Authors: Max Egremont
Forgotten Land (14 page)
The atmosphere of the youth of Alexander Dohna, Schlobitten’s last hereditary owner, was military. Born in 1899, he lived with his parents at Potsdam, where his father was adjutant of the Garde du Corps, among the uniforms that represented Prussian, then German, power. The last Hohenzollern ruler, William II, cherished this as vociferously as any of his predecessors – and the Dohnas were with their emperor. In his memoirs, Dohna wonders what had made his nineteenth-century forebears abandon an earlier, more liberal tradition and move to the right. Could it have been the shock of the revolutions of 1848 or the nationalistic euphoria that accompanied Bismarck’s remarkable expansion of Prussian and German power?
During his lifetime, Alexander Dohna became a symbol of this power and of its loss. Near the start of his memoirs, there’s an early photograph of the little Alexander on an ornate chair in front of Schlobitten, a peaked officer’s cap on his head, his legs crossed and an unyielding gaze directed away from the camera.
Towards the book’s end, there is a quite different scene: the shopkeeper Fürst behind a counter, courteously taking in a pile of dirty clothes.
Towards the book’s end, there is a quite different scene: the shopkeeper Fürst behind a counter, courteously taking in a pile of dirty clothes.
The old world watched over the boy’s christening. The Emperor was his godfather but could not come to the ceremony, so was represented by General von Moltke, from the family of Prussian field marshals. Alexander’s early childhood was spent not only at Potsdam – until his father left the army in 1906 – but also on the Dohna estates in East Prussia: at Behlenhof, Prökelwitz and Schlobitten, the largest of the family’s houses. During the army manoeuvres near Schlobitten, the Emperor came to stay and there were other imperial visits, sometimes for hunting when as many as five hundred roebuck were killed; Dohna’s grandfather Richard Wilhelm Dohna, a conservative member of the Reichstag, is said to have introduced William II to the artistic, sentimental Philipp von Eulenburg – a friendship that later collapsed after the exposure of Eulenburg’s homosexuality.
The Dohna atmosphere was sporting, not artistic; even the librarian had to learn to ride. It was also old-fashioned; Richard Dohna’s marriage to a cousin had been arranged by his father. Structure was important, as the timetable at Prökelwitz for the Emperor’s pleasure shows: breakfast at 3.30 or 4.00; the morning roe-deer shoot; back for a sleep before lunch at 4.00 p.m.; another outing to the woods; then a ‘simple’ evening meal and anecdotes before bed at 10.30. A withered arm – the result of a mishandled delivery at his birth – did not curb the Emperor’s enthusiasm for sport. At meals he used a special large spoon to allow him to eat as fast, and as much, as anyone else.
In old age, Alexander Dohna declared that the years before 1914 had been the best of his long life for families like the Dohnas. A monarchy put the imprimatur of the state on hereditary power, as did the Prussian Herrenhaus, a hereditary upper chamber similar to the old British House of Lords. Royal visits and rituals seemed also to confer legitimacy on the great houses. During the military manoeuvres of 1910, over the flat empty
country that would be the first victim of a Russian invasion, ten thousand soldiers took part and field-grey uniforms were worn for the first time. The eleven-year-old Alexander noticed the enthusiasm of the locals and the pride of the troops. Years later he recalled this, after German patriotism had been tainted by the enormities of the Nazis and the national identity had changed.
country that would be the first victim of a Russian invasion, ten thousand soldiers took part and field-grey uniforms were worn for the first time. The eleven-year-old Alexander noticed the enthusiasm of the locals and the pride of the troops. Years later he recalled this, after German patriotism had been tainted by the enormities of the Nazis and the national identity had changed.
On the estates of East Prussia, the Emperor and his friends returned to a pre-industrial age. The walls of the grand houses were covered in thousands of deer heads, the bleached skulls sprouting the horns that were the trophies of the sport, bringing a wild land into interiors decorated with bosomy nymphs, painted ceilings and classical statuary. The woods near the ruins of Prökelwitz and Schlobitten are still spotted with tablets commemorating notable kills, some visible beneath undergrowth or in forest clearings, signs of an earlier possession, like the soldiers’ graves. At Schlobitten, on September or October nights, you still hear the roaring of the stags.
Alexander Dohna remembered the pale-blue East Prussian sky; the breezes from the Baltic; the journeys in a horse-drawn trap in summer and a sleigh through the long winter snows; the ancient oaks near the great houses; trips to see his cousins the Dönhoffs on one of their estates at Quittainen, near Schlobitten; the tutors and governesses; his grandmother’s brothers, both veterans of the Franco-Prussian War, who came to stay. He felt moved by Sedan Day each September when his father made a speech to celebrate the 1870 victory over the French and the crowd sang patriotic songs. William II was toasted not as the Emperor of Germany but as the King of Prussia.
In the summer of 1914, the Dohnas were on holiday on the Frische Nehrung, the western spit on the Baltic. During the talk of war, Alexander recalled feeling a surging wish to do his duty to the Fatherland and to the royal family. More than fifty years later he thought that from that day the foundations of his life – the world of his happily married parents and their five children – had begun to break up.
