Brussels, like Paris, unfolded as a mash-up of old and new. While Paris was a hard 24 hours, Brussels was an inviting and fun three days. The difference was serendipity, not a true reflection of these two venerable places. This is the problem with short visits.
The bullet train from Paris to Brussels was nearly as quick as a plane. Unlike air travel, we got to see the countryside, enough that when we visited the OldMasters Art Museum in Brussels, I gasped at 17th-century rural panoramas of brick villages and lush fields that looked like what I saw out the train window.
Walking out of the Brussels train station, we saw a metal sculpture high above a building, and below it in giant letters: “In Your Own Time, Migrating Together.
From there, we walked into an Arab and Muslim part of town, where we would spend the next three days. Our rental was one room, adjacent to the owner, a warm woman of Spanish and Arab descent, who left us a plate of cookies. Artful decorations, high ceilings, and large windows made it feel bigger than it was. Outside, we could see a brick wall, a string of apartments, and right below us, a mattress where drugs were occasionally and quietly shared.
On the main road off of our block, people were hoisting bundles wrapped in plastic or blankets onto container trucks: clothing headed for the global south. Brussels has been a center of cloth manufacturing since the 13th century, when flax and wool were the primary materials. Since then, women have been super-exploited to create cloth and profits here. Like London, access to cotton from American slave plantations ignited the cotton revolution in Brussels. This economic boom fueled the political revolution of 1830, although textile workers won little when the region broke off from Denmark and became Belgium. Karl Marx lived in Brussels from 1846-49. Noting the abominable conditions of workers in Belgium, he wrote that the wealth and poverty divide seemed even more stark than in London or Frankfurt.
Oulringh ven Brekelenkam Zwammerdam, 1622|30 – Leiden | Leyde 1669 The Linen Maids
We looked for the apartment where Marx and his family lived in Brussels. To get there, we left the working-class immigrant neighborhood, passed through the touristy old town, and walked through a glitzy area of EU staff homes and offices, before finding the side street and the unassuming apartment with the tiny plaque. It was not an attraction to anyone but us. We were the only people out on the entire block.
A rose-colored view of Brussels
Despite the desperate drug scene below our apartment and the unfolding story of oppression of workers and immigrants, past and present, Brussels was a half-filled rose-colored glass for us. We found a Syrian restaurant a couple of blocks from our place that was so delicious, comfortable, and community-forward that we went back two more times, eating there each of our three days. On the last night, we ordered extra, took home a to-go box, and ate tabouli for breakfast.
We happened upon a free multicultural event sponsored by the EU, a full day of music and movement. We took off our shoes, put our overshirts under a bench, and joined the dancers.
We passed a group of children marching with instruments and flags, chanting and singing in several languages: We migrate together…
Children marching, singing Migrating Together
Can you forgive me for feeling a bit utopic? I wanted to believe I had entered a place of asylum from the anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping Europe. How ignorant of me. Brussels is, after all, the center of the European Union, which signed a pact to stem migration to Europe in April. A few days after our Brussels visit, right-wing xenophobes would sweep Belgium’s parliamentary elections. While we saw a vibrant community of Belgians from diverse Muslim and Arab countries, the door was closing on their brethren. For Afghans, for example, Belgium was, until recently, a haven for asylum seekers fleeing war. Now that there is a “stable government,” even youth whose parents were killed by the Taliban are denied refuge here.
I think what I sensed was a high level of fight-back in the capital of this tiny country. When the EU signed that anti-immigrant pact, Brussels formed a broad coalition to protest. I think that is what made me feel hopeful here. When Marx was here 180 years ago, he found more political openness in Brussels than in Germany or England. It was the space he and Friedrich Engels needed to write their pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto.
In front of Karl Marx’s home, 1846-49.
There is not freedom for all in Brussels or full justice for workers, but perhaps there is more room here to gather, think, write, organize, dance, and fight.
