Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  Chapter 13

  Ja!

  TO THE EAST of Stará L’ubova, a village called Chmel’nica stands a little way back from the Poprad, against a slope that rises into the hills straddling the border to the north. It’s a quiet place, ordinary-looking. There are a few old wooden houses and a lot of modern ones made of cheap building blocks faced with plaster. There is a shop, a bar, a church and a cemetery.

  There are two clues to Chmel’nica’s unusual past beside the main road. One is a village sign, bidding you welcome in Slovak and in German. Almost opposite is a curious little chapel shaped like an igloo, built in memory of one Johann Nepomuk Helliger, a name with distinctly Teutonic associations.

  If you meet one of the elderly souls going about their business and ask them a question in German – Sprechen Sie Deutsch? will do fine – the chances are they will answer you in German. The form of the language they speak among themselves is archaic, a Saxon relic centuries old, but they speak it with pride.

  In Slovak, Chmel’nica means ‘place of hops’. But to the German-speakers – who are still in a majority, though a shrinking one – the name of the village is Hopgarten, which means much the same. It’s a while since anyone has grown hops there, but people do not forget.

  German emigration and colonisation was one of the great forces that shaped central and eastern Europe in the medieval period. Initially its main thrusts were east along the Baltic, east and south into Silesia, and through Bohemia to Austria. The impetus was strong and sustained. Some stayed, some pushed on: down the Danube to Bratislava (which they called Pressburg) and Buda, across the Carpathians into Slovakia, to Transylvania and Dalmatia.

  They came from different parts of the German-speaking world – Bavaria, Saxony, Brandenburg, Swabia, Thuringia, the Tyrol – for the usual reasons: to escape poverty, overcrowding, land shortages, feudal oppression, to seek a better life. What was unusual about this flow of people into the heart of Europe was that it happened mainly, not as a result of aggressive expansionism, but by invitation. In particular, successive Kings of Hungary – whose outlying territories were vulnerable to invaders and plagued by disorder – believed with good reason that German colonists would bring with them measures of German discipline, technology and industry.

  These population transfers were highly organised affairs. A kind of promoter, usually a merchant, was hired to recruit colonists and organise the settlement. They came in groups structured according to the feudal model: a noble or two (if persuadable), merchants, priests, craftsmen, artisans, peasants. The lord held the land in fief to the Crown and apportioned manors or estates to vassals, who in turn parcelled them out among the lower orders.

  The great advantage of the arrangement was that the German social model was imported in its entirety. It included German law, German class structure, the German system of agriculture, and – where appropriate – specialised technologies, particularly mining. It gave the colonists a sense of security and familiarity, enabling them to get on with their business confident that, however far they might have been from where they or their forbears had started, they were at home. They brought home, in its spiritual sense, with them, creating a corner of Germany wherever they were. Much later the tenacity with which they clung to their sense of national identity was to have appalling consequences.

  The settlers of the Zips region at the northern fringe of medieval Hungary were granted exceptional privileges, because their settlements were intended as an outer defensive ring against any repetition of the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, the havoc and horror of which stayed fresh in the minds of Europe’s rulers long after those ferocious men had ridden their horses back to the steppes. The 24 so-called Zipser towns were allowed a form of autonomy, run by councils of landowners, merchants and senior members of the craft guilds. They had the right to hold markets, to pay their feudal dues in cash rather than by sending men off to fight, to levy taxes on their citizens and customs dues on travellers, and to exercise trade monopolies.

  They did well. A walk around the main square of the town they called Leutschau – now Levoča – gives an idea of how well. In 1321 the town was given the power to require passing traders to spend at least 14 days there, and to offer first refusal on their goods to the locals. As Leutschau stood on the major route for importing Hungarian wine into Poland via the Poprad valley as well as silks and perfumes from the East, the opportunities for milking them were extensive.

