National Monument

I'm uploading pictures of various outings and events. With luck I'll fill in the narrative in the future. If you care to see the pictures in a larger, clearer format, click on one and you'll be taken to a slide show of the pictures in the post. This goes for any post on the blog. ~ Kate

National Monument at Vitkov Hill
May 18, 2011
Prague outing, Karl and Kate

Three-Meter Pushkin

by Karl

Proposed statue

One of the nice features of our neighborhood is Puškinovo náměstí, or Pushkin Square. It's a small city block, shaped sort of like a diamond, with grass, two play areas, and big trees, surrounded by quiet streets and pleasant five-story buildings. This was the site of Garrett's biking breakthrough earlier this month and a great place to take the boys for some running around without a big expedition.

Garrett bikes past the playground at Pushkin Square.

Today was the boys' last day of school (!!). I walked them past Pushkin Square, down to the shuttle bus, and when I got back to our building, as I made my way to the stairs I noticed a flier taped up on the building's information board. It turns out today is the last day to comment on a proposed addition to Pushkin Square.  Prague is divided into more than 20 "parts," each with its own mayor (as opposed to the lord mayor of all of Prague) and local council.  Our neighborhood of Bubeneč is in Prague 6, whose mayor says:

The Russian Cultural Foundation has offered Prague 6 a statue of the Russian renaissance poet Pushkin. They have also requested the placement of the statue on Pushkin Square in Bubeneč. Given that the statue would be placed near the dwellings of hundreds of people, we consider it our duty to ask the residents whether they agree with this plan. Based on their answers, we will formulate our position as a response to the Russian side.

I don't feel particularly confident in judgments of visual aesthetics, so I can't weigh in on whether this is a fine piece of art or some kitchy abomination that will ruin a pleasant neighborhood space. But there's also the whole Russian thing.

Can't we all just get along?

by Karl

Back when there was a Czechoslovakia, American students learning geography might naturally assume that there were people called “Czechoslovaks,” just like in Italy there were Italians and in Germany there were Germans. But this was a long name, with weird spelling to boot (“cz” pronounced like “ch,” and “ch” pronounced like “k”—what’s that about?), so “Czechoslovak” was often shortened to “Czech.” This didn’t get rid of the weird spelling issues, but it did save three syllables, so its use was widespread. If there were an Olympic hockey match between the U.S. and Czechoslovakia, the Americans were said to be playing “the Czechs.”

This seemed innocent enough to Americans—after all, people from other countries in the western hemisphere might object to the way we hogged the title “Americans,” but what were we supposed to call ourselves? “U.S. Americans”? Ungainly. “North Americans”? Well, that would still include Canada—and Mexico, too, technically, though they were part of “Latin America,” and so not really in North America, except to some stickler of a geography teacher.

So we were equally comfortable calling ourselves “Americans” and referring to people from Czechoslovakia as “Czechs.”

But if you happened to study the history or geography of the region more closely, at some point you had the surprising discovery that there were actually two different … peoples in Czechoslovakia: Czechs and Slovaks. What’s the difference? It can be summed up with history, religion, economics, and language.

Space of Privacy

We have less than 14 weeks left in Prague, and I'm starting to feel anxious about all that I have yet to see. Not long ago I realized that though I've been to Malostranské náměstí (Little Quarter square) more times than I can count, I'd still not visited St. Nicholas, the high Baroque church which is the anchor of the Little Quarter. It's the dominant feature in the blog's front page picture these days, the copper dome and bell tower boasting a soft green patina.

I headed to Malá Strana two weeks ago intending to tour the church. But first I ducked into the bell tower. The entrance fee included access to a wraparound balcony, with yet another wonderful view of Prague, as well as an exhibition which revealed how the tower was used for observation purposes by the communist secret police.

Up the stairs ... because touring Europe is nothing if not a lot of stair climbing.

From the wraparound balcony ~

East view, down Bridge Street, heading right for Charles Bridge.

Malostranské náměstí (Little Quarter Square), where Nerudova street begins (or ends, depending on your perspective), site of lots of beautiful architecture and, of course, Starbucks.

Southern view down Karmelitská street.

Even got an up close and personal serenade of one of the top-of-the-hour trumpet ditties.

Back inside, I went up to the watch tower.

The office used by the secret police was at the very top of the tower, above the clock.

Prior to coming to Prague, I had only the most superficial understanding of communism and what life was like in eastern bloc countries between WWII and 1989. I heard stories of the many citizens who defected or died trying. Communism was vilified in the West, but I really couldn't have told you what the ideology behind it was and why we were against it.

