My school offers a generous program in which faculty may apply for grants for travel and study around special interests. Last fall I made a pitch to visit Berlin and Prague, with a particular emphasis on sites related to the lives of Germans and Czechs behind the Iron Curtain. I’ve taught a few short term courses on film and literature that depicts life in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Castro’s Cuba, the People’s Republic of China, and the premise of my pitch was that it was a shame I had never set foot in any of those places. Now, thanks to the generosity of my benefactors, I've been. In June Becki and I found ourselves strolling peacefully along Alexanderplatz and in Wenceslas Square, places that were essentially off limits when we were young.
I made a similar trip a few summers ago to Great War sites, and when I wrote about it here later I made a point of limiting myself to a few topics. Otherwise it would have been like the torture of a tourist’s post-travel living room presentation with six carousels of slides. I will adhere to the same policy this time. Yes, we saw some astonishing things I’d love to tell you about. We watched gray-haired metalheads congregate around Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s church. We watched a kid feed a Nutria on the banks of the Vitava, against all the rules on the signs. I’d like to kvetch about how Europeans walking their dogs don’t appear to enjoy having dogs and don't want you to enjoy them, either. But if I started going in to all that kind of stuff, I’d ask too much of your attention spans, even the ones of you who especially polite and attentive. So less is more. Here are four things I think are worth telling you about, each of them in keeping with the core purpose of our trip: to see relics of life behind the Iron Curtain.
Berlin
Bornholmer Straße
One of the inspirations for the Berlin trip was Australian writer Anna Funder’s 2003 book Stasiland, an account of her effort to uncover the stories of the experiences of East Germans under the GDR regime. Funder combines a memoir of her daily life in barely-liberated former East Berlin with the stories of erstwhile GDR citizens who consent to tell her their stories Her first subject, the center of her most detailed and most powerful story, is Miriam Weber. As a teenager in Leipzig in 1968, Miriam got in trouble with the state for posting leaflets mildly objecting to the state’s treatment of protestors. By “got in trouble” I mean “arrested and put on trial.” Rather than expose herself further to what she had already of experienced of the GDR’s harsh treatment of dissenters, 16-year-old Miriam resolved to take the desperate step of going over the wall. Miriam’s account (as narrated by Funder) of her inches-away-from-success effort to make it across the border into the West may be the most memorable passage in the book. She recalls navigating the fences and tool sheds and private gardens near her chosen crossing point, the Bornholmer Bridge, trying to elude the search lights and police dogs and barbed wire. As Miriam tells Funder her harrowing story decades after it happened, it almost seems to be far enough in the past to be spoken of lightly. But not far enough:
I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a stepladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.
She says suddenly, “I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.”
That failed escape was the beginning of half a lifetime of dreadful experiences with the GDR state, including the suspicious death of her husband while he was in state custody.
It turned out that the place we stayed in Berlin had us right in Anna Funder's footsteps. We were in a walkable neighborhood of the Mitte district, close to Weinsbergpark. We'd had no particular intention of staying in what used to be East Berlin, but that’s where we were. One three story building in the neighborhood announced in letters that covered its front from top to bottom (in German), “This house previously stood in another country.” We had brought along our copy of Stasiland, and as we wandered the streets and thumbed through the book we realized that we were essentially living exactly where Funder had lived during her time in scruffy, retooling used-to-be East Berlin (the final evidence was a statue of Heinrich Heine at one entrance to the park). Encouraged by this discovery, we took it a step further and took a train to Bornholmer Bridge to try to find where Miriam Weber had tried and failed to cross over to the West. That bridge is historical now – it was the first place where GDR border guards said “what the hell” and opened the border in 1989. There are memorial displays there to commemorate that event, plus graffitied remnants of the wall. And yes, we found we could walk right to the tracks and paths and private gardens where the brave, desperate teenager got her scars. Normannenstraße
One of the must-sees of our trip was the gigantic headquarters of the Stasi, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the legendary East German secret police. The GDR’s founders spent the 1930s as exiles in Moscow during Stalin’s terror and learned the lessons of his brand of totalitarianism a little too well – they were always trying to outdo their Soviet counterparts in the field of paranoid mass surveillance and brutal suppression of dissent. According to Funder, in the GDR there was one Stasi officer or informer for every 63 people, the highest percentage in the world. The 50 building control center of this massive effort, in the Lichtenberg district of Berlin, is preserved today as a museum.
When Becki and I went to Normannenstraße there was a moment I had a flash of realization – she was walking in Dreyman’s footsteps as she approached House 7, home of the records.
As Funder toured the former East in the late 90s, the effort was well underway to preserve Stasi HQ in amber, and the place we visited in June is the fruit of the effort. The term “banality of evil” is overused, and perhaps misused, too, but in this case the sheer mundanity and seventiesness of the offices and décor is impossible to miss, and it makes an impression. Becki said the desks and chairs made her feel as though she should have been asking for a late pass in 7th grade. That’s exactly how it looks – except, as we were well aware, the effort these bland bureaucrats were engaged in was to stifle free thinking and limit freedom of movement and to infiltrate private life. Our tour guide observed that part of the insidiousness of the Stasi’s organizational structure was to disaggregate every odious task of surveillance and control so that no single person might think of himself as uniquely villainous: I’m not the oppressive secret police, I’m just a guy who makes sure the files are alphabetized.
