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6 College Travels

Teaching history at Concordia enabled more domestic and international travel than I had experienced as a child or anticipated as an adult. Iowa farm families did not venture far from home. If I had not been raised near Wisconsin, I would never have visited it. Watching a friend’s slides taken on the 1961 ISTC Social Science Department Summer Study Tour whetted my appetite for European travels I could not afford. When Kappa Delta Phi paid my expenses for attending its 1962 National Convention in Chicago, I nervously went. It was a big city after all! Well-known public intellectual and historian Max Lerner gave the keynote address. Over lunch, an Alabaman recommended Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream as a good book on race. During Christmas break, I drove through the segregated South in college friend Wes Schaible’s unheated Volkswagen Beetle to visit his South Carolina home. The Organization of American Historians (OAH) brought me back to the Windy City in 1967. It was thrilling to hear authors speak whose books I had studied. Interviewing in hotel rooms for jobs given to others made the 1969 Philadelphia meeting drab by comparison. By this time, Jo and I had toured New England, Boston, Denver, the Southwest, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City.

The Concordia Professional Development Travel Fund budgeted each teacher $100 annually not to exceed $300 cumulative over three years. It was later increased to $450, which I used for attending an OAH annual meeting every third year. The college funded international trips for me as well. A Latin American course-development grant took me to Mexico in 1973. A global studies grant later sent me with other professors to South Africa and Namibia. May Seminars paid me to assist leading six student groups to East Africa and several European countries. The fledgling Concordia College May Seminar Abroad Program had taken flight in 1968 when three modern language professors and twenty-six collegians toured Germany, Spain, and France respectively. An on campus pre-seminar course prepared participants for their travels. Month-long cultural immersion enriched cultural understanding and accelerated language learning. By 1975, a chartered DC-10 left Fargo’s Hector International Airport with 345 collegians, including the Concordia Concert Band, for a month in Europe, Africa, or Asia Minor where eleven seminars studied art and art history, archeology, drama, education, English, history, political science, religion, and languages.

OAH National Conventions

The USD Travel Fund paid for my first airplane ride on a three-legged flight from Sioux Falls to Los Angeles in 1970. By the time the plane reached LAX my ears were so badly plugged that they did not clear until after I returned home. At this convention, I established what became my routine. Attend and note papers delivered on stimulating subjects, scour the book exhibit and order examination copies, and visit with former graduate school pals and teachers. In the City of Angels three decades later, I stayed in the Westin Bonaventure Hotel where Clint Eastwood filmed In the Line of Fire. Despite my fear of heights, I adapted to riding the external, glass-enclosed elevators. Touring Gene Autry’s Museum of Western Heritage richly rewarded me as an old western film lover. The day ended with an afternoon at the Huntington Library Art Collection and Botanical Garden, topped off by a reception with ample food and wine.

The historic Palmer House Hotel and The Berghoff, a German restaurant, made Chicago a favorite convention venue. It enabled visiting the French Impressionist collection at the Art Institute. A downtown walking tour of architecture designed by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Daniel Burnham made me a believer in OAH off-site programs. At another meeting, I visited Jane Addams’s Hull House and learned about urban renewal at Chicago Circle.

In 1981, I stayed at the Detroit Plaza, a seventy-three-story hotel surrounded by six office towers ranging between twenty-one- and thirty-nine-stories. Conceived by Henry Ford II and financed primarily by Ford, the Renaissance Center—one of the world’s largest commercial complexes with banks, brokerage firms, restaurants, and a shopping center—aimed to revitalize Detroit’s economy. Off-site OAH activities included a Stroh’s Brewery tour and a German meal washed down by beer served in the Tap Room as well as visits to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village in Dearborn. It is remarkable the man who called history “bunk” funded the first United States outdoor museum. He collected things Americans made and used because, he said, it is “the best way to preserve our history and tradition.”

For New York City meetings, I stayed in the same Midtown Manhattan hotel located near the Madison Square Garden and Pennsylvania Station under different names: the Statler Hilton (1978) and the New York Penta (1986). Both conferences featured excellent programs peopled by prominent historians. Meals were encounters with ethnic pluralism. One hotel exit took me to a Jewish delicatessen and Rye bread, pastrami, and dill pickle. Another brought me to an Italian restaurant. A third delivered me to a seafood place where a lovely Irish colleen served me swordfish steak. The iconic Empire State Building offered its lavish ground-floor interior and an incomparable 360° view from the 86th Floor Observation Deck. A lower Manhattan bus tour included Battery Park for views of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty highlighted by the driver’s Bronx-accented commentary. An OAH walking tour took me to City Hall, Tammany Hall, City Hall Park, St. Paul’s Chapel, Woolworth Building, Boss Tweed’s courthouse, Al Smith’s home, and Brooklyn Bridge. A second traced the evolution of Greenwich Village, old and new. A third examined disintegration of the lower East Side Jewish and Little Italy enclaves under pressure from expanding Chinatown.

From the Washington Hilton and Tower (1990), I went by train for an OAH-sponsored tour of Annapolis, Maryland’s capital since colonial times. The city’s historic district included many 18th-century brick houses, the domed State House, the Romanesque-style St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, and an historic cemetery. Our guide also walked us around the Chesapeake Bay waterfront grounds of the United States Naval Academy with its beaux-arts architecture, naval history museum, and monuments. My frequent conference roommate David Danbom and I arrived a few days early at the Washington Renaissance Hotel (2002). While he researched his Fargo book at a National Archives repository, I examined 19th century Fargo-Moorhead Masonic pamphlets at the Library of Congress. The self-proclaimed “largest library in the world” is built in the beaux-arts style and decorated lavishly with murals, paintings, marble columns and steps, carved hardwoods, and a stained-glass dome.

The Holocaust Museum, an official United States memorial sited adjacent to the National Mall, documents the more than 44,000 Nazi concentration camps and ghettos. It contrasts starkly with the public grandeur of Washington D.C. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial captures perfectly the sharp feelings engendered by that war. Partially buried, intersecting walls covered with the dead’s engraved names symbolize a closed, healing wound. Critics called Architect Maya Lin’s unconventional, unornamented design “a black gash of shame.” They enabled commissioning Frederick Hart to produce a heroic, bronze figurative sculpture to be placed at the apex of the wall’s two sides. When Lin objected, the Three Servicemen and the Vietnam Women’s memorials were placed off to one side, minimizing their distraction from Lin’s wonderfully symbolic design. Ill will has subsided and the memorial has become a shrine where friends and families meaningfully mourn and suitably honor veterans’ sacrifice. A four-hour bus tour of Civil War Washington led by Professor Edward C. Smith included the grand hilltop home of Frederick Douglass, Lincoln Park, Howard University, the African American Civil War Memorial, Grant Memorial, and other Civil War-related sites. He was wonderfully informative about the role that African Americans had played in the war and Washington, D.C. history. On a contemporary note, he commented upon the rapid appreciation of real estate. For example, his $30,000 town house purchased thirty years before would now sell for more than $600,000.

Other OAH meetings were equally fun and stimulating. At Cincinnati (1983), Dave and I froze our butts at a Cubs-Reds baseball game, and later at our hotel listened to the Cubbies rant about their defeat with multiple conjugations of a one-word vocabulary. Staying at the St. Louis Adam Mark Hotel (1989), I spent a day visiting the nearby Arch and its western historical museums as well as the courthouse where the Dred Scott case was tried. At Toronto (1989), daughter Kristen drove from Rochester, and we shared an afternoon roaming a close-by neighborhood and art museum. At Atlanta (1994), graduate school friend and Georgia State University Professor Craig Lloyd gave University of Mississippi Professor Shelia Skemp and me a city tour that ended at a Thai restaurant for a wonderful meal. At Indianapolis (1998), Danbom, Skemp, and I dined at Engelhardt’s German Restaurant. At Memphis (2003), we ate BBQ and had drinks at B. B. King’s Blues Club on Beale Street. Once described as “the Paris Ritz . . . of the Mississippi Delta,” the Peabody Hotel featured a daily duck march to and from a pond in the lobby. Elevator doors opened in the morning and the birds trooped out for their daily swim. Each evening, they returned to their rooftop aviary in the same way. David and Cyndy Tucker took me to lunch. I had not seen them since their 1965 Iowa City wedding. David had mentored me during my rocky graduate school start. They both had solid scholarly careers at the University of Memphis. An informative off site “Memphis Music” session at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum ended my enjoyable OAH sojourns on Concordia’s dime.

May Seminars and Travel Abroad

I assisted Africanist David Sandgren with his Contemporary East African Seminar in 1976. Happily, David and I had a room with bath in the less than opulent London Sovereign Hotel. He tutored students on using the Underground, enabling them to explore the city on their own. As a group, we visited the Museum of Mankind and viewed its Yoruba and Islamic religious art collections, Benin bronzes, and African textiles. The British Council explained how Tanzania harnessed technical and educational aid to control its own development by expanding national literacy and productive capacity. The government expected secondary school graduates to teach for an extended period to establish a universal primary education system or perform other nation-building tasks. On free days, I enjoyed seeing Buckingham and Kensington palaces, St. James and Hyde parks, Piccadilly Circus, Royal Albert Hall, Westminster and St. Paul’s Cathedral, Tower of London, British Museum, National Gallery, a late-night session at the House of Commons, and a guided tour of Windsor Castle. Many of us saw a live professional play for the first time at the National Theatre: Harold Pinter’s obscure drama, No Man’s Land, starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Several later went to Agatha Christie’s The Mouse Trap, notable for its twenty-four-year run. David and I also stopped at pubs and quaffed an occasional pint unaccompanied by students, as mandated by Concordia rules.

