Forgotten Land (36 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
Faced by these Cold War barriers, the only reconstruction could be through memory. The flash of brass instruments in the sun during fanfares from the Königsberg castle tower; the trips to the coast; the cosy but hard-working farm life; the lakes, the horses and the forests – much of this was resurrected in publications by the firm of Gräfe and Unzer, once based in Königsberg (where it had run the largest bookshop in Germany) before setting up after 1945 in Munich. So from Munich, books of photographs, calendars, recipes, dialect dictionaries and memories kept the old East Prussia, or a version of it, alive.
The Königsberg Museum in Duisburg whose director is Lorenz Grimoni began because Duisburg was Königsberg’s godfather city. One way of keeping the old place alive had been to get cards to all the traceable former inhabitants, asking them for their old Königsberg address and where they lived now. The museum still has over three hundred thousand of these cards – once useful, now forgotten. Revival of a kind came with the 1955 celebrations in Duisburg of Königsberg’s seven hundredth anniversary, although by then most knew that they would never return. Look,
Lorenz says, pointing at a photograph of people sitting in the tiers of a temporary grandstand – that’s the poet Agnes Miegel, a homely-looking woman in a small dark hat known as the Mother of East Prussia.
Lorenz says, pointing at a photograph of people sitting in the tiers of a temporary grandstand – that’s the poet Agnes Miegel, a homely-looking woman in a small dark hat known as the Mother of East Prussia.
The Germans weren’t the only destroyers, and in the museum there are photographs that show the ruins left by the British bombs. Because of this – and the devastation of other German cities – Lorenz’s father had objected to the award at Aachen in May 1956 of the Charlemagne Prize to Winston Churchill. Never, Herr Grimoni told his son, would he understand the decision to give this to the destroyer of so much of European culture. Lorenz isn’t angry, but he wants to penetrate Britain’s self-satisfaction about its past. Then he stops. The silence, I sense, holds a new freedom – to speak of matters that wouldn’t have been raised even ten years ago. He goes on to say that the expelled Germans had hoped just after the war that they might return. They’d even sent a request to the victorious Allies for the restoration to them of their ancient homeland but, of course, Germany was then the hated nation.
Germany was seen as a monster after the war, because, Lorenz Grimoni says, of the terrible murder of the Jews; this has eclipsed everything else about it. A quarter of old German land and hundreds of thousands of people were lost in the east. But mourning for this loss is restricted to a small group, even within Germany itself – and this distorts what should be a part of the German identity. Terrible things happen to countries – yet most of them can be proud of much of their past; here such pride skulks in secret, as if within a forbidden sect.
When Lorenz went to Kaliningrad in 1991 he wasn’t shocked by the desolation, as he’d previously visited an aunt in the old DDR, the communist East Germany. The Russians were kind, but Lorenz saw the two memorials in a park near the old castle – both of them in honour of the commander of the Soviet submarine that had sunk the German liner
Wilhelm Gustloff
in 1945, with the loss of thousands of civilian lives. Should such a tragedy be publicly
celebrated? There shouldn’t be memorials to those, like the submarine commander or to Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the British chief of Bomber Command, who killed civilians, Lorenz thinks. In Kaliningrad in 1991, Lorenz and others had built a Lutheran church – or a good enough temporary one, on an old German graveyard – in three weeks. It had opened with a concert by a choir from Frankfurt. I wonder if he may be hinting at what might have been done if the Germans had had the chance to rebuild Königsberg – as they’d rebuilt their ruined west after 1945 and then (after reunification in 1990) the old communist east, or Mitteldeutschland, as my old German teacher had called it.
