Articles

Postcard from Lisbon - January 2010

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:12:13 +0200

Postcard

Postcard from Lisbon

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

Christopher Lawson takes readers on a guided tour of Portugal's capital

Posted: 20/01/2010

Clutching my highly polished wooden seat as tram 28 lurches through the twisting streets and passes through the Alfama, Baixa and Bairro Alto, Chiado and Estrela, I swear I can glimpse the ghosts of the recently departed mingling with ordinary Lisboetas. Isn’t that Zeca Afonso, the songwriter? Zeca’s stirring, soaring, surging anthem to solidarity in Grandola, a once fiercely communist town in the Alentejo, was the signal for the Carnation Revolution, "os evenimentos" of 25 April 1974, when Portugal finally joined the twentieth century. The revolution took place largely bloodlessly, although special fury was reserved for members of the PIDE (Policia Internacional de defesa do Estado). The austere, pious Antonio Salazar had created the Estado Novo in the 1920s. The military whisked his successor as Prime Minister, Marcelo Caetano, off to exile in Madeira and Brazil. Zeca's life took him to every corner of the Portuguese colonial empire. He must be checking the left-wing credentials of Portugal’s socialist government and is probably pleased that the Prime Minister's name is Socrates.

A Lisbon tram.

And look again at that middle-aged woman in black who walks the pavement with majestic dignity. It can only be Amalia Rodriguez, born in poverty in Alcantara, whose electrifying voice took fado, once the music of the waterfront bars and brothels, across the world. She was received rapturously in Romania in 1969. When Amalia, the “voice of Portugal”, soaked in saudade, hopeless yearning, died in 1999 at the age of 79, the government decreed three days of national mourning. Amalia must have left her tomb in the National Pantheon to rediscover her roots in the Alfama. She is the only woman and the only singer to be buried there.

Let’s get out here, at Cafe a Brasiliera, and join the bronze statue of Fernando Pessoa at his sual seat. Pessoa is smoking perhaps the 60th of his 80 cigarettes a day. Unlike the absent Henrik Ibsen’s sacrosanct table and chair at Oslo’s Grand Hotel, you can actually sit next to this unlikely colossus of modern Portuguese literature, although service at La Brasiliera is famously sloppy.

Absinthe, 90 per cent proof, was the favourite tipple of Portugal’s great poet of evanescence, indefinition and dissatisfaction with things and beings. With no close friends or a partner, Pessoa lived alone most of his life with relatives or in rented rooms. He left a trunk full of poems under his own name and more than four other heteronyms. Images of Pessoa, a slight figure in a clerk’s suit, with neat moustache, bow tie, trilby and round gold-rimmed glasses, stare myopically from many locations in the Lisbon area.

A bronze Fernando Pessoa outside the Cafe a Brasiliera in downtown Lisbon.

Now let’s take the train at Rossio. We’ll head for Estoril, Cascais and Sintra. Estoril, with its impossibly luxurious hotels with marble floors which go on for ever, boasts the largest casino in Europe. Here the great double agent Dusko Popov, a multilingual Royalist Serb, was often to be found during the seven visits he made to Lisbon between 1941 and 1944. Known as Tricycle for his preference for three-in-a-bed sex, Popov was a formidable playboy with a love for la dolce vita. He ran up heavy bills for his British controllers, who tolerated them because he delivered such valuable information. In his way, Popov is not a ghost, but may be one of the immortals, as his lifestyle caught the attention of another wartime habitue of the casino, Ian Fleming, who may have used him as one model for the most famous fictional agent of them all. On a mission to the United States Popov warned J. Edgar Hoover about the attack on Pearl Harbour but was ignored. Tricycle played a vital role in Operation Fortitude, the vast Allied deception plan which persuaded the Germans that the D-Day landing would take place at the Pas de Calais and Norway, not Normandy.

At the Hotel Lawrence in the lush woodlands of Sintra, Lord Byron, during his 1809 grand tour, enchanted with the setting of the second oldest hotel in Iberia, finished several stanzas of Childe Harold.

But most visitors come to Lisbon for gastronomic rather than literary reasons. Portuguese cuisine offers a range of delicious dishes from sardines and cataplana (stewed pork and clams) to roast goat and rabbit. And don't forget to patronise the pastelarias for sticky pastries, lemon curd and custard tarts. And cakes, which the Portuguese make with the same extravagance as the Austrians.

Message (O mar salgado)

Salt-laden sea, how much of all your salt

Is tears of Portugal!

For us to cross you, how many sons have kept

Vigil in vain and mothers wept!

Lived as old maids how many brides-to-be

Till death, that you might be ours, sea!

Was it worth while? It is worth while, all,

If the soul is not small.

Whoever means to sail beyond the Cape

Must double sorrow - no escape.

Peril and abyss has God to the sea given

And yet made it the mirror of heaven.

Fernando Pessoa

Harold Pinter: 10.10.1930 - 24.12.2008 (March 2009)

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:08:12 +0200

Sport

Harold Pinter: 10.10.1930 - 24.12.2008

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

Christopher Lawson salutes the cricket-loving Harold Pinter, who died last Christmas Eve

Posted: 04/03/2009

Harold Pinter, the Nobel-prize winning playwright, polemicist and cricketer, died on Christmas Eve at the age of 78. He was buried on New Year's Eve. Fifty relatives and friends, who included another cricketing man of the theatre, Tom Stoppard, attended the private ceremony, which Pinter had scripted meticulously. Matthew Burton read Pinter's favourite cricket poem, At Lord's, by the Victorian poet Francis Thompson.

Harold Pinter after winning the Nobel prize for Literature in 2005. "I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth - certainly greater than sex, although sex isn't too bad either," he said.

Burton is a member of the Gaieties, the amateur cricket club in which Pinter spent more than half his life as player, captain and manager. Pinter used to read the poem to mark the end of every cricketing season. In 2003, the BBC had organised a reception for him in the Long Room at Lord's, lined with portraits of great cricketers, to introduce a season of Pinter's work. For Pinter, the Lord's ground, in St John's Wood, London, was much more than the home of cricket. Here he played truant from his drama school, RADA, in the 1940s, to watch Compton, Edrich and Hutton in the golden days of English cricket.

Pinter was rarely happier than when playing or watching cricket on a summer's day. In his final newspaper interview he recalled his childhood in the 1930s. "I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket. I had a great friend who is still going – he lives in Australia – called Mick, Mick Goldstein. He used to live around the corner from me in Hackney, and we were very close to the River Lea, and there were fields. We walked down to the fields; there'd be nobody about – it would be really very early in the morning, and there would be a tree we used as a wicket. We would take it in turns to bat and bowl; we would be Lindwall, Miller, Hutton and Compton. That was the life," he told the Guardian.

At Lord's

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though my own red roses there may blow;

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.

For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,

And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,

To and fro: -

O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

The poem celebrates another golden era. Albert Hornby (1847-1925) and Dick Barlow (1851-1919) were great Lancashire batsmen from the 19th century. The red rose is the symbol of Lancashire, the white rose of Yorkshire. In the 15th century the War of the Roses pitted the two dynasties against each other. The two counties maintain an intense cricket rivalry. Even more profound, as our esteemed editor noted in Vivid two years ago, is the rivalry between England and Australia. In 1882, captaining the English side in a tightly contested match, Hornby had lost the Test match to Australia for the first time and inaugurated the Ashes Test series between the two countries.

Pinter was modest about his own cricketing prowess:

"My skills were limited. There were only two things I could do well. I possessed quite a gritty defence and I could hit straight for six - sometimes, oddly enough, off the back foot. But I didn't do either of these things very often. I had little concentration, patience, or the most important thing of all, true relaxation. And my judgment was distinctly less than impeccable. "Listen, son," Arthur would say, "you've got a good pair of forearms but just because you give one ball the charge and get away with it doesn't mean you can go out and give the next ball the charge, does it? Be sensible. What do you think the bowler's doing? He's thinking, son, thinking, he's thinking how to get you out. And if he sees you're going to give him the charge every ball he's got you for breakfast. You're supposed to be an intelligent man. Use your intelligence." "Sorry, Arthur," I said."

A fellow member of the Gaieties described his love of cricket as "Pinteresque, with glints of malevolence in its courtesies, steel beneath its smile". Never a light-hearted social affair, cricket, like drama, possessed performance, economy of gesture and aggression. "Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray," he once said. So, clearly, is cricket.

www.haroldpinter.org

Harold Pinter: Various voices Prose,poetry, politics 1948-1998 (Faber and Faber 1999)

Two state visits - February 2009

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:37:23 +0200

History

Two state visits

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

How King Carol II became a statesman as darkness fell over Europe. (The first of two parts)

Posted: 02/02/2009

Rendezvous from the Evening Standard, 20th September 1939, set in the ruins of Poland, shows Hitler and Stalin genially bowing to each other. The cartoonist David Low captured an important truth: where ideology and national interest are in conflict, national interest prevails. Democratic Europe was shocked to see two old enemies shaking hands.

Seventy and 30 years ago this year two ruthless authoritarians, Romanian heads of state from very different epochs, both of whom had a taste for grandiose building projects and a personality cult, paid State visits to Britain. One was awarded the Order of the Bath, the other the Order of the Garter, which was withdrawn by the Queen in the last hours of his life. King Carol II of Romania came to London between 15-17 November 1938 to be greeted by George VI, father of the present queen, who had succeeded his hapless brother, Edward VIII, on 11 December 1936, after Edward's abdication.

For King Carol it was his fifth and final visit to Britain. He had previously attended the funerals of Queen Alexandra and King George V in 1925 and 1936 and "conducted himself with dignity and discretion". In 1925, Ionel Bratianu, intent on the fall of Carol, had ensured that Carol's reputation was besmirched before he arrived in London. The Crown Prince of Romania had broken his parents' hearts and deserted his wife for the illicit love of a mistress as promiscuous as he was. The adjectives for Magda Lupescu came so easily that use became automatic. She was a "flame-haired, green-eyed temptress with alabaster skin". The quality newspapers preferred "Titian-haired". But what was most significant in a country whose anti-semitic roots ran deep, she was a Jewess, albeit converted. A philanderer who indulged in champagne and gambling orgies, Carol was weak-willed, irresponsible, scatter-brained, pleasure-loving, dissolute and immoral. The royal rapscallion was coming. British newspaper editors desperate for copy, who cared little for the origin of the colourful but unsourced tales, printed them all.

In 1936, when Carol was brought to Dover on the British destroyer Montrose and received a 21-gun salute from Dover Castle, the more scurrilous papers published a fantastic story about the heroic Constantin Cotolan, Romania's Sergeant Yorke, who took part in the funeral procession wearing the formal Sunday costume of peasants from Muscel, Transylvania. Even though Carol was half a mile away in the forward part of the procession, Cotolan was described as his personal masseur. Hauled in to "help the King sober up after an all-night drinking bout", rumour had it that Cotolan had somehow got mixed up in the procession. In 1937, travelling "incognito" on a one-week shopping trip to London, Carol had himself measured for new suits and uniforms at Savile Row, bought gramophone records and antiques and went to the theatre. At a matinee, the audience recognised and applauded him. Much his most controversial visit had been in May 1928, when, a royal exile, he plotted a coup d'etat from the picture-postcard Surrey village of Godstone. He planned to charter a plane to Switzerland and then fly onwards to Romania. Scotland Yard detectives quietly escorted him and his entourage, which included Lupescu, on to a cross-channel steamer at Dover.

President and Madame Ceausescu stayed in Buckingham Palace between 13-16 June 1978, a year after the devastating earthquake of 4 March 1977 and the Jiu Valley miners' protests of August 1 1977, and a matter of weeks before the defection to the United States in July of Ion Pacepa, who had prepared the visit. The lurid revelations in his book Red Horizons were to form the basis of the charges against Ceausescu at the kangaroo-court trial before his execution on 25 December 1989.

A death in Portugal in 1977 provides a link to the earlier visit. Lupescu, long-time mistress and later, wife, of Carol, died in Estoril, probably at the age of 81, surviving her lover by 24 years. An unkind Daily Telegraph obituarist recalled the salacious limerick which had wide currency in the 1930s:

You've all heard of Madame Lupescu

Who came to Romania's rescue.

It's a wonderful thing

To be under a king.

Is democracy better, I esc you?

Nineteen thirty-eight, the year of Munich, and the week after Kristallnacht, which signalled exactly what Hitler had in store for the Jews, hardly constituted a propitious date for a visit to the capital city of the British Empire. It was a year of tension, stress and constant negotiation. Jackbooted Fascism strode throughout Europe. Hitler had reoccupied the Rhineland and Saarland. The British prime minister's appeasement policy, poorly implemented, carried out too late and not enforced with sufficient resolution, had led to Czechosolvakia's loss of Sudetenland and large portions of Slovakia and Ruthenia to Hungary. Poland gained the Duchy of Teschen. By insisting that a strip of Ruthenia be left independent, Hitler had secured a road to the very frontiers of Czechoslovakia - and to the richest and most coveted region of Central Europe, Romania's oilfields. When Goering threatened to bomb Prague, President Hacha, old and sick, had had a mild heart attack. In Czechoslovakia, one of the few remaining democracies in Europe, border fortifications in the form of mountain defences had now been lost, together with 70 per cent of its iron and steel production, 70 per cent of its electrical power, 3.5 million inhabitants, and the Skoda and Tatra Works, the second largest arms manufacturer in Europe. Hitler had designs on Poland. Europe was resigned to war.

