Forgotten Land (37 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
To Solzhenitsyn, the Prussian past may have been discernible, even dominant; to the first post-war German visitors it seemed virtually dead, and some of them, like Lorenz Grimoni and Marion Dönhoff (with her statue of Kant), tried to bring about a tactful resurrection. Two almost simultaneous processes began: a rediscovery of Prussiandom and the further imprinting of a Russian identity. In the Soviet era, it had been thought that the
ruined cathedral, site of the tombs of early Prussian kings, might become a mass grave for the twenty thousand Red Army troops killed in the storming of Königsberg. Eventually, however, the gothic brick building was restored, partly with German money, to resemble a concert hall more than a place of worship; it was saved partly by Kant’s grave. In 1971 the construction of the giant headquarters of the local Communist Party started; frozen in 1981, the building is still unfinished inside, has never been used and is generally known as ‘the Monster’. It is inconceivable that it will ever be demolished, not only for sentimental reasons but because of the risk of disturbing its massive concentration of lethal asbestos.
ruined cathedral, site of the tombs of early Prussian kings, might become a mass grave for the twenty thousand Red Army troops killed in the storming of Königsberg. Eventually, however, the gothic brick building was restored, partly with German money, to resemble a concert hall more than a place of worship; it was saved partly by Kant’s grave. In 1971 the construction of the giant headquarters of the local Communist Party started; frozen in 1981, the building is still unfinished inside, has never been used and is generally known as ‘the Monster’. It is inconceivable that it will ever be demolished, not only for sentimental reasons but because of the risk of disturbing its massive concentration of lethal asbestos.
Soviet triumphalism: the Monster goes up.
The Monster, however, can be seen from all over the city, dominating the skyline, rivalled in height and presence only by the golden domes and gleaming white towers of the new Orthodox cathedral. Both are symbols of Russification, like the statue of Mother Russia, on a triangle between two busy streets off Lenin Square, with one finger pointing at the ground as if to assert possession. More decorous is what remains of the other past that really makes this place unique – Schiller elegant outside the neo-classical theatre, the small plaque to Agnes Miegel on what was once the poet’s house, the Käthe Kollwitz relief of her grandfather Rupp near the solemn pillars of Kant’s tomb.
Käthe Kollwitz missed the final destruction, dying in 1945, just before the war’s end, in a house in Saxony on the estate of a prince who had given her refuge from the bombing of Berlin. A last tragedy had been that of her grandson Peter in 1942, killed, like her son, at the front. Her work – with its emotional call for change and peace and an end to the exploitation of women, its sometimes sweet yet often searing portrayal of motherhood – appealed to many: to the left, to feminists and to the Nazis (whom she loathed). In post-1945 Germany, she was taken up by the communist east, by the Federal Republic and by the reunified state that emerged after 1992; her version of the Pietà is at the centre of Schinkel’s pavilion – the Neue Wache, on the Unter den Linden in Berlin, which is now a memorial to the war dead and to the victims of Fascism. Her face – serene, only slightly disgruntled – is on the stamps. Käthe Kollwitz is definitely a good German.
Major General Sir Alfred Knox lost his parliamentary seat to Labour in the British general election of 1945. He retired to a pleasant house in Berkshire where he remained uncharacteristically silent, writing nothing more than the occasional explosive letter to the newspapers, until his death in 1964.
Alexander Dohna met up with his wife and children in the west in 1945 and was forced into the Volkssturm before surrendering to the British. He was then arrested for suspected complicity in war crimes in Italy; General Dostler, for whom he had worked, was hanged, but Dohna was in jail for only a week. Dohna found it hard in the new Germany and in 1948 went to
Bern, where, because of his family connections, he was given a Swiss passport. From 1950 until 1960 he worked for the drug company Hoffmann – La Roche at Grenzach. These were, he said, the worst years of his life apart from the war. He became involved in attempts to get compensation for loss of property in the old German east, receiving some money for Schlobitten and Prökelwitz but only a tiny fraction of their value. In 1959, he bought a property in Germany, at Lörrach near the Swiss border, and started an express dry-cleaning business, helped by his wife and children. From 1961 they lived in Basel, where he died in 1997.
