Train colors get brighter as you go east. The German long-distance trains are a discreet light gray, a kind of business-suit color. But the Polish trains--at least the Warsaw Expresses to and from Berlin--have magenta-colored engines pulling cars with long lavender stripes, and the old Moscow Express, when it still existed, was painted an imperially deep red and blue. (That used to be my end-of-the-day alarm: Oh, there's the Moscow Express rattling by under the study window, it's time to think about wrapping up work for the afternoon!) Czech trains are sky-blue, bluer even than the summer afternoons.
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| Czech train, countryside near Vienna. Photo by NÖLB Mh, Wiki Commons. |
We are now on the sky-blue high-speed Franz Schubert, which runs from Vienna to Prague, though we are not going so far on it. We are headed for Brno, about two hours north of Vienna: it's the second largest city in Czechia (a name which the Czech Republic agreed last year to use officially, after some years of resistance).
Brno is also the capital of Moravia, one of the three traditional Czech lands. Up on the northeast edge of the country there's the little sliver of Czech Silesia; in the main part of the east, around Brno, is Moravia; and then in the west of the country, around Prague, is Bohemia. So I imagine Brno, a bit, as an island off the seacoast of Bohemia--that imaginary comic-romantic setting for the fourth act of The Winter's Tale, where the young lovers meet and fall in love and in trouble, to the background music of sweet-sour songs by a witty peddler and pickpocket who is seldom out of trouble himself.
But shall I go mourn for that, my dear?
The pale moon shines by night:
And when I wander here and there,
I then do most go right.
We have some anxieties about whether we will go right ourselves, as the Franz Schubert is not making its normal stop in the middle of Brno, and the connections for the next day, to Poland, are rather a muddle.
In a mildly disorienting moment we pass a farmstead where the house and barn and other outbuildings are all painted Czech-railroad sky-blue, an exact match to the Franz Schubert whistling past. (Is the farmer a joker, or is he just somebody with cheap access to the railroad's surplus paint?)
Thank the Lord that Franz Schubert was not a Czech composer and therefore does not get the treatment that the Czech railway metes out to Czech composers. It plays tiny snippets from familiar works as attention-getters before announcements, and the announcements are endless. In the Prague station, when we were there a couple of years ago, it was the opening bars of Smetana's Moldau, over and over and over and over in an insane-making way. On the train out of Vienna it's the opening bars of Dvorak's Humoresque No. 7. Can we stand to hear this repeated twenty-four times in an hour?
The announcements come first in Czech (in which our destination is called Brno), and then in German (in which our destination is called Brünn), and then in English ... Hmm, well, English-speakers aren't very conscious of the town and therefore don't call it anything in particular, so what can the railroad do? They spell out the Czech name and call the place Bee Arr Enn Oh. Here comes the Dvorak snippet again, and then in English, "In ten minutes we will reach Bee Arr Enn Oh."
Bee Arr Enn Oh was working on the tracks in the middle of town, so the train dumped us off at a freight station further out, and we got a city bus from there, listening intently to the stop announcements, now strictly in Czech, to make sure we got off at Hlavni nadrazi, the main station.
Can't miss it. Standard-issue Austro-Hungarian-empire main train station, vintage 1905.
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| Brno central station. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017. |
The main character in Joseph Roth's Kapuzinergruft, set in Austria in the years around World War I, says, "All train stations in the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy were alike ... there was the same second-class and first-class waiting room, the same buffet with the schnaps bottles, and the same blond, full-bosomed cashier and the two enormous palm trees, to the right and left of the buffet ..." The palm trees have been replaced by something else tall in pots, and the cashier probably looks different now, but the facade is unmistakable.
We're just perching here for a night, because going all the way from Vienna to Wroclaw, where Archangel has meetings, is a little too long and complicated to do comfortably in one day. It isn't far, but the route makes a big detour around the east edge of the Sudeten mountains via three separate railway systems. So we are doing the rest of the journey at more leisure tomorrow.
A few minutes' walk from the central station in Brno brings us to the Hotel Grandezza on Cabbage Market Square. (Could such an address be anywhere except in eastern Europe?)
