Speaking German, I ask the waiter for a menu. He smiles a little condescendingly, walks across to a desk and brings over one that has been translated into English. The fare is sturdy stuff, appropriate for long, snowy winters. It’s hard to choose between Creamed Herrings East Prussian, Smoked Ham of Deer, Fried Cockerel Legs, Grapevine Snails, Fillet of Pork Squire’s Style, Masurian Jugged Game, Grandmother’s Semolina Blancmange.

Is Marjellchen a gathering place for those with roots in the province that ceased to be German when the Red Army stormed through it in 1945? Later, as I leave, two middle-aged couples are standing outside and I ask why they chose Marjellchen. Were their families originally from what the restaurant owner’s East Prussian grandmother called her “cold” Baltic homeland? The four of them laugh. One of the men says, no, they know nothing about East Prussia, gesturing with his hand as if to push the place away: nothing at all. It’s Marjellchen’s food that they like - good sustenance to protect you from the winter wind.

*

East Prussia was on the edge. Perhaps this historic pressure on its people – their anxiety and sense of threat, how they faced these - was partly what drew me there from Britain’s island safety. East Prussians used to talk of going into the Reich, particularly during its last years, as if travelling to the mother country from a distant outpost. After the First World War, the province was cut off from the rest of Germany by the Polish Corridor, the thin strip stretching south from the Baltic that had been given to the new Poland in the Treaty of Versailles. Many East Prussians felt the need to stress, before and after their homeland’s extinction in 1945, that the place had been German for five centuries. Stalin had brought about the huge population change, seizing their identity. The Germans were expelled and Poles and Russians moved in.

What were these supposedly long-lasting frontiers? Over time, they had changed as the borders of Prussian districts, the frontiers of Poland and (since 1871) those of Germany shifted. After the Treaty of Versailles, East Prussia’s western frontier was along the river Vistula, east of Danzig (now Polish Gdańsk). It stretched eastwards along the Baltic shore and south to what was then the new Poland’s northern frontier, then north-east, including Königsberg, up through Tilsit (now the Russian Sovetsk), over the River Niemen to the most eastern town of pre-1945 Germany: Memel (today the Lithuanian port of Klaipėda).

Five centuries of continuous German life, it’s said - since the Teutonic Knights, a crusading order of chivalry, had set out in the thirteenth century to conquer this remote land for Christendom, converting or killing (like the crusaders in the Middle East) its pagan people. So East Prussia evolved into the German Empire’s most eastern redoubt, tramped over by invaders. Immigrants sought refuge there from persecution in the rest of Europe, from anti-Semitic Russian tsars, from French Catholic kings or Austrian archbishops.

This makes nonsense of any claims of racial purity. In January 1945, the eleven-year-old Arno Surminski fled his village in the East Prussian district of Masuria, with most of the inhabitants and his parents. The Red Army caught up with them, they were marched back and the older people deported to the Soviet Union, leaving behind Arno who never saw his parents again. Later, as a writer in the west, Surminski thought of his lost homeland as an extraordinary mix – a small part of Asia, invaded by Tatars, also the country of the old pagan Prussians, the Lithuanians, the Russians, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Teutonic Knights, the Germans, the Huguenots from Catholic Europe, the Turks and the Mongol invaders, the Swedes during the Thirty Years War, the French under Napoleon.

In the sixteenth century, with the ending of the Teutonic Knights’ control of the region, Duke Albrecht, the Hohenzollern ruler of East Prussia, swore allegiance to the King of Poland, bringing the land into the Polish-Lithuanian Empire. In the seventeenth century it passed by treaty into the lands of the Hohenzollern Elector of Brandenburg whose descendant was crowned King in Prussia in Königsberg in 1701.

Duke Albrecht called on his fellow European rulers - Henry V111of England, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King Ferdinand of Hungary and Bohemia – to support him against the Turks (the Asiatic hordes) who threatened civilization: a rallying cry of Christendom used 500 years later by Goebbels against the invading Red Army. In twentieth-century Germany, East Prussia could seem an anachronism, still a bastion of the Junkers, the militarized aristocracy from east of the River Elbe that provided much of the officer corps of the German army. Yet Königsberg was the city of the philosopher Immanuel Kant and, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a place of astonishing intellectual discovery. In East Prussia there was tolerance and bigotry; after 1871, in the newly united Germany, it became increasingly fearful and reactionary – against threats real and imagined, in the form of the Poles, the Bolsheviks or economic decay on the edge of the new Reich.

