Forgotten Land (27 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
In August 1930, the Manns astounded the village with a firework display to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Katia’s father, a Jewish professor of mathematics from Munich; it was her Jewish origins that made the general political scene more
threatening for them. In September, Thomas Mann went by horse-drawn coach across the border to the village of Rossitten, to vote in the German elections: the only time he left Nidden that summer. In October, in Berlin, he made a speech, urging the abandonment of extremism; in Rossitten, the Nazi candidate won. Mann still thought that the good sense of most Germans would prevail, but he began to regret his wartime praise of the cold, contemptuous Frederick the Great, his use of Kant’s ‘practical reason’ to condemn scepticism during the mass emotion of 1914 and his sympathy with Fichte’s glorification of Germany’s long, lonely struggle.
threatening for them. In September, Thomas Mann went by horse-drawn coach across the border to the village of Rossitten, to vote in the German elections: the only time he left Nidden that summer. In October, in Berlin, he made a speech, urging the abandonment of extremism; in Rossitten, the Nazi candidate won. Mann still thought that the good sense of most Germans would prevail, but he began to regret his wartime praise of the cold, contemptuous Frederick the Great, his use of Kant’s ‘practical reason’ to condemn scepticism during the mass emotion of 1914 and his sympathy with Fichte’s glorification of Germany’s long, lonely struggle.
The Manns came back to Nidden for the summer of 1931. Again the daily routine was as rigid as Kant’s; again the novelist was moved, as painters like Lovis Corinth were, by the brilliant Nidden blue – of the sky, of the painted shutters and pediments, of the clear lagoon. He walked over the great dunes, survivors of some epic upheaval, with their reminder of buried villages and the camps where French prisoners had died in the Baltic winter during the Franco-Prussian War. Increasingly Mann felt that he had to fight the new barbarism; now the blond Adonises on the beach seemed like potential murderers. In Königsberg, on their return journey west – to the Reich, as East Prussians called the other side of the Polish Corridor – in the late summer of 1931, the Manns saw the barbarity of Nazi gangs, emphasized the next year when, after the elections of 31 July 1932, SA thugs murdered socialists and communists in the city. From Nidden, Mann wrote about this for a Berlin newspaper, which – fearing Nazi revenge – toned down his words about ‘the mish-mash of hysteria and mouldering romanticism’ and ‘half-idiotic slavering of so-called Führers’.
The Nazis loathed Thomas Mann. Goebbels ranted against this ‘mongrel of Indian, negro and Moorish blood’ in reference to the novelist’s Brazilian mother. In Nidden, Mann met threatening men on his woodland walks, the house was stoned and a partly burned copy of
Buddenbrooks
left outside it. In September 1932,
he left, having kept engagements to read at Königsberg and at Elbing, further west in East Prussia. It was the start of his departure from Germany, hastened by the growing anti-Semitism after Hitler came to power in January 1933. That summer, while in Zurich, Mann decided to stay in exile, leaving for the United States in 1938 and becoming an American citizen in 1944.
Buddenbrooks
left outside it. In September 1932,
he left, having kept engagements to read at Königsberg and at Elbing, further west in East Prussia. It was the start of his departure from Germany, hastened by the growing anti-Semitism after Hitler came to power in January 1933. That summer, while in Zurich, Mann decided to stay in exile, leaving for the United States in 1938 and becoming an American citizen in 1944.
In California, he burned his Nidden diaries and notebooks. The last volume of the immense novel
Joseph and His Brothers
was published in 1943. In exile, the patriot of the First World War thought that no remorse or contrition could be enough ‘after the vicious presumption, the wild frenzy of superiority and chimeras of power this people has shown in its intoxication,’ while acknowledging that ‘it has been a singular fate, half painful, half honourable, to have been born a German’. Mann did not return to Germany until 1949, still thinking that the apparently remorseless national self-pity was to be feared. He moved to Zurich, dying there in 1955.
Joseph and His Brothers
was published in 1943. In exile, the patriot of the First World War thought that no remorse or contrition could be enough ‘after the vicious presumption, the wild frenzy of superiority and chimeras of power this people has shown in its intoxication,’ while acknowledging that ‘it has been a singular fate, half painful, half honourable, to have been born a German’. Mann did not return to Germany until 1949, still thinking that the apparently remorseless national self-pity was to be feared. He moved to Zurich, dying there in 1955.
