Authors: Max Egremont

Forgotten Land (7 page)

BOOK: Forgotten Land

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In the museum in Duisburg, the display ends with a case of rubble and photographs of Russians and Germans together; for Königsberg, only the past remains. Enjoying Lorenz Grimoni’s
commentary, his patience, the sandwiches he has brought for our lunch, his references to his life as a Lutheran pastor when he worked briefly in Kaliningrad – I want our talks to go on for weeks. Even then, there would be more to learn.

‘You use the word “atmosphere” [
Stimmung
] a lot,’ Lorenz Grimoni says, suddenly irritated. I say that the atmosphere of the place as it had been before the cataclysm of 1945 is what interested me. It was something I’d glimpsed years before when, while learning German, I stayed with a schoolmaster and his family in Lower Saxony, not far from what was then the border with the communist East German state. When I spoke of East Germany (Ost Deutschland) my host put me right. The German Democratic Republic, or the DDR, wasn’t east but middle Germany. East Germany is further east, in what is now northern Poland and the Russian province of Kaliningrad, in the old Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia. This wasn’t nationalistic dreams, he said, but fact. I wasn’t encouraged to raise the point again.

The island British don’t understand borders, Lorenz Grimoni says: how in central and eastern Europe there was a frequent crossing of these. People mixed, yet they feared another country that was just over a fence. His own name must originally have been Italian although the family had been in East Prussia for centuries. He points at a huge map that shows the spread of the Teutonic Order. In the Middle Ages, its churches and castles were scattered through what are now Hungary, Italy, Alsace, northern Spain, south to Sicily, east to the Baltic. He mentions the start of modern Europe with Charlemagne ruling from Aachen. Before that – and here he smiles – the conquering Anglo-Saxons came to Britain from Germany. Europeans share much, he says: not least, I am left thinking, this long German reach.

In the borderlands, most of the landlords and the middle class on the Russian side were Germans or Poles or Jews. The Tsarist state accepted the Baltic Germans as property owners and administrators of the expanding empire: Sergei Witte was Nicholas II’s Prime Minister; Bennigsen, a Hanoverian, led the Russians
against Napoleon; Count Karl Nesselrode was the non-Russian-speaking Foreign Minister from 1815 to 1856; General von Rennenkampf invaded East Prussia in August 1914. Of the sixteen most prominent Russian generals at the start of the First World War, seven had German names.

One must remember East Prussia’s treasures, its images of tolerance and culture – the silver-bound books made for Duke Albrecht, a prince of the Reformation; the castle and the university libraries; the Wallenrod books given in the seventeenth century; the cathedral tombs of the Polish Radziwiłłs. Now those who had lived in Königsberg are dying and their children are in the new Germany, soothed by its prosperity. But the history of the old east is not only German but European history; Copernicus, with his Polish and German roots, shows the need to think in European terms, to remember weak frontiers.

On 7 July 2009, a manuscript came up for sale in London – a part of Duke Albrecht’s own copy of a treatise on warfare, dated around 1555 and originally in Königsberg. Three hundred and eighty-one pages long, illustrated in full colour, heightened occasionally by liquid gold, and bound in eighteenth-century calf, it shows the change from soldiering based on feudal duty to the modern professional army. Albrecht is depicted as the supreme commander, with an escort of colourfully attired foot-soldiers. He makes a magnificent figure in heavily jointed armour decorated with gold stripes, a broad black hat rimmed by frothing feathers, the distinctive full beard beneath a wide-eyed imposing face, similar to the statue of him outside Kaliningrad cathedral, near the tomb of Kant. In the treatise, the enemy is the Turks (the Asiatic hordes) who threaten the monarchs of the west – Henry VIII of England, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King Ferdinand of Hungary and Bohemia – and civilization. It is Duke Albrecht and his Prussians, on Europe’s eastern edge, who guard the frontier.