In Romania, after the 1929 economic crisis, high unemployment had led to social unrest and strikes, notably the 1929 miners' strike in the Jiu Valley and the railway workers' strike in Grivita. Both were violently repressed. In the 1930s, under Carol's royal dictatorship, 25 governments rotated in and out of power. While the economy recovered amid recurrent crises, industry grew and cultural life flourished, the Iron Guard, a sinister and semi-mystical, anti-semitic, nationalist movement, confronted the government. Carol sought to suppress it mercilessly. Assassinations, massacres and reprisal killings took place on both sides. Corruption and political intrigue reached unprecedented heights. The military plotted. Carol, master manipulator of Romanian politics, forced the incorruptible Maniu into retirement and imprisoned General Antonescu. In the process, with Lupescu, he accumulated an impressive fortune.

As for the House of Windsor, as dysfunctional then as now, which George V had founded by royal proclamation in 1917, the warmth of his reception during his 1935 silver jubilee celebrations had genuinely astonished and pleased him, despite his starchy, remote manner. His doctor Bertrand Dawson had hastened his death on 20 January 1936 by giving him a lethal injection to end the King's suffering and to make sure he died by midnight so that his death could be announced in the Times the next morning. While his despotic. loveless parenting and quarterdeck manner had led the future Edward VIII to seek affection and solace with married women, and left his younger brother, later George VI, with a terrible stammer, to his subjects George V had embodied duty and diligence. With his Victorian sense of morality, George V reportedly described Carol as "that bounder" and never disguised his dislike of him. When, at the end of 1936, Queen Mary, better known for liberating porcelain and silver objets d'art from the stately homes of England, summoned Stanley Baldwin to discuss her son's threat to abdicate, she began: "Really! This might be Romania!"

This royal disapproval had prevented an earlier state visit. Carol, on the other hand, fostered affection and regard for the British royal court. In Romania, George was known as "the soldier king". In fact, he was a philistine, his intellectual interests confined to two books, his stamp album and a volume recording the copious number of partridge, pheasants, snipe, woodcock and grouse, rabbits and hares he had slaughtered. Now, three years after his funeral, the abdication crisis had passed, although children in the streets of London and in playgrounds still sang: "Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson's pinched our king". The monarchy had been weakened. King George VI, a chain-smoker, never in the best of health, who was to die of lung cancer in 1952, deserved much credit for its revival. His exemplary conduct during the war, when, to rally the population, he and his family stayed in London during the Blitz and beyond, increased his stature immeasurably. His wife famously summarized the royal stance: "The girls will not go without me. And I won't leave without the King. And of course the King will never leave."

Carol, acompanied by Crown Pince Michael and his eminence grise, Urdareanu, the court chamberlain, a key member of the camarilla, the unelected court favourites, had come to London to tell the Chamberlain government that his country would resist Hitler, provided the frontier defences and armed forces were brought up to strength and re-equipped. He needed money for large-scale rearmament. Also, he could resist German pressure only if Romania could arrange an adequate market for its products to make it economically independent of Germany. Unless he received economic aid, he would have to come to an accommodation with Hitler, his only alternative way of maintaining the territorial integrity and independence of Romania.

British political circles outside the government and the serious British press well understood Carol's situation and gave him a warm reception. True, he had fathered two children with a teenage schoolgirl, deserted his regiment in wartime, contracted a morganatic marriage with Zizi Lambrino in Odessa, been obliged to annul it, and, despite his marriage to Princess Elena of Greece in 1921, had run off with Lupescu to lead a lotus life on the French Riviera. From 1930 onwards he had presided over his country with a system far removed from democracy. But in the dire circumstances facing Europe at the end of 1938, the "royal rapscallion" stories were forgotten and he was even praised for establishing firm rule in his country. The commentators were unanimous in describing his three-day working visit as his finest hour. The headlines read "From playboy to statesman".

Carol arrived with a concrete, detailed business plan. Could Britain loan Romania 20,000 GBP, partly as a cash advance and partly as extended credit, if Romania bought war materials from Britain? Romania's war industries would be developed, agriculture industrialized, roads and a new naval base on the Black Sea built. As part of the general defence scheme, economic cooperation with Britain would be based on an elaborate system of barter. Britain would buy almost the whole of Romania's wheat and oil production in return for British manufactured goods.

When he spoke at the Guildhall, knowing full well that he was addressing himself to British businessmen and financiers, while replying to the formal greetings of the Lord Mayor of London, he pulled out all the stops. "Am I not the great-grandson of the Great Queen Victoria? This is, therefore, the first, and one of the strongest ties that bind me to this nation." After reminding his audience that Romania had fought on their side in the Great War, he referred subtly to the new barbarism originating from Germany: "Established on the ancient borders of Western civilisation, Roumania created in the course of centuries, through the bravery of her sons, the first breaker of barbaric invasion." He laid on some flattery: "... I do not consider there could be any more useful and reliable ambassadors of peace than the businessmen," and summed up the political purpose of his mission in one sentence:" Roumania, I assure you, is ready to adopt such a programme as soon as she can be certain of receiving sufficient collaboration of a real and serious nature."

But he left empty-handed. The City did not consider Romania a good enough business risk to justify a loan. This resonated in the Treasury at Whitehall and in Downing Street. The British journalist Alexander Levvey Easterman* places the blame for Britain's unhelpful attitude squarely on Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain's chief adviser on international affairs, who was supremely unqualified for the position. Carol then spent five days in Paris closeted with Daladier, the Prime Minister, and Bonnet, the Foreign Minister and the captains of French finance and industry. He found no greater appreciation for the perils of his position, and met with no greater success. Appeasement seemed to have even stronger roots in France.

On November 23, 1938 he left Paris and drove from Basle to Berchtesgarten. He had already received news of increasing Iron Guard violence, orchestrated from Germany. Between his visit to Hitler (a three-hour harangue by the Fuehrer during which Carol stood up stoutly for non-interference in Romania's affairs) and his abdication on 6 September 1940, when Carol left the country, Romania supped full of horrors, human and territorial. Unspeakable atrocities were committed against Jews. Carol ordered the execution of Codreanu, the leader of the Legion, and 13 of his henchmen. An announcement the next day stated that they had been "shot while trying to escape, under escort". In retaliation, an execution squad sent from Germany assassinated Calinescu, the Prime Minister.

The Iron Guard grew in influence. In June of 1940 Stalin demanded the return of Bessarabia and the turnover of Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union. Germany told Romania to concede. In August Bulgaria took over the southern part of Drobuja and Romania was forced to cede Northern Transylvania to its Axis partner Hungary. Grown men wept in the streets of Bucharest. The next month demonstrations by the Iron Guard - and ordinary citizens - and several stormy meetings with Antonescu forced King Carol to abdicate, although he did not use the word in his proclamation. Carol's son Michael became king although power lay in the hands of Prime Minister Antonescu.

The cargo on the special train included three poodles, two pekingese, perhaps ten servants, furs, paintings by Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt, hundreds of canvases, jewels, even the armour that had decorated the walls of the royal palaces of Peliflor and Pelefl, and of course Carol's prized stamp collection.

As the train approached Timisoara station, soldiers stationed along the tracks saluted. The train slowed down and almost came to a complete halt, when suddenly the doors of the railway station burst open and some 300 green-shirted legionnaires stormed the platform. The train immediately accelerated. A group of the legionnaires fired on the train. Bullets damaged part of the station wall. Machine gun fire increased. The train hurtled onwards and made no further stops until the passengers were out of the country, at Velika Kikinda, the first station in Yugoslavia.

We have a last glimpse of Carol leaving Romanian territory and the pages of Romanian history books, cowering in the cast-iron bath tub of the special train which took him into exile, while Lupescu sat resolutely in her seat.

*A.L Easterman (1890-1985), Foreign Editor of the Daily Express and Chief Foreign Correspondent of the Daily Herald, later Political Secretary of the World Jewish Congress (to whose book King Carol, Hitler and Lupescu, Gollancz 1942, I am greatly indebted)

Fiction imitating life - September 2009

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:30:26 +0200

Books

Fiction imitating life

Christopher Lawson

The Ghost by Robert Harris

Robert Harris evokes Martha's Vineyard in winter, the setting for his 2007 political thriller, with wonderful skill. Force ten gales rage, the north wind blows down from Cape Cod, clouds scud, the Atlantic pounds and heaves, empty white clapboard houses creak and bang, and the ghost of Mary Jo Kopechne still haunts the bridge at Chappaquidick Island.

To this deserted spot, the playground of the rich in the summer months, has fled the former prime minister of Britain, Adam Lang, his wife Ruth and his gatekeeper Amelia, with an entourage of a driver and six protection officers from the UK. Lang has summoned a professional ghostwriter, more used to writing up the lives of minor celebrities such as pop stars and footballers, to secure his legacy. The writer's predecessor, Mike McAra, has died in a mysterious accident.

Lang's detractors accuse him of making his career totally subservient to American interests. "One of the serious things I wanted to get at in the book was why is it that the UK no longer seems to have an independent foreign policy, no longer does anything remotely likely to displease the US. And trying to explain that is at the heart of the plot of this book", says Harris. Lang may face the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Harris ferociously attacks extraordinary rendition and state-indulged torture.

Adam Peter Benet Lang, with his theatrical background at university and his fondness for staying in a pop star's West Indian villa, has many of the characteristics of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, friend of Cliff Richard and ex-frontman of the Ugly Rumours.

But he is a difficult man to pin down. "He was like some rare marine specimen fished up from the depths of the ocean, which could only live under extreme pressure. Deposited on the shore, exposed to the thin air of normal life, Lang was in constant danger of expiring from sheer boredom". And "He had achieved his electoral victories by way of morally eviscerating the Labour party, emptying politics of its content, and anaesthetising the country".

Amelia Bly, the loyal gatekeeper, looks like personal aide Anji Hunter, by Blair's side since his early days. Lang's wife Ruth, "famous for her independence", stands in for Cherie Blair. In many ways Ruth becomes the most sinister figure in the book. However, Richard Rycart, the ex-Foreign Secretary, is not quite the late Robin Cook, the principled and eloquent former Foreign Secretary whose untimely death three years ago robbed New Labour of one of its major figures. To the annoyance of the 2008 reader, as the Labour Party implodes, and support in the country dwindles to levels not seen since the days of Ramsay Macdonald, there is no literary equivalent to the electorally doomed Gordon Brown.

The fictional Lang was born on May 6th, 1953, four years before Harris. Although throughout the book an outsider sizes up his contemporary, Harris is of course, an insider himself, a friend of Peter Mandelson and one of the proponents of New Labour. His book can be seen as a cri de coeur at what has happened to his party.

In a promotional interview, Robert Harris suggests his title has no fewer than three meanings. "...The Ghost has many levels really; the ghost writer is the ghost, the ex-prime minister is a ghost of his former self, and in a way Great Britain has become a ghost to the US, a ghost of its former independent self, it seems to me."

The anonymous ghost writer, the man who will only ever have "with" between his subject's name and his own, tells the story in the first person. As soon as McAra's death is revealed to be murder, the protagonist turns from writer to detective, and the book, too, alters course. From a meditation about politics, reputation, writing and the line between fact and fiction, The Ghost becomes a thriller.

A year after publication, Robert Harris's roman a clef has once again hit the headlines of the arts pages of the British press. Roman Polanski will begin filming the book in the autumn. Nicholas Cage has been signed up to play the ghostwriter and Pierce Brosnan the recently ejected Prime Minister, whose reputation is bound to be picked over one more time.

Indeed, the near future will be a hot season for political reputations. In the United States, as well as Oliver Stone's irreverent comic take on W's drunken youth, bestselling writer Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld completed American Wife, both in time for the Republican convention. The protagonist, Alice Blackwell, can only be a thinly disguised Laura Bush. It is guaranteed to drive the White House into a fury. A few seconds googling will get you a graphic depiction of the President's todger. The book, says one reviewer, is a "masterful highbrow-lowbrow mash-up that satisfies as ass-kicking literary fiction and juicy gossip simultaneously".

Hutchinson, Random House, pp 310, ISBN 9780091796259, 2007, GBP 3.86 at www.amazon.co.uk (paperback)

The Casa Universitarilor - October 2008

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:09:08 +0200

Under Ceausescu

The Casa Universitarilor

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

Christopher Lawson remembers the academic regulars, from the highly distinguished to the utterly disreputable, at the Iasi university restaurant club in the mid-1970s

Posted: 04/10/2008

Now privately owned, these days it's just another unremarkable restaurant in Iasi, open to all and sundry. A beer garden opens in the spring and summer months. The wedding receptions every weekend are grander affairs than in the more austere 1970s. Amplified music deafens the guests and can be heard halfway down the street. I remember my acute embarrassment when I was invited to a wedding dinner in the old days. With the American lecturer - who should have warned me - we were among the best-paid participants. All the other guests gave sums of money to the happy couple. I didn't because I didn't know the custom.