Göring used the novelist’s Nidden house on hunting trips, building a bigger residence nearby; Speer visited it while he was on the Spit. Mollenhauer of Blode’s inn tried to protect the pictures Mann had left behind but the Red Army destroyed them, leaving the house a skeleton. In 1967, some writers persuaded the communist Lithuanian authorities that Mann had been anti-fascist; the house was partly restored and, eight years later, on Thomas Mann’s hundredth birthday, celebrations there involved the East German Culture Minister and an exhibition that included films of the novelist’s post-war visits to eastern communist Germany – which he preferred to the Federal Republic, where (he said) too many ex-Nazis remained unpunished. A commemorative tablet had words in Lithuanian and Russian, none in German. In 1995 and 1996, in a free Lithuania, a complete restoration took place. Now there are concerts and readings in summer and links to the other Mann monuments – his old home ‘Buddenbrookhaus’ in Lübeck (where his love of the Baltic began) and the archive in Zurich.
Thomas Mann had been brave. After 1931, when many were preparing to make the best of Hitler, he went on defending Weimar democracy; the Nazis took away his citizenship and burned his books. What Mann thought of, with some shame, as his bourgeois discretion and constraint, his detached and elegant irony – that coldness of the endlessly observing artist – were overcome by his courage. At the end of
The Magic Mountain
, Hans Castorp sees the disintegration in the trenches of pre-1914 Europe, of the world of
Death in Venice
. Within twenty years of the book’s publication, a new, worse barbarism seemed to be symbolized at Nidden by Göring and Speer, and then by the Red Army. Miraculously, Mann’s house, the symbol of a great writer’s discovery of a wild land and momentary peace, has survived.
The Magic Mountain
, Hans Castorp sees the disintegration in the trenches of pre-1914 Europe, of the world of
Death in Venice
. Within twenty years of the book’s publication, a new, worse barbarism seemed to be symbolized at Nidden by Göring and Speer, and then by the Red Army. Miraculously, Mann’s house, the symbol of a great writer’s discovery of a wild land and momentary peace, has survived.
As in Mann’s day, there are horses on the Spit – some thin ones in a clearing in the woods by Smiltyn
, the village near where the ferry gets in from Klaip
da. I ask in the tourist office how many people come each year and the girl thinks about ten thousand. Of course it’s quite deserted now, she says, near the end of autumn, but the summer crowds are big – some foreigners (almost all Germans) but many Lithuanians. Did I know that the weather was going to get better? As she speaks, the sun appears. I must keep an eye out for the elk, she says. She has seen several during the last week. Nida (or the German Nidden) is the place to stay, she says. There are some nice hotels in Nida – and I ought to try to catch the Lithuanian folk-dancing in Juodkrant
, another village. They will be dancing on the green in front of the tourist office – a nice gathering with people in national costume, stalls and food: local specialities, very local. I must be certain to take in the pretty wooden fishermen’s houses. Fishing is still the main activity on the Spit – fishing and tourism.
, the village near where the ferry gets in from Klaipda. I ask in the tourist office how many people come each year and the girl thinks about ten thousand. Of course it’s quite deserted now, she says, near the end of autumn, but the summer crowds are big – some foreigners (almost all Germans) but many Lithuanians. Did I know that the weather was going to get better? As she speaks, the sun appears. I must keep an eye out for the elk, she says. She has seen several during the last week. Nida (or the German Nidden) is the place to stay, she says. There are some nice hotels in Nida – and I ought to try to catch the Lithuanian folk-dancing in Juodkrant, another village. They will be dancing on the green in front of the tourist office – a nice gathering with people in national costume, stalls and food: local specialities, very local. I must be certain to take in the pretty wooden fishermen’s houses. Fishing is still the main activity on the Spit – fishing and tourism.Today the people coming off the ferry are mostly local, some with fishing rods to try their luck in the lagoon, other families bound for the sea-life museum in the old Prussian red-brick
fortress that guards the entrance from the lagoon to the Baltic. It’s a long wait for the bus to Nida, which is parked by the ferry terminal with the doors shut and the driver inside smoking and reading a newspaper, then sleeping for at least an hour.
fortress that guards the entrance from the lagoon to the Baltic. It’s a long wait for the bus to Nida, which is parked by the ferry terminal with the doors shut and the driver inside smoking and reading a newspaper, then sleeping for at least an hour.
