Eastern Europe, 1991: Letters
by Jack Hoeschler
September 15, 1991-Amsterdam
4:15 am
Dear Fritz and Kristen [Fritz to pass on],
It being quite warm and I being unable to sleep because of the combined effects of jet lag and too big a meal last night, I am using the time to answer the very nice letter sent us (to be read on the airplane) in a very mushy envelope [she to explain to Fritz]. We both miss both of you very much – especially when we are traveling like this. It always reminds us of our trip around the world and the great times we had with you. Rest assured, Kristen, that the two old folks are doing well and do not appear to need your aid and protection – so far at least.
The weather in Amsterdam has been perfect. The hotel Del put us in is also perfect – about 29 rooms in a series of 17th century townhouses on one of the best streets (actually divided by a major canal). We have spent most of our time walking the streets and going to museums like the Van Gogh, the Rijksmuseum (National) and the Anne Frank House. The town is ideal for walking with a very lively streetscape (encouraged, I think, by the 5-story zoning restriction on building height in the center).
Just before dinner last night we were following a Van Gogh walking tour when we stumbled onto the infamous Red-Light District of Amsterdam. It proved to be a signal experience for your mother. We saw two whores standing in the doors of their respective (!) establishments wearing stockings, panties and in one case no bra while in the other case she was pulling her huge breasts out of a bra. In a word, your mother was repulsed to the point that she insisted on practically fleeing the place. Henry Buchwald had commented to me that Amsterdam is nothing but a flesh pot and when I told that to Mother on our first day she couldn’t understand how he could feel like that since our neighborhood was so nice. She is now of the same view and is ready to leave. We will have brunch with a composer tomorrow and even if he urges us to stay for some reason or another, I am sure she will insist on moving on promptly.
Seeing the whores, I was struck with how quickly one could expect to contract AIDS in a place like this. That in turn caused me to think of what a defining event AIDS is for your generation. It is the analog of the birth control pill for our generation. Both are revolutionary in their impact, the earlier liberalizing, and the latter conservatizing (if there is such a word). Paralleling these socio-biological forces are the political revolutions of our respective ages – the collapse of the Soviet empire and the communist system for you, and the Viet Nam war for us. The latter was again a liberalizing (in a way) event (at least when combined with the hippie and anti-war movements) for us, just as the former could be characterized as a conservative force or victory. (One could, of course, make a pretty good counter argument that Viet Nam represented a defeat for Democratic, left leaning hubris that could have been avoided by classical, conservative, realpolitik views (as represented by Nixon). At the same time, the collapse of communism can be seen as a victory of classical economic liberalism over the claims of left-wing central state planning principals which quickly become hide bound conservative and over-reactionary.
Whatever the spin one puts on it, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the quick collapse of communism behind it (foretold by the needs for the wall in the first place?) certainly represents the defining event that will mark the next forty five years at least (unless the speed of modern communications and events will compress sea changes into tighter and tighter cycles).
This leads me to think that Kristen should keep an eye out to staying on the crest of this wave as she looks for a job. It would be nice to find some type of job that puts you at the cutting edge of the development of new economies and (hopefully) democracies in the 2nd and 3rd world. Washington is a good place to be in such a situation – until you get more experience it probably is unwise to think about working somewhere like Eastern Europe. On the other hand, I will be looking for ways for your mother and me to help out where our experience and relative youth should make us useful. Perhaps we can each, in our own way, get on the crest of the wave and ride it for a decade or so.
I conclude then with congratulations to Fritz for having shifted from engineering (what I believe to be essentially a conservative profession) to a more liberal curriculum. In a conservative age I think you need to keep your mind and spirit tuned to more liberalizing influences – certainly science and bioscience and the ecology movement could be the perfect mix of liberal and classically conservative ideals that will be in great demand as the 2nd and 3rd world struggles to clean up the mess left by communism and central planning.
Stay tuned – I will report more as we get deeper into East Germany and Czechoslovakia. In the meantime, keep up the hard work.
Love,
Dad
September 22, 1991- Dresden, East Germany
Dear Jay and Judy,
I am writing fairly long letters to various people in lieu of keeping a journal. If you would, please keep this or give it to Mother when you are finished. I will try to collect them when we get back.
We have been in Dresden for the last two days, staying at a delightful mother-in-law’s apartment in the far west suburb of Radebeul. We found the place through the Tourist Information office in Dresden. There is usually one in each town, and they book private homes, B&B’s and pensions; the rates are better than the hotels (here we pay 50 M/night – c. $30; a hotel with barely comparable space would cost about 200 DM/night). The accommodations are usually better than a hotel, and, best of all, you get to meet the people.
In this case we had some trouble finding it and asked some locals. It turned out they had just gotten married, invited us to their place while they searched out a map, and invited us to their wedding party the next night. We spoke a mixture of English, German and Russian until the party where a significant number spoke fine English.