A street in modern Iasi

Those who wait tables today are young, male, brash and a little slapdash. They show you every minute that they are paid the salar minimum de pe economie (Eng: minimum wage.) To be quite honest, the level of service is abysmal. In the old days the middle-aged and motherly waitresses offered more attentive service and called you domnul profesor (Eng: Professor.) In the mid-1980s when austerity became near-starvation, the bar staff fronted a useful operation which provided meat and salami to the families of regular customers.

The clientele has changed radically. In the 1970s the Casa Universitarilor was an exclusive club for university staff. Everyone in the academic world from retired professors to the most junior assistants came to dine here. Young doctors from the university hospital dropped by. Directors and actors from the National Theatre, all speaking immaculate French, had their own table.

One day it stood empty and remained unoccupied for the next few days. I asked a colleague what had happened to this witty, civilised bunch. "They are all in prison for immoral behaviour," she replied, a touch of puritanical smugness in her voice. In Orthodox Romania, the communist system found homosexuality just as difficult to deal with as the post-communists.

Mamaliga was a staple of the appetisers. Somewhat to my surprise, Maurice Toussaint, the French lecturer, loved it. "It travels down your gullet and lands in your stomach with a huge thump. You don't feel hungry for the rest of the day," he opined, while holding forth on some obscure aspect of theoretical linguistics which, apart from him, about six people in the world could understand.

About half the menu was available. You could normally rely on frigarui (Eng: shish-kebab), creier pane (Eng: fried brain), pork chops, and even Chateaubriand, with tomato and cucumber salad or muraturi (Eng: pickled vegetables) on the side. Clatite (Eng: pancakes with jam or chocolate) was the only dessert on offer.

There were microphones in the ashtray stands of course, but colleagues would come and sit with me without demur. "The President has decreed that everyone should be addressed as tovaras (Eng: comrade), not domnul (Eng: Mr.). But he didn't specify what foreign lecturers should be called. So what would you prefer: Domnul tovaras profesor or Tovaras domnul profesor? Or would you prefer to stick to the bourgeois form?"

A weathered teacher from the Department of Romanian as a Foreign Language whom I met in the Casa gave me an expert tour of the Cathedral of the Three Hierarchs. He had acquired his fluent German in a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp after Stalingrad. Rarely would foreign visitors appear. The Berliner Ensemble, one of the greatest theatre troupes in Europe, founded by Bertolt Brecht, put on two memorable performances. In Puntila and his Hired Man Matti, a knockabout comedy about class warfare, bursting with verbal polytechnics, the landlord, Puntilla, is friendly, garrulous and a man of the people, when drunk, but heartless, cynical and penny-pinching when "attacked by sobriety". His faithful chauffeur bears the brunt of his wrath and struggles to keep him inebriated. The highlight for the audience, which apparently included the entire Jewish population of Iasi, was a scene in which Puntila takes a shower on stage, probably to sober up.

The second offering was Gorki's Mother, a model for the "proletarian literature" and socialist realism espoused by the Bolsheviks. The love of the devout Nilovna for her son and the force of his ideas convinces her to support the revolutionary cause. She is beaten to death by police while attempting to smuggle him copies of her son's defence speech. As the play was pure agitprop, with depersonalised, formulaic characters, audience reaction was polite rather than warm.

I met the director sipping Israeli brandy in the Casa. While an exchange student in West Germany, I had actually attended two performances of the Ensemble at the Schiffbauerdamm in 1962, a year after the Wall went up. I had seen Mutter Courage, the nickname of a canteen woman with the Swedish army, haul her cart through 12 of the Thirty Years' War, Europe's bloodiest conflagration before the First World War. Anna Fierling continues to do business with the troops while all three of her children are killed. I had watched The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a parable of Hitler's rise to power set in gangster-controlled 1930s Chicago. Neither experience had ever left me.

With my theatre-fan credentials established, we got on very well. He even invited me to call on him next time I came to Berlin. The following year I took up his offer. After crossing the border at Friedrichstrasse, I found myself sitting in the front row, an honoured guest, at a performance of Brecht's uncollected sketches and short plays, surrounded by the well-scrubbed faces and pressed uniforms of the Free German Youth. Some time in the 1980s, the director defected, of course.

Another foreigner I saw again after an encounter in the Casa was the wealthy and well-preserved wife of the literary editor of the Chicago Tribune. Romania bored her. She particularly disliked the female minder-interpreter who accompanied the couple. This lady operative complained endlessly about the classic Westerns which were the principal fare of Romanian TV at the time.

To the students of the English Department, the critic, an avuncular Carpathian bear of a man, had given a magisterial survey of the state of the American novel which his wife had doubtless heard a hundred times before. She showed more interest when I said I'd be in London that summer.

Probably against my better judgment, we arranged to meet. I found her in the foyer of one of the plushest hotels in Mayfair. Over dinner she mostly complained about her husband. Alarm bells rang. I was uncomfortable. At least 20 years my senior, she invited me very directly to stay the night in her luxurious bedroom. Was the lady a fully paid-up nymphomaniac or just lonely? Playing the polite English gentleman to the hilt, I rebuffed her advances. She wasn't my type at all. She was furious. I couldn't really tell her that I was staying with my Mum and Dad, who would worry unduly if I did not reappear that evening.

But my favourite denizen of the Casa was a home-grown Romanian. Experienced topers from the university community occupied the room on the left of the Casa, known as the Left Bank. It was the preserve, especially late on Sunday mornings, of those of pensionable age, many in their 70s, some in their 80s. Among them, nobody offered more entertainment value than Professor Stefan Cuciureanu, Head of the Italian Department, the thirstiest man in Iasi. Provided he was well-supplied with bottles of wine to quench his inexhaustible craving, he would discourse learnedly and amusingly in French, Italian and Romanian on any literary or linguistic subject within his expertise, from Dante Alighieri to Gabriele d'Annunzio, from Luigi Pirandello to Italo Svevo, on Vulgar and Medieval Latin, and the many bonds which united Romania and Italy.

He had done his postgraduate studies in Mussolini's Italy. With the installation of communism, his master's degree in linguistics was briefly considered fascist and inadmissible in the socialist republic. But Cuciureanu was far more interested in wine than politics. The Securitate left him alone, although his outrageous public behaviour was deeply subversive of the communist system and its outward respectability.

One evening I showed my judgment had improved not one whit by inviting him and a couple of companions to visit my fourth-floor apartment. Already well-oiled, he fell asleep in my only armchair, peed down his trouser leg and wet the government-issue carpet. On regaining consciousness, he proffered me his empty glass, and resumed his previous topic. We had to half-carry him down to the entrance - the lift was broken, of course - and pour him into a taxi. When I next met him a few days later, it was as if nothing untoward had ever happened.

This legendary figure is still talked about fondly. His academic contributions and riotous lifestyle were recently the subject of a paper by a colleague at a conference on 70 years of Italian Studies in Romania. He managed to make three visits to his beloved Italy during the communist era and died, well-pickled, in his 80s, a testimonial to the life-giving properties of vin de casa.

I remember him affectionately. Unlike many inveterate boozers, he was never boring. Well, almost never. These lines are as much a tribute to a colourful tippler and linguist as they are to a place and an era in which the vapours of good wine and good company helped to stifle and drown, for a few hours, the endless adulation of the Conducator in the party newspaper, Scinteia, and on television, where a fawning court poet presided almost every Saturday night over mass propaganda rallies with special light effects.

Ewing Toil - May 2008

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:01:46 +0200

Under Ceausescu

Ewing Toil

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

The apparatchik who permitted Dallas to be shown in Romania had committed a colossal blunder. Far from providing a warning against the evils of capitalism, viewers in this part of the Eastern bloc wanted to have it all, in thick slices

Posted: 18/05/2008

"Why don't you come and stay at my place for a week or so? My wife's a German-speaker. She'd be pleased to meet you. You can give our daughter some practice with her English. And Dallas is on tonight. We'll be having the gang over."

"But you know foreigners aren't allowed to stay at Romanians' houses overnight," I intoned virtuously, although the wine we had shared in the restaurant car had emboldened me. Not that I was especially worried. This law was almost impossible to police.

"It's the best possible entertainment," they chorused, "powerful men, beautiful women in fabulous clothes, and unimaginable barrel-loads of money."

"Don't insult me - come along," ordered my new host, an economist, in the schoolboy French we'd been conversing in for the past few hours. We hefted our bags out of the train and took the trolleybus into the centre of Sibiu. It was the spring of 1979.

Almost as soon as we had settled ourselves in his apartment, his wife arrived, weeping with laughter. Between giggles, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, and without being introduced to me at all, Andrea told her story.

"So they closed all the factories, shut down the schools, issued Romanian flags and lined the people up along the route," she explained. "But it was the wrong route! The official motorcade with Ceausescu in the lead car passed through empty streets. So there'll be no people waving flags on tonight's news, no clapping children. God knows how they'll fill the missing minutes."

Still delighted by this small victory over communist organisation, a huge cock-up by the party, the couple began busying themselves for the major event of the evening. They were one of six couples that took turns to prepare food and wine for the weekly episode of the Ewing family saga.

It was pure escapism, of course. But all these thirty-something Romanians identified themselves totally with JR, Bobby, Sue Ellen and their extended families. "It's the best possible entertainment," they chorused, "powerful men, beautiful women in fabulous clothes, and unimaginable barrel-loads of money." And behind the power struggles and the tantrums, as countless social anthropologists have since testified, lay of course the future, and the whole question of who would inherit the ranch.

With my daughter, I visited the family often after that first meeting. On the last occasion I stayed, in the 1990s, the couple and their friends were running several successful businesses, and coming into their apartments with great wedges of cash.

It was munca patriotica (eng: patriotic work) and munca practica (eng: practical work), the bane of foreign lecturers' lives, which first kindled my twin passions for travelling on Romania's trains and visiting graveyards.

For munca patriotica students picked grapes, harvested maize or sorted potatoes according to the rural area where they were sent. With two weeks off classes, loosely supervised by teachers, they played games when not working and slept in beds in collective farm buildings. I can't tell you about the food because most skipped the meals provided. Their working days weren't too arduous and many had already been harvesting in their schooldays.

The fortnight away from classes played havoc with the academic rhythm of the semester, laboriously established in the first two weeks. Within a matter of another month and a half, it was time for munca practica. Students were attached to other departments, primarily in economics, and translated screeds of texts into a kind of English. If the value of the translations was questionable, it did teach students to touch-type.

And so, with time on my hands, at the recommendation of a Romanian colleague, I took a Round Romania ticket. The train passed Vatra Dornei, in the mountains, where the Ministry of Historic Buildings is now restoring the pre-war casino. I spent a couple of days in Cluj, and remember a graveyard where one gravestone boasted both a cross and a hammer and sickle: the late lamented obviously believed in double insurance. In Timisoara I hurriedly got off a trolleybus, anxious to preserve my dignity as a British lecturer, when I found that my two companions were not buying a tickets "as a protest against the communist system". In a Saxon church in Sighisoara, I watched an elderly woman tend an immaculate grave and plant fresh primroses. "Weit von seinem Land ruhet ...." read the inscription, for a soldier lost on the Russian front. I found the scene unbearably moving.

I was most impressed by the Romanian custom of burying allies and enemies side by side: Here lies a Romanian hero. Here lies a Hungarian hero. Here lies a Russian hero. Here lies a German hero. Surely there is hope for a country, which practices reconciliation as generously as this?

A long way from Vienna - March 2008

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:27:39 +0200

Under Ceausescu

A long way from Vienna

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

Posted: 06/03/2008

The man at the bank exchange counter gave me a wink and something more akin to a knowing Viennese leer than a grin.

"I hob vieles doar, I've got plenty here," he said in thick Wienerdialekt, eyes glittering as he lifted a large piece of cloth to reveal metre-high piles of heavily-used blue 100 lei notes, the colours fading fast. I'd just finished changing my remaining hard currency into Deutschmarks and dollars. Guessing my destination, he asked if I'd like some Romanian money too. Virtuously, I told him that I knew it was illegal to import and export Romanian lei. "Ach, quatsch," he said. The rate he was offering was fantastic, even better than the going black market one. Later, I was told that all the Western embassies in Bucharest paid their local staff with lei from Vienna.

A composite train trip to Romania in the late 1970s-early 1980s and a trip down memory lane for Christopher Lawson.

I needed the deutschmarks and dollars to buy beer on my journey, and for emergencies. Hungarian and Polish beer was always on sale through the Hungarian part of the trip. If you were exceptionally lucky, East German beer might be available. I toured the small supermarket of the Westbahnhof, making sure I had enough to eat and drink, and bought a newspaper, a magazine and a paperback from the newsagent's.