  During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the rich burghers of Leutschau built themselves gabled and portalled mansions around the main square. From the leaded windows beneath the overhanging eaves, they looked out on their splendid arcaded Town Hall, and at the less imposing but equally important Weigh House, where the business of assessing tariffs was done. Closing their heavy studded doors behind them, they would take themselves off across the cobbles to the Church of St James to give thanks for their good fortune. They would heave themselves off their knees into their high-backed seats and fix their eyes on the high altar: 70 feet of limewood chiselled and rubbed into an amazing depiction of the Last Supper, gilded in gold and silver to glint in the dusty light. It took the virtuoso carver known as Master Paul thirty years to complete the work. It and the church and everything else was paid for from the proceeds of trade, and the faces of the saints gathered at the table with Christ are unmistakably German burgher faces. They knew their worth, these fellows, and made sure they received their dues.

  In time the Zipser Sachsen, as they were known, began to feel their geographical predicament. Cut off from their cultural bedrock and spiritual homeland, they were marooned on the edge of a Europe continually ravaged by plague, wars and power struggles. Increasingly their privileges and wealth stoked jealousy among the natives who surrounded them. In 1876 the Hungarian Diet decided it was time to flex its Magyar muscles. The special status of the Zips towns was abolished, German schools were closed, and the pressure to Magyarise – Hungarian names, Hungarian language, Hungarian ways – was intensified. To escape economic hardship and repression, thousands of Zipser craftsmen and peasants emigrated, mainly to the United States.

  Censuses taken in 1869, 1900 and 1910 show a steadily declining German population in the Szepes county, as it had been renamed by the authorities in Budapest. Many of those who remained bent with the breeze, taking Slovak or Hungarian names and gradually letting go of the Teutonic legacy. But many did not. The rump clung with the utmost stubbornness to their German identity and the bond between them and their land, the Blut und Boden, Blood and Soil.

  After 1918, German political philosophers, reacting to the catastrophe of the war and the loss of overseas colonies, embraced the concept of Mitteleuropa, a federation of states across central and eastern Europe brought together by a shared sense of German-ness. It was eagerly seized upon by Nazi ideologues who promoted it into a vision of a Greater Germany, extending from the Saar to the Ukraine, and used it to justify military expansion. The doctrine proved fatally irresistible to the beleaguered fringe populations, particularly the Sudeten and Zipser Germans within the borders of the hastily and precariously cobbled together state of Czechoslovakia.

  In Slovakia, most Zipser Sachsen fervently supported the puppet regime of Jozef Tiso, which repudiated ties with Prague and set about deporting Jews with enthusiasm. Their fate was sealed at the end of the conflict by the decision of the Allies to reconstitute Czechoslovakia and allocate it to the Soviet sphere of influence. The Czech president, Edvard Beneš, was given a free hand to organise the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from Sudeten and Spiš. It was a vicious, cruel, horrible business. Many were murdered in a wave of reprisals. Thousands died of disease and starvation in the internment camps. Only those who were able to prove antifascist credentials were allowed to stay. In Slovakia that meant, in practice, that one German village survived. That was Chmel’nica.

  The book given to me by Slavo and Stano Truska gave the official version of its history, which was that the inhabitan
ts of Chmel’nica ‘proved significant anti-fascist attitude’ and were therefore awarded citizenship by a wise and beneficent state. In fact, on two occasions in 1946 Czech troops surrounded the village with orders to round everyone up and deliver them to the internment camp at Stará L’ubova. Each time the villagers were warned by their Slovak and Ukrainian neighbours and slipped away into the forests, where they remained for several weeks. In the end about 100 were expelled, and the rest – 600 of them – were permitted to return to their homes.

  Some of this history is hinted at in the cemetery. The graves are distributed across rising ground to the eastern side of the village, a short walk from the church. The space is terraced, so that the gravestones stand or lie in neat lines. None is more than a century or so old, which suggests that there must be another resting place for Hopgarten’s departed somewhere else, but I couldn’t find it.

