Forgotten Land (12 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
Hans and Peter Kollwitz were serious crusaders. The hardest time would come afterwards, they thought, because war offered purification and the chance of a new Germany, whereas peace brought the task (or duty) of shaping great change. In August 1914, with all the good news from the west, Peter spoke of German troops reaching London soon.
In late September, Käthe Kollwitz read Heinrich von Kleist’s patriotic drama
The Prince of Homburg
with Hans – and Peter had ten days’ leave because of a bad knee. The boys were at home again, during some beautiful days before Peter went back to barracks in Wünsdorf, near enough for his parents to see him. His mother felt moved by the keen yet devout faces of the young soldiers; she would have liked to kiss them. On 2 October, his cousin
took a photograph of Peter – a thin boy, rather dreamy with lips slightly parted, buttons and belt buckle bright on the grey uniform, his body frail against the sky. Eight days later, on hearing of the fall of Antwerp, the Kollwitzes hung the black, white and red imperial German flag from the window of Peter’s room, for their sons and for victory.
The Prince of Homburg
with Hans – and Peter had ten days’ leave because of a bad knee. The boys were at home again, during some beautiful days before Peter went back to barracks in Wünsdorf, near enough for his parents to see him. His mother felt moved by the keen yet devout faces of the young soldiers; she would have liked to kiss them. On 2 October, his cousin
took a photograph of Peter – a thin boy, rather dreamy with lips slightly parted, buttons and belt buckle bright on the grey uniform, his body frail against the sky. Eight days later, on hearing of the fall of Antwerp, the Kollwitzes hung the black, white and red imperial German flag from the window of Peter’s room, for their sons and for victory.
On 12 October, Peter’s and Hans’s unit, the 207th Infantry Regiment, was sent to the western front after scarcely two months’ training. Before the regiment left, Käthe Kollwitz walked at night with Peter near the barracks, where he pointed out the stars and together they heard soldiers returning through the woods, singing songs of the Fatherland. They said farewell at the station, with a lengthy embrace, some words of love and an avowal of his certainty that he would return. On reaching Belgium, the boys marched the last few miles to the front, Peter with Goethe’s
Faust
in his knapsack, a last present from his mother. They were in flat terrain – with some tall trees, gaunt poplars – the sound of artillery quite near. Transport went by with munitions, pioneers, senior officers and ambulances with the wounded. The new arrivals went past more marching troops, shrapnel bursting over them as they saw the fires of bivouacs and felt the tension of knowing that they must soon come under fire.
Faust
in his knapsack, a last present from his mother. They were in flat terrain – with some tall trees, gaunt poplars – the sound of artillery quite near. Transport went by with munitions, pioneers, senior officers and ambulances with the wounded. The new arrivals went past more marching troops, shrapnel bursting over them as they saw the fires of bivouacs and felt the tension of knowing that they must soon come under fire.
The first card from Peter came to Prenzlauerberg on 14 October, sent on the journey west, from Hanover. Seven days later Käthe wrote of hearing no more news and on 24 October a letter arrived, saying he could hear the thunder of artillery. That evening, in their living room, Käthe and Karl and some friends talked, Käthe thinking of Peter – where is he, is he hungry, is he in danger? On 27 October she wrote in her diary that he had been gone for fourteen days. There was little news, apart from reports of hard fighting at Ypres, Nieuport and Diksmuide.
The Germans hoped to break out of the long front line that ran near the villages of Diksmuide and Langemarck. They wanted to reach the Channel ports and Paris, reviving the war of movement that had ceased in September on the Marne. More reserves
had been called up, including Peter and other young boys, so the myth began of a massacre of the innocents – or the heroes of Langemarck. Peter’s regiment was positioned around Diksmuide; other units were further south at Langemarck; all were involved in what would become one of the battles of Ypres. The untried troops were up against experienced British, French and Belgian riflemen. Almost one hundred thousand Germans were lost there between 21 October and 14 November 1914.
had been called up, including Peter and other young boys, so the myth began of a massacre of the innocents – or the heroes of Langemarck. Peter’s regiment was positioned around Diksmuide; other units were further south at Langemarck; all were involved in what would become one of the battles of Ypres. The untried troops were up against experienced British, French and Belgian riflemen. Almost one hundred thousand Germans were lost there between 21 October and 14 November 1914.
