EASTERN EXPRESS BERLIN - PRAGUE:The train from Berlin to Prague leads to a city much changed from the description found in a battered 1970s copy of 'Let's Go: Europe', in the second part of a series exploring Europe by rail, writes RUADHAN Mac CORMAIC
‘I KNOW EXACTLY the place to go,” wrote a friend in Berlin when I sent word of my stopover. A short walk from the Hauptbahnhof (the central railway station), in an isolated half-timbered building next to the sandy vastness of the site where Germany’s new interior ministry is due to be built, stands Paris-Moskau. Built at the end of the 19th century, the tavern – now a fine restaurant – was one of the few buildings in the area to survive the 1945 battle for the nearby Reichstag intact. Its location made it a crossroads between east and west, and it did a brisk trade with long-distance lorry drivers and east Berliners until the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 hit business and tipped it into decline.
It got its current name, a reference to the 120-year-old railway link between the French and Russian capitals and Berlin’s place between them, in 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms were starting to prise open the Soviet Union. The staff concocted their own special cocktail and called it Glasnost. Today, in a sign of how Europe’s imagery of Russia has evolved in the intervening years, the signature cocktail is called the Gazprom, after the energy megafirm.
The direct rail link between Paris and Moscow still exists (albeit with a 10-hour stopover in Berlin), but I opted for a more circuitous route, heading south to Prague, across the Czech Republic and north to Warsaw.
Over lunch in the dining car, en route to Prague, Patrick Miller from Pennsylvania produces a small rock from his pocket, places it on the table and tells me it’s a memento from one of the highlights of his trip so far. It’s nondescript; I admire it. He explains that he picked it up on the Normandy beaches as a gift for one of his neighbours – another military nut – back home.
“I’d been watching the military channel,” he explains.
“Again,” adds his wife, Janet, with mock exasperation. “I get to fit in my fun stuff every so often, but mostly it’s military.”
Patrick and Janet – amiable and laid-back – are on a two-week train trip, taking in parts of France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic. They don’t have much of a plan, being simply content to enjoy the rare thrill of travelling everywhere by train. “We wake up and say, ‘okay, where do you want to go today’,” Janet says.
“It’s just such a good way to see the countries,” says Patrick, a retiree in his early 50s. “And it’s a great way to meet people.”
One of the unexpected delights, they say, is that their phones are not working.
The highlights so far have been Bruges and Garmisch, the picturesque Bavarian town. The low point – so low they’re not keen to revisit it – was an overnight train from Milan to Napoli. It sounds hot and slow. The memory sets them off.
“It was an adventure – let’s leave it at that,” Janet says.
“Honest to God,” Patrick breaks in. “It was from the 1950s.”
“I thought it would be a neat idea,” Janet protests.
“Never again,” he replies. “Anyway, we had lunch in Napoli and then we turned straight back to Milan. Italy was my choice, unfortunately, so I’m going to live with that for a long time.”
After Dresden, the train passes Königstein Fortress and the Erzgebirge mountains, giving spectacular views of alpine river valleys and rocky escarpments on either side.
“I’m having green overload,” says David Jones, a Texan who who has lived in Dresden for the past six years but flew in this morning from Abu Dhabi, where he is currently posted. “When I left this morning, it was 40 degrees celsius. Then I got into a taxi at Dresden airport, driving through all this green, and I was thinking, wow. Everything green you see in Abu Dhabi is artificial.”
Watching rapt from the window, Jones talks me through a journey he knows well. He explains where the Elbe merges with the Vltava and points out the popular cycle track that runs all the way from the Czech border to the North Sea. He’s meeting some friends in Prague for his first holiday in 18 months.
“Coming over to Europe, this was a real eye-opener, being able to take a train from anywhere to anywhere. You feel you can almost reach out and touch it,” he says, pointing to a looming mountain. “At 35,000ft, it’s just a dot on the map.”
Before I set off, a colleague gave me a copy of Let’s Go: Europe, published in 1977, which seems like an ancient manuscript in the hands of today’s traveller. Its yellowed pages describe a visit to Ireland as a return to another era, “slower, simpler and gentler”, where “even on a cloudy morning, the Irish will call loudly and joyfully as they meet you on the streets: ‘Isn’t it a grand day, thanks be to God!’”
It advises sternly against venturing over the Border, “unless you are courting disaster, or want to risk ending your trip with finality”. Its Ireland is long gone, and so too, with a more literal finality, is its Czechoslovakia. Gone are the red stars it says are emblazoned on everything from trains to ice-cream stands. So, too, are the banners and slogans of party rhetoric.
“Here, the West simply does not exist,” the guidebook says. Let’s Go makes it sound more isolated than it was – Czechoslovakia in 1977 would have been relatively wealthy and open to foreigners – but from today’s vantage point there’s a sharp irony to the picture of closed seclusion it sketches.
I hadn’t been to Prague in about 10 years, but the same awkward juxtaposition still hits you straight away. On one hand, the city is a treasury of cultural wealth and architectural class, a magical succession of finely restored castles, Gothic churches, bridges and monuments. I even found a Cubist lamp post – the only one of its kind, I later read. On the other, parts of the city centre are an open-air sleaze emporium where whole streets are pocked by strip clubs, “live girl shows” or stag parties. Four times I passed a man dressed up as an ostrich sadly handing out leaflets for the Chopin Erotica Show, or something, on Wenceslas Square.
It rained constantly during my stopover in Prague (as it has every time I’ve been there – I have no empirical evidence that it ever stops), and I arrived back at my hotel in the evening sodden and exhausted after a long day. In the empty foyer, I got talking to the night receptionist, Tomás Legierski, a friendly 28-year-old with live-wire enthusiasm and an Einsteinian shock of blond hair.
“Ah, you’re Irish! I’ve been to Ireland 12 times,” he announces. It turns out that Tomás, under his stage name Tomsa, is one of only three or four professional mime artists in the Czech Republic. And he’s huge among Northern Irish Presbyterians.
He talks at length about the history of Czech mime, about the inspiration he took from Ladislav Fialka, a Czech mime who was a friend and collaborator of the great Marcel Marceau. He talks me through his start as an 11-year-old street performer in his hometown in Moravia, and gives a potted 4,000-year history of the form (“in the Middle Ages, no mime”). Tomás hopes to finish his master’s in theatre direction next year, but in the meantime he and his partner perform fairytales for schools and he works three or four nights a week at the hotel to make ends meet.
“Fialka was an icon here. When he died, everything died. Now in the Czech Republic there are only three or four mime artists. There’s no money in it,” he says.
A chance link with some Presbyterian church groups has made him a regular visitor to Ireland, where he has performed for schools, homeless people and various children’s groups. He even shows me the photos.
In the courtyard adjoining the hotel, Tomás demonstrates how he would go about turning himself into a wall or a gust of wind, how he conveys to a crowd that he’s holding an imaginary apple and not, say, a glass of water. It’s fascinating. Before leaving, I wonder how Irish audiences take to it.
“Irish kids are much tougher [audiences] than Czech kids,” he replies. “It’s so different. The Czech kids are more silent. They watch, and if they want to comment on something, they just say it between themselves. They try not to be heard. But Irish kids are not afraid to say, like” – Tomás puts on an Irish accent – “‘What the f***?’” And he bursts into laughter.