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| Hotel Grandezza lobby, Brno. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017. |
We admire the Art Deco lobby and have a late, heavy lunch at the hotel restaurant. (Oh, the weight of eastern European food, the dumplings and the potatoes, the goose and the game and everything rich from the woods.) Then we go out to explore a little.
Nothing heavy here. Much lightness of heart.
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| Brno, Czech Republic. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017. |
The umbrellas are green, red, and white, the Italian colors, because Italy is opening a consulate in Brno this year and, along with a local venture-capital firm, has funded the umbrellas. They stay up during the summer, and at the end of summer they are auctioned off, with the proceeds going to local charities.
Around the corner from the umbrellas, a teenage string quartet is tuning up in the street. They start something that sounds for a moment like Mozart but turns out to be a mock-classical version of the Beatles' Here Comes the Sun.
Oh yes. It's all right, it's all right, here comes the sun. We don't need the umbrellas, it's high summer, bright blue harvest-weather days.
There hasn't been that much summer this summer in Berlin--one of those years when people keep their jackets on straight through from May until October, when they put on something warmer. But we grazed the trailing edge of a south-European heatwave in Vienna, and it looked very hot in the Austrian/ Czech countryside as we passed in the late morning. It looked the way those hot-day, pre-thunderstorm passages in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony or Haydn’s Jahreszeiten sound: the sigh of the heat-exhausted strings almost seemed to rise from the harvested fields as we passed.
**
Here we are at Namesti Svobody--Freedom Square--and where could such a square be except in the old Austro-Hungarian empire? Brno is one of those wonderful things which lots of countries don't really possess, but which flourishes in Central Europe: a deeply cultivated provincial city.
In the nineteenth century Brno had a population of a little over a quarter million, something like the population of present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana or Laredo, Texas. Here, in the mid-nineteenth century, Gregor Mendel, the abbot of the Augustinian friars in Brno, established basic laws of genetics, studying pea plants in the abbey gardens. (He started out studying inheritance in mice, but his bishop didn't like his writing about animal sex, so he switched to pea plants. Anyone who doesn't think history is a joker should contemplate the fact that the genetic processes governing inheritance via sexual reproduction were discovered by a celibate monk.)
When I was in junior high in high-and-dry eastern Colorado, in a town a twentieth the size of Brno, I stumbled across a book in the public library that included a detailed account of Mendel's pea experiments. (The small-town library might not have been comfortable with mouse sex either.) Green seeds and yellow seeds, smooth seeds and wrinkled seeds: dominant and recessive genes pairing off like partners in a square dance, where the caller's text was the formula for the binomial distribution. Great stuff, that was: I loved the mathematical patterns, and I had vivid pictures in mind of a monastery garden in a non-desert country: stone arches, thick green, bees in the shrubbery, sweet damp air.
The monastery garden can't have been so big and lush actually as it was in my imaginings: the abbey is crammed into some fairly tight space in the old town in Brno.
But what big people the local heroes in this little city are: when Mendel died, the organist at his funeral was Leos Janacek, who taught at the Brno conservatory and wrote operas that are staples of the international repertoire. The present-day counterpart of the conservatory in Brno is the Janacek Academy for Music, where Ludvik Kundera taught piano and musicology, and his son Milan grew up to be a famous novelist. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Eat your heart out, Fort Wayne. This deep layering of culture here is like layers of old soft leaves under foot, keeping the world from looking too much like a moonscape, cushioning your contact with the hardness of the world underfoot, sometimes concealing holes where you can break your ankle. (Milan Kundera's first novel was The Joke, in which a student writes a political joke on a summer-break postcard to a girl and in consequence is sent to forced labor in the mines. The jokes in these parts can end badly.)
The great mathematician Kurt Gödel grew up here in Brno. Gödel is the incompleteness-theorems man, the man who put into mathematical-proof form the statement (so incompatible with earlier beliefs in unlimited progress) that there are things it is impossible to know. There are logical problems it is impossible to solve--not just temporarily, because we haven't go there yet, but permanently, in the nature of things.
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| Namesti Svobody, Brno. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017. |
In the nineteenth century Brno had a population of a little over a quarter million, something like the population of present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana or Laredo, Texas. Here, in the mid-nineteenth century, Gregor Mendel, the abbot of the Augustinian friars in Brno, established basic laws of genetics, studying pea plants in the abbey gardens. (He started out studying inheritance in mice, but his bishop didn't like his writing about animal sex, so he switched to pea plants. Anyone who doesn't think history is a joker should contemplate the fact that the genetic processes governing inheritance via sexual reproduction were discovered by a celibate monk.)