I took the elevator up to the second level and boarded the train to Bucharest. My last glimpse of the west was a marital spat. In the station concourse a French-speaking African student was arguing with a Romanian girl. Obviously newly married, both were weighed down with luggage. I often wonder what became of them. Where was their final destination? Abidjan? Libreville? Kinshasa? Or did the newly minted doctor or engineer decide to submerge himself and his bride in the African quarter of Paris or Brussels? One of my students married a Kenyan. The last I heard she was a mother-of-four, a respected senior secondary school teacher of English in Nairobi. Reports said she was happy.

The first Romanian compartments were always occupied by middle-aged and elderly couples with huge quantities of luggage and white goods, refrigerators and washing machines. Somehow, no doubt with the help of relatives in Vienna, they had managed to manhandle the huge linen-covered boxes inside the compartments, occupying the whole area. You rarely saw bona fide tourists from the West. Otherwise the train mostly contained travellers to Budapest, and, more rarely, Germans on their way to visit family in Siebenbuergen.

Soon after the Wiener Waelzer left the station, we passed a spot where the then-Czechoslovak, Hungarian and Austrian borders met. Hungarian police and customs boarded the train. My double transit visa filled a whole page in my passport, as did the Romanian visa. The Hungarian officials were correct, professional and well-trained, probably in the Soviet tradition. The police officer would open your passport, take a 30-second glance at your photo, then imprint your face on his brain with a disconcerting stare, before looking down again at your picture. These were the days when it was unwise to have facial hair which did not appear on your passport picture. I collected the first of four stamps on the visa.

Meanwhile, a slim teenage boy with a ladder was climbing into the ceiling of the corridor. He had unscrewed the panels and was looking into the inside roof compartment with a torch. He was to do this at the Romanian border too, and on the train going back. I had talked to a Romanian who claimed he had smuggled himself to the West in this uncomfortable way. Although he gave me a graphic account of the state of his cramped body, of taking bottles of mineral water to allay thirst and vast quantities of newspaper to soak up his urine, I simply didn't believe him, especially the latter part. Nobody, I was convinced, could get past a security check as thorough as this.

In just two hours we were in Budapest, where there was time enough to grab a hot meal. Later, when I knew the route better, I'd leave my bags at the left luggage, visit a Turkish bath, find a restaurant by the Danube, dine on roast goose and a huge salad and catch the next train. Goulasch Communism flourished in the 1970s and 1980s and a train traveller stopping off in the Hungarian capital could find practically everything his heart could desire.

The view from the sleeper car

The abundance of goods in Budapest was clearly one of the motives for preventing Romanians from travelling west. Today, the communist-era border checks at Lokoshaza-Curtici are described as the most sinister behind the Iron Curtain, because of Ceausescu's paranoia about the Hungarians. It took me a long time to realise that the law about foreigners not being able to stay overnight in Romanian homes was specifically directed at Hungarians staying with their Hungarian-Romanian relatives. But I just recall the checks at about 02.00 as being long, drawn-out and tedious, especially in the winter, an opportunity for the bored, unshaven border police in their scruffy uniforms to smoke Kents and make a little money through bribery. By 1983, my last year of train travelling before the 1989 coup, the police boasted a young, highly educated officer, who spoke impeccable English. I used to make a point of taking him detective stories and thrillers.

By dawn the train began filling up with local commuters and families of peasants. I never actually saw a live chicken in their gigantic carrier bags, but wouldn't have been surprised if a rooster's head suddenly appeared. They carried everything else, large quantities of wine and tuica, bread, vegetables, salami and roast meat, and still more supplies buried further down.

It was time for a getting-to-know-you session. "De unde sinteti? Citi ani aveti? Sunteti casatorit?" (eng: "Where are you from? How old are you? Are you married?" These three staple questions generated a satisfactory 30 minutes of conversation. If you had photographs, so much the better. Britain, as a country, didn't register very strongly. The middle-aged peasant ladies would have preferred me to come from Germany or the USA. However you answered question two,- Multi inainte! (eng: You look younger!) would be the response - question three was a mantrap. "So you're not married? Why ever not? You are the right age!"

Then came the hospitality. I'd normally have some sandwiches from Vienna with me, but they were cast aside in the onslaught of offerings from fellow-passengers. I was plied with food and drink until I was full to bursting. I knew that the hospitality episode was sure to happen, but always took food with me to show that I, too, was prepared and organised for the journey. If I made a lavatory call, I could be sure the peasants would guard my bags like watchful hawks. I often made a point of leaving my camera in the luggage rack because I had such total faith in their honesty.

The restful landscape of Transylvania rolled by with its neat houses, rolling hills, mountains and rivers. And this was the disadvantage of the night train. You did not see the scenery unfold in its full glory because the greater part had gone by in the darkness. I always registered Sinaia with its river, forests and untidy woodworkings. Most of the peasants had alighted by now, and the passengers became more individualistic and minded their own business. I would often get off in Sinaia myself to visit families of former students.

If I went all the way to the Gara de Nord in Bucharest, I'd repair to the Hotel du Nord, an ill-lit, seedy establishment, to await the train to Iasi. The hotel has long since been demolished. In its place now stands the sanitised Hotel Ibis, an outpost of Westernness.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Hotel du Nord was one of the capital's biggest black market centres. I'd pick up the latest gossip and rumour about Romania and the Third World from the African students, who numbered a total of 5,300 in the whole country by 1979. Ceausescu by then had diplomatic relations with every single African country.

The flawed father of pan-Africanism, Kwame Nkrumah, the Osagyefo, the Redeemer, had died of cancer in a Bucharest sanatorium on 27th April, 1972. His body had been flown to Conakry, Guinea. He could not be buried in his homeland of Ghana until a more sympathetic government emerged. One story that can be sourced tells of Emperor Bokassa, once a sergeant-major in the French army, marrying a Bucharest dancer, Gabriela Drimba, in 1973. Bokassa flew her to Bangui to join his harem of 29 wives from several continents. Amid such tales, and reports of the latest drunken escapades of Nicu Ceausescu, I finally felt I had come a long way from Vienna.

Postcard from Vienna - December 2007

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:15:19 +0200

Postcard

Postcard from Vienna

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

Something's been happening to the once-staid Austrian capital. Globalised Vienna pulsates with hipness. It has become a thriving multicultural city with an uber-stylish club scene

Posted: 23/12/2007

Something's been happening to the once-staid Austrian capital. Globalised Vienna pulsates with hipness. While Joerg Haider's unappetising anti-foreigner views are now confined to the governorship of his Carinthian heartland, Vienna has become a thriving multicultural city with an uber-stylish club scene.

Vienna: A changing city

At the Suedbahnhof, coaches from Zagreb and Belgrade regularly disgorge some of the 80,000 one-time refugees Austria took in after the 1990s wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Working migrants, doing the menial jobs the Viennese shun themselves, these integrated new Viennese head home at weekends.

Have lunch in a Turkish restaurant in the Naschmarkt. The shiny aubergines and enormous plums on display at stalls outside makes you imagine you're in southern rather than Central Europe. The poor brother of the Naschmarkt, the Brunnenviertel offers even lower prices. Find it in the 16th District of Ottakring near the Gurtelbogen, the main eight-track ring road which separates the city's rich, better-off inner districts from the outer ones and the former red-light area.

About two-thirds of the local population, attracted by the cheap housing, are Turks or from ex-Yugoslavia. Many artists call the Brunnenviertel home. Cultural activities flourish, especially in May and June, when, since 1999, thousands have enjoyed the annual festival known as Soho in Ottakring, which explodes with exhibitions, projects, music, film, performance and literature.

In 1890 the art nouveau architect Otto Wager designed a new city plan for Vienna, but only his urban rail network with its 400 arches was built. Six stations along the U6 underground line are still in use. Running along the underground, the Gurtelbogen now boasts music bars, open-air stages and clubs with live music. Over the last ten years it has metamorphosed, with the help of EU funding, into one of Vienna's most fashionable nightlife areas. Here are the principal hotspots.

The Chelsea offers Britpop and football. Drop into the Rhiz for local and international musicians, film and video presentations, DJs and electro music. A webcam and an mp3 stream allow you to hear the music at home, and check out the Rhiz patrons. At the B72, two floors with floor-to-ceiling windows, under railway arches, DJs play modern club music in an industrial sci-fi Bladerunner-like setting. All three have open-air stages. The Carina, another subway station club, an Otto Wagner original, and the Concerto, with three floors, a winter garden with hanging plants on the top floor and DJs from all over, also attract hundreds of students every night.

If you're not a 20-something, Vienna's countless cafes beckon. Venerable Hawelka's, patronized by writers, artists and intellectuals, lies not far from St Stephen's Cathedral, with its waiting droschkes, close to the Jewish Museum and the British Bookshop. You can sit here, soak up the atmosphere for as long as you like over a cup of coffee and read newspapers in several languages. Posters advertising concerts and lectures cover the walls.

Order the speciality of the house, Buchteln - rolls filled with plum jam - originally from Bohemia. When Josefine Hawelka, joint founder of the cafe, who used to bake Buchteln every day, died in March 2005 in her 92nd year, the mayor of Vienna delivered the eulogy. The butcher's daughter had become a legend. Her grandson runs the place today.

Hawelka's has been celebrated in song since 1975, when the late lamented singer-songwriter Georg Danzer had a hit with "Jo schau". A naked customer successfully upsets the bourgeois regulars:

Jo schau, so a sau, jossas nawas macht a nackerter im hawelka?

(eng:) "What's a streaker doing in Hawelka's?"

"You don't know who I am," he ripostes. "I'm the most elegant streaker in Vienna."

Two sons of Timisoara - August 2007

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:51:54 +0200

Feature

Two sons of Timisoara

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

Vivid profiles the lives of two cultural icons who, without ever speaking a word of Romanian, vie for the title of Timisoara's greatest son

Posted: 08/06/2007

Two fallible men from the Banat, born in different centuries, neither of whom is recorded as having spoken a single word of Romanian, vie with each other for the title of Timisoara's greatest son.

Both went to America, to discover that the promised land brought mixed blessings. In their rise to prominence, one as the silver screen's aquatic lord of the jungle, one as a lyric poet, each moved among the glitterati of their time. Both had trouble with the censors. One married five times. The other was tormented by a series of unhappy love affairs. Neither possessed business skills. Both died lonely deaths.

In his day, Johnny Weismuller was the world's most famous swimmer who went on to become an icon in the early days of television

In 1904, the Weissmuller family, which had Catholic and Jewish origins, entered the name of the future Tarzan as Janos. All legal records at that time required the Hungarian form of the name. His parents called him Johann. Under this name he was registered on arrival in New York. Young Weissmuller became known as Johnny as soon as he found fame as an Olympic swimmer.

Nikolaus Lenau, born in 1802, was the pen name of Nikolaus Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau. His family of army officers originated from Prussia and Silesia. Lenau's father, a dissolute gambler, died when he was five.

Johnny Weissmuller dropped out of high school to become a champion swimmer and an international movie star. He learned how to swim in the polluted, debris-strewn, waters of Lake Michigan, developing his distinctive, revolutionary, high-riding front crawl.

Lenau had no systematic education during his nomadic childhood. From his father who married his mother in a shotgun wedding, he seems to have inherited a pathological sensuality, mental and physical instability, and a lack of willpower, from his mother depression and hypochondria.

From 1821 to 1831, he studied law, agriculture and medicine in Vienna, Sopron and Bratislava, restlessly criss-crossing the Austro-Hungarian Empire, without ever completing a course. These ten years of restless wandering came to symbolise his lifestyle. His intense melancholy was to drive him mad. The vast and solitary Hungarian puszta (eng: steppe) gave him his first experience of nature.

Johnny emigrated to America at seven months old, a babe in arms, arriving with his family on the S.S. Rotterdam in New York on 26th January 1905. Lenau landed in Chesapeake Bay on 8th October 8 1832, after a sea voyage of two and a half months, marred by storms and bad food. Disembarking at Baltimore, he settled on a homestead in Ohio, determined to seek peace, freedom and a new world of poetry in the New World.

But Lenau, now 30, had never intended to emigrate. He went there to invest in property he could lease out. His real motive was less to escape monarchist repression than to make a profit from land-dealing. He bought land in Crawford County for 3,000 guilders, entrusting the purchase to his servant Philipp Huber. Only in 1847, after Huber's death, did he receive capital and interest. By this time he had already been mad for three years.

The critic who castigated America for being in the toils of an avaricious materialism had gone there to cash in for himself. But he fell ill and lost money on his land speculation deals. Although the Niagara Falls, Indian tribes, and riding through the Urwald (the primeval forest) unleashed his imagination, the reality of life in the New World fell lamentably short of the ideal he had pictured.

Reflecting the anti-American feelings of his time, he saw Bodenlosigkeit (eng: rootlessness) in the general character of all American institutions. There was no community in America, no sense of Fatherand, no real Volk. America's culture "had in no sense come up organically from within." There was only a dull materialism and a lack of poetry. "The American knows nothing; he seeks nothing but money; he has no ideas." America was "the true land of the end, the outer edge of man."

