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The swimming pool above the city (nd-aktuell.de)

On the Kuhberg there is a swimming pool from which you can see the Czech city of Brno.

Photo: IMAGO/YAY Images

Brno, May 2017. I can spend the whole month in the city called Brno in German. We went to the festival with an actress and a visual artist Meeting Brno which has been offering an international cultural program since 2015 around the anniversary of the death march of the Germans from Brno. When I get off the Berlin-Vienna train, the square in front of the station is cordoned off, neo-Nazis have disrupted the May Day demonstration. While I’m hoisting my luggage onto the tram, somewhere in town a photographer snaps sixteen-year-old Lucie Myslíková in a Boy Scout uniform confronting a neo-Nazi. Soap bubbles waft through the picture.

Concentrated in a pedestrian center with huge parks, the city radiates diverse culture, well-kept architecture and immense hospitality. Brno pulsates, thousands of young students characterize the cityscape. The museums, theatres, galleries and pubs are full of people, some until the wee hours. I walk around for days, hike to the nearby quarry, visit labyrinths and bunkers with collections of skulls or weapons, the old and the new football stadium and the museums. See modern and classical art, tour the detailed Museum of Roma Culture, the Špilberk Fortress (with puppets as prisoners) and the Pavilon Anthropos with its replicas of famous cave paintings and a family of mammoths.

In Brno there are many swimming pools, a river pool and a reservoir, all accessible by tram or trolley bus. My favorite swimming pool is on a hill near my pension, through the panorama window of the hall I can see the fortress, the quarry and the yellow rapeseed fields behind the new development areas. I climb it every other day Kuhberg with its sports facilities and associated restaurant and often get a 25 meter track for 2.61 euros alone. Sharing the whirlpool, massage jets and steam room at lunchtime with just a handful of retirees. Huge wooden braces span above us, two outer walls are glazed. The café runs as a gallery at the top of the hall, overlooking the empty outdoor pool, the city and blooming lilacs.

Brno was never destroyed and has always been modern. The ten-day festival is a reminder of how diverse this modern age was – until after 1945 the German population was expelled. Jewish, communist and other unpopular fellow citizens had previously been sent to concentration camps, to the applause of the German population. A difficult story and a long run to fill in the ditches. The city of Brno apologized for the expulsion of Germans in 2015 and takes an active part in the festival Meeting Brno, whose co-founder is the writer Kateřina Tučková. She initiated reconciliation with her first novel.

Brno’s Unesco World Heritage building, the Villa Tugendhat by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, which is popular with all visitors, is part of this story. The Tugendhat family of manufacturers survived the Nazi era and was able to emigrate in time. In 2017, the city is inviting more than one hundred descendants of the Löw-Beer and Tugendhat families from all over the world to the festival – they enrich it, report and continue to renounce their expropriated property.

On the way back from the bathroom I pass the baseball field and the dog park, sit on the grass and read. The lilacs are fragrant and a parrot screeches from the sports restaurant »Ahoi, Ahoy«.

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