  A few of the names – Dekker, Schisser, possibly Lompart – were German, but most were Slovak. The inscriptions told a different story. Most were very simple: Hier Ruhen or Ruhe in Frieden – Here Lies or Rest in Peace. One, cut into a substantial cross, was more elaborate: Gekreuzigter Jesus Erbarme Dich Der Armen Seelen Im Pegfeuer – something about the crucified Jesus being moved to pity poor souls in some kind of fire.

  Walking thoughtfully back to my car I met an elderly, upright man making his way slowly along the street. He was dressed in old clothes, with a flat cap above a nut-brown face. I bade him good day: Guten Tag. He smiled and responded in kind. Summoning my exiguous German for the first time since saying goodbye to Pavel Janicek nearly twenty years before, I asked him if many people in the village still spoke the language. I understood him to reply that the old people – Die Alte Leute – did, but not the young. The village was full of Slovaks. He gestured at one of the new houses. Alles ist kaput, he said, turning away.

  Chapter 14

  Brown coal and spotted trout

  THE DESTINY OF the town of Most, in northern Bohemia, was fixed many millions of years ago when the trees of the great primeval forests fell and decayed. Across a region shaped like the blade of a sickle, stretching across northern Bohemia and south-east Germany into Polish Silesia, an immense stratum of stored energy was deposited. Measured by carbon content, the stuff comes between peat and hard black coal. It is called lignite, or brown coal, and is about the most polluting fuel on earth.

  Compared with its black cousin, brown coal has a much lower burning temperature and releases a much higher proportion of its own volume in carbon waste. Its advantage lies in its accessibility. It lies at the surface or just under. There is no need to sink deep and expensive shafts and dig long and expensive tunnels to get at it. It can just be scooped up and put to use.

  The extraction of lignite began at Most four centuries ago, when the town was called Brüx, and Bohemia was part of the Habsburg monarchy. In the second half of the nineteenth century coal production boomed and Brüx with it. Half a million tons were dug in 1860; 18 million in 1913. It was a grimy place, wholly lacking the splendour and elegance of the spa towns of Carlsbad and Marienbad to the west, but in its dusty way it exhibited the same Germanic sense of self-belief. There was a spacious main square lined with hotels, inns, banks and town houses. There was a brewery, a museum, a theatre, a stately town hall and a lavishly endowed guildhall. The old photographs show a typically solid, respectable, unfancy Habsburg town.

  The old photographs are pretty much all that is left. Brüx became Most when Czechoslovakia was stitched together by the peacemakers in 1919. In 1938, after the German invasion, it temporarily reverted to being Brüx. In 1945, as Most again, it set about cleansing itself of German infection. Around 50,000 German citizens were rounded up and either booted out or set to work in the mines; those, that is, who were not murdered, did not commit suicide (at least 200 did) and survived the internment camps.

  The town went back to its business, digging coal. In time a problem presented itself to the authorities. Surveys showed that the deposits to the east were approaching exhaustion. Plentiful coal remained; the problem was that the town was sitting on it.

  These were not men to allow parochial interests or a bourgeois attachment to old buildings to block the march of progress. It was obvious to anyone that the 100 million tons of coal lying beneath the town were more valuable than the town itself. In 1962 the order came from Prague: Likvidace or liquidation. Down tumbled the town hall, the guildhall, the fine theatre, the solid, sooty burghers’ houses, the rows of miners’ hovels. To replace them, a new Most arose to the west, a bristling forest of square towers and cuboids, steel and concrete emblems of the Marxist–Leninist–Stalinist way. ‘It is a socialist city from its foundations … a representation of our present,’ trumpeted local officials.

  One building alone was spared, the Church of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, which stood on the edge of the mine. This decision was in part a sop to the incurable public attachment to churches. But the Party men also saw an opportunity to demonstrate to the outside world the prowess of socialist technology and an enlightened concern for heritage. The church would be moved in its entirety to a new position, half a mile to the west, where it could continue to overlook the mine.