Lenau found everything wrong, from American beds and the climate which gave him rheumatism, to the American government. To his brother-in-law he wrote, "I have not seen here a courageous dog, a fiery horse, or a man full of passion. Nature is terribly languid." In the now discredited degeneration theory current at the time, Nature, indeed all living things in America, was inferior to nature in Europe. "These Americans are petty-minded, dead as doornails to all intellectual life". He mocked the country as a land bereft of ideas and meaning.

In his most celebrated phrase, America was a land without wine, without nightingales, indeed without songbirds at all. These shortcomings epitomised its spiritual poverty. And yet Lenau had captured birds in Europe to keep them as pets. The line about the absence of nightingales influenced his contemporaries in their view of America. After a thoroughly unsatisfactory year, in 1833 he returned to Stuttgart, where his first volume of poems had been well received. For the 17 years remaining to him he lived partly in Stuttgart and partly in Vienna. Lenau, born Hungarian, Austrian by adoption and German by affiliation, had too many nationalities to feel at home in any.

As a young man and until the day he died, Weissmuller, in order to embrace fully America and the American dream, denied his Central European origins. Exchanging identities with his American brother, he disguised his once Hungarian, now Romanian, origins, and his place and date of birth in order to qualify for the US Olympic swimming team and to obtain a US passport. He won five Olympic gold medals, a host of other awards and retired undefeated from his amateur career.

Nikolaus Lenau wrote to his brother that, 'The American knows nothing; he seeks nothing but money; he has no ideas.' America was 'the true land of the end, the outer edge of man.'

Lenau wrote during the stifling post-Napoleonic Biedermeyer period of 1815-1840. Prince Metternich, master of Realpolitik, acted as Austrian prime minister under the iron-fisted, counterrevolutionary rule of Emperor Franz, a petty tyrant, and his feeble-minded successor, Ferdinand the Benign. Meeting halls and coffee houses were closed; for inspiration, writers were driven into their private selves, towards their close and reliable friends and to Nature. Lenau's poetry mirrors the pessimism of his time and his own personal despair.

Haunted by the gnawing feeling of Weltschmerz, that irreconcilable conflict of temperament and environment, and his own demons, Lenau's poems are packed with the desolate images of nature that depict the loneliness, disillusionment, and loss which ravaged his unstable mind. For him the rose had no fragrance, the sunlight no warmth, springtime no charms. He selected for poetic treatment only those aspects of nature which might serve to intensify the expression of his grief. Lenau saw in nature only the seasons and phenomena of dissolution and decay. Thus, in Herbstlied (eng: Autumn song), the sunset is represented as a dying of the sun, the leaves fall sobbing from the trees, the clouds are dissolved in tears, the wind is described as a murderer. Lenau explains nature in human terms.

Predominantly a lyric poet, he was also inspired by historical and mythical figures such as Faust, who confronted an absurd life devoid of absolute values, and Savanorola, who stressed that freedom from political and intellectual tyranny made up an essential part of Christianity. He used many Romantic archetypes: the wanderer, the notion that "above every joy there hovers a threatening vulture," the pervasive 19th century melancholy, the restless striving for an ultimate justice beyond human reach, and the belief that nature mirrors human woes.

Weissmuller flourished during 1932-1948, the Depresion, world war two and Hollywood's first golden age. He never actually said: "Me Tarzan, you Jane", but disliked the monosyllabic dialogue he was given "Ungawa", his main utterance, could mean anything at all. Of his acting ability, he was not in the same league as Edward G. Robinson, another Romanian-born Hollywood icon. Weismuller had no control over the part, but the Tarzan he played was far from Edgar Rice Burrough's multilingual, erudite creation, who spoke English, French, German, Swahili and Arabic. Yet Weissmuller's Tarzan struck a chord with audiences from the start.

His films certainly contibuted to raising morale and providing escapist entertainment in the United States and round the world during the Depression years, and later during the war effort. Mikhail Gorbachev and Queen Elizabeth II have said they remember them. The Tarzan yell was broadcast on the battlefront.

Both men moved easily among their peers, poets in one case, movie stars in another. In Vienna, Lenau, assisted by his courtly bearing, poetic temperament and virtuosity on the violin and guitar, was made welcome in the literary salons of his time. He knew the tragic dramatist Franz Grillparzer and the farceur Ferdinand Raimund, who wrote romantic magical fantasies for the stage. In Stuttgart he was a frequent guest of the great figures of the Swabian school, the poet-politician Ludwig Uhland and Justinus Kerner, the poet and medical writer.

Weissmuller, racing his yacht against Errol Flynn and Bogart, golfing with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, had John Wayne and Raoul Walsh as neighbours and friends. Joe Louis and Robert Mitchum dropped by regularly. He did his bit for the war effort by teaching navy recruits how to swim in water covered in burning petroleum. A hopeless businessman, he invested unsuccessfully in buildings, golf courses, beach clubs, and a frozen meat business.

The poet lived off a small legacy from his grandmother, and progressed from one unsatisfactory love affair to the next, alternatively suffering from exaltation and dejection, guilt and lost innocence, pouring out the intensity of his devotion in endless letters.

The movie star married five times. Sixty years after his Olympic triumphs in Paris, the screen Tarzan died, lonely and broken, in Acapulco. He was laid to rest in a simple cemetery plot of the Panteón Valle de la Luz (Valley of the Light). At Weissmuller's request, the Tarzan yell was played as the coffin was lowered into he ground.

President Reagan sent a telegram. John Gavin, actor and US ambassador to Mexico, represented his country officially. Linda Christian, the actress who played opposite him and José Estrada, one of Johnny's stunt doubles in the film, were the only Hollywood personalities present. Senator Ted Kennedy managed to arrange a 21-gun salute by the Marines, normally reserved for presidents or heads of state.

In true Romantic fashion Lenau succumbed in 1850 to the tertiary phase of syphilis, general paralysis of the insane, in Oberdoebling near Vienna. The 1848 revolutions, which he probably never noticed, passed him by. He had been mad for six years. He is buried by a stream in Weidling, which flows into the Danube, which in its turn flows onwards into Hungary and Romania.

Weismuller, who lied about his place of birth until his death, is now considered a great Romanian. He made 12 Tarzan and 16 Jungle Jim movies. As Tarzan, he appeared on a Romanian postage stamp last year. His son was able to visit Romania to celebrate Johnny's 100th birthday in 2004, before he himself died of lung cancer last year.

In a way the 'rivalry' between the two men is already settled. Lenau's birthplace Csatád, was rebaptized Lenauheim in 1926. A dozen streets in Germany and Austria have his name. A gymnasium in Timisoara is named after him. Austria created an International Lenau Prize. Winners in recent years have included Claudio Magris, chronicler of the Danube, Julian Barnes, interpreter of France and French culture and the distinguished polymath Umberto Eco.

Weissmuller leaves behind his swimming legacy, a string of forgettable movies and his famous ululating yell, Lenau his innately musical lyrics, set to music for generations to come by Schubert, Mendelsohn, Mahler, Liszt and Richard Strauss. A sensitive and passionate poet with a mastery of language, Lenau understood the ephemeral nature of life. He stood for justice and understanding of human suffering. A literary warrior for freedom and humanity, he fought against the misuse of power, the persecution of the innocent and religious fanaticism. In 1831, in Heidelberg and Weinsberg, before he took ship to America, he met a number of the thousands of Polish exiles who had fled Warsaw after their failed uprising against Russia. His Polenlieder collection is devoted to their struggle. Lenau's ghost still rides across the puszta. In the 21st century, Austria's greatest 19th century poet seems a suitable representative of Romania's most tolerant city.

"How many Romanian women are too many?" - April 2007

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 16:15:51 +0200

Under Ceausescu

"How many Romanian women are too many?"

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

Our Iasi correspondent remembers some of the many colourful foreign lecturers who worked in Romania in the days of the Conducator

Posted: 30/04/2007

Sporting a straggly guerilla’s beard and shoulder-length hair curling round the collar of his camouflage jacket, Francisco, who hailed from Cochabamba, Bolivia’s City of Eternal Spring, could hardly contain his excitement as the Dacia Express approached the Hungarian-Romanian border town of Curtici. On each pocket of his jacket was emblazoned the name of a hero from the communist pantheon, Marx, Lenin, Castro and Guevara. Early in the 1970s, Francisco was on his way to join his wife, the newly appointed American Fulbright lecturer in Iasi. When Romanian police and customs officers reached his compartment, he embraced each in turn and kissed them on both cheeks. “I am so happy to be in a truly communist country!” he exclaimed ecstatically. “I am myself a communist!”

Not all foreign lecturers have hair as long as this.

The authorities found his behaviour and apparel so suspicious that they threw him into a cell overnight for his pains. The following morning, phone calls to the US embassy in Bucharest established that the South American revolutionary was indeed the husband of the Fulbright lecturer in Iasi, and had crossed into Romania to join her. Released from confinement, the chastened Ayamara made his way onwards to the Moldavian capital. On his arrival, not having eaten for 24 hours, he knocked frantically on the door of Roberto Scagno, now of the Univerity of Padua, and promptly emptied his refrigerator.

His wife’s surname was Eichmann. The American academic was the granddaughter of Volga Germans. A number of foreign lecturers and their wives had equally exotic roots. Nacera, the wife of Lionel Lebel, a guitar-playing Breton, was a Kabyle from Algeria. Michele Anciaux from Seattle had Belgian roots. My successor Tim Williams was married to the most exotic wife of all, a Guadeloupean. At that time an Antillaise could blend in easily with the considerable African population in Iasi.

It was bad enough that foreign lecturers brought strong opinions, rock music, newspapers, magazines and designer clothes to Ceausescu’s hermetically sealed paradise. To import a dash of cosmopolitanism as well was unforgivable.

Later in the 1970s, in Constanta, the Fulbrighter, a German literature specialist from the mid-West, fell in with the only other American citizen in town, a Caterpillar tractor mechanic and maintenance man hailing from Hawaii. After dusk in the spring, the academic and his newfound blue-collar Polynesian friend, who had a black belt in karate, were strolling along the seafront after dinner with two young Romanian women. Their western origins gleamed in the moonlight. A policeman stopped them and asked them for identification. Infuriated by this intrusion into his romantic evening, the tattooed Hawaiian hissed: “I’m going to lay him out.” “You crazy?” the lecturer whispered back. He had come to southeastern Europe to spread American culture, not to flatten the local fuzz. “It’s ok,” replied the confident islander. “When he wakes up in the morning he won’t remember a thing.” With an expert chop, he thumped the law enforcement officer, who collapsed unconscious on the sidewalk. History records that the martial arts fighter was right. The American served out his contract without incident, but probably with added stature for the company he kept.

Another Fulbright lecturer had such a rich and wonderful time in Romania that, after returning for a few years to the US, he applied to return for a second full-year Fulbright lectureship. Unfortunately, although he was recommended for the lectureship by his US scholarly peers, the Romanian Ministry of Education did not approve him for the return visit. The lecturer, who had acquired the patient but persistent ways required at the time to get anything at all done in Romania, visited Romania on his own and finally managed to get an audience with someone he knew at the university who would be in a position to explain. The lecturer asked: "Can you please tell me how it happened that my request was denied to return for a second year? Was it that failing grade I gave to the daughter of a high-ranking party official, despite the advice of all my Romanian faculty colleagues to give her a high mark, even though she was a terrible student?"

The university representative responded: "No, but the Ministry of Education is of the opinion that in your year with us you slept with too many Romanian women.” (rom: "Ministerul Invatamantului este de parere ca in cursul anului pe care l-ati petrecut la noi ati dormit cu prea multe romance.") The lecturer: "Cate romance sunt prea multe?" ("How many Romanian women are too many?") He was trying to determine exactly which Romanian woman had taken him over his limit. His ability to formulate his final question so quickly demonstrated how well he had absorbed the Romanian sense of humour in defeat, as well as the Romanian penchant for speculation that was theoretically strategic but practically pointless.

Observant Romanian watchers of foreign lecturers in Iasi university circles rejoiced most over a studious Fulbrighter who managed to baffle the Securitate. Most foreign lecturers practiced the usual male vices, chasing sultry Balkan women and consuming Romanian wine and tuica in heroic quantities. This lecturer, however, showed no interest either in the fair sex or in alcohol. Instead, his greatest pleasure lay in consuming copious amounts of Romanian food. The secret police could find no other weakness.

Roberto Scagno, today Europe’s greatest authority on the work of Mircea Eliade, ensured a regular supply of wine through his girlfriend, who had good connections with the Party. The Party and the Church owned the best vineyards between them. Taking his lead from the Genius of the Carpathians, the official soubriquet of the President, Roberto carefully referred to the Conducator as “le grand forestier”. The French lecturers generally lived blamelessly domesticated lives, working on their doctorates by day and snuggling up with their Romanian fiancées at night. In their six hours of weekly teaching, they contributed to the general subversion of communism by showing videos of French television shows with ads, which the students had never seen before.