After an overnight flight on Ethiopian Air to Addis Ababa, we disembarked via a walkway walled off by sheets of corrugated tin guarded by heavily armed soldiers. This glimpse of military rule shocked us as did scenes of pervasive poverty while bussing to our modern hotel. Its exterior walls had been damaged from gunfire during Emperor Hailie Selassie’s overthrow. The conservative monarchy, Ethiopian Orthodox Church, feudal agriculture, poor transportation and sanitation, and inadequate schools had condemned the ancient civilization to illiteracy, pervasive disease, and economic underdevelopment. Mud huts intermingled with westernized structures throughout the sprawling city. Donkeys, chickens, goat and sheep flocks, pedestrians, bicycles, and carts competed with motor vehicles in using paved or dust-covered streets. The Evangelical Church President, Lutheran missionaries, and locked out university students all expressed anxiety about chaotic conditions. Could new revolutionary rulers solve the country’s problems? Chronic political instability threated their projected new multi-party democratic socialist state and expanded educational system.

A flight to Kenya, brought us to where David had taught in the early days of national independence. Westernized Nairobi made everyone feel more comfortable. The Brunner’s Hotel—a venerable colonial establishment—memorably served an English breakfast daily: eggs, bacon, bangers (sausages), beans, fried tomatoes, toast, orange marmalade, and coffee or tea. Malaria-bearing mosquito control consisted of a man treating each room nightly with a hand sprayer similar to one we had used on our farm to keep flies off cattle. Everyone took pills daily as an added precaution. At an American Embassy staff briefing, we learned about Kenya’s private enterprise model with some state intervention. President Jomo Kenyatta had created stability via economic opportunity and an open, democratic society. Cabinet ministers and parliament kept government accountable. An upper stratum enriched itself through political corruption and permitted some wealth trickling down to the lower classes. What would happen when the aged Kenyatta died was a question much discussed among Kenyans. In any event, the country’s 3.5 percent population growth threatened higher unemployment and instability for a new generation of leaders to solve.

The St. George Elementary School classrooms, where David taught, had dirt floors, no glass windows, chalk, chalkboards, and few textbooks. Children excitedly performed songs, dances, and English recitations. Africans were negotiating with English owners for the sale of a nearby six hundred-acre coffee farm as government policy required. Eighty-five skilled unionized workers earned $125 monthly; during harvest more numerous unskilled day laborers were paid much less. Four to ten acre Kikuyu farms grew coffee or tea at higher elevations and corn and beans at lower ones. They kept a cow, one or two calves, and maybe ten sheep. “Wealthy” farmers earned $400 annually. Well-conditioned all-weather tarmac roads carried few vehicles. Most people walked or rode bicycles. We bussed through the beautiful Kenyan countryside from the highland through rain forests onto a grassy plateau and into the rift valley 2000 feet below the surrounding plain.

During a weekend at the Amboseli Game Park Lodge, Mount Kilimanjaro dominated the landscape when not obscured by clouds. Morning and evening game runs showed elephants, water buffalo, wildebeests, giraffes, jackals, lions, and a pair of cheetahs stalking gazelles. Coffee on the moonlit veranda followed five-course dinners served by candlelight. Departing Amboseli in vans for Arusha, Tanzania, we gained altitude and crops of corn, bananas, and tea appeared. Missionaries who had graduated from Concordia arranged our program. Christians had proselytized among 120 tribes totaling 15 million people, about one third of the population. Denominationally established hospitals and schools benefited converts, who backed independence and had good relations with the Tanzanian government despite President Julius Nyerere’s African socialism. Small mud brick homes with thatched or corrugated tin roofs and normally no electricity or glass windows dotted the rugged Tanzanian highlands. People wearing colorful African clothing or ragged, dirty western garb walked along rural roads. Most were barefoot. A few had tennis shoes or rubber sandals. Some carried burdens on their heads or backs, rode bicycles, or herded cattle and goats. Others sat, waiting for a bus.

Returning to Nairobi, our group dined with the Otienos, a prominent Kenyan couple whose daughter had attended Concordia. The elegant dinner featured soup, fried rice, curry, goat meat, vegetables, fruit, custard, beer, vermouth, and coffee. The couple and their children treated us to songs and dancing. He shared stories about Kenyan politics and his legal work. She talked about her freedom fighter days, current business, and women’s rights. Mrs. Otieno gave us two tickets for the Independence Day fête. Tom Sewall and I witnessed President Kenyatta and other dignitaries arrive. The parade featured military units, police and firemen, youth corps, and traditional dancers marching beneath the noisy air force flyovers. Kenyatta delivered his address vigorously in Swahili and English, emphasizing economic progress and Harambe (all Kenyans pulling together). While watching TV at dinner with one of David’s former students that evening, we had no trouble picking out Tom’s and my white faces in the African crowd.

An overnight train took us to the oppressively humid coastal city of Mombassa and its narrow, winding streets and crowded markets. After touring a Hindu Temple and the 17th century Fort Jesus, we enjoyed four days at Janini Beach. Income from tourism boosts Kenyan economic prosperity. On our return to Europe, we stopped two days in Addis Ababa and visited the city market, reputably the largest in Africa. Vendors young and old try to sell something to all who pass by—a shoeshine, newspaper, Time or Newsweek; potatoes, onions, or peppers; and rugs. The noisy crush of humanity can be overwhelming, but students, having well-honed acquisitive passions, usually thrived. We enjoyed a delicious evening meal with a wealthy Ethiopian family and their friends. The architect father had designed their magnificent and spacious home constructed of native stone, marble, and wood, which had been located in a gated community secured by private guards. While describing his current work designing government buildings, a friend sarcastically remarked: “The government has nationalized his brain.” All anxiously worried the regime might adopt a Chinese model and confiscate everything.

Addis Ababa market in Ethiopia.

Our Paris flight via Cairo, Athens, and Rome afforded glimpses of pyramids, Parthenon Mediterranean Sea, and Alps. I enjoyed seeing many Parisian places my college French professor had highlighted: the Place de la Concorde, Champs Elysées, Arc De Triomphe, and Eiffel Tower. At the Louvre, the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory of Samothrace, and Mona Lisa recalled Humanities I and II. We attended Grand Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, had an afternoon picnic at the Versailles Palace, and toured the Chartres Cathedral. On the last evening, several of us dined at a sidewalk café and watched the Seine flow past Notre Dame.

In 1979, assisting church historian Jim Haney with “Conflict and Accommodation: Christ and Culture in the USSR and Poland,” I co-taught the pre-seminar and kept expenses. Jim had a gift for guiding students and explaining how the Gothic style of Westminster Abby evoked the mystery of God’s presence by directing human eyes upward with tall columns and stained glass windows before hearing a small, superb male choir make “Evensong” deeply moving. After walking by Number 10 Downing Street, St. James Park, and Buckingham Palace, a student collapsed. An ambulance took her, Jo, and me to the hospital. Diagnosed with low blood sugar, she recovered quickly. Socialized medicine meant no charge. Sleep and a continental breakfast restored with us with hard rolls, butter, marmalade, and strong coffee diluted by milk.

At the British Museum, Jim’s commentary about illuminated manuscripts, scripture fragments, and Parthenon sculptures helped everyone understand the Greek origins of the Russian Orthodox Church. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at St. George’s Theatre that evening dramatized how demagogues easily sway mobs, threaten tyranny, provoke resistance, and unleash anarchy that breeds new tyrants. After seeing a musical comedy version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at the Shaftsbury Theatre, Professor Gordon Lell explained that Chaucer told these stories about capital sins and punishment for “pleasure” not “morality.”

Speakers at London’s Russian and East European Studies Centre stated the Russian church should not be depicted as a haven for the old, poor, and uneducated. The government barred Christians from higher education, which meant many compromised to have careers. Baptist and Orthodox dissenters engage in Samizdat (self-publishing) to affirm religious and other freedoms. Polish Catholicism is stronger than Russian Orthodoxy due to its close tie with nationalism forged by foreign invasions. It claims rights to education, freedom from censorship, and separation from the Communist state, affecting the larger society. Although embarrassed by religion, the atheistic regime is too weak to impose full-scale repression or prevent the Polish Pope’s projected visit.