Wilhelm Gustloff
in 1945, with the loss of thousands of civilian lives. Should such a tragedy be publicly
celebrated? There shouldn’t be memorials to those, like the submarine commander or to Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the British chief of Bomber Command, who killed civilians, Lorenz thinks. In Kaliningrad in 1991, Lorenz and others had built a Lutheran church – or a good enough temporary one, on an old German graveyard – in three weeks. It had opened with a concert by a choir from Frankfurt. I wonder if he may be hinting at what might have been done if the Germans had had the chance to rebuild Königsberg – as they’d rebuilt their ruined west after 1945 and then (after reunification in 1990) the old communist east, or Mitteldeutschland, as my old German teacher had called it.
Think of the vast shadows over East Prussia between the wars, Lorenz says – Bolshevik Russia to the east, a new nationalistic Poland to the south and west. Memel, previously the most eastern town in Germany, went in the Treaty of Versailles – one of the oldest frontier towns in Europe. That was why there was the colossal East Prussian vote for the Nazis. Against this, in the war of memory, he cites the Königsberg liberal tradition. Wasn’t it also the city of Kant?
Less popular among the
Vertriebene
(the expelled people) than the obvious magnificence of Kant were sceptical contemporary writers like Siegfried Lenz and Arno Surminski, whose not so golden nostalgia darkened the roseate glow. To the poet Johannes Bobrowski, for instance, the dislocation from the beautiful past had come earlier than 1945. Settling after the war in communist East Berlin, where he worked first in children’s and then in evangelical publishing, Bobrowski started by writing with conventional nostalgia about his old homeland before creating a mythical landscape in poems of austere beauty that went much further back – to the lost world of Sarmatia, before any western German intrusion, before the Teutonic Knights. For Bobrowski it was the massacre of Jews and prisoners, and the destruction of so much history, which he saw as a soldier on the eastern front that marked the real break with the old East Prussia where different peoples had once lived together – not the defeat of 1945.
Vertriebene
(the expelled people) than the obvious magnificence of Kant were sceptical contemporary writers like Siegfried Lenz and Arno Surminski, whose not so golden nostalgia darkened the roseate glow. To the poet Johannes Bobrowski, for instance, the dislocation from the beautiful past had come earlier than 1945. Settling after the war in communist East Berlin, where he worked first in children’s and then in evangelical publishing, Bobrowski started by writing with conventional nostalgia about his old homeland before creating a mythical landscape in poems of austere beauty that went much further back – to the lost world of Sarmatia, before any western German intrusion, before the Teutonic Knights. For Bobrowski it was the massacre of Jews and prisoners, and the destruction of so much history, which he saw as a soldier on the eastern front that marked the real break with the old East Prussia where different peoples had once lived together – not the defeat of 1945.
Like other West German politicians, Adenauer appeared to court the expelled Germans, giving generous subsidies and saying that the 1937 borders should be restored; privately, however, he doubted the chances of this. What Adenauer wanted was to embed the Federal Republic in the west. A Roman Catholic Rhinelander (not a Prussian), he saw, not entirely regretfully, the eastern territories as lost. But the stridency of the expelled Germans was useful in negotiations with the Western allies; listen to these people, see what an explosion of nationalism there might be, Adenauer said, if West Germany is not given more of what it needs or wants. Stridency also made it easier to dismiss the expelled Germans’ claims, even if, at election time, all parties courted them. When Michael Wieck, a survivor of the Holocaust, went back in 1992 to Kaliningrad, he heard someone in his tour group say that there was only one person who could change this mess: Hitler. And it’s still easy to get some of those who feel they have a claim on Germany’s old eastern territories to come out with this sort of thing as they contemplate their loss. Not surprisingly, memories of violence and horror can flare up again across the new frontiers. In September 2003, during a debate about a proposed Berlin memorial to the expelled Germans, Erika Steinbach, one of their leaders, was shown in a cartoon in a Polish paper dressed as an SS dominatrix riding on the back of the pathetic-looking German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, over the caption ‘The German Trojan Horse’.