Bern, where, because of his family connections, he was given a Swiss passport. From 1950 until 1960 he worked for the drug company Hoffmann – La Roche at Grenzach. These were, he said, the worst years of his life apart from the war. He became involved in attempts to get compensation for loss of property in the old German east, receiving some money for Schlobitten and Prökelwitz but only a tiny fraction of their value. In 1959, he bought a property in Germany, at Lörrach near the Swiss border, and started an express dry-cleaning business, helped by his wife and children. From 1961 they lived in Basel, where he died in 1997.
Walter Frevert’s book about the old Rominten was a success. In 1959 he won the German Hunting Protection Society’s literary prize, also becoming a radio and television personality with considerable theatrical talent, if sometimes on the brink of self-caricature. He had already, in 1951, presented a two-hour programme on a Baden-Baden radio station about hunting and its culture to coincide with Hubertustag, the day of St Hubert, the sport’s patron saint – and
Rominten
greatly helped this new career. Frevert’s reputation prompted the firm Puma to ask him to design a new hunting knife. He took to wearing a monocle, and dignitaries came to his home in Kaltenbronn, including the Federal Chancellor Adenauer.
Rominten
greatly helped this new career. Frevert’s reputation prompted the firm Puma to ask him to design a new hunting knife. He took to wearing a monocle, and dignitaries came to his home in Kaltenbronn, including the Federal Chancellor Adenauer.
Frevert was apt to adopt a mystical tone when speaking of the forest, of hunting, of the great wild places, of his horror of animals in captivity. He claimed to have found on shooting trips to Africa that utopia where, if he had been younger, he would have lived. As his fame grew, so did his propensity to philosophize – to hold forth in an orotund and self-satisfied manner on how hunting revealed man’s origins. His confidence and his vanity could be offensive; to invite the former German Chancellor and servant of Hitler Franz von Papen, who’d been tried for war crimes, to shoot at Gernsbach was foolish and incurred open criticism.
Frevert had, he said, four gods – Bacchus (wine), Apollo (music), Venus (love) and Diana (hunting). Certainly great gusts of pleasure seemed to have blown through his life – not only in
the liking for luxury but in youthful memories of what had moved him in the old Germany: to have heard Wilhelm Kempff playing Beethoven’s
Appassionata
on a moonlit night in a castle with a view of ‘the eternal mountains’; or
Parsifal
at Bayreuth, or Shakespeare in the Prince Regent Theatre in Munich; or to have experienced the primitive, never-failing delight of an open fire – ‘what luck it is, to be of mankind.’ People who knew about his past sometimes couldn’t resist taking some of the air out of him. One old Rominten colleague mocked the highly coloured description of the shooting in October 1944 of Frevert’s last Rominten stag, the Lieutenant, remarking on how this account neglected to say that the animal had already been wounded some days before by Göring: ‘not so much pedal, Herr Oberforstmeister.’
the liking for luxury but in youthful memories of what had moved him in the old Germany: to have heard Wilhelm Kempff playing Beethoven’s
Appassionata
on a moonlit night in a castle with a view of ‘the eternal mountains’; or
Parsifal
at Bayreuth, or Shakespeare in the Prince Regent Theatre in Munich; or to have experienced the primitive, never-failing delight of an open fire – ‘what luck it is, to be of mankind.’ People who knew about his past sometimes couldn’t resist taking some of the air out of him. One old Rominten colleague mocked the highly coloured description of the shooting in October 1944 of Frevert’s last Rominten stag, the Lieutenant, remarking on how this account neglected to say that the animal had already been wounded some days before by Göring: ‘not so much pedal, Herr Oberforstmeister.’
It was Białowies that darkened all this. In 1958, the war-crimes investigator Simon Wiesenthal, who had been involved in bringing Adolf Eichmann to justice, came several times to the forestry offices in Kaltenbronn in 1958 to conduct long interviews with Frevert. The Oberforstmeister had not been mentioned in similar investigations taking place under the Polish and German governments. Further moves were made during the summer of 1962 to reopen inquiries in Poland into what Frevert had done in Białowies. This was a shadowy threat, or background darkness; it’s certain, also, that Frevert, with his worship of energy and strength, had a horror of physical failing and had started to feel depressed. His ability to control his beloved dogs seemed to be weakening. A quick death was what he wanted, he said. There may have been shame too: over the suicide of his first wife and what had happened in eastern Poland, a hidden fragility beneath the bombast.
