So it really does exist. A high road through the mountains of Romania. Completed in 1974. Viewed by my father that same year, while his 'guide' told him not to walk too close to the edge, because he would not be the first to crash over the edge. After which his 'guide', the secret agent every Western journalist in the Eastern bloc took with him, gave him a playful push. For my father, after years of harassment by the secret services of the GDR, Poland, Russia and now Romania, reason to give up his journalistic work in the Eastern Bloc. The Romanian Securitate was the worst of the bunch. I knew that in 1974, the rest of my friends found out in 1989, when the mass graves, secret prisons and other horrors of the former Eastern Bloc regimes became known with the fall of the Iron Curtain.
So I secretly also thought it was a myth, that road, but it exists, and the story around it can also be read in The Eastern Bloc bookIn fact, every page of the book offers a surprise. That also makes the reference book compiled by Hellen Kooijman and Guido van Eijk so much more than a simple travel guide through Eastern Europe. Instead of cool tips from fellow tourists, in which guides like Lonely Planet abound, this is full of things you really didn't know yet, and which have been written down by real journalists and writers: correspondents, specialists, people who know the country in question like the back of their hand, and above all know what backpacker guides don't find interesting. And so that is often what is most interesting.
Because of course the megalomaniac statues, gigantic palaces and fragments of barracks and defences are sublime to behold. Of course, we still want to know how a few hours' travel from home, behind an impenetrable wall, a sanctuary state was built that gagged all its inhabitants. The remains are often quickly removed, like the Berlin Wall, which remains tangible in only a few places. More often, removal is not an option at all, either because the structures are too bulky or because people are secretly a bit proud of them.
A whole generation has now grown up knowing the Eastern Bloc only by hearsay. We are waiting for the first Stasi deniers, just as there are those who cannot grasp the fact that 6 million people were systematically and mechanically exterminated in the five years between 1940 and 1945 by an army of highly educated Strauss lovers and Goethe readers.
The best compliment of this travel guide, however, is that thanks to this book, you don't even really need to travel. The photos are stunning, the stories range from hilarious to horrifying and you are almost certain that in reality, things can only disappoint.
Although.
Through a tip via Facebook from one of the authors of this book, I ended up in the Milchbar Café Sibylle on Karl Marx Allee in former East Berlin. Just a pub where you can sit down and try to imagine what it used to be like: drinking milk in a café. Fortunately, they have very nice wine there now. Then again, that helps to pronounce the name of that death road in Romania.
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