The road from Diksmuide to Ostend passes near the village of Beerst. This was no-man’s-land in 1914; now it’s a country of potato fields and cattle where poplars rise from the edge of crops of sugar beet or groups of farm buildings near the River Yser. In October 1914 this was crossed with trenches and strewn with the dead. ‘It is ugly here, very ugly,’ one of Peter’s comrades wrote, although he felt glad that the tension of waiting was over. Peter Kollwitz and his detachment were put into trenches a little over a mile east of the Yser. Peter himself was killed instantly by a bullet on the night of 22 October, the first of his regiment to die, shot by a Belgian defending his country. His comrades buried him near the trench. Eight days later, the official letter arrived in Prenzlauerberg: ‘Your son has fallen.’
On 11 November, some dozen miles to the south of Diksmuide and Beerst, around the village of Langemarck, in an area defended by British regular troops, another group of young, untried Germans went into battle singing ‘Deutschland über Alles’. The young Austrian Adolf Hitler, a volunteer in a Bavarian infantry regiment, was there and vowed revenge; others, however, felt a deep bitterness about the crude patriotism promoted by incompetent leaders. ‘All a fraud,’ Hans Koch, the friend of Peter’s who was at Langemarck, wrote of the subsequent myth, sharing Käthe Kollwitz’s anger at idealism betrayed.
Another friend of Peter’s, Eric Krems, declared that people shouldn’t believe speeches about the army’s glorious spirit, for many soldiers felt a hatred of war that would soon become hatred of the government. He quoted a Prussian officer who said that
four people had made the war – the Tsar, the German Emperor, the French President and ‘the English fellow’ (presumably the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith); everyone else had been fooled. The Prussian foresaw a time when there was no German or Russian Emperor but a republic of all the people. Eric Krems, killed at Verdun, aged twenty, in March 1916, never saw this. Hans Koch survived (although twice wounded) and returned to Berlin, where he took part in the revolution in 1918 and 1919. He died in 1995, aged ninety-eight, believing that humanity had a greater capacity for error than for progress.
four people had made the war – the Tsar, the German Emperor, the French President and ‘the English fellow’ (presumably the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith); everyone else had been fooled. The Prussian foresaw a time when there was no German or Russian Emperor but a republic of all the people. Eric Krems, killed at Verdun, aged twenty, in March 1916, never saw this. Hans Koch survived (although twice wounded) and returned to Berlin, where he took part in the revolution in 1918 and 1919. He died in 1995, aged ninety-eight, believing that humanity had a greater capacity for error than for progress.
Symbols of the East Prussian Junkers have survived on their old lands – and among these is a ruined mansion on the edge of a village in northern Poland. Satellite dishes sprout from the roofs of some newish houses in the main street, firewood is stacked beside rickety wooden huts, stork nests fluff out from the top of telegraph poles and red-brick barns – some used as garages or for storage – show the Prussian past, as do the ruins of the large brick and stone house that once dominated the village. A post-1945 identity is shown in a long low set of stables for what look like racehorses, certainly thoroughbreds. Here the mild human disorder glides into elegance; meadows stretch away from the stables, immaculately fenced with white-painted rails like Newmarket or Kentucky, until they become farmland. You can see the green leaves of a potato crop and other fields sown with wheat or barley or rye, before what seems like a woodland wilderness that surrounds this settlement. This is the place where Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, once a leader of the conservatives and spokesman for the Junkers in the Reichstag, once lived and ruled, where he fought election crowds with his fists and entertained his neighbour Hindenburg – and where I’m chased away by the Polish owner of Januschau’s ruined house who wields a spade while shouting, ‘Nein! Nein!’
