10

Is It OK to Miss the Cold War? The Philosophical Dilemma of Eastern Europe

No one makes me feel older than Rick Steves. For those who haven’t hit the downside of the demographic bell curve, Steves is the amiable and exhaustively informed über-goober of European travel who’s built an empire by turning two millennia of Old World culture into half-hour packlettes of tourist vanilla for a PBS fan base that considers 60 Minutes a bastion of youthful impertinence.

Because Steves has now introduced more Americans to European culture than Fellini, because lands of the former Eastern bloc have been crowned the up-and-coming Euro travel destination, and because I was prepping for a trip there, the Dufus King appeared unbidden one evening last year in my DVD player. Less jaded by industry puffery than I am, Joyce had brought into our home a pair of Steves videos covering Budapest, Slovenia, and Croatia, sites that comprised much of the itinerary for our own glorious expedition to Eastern and Central Europe.

Beyond the single-camera, boilerplate editing with the approximate production value of a local news field report, Steves’s program depressed me for the same reasons almost all travel reporting depresses me. Everything the gushing host encountered was so relentlessly charming. Every description sounded as if it had been lifted from a feminine-hygiene-spray commercial. Seas glistened. Cities sparkled. Hungary was a “goulash” of influences. And, of course, the Croatian city of Split was the usual fascinating blend of the ancient and modern.

It was disappointing though not surprising that Steves had beaten me to the vacation republics of the former Yugoslavia. Shortly after the turn of the twenty-first century, the travel media began touting Eastern and Central Europe as a paradise of rock-bottom prices, undiscovered villages, and empty beaches. Even better, it was filled with local rustics as yet untainted by the Western economic blitz that would make spicy chicken-breast sandwiches slathered in chipotle barbecue sauce with a side of deep-fried tater nuggets available on every street corner in the world.

Like new inmates in prison, the appeal of emerging capitalist countries from the dismantled Soviet Union lies in their virginity. When travel writers and TV hosts brim lustily about “newly prosperous countries” where, paradoxically, hotel rooms go for only twenty bucks a night, it’s not a celebration of a bustling economy or newfound political freedom. It’s a clarion call for travelers to get their hands on the plunder before everyone else. Covering Bulgaria in 2006, Steves raved about three-dollar meals, reported on the Peace Corps’ dutiful efforts to lay the groundwork for democracy, reassuringly noted the presence of a McDonald’s just down the street from his hotel, and called the country “a capitalist puppy.” (No offense, Bulgaria, but, seriously, you do make a really cute mascot!)

All of this raises a philosophical question that has long troubled thoughtful travelers: When we all know that tourism will destroy many of the exceptional qualities of a given culture, why do we rush to be part of the desecration?

Like our consumption of Middle East oil and hip-hop misogyny, the understanding that we’re part of a corrosive, immoral practice doesn’t stop us from partaking in it. In fact, that knowledge only seems to make our consumption more frenzied. We venerate what we destroy. But first we destroy. If you don’t believe that, talk to a Native American. Or a Japanese samurai, if you can find one.

Prague is a prime example. Crammed with Romanesque, Baroque, and Gothic architecture dating to the twelfth century, Old Town Square in the Czech capital is a world treasure. It took less than a decade after the fall of Communism, however, for the area to be overrun by KFC, Pizza Hut, and those ridiculous European-brand boutiques that turn every historic site on the continent into outdoor malls for the most extravagant or clueless shoppers in the world. Prada. Fendi. Gucci. I could spend the rest of my life in Europe and still not understand why anyone goes to St. Mark’s Square in Venice or Váci Utca in Budapest to shop at places that consider 600 percent a fair markup.

In the West, we take for granted the material prizes available to the most industrious, intelligent, or financially fortunate among us. Hermès handbags and chrome-plated Ferrari stick shifts are the carrots that keep the capitalist mule groaning along. Across the old Soviet bloc, however, the uneven economic transformation has brought swarms of Westerners looking for deals on everything from cheap property and antiques to sex with minors—Romania being just one well-known target of pedophiles—leading to a curious kind of nostalgia for the days when the Western market economy somehow seemed more benign as an enemy than it does now as a friend.

Among the more fascinating products of Ostalgia (German slang for the country’s omnipresent nostalgia for the goods, services, and symbols of the former East Germany) is the return of the Trabant or, affectionately, the Trabi. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the flimsy, two-stroke, plastic-and-fiberglass car that once dominated East German roads quickly became a symbol of disgraced Soviet-style market controls. In recent years, however, Trabi clubs around Germany helped return the stubby little vehicle to view. Hans Q. Public loved it. A modified version of the car went back into manufacture. Today, companies such as Trabi-Safari offer rides around Berlin and Dresden in the phoenix of the East German auto industry.

“A few years ago only a few enthusiasts dared show themselves in public with their Trabis,” says the company. “Now the cult vehicle of the East is back.”

The resurgence of perhaps the crappiest car ever put into mass production reflects a three-tiered wave of Iron Curtain nostalgia in Europe that begins with wistful old proles who pine for the more prosperous lives they enjoyed under the former economy. Their maudlin Slavic outlook trickles down to Eastern Europe’s perpetually unemployed or underemployed younger generation who never even had the chance to work in the system their parents romanticize. Finally, there are the foreign hipsters and countrymen wealthy enough to indulge an interest in Communist kitsch.