Equally respected by the ambassadors of both East and West Germany, Helga Crossman, doyenne of the foreign lecturers, had spent five years in Iasi working on her doctorate. Her supervisor in Tuebingen was the distinguished Romanian-born linguist, Eugenio Coseriu. Helga told me how she had survived that long in an information-shorn world of rumour. She could not sleep at night until she had rerun in her mind all the conversations she had taken part in that day. Only when she recalled what A had told her about B, or X about Y, and whether or not she had unwittingly divulged any confidences herself, could Helga summon up the honey-heavy dew of slumber. For three months during a particularly heavy winter, Helga skied from her apartment in Podul Ros to the University. Not unnaturally, she became something of a local celebrity. To everyone’s joy, Helga, a supreme diplomat herself, became engaged to a diplomat at the West German embassy, who was about to be posted to Peru. On his visits to Iasi she gave him weekend lessons on hand-kissing, teaching him how not to crack his teeth on the lady’s knuckles when introduced.

From Central America, Jorge Blanco Campos, a specialist in Kafka, spent two years in Iasi. While the Generalissimo still ruled in Spain, democratic Costa Rica provided Spanish lecturers. Allowed one phone call to San Jose during his lectureship, Jorgito reported to his family that life in Iasi was muy austere (eng: terribly austere), to the consternation of the Securitate.

Maria, the young Polish lectorita from Gdansk, who spoke impeccable French, had to leave after three months. She felt that everyone was spying on her (which they were, of course). I joined the Professor of Russian and her team at the station to see her off. It seemed to me totally unjust that a fellow-Warsaw Pact member should suffer from the anti-foreigner paranoia raging at the time.

Nor should we forget the name of the first secretary of the communist party in Iasi in the second half of the 1970s. The Party controlled the Securitate, which, on its own, could not recruit its officers. This gentleman, unusually multilingual, became quite famous after December 1989. His name is Ion Iliescu.

'Shoulder-charging the door in turn, we broke the lock like 1930s Chicago gangsters' - April 2007

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 16:08:33 +0200

Under Ceausescu

'Shoulder-charging the door in turn, we broke the lock like 1930s Chicago gangsters'

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

Vivid’s Iasi correspondent recalls his first day in Romania, back in September 1976

Posted: 01/04/2007

A Swedish businessman looked on helplessly as his luggage was ripped open and the contents strewn over the customs desk. “Doesn’t anyone here speak English?” he wailed, losing his Scandinavian cool. The customs officers were hoping for bribes, unknown in Nordic business culture.

The Palace of Culture in Iasi

In the bleak, bare, brown arrivals and departures hall, a dozen sober-faced Chinese in Mao suits queued in orderly groups. It was 9 September 1976. I had arrived in Otopeni six days after the death of Mao Zedung. When it came to my turn to be inspected, the bored customs man found clothes, LP records and paperback books. I had a vague feeling that Western pop, rock and folk might be considered subversive, but he waved me through.

A new face appeared. ‘Professor Lawson?’ asked a youthful, enthusiastic-looking twentysomething Romanian in an oversized summer suit. I’ll call him PS. He looked embarrassingly shy. It was the first time I’d ever been addressed in this way. Swallowing my surprise (after all, I just had a postgraduate certificate), I shook hands vigorously with my host and his then-wife, a doctor.

I felt the need to make small talk. ‘The giants are leaving the earth,’ I said portentously, referring to Mao’s imminent funeral. I now regret bitterly having said this. At the time the full extent of Mao’s crimes against the Chinese people had not yet been documented. Nor had his total lack of personal hygiene.

‘But we still have giants on earth,’ said PS. I gaped at him. ‘Our President, Nicolae Ceausescu, the giant of the Carpathians,’ he said, smiling smugly.

Our first stop was the British Embassy, where I was to meet the cultural attache and have a quick look at the library. A young Romanian soldier stood outside the embassy grounds, armed with rifle and bayonet. He looked thoroughly bored. I found out later that, far from guarding the embassy, his menacing, if youthful presence was intended to dissuade Romanians from using the library. Later, too, in the subzero winter temperatures, when the exposed fingers in his fingerless woolen gloves seemed to freeze to the metal, kindly middle-aged women from the embassy brought him hot coffee.

We walked into the grounds, but my host stayed outside the embassy building with his wife. ‘Do come in,’ I said. He was paralysed in embarrassment. ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Why ever not?’ ‘You see, I have applied for a scholarship to go to the United States, and I do not want the Americans to see me with British.’ I tried to digest this extraordinary statement. Adamant, he skulked by the wall, as I went inside alone. I glanced back. He looked shiftily at me and broke eye contact.

The cultural attache was expecting me. He introduced me to the Romanian head librarian, a charming, no-nonsense woman of indeterminate age. For ten minutes, we talked books and necessary formalities in his office. I didn’t want to stay long as I felt guilty about the voluntary self-exile of my host outside. More importantly, would he still be there? I admired the library and borrowed a couple of books.

Brushing aside his recent discomfort, my future colleague announced the next part of the plan. We were to spend the evening in Carul cu Bere. A highly qualified beer drinker, I felt very much at home among the ornate wooden paneling and the art nouveau exterior. I recall that the service was acceptable and sampled my first mititei. In this almost Austrian atmosphere, I had a faint glimpse of interwar Bucharest. I certainly registered the female patrons, all heavily made up with bright red lacquered fingernails. There may have been a Roma orchestra. Noise and smoke limited conversation to banalities.

Rooms had been booked in an inexpensive hotel or a hostel. We had a leisurely breakfast, dining on that Romanian breakfast staple, an omelette. The white bread tasted of nothing.

On the afternoon train to Iasi, we descended on the restaurant car, where we ate snitel pane with salata de castraveti si rosii and drank wine. Alas, this estimable institution, the Romanian vagon restaurant, had been abolished by the beginning of the 1980s. I continued my efforts at making polite conversation. ‘I understand that one of my British lecturer predecessors married one of his students.’ Quick as a flash came the authorised response. ‘Yes, the girl was a well-known – how do you say – prostitute. She slept with many of the teachers at the university.’ Was I really supposed to believe this standard smear? Had my host tried this line out on other Westerners? End of attempt at polite conversation, anyway.

It must have been on this train that I first collided with a Romanian public toilet. I must excise the details for a family audience. Arriving in Iasi after what seemed an interminable journey, we hailed a taxi for my quarters in the zona industriala. It was too late for the trams. We took the lift up to the fourth floor.

With an unconvincing show of searching his pockets, my host admitted that he had forgotten to bring the key. It was late. I was tired. The university was far away. Anyway, PS did not have the telephone number of the man responsible for the guest flats. There was only one solution. Shoulder-charging the door in turn, egged on by my colleague’s amused wife, we broke the lock like 1930s Chicago gangsters. The place which was to be my home for the next two years was twice the size of that of a Romanian lecturer.

As I made my farewells, and prepared to sleep, I reflected on the day’s events. I had had the whole Romanian experience in 36 hours, hospitality, striking black-haired women, inexplicable Balkan behaviour, sheer incompetence, wonderful food and wine.

The Securitate and me - December 2006

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:24:36 +0200

Feature

The Securitate and me

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

Posted: 30/12/2006

Vivid’s man in Iasi relates how he was implicated in the investigations that revealed Sorin Antohi’s Securitate past

Guildenstern: Our names shouted out in a certain dawn … a message ... a summons ... There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said no. But somehow we missed it. Well, we’ll know better next time.

Sorin Antohi, Securitate collaborator

Rosencrantz: We’ve done nothing wrong. We didn’t harm anyone. Did we?

Guildenstern: I can’t remember.

Guildenstern: All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into line it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

(Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 1967)

Since his resignation on 23 October, his name and title at his workplace have disappeared into cyberspace, although he has hardly been absent from the Romanian press over the past several weeks. I am belatedly adding to the column inches for an English-speaking audience, confident that Sorin Antohi’s cunning, calculating face will soon return to our television screens.

The former professor of history at the Soros-funded Central European University, Budapest, and founding director and principal fundraiser of Pasts Inc., the Institute of Historical Studies, resigned all his positions on 23 October when Ziarul de Iasi revealed that he had lied about a non-existent doctorate from the University of Iasi. A month before, he had published a lengthy confession in Cotidianul admitting that he had been an informer for the Securitate in his late teens and early twenties. Like more notorious figures such as Dan Voiculescu, he claimed that nobody had suffered as a result of his activities. Most shockingly, Antohi had also been a member of the CNSAS, the Council for the study of the Securitate archives (www.cnsas.ro), an independent body accountable to Parliament, until he resigned for “health reasons”.

As in all scandals from Profumo to Watergate, the cover-up rather than the case itself constitutes the real offence. The CNSAS, a commission appointed by Parliament six years ago to declassify and pass judgment on servants of the security forces, did not disclose Antohi’s collaborationist past. His records “disappeared”. An ambitious academic who became an authority on the oppressive past of his country, supposedly dedicated to the search for truth, is revealed as an opportunistic liar.

After all, he had had 16 years to come clean about his past as an informer for the communist secret police. In 1990, as a servant of the new Iliescu government, he had even presented himself as a long-time opponent of communism. The Romanian word for copper’s nark is turnator. Somehow the Zulu and Xhosa word impimpi (eng: collaborator, scab, spy) from the apartheid era, is more expressive.

Impimpi probably lied about his doctorate when the CEU hired him simply because he thought he could get away with it. Antohi, whose learning and intelligence blazes as brightly as his less admirable qualities, had completed nearly all of the formalities required for a doctorate except the defence itself. Universal acclaim greeted his books, although checks are being made on some of the publications he listed.

I write as someone named in his confession. But in the comparatively benign 1970s, as a British lecturer, I was a mere foreigner. My name has been plastered across the Romanian press linked to bird-brained allegations. But that’s the worst that’s happened to me.

Many Romanians suffered unspeakable horrors in the years between 1948 and 1964. As far as I am concerned, it is a badge of honour to be considered “hostile” to a system which had been responsible for the deaths of at least one million people in the whole country, intellectuals, believers of various faiths, village and factory leaders, and old-established families who had created modernity in a previous era.

A further quarter of a million had perished in state institutions, thousands on grandiose construction projects. Countless family members were traumatised. Individuals were kept in a state of permanent terror or forced into exile. Hundreds of thousands of womens’ lives were ruined by Elena Ceausescu’s lunatic ban on contraception and abortion. Even if this semi-literate, vindictive woman may not specifically have forbidden sex education, her actions created several generations of young women deprived of the most basic family planning procedures, many of whom died after botched abortions.

I came to Romania to further my career as a TESOL teacher. I wanted to work at university level, and, newly qualified, knew I would make myself interesting to future employers if I survived a two-year contract in a “difficult” communist country. I chose Romania because I felt that Romanian would be easier to learn than a Slav language.

Although British Council presence in Romania dates from 1938, when Bucharest was one of the first five cities where it set up an overseas office, government-inspired xenophobia reigned in the mid-Seventies. Many Romanians simply could not understand why foreigners came to live in the Socialist Republic. In what passed for humour at that time, British lecturers were told that they had had a reputation for being homosexuals, Jews or spies, or sometimes all three. This so-called joke neatly summed up the homophobia, anti-Semitism and paranoia prevalent in that decade.

Antohi, who was then a teenager still at high school, visited my apartment one Friday evening, and then came regularly. I had a large collection of LPs, which included the complete works of Bob Dylan, kept open house at weekends, and welcomed all and sundry. Most were university students. Antohi had no business coming. I did not know him at all. One of my students introduced him as a rock music fan.

After a number of further visits, when I assumed he was practising his (very good) school English, he started provocative, rather aggressive discussions, and assumed an air of over-familiarity. His behaviour became so strange that I soon smelt a rat. This pipsqueak was too transparent in his dedublarea (eng: duplicity) to be a good spy.

All the foreign lecturers were spied on, their telephones tapped, their letters opened, their conversations reported, their movements noted.

In this atmosphere I decided that my only recourse was to be myself. Antohi’s controller, a Securitate colonel, lived near the Zona Industriala, the location of my casa de oaspeti (eng: guest house.) It was very convenient for Antohi to visit both places. My file says I was “unduly sympathetic” to the “co-inhabiting nationalities”, especially the Transylavanian Saxons. Well, I spoke German and found the Saxons far more westernized than the average Romanian intellectual. One young Saxon in particular, an architecture student, visited frequently.

Most entertainingly, I “reported to the Cultural Attache at the British Embassy” and “recruited Romanians” for the service of Her Majesty.

Impimpi is the only possible source for this nonsense. As the heroic veteran dissident Doina Cornea points out, informers typically exaggerate so they appear invaluable to their bosses. In fact, I wrote one annual report each year of my stay about my working conditions at the university, and what it was like to live in Iasi. These reports, entirely concerned with educational matters, did not even name names. I delivered each of the two reports by hand to the British Embassy.

