Forgotten Land (23 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
Dönhoff’s new colleagues had asked for her. They’d seen an explosive memorandum of protest that she had written to the British occupying forces; she had anti-Nazi credentials; her doctorate was impressive, as were her imagined establishment contacts. Some on the paper were doubtful about her Junker ancestry (reminiscent of a bad, old Germany). Her title also seemed inconsistent with what they wanted to be. But risk was part of the project, which was probably doomed; they might all be out of work in a year. What moved them was a sense of responsibility or disgust (some of them were Jewish) for the Hitler years – and a wish to make a new, decent liberal country. A colleague wrote of Marion Dönhoff as being a symbol of these hopes – young, passionate and amateurish like many of the others. Her writing was strewn with commas; she lived in small rented rooms and often went hungry. A veteran journalist mocked
Die Zeit
as a group of friends talking loftily about God and the world, out of touch with reality. This shocked her – before she saw that this was how they should be.
Die Zeit
as a group of friends talking loftily about God and the world, out of touch with reality. This shocked her – before she saw that this was how they should be.
Her self-confidence – and self-righteousness – can be seen in what she wrote about the poor distribution of food and clumsy censorship by the British occupying forces. She decried the victors’ justice at Nuremberg, believing that Germans who had opposed the Nazis should sit on the war crimes tribunal as well. Her authority and moral power grew as she settled into her new world. Later there were rows, even temporary exile to London, where she worked on the
Observer
, then edited by her friend David Astor. The force was there, if she was right or wrong: an echo of the old Prussia of Frederick the Great and the nineteenth-century reformers. What was reasonable and best should be obvious: clear to everyone, not just to her.
Observer
, then edited by her friend David Astor. The force was there, if she was right or wrong: an echo of the old Prussia of Frederick the Great and the nineteenth-century reformers. What was reasonable and best should be obvious: clear to everyone, not just to her.
To achieve anything like this, as a woman, was rare. The irony is that the Countess remained quite old-fashioned. She preferred male company, took little interest in feminism and liked being the only woman in the room. Even in old age she could be flirtatious. Young men – her nephews, great-nephews or younger journalists at
Die Zeit
(known as her ‘Bubis’) – were close to her, alongside grand friends like Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Henry Kissinger.
Die Zeit
(known as her ‘Bubis’) – were close to her, alongside grand friends like Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Henry Kissinger.
The nickname – the Red Countess – was still used by her opponents. Perhaps because of the chaos she had seen and through a wish to be in touch with her old homeland, Marion Dönhoff, although anti-communist, spoke against the build-up of arms and a confrontation with the Soviet Union. She was suspicious of the Americans, particularly of Nixon and of Reagan. When defiance burst out of the Soviet empire in the 1980s – from Lech Wał
sa’s Solidarity in Poland or Pope John Paul II – she was sceptical of these. It was better to work for detente, for gradual change, and not risk angry confrontation, perhaps another war even worse than her memories of the last. She supported the communist General Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law in Poland, believing that it may have prevented a Russian invasion. For this Marion Dönhoff was criticized. Perhaps, it was said, her most useful role had been as a chronicler of her own extraordinary past.
sa’s Solidarity in Poland or Pope John Paul II – she was sceptical of these. It was better to work for detente, for gradual change, and not risk angry confrontation, perhaps another war even worse than her memories of the last. She supported the communist General Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law in Poland, believing that it may have prevented a Russian invasion. For this Marion Dönhoff was criticized. Perhaps, it was said, her most useful role had been as a chronicler of her own extraordinary past.Schlobitten, Januschau, Steinort, Friedrichstein – the lost houses of East Prussia – represented refinement of the fortresses of the Teutonic Knights into outposts of courtliness or political power before their entrapment between two revolutions: those of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Eventually there was only one possibility – flight and an end to the eastward movement that had begun some eight centuries before.