Fearing a Russian invasion, the Dohna parents sent their children west, to relations in Darmstadt. After Tannenberg, when the saviour Hindenburg had made East Prussia safe, the children returned for Christmas at Schlobitten. Alexander Dohna went back to Darmstadt, to live in a pension and to go to the Ludwig-Georg-Gymnasium, where he made friends with a boy called Karl Wolff who later changed his life. In 1916, he moved to Switzerland, to a school in Davos. In 1918, he was at Potsdam, as a young officer in his father’s old regiment, going into the field in September, to Kursk, near Kiev. There was no fighting; in March the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been signed with the new Bolshevik government. On 10 November, in Ukraine, he heard of the Emperor’s abdication, feeling relief because it must signal the end of the war. On 18 November, his father died and Alexander became the Fürst. The next month, sick with diphtheria, he took the train west and, on arrival at Dresden, saw the new defeated Germany: a banner that declared ‘Proletarians of the World Unite’. At Potsdam, he left the army and in January 1919 arrived at Schlobitten, now the centre of his world. In the hall was part of his dead father’s collection of hats, symbol of the age’s formality. At that date, it was inconceivable that anyone should be seen outside the Dohna house without a hat.
Dr Tadeusz Iwi
ski, the member of parliament for the once-German north-eastern part of Poland (that includes Słobity, formerly Schlobitten), agrees to see me in a Warsaw hotel. He’s been hard to reach because of an election campaign. When we meet, I recognize him because I’ve just come from Olsztyn, his constituency’s largest town, where I’d seen a poster of his smiling face to which someone had added two long, curving vampire’s teeth.
ski, the member of parliament for the once-German north-eastern part of Poland (that includes Słobity, formerly Schlobitten), agrees to see me in a Warsaw hotel. He’s been hard to reach because of an election campaign. When we meet, I recognize him because I’ve just come from Olsztyn, his constituency’s largest town, where I’d seen a poster of his smiling face to which someone had added two long, curving vampire’s teeth.A professor at Olsztyn University, and a brilliant linguist who speaks Mandarin Chinese, Tadeusz Iwi
ski now leads one of the parties of the left. His family had roots in Olsztyn during the German times (when it was Allenstein), and after the region became Polish his father worked there as an engineer. Born in 1944, Tadeusz had a soaring academic career, obtaining a Ph.D. at Warsaw University in international relations and scholarships to Harvard and to Berkeley.
ski now leads one of the parties of the left. His family had roots in Olsztyn during the German times (when it was Allenstein), and after the region became Polish his father worked there as an engineer. Born in 1944, Tadeusz had a soaring academic career, obtaining a Ph.D. at Warsaw University in international relations and scholarships to Harvard and to Berkeley.Tadeusz Iwi
ski is interested in land tenure in British colonial Nigeria and I try to stop him talking about this although his knowledge of it is phenomenal. Did I know, he says, that the Portuguese had been the first into Africa and the last out? Small and energetic, he gesticulates a lot, once knocking over his cup of coffee. That day he has already been three times on television and has another interview lined up for this evening. He thinks that as a politician today you can do nothing without the media. It means he’s recognized all over the place, even recently by some Polish visitors to Cape Town, where he was attending a congress.
ski is interested in land tenure in British colonial Nigeria and I try to stop him talking about this although his knowledge of it is phenomenal. Did I know, he says, that the Portuguese had been the first into Africa and the last out? Small and energetic, he gesticulates a lot, once knocking over his cup of coffee. That day he has already been three times on television and has another interview lined up for this evening. He thinks that as a politician today you can do nothing without the media. It means he’s recognized all over the place, even recently by some Polish visitors to Cape Town, where he was attending a congress.Why am I interested in north-east Poland? he wonders. He seems pleased. Have I been to Olsztyn already? Where did I stay?
The hotels were full but I’d found a room near the castle, in the Polish-German House of Friendship, used mostly by youth groups. Here I’d felt conspicuous, old: aware of cool glances from staff and guests.
The hotels were full but I’d found a room near the castle, in the Polish-German House of Friendship, used mostly by youth groups. Here I’d felt conspicuous, old: aware of cool glances from staff and guests.
Olsztyn mixes Poland and Germany. There’s the old centre – the red-brick castle of the Teutonic Knights and the churches, the gabled houses round a market square (where a Prussian marksman nearly shot Napoleon) and fortified walls and historic gates, a place for tourists: then the nineteenth-century and Communist-era town that blends into the ring road, the new university and the Michelin tyre factory that show the modern Poland of the European Union. On the outskirts, you see a signpost to Kaliningrad. The Russian border can take hours to cross because of visa inspections and searches to stop smuggling.
