East. West. Good. Bad. Win. Lose.

Draw

The final part of the Iron Route

And so, at last, I am in Berlin. After more than a thousand miles by train, through some of the darkest moments in European history, some well known, others not, I find myself with a plastic fork in one hand and a fluffy orange sausage in the other.

The city of Berlin has a fascinating present, a promising future, and a documented, toxic past. Memorials to the holocaust rise out of the streets. So, too, do strips of tarnished metal that snake through the city where the Berlin Wall used to stand. All are symbols of respect, of regret and of remembrance.

But as it turns out, the key to understanding east-west relationships lies somewhere else. In the chilli powder cuteness of the Currywurst museum. Across illuminated sausage on a miniature map of the city, I met people.

People like me.

My age.

My sex.

My skin colour.

Not that I believe that any of that counts for very much.

No, what we really had in common was this: we all heard the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall when we were at school. We were the last generation of the Cold War – with the least understanding.

Yvonne in West Germany, Nicole in East Germany, and myself in the UK.

We were the last generation of the Cold War – with the least understanding.

After currywurst, we moved on to chocolate in the Fassbender & Rausch cafe, the sort that has seen it all since its inception in 1863. The sort whose chestnut dark tables and cream laden menus encourage conversation.

“Our school was very different to yours,” says Nicole as we unwrap the scarves and hats that bind us and give the chocolate menu some serious attention.

“We had to sit bolt upright or else we’d be hit. In our schoolbooks, what we now know as America was all in black. And the UK. And most of the rest of the world.”

Chris Benedict, whom I meet the following day agrees.

“And history,” she says. “We found out afterwards that things…That things were not quite as we had been told.”

Chris gives talks about architecture and history and I find her through Context Travel, a tour guide company I’ve fallen in love with. We meet on the controversially named Karl-Marx-Allee Boulevard outside Cafe Sibylle. Somewhat poignantly, it’s closed.

Chris is fresh-faced and oblivious to the cold; Cafe Sybille contains Stalin’s moustache, albeit from a statue rather than the real thing, and apparently a part rather than the whole.

Karl Marx is broad, straight and more than a little bleak, but to be fair that’s probably thanks to the clouds growling overhead than to any aspect of the architecture we’re looking at.

Chris herself grew up in East Berlin. She goes a great job of pointing out the examples of Socialist Classicism and the butch ceramics that still line the buildings. She talks about the city’s 1.5 million homeless at the end of the Second World War and the competing, driving need for housing in each of the occupied zones. How Karl-Marx-Allee was the setting for the 1953 uprising, when 125 labourers lost their lives in the routine Soviet response to protests. How this used to be called Stalin-Allee. How it follows a straight line back towards the West.

But I want to ask about the people. About her views. About the parallel life in this world that was sealed off from mine.

Cafe Sybille contains Stalin’s moustache

I’m wondering about how best to approach the subject when I arrive there by accident, with a clumsy question about reunification.

“Everyone talks about reunification,” she says, eyes narrowing, “as if that’s what actually happened.

“As if East was united with West. That’s not what happened.

“If that had happened we would have seen compromise. If that had happened, we would have been shown some respect, there would have been some appreciation for our values, for the things that mattered to us.

“Instead, the West talked about winning.”

This was relatively new to me. My background told me that Russia ran out of money, not to mention enthusiasm, leaving the western front to collapse on its own. My US family took me by surprise by claiming it as a victory for Uncle Sam.

One wall, two sides, multiple outlooks.

Chris, to be fair, backed up her viewpoint.

After “reunification,” everything switched to the West’s version of capitalism. Grown adults, trained to be good citizens and to work for the state, suddenly found themselves without a state. Without a job. Without money. Without healthcare. And without a clue about where to go from here.

“Everyone talks about reunification,” she says, eyes narrowing, “as if that’s what actually happened.”

It takes time to learn business skills. It also takes time to learn about the geography and history behind all those blacked out books.

Yet when the job applications began, it was training and exams in the West’s view of the world that mattered. East German professors fell by the wayside as those from the West took all the top spots.

Chris hugs her papers against her chest and we descend into the metro.

“I look around today and I think about all we’ve lost,” she says. “Today, the message is always to make money, to buy clothes and to be selfish. There’s no sense of community any more, of helping each other out. No-one does anything now unless they think it will earn them money.”

I clear my throat, my voice wavers a little. “But wasn’t that sense of community achieved through, well, the Stasi spying on people and reporting them if they acted out of line?”

“Well, yes the Stasi did keep files. But that was to protect what we had, we had to guard the little progress we had made – and we were under constant attack from outside.”

The train doors open.

My brain zig-zags. “But didn’t you, well, mind that people were spying on you?”

“Well, I didn’t know at the time, I was too young. But yes, the adults knew and people accepted it. Privacy wasn’t so important. It was better to give everyone an education, a job, healthcare. To protect what we had. It was only going to be temporary. We were fighting a war.”

I open my mouth and then close it again, my ignorance bubbling into the air.

I think about what she’s said. On the one hand, it sounds ridiculous. On the other, the mirror image of life today. We acquiesce to our records being kept, to being patted down by strangers at airports and many other things besides because our governments tell us we are at war. That our freedom and our way of life is under threat.

Fat drops of rain fall from the sky as we emerge in former West Berlin. We’re walking through an ambitious building project designed to compete with the Soviet-led architecture as part of the ideological and political struggle between here and StalinAllee. In the East, the buildings were uniform; here on the West, architects emphasised individuality.

The rain is ugly now. Thick, bitter, fast and vicious. We take refuge in a modern church, stained glass colours hovering over our heads, blunt colours filling the edges of gloom. My shoes squeak as I walk but beyond that, all I can hear is rain.

More than 20 years have passed since I first saw those pictures, the ones with graffiti on concrete, broken slabs of that political wall and animated, almost frenzied crowds shouting into the night. Twenty years since the crowd overwhelmed the guards after a mishap on the radio. Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Until this trip, I’d always wondered why then. Why, after decades and decades of checkpoints and armed guards did the crowd suddenly decide to rush forwards and rush through.

Time at the Austro-Hungary border helped with that. So, too, did my afternoon with Julian Smith-Newman, another academic from Context.

