Forgotten Land (16 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
Dönhoff had stayed away from her homeland for some forty-four years until, in 1989, the philosopher Immanuel Kant took her back to Königsberg, now Kaliningrad. For her journey east, she went in two guises: someone from an utterly foreign past but also one of the most distinguished liberal figures in modern
Germany. Even someone of her impeccable reputation found it difficult to get permission to enter what was then the closed zone of Kaliningrad; only at the last minute did the Russians grant the visas. She travelled by car, in August, in a Citroën
deux chevaux
driven by a young nephew, Hermann Hatzfeld. Marion Dönhoff never had children or married, although she was several times in love.
Germany. Even someone of her impeccable reputation found it difficult to get permission to enter what was then the closed zone of Kaliningrad; only at the last minute did the Russians grant the visas. She travelled by car, in August, in a Citroën
deux chevaux
driven by a young nephew, Hermann Hatzfeld. Marion Dönhoff never had children or married, although she was several times in love.
It was Kant who allowed her to go back. A Dönhoff great-great-grandfather had heard the philosopher lecture in Königsberg, but her family’s most recent link with him had been towards the end of the war, when a statue of Kant by Christian Rauch, his home town’s memorial to him, was sent to Friedrichstein for protection from the bombing. Her father had died, her brothers were in the army (one had already been killed), her other unmarried sister had Down’s syndrome, so Marion Dönhoff had taken over much of the management of the family properties. She placed the statue in a quiet grove in the park at Friedrichstein.
Then came her flight west, in January 1945, and the arrival of the Red Army. Friedrichstein fell into ruins and has almost completely vanished. With it has gone much of the family collection and an archive that had started when a Dönhoff settled in this remote land in the seventeenth century. It’s important to remember that borders and allegiances often shifted. Marion Dönhoff’s ancestors – and the Dohnas and the Lehndorffs – had, after coming east, served not only the dukes and kings of Prussia and the emperors of Germany but the kings of Poland as well.
Kant’s statue disappeared after the war, with the old world. In the 1980s, Marion Dönhoff tried to find out what had happened, writing to her friend the communist poet Rudolf Jacquemien, one of the few Germans in Kaliningrad. No one knew anything about it, but Jacquemien did his best to find out. A roistering, red-faced man, he’d come to Stalin’s Soviet Union as an idealistic communist before the war, working as a seaman before service in the Red Army and imprisonment as a German. In the more relaxed late 1960s, he retired to Kaliningrad, drawn perhaps by what
remained of the German atmosphere, joining the writers’ club and writing his poetry about the sea and love and a joy in life that had survived Stalin’s labour camps. ‘I didn’t cry when I was born,’ he told a Russian friend, but laughed to meet the world.
remained of the German atmosphere, joining the writers’ club and writing his poetry about the sea and love and a joy in life that had survived Stalin’s labour camps. ‘I didn’t cry when I was born,’ he told a Russian friend, but laughed to meet the world.
So Rudolf Jacquemien and some friends set out from Kaliningrad for what had been Friedrichstein – now the Russian Kamenka – to try to find Kant. Marion Dönhoff had sent him the plan of the grounds and directions to where the statue might be, perhaps buried under the reclaiming earth. Quickly they excavated remnants of her former life: cups bearing the Dönhoff arms – for which they rapidly brewed up tea – small plates, a jug, further remains of the Count’s breakfast service, and some silver coins (1935 Reichsmarks with Hindenburg’s head on them, the German eagle joined with Hitler’s swastika). Suddenly one of the Russians there, the writer Yuri Ivanov, felt overcome – in this Soviet land – by the romantic idea of Marion Dönhoff’s youth.