I met Olga in 1992 when she had just left university. She was working then for a group of British farmers who wanted to invest
in the Kaliningrad region; now she’s with the European Union office in the city and sometimes guides foreign visitors. Today she drives me out of Kaliningrad through early-winter drizzle, the traffic bad in the rush hour as we go in search of what has survived.
in the Kaliningrad region; now she’s with the European Union office in the city and sometimes guides foreign visitors. Today she drives me out of Kaliningrad through early-winter drizzle, the traffic bad in the rush hour as we go in search of what has survived.
We go right at the Dohna tower and the Amber Museum, away from one of the city’s many war memorials – a statue of Vassilevsky, the commander of the Red Army’s last assault on Königsberg – to a stretch of the old German wall, past a turreted gate. Through the trees to our right is the low red-brick bungalow of the German – Russian Friendship House; you can just see the bright-yellow sculptures of figures sitting on a bench – apparently two drunks leaning towards one another, one playing an accordion, the other the balalaika, Disney-like symbols of reconciliation.
We head past the car dealers’ glass showrooms to the new ring road, for which all the crushed stone was imported from Sweden. Alongside us, the limes and chestnuts form a broken avenue, still with some leaves left. Before his dismissal by Putin, Governor Georgy Boos had wanted all these trees to come down, for they stop progress (or road widening) and are foreign. Attempting to give a certain idealism to the destruction, he’s said to have compared their deaths to those German soldiers killed in the Great Patriotic War.
Yes, Olga says, the Brezhnev years – when the castle was destroyed and the cathedral nearly went – were stagnant but a relief (if you stayed in line) after earlier hardship. She runs through the good points: handicapped people were better cared for (although hidden because all Soviet citizens should be seen to be strong), the old better looked after; there was less financial corruption; alcoholism was controlled and treated. But then she could never have had this life where her daughter and she travel to Europe and to the United States. Recently she came to London for several weeks to stay with a friend in an eighteenth-century house in Spitalfields.
We reach scrubby land and a broad cultivated field where the rainy horizon is blurred and some distant clumps of trees loom like enormous dark cages. We cross what seems like a border through an old gateway into a thin, straight alley where limes form a high perforated tunnel. At the end, on the right, are some German houses and a glimpse of a large lake before a red-brick building and a clearing, perhaps where the mansion may have been. Now there’s only what look like two adjoining barns, one of familiar Prussian red brick, the other covered in grey-white plaster.
A low, more recent construction is at right angles behind this, with two or three neat gardens in front of it. In one of the gardens, a man briefly turns off his leaf-blowing machine to say that the only person who knows about the place’s history has moved to Kaliningrad. I see a large stone with a creeper trailing across it, beside a garden seat where he’s made what looks like a rockery. On the stone, beneath the plant’s tendrils, are the carved words ‘Heinrich Graf Dönhoff,’ then the dates of his birth and death (1899 and 1942) and the words ‘Der Tod ist das Tor zum Leben’ (death is the gateway to life) – Marion’s eldest brother, who was killed in a plane crash on the eastern front.
Now the place is no longer a private realm, one family’s cherished paradise, but free for anyone to come and go as he or she pleases. In the woods that cover much of the old landscaped park and garden we see empty bottles and burned litter – remnants of summer evenings – and a notice saying to beware of the arrows shot in the practice sessions of a local archery club. Friedrichstein exists only in old photographs. In these you can see the park and gardens, the grand rooms and the study of Marion Dönhoff’s father, which was changed at the end of the 1930s into an apartment for a forester. The study looks Spartan, with functional furniture and hunting trophies on the walls – and, in one photograph, beside a stag’s head, a drawing of Adolf Hitler. In the 1980s, when Yuri Ivanov came with Rudolf Jacquemien to look for the statue of Kant, there seems still to have been the church
tower at Komsomolsk, all that remained of the place where the Dönhoffs had worshipped together, a reason given by Marion for why the children of her brother Heinrich and his Roman Catholic wife couldn’t inherit. Someone in Komsomolsk says that the whole church was demolished and the brick and stone used for building elsewhere.
tower at Komsomolsk, all that remained of the place where the Dönhoffs had worshipped together, a reason given by Marion for why the children of her brother Heinrich and his Roman Catholic wife couldn’t inherit. Someone in Komsomolsk says that the whole church was demolished and the brick and stone used for building elsewhere.
