Lest We Forget: Dark Days in the Majestic Cities of Mitteleuropa

Circle of Scholars has organized a tour called, accurately enough, “Majestic Cities of Central and Eastern Europe.” The travelers going there and all of us here, should remember that six of the seven cities—and Vienna escaped by only the skin of its Austrian teeth—once (within our baby-boomer living memory) lay behind the Iron Curtain in the belly of the Communist beast. Behind the majestic cathedrals and palaces sat the malevolent tanks of the Red Army, with their cannon loaded and their engines idling. This class will be a reminder of the Second Defenestration of Prague (much deadlier than the First) in 1948; the Hungarian Uprising (where are the Americans?) in 1956; the grotesquerie of the Berlin Wall in 1961; the extinction of the Prague Spring in 1968; the dawn that began to break in Krakow in 1979 when Pope John Paul II returned to his hometown to be greeted by 3 million cheering Poles; the epic, almost opera buffa, night of November 9-10, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. In these majestic cities, there is indeed much to see, but also… much to remember.

Peter Baylor is offering his fifth course. He is, among other things, a septuagenarian husband, father, grandfather, friend, sibling, veteran, son (forever grateful to his parents), retired lawyer and working tour guide. Peter borrowed this line from a college professor: “I do not propose to teach you anything; I am trying to share an enthusiasm. OK?”