Once considered gloomy and socially frigid, life with the Russian bear now seems almost quaint in comparison with the troubles of today, leading a number of Easterners as well as Westerners to consider what was once unimaginable: Is it possible that the days of the Rosenbergs, Sputnik, classroom air-raid drills, Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev pounding his shoe on a desk at the U.N., mutually assured destruction, and Olympic boycotts were in fact better times? In simpler terms, is it wrong to miss the Cold War?

 

In 1999, Sports Illustrated named the Miracle on Ice, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey victory over the Soviet Union, the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. The selection surprised no one. The now-mythic triumph of the ragtag crew of blue-collar, college hockey amateurs over the professional Communist juggernaut at Lake Placid routinely shows up on lists devoted not simply to sports milestones but to American history. The U.S. hockey-team defeat of the evil empire is still viewed as a defining political moment, a sorely needed American victory during a time of social disillusionment, economic recession, humiliation in Iran, and perceived military weakness.

A contrarian by nature, I tend to dismiss hyperbole that expands the importance of ordinary events. The world is too complicated a place to anoint any single incident a “turning point” upon which all pivots. In the case of the Miracle on Ice, I make an exception.

The Miracle on Ice occurred during my junior year of high school. No other happening from that era lives in my mind with greater clarity; more than two decades on, I recognize that game as the zenith of my feelings of patriotism and unbridled zeal for sports. The coke train at the Alaska legislature, Iran-Contra, and 1981 baseball strike were just around the corner.

Like the Cold War, the Miracle on Ice was a multilayered affair, and the extraordinary circumstances in which I saw the game no doubt contribute to my abiding nostalgia for its mythology. Alongside perhaps a hundred high school kids from around Southeast Alaska, I experienced the greatest moment in twentieth-century sports in a double room at the old Marine View Hotel in Ketchikan. The occasion for this massive gathering of youth was not the soon-to-be-historic hockey game but something considered at the time even more sacred: the annual Southeast Alaska High School Basketball Tournament.

Held in a different town each year, “Southeast” was the culmination of the region’s high school sports and social calendar. Separated by ocean and mountains throughout the year, kids who traveled to the tournament on state ferries as part of school organizations (band geek, in my case) were housed over the long weekend with local families of area kids. Students who traveled independent of official school groups, such as my enterprising pal Randy, arranged their own ferry tickets and accommodations. Unburdened by curfews or other school regulations, these freelancers stayed where they pleased and hosted the kinds of parties that might be thrown beyond the reach of parents, teachers, preachers, and other enemies of adolescent freedom. Which is how I came to spend the night of February 22, 1980, bumping shoulders with a crowd of high school kids crammed into a seventh-floor hotel room rented out by Randy and two other Juneau guys.

Sometime around four in the afternoon on game day, my buddy Tom⁸ and I walked from the Ketchikan High School gym to Randy’s room and found that he and his pals had filled their bathtub with the largest batch of P.J. we’d ever seen. Harder to swallow than a North Korean election result, P.J. (aka Purple Jesus) was an Alaska party tradition that consisted of a large vessel filled with whatever fruit juices and alcohol high school kids could round up on short notice—frozen grape juice, Hawaiian Punch, vodka, rum, beer, anything else that wouldn’t be missed from parents’ liquor cabinets. The critical ingredient, however, was Everclear, the lethal 190-proof grain alcohol that can also be used as a solvent, hand cleanser, disinfectant, and fuel in lightweight backpacker stoves. In other parts of the country, P.J. goes by names like Rat Poison, Jungle Juice, and Sex Mix.

As afternoon faded into night and kids dipped their cups for the tenth and twentieth times into the makeshift bathtub tureen, the P.J. level slowly went down, leaving soapy purple rings around the tub, a nauseating record of the party’s progress. In addition to a general aroma of fermentation, the room was redolent of Matanuska Thunderfuck and other sublime weed vintages. Kids in letterman’s jackets—giant P’s for Petersburg, W’s for Wrangell, M’s for Metlakatla, and so on—moved through the crowd. The Haines Glacier Bears cheerleader whom every guy wanted to meet had reportedly been called by someone with connections to Haines High and was on her way over. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Foghat, and Van Halen roared out of an oversized portable tape deck.

Needless to say, we were ready for a hockey game.

What people remember most about the Miracle on Ice is the game-winning goal scored by captain Mike Eruzione, and Al Michaels screaming, “Do you believe in miracles?” More than just the final minutes, however, the entire game was played under the weight of an almost unbearable tension. The machinelike Soviets controlled the puck for virtually every tick of the clock. They out-shot the gutsy young Americans thirty-nine to sixteen. Against the four-time defending champions, however, something about the Americans’ body language—and in goalie Jim Craig’s supernatural night of netminding—kept you believing that the impossible might happen.

The Soviets led three to two going into the final period. With hope fading and twelve minutes remaining, Mark Johnson scored the tying goal. Just ninety seconds later, while our celebration of Johnson’s goal was still vibrating the rafters, Eruzione flicked his game-winning twenty-five-footer into the back of the net. The Marine View seemed to teeter on its foundation. The final ten minutes of the game was the most indescribable “Please, God, let us hang on” agony I’ve ever endured. I watched most of it with my hands folded and eyes closed. I don’t know this for certain, but the beating applied to the Marine View by a packed house of euphoric high school drunks who stomped in triumph for three straight hours after the United States skated off the ice had to have contributed to the venerable hotel’s closure a few years later.