At the end of July 1962, Frevert set out one evening from a hunting lodge in Kaltenbronn with his rifle and favourite bloodhound, Blanka, for a high seat. The next day, when no one had seen him, a search began – and his body was found, the dog sitting beside him, Frevert still clutching its lead. A fatal wound was found, in his left breast, penetrating the heart.
It seemed an obvious suicide, although the public, or ‘official’, line spoke of a hunting accident, perhaps caused by a stumble involving the dog. The funeral took place on 2 August 1962, in Gernsbach on a day of brilliant sunshine. The oak coffin had Frevert’s forester’s hat on its lid and a covering of leaves and was escorted by forestry officials; the President of the Bundestag, Eugen Gerstenmaier, gave a eulogy. Later, a small pine branch from Rominten was put on the grave and in 1964, the forestry directorate put up a commemorative stone to Frevert a hundred yards from where he had been found dead. His widow, Heinke, survived him until 1997, in old age remembering particularly the Hanoverian bloodhound trials where this legendary figure had been an inspiration. ‘How long is it since we had such delightful hunting days together?’ she asked a friend near the end.
Hans von Lehndorff resumed his work as a surgeon after the war, settling in Bad Godesberg, marrying Margarethe Countess Finck von Finckenstein, from another Prussian aristocratic family, and having two children. He became a Protestant deacon, declaring that the most decisive event in his life had been his meeting with Jesus Christ through the Lutheran Confessional Church in 1941 and 1942. In 1961, he published his diaries of the last days of East Prussia, which became a bestseller in the new Germany, and gave the profits to religious charities. In an effort to retrieve some of the spirit of what he had known, Lehndorff would take his two sons on holiday to Finland, where the landscape reminded him of the old East Prussia. After 1945, because of the deaths of cousins and brothers, he became the notional heir to Steinort, as we have seen. The place was still locked up in the communist system when Lehndorff died in 1987 and is now the property of the company that operates the marina on the lake below the partly ruined house. Germans (but not the Lehndorff family) have tried to reclaim through the courts land that they once owned in the old East Prussia – a process watched with anxiety by the Poles. Some German businessmen had the tentative idea, through lease or purchase, of setting up Steinort as a museum of the old
German presence in the east, envisaging a calm long view (rather than a celebration) of history.
German presence in the east, envisaging a calm long view (rather than a celebration) of history.
In 1975, the French writer Michel Tournier, whose Goncourt Prize – winning novel
The Erl-King
is set in wartime East Prussia, went with Lehndorff to his old homeland. Tournier had never been to the place he’d written about. Expecting a grim landscape, he found, in what were now Polish lands, a bright place of lakes and forests, full of young people on holiday, walking or in canoes or camping – a sign, at least superficially, of a secure new identity. With Tournier and Lehndorff was the proprietor of one of Bonn’s grandest delicatessens, who clearly looked on Lehndorff as a saint, attending to his needs, sometimes carrying this frail figure, whose health had been lastingly affected by his ordeals. The Mercedes in which they travelled was filled with examples of the shop’s finest wares, which were given to the people in Steinort (now Sztynort) and others languishing under the grim diet imposed by communist Poland. This was Lehndorff’s first visit since the war, and Michel Tournier watched with immense sympathy his friend’s confusion among the ruined houses and unrecognizable gardens of his childhood, the vanished trees and paths and the overgrown graves.