After we move off down the Spit, the gap widens gradually between the mainland and the peninsula so that when the bus reaches Nida’s painted wooden houses, the Lithuanian and Russian coastline is dim through a haze. Nida is still a holiday place of sailing boats, cafés and restaurants and bright wooden signs and weather vanes, with only a few Soviet-era additions.
Wartime destruction reduced the Hermann Blode inn to one wing, from which guests wander across to the crisply kept thatched Mann house that is just across from it. Blode, who died in 1934, is buried in the graveyard of the nineteenth-century German red-brick church – and Nida became the German Nidden again in 1939 when Memel returned to the Reich. Erich Koch, East Prussia’s Gauleiter, wanted to set up a Strength Through Joy youth camp there. Albert Speer, who had stayed at the inn, helped to stop this, and the place was quiet until the summer of 1944, when the Red Army guns broke the tranquillity and the inn filled up with refugees. As the Soviets took Preila (the German Preil), the next village, Ernst Mollenhauer, Blode’s successor, fled. His collection of pictures – by artists like Lovis Corinth and Max Pechstein who had often paid Blode with their work – was fed into the flames of a makeshift Russian sauna.
The Spit is still an enchanting memory. Michael Wieck, the retired leader of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, remembers his childhood trips there from pre-war Königsberg – when they left the North Station in a wheezing steam train that went across the Samland to Cranz before boarding the ferry to Nidden. No cars or vehicles were allowed on the Spit – only horse-drawn carts. The clear lagoon rippled on one side, the Baltic heaved on the other, and between the two were the dunes and pine woods, the wind sometimes flinging the sand with such force that it stung your bare legs. The Wiecks (both Michael’s parents were musicians)
and other artists stayed at Blode’s guest-house. But even in this remote place, Nazi songs began to be sung, the fishermen became infected and the local tinker was called a ‘Yid’. This threatened his family, for Michael is a Jew.
and other artists stayed at Blode’s guest-house. But even in this remote place, Nazi songs began to be sung, the fishermen became infected and the local tinker was called a ‘Yid’. This threatened his family, for Michael is a Jew.
Michael Wieck is Jewish through his mother. Her father had been a Prussian master builder – an engineer and a cultured man who had entertained a distant cousin, Clara Schumann, and the composer Brahms and the violinist Joachim at his house in Berlin. The Wiecks, however, were gentiles. Some of Michael’s relations died in Auschwitz, others were fellow-travellers of the Third Reich.
Königsberg’s German Jewish community goes back to 1540, to two doctors; by 1716 there were thirty-eight Jewish families, the population rising to some five thousand in 1880 (or approximately 1.8 per cent of Königsberg’s citizens). Immigrants from the Russian persecutions continued to come until 1914, even though border controls were tightened. The so-called Ostjuden were looked down on, not least by western Jews, and the influx led to tension. To be a Jew in East Prussia was, like everywhere in Europe, to be set apart.
Before 1914, however, Jews could feel cherished in Königsberg. At the inauguration of the city’s new synagogue in 1896, the Mayor, alongside the Governor of East Prussia, Count Wilhelm von Bismarck (son of the Iron Chancellor) and several Christian priests, spoke of his gratitude for ‘the active and devoted work of our Israelite fellow citizens, not only for the communal administration but in general for every public concern’. He praised the Jewish love of the family, appreciation of arts and sciences, obedience to the laws and to the Emperor; ‘only blind fanatics’, the Mayor declared, would want to persecute such a people. There was anti-Semitism in clubs or in student fraternity houses; as in the rest of Germany, Jews were excluded from senior posts
in universities, the civil service and the army, and in East Prussia’s rural hinterland the atmosphere was less friendly. But pre-1914 Königsberg has been described as being ‘as close to real pluralism as a Prussian city could get’.
in universities, the civil service and the army, and in East Prussia’s rural hinterland the atmosphere was less friendly. But pre-1914 Königsberg has been described as being ‘as close to real pluralism as a Prussian city could get’.