Prussian reforms of the early nineteenth century left the Junkers remarkably unscathed – still important as producers of food and loyal supporters of the Hohenzollerns. Even the abolition of serfdom and the after-shock of the 1848 revolution, when the nobility lost more of its feudal privileges, didn’t cripple their
powerful role or their domination of the officer corps. Bismarck attacked aspects of the feudalism that gave the Junkers such power. They turned against him for this, many also disapproving of his campaign against the Catholics, perhaps because they valued the cheap Polish labour on their estates. There were anti-Semitic complaints about the influence of Bismarck’s Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder and the new capitalism that seemed to be seeking privileges at least equal to those of landowners and farmers. Bismarck, who saw himself as a Pomeranian farmer, felt betrayed. But skilful farming meant that profits from land remained good and the size of properties increased.
powerful role or their domination of the officer corps. Bismarck attacked aspects of the feudalism that gave the Junkers such power. They turned against him for this, many also disapproving of his campaign against the Catholics, perhaps because they valued the cheap Polish labour on their estates. There were anti-Semitic complaints about the influence of Bismarck’s Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder and the new capitalism that seemed to be seeking privileges at least equal to those of landowners and farmers. Bismarck, who saw himself as a Pomeranian farmer, felt betrayed. But skilful farming meant that profits from land remained good and the size of properties increased.
The fall in agricultural prices that began in the 1870s with the import of corn from North America and Russia was a threat. In the years from 1883 to 1885 Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau saw the price of his rye almost halved, although a growing income came from the distillation of spirits from potatoes. Once again the privileged status of the Junkers became clear; Bismarck introduced tariffs against imported grain, small at first but rising over the years, and so won back his popularity among this powerful class. By 1894, the novelist Theodore Fontane, chronicler of the Junkers, was writing of their ‘unbearable demands’: how ‘they only know themselves and their advantage, and the sooner they are disposed of the better.’ In most European countries the nobility grew closer to the bourgeoisie; in Prussia its privileged position seemed to be more entrenched, more exclusive.
The Junkers felt threatened – by cheap imports from across the border in Russia, by a potentially rebellious Polish minority and by the bankers and businessmen whose new commercial power might overwhelm the landed interest. Tariffs, which Januschau thought essential to his survival, meant high food prices; liberal politicians complained also that the Junkers paid badly, took advantage of cheap immigrant labour from Russian Poland, and offered use of land rather than wages (the ‘cashless society’ later recalled nostalgically by Marion Dönhoff), which bound workers even more tightly to them. The treatment of seasonal labour could
be brutal. The landlords knew that there was a plentiful supply from across the border.
be brutal. The landlords knew that there was a plentiful supply from across the border.
Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau’s fear of democracy grew during the First World War. By 1917, he had concluded that the unreliable Reichstag not only wished for a republic but threatened the army ‘from the rear’ by its feeble requests for peace talks. Three years before, back in his beloved army, he had celebrated his sixtieth birthday under Hindenburg’s command in the east, before going west, to the Somme, then back east again, to report to Hindenburg in April 1916 and to see action with an infantry regiment, winning the Iron Cross, first class. Januschau considered that commanding men in battle was perfectly natural – like running his estates. In November 1917, with still no sign of victory in spite of the U-boat campaign and the huge advances into Russia, he returned home to concern himself with the vital production of food. Despising Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor, Januschau conspired to replace him with a stronger man, perhaps Admiral von Tirpitz, who had built up the German fleet before 1914. When neither Hindenburg nor the Crown Prince nor the Emperor responded, he blamed democracy.
The aging Junker traced the decline: the departure of Bismarck, whose successors allowed a hostile ring – France and Russia and Britain – to tighten round Germany; mediocre civilian leadership; the rise of the Social Democrats; the power of the Reichstag; the threat to the institution he revered most, the monarchy. To Januschau, Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s victories in the east should have been leading to a permanent extension of German rule not only over the conquered Russian part of Poland but over a new and dependent state of Ukraine as well.
