14 July

The next day we woke early to catch a bus to Catherine’s palace. Had I written this the day after it happened, I might have told you for sure if it was Catherine I or II. But, for now, I’ll go with II. It’s another big amazing palace with gobs of gold and Versailles imitations right and left. This one even features the Amber Room. I had never heard of it, but that hadn’t kept it from getting apparently quite famous. Anyway, if you like palace type stuff, I recommend this one. Our guide was good, the garden was pretty, etc. Blah blah. See it or don’t, but me describing it is an injustice to everyone.

One point I will pick up on, however, is the evil German soldier. Apparently he is guilty of destroying much of Europe – Peterhof and Catherine’s palace among them. I have no beef with the story of the evil German soldier except that it always seems to stop there. Why did the soldiers tear up the amazing wood floors of the palace? Well, because they were Nazis. Period. Nazis do that sort of shit.

I have uncles who were evil German soldiers so forgive me if that answer seems a bit too easy. Did the soldiers realize they were destroying expensive and beautiful art? Were they ordered to? Were they freezing? Were they starving? I guess we don’t care. They were Nazi soldiers doing what Nazi soldiers do.

It’s a huge pity all that stuff was destroyed. And there is no doubt who is responsible. But the discourse is a bit odd. When we got to Kiel, the shore excursion director spoke about how so much of the medieval part of town had been destroyed by the RAF. It was a pity, but he couched it in terms of it being the German’s fault for building a fleet there. Had they not, of course, the Brits would not have been compelled to bomb it to smithereens.

In this Allied Good Guys and Axis Bad Guys story, however, the main points get lost. The plain fact is that war sucks. It demolishes history, art and culture, in addition to human lives. I care far less about the agent doing the demolishing. Generally those who are strong and want something from the weak, take it. This can mean theft, rape, murder, war and genocide. This is the human problem.

Moreover, when we talk about war between nations, we are not seeing the larger forces at work. Germany and Britain and Russia didn’t fight. The elite from each of those countries forced (at gunpoint or through brainwashing) the average man to fight and the average woman to clean up the mess. These are the people who miss their beautiful medieval town center. I’d say they’d miss their intricate palaces, but I doubt most Russians ever saw those from the inside anyway.

After we finished our tour of Catherine’s palace, we were treated to a lovely chicken supper. They sat our boatload of hundreds of Americans in a small dining room and began serving us. Unfortunately the excellent service and sumptuous food was entirely upstaged by the heat. It was noontime and the temperature outside was nearing 40. Inside we had a couple hundred bodies in a small room with windows nailed shut (presumably against the cold) and no air conditioning. Doing no more than moving their forks to their mouths, people were dripping with sweat. I don’t use that phrase lightly. Everyone at our table had splotches of sweat on their shirts and beads on their foreheads, which would occasionally run down their faces and onto the table or their laps. At some point you just had to laugh and stop worrying about it.