In 1945, the bastion crumbled. The north-eastern part – Königsberg and its ice-free port, an enclave about the size of Northern Ireland – was taken by Stalin for the Soviet Union; the rest joined the new communist Poland. More than most of Europe, East Prussia is strewn with symbols of a turbulent past – in its buildings, its ruins and its graves. Poland has absorbed the western parts, with a few remaining tensions. In the north-east, the Russians of the Kaliningrad region find themselves cut off from the rest of Russia since the early 1990s by a Poland and a Lithuania now outside what was the Soviet block, places they go to increasingly often. Many Kaliningraders compare their lives not so much to those of other Russians as to those of Poles and Lithuanians in the European Union, and, although dissatisfied, have hopes of change.

For Germans, however, East Prussia is a memory – one that they can shape into myth and regret, fading perhaps but still a reminder of how they once were, in what their forebears thought of as their country’s (and civilisation’s) most eastern redoubt. A place of reconciliation, of fantasy or of hope: perhaps, after its last painful years, this is now East Prussia’s destiny.

*

The great build-up of hatred that marked the end of East Prussia came even to a comparatively serene Britain when the future of the German eastern territories was raised in the House of Commons by the Prime Minister Winston Churchill on 15 December 1944. The debate was about what form post-war Poland might take. The plans were still hypothetical; Allied troops might be inside western Germany and the Red Army pouring across the eastern German frontiers, but the enemy was still fighting hard.

Churchill’s oratory rose, evoking a strange country, far from Westminster – ‘the most desolate’ Pripet Marshes; Danzig, ‘one of the most magnificent cities and harbours in the whole of the world’ – as he spoke of Polish concessions to the Soviet Union in the east in return for conquered territory in the west. Germany would lose East Prussia, with its capital of Königsberg, coronation city of the Prussian kings. What would happen to the Germans? Expulsion was, the British Prime Minister said, the best answer: the shifting of millions of people – ‘a clean sweep’ - as had happened after 1918 when the frontiers between Greece and Turkey had been redrawn.

Why shouldn’t there be room in a new Germany for the expelled East Prussians, Silesians, Pomeranians and the rest? Six to seven million Germans had been killed in a war ‘into which they did not hesitate, for a second time in a generation, to plunge all Europe and the world’. Ten or twelve million prisoners of war and slave labourers taken to Germany from previously conquered territories would be sent back to their own countries.

There was some sympathy at Westminster that December for the German victims. One member of parliament was shocked at the idea of ‘5,000,000 Germans again forced from their homes and transferred to western Germany’; another declared that ‘The Poles do not want East Prussia as a compensation. It is the same as if you took away East Anglia from Britain and gave it to Germany, and offered us Normandy instead. It is a monstrous suggestion.’ But the Conservative Robert Boothby claimed that the province was ‘to-day what it has been for the last two centuries, the focal point of the infection of Prussian militarism...... The German population of East Prussia should be, as the Prime Minister said, expelled. It is rough but, by God, they deserve it.’

Outside parliament, a campaign began against the expulsions; British churchmen condemned them and George Orwell wrote of ‘this enormous crime’. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz told an English friend he couldn’t understand such sentimentality which was apparently founded on the unrealistic belief that the hatred elsewhere in Europe could be stopped. Appalling destruction had already hit East Prussia when the Red Army crossed its borders in October 1944. Two months earlier, in August, the R.A.F. had bombed Königsberg, smashing the city’s historic centre. After the raids, fires burnt for days. Smoke, loosened timber, rubble and the stench of corpses had formed a cordon around what had once been thought of as one of the last redoubts of western European civilization.

Its tight streets, wooden buildings, packed warehouses and winds from the Baltic had always made Königsberg prone to fires which, centuries before, had terrified its most famous citizen. The dying philosopher Immanuel Kant often fell asleep while reading and one night his head nodded into some nearby candles that set fire to his cotton night cap. Already nightmares plagued him; old street songs heard in childhood and ghostly murderers became fearful torments; when his servant answered his cries, Kant thought the man had come to kill him. In daylight, the philosopher wrote, ‘No surrender now to panics of darkness.’ Until then he had insisted on a silent bedroom, without light: not even a glimpse of the moon through a shutter’s crack. Now, in the new dark terror, he brought in a lamp and a clock whose tick and striking of the hours helped towards peace.