In February 1915, the Germans launched another offensive across the Russian frontier, amid violent snowstorms and sudden thaws that turned the roads into morasses of mud. The Russian retreat became disastrous; the generals – Sievers and Budberg, both of German extraction – were replaced: and Knox, still a frequent visitor to the front, wrote of ‘the worst thing since
Tannenberg’. Russian losses, even up to 13 January 1915 – the first five months of the war – were grim: 13,899 officers, 482,162 men, 319 officials. The superiority of German equipment was overwhelming. From May 1915, the Germans advanced further eastwards; by 18 July they were threatening Riga. On 16 July, Knox left Warsaw, imagining during a last walk in the Łazienki Gardens how the city would be under German occupation; on the night of 4 August, Warsaw was abandoned. By the end of September the Germans were east of Wilno (now Vilnius), several hundred miles into Russia. Knox saw the chaos of the retreat as long lines of Poles fled from the invaders along roads blocked with carts and children driving geese, cows or pigs. The rumour was that the Germans took everything, that it was safer inside Russia’s borders, wherever these might now be.
Tannenberg’. Russian losses, even up to 13 January 1915 – the first five months of the war – were grim: 13,899 officers, 482,162 men, 319 officials. The superiority of German equipment was overwhelming. From May 1915, the Germans advanced further eastwards; by 18 July they were threatening Riga. On 16 July, Knox left Warsaw, imagining during a last walk in the Łazienki Gardens how the city would be under German occupation; on the night of 4 August, Warsaw was abandoned. By the end of September the Germans were east of Wilno (now Vilnius), several hundred miles into Russia. Knox saw the chaos of the retreat as long lines of Poles fled from the invaders along roads blocked with carts and children driving geese, cows or pigs. The rumour was that the Germans took everything, that it was safer inside Russia’s borders, wherever these might now be.
On 5 September, the Tsar took command of the Russian forces, making him even more closely identified with failure. Knox, shocked by the corruption and inefficiency he had found, wrote to the War Office on 19 September 1915, ‘If ever there has been a Government that richly deserved a revolution, it is the present one in Russia.’ By the end of the month, just short of Riga, the German advance in the north stopped as troops were sent west to Serbia or to France. The eastern front was still a war of movement, in contrast to the stalemate in the trenches in the west. By the autumn of 1915, the Germans were in Lithuania, having taken some 65,500 square miles of new territory which came under the control of their generals, principally Ludendorff, in a colonial entity called Ober-Ost. In January 1916 the Russian general Brusilov had startling successes against the mostly Austro-Hungarian forces, advancing into Galicia – but in 1917, amid revolutionary turmoil in Russia, the Germans reached further east.
The conquerors were shocked and fascinated by this land’s filth and disorder, its primitive poor people, the unending forests, the tumbledown settlements, the deep silence and the strangeness. The Russians had left a terrible devastation, destroying
much in their retreat. To cleanse all this seemed worthy of the heirs of the Teutonic Knights, and a wholehearted programme of improvement began. Bavarian foresters tackled the wild eastern woodlands, surveyors and engineers set to work, roads were cut through the wilderness, and by the end of 1915 there had been a transformation, an ostensible triumph of German technical ingenuity over Baltic stone-worshippers. Ludendorff hoped to make a wall of German settlements, under military protection, simultaneously enriching the Reich and defending civilization. There was nothing civilized, however, about the conditions of the work gangs or the complaints of rape and brutality; it was as if a moral frontier had been crossed once the troops and administrators left East Prussia, the last German outpost.
much in their retreat. To cleanse all this seemed worthy of the heirs of the Teutonic Knights, and a wholehearted programme of improvement began. Bavarian foresters tackled the wild eastern woodlands, surveyors and engineers set to work, roads were cut through the wilderness, and by the end of 1915 there had been a transformation, an ostensible triumph of German technical ingenuity over Baltic stone-worshippers. Ludendorff hoped to make a wall of German settlements, under military protection, simultaneously enriching the Reich and defending civilization. There was nothing civilized, however, about the conditions of the work gangs or the complaints of rape and brutality; it was as if a moral frontier had been crossed once the troops and administrators left East Prussia, the last German outpost.
