Once burned, twice shy.
Twenty times burned, Central Europe.
Between Ottomans, Swedes, Napoleon, Hapsburgs, non-Nazi Germans, Nazi
Germans, and Communists, Central Europe has the habit of being burned to the
ground by most any marauder.
To discourage this cycle of destruction, medieval city
planners turned to a new model: find a hill, build a castle on it, and keep
your important stuff in the castle.
We prepare to storm the castle.
Aside from walls, which came standard, the particular
defense mechanisms varied from castle to castle. In Cesky Krumlov, the royals filled the moat
with bears. (Incidentally, I have an
idea for a Revenant sequel.) In Prague, castle dwellers pushed people out
of windows, an approach which led to the 1618 Defenestration of Prague, my new
favorite historical event. In Salzburg,
the castle had a giant mechanical organ which could blast only one chord and
was presumably used to annoy invaders or summon Von Trapps.
Today, the castles have more passive(-aggressive)
defenses. Many have been declared UNESCO
Heritage Sites, so before you attack them, you have to fill out the requisite
paperwork. In Vienna, the Schloss Schonbrunn
deters potential siegers with an educational playground where a sign advertises/threatens
“If you can do math with your feet, you’ll have fun.” And in Salzburg, the Schloss Hellbrunn has a
battery of “joke fountains” that work thusly: the guide invites you to look at
a music box; the guide pulls a lever; the music box shoots you with a jet of
water. Replace “music box” with lion,
flying hat, and lawn furniture, and you’ve seen the remainder of the tour.
Schloss Schonbrunn. Careful, it's educational.
In contrast to the castles, the villages below were seen as
disposable, a necessary sacrifice to those who maraud. As such, valuables were stored offsite. For example, the statues on the Charles
Bridge in Prague are merely reproductions; the originals are in that warehouse
from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even museums don’t necessarily contain
valuables. Consider the Deutsche Museum.
As a child, when my parents asked me to clean my room, I
would instead put labels upon the messy heaps (“Legos, circa 1987”) and claim
they were exhibits. With the Deutsches
Museum, Munich has taken the same approach.
They stack their used industrial equipment in display cases, slap on
incredibly technical descriptions (“Turbofan engines are turbojet engines
characterized by the fact that part of the air entering the first compressor
stages flows through an annular bypass duct and leaves the engine without
combustion through the exhaust nozzle”), and call it a day.
Left to fend for themselves, the villages and cities have
developed defenses for keeping would-be marauders at bay. First, they rely on the power of
distraction. You can’t pillage if you’re
too busy doing touristy crap. As such,
in every Central European city, you will find three things: a mirror maze, a
torture museum, and a tower that looks like the handle of a lightsaber. To these, each city adds its regional specialty:
Towers abound.
Munich, of course, has the Glockenspiel. This is basically the Small World ride with
arthritis: figurines in a giant cuckoo clock lurch around celebrating the end
of the Black Plague. To supplement this
display, every seven years, Munich invites cooper dancers to come “dance away
the plague,” an approach to public health that only Jenny McCarthy could love. (As it turns out, the cooper dancer fund
would have been better spent on walls, for in 1632, Sweden conquered the undefended
city.)
Prague, in contrast, has the Strahov Library where beautiful
leather volumes line the halls as far and as high as the eye can see. I cannot overstate the effect. If Belle saw this library, she would drop the
Beast like so many petals on a magical rose.
But Sweden, of course, invaded Prague, pillaged Strahov, and took many
of the books. Now whenever the Swedish
ambassador visits Prague, he gives back one or two books, and Prague pretends
everything’s cool.
Ooh, books.
An aside on Sweden: in 2016, “Swedish army” sounds like a
punchline (cf. Why did the chicken cross the road? / Swedish army), but once
they meant business. In addition to the
city of Munich and the books of Prague, the Swedes conquered (and kept)
two-thirds of Denmark. Luckily, they’ve
mellowed out in the intervening centuries, and Ikea has since replaced the army
as Sweden’s most terrifying export.
Not to be outdone by books or clocks, Salzburg offers three
forms of distraction: Mozart (who was born there), The Sound of Music (which was filmed there), and marionettes (for
which there is no justification). All of
these come together in the Salzburg Marionette Theatre. My travel mates and I bought tickets to an
all-marionette performance of The Sound
of Music, mostly so we could see marionette Maria put on her own marionette
show of “The Lonely Goatherd.” (It’s
marionettes all the way down.) However,
the theatre bait-and-switched us to The
Magic Flute, whereupon we were forcibly cultured. (Fun fact: the lyrics in the Queen of the
Night’s aria translate roughly to “Go sta-a-a-a-ab him with a knife.”)
This is exactly what Mozart intended.
In its attempts to distract modern invaders, however,
Central Europe sometimes misses the mark.
In Munich, bars advertise “American table dancing.” Unless I’ve been sitting at the wrong tables
all my life, this is not a thing. And
Vienna, figuring that Times Square is a place we like (as opposed to a place we
have to go because all the subways stop there), has fashioned the area outside
the State Opera into its own Times Square complete with costumed figures. True, they’re Mozarts instead of Cookie
Monsters, but they still try to sell you CDs.
As another line of defense, Central Europe attempts to
incapacitate its visitors by means of food.