When the southern part of East Prussia came within their new frontiers, the Poles could think that they were absorbing land linked to Poland for centuries. But the Soviet occupation of Königsberg and the north was different. The renaming of the city – in July 1946 – symbolized more than Russification. Mikhail Kalinin was a grim Bolshevik – one of Stalin’s creatures. Kaliningrad meant the transformation of what the new rulers saw as a Prussian militaristic bastion into a Soviet utopia.
At the war’s end, after General Lasch’s surrender, some hundred and thirty-seven thousand Germans were still in Königsberg,
survivors of horrific destruction. Red Army commanders took over the smartest German villas; Gauleiter Koch’s residence became an officers’ club. That first summer of Soviet possession, the place was in chaos – unharvested crops, no public transport, terror for women, ravaging hunger (with the occupiers suffering almost as much as their new subjects) and rumours of wolves roaming the city. At first the Russians wanted at least some Germans to stay, to teach them how to run the place. German newspapers came out and German clubs were set up, with dances where Germans met Russians. But in October 1947, Stalin ordered the deportation of the German former citizens of Königsberg; by November 1948 the Red Army General in charge was reporting that the exodus was over. A total of 102,125 Germans had left, leaving only a few hundred useful experts who stayed until 1951.
survivors of horrific destruction. Red Army commanders took over the smartest German villas; Gauleiter Koch’s residence became an officers’ club. That first summer of Soviet possession, the place was in chaos – unharvested crops, no public transport, terror for women, ravaging hunger (with the occupiers suffering almost as much as their new subjects) and rumours of wolves roaming the city. At first the Russians wanted at least some Germans to stay, to teach them how to run the place. German newspapers came out and German clubs were set up, with dances where Germans met Russians. But in October 1947, Stalin ordered the deportation of the German former citizens of Königsberg; by November 1948 the Red Army General in charge was reporting that the exodus was over. A total of 102,125 Germans had left, leaving only a few hundred useful experts who stayed until 1951.
Soviet citizens were encouraged to settle in the new zone, with a free journey, the promise of a home and a period free of tax. Many who came were widows with children, having lost their husbands in the war; often they were horrified by their first glimpse of the ruins – and wanted to leave without getting out of the train. In 1946, some within the new Russian authority believed that the comprehensive destruction made rebuilding impossible, that the ruins should be left as a memorial to the dead of the Great Patriotic War – and stones and bricks were carted off to be used in the repair of other Soviet cities. Then a new symbolism took root, that of a heroic place; Kaliningrad was the final victory; it was also a new fortress, against capitalism and the west. The city must become a revolutionary utopia, representing the defeat of the Prussian military past.
The blasts of propaganda began.
Kaliningradskaya Pravda
declared in 1946 that in the devastated country many districts had seen a harvest ‘of which the Germans had never dreamed’. The city centre – the castle, cathedral and university district – was what the Soviets changed most, hollowing out the old Königsberg while leaving whole suburbs untouched. Slowly the settlers, from
all over the Soviet Union (including some ethnic Germans), began to arrive.
Kaliningradskaya Pravda
declared in 1946 that in the devastated country many districts had seen a harvest ‘of which the Germans had never dreamed’. The city centre – the castle, cathedral and university district – was what the Soviets changed most, hollowing out the old Königsberg while leaving whole suburbs untouched. Slowly the settlers, from
all over the Soviet Union (including some ethnic Germans), began to arrive.
Stalin had wanted the city as an obvious reward for the Soviet people’s terrible sacrifices and also because of its ice-free port on the Baltic. Kaliningrad became the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet, closed to foreigners and as hard to reach as the Arctic wastes. Slowly the soulless avenues and concrete of Soviet planning began to fill the centre, alongside the reproachful ruins. During the 1960s, architects and intellectuals called for the castle to be restored, emphasizing its historic links with Russia through visits by Peter the Great and Marshal Suvorov and the trial there of German Social Democrats who’d helped Russian revolutionaries. Old Riga had been rebuilt by the Soviets, as had the tsars’ palaces in Leningrad – and the Polish communist government had rebuilt Warsaw, Marienburg (now Malbork) and Gda
sk; why couldn’t something similar happen in Kaliningrad, to show the uniqueness of its past? The castle ruins even featured in tourist posters that encouraged people from within the Soviet Union to come to the Baltic – ‘door to the gothic, to jazz, street cafés, the door to Europe …’ But the Kremlin of the grey, stifling Brezhnev era ordered the city government to blow up the castle.
