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Authors: Max Egremont

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Knox considered that the greatest obstacles to a Russian invasion were the lakes, generally frozen from the start of January until the end of March. The huge woodlands – the forests on either side of the River Nieman, the Kaiser’s hunting domain at Rominten, the Johannisburg forest where Bennigsen had hidden his advance from Napoleon – were crossed by railways and metalled roads on the German side. But large, dense areas remained practically impenetrable, particularly for cavalry; in Russia these were wilder although during the snowy, freezing winter even the best metalled highway became useless.
The Colonel’s report conveys the sense that beyond Germany’s eastern frontier lay chaos. Indeed Knox’s journey was, to a certain extent, one of exploration, for few people in western Europe knew much about the region that, for many, seemed to exist on the continent’s most distant ramparts. In 1913, the introduction to Karl Baedeker’s guide to Germany gave the places most likely to interest visitors. ‘Eastern Germany’, the book says, ‘lies outside the range of the ordinary tourist’ although Danzig had interesting brick churches and some baroque buildings – and the castle at Marienburg was ‘the noblest secular building in medieval Germany’. Königsberg, however, the capital of East Prussia, had ‘little to offer the sightseer’.
Baedeker printed only a few details of this city of 246,000 people (a figure which included a garrison of 9,500). It was, contemporary sources declared, a trading centre for grain and timber where barges carried cargo along the River Pregel, which was linked by a canal to Pillau, an ice-free port onto the Baltic. Königsberg had become one of the largest centres for the import of tea (into Russia and Poland) and peas and linseed, eaten as cheap food, again principally in Russia and Poland. Industry took the form mostly of sawmills or iron-foundries, linked to the region’s agriculture. Two buildings dominated the city: the castle and the cathedral. A gothic tower of the castle stretched upwards from a
structure much changed since the sixteenth century yet still possessing an air of dark, solid medievalism; the last nationally important event there had been the coronation in 1861 of the Prussian King William I – later emperor of a united Germany – although (Baedeker said) the present Emperor William II stayed in the royal apartments on visits to his eastern capital. Within sight of the castle, the red-brick cathedral was on an island in the River Pregel that had some of the city’s oldest buildings. Begun in 1325, during the Teutonic Knights’ crusade to bring Christianity to the Baltic, not completed until the middle of the fifteenth century and restored in the years 1901 – 7, it still had its western tower unfinished. Inside were mural paintings of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among the monuments and graves of the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order was a memorial to Duke Albrecht, Königsberg’s sixteenth-century ruler, the founder of the university and a follower of Luther.
Königsberg was a city of memorials. Those to the first Emperor William I and the Prussian King Frederick I were outside the palace, as was Duke Albrecht’s; a bronze statue of Bismarck loomed in the Kaiser Wilhelm Platz; the beautiful Queen Luise, who had pleaded with Napoleon for her country, had a memorial in the castle. Opposite the theatre was Schiller, who could have known little of Königsberg; also in the Kaiser Wilhelm Platz was the tomb of Hans Luther, the son of Martin. On one of the city’s brick gateways, the Königstor, the statues showed a mix of national and local: King Ottokar of Bohemia (a thirteenth-century leader of the northern crusade after whom Königsberg had been named) and (again) Duke Albrecht and King Frederick I. There were busts or statues of Kant in the Parade-Platz (near Schiller) and in the senate hall of the university, and there were printed or written reminiscences and mementoes of him in the museum. Next to the cathedral was his grave with a further bust, and carved words from the
Critique of Practical Reason
: ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’
What of the town’s pleasures? Among these in 1913 were
the zoo, the Botanical Gardens, the pictures in the municipal museums (including works by Caspar David Friedrich, Lovis Corinth, Frans Hals), the parks and open-air concerts in summer; the ceremony on the castle’s tower when a choir sang at sunset; and the sea, not far by road or rail: Rauschen, Cranz and Palmnicken on the Samland coast and the Kurische Nehrung, or Spit, with its high, dangerous dunes. Cranz was the most popular seaside resort. Russian and Polish Jews came there, feeling safe in the more tolerant East Prussia. Although generally welcome, they tended to avoid the fashionable beach-side promenade where they might receive cool glances but rarely anything worse.
 
 
Lorenz Grimoni, curator of the Königsberg Museum in Duisburg, recalls his old homeland of East Prussia. What remains? he asks. Is it just photographs and memories, poems about dark woods and crystal lakes and exile?
I think of him as Lorenz although I’ve never called him this because we stick to the German formality of Herr Grimoni and Herr Egremont – which may give more structure to our talks. Lorenz reveals his memories, of his childhood at the end of the war, on East Prussia’s western edge, of the best Christmas ever, in 1944 before the flight west in a slow train trying to dodge the Red Army. ‘It went like this,’ he says of the journey. I watch as he draws quick, deep lines, almost tearing the paper. Later in our talk, he does it again – ‘Like this,’ the pen going deeper, as if to make a more secure trench. His own story is quite typical, he thinks – he was born in 1939, near Hindenburg’s old home at Neudeck, yet untypical perhaps in that he was baptized in the old castle chapel in Königsberg because his grandparents lived in the city. His father was a schoolteacher and joined the wartime Luftwaffe, ending up in a British prison camp in Schleswig-Holstein. The young Lorenz had been ill with tuberculosis; now he is thin and straight, eyes bright behind glasses, missing nothing. Again he speaks of the flight – to Danzig on that slow train, by rail
again to Saxony, across the Elbe, to Magdeburg: then post-war life in Düsseldorf where his father taught again, before Lorenz was ordained as a Lutheran priest. What he wants is to see that history isn’t forgotten.
