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Romania, Germany and Poland. Trip report from BH

Romania, Germany and Poland. Trip report from BH

Old Jul 7th, 2005, 01:52 AM
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Romania, Germany and Poland. Trip report from BH

From 25 May to 19 June I went to stay with two old friends, ladies of my age, and to attend festivals, of film in Romania and of music in Germany. I had a good time, despite being poor at walking. I flew from Gatwick by Easyjet to Budapest at 80 euros, bike included, and had a pleasant cream cake and coffee at Gerbeaud’s glorious café in the city centre (but alas they have added a pub in the London style), and cycled in the afternoon and evening with near the Danube. A night train took me to Alba Julia, where my friend had booked me on a Greek bus to Cluj Napoca. There I stayed ten days, saw two films, and attended three concerts. The concerts were more my style than the films, which had too much violence for my taste. My Romanian friend started to learn English three years ago and has made great progress, helped by family visits to Australia and Greece, where her son was working. She puts me to shame: I failed to learn Russian thirtty years ago, and still have no Slavonic tongue. She re-introduced me to friends of hers in the academic and artistic worlds. Her own income dropped like a lead balloon when she retired from state service soon after the revolution. The same happened to many state servants in those years. In her case, her son is a successful computer consultant in London, and she lives fairly well. One man whom I met again was a writer, columnist and journalist, widely travelled, often paid in dollars, so now able to live in style as he writes his memoirs in retirement (it is time I started on mine). She is as pleased as I by the new government that came in half a year ago. At the festival’s end I took a train south to revisit Brasov, a tri-lingual city that I liked in 1977 and still like. On the train I met a Dutch couple (the Dutch do get about) who had rooms booked with Maria Bolea, a woman praised in the Lonely Planet guide book, who has bed and breakfast and connects with other landladies. So I decided to join that party, to the extent of taking a room for the night. It was ideally placed, since I no longer had my bike with me, bang beside a bus stop with busses every ten minutes into the fine city centre old square, I supped well with the Dutch couple on the Saturday evening off the square. Next day I caught morning prayer in German in the great medieval church, which is Lutheran Protestant. Brasov still has a strong population of German speakers, as well as Hungarian and Romanian. I still feel the oddity that German Lutherans have no system of coffee and chat after church, unlike (for example) the American Lutherans at St Anne and St Agnes in the city of London, which is thoroughly hospitable, and gives good lunch hour weekday recitals with coffee, bring your own sandwiches.

After church I went to the city historical museum, full of memories of the German-speaking guilds and citizens, and after lunch to the very old schoolrooms next to a church, where the pastor explained to a party of visiting Germans the school’s importance in keeping up Romanian Renaissance culture: the school even had its own seventeenth century printing press. I am of course keen on the work of St Cyril and St Methodosius in converting the Slavs to Christianity, but less keen on their invention of their own alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, that has served to keep the orthodox separate in their reading from the books of western Christians. It is striking how the borders of Orthodox Christendom are still, more or less, the borders of the European Union. The saints built a barrier, not a bridge. Thank heavens St Boniface of Cornwall used the Latin script, not his own invention, to convert the Germans.

That evening I took my sleeper in the Dacia Express to Gyor in Hungary, and doubled back to reach Budapest for a day. As this was Monday very few museums were open, but a taxi took me to the museum of the city ambulance services, and after lunch a rack railway took me straight up castle hill to the museum of the history of Budapest, where I again had the strange feeling I have when I see this normal European country, newly engaged in the Renaissance, taken for two centuries under the Turks.

Next day after my sleeper I dropped off at Augsburg to see the baroque statues of a great Flemish sculptor whom the city employed to mark the streets, and then go on to Wiesbaden, where my second host picked me up by car. After two or three days in her house, resting and eating well, we started off east.