Did my education let me down? Or am I really slow? Probably a little of both. I know this much -- visiting landmarks that played a role in this history and talking with friends who lived through it has done more for helping me get my head around what people experienced here, and in East Germany, Poland, the USSR, etc., than any history book or class.

I recently finished Slavenka Drakulić's memoir How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. Drakulić is a journalist from Croatia, and her book is a collection of essays that chronicles the effect communism had on various aspects of everyday life, especially for women.

One essay, entitled "Our Little Stasi" explores the notion of privacy and personal space, something she and her countrymen didn't have. After the overthrow of the communist leadership in 1989-90, an initiative from the newly elected president led to a small but significant change in behavior at the post office.

In November 1990, we citizens of the new democratic republic of Croatia received postcards with an unusual explanation from the central management of the Croatian Post Office and Telecommunications . …(it said that) from now on, when waiting in a post office, one must stand behind a yellow line on the floor. This yellow line will indicate a so-called 'space of privacy,' so that every citizen from now on will be able to do his or her business alone at the window, without someone constantly peeking over their shoulder. (Drakulić)

Prior to that,  Drakulić wrote, no one could expect to conduct personal business without an audience. She described a typical scene at the pre-1989 post office, where people went not only to send and receive correspondence, but also to pay bills and rent.

Behind me people are sighing. I don't only hear it, I can feel it on my neck because a fat man behind me keeps snorting. Even though I don't glance at it, I can see his hand with a money order for 450 dinars for his rent. Although I can't imagine what could interest me less at this moment, I almost automatically make a quick calculation: it has to be at least a two-room apartment, in a new building, because rents are cheaper in the old ones. Then I stop, ashamed of myself. The only reason I don't feel like a spy is that he too can 'spy' on me: he can see that I'm paying a 350-dinar installment for some books, and that my telephone bill is enormous, 1,300 dinars. Perhaps right now he's wondering how I can afford such a huge bill, when my profession obviously has something to do with books, and we all very well know one can't live on any kind of intellectual work. In fact he really can learn a lot about my own and everyone else's lives just by waiting in a post office, bank, or any other institution that involves standing in line. (Drakulić)

The institution of a discrete zone led to an awakening in the public psyche. 

All of a sudden, private space became important, even fashionable in a country where for forty-five years, if not longer, nobody had even thought in these terms, and it was perfectly normal not only to have to wait in line pressed rightly together, but to peer at each other's documents, accounts, letters, and bills quite shamelessly. Considering that privacy was a bad word, such peering was even safe. Asking for the right to privacy meant you had something to hide. And hiding something meant it was forbidden. If it was forbidden, it must have been against the state. Finally, if it was against the state, you must have been an enemy. (Drakulić)

I climbed to the top of St. Nicholas' church bell tower to this watch post of Státní bezpečnost (communist secret police or State Security), called StB for short. There I found a modest little office with a desk and a television, walls papered with newspaper clippings from football matches in the 1980s. 

While anyone could have been an informer, it appears that only men were expected to staff this post.

From this vantage point StB could monitor activity in Malá Strana and down to Charles Bridge, as well as south on Karmelitská and north up toward the castle.

A beautiful, bright view with a dark history.

StB, the exhibit read, "created an atmosphere of fear and repression. From the start of the 1960s up until the last days in 1989, it primarily focused on surveillance of the population. Among other things this included wiretapping and monitoring designated people." The black and white pictures throughout this post are from the bell tower exhibit and represent a small example of surveillance photos taken by StB.

Regarding the 'space of privacy' postcards, Drakulić wrote, "It (made) you aware that you (had) a right to such a thing. It also (made) you ask yourself, how come you forgot that privacy is normal?"

It seems that in a society in which secret police are scampering around taking photos on the sly like these above, an expectation of privacy would quickly pack its bags.

I never did get to the church as I was so wrapped up in the bell tower view and exhibit. Another day ...

Found Conversation No. 2

by Karl

As you can read here, the family recently enjoyed a birthday celebration which included a chance to ride Segways around a park on Prague’s Kampa Island. It was a little bit nerve-wracking watching the kids zoom around, as an innate sense of caution is not usually the dominant trait in eight-year-old boys. Or in six-year-old boys, for that matter — early on, Garrett clipped the base of a tree with his left wheel and went tumbling forward off the contraption. Garrett was uninjured, the Segway just needed to be reset, and off he rode to another adventure.

