Posts Tagged ‘germany’

Map of Western Europe

It’s been a couple of days since my return from Europe, so I thought I’d chime in with a few reflections from the recent trip and a few remarks.

First, it was great to be back in Europe after more than a year away from the Continent.

For a short while there, I was able to pretend like I was living back there, enjoying that special blend of sweet doing nothing which is such a hallmark of the average European’s lifestyle. I needed to just kick back and enjoy the crowds for a few days, but it was too short. I felt like the entire thing was rushed. Whirlwind. It’s nothing something I want to duplicate anytime soon…and I can see how the jet-setting lifestyle starts to get on the nerves of a lot of commuting business people. Jumping on and off planes, hopping into rental cars and speeding off along motorways with the pedal to the floor, eating sugary food and crap, and not resting nearly enough is a recipe for a case of the sneezes. I don’t know how some businesspeople manage to keep it all together.

Also, it was great to have a very compact set of goals to achieve on my trip and to have met them in such a short period of time. Always great when you can achieve what you set out to do. I went through the list and crossed things off as I made my way through.

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Funny how referrals work, you know? I was simply blowing though Jan Wong’s sensational China Whispers: Searching for Forgiveness in Beijing a couple of weeks back and stumbled upon Aussie author Anna Funder’s Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall.

Given how I suffer from an incurable case of ostologie, I leapt at the chance to snatch up my copy of Funder’s coming-of-age travelogue as soon as I returned to the Golden Burg (Prague). And – sports fans – I’m pleased to announce that I whipped through this one equally as quickly.

Get a look at this author, will ya?

Yowzahs!

But getting completely serious again (for just a moment), let’s pay due respects to Funder’s stalwart effort to compile a truly quality piece of non-fiction writing. Spliced together over the course of approximately seven years of painstaking personal research – both behind and in front of the Wall — Stasiland (affiliate link)  is the author’s attempt to give a distinctly human face to the one-time formidable, cunning, and truly thorough state security apparatus, the Stasi, by going way behind the headlines and monstrous rhetoric to the far reaches of the former German Democratic Republic’s frontiers. It was here where Funder would uncover stories of people who suffered torturously at the Stasi’s omnipotent devious hands.

A Divided Germany

The Stasi’s Emblem

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More political sausage for the day, folks. Bear with me. I know it’s a bit on the dry side, but it’s where I’m at for the next couple of weeks and all of it relates to another thing I’ve got on the burner at present. I’ll try to make it entertaining by being as irreverent and slapstick as I can, without losing the thrust of the argument.

So I was rummaging through yet another old stack of books last week when I happened across Anthony Bailey’s excellent early-‘80s travelogue Around the Edge of the Forest: An Iron Curtain Journey that recalls his early-1980’s journey along the fringe of the East and West German border area along – as the book’s title promises — the wooded forest separating the two former belligerent Germanys.

I nearly upended the shelf on which Bailey’s book was resting in my sudden zeal to prise it from the stack, given how rare it is these days in Prague to find books of this type in homes. Two decades after Wall Fall, the interests of most denizens of this post-Communist statelet is decidedly far away from discussions of past crimes and ignominies, with its focus pointed clearly towards the West. Read the rest of this entry »