Europe

by Jan Morris

  Wedged between drab tenement blocks off Zlota Street in Warsaw stands a fragment of another kind of frontier. It is only a few yards long, about twenty feet high, but it has a dreadful significance, for it is the last remaining piece of the Warsaw ghetto wall. During the Nazi occupation of Warsaw in the 1940s this construction enclosed a huge area of the city, imprisoning several hundred thousand Jews who were later shipped away in cattle-trucks to be murdered in neighbouring death-camps. I had some difficulty finding it, on a winter morning when the streets were deep in snow and a steady sleet fell upon the city, but when at last I found my way through the slushy gates, yards and alleyways, and saw its ugly brown mass towering there before me, I knew at once what it was. In my imagination at least it was unmistakably a frontier between life and death.

  16 The Curtain

  But the most notorious European frontier of my time has been the Iron Curtain, the ideological barrier which, at the command of Soviet Russia, fell in 1945 from Lübeck Bay on the Baltic to Trieste. It bisected Europe, split Germany into two States, and formed the western borders of East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, as of Communism itself. It was given its name by Winston Churchill, and the Cold War between Communism and capitalism made it hideously suspicious and unwelcoming. Like the Roman Limes, it separated not just States, or peoples, or territories, or histories, but ideas: on the one side of it (the Roman side, in Western eyes) were free enterprise, liberty, accountability: on the other side (the barbarian side, or baboonery, as Churchill would have said) were tyranny, collectivism and deceit. The Iron Curtain was hundreds of miles of barbed wire, watch-tower and minefield, with an awful sameness to it. Travelling from west to east through it was like entering a drab and disturbing dream, peopled by all the ogres of totalitarianism, a half-lit world of shabby resentments, where anything could be done to you, I used to feel, without anybody ever hearing of it, and your every step was dogged by watchful eyes and mechanisms. Some of this was doubtless paranoiac fancy, but much of it was all too true, and wherever you were travelling behind the Iron Curtain it was only wise to assume that your room was bugged, that your friendliest informant worked for the secret police, and that your curriculum vitae was on a file somewhere.

  The Curtain cast a chill far across Europe, and incited every kind of skulduggery, from State espionage to old-school whisky smuggling. I never visited a Communist capital, in the worst years of the Cold War, without feeling myself to be a character in a novel or a movie – with some reason, for newspaper correspondents in those times and places were generally assumed to be agents on the side. When the first spy books of John le Carré appeared, heralding a new genre of fiction and cinema, we all saw ourselves somewhere in their pages or sequences. On a journey to Budapest once I was asked by a friend to take a package of books to a diplomat serving in one of the embassies there. I did not ask what the books were, and asked no questions either when it was suggested that I hand them over at a rendezvous in the middle of the Chain Bridge, linking Buda and Pest across the Danube, lately rebuilt after its destruction by the German Army. It was just like a film. Promptly at the appointed time I started out across the walkway of the bridge, and presently I became aware of a particular figure approaching me among the pedestrians from the other end. I saw both of us as it were through a long-focus lens, shimmering a little, the distance distorted as we neared each other. We met. We exchanged compliments. We shook hands. I handed over the package, and to dark portentous music – all drums and cellos – I returned to the Buda shore as the credit titles rolled.

  17 Into the new world

  One of the most theatrical manifestations of the Iron Curtain occurred if you drove northwards out of eastern Austria towards the then Czech city of Bratislava. There the wire and watchposts of the Communist frontier were backed immediately by one of Europe’s most spectacular housing developments. Right and left beyond the frontier, masking the horizon as far as one could see, extended the vast new town called Petržalka – a communal forest of high-rise tenements, a tundra of concrete, treeless, chimney-less, spire-less, all new, all right angles, one block in merciless enfilade behind another. It was a declaration of a brave new world, where nothing was frivolous. More than 100,000 people had been resettled in this living-machine: between the blocks you might just make out the old towers of Bratislava over the Danube, and the burnt-out fifteenth-century castle on its hill.

