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Up the river at Komarno, the largest majority Hungarian city in Slovakia, a wary confidence prevails that the worst of the tensions between Hungarians and Slovaks have been laid to rest. I found everyone who was anybody in the town gathered at a reception at the former Austro-Hungarian officer's casino, where they were bilingually honoring local athletes — footballers, water polo players and canoeists — who had returned from the Sydney Olympics. Zoltan Sebök, a physician and city council member, fights to bolster tolerance over parochialism. "I'll be happy when this border means nothing, and when the rights of individuals, not of groups, become paramount," he says. "When we have that, we'll get into the E.U."
In the Czech town of Nachod, east of Prague on the Polish border, Vladimir Bucko lives in what is known as an American-style villa, with a sweeping drive and a basement swimming pool. In 1996 he bought out a state-owned textile factory that had once belonged to Oskar Schindler, of Schindler's List fame, in the town of Svitavy. His firm makes high-quality woolen upholstery fabric, mostly for export; his biggest client is the Swedish furniture giant Ikea. Bucko also owns a chicken processing plant in another town. But for all his showy success, he is deeply pessimistic about being able to grow his businesses further. "The banks are impossible," he says. "We can't get the credit we need to invest, or even for raw materials." Bucko claims that his chicken business operates far more cheaply than its counterparts in the E.U., but he can't export his broilers. And the local market has been all but locked up by Western-owned supermarkets that he claims demand exorbitant up-front fees to put local produce in their stores. "Whether it's textiles or chickens, we get a lower price just because we're 'Eastern Europe,'" says Bucko. "By the time we get into the E.U., it will be too late for a lot of businesses here."
If a successful businessman is given to that kind of pessimism, it's hardly surprising that poorer people have even darker visions. Across the border in the mountains of Poland, I encountered a group of woodcutters gathered under a plastic awning for a midmorning round of beer during a torrential rainfall. Jerzy Witkewicz, 48, is one of the walking wounded: since a tree fell on him 25 years ago, his right leg and left arm have been held together by screws and metal plates. "I've got a wife, a son, seven hectares, a cow, two horses, a tractor and a trailer with flat tires," he says. "That's it. I'm like Poland itself: if all you've got to work your land is an old mare, you have to sell out." He and his friends sagely agree that Poland's entry into the E.U. will amount to precisely that — a massive sellout. Already they are squeezed between their meagre wages and the increasing costs of living, which they blame squarely on an influx of Western imports.
To be sure, some are adjusting. Most of the people who live in Silesia, or their parents and grandparents, came from elsewhere in Poland after the predominately German population was driven out at the end of World War II. Zbigniew Slatinski, 46, was born on a farm here, but his mother was from Lublin and his father from Krakow, and when they arrived they planted what they knew: potatoes, rutabagas, cabbage, some grain. Five years ago Zbigniew gave up on that. "This is a mountain climate, and you can't make any money growing that stuff," he says. Instead he planted trees: silver fir, cyprus and evergreen bushes. "Now I work a month in the spring and another in the autumn," he says. "The new middle class has heard about me, they come down here and buy trees for their yards. I wish I'd done it sooner instead of breaking my back trying to grow cabbage."
A thousand years ago it was Slavs, not Germans, who lived on both banks of the Oder River, which I crossed by train from Wroclaw. Today a remnant of those Western Slavs, some 60,000 Sorbs, live in and around the town of Bautzen and more sparsely farther north. In the village of Crostwitz, I slipped into the back of the Catholic church on a Wednesday afternoon to hear Father Clemens Rehor call up the children to be blessed. A congregation of about 60 people, including five elderly women wearing black bonnets and enormous black bows, sang a simple tune in the Sorb language.
Quaint? Sure. But the fact that there are any Sorbs left at all is a tribute to their culture's resilience. After centuries of repression by the Prussians, the Sorbs faced a policy of cultural eradication under the Nazis — their language banned, their teachers and priests exiled or interned. In reaction, the communist regime of the German Democratic Republic made a very public effort to preserve the culture, setting up Sorb schools, subsidizing their newspapers and funding their folklore groups. But the newspapers had no more political leeway than any others in East Germany, and the government's industrialization of the region led to a halving of the Sorb population since 1945. "Everything that came before re-unification was lip service," says Rehor, a big and purposeful man. He is convinced that to preserve their way of life, the Sorbs have to commit more of the shrinking subsidies they get from government to education rather than to folklore. "As long as there are children that speak Sorb, there will be Sorb culture," says Rehor. "There is a positive foundation for a real renaissance."
Perhaps he's right, and not just for the Sorbs. On the train ride westward across Germany on the long haul to Amsterdam, it was easy to think so. The sheer variety of Europe's people, the wealth of their customs and habits won't be as easily leveled by "cultural homogenization" as many fear. As I headed home to Brussels the next night, I didn't realize I had crossed into Belgium until I noticed the seedier look of the railway stations. Heaped with disdain as it often is, Belgium, with its ramshackle ambience, seemed just the right place to braid the vibrant chaos of the East into a broader European Union.
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Fresh Start
Encounters with the black marketeers, fishermen, border guards and tree farmers of Eastern Europe's fraying patchwork
Photo Gallery
Check out the photos from this leg of TIME's Fast Forward Europe voyage
Young and Restless
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New Frontier
A town divided by a river and history looks forward to the day E.U. expansion will heal the rift
Pack Leader
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New Worlds
Czech film director Jan Sverak on movies, imagination and the illusion of reality
Driver's Seat
Hungarian firms are using foreign investment to make buses to sell to the U.S.
Expanding Rapidly
Gunter Verheugen, the European Union's Commissioner for enlargement, keeps his cool
For Love and Money
An upstart German company has turned condom making into an art form — and a global enterprise
Investor Intelligentsia
Look out Yahoo! Finance. Here comes Neuermarkt.com!
Welcome to the Content Metropolis
How a venerable Hanseatic port shed its Old Economy image to become Germany's hottest city for digital media | profiles
A Fantastic Voyage
The engineers at microTEC think small is beautiful
Stanislaw Drzewiecki
The 13-year-old pianist has been called 'Poland's Mozart'
Anetta Kahane
TIME talks with Germany's anti-racist activist
The Persistence of Memory
TIME speaks with Joachim Russek, director of Poland's Judaica Foundation
People To Watch: Viktor & Rolf | Monika Fleischmann | Jan Suchan | Anaclet Kabengele Kalondji
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