When I reached the park I could see all I’d needed, wanted, to see in the distance: Hradčany (the Prague Castle), Petřin Tower, and the Metronome. I’d wanted to see these things because looking at all three at once was a seamless blend of far and recent pasts: Where the Metronome now sits once stood the world’s tallest statue of Joseph Stalin, which, legend has it, was dismembered and every one of its fragments sent to various parts of the Czech Republic, and then buried so that it may never be reassembled. The castle is a longstanding emblem of Czechness, perhaps the greatest reminder that they were here.

When I looked up at the Metronome and down at the city, at the river, all covered in snow and fog, I saw what I’d loved about Central Europe: endurance. The buildings below have stood there for centuries, but they’ve been owned, celebrated, and occupied by both the winners and the losers of this city—once-oppressing Germans, clinically stern Russians, ever-hopeful Czechs. The Czechs are still here, and this fact alone has been a reason for my return. I’ve returned because I’ve loved them, and I’ve loved them because they’ve endured.

 

“Do we have anything comparable to the Central Europeans’ romantic project of a Europe of small nations,” Sontag asks,

able to communicate freely with one another and pool their experience, their immense civic maturity and cultural depth, which have been acquired at the cost of so much suffering and privation? For us, who can hop from continent to continent without securing permission from anyone for a night at the opera, could Europe mean anything of that value? Or is the ideal Europe rendered obsolete by our prosperity, our liberty, our selfishness? And the idea itself, for us, spoiled beyond repair?

I can say that whenever I’ve come to Europe I haven’t wanted to be like the few of my friends who’ve visited only wanting to see Big Ben and the Coliseum and the Eiffel Tower, all trinkets of a Europe I’m in no hurry to see, because it might cheapen my experience here. What I’ve fallen in love with is “the other Europe” (coined by Philip Roth, I believe), a Europe no one back home romanticizes because they (a) don’t know or care about it or (b) forget it even exists as a part of the continent of Europe. “While all European nations are believed to be a part of a relatively homogeneous cultural and intellectual community,” Dina Iordanova writes in Cinema of the Other Europe, “the culture of East Central Europe from the second part of the twentieth century has not yet been fully integrated into what is seen to be European.” I love this lack of integration: I love that I’ve never known anyone who wanted to come to Prague just to go shopping, because it means that Prague is still hidden, still somehow protected from all of that American travel-gluttony fed by souvenir buyers and picture-takers.

This means, I realize, that I have exoticized Prague—it means that I’ve exoticized this hidden culture and its homogeneity, and that this is what I’ve been protective of. It’s an issue of my loving homogeneity because it isn’t something I get much of in the U.S., and it therefore becomes foreign and exciting to me.

I’ve done the same thing with the Czechs that some Czechs have done with the U.S. I’ve come to see their buildings and absorb their customs and learn their vocabulary, but I cannot, will not ever know what it’s like to live on their wages or have my thinking be the result of their language or history. A friend of mine, for example, once remarked that 90Kč (Czech koruns) was a lot of money for him to spend on a certain food item, and in my head I thought that’s only about five dollars and then I felt the shit that comes along with my privileged position, of being able to say only, and I was hit immediately, irredeemably, with an American guilt I never felt here when I was younger. I started to wish for strange, strange reasons that I were poorer.

I wished that I were poorer because I had a wish to assimilate. Which is off-putting to me when I think about it, because the Czechs themselves have spent their entire history fighting assimilation and poverty. For centuries they shared their land with other peoples, not even becoming Czechoslovakia until 1918 and not separating themselves from the Slovaks to become the Czech Republic until ’89, after occupation by both the Nazis and the Soviets. Assimilation in the face of oppression, both fiscal and otherwise, has been a method of survival for them; but here I am, treating it luxuriously, abusing the freedom to even be in this country for the sake of donning their clothes. I might be the one ruining my own ideal Europe.

 

On my last full day in Prague one winter visit, I began my morning by walking from the dorm I was staying in to Petřin Hill. I walked through an entrance with two stone walls, one on each side, like entering an abandoned fortress in the dead of day.

I walked up a small road leading to the top of the hill. When I had studied here the previous summer, my friends and I took a different route. We’d enter from the same gate, see the same stone walls greet us at the entrance, but then we’d make a left at the point where the cobblestones split off into two distinct roads. On this morning, I made a right.

The road had been cleared of all snow so that cars, the few that were there, could drive by, meaning the sidewalk was now covered in slush. After all the slush and all the uphill walking I finally saw something familiar: the Petřin Tower. Rumor has it that the tower was built in 1891 to be an exact, miniaturized replica of Paris’s Eiffel Tower, which had been built just a couple years before. Rumor has it that the same blueprints were even used for both.