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.
Looking at one of the lost classes, I wondered what Lidice means now for Czech-German relations, especially as the two countries are EU linchpins in Central Europe's revival. Nor should it be forgotten that East German troops suppressed the 1968 Prague Spring.
While architecturally stunning, Prague is choking on its tourist success. Bounded by the Vltava River and a grotesque 1960s-era elevated highway, Prague's old city has taken on the qualities of a Las Vegas themed complex, complete with jugglers, touts, sidewalk artists, and boutiques. Even Jewish Prague, with its old cemetery and its fallen headstones, has the feel of a Disney pavilion (with long lines and $15 admission tickets).
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Beyond Prague's golden triangles, the Czech Republic is less the economic success that is often described in upbeat press releases from Brussels.
We rolled through countless towns and villages that had the feeling they were still hiding behind a Berlin Wall - in this case an economic partition that consigns much of Bohemia and Moravia (the principal Czech regions) to life as second-hand pawn shops.
The Czech Republic uses crowns for its currency, not the euro, and the crown has depreciated badly against the U.S. dollar - another indicator of economic stagnation.
South of Brno - a stunning city of Habsburg elegance, its old town renovated with EU assistance - we biked from the Napoleonic battlefield of Austerlitz to the Austrian border, to see what traces remain of the actual Iron Curtain.
The barbed wire has come down, as have the observation towers, but the scar remains visible in the cement claws that once held the fence in place. Now the line is a physical mark of economic stratification.
The Czech border town of BÃ…?eclav - only 50 miles north of glittering Vienna - has the look of a time-capsule city, a remnant of socialist realism with drab worker housing, a polluted river, and shop windows displaying the trinkets of recycled Marxism.
Buying train tickets to the Viennese capital (also within the European Union but on the other side of the psychological Wall) took 20 minutes and produced a Kafkaesque wad of eight tickets (for the seats and reservations, and then the same for the bikes). We felt like spies paying ransom to come in from the cold.
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Unlike Prague, Vienna is well adapted for bicycles, with many paths that cut across the baroque city squares or around the Ringstrasse. On two wheels we tracked down Sigmund Freud's psychiatric office, Hitler's bleak rooming house, and the doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand's last car, wondering if the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire isn't a cautionary tale for European integration.
At its best, the empire was the United States of Europe, with a patchwork of languages, religions, and ethnicity living under the same big tent, albeit one that holed easily. Would the world have been different if Hitler had found his way to Freud's couch? Instead, after the Anschluss, he drove Freud to exile in London.
In 1919, the Austrians were left with a rump state, while Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Romanians, Poles, Galicians, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, and others rushed to exit the imperial doors.
Napoleon (in 1805), Bismarck (in 1866) and Hitler (in 1938) were the co-authors of Austria's drawn-out end of empire. Each tried to graft their own brand of pan-Europeanism - first French, then Prussian and German - on the continent that the European Union has come to inherit.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire had all the elements that EU commissioners in Brussels would love to impose today: a common currency, a single system of law, religious tolerance, ethnic liberalism, and internal borders that stretch from near the Baltic to the Adriatic.
Instead of giving Europe a new birth of freedom or a blueprint for federalism, the United States of Europe foundered on the rocks of violent nationalism - a nationalism that resembles the separatist impulses seen today in Ukraine, Scotland, the Basque Country, Kosovo and Wallonia, not to mention the seven splinter countries that emerged from the former Yugoslavia.
As many eulogies, beginning with Voltaire's, for the Austrian-dominated Holy Roman Empire acknowledged, "It was neither Holy, Roman, nor much of an empire."
The same might someday be said of the European Union - that it wasn't "European, nor much of a union"-although the collective hope, as Vonnegut writes in Slaughterhouse-Five, is that "people aren't supposed to look back."