The win over the robotic titans from the USSR was indeed a political as well as an athletic statement. I’ve always been surprised, however, that one of the most satisfying elements of the victory has been overlooked by academics seeking to imbue it with larger meaning. As much as anything, and this was particularly true for genuine sports fans, the Miracle on Ice was payback for the Soviet theft of the basketball gold medal at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, when referees twice put time back on the clock of a completed game, allowing the Russians to win with a Hail Stalin play as the clock expired for a third time.

Ever since I was eight years old, I’ve associated cheating at sports with pagan Communism and still consider that Olympic abomination the most painful and corrupt sports defeat I’ve ever witnessed. The visceral satisfaction of seeing justice meted out on the ice at Lake Placid exorcised eight years of pent-up rage. In the Marine View, we weren’t just celebrating a shocking upset, a political coup, or even the late-night arrival of more Everclear and (finally!) the cheerleader from Haines. We were celebrating the fulfillment of that most precious and seldom realized human emotion: revenge.

 

As a kid, other than the “From Russia with Love” pictorials that Playboy and Penthouse reliably cranked out every few years in the name of forbidden temptation, nothing about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics struck me as attractive or enticing. Any appreciation I had of the nuance that existed behind the Iron Curtain was limited to whether the grim-faced Muscovites we saw on the news were waiting in lines for toilet paper or spoiled cabbage. I grew up with no interest or expectation of ever visiting Eastern Europe.

That changed in 1994 when a group of guys I barely knew asked if I wanted to go with them to Germany. As I had no other prospects at the time, and they promised to pay my expenses, I said, “Why not?” The group was called the Surf Trio.

In the early nineties, when I wasn’t in Asia or Juneau, I was in Portland, Oregon, playing music in plywood practice rooms and occasionally in the type of smoky bars where, if songs like Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” didn’t blast out of the jukebox at least twice an hour, it wasn’t considered a good crowd. The music of the day would soon make international stars of the flannel-and-thrift-store musicians who played the same humble stages I did. After bailing out of a band called Mood Paint that would go on to become Pond (dedicated grunge-era fans will recognize the group founded by my Juneau pals Charlie Campbell and Chris Brady), I hooked on with Portland’s Surf Trio, an established band who had recently lost their drummer and needed a new one in a hurry.

The Surf Trio was neither a trio nor a traditional surf band. Despite the unfortunate name and tedious explanations about its pseudo-ironic origins, the band’s distortion-heavy, four-four rock, catchy two-minute tunes—almost every song began “Onetwothreefour!”—melodic lead guitars, and energetic front man Jeff had earned it a decent regional following. More scruffy than pretty, the only groupies our guitarists Ron and Pete attracted were the grizzled guys at the bar who’d stagger backstage after shows to tell us how great we were, but how you couldn’t hear the rhythm guitar for shit in the mix, and, at any rate, how the Dandy Warhols or Candlebox or Sweaty Nipples or Death Midget or Completely Grocery show the night before had drawn a way bigger crowd.

In that strange “big in Japan” way, the Surf Trio also had a name and small record deal in Germany. While I was in the band, the label twice flew the Surf Trio to Germany for concert tours, the second of which we made with a Swedish bubblegum-punk outfit called Psychotic Youth. In this way, crammed in a van with seven other unshowered and temperamental rock-and-roll hopefuls, led by a gentle yet absentminded tour manager named Gerd, I managed to beat the capitalist masses to Eastern Europe. Or at least what had until recently been East Germany.

With one exception, Psychotic Youth weren’t as scary as their name implied. They were in some respects the Surf Trio’s European doppelgängers—four garrulous guys from Gothenburg whose knowledge of music trivia and useless pop culture was as extensive as our own. Such information is valuable on long rides in a tour van if you’re the type, as I am, who prides himself on being able to answer the question, “Who is the only lead singer to reach the American Top 40 charts as part of four different acts?” The answer is Paul Carrack⁹ (“How Long” with Ace in 1975; “Tempted” with Squeeze in 1981; “I Need You” as a solo artist in 1982; “The Living Years” with Mike and the Mechanics in 1988). The kicker, however, is knowing that the former front man for alleged cheese-merchants Mike and the Mechanics was also the man who played the tinkling piano line on the Smiths’ landmark “Reel Around the Fountain.” Psychotic Youth appreciated this type of banter, and the Surf Trio appreciated them for appreciating it. We got along like IKEA and Allen wrenches.

The aforementioned exception was Alex, Psychotic Youth’s drummer, a man with no patience for trivial chatter and whose Eric the Red tresses, beer breakfasts, and perpetually clenched fists were constant reminders that bloodthirsty Vikings came from all over Scandinavia, not just Norway. Alex was unhappy about a lot of things—the cramped tour van, the sweltering heat, the lousy food provided each night by the clubs and halls where we played. But mostly what he didn’t like were Germans. As Gerd was for the better part of the day the only German within striking distance, and as Gerd was, this side of Sergeant Schultz, the most incompetent manager the Germans ever put in charge of anything, he quickly became the target of Alex’s intimidating harassment.

With Gerd behind the wheel, even two-block trips down the street couldn’t be completed without a complicated series of U-turns, three-point maneuvers, and extended map consultations. After a few days of this, Gerd couldn’t pull over to take a leak without his intelligence being questioned by Alex, who made matters worse by screaming “Imbecile!” and comparing everything the poor guy did to some atrocity committed by the Third Reich. Europe will probably have to burn itself to the ground once again before it completely gets over World War II.