When I was in junior high in high-and-dry eastern Colorado, in a town a twentieth the size of Brno, I stumbled across a book in the public library that included a detailed account of Mendel's pea experiments. (The small-town library might not have been comfortable with mouse sex either.) Green seeds and yellow seeds, smooth seeds and wrinkled seeds: dominant and recessive genes pairing off like partners in a square dance, where the caller's text was the formula for the binomial distribution. Great stuff, that was: I loved the mathematical patterns, and I had vivid pictures in mind of a monastery garden in a non-desert country: stone arches, thick green, bees in the shrubbery, sweet damp air.
The monastery garden can't have been so big and lush actually as it was in my imaginings: the abbey is crammed into some fairly tight space in the old town in Brno.
But what big people the local heroes in this little city are: when Mendel died, the organist at his funeral was Leos Janacek, who taught at the Brno conservatory and wrote operas that are staples of the international repertoire. The present-day counterpart of the conservatory in Brno is the Janacek Academy for Music, where Ludvik Kundera taught piano and musicology, and his son Milan grew up to be a famous novelist. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Eat your heart out, Fort Wayne. This deep layering of culture here is like layers of old soft leaves under foot, keeping the world from looking too much like a moonscape, cushioning your contact with the hardness of the world underfoot, sometimes concealing holes where you can break your ankle. (Milan Kundera's first novel was The Joke, in which a student writes a political joke on a summer-break postcard to a girl and in consequence is sent to forced labor in the mines. The jokes in these parts can end badly.)
The great mathematician Kurt Gödel grew up here in Brno. Gödel is the incompleteness-theorems man, the man who put into mathematical-proof form the statement (so incompatible with earlier beliefs in unlimited progress) that there are things it is impossible to know. There are logical problems it is impossible to solve--not just temporarily, because we haven't go there yet, but permanently, in the nature of things.
**
There are problems that can't be solved, and they aren't only mathematical. The local lightness of heart, the laughter and forgetting, has to float over the usual historical abysses. The Spilberk fortress, that sits so picturesquely above the town, was the worst political prison in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Which was saying something, though it wasn't a gulag or an extermination camp.)
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| Spilberk, Brno. Photo by Petr.Adamek, Wiki Commons. |
Namesti Svobody, Freedom Square, had a brief career as Adolf Hitler Square in times past (also Franz-Joseph Square, and Big Square, and Victory Square, and I do not know what all), and most of the city's fairly numerous Jews died in Theresienstadt.... Terecin, the town is now; just as Auschwitz, just over the Polish border, is Oswiecim. The German names are kept for the death camps, while the towns themselves have retreated, understandably, into their old Slavic names.
Brno had once been predominantly German-speaking, but by the end of World War II quite a few of the ethnic Germans--those who had the means and the wit--had cleared out, knowing that nothing good was coming for them at the war's end. Twenty-some thousand Germans were left: mostly old folks, small children and the mothers of small children, people who weren't so mobile. A few weeks after the war's end, they were rounded up and marched hurriedly and somewhat brutally to the Austrian border, as part of the wave of ethnic cleansing that swept through eastern Europe after the war. Some died along the way; more died in the border camp where they were stuck when the Austrians wouldn't let them in. Lack of food, lack of sanitation, dysentery epidemic; some deliberate killing by the locals.
Brno has, in civilized fashion, expressed regret about these things. The old synagogue has recently had a big renovation and seems to be flourishing. A memorial has been set up to the post-war deportees, near where the march to the Austrian border started. It's in the St. Thomas abbey garden, where Mendel grew his peas.
Lightness of heart. It is hardly decent to joke about some things, but even in dead-serious matters, a little comic trickery is not such a bad thing. The Thirty Years' War started in Bohemia and devastated much of the Czech lands (murder, pillage, plague, starvation). Brno was besieged by the Swedes during the war but held out--only just. Both city and besiegers were reaching the end of their resources and, as the story goes, the commander of the besieging forces said one day that if the walls weren't breached by the time the noon bells rang, the besiegers would move on. The walls were very near to being breached, so the jokers in the city rang the bells early, before the worst could happen, and the Swedes pulled out to plunder elsewhere. As the story goes.
