Trump’s Great Escape: Night Trains to Armenia

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

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

Kaiser’s trains were heading south-southeast from Ankara, while I decided to head east on Great Dane Expresswhich runs out, so to speak, in Kars, a city west of the Turkish-Armenian border (sadly lined with barbed wire and closed).

Instead of driving several hours from Kars to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, I should describe a great circle route – through Gori and Tbilisi, all in the republic of Georgia – before I could enter Armenia.

At least on so many overnight trains through the Balkans and the Anatolian plains of eastern Turkey, I could indulge in one of my pleasures: reading 19th and early 20th century diplomatic histories of the clashes in that part of the world between the great powers, especially Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. (Erzurum was fought in the Crimea, 1877 Russo-Turkish and great wars.)

Best of all, since I’d be traveling on my folding bike, I could spend some of my rail-free days pushing the big rig around cities like Vienna, Bucharest, Ankara and Batumi.

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

With luck, the only downside would be rainy, cold days and the occasional flat tire, for which I carried an assortment of tire irons, patches and glue. For books, I had a loaded Kindle. At best, Trump would fade over the horizon.

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Weighing my route options to reach the Caucasus, I could leave Alpine Switzerland through one of three passes.

I could start my journeys with trains to Milan and Venice and try to make my way through the former Yugoslavia to Belgrade, Sofia and finally Istanbul. But that line wobbles between Belgrade and Sofia, and it’s no picnic between Zagreb and Belgrade.

Alternatively, I could also take a night train from Basel (NW Switzerland) to Berlin and from there take the right line to Baghdad, which from 1903 to 1934 made imperial stops at Vienna, Budapest, Sofia and Constantinople before to 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 take the night trains to Cluj-Napoca (in Transylvania) and Bucharest.

It had been a while since I had been to Vienna, where I studied in the spring of my junior year of college. Every time I go back, I remember that semester when I wrote a long paper about the outbreak of the First World War in Sarajevo and also to prepare for Carnival (Carnival season in Austria) — took lessons to learn to waltz.

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This route meant leaving home at dawn and riding trains for about twelve hours, but on my first day of travel I thought I could get as far as Vienna and, at best, see the Austrian Alps while having lunch in a dining car.

These were post-pandemic trips. No one from the officialdom asked to inspect my vaccination card or scolded me for improper masking. At the same time, European railways have never recovered from the virus. While looking for connecting trains to Vienna, I discovered that not all intercity express trains were back in operation yet.

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, the railway junction between Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Austria.

Normally I wouldn’t mind changing trains (in fact I would have been happy with the change as I find nothing more appealing than waiting on a platform) but in this case I was riding a folding bike and every stop involved – I take out my luggage and go down the stairs of the station. Besides, we were traveling on a Sunday and the Austrian trains were full of students returning from the weekend.

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Nor, squeezed into a tiny Railjet coach seat, did I enjoy the ride as much as I thought I would when I was plotting my course while sitting at home in front of the fireplace. I had to lock my bike to a rack in another car and had to tuck my panniers under my feet, which left little leg room. I felt like a donkey.

Although there are normally hourly Railjet trains between Zurich and Austria, I got the feeling from the seat reservation that, at least on 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. Also, much of this long-distance travel could be taken up by additional night trains. But discount airlines killed off the last surviving sleepers in the 1990s.

Only now are night trains returning to the European landscape, largely thanks to the efforts of Austria’s national railway company, ÖBB, which in recent years has inaugurated a network of Nightjet sleepers across Europe. (There’s also something called EuroNight and a startup company, European Sleeper.) But they’re often full, too, though on other trips I’ve managed to get a compartment in places like Zagreb and Krakow.

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To pass the time on this trip, I read Stephen Zweig’s memoir, The world of yesterday: Memoirs of a Europeanmuch of which is set in and around Vienna.

I had read a number of Zweig books, but never his memoirs. I knew he sent 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 while fleeing his native Austria and enduring life on the in the 1930s as a European Jewish 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 put it, “kind of temporary—about me,” and in desperation he ended up in Brazil , interrupted. from all that he had worked for and loved. He writes at the beginning of the memoir:

All the pale horses of the apocalypse have rushed 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 supreme plague that poisoned the flower of our European culture, nationalism in general. .. I write in the middle of the war, I write abroad and without anything to play with my memory; I have no copies of my books, no notes, no letters from friends available here in my hotel room.

I confess that reading Zweig made me sad because from the first page I knew that the lights would go out all over Europe and that Zweig himself would be among the first victims. And I was heading into the maelstrom of Eastern Europe where Russia, Germany, and Austria were frequently being consumed and at a time when there was an ongoing war between Russia and the Ukraine that looked a lot like the wars Zweig had to flee. (Write: “I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and I had to steal from it like a thief the night before it was relegated to the status of a German provincial city.“)

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

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

I had looked up Zweig’s memoirs thinking I might flounder fin de siècle Vienna, when in the early 1900s a world war was unthinkable for anyone attending carnival balls or strolling the Prater. But in his presence I dwelt more on the somnambulism of my own generation—at my own Mar-a-Lago balls—and after a while, I confess, I put Zweig’s fateful words aside and went in search of lunch.