Word: warsaw
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...broken, at least conceptually. Its reason for being was to deter the Soviet Union from launching an invasion through West Germany to the English Channel. With that danger diminished to the vanishing point, NATO is already undergoing its own deconstruction, more subtle, dignified and gradual than that of the Warsaw Pact but in the long run just as relentless...
...worst mistakes after the First World War was the international isolation of the Weimar Republic. I am strictly against repeating that mistake. Germany, and that includes a unified Germany, is part of the Western community of shared values. We cannot accept anything less. It is remarkable that all Warsaw Pact countries except the Soviet Union are for full German membership in NATO. Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia are in favor of it -- unconditionally and completely. Why? Simply because they do not want Germany to be isolated. The U.S., all our other allies and the Germans themselves should raise this issue...
More troubling is the fact that the region's capital cities are desperately short of hotel space. Every night this summer, Warsaw will need 3,000 more beds than are available. Prague, which has 6,000 tourist-class beds, needs to double its capacity if it is to begin to cope with demand. It is as bad, if not worse, in Budapest. "We just can't keep up with the boom," says Gyorgy Szekely, vice president of Ibusz, the state-run travel company. "We need more of everything." Given the accommodations shortage, the best advice for tourists...
Apart from the well-trod tourist trail around the bloc, which leads to such places as the Ghetto Memorial in Warsaw, the Old Town Square in Prague and the neo-Gothic parliament building on the banks of the Danube in Budapest, the cities have some surprising things to offer. Even the region's grim industrial agglomerations are worth seeing, if only to judge for yourself how badly communism failed...
...listen to good jazz in Warsaw, take in a performance at what is possibly the best puppet theater in the world in Prague, and go to an opera in Budapest for about what it would cost for an intermission drink anywhere in the West. In Cluj, the capital of the medieval kingdom of Transylvania in Romania, three decades of Ceausescu misrule have emptied shops and condemned people to a dreary life in ill-lighted, poorly heated apartments. But the Ceausescu era did not kill the arts. At a recent Rachmaninoff concert performed by the Cluj Philharmonic Orchestra, the pianist...