These were all well-educated, but not rich people. The groom is a forestry engineer, the bride is an unemployed (2/3 of her factory workforce laid off) engineering technician. Their friends and relatives had all gone to the University. On the whole, East Germans (Ossies) are better educated than the Wessies. It was interesting talking about the changes since reunification. They are all concerned about whether they will be able to find work (upon layoff they get 68% of salary for one year). They are concerned that family values and time with the family will slip because of the new pressure to work in a market economy. The problem of what to do with or how to treat communists and Stasi members is large on the horizon. But everyone was very friendly, thoughtful, and generally hopeful. They despair for the Russians without Western help, however….
September 24, 1991--Prague
Please pass on to Fritz and save for the scrap book.
Dear Kristen,
We are in Prague after a very interesting stay in Dresden, East Germany. When we left Amsterdam, we drove east on local roads through pleasant farm and forest areas. We stopped at Paleis Het Loo, a country estate of the Dutch royal family that has been furnished in various styles in different wings so that you can see how people lived in different periods over its 250-year history. It is quite the place because it consciously competed with Versailles as the finest country estate in Europe. The nicest feature was the use of fresh flowers in all the vases (many very large) which gave you the feeling that the place was still lived in.
We then continued eastward across the German border to Münster. It is easy to see how easy it was for the German army to sweep into Holland and Belgium around the Maginot Line. They came so quickly that the Dutch were unable to use their traditional defense – flooding the country by opening the dikes and using their navy to fight the enemy’s army. (It would be interesting to review the diplomatic history of the 1938-’39 period to see why the Dutch did not see the Germans coming.)
Münster is a wonderful city about the size of St. Paul and is the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia state. It is the picture of prosperity and German neatness with wonderful old (or rebuilt to look old) facades and churches and a delightful pedestrian precinct in the central 8-square-blocks of town, it is an urban planner’s dream. It also has a nice university that looks like a good midwestern college – a perfect place to recommend to anyone who would like to study in Germany.
After Münster we drove to Hamelin (Hamelin of Pied Piper fame). It was crowded with tourists, not that picturesque, and we only stayed a few hours before heading to the Harz Mountains – the source of many of Grimm’s fairy tales. We spent the night at Goslar, the seat of early medieval Holy Roman Emperors. It is quite a picturesque place on the edge of the mountains (which are really only about 1000 feet). We did the full round of touring the quaint streets and small churches the next day (including a tour, in German, of the painted meeting room of the Rathaus– the place was worth about 5-7 minutes, but the tour guide went on in great detail about everything for 45 minutes before we could get out). The Germans formed up in various tour groups going around the city studying everything in similar detail. They don’t want to miss a thing. Uncle Frank would have loved it. The final conclusion was that there were plenty of picturesque places in the north of Germany to keep a good tourist just as busy as in the south.
We then headed for the old border between East and West Germany which lay a few kilometers further east. It was interesting making the crossing at a small rural station – the station was now closed but you still had to make a zigzag to get through the check point. Before crossing we drove up the valley along the small stream that apparently represented the actual border looking for a scenic lookout that was shown on our map. We never found it but noticed another poorer road paralleling ours on the other side of the stream – a strange thing for such a small valley. At the top we were able to cross the stream and take the other road down. As we did so we saw that beyond the road (through a 10-meter strip of trees) there was a 1200 meter clearing running the entire length of the valley complete with search lights every 50 meters and two high wire fences. This was the rural counterpart of the Berlin Wall, and it looked like a real concentration camp scene. But now the wire had been removed from some of the fence posts and the light stands and fixtures were all rusted and unworkable. It was nevertheless a very eerie experience.
We drove on to the nearest town when we reached the bottom of the valley and it was like going back in a time zone to sometime in the early 50’s – the war had ended but only a few years before as evidenced by the bullet holes still evident in the sides of buildings and by the ruins that appeared periodically. The roads were very rough and narrow and the houses were all a dreary grey. The cars were the noisy, smoky Trabants that we first heard about when the Berlin Wall first started to crack. After several miles of this grey scene (better suited for a black and white movie on WWII) we headed straight for Berlin by the autobahn.
In Berlin we stayed in a pensione for two nights and then a small hotel (which mother liked better). All the big hotels were booked. We spent time at the Brandenburg Gate and on the Museum Island in East Berlin where all the great old museums were – only trouble was that the great old collections weren’t there (except for Egyptian and Greek ruins in the Pergamon Museum).
We are going to dinner with David Weyerhaeuser who is working in Prague so I must stop for now.
Love,
Dad
Later fragment: Prague continues to delight us with an astounding array of music and theater offerings. Everyone here is abuzz with discussions of the referendum over national unity (i.e., should the Slovaks have a separate state). The weather has been excellent, and the tourists are flocking in from Spain, Italy and everywhere in Europe – we see few Americans.
