The 2007 History trip to Leipzig, Dresden and Prague. Gregory Steckelmacher has written the following reflections on the recent History Trip. Please submit your responses. “Europe’s basically one giant guilt-trip about World War II,” to paraphrase Gabriel, the oft-used tour-guide of the History department on their expeditions into continental Europe. He had said this on a tram making its way through Dresden, referring to the TV screens fitted into the ceilings of each carriage, which continuously played a selection of government and commercial advertisements, and noticeably contained a wide array of ethnic minorities. That the German government still appeared to be trying to right the wrongs of its past appeared odd, but the necessity was demonstrated by the drunken man who had followed us around Leipzig, shouting “only a dead Indian is a good Indian”. Although he sheepishly ran off at the first mention of police on a mobile phone, it had only been around seven weeks prior to our visit when eight Indians were injured in an attack near Leipzig itself. In some ways the 18 years after the fall of communism seemed a long time. The huge shopping centres and shopping-centres-in-train-stations (a by-product of Sunday trading laws, I am told) were bustling and I couldn’t imagine them not being there. Alternatively, however, the scars of a bygone era were unmissable when traversing the residential areas of Leipzig. Huge concrete buildings tower over the roads, each filled with the same communist flats, mandatory for everyone (as Gabriel told us, you would never need to ask where the toilet was when visiting a friend, for it would be in the exact same place as in your own apartment). Dilapidated and in need of renovation, sitting on land that no-one wants to buy, they are brightened only by large decorative hangings positioned on their side. The situation is worse in Dresden, a city which had almost all of its 19th century architecture destroyed in a firestorm created by the Allies in 1945; it now looks as though it has been overrun by council-housing. And, indeed, where communism hasn’t literally built over the past, nothing has. Dresden is 63% green areas, and although I was sceptical when Gabriel first informed us, casually yet seemingly cynically, that there was nothing anymore at Dresden, I can not help but agree. The new shopping centres, museums, and even a football stadium, are there, but the architecture of Dresden’s past is sorely absent. A shopping centre is no identity for a town to cling to.
| Monument to the lost children of Lidice |
Prague itself appeared to have successfully retained most of its architectural history, something which might be seen in the staunch warning we got of pick-pockets whilst in the city, a sure sign of tourists flocking to view it in all its beauty. Our time there was spent touring the city’s wealth of landmarks, from Charles Bridge to Prague Castle, and from the Astronomical Clock to Wenceslas Square, where student Jan Palach set himself on fire as a political protest against the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, it was outside Prague itself where I received my most poignant experience of the History trip – at the site of the old village of Lidice, which proved that the Nazis’ drive to exterminate their enemies was not a solely attack on the Jews of Europe. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by the Czech resistance force, it was ordered that the village be completely destroyed, and its men and most of its children (save those young enough to be “Germanized”) were killed. The people living in the village had no connection to those involved in the assassination other than the fact that its name was written on a piece of paper held by one of the assassins – the people there were truly innocent. And so, I found myself reconsidering, even if only for a small while, my beliefs on the Holocaust. Perhaps because I had been raised in a Jewish environment, I had always felt that the Holocaust was brought up too much, and that people had never really moved on from it. Yet, on the last few days of the trip, I was asking myself if that was entirely fair. Should the atrocities of the German regime be forgotten? Should Lidice and its 82 gassed children be forgotten? You would have to be most hardened to say so. But I soon found myself thinking once again that if we allow ourselves to be too concerned with events in the past, we stop making decisions based on the current situation, but rather because of what has happened already, subsequently producing choices which might not always be the most appropriate. Gregory Steckelmacher