Near the end of the tour, Gerd announced that we would once more be heading into the former East Germany, this time to headline an all-day music festival in a city called Magdeburg. We’d already played a semi-dreary former East German city called Freiberg, where the terrain of mountains and valleys had made it impossible during the Cold War for residents to pick up radio and television transmissions from the West. Cut off for decades from virtually all outside news, music, and entertainment, Freiberg had been part of an area known as Dark Germany, or the Valley of the Ignorants.

“Magdeburg wasn’t in the Valley of the Ignorants,” Gerd told us as we motored down a stretch of autobahn that for once wasn’t clogged with vehicles. “But it was known as a backward part of the country. Maybe you will find it has not improved at the same rate as other places in the old GDR.”

Gerd’s warning turned out to be the understatement of the trip. What Godzilla did to Tokyo, what Mount St. Helens did to Mount St. Helens, Communism, or maybe post-Communism, had done to Magdeburg. The entire city had the burned-out look of a condemned block in the Bronx. Rows of drab Soviet-era apartment buildings stood like crumbling boxes, hoary relics of an irrelevant civilization. Concrete walls were eroded to the rebar. Windows were broken out. Front doors were missing.

And people were living inside these wrecks. This we could tell only by the furtive heads that poked in and out of the spaces where windows should have been as we drove slowly through the narrow, deserted streets. Glares of suspicion followed us around every turn. No one spoke, smiled, or waved; they just stared with that discomfiting Eastern European mixture of curiosity, resentment, and muted hostility. Magdeburg was a time warp, a garbage-strewn Star Trek episode freakish enough to silence even Alex.

Our destination was a venue called Knast, which turned out to be an imposing structure of soot-covered red bricks that during the Cold War had served as a Stasi prison—Stasi being the East German secret police as fearsome as the KGB. Once a center for interrogation and torture of political prisoners, the facility had been recast somewhat ironically as a youth center. In the case of Knast, “youth center” was a definition loose enough to make a presidential press secretary weep with pride. Far from a boys or girls club, much less a concert venue, Knast was essentially a former jail now functioning as a flophouse and dealing station for a small army of half-dressed homeless kids whose ragged appearance conjured images of postapocalyptic desolation.

Excepting a Psychotic Youth/Surf Trio tour poster someone had hung on the front gate, no one appeared to be prepping for an afternoon music festival. Gerd parked the van, and we wandered tentatively through the old prison, literally stumbling over slow-moving or immobile figures passed out on dirt and concrete floors amid empty beer cans, vodka bottles, hypodermic needles, burnt spoons, crack pipes, trash, puddles of piss, roaches, and mice. The oldest kid in the place was maybe nineteen, the youngest no more than seven or eight. Occasionally a sluggish form would roll over and shoot us a menacing stare. Mostly we were ignored.

Though no one appeared to be in charge, Gerd eventually found a weedy-haired blond kid who looked about thirty-five but who was actually thirteen. The kid took us around to the back of the prison to show us where bands sometimes set up. A sad little concrete stage stood in a corner of the large yard overgrown with grass and weeds; it was easy to imagine a prison commandant standing on it and addressing rows of ashen-faced Communist inmates. Graffiti covered every hard surface. Mongrel dogs patrolled the yard like hyenas, teeth bared, tongues lolling. If you squinted hard enough, you’d swear you could still see police snipers posted in the original brick watchtowers that loomed over the entire milieu in an accusatory fashion.

“Where are the other bands?” Gerd asked the scraggly-haired kid.

“What bands?” said the kid.

“We are here to play the music festival,” Gerd replied. “There are supposed to be four other bands on the lineup.”

“I know nothing of this,” said the kid.

“Where is Cristoph?” Christoph was the guy who’d booked us into Knast.

“Cristoph has gone. He left Magdeburg last month. Maybe Berlin.” Without another word, the kid turned and walked away.

As the French author Michel Houellebecq has noted, “One cannot say that communism particularly fostered sentimentality in human relations.”

Across Germany, I’d been documenting the Surf Trio’s adventures on film, but in Magdeburg I decided it might be wise to keep my camera as inconspicuous as possible. I did get in a few snaps—though, as with places like the Grand Canyon, the results proved the difficulty of doing photographic justice to nature’s most spectacular scenes—but we were surrounded by a desperate bunch, and I knew that, even fenced, my new Canon EOS was probably worth ten times the collective liquid holdings of the Knast crowd. I’m not a jittery traveler, but my grandfather had a famous story about meeting strangers on the road and being at Knast did everything but summon his ghost for the retelling.

Bop’s story took place during the Great Depression. He was seventeen or eighteen at the time, driving his father’s truck somewhere in Ohio when he picked up a hitchhiker. The hitcher was a young man, not much older than Bop. He tossed his duffel bag in the back, hopped in front, and immediately began reciting a dreadful tale of woe.

The guy had been discharged from the army six months earlier and hadn’t been able to find work since. The government still owed him back pay. His parents had recently lost their house to the bank. Now the whole family was broke, hungry, and wandering the Midwest in search of jobs and shelter. He finished his bleak yarn by looking across the cab at Bop and saying, “You know, I believe I’d kill a man for five dollars if the opportunity presented itself.”

My grandfather hadn’t yet been around the world, but he knew he didn’t like the way the hitchhiker’s eyes darted around the cab. He also knew that even if the truck he was driving wasn’t worth five dollars, the saw-buck in his pocket was. Bop continued making small talk, asking about the army and so forth, before suggesting the two of them pull over for a cup of coffee.