Felix Grayeff was born in 1906 into a Königsberg Jewish family who were involved in the highly profitable corn trade. Grayeff remembered a thriving place, with a symphony orchestra, an opera house, three theatres and three daily papers, the most celebrated of which, the liberal
Hartungsche Zeitung
, had been read by Kant – and approximately three thousand Jews: some first- or second-generation immigrants from Lithuania or Ukraine (and from Russian persecution) and others whose families had been there for centuries. One of Grayeff’s earliest memories is from 1910, of the thunderous welcome for the Emperor and Empress in Königsberg. The boy was told that the Russian Tsar couldn’t move freely among his subjects without danger of assassination, whereas William was so loved he did not even need special police protection.
Hartungsche Zeitung
, had been read by Kant – and approximately three thousand Jews: some first- or second-generation immigrants from Lithuania or Ukraine (and from Russian persecution) and others whose families had been there for centuries. One of Grayeff’s earliest memories is from 1910, of the thunderous welcome for the Emperor and Empress in Königsberg. The boy was told that the Russian Tsar couldn’t move freely among his subjects without danger of assassination, whereas William was so loved he did not even need special police protection.
Felix Grayeff’s education was thoroughly German or Prussian, modernized so that French was the first foreign language instead of Latin. Emphasis was on rigorous classroom work, with what Grayeff saw later as nationalist indoctrination, similar to the idea of imperial mission that filled the heads of his young British contemporaries. Civilization (brilliant repartee, paradox, elegance, constant questioning, disrespect for authority) was what Germany’s rivals, Britain and France (particularly France), prized, the teachers said; the German way, however, was
Kultur
, an experience of – and a reverence for – what was profound in thought, feeling and knowledge. A way of reaching this was through the great past – and through the geniuses who had formed it: Kant in philosophy, Goethe in poetry. The German language was, the teachers declared, the most expressive and the most serious, the most flexible, of all modern languages, second only to ancient Greek. A thorough gathering of facts must, it was thought, bring impartiality and good judgement to any decision.
Kultur
, an experience of – and a reverence for – what was profound in thought, feeling and knowledge. A way of reaching this was through the great past – and through the geniuses who had formed it: Kant in philosophy, Goethe in poetry. The German language was, the teachers declared, the most expressive and the most serious, the most flexible, of all modern languages, second only to ancient Greek. A thorough gathering of facts must, it was thought, bring impartiality and good judgement to any decision.
Kant was at the heart of this – his categorical imperative and his emphasis on duty. Always speak the truth; never let a lie defile you: this was drilled into the young Felix. Out of it all came bluntness, perhaps discourtesy; but the line from Goethe’s Faust should be the guide: ‘In German one lies when one is polite.’ History, however, was different – and here Felix Grayeff’s teachers showed a contradiction. The cunning of Bismarck and of Frederick the Great should be admired, even if it differed from the high standards expected in private life. Foreign statesmen like Richelieu and the Elder Pitt were praised for their ruthless use of power.
The Grayeffs were intensely patriotic. A year or two before the First World War, his uncle asked the young Felix to imagine that the Emperor was nearby and that someone tried to kill him. Would the boy throw himself in front of the assassin? The uncle said that he would not hesitate to sacrifice his own life for the Emperor. On the first day of the war, this man, although thirty-five, volunteered for the army, to be killed a year later. During the campaigns in the east, the German army encouraged Jewish Russians to desert from the Tsar’s forces, distributing leaflets in Yiddish, beginning ‘My dear Jews’, that offered release from Russian anti-Semitism.
