First Vienna in 1978, then in Budapest in August 1980 I had a conversation in a fin-de-siecle cafe with an elderly couple--retired physicists--who spoke good English. We spoke in Denglisch. Mitteleuropa Kultur at its finest. The next year I read Karl Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna and understood where they were from.
All good preparation for seeing Istvan Szabo's masterpieces Mephisto, Colonel Redl and Sunshine.
I didn't get to Prague until August 1991, Berlin until March 1992. After 1992 life was all business after I started my ad agency doing photography and brochures for the yachting and tourism industries and investing in real estate in Riga in 1998, collecting my piece of the peace dividend during our all too brief honeymoon from history.
