Look, we have come through!

IB World May 2001

It must have been Easter 1984, on a day trip to the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain – how quickly political language becomes obsolete. We were an exchange group from an international school in Paris, guests of our Bruderschule in Hamelin: African diplomats’ kids from the French sphere of influence; Iranian refugees from the Shah, the Ayatollah and the Iran-Iraq war; the sons and daughters of sundry international carpetbaggers.

We faced two po-faced East German border guards high in the Harz Mountains. There were always two of them: if one crossed over, we were told, the other shot him. The strip beyond the Iron Curtain was mined and ploughed to perfection. Rabbits crossed it with impunity. Yameogo, from Upper Volta, in Church brogues and Paris tailoring, break-danced close to the fence with his new ghetto blaster, bought in downtown Hannover.

In Hamelin, we’d been given a tour of Germany’s state-of-the-art borstal. The director ushered us into his enormous office and proposed a toast to French-German Freundschaft. Behind the clinking of Sekt flutes the muted clicking of heels. The dorms had posters of Nina Hagen and Police. The tools in the workshop were all numbered and accounted for.

The borstal’s inmates were wary seventeen-year-old recidivists from the post-war German boom, budding mechanics with blue tattoos bent over tooling machines. The metal doors automatically closed that little bit too quickly, nipping our heels. Swivelling cameras followed our movements. It was 1984, the year the future became tangible. The Shah had died. Pacman and Donkey Kong pinged in the back of cafés and Bierstuben. In all the cutting-edge schools teachers were taking crash courses in how to use computers.

Ironic that Germany’s showcase borstal should be in Hamelin. One could almost imagine the Rattenfänger, the fabled rat-catcher, whistling mischievously down the mountain path into this bourgeois heartland – the word bourgeois sat easily on our tongues in that year the Socialists came to power in France.

One version of the fable, by the English poet Robert Browning, has the abducted children re-surfacing in Transylvania:

In Transylvania there’s a tribe...

... their fathers and mothers having risen

Out of some subterranean prison

Into which they had been trepanned

Long time ago, in a mighty band,

Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,

But how or why they don’t understand.

Browning is referring to the Almasch cave in an area populated in the twelfth century by two hundred thousand plantation Saxons. Thus myth and history join hands.

But no: they resurface sixteen years later Katalinpuszta, just north of Vac along the Danube in Hungary, on a CAS (Creativity, Action, Service) weekend at the start of term. They have come up from Budapest with their Discmans. They wear designer shades in the light. They emerge in a totally transformed world. Is it a New World Order or is it the same old history-sodden landscape?

The Iron Curtain itself has become insubstantial. How strange it is to teach Orwell’s Nineteen Eightyfour in the Seventies, the Eighties, the Nineties and now in the new century. You remember Doonesbury’s cartoon when the Iron Curtain fell: ‘they came, they saw, they did a little shopping’. Badminton and American football are underway. A bar-b-q is sizzling nicely. Floating across the camp is Serbian, Slovenian, Romanian, German, and Ukrainian – all the tongues that were tied so long behind that spiky curtain. It is springtime in Central Europe. We can go anywhere we want. On a walk through the hills Plato gets mentioned, somehow, and his allegorical cave.

The maps may be redrawn and the names changed, but the river stays the same. The horses under the trees are essentially the same horses that brought those Hungarian tribes down across Asia and out of the Carpathian hills eleven centuries ago. The horse flies are the very slowly evolving descendants of the horseflies of antiquity, which might have settled on Plato. And the wanton boys and girls, freckled with sunshine, coming down the bridle path under the trees, find the same plunging view of the Danube, Esztergom episcopal in the distance.

The kids squint as if they have been too long in darkness. Their ears twitch, like the horses, as though they hear a tinny music. Look, they seem to say. Look how we have come through!

Budapest 2000