After 1918, Königsberg’s Jews lived in the shadow of economic crisis and political threat. Michael Wieck believes that only four Jews forced to wear the Star of David in Königsberg survived the Second World War, the persecution and the Russian occupation, for Jews were murdered not only under Hitler but by Stalin’s Soviet regime as well. Two men seem to him to be particularly bleak representatives of that dark past, partly because they went on to great acclaim, one as a scientist, the other as a soldier who was thought to have saved German lives: Konrad Lorenz (the Nobel Prize – winning zoologist) and Otto Lasch (the German commander of Königsberg at the end of the Second World War). He cannot forget some words written by Konrad Lorenz in 1940, when he was a professor at Königsberg, that seem to justify fascist policies of selection and extermination and ‘an even more
rigorous eradication of those who are ethically inferior than is the case at present’ – the need to rely ‘on the healthy sentiments of the best among us and entrust them with the selection that determines whether our race thrives or decays …’
rigorous eradication of those who are ethically inferior than is the case at present’ – the need to rely ‘on the healthy sentiments of the best among us and entrust them with the selection that determines whether our race thrives or decays …’
The Königsberg synagogue.
Wieck’s mother was the violist and his gentile father was the second violin in the Königsberg String Quartet. They had separate apartments to allow each to practise without hearing the other. Simple love came from his mother’s sister, his spinster aunt Fanny, who was not intelligent but warm and soft and beautifully gentle. As a thirteen-year-old boy, Michael went with Fanny and his Jewish schoolteacher to the train station, where his aunt sat exhausted with her suitcase – red-faced, eyes imploring. The teacher told him to leave before the train took them off, perhaps to Chełmno, where the first mass gassing took place, or to Auschwitz.
Made to feel inferior at school as a Jew, he had to stand in
the back row when Hitler was welcomed hysterically to Königsberg; after this he transferred to the easier atmosphere of a Jewish private school. Throughout Michael Wieck’s childhood, however, the city seemed a fairy-tale place, with its castle, narrow streets, great squares, heavy fortified gates, high medieval walls and the dark warehouses along the River Pregel, even if intimations of horror began when the Nazi Jungvolk (the junior section of the Hitler Youth) waited for the Jewish children. It was a tense but exciting time. War threatened, yet young love and intense emotionalism could be overwhelming, as during a performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s
Der Freischütz
at the Königsberg opera: in the Wolf’s Glen scene a terror of death came over him, followed by an extraordinary acceptance of it. It was, Wieck thinks, a hint, he thinks of what the end might be – the horror, and then peace.
the back row when Hitler was welcomed hysterically to Königsberg; after this he transferred to the easier atmosphere of a Jewish private school. Throughout Michael Wieck’s childhood, however, the city seemed a fairy-tale place, with its castle, narrow streets, great squares, heavy fortified gates, high medieval walls and the dark warehouses along the River Pregel, even if intimations of horror began when the Nazi Jungvolk (the junior section of the Hitler Youth) waited for the Jewish children. It was a tense but exciting time. War threatened, yet young love and intense emotionalism could be overwhelming, as during a performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s
Der Freischütz
at the Königsberg opera: in the Wolf’s Glen scene a terror of death came over him, followed by an extraordinary acceptance of it. It was, Wieck thinks, a hint, he thinks of what the end might be – the horror, and then peace.
In the winter of 1938 – 9, after Kristallnacht and the burning of the synagogues, Michael Wieck’s teacher described how the Torah scrolls had been ripped apart and thrown out into the street. His sister Miriam was sent by his parents through a Quaker programme to a boarding school in Edinburgh; he didn’t see her for ten years. Michael’s father had an invitation from relations to go to Sweden, which would have saved them all – but Herr Wieck couldn’t face the dislocating change. With war – and the string of early victories – all Germany seemed drunk, rocketed into some sublime place. The Jews were pressed further down, their food rations cut, and only certain shops remained open to them; they could not go out after eight o’clock in the evening and were drafted into dangerous jobs. Wieck’s mother, the viola player, was made to work ten hours a day in a chemical factory.
The invasion of Russia began in June 1941. In July, Michael Wieck had his bar mitzvah, in the small Orthodox synagogue, which had been badly damaged but not, unlike the larger liberal one, destroyed. The Wiecks were visited by Michael’s half-brother, Peter, his father’s son by a first marriage – a Wehrmacht officer who was cool to his Jewish stepmother and to Michael.
Peter described how German troops poured petrol over Russians and set fire to them during the campaign on the eastern front. After the decree that Jews had to wear the Star of David, the boy endured insults in the street, only sometimes receiving surreptitious gifts of food and once a kind word from two Russian women prisoners who were working as slaves. The Wiecks put as many edible scraps into their dustbins as they could, to help the scavenging Russians forced to work as refuse collectors.