Unlike most walls, the Berlin one was built to keep people in rather than keep people out – according to the West. The jingle played on East German radio (available at the brilliant but cumbersomely named Berlin Wall and Memorial Documentation Centre) describes how East Germany planned to clean up their lovely Berlin by building up a wall to keep out all the nasty fascists who wanted to contaminate the good way of living.

It’s a line of thinking that I want to talk to Chris about.

“If communism brought everyone a better life, then why persecute those who wanted to leave?”

“Well, not many wanted to leave…”

“But those who did?”

“What we were told, but I was a child at the time, was that those people either didn’t really understand and needed to be retrained – like a child who runs into the road. Or…”

I can’t tell if she’s embarrassed, cautious or slightly defiant…

“Or were spies or traitors and a threat to the progress that had been made.”

Thoughts, opinions and memories shift through my mind.

“But when the wall fell,” I say. “Thousands rushed to escape.”

Her eyes light up. “But they came back!”

She’s animated now. “They went to see, to have a look. To find friends and family. They were curious, it was natural.

“But most people,” she adds. “They came back.”

I think back to the event at Sopron, when refugees flooded from Hungary to Austria at the first breach of the Iron Curtain. Only East Germans fled; Hungarians stayed put.

A final question.

“Um, well, if communism works and capitalism is wrong,” I say, floating over delicate ground again. “Then why didn’t communism, well, work?”

“I don’t know,” she replies, before smiling, definitely with embarrassment this time.”Well, there is a theory…No…It doesn’t…There’s too much evidence now, but…”

“But?”

“But, well. All our lives we were told that the West was plotting to bring the system down.

“And they were.

“And they did.”

On those grounds alone, she’s in perfect agreement with my family in the US.

“When the wall fell, thousands rushed to escape.”

“But they came back.”

I stop and think. She grants me one more answer. “If a system is deliberately destroyed from the outside, can that really meant that it’s the system itself that doesn’t work?”

Back at the chocolate house, I hear a different point of view.

Nicole is less forgiving of the Stasi – and the whole setup in general.

“I was once asked at school to name the leader of Germany,” she told me. “We had western television at home – illegally – and so I’d seen and heard a lot of what was going on.

“I gave my answer and it wasn’t Honecker.” (The leader of the GDR at that time.)

“My teacher froze. She demanded to know how I knew that name. Soon after, my parents were called to explain. Not to the school, to the authorities.”

She folds her arms. “Obviously, they weren’t bringing me up like a good little communist.”

I stir my hot chocolate into an ever-increasing ellipse.

“I am sure,” says Nicole, “They are sure that I would have been taken away if this had happened one year earlier. But in 1989, there was a lot going on…Money, other issues. We received a caution.”

Nicole sits back in her chair. “You know, every now and then, my father forgets what it was really like. He looks back and says ‘well, at least everyone had a job, at least everyone got along.’”

She shakes her head. “We shouldn’t forget.”

Remembrance

The currywurst museum shows a map of the city at the end of the Second World War. As it turns out, the birth of Berlin’s signature dish coincided with the birth of the Cold War.

According to legend, Herta Heuwer took the pork sausage from Germany, the ketchup from the occupying Yanks and the chilli powder from the occupying Brits (via the Indian subcontinent, I suppose) to create what is now the city’s most popular dish. Variations then developed – and still linger – between the old lines of east and west.

“The most obscure thing,” said Chris, “is that the Wall still exists in the mind. People define themselves as East / West Berliners even 20 years later.”

And does she still view the Americans as the enemy?

She throws her head back laughing. “Well, I married one.

“We each say to each other: ‘it’s so funny, because we each grew up being told to be scared of each other and to hate each other.’

“And then we met, and both had to say, ‘Oh! So that’s what you’re really like!’”

We say goodbye and I walk off into a waterlogged Berlin sky.

Died trying to cross the Berlin Wall

And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes the Iron Route. I hope you’ve enjoyed following along – and found it interesting in some – or even many – ways. Over the next few weeks I’ll be tidying up the resources page and over the next year or so will add an awful lot more about what each of the places I visited are like today.

It’s a project that’s taught me a lot – both in terms of history and writing and blogging skills (many of which turned out to be much harder than I thought) – but most of all it has taught me an immense amount of gratitude. Enormous gratitude for the multitude of people who helped me along the way (when it comes to Berlin, please check out Yvonne’s stunning video blog Just Travelous, Context Travel, the Berlin Moevenpick, Visit Berlin and InterRail) but above all else, it’s taught me gratitude for freedom.

Freedom for all sorts of things – ideas, travel, race, religion and information – but right now as I prepare to hit publish, I’m grateful for my freedom of speech.

Happy reading, happy travels and I hope to see you again soon.

 “We each grew up being told to be scared of each other and to hate each other. And then we met, and both had to say, ‘Oh! So that’s what you’re really like!’”

The Berlin Wall – The Unheard Story first appeared on @insidetravellab on Twitter.

Blame it on the movies. Every time I approach a stadium, that’s the rhythm my memory plays. The exalted jingle of American baseball.

Tonight is no exception, even though the game is football, the teams are European and the streets are thronging with vodka, scarves and scarlet face paint instead of foam fingers and men in tight white trousers.

Traaa um pum pum pum. Traaa um pump um pum.

I’m in Warsaw, Poland, and I’m heading into the National Stadium for its inaugural game. We’re only 100 days from Euro 2012 and it’s hard not to get carried along with the cracking cold cheer of the crowd.

A young woman sweeps a stroke of white across my cheeks and the moisture traps the coolness of the air. The next stroke brings the red, the colours of Poland (and Portugal, who they’re playing, as it happens, but I don’t mention that. I don’t want to spoil the mood.)

Warsaw National Stadium

The stadium walls gleam and embrace the night sky. The spotlights shine. The punters pose. Every inch of darkness is awash with photons: spotlights, flashlights, coach queue headlights.  It’s cold but the noise brings in the heat. The rowdy, raucous, rollercoaster of belonging in a congregation that trembles with pride and overflows with anticipation.

Yet I carry a guilty secret. This is the first professional football match I’ve ever seen. I caught a regional game once in Chile, bodies scrambling over terraces and mounted policemen striking those bodies back down. There’s a rumour I once saw Brighton & Hove Albion play when I was too young to remember, but as anyone who recognises the name will tell you, that doesn’t count for much. As for the rest of you, well, that ignorance rather says the same thing.

