The idea of spending the Christmas and New Year's holiday in Eastern Europe first occurred to me on the train ride back from Berlin to Zurich after the weekend of November 19, one week after the Wall came down. That weekend, of course, was inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall the week before. I was in Heidelberg that weekend playing tourist and some German students had set up loudspeakers in a public square with the news reports from Berlin. I went to Berlin the following week with friends, when the sight of East Germans walking freely to the west was still something novel, and every Trabi crossing the border was cheered. On the train ride back to Zurich, the plan for an extended trip to Eastern Europe began to take shape.
At the time, I was a post-doc at the IBM Zurich Research Lab, and I had a reputation for doing a lot of travelling. The itinerary this time seemed clear: Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden: the hot spots of the East German revolution, Prague, of course, where events had just begin to heat up while we were visiting Berlin (and I hoped they'd stay hot until we got there), Vienna and Budapest, for the contrasts, and Ljubljana because it was a nice place that I wanted to explore further and because Yugoslavia had its own interesting political goings-on. I plotted the itinerary and planned to leave on the 23rd of December. By good fortune, the stay in Prague fell over New Year's Eve, and Christmas Day was to be spent in Berlin. I tacked a night in Nuremburg onto the beginning. I had always wanted to see it, and the Christmas market would still be going on.
The next step was to find a travelling companion. Unfortunately, the usual suspects were unavailable. My apartment-mate, Lloyd, another IBM post-doc who shared my aversion for overly fastidious Swiss landladies who objected to American grad-student standards of household cleanliness, was expecting a visit from his girlfriend, although he offered to join us in Prague. (This ultimately didn't work out because his girlfriend, a Sri Lankan studying in the US, couldn't get the West German transit visa needed to take the train from Switzerland to Czechoslovakia.) Doug, a Canadian friend and colleague, was planning to be back in Canada. Lloyd and Doug were the ones who had traveled with me to Berlin the previous November, when the Wall came down. My friends from the US all had other plans or were unwilling to spend the money. One friend with whom I had previously travelled, Mark, was in the states on business, but when I offered him the opportunity to go on the trip, he jumped at it and modified his travel plans, expecting, rightly, that this would be the opportunity of a lifetime.
If you recall what was going on at that time, the Wall had just been breached, demonstrations were going on in Leipzig and Dresden, and several East German Governments had fallen. There were big demonstrations in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria was shaken, and people were just waiting for Romania to go up. Hungary was calm, although they had started the whole thing by opening the border with Austria.
Travel arrangements were the next thing to be made. I had never traveled in East Germany or Czechoslovakia before, and I didn't relish the thought of dealing with their travel bureaucracies. On the other hand, I didn't want to take a tour. Basically, I wanted my accommodations taken care of. Switzerland has no shortage of travel agencies, and I went to the downtown Zurich (Bahnhofplatz) office of Kuoni, the largest travel agency in Switzerland (and one of the largest companies in Switzerland, period. Travel is a big business for the Swiss - not just foreigners visiting the country, but for the Swiss who go abroad.) There I met Mr. Patrick Saner, one of their European travel specialists. I gave him my itinerary, and asked him to reserve low- to mid-priced hotels in each city on the given days. I had tried to give the German names of the places I wanted to visit (like Prag and Wien instead of Prague and Vienna), since on a previous transaction with a Swiss travel agency, trying to inquire as to the fare to Crete, the woman on the other end couldn't understand where I wanted to go. Finally, I pulled a dictionary down off my shelf, looked up the German, and said I wanted to go to 'Kreta.' 'Oh! Kreta!,' she said, and it was smooth sailing from there. In this case, however, Mr. Saner pointed out one of the entries I had given him and said, 'Where's Laibach?' I pointed out that Laibach was Ljubljana, which was news to him. I suppose that nobody in Germany's called it that in about 100 years.
Mr. Saner looked at the itinerary and said that they could get the East German reservations and the visa, and the Czech and Hungarian reservations, but that it would be simpler for me to get the Czech and Hungarian visas in Bern myself. He said that they had no affiliate in Ljubljana, but that I shouldn't have any problem finding a place there without a reservation. (This was just as well, because I ended up not going.) Finally, he said that finding a hotel room in Prague around Christmas would be difficult, but that he would try his best.
Later that week, I took the morning off and took the hour-and-a-half train ride from Zurich to Bern, the Swiss capital. The Czech embassy was just on the edge of the central area, and I suspected that that was the one that would take the longest to get. All three embassies I wanted to visit (I also wanted to pick up the Yugoslavian visa ahead of time) only issued visas between 10 and noon.
