Forgotten Land (17 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
Marion Dönhoff’s memoirs tell of an apparently idyllic upper-class childhood of that time, with no sign of rebellion against its feudal roots. A large family of brothers, sisters and cousins – Lehndorffs and Dohnas among them – and tutors and governesses and school in Königsberg made a world whose defences were not easily breached until September 1924, when she was fifteen. The car that was taking a group of them home from the seaside village of Cranz crashed into the River Pregel. Marion swam free but two of her cousins, a boy and a girl, were drowned. The next morning the two coffins were laid out in the garden room at Friedrichstein.
Her mother thought that she needed to be sent away, to have her mind filled with new experience: to schools in Berlin and Potsdam. It was while at university in Frankfurt that she saw the brown-shirted young men celebrate the appointment by President von Hindenburg of Hitler as chancellor in January 1933. Marion Dönhoff realized, she wrote later, that this meant the eventual destruction of everything that she loved.
A carved stone lion stands in the main square of Olsztynek (once the German Hohenstein), its solemn face blurred by years of severe winters. This is the most obvious remnant of what was once a memorial to the victory at Tannenberg and to the German dead. The vast structure itself has become a shallow pit of rubble and grass, dotted with empty bottles, grey ashes and patches of burned ground – the detritus of moonlight parties. On a wet morning, I slither across all this, watched by a Polish taxi driver.
He had said that the battlefield of Grunwald, the fifteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian victory over the Teutonic Knights, is nearby – easy to reach. Would I go there next? He could do me a nice tour: Grunwald, then Olsztynek, then the open-air museum outside the town – fascinating wooden buildings, barns, milking parlours, a church – then the Stalag 1B prison camp and finally to the station or the bus stop so that I could catch a train or bus back to Olsztyn. Or for a little bit more he could drive me all the way: better, really, in the rain. He looked at me, confident, the German words rolling along to show he had done this often for visitors from the country that had formed this landscape.
It’s difficult still to get around in this part of Masuria, especially when you go north or east. Quite fast trains reach Olsztyn, the regional capital, from Warsaw and other big cities; then you can get slow local trains to some of the bigger resorts like Mikołajki, which Tadeusz Iwi
ski compares, not altogether accurately, to Venice. There are buses, less frequent than when I first came in 1992, for the timetable has been cut. So I take up the offer of the roundtrip to Grunwald, the open-air museum and the prison camp.
ski compares, not altogether accurately, to Venice. There are buses, less frequent than when I first came in 1992, for the timetable has been cut. So I take up the offer of the roundtrip to Grunwald, the open-air museum and the prison camp.Masuria is a land of battles. German wooden or metal crosses rise above uncut grass in fields, often on the edge of a wood, out of the way of crop-harvesting, or neatly lined up in cemeteries, some of which have been restored to mark reconciliation in a new Europe. The Russian memorials are more obvious, although unloved by the Poles – like the huge Soviet war cemetery further north, on the Baltic, near the Russian border, at Braniewo, where the names and pictures cut or stuck on each stone have either gone or faded into a few vague lines. Braniewo still has a tall white triumphal column and sculpted figures of Red Army soldiers. It was rumoured that Putin would come there in 2009, when he was in Gda
sk for the anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, but he went back to Russia instead. At Braniewo, you’re usually alone among the dead.
sk for the anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, but he went back to Russia instead. At Braniewo, you’re usually alone among the dead.‘You like our weather?’ the taxi driver asks, on the way to Grunwald. The rain has stopped, and the sun lifts the flat land, catching a machine harvesting maize from a field. ‘You know we have the most beautiful autumns in Europe – they just go on and on.’
I ask how many people come to what’s left of the Tannenberg Memorial and he says hardly any – just a few Germans. ‘It’s gone,’ he says. ‘Over.’ Grunwald is popular, however – not very popular, but school groups come because it’s an important part of Polish history. Had I been to Kraków? There’s so much history in Kraków. Warsaw is fine but it’s been rebuilt, so you haven’t got the feeling in the bricks and stones, in the walls and doorways. He knows that some of the stone used to rebuild Warsaw came from here – German stone.
The Grunwald site brings back two periods of history – the fifteenth century and the communist post-war years when, in 1960, the memorial was built. First you have to go through the avenues of stalls selling plastic swords, armour, tabards, helmets, mugs, and miniature knights on horses and fast food. There’s no other tourist around so each stall-keeper stares at me as we pass – or at the two of us, for the taxi driver comes too, which I don’t
mind at all because he’s very easy: a fat, short, funny middle-aged man.
mind at all because he’s very easy: a fat, short, funny middle-aged man.