Yuri Ivanov had been near Friedrichstein before – in 1945 with the Red Army when he was attached to a unit searching for East Prussian art treasures, for the Amber Room (a 1716 Prussian gift to the Tsar Peter the Great, plundered from Leningrad by the Nazis) and the great libraries. He recalled what he’d seen then on a German airfield off the road out of Königsberg – the rows of abandoned Junkers and Focke-Wulf planes (which would have bombed his family’s Leningrad house) with records of sorties marked on their fuselages (Tallinn, Leningrad, Liep
ja) and pinups still stuck in the cockpits – then, further on, the former panzer school named after Heinz Guderian, one of the pioneers of Blitzkrieg. All this had been surrendered or broken into the detritus of defeat. It was further remnants of such destruction that he found at Friedrichstein on the hunt for Kant some forty years later, after turning into a long tree-lined alley that leads off the main road into what had been the private Dönhoff domain. Uncontrolled woodland, weed and wild flowers have taken over the mown lawns and carefully placed statues or selected plants of
a planned landscape that had once been its owners’ idea of a civilized world.
ja) and pinups still stuck in the cockpits – then, further on, the former panzer school named after Heinz Guderian, one of the pioneers of Blitzkrieg. All this had been surrendered or broken into the detritus of defeat. It was further remnants of such destruction that he found at Friedrichstein on the hunt for Kant some forty years later, after turning into a long tree-lined alley that leads off the main road into what had been the private Dönhoff domain. Uncontrolled woodland, weed and wild flowers have taken over the mown lawns and carefully placed statues or selected plants ofa planned landscape that had once been its owners’ idea of a civilized world.
With excited cries, Yuri Ivanov and the search party pored over a new discovery, a large stone head of the god Neptune. But Ivanov was surrendering to another past – different to his own of being bombed and starved during the German army’s siege of Leningrad, or even the chaotic victory of 1945. He felt instead, in that bright Baltic light, the romance of the old German version of Friedrichstein – the pale stone, the family’s arms above the entrance, the sun over the garden and the ancient oaks in the park. Inside had been the chain of rooms, the red room or the green saloon and the Gobelins or Flanders tapestries and (scrupulously stored and catalogued) the archives where Marion’s research and writing life had begun: all the ‘beauty, calm’ and space brought by generations, Yuri Ivanov thought, before the bombers had flown over it, east towards Russia at the start of the invasion that had ended in destruction. How strange that this could move him, a former enemy. Another shout came from the search party – it was not Kant they had found but another stone version of a god, perhaps Pregel, a river god worshipped by the old Prussians who had been at least partly exterminated by the Teutonic Knights, the first Germans here.
In the evening, after their work, the party sat drinking more tea out of the Dönhoff cups by a small fire they had made. Wild duck flew overhead, seeking the artificial lake, Friedrichstein’s most obvious remains. Rudolf Jacquemien read his companions some verses about the Lithuanian sea princess Jurate’s love for the young fisherman Kastytis that had annoyed the sea king Naglys, the brother of Pregel, whose head they had just found. Ivanov’s romance took off again. These two Germans, Marion Dönhoff and Rudolf Jacquemien, had been brought together by destruction, for Friedrichstein was as far as you could imagine from Jacquemien’s childhood in the cold rooms of a Roman Catholic children’s home in Kiel before he began work as a gravedigger, miner and seaman. In 1932, fervently anti-fascist, he came on a freighter to the north
Russian harbour of Archangel, meeting a Russian girl there and deciding, on a second visit, to stay in Soviet Russia; later came the Red Army and a Siberian labour camp. Another member of the search party shouts, very excited, thinking she has found more treasure – but it turns out to be the top of a used anti-tank shell.
Russian harbour of Archangel, meeting a Russian girl there and deciding, on a second visit, to stay in Soviet Russia; later came the Red Army and a Siberian labour camp. Another member of the search party shouts, very excited, thinking she has found more treasure – but it turns out to be the top of a used anti-tank shell.
