks—were treated during the First Republic. And what was lost with the dissolution of Austria-Hungary.
            Václav Havel, as a former dissident, would have preferred the critical thinking, but as a man of calm deliberation would have disdained the acrimony on display at the event in front of the radio station. But that’s how things go sometimes.
            I’ve had about enough of anniversaries for a while. It’s time to consider the present – and future. Especially in the maelstrom of populism and racism, ecological degradation, authoritarianism, and a constant coarsening of political discussion. Let’s get to work on fixing things in 2019!

Two thousand years ago, Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem. And two hundred years ago to the day, to celebrate that birth, the song “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” (“Silent Night, Holy Night”) was first performed in a small church near Salzburg, Austria. So important is this hymn in the Western Christian world that UNESCO declared it an “intangible cultural heritage” in 2011.

So I'm proud to present my video below, singing all three of the original German verses.

Back in 1993, when “Silent Night” turned 175, I had the privilege of leading a group of my Slovak secondary-school students in a rendition. Since they had a language-focused curriculum, they were quite capable of pulling off the quadrilingual version: the original German text, followed by verses in English and French, and finally Slovak, the home language.

As far as travel goes, I’ve been in the Salzburg region several times, but I’ve still never made it to the Silent Night Chapel. It's not the original building where it was performed – that St. Nicholas Church was demolished due to severe flood damage in the late 1800s. The new chapel was completed in 1924, spurred in part by the desire to honor the 100th anniversary of the song in 1918 – but that came at a very difficult time at the end of World War I.

This fact fits in with my numerous writings on anniversaries this year, many having to do with the tumult of a century ago, but also with subjects like the 50th anniversary of the Prague Spring and subsequent Soviet invasion.

I’ll post an essay on that subject later in the week. Till then, keep safe, and enjoy your holidays!

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
 
That’s my favorite quote from Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. Although I could choose many others, I think this one reflects his understanding of both human fallibility and the misguided attempts of totalitarian systems to “cure” society.
 
The Russian writer and Nobel laureate was born on this day in 1918 in Kislovodsk, a spa town of the North Caucasus. Although a decorated officer in World War II, he was arrested near the end of the conflict on spurious charges of anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation, and spent eight years in prisons and labor camps, followed by internal exile, before being exonerated under Khrushchev. His fictional work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about the struggles of prisoners in penal colonies to merely survive, was published in 1962. It received official approval, as the new regime sought to expose the horrific abuses of Stalinism.
 
But after Brezhnev removed Khrushchev in 1964, conditions again became repressive, and Solzhenitsyn not only was unable to publish, he also had to hide manuscripts from the KGB. He was kicked out of the Writers’ Union in 1969, meaning he could no longer publish (except by samizdat or “self-publication,” which was illegal). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 but could not receive it in Stockholm. In 1973, his three-volume Gulag Archipelago was published in France. The work documented the atrocities of the Soviet prison system under Stalin, in large part through the personal experiences of 227 victims. It seared the term ‘gulag’ into the conscience of humanity.
 
As a result, authorities expelled him from the Soviet Union the following year. (Poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, whose death I covered in April 2017, suffered reprisals from the authorities for his moral support of Solzhenitsyn at the time of his expulsion, something I failed to mention in that article.) He picked up his Nobel in Stockholm later, when the 1974 prizes were awarded. He eventually settled in the U.S. in a small town in Vermont. He became increasingly isolated (a local gas station at one point posted a sign: “No directions to the Solzhenitsyns”), as he refused to temper his criticism of the West as well as that of the Soviet Communist Party. He caused quite a stir with his 1978 Harvard commencement address condemning American materialism.
 
He continued to work on various books from his Vermont residence. His Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990 under Gorbachev, and he finally returned to Russia in 1994, after the disintegration of the USSR, when he famously took a train journey from Vladivostok across the country.
 
When I made my first trip to Russia for language study in the summer of 1995, I was curious about the author, having read parts of Gulag Archipelago in college. As I was living year-round in Slovakia at the time, I told one of my students (I taught English a couple of hours per week) I'd chosen to go to Czechoslovakia in 1990 in large part because of the presidency of playwright/political prisoner Vaclav Havel. My student couldn’t resist asking, “So if Solzhenitsyn becomes president, you will move to Russia?”
 
Back then Solzhenitsyn had a twice-monthly TV program, which I watched with my host mother. She would interpret his political commentary into simplified Russian when necessary, as well as fill in the background. I could understand things like his parody of tendentiously worded referendum questions: “Do you want this wonderful, brilliant [measure] – ili nyet, or not.” My host mother explained the cronyism in the sale of previously state-owned factories, using the then widespread term priskhvatizatsia, a blend of ‘privatization’ and the verb meaning ‘snatch up.’
 
Solzhenitsyn became a backer of Putin in the early 2000s, a position from which he never swayed before his death in 2008. While he is associated with the Russian right’s emphasis on Orthodoxy and other traditions, he lambasted the far right’s obsession with conspiracy theories involving Free Masonry and world Jewry. Some commentators have found latent anti-Semitism in his works, yet Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Elie Wiesel claimed the man was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite.
 
Whatever his faults and controversies, he should be celebrated for his contributions to literature and history.
 

For a somewhat more detailed treatment of Solzhenitsyn's life, I suggest this commentary from Dr. Angela Brintlinger of The Ohio State University, whom I had the pleasure to know in my years of graduate study there.