Forgotten Land (3 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
East Prussia was Germany’s (some claimed western Europe’s) eastern redoubt. People remarked on its neat towns and villages,
its cultivated fields – the order imposed upon broad lakes, poor soil and apparently illimitable forests. There was a sense still of colonization, though much of it had been controlled by Germans since the fourteenth century. Asia began at these frontiers, it was said. System against chaos, a threatened civilization, a hard place to be – these formed the land’s myth.
its cultivated fields – the order imposed upon broad lakes, poor soil and apparently illimitable forests. There was a sense still of colonization, though much of it had been controlled by Germans since the fourteenth century. Asia began at these frontiers, it was said. System against chaos, a threatened civilization, a hard place to be – these formed the land’s myth.
If you go east, from Lüneburg and Duisburg, away from the past, back to Kaliningrad (the old Königsberg) there’s competition, more than six decades after the expulsions, to be the last German – someone now to be cherished rather than expelled or killed. I see this when I meet the farmer Johann van der Decken on a bright late-autumn day. We are near the Russian town of Gusev, until 1945 the German Gumbinnen, twenty or so miles from Kaliningrad. Aged about fifty-five, bearded, his face tanned below the line of his cap, Johann has been here for twelve years. He really is, he says, the last German working this land; true, there’d been a group near Chernyakhovsk (the old German Insterburg) but most of them were leaving. As for Stahl, an old man who’d been born in East Prussia and then came back – he just keeps a few cows and pigs: not proper farming.
Johann’s farm – some two thousand acres of wheat, barley, oil-seed rape and dairy cows, employing thirty-four people – is big, different to those of Stahl and the Chernyakhovsk Germans in another way; Johann has no links at all with the province. He grew up near Hamburg and before coming here he worked in agriculture in Africa, where he met his Russian wife. Is he like the Germans who had come east to develop the land centuries earlier, following the Teutonic Knights? First Africa, then Kaliningrad – Johann is a pioneer. He’s building (or rebuilding) the place. Kaliningrad agriculture had collapsed in the 1990s, after the closure of the huge Soviet collective farms.
Johann van der Decken had come from outside to what had been East Prussia, not like Klaus Lunau, who lives in the neatest
Zelenogradsk (once the German Cranz). As I walk with Klaus Lunau through Zelenogradsk, past the hideous glass and brick house built for Boris Yeltsin (who never spent a night in it), he says that he really is the last German from the old Königsberg in the Kaliningrad Oblast (or district), having retired here from intelligence work for the German army and police. But what about Gerda Preuss, I ask – the old lady who had lived since the 1945 Soviet take-over in Königsberg with her Russian partner, Maria? What about Rudolf Jacquemien, the communist poet? Klaus says that Gerda Preuss and Rudolf Jacquemien are dead. Only he remains.
Zelenogradsk (once the German Cranz). As I walk with Klaus Lunau through Zelenogradsk, past the hideous glass and brick house built for Boris Yeltsin (who never spent a night in it), he says that he really is the last German from the old Königsberg in the Kaliningrad Oblast (or district), having retired here from intelligence work for the German army and police. But what about Gerda Preuss, I ask – the old lady who had lived since the 1945 Soviet take-over in Königsberg with her Russian partner, Maria? What about Rudolf Jacquemien, the communist poet? Klaus says that Gerda Preuss and Rudolf Jacquemien are dead. Only he remains.
All of them, Johann van der Decken, Gerda Preuss and Klaus Lunau, feel or felt secure in Kaliningrad because they married or lived with Russians; Rudolf Jacquemien came there in the 1950s, an idealistic Marxist, so was different: not a survivor but an immigrant. The larger part of the old East Prussia, its southern bit, from the Russian frontier to the Vistula or Weichsel River, went to Poland after the last war. Here there are more Germans, several thousand, many from the large Polish minority that had lived for centuries under German rule. If you want greater evidence of the old German east, it’s in the churches and castles and civic buildings or on the faded headstones of the graves scattered across this forgotten land.