The Russian search party never found the statue – so Marion Dönhoff decided to give a smaller copy to the Russians and to take it to Kaliningrad herself. In Berlin she tracked down a cast of another Kant statue by Rauch, practically identical, and paid for a bronze copy of this from an award recently given to her: the Heine Prize, named after the poet who, ironically, had written scornfully about Kant. The gift was a restoration of a tiny part of a city that is described sometimes as having been almost completely lost. In fact there are many survivors in Kaliningrad from the German times, such as the cathedral, the red-brick fortifications, the city gates, the former Prussian government buildings and the tomb of Kant. Before she went back, Dönhoff couldn’t have realized how much of Königsberg had lasted, outside the bombed centre. As with the contents of Friedrichstein, she may have wished to think of a total destruction.
She had a unique place in post-war Germany. I knew this when I went to see her in 1992. Biographies of her – there have been several – show a photograph of ‘die Gräfin’ with other journalists meeting the Indian Prime Minister Nehru in the early 1960s; it is Dönhoff who is talking, her hands together in her lap, her face slightly tentative but severe and thoughtful as she sits in the most significant position, opposite the Prime Minister, the only woman there, with the others on both sides of her. Nehru smiles at an ashtray, a little awkwardly, apparently stubbing out a cigarette. It could be two heads of government on equal terms. There were rumours that Marion Dönhoff was once offered the presidency of West Germany.
With me she is kind and practical. We meet in her modest room at
Die Zeit
where the only apparent evidence of the past is a small picture of Friedrichstein that’s easy to miss. When am I
going to East Prussia? In the spring? It is, she says, important not to go too early, ideally not before May. The frosts and the cold and the rain can linger past April, muddying the roads, covering the land with mist and fog. Where am I thinking of going? She unfolds a beautiful pre-war map, backed on linen, with the old German names; then begins to trace possible routes, her small brown hands moving quickly over the region’s former identity.
Die Zeit
where the only apparent evidence of the past is a small picture of Friedrichstein that’s easy to miss. When am I
going to East Prussia? In the spring? It is, she says, important not to go too early, ideally not before May. The frosts and the cold and the rain can linger past April, muddying the roads, covering the land with mist and fog. Where am I thinking of going? She unfolds a beautiful pre-war map, backed on linen, with the old German names; then begins to trace possible routes, her small brown hands moving quickly over the region’s former identity.
I find her smaller than I had expected, and more humorous: agile and spare, quick in movement. She is severe only occasionally, once when I ask what she must have been asked hundreds of times – if she had thought after 1945 that her old homeland might be German again. No, she answers sharply, it has gone for ever, as if the question had been entirely about the present. The telephone rings once, a call that she says she must take. I hear the conversation, about a conference. Will Dr Kissinger be there? she asks. The answer seems to be yes. In that case, she says, she may go.
The worlds of politics and of writing were natural places for her, I think, for the recent history of her family shows culture and responsibility. Marion’s father, August von Dönhoff, was sixty-four when she, the youngest of seven children, was born in 1909. He’d been a soldier in Bismarck’s Austrian and French wars, then – after German unification – a diplomat in Paris, St Petersburg, London, Washington and Vienna and later a conservative member of the Prussian and German parliaments. She talks of him also as an art collector, a friend of the Berlin museum director Wilhelm Bode, who liked the baroque, the rococo, and Renaissance sculpture, bronzes and coins. Political perhaps from duty, he became more nationalistic during the First World War, in which one of his sons fought. His daughter doesn’t mention this – or that August von Dönhoff was at a meeting at Königsberg castle in 1917 convened by the right-wing agitator August Kapp.
August von Dönhoff died in 1919. Marion didn’t know her father well; he was often away in Berlin although she remembers him reading late in his study at Friedrichstein on long winter
evenings, the lamp a bright speck down a dark passage. Her father was worldly and cultured. Her mother, Ria, twenty years younger than August, was a lady-in-waiting to the last Empress, Augusta Victoria. Like her mistress, Ria was devout yet, unlike the philistine Empress, musical, organizing concerts at Friedrichstein by artists of the calibre of Fritz Busch and Edwin Fischer. Marion’s childhood world was, she believed, intensely Prussian, with an atmosphere that went back to her grandfather, also called August, who had been, briefly, the Prussian Foreign Minister before the unification of Germany. In her short book about Prussia, she quotes August’s letters from post-unification Berlin to his sister that lament the loss of what he sees as the Prussian virtues of thrift, of frugality, of the elevation of duty above personal profit: how these had been replaced by ostentation and greed in the feverish years after the Franco-Prussian War. The book shows also Marion Dönhoff’s distaste for the last Hohenzollern ruler, the Emperor William II. He had, she thought, the vulgarity and crassness of a parvenu.