Tadeusz Iwi
ski talks about the region’s history, about the exodus of Germans at the war’s end and the influx of Poles from the territories further east that had been taken by Stalin. He speaks of his constituency, what it was like and what it has become – different to the Dohna story of a feudal order maintained even in devastation and retreat. After 1945, hundreds of thousands of Poles were moved into the former East Prussia. The new Poland had new frontiers; these were pushed west to the River Oder – bringing in a swathe of the old Germany, including Breslau (now Wrocław) and Danzig (now Gda
sk) – but they contracted in the east. Much of what had been eastern Poland between the wars – Lwów, for instance, and Wilno (now Vilnius) – became part of the Soviet Union.
ski talks about the region’s history, about the exodus of Germans at the war’s end and the influx of Poles from the territories further east that had been taken by Stalin. He speaks of his constituency, what it was like and what it has become – different to the Dohna story of a feudal order maintained even in devastation and retreat. After 1945, hundreds of thousands of Poles were moved into the former East Prussia. The new Poland had new frontiers; these were pushed west to the River Oder – bringing in a swathe of the old Germany, including Breslau (now Wrocław) and Danzig (now Gdask) – but they contracted in the east. Much of what had been eastern Poland between the wars – Lwów, for instance, and Wilno (now Vilnius) – became part of the Soviet Union.Stalin wanted the Poles out of his new lands. Poland needed settlers for its own new territories, where millions of Germans had been expelled or killed. So Poles, many either town-dwellers or from some of the poorest parts of eastern Europe, were shifted into the wrecked landscape of what had been eastern Germany. They entered Silesia with its mines and industry, Pomerania – a mostly agricultural province – and the most rural area of all: East Prussia. The former German East Prussian land had been well
cultivated, with field drainage begun in the eighteenth century on the advice of the Dutch. The cataclysmic war had destroyed much of this; and the new communist Poland imposed collectivization, run by people who didn’t know the land. Inefficiency or destruction ruined farms that before 1945 had been Germany’s breadbasket. It was the same in the new Russian district of Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg.
cultivated, with field drainage begun in the eighteenth century on the advice of the Dutch. The cataclysmic war had destroyed much of this; and the new communist Poland imposed collectivization, run by people who didn’t know the land. Inefficiency or destruction ruined farms that before 1945 had been Germany’s breadbasket. It was the same in the new Russian district of Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg.
Now, in the new Poland of privatization and the Common Agricultural Policy, Tadeusz Iwi
ski says, you can see much more cultivation, sometimes by big, highly mechanized farming companies from the United States and western Europe. But, he adds, the workers on the old state units have suffered. In parts of Masuria, the unemployment rate is over 20 per cent, one of the worst in Poland. The old, admittedly over-manned collective farms, he says, at least looked after their workers. Since Poland joined the European Union, the subsidies go to the new farmers, not to the unemployed. Some of the land is good – like the black soil of Ukraine. And the farming companies benefit from the EU Common Agricultural Policy. Is it true that the Queen of England, who owns so much land, is one of the greatest beneficiaries of this? Tadeusz Iwi
ski’s eyes glint like twin blades.
ski says, you can see much more cultivation, sometimes by big, highly mechanized farming companies from the United States and western Europe. But, he adds, the workers on the old state units have suffered. In parts of Masuria, the unemployment rate is over 20 per cent, one of the worst in Poland. The old, admittedly over-manned collective farms, he says, at least looked after their workers. Since Poland joined the European Union, the subsidies go to the new farmers, not to the unemployed. Some of the land is good – like the black soil of Ukraine. And the farming companies benefit from the EU Common Agricultural Policy. Is it true that the Queen of England, who owns so much land, is one of the greatest beneficiaries of this? Tadeusz Iwiski’s eyes glint like twin blades.Communist Poland hadn’t been like the Soviet Union, he says; you could travel abroad, the Roman Catholic Church was strong, there was some private ownership. Is it surprising, he asks, if some older people feel nostalgic for the old days of full employment? Parts of his constituency are like the Kaliningrad region: poor, left behind. To Poles, Kaliningrad is a strange land – Russian but cut off from the rest of Russia, unknown yet so near. An exhibition of photographs called ‘The New Europe’ in a Warsaw square has a section on Kaliningrad. Pictures of proud, bemedalled Red Army veterans are mounted alongside others of bleak Soviet housing and military parades. The text describes a place filled with missiles, nuclear weapons, cemeteries, war memorials and a seething, insecure people: a danger, it is implied, to the world.
Three great reconciliations are needed for Poland now, Tadeusz Iwi
ski thinks – with Germany, with Ukraine and with Russia. Many remember the Fourth Partition of Poland – the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 between Germany and the Soviet Union that divided the country between the two monsters of twentieth-century Europe. This was followed by the murders of the war and its aftermath – Poles killed by Ukrainian nationalists, by the Soviets and by the Germans.
ski thinks – with Germany, with Ukraine and with Russia. Many remember the Fourth Partition of Poland – the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 between Germany and the Soviet Union that divided the country between the two monsters of twentieth-century Europe. This was followed by the murders of the war and its aftermath – Poles killed by Ukrainian nationalists, by the Soviets and by the Germans.Other books
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