As a school child of the late ’50s and early ’60s, the Communist Threat was an ever-present dark (mushroom) cloud that hung over my formative years.
And yet, we were not among those students famously drilled in the turtle-taught tradition of “duck-and-cover.” Maybe Catholic schools, being closer to the God than the Publics, had a special papal immunity to the perils of the impending nuclear holocaust so we did not practice this ridiculous and ineffective ritual. Besides, we had enough of our own rituals to keep us occupied trying to get to our heavenly reward. We didn’t need the assistance of some distant comrade with his finger poised perilously above “the button” to accelerate that journey.
But I digress.
Anyway, the ominous Iron Curtain and, in particular, the division and isolation of Berlin were particularly fascinating to me. I dreamed of the day when I could experience this claustrophobic island of rampant Western commercialism girdled by a hostile Sea of Socialist Evil. Maybe it was because my own ethnic roots came from two mysterious, down-trodden lands accessible only through encyclopedias and locally-published foreign-language newspapers. Knowledge of the “old country” was kept as guarded from the 1st and 2nd generations by the immigrant founding family members as Eastern European citizens were sheltered from the decadent influences of the West by the hammer-and-sickle might of the Soviet Order.
Fast forward to 2014. The year 1989 is just another year like any other to a new generation: past and forgotten. The Wall (not Pink Floyd’s — Kruschev’s) has been shattered and scattered around the world. East has met West and the Germanies are one Reich again. And Bonn, once a backwater Rhine River hamlet until thrust into the forefront of the Cold War, has returned to the anonymity it so richly deserved when the governmental torch was passed back to Berlin at reunification.
And us? We are the grateful recipients of this Grand Circle River Cruise — our first European river cruise — through the generosity of those globe-trotting travelers, John and Carol Gibb. This trip will put us smack in the midst of what was once the standard-bearer of Euro-Communism, East Germany, and its neighbor, the Czech Republic. Having learned much about how the Russians transformed the former Baltic countries into Soviet Socialist Republics, I looked forward to seeing how their political theory was translated into German.
A Taste of the Soviet Bloc 