My teaching scrupulously avoided politics. Female students in my classes told me within the first two weeks which students in my classes were informers. My lessons contained only non-political themes, either literary or based on humanistic psychology, an intellectually shaky approach which nevertheless encouraged students to talk about their personal lives, their hopes and dreams. With the American lecturer, I projected documentary films from our embassies on an ancient Russian projector. We ran a borrowing library for students and started an English club for secondary school teachers and pupils.

With a group of dedicated first-year students, I put on three dramatic evenings at the Casa Tineretului, as it was then called. I scoured the work of modern British dramatists to find non-political material, and lighted on Tom Stoppard. A short play A Separate Peace, which concerned a mysteriously healthy man who checked into a hospital formed the centrepiece. The would-be patient just wanted to be looked after by pretty, sympathetic nurses. A brief biography and short extracts from other Stoppard plays made up the rest of the evening.

I was just in time. That summer in London saw a performance of Every Good Boy Deserves a Favour. Andre Previn had challenged Stoppard to put on a play containing a symphony orchestra. The Czech-born playwright chose a Russian prison camp as his setting.

Antohi went on to study English at Cuza University, when he wihdrew from his work for the Securitate. Subsequently he was resident at the Universities of Michigan and Bielefeld and one of the universities in Montpelier. He wrote and published voluminously.

Central and East European, as well as Russian poets have always had a special relationship with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the almost-definitive version of which was first performed in 1601 in the dying years of the Elizabethan police state. Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, had set up and run a tentacular network of secret agents from Rheims to Constantinople to prevent Catholic assassination plots against the Virgin Queen. Modern writers from the then-communist states instantly recognised and identified with Elsinore, a walled city seething with spies, and reserved especial scorn for Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Polonius.

Antohi, described by his erstwhile colleagues as a shining light of Romanian intellectual life, may have fallen like Lucifer, although his demise hardly ranks as Shakespearean tragedy. When the Treens invade Romania from the planet Venus as the first step to world domination, he will certainly re-emerge as National Security Adviser to the Mekon. Even as a scared 19-year-old, he could have said No. Am I sympathetic to his self-induced plight? I quote the Danish prince on the fate of the attendant lords: “Why, man, they did make love to this employment. They are not near my conscience.”

Three different faces - December 2005

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:57:47 +0200

Reportage

Three different faces

By Vivid writer: Christopher Lawson

Christopher Lawson reports on three different impressions of Romania from the British media

Posted: December 2005

In one single week at the end of September, the British press ran three Romania-related stories. One enshrined memories of the country’s rackety past, another reported on Roma teenagers in the UK, while the third was a feelgood account of a star student bound for Balliol. Taken together, they convey a certain image of the country.

Helen O’Brien, born Elena Constantinescu, fled the Russian cavalry on a racehorse in 1944 and was exiled in 1946 after the death of her first husband, an RAF officer, a month after marriage. She returned to the former family estates in1990, to be greeted by aged retainers.

Endowed, says her most substantial obituarist Veronica Horwell, with several languages, a showgirl’s figure and a head for figures, she owned and ran the Eve Club, just off Regent Street, for 39 years. With a strict ban on flash photography, Eve’s attracted kings, Arab princes, maharajahs, ambassadors, sultans, lords, erring clerics (including the Bishop of Southwell, who married a hostess), visiting showbiz stars, louche, philandering conservative politicians, business tycoons, high-end call girls, top rozzers from Scotland Yard, Eastern bloc diplomats and spies.

Membership cost a guinea a year. In the restrictive 1950s, Eve’s was beyond licensing laws. Champagne corks popped and bubbly flowed until 3 am. The dazzling floorshow reached international standards.

Beneath the glamour, the smell of sex, scandal and espionage hovered over the nightclub. But there was no sex on the premises. “We were not a whorehouse,” noted Helen. John Profumo, the cabinet minister undone by a sex scandal, held his stag night there, but Helen banned Christine Keeler, one of his undoers. “Too easily led,” she said. Norma Levy, author of the demise of Lord Lambton, lasted a few days. “Hard and mercenary, no breeding,” was Helen’s verdict. When she was negotiating with a Romanian secret agent for an exit visa for her parents, Helen, a fervent anticommunist, was recruited by M15 and M16.

Lord Jellicoe, leader of the Tories in the House of Lords, brought red government dispatch boxes to the club. Without photographers, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Shirley Bassey, Barbara Cartland, Bond girl Eunice Gayson and Jack Hawkins felt secure at Eve’s. Errol Flynn mislaid his 12-year-old son, the future Vietnam war photographer Sean, and found him in the dressing rooms watching dancers.

Ari Onassis, “a hairy peasant without manners,” did not impress the proprietor. She threw out Nicu Ceausescu after he groped one hostess and bit another in the neck.

In the 1970s, Annabel’s, bursting with paparazzi, began to displace Eve’s. The end of the Cold War put paid to the spying. Floor shows with showgirls were passé.

Helen and husband Jimmy retired to a villa in the south of France, where Helen wrote her memoirs, The Queen of Clubs, in Romanian.

If we now turn from the glossy side of London society to those at the bottom of the pile, 500 young Romanian Roma have been identified as living in London. Because up to half do not attend school regularly, the Children’s Society has launched a film and guide to provide an insight into Roma behaviour and to dispel negative stereotypes.

Targeted at health workers, teachers, social workers and the police, the material is based on questionnaires sent to asylum teams, traveller education services, social services and schools. It answers the need for wide-ranging information about Roma culture and lifestyle, “to inform daily practice and future planning.” The co-author, Heather Ureche, conducted focus groups with health visitors. Half of them, with a substantial number of Roma clients, were at a loss to understand their charges.

In Roma society, teenagers are considered adults. To leave younger siblings with teenagers does not present a problem. Poor school attendance may be attributed to a nomadic way of life and the need to earn money. As patients they proved difficult and slow to adapt to new rules. They have poor time-keeping skills and no experience of appointment systems.

Many arrive in Britain, writes Alison Benjamin, with longstanding, untreated illnesses such as hepatitis B, digestive disorders and depression, coupled with stories of discrimination in Romanian public services. Corruption at hospitals was mentioned, as well as police beatings of men and women spat at in the street.

The report recommends that Roma children attend school from as early an age as possible, with literacy support tailored to their needs. At the same time, it stresses that work needs to be done with families to coax them into education and enable them to understand their rights and obligations.

Half of the young people who took part in That’s Who I Am have been sent back to Romania. Their asylum cases were turned down.

Truly, this is a hard field to hoe.

Far away from nightclubs and unruly teenagers is the heartening tale of 17-year-old Diana Ples from a high school in Arad. Diana’s mum is a carpenter, her dad an electrician. She benefitted from a partnership scheme run by Aquinas College, a Roman Catholic sixth-form college in Stockport. An essay on “Why I want to study abroad” led to her leap from modest family circumstances in western Transylvania to a place at Balliol College with an annual grant of GBP 20,000. She claims that her stunning command of English is due to a childhood addiction to Cartoon Network. “Dexter’s Laboratory and the Adams Family weren’t subtitled, but after a while we started figuring them out.”

She scored five grade As at A Level, in English Literature, Maths, History, Chemistry and General Studies, and AS Levels in Philosophy, Mechanics and Psychology, all top grade. After a mere two years in the UK, she scored 300 out of 300 in English literature, “my biggest passion” says Diana. The examiners decided she had not dropped a mark in philosophy. “The philosophy staff at Aquinas were reduced to writing just one word, ‘awesome,’ at the end of her essays,” said principal Ambrose Smith. During her time in Stockport she lived with the principal and his family.

The general warmth and friendliness she experienced in the northwest of England over the past two years surprised her, she confesses. “The East European view of the English was that they were cold, snobbish people. But I have found they are awfully nice. In Romania, it’s a much tougher environment. You have to be tougher.”

What will be the end of this heartening story? I suspect a glittering career as a philosophy academic awaits Diana at Oxford, and wonder if she will ever return to Romania for good. No matter. If only all stories about Romania were so positive.

False information - April 2006

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:49:18 +0200

Books

False information

Christopher Lawson

'False Impression' by Jeffrey Archer

Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare, author, peer, perjurer, buffoon, philanderer, fantasist, charlatan, inveterate self-publicist and all-round bounder, has sold 120 million novels worldwide. An amusing and generous host, Archer also possesses admirable resilience, energy and not a little chutzpah. “It is impossible,” writes Roy Hattersley, “to kick him when he’s down because he’s never down.” His huge British and international readership, which clearly loves an amiable rogue, must surely be inured by now to the former prisoner’s cardboard characters, wooden dialogue and factual inaccuracies.

Jeffrey Archer’s new thriller False Impression has a Romanian heroine, two Romanian villains and a part-Romanian setting.

Anna Petrescu, a US-educated art dealer and marathon runner, embarks on a chase around the immediate post-911 world after the disappearance of Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Mutilated Ear. She is pursued by Bryce Fenston, born Nicu Munteanu, a money launderer and executioner, and Olga Krantz, a former gymnast transformed into the “kitchen knife killer”, who handily transports dollar bills in a condom inside her rectum. Two scenes play out in Bucharest.

Sarah Jane Checkland has already given Archer his grades in art history. Gaugin was not staying with van Gogh in Arles in 1889; he left the previous year. Van Gogh’s friend Dr Gachet did not buy the self-portrait in 1889. In reality he did not meet the artist until May 1890.

I thought we should check Jeffrey’s Romanian background as well. After all, as he told publishers and literary editors over mini-shepherd’s pies and Krug champagne at his penthouse party on Thursday 2 March, the book took two years to write and went through his usual 17 rewrites.

So how did Anna come to the States?

“Her uncle, George Petrescu, had migrated from Romania in 1972, to settle in Danville, Illinois. Within weeks of Ceausescu appointing himself president, George had written to his brother imploring him to come to America. When Ceausescu declared Romania a socialist republic and made his wife Elena his deputy, George wrote to his brother renewing his invitation, which included his young niece, Anna.

Anna is smuggled out of Bucharest in 1987. Her uncle sends her two hundred dollars “to assist with her passage”. “She had fallen in love with America even before the boat had docked … she knew so few words of English that she couldn’t even recite the Pledge of Allegiance at morning assembly”.

Now hang on, Jeffrey. Ceausescu declared Romania a socialist republic in 1965, when he first came to power. He appointed himself President in 1972. Elena became first deputy prime minister in 1980.

How many passenger liners, apart from cruise ships, sailed to the US in the 1980s? And how much money did her family put up? Two hundred dollars would not have got Anna very far. And would a Romanian teenager like Anna, who is 17 in 1987, really not speak much English? According to the Economist, Romania is “the most multilingual country in Europe after the Netherlands”. And anyway, isn’t the Pledge of Allegiance more about content than language skills?

Archer’s history, geography and topography are reliably shaky. Bucharest boasts a hotel called Bucharesti (sic) International. A square in the Berceni district is spelt Piazza (even though Piata Universitatii appears correctly on the following page.) The first name of the heroic Colonel Slatinaru is the Russian Sergei rather than the Romanian Sergiu. With no mention of Moldova or the Ukraine, Olga appears to escape from a high-security hospital in the Romanian capital directly “across the border” to Moscow, with the help of a truck driver she murders, a train and a plane, in 17 hours.

From Otopeni you can apparently fly directly to Hong Kong and New Delhi. Sergei takes Olga to “the old airport”, not used “since Ceausescu had attempted to escape in November 1989”. November? After 17 rewrites?

While places such as Jilava prison camp and Berceni, a run-down section of Bucharest, are cited correctly and there are en-passant notes on high rise blocks, malfunctioning lifts and graffiti in Bucharest, there is not a single Buna ziua, La revedere or Multumesc to add just a smidgeon of local colour to the Bucharest episodes. We do however get a line each of Japanese and French.

Archer seems to know next to nothing about the coup d’etat of December 1989, and does not mention that the executions took place on Christmas Day. Romania is used as a vague and convenient former totalitarian backcloth for the present adventures. There are references to escaping from rebels in the Romanian hills, and to a surrounded platoon on the border with Bulgaria which was “quickly rounded up and marched to the nearest prisoner-of-war camp”. Here Krantz cuts their throats.

In the only substantial comment on post-coup Romania, Anna “realised that the new regime still had a long way to go if they were to achieve the prosperity-for-all programme they had promised the voters following the downfall of Ceausescu”. Well, that’s accurate enough.

Inspecting Archer’s rented house in Mallorca, Archer’s fellow peer Roy Hattersley provides an explanation for the errors we have noted above. “He certainly does not read. In the house that he has chosen for work on his short stories, there are no books.”

The best thrillers, such as Alan Furst’s riveting chronicles of 1930s and 1940s Eastern Europe, teach the reader facts he or she did not know before. Clearly, it was too much to ask Lord Archer, of all people, for extra insights into the much misunderstood country in which we live.