Prague
Švejk
As we meandered through the older neighborhoods of Prague, through Old Town Square and the Jewish Quarter and Wenceslas Square and back and forth across the legendary Charles Bridge, we noticed a couple of locations of what appeared to be a franchised restaurant, maybe a kind of Applebee’s of the Czech Republic, called “Švejk.” The signage featured a cartoon mascot, a cheerfully smiling tubby soldier who reminded Becki of Beetle Bailey. We were intrigued. A Google search revealed that this “Švejk” fellow is a character from a famous novel by the Czech author Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Švejk (1923) about the misadventures of a draftee in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War 1. We tried out a Švejk franchise near our hotel. The food was nothing to write home about, but the existence of the Švejk chain prompted me to acquire a copy of Hasek’s novel when we got back to the States.
It turns out that Švejk is such a hilariously duty-shirking, officer-maddening, subversive doofus of a character that you could transplant his restaurant to the U.S. and rename it “Yossarian’s”. In fact, it was unsurprising to learn that Joseph Heller said he could not have written Catch-22 if it weren’t for Hasek. Whether Švejk is forging dog pedigrees to con buyers or feigning half-wittedness to avoid military service or trying haplessly to manage his officer's mistress, you can practically see Yossarian in the corner taking notes. The Good Soldier Švejk is very funny, but it is comedy underscored with the distinctive bitterness you almost always find in literature about World War I composed by veterans who witnessed all that pointless suffering. Even as Hasek makes us laugh at Švejk’s aimless but somehow disarming storytelling, there’s no mistaking his rage at the architects of the war, in this case the Austro-Hungarian military and aristocracy. Hasek died before he could complete the novel to his satisfaction, but even in the state he left it it became an iconic text of Czech literature. 
The communist regime in Czechoslovakia backed two film versions of The Good Soldier Švejk, I presume because some of the primary targets of Hasek’s satire are the very targets any conscientious Marxist would have chosen, such as the institutional church (Švejk’s squalid term of service for a drunken scoundrel of a military chaplain makes Heller’s portrayal of the chaplain in Catch-22 read like a hagiography by comparison). But it seems to me that where The Good Soldier Švejk is concerned, the Czech communist regime would have done well to remember Swift’s observation that satire is a kind of magic mirror where people can see everybody’s face but their own. Švejk’s story mocks institutional lying and hypocrisy and cruelty. The regime that filmed his story was notorious for all of these. If an anti-authoritarian satire like The Good Soldier Švejk is a treasured piece of your national literature, then you’re probably wired never to tolerate the kind of rule practiced in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989.
Whether it really honors Švejk to feature his image on a menu that looks like it ought to offer deluxe loaded nachos - that’s a question for another discussion, one about the return of capitalism to Eastern Europe.
Stalin Letná
At the Museum of Communism in Prague I was particularly attracted to the displays on the Prague Spring (the ill-fated, largely student-led effort at liberalization in 1968 that ended with a Soviet invasion) and the Velvet Revolution (the huge non-violent demonstrations in 1989 that meant an end to the totalitarian regime). I mostly knew what to anticipate from these displays, but I was unprepared for how moved I would be by a particular photograph, one of two men together, taken in 1989. The older man was Alexander Dubček, the Slovak statesman who had been the primary leader of the Prague Spring in 1968 and fell from power when the crackdown happened. The younger man was Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright whose eloquence and courage made him the international face of the drive to liberate Czechoslovakia from totalitarian rule in 1989. Here they were, together. I had just assumed that Dubček hadn’t survived the Prague Spring, that he had disappeared into a Gulag, or died like one of those self-immolating protesters in the aftermath of the 1968 tanks. But the truth was he had just lived on in obscurity, and it was very moving to see him in his old age arm-in-arm with Havel, having lived long enough to celebrate the success of his once doomed cause.
Some of those big demonstrations in 1989 happened in Letná Park, on the same ridge above the city where you can see the famous Castle. At Letná I saw something else that will stay in my memory, in a heartening way.
Another story told at the Museum of Communism was of a
gargantuan statue of Stalin, the world’s largest, that stood at the edge of Letná from 1955 to 1962, before de-Stalinizing Soviet leaders had it dynamited. For seven years the statue stared down overwhelmingly at anyone crossing the Czech Bridge over the Vitava River. The sculptor, Otakar Svec, killed himself a few days before the unveiling of the statue, apparently guilt-ridden over his own part in glorifying Stalin. Where the statue used to be there is now a large metronome, kind of a pop art installation. The metronome is listed as an attraction in Prague, but way down the list. It is said to be a place frequented by skateboarders. The implication is that there are many better places to visit. Until we saw the story of the Stalin statue at the Museum of Communism it had not even occurred to me that we should visit that place. Now I wanted to go.
At Letná we found that everything that had been set up long ago to make the Stalin statue a destination is still essentially there, notably grand staircases and an enormous concrete pad where the statue used to stand.
Prague is one of those fortunate continental European cities that has never been the target of a full scale bombing campaign, so it has more fascinating architecture than most, both old and new, for tourists to gaze upon. There are all kinds of interesting structures to see – the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn, the rotating head of Franz Kafka, the Dancing House, the Powder Tower – but for this tourist no place in Prague speaks more inspiringly to our times than something that isn’t there - the vast empty space at Letná where a monument to human cruelty and egotism no longer stands.
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