The poet Agnes Miegel was at the great 1955 Königsberg reunion in Duisburg – a neat, housewifely woman in an overcoat and tight dark hat, her appearance at odds with her powerful work. Miegel had enshrined the East Prussian story in verse and prose; her own flight across the Baltic to a Danish refugee camp in 1945 was what many of those at Duisburg would have experienced. But there’s one Miegel poem – what an admirer calls ‘the great error’ – that makes Lorenz Grimoni agitated when he tries to explain it.
‘Look,’ he says to me, picking up his pencil and seizing another piece of paper, ‘here is how it was.’ He draws a series of circles, a rough map. ‘Here is East Prussia after 1919.’ One circle. ‘Here is Bolshevik Russia.’ Another bigger circle, to the south and east. ‘Here is the new Poland.’ A big circle to the south. ‘Here are the new Baltic States.’ A smaller circle to the north-east. ‘You see – surrounded. Cut off!’
The circles aren’t complete so he quickly draws another line, making it dark and deep – like the chart of his journey west in 1945 – to show the Polish Corridor. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘Agnes Miegel was brown.’ This means National Socialist. ‘But she lived on the frontier.’
Reading Agnes Miegel (who is now remembered by few people in Germany) you sense a fragility that yearned for strength, even in her popular journalism. These friendly essays – written for Königsberg papers between the wars – are different to her ballads and stories, which are set in a wild, often violent past. If only she hadn’t written the poem; it led to a ban on her publishing anything for several years after the war. When Agnes
Miegel came back into print, one theme was how grateful she was to have known her homeland before its end. Born in 1879 in Königsberg, she wrote of the vast skies of her childhood, of the myths and history of the German east; also of an undisturbed, stiflingly cosy bourgeois world.
Miegel came back into print, one theme was how grateful she was to have known her homeland before its end. Born in 1879 in Königsberg, she wrote of the vast skies of her childhood, of the myths and history of the German east; also of an undisturbed, stiflingly cosy bourgeois world.
Agnes Miegel was the only daughter of a successful businessman. Her mother’s family were farmers who had left Salzburg for East Prussia in the eighteenth century because of their Protestant faith. This combination made her, she felt, a good representative of the province. It was a cultured household – and years later she remembered what had seemed even more important: home, the garden with her own flower bed, the evening cooking, the singing of the gardener’s wife, the brightly lit and full shops, the only intrusion a voice calling her to what she thought of as the lonely, dark way of art. After leaving school she worked in Weimar, Berlin and England (in Bristol) as a children’s nurse and teacher – before returning to Königsberg to look after her sick parents. Most of her life she suffered from bad health.
The poet Börries von Münchhausen considered Agnes Miegel the greatest living poet of ballads and took her into his Göttingen literary circle. She seems to have had no lasting, loving relationship although she loved Münchhausen. In 1913, the year her mother died, she won the Kleist Prize, and by 1917, the year of her father’s death, she was already well known. Her 1920s sketches of East Prussian life were popular, perhaps because they show a cosy and kind world at a time of threat. With these came the more powerful poems, ballads and tales of the Prussian past. In 1924, during the celebrations of the two hundredth birthday of Kant, the University of Königsberg gave her an honorary degree. In 1936 she won the Herder Prize; in 1945, the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt. At the end of the war, Agnes Miegel was one of the most famous poets in Germany.
She had written of a premonition of destruction, and often her work is dark and tragic. Miegel’s most famous poem, ‘Die Frauen von Nidden’ (The Women of Nidden), is based on what was
thought to be a true story about people on the Curonian Spit (or Kurische Nehrung). These believed that as God had protected them from the huge shifting dunes, so the plague would be kept away by the lagoon that separated the Spit from the mainland. But, carried by elk, the killer disease reached the Spit, leaving only a few women alive who pray that they may attain peace by being buried by the giant dunes. At the poem’s end, their prayers are answered.
thought to be a true story about people on the Curonian Spit (or Kurische Nehrung). These believed that as God had protected them from the huge shifting dunes, so the plague would be kept away by the lagoon that separated the Spit from the mainland. But, carried by elk, the killer disease reached the Spit, leaving only a few women alive who pray that they may attain peace by being buried by the giant dunes. At the poem’s end, their prayers are answered.
