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Short fiction: “We Will Conquer Music and Art with Superior Military Technology”
The rest of the day was taken up with exploring Prussian Occupation and its environs. Everywhere I went, soldiers on horseback were impossible to avoid.
As a tourist, I could come and go as I pleased as long as I didn’t make any trouble. The people who lived there were not so fortunate — every now and then a soldier would make a show of force by dragging a local out of their home and roughing them up. Other times, they’d scoop someone off the street and take them to who knows where, and the poor soul would not be seen nor heard from ever again. It was ugly, for sure, but nevertheless trumpeted enthusiastically by tourism brochures. (“See the oppression experience UP CLOSE by witnessing AUTHENTIC PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE at the hands of an occupying army!”)
I took part in a guided tour of the Prussian Occupation Museum, though it was a very disjointed experience — every time we’d get to the next exhibit or display, the soldier accompanying us would point a gun at the guide’s head, and they would stop their spiel in mid-sentence and simply move on to the next stop, and then the process would repeat all over again.
By the time I left the museum, I hadn’t really learned anything at all. The only complete information imparted was the fact that the…