“On me,” Bop said. “I’ve got a little extra change in my pocket.”

A few miles up the road, Bop spotted a diner and pulled over. The two men settled into a table, but before the waitress could come over, Bop feigned a look of surprise.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, patting his coat pockets. “I left my wallet out in the truck. Be right back.”

Leaving his new friend at the table, Bop hustled out to the parking lot, lifted the guy’s duffel bag from the back of the truck, and tossed it next to the front door of the diner. Then he got in the truck and roared off.

“It’s not that I thought he was a bad guy,” Bop said. “But an empty belly can lead even the best people to do bad things.”

 

In a rain that had been threatening since dawn, the Surf Trio and Psychotic Youth rocked the Magdeburg “music festival.” Not that anyone cared. Though most of Knast’s homeless tribe stirred at the first sounds of power chords in the prison yard, only a few wraithlike figures hung around the stage for more than two or three songs. The Surf Trio went on first, and we ended up playing most of our set in front of four half-naked ten-year-olds, who, to their credit, pressed close to the stage and seemed to enjoy themselves. Though since they were drinking beer the whole time, we tried not to give ourselves too much credit, even when they shyly asked for our autographs after the show.

Psychotic Youth fared worse. Their power-pop harmonies and more polished sound didn’t sit well with the ten or fifteen hard-core derelicts who wandered out to see the headliners. From their opening number, the Swedes were jeered by a gang of rough-boy Germans dressed like seventies London punks, sending Alex into a blind rage as he pounded away on his drum kit. Mercifully, the hecklers retreated after a few songs to the far end of the yard, where a picnic table and decaying snack kiosk filled with beer kept the rabble occupied while the orchestra fiddled onstage.

Knast broke the tour. Unleashing a fury that had been building from the moment Gerd had taken his first wrong turn out of the Frankfurt airport, Alex channeled Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. After the humiliation of the show, he jumped into Gerd’s face and demanded we be taken at once to a four-star hotel, fed properly, and given a day off from the van, the tour, and, most especially, from Gerd. He followed the verbal onslaught by shoving into Gerd’s chest a written list of terms dictating the way the rest of the tour would proceed. Alex presented his manifesto along with the information that he and the other members of the bands were from this point onward in charge of the tour. To hell with the record label. If he wished, Gerd could stay on with the new title of “driver.” Otherwise, we were taking the van.

Gerd put up no fight. It’s possible he’d been even more shocked by the conditions in Magdeburg than we were. By nightfall, we were ensconced in a business hotel far from Knast. The crisp white sheets felt good, but the hellish day had left us all too drained to enjoy them. The entry I made in my journal that night suggested that there was more than one drama-queen drummer on the tour:

One of the most miserable days of my life. East Germany is a post-Orwellian nightmare. All is dour, gray, abandoned, defeated. Highlight of day was dinner of potato chips and soda purchased and consumed at a gas station, the only sign of working commerce Jeff, Jörgen, Ulf, Johannes, and I could find after thirty minutes of walking following Alex’s meltdown. Awful show. Fights between rival packs of mangy dogs received more attention than the bands. Magdeburg is seediest, scuzziest, most squalid disaster I’ve ever seen. Memory has a way of injecting a golden hue on hardship—I won’t forget the wretched truth of this day. Those who survive epic adversity become members of an infamous fraternity whose suffering becomes associated with a single name. Pompeii. Bataan. Chernobyl. Add Magdeburg to that notorious list. This might seem hysterical, but there are in my midst at least seven musicians and one ruined manager who wouldn’t argue the point.

By morning, Alex had calmed down, and so had I, but the chatty, jocular atmosphere in the van was never restored. Gerd continued driving, but he barely spoke the rest of the trip. The agony was short-lived. We had only two shows to go; then it was time for relieved handshakes and flights back to Sweden and the States. I sat next to Ron and Pete on the way home, and we agreed that none of us had any desire or intention of ever witnessing more of life behind the old Iron Curtain. Though I know for a fact that Ron and Pete have kept their end of the bargain, for me, it was just another resolution I’d eventually end up breaking.

 

One of my most satisfying Soviet-style encounters came seven years later on a winter train trip from Moscow to Berlin. The memory of Magdeburg hadn’t faded, but work is work, and I was traveling once more through post-Communist lands, this time doing research for the European edition of my World War II guidebooks.

Well aware of the rules against carrying contraband across international borders, I’d nonetheless hidden in the bottom of my suitcase a massive Russian Navy flag that had once flown above the deck on a Soviet submarine. Sifting through a junk shop in Moscow, I’d become infatuated with the maritime flag, its white field, blue stripe across the bottom, ominous red star in the left corner, and hammer and sickle in the right. My brother had spent much of his U.S. Navy career inside P-3 aircraft dropping sonar buoys on Soviet subs in the Pacific, and I was taken by the idea that he couldn’t possibly receive a more unexpected Christmas present than this rare and historic trophy.

Although they’re widely available from dealers across the country, it’s illegal to take Communist military artifacts out of Russia. Being caught with the flag, however, didn’t concern me until the moment my overnight train to Germany jerked to a violent halt in the middle of a dead-black night somewhere west of Moscow. I awoke to a commotion of angry Russian voices. I pulled back the flimsy curtain on the window. Heavy snow was falling at a forty-five-degree angle. We weren’t in a station or for that matter near any signs of civilization or electricity. I checked the clock. 2:45 AM. For a moment I wondered if a group of Russia’s famed gangsters had hijacked the train.