Students fell in love with Oxford University. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s visit kept us from entering the world-renown Bodleian Library. The news pictured our group among Marxist/Anarchist protestors. Oxford Lecturer Timothy Ware—parish priest, monk, and author of The Orthodox Church (1963)—spoke to us about Monasticism in the Orthodox tradition. Despite his learning, scholarship is not as important in Eastern Orthodoxy as it is in Western Catholicism. Orthodoxy extends hospitality to those seeking spiritual renewal, and provides a house of prayer, which safeguards spirituality and offers greater security to the pursuit of daily life. We met Orthodox students and worshipped at a Greek Orthodox Church. Priest, choir, and congregation celebrate the Eucharist each Sunday, reenacting Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Colleague Don Luck once described Orthodox worship—priestly chants, choral music, bells, lighted candles, corporate prayers, burning incense—as “smells, bells, and yells.”

A long day’s travel to Poland via London subway, British jetliner, Warsaw tour and public buses, propeller airplane, and Kraków tour bus delivered us to a Holiday Inn at midnight. Jim would have preferred something more Polish. The Auschwitz gate mockingly promised: Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free). Nazis incarcerated 1.3 million people here. An estimated 1.1 million died. More than 85 percent were Jews. German crimes against humanity are recalled by double rows of electrified barbed wire fence; photographs of German officers and guards; ledgers listing prisoners’ names; glass cases displaying victims’ shoes, eyeglasses, hair, teeth, and other personal effects; and Zyklon B canisters, gas chambers, and crematoria.

Small, private farms dot the surrounding countryside. Many horses and women are seen; tractors and males are not. Men are weekday factory workers and weekend farmers. We met the Catholic Intellectuals Club at a 16th Century Jesuit House in Kraków. They proclaimed Poland’s strong religious life. Archbishop Karol Wojtyla counteracted secularization, worked with Protestants ecumenically, and moved the church to uphold human rights before he became John Paul II. He defied the government, building a church at Nowo Huta (New Steelworks). Workers poured concrete foundations and walls with wheelbarrows until dangerous scaffolding forced government to provide them construction machinery.

At Warsaw’s once elegant prewar Hotel Bristol, a Polish agent passed a German code machine to an English counterpart, a vital acquisition for the British war effort. In the Old Town, which the Germans completely destroyed, Polish nationalists have carefully reconstructed 16th and 17th century buildings as well as Gothic and Baroque cathedrals. Numerous invasions made Poles anti-German and –Russian; their preference for homogeneity left them susceptible to anti-Semitism. Soviet power forced central planning on Poles, although farmers resisted collectivized agriculture. Western debt compelled government to tolerate the black market and decentralize the economy to expand exports despite fear of losing control.

We departed Warsaw for Moscow via London because we could not fly directly to the Soviet Union from Poland. It took four hours to clear customs in Moscow. When officials found Russian Bibles our group hoped to distribute, they forced Jim to sign a confession, fined him fifty rubles, and threatened expulsion for any other violations of Soviet law. The Lenin Hills Hotel holding supper until after ten o’clock eased group frustrations. The few students who followed directions did not get caught. They proudly passed their Bibles to Russian Christians in exchange for tearful thanks. Intourist—Joseph Stalin’s travel agency—assigned us a guide Jim knew. Olga—shapely, personable, and efficient—traveled with us for our entire stay. Her signature phrase—“You will now take photograph of beautiful Soviet city”—made everyone smile. An Intourist emphasis on cultural events sent us to the ballet twice. Occasional pools of vomit on marble floors testified to excessive alcohol consumption.

While touring the Kremlin, we chatted with American character actor, John Randolph, a child of Russian emigrants who had been blacklisted for leftist politics during McCarthyism. At the Cathedral of the Annunciation elaborately decorated frescoes and icons evidenced beauty as the essence of Orthodox worship. The Tsar’s cannon and bell, the largest ever cast and never used, and the Kremlin’s Red Stars, each weighing a ton, testified to Russian love of gigantism and their technical ineptitude. Outside the Kremlin wall, guards at Lenin’s Tomb demanded reverence from everyone. The Veneration displayed at the Museum of Marx and Engels similarly revealed how the Communist Party had made Marxism the USSR’s secular religion. At the world-class Tretyakov Art Gallery, the guide set aside Christianity to give progressive social interpretations of major paintings dating from the 11th Century. Our subway ride to see the Red Square at night exhibited additional Soviet icons. Each station, built on a monumental scale, demonstrated how socialism should be beautiful as well as functional. Seven Stalinist Skyscrapers built in a decadent Roman imperial style less successfully showed this principle.

The Golden Ring of ancient towns northeast of Moscow shaped the Russian Orthodox tradition. To visit these sites, we traveled through a landscape of newly worked collective farm fields as well as birch and pine forests. Small, wood frame or log houses painted brown, green or blue, and decorated with carvings dotted the countryside. The Vladimir Suzdal Museum Reserve had more than fifty-four monuments including the Golden Gate, the 12th Century Assumption and St. Demetrius cathedrals, and the 14th Century Savior Monastery of St. Euthymius. Suzdal monastery probably housed prisoners as part of Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago. Peasant life shown in the Museum of Wooden Architecture stood in stark contrast to large, opulent churches. At Zagorsk (renamed for a revolutionary in 1930), the large, beautiful 15th century Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius is an important pilgrimage destination as the national church center.

Engelhardt Square in Leningrad.

Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg as an opening to the West. Prominent Baroque-style buildings are the St. Isaac’s and Peter and Paul cathedrals, Hermitage, (built to house Catherine the Great’s eminent Western art collection), and Winter Palace (modeled on Louis XIV’s Versailles). Leningrad, as the post-revolutionary city was renamed, symbolized a westernized elite and alienated masses. It exploded in 1917 as workers swarmed up the “October Stairs” and deposed the Tsar. We worshipped at an Orthodox Church filled with mostly older women, a few elderly men, and a scattering of young adults. The service bustled with activity. People came and went, lighted and passed candles, and circulated prayer lists. A woman screamed when crushed in the priestly procession exiting the church. Religious shrines of another sort are found at the Cruiser Aurora, hundreds of Great Patriotic War monuments, and the Museum of the Revolution with its stained glass windows, mosaics, and Lenin statues. The Bolshevists appropriated Christian symbols, transformed revolutionary heroes into saints, and made the nation an eternal principle. A day trip to Novgorod, a commercial power between the 12th and 16th centuries, revealed innumerable older churches and monasteries. Our bus driver ate a cucumber and drank a half pint of vodka for lunch. He drove mostly in the center (passing) lane of a three-lane highway as we roared back to Leningrad.

Our late afternoon flight to Tbilisi, Georgia, departed and arrived on schedule, an unexpected occurrence in Soviet domestic air travel. The city’s proximity to the lucrative Silk Road made it a point of contention among successive global empires since the 5th century CE revealed in architectural styles: Georgian, Middle Eastern, Classical, Byzantine, Beaux-Arts, and Soviet Modern. Yet Georgian language signs, monuments to local heroes, and the Joseph Stalin hydroelectric plant named for a native son who made good, expressed Georgian nationalism. Private homes, automobiles, gardens, fruit trees, and produce privately sold showed Georgian Red Capitalism. Religion is more visible in numerous functioning churches, priests and nuns walking on the street, and people wearing and selling crosses. Males hitting on women and recklessly driving cars evidenced Georgian machismo.

Brunch at the Kirov Machine in Tbilisi, Georgia.

We visited the Kirov Machine Tool Factory, Georgian Museum of Art, ancient Georgian capital Mtskheta, Jvari Monastery (6th century), and Svetitskhoveli Cathedral (11th century). The architectural style of these Eastern Orthodox structures differs markedly from Russian Orthodox churches. Their frescoes were painted over so scenes of Georgian history did not offend visiting Tsar Nicholas II. Our group stayed at a youth hostel located on Lake Tbilisi. The renowned Georgian Children’s Folk Dance Troup performed there one evening. Jo and I had the pleasure of seeing them again at Concordia on their United States tour. After an afternoon swimming, playing volleyball, throwing Frisbees, and getting sunburned on a rocky beach, Jo and I traded our Frisbee for a bottle of champagne. Soviet youth everywhere willingly paid high prices to satisfy their cravings for blue jeans, CDs, or other western goods. The hostel did not have many guests until the weekend. An open, hanging main stairway with deteriorating steps worried us as we went to and from our rooms. Poorly fitted windows and doors, cracked plaster walls and ceilings, and leaky plumbing evidenced shoddy Soviet construction skills.

On an overnight train to Erevan, Armenia, music blared from speakers as it had on our domestic flight. Many songs resembled United States country and western. Our new and already decaying hotel gave us an excellent view of Mt. Ararat, the reputed landing spot of Noah’s Ark. At Etchmiadzin Cathedral, seat of the Catholicos (supreme head) of the Armenian Apostolic Church, younger worshipers than those in Leningrad included entire families and a uniformed man. Tsisernakaberg, official memorial to Armenian Genocide victims of Turkey, is located nearby. At the International Student Center that evening, hospitable Armenians treated us to several bottles of wine. Jim wisely marched the group home early and sternly warned them to be quiet in the hotel. Day trips by bus took us to alpine Lake Sevan, site of the 9th century Sevanavank and

Jo and Carroll at Lake Sevan.

Hayravank monasteries and to Garni, site of a 3rd century BCE Armenian fortress, which the Romans, Arabs, and an earthquake successively destroyed, and 1st century CE Roman Temple and baths. At nearby Geghard, Gregory the Illuminator founded the 4th century Monastery of the Cave. Most buildings in the fortress and spiritual center date from the 14th century; three churches have been carved out of solid rock.

