I am hoping that a good way to get myself to finish the email that I starting writing yesterday will be to write today's email. I have so much to say that I do not want to start writing!
I will start this post off with a few simple observations. The one thing of which Dresden cannot boast to Prague is the number of Russians in the city; there are probably at least as many Russians per capita in Prague as there are in Dresden. Dresden is better than Prague in every other way. The train station is more efficiently-run than Prague's; the people who work at the train station are polite and give one tons of help and information; far more trains enter and leave Dresden, as far as I can tell, than do Prague; and one can get high-quality, local, relatively-cheap fruit from street vendors, of which I could not find any in Prague, rather than having to buy it for exorbitant prices at liquor stores (I hope that Prague is unique in this way; it was not one of the city's high points.). There are no more bums wandering the streets and begging for change, and there are no more gaudy advertisements on every corner. Advertising in Prague is of the type that might appeal to chimpanzees: advertisements are made as large as possible and are done up in the brightest possible colors, often with striking contrasts between their background colors and the colors of their lettering. Since they compete with one another, they stick out from builings and hang over the street like some sort of monstrous, mutant foliage. (Advertising in Russia is identical.) In both Dresden and Bautzen, signs are small and neat, attracting one by saying what they have to say without jumping up and down and screaming in one's ears, so to speak. Stores display exactly what they have to offer rather than being designed on the assumption that store owners will have pull people inside off of the streets with their signs.
That being said, I spent my day in Bautzen. I left the hostel in which I am staying at around 10:00 AM and had breakfast (very cheaply) at a bakery, at which point I had an epiphany: one can buy milk, cereal, and breadstuffs and have normal breakfasts while travelling. Up until this morning, I was averse to doing so, as I was wary of not finishing what I bought and having to lug it around Europe with me. This fear, I think, was inculcated in me by my experience of carrying everything on my back when I made my first few trips across the ocean. Now that I have an ordinary (for the modern day - i.e., with wheels) suitcase, the idea of carrying around a bit of unfinished cereal is not all that repulsive, as it does not weigh much or take up much space once one has thrown the box away (or, rather, recycled it; people recycle as much as possible in Germany). It is a pity that I did not think of buying ordinary food for breakfast until just now; since I spent only one night in several cities, which would have made buying ordinary foodstuffs impossible (as one cannot buy small enough portions of them), and since the hostels in which I previously stayed for multiple nights offered free or (somewhat) affordable breakfasts, it never occurred to me to buy my own breakfast food. I will make use of this new realization if either of the hostels in Leipzig or Berlin do not offer free breakfasts; otherwise, I will have to keep it in mind for a future trip.
Having breakfasted, I went to the cathedral, which I did not get to see yesterday. The cathedral's interior was much more spare than any that I had seen of late, and its columns - what I have been calling "supporting pillars" - were placed in such a way as to create the effect of the cathedral's having several different rooms. One of these, the most interesting, was a memorial for the Jews mistreated prior to World War II and slaughtered during the war; a plaque in the room read, "We will not forget." It will be tough to summarize my thoughts on this matter in a small amount of time and space; the basic gist of them, as stated in a previous post, is that Germany does a great job of remembering the war and openly talking about it. While it was the Germans who slaughtered so many Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, mental retards, and other so-called undesirables, the war itself, and even the Holocaust, were more of a human disaster than anything else. Prominent Nazis were tried for crimes against humanity specifically because their actions did damage to mankind as a whole: they were crimes of man against man more than Nazi against Jew; they were a disaster for the entire human race. As such, it is the duty of all people from all nations to remember the Holocaust and other such atrocities in an effort to avoid repeating them. In my last post on this subject, I sounded pessimistic about our having learned anything from the mistakes of World War II, as many large-scale atrocities - genocides - have taken place since then. A metaphor that occurred to me then, but which I did not want to use, as I feared that it would trivialize the Holocaust and put it in too positive a light, was that World War II was like a natural brush fire, which clears out a forest's dead undergrowth and makes room for the growth of new plants and trees. According to this metaphor, World War II cleared out an imperialistic, old-world order of nations' continuously trying to oust and outdo one another, making room for the growth of such institutions as the UN and the realizations that genocide is not good for us and that we would do better to work together than to try to kill each other.