In a Hamburg bookshop, I find a large section on the former German eastern territories – Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia. Among the books are a history of the great neo-classical Dönhoff house at Friedrichstein, with photographs taken before its destruction in 1945; an illustrated account of the journalist Marion Dönhoff’s flight west ahead of the Red Army; and her own memoirs of childhood and escape, written after she’d become one of the most admired women in post-war Germany. The shelf also has a novel, later filmed, by one of Marion’s young
relations about the trek west, a neat European romance between a young German aristocrat and French prisoner of war. There are also collections of sun-filled photographs. One is called
Beautiful East Prussia, Pearl of the East
.
relations about the trek west, a neat European romance between a young German aristocrat and French prisoner of war. There are also collections of sun-filled photographs. One is called
Beautiful East Prussia, Pearl of the East
.
Several post-1945 survivors of the East Prussian landowning families – or Junkers (from Jung Herr or Young Lord) – wrote their memoirs; from these we know about the Dönhoffs of Friedrichstein, the Lehndorffs of Steinort and the Dohnas of Schlobitten. The books tell of a still partly feudal society, a world (apparently) of obligation and trust. Marion Dönhoff depicts a frugal innocence in the huge pre-war Friedrichstein that is almost bleakly dutiful. One of the estate workers at Schlobitten, the Dohna property, told Alexander Dohna’s startled young wife that everyone in the place looked upon her as their mother. Hans von Lehndorff, the last heir to Steinort, evokes the place’s beauty and worthwhile life. All these seem to say: is it so wrong to regret the passing of this world?
It’s near the end of winter, so Hamburg is cold, its wealth dulled by a leaden twilight. I think of my meeting with Marion Dönhoff some eighteen years ago, how in one of her books she describes hearing at night in her house in the Hamburg suburbs the distant shutting of a car door, a break in a silence that had brought back her earlier life in a much more remote place. Before the war, Hamburg and Königsberg had both been rich trading cities; in 1944 and 1945 both suffered terrible destruction. Then came the two kinds of rebirth – the Soviet and that of capitalist western Europe. When I mentioned to Marion Dönhoff the immense difference between rich Hamburg and poor Kaliningrad, she hadn’t responded; perhaps it was too obvious.
This day in Hamburg I have lunch with two German friends and we talk about the millions of refugees who had come after the war to the new Germany from the old eastern territories. In the communist zone, they were controlled by the Soviet occupiers, but in the democratic west these people formed a large and active group. Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor of the new Federal
Republic, feared an island of anger and reaction. They were given money and, in places like the Duisburg and Lüneburg museums, memorialization of their former lives.
Republic, feared an island of anger and reaction. They were given money and, in places like the Duisburg and Lüneburg museums, memorialization of their former lives.
This didn’t put an end to resentment and demands for a return of what had gone; although my friends don’t say so, I think that the absorption of so many is an extraordinary achievement. We talked about the leader of the Bund der Vertriebenen (the largest organization of the expelled), Erika Steinbach – how she infuriates the Poles, particularly those who now live in what was, until 1945, the southern part of East Prussia. Should this be worrying? No, because her latest campaign is for a memorial in Berlin to the expelled people – not about property or frontiers. Frau Steinbach had wanted the memorial for the Germans whereas others, particularly in Poland, say victims throughout Europe should be commemorated. Much more important points had been settled at the time of reunification, when the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl accepted the post-1945 frontiers. The legal challenges brought by a few Germans who had left Poland in the communist time and now wished to reclaim land weren’t important. I remembered what a Polish politician said to me – how you could play on German guilt. Perhaps this could last for ever – an infinity of darkness.
When I first went there in 1992, Kaliningrad had also seemed darkly shocking. I got off the train into a parody of Soviet planning with cracked concrete, cratered streets, people bent against the cold and wet and a sleek German tour coach gliding past belching Ladas and dirty, dented trams. Rumours went round – that Helmut Kohl wanted to buy the place back for the newly reunited Germany: that the Germans, Poles, Lithuanians and Russians might run the enclave (now cut off from the rest of Russia) together. In a broken-down hotel that was patrolled by prostitutes and drug dealers, I asked two Russian students what they thought should happen. One said that the name must be changed; Mikhail Kalinin, Stalin’s henchman, represented the bad years (it jolted me to think that there had been a worse time). Now the place should
be called Kantgrad, to show that Russia’s most western land was now part of a new Europe.
be called Kantgrad, to show that Russia’s most western land was now part of a new Europe.
Soviet housing on the river in Kaliningrad.