Kant did much to give his home city its identity, not only as part of an intellectual revolution that rocked Europe but as an outpost of civilization. Hadn’t this “civilizing” impulse been the essence of the land since the thirteenth century and its conquest for Christianity by the Teutonic Knights? To the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, East Prussia meant something else, especially in comparison with his Soviet homeland: material progress and efficiency. Ever since arriving there with the Red Army at the end of the war, Solzhenitsyn had never lost his astonishment at those neat farms, villages and towns where he had tried to control his men in the terrifying riot of looting and violence:

Tiles, tiles – and see the towers,
All the turrets and the spires,
And houses built of solid brick”

Before:

“Our columns pour ahead like lava
With wild cries, whistling, headlights’ glare
Klein Goslau, Gross Goslau –
Every village – is now a fire!

It was the huge Soviet offensive of June 1944 that began the last months of German East Prussia. Previously the province had been spared the worst of the fighting although the wounded had passed through Königsberg and those with sons or husbands on the eastern front would have heard about the change from advance to retreat. Many imagined a short Russian occupation, quickly followed by liberation, as in 1914, or a negotiated peace and return of their land. This time, however, the spirit and power of the invaders was different. In October 1944, Soviet troops were on German soil, near Gumbinnen, between Stallupönen and Rominten Heath. The village of Nemmersdorf was captured, then retaken by the Germans – but not until the Red Army had unleashed terror on an unimaginable scale.

Goebbels and the Nazi propaganda machine thundered against the “fury of the Soviet beasts”, evoking the ancient ghosts of the Asiatic hordes. Now, however, there could be no help from the rest of Christendom. The German occupation of the western Soviet Union had been horrifically cruel – communist party members hanged instantly, Jews either shot or sent to extermination camps, women raped, men carted off to the Reich to work as slaves, “the fascists” laughing as they burnt their victims’ corpses. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war died in German camps in a regime of terror and starvation. The Wehrmacht shot or hanged innocent people in villages suspected of harbouring Russian partisans; the requisitioning of food led to widespread famine. Nearly 7.5 million Soviet civilians are thought to have been killed under German occupation. The Germans had found local collaborators, particularly in Ukraine or on the Baltic, who had suffered under Stalin; but Teutonic contempt, made worse by Nazi racism, prevented more extensive help.

In July 1944, the Red Army entered the first extermination camp to be liberated, at Majdenek, near Lublin and the Polish-Soviet border. The thousands of victims had been Jews and also Russians and Poles. Soviet anti-Semitism notwithstanding, propaganda made the most of Majdenek, emphasizing the message that accompanied the massive Red Army offensives in the last year of the war. The Germans were beasts; Soviet rage and revenge were just. Even intellectuals and admirers of western European culture shared these feelings. The writer Lev Kopelev (a Red Army officer at the time who later settled in Germany) ordered his men to get out of their jeeps and relieve themselves on the hated German soil after they had crossed the border into East Prussia.

In the middle of November, the front fell silent, with the Red Army on Rominten Heath. The offensive seemed to have faltered; Christmas and New Year were calm. On 13 January 13 1945, the surge began again. Captain Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an officer in the Soviet artillery, received a bundle of leaflets bearing Marshal Rokossovsky’s message to the troops – that this was the last great offensive and ‘Germany lies before us’. Earlier, Stalin’s decision had been revealed to the troops by political commissars - that moral scruples should be cast aside in a campaign of revenge, looting and terror. Repelled, Solzhenitsyn told his men that they should represent ‘a proud magnanimous Russia’. Once the advance began it proved to be impossible to enforce this. The writer was horrified by the violence inflicted on the orderly land yet even he couldn’t resist taking some Russian books that were banned in the Soviet Union, and, from a German post office, piles of fine paper, handfuls of German pencils, paper clips, labels, folders and bottles of ink. He also seized, from the house of a German miller – who had fled – illustrations from a book on the First World War, photographs of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II and the generals of both sides who had once fought here, on the eastern front: the Germans Ludendorff and Hindenburg, the Russians Samsonov and Brusilov. Captain Solzhenitsyn walked through the devastated towns – Neidenburg in flames, Allenstein where trains of German refugees were still arriving. It was in Wormditt (now the Polish Orneta) on 9 February that he took the fatal telephone call – an order to report to brigade headquarters where he was arrested for having made jokes about Stalin in a letter to a friend. Solzhenitsyn’s time in the Gulag had begun.