The Czech consular section was around the side of a nice large house. The area was quiet, but when I opened the door, there was a mob scene inside. It seemed that everybody wanted a visa to Czechoslovakia. While I was filling out my forms and standing on line, I spoke to a man who had left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and had never returned since then. In the meantime he lived in Basle and designed nuclear power plants. Now he felt it was time to go back for a visit. I finally fought my way to the front of the line, handed in my form, my passport, and my fee, and ten minutes later had my visa. The entire process had taken about 45 minutes, and it would have taken over a week by mail. I was glad I had done it this way, since I had heard stories of the Czech embassy in the US, not used to being the center of attention and swamped with visa requests, actually losing passports.
Nearby was the Yugoslavian embassy. It wasn't crowded at all, but contained a number of unsavory-looking characters who all seemed to be waiting for the person behind the counter, who never showed up. It was getting to be almost noon, and I wanted to get the Hungarian visa, too, so I left, figuring that I could get the Yugoslavian visa at the border, without any problem, just like the last time I was there.
I got to the Hungarian consulate around ten minutes before noon. I was the only person there. The woman took my passport, my application form, and my 35 Franc fee, and five minutes later I had a second ornate Hungarian visa right beside the first. (I had been there earlier that year. The last time I had gotten one, it had been easy, too. I was in Vienna, and went to the IBUSZ Hungarian travel bureau. They took the passports to the embassy and brought them back later that day with visas. I could even have done it myself there, and it would have been faster and cheaper.)
Travel arrangements, visas, and travelling companion taken care of, the next step was to obtain some introductions to meet people in the various cities. This was something I had never done before, but I thought that at a time like this it was important to meet the people there and find out what was happening. (I wasn't confident that I would be able to meet many people on my own, or that they would be willing to open up to a stranger without an introduction. As it turned out, though, people were more than willing to talk.) As I had numerous German colleagues and a couple of Czech ones, this didn't seem to present a problem.
I recalled that Willibald, one of my co-workers, had family in East Berlin, and I asked him if it would be possible to arrange an introduction. He said he would have to think about it. He was quite troubled by the events in East Germany, and was afraid that the East Germans would rush headlong into an embrace with the West and reunification. He was convinced that the West was in a spiritual crisis, and that there was nothing of value for the East Germans to gain by joining the West. (The material aspects of the change were for him trivial.) He had no love for Communism as it was practised in Eastern Europe, but felt that the East Germans, by starting from scratch, could achieve something new and better, a 'third way,' and that, in any case, by adopting capitalism and materialism, they would be discarding any spiritual and communal benefits that they gained under the old regime. At the time I though that this was easy sentimentalism and said so. Why should the East Germans be thwarted in their desire for a better material life, and why experiment on them, especially when they were just emerging from a nightmare experiment? Could you blame them for wanting freedom of speech, and better jobs and better cars, and fresh fruit to go with it? Later on, as I met the people, my feelings started to change, but for the most part I still believe it.
A few days later, Willibald came back to me and said that he had thought about it and that he thought it would be a good idea for me to meet his family (actually, his wife's family), that he thought that it was important for Americans to experience life in the East first-hand. He asked me not to push the hosts too hard, that they had suffered greatly between the war and the Communist regime, and that the rug was being pulled out from under them again, and that it all required sensitivity. He warned me not to offer solutions to their problems, something that he felt Americans were prone to, and asked me to convey his concerns to Mark, who was still travelling. I agreed with all his conditions, and I agreed to them.
The other introductions were not so difficult to arrange. Another friend, Matthias, had a number of friends in Dresden, and gave us their names and addresses. He said, though, that they had no telephone, and that since there was no time to write a letter, we should just go and knock on their door. He couldn't guarantee that they would be home, though, since he had heard that they might be travelling in the West around that time visiting family.
A Czech friend, Jan, who had left the country around 1972 and hadn't been back since (although he was thinking about it) enthusiastically joined in, contacting friends he hadn't contacted in many years. (He later had to do this service for a number of other friends who followed us to Prague.) He called a friend from University days, who said he'd be happy to show us around, and that we should call him the night before we got into Prague. The friend also said that we had picked a good day to arrive in Prague, since it was the day that Havel would be inaugurated as President. When we asked if we should bring him anything, he said that some chocolate for his son would be nice. Jan added to us that t-shirts with American college logos were popular in Czechoslovakia, and would be an appreciated gift, but I couldn't find any that I was willing to part with, but I had an American hockey jersey that I thought would make a good gift.
Jan also contacted a woman he knew who worked for Czech radio who said she might be able to get us interviewed. He gave her the other friend's number and said that she should leave a message for us that way. We ended up not hearing from her; I have a feeling that she had other, more important people to interview than a couple of visiting Americans. |