Our Moscow departure turned into a more typical Soviet domestic flying experience. It took off twelve hours late. Soviets put foreigners in a separate waiting area. They did not explain our flight delay or offer public telephone service. Olga returned to Erevan to make necessary calls canceling hotel reservations. Soviets rigidly board planes by row from front to back. The second stairway cannot begin until the first finishes because “The rules forbid it!” GUM—the large Moscow department store—operated similarly. Shoppers stood in long lines to pick from the limited goods available and then queued up a second time to pay. Our Moscow flight to London confirmed doubts about Aeroflot. Frost condensed on cabin windows. The pilot abruptly corrected his London approach due at another plane in our air space. The rough landing is the worst in my memory. Still, we did not die. We went by subway to Victoria Station where we later boarded the evening Paris train. The May Seminar Office had not told us about a changed Saturday departure time, creating considerable confusion and irritation. Jo and I made our way to see the Neo-Romanesque Sacré Coeur Basilica at Montmartre, which my college French professor had correctly called a “white elephant” despite its impressive mosaic of Christ.

Student travel journals disappointed me. Even the most academically talented did not tie pre-seminar learning with trip experiences despite explicit directions and extensive group discussion. Ability to theorize is an essential liberal arts skill. Strengthening it via integration with experiential learning is desirable but apparently not easily attained. Theory seems to have been lost rather than enriched by practical experience. To be sure, students developed confidence by coping with unfamiliar circumstances. Most were observant, willing to converse with people they met, and quite animated in talking about these encounters without relating them to any kind of conceptual framework. Attending concerts and plays may have stimulated an interest in high culture for some. Observing new institutions and customs may have aroused cross-cultural awareness in others. Some reflected about alternative worldviews and practices; others defended capitalism and celebrated United States material abundance as proof of American superiority. Of course, none of us realized how close to collapse the USSR and its satellites actually were.

Our family in Greece.

In 1987 philosopher Gregg Muilenburg and I taught an ambitious pre-May Seminar course entitled Our Greek Inheritance for integration credit in history and philosophy. Although working extremely hard at preparing lectures. I could not overcome my limited ancient history knowledge or, while traveling, retain sufficient guidebook information for imaginatively recreating structures from piles of rubble. Yet I enjoyed the trip, learned a lot, and expressed willingness to go again. Gregg wisely ignored me and partnered with the better informed classicist Ed Schmoll. Jo, and our teen-age daughters accompanied us. Despite copious tears about leaving their friends, Kristen and Rachel were fine once the plane left Hector International. Graciously accepted by the group, they functioned well independently and often navigated European cities more skillfully than collegians. Their maturity helped them maximize the experience and more than justified our $7300 expense.

Polished stone floors and stairs at Hotel Hermes in Athens made it an echo chamber, magnifying every sound spirited collegians made. The Plaka neighborhood had narrow, cobblestone streets lined with shops and family run tavernas. These stayed open late at night as owners’ loudly solicited patrons from tourist crowds. The National Museum of Archeology’s world-class ancient Greek art collection has the golden funeral mask of Agamemnon from the Mycenaean tombs, “a prehistory Mona Lisa” that dates from 1500 BCE, and three ancient bronze statues: The Jockey of Artemision, God from the Sea, and Antikythera Youth.

The Acropolis, an ancient citadel and rocky outcrop that Pericles transformed into an impressive sanctuary in the 5th century BCE, rises above Athens. We walked up to it partly on the Sacred Way. The Parthenon, built between 447 and 431 BCE, is the finest example of Greek architecture. For almost a thousand years, it served as a temple dedicated to Athena, the city’s tutelary deity and goddess of wisdom and warriors, before being converted to Christian church and then Islamic mosque. Sculptural decoration on pediments and frieze circling the structure had pedagogical purpose, depicting an idealized Pan-Athenian Procession and an Athenian foundation myth, memory, and identity. A Turkish ammunition dump exploded by a Venetian shell partially destroyed the Parthenon in the 17th century. Pollution-caused damage kept us and other tourists from entering the existing structure. The nearby Athena Nike (“personification of victory”) Temple is a reconstructed Ionic architectural gem, which shows the elegance and charm of small shrines.

The Odeon of Herodes Atticus, built in 161 BCE on the Acropolis southern slope and reconstructed in the 1950s, is one of the best places in Athens for live theatre performances. The nearby Theatre of Dionysus, erected in 6th century BCE adjacent to temples of nature and the fertility god Dionysus, hosted dramatic contests, including plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes in the 5th century BCE for the annual spring festival of Dionysus. Ancient Athenian economic, political, and spiritual life centered in the Greek and Roman agoras located north of the Acropolis. Consulting Blue Guide Greece, we located foundations of the prison where Socrates was held and executed. The reconstructed Stoa of Attalos, built 150-138 BCE today houses the Ancient Agora Museum, displaying ballots for banishment, a Roman child’s commode, and statues of Hermes, divine emissary and trickster.

During a six-day Peloponnesian bus tour, we marveled at the gorgeous Aegean Sea and mountain scenery. We stopped at Eleusis, birthplace of Aeschylus and site of the Eleusinian mysteries, a cult honored from 600 BCE until 450 CE. Corinth, an Athenian commercial rival on the isthmus linking the mainland to the Peloponnese famous for vice, is known to Christians from the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters. The Temple of Apollo, one of the oldest in Greece, is the most notable remaining monument. Epidaurus, reputed to be the birthplace of Apollo’s son Asclepius, became a celebrated healing center. Its theatre, seating 14,000 and renown for perfect acoustics, still stages live performances. Mycenae, sited on an acropolis commanding routes from the coastal plain north to the isthmus, has the Lion Gate, the only known monumental Bronze Age Greek sculpture. The Treasury of Atreus in a Beehive tomb outside the walls may be Agamemnon’s burial place. Homer claimed Cyclopes must have built the walls of nearby Tiryns since only giants could have lifted such huge stones. Mycenaean civilization peaked about 1350 BCE. Olympia’s well-shaded sanctuary hosted games every 4th year from the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE. Architectural additions continued until earthquakes, floods, and Gothic raids beginning in the 5th century CE damaged the great Temple of Zeus, shrines, priests’ residences, treasuries, Stoa, hostels, baths, stadium, and gymnasium.

We ferried across the Gulf of Corinth and drove along its beautiful north coast to Delphi, seat of the famous oracle. The picturesque town sits on the southwest slope of Mt. Parnassus. A full moon lighted our view of the coastal plain as we ate at an outdoor restaurant. Greek food, always good and cheap, often comes with scenery attached. The oracle made Delphi rich. The dramatic and athletic festivals honoring Apollo rivaled those held elsewhere. The Sacred Way winds upward past the Stoa and reconstructed Athenian Treasury to the Temple of Apollo, theatre, and the stadium.

Knossos Palace, Crete.

We traveled overnight by ferry from Piraeus to Heraklion, Crete. Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations shared an early form of Greek language, colorful fresco art, and elaborate palace complexes at Knossos and Phaistos, built between 2000 and 1400 BCE. Not fortresses like Mycenae, these were commercial, manufacturing, civic, and religious centers, storing goods for trade and housing shrines for worshiping the Mother Goddess closely linked with snakes. At Knossos, the Throne Room may have seated a priest-king, or his queen. Corridors connected 1300 rooms, sometimes placed in five-story sections. Huge clay pots held olive oil, beans, grain, and dried fish for processing by mills and presses. Aqueducts brought fresh water from outside springs and drains carried away wastewater and runoff. Pale red walls and pavements, dark red Minoan columns (built from inverted cypress trunks), and fresco panel murals, depicting people, mythological creatures, marine life, animals, and vegetation gave the palace color. Notable among the Minoan artifacts at the Heraklion Archeological Museum are the bull leaper (1500 BCE), an ivory figure from the palace of Knossos; the Phaistos Disc (1600 BCE) made by pressing 242 symbols in a spiral pattern on both sides; and the Snake Goddess, a priestess performing a ritual with two raised snakes. Snakes shedding skin suggested renewal of life.

At Rome, we stayed at the Hotel Columbus, a 15th century building conveniently near St. Peter’s Basilica where we witnessed an evening candle lit mass in which worshippers sang “Ave Maria” while disabled worshippers processed around the square. The Vatican Museum has many Classical and Renaissance masterpieces. Laocoön and His Sons (42-20 BCE) is a marble copy of a bronze original described by the Roman poet Virgil in The Aeneid. Its huge scale and the emotionalism of giant serpents killing the Trojan priest and his offspring influenced Michelangelo’s sculpture. Raphael’s famous fresco The School of Athens (1511) depicts ancient philosophers gathered around Plato and Aristotle. It splendidly illustrates classically inspired Renaissance art by synthesizing worldly Greek and spiritual Christian ideas.