I sense that Lorenz knows how British moral self-righteousness rises if Germans hint at any entitlement to pity. He has already headed this off by reminding me, in the most courteous possible way, of the RAF’s destruction of the medieval centre of Königsberg, and the slaughter of many of its people. What he wants is recognition for East Prussia’s beauty, its history and its genius. Kant taught at the University of Königsberg, where Herder and Hamann studied. In Frauenburg (now the Polish Frombork), some thirty miles west along the Baltic coast – from whose cathedral tower you can see Kaliningrad – Copernicus revolutionized science.
Lorenz’s stories often cross frontiers. Kant spent several years as a subject of the Russian Tsarina Elizabeth when the Russians occupied Königsberg; Herder believed the Teutonic Knights’ campaign of conversion and conquest was an affront to the native culture and therefore wrong; there’s doubt about whether Copernicus was Polish or German. And whose country is East Prussia? Are people still frightened of who might want it? When looking at one of the land’s ruined Prussian manor houses, symbols of conquest, I was chased across a field by its Polish owner, who was wielding a shovel and shouting perhaps one of the few German words he knew: ‘Nein! Nein!’
Ruins – even a few bricks or stones or an overgrown grave – show that history is hard to destroy. At Slobity in Poland (formerly Schlobitten in East Prussia) on an outside wall of the church there’s a war memorial – a stone tablet set into the brick – that lists several members of the Dohna family, who owned the big house nearby. In the 1920s, the last Dohna to live at Schlobitten, terrified of revolution, stored arms behind the church’s organ. Now when I mention the Dohnas to some of the present inhabitants, only a few hundred yards from the big house’s ruins,
these Poles look at me as if I am mad. Who knows or cares now about these ancient Grafs or Fürsts, even if they had once attended Kant’s lectures in Königsberg and been friends of Frederick the Great, the Emperor William II and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring?
The Junkers – the landowners east of the Elbe – were looked on as a people apart. The Emperor William II’s friend Philipp von Eulenburg, whose disgrace after a homosexual scandal had threatened to engulf the throne, inherited property in East Prussia before 1914. Eulenburg liked to compare his family’s three estates: one near the Dutch border at Cleves in what is now North-Rhine-Westphalia; another in Brandenburg, not far from Berlin; and the third in East Prussia. The Cleves property, he thought, was in character and culture two hundred years ahead of the one in Brandenburg, because of its proximity to progressive Holland; but he put his East Prussian estate two hundred years behind Brandenburg, which meant a four-hundred-year gap with Cleves. This was as much time as separates the twentieth century from the still partly medieval society before the Thirty Years War.
Eulenburg was bitter after the scandal, when many of his relations and friends had deserted him. In his memoirs he looks coolly at the east, particularly at his cousins the Dohna family. He admires the local patriotism of East Prussians and the landscape’s beauty, calling it a paradise for horses and people, and traces the history back to the Teutonic Knights and the early settlers – pioneers, he thinks, like the colonizers in the Americas or Africa. He thought the nearness to Russia had made the people different, like Russian or Slavs, implying a primitive feel to the place. The Germans, Eulenburg believed, had no talent for colonization, and had dealt badly with the Polish and other minorities, exploiting them instead of offering consistency and security. The grand East Prussian families often inter-married, creating the idea of a caste apart, an isolated world – and with this went that other colonial characteristic: opportunism, exemplified, Eulenburg thought, by Duke Albrecht’s sixteenth-century decision to turn his duchy into
a vassal state of the King of Poland. They were out for themselves – this was the only allegiance these rich East Prussians knew; such ruthlessness darkened their behaviour. Had it really been necessary for his Dohna cousins to put a perfectly sane uncle into a lunatic asylum because he had publicly questioned their supposedly distinguished ancestry?
There were, a German friend told me, three landowning families that, before 1945, were among the richest and most important in East Prussia: the Dönhoffs, the Lehndorffs and the Dohnas. Each had territorial power and possessions, symbolized by their houses: the Dönhoff neo-classical castle Friedrichstein, the Lehndorff ‘great wilderness’ at Steinort and, west from this – some miles south-east of Elbl
g (formerly the German Elbing) and north-east of Pasł
k (once Preussisch Holland) – Schlobitten, the Dohna mansion. Schlobitten is a ruin with jagged walls and crumbling outbuildings, more destroyed than Steinort but not completely lost like Friedrichstein.
There’s a photograph in his memoirs of the last Dohna owner of this place, Fürst (Prince) Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten, revisiting his old estates in 1974. The Fürst is talking, and apparently giving advice, to the Polish director of the Slobity collective farm, Mr Konarzewski, who is neat in a suit and tie (perhaps put on especially for the Prince’s visit) while a jacketless, shirt-sleeved Alexander Dohna wears Wellington boots, as if ready for work in the fields; only his large, angular head and height seem appropriate to a Fürst of the old German Empire. By 1974, any hope of return had gone; it was Mr Konarzewski who controlled the Slobity woods – where the last Emperor and Hermann Göring had once hunted – and it was a Polish Roman Catholic priest who listened to the requests that the Fürst might be allowed to pay for the restoration of the family graves in what had once been the village of Schlobitten’s Lutheran church.
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