The Erl-King
is set in wartime East Prussia, went with Lehndorff to his old homeland. Tournier had never been to the place he’d written about. Expecting a grim landscape, he found, in what were now Polish lands, a bright place of lakes and forests, full of young people on holiday, walking or in canoes or camping – a sign, at least superficially, of a secure new identity. With Tournier and Lehndorff was the proprietor of one of Bonn’s grandest delicatessens, who clearly looked on Lehndorff as a saint, attending to his needs, sometimes carrying this frail figure, whose health had been lastingly affected by his ordeals. The Mercedes in which they travelled was filled with examples of the shop’s finest wares, which were given to the people in Steinort (now Sztynort) and others languishing under the grim diet imposed by communist Poland. This was Lehndorff’s first visit since the war, and Michel Tournier watched with immense sympathy his friend’s confusion among the ruined houses and unrecognizable gardens of his childhood, the vanished trees and paths and the overgrown graves.
Soon Allenstein, Rauschen and the Kurische Nehrung, even Königsberg, will be strange names on sepia photographs hung up for the tourists in Polish or Russian hotels or needing explanatory footnotes in history books; soon that wordless sense of what they meant to those who lived there – how they really looked or felt – will be gone, after the deaths of the last people who knew them. The plans for the museum at Sztynort (or Steinort) have, as yet, come to nothing; the Königsberg and East Prussian museums in Duisburg and in Lüneburg go on, but with few visitors. Meanwhile in the Russian Zelenogradsk, or the old German Cranz, some twenty miles from Kaliningrad, Klaus Lunau is the last exhibit in what one might call the region’s living museum, now that Gerda Preuss is dead. Having left Cranz as a boy in January 1945, just before the arrival of the Red Army, he now lives there
for at least six months of the year with his Russian wife, Valentina, after a career in the West German police, mostly in Bonn.
for at least six months of the year with his Russian wife, Valentina, after a career in the West German police, mostly in Bonn.
Hans von Lehndorff in old age.
During the post-war years, Klaus and his fellow East Prussians held annual reunions in the Federal Republic, often thousands gathering to keep the old world alive. In 1995, some fifty years after Klaus’s schooldays there, the old pupils of the Cranz village school decided to return to where they had grown up; and the Russian post-Soviet authorities, keen on tourism, encouraged this. Eighteen elderly but skittish Germans came, and Valentina (who was one of the interpreters) remembers how quickly they reverted to behaving like children, reincarnations of their 1945 selves. A year later Klaus returned, to have the same interpreter; when his German wife died, Valentina came to see him in his West German home at Langenhagen and they married. Her Russian citizenship allows them to have property in what is
now Zelenogradsk (although he has kept a flat in Langenhagen). They both seem very happy in the small yellow-painted wooden house, the neatest residence in the street (someone in Kaliningrad told me, ‘You can’t miss the German house’).
now Zelenogradsk (although he has kept a flat in Langenhagen). They both seem very happy in the small yellow-painted wooden house, the neatest residence in the street (someone in Kaliningrad told me, ‘You can’t miss the German house’).
A vigorous man of over eighty, Klaus prefers the climate here to Langenhagen, where he spends less and less time. He finds the East Prussian air cleaner, the skies brighter, and of course he can smell and see the sea, as in his childhood, although the old pre-war wooden barriers on the beach have been let go and the Soviet times brought some hideous building. He still works very hard as a contact for those interested in the German past, sometimes staying up all night answering emails, running his own website and editing a journal called
Our Beautiful Samland
that has memories from the diminishing group of former inhabitants and news of what is happening in the region now.
Our Beautiful Samland
that has memories from the diminishing group of former inhabitants and news of what is happening in the region now.
Klaus likes the Russians very much. As a German, he has never had any trouble in Zelenogradsk and has set up a system of life-saving here so that tourists in summer are watched from the beach when they swim. He is still stunned by the changes that have taken place since the Soviet Union ended – better shops, better hotels, lively cafés, a sense of joining the world; now Arabs and oligarchs from Moscow buy property in the village. But, strangest of all, he was asked to give a talk about his wartime memories, what Cranz had endured when the Russians came. At the end, several people wept, telling him that they felt ashamed of the Red Army.
Most summer days Klaus swims, still very energetic in his eighties. The Baltic is difficult and dangerous, he knows, with quick currents and undertows – but, after years of practice, he has mastered them. You need to learn, he says, when to let yourself be carried along rather than struggle against the relentless grey water: also when precisely to kick free, when to strike out or to make for home.
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