This playing with time is commemorated on Freedom Square by a very phallic-looking astronomical clock (resemblance sometimes enhanced, I hear, by a condom-like plastic covering that is used to protect it when there are rowdy-big-crowd sporting events).
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| Brno Astronomical Clock. Photo, Pavel Sevela, Wiki Commons. |
The wittiness of the public sculpture is part of Brno's decidedly non-provincial character. (Public sculpture in American cities of comparable size tends to be a mix of bland abstractions and children-and-animals kitsch.) We mosey on to Moravian Square, where the sculptural program celebrates the cardinal virtues: the qualities you need to run society. Courage, Wisdom, Moderation, Justice.
This modern-day representation of Jobst, Margrave of Moravia (fifteenth century) is supposed to represent Courage.
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| Courage, by Jaroslav Róna, Moravské náměstí, Brno. Photo, M. Seadle, 2017. |
Courage? Who knows. Ambition, at least. Margrave Jobst gets some good press in these parts because he did well for himself, starting out with just Moravia but later picking up additional titles and property: Duke of Luxemburg, Elector and Margrave of Brandenburg. (Moravia had some money, and the cousins who owned rights in these other lands were willing to pawn them for ready cash.) The Luxemburg lands were worth something; Brandenburg wasn't, really, except for the electoral title, and Jobst let Brandenburg fall into anarchy.
The cousins needed cash to pay for their imperial ambitions, and Jobst himself, as a nephew of the previous emperor, also caught the bug. At one point Jobst ran for emperor against his younger cousin Sigismund (the one who had pawned Brandenburg to him). He got four of the seven electoral votes (presumably including his own), and Sigismund only got three; but then Jobst died very suddenly (suspicion of poison, but there were all sorts of reasons why people died suddenly in the fifteenth century), and Sigismund ended up as emperor after all. The cities of Brandenburg sent a delegation to Emperor Sigismund saying: It's a disaster here! Send us a new margrave who will clean up the place! Sigismund sent them one Friedrich Hohenzollern, which of course was the beginning of a long story, but then practically anything is the beginning of a long story.
The Jobst statue is referred to locally as The Giraffe.
Nearby there is a rather restrained water fountain representing Temperance or Moderation. A relief map of Brno during the Thirty Years' War represents Wisdom or Foresight (reference to the locals tricking the Swedish besiegers).
Here is Justice, which has given rise to much speculative interpretation.
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| Justice, by Marius Kotrba, Moravské náměstí, Brno. Photo, M. Seadle, 2017. |
Are we supposed to see that justice is anonymous (the faceless figure), not a respecter of persons? Or that justice is difficult (the weight of the block being lifted)? Or that the little fountain springing up under the heavy block seems to lift it as effectively as the over-muscled bronze figure? (Justice is something that springs up from below, from the people?)
Locally the sculpture is called something like "an official stealing a machine."
Somewhere hereabouts is also a monumental sculpture representing the Victory of the Red Army over Fascism, but we seem to have missed it; it may be away for repair.
**
The main character in Roth's Kapuzinergruft, a Viennese of Slovenian descent who has gone to visit friends in Zlotograd, a tiny town in Galicia (now Poland or the Ukraine), observes that the only coffee-house in Zlotograd didn't look any different from his preferred cafe in the university quarter in Vienna. "I had seen the same in Agram [now Zagreb, in Croatia], in Olmütz [now Olomuc, in the Czech Republic], in Brünn [Brno], in Kesckemet [now in Hungary], in Szombathely [also Hungary], in Ödenburg [now Sopron, Hungary], in Sternberg [who knows], in Müglitz [now Mohelnice in the Czech Republic]. The chessboards, the dominos, the smoky walls, the gaslights, the kitchen table in the corner by the toilets, the blue-aproned maid, the country policeman with the yellow helmet who stepped in, an equal mix of authority and embarrassment, and shyly leaned his rifle with its fixed bayonet almost in the umbrella-stand, and the card-players with whiskers like the Emperor's and round collars: all this was home to me. It was something stronger than having only one country; it was wide and diverse, but familiar and homelike ..."