Emperor Hadrian completed the Pantheon in 126 CE; it became a 7th century Christian church. Later classical revival architects often copied its circular domed cella and conventional temple portico of pediment and sixteen Corinthian columns. The world’s biggest unreinforced cement dome interior symbolizes the firmament. An oculus at its apex and entrance are the only natural light sources. The Coliseum (80 CE) derived its name from a nearby colossal statue of Nero that lasted into the Middle Ages with substituted heads of successive Emperors. Nearly 80,000 spectators may have witnessed battling gladiators, executions, mock sea battles, animal hunts, and Classical drama. For centuries daily life centered on the nearby Roman Forum where worship, commerce, speeches, elections, legislation, and triumphal processions occurred. The site, crowded and layered with ruins of the Republican and Imperial millennia, is less easily grasped than the Coliseum. The austere Senate House (Curia Julia), begun by Julius Caesar in 44 BCE and finished by his nephew Octavian in 29 BCE featured the altar of Victory and a strikingly decorated floor. The building survived after being converted into a basilica in the 7th century. The decorated Arch of Septimius Severus (203 CE) stands along the Sacred Way and commemorated Roman victories over the Parthians. A six-horse gilded bronze chariot driven by Septimius Severus, flanked by his two sons on horseback, originally stood at the top.

The Villa Borghese has several life-sized classically themed statues by Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, an early 17th master at portraying emotions in marble. Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius Fleeing Troy shows the legendary founder of Rome carrying his father with his son following. A small pedestal holds and enhances the spiraling movement of the three figures. Muscles, tendons, and veins bulge while the old man’s skin sags. The Rape of Persephone depicts Pluto abducting the maiden. Tears run down her cheek while she struggles to escape his fingers pressing into her flesh. Her futility bemuses him. Apollo and Daphne reveals the nymph being changed into a laurel tree at the lovesick god’s touch. David depicts him gathering strength while aiming his slingshot at the giant. His intense gaze compels viewers to imagine Goliath.

Renewed interest in Greek language, literature, and civilization funded by riches from finance and trade made Florence an Italian Renaissance center and one of the world’s most beautiful cities. The Medici Library has manuscripts by Homer, Aristotle, Pausinius, Livy, Caesar, and others. The tombs of Renaissance figures Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Galileo can be viewed at Basilica di Santa Croce. It is also notable for several chapels decorated by the 14th century painter Giotto and his pupils. Other churches reveal similar Christian humanist influences. Il Duomo, a Gothic cathedral begun in the 13th century, is known for the world’s largest masonry dome engineered by Filippo Brunelleschi, which dominates the city skyline. The Pantheon offered solutions to construction problems this Renaissance project posed. The church has forty-four stained glass windows designed by Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and other Renaissance artists. Museum collections of Florentine art show the development of humanist themes in traditional religious scenes like Adoration of the Magi and Annunciation of Mary. Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli based The Birth of Venus on Homer’s account of Venus riding sea foam and a seashell to the island of Cythera after her birth. He modeled Venus on pagan sculpture, painting her nude with an idealized face and skin like marble.

Michelangelo’s David is the first Renaissance large-scale nude statue made since antiquity. It has a muscular physique and visible veins in his arms and hands as David clutches the stone and slingshot. He carved it double life size to be placed high on Il Duomo. It became a civic symbol of the people’s fight against Medici tyranny, and today stands inside the Galleria dell’ Accademia Museum. In contrast, Donatello created a life-size bronze David as a semi-effeminate boy dressed in boots and hat with a sword and Goliath’s head as the Bible describes.

Parisian museums highlighted additional elements of the Greek heritage. At the Louvre, Jacque-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii (1784) proclaimed the neo-classical style in its message of patriotic sacrifice. The scene, taken from the Roman historian Livy, shows a father urging his sons to fight for their city’s honor despite their sister’s lamentation. David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) similarly used classical themes in appealing for reunification after prolonged revolutionary bloodshed. The Winged Victory of Samothrace (200-190 BCE), a masterful Hellenistic sculpture honoring a sea battle, portrays the goddess’s flowing robes as though she were alighting on a ship’s prow. At The Musée Rodin, Auguste Rodin’s bronze The Thinker (1904) displayed his interest in classical themes and Michelangelo.

The Elgin Marbles at the British Museum included more than half of the remaining Parthenon sculptural decorations: twenty-one statues from the east and west pediments, fifteen of ninety-two metope panels depicting battles between the Lapiths and Centaurs, and 247 feet of the interior Parthenon Frieze. The deep relief of metope figures shows how costly the temple was. “The Room of Augustus” traced how his image changed from Hellenistic King to democratic Greek leader more in accord with Rome’s Republican tradition. Still, portrait busts and coin images demonstrated his imperial intentions. A guided tour of Cambridge revealed a medieval university that long kept Greek and Latin language, literature, history, and philosophy at its curricular core until the late 19th century. It marked a fitting conclusion for a travel seminar studying classical heritage.

I signed on as a chaperone, traveling companion, and keeper of accounts for trips in 1996, 1998, and 2000 with departmental colleague Vince Arnold’s well-run seminar, Twin Faces of Fascism. “Fun with Fascism,” as I waggishly called it, started in Rome, touring the Coliseum and Forum, EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma), and Foro Mussolini. Mussolini formed Fascism from ancient Roman models: Sport strengthened Italians to wage war and restore a Mediterranean Empire; bread and games diverted the masses; and architecture symbolized imperial power. For example, Mussolini built EUR on a thousand-acre site between the city’s southern edge and Ostia’s ancient port for the 1942 World’s Fair. It linked Fascism’s promising future symbolically with the Empire’s brilliant past. After Mussolini’s fall from power, postwar Italian governments repaired wartime damage and completed EUR construction. It is a thriving suburb today with many government offices, museums, shops, and residences.

Constructed between 1928 and 1938, the Foro Mussolini sports complex had the purpose of creating the new Fascist man and attracting the 1940 Olympics. The Stadium of the Marbles has Carrara marble steps lined by fifty-nine (of sixty original) classical statues of athletes performing various sports. Decorative mosaics modeled on those at Ostia state an important Fascist slogan: “It is necessary to win but it is more necessary to engage in combat.” The renamed Foro Italico complex annually hosts the Italian Tennis Open. When the 1960 Summer Olympics were held here, the Italian National Committee used the former Fascist Male Academy of Physical Education building for offices and replaced the Fascist square columns and eagles in the original Olympic Stadium. It also erected several large granite blocks depicting how a Republic had succeeded Mussolini’s regime.

The once wealthy city-states of Florence and Venice promoted the rebirth of classical learning. Mussolini promised Fascism would restore Renaissance glories. If Florentine humanist Niccolò Machiavelli’s realpolitik primer The Prince (1509) influenced Mussolini, an amoral opportunist like him should not have overreached in waging wars of conquest. Although Jews had lived in Italy since Roman times, Venice did not permit them to settle until 1516 in order to exploit their economic skills. Set apart in the world’s oldest ghetto linked to the rest of the city by two bridges, open only during daytime, Jews prospered and became Italian citizens with national unification in 1861. By the 20th century, they numbered 40,000 and were so well integrated that some became Fascists. Even though anti-Semitism permeated church, society, and rightwing parties, Mussolini did not enact anti-Jewish laws until 1938. Death camp deportations began in 1943 when the Fascist government collapsed and Germans took control. At times aided by Italian gentiles, many Jews hid, faked papers, or resisted.

In 1908 young Adolf Hitler came to Vienna, the Hapsburg Empire’s largest, most multi ethnic city, to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, which twice-rejected him. Hitler viewed the capital as too international, wicked, and Jewish. He often strolled along the Ringstrasse and admired the neo-classical Parliament building where he attended debates and learned to hate democracy. Standing in the cheap seats at the Vienna State Opera nourished his passion for Wagner. A watercolor of this Neo-Renaissance structure was one of many he sold on the street to support himself. Anschluss in 1938 enabled Hitler’s triumphant return. His parade progressed along the Ringstrasse and stopped at the Hofburg Palace, the former imperial winter residence. From a terrace, he addressed 200,000 jubilant Viennese jammed into Heldenplatz (Heroes Square). What he called reunification other alarmed European leaders labeled forcible annexation. By ending Austrian independence, Hitler took another step to reunite all ethnic Germans and to reclaim all German territories lost after the First World War. Austrian Jews did not hail Hitler’s speech. Kristallnacht soon hit Vienna hard, killing 700 Jews and destroying ninety-three places of worship.

The large Mauthausen complex near Linz in upper Austria had 85,000 inmates in subcamps that housed slave labor for quarries, and mines as well as munitions, arms, and fighter aircraft factories. The so-called “bone-mill” held criminals, POWs, and political prisoners of many nationalities—Jews, Poles, Russians, Germans, and Spaniards. Set up as a labor camp to mine granite from a nearby quarry for Hitler’s architectural plans, the work regimen and brutal guards made a death camp for more than 135,000 victims. Prisoners were forced to carry stones weighing fifty kilos up “the stairway of death.” They were starved, worked to death, marched off the cliff into the quarry, shot, and gassed. Our visit ended with all joining hands as a gesture of human solidarity and placing small stones on tombstones in remembrance.