One thing I do remember, though, was the Hillsborough Crush, my school-age eyes watching more than 90 people die because people lost all sense of reason in the heat of the beautiful game.

It put me off. And I still feel uneasy about crowds.

One thing I do remember, though, was the Hillsborough Crush

But if there’s one thing you can’t deny, it’s that football has an international appeal. It’s played in over 200 countries, by an estimated 250 million people. It’s the number one sport worldwide and requires an impressively small amount of kit.

It’s a near-universal ice-breaker, from corporate meetings to crotchety consultants, great aunts at weddings to dusty children on the street.

Say the right thing about football and you’re one step closer to finding a new friend.

Football’s also a multibillion dollar business, of course. Its players are some of the best paid in history (Messi earns over $400 000 a week) overshadowing Hollywood actors, politicians and much lesser mortals like healthcare staff, teachers, policemen and travel bloggers.

When I arrived in communist China at the turn of the century, Tiananmen Square was devoid of advertising, save for the face of one man.

And I’m not talking about Chairman Mao.

It was David Beckham whose face beamed from the buses that trawled through Beijing on that particular day.

Those two simple words, “David” and “Beckham” or those other two “Man” and “United,” have opened more doors for me around the world than any of the recited greetings I’ve gleaned from phrasebooks.

Food may be the way to a man’s heart, but football’’s the better conversation starter.

Food may be the way to a man’s heart, but football’’s the better conversation starter.

So when the invitation came through on that cold February night to catch the game in action, I knew I had to get a better look.

Warsaw, indeed the whole of Poland, had been preparing for this moment. Shoes polished, hair slicked back, timely reminders heeded to wash behind the ears. Euro 2012 takes in sixteen nations and thousands of people and Poland’s co-hosting with the Ukraine marks a watershed in eastern European sport.

The Game

Back on the terraces, the excitement pulsed through the stands. The pounding beat of the chants, the shared tomfoolery of the Mexican waves, the hats, the scarves, the swirling melee of face paint and vodka.

We took our seats, swaying in support of our host Poland, until we realised we were sat behind the Portuguese press.

It damped the mood somewhat, bringing us back to reality. For all the songs and all the fireworks, nothing that happened tonight was going to matter at all. Whatever way you looked at it, we were watching a bunch of strangers on a field, chasing a ball.

I felt the paint, cracked and dry on my cheeks; I felt a fool.

But then another illusion appeared as the players streamed on to the pitch, the grounds blazing beneath the fire of celebrity.

We weren’t watching strangers. We were watching superstars! And if football casts a spell, that’s nothing compared to celebrity.

There, in shorts and studded boots, strode Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the most famous players in the world.

There, in shorts and studded boots, strode Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the most famous players in the world.

The fascination is bizarre. Here is a man who I’ve never met but whose face I’ve seen a thousand times. Without knowing quite how, I can recognise him from afar, from the way he moves. I know he has a son. I know he lived in the UK. I know he winked when a teammate was sent off. I know how much he earns.

And he doesn’t know me at all.

And why do I know all this? Because he’s a man who’s good at kicking a ball.

Celebrity, like football, excites us, yet it’s so very difficult to justify.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, it wasn’t an exciting match and my mind was wandering freely. Nil-nil at half-time when I sought warmth in the food queues; nil-nil at the final whistle when the red and whites flowed jubilant into the streets. Vodka streamed through the bars of Warsaw and conversations came my way on account of the two stripes on my cheek.

We all need tribes, for better and for worse, and tonight I bathed in the best of my adopted tribe. I tasted vodka served with a blade of grass, ate pickled fish on dark rye bread, fended off invites to strip clubs and wandered home happy.

I was no closer to understanding football, nor celebrity, but I really didn’t mind.

I’d seen the best of a sport that had held me for too long in its shadow with the ghosts of that crush in 1989.

Today, Euro 2012 is just around the corner and will be co-hosted between Poland and the Ukraine.

Warsaw is ready. And perhaps, now, so am I.

Disclosure: I travelled to Warsaw as a guest of the Polish National Tourist Office.

Football: How to make friends

Football. What do you think? Love it? Hate it? Find it helps with conversations around the world?

The Ghosts of the Beautiful Game first appeared on @insidetravellab on Twitter.

A new tradition in the heart of antiquity

Two years have catapulted by since I first glimpsed the love padlocks on Paris’ Pont des Arts. Since then, I’ve seen them everywhere, from windswept cliffs to Spanish steps, from industrial fences to bejewelled handcuffs that dance along the Hohenzollernbrücke railway bridge.

But this afternoon, I found some on the walls of the Colosseum in Rome: labelled, locked and a little bit lost.

What kind of romance, I wondered as I took the photo, longs to claims the ridge that overlooks death? What kind of passion throws the keys into the maze of execution below?

Neither the stone nor the padlocks had an answer for me, of course, and as I strolled around the rest of this two thousand year old icon, I couldn’t find any more.

Perhaps there’s a reason why love on the edge of death just hasn’t caught on.

What do you think?

Love on the Edge of Death first appeared on @insidetravellab on Twitter.

“How do we know when we’ve arrived when we travel? Because we recognise the image we’ve already seen. We think we’re chasing new experiences but we’re actually chasing our memories.” Dr Gillespie

We’ll take a slight detour today from the written word to the spoken one. Here’s the link to my session at the 2012 Literary festival at the London School of Economics.

I think it’ll be a marmite moment: you’ll either love it or you’ll hate it.

In short, it’s a one hour presentation and panel discussion from myself, travel writer Horatio Clare and Social Psychologist Alex Gillespie and we end up covering travel, truth and philosophy (with the odd reference to Angelina Jolie and the Welsh Rugby Team. Although not at the same time.)

Travel, Truth & Philosophy first appeared on @insidetravellab on Twitter.

The Road to Sopron

Sometimes things go wrong in life. The printer at the car hire company breaks, the sat nav doesn’t work, the journey is longer than you’ve been told and you turn up very late.

Sometimes other things go wrong in life. You’re shot at by soldiers while walking in a field, you’re banned from living with your family and the very act of trying to cross the border that contains you brands you a criminal in a regime reliant on torture and execution.

And sometimes those two worlds collide.