Macmillan, 2006, pp 528, ISBN 1405032553, £9.88, at www.amazon.co.uk

Ceausescu's Africans - April 2005

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:45:39 +0200

Ceausescu's Africans

By Christopher Lawson

April 2005

If you posed the question: “Is there any aspect of life in Ceausescu’s Romania in the late 1970s that you miss now?” I would have to admit that I miss the presence of the African students. Generally studying medicine, engineering or architecture, the young Africans provided a dash of the exotic, adding a glimpse of the wider world to a closed society. The more adventurous and ambitious among them plunged into minor criminality and ran an alternative economy. By Romanian standards, they were generally well off. Young female students, seeking adventure and perhaps a new life beyond Moldova, found the Africans irresistible.

At the point I ought to state, quite categorically, that especially the Romanian medical education system, while lacking Western-style equipment, provided these students with a solid and pretty rigorous background for conditions in African countries. Many English-speaking countries required the graduates to follow a more Western-style top-up course before they could practice.

Since I had quite recently spent five years teaching in Swaziland, Botswana and Zambia, I found myself gravitating towards them. Apart from those from the poorest countries, such as Chad, the African students had a more western Weltanschaung than even the best educated, but untravelled, Romanians I had met. Many knew the West well, where they might well have friends and family, and travelled there frequently.

Practically every country on the continent and Madagascar was represented. All learned Romanian in an anul pregatitor. While the French speakers found the language a breeze, many English speakers also acquitted themselves well.

There were hustling, extravagant, Nigerians, intellectual Algerians, Moroccans, Tanzanians and Ethiopians, mildly disorganised Guineans from Conakry, totally disorganised Congolese from then-Zaire, elitist Ivoirians, one hugely likeable multilingual Portuguese-speaker from Guinea-Bissau, music-loving Zimbabweans and studious Malagasies. There was even a South African with a Botswana passport.

I recognised his thick, rich, township accent immediately when I heard him, slightly the worse from over-intake of Radeburger beer in the Hotel Unirea, railing at a hapless waiter: “True’s God, man, if you put a Boer (an Afrikaner) and a Romanian up against a wall, I will shoot the Romanian first!” Tswetswe was a tsotsi, a wide boy, with the sharp wisdom of street kids. “You know that cooking oil we have here, Chris, man, it is South African! I recognise the taste.” You have to remember that Romania’s trade connections at this time, with the Conducator’s frequent visits to Third World destinations, were so tentacular that the country was a net exporter of South American bananas.

It was the Africans who retold me the marvellous political jokes, told to them by Romanian friends. The best of the bancuri, extraordinarily obscene, involved dialogues between two flies who had taken up residence in the private parts of the Conducator and his much-reviled wife.

Many Africans worked the Black Market, some more effectively than others. The shrewdest of them all departed for the Black Sea in the summer where they offered complex exchange services for Polish and East German tourists from zlotys and Ostmarks into lei and dollars.

The Hotel Unirea always had African customers with shoulder bags stuffed with Kent cigarettes. A packet of Kent was exactly a dollar, 30 lei in the money of the time. The absurd official rate was 12. Capitalist Nigerians and socialist Tanzanians were the shrewdest operators. They diversified their product range beyond mere cigarettes into jeans, cosmetics and more. Very few French-speakers rivalled their marketing and sales skills.

A few snapshots. Once, after my two-year stay, I boarded the Wiener Waelzer at the Westbahnhof , sharing a compartment with a student from oil-rich Gabon. These West Africans had a colourful reputation. Dollar notes and condoms fell from the pockets of their designer jeans. My baggage contained a typewriter adapted to Romanian diacritics, a few books, the most subversive items I could think of bringing, and about five cartons of Kent cigarettes, with their mystical power.

The Gabonese had a huge windscreen, carefully wrapped in brown paper, for a Mercedes car. He had bought it in Germany on behalf of an Arab fellow-student who could not travel to the west.

When we reached the Hungarian-Romanian border at about 2 a.m., a Romanian colonel boarded the train. He zeroed in on our compartment. “Have you got anything good to smoke?” he asked, glancing up at the deliberately visible Kents in the luggage rack and settling himself comfortably down. We had a pleasant chat about nothing in particular. The police and customs followed him.

For three packets the customs officer forgot his carbon paper when he wrote the receipt for the typewriter, which of course would have to be taken in for annual checks of the typeface. Later he came back for more cigarettes for his boss and his brother “who was sick in hospital”. None of the officials even glanced at the brown parcel in the corridor.

“Tout etait perdu quand ils ont vu les cartouches,” reflected the Gabonese.

Back in Iasi, Joseph, from Arusha in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, shrugged as he sat at his usual table. “If I were a student in America, I would have a vacation job to earn money. In Romania, this is my vacation job.” After five years Joseph had saved enough money to buy a car and have it shipped home to Dar-es-Salaam. Years later, he sent me a letter from Arusha. He was running a successful import-export business.

Missionary-educated Charles from Zimbabwe, the only other British citizen in town, was too bashful to remove his underpants when we practiced FKK, “freie koerperliche Kultur”, with Saxon friends in a mountain valley near Sibiu. But his modesty had not prevented him from deflowering an American nun while at secondary school in then-Salisbury, where he also protested against the illegal Smith regime.

As we strolled up the hillside that morning, a kindly Romanian grandmother came out from her village to greet us. Charles was the first African she had ever seen. He charmed her with his polite, fluent Romanian. She invited us into her village and poured us tuica from a huge barrel. Although it was ten o’clock in the morning and the sun was beating down, we couldn’t really refuse her hospitality.

Conditions for doctors and nurses in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe are so deplorable these days that they have led to a mass exodus of medical personnel. Those who remain make do with substandard equipment and lack the most basic necessities. Charles, who once protested against UDI, and knows all about dictatorships, has incurred the wrath of the ruling party by organising his staff in Harare’s major hospital.

I still don’t really understand the precise rationale for the huge African presence in Romania in those days. But I suspect that Ceausescu pocketed hard currency from UN agencies, and awarded the students some kind of pittance in lei. He cashed them in, just as he cynically exported Jews and Germans for money.

Letter from Iasi - April 2005

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:19:20 +0200

Letter from Iasi

Iasi, city of writers and poets and home to Romania's oldest and most prestigious university, is justly celebrated for its vibrant intellectual and artistic life, in which the German and French cultural centres and the British Council Library all play a significant role.

Christopher Lawson

April 2005

I met the new Director of the Goethe Zentrum, Iasi, as she was packing up mounted photographs of carnivals and preparing to drive them to the Zentrum in Sibiu. Plans for an exhibition of student lithographs, the framework for her formal introduction to the great and the good of Iasi, were well under way.

Sigrun Andree was born in Agnita, 60 kilometres from Sibiu. It was a huge adventure to go with the family to Hermannstadt. In 1980, at the age of 13, she left Transylvania and her protected, rural childhood behind to join her family in Heilbronn.

The process of Familenzusammenfuehrung, of bringing the family together, took about 18 months in Ceausescu’s Romania. The late Conducator, as is now well-known, sold off his German and Jewish populations as commodities for hard currency. In the mid-1980s the approximate cost amounted to DM6000 per person.

Well aware of her Saxon identity, Sigrun admits to pangs of nostalgia when she passes hay wagons on the road, the driver talking into a mobile phone. She misses the landscape of Transylvania, but on the whole tries to avoid Agnita. Economic depression has struck the Saxon village with their neat houses. The Agnita of 2005 is no longer the Agnita she remembers.

In the 1970s and 1980s there were agonised discussions among the Saxon community about the rightness of leaving all those hundreds of years of traditions behind. But in the Federal Republic, Landsmannschaften - associations based on former German communities - flourish. In the end, Germany and the West proved too much of a magnet.

Completing her abitur in Heilbronn, one of many centres of Saxon “immigration”, Sigrun began studying medicine in Heidelberg, and then in Berlin, where she witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. From village origins, she had begun a new phase of her life as a city woman.

In Berlin, working as a photographer, Sigrun found herself drawn to the world of the arts. She went to concerts, everything from jazz to classical music, the theatre and dance, practically every night.

Now she knew where her future career would take her. Sigrun abandoned medicine with a degree, opting instead for a master’s course in culture management, finally obtaining her diploma as a media counsellor in 2000. The course was intensely practical, with plenty of attachments to orchestras and dance groups. She managed stand-up comedians and organised festivals. On the way she also picked up another qualification as a translator/interpreter in English and Spanish.

This interview was conducted in the fluent English of this staatlich geprueft Uebersetzer - authorised translator - which Sigrun honed working with IT teams from London to Sunderland on secondment to Germany.

“What was the largest event you took part in?” I asked.

“That would have to be Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a massive spectacle held on Berlin’s Todesstreifen, the no man’s zone, to celebrate German reunification. I was working as a photographer at the time. Marianne Faithfull was also making a video that was shown at the show.”

Her previous job was with the Institut fuer Auslandsbeziehung, an organisation supporting German minorities in Eastern Europe. The main office for Romania was located in Sibiu. Working with local partners, she put on plays, held exhibitions, and organised summer camps. In Sibiu? The obvious questions arise. “No,” says Sigrun firmly, “I went for the job. I’d always worked on projects.”

Now established in Romania, Sigrun joined the Goethe Zentrum which also works with local partners, Kulturgesellschaften, involving local people in every activity. The Goethe Zentrum in Iasi rests on two pillars, German-language courses and cultural activities. Most funding comes from Germany.

So what’s the difference between the Goethe Institut and a Zentrum? “The Institut is a huge organisation that represents Germany all over the world. It is centrally organised with headquarters in Munich and institutes across the world. The Goethe Institut supports the Zentrums, which however receive most of their backing from local partners. They do not necessarily have any German directors or staff,” she said.

The 2005 programme of the Goethe Zentrum is balanced and ambitious. There will be lectures, exhibitions, three theatre performances, presentations of novelists and poets, music, with a particular emphasis on works translated into Romanian or with a Romanian connection. The centre’s art gallery offers a forum for young Romanian artists.

As ever, the centre will cooperate with local partners, the Periferic Festival, which offers performances and installations, Cuza University, the Xenopol History Institute, and the National Theatre of Iasi.

In March there were two days of celebration of the extraordinary life and work of Aglaia Veteranyi, born into a circus family in Bucharest, who roamed Europe performing with her parents. Illiterate until she was a teenager, Aglaia learned to read and write German and became a novelist whose principal subject was identity.

The video artist Lillevän and the musician Marc Weiser will visit from Germany, as will the Ulrich Gumpert Jazz Band for the Richard Oschanitzky Festival in May. Jürgen Bothner and Romeo Cosma held a jazz concert in March.

The pianist Andreas Henkel will give a concert at the Philharmonic and hold a one-week master class at the music school in April.

To celebrate the Austrian Nobel literature laureate, Elfriede Jelinek, the theatre will put on one of her plays. There will be a showing of The Piano Player, a movie based on a Jelinek novel, with lectures and discussions. And this is not the only example of German-Austrian cooperation. Earlier in the year the Zentrum gave financial support to the Pygmalion Theater of Vienna which put on The Wonderful World of Sigmund Freud, a hilarious (and very Viennese) account of Freud’s use of the Grimm Brothers Snow White myth with three of his hapless, early subjects.

Nor does the Zentrum forget the 50,000 student population of Iasi. Apart from the language courses, there are regular activities for students, a film club and a music club run by Iasi’s indefatigable Mr Music, George Panzaru, who offers talks and DVDs on every musical subject under the sun, from Kraut Rock to Scandinavian jazz, from Celtic music to Leonard Cohen. In the autumn there will be a German exhibition and urban project linking art, sociology and architecture, showing pictures and interviews with people who live in the Allee der Kosmonauten, a huge alley in East Berlin.

In the summer, for young and old alike, in the setting of the splendid garden of the Zentrum, there will be a Ceai dansant or Tanztee, with German and Romanian dance music from the 1920s.

Plans for the end of the year and 2006 are closely linked to the football World Cup which will be held in Germany. There will be an exhibition of Magnum photographs, for example.

In 2005 there are three notable commemorations of the deaths of great Germans. Friedrich Schiller, poet, historian, essayist and playwright, joint founder of modern German literature with Goethe, wrote passionately and enduringly of freedom and idealism at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. His An die Freude, the Ode to Joy, set to music by Beethoven, has become the anthem of a united Europe.

Two thousand and five also marks the anniversary of the deaths of three notable Germans. Friedrich von Schiller died 200 years ago. Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann died in 1955. It is also 100 years since Einstein’s miraculous year of 1905, when, at age 26, the physicist published three papers which changed the way we look at the world. The Nobel Prize winner, whose contributions to physics encompass far more than the theory of relativity, was born German, then became a Swiss citizen, and German again, finally adopting American nationality.

Thomas Mann, the epic novelist, short story writer, essayist and, for a son of sober, bourgeois Luebeck, improbable gay icon, was another German Nobel laureate who, for political reasons, became an American citizen. All his life, as his massive novels illustrate, Mann was torn between the comfortable, common sense values of his Northern merchant father and the sensual, artistic world of his Brazilian-born mother.

But Sigrun will leave full celebrations of these internationally celebrated figures to Romanian partners. Outside the Zentrum, on Copou, the university hill, a few salient quotations from the masters will fly on special banners, a muted reminder of Germany’s colossal contribution to the arts and sciences.