(I’m including songs I heard while moving through in Europe in 1985. I’d like to say that I recall music of local origin, but alas, my brain wasn’t always trained for it…yet.)
Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 7: Vienna and the dawning of a Habsburg fixation.
A fascination with history brought me to Europe in 1985.
The trip wasn’t about bicycling, because I wasn’t engaged in that pursuit (yet). It certainly wasn’t about drunken mayhem (I was too cautious) or hooking up, which for me was a once-per-decade, Halley’s Comet, coin-flip sort of purely accidental occurrence.
Rather, my prevailing vibe was a recurring syllabus of Western Civilization & Culture 101.
Copious quantities of classics were absorbed through daily doses of architecture, art and museum visits. I sought pottery, paintings and panes of stained glass, and remained the wide-eyed student throughout. Every last moment was new to me, and each day felt like I was being shaken to the core and reborn.
It gradually dawned on me that history is forever interwoven with the here and now. Whenever I emerged from the European past ― usually stooping, given that few medieval buildings were constructed with 6-foot, 4-inch Americans in mind ― the contemporary European present immediately reappeared.
How had the Europeans gotten from there to here, and why did we Americans turn out so differently?
Europe was indeed old, but also relentlessly topical. In Istanbul, soldiers with machine guns were posted at street corners near the Topkapi Palace, presumably because of heightened tensions since the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in 1984.
At the youth hostel in Basel, I chanced upon an environmental activist concerned about pollution in the Rhine. I’d been in Greece for a spirited election, and everywhere spent time with travelers my age or younger who wanted to discuss Palestinian liberation, nuclear free zones, refugee rights and organic farming.
English-speaking Europeans invariably circled around to current events in the political sphere. After all, the continent was still divided into armed camps, and a sizeable chunk of it remained Communist. In 1985, Europe was four decades removed from its uneasy post-WWII settlement, but the various “-isms” still mattered.
As an American, I was expected to answer criticisms of President Ronald Reagan, which I tended to do by heartily agreeing with the arguments of my interlocutors, seeing as they couldn’t be any more opposed to Reagan than I was.
As the days passed during my first...Read more