In addition to hurting themselves, there was always the possibility that the boys would clip a person, rather than a tree, as they weaved in and out among the moving obstacles that kept strolling through the park on a sunny afternoon. And along came a perfect target for such a collision, an elderly woman making her way gingerly along the path, with the help of a pair of crutches. They weren’t the kind that tuck under your arms like when you have a broken leg. These were more like extended canes, with a grip-type handle, and above that a cradle for the forearm, for better stability. In Prague you often see an older person with a single crutch of this type. This woman used two.

Kate and I were talking with an English couple whose son was another birthday guest. The woman paused as she went past, then turned and said something to Kate, who happened to be nearest her, and I came over to interpret. I made some apologetic remark about how I hoped the kids wouldn’t crash into anyone.

“Oh no," she said, "it’s marvelous to see them moving about like that. Ever since I’ve had to use these crutches, I’ve been fascinated by anything that moves perfectly.”

She and I talked a little more, then one of the kids took a tumble (it turned out he was fine). "Oh, that's OK," said the woman. "When my kids were young they played ice hockey and one time a kid went down and hit his head on the ice. The coach came over. 'How many fingers am I holding up? … Three, good. Does your head hurt? Only a little? Fine. Do you feel like you're going to throw up? No? Good. Take five minutes on the bench, then back in the game.' I came over and looked in the boy's eyes to see if the pupils were the same size — if they're not, that can indicate bleeding inside the head and you have to get it taken care of right away. The coach asked me what I was doing and I explained. 'Oh,' he said, 'I'll add that to my list of things to check.'"

We got talking about languages and learning Russian, and she said she'd gone to a high school right nearby in Malá strana that had "expanded Russian education." In the communist period all schools taught Russian, so all Czechs ended up with some familiarity with the language. A few designated schools spent considerably more time on it, and students coming out of those places could actually use the language.

"They say that every idiotic thing in life is good for something," the woman explained. Then she told me a story of 1968.

By way of background, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was perhaps the most … loyal of the communist parties in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. By "loyal" of course I mean that it spent the most time trying to figure out what Moscow was likely to want it to do, even before Moscow expressed its will, perhaps even before Moscow knew its own will. This had some comic effects, as when the party decided to build the world's largest statue of Stalin.

It took them so long to work it out, that it didn't go up until 1955 — two years after the dictator's death, and only one year before Khrushchev would deliver his "secret speech" in which he "revealed" many of Stalin's crimes. Lots of people knew about the crimes already, but once the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union laid them out in a speech, it was OK to talk about them. And it was also somewhat embarrassing to have just put up the world's largest statue of a man who was now officially considered problematic. In 1962 they finally got around to dynamiting the thing.

The local party's slavish devotion to Moscow's line had less humorous consequences as well, resulting in conditions that were arguably more repressive here than in other Soviet satellites. All of that started to change in 1967, both with rehabilitation of people convicted in Stalinist show-trials in the early 1950s, and with writers starting to argue openly that literature should be independent of Party doctrine.

In late 1967 and early 1968 things started moving within the Party as well, with Alexander Dubček replacing a more conventional leader and starting to work out a reform program. Over the following months this developed into the famous "Prague Spring," an effort to create what Dubček called "socialism with a human face" (which itself is a pretty damning statement about what socialism was like up to that point). There were economic components, trying to make the economy more innovative and moving away from Soviet-style emphasis on heavy industry. But there were also political aspects, with ever-greater press freedom and discussions of multi-party elections.

Dubček and the Czechoslovak leadership repeatedly assured their allies in the Warsaw Pact of their continued support of the alliance and their unwavering devotion to socialism, but the course of developments over the spring and into the summer revealed the inherent contradictions in their position. On the one hand they promised socialism and fealty to the Soviet Union; on the other, they were letting people say more and more what they wanted to say, and people were saying they wanted free elections sooner rather than later, and people were saying that socialism actually had a lot of problems — how could you possibly have a truly free press and free elections and still guarantee that the country would remain socialist and would stay in the Warsaw Pact?

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev drew the obvious conclusion, wholeheartedly supported by the leaders of the other satellites, who didn't want their own populations getting any dangerous ideas about elections, free speech, and the like. On the night of August 20-21, 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and set the country on a path back to pro-Soviet orthodoxy, a period that came to be known as "normalization."