My main fear about this analogy, besides the risk that it would cast World War II in a positive light (as a positive destructive force that led to the construction of better things), was that it might be grossly inaccurate: I am not sure if our suffering through World War II led to any important new understandings about world affairs, and I am not sure if the world that replaced it is any better than the world that it detroyed. I expect that it had a positive impact on Europe (though whether it was worth all of that bloodshed is questionable), as the WHO, EU, and other large-scale, global organizations may never have formed if Europe had not grown more unified (and I expect that the war made it more unified, in the end), and Germany itself, as well as all of the rest of Western Europe, to my knowledge, has abstained from large-scale murder since the end of the war. I wonder if relations between neighboring countries in Europe were so acrimonious and the desire for conquest so great that, had World War II not broken out, another, equivalent war would, at some point, have arisen and done the same basic things as World War II, perhaps leading to the massacre of some other group of people than the Jews; one can only speculate. The Jews themselves were in a unique position leading up to World War II, as they had been hated in much of Europe for hundreds of years and had no country of their own; it is possible that no other group of people was as likely as they to be prayed upon. Whatever the case, my main query is whether or not the effects of World War II, while the war itself was a calamity, included increased European (Western European) unification and the creation of large-scale organizations that have made life better for a giant number of people all over the world.
These are the types of questions that are discussed in Dresden itself, in the city's Hygeine Museum (or something like that). The museum is located just outside of the historic city center, far enough away that I probably will not find time to see it, given that my hostel is far from Dresden's main train station but right next to a different train station. My plan was to visit the Hygeine Museum after seeing Bautzen today, but I was so tired when I got back from Bautzen that I decided to head right back to my hostel. I may still see the museum tomorrow, if I have the energy; I will not have to cook, as I have made enough dinner for two nights, and I might be better-rested tomorrow. I slept fine last night, but I still have a bit of a hangover, so to speak, from Prague. My sleeping schedule is not that interesting, though, and I have strayed from the topic of this email!
My trip to Bautzen was entirely painless, which could not have been said of any of my trips through Eastern Europe. I was told exactly how to get there and back by a member of the railway staff; the train that I was in was air-conditioned and had big windows; every train stop was displayed overhead and mentioned on a loudspeaker; and the train was even on time. The countryside outside of Dresden is densely-wooded, and I saw three hawks on the way to Bautzen; I have not mentioned the birds much of late because, while I like them, I cannot name any of them, and I have nothing new to say about them. As was the case with Dinkelsbuhl, I got an excellent view of Bautzen's historic city center as the train pulled up to the platform. My walk through the city filled me with impressions, which it would be hard to arrange in any orderly way. Despite being quite small (It has a population of roughly 40,000 people.), Bautzen has modern shopping malls and a modern medical center; the city has the most sophisticated bike paths, which include a separate lane for bikers who are turning left, that I have ever seen; it has a giant number of historical monuments, each with a plaque describing (in German) what their purpose is (or was?); it has a museum, music hall, and restaurants devoted to the preservation of Sorbian culture, which is that of a Slavic (I think) people that resides in East Germany; it has a river and a huge number of trees for such a small city; it has parts of its old city wall and many of its old towers; and so on. What Canadian city, I wonder, can boast of such a rich combination of modern and historical accoutrements? My trip to Bautzen gave me the idea that, beyond simply being pleasant to visit, small towns can sometimes give one more of a proverbial window into the past than larger cities, which much more prominently display large-scale human achievement. Since life in small cities changes so slowly, and since there is so little construction and development in them (compared to that in big cities), they are better-equipped to show us what life was like, say, a hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred years ago than larger cities, which are bound to be more modern. While the juxtaposition of new and old can be rewarding and enrich a city's contemporary profile, it cannot help but water down one's impression of the past, as old cathedrals do not look so old when they are right next to shopping malls. (While Bautzen had plenty of newer buildings, they were not right next to the old ones, as the city center was too small to hold very many of them.) My gripes about wasting time in small cities in Eastern Europe was not so much founded on those cities' being small, then, but on their being in Eastern Europe: small cities in Germany (and, presumably, France, Italy, Spain, and England) can both be pleasant to visit and teach one more about the world. Bautzen restored my confidence in the value of not exclusively visiting metropolises, while my visit to Dresden itself has erased all regret that I might have felt at having spent so much time in Germany - each major city in Germany has something different to offer.