‘Not for you, eh?’ he says, pointing at the plastic swords that hang on a line or lie flat on a stall’s counter in front of coloured tunics stamped with lions or eagles or the black cross on a white background of the beaten Teutonic Knights. Not really, I say. ‘Any children?’ he asks. Yes. ‘Well, why not buy them something?’ They’re a bit old for this, I answer. ‘Oh, and I’d thought you were a young man!’ We walk on. ‘What about these?’ he asks. There’s a display of real axes and heavy swords and shields and one vicious-looking weapon of an iron ball with spikes protruding from it like tiny dark daggers. ‘Grown-up games!’ he says. In summer the region stages mock battles or tournaments for the tourists. Occasionally a sword strikes too hard and someone is really hurt.
On 17 July 1960, the victory’s anniversary, the Polish Communist Party newspaper described Grunwald as a catastrophic defeat for German military feudalism – and it was easy to recall that the terrifying German invaders of 1940 had had the black cross of the Orders on their tanks. The high steel lances that dominate the Grunwald monument loom as if in perpetual warning. To reach them, you walk up a hill, past scattered stones – some inscribed with the dates of commemorative gatherings – to a flight of stone steps. At the top, across from the lances, is a thick column carved with impassive warrior faces looking out from stone sculpted to resemble a helmet’s open visor. The grey-fronted museum – a low curving stone and concrete building, with serrated boulders on its outer wall – forms one side of the complex; facing it is a menacingly empty stone semi-circle, like a classical amphitheatre. On another side, in a further classical allusion, there’s a carved stone frieze of battling horsemen.
Inside the museum – opposite a fading abstract mosaic – cannons, pikes, more lances and models of knights in real armour divide display cases crowded with weapons, tunics and crosses or
interpretive maps of the Polish victory. A recurring motif is that of the two eagles, their wings spread for ascent: white for Poland and black for the Teutonic Knights. A crowned white bust – presumably of the triumphant Polish-Lithuanian King – seems suddenly startling against the grey walls and the outside cloud. Flanking the bland-faced monarch, under the carved date of 1410, are two wreaths of plastic flowers.
interpretive maps of the Polish victory. A recurring motif is that of the two eagles, their wings spread for ascent: white for Poland and black for the Teutonic Knights. A crowned white bust – presumably of the triumphant Polish-Lithuanian King – seems suddenly startling against the grey walls and the outside cloud. Flanking the bland-faced monarch, under the carved date of 1410, are two wreaths of plastic flowers.
The land stretching away below the hill has single trees or occasionally a clump on it – pleasant invaders in the rolling pasture. The only human activity is a tractor and a cutter harvesting maize. ‘Grunwald was a feudal battle,’ a German historian told me. ‘You can’t think of a national victory or defeat. There were knights on both sides from all over Europe – Germans fighting for the Polish-Lithuanian King, Poles with the Teutonic Knights.’ Fritz Gause, in 1960, asserted that Germans had the right to remember both 1410 and 1914 through memorials in both places. Both battles were in defence of Germany; both memorials stood on German soil. In 1960, there was still no treaty to confirm the post-1945 eastern frontiers.
The myth of Grunwald was appropriated by grandiloquent twentieth-century nationalism. In 1901, a memorial was put up there, still on the site today but not cherished, to Ulrich von Jungingen, the Teutonic Knights’ Grand Master, who had been killed in the battle. After 1945, the German voices faded. In 1981, the patriotic communist Polish Grunwald Association was founded, under the patronage of the anti-Semitic thuggish General Mieczysław Moczar; soon it had over a hundred thousand members. In 1990, as communism was ending, the Polish President General Jaruzelski came to the monument, with representatives from Russia, Lithuania and Czechoslovakia – Slav lands that had suffered under the Germans – and the local Roman Catholic bishop – because the battle had been a defeat for the Reformation. Annual celebrations are still held there. But Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s miraculous defeat of the Soviet army outside Warsaw in
August 1920 – stopping the Bolshevik push into western Europe – is now thought to be a more powerful symbol of Polish freedom.
August 1920 – stopping the Bolshevik push into western Europe – is now thought to be a more powerful symbol of Polish freedom.
In October 1918, Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau called for a dictatorship, an immediate dissolution of the Reichstag and a compulsory mass call-up. But, a month later, he was living in a defeated Germany. Soon a revolution threatened even his own estates. Returning to Januschau at the end of the year, he gathered up ex-soldiers to defend the place and threatened troublemakers with the whip, seizing one by the ear and asking, ‘Who rules in Januschau?’ The man bowed down to the old authority.