There have certainly been deadlier invasions — for instance, the one that put down the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Dubček called for people not to resist, and as far as using violence, they generally listened, though people tried confusion tactics like switching street signs, or taking them down, and Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague were covered with people urging the soldiers inside to go home. Still, it was an invasion, there were tanks and foreign soldiers everywhere, and some people did die.

Back to the woman at Kampa. She was in Čáslav, a town about an hour east of Prague, and needed to get back to the capital. There were tanks on all the roads and people weren't supposed to travel without permission. A young man in Čáslav was having liver trouble and needed to be taken to Prague for treatment, and the woman saw her opportunity.

"Being 32 and foolish, I figured they wouldn't shoot at an ambulance, so I went along for the ride."

But along the way they were stopped by two Soviet soldiers from Kirghizstan. The woman got out of the ambulance and tried explaining that they were taking this sick man to Prague and they had to get there "or it's amen for him," but their Russian wasn't very good and she wasn't making herself understood. Then an officer came out of the woods and started shouting at her, what the hell did they think they were doing, driving along like this? She explained about the man with the liver condition. The officer opened the back of the ambulance and saw the man's gray-yellow skin and smelled the particular, offensive smell of the sweat that comes off of people with liver problems, so he knew she wasn't making it up about the illness.

Eventually another officer came over and shouted at her some more, but finally agreed to accommodate her. He called over a soldier who had a board on his back, which served as a writing surface. One of the officers wrote out papers allowing the ambulance to continue to Prague, and even gave it an official stamp. The woman took the papers and went to get back in the ambulance.

"The driver said, 'You might want to think about whether to sit in front or in back.'"

"'What do you mean?' I asked, and then I smelled it."

"'Well, actually,’ he said, ‘it probably won't matter — I've already shit my pants.' When we got to the hospital in Prague, the staff asked how we'd managed to get through, and the driver pointed to me. The doctor asked if I was crazy, but I was just a foolish 32 year old, and I thought they wouldn’t shoot at an ambulance."

And she spoke good Russian. Every idiotic thing in life is good for something.

Found Conversation No. 1

by Karl

In the fall of 1989 I sat in Indiana and watched on the pages of the New York Times as Moscow's satellites in Eastern Europe broke away one after another, each one seeming to take less time than the one before, each upheaval surprisingly peaceful until the bloody spectacle that ended the mad reign of the Ceaușescus in Romania.

Partly inspired by that story, partly wanting to get away from my own country which seemed to view the Gulf War as a made-for-TV movie, partly as a crucial piece of my own warped plan to get out of music and into economics (it's true, and it worked, but that's another story), I ran off to Czechoslovakia for 1991-92, and Czech language and culture and history became an adopted part of my own cultural heritage. It's because of that stay that Kate and the boys and I are here this year rather than in some other foreign country, or maybe we'd still be at home.

And so it is that we happen to be here, in the World That 1989 Built, when a wave of protest is sweeping through the Arab world, toppling or shaking dictators who've been in power for 30 or 40 years. And commentators around the world note the resemblance -- the more glib call it "the Arab 1989," while the sober ones ask to what extent the comparison might or might not hold. There's the phenomenon of repressive regimes that seem stable until they are suddenly swallowed up in a wave of discontent. There's the incredible hope of new possibilities, though there seems to be more fear in the current case -- at least among outsiders -- that promising beginnings could head off in a terrible direction.

And this is when we meet The Guy in the Restaurant.

We went to Dresden for a short visit while the boys' school was on break, and at the end of a day wandering around taking in the rebuilt splendors of "Florence on the Elbe" (as well as a romp on a spectacular playground structure), we stop in at a restaurant across the street from our hotel. Its owners are from somewhere in the Middle East, and it serves both döner kebab and pizza -- something for everyone, in our family's case. Inside the TV is playing Al-Jazeera in Arabic. The crawl along the bottom of the screen is in Arabic. The right-hand side of the screen shows Qaddafi giving a speech, and it's clearly being left in the original language. The left-hand side shows a tape loop of street protests and burnt buildings and bloody protesters and a defaced poster of Qaddafi and people throwing shoes at a TV image of some hated person appearing projected above them on a wall.

It's interesting watching Qaddafi without being able to understand a word he says. He comes across as deranged. In his body language, in the flow of words punctuated by eruptions, the eruptions tailing off into a search for the right thing to say to make everything better, you can almost see what he's feeling. "I can't believe you don't love me anymore, after all I've done for you. You can't leave me. You'll be sorry." He just looks like a guy for whom it's all about him.