  18 Enjoy yourself

  Even going into Yugoslavia, in the Communist Tito’s day, could be a disheartening experience. I often did this out of Trieste. In the days when the Iron Curtain still stood, but Communist Yugoslavia had opted out of the Soviet system, people from all the Yugoslav republics came to Trieste at weekends to shop, sell things or engage in under-the-counter transactions. On Sunday nights they went home again, loaded with cookers, televisions, videos, toys and clothes, until their stuffy buses were jam-packed with boxes and packages, and there were bundles under the seats, and clothes in plastic bags hanging from the roofs, and the faces of the shoppers looked out from their windows like refugees on the move. Rogues and opportunists of every kind came too, dealing in gold and jeans and other gilt-edged commodities of the day, so that when the time came for them to go home again the Yugoslav frontier officials were less than relaxed. It took many hours, on a Sunday night, to get into Yugoslavia. I can see now the hundreds of cars lurching and overheating in the gathering dark, the ad-hoc hamburger bars beside the road, the occasional bully-truck forcing its way through by sheer weight and horsepower, those pale weary faces at the windows of buses, and at last the dim-lit frontier post, and a joyless official with a red star on his cap. A slow flicking through the pages of our passports, a silent gesture of release, and away with us into the dark Communist half of the continent. ‘Cheer up,’ I said to the frontier official once. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ the man lugubriously replied.

  19 Warmth in a frigid world

  Behind the Iron Curtain, however, within what President Reagan called ‘The Evil Empire’, frontier posts between the various subject States could be islands of unexpected cheerfulness. I suppose there was always a faint hope that things might be brighter in the next of the People’s Republics. I remember with pleasure taking notes in a café at a lesser border post among the woodlands between Czechoslovakia and Poland, both of them then in the depths of Stalinist oppression. How it revivified me, after a few weeks among the metropolitan apparatchiks! Excited students tumbled out of buses beneath the dark trees, cluttered with sleeping-bags and backpacks; businessmen in wide black hats like villains in old thrillers sat about doing murky things with banknotes; big Polish truck-drivers in leather jackets drank flagons of beer, sometimes joined by policemen with what we used to call burp guns on their shoulders; and more or less camping out on the edge of the forest, all around the border post, was a shifting audience from the local village, fine plump mothers, adorable little girls with pigtails, just watching the show. ‘Change money?’ dubious loiterers occasionally asked me – always a leitmotif of travel in eastern Europe; and although in those days I preferred not to take the risk, having had a nasty scare in Warsaw once, still the black-market inquiry gave me, like the show and bustle of the frontier itself, a warm sense of collusion in a generally frigid world.

  20 On the edge

  Within a loop of the Curtain stood the easternmost place in West Germany, in the days of the Cold War. It was a small fishing-village called Schnackenburg, in Lower Saxony, built in a bend of the River Elbe which there formed the frontier between the two Germanies. This really seemed like the edge of civilization. It was a delightful little place, all by itself on the river’s bank. It had a fishing-harbour, and a small market-place shaded by chestnuts, and a couple of streets of pleasant wood-and-brick houses. All around was green farmland, and the village was protected from river floods by a high levee, in the Mississippi manner. Up there, if you looked behind you to the west, you would see the village sheltered snugly behind its grassy embankment, a family-look
ing place where everyone knew everyone else, and the men met genially in the evening at the inn, or gregariously tended their nets and outboard motors in the harbour, and the small boys messed about at the water’s edge, and the women gossiped over their washing-lines – a little epitome of old-fashioned riverine Germany. If you looked to the east, though, over the wide river, you seemed to be looking at nowhere. Over there the scrubby lowlands, speckled with the odd thicket of willow, looked dank, desolate and possibly land-mined. It was as though nobody went there any more, as though some grim catastrophe had drained the life from the countryside. There were many places in eastern Germany then which had not seen a foreign face, Russians apart, since the 1930s. The two banks of the Elbe were like different worlds, and now and then a grey patrol boat of the Communist DDR – the Deutsche Demokratische Republik – cruised watchfully upstream, maintaining the distinction.

