In July 1989 I graduated from university, and then, shortly afterwards, during that unusually warm and settled summer, set off to travel across Europe by train. The plan was to head east; something was stirring behind the Iron Curtain and I wanted to find out more about what was going on. On one journey I got as far as the Czechoslovakian border, only to be hauled off a train for not having a visa or any other official right of entry. I was kept in detention for a couple of hours in an austere and desolate room – as austere and desolate as the nation states the communists had created – before being bundled back on a train and returned to Vienna.
That year – the year of the crowd, as we call it in this special issue – there was a profound sense, for the first time in my lifetime, that the Cold War was coming to an end; that communist totalitarianism was collapsing. Also obvious was the imminent demise of entire political eras, with Europe’s ageing dictators being toppled from within: Honecker, Zhivkov, Ceausescu and, eventually, Jaruzelski.
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