The libraries of Königsberg, of the university and the castle, were strong in music, manuscripts from the time of the Teutonic Order and the history of the Baltic; the first book printed in
Lithuanian came out of Königsberg. At the end, as the frontier crumbled, books, manuscripts and records of four hundred years were taken west on lorries, ships and trains – a symbolic reversal of the northern crusades – to escape the Red Army. Others were burned in the raids of August 1944 or looted or taken into the victors’ collections. Among the treasures was Duke Albrecht’s silver library, twenty opulently bound volumes – thought at least partly to reflect the taste of Albrecht’s second wife, Anna Maria – showing the brilliance of the goldsmith’s and silversmith’s art in the age of the Reformation; some had been made by Königsberg craftsmen, others at Nuremberg.

Are the silver books beautiful, or are the decorated surfaces and heavy bronze clasps a crude show of luxury and power? You can see some of them in the University Library of Toru

(formerly Thorn). The bindings have that low light of old silver; their decoration – elaborate patterns of foliage or images like that of the Virtues or biblical scenes such as the Creation, Abraham’s sacrifice or Jacob’s dream – is still fresh. In the centre rondel of one is Duke Albrecht himself, in armour, holding up his sword, the other hand resting just below his breast plate; another rondel shows his wife Anna Maria, some forty years younger than he: her hands clasped across her fur-lined cape, a flat brimmed hat above her large-eyed face. Albrecht was a prince of the Reformation; Luther came to Königsberg. Within their bindings and heavy wooden boards, the texts, printed in Wittenberg or Nuremberg, are contemporary Protestant devotional works: not rare. It is the outward show that Albrecht and his wife were seeking. The bindings are a sign of the ambition and confidence of these rulers of a small Baltic state.

During the Second World War, books from German-occupied Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian and Russian libraries were taken to Königsberg as part of the programme of cultural imperialism – or so-called rescue of culture from the Slavs. The Nazis were particularly interested in German book collections in the east – in the libraries in towns like Breslau, Danzig and Königsberg
– seeing them as bastions of German civilization. In 1944, as the Red Army approached, this arrogance crumbled. From March of that year, the Königsberg librarian, Carl Diesch, reported on plans for evacuation. Some manuscripts and early printed books were put in a bunker and other rare items were dispersed to large houses in the province.

In August, Diesch and two of his most important assistants were sent on military duties to Lithuania. He returned to Königsberg after two months, frantically arranging for the evacuation west of historic material, which is now in the Prussian State Archives at Berlin or at the University of Göttingen. On 6 April 1945, the librarian was on the last ship to leave Pillau, accompanied by seven chests of books and manuscripts, most of which were lost during the chaotic journey. After the war Diesch went to Leipzig, where again he became a librarian and continued his research into the romantic period in German literature. He showed National Socialism’s pervasive stain, when an anti-Semitic passage he had written during the war about the poet Heinrich Heine resurfaced. Diesch claimed that such sentiments had been expected then of all who held state office. But the piece darkened his last years. His death in 1957 was marked by a stiflingly discreet obituary in a university journal.

When he fled from Königsberg, Carl Diesch left behind some hundred and forty thousand books and manuscripts that had been distributed among various large houses throughout the province. The silver library was at Schloss Karwinden (now the Polish Karwiny), near what was then Elbing (now Elbl

g). When the Poles moved into what had been the south-western part of the old East Prussia, the books from Karwinden and other hiding places were brought together at Pasł

k (formerly the German Preussisch Holland). In 1947 some twenty thousand of these were chosen for the library of the new university at Toru

where the pre-war Wilno University was to be re-established. The new Poland had moved westwards. In the changed borders, the formerly Polish Wilno had become the new Lithuanian (or, until
1990, Soviet) Vilnius. In the two years since the war’s end, the collection at Karwinden had shrunk, through theft and loss. The silver library had been reduced from twenty books to some fourteen or fifteen. Now one, without its printed text, is in the Polish National Library in Warsaw, another (again the binding alone) in the castle at Kraków, one in the Masurian museum in Olsztyn (the former Allenstein – not to be confused with the very much smaller Olszynek to the south-west, the German Hohenstein) and the rest in Toru

Kant’s tomb outside Königsberg cathedral.