Adolf Hitler began vacationing at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps of southeastern Germany in the 1920s. He eventually bought a home, which he remodeled and renamed the Berghof (Mountain Court). The house had a large terrace and picture window, giving him a panoramic view of snow-capped mountains in his native Austria. Nazi leaders built mountain homes nearby. A landing strip and an adjoining barracks housing a large SS contingent were also constructed. Hundreds of British RAF Lancaster heavy bombers attacked Obersalzberg and the Berghof in April 1945. Bavarian authorities later removed all traces of the Nazi complex.

Martin Bormann built the Kehlsteinhaus (“Eagle’s Nest”) on a mountain peak as a present for Hitler’s 50th birthday. A 125-meter tunnel leads from the car park to an ornate elevator surfaced with polished brass, Venetian mirrors, and green leather. It ascends the final 124 meters to the top. A red Italian marble fireplace presented by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini dominates the structure’s main reception room. Nazi party members used it exclusively for social and government meetings. Hitler rarely visited because he disliked heights, thin mountain air, and likely bad weather. Today it is a popular tourist attraction with a restaurant, outdoor beer garden, and spectacular views. We stayed at the nearby Dr. Hugo Beck Haus. Despite Spartan accommodations, a German woman with no English fixed us bountiful meals on a wood-fired stove. Students shopped in Berchtesgaden, traveling there and back via a mountain lift. Jo and I hiked the graveled trails and enjoyed the splendid scenery.

The Eagle’s Nest, Bavarian Alps.

At Munich, Bavaria’s beautiful capital, Jo and I dined with former Concordia student and German native Werner Bomm who recounted the difficulties of reuniting West and East Germany. We also visited the Haus du Kunst, built by the Nazis in the Classical style to showcase the best German art in contrast to modernist works concurrently displayed in the Degenerate Art Exhibition; and had a meal at the Hofbräuhaus where Hitler often spoke to the Nazi Party in the third floor Festival Hall. Our group had a tour and talk about “The White Rose Movement” at the Ludwig Maximilian University. A monument memorializes the professor and students who resisted Nazism with an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign between June 1942 and February 1943. In showing how some Germans resisted Nazism the White Rose had more effect internationally than nationally, novelist Thomas Mann maintained.

A tour bus took us on the Romantic Road to Neuschwanstein—“the fairy tale castle” of “Mad” King Ludwig II. The concert hall had perfect acoustics and Hitler, who shared the king’s love for Wagner, visited there often. During World War II, it served as a depot for art Nazis plundered from occupied countries. The Reichsbank also deposited much of its gold reserve here. It was lost during the war’s last months and never recovered. Benito Mussolini’s successful 1922 March on Rome inspired Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, which failed. Bavarian authorities arrested Hitler two days after the coup and tried him for treason. A sympathetic judge did not deport him to Austria as required by law and imposed a surprisingly light five-year sentence. He served only nine months. The widely publicized trial gave him national and world attention. He wrote Mein Kampf in Landsberg Prison. Upon release, Hitler dropped revolution and instead emphasized mass propaganda aimed at winning elections to gain power.

After teaching Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will for many years, visiting the Nuremberg Nazi Party rally site excited me. The city had been a medieval trade center and the unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Peripatic emperors (including Hitler’s hero Frederick Barbarossa) temporarily governed here. In addition to Nuremberg’s historical significance, Hitler picked it for Nazi rallies because it was centrally located, had land available for development, and was the hometown of Jules Streicher, Nazi publisher of Der Stürmer. He commissioned Albert Speer to prepare architectural plans for the eleven square kilometer rally site located southeast of Nuremberg. Party congresses met here in 1927 and 1929 until a socialist city government excluded them. After Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis gathered annually between 1933 and 1938. The meetings and architecture expressed Nazi ideals of strengthening community and subordinating individuals. Hitler convened the Reichstag here to pass the 1935 anti-Semitic Law, revoking German citizenship for Jews and other non-Aryans.

Rallies attracted 150,000 people to rites staged at the Luitpoldarena, a large deployment area created by Hitler from an existing park. One consecrated new SA- and SS-unit flags by touching the Blood flag carried by during the 1923 Putsch. The party appropriated the existing Hall of Honor, an arcaded structure with a stone terrace and two rows of fire bowl pedestals, to commemorate German war dead and Nazi martyrs. The ritual ended with Hitler, accompanied by SS and SA leaders, marching through the arena from the main grandstand to give the Nazi salute at the Honor Hall terrace. The unfinished Congress Hall with a granite façade inspired by the Roman Coliseum, would have seated 50,000 and had a self-supporting roof. The Great Road, paved with black and gray granite and intended as the site’s central axis, pointed toward the Kaiserhof, connecting past medieval glory with the Nazi present. East of the road, Zeppelinfeld had a large grandstand and a small stand, which Speer based on the Pergamon Alter. Several mass formation scenes for Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will were filmed here. These structures are protected as significant examples of Nazi architecture. Since 2001, the Nazi Rally Ground Museum and Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra are located in the completed Congress Hall.

The Nuremberg Palace of Justice survived allied strategic bombing that destroyed about 90 percent of the medieval city center. Our group visited Room 600 where twenty-four prominent Nazis were prosecuted for the Holocaust and other war crimes. Sentences varied: death (12), prison (6), and acquittal (4). Just four expressed repentance. Robert Ley committed suicide before his trial as did Hermann Goering before his execution. Hitler and others killed themselves to avoid punishment. Several escaped to South America.

Poorly repaired buildings and few modern shops evidenced communist effects on East Germany when we visited the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. The SS established one of the first and largest camps in Germany at Goethe’s favorite mountain haunt in 1937. Jedem das Seine (“to each his own”) on the gate could only be read from the inside and justified Aryans’ right to destroy inferior humans. Buchenwald held nearly 240,000 people, including Jews, Roma, Poles and other Slavs, mentally ill and physically disabled, homosexuals, criminals, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and POWs. Forced labor in armaments factories, medical experiments, starvations, disease, and arbitrary murder killed an estimated 56,000.

At the Wannsee Villa on a beautiful lake in a southern Berlin suburb, a property acquired from previous Jewish owners, Reinhard Heydrich arranged a January 1942 meeting that implemented the final solution of the Jewish question by the SS exterminating Jews deported to Poland from countries throughout German-occupied Europe. Goering authorized Heydrich in writing to prepare a plan six months earlier when mass killing of Soviet Jews had already begun. Attendees included officials from the SS, Foreign Office and ministries of justice, interior, and state, who arranged the smooth flow of deportations Nazis desired.

At the New Synagogue, seating 3000 people and built in 1866, we learned that Jews settled in Germany during the 12th century; were expelled in the early 16th century; came back after the Thirty Years War; and were restricted until Prussia (1851) and the new German Empire (1871) granted them citizenship. During Kristallnacht (1938), a Nazi mob desecrated Torah scrolls and set furnishings on fire. The blaze was extinguished and the repaired building served as a synagogue until 1940 when the Nazis seized it for the storage of uniforms. Allied bombs severely damaged the structure before it burned completely during the Battle of Berlin. After East Germany fell in 1989, the restored façade, dome, and rooms housed a Jewish Center. A small congregation formed in 1995. The Weissensee Cemetery revealed many World War I veteran monuments indicating Jewish pride in the German Fatherland Other stones name the concentration camps and honor Jewish death camp victims, as well as those who committed suicide to avoid deportation. A Holocaust memorial marker stands at the entrance.

The Brandenburg Gate, commissioned by Prussian King Frederick William II to represent peace in the late 18th century and redesigned as a triumphal arch after Napoleon’s defeat, giving the goddess of victory a wreath of oak leaves and adding the Prussian eagle and Iron Cross to her lance. Nazis often used the monument for propaganda. When von Hindenburg made Hitler chancellor in 1933, for example, thousands of SS and brown shirted storm troopers passed under the gate in a torchlight procession to the presidential palace where they cheered Hitler and the Nazi party. An indoor and outdoor history museum and memorial—the Topography of Terror—is located nearby beside a preserved section of the Berlin Wall on the site of SS and Gestapo headquarters.

Subsequent seminars took us to several new sites. At Venice, I enjoyed the Doge’s Palace and its opulent apartments and chambers for the Council of Ten, Great Council, Senate, and law courts. The Bridge of Sighs linked the Palace to the New Prisons. It is named for the sound prisoners made as they last glimpsed freedom on their way from sentencing to lockup. Students liked feeding corn to pigeons on the square as well as the boat tour of the Grand Canal and St. George’s Island where Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed. In Vienna, the Koncerthaus featured Mozart one year and Strauss/Mahler the next. At the Austrian Resistance Museum, an American Jewish speaker described his prewar Austrian boyhood and boldly claimed there had been no resistance because Austrians welcomed Nazism with open arms. His talk and the exhibition nicely laid out a key debate in Nazi historiography.