evenings, the lamp a bright speck down a dark passage. Her father was worldly and cultured. Her mother, Ria, twenty years younger than August, was a lady-in-waiting to the last Empress, Augusta Victoria. Like her mistress, Ria was devout yet, unlike the philistine Empress, musical, organizing concerts at Friedrichstein by artists of the calibre of Fritz Busch and Edwin Fischer. Marion’s childhood world was, she believed, intensely Prussian, with an atmosphere that went back to her grandfather, also called August, who had been, briefly, the Prussian Foreign Minister before the unification of Germany. In her short book about Prussia, she quotes August’s letters from post-unification Berlin to his sister that lament the loss of what he sees as the Prussian virtues of thrift, of frugality, of the elevation of duty above personal profit: how these had been replaced by ostentation and greed in the feverish years after the Franco-Prussian War. The book shows also Marion Dönhoff’s distaste for the last Hohenzollern ruler, the Emperor William II. He had, she thought, the vulgarity and crassness of a parvenu.
It’s as if she seeks to vault over the Nazi years, the Weimar Republic, the First World War, the brash Wilhelmine time, even Bismarck’s victories. Beyond these lie what she admires – the reformers of the early nineteenth century like Stein and Hardenberg, whom she saw as having created a state that was not only powerful but responsive to its citizens. Hadn’t Frederick the Great, the autocratic imposer of tolerance, welcomed immigrants and other religions (unlike Britain, where Roman Catholics did not have the same rights as other citizens until 1829) and promoted education? At the book’s end, she claims that these traditions had moved the conspirators of July 1944, most of whom she had known. Weren’t many of them descended from the great Prussians of the past? In a Shakespearian lament, she lists the names: Moltke, Schwerin, Schulenburg, Lehndorff, Yorck.
Not all of Marion’s relations shared her liberalism. After the defeat of 1918, as Germany descended into revolution, her eldest brother Heinrich, who had fought in the war, joined the Freikorps,
the private army financed by right-wing business interests, to fight Bolshevism in the Baltic. Such fear of a breakdown of order is understandable in a family that had much to lose and was linked to the Hohenzollerns and a world now tainted with failure. As with the Dohna
Schloss
at Schlobitten, the Emperor and his entourage had often stayed at Friedrichstein on eastern visits. In 1916, Hindenburg came for a week, two years after Tannenberg and the battles of the Masurian Lakes. So in 1919, with her husband too blind to write and near death, Ria wrote to the commander of the German troops still on the north-eastern frontier, about her fear of revolutionaries from Königsberg or invasion from the new Poland or Bolshevik Russia. She asked the General to take Friedrichstein under his personal protection and approached Hindenburg himself – whom she recalled had ‘loved’ the place. Troops were moved there soon afterwards.
the private army financed by right-wing business interests, to fight Bolshevism in the Baltic. Such fear of a breakdown of order is understandable in a family that had much to lose and was linked to the Hohenzollerns and a world now tainted with failure. As with the Dohna
Schloss
at Schlobitten, the Emperor and his entourage had often stayed at Friedrichstein on eastern visits. In 1916, Hindenburg came for a week, two years after Tannenberg and the battles of the Masurian Lakes. So in 1919, with her husband too blind to write and near death, Ria wrote to the commander of the German troops still on the north-eastern frontier, about her fear of revolutionaries from Königsberg or invasion from the new Poland or Bolshevik Russia. She asked the General to take Friedrichstein under his personal protection and approached Hindenburg himself – whom she recalled had ‘loved’ the place. Troops were moved there soon afterwards.
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