Those who write or talk about the city still stress its horror. It has ‘bad karma’, I was told – this hideous, failed Kaliningrad, forever doomed, stifled by a confused and bloody past, riddled with AIDS and drugs and smuggling and crime. Is it worse than many other Russian cities blighted by Soviet planning? I don’t think so. Kaliningrad
does
have its own inhuman centre, as if a great scoop had lifted up a whole quarter, replacing it with wide avenues and chipped concrete walkways, potholed highways and bridges over the slow dark river, often seen through a haze of pollution, across memorials, heroic statues and models of weapons commemorating the Great Patriotic War. On the trams, obviously over-burdened people make you feel ashamed to be rich and happy. But beyond this is a layered history, the sense of stones beneath concrete, of streets and houses of a foreign past not yet dissolved into a new identity. The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky,
when he came to Kaliningrad in the 1960s, wrote of the trees whispering in German.
does
have its own inhuman centre, as if a great scoop had lifted up a whole quarter, replacing it with wide avenues and chipped concrete walkways, potholed highways and bridges over the slow dark river, often seen through a haze of pollution, across memorials, heroic statues and models of weapons commemorating the Great Patriotic War. On the trams, obviously over-burdened people make you feel ashamed to be rich and happy. But beyond this is a layered history, the sense of stones beneath concrete, of streets and houses of a foreign past not yet dissolved into a new identity. The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky,
when he came to Kaliningrad in the 1960s, wrote of the trees whispering in German.
In spite of Soviet destruction, the past can come suddenly back, like the quick lifting of a blanket. You see it in the neat pre-war German railway stations – resembling giant parts of an ancient train set – the paint not thick enough to hide the old names: Rominten, for instance, in black gothic lettering at the stop for the old imperial hunting lodge, once the preserve of the German emperors and that passionate slaughterer of all game, Hermann Göring. The tomb of Immanuel Kant survived the bombs and the changes, to become a sacred place where newly married Russian couples are photographed, the bride’s white dress brilliant against the memorial’s pale-pink stone and the cathedral’s dark-red Prussian brick. The students I first met in 1992 have done well, mostly through links to the west; Eduard and Olga look outwards from Kaliningrad, working for foreign companies or for the European Union. To them, it’s inconceivable that the place can be anything other than Russian. But they know that Königsberg is what makes this Russian place different.
Probably the German city had never been beautiful – idiosyncratic perhaps, with its mysterious corners, self-conscious medievalism, crooked streets, gothic towers and dark blocks of warehouses along a slow, oily river. The former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt – who passed through Königsberg on his way to the eastern front – remembers a very provincial place. Most of the buildings – even the famous red-brick fortifications around it that guarded western civilization – were nineteenth century, making, at best, a place of character and memory, enfolding its people in a limited, comfortable world. The centre – the castle, cathedral and university district – was what the Soviets and the bombing changed most. After 1945, they blew up some of the churches; now the Juditterkirche, the oldest church in East Prussia, is a place of Russian Orthodox worship, with the old German cemetery next to it. German money has paid for much of what has been done since 1991, often – as with the cathedral
and its stiflingly inoffensive civic interior – alongside Russian government funds.
and its stiflingly inoffensive civic interior – alongside Russian government funds.
In this post-Soviet age, black limousines and dark-suited bodyguards, former members of the special forces, wait outside the Kaliningrad clubs, restaurants and hotels; the show of money mocks any idea of communism. Most of the city government’s plans for tourism seem to leap over the Soviet years and, as you walk round, you sense their brevity. Across from the concrete are the sugary early twentieth-century baroque of the former courthouse (now the headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet), the red brick of the nineteenth-century copies of the medieval gates and the Dohna tower (now the Amber Museum). German or Prussian gothic is still a powerful presence, mostly nineteenth century, except in the outside of the restored cathedral, one of the largest brick gothic buildings in Europe. A lake, dark green and pungent in summer, stretches from where the castle once was before the Soviet triumph of the building of the high, still empty and asbestos-ridden old Communist Party headquarters. More recent buildings can seem stagey, crudely imitative, Königsberg in caricature; they are certainly not Soviet.
The tourists are mostly German. When Kaliningrad first opened to the world in 1991, many of those who had lived there before 1945 came back for the first time since the expulsions. It’s said that several, standing perhaps where the castle once was, or in Victory Square (formerly Kochplatz, named after himself by the last National Socialist Gauleiter, Erich Koch) or what had been the main business street, the old Steindamm, or the former Lindenstrasse – where the former Jewish orphanage still stands – were overwhelmed, bursting into tears at the memory of terror or of loss.
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