Eastern Reproaches

Max Egremont: Forgotten Land - Journey Among the Ghosts of East Prussia

The Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2011

In 1945, Stalin seized East Prussia, Germany's venerable redoubt on the Baltic Sea, as a spoil of war. A portion went to the "People's Republic" that the Soviets had just created in Poland. He kept the rest. The last surviving Germans were killed or deported. The cozy old Königsberg of the Teutonic Knights—the home, during the Enlightenment, of no less than Immanuel Kant—was transformed into Kaliningrad—a bleak Soviet place named after Mikhail Kalinin, the token peasant who was titular head of Stalin's USSR.

Nearly 70 years later, the countries behind these borders have changed, but the frontiers have not, and will not. The Polish part is finally and truly Polish; the sliver of East Prussia given to the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic is now a part of independent Lithuania; the rest of the old Soviet slice is a seedy Russian exclave surrounded by the European Union. The only Germans there are tourists, in search of an elusive land that lingers on in family lore and in the dreams of the dispossessed for a vanished, fondly imagined, past.

Max Egremont's idiosyncratic, disjointed and beautifully written volume makes an ideal guide to this shifting, shadowy realm. In part a piecemeal history of the final half-century of German East Prussia, in part a travelogue through what was left behind, "Forgotten Land" is gently elegiac. Shifting constantly between present and a variety of pasts, it is as wistful as a flick-through of an old photo album, as melancholy as a rain-spattered northern autumn afternoon.

From East Prussia's tangled history Mr. Egremont extracts the one essential fact: To the Germans who lived there, this was the frontier, a vulnerable salient pierced deep into Slavic and Baltic realms. The Teutonic Knights of the Medieval Northern Crusades brought Christianity to the Eastern Baltic, and Germans into the region. Those who followed in their wake settled territories that became the Duchy of Prussia in the 16th century, then part of the larger Kingdom of Prussia in the 18th, before being absorbed into the German empire in the 19th. For all that, East Prussia was never quite able to shake off a vaguely colonial economy and a vaguely colonial unease, an unease exacerbated when the Treaty of Versailles left it separated from the Fatherland by a slice of newly reconstituted Poland.

The mansions of the Junkers that anchored this world—and this worldview—seemed frozen in a pre-industrial age, on occasion boasting moldering grandeur and aristocratic eccentricity on an English scale—Carol Lehndorff, owner between the wars of an ancestral pile that dominated Steinort (now Sztynort, Poland) rejoiced in alcohol, rejected vegetables and "when alone . . . lived in two rooms on the warm south side of the house, contemplating his collection of Prussian coins." Mr. Egremont grants us glimpses of an austerely gorgeous idyll, of untamed forests and wide Masurian lakes, of a "softly lit horizon . . . [and] the pale-blue East Prussian sky," of ice-sailing regattas and sleigh rides, of marzipan at Christmas.

The central tragedy of this book is the arrival of the Red Army in late 1944, raping, butchering and smashing its way through a civilization more than half a millennium old in a bloodbath that was both berserker vengeance and cold ethnic cleansing. But he does not let mourning for what was so cruelly lost obscure the edge to the old East Prussian idyll, the harshness that came from the hardscrabble rural life, an authoritarian culture and, always, the anxious politics of a borderland. Versailles turned this mix toxic; Hitler made it murderous.

And Mr. Egremont is unsparing in his account of the consequences. Thus he describes a massacre of Jews on the beach at Palmnicken (now Yantarny, Russia) just before the Soviets came, a killing field that, like so much in this area, came to be stripped of its story. When bodies were discovered in the 1960s, they were assumed to have been slaughtered Russian soldiers. A memorial went up. There was a wreath-laying each year and a parade. Decades later, a former Hitler Youth, returning to the scene of the crime, put the record straight.

Then there's the tale of Walter Frevert, senior forest master for Herman Goering at the kaiser's old hunting grounds at Rominten (now Krasnolesye, Russia). Asked to extend the estate into conquered Poland, Frevert complied, evicting inconvenient locals, a comparatively mild rehearsal for his subsequent transformation of another Polish forest, an exercise that involved the destruction of 35 villages and killing or deporting their inhabitants. After the war, Frevert published "Rominten" (1957), an evocative, if evasive, book about the "paradise" from which he—and Germany—had been expelled. It was a hit. And then the investigations began. The hunter shot himself. An accident, some said.

For others, confronting the past was easier. In early 1945, Marion Dönhoff, a countess long opposed to Hitler, jumped onto her horse and rode west, stopping off at the Bismarck estate at Varzin (now Warcino, Poland: Old Otto would not be pleased) to stay with the widow of the iron chancellor's youngest son. Dönhoff remained for two days listening to reminiscences of empire "as the refugees trailed by outside and an ancient butler served bottles of vintage wine." Then she rode on.

Dönhoff next saw her homeland 44 years later. In 1989, she gave Kaliningrad a statue of Kant, a symbol of reconciliation between old city and new. It was well-received. She was well-received. But the friendliness could not mask what everyone knew. East Prussia's mournful coda was coming to an end. The dwindling band of exiles grows smaller, and their sorrows, at last acknowledged, give off an ever fainter sound. Some buildings, some ruins and some tourists will soon be all that there is to show for the grand Teutonic centuries.

On visiting Kaliningrad in the 1960s, the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote that the trees "whisper in German." They don't any more. But Max Egremont heard their last words.