The standard cuisine is sausage and beer, and the standard portion size
is you-shall-never-walk-again. In
Munich, in a futile attempt to eat healthily, I ordered a “wurst salad.” The result: a salad where every leaf was a
slice of salami. As a concession to
one’s arteries, a sprig of lettuce had been plopped on top. At the Augustinerbrau beer gardens in
Salzburg, libations were served by the stein, where stein is German for “bucket
with a handle on the side.” Suffice it
to say, by the time we reached the Czech Republic, I was delighted to see
something other than sausage and beer on the menu: a poppy seed dumpling. Eagerly, I ordered it, and less eagerly, I
received it. The dish was literally a
pile of poppy seeds. Imagine Zabar’s
after the bagel Rapture.
German salad: it's the wurst.
If invaders aren’t sufficiently waylaid by sights or food,
Central Europe has ensured that they won’t be able to get around, at least in a
manner than permits their continued survival.
Like the Swedish army, we started out on foot. However, we soon noticed a few oddities. First, no one in Central Europe
jaywalked. No one. It didn’t matter whether the road was empty
or the street was abandoned; if the sign didn’t say “Walk,” people did not walk. Second, the walk signs are designed to kill
Americans. The flashing red hand with a
countdown number means not “You can walk for X more seconds,” but rather “Wait
X seconds before you start
walking.” A flashing walking-guy means less
“Consider increasing your pace” than “In two seconds, a car will run you down.”
Duly terrified, we switched from foot to bus. This was short-lived, and almost so were
we. One of the drivers read while speeding
down the highway. The other, also while
driving, showed us pictures of cars he’d like to buy, children he’d already had,
and the artwork of said children. This
approach to driving explains why you don’t see jaywalkers in Central Europe. They all died.
Finally, we settled with train. Beautiful, punctual, and not-deraily, Central
Europe’s train system puts Amtrak to shame. However, as we would learn, it’s filled with
brigands. During the trip to Graz, an older
gentleman bumped into our seat and proceeded to apologize. What we didn’t know: while he was
apologizing, his accomplice purloined my travel mates’ bag. It was textbook smash-and-grab, and it could
have been prevented if only we’d taken the standard precautionary
measures. Namely, when an old person
approaches, punch them.
Somehow our bags were stolen.
Given its methods of distracting, waylaying, and otherwise
maiming, you may think that Central Europe is overreacting to potential
siegers. But then you see who’s sieging:
In a restaurant in Budapest, I met a fellow American tourist
who explained he was a “bit of a troublemaker” at Bob Jones University. In fact, he kissed many women there, and one
of these women has since “rejected Christ, married (whispered) a black man, and moved into a high rise in
Chicago.” He seemed most upset about the
Chicago part.
But Central Europe faces an invader that’s worse than
tourists: touring musicals. In addition
to the Grease (“The #1 Party
Musical!”), signs advertise Gladiator: A
Giga Musical and, more disturbingly, Mozart
das Musical. The latter depicts the
title character in a man-on-the-front-of-a-romance-novel shirt complete with
plunging neckline and frilly sleeves.
Passion in his eyes, sexy Amadeus reaches toward the camera as if to
say, “Help me, Peter Shaffer, you are my only hope.”
I'd go.
With all these invasions past and present, Central Europe’s
siege mentality is to be expected.
However, it’s been applied with ill effect to a more recent event: the
Syrian refugee crisis.
As one might expect, cities’ willingness to accept refugees
is inversely proportional to the chance that refugees will actually go
there. Salzburg declares “Refugees are
Welcome Here,” and the sign is in English so that tourists can acknowledge
Salzburg’s generous offer. The only
catches: (i) Salzburg is on the opposite side of the country from where the
refugees are trying to enter, and (ii) the refugees are trying to get to Germany,
not Austria. It would be like Greenland
putting up a sign that said “Hondurans Welcome!”
Hmm.
In Central Europe, most of the refugees are stalled in
Hungary, and the country has made zero-effort (in fact, negative-effort) to accommodate
them. When crossing from Austria to
Hungary, which you’re allowed to do if you look not-Arab, the shift in borders
is clear: you transfer from a sleek electric train to a Soviet-era diesel one, whereupon
a large Hungarian woman sits next to you and sobs for an hour. Outside the train, policemen watch over clusters
of refugees sitting cross-legged on the platform. Other people may enter the train, but the
police ensure that the refugees stay outside.
Eventually we arrived in Keleti, Budapest’s main train
station. Throughout the terminal, a tent
city has sprung up, as well as NGO-run support stations where water is
distributed, clothing swapped, and smartphones charged. The presence of smartphones surprised me. From press coverage, I expected the refugees
to be impoverished. Looking closer, though,
I noticed that the tents were up-scale brands like Northface, and the people in
the tents were fashionably dressed and impeccably groomed. The Syrians in this
train station weren’t coming for economic opportunity; they were fleeing for
their lives. But will the surrounding
countries accommodate them?
Keleti Railway Station
After centuries of invasion by anyone with a cannon and a
dream, Central Europe has prepared a bevy of defenses. These range from the physical (e.g. castles,
wurst salad) to the emotional (e.g. xenophobia), and they’re certainly
understandable. However, while “fear of
invasion” is an apt lens through which to view tourists, Nazis, or ABBA, it’s a
horrible way of regarding refugees. They
don’t need defenses raised against them; rather, they need defending, and by
geographic lot, that task has fallen to the Central Europeans. May they all be as enthusiastic as that sign
in Salzburg.
Metaphorically speaking, I hope there are enough seats at Mozart das Musical for everyone.
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