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November 6-15, 2008
Mike and I tend to be event-driven travelers. We love to see new places and experience new things, but we usually don't set out on a trip unless we have an underlying motive for going -- visiting family or friends, seeing a play on Broadway, celebrating a special occasion. Once we've decided to go someplace, we take full advantage of the opportunity to explore our surroundings.... but we've rarely (never?) simply set off to visit a random, unfamiliar destination. 
This time, a couple of friends we know through our interest in Star Trek told us about a cruise on the Danube River from Nuremburg to Budapest, with an option to begin a day or two early in Prague. Mike and I had never taken a cruise of any kind and, honestly, never given much thought to visiting Central Europe. But everything about the trip looked promising: a chance to spend time with friends and see interesting historic sights, at a convenient time and a great price. It sounded like an ideal trip!
As it turned out, our friends couldn't make the trip (due to an uncooperative work schedule), and so the experience wasn't exactly what we'd anticipated -- but it was still a marvelous vacation!
We saw and heard too much on this trip to possibly do justice to it with a few journal notes and photos. I'll describe some of my general impressions here, and then you're welcome to browse through some of the photos I took at the many towns we visited along the river. If you have any interest in or knowledge of European history, church history, architecture, the Roman Empire, the Holocaust, or numerous other related subjects, you'll know that my observations here barely scratch the surface on any of those topics. If you find you want to read more, I'll include a few helpful links below, and you can always pursue your own Google searches or visit your local library or bookstore.
General Impressions
I like cruising!
Our ship was the Amacello, designed specifically for the Main-Danube Canal and, therefore, able to fit inside the smallest locks and pass under the lowest bridges on the route. From the outside, it's flat and boxy, 110 meters long and 11.4 meters wide. On the inside, it is a warm, comfortable little hotel with lounges at the bow and stern, a sundeck/observation deck with a jacuzzi, and excellent food service in a large dining room. We had 110 passengers on our voyage, half of them part of the "CruiseTrek" group of Star Trek fans and guests, and 42 crew members taking care of our every need.
The food was amazing... delicious, plentiful, artfully presented, and elegantly served. There was an "early riser" pre-breakfast, a full breakfast buffet, a pre-lunch snack, a multi-course lunch, afternoon tea, sometimes a pre-dinner snack, a multi-course dinner, and of course a late-night snack in the unlikely event that anyone could possibly still be hungry at the end of the day! All of you who know Mike know that he is not particularly thrilled by "fancy" food of any kind but, don't worry, he didn't go hungry: breakfast provided him with simple staples like oatmeal, scrambled eggs, toast, and fresh fruit, and for lunch and dinner we made a point of always sitting in the same area in the dining room so that we always had the same server, Tina. At our first meal, Mike explained his preferences, and from then on she made sure to get his food from the kitchen the way he wanted it, uncluttered by sauces or unfamiliar vegetables. He enjoyed grilled chicken breast and hamburger while I happily indulged in creamy soups, lots of tender, tasty fish, wonderful pasta dishes, and an endless variety of flavorful, pungent local and international cheeses.
History -- there's so much of it in this part of the world! Many of the towns we visited date back to Roman times, or earlier. We had tours at each stop, guided by local experts, often people with history degrees from a nearby university. They rattled off more names and dates than I could possibly remember, but a few ideas stuck with me. First, that the Danube River (Donau in Austria, Duna in Hungary) has often been a border between tribes, empires, kingdoms, and countries. It was the northern border of the Roman Empire for a long time, which resulted in the building of many forts and garrison towns, and those settlements often survived and remained continuously inhabited right up to today. Second, that there was a constant, complex shifting back and forth of dominance between wealthy merchant families, bishops and other Church authorities, and political figures such as kings, archdukes, princes, and Holy Roman Emperors. Third, the crucial role played by changes in economic circumstance: for example, we saw one church where the first third of it was completed in 50 years in the Gothic style because that was a time of properity for the town, but then money grew tight and the other two-thirds took over 200 years to complete and ended up looking very different from the first section!
Scaffolding appears in almost every photo we took of churches and historic buildings, not because we love the geometric intricacy of scaffolding (although one of our traveling companions seemed to be a bit of a scaffolding connoisseur and enjoyed seeing the changing styles used from one city to the next!) but because, according to one of our guides, the task of maintaining old buildings is neverending. If they're not doing repair and renovation, they're cleaning away the grime from centuries of air pollution. And by the time they finish cleaning and fixing every nook and cranny of a massive building covered with intricate stone carving, guilded statues, and colorful tiles, it's time to go back to the first spot they cleaned and start over again!
For me, it was impossible to walk the narrow medieval lanes or more modern streets of the places we visited without occasional moments of melancholy. Our trip coincided with the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," November 9-10, 1938, when Nazi-supported riots led to the destruction of hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned businesses. Although the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe was long and complex, most people agree that Kristallnacht was one of its watershed moments. Near the start of our trip, we visited Terezin, outside Prague, a prison and ghetto where Jews evicted from their homes throughout Nazi-controlled Europe were held for months or years before eventually being sent to extermination camps.
Although seeing Terezin was sobering, I found myself haunted more by our visits to ordinary towns and cities. For centuries, even though Europe was undeniably dominated in every way by the Church, Jews were an accepted part of the community and contributors (sometimes welcome, sometimes merely tolerated) to the culture and daily life of the larger society. The Nazi attempted genocide failed, in that they didn't murder every single Jew. But many of those who survived never returned to their homes, choosing instead to emigrate to Israel, the U.S., Britain, or Australia. Who can blame them? In many of the historic districts we visited, it was easy to imagine life in a small, medieval town or bustling Enlightenment-era city, Jews and Christians living in adjacent neighborhoods, meeting every day at the docks or in the marketplace, experiencing the same river floods, the same royal political dramas, the same good or bad harvests. Then the Nazis came and, in too many places, Christian neighbors looked away and did nothing, or actively participated, as entire Jewish communities, babies to adults to frail elderly, were rounded up and shipped off to oblivion.
Today, there are still Jews in Europe, and many vibrant Jewish communities. But the Nazi era tore a huge, ragged hole in the centuries-old fabric of European Jewish culture. What used to be "the Jewish quarter" in big cities is now just another patch of urban real estate, perhaps with a few old buildings preserved as museums, but otherwise indistinguishable from any other neighborhood. And in some of the smaller towns, the only trace that remains of a once-living community is a plaque on a ruined fragment of wall, identifying the former site of the town's synagogue. The people, however, are gone, erased, nothing more now than a historical footnote.
Central Europe is beautiful, rich in culture and history.... but throughout our trip, I couldn't shake my awareness of what was absent.
A display at the Jewish Museum of Vienna said it this way: "Historical objects give us the illusion of being in touch with the past. In fact, while the substance remains, the soul of the object is lost to history."
Links
A few sites with more info if any of the above topics are unfamiliar:
With a little Googling you can find lots more tourist websites, museum home pages, and Wikipedia articles to fill in any details I left out in my musings above, or in my captions on the pages that follow. Happy Websurfing!
First page of photos: Prague
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