Jack
Salzburg, Austria
September 27, 1991
Dear Fritz,
This is a continuation of the letter I sent to Kristen with instructions to pass it on to you – would you do likewise with this and then keep them after you are done so we may add them to the scrapbook in lieu of a journal.
When I left Kristen we were in Berlin, having spent most of our time at the old state museums in East Berlin where we could not figure out what had happened to the old collections they were famous for. I am now convinced that what the West did not get (more on that later) was probably shipped off the Moscow or the Hermitage in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).
The last night before we left, we went to Checkpoint Charlie, the site of the only crossing for foreigners into East Berlin. It was quite a sight to see where the wall and the two check points had been. Down the block on the western side is the Check Point Charlie Museum, a somewhat amateurish but still very poignant and effective presentation of the history of the Wall and of the efforts to breach it, to leap it and to bring it down. I had forgotten all the stories of how people tried to get through or over it (by tunnel, by balloon, by car lower than the cross bars of the gates and by numerous other ruses). They also had movies and other information on other freedom fighting groups like Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia and Solidarity in Poland. When you go there, you should definitely spend 2-3 hours in the museum. Some of the stories will bring you to tears.
As we headed out of Berlin the next day for Dresden we decided to stop off at the Dahlem Museum next to the Free University in West Berlin in the southern suburb of Dahlem. It wasn’t given a lot of play in our guidebooks but when we got there we found all of the paintings and archaeological collections that were missing from the Stadt Museum on the Insel in East Berlin. Everything that had been captured by the Western groups was there, and it was an impressive collection, indeed. We stayed there until about 3 pm looking at Old Master paintings and wonderful medieval stuff as well as a show on Aztec art and a bunch of classical antiquities that we couldn’t spend much time on. Clearly, this is the first museum one should see in Berlin. Apparently, it will be moved downtown (still on the west side) in a few years.
After Dahlem, we got directions (and a guided trip) from a West Berliner who had bought an old, ruined castle on the east side on the way to Dresden. We then took the local road (paralleling the autobahn) to Dresden (only about 2 ¾ hours). The highlight of this trip was the fact that the road was cut off by a large Soviet army base which we had to circumnavigate. Apparently only about 50% of the Soviet troops have left and these are in no hurry to leave because life in Germany is better than they will find it in Russia. This is why the West Germans agreed to give the Russians $30 million to build new housing for the troops in Russia.
When we reached Dresden we found that all of the hotels were full but the City Information office lined us up with a woman in the suburbs who had a mother-in-law apartment for us to rent at 50 DM/night. It was after 8 when we started looking for the place and because it was quite far out we had to ask directions several times. The last time we ended up asking a couple who had just been married and as a result they invited us to their wedding party the next night. To make a long story short, we were the hit of the party and met several interesting people as many of them could speak English. I do not believe any of them had met an American before.
The party was interesting because the bride and groom were well educated (he with a technical degree in forestry, and she as an engineering technician) but they were relatively poor by Western standards. They had been living together for 11 years and had a 4-year-old daughter. They were living in a 3 or 4 room apartment over her mother and grandmother in the back of what appeared to be a storage or commercial building which was not open to the street. They had a nice garden in the back however, and that is where the party was, complete with a large pig on a spit and colored lights over the tables. The food was good, and the company included all ages – from babies to grandparents.
I spoke with a scientist who is an assistant to a professor at the University. He appeared to have relatives who had worked for STASI, the secret police. He was sympathetic to the plight of the STASI personnel who are now finding that no one wanted to hire them. He was also concerned about his own job (as was everyone there who hadn’t already been laid off). It is a time of tremendous change for them all and they justifiably fear the loss of some of the values of the communist system, such as a 4 pm quitting time so they can be with their families, and an educational system that appears to be better than that of West Germany. They also fear the materialism of Western values. Most of all they do not know where they will get a job as so many state enterprises are closing. The bride, for instance, has been laid off and is very unsure of where to look for work.
I counseled them not to fear and to look at the construction industry because so much money was being put into infrastructure repair. This is especially the case in their state of Saxony. The thought of trying to get a job out of the area of their training seemed particularly difficult to them, however.
Mother met the niece and nephew of the bride (a girl, Monique, about 18 and a boy, Mark, about 12). Monique would like to come to America to work as an au pair girl and we will speak with Jay and Judy Hoeschler about her. She speaks English well, is very polite and quite smart. Their father is a salesman for an East German computer company and has learned English just by reading it. He too was very friendly. All in all, we found this group of Germans to be very friendly, well-educated and well-spoken, and, we think, quite likely to be successful within a few years after the economy turns around.
