Bookpacking’s Blog

Czech Republic; Prague-Dresden train EC170

Some things just have to be done. We’re sat on a Euro City train waiting to leave Prague for the former East German city of Dresden. Cued-up via YouTube is the classic Kraftwerk ode to pan-Europeanism, “Trans Europe Express”.

OK, so this isn’t one of those shiny new ICE trains (Germany’s TGV), but a red box of a locomotive with eight Hungarian carriages attached. But it’s clean and modern, and we can’t but help get excited about a train journey. Sentimental Journey, Brief Encounter, Casablanca; travel is romantic, full stop. But there’s something even more so about a train. The bus was going to be 500Kc, the train was only 600 and ran more frequently. So here we are riding along the Vltava with the pioneering electric rhythms of Germany’s most famous band.

And for extra novelty value (for a Brit at least) we’ve got ourselves a compartment. Remember those? Windows all steamed up from the days when diesel engines used hot steam to heat the carriages. One day last month, on a journey beset by problems, we sat on the platform at Doncaster while a useless tannoy mumble unintelligibly and harassed travellers asked hapless station staff the same question over and over.

Out of the gloom like a vision from the past appeared one of the rail charter trains that take enthusiasts up unusual branch lines or behind rare engines. Table lamps illuminated white-clothed tables through those steamy windows; it looked like the cosiest place in the world to be. And not for the first time we wondered about ‘progress’.

So as we travel through what was presumably the Sudetenland (annexed by Hitler), Dresden looms. The old “Florence of the Elbe” was completely devastated in WW2 by Allied incendiary bombs. My grandfather was in Bomber Command – the men who had the highest attrition rate, but were sidelined post-war as Churchill distanced himself from responsibility for “total war”: the deliberate targeting of civilians. And there’s a double irony in that my Grandmother was a fire warden in the blitzed-out Black Country city of Coventry.

Readers of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” can hear about the destruction of Dresden; or rather un-destruction – the action all takes place backwards. 25-35,000 dead in one night; bodies melting in pools of fat. Words are inadequate. Perhaps some things are so unreal that postmodern semi-sci-fi is the only way to make sense of them.

PS with regards to the old ‘Is the Euro making things more expensive’ chestnut: the Czechs aren’t in the Euro zone yet, but the odd tourist-related business appears to take it. The same sandwich was £1.20 in Czech Crowns at the train station, or £1.75 with Euros. This is a pattern you see all over. Where’s it all going, we wonder?

 Czech Republic; Prague; Kafka Museum

Kafka is often credited with having anticipated the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. Visiting the Kafka Museum in Prague, it’s easy to see why. The powerless individual helpless against an unfair and uncaring system whose decisions make no sense perfectly sums up the life under communism that one often reads about; everybody agreeing that the sky is green while staring directly into the clear blue.

Yet it was obvious that Kafka was a prisoner not of some external system, but of his own mind. As one display panel points out, he was never able to commit to a relationship because he was never able to “shake himself free of the rules he himself had imposed”. Just like one of his major writing influences, Flaubert, he also sought refuge in long-distance relationships and the abstract world of a love conducted by letters; where he could control things.

Kafka is yet another tortured artist who seems to prove the maxim that the best art comes out of pain. The allegorical Prague he dreamt up was composed of walls and boundaries which he had built for himself. Self-loathing and a hatred of his own body meant he was always held back. He found solace in the “Prague Four” band of intellectual friends, and gave himself eventually to his first love – literature.

He was the perfect example of the frustrated artist, driven to the edge of insanity by the mundane of a 9-5 that he hated. One of the sections of the museum is called “The Endless Office”. Anyone who has been in job that feels like a slow cerebral death can sympathise with that feeling of being trapped; a purgatorial paralysis of the mind and a overwhelming sense of stagnation. One of the displays refers to those “infinite” eight hours of the working day.

But if there is a hero in this realm of anti’s, it is Kafka’s comrade Max Brod. Nietzsche was dishonoured in death by a sister who manipulated his pre-life coaching message of liberation from the self (the “will to power”) to suit Nazi ends; but Kafka owes Brod a big posthumous debt. In life, Brod had recognised and nurtured Kafka’s superior talent. In death, Brod went against the wishes of his loved and respected friend, and bravely but guiltily disregarded Kafka’s request to burn his manuscripts. A tree fell in the literary forest; and thanks to Brod, we heard it.

A bitter breeze blew off the Baltic and the towering masts of a ‘tall ship’ swayed gently in the night sky to the sound of waves. This lonely outpost on the end of a pier in Gdynia seemed an appropriate location for the squat grey head of Joseph Conrad to sit in contemplation. Though, given his penchant for travel and mystery it would have been more appropriate for him to be looking out to sea, and not towards the most westerly of the Tri-City group.

From west to east they are Gdynia, Sopot and Gdansk. The middle one is known as a fashionable resort, the other two for building ships. A rose between two thorns if you were being uncharitable, were it not that Gdansk is actually quite pretty and on this desolate winter’s night Gdynia appeared only plain, not ugly.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, to give him his full and un-anglicised name, was born in what is now Ukraine, but used to be Poland (Yalta rears its head again, the 1945 carving-up of newly-liberated Europe between the Allies). We heard this is the only statue of him in Poland, though there is a plaque in Krakow at one of the places he used to live. He became a British subject in 1886, and with titles like “The Secret Agent” lived and wrote a life of adventure and travel.

Respected novels like “Nostromo” were lost on Bookpacking as a sixth-former, we weren’t really interested in the “taciturn capitaz de cargadores”. It always seemed that our teacher hated school even more than us, so perhaps that had an influence. Our French teacher was committed and not a little ruthless; today we speak almost fluent French, so read into that what you will.

Despite this, whenever we are near London’s East End, we think of the 1800s, and a ship on the Thames – gateway to a relatively unknown world for a maritime nation built on Empire – and the starting point for Conrad’s most famous book. Presciently, given the horrors that swept Europe in the following century it was this Pole who gave us the “Heart of Darkness”.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised; in broad terms it’s a backwater of the psyche he’s talking about, and not a particular geographical location. But if you’d asked around in the cafes and parlours of Western Europe, we bet his contemporaries would have said of the savagery: “It couldn’t happen here”.