All this was lost he says, in the "great war, that we call the World War--rightly, to my mind, not because the whole world was involved in it, but because in consequence of it we all lost a world, our world."
**
More worlds were lost later. But, as Autolycus the pickpocket says in The Winter's Tale,
Jog on, jog on, the footpath-way,
And merrily hent the stile-a,
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a.
Laughter and forgetting.
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| In Brno. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017. ("Jednota" means "unity.") |
We stop at a cafe, not the century-ago standard-issue Austro-Hungarian type (mostly long gone), but something lovely of its kind. Both indoors and outdoors it is moderately full of young people working on their laptops, singly and in groups: not crowded, not rushed, but a bit intense. The place (Kafec by name, if I remember rightly) is a holy temple to caffeinated drinks.
Later in the year Kafec puts out a press release on its website saying (in the automatic-translation version): "As the first in the Czech Republic we prepare Naked espresso. What is different about?"
It seems that "what is different about," is that with this type of machine the coffee encounters less metal on its way to the cup, so there are no flavor faults due to metal temperature fluctuations or to the oily coating left on the metal from making the previous cup. As the machine translation says, "Naked espresso is a hit especially in specialty cafes in London. There, the coffee lovers can literally defeat it. [Don't ask me what this means, I can't read the Czech.] Even in the Czech Republic, you will find a few places where you can get the coffee you like. But it's hard to get to her normally."
In the coffee shops I used to live near, some thousands of miles west of here, there was an emphasis on having new drinks: a new syrup flavor to drown the coffee taste, new combinations of ingredients, new names. As for high-quality basic espresso (no caramel syrup, no soy)--well, "it's hard to get to her normally." Here, in contrast, there is an emphasis on doing the old things, the world-foundational things like plain espresso, exactly right. There is something touching about this.
It was hot, we had pitchers of cold tea floating full of apple and lemon slices (not a new drink: it's grandmother stuff in this part of the world). We wandered about afterwards in the mellowing evening, nowhere in particular, saying, Isn't this interesting, isn't this lovely, isn't this humane, somehow. At least on such a summer's day, Brno is something you want to encourage, something you want to see blooming and flourishing, something you want to contribute to. Lucky Brno.
Eventually, in the evening, we settled in one of the other squares, at a good spot for watching the evening foot-traffic and the high tinted summer sky. After such a massive late lunch, we couldn't imagine having another meal, but--after all, we hadn't had dessert yet, had we? So, a glass of wine and a dish of ... ah, how perfect. Hazelnut ice cream. Hazelnut used to be the default flavor in central Europe, half a lifetime ago: if the little ice-cream stand at the tram stop, or at the top of a steep hill in the park, had only one flavor, it would be hazelnut in those days. Now you can hardly find it, I have no idea why.
***
Next day, off to the races, with various connections in Nowheresville: a Czech train from Brno to Bohumin, tight connection there with a Polish local to Katowice, and then a more leisurely connection with a Polish Intercity to Wroclaw. The train to Bohumin is labeled on our tickets as a Schnellzug, a fast train (this means, not as fast the old expresses or the modern-day high-speeds) ... and how that term brings back the past, before the days of the sealed high-speeds shooting along almost too fast to let you see the landscape.
The old grades of trains are mostly gone now. The days of hazelnut ice cream were the days of Schnellzüge and Eilzüge (the next grade down: literally, "hurry trains," but they didn't hurry all that much), and finally the trains with no speed designation at all, the milk trains (probably a lost term in modern English), what the Germans called Bummelzüge--strolling trains, loitering trains. (I remember little Bummelzüge climbing laboriously in the Austrian Alps, so slow that you could stand out on the open platform between the cars, breathing in great draughts of mountain air.)
Here in the Czech train there are still old-fashioned compartments, in which the curtains smell a bit of all the heads that have leaned on them for years, and the way to make the compartments tolerable on a hot day is to keep the corridor window and the door to the corridor open but keep the compartment window closed. (If you left the compartment window open, things would fly around too much when the train is going fast and your newspaper would land somewhere over the Polish border.)