The
Ostpreussische Zeitung
pieces, written between 1923 and 1926, the year she had her great success as a novelist with
Stories from Old Prussia
, must have appealed to the paper’s readers – mostly conservative nationalists and property owners. They show the dark times after the First World War and find comfort in the friendliness of housewives and stall-holders and shopkeepers, the silver River Pregel, the spring sky, the country people and clouds of pigeons and doves. She writes of the wind from the east – not from the ocean or from the Alps but from the endless land of the Steppes – and scorns people who live west of the Vistula who could never appreciate the relief of an East Prussian spring. Gloom about the new materialism, the world of cars and fashion, and her humiliated land haunts her. In Hamburg with her blond, brown little godson Jochen, she sees a ship flying the German flag and feels a surge of pride through the humiliation of defeat. Germany, she writes, is like no other country. It must go its own ‘terrible and great way’, the Titan’s destiny.
Ostpreussische Zeitung
pieces, written between 1923 and 1926, the year she had her great success as a novelist with
Stories from Old Prussia
, must have appealed to the paper’s readers – mostly conservative nationalists and property owners. They show the dark times after the First World War and find comfort in the friendliness of housewives and stall-holders and shopkeepers, the silver River Pregel, the spring sky, the country people and clouds of pigeons and doves. She writes of the wind from the east – not from the ocean or from the Alps but from the endless land of the Steppes – and scorns people who live west of the Vistula who could never appreciate the relief of an East Prussian spring. Gloom about the new materialism, the world of cars and fashion, and her humiliated land haunts her. In Hamburg with her blond, brown little godson Jochen, she sees a ship flying the German flag and feels a surge of pride through the humiliation of defeat. Germany, she writes, is like no other country. It must go its own ‘terrible and great way’, the Titan’s destiny.
Agnes Miegel joined the National Socialist Women’s Organization in 1937 and the Nazi Party in 1940. To her, Hitler was the new Hindenburg, the defender of East Prussia. She had written a poem to the old Field Marshal and did the same for the Führer of the new Reich, including both of these in
Ostland
, published in 1940, the volume that she came to regret deeply. Many of the poems were part of the propaganda that she and others favoured by the Nazis were encouraged to produce. One is addressed to Hindenburg, remembering the Tannenberg victory; another calls for the rest of Germany to show support for East Prussia during
the plebiscites of July 1920; ‘Copernicus’ claims that the great scientist was definitely German, not Polish; the loss of Memel after 1919 is lamented; she rejoices in the 1939 recovery of Danzig; and ‘To Germany’s Youth, Autumn 1939’ is a call to arms. Agnes Miegel shows an anxious, threatened East Prussia – civilization’s last redoubt, a warrior land.
Ostland
, published in 1940, the volume that she came to regret deeply. Many of the poems were part of the propaganda that she and others favoured by the Nazis were encouraged to produce. One is addressed to Hindenburg, remembering the Tannenberg victory; another calls for the rest of Germany to show support for East Prussia during
the plebiscites of July 1920; ‘Copernicus’ claims that the great scientist was definitely German, not Polish; the loss of Memel after 1919 is lamented; she rejoices in the 1939 recovery of Danzig; and ‘To Germany’s Youth, Autumn 1939’ is a call to arms. Agnes Miegel shows an anxious, threatened East Prussia – civilization’s last redoubt, a warrior land.
Agnes Miegel.