With my passenger comfortably seated, I turned on the ignition, apologised, silently cursed the car hire company, apologised again and drove away.

The Winter Sun

My passenger spoke little. A right hand turn here, a straight on there.

We drove past green fields and the residential roads of St Margarathen in Austria, the winter sun piercing the windscreen, forcing me to squint.

“This road,” said my passenger, Alexander Wind, “was built by the Romans around two thousand years ago. That is why it is straight.”

We drive past a school.

“The Romans marched their labourers along this road.

“Then the Nazis marched the Jews to the camp on that hill.”

I glance in the rear view mirror but the sunlight splinters my sight.

“And then in nineteen-eighty-nine,” says Wind, his Austro-German accent separating out each syllable like a marching military parade, “more than six hundred people escaped from Hungary and walked, with nothing, along this road.”

He’s talking, of course, about the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The real fall, the first exodus. The unprecedented event that took place on the 19^th August 1989, three months ahead of the fall of the Berlin wall.

And he should know what he’s talking about. He was there.

He’s talking, of course, about the fall of the Iron Curtain. And he should know, he was there

These days, there, is an unwatched, almost unmarked piece of ground where grass runs on either side of that straight Roman road. The only barrier resembles a giant staple ploughed into the earth, it’s a traffic restriction for heavy vehicles.

And as for personnel, we are alone.

An empty watchtower sits blind on the horizon. A summer pagoda hibernates on the lawn.

The whole thing feels absurd – and a long, long, long way away from where I began my journey in Istanbul. Back then, I had assumed that the Iron Curtain was an ideological divide, apart from that notorious wall in Berlin. I hadn’t realised that barbed wire, armed guards and a Soviet SZ-100 signalling system with 24 volt electric cables divided Hungary from Austria as late as 1989.

“I came here with my friend of Holland,” says Wind. “Just to look and to make some pictures.”

He trembles.

“And the soldiers, they took their guns and they shot.”

We walk around the information boards, one by one, my soul turning cobalt with cold. I force myself to imagine this place in the sticky sweet heat of summer, in the time when blonde bubblegum perms and Boy George crops ruled, when jean waistbands were high and trainers bright white.

I have to picture myself here in 1989 at the “pan-European picnic” in August.

“And the soldiers, they took their guns and they shot.”

After 40 years of watchtowers and guards, a symbolic, controlled border opening was supposed to take place as a gesture of harmony in Europe. A small group of pre-approved, registered delegates had planned to eat, drink and pose for political photographs in the sun.

Change was afoot in the Soviet bloc. A new man, Gorbachev had mentioned words like perestroika and glasnost. Money was increasingly scarce. And in Hungary, a problem was developing.

The steel barbed wire that defined the Iron Curtain was rusting away – and Russia no longer had the funds to replace it. Budapest decided not to foot the bill.

The world looked on nervously. Russian troops remained on Hungarian soil and many remembered the hundreds who died at the bullets of the Soviets in 1956 after students protested in the streets.

Yet perhaps enough time had passed for a new generation to forget the punishment of the past.

The day of the picnic arrived. Instead of one small group of delegates, the Hungarian border guards witnessed tens upon hundreds of men, women and children walk up towards them. Men, women and children who they had been ordered to shoot to kill.

Alexander Wind raps his knuckles against the information board. He begins to sob.

“This man,” he says, pointing to the photograph. “It is this man that I…”

He wipes his eyes.

“Arpád Bella,” he weeps again. I read the sign, identifying Bella as the Hungarian Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the border that day.

Men, women and children who they had been ordered to shoot to kill.

“I have learned Hungarian in order to meet him and to try to understand why,” says Wind. “Why he did what he did.

“He had been ordered to shoot. And he did not.”

Over six hundred people fled in those three hours. They left behind their cars, their possessions, everything, running, striding and staggering through the border crossing and along that Roman road towards St Margarethen.

Within weeks, over 10 000 refugees had fled from East Germany to West through Hungary and then Austria.

Within months, the Berlin Wall fell.

Later, my fingertips return to life as we warm up in a pub in St Margarethen. Alexander Wind shows me newspaper cuttings, interviews and photographs of himself as a younger man. He unwraps crumpled white plastic to show barbed wire the colour of peat.

“Break it down and take it with you,” says Wind. “That was what they said to us that day.”

I pick up the piece of the former iron curtain and turn it over.

It’s fragile, it crumbles a little but its points can still sting.

I’m overcome with a sense of gratitude. For my freedoms and for my opportunities – for the chance to travel along the iron route and to visit this place and hear about this historic day.

But I still have questions. Plenty of questions.

“Break it down and take it with you,” says Wind. “That was what they said to us that day.”

Written in my notebook is a quote from the memorial:

“These are the tearful moments of happiness on the other side of the border- on the field of freedom. These pictures undoubtedly prove what autocracy meant to the nations of Eastern Europe. One’s home (surrounded by the Iron Curtain) could only be left with such happiness when there is no freedom, only tyranny.”

It’s the kind of statement that makes sense at first glance but that falls apart later on.

While soothing, it’s too easy to summarise that oppression and communism blighted the “east” while freedom and democracy illuminated the “west.”

The thousands who crossed the iron curtain came from East Germany, not Hungary and not from the rest of the Soviet bloc. When the first hole appeared in the Iron Curtain, most Hungarians stayed put.

I was clearly missing a part of the puzzle.

A part I went on to find in Berlin.

A part that lives in the shadow of perhaps the world’s most infamous wall.

To be continued…

Find the previous post here: What is communism? Prague tries to explain.

This article forms part of the Iron Route Project which could not have taken place without the help of InterRail. A huge thank you also to the Austrian Tourist Board and the Burgenland Tourist Board for helping with this stage of the journey. And of course, the biggest thank you of all to Mr Alexander Wind for spending the day with me on the road to Sopron.

The Day I Held the Iron Curtain In My Hand first appeared on @insidetravellab on Twitter.

Win A Book on Going Slow…

You know it comes to something when your own computer tells you to slow down (WordPress, my blogging platform, often thinks I type too fast.) Now it turns out there’s a book that’ll tell you to do the same thing.

Go slow.

I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m quite a fan of speed, really, and not very good at being idle.

I am, perhaps, the “target audience” for Alastair Sawday’s book.