Above all this, an occasional lofty visitor to it, was Hindenburg, whose favourite play –
Wallenstein’s Camp
by Schiller – was most appropriate. To many he seemed the reincarnation of the mighty general of the Thirty Years War, and his troops the equivalent of the freebooting
Landsknechte
who had terrified central Europe. The discussion of the possibilities of the east received intellectual foundations in 1916 when the Institut für Ostdeutsche Wirtschaft opened in Königsberg, becoming part of the university there in 1918. Not everyone liked what they saw in Ober-Ost. The writer Arnold Zweig worked in its administration, and his anti-war novel, later burned by the Nazis,
The Case of Sergeant Grischa
, describes Ludendorff (called Schieffenzahn in the book) contemplating his sprawling domain: ‘It was for them to obey, to follow and bow down. If they did not, they must be trodden underfoot. From a great height, as though from a captive balloon poised far above them, he looked down upon his realm, his towns, his forests, fields, and scattered herds of men and saw – nothing’: a vision of arrogance and contempt.
Wallenstein’s Camp
by Schiller – was most appropriate. To many he seemed the reincarnation of the mighty general of the Thirty Years War, and his troops the equivalent of the freebooting
Landsknechte
who had terrified central Europe. The discussion of the possibilities of the east received intellectual foundations in 1916 when the Institut für Ostdeutsche Wirtschaft opened in Königsberg, becoming part of the university there in 1918. Not everyone liked what they saw in Ober-Ost. The writer Arnold Zweig worked in its administration, and his anti-war novel, later burned by the Nazis,
The Case of Sergeant Grischa
, describes Ludendorff (called Schieffenzahn in the book) contemplating his sprawling domain: ‘It was for them to obey, to follow and bow down. If they did not, they must be trodden underfoot. From a great height, as though from a captive balloon poised far above them, he looked down upon his realm, his towns, his forests, fields, and scattered herds of men and saw – nothing’: a vision of arrogance and contempt.
Hans Koch, Peter’s friend, came to see Käthe Kollwitz in November 1914 to tell her about Peter’s last days – how her son had
played with the children in the Belgian house where he had been billeted, how he had made friends with and protected a retarded old man who said, on hearing of the boy’s death, that he wanted to be with Peter in his grave.
played with the children in the Belgian house where he had been billeted, how he had made friends with and protected a retarded old man who said, on hearing of the boy’s death, that he wanted to be with Peter in his grave.
She sat often in her son’s room and it became a shrine: ‘My boy, I am with you in your room, at your table,’ she wrote in her diary on 12 November. The print
Waiting (Anxiety)
was published just after Peter had been killed – a depiction of a woman alone weighed down by what might happen – and at the start of December, after a sleepless night, she thought of a memorial: Peter’s body lying with his eyes open to the sky, with his father at its head and his mother at the foot, to be put up in Berlin, in Havelberg, above the river: a memorial not only to her son but to all volunteers. It might be dedicated on a summer’s day in a ceremony with schoolchildren singing the patriotic hymn ‘No finer death in the world than to be slain by the enemy.’ In her lithograph of 1914, in memory of Ludwig Frank, a Social Democrat politician who, like Peter, had volunteered and been killed, mourners touch each other as they kneel, brought together by Frank’s ideals.
Waiting (Anxiety)
was published just after Peter had been killed – a depiction of a woman alone weighed down by what might happen – and at the start of December, after a sleepless night, she thought of a memorial: Peter’s body lying with his eyes open to the sky, with his father at its head and his mother at the foot, to be put up in Berlin, in Havelberg, above the river: a memorial not only to her son but to all volunteers. It might be dedicated on a summer’s day in a ceremony with schoolchildren singing the patriotic hymn ‘No finer death in the world than to be slain by the enemy.’ In her lithograph of 1914, in memory of Ludwig Frank, a Social Democrat politician who, like Peter, had volunteered and been killed, mourners touch each other as they kneel, brought together by Frank’s ideals.