Beautiful, historic, and relatively inexpensive Prague quickly became a student favorite. Attractions included art and music as well as the Jewish Quarter, Old Town Square with its monument to Protestant reformer Jan Hus and medieval astronomical clock mounted on the Old Town Hall, Charles Bridge, and Castle. After World War I, the former Hapsburg imperial city became capital of newly independent Czechoslovakia. The state died when the German Army entered Prague on 15 March 1939 and Hitler, speaking from the castle, proclaimed Bohemia and Moravia a German protectorate. After Czechs assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler ordered bloody reprisals, deporting and killing an estimated 75,000 Jews. The Old New Synagogue, Europe’s oldest active synagogue, was completed in 1270 as one of the city’s first Gothic buildings. The Nazis expected a Jewish Museum and one of the world’s largest Judaica collections would preserve the history of a vanished race after the war. The Old Jewish Cemetery, the biggest in Europe and a notable historical monument, stands several meters higher than adjoining streets. Respect for the dead and insufficient space, led to adding twelve layers of new soil for burials. Gravestones densely cover the surface.

Dachau opened in March 1933 as Germany’s first center for detaining 5000 political prisoners, which Heinrich Himmler claimed would restore order. It soon embraced forced labor and eventually imprisonment of Jews, criminals, and foreign nationals from occupied countries. The system grew into one hundred labor subcamps throughout southern Germany and Austria. Dachau’s main gate carried the cynical slogan: Arbeit macht frei (“work shall make you free”). Detainees arrived at Dachau until the end of the war. Himmler declared, “No prisoners shall be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive.” The Nazis built Birkenau in October 1941 to ease congestion at Auschwitz. After the SS implemented the final solution, it became an extermination camp when its first gas chamber started operation in March 1942. By 1943, four crematoria increased capacity and eventually killed 1.3 million victims. The Big Three of Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin and Clement Attlee held the 1945 Potsdam Conference at Cecilienhof to set the course for Cold War history because no suitable undamaged buildings could be found in war-torn Berlin.

Amsterdam offered a new venue for ending our continental tour. Lines at the Anne Frank House were long. It is Netherlands’ third-most visited museum and puts a human face on the holocaust. During World War II, Anne Frank hid with her family and four other people in the Secret Annex of this 17th century canal house for two years and one month until anonymously betrayed to the authorities. Only Otto Frank survived the death camps. He published Anne’s secret diary in 1947, which I purchased to commemorate my visit.

Global Studies in Southern Africa

May Seminars celebrated their 25th anniversary in 1992. Ninety-three professors and nearly 4000 students had taken part, and about one-third of graduating classes had studied overseas. Newly named World Study Program Director political scientist Peter Hovde expanded overseas travel globally with year-long programs on the Mediterranean island of Malta and the Indian subcontinent as well as May Seminars to South America, South Africa, China, India, New Zealand, and Australia. The Caesarea Maritima archeological expedition, foreign language practicums, and exchanges with Hong Kong, Norway, and Tanzania offered additional summertime study opportunities. Hovde and Associate Dean Virginia Coombs proposed a three-year global studies development project to the Consortium for Advancement of Private Higher Education. A Knight Foundation matching grant awarded $404,000 to design a cross-cultural global studies requirement, elevate international awareness campus wide, and send four faculty teams of twelve on three-weeks trips to underdeveloped countries. Africanist David Sandgren directed the latter program in which groups journeyed to Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador (1992); Southern Africa and India (1993); and South America which required one year of Spanish language study (1994). Participants were expected to take responsibility for creating a more just and sustainable world and sharing trip information with the college community, local service clubs, and area churches. Incorporating global perspectives into their teaching would elevate consciousness among all students. Global travel participants certainly had their cultural awareness heightened and enriched.

The South Africa – Namibia Seminar traveled almost daily by planes, trains, or automobiles. It was the most exhausting three weeks of my life. A privileged first world White minority exploited a third world Black majority within each country. Mavis Anderson from the Augsburg University Center for Global Education and Experience conducted our tour, putting us in direct contact with as many groups and viewpoints as possible. Local Johannesburg (Jo-burg) guides Sandy and Tom as well as their African contacts were trusted to make wise decisions about our safety despite heightened social tensions from a Communist leader’s assassination. We rode in two VW vans via a four-lane highway through an urban area covered with yellowed tailings from mining gold and encountered a haze of pungent coal smoke in Soweto at suppertime. Trash littered the ground. People walked or waited for buses. Yards had pens for goats and chickens. An occasional cow wandered through the streets. A high fence topped by razor wire surrounded the imposing brick Ipelegeng Anglican Community Centre. Guards manned the gate. As our expected meal was not available, Tom brought food from Chicken Licken, the “largest non-American-owned fried chicken franchise in the world.” The cook supplemented the meat with rubbery grits and leftover cooked vegetables in a curry sauce. Our Spartan rooms had towels and a hanger, blanket, and mattress on a wood box frame. Fatigue ensured me a sound six-hour sleep.

Morris Isaacson School, Soweto, South Africa.

The next day was beautiful as most days would be—clear blue sky and crisp fall-like temperatures between 50 and 70 degrees. The guides wisely scheduled our first stop at Morris Isaacson High School, a perfect place to settle nervous American academics. The 1976 Soweto uprising began at this building, which now had grassless grounds, firebombed library, and broken windows. The government expended three times more per White pupil than Black ones. Yet Morris Isaacson had high graduation and university acceptance rates. We next visited Baragwanath Hospital, a large research and acute care facility for Blacks; a small cooperative secretarial school; and the Soweto Methodist Community Centre. Residents shared their hopes for a democratic non-racial South Africa and expressed frustration with slow progress. Government complicity in widespread rightwing violence provokes retaliation, disrupting Black education. Youth leader Steve Mokwena, an articulate University of Witwatersrand honor graduate, provided an excellent conceptual framework for processing information. It was hard for a state with a history of intolerance and authoritarian repression to restructure a society based on Apartheid. A new multiracial government must redistribute goods from a mismanaged, inequitable economy, and reform education to rescue the lost generation of alienated, illiterate, unskilled Black youth. The new government may be unable to provide basic services fast enough for the needy Black majority. The necessary 3 percent annual growth rate to fund redistribution likely cannot be attained when population is growing too fast and the mineral-based-export economy is expanding too slowly.

The Republic of Venda near the Zimbabwe border, one of several Black homelands White nationalists created in the name of racial equality, in reality kept Blacks separated in tribal groups and perpetuated White minority rule. The ten-year-old University of Venda typified Apartheid paradoxes. A beautiful library had less than 10,000 books. Modern computer, video, and language laboratories had not been assembled. Classrooms lacked chairs. Poorly qualified faculty included Afrikaners uninterested in teaching Blacks, who dropped out in large numbers or could not find jobs if they did graduate.

Worship with an African Lutheran congregation established by German missionaries highlighted our visit. It lasted more than two hours. Women sat on one side and men on the other. As honored guests we occupied the front pews unseparated by gender. A female voice singing spontaneously started the service. Youth danced and sang three songs. The congregation prayed that a date for the 1994 national multiracial election date would soon be set. The sermon, given in Venda and English, addressed many topics. The Reverend Ndaganeni Phaswana, ELCA Northern Diocese Executive Secretary who accompanied us, translated both languages with ease. The previous evening, he had shared a chilling account of being tortured while held five months in isolation on charges of bombing a police station until a court freed him.

A White Jo-burg Lutheran congregation spoke about their fears of an unknown future. They might lose homes and jobs or suffer violent crimes at the hands of alienated Blacks. Stalled negotiations and extremist acts elevated fears. All claimed to have provided jobs and not taken anything from anyone, which were common White self-justifications. They had three choices: An ultra-right minority White state; an ANC non-racialist national state; or the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) populist-federalist alternative. According to a Center of Policy Studies speaker, power sharing was the only reasonable choice. Whites and Blacks must negotiate redistribution of goods; everyone had a stake in maintaining the economy. Even if ANC attained multiracial national elections and government, social class would remain as important as race. White flight and equal rights legislation would create many opportunities for well-educated Blacks who might lose touch with the Black masses, a trend already evidenced among some ANC bureaucrats.

Peter Kerchhoff told us about the Pietermaritzburg Agency for Christian Social Awareness (PACSA), and its difficulties in promoting change. Police harassment makes Whites and Blacks afraid. Housing is in short supply so several families often occupy single dwellings. Even well-intentioned White city councils often act without consulting those in need. For example, an empty residential site had water and rows of concrete outhouses. Yet it had not been electrified even though a power line passed nearby. New residents had not bought unacceptably small 25’ x 25’ lots for building homes on them. At South Africa’s principal port city, Patrick Vorster of the Diakonia Ecumenical Social Ministry Organization showed how Durban had been segregated into White, Asian, Colored, and Black areas separated by wasteland. While Whites occupied the city center, Distantly situated Black townships were served by only one or two roads easily closed during racial unrest. Some rejected White-appointed officials and created their own governing structures. Even squatter settlements at times organized communities, a hopeful confirmation of the ANC empowering people ideology. Yet unemployment and school non-attendance rates at 80 and 50 percent respectively complicated community building.

Namibia, a large, arid, lightly populated third world nation, had first world components in the capital Windhoek. Neatly laid out, it numbered just 150,000 people and retained traces of a German colonial past: street names, war memorials, and a large Lutheran church. Katutura, a Black township, evidenced the Apartheid legacy of racial exclusion: inadequate housing and education, joblessness, violence, and crime. As residents told us: “Even dogs are better treated than Black workers.” The Women’s Center provided day care and literacy classes for the many single mothers. Women eased the housing shortage, forming cooperatives, making bricks, and selling them to others. The country exuded prickly pride in its recent independence from South Africa. Namibians distrusted foreigners, fearing continued political and economic domination.