Peter described how German troops poured petrol over Russians and set fire to them during the campaign on the eastern front. After the decree that Jews had to wear the Star of David, the boy endured insults in the street, only sometimes receiving surreptitious gifts of food and once a kind word from two Russian women prisoners who were working as slaves. The Wiecks put as many edible scraps into their dustbins as they could, to help the scavenging Russians forced to work as refuse collectors.
On the Sabbath, the Rabbi remembered those who had recently left on the transports. No one spoke of what happened in the camps, although there were suicides among some of those ordered to the assembly points. Michael Wieck and his school friends were even used as messengers by the Gestapo to summon the victims.
It was a time of isolation, of solitary bicycle trips (when he still wore the partly covered star) – to swim in the city ponds or to suburban woodland or riding along the Pregel, past the warehouses and the slow-moving barges. Michael had a job at a cabinet-maker’s, where the work was arduous, much of it making coffins; the owner warned against some ardent Nazis in the workforce and passed over extra food, but another apprentice was a bully. Aged fourteen, Michael was moved, possibly as a result of a denunciation, to the chemical factory where his mother worked – a foul place thick with the steam from cauldrons of boiling liquid for soap, detergents and cleaning fluids. Gradually those wearing the Star of David became fewer and fewer as the deportations gathered pace, among them the girl that Michael Wieck thought of as his sweetheart – and the campaign against the Jews intensified at the first signs of imminent defeat. Michael questioned the idea of a merciful God who could permit such wretchedness.
On 26 August 1944, after he and Klaus, the child of their neighbour, who was in the Hitler Youth, had said good night in Morse code by blinking lamps, the huge RAF raids began; three nights later the inferno reached its limit when napalm set the city
on fire and no one could go into the charred centre. For Wieck, the August raids were the real end of Königsberg as a German place, their terrifying power destroying the old dream that the city could outlive any of its citizens as it had survived the previous Russian and Tatar invasions, the Thirty Years War and Napoleon. In the clear-up, the remaining Jews and the Russian and French prisoners were given some of the hardest work. Soon a new sound began – that of distant artillery. One of the few surviving Jews told Michael that he should rejoice, for the Russians would be their liberators.
on fire and no one could go into the charred centre. For Wieck, the August raids were the real end of Königsberg as a German place, their terrifying power destroying the old dream that the city could outlive any of its citizens as it had survived the previous Russian and Tatar invasions, the Thirty Years War and Napoleon. In the clear-up, the remaining Jews and the Russian and French prisoners were given some of the hardest work. Soon a new sound began – that of distant artillery. One of the few surviving Jews told Michael that he should rejoice, for the Russians would be their liberators.
Some Germans became friendly as the Red Army came closer: to Gumbinnen, then to Insterburg. Refugees began to arrive in Königsberg with stories of Soviet atrocities; Russian planes flew low over the city, firing at whatever moved; people dreaded clear skies, that blue East Prussian brightness later to be remembered with such nostalgia. In January 1945 the suburb of Metgethen fell, only five and a half miles from where the Wiecks lived – then was recaptured a month later. Lasch, the commandant, and Goebbels’s propaganda machine made the most of what was found in the retaken Metgethen – the destruction, the hanged and raped German women.
The siege had now lasted almost four months, but General Lasch, under Hitler’s orders, held out. Michael Wieck saw the bodies of young soldiers hanging from gallows by the North Station, with signs round their necks: ‘I had to die because I am a coward.’ Rumours began that all the Jews were to be taken away before the Red Army entered the city. On 8 April the street fighting moved away – and from the cellar next to where his family was sheltering, the boy went out and saw a solitary Russian soldier on a bicycle: then a tank with its Russian crew eating breakfast on the open part at the back. At noon, the first Russian entered the cellar. He asked if there were any German soldiers and took Michael’s father’s watch, proudly showing what a collection of ‘uri’ he had. More soldiers arrived; one lost his temper when Michael’s mother whistled what had become the family theme
tune, from the second movement of the Beethoven quartet opus 59/1 – and fired off his pistol.
tune, from the second movement of the Beethoven quartet opus 59/1 – and fired off his pistol.
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