sk; why couldn’t something similar happen in Kaliningrad, to show the uniqueness of its past? The castle ruins even featured in tourist posters that encouraged people from within the Soviet Union to come to the Baltic – ‘door to the gothic, to jazz, street cafés, the door to Europe …’ But the Kremlin of the grey, stifling Brezhnev era ordered the city government to blow up the castle.To the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, however, German East Prussia couldn’t be so easily rubbed out. His time there at the end of the war had fascinated him all through his post-war years in the Gulag, not only through its glimpse of a previously unknown west but because he thought that one of the crucial moments of twentieth-century history had happened in Ostpreussen – one of the ‘nodal points’ in European destiny. To Solzhenitsyn, the August 1914 campaign and the Russian defeat at Tannenberg presaged not only the eventual collapse of the Germans but also the revolution of 1917. In 1945, through the smoke and flames of destruction, he’d seen the arrogance of ‘the towers of Hohenstein’ – the Tannenberg Memorial to that German triumph. ‘Untouched I’ll leave you,’ he wrote of East Prussia later, in a poem composed in a Soviet prison camp,
I’ll be off
Like Pilate when he washed his hands.
Between us there is Samsonov,
Between us many a cross there stands
Of whitened Russian bones. For strange
Feelings rule my soul tonight.
I’ve known you now for all these years …
Long since a premonition rose,
Ostpreussen!
that our paths would cross.
Between us there is Samsonov,
Between us many a cross there stands
Of whitened Russian bones. For strange
Feelings rule my soul tonight.
I’ve known you now for all these years …
Long since a premonition rose,
Ostpreussen!
that our paths would cross.
So it was to Kaliningrad that he went in the summer of 1967, in search of atmosphere for a series of novels about the First World War and the revolution, of which the first volume was to be
August 1914
. This research had an additional fascination, as Solzhenitsyn’s father had fought under the Russian General Samsonov in that fatal campaign. There was also nostalgia: he wished to revisit where his artillery battery had been in 1944 and 1945. On the way north, they camped out – the Solzhenitsyns and another couple, their friends the Etkinds – the author reciting to them from memory by the campfire the whole of his poem about the 1944 and 1945 invasion,
Prussian Nights
. It wasn’t possible to see all Samsonov’s 1914 route through the old Germany – much of it now being over the border in the new Poland. But the woods and marshes and the once diligently drained fields and towns and villages near Kaliningrad hadn’t lost that solid feel that Solzhenitsyn recalled from twenty years before; nor, in spite of its gutted centre, had the city itself where, in the tomb of Kant and the old German houses that remained, the novelist sensed centuries of proud history and bourgeois care.
August 1914
. This research had an additional fascination, as Solzhenitsyn’s father had fought under the Russian General Samsonov in that fatal campaign. There was also nostalgia: he wished to revisit where his artillery battery had been in 1944 and 1945. On the way north, they camped out – the Solzhenitsyns and another couple, their friends the Etkinds – the author reciting to them from memory by the campfire the whole of his poem about the 1944 and 1945 invasion,
Prussian Nights
. It wasn’t possible to see all Samsonov’s 1914 route through the old Germany – much of it now being over the border in the new Poland. But the woods and marshes and the once diligently drained fields and towns and villages near Kaliningrad hadn’t lost that solid feel that Solzhenitsyn recalled from twenty years before; nor, in spite of its gutted centre, had the city itself where, in the tomb of Kant and the old German houses that remained, the novelist sensed centuries of proud history and bourgeois care.
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