She felt alone, torn between anger and pride. In her diary on the last day of 1914 she declared her wish to be ‘faithful’ to Peter’s love of his country, to the idealistic young; she must work harder because death had stopped him from working. He must help her to go on; if only the mist through which she saw him might clear. She knew he was there and she dreaded the distance becoming greater, the memories more vague; he must stay. On 15 February 1915, she told Hans that she doubted now what she had previously thought – that egoism had to end, that the Fatherland had the right to ask for a life. Work she saw now as even more vital. The artist Max Liebermann wrote to her that she must go on working. She recalled her grandfather Rupp’s words, ‘A gift is a duty.’
Käthe Kollwitz’s journey from patriotic emotion to pacifist internationalism had begun, yet she couldn’t accept that Peter
had died for criminal madness, because this would make his loss pointless. She thought of Goethe’s line ‘Seed corn is not for harvesting.’ Had it been wrong of her to plead with Karl to let the boy go? She told Hans that his father and she would gladly have given their lives so that their sons could live. But she had liked the patriotism Peter had shown, its pure emotion. The Fatherland
did
stand at the back of everything, overshadowing each individual life.
had died for criminal madness, because this would make his loss pointless. She thought of Goethe’s line ‘Seed corn is not for harvesting.’ Had it been wrong of her to plead with Karl to let the boy go? She told Hans that his father and she would gladly have given their lives so that their sons could live. But she had liked the patriotism Peter had shown, its pure emotion. The Fatherland
did
stand at the back of everything, overshadowing each individual life.
On 2 January 1916, she wrote in her diary of the year without Peter, how, like him, she loved Germany. Had their positions on the war been close? In 1915 she noted in her diary the taking of Warsaw by the Germans, but she also drew two grieving parents round the mocking symbol of a joyful family festival – a Christmas tree. The death of her son made her work more sombre. A theme for the rest of her life was the betrayal of the young by the old who had exploited their idealism. It was as if grief became her closest companion, her most intense love, so personal that it was a barrier between her and Karl, even between her and Hans. Grief and guilt could, she thought, be soothed by art – by absorption in making a heartfelt work.
The self-portraits begin to show age and stoicism, a wish not to hide suffering but to give it dignity and beauty. Peter’s friends began to call her Mother Käthe. Another sentence from grandfather Rupp came back: “Man is not born for happiness but so that he can fulfil his duty.” On 11 October 1916, as winter came to the battlefields, she wrote of the madness of the youth of Europe killing each other: of how the love of country inflaming German, British, Russian and French boys had been betrayed. Was it disloyal to Peter to think like this? He had died believing the ideals for which he – and they – had gone to fight.
In June 1916, Käthe and Karl had their silver wedding. She had stayed with him yet could feel, as in the past, stifled by his love. The next year she started to dream of a simple life, away from Berlin, in a country cottage with a garden, a dream – not
reflected in the urban, committed atmosphere of her work. Her fame should, she felt, have been more consolation – and she did like it: the celebrations of her fiftieth birthday in 1917 with exhibitions in Bremen, Berlin and, in July, Königsberg, which she went to see. A review in the
Königsberg Hartungsche Zeitung
said what Gerhart Hauptmann also now thought – that the works were relentlessly serious, full of the heart’s suffering, conveying exhaustion, despair, apathy, showing that humanity’s way is ‘hard, awkward, haggard’, its forms ‘emaciated, unlovely … The ugly and unpleasant is predominant; the gentle, soft and kind fail.’
reflected in the urban, committed atmosphere of her work. Her fame should, she felt, have been more consolation – and she did like it: the celebrations of her fiftieth birthday in 1917 with exhibitions in Bremen, Berlin and, in July, Königsberg, which she went to see. A review in the
Königsberg Hartungsche Zeitung
said what Gerhart Hauptmann also now thought – that the works were relentlessly serious, full of the heart’s suffering, conveying exhaustion, despair, apathy, showing that humanity’s way is ‘hard, awkward, haggard’, its forms ‘emaciated, unlovely … The ugly and unpleasant is predominant; the gentle, soft and kind fail.’
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