Dresden, as I may end up mentioning in yesterday's post about Dresden, which, anacronistically, I am going to finish after this one, is largely under construction. The firebombing at the end of World War II was, while fully deserved, a disaster for the city, and its oppression under communist Russia further retarded its growth into a cultural center. Beyond being full of reminders of World War II, Dresden has many statues and plaques in memorium of its difficult years under communist dictatorship and its triumphant casting off of the chains of communism. Dresdeners' pride in their past reminds me of that of Bratislava, as the city is permeated by an air of successfully overcoming difficulties and continuing to grow. The city is full of students and young parents; it has large, clean, safe, and very-elaborate playgrounds for children; it is full of cyclists and bike paths; and its people are friendly and open, as though friendliness and openness were expected: the citizens of this city are united by more than geography. I may as well end this email on this note and continue to my previous one, in which I will make more observations about the city itself; I hope to finished it quickly enough to send it today, as it would be nice not to have it carry over into tomorrow's writing time. I have a busy day planned for the morrow and will probably have enough to write about without having to finish an earlier email. Goodbye!
I have one more point to make. The river Spree is spelt Sprjewje in Polish, if my memory holds. What the hell were the Polish thinking when they made this name up?
I will start this post off with a few simple observations. The one thing of which Dresden cannot boast to Prague is the number of Russians in the city; there are probably at least as many Russians per capita in Prague as there are in Dresden. Dresden is better than Prague in every other way. The train station is more efficiently-run than Prague's; the people who work at the train station are polite and give one tons of help and information; far more trains enter and leave Dresden, as far as I can tell, than do Prague; and one can get high-quality, local, relatively-cheap fruit from street vendors, of which I could not find any in Prague, rather than having to buy it for exorbitant prices at liquor stores (I hope that Prague is unique in this way; it was not one of the city's high points.). There are no more bums wandering the streets and begging for change, and there are no more gaudy advertisements on every corner. Advertising in Prague is of the type that might appeal to chimpanzees: advertisements are made as large as possible and are done up in the brightest possible colors, often with striking contrasts between their background colors and the colors of their lettering. Since they compete with one another, they stick out from builings and hang over the street like some sort of monstrous, mutant foliage. (Advertising in Russia is identical.) In both Dresden and Bautzen, signs are small and neat, attracting one by saying what they have to say without jumping up and down and screaming in one's ears, so to speak. Stores display exactly what they have to offer rather than being designed on the assumption that store owners will have pull people inside off of the streets with their signs.
That being said, I spent my day in Bautzen. I left the hostel in which I am staying at around 10:00 AM and had breakfast (very cheaply) at a bakery, at which point I had an epiphany: one can buy milk, cereal, and breadstuffs and have normal breakfasts while travelling. Up until this morning, I was averse to doing so, as I was wary of not finishing what I bought and having to lug it around Europe with me. This fear, I think, was inculcated in me by my experience of carrying everything on my back when I made my first few trips across the ocean. Now that I have an ordinary (for the modern day - i.e., with wheels) suitcase, the idea of carrying around a bit of unfinished cereal is not all that repulsive, as it does not weigh much or take up much space once one has thrown the box away (or, rather, recycled it; people recycle as much as possible in Germany). It is a pity that I did not think of buying ordinary food for breakfast until just now; since I spent only one night in several cities, which would have made buying ordinary foodstuffs impossible (as one cannot buy small enough portions of them), and since the hostels in which I previously stayed for multiple nights offered free or (somewhat) affordable breakfasts, it never occurred to me to buy my own breakfast food. I will make use of this new realization if either of the hostels in Leipzig or Berlin do not offer free breakfasts; otherwise, I will have to keep it in mind for a future trip.