Sets of steel-toed boots clattered along the corridor, and a moment later an insistent pounding shook the door of my compartment. Before I could answer, the door swung open. Two husky, uniformed men wearing tight frowns and comically high green and red military hats dusted with snow stood in the hallway. I immediately thought, “Why the hell did I buy that goddamn flag?”

“Passport.”

The taller of the officials held out his hand while the shorter one cast fishy looks around the tiny compartment. Apparently we’d arrived at a border crossing. The men were Belarusian customs agents. Belarus had been a province within the USSR. Now it’s an independent nation between Russia and Poland.

“American?”

It said so on the little blue booklet, but the guys wanted a second opinion. Generally fearful of European border officials and preoccupied with the flag, I was in no frame of mind to offer a snappy comeback.

“What is the purpose of your trip to Belarus?”

“Just transit to Berlin,” I said.

The two agents squeezed into the compartment. The tall one stood in front of my bunk turning over blankets and pillows. The short one picked up the green plastic tube on the sink, opened it, found my toothbrush, pulled it out of the container, inspected the bristles, and put it away. This wasn’t going to be like sneaking an extra gallon of Kahlua through Tijuana.

“Your suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“Open.”

I tried to simulate the composure of a man who’d opened thousands of suitcases in the middle of the night for impatient ex–Soviet officials. The top layer was dirty underwear and old socks. Joyce once told me this would discourage inspections. The short guard dug in without hesitation. Within twenty seconds he’d found one of the Red Army medals I’d rolled up in a pair of socks. His nose twitched like a hound dog’s in a prison cell. A minute later he was holding up my flag and nodding to his buddy, obviously pleased with his work. Stretched out, the flag reached nearly from one side of the compartment to the other.

“You are American military?” the tall one asked, though it didn’t sound exactly like a question.

“No, no. Not military. Civilian.”

“Then why you carry Soviet Navy flag?”

Despite having plenty of time to prepare for this very fair and clearly inevitable question, I didn’t have an answer that I thought might satisfy the type of people likely to ask it. Since I figured the flag was probably a goner—these guys could’ve been pissed-off ex–Soviet Navy for all I knew—I told the truth. I said it was a souvenir for my Cold Warrior brother. Now retired, mind you, and utterly respectful of the determined, resourceful, and noble enemy against whom he operated as a mere pawn in a superpower game fueled by inexorable forces beyond the control of rational men such as ourselves, who…

“You may not take this flag out of Russia,” the tall one said.

I shrugged, but my insides were churning at the thought of what the punishment for such a crime might be. The guard looked me in the face once more, held my eyes for an uncomfortably long time, then handed back my passport.

“But you are in Belarus now, not Russia.”

With that, the short guard carefully refolded the flag, military style, placed it back in my suitcase, and closed the top. He very nearly smiled as he turned and shut the door behind him.

 

My stories about Magdeburg junkie-orphans and Belarusian border officials might give the impression that Eastern Europe hasn’t changed much since Yeltsin left the Kremlin liquor cabinet empty. For better or worse, though, the truth is that these experiences grow more infrequent with each passing year. With few exceptions, what traces of the Iron Curtain that remain are now, like pie ’n’ mash shops in London, subject to tourist-driven preservation without which they’d quickly go the way of Yakov Smirnoff. Just as you can imagine the Revolutionary War while walking the Freedom Trail in Boston, it’s easy enough to find evidence of the Cold War in Eastern Europe but usually only in places where it’s been shot, stuffed, tagged, and sealed in a glass case: the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin, Josip Tito’s birthplace in Croatia, the secret police House of Terror in Budapest, the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow. The latter displays a piece of Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane, on exhibit since being shot down in 1960, an event that dashed American hopes for success at an upcoming superpower conference and some years later provided a quartet of Irish rockers with both a name and early muse.

The Moscow museum is among the finest military museums in the world, but other sites dedicated strictly to Cold War history often aren’t very good. The Museum of Communism in Prague, designed primarily to dance on the Soviet grave by spreading procapitalist ideology, sells cards and T-shirts that make an ironic joke of the fact that it shares building space with a McDonald’s. It’s a clever shtick that sells lots of merchandise, though I found it discouraging that no one at the museum seemed aware of, much less bothered by, what a sad fucking fact it is that the Big Mac has emerged as the ultimate symbol of Western conquest.

I’m not saying I won’t shove a Quarter Pounder in my face from time to time when I’m overseas. Nor that I want to see a leader get off Air Force One in Berlin and shout, “Mr. Putin, rebuild that wall!” In significant ways, Eastern Europe is much better off now than it was fifteen years ago.

What I am saying is that it’s not just lonely at the top; it’s boring. The spread of Western ideology might be good for big business, but speaking strictly from the perspective of an individual traveler who values the exotic, capitalism sucks. Countries that function with outlandish economic or political systems may not be as comfortable or easy to get to, and may not have very good shopping, but being different and difficult is precisely what makes them rewarding for many visitors. It’s a funny line, but there are plenty of people like me who disagree with Stephen Colbert when he says, “There’s nothing American tourists like more than the things they can get at home.”

The U.S. government’s campaign to remake the international map in its own image, or at the very least make it conform to American corporate rules and standards, makes the world a duller place. What’s the point of a planet where vive la différence refers simply to the distances that can be measured between S, M, L, and XL? For me, getting to Red Square in 2003 might have felt more like an achievement had we not eaten Sbarro pizza in a mall immediately afterward.