The poem to the Führer, with which
Ostland
begins, had been written not, she says, with ‘youth’s enthusiasm’ but with mature judgement, with a joy that all had been renewed and a wish to serve him (‘overpoweringly, humble thanks fill me’), to sacrifice herself, conscious that past troubles have been:
Ostland
begins, had been written not, she says, with ‘youth’s enthusiasm’ but with mature judgement, with a joy that all had been renewed and a wish to serve him (‘overpoweringly, humble thanks fill me’), to sacrifice herself, conscious that past troubles have been:
Wiped away like the tears from the face of a widow By your hands! …
Perhaps it was innocence that led to such capitulation, perhaps also a subliminal wish to be not only protected but overwhelmed.
After 1945 she had to wait before her work could appear again. Now the poetry and the essays were mostly nostalgic, glimpses of a good past, reassuring to those who had been expelled and blaming the loss of her old home not so much on German guilt as on mysterious, dark fate. The title of her first post-war book of poems, published in 1949, was
But You Remain in Me
. It had glimpses of destruction, as in ‘Autumn 1945’:
But You Remain in Me
. It had glimpses of destruction, as in ‘Autumn 1945’:
Splintered stumps gaped
Over at the collapsed ruins
Wild dogs hunt in packs
Through blackened barns … ;
Over at the collapsed ruins
Wild dogs hunt in packs
Through blackened barns … ;
and that lost but longed-for East Prussian cosiness, recalled in ‘Christmas 1948’:
What were you Christmas to my child’s heart? …
… I am but a guest
in a country still German …
Answer me in this night wind,
Coming from the homeland as hushed weeping …
… I am but a guest
in a country still German …
Answer me in this night wind,
Coming from the homeland as hushed weeping …
Photographs show her as a beautiful young woman. Did she ever have sexual experiences? Lorenz Grimoni glares at me, grasping his pencil like a dagger to defend her, so I don’t ask him. In Berlin, I ask a Polish friend who’s written about East Prussia, but he’s never heard of anything. Could there be something in the Agnes Miegel archive in Marburg? he wonders.
Her poetry is passionate, etched (especially after 1945) with memory, although she said she felt no bitterness. She began to win prizes again – in 1958 the East German cultural award, in 1959 the prize of the Bavarian Academy of Art (many refugees from the east had settled in Bavaria), in 1962 the prize of the West Prussian Landsmannschaft
,
an organization for the ‘expelled’.
In her new home in Bad Nenndorf, she said how hard it was to dispute lies, implying that these had been spread about her past; her friends believed that she was entitled to some mistakes. The Christian faith stayed with her: the sense also that she’d been lucky in life until 1945, when what she thought of as her good world had ended in shame. Lulu von Strauss und Torney, her great friend, had married Eugen Dietrichs, a collaborator of the British racist and Teutonophile Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Börries von Münchhausen killed himself after the defeat of his idol, Adolf Hitler.
,
an organization for the ‘expelled’.
In her new home in Bad Nenndorf, she said how hard it was to dispute lies, implying that these had been spread about her past; her friends believed that she was entitled to some mistakes. The Christian faith stayed with her: the sense also that she’d been lucky in life until 1945, when what she thought of as her good world had ended in shame. Lulu von Strauss und Torney, her great friend, had married Eugen Dietrichs, a collaborator of the British racist and Teutonophile Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Börries von Münchhausen killed himself after the defeat of his idol, Adolf Hitler.
The stain remains, darkening attempts at revival. At an Agnes Miegel day in Bad Nenndorf in 2005, only sixty people came to hear a Berlin theatre troupe put on dramatized readings of her oriental fairy stories
Tales of Ali the Poet
– the actors dressed in fezzes and brocaded robes, puffing at hookahs. The day’s organizers had hoped for more. One lecturer spoke of the power of Agnes Miegel’s work beyond that one fatal poem: for instance the 1931 story ‘Homecoming’ – about a Berlin doctor returning to his old home in Königsberg to see his dying grandmother: and about how the city’s bridges, towers, cemeteries and gardens blur between memory, fantasy and reality into an imagined paradise. Was this a premonition that the place would soon live only in the imagination of those who had been expelled from it? Agnes Miegel, her admirers believe, had mystical power.