She had never seen east Germany, the old German Democratic Republic, and started with the usual west German prejudice against the easterners, who she said had never learnt what hard work was, and expected the west to support them for ever. A little west of Dresden we picked up bed and breakfast by driving into a village and asking a villager: we did very well, and paid little. In Dresden next day she saw the great work both done and in progress, and we fell in with a plant geneticist, near retirement, an easterner of course, who was just her and my idea of a civilised man: we had coffee and cake at length. We saw the Zwinger Opera house and the Frauenkirche. The East German state meant to keep the church as a lasting monument to our bombing of 1944, but when the wall came down united Germany changed that plan, rebuilt the church, and Queen Elizabeth attended the re-opening two months ago. I am glad. I do not like huge ruins in a city centre, and I hope to see the Kaiser Wilhelm church in west Berlin rebuilt. The young need little reminder that war is a disaster. About four we drove off 80 minutes eastwards from Dresden, and to our hotel.

Here it gets complicated, and a map will help you. At Yalta the big three drew new frontiers in central and eastern Europe, and Stalin moved countries two hundred milers westward. So Poland lost a belt of land around Lviv (Lvov) to Ukraine, and a Germany a belt of land (roughly, Silesia and north of there) to Poland. The movements were harsh: populations of whole towns were moved with just their suitcases to become displaced persons. Britain and the USA signed up to this. Germany suffered worst from the frontier changes, though in most of Germany the amazing generosity of the U S Marshall Plan, and heavy labour by penniless Germans, launched the economic miracle. The harshness paid little account to geography, and any town or city on the frontier, which in this region was a small river, was simply sliced in two. One such city was Gorlitz, where the bulk of the city stayed in Germany, but the eastern suburbs were put into Poland. These parts included a few hotels, and the best of these, with three stars, was the Pod Orlem at 30 euros per person per night, with en suite bathroom and breakfast. I chose our stay to coincide with the music festival in the German city, and booked for a concert or recital each night. By day we drove to see nearby cities and country houses, and took a nap before supper and music. We ate chiefly in Germany, which generally served better food than Poland did (I speak only of Gorlitz: there is good eating elsewhere in Poland). The country houses dated from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, built by local German magnates, often in a strange mock-gothic style which the builders took to be English, but which got the balances strangely wrong. We had good road maps and guide books, but still took much time just getting around. The leading cities we saw were Jelenia Gora, a hillside Baroque city in Poland, and Bautzen.

Continued…



Bautzen deserves a word. At the reformation Lutherans and Catholics agreed a timetable for joint use of the cathedral. They alternated services, and used the same pews but different altars or Communion tables and different pulpits and lecterns. This they have done for four centuries. Perhaps as a result, the sculptures and carvings of the Protestant fittings are ornate, more baroque than I think usual to protestants. However that may be, this island of concord in Germany torn by strife over creeds is inspiring to see. If people can do that there is hope yet in Bosnia and Ulster.

The same city of Bautzen is capital for a few hundred thousand Sorbs. These are a nation of Slavs who were there when the Germanic tribes came flooding into the area two thousand years ago, and they stayed there, chiefly as village farmers, but also as craftsmen in their town. Hitler thought Germans should speak German, not what he saw as the second-rate language of Slavs, so he closed their schools and forbade anyone to speak Sorb in church (he did much the same thing in Alsace-Lorraine). The Communists after him saw the Sorbs as a folk movement, a movement of the people, and subsidised them. Now, under European Union rules for minorities, they have several schools, a good museum, a publishing house and a theatre, and street signs are bilingual. They make cream cakes as good as any in the region.

I first saw Gorlitz in 1987, before the wall came down. The East German state had no Marshal Plan money and not money enough to set about the wholesale renovation of street after street of fined merchant houses on great squares. In 1987 there were house walls in the old city centre that had trees growing from them. Had the cold war lasted ten years more nearly all would have been lost. Now one building in twenty is grey and rotting, but they are at work on them. The first problem was to decide who owned the houses, and in some cases that problem remains. The next is to pay the huge costs. You may be a moderately successful west German family who find you own a fine house: how will you pay to keep it standing ? State money has gone into water, gas, power, roads, pavements and gardens, and many westerners come at the weekend, or the retired on weekdays, to see a city that the allied bombers never reached, a city typical of so many now lost in the west. Thank goodness the eastern government never had money enough to destroy old cities and rebuild them on socialist lines. The penalty now is unemployment at 25 percent, and a result of that is that café and restaurant prices are three quarters of those in the west. The cream cakes, too, are cheap and good: I averaged two a day, with whipped cream. Coffee-and-cake houses were open in the last decade of socialist days, not many, and with limited stock, but with all the correct bourgeous touches, including waitresses in black, with frilled white aprons. They struck me as odd in the Workers Paradise, but in 1987 I took advantage of the rate of exchange to buy two dozen table napkins, in double damask, that I use to this day for dinner parties in London.