This train is not often going fast, however; there is track work, and the train is running later and later toward our tight connection in Nowheresville. As we come into the Nowhereseville station, the nice young Czech conductor catches us and points out the window: That's your train, the red one right there. It's a Polish train. (To excuse its shabby appearance, or to explain why it is red and not blue?) So we make a mad dash down the platform and down the stairs and through the tunnel under the tracks and up the stairs again, in the terrific noon heat, and throw ourselves into the Polish train with a minute or two to spare.
This is an old old train: no compartments, no airplane-like rows of seats either, just miscellaneous padded benches bolted to the floor here and there, facing in random directions. Someone has painted a swastika on the trash container by the seats we choose first; it is discomforting, and we move.
The train stops everywhere. Towns, villages, little platforms in the fields and woods, mostly very tidy, freshly painted and swept. Most of the windows are open--without creating an excessive cross-draft, at this speed--and the late summer drifts through the car: smells of goldenrod, cornfields, tinder-dry grass in the noon sun, leafy green smells of forest-shade. We do not stop at Oswiecim, which is not quite on the route but is not far away.
We have a little time in Katowice, where a new station-cum-shopping-mall built with EU money--the modern-day equivalent of the Austro-Hungarian standard station of a hundred years ago--has recently replaced what was said to be one of the scuzziest stations in Europe. In the mall side of the station is a grand provincial-town chocolaterie, as touchingly dedicated to traditional perfections as the coffee shop in Brno. There are hot chocolates in tall clear glasses with translucent layers of fruit-stuff that can be stirred into the chocolate, beautiful as the fake-marble columns in a baroque church. Archangel says that his marble column tastes wonderful. (I, as a perverse chocolate-hater, stick to espresso.)
The Polish intercity from Katowice to Wroclaw has eight-person (that is, rather crowded) compartments, into which the sun beats mercilessly. We will fry if all the windows are not open; so all the windows are open and you hang onto your lighter-weight belongings, and the curtains fly out like flags in the wind. Some people decamp to stand in the shadier corridor. We are too lazy, and sit in the compartment and bake, next to one of those astonishingly beautiful young women that flourish in this part of the world (I remember seeing them by the half-dozen in a Polish neighborhood in London): the most impossibly silver-gilt hair and porcelain complexion, a Fabergé object come alive.
**
The Czechs don't mind referring to Brno as Brünn in the train announcements, but the Poles aren't going to announce Wroclaw as Breslau, which it once was. Breslau was the capital of Silesia, that anomalous land between Poland and various Germanic states (Austria, Saxony, Prussia).
The twentieth century was nastier here than in Brno; there is no laughter and forgetting here. Breslau was something of a nest of Nazi enthusiasts before and during World War II. The German commander of the city, trying to hold out against advancing Russians in the last year of the war, delayed sending the women and children away until the winter was bitter; some eighteen thousand, mostly children, froze to death, trying to find a way to shelter. Half the old town was destroyed by the time the Russians took it, 90% of the western and southern quarters of the city. There were some forty thousand unburied dead. The situation of the city was half-desperate for so long that there was a smallpox epidemic here as late as in the early 1960s.
In 1910, 96% of the inhabitants of Wroclaw had said (truly or otherwise--it was probably a useful thing to say in 1910) that German was their native language. But the Germans were all cleared out after the war, and a new population was installed, in many cases Poles (and others) from the vaguely Ukrainian, vaguely White Russian regions of eastern Poland that the Soviet Union annexed after the war. These people and the old city didn't know each other, they had no common memories, they looked strange to each other.
But they have made a city, and the city has made them: Wroclaw is doing well. Forbes Poland (I didn't know there was such a thing), ranks the city as having the best environment for business in Poland. There's a new Bombardier plant here, an expanded 3M plant, a Nokia office, a Google office. (I'm not saying this in a capitalism-triumphalist sort of way; it's just that jobs are a good thing.) Tourism is big business (overweighted with elderly Germans, at present), but it hasn't really degraded the place yet.
The old city has been handsomely restored, so that it looks like the old city that most of the post-war period's new inhabitants had never seen:
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| Wroclaw. Plac Solny (Salt Market). Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017. |
You walk into squares like this from the nearby brutalities of postwar building and think--ah, we're not in the Austro-Hungarian Empire any more, Toto. We're in a Hansestadt! It could be Lübeck or Wismar or Gdansk or any number of places with access to the North Sea or the Baltic. (Most of them destroyed and rebuilt, like this one.)