Tales of Ali the Poet
– the actors dressed in fezzes and brocaded robes, puffing at hookahs. The day’s organizers had hoped for more. One lecturer spoke of the power of Agnes Miegel’s work beyond that one fatal poem: for instance the 1931 story ‘Homecoming’ – about a Berlin doctor returning to his old home in Königsberg to see his dying grandmother: and about how the city’s bridges, towers, cemeteries and gardens blur between memory, fantasy and reality into an imagined paradise. Was this a premonition that the place would soon live only in the imagination of those who had been expelled from it? Agnes Miegel, her admirers believe, had mystical power.
How good it is, the old Königsbergers think, that today there is an Agnes Miegel Society in Kaliningrad – extraordinary when you recall some of her work: its exaltation of force and a glorious German past. In the winter of 2005, a group of Miegel admirers went by bus from Duisburg to Kaliningrad, thinking of her line about her heart rising ‘like a lark, upwards, upwards to the old homeland.’ They were met by Russian fellow enthusiasts; readings took place in German and Russian and a wreath was laid under the bronze tablet on her old home. Among the poems read by a Russian writer was ‘At the Garden Hedge,’ where the poet meets a Russian mother who lost her son in the First
World War. ‘Bread’, the Russian said, was his favourite Miegel poem; the visitors were impressed that he liked these lines about the joy of eating German bread again after the flight to Denmark. The Russians have even named a school after her in Kaliningrad.
World War. ‘Bread’, the Russian said, was his favourite Miegel poem; the visitors were impressed that he liked these lines about the joy of eating German bread again after the flight to Denmark. The Russians have even named a school after her in Kaliningrad.
Other exiles polished their memories until the old landmarks – the Curonian Spit, the Frisches Haff (the lagoon), the dunes and the amber, the woods and the lakes, Rominten Heath, the horses at Trakehnen, the elk and the deer, Königsberg and Marienburg – shone like gold. But the road back to a new life was hard at first for Agnes Miegel. That poem was always there, with the grim finality of publication, even if she kept it out of all new collections of her work. Her resonance and power, rooted often in myth, did find readers, not only among the exiles. Schools and streets were named after her in several German cities; her head was put on a postage stamp in 1979, to mark the centenary of her birth. The names of the schools and the streets were sometimes changed, however, when a watchful local or a campaigning councillor brought Miegel’s past to the surface again. That poem of 1938 to Hitler – like Carl Diesch’s article on Heine or Konrad Lorenz’s utterances on eugenics or the extracts from the published transcripts of the interrogations of the July 1944 conspirators – shows how widely the Nazi stain could spread.
Order was what Agnes Miegel cherished. But it wasn’t only in Germany that politicians stressed the need for order as a guard against revolution. The chaos that he’d seen in Russia – and the need to fight it – featured very strongly in Alfred Knox’s political life. At Westminster, as a newly elected member of parliament, he castigated the ‘immoral’ trade agreement with Russia of 1921 and ‘the Soviet sore’ – and on 5 February 1930 quoted Mussolini on Soviet Russia, ‘It is a system that supported dictatorship on a pile of corpses.’ As an imperialist who had served in India, he, like Winston Churchill, favoured rigorous British control of the
sub-continent. Indian home rule must lead to ‘a communist state in India within our lifetime’.
sub-continent. Indian home rule must lead to ‘a communist state in India within our lifetime’.
At first, Sir Alfred Knox was suspicious of the new National Socialist German state, fearing any kind of German rearmament. Five months after Hitler had come to power, Knox called for the British government to threaten to cancel trade agreements with Germany, and two years later asked a question about Switzerland supplying arms to Nazi Germany. He advocated British rearmament and favoured Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War, admiring their fight against communism. ‘Wake up, England,’ Knox called on 11 December 1936, from the ‘dream’ of a peaceful world brought about by the League of Nations. It was his loathing of the Soviet Union that led him to become more tolerant of the German revolution. By June 1937, he was defending the speech given by Nevile Henderson, Britain’s Ambassador to Germany, which some called ‘a panegyric on National Socialism’ but which Knox described as ‘a real contribution to the cause of peace’. Knox thought that the new Germany was the only European nation actively fighting the Bolshevik threat.
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