Having breakfasted, I went to the cathedral, which I did not get to see yesterday. The cathedral's interior was much more spare than any that I had seen of late, and its columns - what I have been calling "supporting pillars" - were placed in such a way as to create the effect of the cathedral's having several different rooms. One of these, the most interesting, was a memorial for the Jews mistreated prior to World War II and slaughtered during the war; a plaque in the room read, "We will not forget." It will be tough to summarize my thoughts on this matter in a small amount of time and space; the basic gist of them, as stated in a previous post, is that Germany does a great job of remembering the war and openly talking about it. While it was the Germans who slaughtered so many Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, mental retards, and other so-called undesirables, the war itself, and even the Holocaust, were more of a human disaster than anything else. Prominent Nazis were tried for crimes against humanity specifically because their actions did damage to mankind as a whole: they were crimes of man against man more than Nazi against Jew; they were a disaster for the entire human race. As such, it is the duty of all people from all nations to remember the Holocaust and other such atrocities in an effort to avoid repeating them. In my last post on this subject, I sounded pessimistic about our having learned anything from the mistakes of World War II, as many large-scale atrocities - genocides - have taken place since then. A metaphor that occurred to me then, but which I did not want to use, as I feared that it would trivialize the Holocaust and put it in too positive a light, was that World War II was like a natural brush fire, which clears out a forest's dead undergrowth and makes room for the growth of new plants and trees. According to this metaphor, World War II cleared out an imperialistic, old-world order of nations' continuously trying to oust and outdo one another, making room for the growth of such institutions as the UN and the realizations that genocide is not good for us and that we would do better to work together than to try to kill each other.
My main fear about this analogy, besides the risk that it would cast World War II in a positive light (as a positive destructive force that led to the construction of better things), was that it might be grossly inaccurate: I am not sure if our suffering through World War II led to any important new understandings about world affairs, and I am not sure if the world that replaced it is any better than the world that it detroyed. I expect that it had a positive impact on Europe (though whether it was worth all of that bloodshed is questionable), as the WHO, EU, and other large-scale, global organizations may never have formed if Europe had not grown more unified (and I expect that the war made it more unified, in the end), and Germany itself, as well as all of the rest of Western Europe, to my knowledge, has abstained from large-scale murder since the end of the war. I wonder if relations between neighboring countries in Europe were so acrimonious and the desire for conquest so great that, had World War II not broken out, another, equivalent war would, at some point, have arisen and done the same basic things as World War II, perhaps leading to the massacre of some other group of people than the Jews; one can only speculate. The Jews themselves were in a unique position leading up to World War II, as they had been hated in much of Europe for hundreds of years and had no country of their own; it is possible that no other group of people was as likely as they to be prayed upon. Whatever the case, my main query is whether or not the effects of World War II, while the war itself was a calamity, included increased European (Western European) unification and the creation of large-scale organizations that have made life better for a giant number of people all over the world.
These are the types of questions that are discussed in Dresden itself, in the city's Hygeine Museum (or something like that). The museum is located just outside of the historic city center, far enough away that I probably will not find time to see it, given that my hostel is far from Dresden's main train station but right next to a different train station. My plan was to visit the Hygeine Museum after seeing Bautzen today, but I was so tired when I got back from Bautzen that I decided to head right back to my hostel. I may still see the museum tomorrow, if I have the energy; I will not have to cook, as I have made enough dinner for two nights, and I might be better-rested tomorrow. I slept fine last night, but I still have a bit of a hangover, so to speak, from Prague. My sleeping schedule is not that interesting, though, and I have strayed from the topic of this email!