After two days in Dresden we drove on to Prague. The bride’s parents drove with us to the border to show us the Saxon Switzerland, an area of interesting sedimentary escarpments about 1,000 feet high south of Dresden along the Elbe River. They were quite picturesque and clearly a favorite spot for technical rock climbers – we saw many of them.
I will leave off with this for now and pick up the story later in my next letter to Kristen.
Love,
Dad
Somewhere on the German Alpine Road between Salzburg and Lindau
September 27, 1991
Dear Kristen,
This is a pickup on our trip. Find out from Fritz what happened in the last half of our Berlin stay and at Dresden. Give this letter to him as well and keep all copies.
Crossing over the border from East Germany to Czechoslovakia was like crossing over from West to East Germany. We had clearly stepped down and back in time in terms of development, quality of roads and apparent economic health. But when we got to Prague, and later when we traveled south of Prague through Bohemia to Austria, we found the situation to equal or possibly even surpass that of East Germany. It all goes to show that it is hard to state fixed opinions based on a short stay of a week.
In any event, when we arrived in Prague we drove around the center of town for a few minutes to get a feel for the place. As we drove into Wenceslaus Square a policeman pulled us over and promptly gave us an $8 fine for driving in the square even though there were a large number of cars around) contrary to a sign in Czech that he pointed to a block away. Apparently, all of the other cars were cabs or had permits from the hotels in the square. There was no talking him out of it.
We then proceeded to the Information Center to find a room. According to the New York Times in July, the best deal was to book into a private apartment or a B&B. After we did so and the agent told us how to get to the apartment, she warned us to park our car at the ramp at the main train station, however, because Bulgarian gangs were stealing western cars in that neighborhood.
Being somewhat slowed but not yet deterred by that news, we drove to the apartment. It was in a typical rundown (on the outside) communist bloc building with dirt in the hallways and poor lighting. There were no cars better than a Trabant on the streets. The landlady was pleasant but spoke no English and little Russian. Our room was clean, but we were to sleep on a roll-out couch that felt like a three ridge mountain range. All in all, it was not a good start for our stay and Mother wanted to leave town immediately.
The situation was saved when we moved the next day to a state-run tourist hotel ($130/night). With further walking around (we left the car at the hotel and took the subway – very clean and fast) we found the city to be quite beautiful (beneath a uniform layer of dirt) and alive with debate about the upcoming referendum regarding unity vs not with the Slovaks. The next night we had dinner at the apartment of a Czech surgeon who was a friend of Eric Nilsson, the attorney for First Trust. The surgeon and his wife were interesting because they regarded the Slovaks as invisible people (the way blacks were and are regarded in America). Mother felt quite sympathetic for the Slovaks and hoped they would succeed.
The next day we met some new music people and composers. None of them knew whether the State-subsidized Fund for Contemporary Czech Music (like the Composer’s Forum) would survive the year, since everything was going bankrupt and the country had more pressing needs for its money. At the same time, we have never been in a city with more music. There were concerts at noon, 3, 5:30 and 8pm in several places around town – mostly classical and many geared to celebrating the Mozart year. The quality seemed very good, notwithstanding the large quantity, and it will be interesting to see if they can maintain this level of effort as the rebuilding process goes on. In any event, the amount of music as well as the number of legitimate theaters left us with an overwhelming impression of the intellectual and artistic vitality of the place. It was clearly stronger than Dresden, Berlin or Amsterdam. We hope it will keep up.
Interestingly enough, the new music people had their heads buried in their own books and tended to disdain all of the other music as “the usual” and “for the tourists.” Once again, these types of specialists fail to see the need to form partnerships with others working in their own field and thus feel (and are) even more isolated.
Even Mother agreed that Prague would be an interesting place to work – especially if they could clean up the air. But she still wants to stall things for 3-5 years. You should try to get here in the next few years if you can because it is truly the center of Europe and you will find it very exciting.
After we left Prague, we drove directly south through Bohemia to Austria. Bohemia looked much better than the area between Prague and Dresden. Unfortunately, the air pollution left a substantial haze over everything. The roads were good, however, (I picked up another ticket for speeding) and we got quickly to Linz, Austria that evening only to find that there were no rooms to be had in the city due to a Bruckner festival. We then headed to Salzburg and found a small town hotel along the way.
The next day we got to Salzburg to find it choked with tourists and too cute for words. After walking around for a few hours we headed westward on the German Alpine Road to Lindau. Halfway along we stopped at a lovely country Gast Haus high in the mountains.
Before that we stopped at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain retreat, and went up to his “Eagle’s Nest” to retrace Uncle Frank’s steps. Not really much to report except a nice view and a rather heavy National Socialist architecture. The Alpine Road is very pretty, however, and we’ll continue to mosey along it tomorrow and try to stay in Lindau with Wolfgang, et al.
Hope all else is going well with your job search. We are planning Thanksgiving in Williamsburg and Christmas at the cabin.
Love,
Dad