Ruminating over these general themes last year in a beach restaurant on the Croatian island of Vis while enjoying a gorgonzola-and-pepperoni pizza as George Benson’s “Breezin’” played in the background, I arrived at a somewhat surprising conclusion. There was only one way for me to come to grips with my ambivalent feelings about missing the Cold War. I needed to return to Magdeburg.

From Croatia, Joyce and I had made the two-day overland trip to Berlin, where I sprang the news of the idea that had been boiling inside me since Vis. Given that over the years she’d heard numerous versions of my story about Knast and Gerd and Psychotic Youth, it was not altogether surprising that the levelheaded Joyce disapproved of the plan and declared that she would not be joining me on any quixotic voyages into my murky past. I told her about the tree of personal questing growing inside of me. She told me Berlin was filled with excellent museums and restaurants. The next morning, I made the two-hour train trip to Magdeburg alone.

As I’ve mentioned before, one sneaky thing about travel stories are the phony raisons d’être writers often invent to justify their travels. Rather than just admit that they’re hang gliding over the Argentine pampas because some magazine or book publisher paid them to, they fabricate a steaming pile about their urgent desire to follow the footsteps of Che Guevara or some other nonsense that makes them sound both appealingly adventuresome and introspective. This is why I want to stress that I didn’t have any good reason to return to Magdeburg. Nobody was paying me to go there—and, believe me, travel writers hate paying for trips with their own money—and Joyce and I were in Germany only because I wanted to visit my old Maxim pal Dave Malley, who had moved there.

What I wanted from Magdeburg a decade after surviving my initial trauma, I wasn’t sure. Having traveled through Germany often in the intervening years, however, I knew what I was likely going to find: change. Specifically, the kind that blurs the lines that once solidly separated East and West.

Change in Magdeburg was evident in more than just the bright autumn sunshine and new “Fan American Sports Bar” across the street from the station where I disembarked. Despair had been replaced by vitality. And chain stores. People sat outside drinking coffee and tilting their faces back to catch the sun. Couples pushed babies in strollers down tree-lined sidewalks. Downtown’s historic walking route looked mildly interesting, but rather than delay the inevitable, I hailed a cab and told the driver, “Knast.”

At least one beat-up GDR apartment house was as neglected as the entire neighborhood had been when I’d walked through it with Jeff, Jörgen, Ulf, and Johannes, but, for the most part, the buildings were new or renovated. All of them had doors. Flower boxes hung beneath new vinyl window frames. Not exactly McMansion suburbia, Magdeburg nonetheless looked like a perfectly functional mid-major city, a German San Antonio or Charlotte. It’s mind-boggling how fast an entire city can be rebuilt once proud, defiant people get organized. In less than a decade virtually all of Magdeburg had rebounded. Six-plus years later, the scorched hole in the earth at Ground Zero in New York remains a national disgrace.

Aside from the odd apartment building, about the only thing that had escaped the extreme-makeover treatment was Knast itself. I immediately recognized the graffiti-covered metal gate where Gerd had parked the van and we’d unloaded our gear in gloomy silence. Still plastered with tour posters—alas, not a trace of the old Psychotic Youth/Surf Trio handbill remained—the gate was locked. Between the hinges I could see the yard had been mowed and the piles of broken bricks and cinder blocks hauled away. Otherwise, the same.

In front, a large sign with white block letters hung across the imposing prison facade: “Gedenkstätte Moritzplatz Megdberg für die Opfer politischer Gewaltherrschaft 1945–1989.” I couldn’t read the German, but anything commemorating the dark years of 1945–1989 didn’t suggest a party inside. I pushed the door beneath the sign and found it open.

Since no one seemed to be around, I gave myself a tour, stepping tentatively at first, then marching through the eerily empty hallways like I owned the place. Last time I’d been here, the rooms, cells, and basement closets had been teeming with underage squatters and sundry vermin. Now they were cleaned up, painted, and decorated with black-and-white historical photo enlargements and interpretive signage.

“Yes, can I help you?”

A lean woman with short, straight brown hair was calling from the far end of a darkened corridor. I looked up to find her moving toward me with brisk, officious strides. She was dressed in wide black pants, and her shoes clacked across the tile floor. Not the type, I guessed, who’d consider my sentimental journey just cause for trespassing.

“Ah, yes, well,” I said. “Do you work here?”

I’m not, as a rule, what’s known as a “charmer” with the ladies. But I hadn’t come all the way to Knast just to get kicked out five minutes after I’d breached the door. Calling on all of my JET cross-cultural training and foreign diplomacy skills, I smiled, offered a handshake, and introduced myself.

Her name was Kirsa. She’d grown up on the outskirts of Magdeburg under GDR rule, and she was now the chief fund-raiser for and caretaker of this former Stasi prison, since converted into a museum. At forty-three, she was older than me, though not by much, meaning that while I’d been in Ketchikan watching the U.S. hockey team thrash the Soviets, she’d been in an East German university writing a paper or studying for an exam or partying in whatever way they did in the GDR.

Kirsa was thus a potential fountain of information, and though she was obviously anxious for both of us to leave—it was Sunday, the museum was officially closed, and she’d just stopped by to collect some things, which explained the open door and empty halls—I pressed her into conversation. The first thing I told her was that I’d been to Magdeburg a decade earlier and that the city now not only looked completely different, it felt different.

