Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  All eyes were on the officials on the podium as one of them began reading a long statement in Czech. Through years of habit, I turned towards the back of the room where I noticed an upper door quietly open and two figures emerge on to a small ‘private’ dais behind and above us. One, a thin white-haired man in his seventies, looked familiar. I realized I had seen him several times in the Palais Czernin where he had escorted me to meetings with Foreign Ministry officials. Then, as now, he wore the faded blue uniform of a ministry beadle. He had spoken neither English nor much German, but we had exchanged some pleasantries in Russian. He was obviously an educated man but apparently of no significance in the hierarchy of the ministry. As I looked at him now it was his companion who arrested my attention: a stocky man in his late forties, wearing a coat and trilby hat, as if he had only dropped in for a few minutes to check things were running smoothly and would not be staying long. This man silently watched the men on the stage while the Czech official deferentially bent and whispered into his ear.

  There were simultaneous French, German and English versions of what the podium politicians were saying in Czech. The Foreign Ministry official was therefore clearly translating into another language: Russian? I asked myself, who kept their Soviet-style trilby hats on their heads indoors in 1989? Who commanded this kind of special treatment from the old hands of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs? Everything about this man’s clothes and demeanour suggested a senior Russian official. I was almost certainly looking up at the Soviet ‘diplomat’ who had delivered Gorbachev’s ‘greeting’ to the Central Committee a few days earlier. If this was right I was also looking at the son of the Soviet diplomat who in 1968 had been directly responsible for urging Moscow to snuff out the Prague Spring. At the very least, here was proof that Moscow was carefully watching the progress of political events. ‘Ottokar’ had as usual been well informed; Moscow was leaving nothing to chance with these ‘Czech bunglers’.

  In East Berlin, Politburo members were being threatened with arrest. Would Prague go the East German route or would it go the more conciliatory Hungarian route, or, as ‘Ottokar’ put it when we next met, the German route in a Hungarian way? Would Prague’s evaluation of 1968 give the Soviets the window of opportunity to ‘deprive the West of an enemy’? As the press conference drew to an end, the two unnoticed observers discreetly retired through their private door. A system was falling, an ideology was being buried and the map of Central Europe was about to be remade, but the head of the KGB in Prague still possessed certain privileges. He vanished as silently and unobtrusively as he had appeared.

  Walking back to the Alcron Hotel I saw for the first time in ten days a policeman in Wenceslaus Square. Fog sealed the side streets and the air was again heavy with the unmistakable, almost incense-like smell of burning brown coal. For the first time in many days I was asleep before 3.00 a.m. The following morning I read in Rudé Právo that ‘Ottokar’ had been promoted to be head of Četeka, the national news agency. His trip to Moscow had obviously been successful. The following day when I visited him it was in the opulent panelled room on the fifth floor of the news agency’s headquarters. A large portrait of Lenin still hung on the wall above his desk. He was at the heart of what colleagues called ‘the nuclear forces of the Czechoslovak media’. That morning, he had called his 1,700-strong workforce together and told them that he wanted to make the news agency ‘open, independent and above all free from government interference’. They had stared at him in amazement and disbelief.

  That afternoon I stopped at the Franciscan church and watched a painter high up under the dome swing on a rope across the sanctuary, trying to recover a brush that had fallen 20 feet below him and lodged behind a statue of a Madonna. The reformist Czechs would have to engage in similar acrobatics to navigate the new world they were now entering. Already in the Alcron Hotel, the Czech national tricolours were vanishing from the waiters’ jackets and, even though Christmas decorations were being put up, the cameras which had covered every corner of the foyer were still firmly in place, a vivid symbol of the totalitarian state. We fondly imagined they would soon be dismantled along with the rest of the state apparatus of repression and surveillance, not knowing that within a generation such cameras would become de rigueur throughout many parts of the West.

  The following day I took a train for Berlin and that same evening wandered under a full moon through the deserted gardens of Sanssouci in Potsdam with only a single swan and some ducks for company. That idol of Victorian England, Frederick II of Prussia, cast a long shadow over the events of these days. Would it be long before the spirit of the Prussian hegemony stirred again? A nearby market in the centre of Potsdam conjured up a harmless picture of an almost fairy-tale Germany. Lantern-lit stalls were selling tin soldiers and wooden toys while a group of young children chanted, ‘Einheit, Einheit: wir wollen Einheit’ (Unity, unity: we want unity), with a sweetness that only eight-year-old girls in plaits can produce.

  That these sentiments did not meet with universal approval beyond Germany’s borders was brought home to me a few days later when I was asked to file a story on the meeting in Berlin of the British, French, Soviet and American ambassadors to West Germany. The story was really nothing more than a caption to a photograph of these diplomats in front of the Four Powers’ Kontrollratsgebäude (Control Commission Building). Yet this meeting was fraught with symbolism. The photo-opportunity on 11 December was a visual coup de théâtre, warning the Germans that reunification and the dramatic de facto changes to West and East Germany’s sovereignty were as yet neither legal nor permanent. Despite the euphoria and the public demonstrations of the previous weeks, the four victorious powers of the Second World War were still legally in control of Berlin.