*

As I read about the ghosts that I’d found on my East Prussian journeys, their experiences often seemed oddly symbolic. The young Martin Bergau, marching before the war with the Hitler Youth near the Baltic, glimpsed an elk loping away as if in mockery of their intrusion into its wilderness. In July 1944, Heinrich von Lehndorff, whose ancestors had come east some four centuries before, fled the German police through his own woods. In 1945, Johannes Jänicke’s wife opened the door of their rectory in a Baltic seaside village to confront Red Army soldiers in search of loot and women. In the autumn of 1944, the forester Walter Frevert killed his last stag in Rominten forest, the rifle shot mingling with the sound of the approaching Soviet guns. In Königsberg, the nineteen-year-old Michael Wieck, from a cultured family of musicians, tossed bodies into bomb craters that served as graves, many of the dead having killed themselves rather than face the Red Army. All these dead Germans, perhaps once proudly Aryan, overwhelmed him with the miracle of his own survival, as a Jew.

Four years later, the last Germans were shipped out. The Wieck family bribed a Soviet official before being told to report to the train station with hand luggage and enough food for seven days. A thousand Germans were loaded on to freight cars and the chaste, shy Michael found himself lying next to women and girls who giggled at his confusion. Very slowly they moved across Poland, let out at intervals for exercise, the weather warm at last in Soviet occupied Germany where, in a quarantine camp, the Wiecks decided to try for freedom in the west.

Friends and relations got them out but to adapt was hard. Taken to a film at the British Information Centre in Berlin, Michael found it depressingly trivial after what he had seen. He settled in West Berlin, enrolled at the Berlin Conservatory of Music and was joined by his mother, his parents having separated. Shyness and anxiety and thoughts about the past plagued him. In 1950 he married Hildegard, from a Prussian gentile family, becoming aware that people wanted him, as a Jew, to absolve them of responsibility. Weren’t the bombing of the German cities and the Red Army’s brutality just as bad, they asked?

He thought of emigration and went alone to Israel but felt the country would be difficult for his gentile wife. By now he was a violinist in an orchestra, still having nightmares, frightened that his cries would wake his colleagues in hotels when they were on tour. He recalled how in a camp outside Königsberg he had sworn to God that he would always be easily satisfied, never greedy for things. Why was happiness so hard to find? What and when should he forgive and forget? Even now Michael Wieck’s heart jumps when he hears talk of “the Jews”.

In post-war Berlin, the world couldn’t quite be re-ordered. The Wiecks made friends with a man who revealed he had been in the army in the Lichterfeld barracks, an SS headquarters; a cousin, the actress Dorothea Wieck, told of banal conversations with Hitler, how charming he was; Michael’s father-in-law said scornfully that the Jewish scientists had saved themselves by emigrating early. Michael thought that his wife’s family weren’t pleased that she had married a Jew.

Perhaps emigration would be better – and they chose New Zealand, a lovely land he’d seen while on a tour with the Berlin Chamber Orchestra. Michael Wieck encountered anti-Semitism there and missed German culture so much that, after seven years, he, his wife and their four children came back. Everyone had, he thought, a potential for hatred and timidity, for obsequiousness and cruelty - and the past was inescapable. On a concert tour in the Soviet Union, he and the orchestra flew over the Baltic coast and the Curonian Spit and he trembled, felt feverish; then they were above Königsberg where he had lived in joy and terror, a contrast now to his much calmer life. After he had moved to Stuttgart, to join its Radio Symphony Orchestra, he was on tour in Jerusalem. At the Wailing Wall, a small boy, resembling the young Michael, recited the Torah, with a rabbi and the boy’s family. Taken back to his own youthful faith and innocence, Michael wept, engulfed by joy and pain. Were the tears a warning not to forget? Were they an apprehension of God?

In Berlin, Michael Wieck had yearned for a particular landscape, for the Baltic; he was, he thought, still an East Prussian. He had seen the dramatic changes – how when the Red Army came, the Nazis turned into grovelling creatures, how liberated Poles became bullies. His Jewishness - so vital in the Hitler years - was forgotten under the Russians when the Germans helped him. He thinks now that persecution often comes out of a search for identity. It’s enough, he thinks, to be a human among other humans; to be an outsider in a community is to be intellectually independent. Perhaps real security and peace come only after death. It’s hard to see this coming soon to the spry eighty-three-year-old who welcomes me to his Stuttgart house.

© Max Egremont 2011, 2024