A group of four men comes into the shop, clearly on friendly terms with the owners. One of them turns to watch the TV and his scorn for Qaddafi is obvious. I don't remember how our conversation started -- maybe he said something for the general consumption of those around him, which included me; maybe the opening was my comment that "he doesn't look sane."

"No, he's crazy! You see that green book he's citing from? That's his book, he wrote it, it has his rules for how people are supposed to live. When there's a parade, everybody has to carry a copy of the green book. Democracy -- we all want democracy! Qaddafi says, What is democracy? He says it comes from Arabic, that 'dem' means 'stay' and 'krasy' means 'chair,' so 'democracy' means you should stay in your chair forever."

I had the sense his German wasn't perfect, and my German is a lot worse than his, so I know I didn't get 100% of our conversation, but this particular bit involved simple words, and the guy was also good with hand gestures, so I'm reasonably confident I got this part right.

He asked where we were from and I said, "New York, but not the city." He switched to English, which was harder for him than German, though it was easier for me to understand. He had a brother who taught at a university in New York City. "Which university?" He didn't know. He said something having to do with animals and medicine. I'm not sure whether the brother teaches at a veterinary school or is a doctor who has too many pets. And this was in English -- like I said, I'm an unreliable narrator of what passed between us.

Kate and Ben had come over by now, and I asked the man where he was from. "Palestine," and his voice and face glowed with as much love as anyone has ever had for his country.

"Where's that?" asked Ben, and I answered that it was next to Israel. I don't know if the man heard my answer but he smiled at Ben and held up a finger to say, 'Hold on, I'll explain,' happy to have a young audience to educate. He unzipped his jacked a bit ... wait, not there ... then he reached inside his shirt to pull up an object hung from a chain around his neck, the way many Christians wear a cross. The object is about two inches long and its colors are the Palestinian flag. Its outline is Palestine. Or rather, Israel and Palestine if you accept the two-state solution. Or Israel, if you're a hard-core believer in that country's right to everything you say God once promised the Jews.

He points to the different borders: Syria, Jordan, Mediterranean, Egypt, Red Sea, Dead Sea. There's no Israel. It has been wiped off his map. Though to be fair, one would need magic to make a pendant out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

I feel uncomfortable in my subsequent silence, but it somehow doesn't seem like the setting to get into a debate on the reciprocal grievances of Mideast politics. He says something about Arafat, it seems to be a positive remark, but I'm not sure, and then it's pretty clear that it was positive, in contrast to his attitude toward Hamas, which is unmistakably negative, though I didn't catch his reason for not liking them -- did he say something about terrorists?

As you walk around the rebuilt old part of Dresden, you get repeated reminders of what happened here. There's the piece of the dome of the Frauenkirche, placed on the pavement next to the stunningly rebuilt church. Inside the Church of the Court next to the palace, there are pictures showing the burnt walls with most of the roof gone. In the Church of the Holy Cross, the structure has been rebuilt but the wall surfaces of the sanctuary have been left in a rough gray plaster instead of their prewar decor, as a ghostly reminder of what can happen in war. In the Court Church there's a new altar with the dates January 30, 1933, and February 13, 1945, acknowledging that the horror reigned on Dresden in the firebombing at the end of the war had its roots in Hitler taking power.

In the end, the war that Hitler started left a hole in the middle of Europe and opened the door for the Russian domination of the eastern part of the continent, the domination that was finally thrown off in 1989 with parts of the Soviet Union itself slipping the leash in 1991. For 40-plus years there was not just irrationality, but an active hostility to rationality, supporting the weight of its own futility on the bodies of those it found the need to destroy, the souls of those it had to muzzle lest they point out the obvious stupidities of the system.

In the course of a year it was gone and the former satellites were left to find their way to some sort of normal life. In the more western ones that has gone fairly well. There are things you might wish were different, but all in all life is pretty good. Further east they carry a heavier historical burden and they've had a harder time. In Ukraine, the new president is locking up the opposition under the plausible pretext of fighting corruption. Yugoslavia famously tore itself into a series of mini-countries in a fratricidal war that brought genocide back to Europe, where people assumed that Hitler had sufficiently inoculated the population against such madness.

I hope the man in the restaurant gets some of what he wants: an end to self-serving dictators, a chance not to feel ashamed of the incompetent clowns running one's country. But there's the wild card of what happens if popular sentiment favors more active hostility to Israel and new governments try to satisfy that hostility. Even without the Israeli question, it's going to be tricky economically and politically to make things come out decently.

Dresden has its reminders of what happens when we don't get that right.