My idea of Europe continues here into aspects of its architectural makeup. I’ve always been awed by churches, and I even fiddled with architecture and floor plans late in elementary school because I thought that maybe I’d become an architect. I didn’t, but I still learned to marvel at the buildings other people could draw, especially churches. Churches have a majesty to them that I don’t see in other buildings—perhaps it’s because they’re spooky in that always-connected-to-the-other-side way, but churches somehow evoke a measure of respect that I just don’t have for other buildings.

There’s also landscape. There are greens here that I feel don’t exist in the U.S.—pine trees sitting atop large hills in places like Germany and along the highway in the Czech Republic that I’m not going to find anywhere else, wouldn’t want to find anywhere else, that have me envy Europe’s rural populations. Suburbs of a city like Chicago are perfect for commerce, sure, but drive twenty minutes outside of Prague or Paris and you’ll be met by smiling old women on the sidewalk in aprons wishing you a good day.

This leads me to my final idea of Europe. I’ve been to Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam, and of course Prague, as well as a number of other towns and villages outside of these main European attractions, if I’m just counting the places where I’ve covered ground instead of just hiding out in airports, and one of the things that makes Prague and any place east of Germany (though Finland doesn’t exactly fit my image of Eastern Europe) appealing to me is their autonomy. I enjoy the pride Central Europeans have in their countries, in their European status—their willingness to own up to the ways they’re pitted, financially and otherwise, against places like France or Italy while still raising a beer with joy. So much about Western Europe seems too metro-commercial for me, a quality I’ve found unattractive.

 

“If I must describe what Europe means to me as an American,” Susan Sontag writes in “The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy),”

I would start with liberation. Liberation from what passes in America for a culture. The diversity, seriousness, fastidiousness, density of European culture constitute an Archimedean point from which I can, mentally, move the world. I cannot do that from America, from what American culture gives me, as a collection of standards, as a legacy.

What passes for culture in the U.S. is muddy at best. Though Americans claim to celebrate diversity, there’s still a homogenized standard there that allows some of us to find ways to pass as good citizens of our country. Those of us who don’t pass are left in the margins, visible yet ignored, though still helping America appear as the melting pot it’s always claimed to be.

When I was twenty-one, walking down a hallway at school, I passed a flyer for a study abroad information session on a bulletin board—for a place called Prague, in a country called the Czech Republic. Not Czechoslovakia. I attended all of the pre-trip meetings, got to know the students and teachers planning to go abroad, signed up for my classes, and readied myself to leave the U.S.. What I didn’t do was learn about the Czechs’ language, or their history, or their culture. The one bit of preparation I did for my trip was read on the Internet about whether it would be safe for me to be here as a black person.

I read a lot about Skinheads: neo-Nazis who liked to cause trouble in the streets and who claimed not to be racist but only disliked outsiders. They say things like “We will get rid of the unadaptables”: drug dealers, homeless people, homosexuals, immigrants, and Roma, because homogeneity is part of what keeps Czech culture “pure.” The neo-Nazis are among those who’ve wanted the purity of their nation to be defined by and condensed to history, geography, and lineage.

What I’d come to think was that to be both Czech and a neo-Nazi was to be anti-Czech. During the War the Nazis invaded Prague, sending Prague’s Czechs into “lesser” parts of the city and deporting its Jews. The Nazis were anti-Czech, anti-Bohemia, anti-mixing. To wish to be a neo-Nazi here is to wish to claim an antiquated, very specific, very narrow German ideal, not to have pride in one’s Czechness, which celebrates, perhaps above all, an independent spirit not superior to other nations.

My idea of Prague, and of Europe, is that it should be mixed. Prague is Europe’s sixth most-visited city, and, I’ve heard, Europe’s most international city per capita. This doesn’t mean that when I’m here I’m flooded with the image of other brown people like myself, but this city is a hub, a connecting point between, say, western Russians and Italians or the French. So to see a specific group try and oust what composes this city, a demographic of far more than just (white) Czechs is nonsensical at best: A portrait of a group of people whose conservatism is perhaps more bold than their patriotism.

I’ve seen neo-Nazis in the city exactly once during any of my visits to Prague. There were five or six of them standing near a tram stop one afternoon, all with shaved heads and wearing black pants tucked into combat boots and sort of puffy, green jackets. When I saw them I turned and walked in the opposite direction, frightened, knowing I could maybe outrun but wouldn’t overpower six of them if it came down to it. A tram came by, and I used it to block their view of me and crossed the street, then turned around and ran my route as I had before, knowing they couldn’t see me anymore. I don’t know if they got on that tram or not, or whether they saw me or not, but I was safe and have been ever since.

Now, I don’t even know if they were neo-Nazis. I never saw any Swastikas, and I was maybe presumptuous, reacting to the collective wardrobe of a few individuals, letting anything I’d read or seen or heard about in the news perpetuate the fear that got me running across the street. But back then, I was terrified. I thought I’d found myself in a scene straight from a movie: A scared young man caught in the open and in plain sight of those who hated him. I saw no choice but flight.

Neo-Nazis really aren’t prevalent in this city. I’m more or less safe here, and when people ask me if I’m treated strangely or differently here because I’m black I tell them I get stares from locals in their sixties, their seventies, and so on, but I’m treated cordially by younger Czechs: Those who are less surprised to see a black person walking their streets. I’m greeted, smiled at, nodded at, sometimes said “good day” to; not treated as a local but not treated as unwelcome, either. This is more than I could ask for in some American cities.