  21 The Wall

  The apex, the epitome and the most public shame of the Iron Curtain was the Berlin Wall, which for twenty-eight years separated the western half of the old German capital from the eastern, and stopped the people moving from one part to the other. Each half was an ideological surrogate: the one of Washington, the other of Moscow. The civic effect was bizarre, and made nonsense of a great city. All the old centres of power were in the East, while West Berlin was in effect a city of suburbs. It was as though London were to be divided by a frontier running north to south through Hyde Park Corner. Whitehall, Buckingham Palace, the City of London would be in one part, while the other would have as its epicentres Knightsbridge and Sloane Square. All the pomp would be on one side, most of the fizz on the other. Sidling squalidly through the city, scrawled with graffiti on the capitalist side, hideously blank on the Communist, the Berlin Wall put a seal upon this idiocy, and might have been deliberately designed to discredit what it stood for. I always used to think that if Communism had evolved a sense of humour the ideology might have succeeded, but it remained profoundly laughless from start to finish, and the Berlin Wall was its proper artistic memorial: not only overbearing, and dogmatic, and ugly, and unkind, but impregnated in its every foot with a complete absence of merriment. It accurately emblemized, for all the world to note, the contrast between the Communist and capitalist ways of life.

  I well remember crossing into East Berlin for the first time in the 1950s, before the Wall went up, and seeing before me as in some fearful fantasy, more UFA than Hollywood, the vast and colourless space of the still uncompleted Stalinallee (later to be renamed Karl-Marx-Allee) . It seems in my memory to have been all dark, without street lights at all, certainly without trees, only the awful hulks of new rectilinear buildings, one after the other down the enormous highway, all treeless, all lifeless, all loveless, all humourless, all phantasmagorical. No less vividly do I recall coming the other way, out of Russia through the DDR into the West. Then, as I remember it, having passed through the morose inquiries of the East German checkpoint and the hardly more engaging inspection of the American, I seemed to come up against a wall of light, a hallucination precisely the opposite of the one on the other side – everything dazzling, colourful, effulgent, inviting. I did what many travellers did in those days, when they came to Berlin out of the Soviet Union: I took a taxi straight to the Hilton Hotel and asked if they would mind keeping my tin of Caspian caviare in the kitchen freezer. Such were the contrasts the Berlin Wall was so perversely determined to emphasize.

  22 Making up for things

  The Communist system looked ghastly to the outsider, and was hideously cruel to many of its citizens, but it had its compensations. When it collapsed, plenty of its elderly subjects would miss it, and go on voting for its electoral candidates. Jobs were generally secure, in the lands of the informers and the political police, pensions were paid, there was little public crime, behave yourself and you were generally left alone. Even among the dissidents there was the tingle of excitement that went with danger, and I had a lot of fun with people behind the Iron Curtain, even in the most frightening years of Stalinist oppression. As the Bulgarian novelist Ivan Vasov declared, during the nineteenth-century Turkish occupation of his own country, oppression can make people happy – deprived of political liberty, they make up for it in life, love and music.

  23 Celebrations

  Anyway, the Iron Curtain was lifted in the end, and the dreadful Wall came down. In 1990 I peered through one of the first holes in it, and saw on the other side two soldiers listlessly kicking a steel helmet around a dusty yard, as in a morality play. The whole world shared the excitement when the deprived East Germans came swarming in their thousands through the abandoned check-posts in their wretched little Trabant cars, popping and smoking and breaking down among the svelte modern motors of the West. I found this spectacle infinitely pathetic, especially when one saw a sweating paterfamilias from East Berlin, helped by his embarrassed children, desperately pushing his stalled car out of the traffic – his wife looking cross in the front seat, BMWs swarming all around. Still, it was delightful to be able, in those early months, to swan at will across that once implacable border, and I recall with pleasure a Sunday morning beside the Müggelsee, in a corner of East Berlin that would have been depressing indeed a few weeks before, and was overlooked still by grim black factories of the Workers’ Paradise. Walking through the woods there that day I heard a strain of German music – ho-ho, thump-thump music – and presently found at a waterside hotel several thousand East Germans celebrating their emancipation – laughing, singing, dancing, beer-drinking, one band playing the old oom-pah-pah, the other exploring the less raucous fringes of rock. All was comradely and sentimental, the very spirit of Gemütlichkeit.