  Trenches were dug, runners were laid, the interior pillars were girdled in steel and concrete belts, and the whole structure was shifted at a speed of two centimetres a minute on a journey lasting 28 days. The church reached its new resting place on 30 September 1975. It was a proud day in the history of the republic and was celebrated in an official film which opens with soothing harp music and a sequence of shots of the old town being smashed down. The Virgin’s church then appears, standing over the chasm of the mine. A voice, mincing and precise, asks in English: ‘How is a church transferred?’ Bulldozers grind, craftsmen chisel, engineers ponder charts, ‘heroes in overalls’ get the hard work done. Harps twang anew. ‘Let praise be given,’ the voice exhorts, ‘to those who deserve praise’ – foremost among these, according to the commentary, the Czech Ministry of Culture.

  This nauseating piece of propagandist tosh was released in 1988, the year before the Velvet Revolution. Curiously it was still being shown, entirely unedited, when I visited the church in July 2008. The heroes of the Ministry of Culture who had ordered the likvidace of old Most were apparently still heroes. Nor was there any significant reference to the episode in the spacious municipal museum. Having wandered through echoing rooms displaying photos of winter sports, old peasants, wooden churches and the opening of a dam, and inspected the inevitable cabinets of dead birds and desiccated fungi, I demanded to know why the destruction of the old town had been ignored. The museum’s deputy director was summoned. He produced a postcard of nineteenth-century Brüx. I asked if that was all they had. He shrugged his shoulders and looked helpless.

  On a peach of a summer’s day in late May 1990 I took the road that led from Prague towards north Bohemia. I had Smetana in my head, pictures of rolling hills, deep woods filled with birdsong, sweeping fields, market towns of ochre houses with higgledy-piggledy roofs, a gabled tavern with oak benches and tables and flagons of cool, golden beer. I was heading for a place called Litvinov, which was not far from the border with East Germany. Apart from that, I knew nothing about it. I had never heard of the North Bohemian Brown Coal Basin.

  Gradually I became aware of a change in the quality of the light, as if someone had stretched a grubby handkerchief across the sky. The blue was infected by a sickly pallor. I stopped whistling Má Vlast and looked more closely in front of me. Ahead was a different sky altogether, yellowish-grey, menacing, pressing down on the land.

  An airborne warning trembled against my sinus membranes. A few miles further on I was assailed by a dreadful smell of soot, bad eggs, blocked drainpipes and decomposed earthworms, with a sharp tang to it that recalled botched experiments in the chemistry lab at school and an acrid taste that puckered the inside of my mouth.

  The road took me along the eastern flank of Litvinov’s neighb
our, Most. To my right a brown abyss stretched further than I could see, its limits lost in the fog of dust hanging over it. Far below I glimpsed wavering lines of trucks and diggers, like the larvae of caddis flies, crawling across the bottom. Further on, squat cooling towers took shape in the murk, resembling pustules thrust up from an infected limb. A gigantic agglomeration of shapes in steel and concrete began to reveal itself: pipes twisting like snakes in a pit; fat cylinders on their sides, thin cylinders poking up; compressors, turbines, silos webbed with ladders and platforms; storage tanks stained with filth; grimy office blocks. Railway lines threaded their way through this jungle, panting locomotives pulling long lines of rusty red wagons. The whole nightmarish organism smoked and steamed and hissed and clanked and throbbed with an appalling mechanised vitality. I had reached the Czechoslovak–Soviet Friendship Petro-Chemicals Works.

  Litvinov was attached to the northern perimeter of the complex and more than 11,000 of its people worked there. They knew their role in the partnership. They were all used to seeing the sun as a furnace in a purulent yellow sky. They were used to keeping their windows shut even on the hottest day. They were used to regarding the wind as their best friend, because on the days without it the toxic gas shield pressed down on them like a cupped hand. On those days – the worst of them in winter – everyone’s head ached. Mothers kept small children at home; the older ones went to school wearing breathing masks supplied free by the compassionate Party. Everyone in Litvinov knew that the rates of cancers, viral liver infections, parasitic and respiratory diseases, and allergies were far higher than anywhere else in Czechoslovakia, and that life expectancy was years below.