“As in most of East Germany, a number of programs have been undertaken to rebuild the city,” she told me in slow, concise English. “Naturally, the city looks much nicer than before. But the situation with jobs is still not good for many people, so maybe looks can be deceiving.”

I told Kirsa that in ten years I’d yet to meet an Eastern European who hadn’t bemoaned the false promises of democracy, a betrayal that had annihilated the pillars of the education and social-welfare system that once held their societies intact. She looked at me as if I’d just pointed out that the sun was a star around which our spherical earth orbited and rotated.

“Of course, many necessary aspects of life have been degraded in recent years,” she said. “There is much more a sense of hopelessness about these things.”

“Yet clearly things are better now than they were before,” I said. “Magdeburg looked like a war zone when I was here in the midnineties.”

Kirsa shrugged and looked at me with hard, icy blue eyes. It occurred to me that twenty years ago she’d have been exactly the type of mirthless East German hard-ass I wouldn’t have had a chance in hell of beating in the hundred-meter freestyle.

“I have a good job, so for me and my children, the situation is much better than before,” she said. “For those people without jobs, maybe you have to ask them this question for yourself.”

I asked Kirsa if she could let me into the prison yard where the Surf Trio had played. She told me she didn’t have the key and, anyway, that part of the facility still belonged to the youth center, not the museum. I told her what type of “youth center” it had been a decade earlier.

“I think you will find it is much better now,” she said, “but perhaps the young people there are not so different as you describe. It is still a hard life here for many people.”

We talked some more—employment, education, politics—but she was getting fidgety, and I didn’t want to lose her without addressing what I was gradually beginning to understand as the point of my visit. Coming to Magdeburg with all the advantages available to the average white, college-educated American male, I didn’t want to sound like a naïve or entitled dick. I was going to have to put this as delicately as possible. I smiled and cleared my throat.

“Given that I never lived under Communist rule, and given how oppressive I know it was, and not wanting to trivialize any of that, I’m embarrassed saying this,” I began, “but I can’t help feeling a little regret whenever I visit Eastern Europe. In an abstract way, I hated you, or at least your government and country, for a good portion of my life. But now, the militaristic statuary and Social Realism art and threatening totalitarian uniforms? They look sort of stylish. The straightforward morality of a Cold War struggle against a professional and worthy foe dedicated to science and economic equality, at least as they interpreted it? I sort of miss it.”

Kirsa thought about this strange confession for a long time. Then she nodded without smiling.

“Many Ossi (East Germans) can understand this feeling,” she said, and nothing more.

Kirsa walked me to the door and locked it behind me. In front of the building, a stocky man in a black leather coat was parking his BMW. I waited until he’d shut the door, then held out my Canon. “Take my picture?” I asked.

The guy said, “No problem.” I stood in front of Knast looking over the photographer’s shoulder at a nicely manicured park across the street. While he lined me up in the frame, I thought, “Not only can you not go home again; you can’t even go back to Magdeburg.”

 

I ate lunch in a café and took a late train to Berlin. Back at the hotel, I flopped on the bed, turned on the TV, and stopped flicking channels when I hit a basketball game. The NBA season was getting under way with a series of exhibition games in Cologne and the Philadelphia 76ers were playing CSKA Moscow, the outfit formerly known as the Red Army team. Three Americans were on the Moscow roster, one of whom, I was surprised to see, was Trajan Langdon.

Trajan Langdon was once the most famous man in Alaska. Born in May 1976, he was three years old at the time of the Miracle on Ice, too young to remember anything of the day beyond perhaps the twenty-foot Nerf shots I’m sure he was already draining in his parents’ living room. He hadn’t even been alive when the original evildoers had stolen the 1972 Olympic basketball gold medal.

The first basketball player from the state to achieve national recognition, Langdon had been heavily recruited out of Anchorage Christian High in 1994 and played for coach Mike Krzyzewski at Duke. There, as one of the best outside shooters in the country, he became known as the “Alaskan Assassin.” Langdon went on to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers, but as a medium-sized guard with below-average ball-handling skills, he never established his groove in the NBA. He washed out of the league after three seasons.

Expat ballplayers in Russia don’t get many chances to perform in front of NBA coaches—against Philadelphia, Langdon was playing his ass off, chesting up much bigger guys on D, scrambling for loose balls, fighting through picks, jacking up shots every time he touched the rock. Even as a small figure on TV, he showed the intensity of a man desperate to work his way back to the States, a desire no one who’s spent time in Moscow could hold against him. Langdon wasn’t the team’s first offensive option on the floor, and he wasn’t surrounded by great players, but if CSKA Moscow lost, it wasn’t going to be his fault.

Despite his hard-nosed effort, the Alaskan Assassin didn’t score much in the first half. Allen Iverson was lighting up Moscow; no one would ever mistake this for a larger-than-life duel between East and West. Then in the third quarter Langdon flashed some of his old form, stopping a Philly run by popping behind the arc and burying a clutch three-pointer.

For a moment it looked like a game-changing bucket. As he ran down court sharing high fives with his Russian teammates, the camera zoomed in on Langdon’s smiling face, and all at once I wondered if I’d been wrong about him wanting to go back to the States. Far from looking at a homesick baller, I was watching a man in a red jersey unambiguously interested in nothing more than beating the Americans. I was looking, with a mixture of envy and pity, at a man who even if he wanted to would never be able to find his way back in a world in which war had become peace, freedom had become slavery, ignorance had become strength, and East had become West.