  This seemingly harmless meeting was a shot across German populist bows, an unambiguous call for a pause in the momentum which was building up towards reunification in West German political circles. In his memoirs, West Germany’s Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, recalled this event with thinly veiled fury:

  The ambassadors felt it correct to organize a photo-opportunity recording their meeting together at this time. What did they intend by this démarche? A warning to the Germans? … How had it come to this photographic recording of their meeting? … Was this the Allies’ answer to the peaceful revolution of the DDR and the wishes of all Germans for freedom, democracy and unity? … I was deeply perturbed.fn2

  A few days later he angrily protested to the NATO foreign ministers that London and Washington would have to choose whether ‘they wish to speak to Germany directly or discuss Germany with Moscow’.

  Oblivious to these controversies I took a train to the Rhineland to catch a flight back to London for a few days’ rest before heading off to Bucharest. In Romania, Moscow was clearly beginning to lay the charges for the demolition of the Ceauşescu tyranny and yet another seismic change.

  As the train sped south across Germany in the winter dusk, its compartments were empty; even the Mitropa restaurant car was deserted. Outside, a countryside rushed past in which people seemed equally absent. Within a few years, bright lights, modern infrastructure and above all cars would completely transform this landscape.

  Two days later, when the bustle and noise of London appeared remote in time and space from everything I had experienced, I headed off to a routine examination at St Thomas’s Hospital. I dropped into the Duchy Arms for a drink. A group of retired Buckingham Palace retainers who lived on the nearby Duchy of Cornwall estate were discussing the events in Berlin of the previous weeks. They were all in their late seventies and veterans of the Second World War. They, too, had followed the dramas with interest.

  ‘You can’t tell me that there isn’t something wrong with a country like Germany,’ one of them ponderously argued. ‘One moment they are shooting each other for crossing the Wall; the next they are all crying and hugging each other. It just isn’t normal, is it?’ Here was a practical counterpoint to the elation of the last few
weeks. Anglo-Saxon prejudice, or cold realism in the light of bitter experience? Who was I to question the views of those who had also lived through some of Germany’s dramas? I hoped they were wrong, but only time would tell.

  A few hours later my exhausted enthusiasm for the events I had witnessed was given a check of a more enduring nature. Two doctors at St Thomas’s carefully examined my weary body and immediately diagnosed acute appendicitis. The revolution in Bucharest would be one I would miss. For me too, the Cold War was over.

  Afterword

  In the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 from Mitteleuropa, the map of Europe was remade. Two important creations of the 1919 post-Great War settlements, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, were dismantled – the former peacefully, the latter violently. It was the nineteenth-century Czech historian František Palacký who sagely predicted that once the Habsburgs left Central Europe their place would be taken by competing Russian and German influence. The experience of the Warsaw Pact countries in the twentieth century and more recent events in Ukraine in the twenty-first have underlined the truth of Palacký’s prediction. In that sense the Cold War was just a phase in the life of a part of the continent which continues to be shaped by historical and geographical constants. When the cost of the Cold War arms race threatened to cripple the Soviet Union, its leadership realized it had no choice but to withdraw from its defensive glacis in Central Europe, but it would be a mistake to imagine Moscow’s influence in these parts ceased at the moment its formal power retreated.

  Within Palacký’s geopolitical parameters, material progress in Central Europe has been enormous since 1989. Warsaw embraced Anglo-Saxon capitalism and flourished, becoming in the space of a few years a prosperous European capital. Berlin followed a similar path and began (tacitly) positioning itself once again to become the rival of Paris and London. Even Prague demonstrated that it was no slouch when it came to the heady new world of private equity and venture capital. The Alcron Hotel, whose faded charms were home for so many correspondents during the Cold War, survived for barely three months after the Velvet Revolution. When it reopened after radical refurbishment a year later, we looked in vain for the stained-glass and faded art deco charm which had given the hotel its unique atmosphere. The Alcron’s interiors had survived intact the Nazi occupation in 1939, the arrival of the Red Army in 1945 and the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, but against the armoury of ‘turbo-capitalism’ following the 1989 Velvet Revolution it had proved utterly defenceless. Its bland interiors today could be equally appropriate in Hong Kong or Los Angeles; any hint of the connection with the pre-war world of Masaryk’s Prague has been erased.

  Very few elements of daily life in Central Europe were impervious to these types of changes. Continuity, however, did not entirely vanish: the duties of a professional musician for example remained more or less unaltered. Passing through the Slovene capital in 2005, I lunched with former colleagues and was pleasantly surprised to be offered back my old job at the Ljubljana Opera House, as if nothing had changed in the intervening twenty-five years. The next season’s performances of La Bohème still required a first horn player. Despite the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, most of the orchestra were those with whom I had made music a quarter of a century earlier.