“Slow is a political movement,” he says in the introduction to his book Go Slow Italy. “It is in deadly earnest, a powerful idea with the capacity for changing the way we think and act. Peaceful and non-confrontational, but reaching deep into our lives, it has some of the underlying power of Ghandi’s revolutionary pacifism.”

It’s enough to make me think about putting down my iPhone.

Sawday goes on to say “before we take ourselves too seriously, let us go back to the foundations of it all.”

Apparently, plans to build a McDonalds near the Spanish Steps in Rome provoked such a wave of revulsion that the Slow Food movement was launched. With its headquarters in Italy, it aimed not only to reclaim traditional, slow, wholesome cooking techniques but also to promote a healthier, happier, better way of living.

I think they may be on to something. I certainly felt that way when I took cooking lessons in Tuscany last year.

I’d heard of the Slow Movement before but this was my first introduction to a travel book on the subject. After time spent discussing the overall concept, the book travels across Italy itself, introducing history and a taste of poetry through the descriptions of each region and the lodges, B&Bs and other special places contained therein.

You’ll even find recipes, from tiramisu to pasta a la rocca, thrown in among the directions on how to travel by train – slowly.

I can’t say I agree with everything Slow seems to stand for, though. They are anti-Health & Safety, for example, describing it as a “new and complex ways of doing old, well-tried-things.” No doubt some aspects are, but others save lives as I’ve seen myself. If the people saved by seatbelts, cycle helmets and lifeguards are a hangover of hassle and complexity from life in the fast lane then I’m happy to rev it up a notch.

Others, meanwhile are more than enough to make me pause (hoho!) and think. After all, I am sure there are many, many lives to be saved by eating properly and exercising, before I even get to the impact on the environment

One phrase in particular stood out:

“In your spare time, eat, sleep and rest when your body tells you to.”

One phrase in particular stood out:

“In your spare time, eat, sleep and rest when your body tells you to.”

How many of us can say we do that? For me it’s about as likely to happen as walking into a McDonalds and ordering an organic salad.

So why am I telling you about this book?

For one thing, I think it’s an interesting read and fascinating line of thought.

For another, I will be travelling through Italy later this month and seeing if I can do my bit for Slow.

How to win

And for the third – you can win a copy by subscribing to this month’s Inside the Travel Lab newsletter. Just pop your email address in the form over here and you’re done. No cash, no long form, no tedious questionnaire.

(And in case you’ve already subscribed, don’t feel hard done by. There’s a sister book, Sawday’s Special Places to Stay Italy that’s available as a prize for already loyal subscribers. You know I wouldn’t forget you ;) )

Disclosure: Sawday’s are kindly providing the prizes but as ever, as always, everything I say about them is entirely up to me. As it always will be on Inside the Travel Lab.

Life in the Slow Lane – Slow Italy first appeared on @insidetravellab on Twitter.

Not just the thousand miles from Istanbul, nor the change in career since I’d last crossed these cobblestones. No, I was thinking about my lessons in European history as I’d travelled back and forth across the former iron curtain.

Prague, like many of the cities along this Iron Route, witnessed much of this history first hand. While spared the intense bombing that scarred Warsaw, London, Dresden and Berlin, they hadn’t been spared much else.

The Nazi Occupation of Czechoslovakia took place before the war even began. Not as a result of direct military aggression, nor the result of a democratic alliance, but as a peculiar act of politics.

The Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia was signed over to Nazi Germany by Italy, France and the UK in the name of something it took me a while to recognise.

Appeasement. A crucial part of history we had actually covered in school.

Prague and the Cold War. The Backstory.

At the time (in 1938) the horror of World War One was recent enough to make many desperate to avoid another Anglo-German conflict yet distant enough for a new generation of soldiers to have arrived. The Anschluss between Austria and Germany occurred with unease – but appeared welcome by the people of Austria. A natural redress, perhaps, of the harsh conditions of surrender drawn up at the Treaty of Versailles.

And there were over 3 million Germans living in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia after all. And Hitler had promised that after Sudetenland, he would stop. He really would. He just wanted one more piece of fragmented Germany back where it belonged and then all would be well with the world again.

This (somewhat simplified) version of events led to what must be one of the most embarrassing political moments on record: Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, brandishing a piece of paper in triumph and declaring that he had negotiated “peace for our time.”

Within months, Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and then Poland and within the year the world was once more at war.

It’s a short and fairly easy walk from the iconic Karluv Most Bridge to Wenceslas Square and only a little further to the golden arches of McDonalds.

Upstairs and across from the casino is Prague’s museum of communism.

Prague’s Museum of Communism

As I passed the Russian Doll with fangs, I realised how seldom I’d heard the ideas behind communism discussed. In the States, the C word seemed unutterable. In Budapest, it stood as a codeword for terror. At home, a plot device for spy thrillers and only in Cuba had I seen its merits explained.

Prague’s Museum of Communism stands out from the crowd – by actually talking about communism. For a little while at least, before moving on to how things went wrong.

This made interesting background thinking in the quaint cobbled streets of Prague but by the time I left Berlin these interpretations had changed the way I saw the world.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

What is Communism? Let’s Start with Karl Marx

The truth is (as is usually the case) that several different people came up with the “idea” of communism, although Karl Marx usually gets the sound bite.

This German theologian claimed that the driving force for all of history was the struggle between the classes. Usually, this struggle took place between the current elite and a new elite, two small groups wrestling for power.

After the industrial revolution, Marx felt that history would move on to a different but logical step. For the first time, the larger, exploited working class would overthrow the ruling elite. This socialist revolution would create a political system dominated by the majority, not the minority as in the past. (And present, of course, with the “1% protests” outside Wall Street.)

We all have a lifetime of words and actions and none of us know which, if any, will have any lasting effect. Given the events of the 20^th century, a few of Marx’s points seem particularly poignant:

1)       Marx wasn’t clear about what would happen after the socialist revolution. He theorised that eventually there would be no politics and no need for a state but that in the meantime a temporary dictatorship would be necessary. If ever a man needed to expand on a two word idea, it was Karl Marx and the words temporary dictatorship.

2)      Marx remained convinced that only advanced industrial societies could have socialist revolutions; that communism could not and would not work in impoverished agricultural societies simply because history had to follow its logical steps.

3)      Communism could not work in one country alone: it needed an international approach.

