Last Days in Old Europe by Richard Bassett

Author:Richard Bassett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241014875
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

The End of the Ancien Régime

Warsaw–Gdańsk–Cetinje–East Berlin–Wolfenbüttel–Leipzig–Gera–Prague

The farewells to Vienna were long and sometimes tearful, but my friends promised to be there whenever I returned. Remarkably, they also arranged for the Hotel Bristol to allow me, for only a modest sum, to retain a second-floor suite, unchanged since the 1930s and much favoured by the Duke of Windsor who had come regularly to Vienna to consult his oculist. Further douceurs were promised by the local representative of Austrian Airlines in Warsaw, who was instructed by his colleagues in Vienna to ‘look out for me’. Finally, Polish friends in Vienna gave me the telephone numbers of their cousins who would ‘surely have a beautiful sister or two’ to teach me Polish. Thus prepared, and after some happy days on the way in Bad Godesberg and Berlin, I boarded the train one day in late autumn for Warszawa Centralna.

The carriage was full of Poles who had been shopping in East Berlin and whose vivacity contrasted with the more stolid East Germans who occupied other parts of the train. The Poles’ smiles and laughter halted immediately the East German customs officials and border police entered our compartment. The temperature seemed to plummet as the guttural Prussian accents echoed along the carriage corridor, a vivid example of the hostility these two nations still felt towards each other. An hour later there was palpable relief when the German guards departed to be replaced by the much less formal, green-uniformed Poles. An elderly Polish man in a suit sitting opposite winked at me, saying in heavily accented German as a tall blonde Polish girl in uniform passed by, ‘Jetzt ist alles Scheiss egal!’ (Now who the **** cares?). The train trundled slowly across the plains of Pomerania. Outside the landscape was empty, flat and monotonous in the autumn sun. My eye searched in vain for any north German equivalent of the soft hills of the Alpenvorland or the craggy outcrops of rock on which so many Austrian castles were perched. Inside my compartment, an East German lady, in her early eighties, surveyed the landscape quizzically. Since her seventy-fifth birthday, she declared, she had been ‘allowed to travel’ and she was now preparing to leave the train at the Polish frontier to visit some friends. Her austerity and simplicity were impressive. She had grown up on the island of Rügen and had spent ‘a little time’ in Berlin before the war. She reminded me in a way of Blanka, a similar mien of self-discipline forged by life in a turbulent Europe. Like Blanka she also knew off by heart the old song immortalized by Mozart in The Magic Flute: ‘Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit bis an dein kühles Grab / Und weich keinen Finger breit von Gottes Wegen ab’ (Be honest and loyal until your grave is cold / And never deviate by as much as a finger’s width from God’s merciful way). I remembered most of the words, sung to the tune of Papageno’s first aria,

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