  24 Pollution

  The next day I had a meeting with two Berlin officials, one from each side of the abandoned barricade. The man from the west was dressed in the coolest Western style, and gave me an elegantly embossed visiting-card with translations in English and Japanese. The man from the east wore an ill-cut dark suit without a tie, and offered me only a piece of pasteboard with his name typed upon it, and a crookedly stamped logo on the back. It was to be many a year before the effects of the Iron Curtain were dispersed. You were no longer threatened by secret policemen when you passed the shadow of the Curtain, but you felt yourself oppressed still by a sense of hangover – a frayed, bloodshot, badly cut, grubby feeling. Some of it really was grubbiness. Many of the old frontier towns of the Communist world were horribly run-down, their buildings peeling and unpainted, their streets potholed, their clothes dowdy, their wattages low as ever, and everywhere that depressing lack of colour. On their outskirts, factories like mills from the Industrial Revolution still belched their soot, while the cars and trucks on the roads pumped black exhaust smoke into an atmosphere that was already opaque. Monotonous estates of high-rise tenements loomed over historic cities. A squalid mafia proliferated. It was pollution of every kind, and I used to feel that the very minds of those places had been made soiled and sordid, after so many years of degradation. If you crossed from Austria into Czechoslovakia at the start of the 1990s the immigration people were civil enough at the frontier, and no armed guards brandished their Kalashnikovs ominously around your car, but when you drove away an unexpected kind of functionary still let you know that you had crossed the old Iron Curtain. In twos and threes along the road the prostitutes stood in welcome, some bunched together in bus shelters, some thumbing trucks, most of them just hanging around kicking their stiletto heels – they called the road to Prague in those days ‘the longest brothel in the world’. But at least the women smiled. That was something.

  25 From a speech by Václav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia, 1 January 1990

  We live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learnt not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves … The [Communist] regime reduced gifted and autonomous people, skilfully working in their own country
, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine …

  26 Old hotels

  It was surprising how quickly, nevertheless, I began to find hotels of the former Communist Europe downright nostalgic. Some, of course, were very soon internationalized, and became much like hotels anywhere in the West – the Bristol in Warsaw, for whose management, back in the 1950s, I had banged out a simple brochure on my portable typewriter, presently became a member of the Leading Hotels of the World association. But I rather missed the old hotels, the Party hotels, the bugged and commissared hotels. I still come across one occasionally, in some less than completely reconstructed People’s Republic, and when I check in there back it all comes, at least in memory! Here is the stony-faced receptionist demanding your passport. Here is the sly porter wanting to change your money. Ahead of you down the brown corridor with its wrinkled carpet and forty-watt bulbs, as you are conducted to your room, strides the statutory burly figure with his coat slung over his shoulders and a mock-leather briefcase in his hand. On tables all around are distributed the ill-printed hotel brochures, not unlike the one I wrote for the Poles, with their pages decoratively pleated, like napkins. Armies of fraternal delegates have walked these passages before you. KGB squads have skulked about up here. And when you reach your room at last, dim and stuffy at the back of the building, why! it is the very room you had all those years before, in the days when you could still see the big red star shining from the House of the Party over the rooftops. ‘Sixty blogods to the dollar,’ the porter urges once more – ‘you won’t do better than that’: and ‘OK,’ you say this time.