The festival is a good provincial-level festival: the next comes in June 2007. Please see www.schlesische-musikfeste.de/. A youth orchestra played the opening concert, and various groups gave recitals in gothic churches. The last concert was by the Lausatian Symphony Orchestra, who gave us Shostokovich’s fourth, I thought well done. The mayor attended, and the applause lasted long. Speaking before the music, the conductor mentioned that many players are Poles, and indeed their bus was outside waiting to take them home. A bonus for me was that the city’s major concert hall is under repair, so the concert took placed in the great display shed of the Bombardier company, who make railway coaches, so I could admire fine engineering on a big scale while hearing fine music on a Stalinist scale. It is a bit embarrassing to know that Stalin and I share tastes in music, but we do.

I had thought of a fifth week, on special trains in Serbia, but my feet were playing me up, and it was time to start home. I started with an hour at an exhibition in the horse stalls of a nineteenth century country house near Cottbus called Branitz. I went to see an exhibition, running till October, about a Prussian prince who went off on a study trip to England to see how we did landscape gardening. He found he had not enough money to get far in his works, but later the family found the money, and the land around the house is nicely gardened in the English style, like the English garden in Munich, but smaller. In fact the prince made a packet by selling his memoirs of the trip, where he got on well socially in the London and Brighton of the Regency and the young Queen Victoria. I have written to the Brighton Museum to ask them to think of bringing the display over here in November. As you know, we Britons do like to hear of foreign visitors who come to admire us.

In Berlin Zoo station that afternoon I met in the IC restaurant with Ms Gardner, joint editor of a new magazine called hidden Europe, which likes little known places, or little known places in well-known cities. The current issue has a piece on Turkish, Tunisian, and other restaurants, music houses, and restaurants at the rue de Belleville, Gare du Nord, and elsewhere in the inner city of Paris. You will find their pages at http://www.hiddeneurope.co.uk. Ms Gardner had written to me by Email, we have much in common, and we fixed to meet at the station restaurant to talk. After that she kindly drove me to the Opera in the west, to hear a concert, which was good, but not worth the 50 euro ticket.

Overnight I took trains via Brussels Midi to Waterloo, where I had booked a porter to wheel my suitcase right out to the bus stop across the road, for busses to my house. I missed the morning service, but caught coffee after church. Then I set about catching up on sleep and resting my feet. My nurses in London say my feet have done quite well. Their condition went down a little, as the nurses who bandaged them for me twice a week were not trained in that form of dressing, so I had to back-seat-drive them, in a combination of German, English, and sign language.
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Old Jul 7th, 2005, 05:45 AM
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always good to hear something from Ben Haines. An interesting report. Thankyou.
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Old Jul 7th, 2005, 06:40 AM
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Great report, thank you so much for posting Mr. Haines. So glad you had a good holiday
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Old Jul 7th, 2005, 07:54 AM
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P.S. You mention writing a memoir. I do hope you find the time for it and that you will post excerpts on Fodors. I am sure we would all love to read about the many trips you have taken and everything you have seen.
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Old Jul 7th, 2005, 08:56 AM
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Mnay thanks for sharing the report. I am glad that you are able to Log-in again.
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Old Jul 7th, 2005, 09:00 AM
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Thank you for the report, Mr. Haines. I hope you and yours are doing well.
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Old Jul 7th, 2005, 08:13 PM
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I'd commented on JudyC's thread, but as you've overcome your connection issues, I just want to thank you again for your note. I enjoyed it - it was very informative. You've highlighted a couple of the Romanian cities that we had to bypass for the sake of time. More reasons to return.
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