My trip to Bautzen was entirely painless, which could not have been said of any of my trips through Eastern Europe. I was told exactly how to get there and back by a member of the railway staff; the train that I was in was air-conditioned and had big windows; every train stop was displayed overhead and mentioned on a loudspeaker; and the train was even on time. The countryside outside of Dresden is densely-wooded, and I saw three hawks on the way to Bautzen; I have not mentioned the birds much of late because, while I like them, I cannot name any of them, and I have nothing new to say about them. As was the case with Dinkelsbuhl, I got an excellent view of Bautzen's historic city center as the train pulled up to the platform. My walk through the city filled me with impressions, which it would be hard to arrange in any orderly way. Despite being quite small (It has a population of roughly 40,000 people.), Bautzen has modern shopping malls and a modern medical center; the city has the most sophisticated bike paths, which include a separate lane for bikers who are turning left, that I have ever seen; it has a giant number of historical monuments, each with a plaque describing (in German) what their purpose is (or was?); it has a museum, music hall, and restaurants devoted to the preservation of Sorbian culture, which is that of a Slavic (I think) people that resides in East Germany; it has a river and a huge number of trees for such a small city; it has parts of its old city wall and many of its old towers; and so on. What Canadian city, I wonder, can boast of such a rich combination of modern and historical accoutrements? My trip to Bautzen gave me the idea that, beyond simply being pleasant to visit, small towns can sometimes give one more of a proverbial window into the past than larger cities, which much more prominently display large-scale human achievement. Since life in small cities changes so slowly, and since there is so little construction and development in them (compared to that in big cities), they are better-equipped to show us what life was like, say, a hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred years ago than larger cities, which are bound to be more modern. While the juxtaposition of new and old can be rewarding and enrich a city's contemporary profile, it cannot help but water down one's impression of the past, as old cathedrals do not look so old when they are right next to shopping malls. (While Bautzen had plenty of newer buildings, they were not right next to the old ones, as the city center was too small to hold very many of them.) My gripes about wasting time in small cities in Eastern Europe was not so much founded on those cities' being small, then, but on their being in Eastern Europe: small cities in Germany (and, presumably, France, Italy, Spain, and England) can both be pleasant to visit and teach one more about the world. Bautzen restored my confidence in the value of not exclusively visiting metropolises, while my visit to Dresden itself has erased all regret that I might have felt at having spent so much time in Germany - each major city in Germany has something different to offer.
Dresden, as I may end up mentioning in yesterday's post about Dresden, which, anacronistically, I am going to finish after this one, is largely under construction. The firebombing at the end of World War II was, while fully deserved, a disaster for the city, and its oppression under communist Russia further retarded its growth into a cultural center. Beyond being full of reminders of World War II, Dresden has many statues and plaques in memorium of its difficult years under communist dictatorship and its triumphant casting off of the chains of communism. Dresdeners' pride in their past reminds me of that of Bratislava, as the city is permeated by an air of successfully overcoming difficulties and continuing to grow. The city is full of students and young parents; it has large, clean, safe, and very-elaborate playgrounds for children; it is full of cyclists and bike paths; and its people are friendly and open, as though friendliness and openness were expected: the citizens of this city are united by more than geography. I may as well end this email on this note and continue to my previous one, in which I will make more observations about the city itself; I hope to finished it quickly enough to send it today, as it would be nice not to have it carry over into tomorrow's writing time. I have a busy day planned for the morrow and will probably have enough to write about without having to finish an earlier email. Goodbye!
I have one more point to make. The river Spree is spelt Sprjewje in Polish, if my memory holds. What the hell were the Polish thinking when they made this name up?
This is a view of part of Bautzen and the river Spree.
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