The Journey [antikvár]

Preface "American authors have perfected one hundred sixty-five ways of describing the act of making love, but show less skill in examining the way an individual exists within the changing framework of history" was a statement by Czeslaw Milosz I remember from sometime in the early '60s. Well, I had my first exposure to life within that framework as a boy of 18 walking across Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, and Prague in the summer of 1939. It was an adventure: disobeying my father who had other plans for my summer, exploring a part of Europe as far away as Romania and Bulgaria, seeing with my own eyes what I had read about in college on Hitler's National Socialism. And all of this lay under the threat of war due to break as soon as the harvests were in. For a disobedient adolescent, there was the side issue of the relation between attitudes towards Jews within my family's world and what I saw in Vienna of Jews wearing a yellow armband with a six-pointed star or seated on a yellow bench, and then the relation between that yellow bench and the special benches for Negroes that I had seen in Mississippi where my father owned a 3000-acre cotton plantation. A historian's fascination with unwanted comparisons began on that journey. Later on the journey involved two years as a soldier in Italy and a dozen visits to postwar Prague and Warsaw to ask what was a Communist pohce state. How did individuals survive History and retain some sense of identity and integrity? I kept returning to what became "my" Europe, gradually making a few close friends through whose eyes I acquired a sense of this world from the inside. Out of the untidy suitcase of observations and conclusions from a lifelong career as history teacher came souvenirs like the similarities between Franz Josef and Ronald Reagan, the different ways of looking at abstractions like Staatsmacht, which needs no translation, the self-righteousness and self-delusions of nationalism. The heroic Pole stands up to the brutal German and then humiliates the Jew who does the same to the Palestinian who blows up a busload of housewives and schoolchildren. The Germans cheer their victories over Poland, Norway and France, the Americans theirs over Grenada, Panama and Iraq. There is no escape.