Czech Republic: Chasing the Soviet Sunset
By Evan Thoreau Heigert

It’s well past midnight, and I’m lying awake against the cracked green cushions of the train bench. I watch the flickering lights run across the walls of the empty coach. The bumps and rolling of the tracks continually thrust me out of whatever light dozing I settle into. Suddenly the door to the cabin is thrown open, and two thick oak trees dressed in camouflage fatigues and black berets stand in the light. One wears a submachine gun on a strap around his shoulder; the other holds back an intimidating German Shepherd. I jump to my feet and ramble in broken bits of German and English, digging through my rucksack searching for identification. I find my passport and hand it over to the officer, who studies it with a cold stare, hands it back with a nod, and disappears once again behind the closing door. I exhale and fall back against the bench, my heart pounding, and look out the window as the train barrels east through the night-soaked lands of the former Eastern Bloc.

The mere mention of Eastern Europe dredges up images of green Soviet tanks, soldiers in furry caps and endless grids of bleak city blocks. I distinctly remember watching the fall of the Berlin Wall as a child. I stared in awe at the little kitchen television as men clambered over the graffitied barrier, yelling, shouting, thrusting fists in the air. I couldn’t tell if they were actions of joy or terror. What was life like in that isolated part of the world? It seemed to me a place devoid of color, eternally locked in winter, where the furrowed faces of old men contrasted against the smooth concrete of Soviet high-rises.

So it came as quite a surprise when in college, friends returned from studies abroad boasting of the elegance and modernity of old Eastern capitals like Prague and Berlin. By this time – half a generation removed from the Cold War – the stigma of Soviet oppression had slowly morphed into a kind of stoic retro chic. Films depicting the ‘glory days’ of East Germany were flickering across western movie screens. Pop Art was embracing the Cold War era; a guerrilla exhibition of graffiti artists dubbed the East Side Gallery covered crumbling sections of the Berlin Wall. Of course, no self-respecting alternative college student would be caught without the mandatory olive-green GDR army jacket – bullet holes and military patches earned extra points. In my own freshly-formed adult mind, preconceptions of the former Bloc also shifted. I regaled myself with images of the KGB underground, cavernous Russian Cathedrals, the chime of iron bells ringing through desolate streets where ghosts of soldiers in fur parkas still marched.

But these vintage images stood in contrast to my surroundings, when years later I find myself in the ultra-modern Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Opened just days before my arrival, the train station is a slender, tube-like structure boasting of wall-to-wall glass and exposed steel supports – the stylistic grandchild of the classic Bauhaus design that welcomed Germany into the last century. During my first visit to the German capital, I had come expecting the cold, Soviet-style civic planning I read about in school. Instead, I found a city unbelievable dynamic, modern, and warm. Across the sprawling metropolis, new buildings pop up like silver flowers reaching to touch the icy sky. This gaping disparity between expectation and reality leave me a touch uneasy – a feeling I seem to share with many of the older Berliners who lived through the Cold War.

Nowhere else is this conflict between the old and new so apparent as in infamous East Berlin. Now a major civic center, modern banks, office buildings, and temples of capitalism now reside in the former Soviet bastions of Alexanderplatz and Nikolaiviertel. Truly, the only scraps of East Germany I can find are a 200-meter length of the concrete wall and a copper plaque laid into the concrete of Birchbuschstrasse that reads, “You are now crossing Checkpoint Charlie”. Berlin is a town in transition. One needs only to look up towards the space age Fernsehturm, standing like a sentinel above the glimmering city below, to see how this is true.

So with my taste for Soviet chic not yet sated, I decided to move further east across the German border into lands that less than twenty years ago were veiled well behind the iron curtain. In the dying light of sunset, we coast south through farmlands towards the industrial city of Dresden, a mere ninty minute ride from Berlin via the sleek and powerful ICE bullet train. In the Saxon capital I switch to a much slower Soviet-era train, heading across the border into the Czech province of Bohemia. Like stepping from a Porsche and getting into a Yugo, the shift is shocking, but I take solace in the fact that I’m on the right track. As darkness falls over the borderland, I let the rhythm of the tracks lull me into what will prove to be a restless night.

Prague is utterly perplexing to the new arrival. It’s still dark the next morning as we chug into the main train station, a monstrous iron structure on the Far East side of town. I step out into a city doused in the greyness of pre-dawn. A sleepless night and a new city leave me with an unsettling, lonely feeling, as I try to navigate the dark industrial blocks that surround the station. It becomes suddenly obvious why this is the hometown of that master of isolation, Franz Kafka. Although widely read as one of the great German writers, young Kafka spent much of his life roaming the early morning streets of Prague, developing the modern ennui that helped define the early 20th century.

I work my way west as the sun begins to rise behind me. The sense of isolation fades in the busying streets, but the confusion remains. Narrow medieval lanes seem to begin and end of their own accord, presumably following the curve of the Vltava River as it cuts a wide arc through the heart of the city. Somehow I find the grand boulevard of Wenceslas Square – a strip crowded with shops, restaurants, and small pubs that funnels new arrivals into the Staré Mêsto (Old Town). A statue of  King Wenseslas on horseback stands guard at the foot of the National Museum on the square’s southeast end. Today the square is a symbol of the richness of Prague’s commerce, but during the communist era it served a much different purpose. It was here that thousands of young Czechs protested the Soviet invasion in the 1960s. The famed student activists Jan Palach and Jan Zajic burned themselves alive on these very cobblestones as an act of martyrdom, demanding the freedom of their homeland.

I continue past vendors selling fried cheese and sausage, and slip into the heart of the old quarter. The deep, shadowed avenues are mesmerizing. The city here is literally golden; smoke-streaked sandstone glows with a kind of dull luster, like a grandmother’s old ring that begs for a good shining. But characteristically, no polish has come to Prague’s worn facades – and that may well be the essence of her charm. The signature of countless centuries are inscribed on the very walls of the city. The relative insignificance of Prague as a military target saved it from WWII bombers. The city remains more or less intact, a rarity on a continent where so many old cities were rebuilt merely half-a-century ago.

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