The treaty negotiations pointed to a humiliation, like that imposed by the Germans on Bolshevik Russia earlier that year. Attempting to act as a unifying figure, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg issued an appeal to the German people in February 1919. He evoked what, four years before, had been an unquestionable victory: the defence of the eastern frontier at Tannenberg. As Chief of Army Command he had, he said, decided to make his headquarters in the east, a land that had many memories for him. Germany had asked for peace because of the numerical superiority of the enemy and the hunger blockade; now the people must rally like the ‘faithful ones’ of 1914. ‘Old comrades and fellow fighters of Tannenberg and the Masurians, hasten to my aid!’
The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, took from Germany some 13 per cent of its pre-war territory. In the east, Danzig and Memel became ‘free’ international cities; a ‘corridor’ of land between East Prussia and the rest of Germany was given to the new Poland, as were parts of Silesia and Pomerania, some of which had been Polish before the eighteenth-century partitions. The victorious powers organized plebiscites in parts of East Prussia that adjoined Poland to ask if the locals wanted to be German or Poles. The results were victories for the Germans, even in the Roman Catholic districts of Masuria, mostly by huge majorities.
The new Poland, threatened by Bolshevik Russia, seemed to many too fragile an enterprise to risk joining. A delighted Januschau made a fulsome speech to German troops who were now allowed back into Deutsch Eylau, his local town. When August Kapp, from Königsberg, called on him to ask for support for his nationalist putsch, Januschau advised that it would be better to start this in East Prussia, not in Berlin.
The new Poland, threatened by Bolshevik Russia, seemed to many too fragile an enterprise to risk joining. A delighted Januschau made a fulsome speech to German troops who were now allowed back into Deutsch Eylau, his local town. When August Kapp, from Königsberg, called on him to ask for support for his nationalist putsch, Januschau advised that it would be better to start this in East Prussia, not in Berlin.
Distrust between the two nationalities grew worse. Some Poles left the new East Prussia for the new Poland – which became a more secure place after the Polish Marshal Piłsudski’s victory over the invading Russians in August 1920, a month after the plebiscites. Those who stayed found themselves seen as potential traitors within an increasingly uneasy land. The 11th of July, the day of the German plebiscite victories, became, like the anniversary of the battle of Tannenberg, an annual celebration. East Prussian towns and villages that sounded Polish – or not German – began to have their names changed.
Socialist and pacifist groups protested against Hindenburg’s 1922 triumphal tour of East Prussia, which resembled an imperial progress, celebrated particularly by nationalist groups. Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau suggested that no Social Democrat or even any representative of the centre parties should be allowed to shake hands with the hero because they had betrayed the armed forces by making peace in 1918. Hindenburg demurred at this but, in general, he avoided contact with the left. Planning began for a new monument – one of the most obviously symbolic constructions in modern European history – to be built on the Tannenberg battlefield, provocatively near the post-Versailles Polish frontier.
On 31 August 1924, the tenth anniversary of the battle, Hindenburg laid the foundation stone, and the vast assembly showed the wish, or need, to recall victory. Crowds had begun to gather in the middle of the night; by midday, the hour for the ceremonies, the correspondent of the London
Times
thought there might be as many as a hundred thousand, with thirty thousand
veterans and members of patriotic organizations. It was an occasion of imperial ceremony. Hindenburg had declared that he was a monarchist, in spite of his role in getting rid of the last Emperor in November 1918. Banners were brought forward; two services – Roman Catholic and Protestant – were held on the battlefield, and the Governor of East Prussia, Ernst Siehr, expressed the hope that this commemoration would help to awaken a national spirit in the Fatherland. The memorial symbolized the fear of the Poles and of Bolshevik Russia, of East Prussia’s new isolation from the rest of Germany and thankfulness for an earlier deliverance. The Social Democrat government of Prussia reluctantly became involved in the financing. After Hindenburg’s election as president of Germany in 1925, the national government gave direct support.
Times
thought there might be as many as a hundred thousand, with thirty thousand
veterans and members of patriotic organizations. It was an occasion of imperial ceremony. Hindenburg had declared that he was a monarchist, in spite of his role in getting rid of the last Emperor in November 1918. Banners were brought forward; two services – Roman Catholic and Protestant – were held on the battlefield, and the Governor of East Prussia, Ernst Siehr, expressed the hope that this commemoration would help to awaken a national spirit in the Fatherland. The memorial symbolized the fear of the Poles and of Bolshevik Russia, of East Prussia’s new isolation from the rest of Germany and thankfulness for an earlier deliverance. The Social Democrat government of Prussia reluctantly became involved in the financing. After Hindenburg’s election as president of Germany in 1925, the national government gave direct support.
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