Tired of all things Trump—the endless lying and criminality, the perverts in his inner circle, the stealing and the golf course monarchy, and the existence of people who could actually vote for him—I decided to pack my papers, books, computer, and some clothes into two small bicycle saddle bags and head out on a series of overnight trains from Geneva (where I live) to Yerevan, Armenia (about which I often dream). At least along the way I would be spared contemplating America in the thrall of Agent Orange.

I gave myself two weeks to get there, and the route I chose was roughly that of the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway, which in the late 19th century Kaiser Wilhelm II hoped would turn Germany into a Middle Eastern colonial power on the Persian Gulf.

The Kaiser’s trains headed south-by-southeast from Ankara whereas I decided to head east on the Dogu Express, which runs out of steam, so to speak, in Kars, a city to the west of the Turkish-Armenian border (unfortunately lined with barbed wire and closed).

Instead of driving a few hours from Kars to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, I would have to describe a great circle route—by way of Gori and Tbilisi, all in the republic of Georgia—before I could enter Armenia.

At least on so many overnight trains across the Balkans and the Anatolian plains of eastern Turkey, I could indulge in one of my pleasures: to read diplomatic histories from the 19th and early 20th centuries about the collisions in that part of the world between the great powers, notably Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. (Erzurum was fought over in the Crimean, 1877 Russo-Turkish, and Great wars.)

Best of all, as I would be traveling with my folding bicycle, I could spend some of my non-railway days pushing the big gear around cities such as Vienna, Bucharest, Ankara, and Batumi.

My hope was to understand better the endless conflicts in that part of the world (the latest being the current war between Russia and Ukraine).

With luck the only downside would be rainy, cool days and the occasional flat tire, for which I was carrying an assortment of tire irons, patches, and glue. For books, I had a loaded Kindle. Best of all, Trump would fade over the horizon.

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In weighing my routing options to get to the Caucasus, I could leave alpine Switzerland by one of three passes.

I could begin my travels on trains to Milan and Venice, and try to make my way across former Yugoslavia to Belgrade, Sofia, and finally Istanbul. But that line goes wobbly between Belgrade and Sofia, and it isn’t a picnic between Zagreb and Belgrade.

Alternatively, I could also take a night train from Basel (northwest Switzerland) to Berlin, and there pick up the proper line to Baghdad, which from 1903 to 1934 made imperial stops in Vienna, Budapest, Sofia, and Constantinople before making its run to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

In the end I chose a third option, which was to bypass Berlin and Trieste, and go from Geneva and Zurich to Vienna, and from there ride overnight trains to Cluj-Napoca (in Transylvania) and Bucharest.

It had been a while since I had been in Vienna, where I studied in the spring of my college junior year. Whenever I return I am reminded of that semester, when I wrote a long paper on the outbreak of World War I in Sarajevo and also—to get ready for Fasching (Austria’s carnival season)—took lessons to learn how to waltz.

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This route meant leaving home at the crack of dawn and riding trains for about twelve hours, but in my first day of traveling I figured I could make it all the way to Vienna and, best of all, see the Austrian alps while having lunch in a dining car.

These were post-pandemic travels. No one in officialdom asked to inspect my vaccination card or berated me for improper masking. At the same time, European railways have never recovered from the virus. As I was searching for connecting trains to Vienna, I discovered that not all of the intercity express trains were still back in service.

To get to Zurich (less than three hours from Geneva), I had to change in Biel, and then continuing from Zurich to Vienna I had to make another change in Feldkirch, a rail junction between Switzerland, Lichtenstein, and Austria.

Normally I would not minded changing trains (actually the switching would have pleased me, as I find nothing more alluring that to wait on a platform), but in this instance I was schlepping a folding bicycle, and each stop involved humping my bags up and down station stairs. Additionally, I was traveling on a Sunday, and the Austrian trains were packed with students returning from their weekends.

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Nor, scrunched into a small Railjet coach seat, did I love the ride as much as I thought I might when I was plotting my course while sitting at home in front of the fireplace. I had to lock my bicycle to a rack in another car, and I had to wedge my saddle bags under my feet, which left little leg room. I felt like I was on a donkey.

Although normally there are hourly Railjet trains between Zurich and Austria, I got the feeling from booking my seat reservation that at least that weekend many of the trains were fully booked.

All the confusion and crowded trains spoke to me of a failure in European rail planning: many trains could be longer and accommodate more passengers. As well, a lot of this long distance travel could be taken up with additional night trains. But discount airlines killed off the last sleepers that survived into the 1990s.

Only now are night trains returning to the European landscape, thanks in large part to the efforts of the Austrian national railway company, ÖBB, which in recent years inaugurated has a network of Nightjet sleepers across Europe. (There is also something called EuroNight and a startup company, European Sleeper.) But they, too, are often full, although on other trips I have managed to get a compartment to places such as Zagreb and Krakow.

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To pass the time on this journey, I read Stephen Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European, much of which is set in and around Vienna.

I had read a number of Zweig books, but never his memoir. I knew that he had mailed off the manuscript from Brazil to his publisher the day before he and his wife committed suicide in 1942. He had begun writing the book in 1934, and worked on it as he fled his native Austria and endured life on the run in the 1930s as a Jewish European refugee.

Although Zweig was a writer of the first rank, with friends and connections in all the major European countries, he still felt, as Willy Loman said, “kind of temporary—about myself,” and in desperation he ended up in Brazil, cut off from everything he had worked for and loved. He writes at the beginning of the memoir:

All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life: revolution and famine, currency depreciation and terror, epidemics and emigration; I have seen great mass ideologies grow before my eyes and spread, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture, nationalism in general….I write in the middle of the war, I write abroad and with nothing to jog my memory; I have no copies of my books, no notes, no letters from friends available here in my hotel room.

I confess reading Zweig made me sad, as from the first page I knew that the lights would go out across Europe, and that Zweig himself would be among the first casualties. And I was heading toward the vortex of Eastern Europe into which Russia, Germany, and Austria were frequently consumed, and at a time when there was an ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine that felt very much like the wars that Zweig had to flee. (He writes: “I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town.”)

Reading Zweig, it was easy to make the connection between Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler, both men of low cunning and expedience, for whom genocide was yet another means of repression.

It was easy, too, to believe that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to conspire with his puppet master—Putin—and deliver Eastern Europe behind another Iron Curtain. (Zweig writes: “Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.”)

I had sought out Zweig’s memoir thinking I might wallow in fin de siècle Vienna, when in the early 1900s a world war was inconceivable to anyone attending the carnival balls or strolling in the Prater. But in his presence I dwelled more on the sleepwalking of my own generation—at their own Mar-a-Lago balls—and after a while, I confess, I put away Zweig’s fateful words and went in search of lunch.

 

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