Some fine things have been saved from the Renaissance days, however, when the Hansa cities were rich. Here, for example, is a 16th-century relief in St. Elisabeth's church, showing Jonah and the whale. (Not clear whether the whale is in pursuit of Jonah in this scene, or has just burped him up onto shore.)
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| Jonah and the Whale, Church of St. Elisabeth, Wroclaw. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017 |
There's still an interesting arts life here. I pass the opera house (grand 19th-century German-empire sort of place), which is prominently displaying the coming season's program. Early in the fall there is to be a little festival of Polish opera: something by Pendercki, something by Gorecki, and the premier of an opera called Immanuel Kant by the Polish jazz pianist Leszek Mozdzer. (I'm sorry not to get a chance to hear that one: I'm curious. Jazz arias with texts from the Critique of Pure Reason, or ....?)
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| "Passage," by Jerzy Kalina. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017 |
There are distinctive Wroclawian sorts of public art. Here and there you see paintings over bricked-up windows, showing people looking out:
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| In Wroclaw. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017. |
And there are the famous dwarves. Wroclaw was one of the hotbeds of the Orange Alternative, a kind of anarchic-satirical wing of the anti-regime movement of the 1980s. (The soberer side of the movement was Solidarity.)
The goal of the Orange Alternative was to make the heavy-handed enforcers of the regime look ridiculous. At one point [says Wikipedia] "participants were able to provoke the Communist militia into arresting 77 Santa Clauses, or on another occasion, anyone wearing anything orange." The movement put out slogans like "Every militiaman is a piece of art," or "Citizen, help the militia, beat yourself up."
In one phase, they painted graffiti of dwarves over the white patches on walls where the police had painted over anti-regime slogans. In another phase, isome ten thousand people marched through the middle of Wroclaw wearing orange dwarf hats. About a dozen years ago, little bronze dwarves started popping up all over Wroclaw, in honor of the anarchist jokers of the 80s.
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| Dwarf: Kacper the printer. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017. |
Many of the dwarves have some local-historical reference, like the one here. The original Kacper created the first printed works in Polish, here in Wroclaw in the 15th century. He was a canon at the cathedral, which stands in a dreamy-aggressive kind of way on one of the islands in the River Oder, where the river splits and straggles on the north side of the old town.
The cathedral is brick gothic--it could be in Rostock or Stralsund or anywhere along the German coast ... but no, there's something a bit different about it. The spires look too tall for the base, tipsily too tall--ethereal and disquieting.
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| Wroclaw cathedral. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2017. |
They have not fallen down, however. (War damage aside.)
A change of weather blows in while we are in Wroclaw, the temperature drops fifteen degrees during the night. There are dispiriting things here. I don't want to be a chauvinist, and people here had plenty of reason not to like the Germans, but the erasure of the German past of the city is a little creepy. It's much easier to suppose, walking around here than walking around Brno, that the city was never part of a German-speaking world.
It's aggressively Polish, and I do begin to grasp some basics of Polish, which is interesting. "Main," or "central," as an adjective in front of "railroad station," sounds almost the same as in Czech, it's just spelled differently: glowny instead of hlavni. (I wonder how many other words are like this, almost the same between Polish and Czech?) Noun plurals are created by adding y (or sometimes i) to the end of the word. I often pass a billboard that advertises sales and maintenance for computery, laptopy, telefony, and tablety.
**
In a few days we head home: one train to Poznan, and then a change to the Warsaw Express (magenta engine, lavender-striped cars, and all) to get us to Berlin. The Poznan station is shabby (not clear there's a usable interior here?), and the wind on the platform is freezing: it could have been November instead of mid-August. Winter-coat weather, but no winter coats in the luggage.
There is a Polish couple in the Poznan-Berlin dining car with us: he gets through a lot of Jack Daniels in the course of an hour or so, and has endless urgent-sounding business calls on his mobile. The conversations, which do not sound very happy, are mostly in Polish, but I hear German passages here and there, and occasional English phrases. "Marketing team" comes up fairly often. Once in the middle of the stream of Polish, I hear "Shit happens."
It does.
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