Maybe that is because of the jurisdictional jumble that rules Belgium. Within this small country, there is a national government, a government for the French, a government for the Flemish, a government for the Germans, and a government for the multilingual Brussels region ( of which the city is a center). Then there is the EU and NATO. Perhaps these seven jurisdictions provide wiggle room for an eighth governing body: the organized political and working class.
We got a message on our phone that there was going to be a national strike that might interfere with our travels. I googled national strike Belgium and six dates came up. National striking is a regular occurrence in Belgium! We did not see strikers. The June 3 call did not happen as far as we know, though our bus was an hour late, but reading about the history of mass worker actions was inspiring, and helped to explain the persistence of Belgium’s social welfare programs. People organize and speak up here. EU climate actions are common. A few days before we arrived, a Pride event focused on Palestine. We saw posters and graffiti left over from these recent events.
The only protest we saw was a Critical Mass event, no more or less rebellious than the monthly pedal street takeovers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. It made me laugh, seeing the same characters—and I say that with love. A few riders held signs or flags to note their solidarity with Palestine. There were children, old people, and youth in gay costumes. Stalled drivers did their part, adding a horn section to the boom box music carted on bicycles.
The BELvue History Museum lauded Belgium’s robust social welfare state, where injury, illness, disability, job loss, and/or parenthood do not leave anyone destitute. Unless you are an immigrant not covered by the enlightened system. In Brussels, it seems, the wealthiest class is those who work for the EU— and the poorest are immigrants. Despite a structure that denies basic rights to immigrants, the museum taught respect for migration, highlighting that for the first half of the twentieth century, poverty drove many to leave for the Americas. The tide turned in the 1950s. Since then, Belgium has been a destination for people migrating from other parts of Europe and the Global South. “We speak 184 languages here,” one museum plaque boasted.
Being from the United States, Brussels still seemed quite homogenous. It was not as diverse as Oakland, Brooklyn, or even Minneapolis, for example. But compared to Paris or Madrid, it felt like a more cosmopolitan place. Having three official languages opens things up, I think. It made it easier for us to get by with our 25 words of French. We understood more. It was fun and not strange to mix languages in a single sentence. If you can mix French and Dutch, why not mix French and Syrian, or Dutch and Afghan?
We visited the Jewish Museum in Brussels. It had been the site of a terrorist attack in May of 2014. Four people died. In the foyer, between two security doors and a metal detector, were wreaths from Muslim, Christian, and secular groups, marking this tragic 10th anniversary. It is one of those exhibits put together by a few people—a family, maybe—representing what interests them. There was a long video that introduced visitors to the practice and tenets of Judaism. It used the rites of one family to show how Jews celebrate holidays and observe birth-to-death rituals. World War II and the Holocaust were a small but poignant part of the museum.
Display, Jewish Museum of Brussels
Near the museum, we found plaques on the sidewalk noting that in this apartment lived someone who was killed in a Nazi concentration camp.
Sidewalk memorial to people who once lived here, who perished in Nazi concentration camps, Groningen
The Jewish Museum had a temporary exhibit on Tangier, Morocco. It was surprising and beautiful to have this connection to our experience visiting the Tangier Jewish Quarter, cemetery, and synagogue. The point of the Brussels Jewish Museum exhibit was to show Muslims and Jews thriving together.
The clarity in this description, above, of Jewish ethical and moral tenets arrested me. Of course, all religions have been interpreted to justify opposing political positions and actions. In my mind, these words can not justify a state that represses other people. There is no room in Jewish ethics, as stated here, for support of Israel’s occupation in Palestine or its genocidal rampage in Gaza.
I was in Brussels at a moment when many in the United States and elsewhere faced job loss, removal from universities, and other forms of persecution for opposing the genocide in Gaza. I’m grateful I had the space as a retired traveler to think and write such ideas. But manifestos without action are just words.
This essay about a visit to Brussels in June 2024 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering if/how memory can liberate the present.