Putting the plan into action: Lenin

Fast forward to a boy born in the late 19^th century whose brother was arrested and executed as a teenager for an alleged plot against the Russian Tsar. This boy becomes the leader of the Bolsheviks who overthrow their monarchy in 1917 and usher in more than seven decades of communism in Moscow.

Lenin wasn’t a theologian; he was a party leader who needed to get things done. And thus, he added a few more factors into Marx’s mix:

1)      He argued that some people are more politically aware than others and should assume responsibility for leading society to socialism.

2)      For practical reasons, a degree of secrecy would be required.

3)      He glossed over Marx’s belief that only advanced industrial nations were ready for communism, as Russia itself was still predominantly an agricultural country.

Russia, Lenin argued, was the weak link in the chain of powerful capitalist countries. Break the chain here and international capitalism would collapse. Russia would then be absorbed into the new international socialist orbit by countries who were sufficiently developed, such as Britain, France and Germany at the time.

And Then, Stalin

Often depicted as the face of communism, it was Stalin who largely spearheaded the formation of the Soviet Bloc.

He was Lenin’s rather controversial successor as the head of the Bolsheviks, a man promoted because he appeared more moderate and stable than his main competitor Trotsky.

It’s another one of those historical moments that shriek out from the page like a bloodied exclamation mark.

Stalin, as it transpired, was not particularly moderate. He was a driven man who left a complex legacy.

His armies freed prisoners from the Nazi concentration camps before themselves constructing monstrous gulags. His policies transformed Russia into a superpower with nuclear capabilities yet left millions dying of starvation.

His paranoia and ruthlessness became a prominent feature of communism as it spread worldwide.

Stalin signed deals with Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill and was once nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Little of that appears in the Prague museum, privately curated by an American businessman.

Here, Marx, Lenin and Stalin are held to account for the deaths of more than 100 million people across the world.

Here, Marx, Lenin and Stalin are held to account for the deaths of more than 100 million people across the world.

It’s a powerful statement, despite its flaws.

The Prague Museum of Communism

With that as a backdrop, the museum shows us everyday life in communist Czechoslovakia, from the run-down shops with little to no food to the scarlet stars that young children wore. We see anti-American propaganda and the development of the Socialist Realism art movement.

The museum promises a trip through the Dream, The Reality and the Nightmare of communism and it’s to its great credit that it spends time on the first two.

The final section recreates the bare-bulbed interrogation desk reminiscent of the House of Terror in Budapest. But whereas that museum faded away after the Stalin years, Prague just keeps on going.

It talks about the Prague Spring in 1968, when the more moderate socialist leader in Czechoslovakia tried to ease restrictions. The Soviets responded by invading once more.

And then it screams and shrieks its way through the Velvet Revolution, with colour TV footage of the protests on Wenceslas Square. The year when the Soviet Union crumbled and the iron curtain fell.

I still can’t understand why. Why the difference? Why the militant repression in the 1960s, yet the almost defeatist disintegration in 1989?

It’s late and already past closing time. The women who are working here tonight are already being kind by letting me stay.

I grab a few last snapshots of new upon old memories: of high-waisted jeans and bubble gum perms intermingled with police brutality on Wenceslas Square.

They’re still in my mind as I head back to the bridge, back to the hotel and past Wenceslas Square.

Today, the bloodied and beaten bodies that screamed on these streets are replaced by Christmas Markets and the sweet smell of cinnamon. It’s a disorienting experience.

Today, the bloodied and beaten bodies that screamed on these streets are replaced by Christmas Markets and the sweet smell of cinnamon. It’s a disorienting experience.

And after Prague, there’s only one more stop left on the Iron Route: Berlin itself, the city that symbolises the Cold War.

I take the cable car up to the hotel, watching the modern city of Prague spread out beneath muffled Christmas lights.

I’m still thinking about the Museum of Communism, but I’m also thinking of something else. A man I met at the border between Austria and Hungary. An eyewitness on the day when the iron curtain was first breached…

Read the next part here

What is Communism? Prague Tries to Explain… first appeared on @insidetravellab on Twitter.

This post forms part of the Iron Route series: a journey from Istanbul to Berlin by train.

Vienna, Austria

The year is 1945 and ash, smoke, poverty and despair rise through the rubble of Europe. Nearly ten million Soviets died on the eastern front. Eleven million in the concentration camps. And the Soviet Red Army have just captured Vienna.

Berlin stands divided between the victorious Allied Forces: France, Britain the US and Russia. This division, hastily conceived out of the urgent need to manage a crippled city, paved the way for some of the most dramatic scenes of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Airlift, and in 1989, the scenes of reunification.

But I haven’t reached Berlin yet. I’m in Vienna, in 2011, in Austria. A country known for Mozart, the Habsburgs, coffee houses and rich, sharp-tasting chocolate cake called Sachertorte.

What isn’t so well known is that Vienna, too, stood divided in 1945. Just as in Berlin, the Allies carved the city into different districts to sift through the wreckage, repatriate the displaced and generally try to make sense of the new world and new world order.

Berlin went on to become a central focus for the Cold War; Vienna declared itself neutral after only ten years.
Why? How? And does this fit into the context of the Iron Route?

Berlin went on to become a focus for the Cold War; Vienna declared itself neutral. Why? How?

Vienna’s History

“The short version is that Stalin traded Vienna for Berlin,” surmised my guide, the incredibly intelligent and interesting man with the longest name imaginable: Gerhard Strassgschwandtner.

He runs The Third Man Museum, an excellent homage to the hit film that scooped up a shelf of Oscars back in 1950.

If both screenplay and novel are unfamiliar to you (and don’t worry, they were to me too) the Third Man tells the story of a man named Martins who arrives in Vienna during its occupation at the end of the Second World War. Within hours he learns that the friend he’s come to visit, one Harry Lime, is dead and buried. Yet there’s a policeman lurking around who seems convinced that Lime was not all he seemed.

Enter detective work, adventure, conspiracy and derring-do as those involved try to work out who the mysterious third man was at the moment when Lime was killed, all set against the backdrop of post-war Vienna and the farce of the four-power governing system.

The backdrop, by the way, isn’t a Hollywood screen. The Third Man really was filmed in post-war Vienna. That rubble, that darkness, the raw and decimated feel. It’s real.

