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World War I Revisited: Prague To Paris On The "Goeth" Train
Rate it! Votes (1) | Comments (0) By George Ridge Posted August 6th, 2007

I don't know what I expected. At the very least there should have been some minor jolt, some bump or ripple in the steel tracks to impair the otherwise smooth passage of our train. "Grenze." With sad eyes, a stranger sitting at my elbow in the dining car whispered the German word. Otherwise I would not have known exactly, to the pinpoint. The stranger made no gesture. His voice was barely audible as if to hide the location even from the freezing, snow-banked countryside that we hurtled across at 90 miles an hour. The Border. Certainly not just any border. And not even any border, anymore. Our sleek Eurocity express train No. 96, nicknamed Goethe, seven hours and 15 minutes out of Prague, seven hours and 14 minutes from its Paris destination, had just crossed -- without incident -- the former Iron Curtain.

The Goeth
Maybe the Goethe isn't the Orient Express, but it is a comfortable, businesslike train that travels from the Czech Republic to Paris almost entirely in daylight. It sets a fine table for dining. The wide picture windows, however, do not simply look onto a peaceful, bucolic present. They also gaze into the whole of this turbulent century.

I found myself ticking off history as the wheels beneath me chewed away the miles. Prague 1948. Prague 1968 and the Velvet Revolution, 1989. The Sudetenland 1938. Dresden 1945. Weimar between the wars. The Iron Curtain 1945-89, RIP. The Rhine north of Mannheim, where Patton's armies crossed in 1945. The Saarland 1936, Hitler's first conquest. The Maginot Line 1940. Metz and Verdun 1914-18. Chateau-Theirry and Belleau Wood 1918. The Marne River near Paris 1914.

Nearing the millenium on its now-pedestrian daily journey, the Goethe prys open a cross section of central European events that many of us remember. Compared to technicolor Germany, Prague and its environs are still cement gray and, at best, a faded goldenrod color that the sun lifts marginally from overnight drabness.

The sun was at stage right as we left the station at 6:29, ready for its entrance cue. Waters of the Elbe River joined our path not far to the north and seemed to wash away some of the industrial blight that the northern Czech Republic has come to endure. Only a dusting of snow saved the land from horizon-to-horizon grayness, a sugar-frosting for the towns that reflect neither industrial prosperity nor worker paradise. Karl Marx much preferred the spa of Karlsbad (named after another Karl and now called Karlovy Vary). In Germany, even in the former East, industrial might is more circumspect. Vineyards cover the façade.

Over an eminently satisfying breakfast of soft-boiled egg served cup-style in the European manner, salmon omelette, hard German rolls and coffee, I watched the spires of Dresden emerge.

East Germany lives on in the gloom of Dresden. Under its lacy steeples the city remains a hollow core surrounded by boxy Communist apartments. With West German money it will be a showplace in a decade, but for now the scars remain from a single bombing raid 53 years ago almost to the moment of my leisurely breakfast.

Wintery fields punctuated by a series of atomic cooling towers filled my thoughts until we had passed Leipzig and Weimar. Near Weimar a French salesman in my compartment offered me a glass of Alsatian Riesling reserve. We drank a toast to Napoleon's victory at nearby Jena, but that's another century.

Soon I saw where the Riesling came from. The dining car was celebrating Alsatian month with a menu including lake pike on a bed of mild sauerkraut, the Alsatian peasant's stew of baeckeoffe and Bettelmanns soup, a dessert. Continuing the Riesling with my stew, which also uses white wine in its preparation, I caught the platinum gleam of the Werra River in the distance. This I knew to be near the fences, towers and minefields that held the world on tetherhooks for nearly half a century.

We sliced apart the diminished Iron Curtain with more ease than I cut the turnip of my stew. Nothing. No guard towers. Even the naked strips in the forest had been regrown. Its 15 minutes of fame -- actually 44 years -- were over. About the only individuality allowed in the former Czechoslovakia or East Germany were in Garden cottages, where the owners nevertheless made statements of gingerbread from Grimm's tales, playhouse Bavarian and A-frame.

What a contrast to Frankfurt's muscular aluminum-paneled skyline. Even an apartment house wore enormous multicolored dunce caps, an architectural plea for individuality much like the garden cottages of two hours ago. And what a joy it was after Saarbrucken to reach the French railbed, the most cushioned of all Europe. The temptation was to die with the sun and wake up in Paris. Even ordinary trains attain speeds of 120 miles an hour in France, so the entire sweep of World War I from Metz to the Marne passed by within 2 1/2 hours. We reached Gare de l'Est in Paris a minute early after 700 miles. And don't forget the century of travel it took us to get there.

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George Ridge has written a Sunday travel column for the "Arizona Daily Star" in Tucson, Ariz., for 14 years. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona.

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