ROB CAMERON

A Czech DNA expert is carrying out tests on clothes belonging to the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. The tests should provide a definitive answer to an explosive claim that has fascinated readers for almost a century. Was Masaryk – champion of Slav rights and father of the Czechoslovak state – the illegitimate son of the Austro-Hungarian emperor?

Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Ferdinand Porsche … most of us would describe these well-known personalities as ‘German’ – and we’d be half-right; German was their mother tongue. But they weren’t born in Germany or even Austria – they were born here in what is now the Czech Republic. A new exhibition is trying to correct the country’s rather cold relationship to them.

When the EU’s Schengen zone expanded in 2007 to include much of Central and Eastern Europe, one of the least enthusiastic countries was Austria, where fear of foreigners has long dominated the national debate. But in the far east of Austria, along the River Danube that forms the border with Slovakia, the reality of Schengen has changed both attitudes and lives.

“Could you,” I once asked a train-mad friend “travel right across the Czech Republic using only the slow, stopping trains?” The answer was yes, as I and another friend proved in 2007. We spent 19 days covering 2,000 kilometres, setting foot in over 80 towns and villages, and crossing the border into Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Austria. This is an audio diary of that journey.