Within its limited fiscal resources, the new government had built houses, paved roads, offered manufacturing incentives, and bought unused land from large owners for distribution to rural workers. Seeking 300,000 new jobs, Namibia required training programs and employment opportunities for native workers from foreign companies seeking to invest. It also looked to expand exports to other African nations and Europe. A White Chamber of Commerce representative did not mind the generations it would take to overcome the traditional subsistence economy. A strong private and public economic partnership had been created and his worst fears about socialism had not been realized. Minimal redistribution demands meant that independence had worked much better than he had expected.

Namibia needed an improved educational system to better instruct pupils in English (its official language), attract investors, and expand opportunities. Isolated rural schools struggled to find even poorly trained teachers. Currently, 40,000 school age children did not attend. Most completing elementary grades did not continue. The Katutura People’s Primary School showed what local initiative and international funds could do. Namibia’s first English-speaking school had forty-two teachers and 1400 students. Administrators and professors explained how they were building the University of Namibia, a national higher education institution, on the campus of a former White teacher’s college. They needed several million dollars to add buildings, books and other educational resources; recruit an educationally qualified student body and faculty, develop a curriculum, and provide education, research, and extension services to all Namibians.

Multinational corporations controlled mining on which the colonial economy had been built. Historically, they did not have the county’s best interests at heart. Namibian, French, German, and Iranian interests now owned the Rössing open pit uranium mine, which employed 1300 people. White managers expressed pride in the company safety record as well as the school and hospital in their company town, Arandis. When the mostly Black work force complained about a history of poor housing, low pay, and harsh discipline, Rössing gave Arandis self-governing status. The Namibian and Spanish owned Tunacor Fisheries processed white fish, canned sardines, and made fish-meal. During just four months of operation, it employed 1500 mostly northern migrants. The government planned to expand international trade and exploit the potential of fishing by increasing the number of such plants at Walvis Bay, which South Africa would soon transfer to Namibia.

The Cape of Good Hope.

Multiracial Cape Town, the seat of the South African legislature and Western Cape Province capital, is the destination for many immigrants and expatriates. On Sunday, we attended an Anglican Eucharistic mass followed by coffee in the crypt, lunched on the “Sunday roast” at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, and drove south to the spectacularly scenic Cape of Good Hope where the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet.

After the National Party won the 1948 national elections on an Apartheid platform, it enacted the Group Areas Act to segregate races throughout South Africa. It took twenty-one years to remove 50,000 people from the vibrant District Six multicultural community in Cape Town. People’s trades did not transplant to the new race-based townships. When Blacks did not disappear into the homelands as Afrikaners had expected, housing shortages developed. In the cramped living room of a small four-room township house, we learned about Democratic Party (DP) organization and the politically neutral Hanover Park Civic Association. Fearing an ANC police state and Black Nationalism, the DP carried the civil rights banner for all races.

On our last day, we toured parliament and heard from MP Jan van Eck, a former liberal journal editor. Elected as a Progressive Federal Party member, he joined the DP and now aligned with the ANC, a liberation movement of the “have nots.” If the White National Party and the Black ANC can agree about political process then a peaceful solution is at hand. Black Africans want to be recognized as a majority and have basic needs addressed. Nelson Mandela and Frederick DeKlerk are committed to finding a political solution. Van Eck’s optimism stood in marked contrast to the pessimism we had heard from many Blacks and Whites. It was an excellent send-off for our return to the United States.

To fulfill the Knight Global Studies Grant expectations stipulated for me, I assigned George Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History in my United States in Perspective history courses. During discussion of Fredrickson’s book, I showed slides and talked about my trip experiences. For outreach, I wrote articles for the First Congregational UCC Moorhead Monthly Newsletter and gave a talk to a gathering of about thirty interested church members. The trip revealed how Apartheid paralleled Nazi anti-Semitism. The AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Movement)—a neo-Nazi separatist political and paramilitary organization—operated under the slogan” God, Volk, and Fatherland.” The Voortreker Monument near Pretoria embodied a similar White nationalist ideology in commemorating Dutch settlers who trekked from Cape Providence to the Transvaal and Orange Free State in the mid-19th century. The sun’s rays annually striking the Cenotaph inside the monument on December 16 symbolizes God’s blessing on the White nationalist project of bringing “the flame of civilization” to savage African peoples. Happily, the Nobel Prize winning work of Nelson Mandela and Frederick DeKlerk in negotiating a peaceful end of Apartheid stood in stark contrast to Nazi death camps and projected a beacon of hope for oppressed peoples everywhere. Educated South African Blacks assumed places in the privileged White first world society, enjoying the wealth a relatively stable mixed economy offered. Yet most ill-educated, impoverished Blacks did not benefit. Twenty-first century South Africa still faces high crime rates, ethnic tensions, great housing and educational disparities, and an AIDS pandemic.

Travel Gleanings

May Seminars seem originally patterned on the 18th century grand European tour for educating elder sons of the English aristocracy. Youths accompanied by prudent clergymen were expected to experience classical civilization, develop language facility, broaden their minds, acquire social polish, form personal contacts, and sow wild oats discreetly far from home. They were obliged to write long letters detailing their personal progress. Still, many failed to achieve expectations, suggesting tours were wasted on immature minds. May Seminars suffered similarly. Some students consumed too much alcohol and seldom acquired language facility. Few travel journals revealed mature reflection about what had been experienced. As Bertolt Brecht had Galileo pithily explain to an assistant in one of his plays: “Gawking is not seeing.”

Seminar shortcomings compelled Professor of Psychology Mark Covey to dismiss them as “the tour bus model of international education” in which groups experienced a country’s culture superficially and seldom engaged with people and their daily lives. Taking criticisms seriously, Concordia College attempted to improve international education and market itself “as global like no other.” Overseas programs expanded beyond May Seminars to include summer school, field studies, and research abroad; musical ensemble tours; global cooperative education and student teacher placement; and semester- and year-long continuous study at more than thirty locations. Exploration Seminars embedded in first or second semester classes took less expensive shorter trips during mid-semester breaks, which enhanced learning more for those who traveled than for those who did not. May Seminars focused on one or two locales, enabling participants to have home stays, do service learning, and connect more with the people and places. All traveling for credit now had an extended period upon returning to campus for conversing and assessing their experience. They could no longer evade demonstrating they had learned something. Provost Mark Krejci and Associate Dean of Global Learning Per Anderson aimed to expand travel to the poorer global south and have more than six hundred annually studying abroad within five years. A severe recession in 2008 and ever-higher costs dashed their hopes.

So, what did I learn from my tour bus travels visiting twelve European and three African nations? Conversations with Ethiopians and Kenyans, Poles and Russians, Greeks and Italians, Germans and Hollanders deepened my understanding of people and the course of world history. Whatever our cultural and language differences, similarities of urban life everywhere imparted shared awareness of the problems and prospects of modern global civilization. Greece, Crete, and Italy enhanced my knowledge about how classical civilization shaped the subsequent history of Western culture. Greek learning inspired the Italian Renaissance. Its brilliant art, architecture, and civic humanism rank among the best of Western creative achievements. On the other hand, Mussolini built Italian Fascism from ancient Roman models. War made nations great. Sport prepared fascist men and women for military tasks. Architecture symbolized Roman imperial power and genius. Hitler followed the path set by Mussolini, waging imperial wars of conquest and adopting classical architecture to symbolize German greatness and counteract degenerate Jew-spawned modernist art and other threats to the master race.

Travel enriched my life religiously while worshipping at Westminster Abby, Notre Dame Cathedral, and a Leningrad Orthodox church. Hearing globally renown symphony orchestras; attending theater, opera, and ballet performances; and visiting several world-class museums benefited me aesthetically. Africa teaching me about “the peoples without history” deepened my teaching of Latin America. Understanding intellectual history similarly expanded from studying how antiquity had influenced the West, and how secular culture and Christianity had interacted. The USSR prompted reflections about its convergence with the United States. Both countries shared systemic problems despite their Cold War ideological antagonisms: Centralized, planning bureaucracies; pollution and urban blight; inadequate housing, health care, and education; drugs, crime, and alcoholism. Marxism guided the industrialization of Poland and Russia. Ironically, Western materialism and Russian communist atheism at times similarly yielded a weakened Church as well as popular religious indifference and ignorance.

Yet while Soviet power dictated Poles accept communist rule, it could not eliminate Catholicism tied historically to Polish nationalism. Protestants standing with Catholics against Communism made Poland more open and pluralist than the USSR. Ancient Russian centers Zagorsk and Novgorod evidenced the importance of Orthodox religion to national culture and kept Stalin from destroying it. The Orthodox Church accommodated itself to harassment after the war because martyrdom it not a useful survival strategy. Meanwhile like Poles, Georgians and Armenians, openly practiced Christianity while Marxist secular religion celebrated Lenin as an icon and pointed the way to building a new heaven on earth.

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