  But if the life of a professional musician had not changed significantly since the end of the Cold War, the former douceur de vivre of the foreign correspondent’s world was shattered once developments in modern communication took hold. Paradoxically, while logistics became easier, the burden of competition and costs increased. The small band of British foreign correspondents behind the Iron Curtain may have competed with each other almost as much as we tried to outwit the ideological enemy, but at least we fought alone, untroubled by the imperatives of the digital age with its blogosphere, tweet-decks and demands for instant response. We may have had a pistol pointed at our heads each afternoon as we struggled with deadlines, but we rarely spent more than an hour or two a day at our ‘desks’. In the two and a half decades since I last penned a dispatch, the internet and smartphone with camera have undoubtedly changed all that.

  As a consequence the modern foreign correspondent faces challenges which were not even part of my generation’s worst nightmares. We could not have imagined our ‘authoritative’ newspapers changing out of all visual (and intellectual) recognition or indeed in some cases ceasing to exist. The modern foreign correspondent can perhaps take only slight consolation from the fact that our old sparring partners, and sometime allies, the diplomatists, have been rendered possibly even more obsolescent by advances in modern technology.

  My professional life in Central Europe began in Trieste in 1979, and Trieste has remained ever since a refuge and inspiration. Whenever, perhaps sometimes to the chagrin of colleagues, I adopted Blanka’s mantra ‘Ich verschwind mich gern’ (I enjoy disappearing), it has usually been to Trieste. I kept in contact with friends there for many years, although gradually, one by one, each has passed away.

  Sometimes death brought significant changes. It was to be more than fifteen years after my first visit to the beautiful Torre e Tasso castle beyond Trieste before I stood in the salotto dell’imperatore at Duino again, gazing out on to the Felsen. Inevitably the wind was blowing under a bright, cloudless sky and once more Rilke’s words came to mind:

  und gesetzt selbst, es nähme

  einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem

  stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts

  als des Schrecklichen Anfang

  (And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart

  I should be consumed in that overwhelming existence

  For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror)fn1

  This time I was alone, standing in a forlorn and empty room. Large squares of brighter paint revealed where the pictures of Venice, Bohemia and Austria had hung. All the Viennese blue-upholstered furniture had been carried away, along with the fine bust of the Archduke Johann and the exquisite portrait of Maria Theresa, all dispersed by the auctioneer’s hammer. Of the sparkling kindness of Durchlaucht Raimondo, there was no longer any sign. An almost French iciness seemed to invest the space.

  The old Prince had died in 1986 and his descendants had apparently given up the idea of continuing the eclectic old Austrian style accumulated over several earlier generations. These rooms which had resounded to our laughter and happy Tratsch were now cold and deserted, the treasures of several hundred years scattered. Where was the desk Rilke had written on? Where were the books the Empress Elisabeth had carefully read, sitting in the old library above the Palladio staircase?

  As I walked between Duino and the nearby village of Sistiana, I stumbled across a small plaque announcing the recent dedication of a newly constructed public square, the Piazza Goffredo Banfield, a modest tribute to the ‘Eagle of Trieste’.

  Banfield had also died in 1986, though not before he had written his memoirs and had been fêted in Vienna. At the reception for its launch, he had cut a dashing figure, dressed in a grey double-breasted suit, cream shirt and midnight-blue tie. He seemed like a sepia photograph in which the only splash of colour was the small red-white-red ribbon of his buttonhole, emblem of the chivalric military brotherhood of which he was the last surviving member.

  Apart from the effervescent Salmona, the habitués of the Bar Danubio had also all departed: Giorgio Voghera, Lina Galli and Piero Kern, as well as their friend Alma Morpurgo. Today, some two decades after Voghera’s death, his writings are finally receiving the critical praise they merit from a wider international audience, although his books still remain unknown to English-language readers. As for Blanka and Gianpaolo Tamaro, whose lives had become intertwined thirty years before I got to know them, they met a poignant end together when Tamaro’s Alfa Romeo crashed in dense fog one winter’s evening near Zagreb. The car had been pulverized by an oncoming lorry less than half a mile from the village of Samobor where Blanka had spent her holidays as a child
with her Feldmarschalleutnant grandfather.

  Perhaps it was Marcus Aurelius, writing in Vienna nearly 2,000 years ago, who best described the curious symmetries in our lives: ‘All things are interwoven with one another; a sacred bond unites them; there is scarcely one thing that is isolated from another. Everything is coordinated, everything works together in giving form to the one universe.’fn2

  I like to think that from the Molo Audace, the Triestine sky remains unfailingly the bluest in the Adriatic, but if its infinite horizon tells us anything it is surely that it is not time which passes but we, the fleeting protagonists of our own modest epics, who, etching out the patterns of our lives, move swiftly on.

  Acknowledgements

  This book could not have been written without the kind support and friendship over many years of the people I encountered in Central Europe. Forty-year-old diaries and a fading memory are modest foundations on which to bring personalities back to life, but it was the presence of those personalities in Trieste, Vienna, Warsaw and Prague which made life along and behind the Iron Curtain so memorable and enriching, and I hope I have described them faithfully in these pages. If I have succeeded in conveying the excitement and reward which arises from chance encounters across different generations, then this book will have succeeded in its purpose.