Out on the streets of Vienna today, the grey cloak of winter blunts – but cannot disguise – the city’s classical beauty.

Vienna’s Classical Beauty

It’s a masterpiece of imperial European resplendence. Of columns, arches, sweeping grand driveways, statues, sculptures and cosy cobbled alleyways. Vienna remains a global centre for culture, classical music and history.

And it’s a powerful history. I stood in the Museumsquartier, listening to Gerhard describe the buildings around me. First, the statue of Empress Maria Teresa and the story of her sixteen children and 40 years on the throne.

Then, we crossed the road and he showed me another picture.

I recoiled.

There, in black and white, but there nonetheless was a photo of the ground I was standing on. The balcony I was looking at. The skyline of Vienna.

Only this photo had more than the odd duffel-coated tourist and a ramshackle line of schoolchildren.

This photograph had a rapturous crowd filling every available space, with every face turned to idolise one man: Adolf Hitler as he welcomed Austria into the Third Reich in 1938.

I tried to ignore my heartbeat and the cold seeping into my toes. Nausea coiled around my stomach.

With every face turned to idolise one man: Adolf Hitler as he welcomed Austria into the Third Reich.

I’ve wondered before about the purpose of visiting historical sites. Whether they should carry any power or significance at all and whether it should make any difference where I am when I think about something. Whether it should make any difference if there’s something I can reach out and touch.

“You have to realise,” said Gerhard, “that Hitler was promising a dream. He was promising them hope and a better future, a release from the miserable years of the Great Depression and the shame at losing the empire during the First World War.

“He didn’t arrive saying ‘we will kill the Jews, destroy your homes and leave you in ruins. The Third Reich was supposed to last for 1000 years.

“At the end, people felt humiliated. They felt duped. They’d fallen for the dream, believed it, supported it and,” he taps the photograph of the ruins and the rubble. “This was how it ended.”

Our conversation continued onto the public tram, where I, for one, felt awkward.

I ask whether we should lower our voices, but Gerhard shakes his head.

“After the war, nobody wanted to talk about it,” he says. “People said that ‘Austria was a victim.’”

“And you, what do you say?”

He sighs. “I think that the tourist board wants to say to the world ‘Just look at how beautiful Vienna is. Look at Mozart and Sachertorte and the riding school. Forget about that unpleasantness. Look at how pretty our Vienna is.’”

“Vienna is beautiful,” I say, “even without the chocolate cake. But to be fair to the tourist board, they are paying for me to be here…Talking to you.”

“Well, they don’t help fund the museum,” he replies.

We enter a traditional Viennese coffeehouse and talk among the smoke.

We discuss the borders with Hungary, the ideological divisions that grew between the US and the USSR. The need, for everyone involved, to avoid yet another war in Europe that would spread across the world. To avoid another war that no-one could afford.

Ultimately, we arrive again at the central question: Berlin and Vienna. Two cities, both divided. Why the different destinies?

Stalin hungered to keep his territories in the east. And to punish Germany for bringing Russia to its knees twice in half a century. While Vienna had power and great geographical prominence, Berlin remained the heart of the enemy’s core.

Negotiations intensified as the former allies became opponents in a new Cold War. And the short version, when it comes down to it, is that Stalin traded Vienna for Berlin, along with a continued Soviet influence in a communist East Germany.

There would be no Berlin Wall in Vienna.

There is still, however, a wall.

There is still, however, a wall.

It’s located just outside the royal city centre, on a quiet side street lined with cars. It bears a sign that reads Wunden der Erinnerung and the stone is pockmarked at around head height.

Those marks come from gunfire between the Soviets and the Nazis.

The words mean Scars of Remembrance.

Scars of Remembrance

This article forms part of a series called the Iron Route about the journey from Istanbul to Berlin by train, zig-zagging across the former iron curtain. It was sponsored by InterRail and you can read more about it here.

Disclosure: The Austrian National Tourist Office supported my stay in Vienna

I’d highly recommend a visit to the small Third Man Museum for a fascinating look at pre and post-war Vienna. I’d also recommend meeting Austrian tour guide Gerhard Strassgschwandtner if you can, for a fascinating conversation about European history.

The Sewer from the Third Man

What do you think? Is it “worth” visiting historical sites?

The Berlin Wall in Vienna first appeared on @insidetravellab on Twitter.

You have to put yourself in my shoes.

Boots, really, with thick rubber soles to keep out the cold and to keep a foothold on the ice. Boots that worked hard and worked fast, striding between commuters in a winter-worn Budapest. Five feet, six inches above them, a troubled mind tangled through what it had just seen.

I had just left Budapest’s House of Terror as part of my Iron Route journey. It was first the Nazi and then the Communist Secret Service headquarters – and it left me thinking.

It also left me running to catch my next appointment: a tour of the Budapest Parliament Buildings, rumoured to be the most beautiful of their kind in the world.

After the Nazi and Soviet prisons, I’d have been impressed by a tin shack and a bucket of rotten eels as long as they’d enabled a healthy democracy. But Budapest was about to take it one or two steps further.

Or, more accurately, three or four steps further, down the corridor, across the road and into a Ferrari that’s speeding along towards wowville.

Both inside and out, the opulence, elegance and extravagance of Hungary’s government buildings are difficult to overstate. Gilded leaves, midnight blue, high vaults, ornate ceilings, an intricate gothic exterior modelled on London’s Houses of Parliament and even some polished brass holders for ministers’ cigars. Just like that last sentence, it’s a lot to take in.

Its magnificence comes as such a contrast to the austere blocks of communist-era buildings that an almost silent whisper seems to spin throughout the corridors:

“This is what democracy looks like,” it says. “You’ve just seen the alternatives. See this gleaming, shining example? This represents freedom.”

It’s a comforting whisper, for all its treacherous simplicity.

The Soviet-style buildings from the post-war years often have sculptures of “ordinary people” who stand guard above government buildings to remind the politicians who passed below just who was supposed to be working for whom.

Or at least that was the idea.

After the Nazi and Soviet prisons, I’d have been impressed by a tin shack and a bucket of rotten eels.

Back here in Budapest, the parliament doesn’t bother with “ordinary people.” Instead, it opts for gold and pearls and brandishes Hungary’s crown jewels at the summit of a sumptuous velveteen staircase.

