Although I read The Economist and listen to the podcasts of the Financial Times, I never can make up my mind about the state of the European Union until I hit the road - in the most recent case that which links Dresden, in Eastern Germany, across the Czech Republic to Vienna, on the meandering bike paths (numbers 7, 4, and 9) that are part of the EuroVelo network.
In my mind this is as close as Europe gets to what Rudyard Kipling in Kim describes as that "great highway of all humanity." But rather than take to the road in the company of Kim's faith healers, shamans, sahibs, lamas, missionaries, and factotums, my son and I traversed the heart of Europe on our bikes, coming to the conclusion that the economics of the Union have progressed little from those that the Treaty of Versailles, a century before, imposed on a similarly fragile international network.
The European Union - like Versailles - believes in small national states, debt economics, contentious frontiers, and Germany über alles. It also asks its people to suspend their historical imagination and live only in present time, drawing a curtain over the pre-1989 world.
Unfortunately, the great roads of Central Europe are littered with memories.
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And so we started our journey in Dresden, the capital of Saxony on the River Elbe, hoping to track down the meat lockers that novelist Kurt Vonnegut recalled in his fictional account of the 1945 fire bombings, Slaughterhouse-Five.
Vonnegut was taken as a prisoner of war in December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge in the Belgian Ardennes, and transported in a rail car to Dresden, where he was imprisoned on the outskirts in a building called, like his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.
From Feb. 13-15, 1945, British and American bombers created a firestorm over Dresden, engulfing the medieval city in flames and destroying most of the imperial buildings.
Vonnegut survived the blasts and in the 1960s wrote his novel, taking its title from his stockade. American weaponry devoured historic Dresden - a city with no military importance - and some 25,000 citizens lost their lives in the cauldron. (Vonnegut, who was there, put the losses at over 100,000.)
Vonnegut's prison is only remembered in print, as the actual slaughterhouse, while still standing, bears no markers from either German or American remembrance committees. Each for their own reasons would prefer to forget the legacy of Dresden.
After many loops on the bike, we found Vonnegut's prisoner-of-war dwellings - hulking, empty monoliths, with broken windows and cracked walls, that look unchanged from the 1940s.
Whether they are being saved for a firebombing museum or are simply relics from the German Democratic Republic (the old name for East Germany) is unclear. If there are open wounds between Germans and Americans, Slaughterhouse-Five is a good place to remember them.
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Between Dresden and Prague, with snow in our faces, we rolled for much of the way along the Elbe. We crossed a gap in the Sudeten Mountains that were the price of peace in the ill-fated 1938 Munich Agreement between Germany and the Western powers, allowing the jackboots of Adolf Hitler to press against the throat of Czechoslovakia.
At Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sold the Czechs down the River Elbe. He hoped to exchange their loss for pan-European peace. On his return to London, Chamberlain said: "My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time," after which U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt sent him a two world cable: "Good man!" By contrast, Churchill called his speech a "preparation to scuttle."
Chamberlain also sowed an enduring mistrust among many East Europeans. To them, the concession showed that western allies could not be counted on to defend their interests. Europe's enduring East-West tension now hovers over manifold crises: Ukraine's civil unrest, Greece's brittle economy, and Kosovo's uncertain status as the bastard child of NATO.
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Outside Prague, we detoured on the bikes to Lidice, a village that the Nazis in 1942 razed in reprisal for the Czech underground's assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich - at the time Hitler's instrument of suppression in Prague, and additionally, at the Wannsee Conference, an architect of the Final Solution.
Lidice has an evocative museum to the memory of its 340 citizens who were killed in the massacre - or, in the case of its children, scattered around the Reich. (Only 17 came back.) Many are shown in black-and-white pictures resembling those that would have found their way into a high school yearbook.