“Who cares about ordinary people?” it cries. “Look, just look, at how beautiful this is! At how brilliant we are!”

And it works.

The corridors are lined with hushed queues of people – all mesmerised into a stupor of admiration.

Including me.

“This is what democracy looks like,” it says. “You’ve just seen the alternatives. See this gleaming, shining example? This represents freedom.”

In reality, of course, the buildings themselves have nothing to do with the freedom of the people. Or even democracy. Budapest’s Parliament Buildings were completed in 1904, so they’ve seen it all: the Habsburgs, the Nazis, the Soviets and more.

And even democracy itself is no guarantee of freedom. Hitler, after all, was democratically elected, a fact one of my schoolteachers was prone to repeat.

It seems too obvious to stand among these paintings, these stories, these histories and these ceilings and to finish by saying that it is people who give freedom to the people, not the buildings nor the systems that use their names.

But as I said at the beginning, you have to put yourself in my shoes. Those boots had covered a century in only a single day,.

And there’s only so much insulation they could provide.

The Traditional Part

Budapest’s Parliamentary Buildings are beautiful and worth the queue the day before to get a ticket. Visit Ken Kaminesky’s site for some truly stunning pictures of the Hungarian Parliament.

Disclosure: I visited Hungary as part of my Iron Route project, sponsored by InterRail, and I received complimentary entry into the Parliament Buildings thanks to Hungary Tourism.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like first appeared on @insidetravellab on Twitter.

I stand in another queue. Alone, in silence. Paperwork in one hand, a heap of clothing in the other, limp yet heavy like the body of a sleeping child. It’s cold outside.

I wait.

I queue.

I hand over my camera.

Number 60 Andrássy Street, The House of Terror

Number 60 Andrássy Street has credentials that would wither estate agents into anthrax-laden dust. And they’re enough to make the rest of us weep and drop to our knees, wondering whether to just give up on this whole thing called the human race.

Number 60 Andrássy Street was once the Hungarian Headquarters for the Nazis. After their defeat at the end of WWII, it became the headquarters for the secret police of the totalitarian communist state. Now, finally, this former mansion on the Champs-Élysées-like boulevard functions as a museum, albeit one that draws criticism for its biased interpretation of crimes on Hungarian soil.

I wait in the queue and hear an old man sobbing, sobbing and sobbing, again and again on a video loop while receptionists chat to each other and horror sound effects filter down from another floor.

It’s a queasy, conflicted feeling I first experienced on a muddy hilltop on the outskirts of Krakow, shoes soaked in melting snow. The site of a former concentration camp (the one shown in Schindler’s List,) this hill was also the viewpoint for a bland international shopping centre, a splodge of simplistic yellows and reds amidst grey and grit-lined car parks.

A few teens used it as a shortcut and an older woman strode past, walking her dog. My presence there seemed absurd and I shivered back to my hotel, numbed in more ways than one.

The following day, I visited Auschwitz, where history hadn’t been cleared away; it hadn’t been reconstructed. It just stood. As it was. As it had been.

Here at 60 Andrássy Street, things are different. A lot of effort has been expended creating a multimedia experience that tries to fill in the gaps: the aching, inexplicable voids that history has left.

And it’s not interested in nuance. Nor self-reflection.

Hungary’s history during the 20^th century does not make for pleasant reading. Part of the Habsburg’s Austro-Hungarian empire at the start of the century, its defeat in World War One stripped it of territory and, by the look of things in this museum, an enormous amount of pride.

When World War Two broke out, a democratic Hungary sided with Hitler and the Axis powers before entering into years of complex diplomacy within the maelstrom of the world’s deadliest conflict. Siding with Hitler yet trying to negotiate peace with the UK and US. Passing anti-semitic laws yet keeping Jews from the concentration camps. Aggression against Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, yet trying to keep the war from its doors.

It’s a fascinating, terrifying, deadly memoir of conflict and survival amid the howling storm of contrasting – and ultimately catastrophic – ideologies on both sides.

It was doomed to fail.

And it was doomed to fail. On learning of Hungary’s negotiations with the West in 1944, Hitler sent in his own troops, transported over 600 000 to the concentration camps and fought to the end against the Soviets in the siege of Budapest.

The whole period raises questions about the fight for freedom, appeasement, coercion, diplomacy, national pride, borders, identity and more…yet the museum itself addresses none of these. In fact, it barely mentions Hungary’s role throughout those years, only its losses.

But those losses, Hungary’s losses, were staggering. Ten percent of the population dead – and occupation by the Soviet Red Army.

Within two years, democracy had gone. So had the leaders of the opposition.

The House of Terror launches a scathing account of the Stalinist years. Reconstructed interrogation rooms. Twisted agricultural policy. Deportation accounts. Old uniforms. The gulag. Bread shortages. Old photographs. Paranoia. Betrayal. The disruption of religious life.

It’s a stifling amount of information that’s difficult to sift through in one go. And it’s certainly the most damning view of life behind the iron curtain I’ve seen so far during my #ironroute journey.

A guard directs me to a lift.

The doors slam, the lights go out, and the machine screeches slowly towards the basement. In the shadows, a prisoner is led along an underground corridor, his final footsteps before his state execution.

The doors open into clawing darkness and a stench of urine. It’s the same corridor, the same cells, the same short walk to the scaffold.

I begin to feel sick.

Later, back in daylight and pacing along the frosted pavement, surrounded by leafy beauty and resplendent buildings, my mind feels uneasy again.

It hovers on the power of place and reality in trying to come to terms with the crimes of the past. It hovers on freedom of speech, capital punishment, genocide and fear. It realises for the first time that a part of me is grateful for our current Prime Minister. And even the tabloid press. And even the ill-informed criticisms about my own work.

Disturbing thoughts indeed.

I’m out of breath by the time I reach the Hungarian Parliament Building.

I stand in the queue, a man turns me back.

I stand in another queue. Alone, in silence. Paperwork in one hand, a heap of clothing in the other, limp yet heavy like the body of a sleeping child. It’s cold outside.

I wait.

I queue.

I hand over my camera.

I get to keep it. They hand it back.

Photos of the Parliament Building to follow.

This post forms part of the #ironroute journey from Istanbul to Berlin by train with InterRail.

The House of Terror in Budapest first appeared on @insidetravellab on Twitter.