Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  A German, who had been working during the siege as a doctor, took a walk to see for himself:

  Slowly, systematically, Soviet soldiers were blowing holes in the streets, wrecking churches, burning houses, raping women. The scale of the destruction is difficult to imagine. The idea was not simply to defeat Königsberg, but to destroy its history…

  Up the Königstrasse, over the Rossgartenmarkt and beyond, wound an enormous coil of incoming troops, in which we now became engulfed. I pinched my thigh hard to convince myself that all of this was no dream… ‘Königsberg in 1945,’ I told myself repeatedly…

  Just about here was where our dentist used to live. He worked up there – in the air. Perhaps in those days… he may have looked down at the peaceful street below… Now, between flaming ruins, a wildly yelling throng, without beginning or end, was pushing its way along the same street.99

  The confusion is indicative of the conditions that reigned amid the post-war ruins of Königsberg. There are many mysteries. What happened, for example, to the German civilians who were still alive at the war’s end? Of East Prussia’s population of 2.2 million, an estimated 300,000 were killed during the fighting; 193,000 were still trapped in the city before the final assault, but only 50,000 were sent to Germany in 1949, having been used for forced labour. The figures do not add up. The deficit appears to total 100,000 at the very least.*

  A Königsberger, having fled the city, joined a group of refugees in an empty village:

  In the farmyard further down the road stood a cart, to which four naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position… In the dwellings we found a total of seventy-two women, including children, and one old man, all dead, all murdered in a bestial manner, except only for a few who had bullet holes in their necks. Some babies had their heads bashed in… All the women, as well as the girls… had been raped.101

  Five decades later, a visiting historian who saw the place with her own eyes, made a considered judgement:

  [KÖnigsberg was] one of the few places where Stalin succeeded completely in what he set out to do. He exterminated the East Prussians as thoroughly as the Teutonic Knights once exterminated the Prus, taking a few years instead of a century. He filled the city with outsiders. He destroyed the churches and the houses and the trees. He put concrete blocks in their place. He obliterated the past. ‘If I were dropped in this town by parachute and asked where I was,’ wrote [Marion von DÖnhoff ] who spent her childhood near KÖnigsberg and returned long after the war, ‘I would answer: perhaps Irkutsk.’102

  The formal termination of Prussia’s existence was delayed for a while more. Here, historians must distinguish between the province of East Prussia and the state of Prussia. The province was liquidated by the Potsdam Conference; the state was not. Despite Allied assertions to the contrary, the Potsdam Conference, which lasted from 17 July to 2 August 1945, possessed no legal standing. It was a makeshift arrangement between the victorious Allied leaders, who met to discuss the management of a defeated Germany and, pending an intended peace conference, to make interim judgements on urgent matters. A Council of Foreign Ministers prepared the peace conference’s agenda, but the conference never met, so the decisions taken at Potsdam, unlike those embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, did not receive the endorsement of an international treaty. In relation to Königsberg and East Prussia, they were extremely vague and tentative:

  The Conference examined a proposal by the Soviet Government to the effect that pending the final determination of… the peace settlement, the section of the [USSR’s] western frontier adjacent to the Baltic Sea should pass from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig to the east, north of Braunsberg-Goldap, to the meeting point of the frontiers of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia. The Conference has agreed in principle… concerning the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the City of Königsberg and the area adjacent to it as described above subject to expert examination…

  The President of the United States and the British Prime Minister have declared that they will support the proposal of the Conference at the forthcoming peace settlement.103

  Nothing was spelled out in the Potsdam Agreement about the division of East Prussia. Though the new Soviet frontier was to pass ‘north of Braunsberg-Goldap’, the Allied negotiators did not indicate that the area to the south of the line was to be handed to Poland. This not-so-trivial matter was left to a private understanding between the Soviet Union and its Polish Communist clients, and to a separate, Polish-Soviet Treaty signed on 16 August 1945.104 Only then did the map emerge that held good for the rest of the century.

  For the time being, the Allied Control Authority, which was running occupied Germany, put the Prussian question aside. The Council of the Four Powers – the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France – which administered the four zones of occupation plus Berlin, were overburdened by pressing issues of emergency welfare, reconstruction, economic re-priming, and de-Nazification. They only remembered Prussia when they began to prepare a new, comprehensive network of German administrative units.

  Prussia presented an unforeseen problem. The Freistaat Preussen had been overthrown illegally in 1932–3, and could now be regarded as a victim of Nazi aggression. Its long-serving prime minister Otto Braun had returned from Swiss exile. Like his protégé Willi Brandt, he was an acknowledged anti-Nazi, and was back in Berlin lobbying strongly for the restoration of the state from whose helm he had been abruptly removed a dozen years earlier. The fact was, of course, that Prussia’s former provinces had already been broken up, and the would-be state had no territory left to administer. In any case, the Soviets were implacably opposed. Their thinking was reflected in the Allied Control Authority’s Law No. 46 of 25 February 1947. Not only was the State of Prussia peremptorily abolished; it was characterized as ‘a bearer of militarism and reaction’.105

  Law No. 46 merely put the final nail in Prussia’s empty coffin. The body of Prussia, the living substance, the community of human beings that had stayed intact until January 1945, had already been dispersed. By 1947 there was virtually nothing left. Prussia suffered the fate of Carthage: ‘ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant’, ‘they create a desert, and they call it peace’.

  III

  Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the memory site* par excellence of all things Prussian has been established in Berlin. After a break of forty-five years, reunited Berlin returned to its position at the head of a united Germany, and is booming, not least as a cultural centre. Despite the passage of time, however, Berliners cannot help being reminded that they are reclaiming a historically polluted space, which served not too long ago as capital both of the Third Reich and of the German Democratic Republic. So anything which diverts attention from the ‘bad old days’ is welcome, and deliberately cultivated memories of Prussia constitute an effective antidote to the otherwise unsavoury odours of the Hitlerzeit, the Mauer and the Volksrepublik. Sighs of relief are everywhere audible, thanking the stars that many aspects of the city’s Prussian connection can be celebrated with pride and enthusiasm. Even so, observers puzzle over the exact causes:

  It is more than a ‘yearning for Prussia’, more than a passing nostalgic whim which prevents the ghost of Prussia from being laid to rest…; it is more than a mere escapist tendency or wish to flee into the past. This new sensitivity towards Prussia more likely expresses growing dissatisfaction with the shallowness of the present, a desire to see it more deeply rooted in the soil of history. Far from indicating a ‘flight from Federal Republican reality’, it suggests an attempt to safeguard the reality in its entirety, no matter how dubious its constituent elements might be.106

  In the early twenty-first century, therefore, nostalgia about parts of the past mingles with optimism about the future. Berliners and tourists alike ogle the cranes and skyscrapers of the Potsdamer Platz that is rising from the ruins left during the Cold War. They admire the restored Reichstag, which still retains its dedication �
��dem DEUTSCHEN VOLKe’, ‘To the German Nation’, but whose heavy stone dome has been replaced by a light and airy glass one by the British architect Norman Foster. They gaze at the restored Brandenburg Gate, past which the Berlin Wall ran until recently, or at the re-gilded Siegessäule, the ‘Victory Column’, which commemorates the Franco-Prussian War. The mindless triumphalism of former times has gone, but there is no reluctance to recall Prussia’s days of non-military glory. The royal palaces at Potsdam and Charlottenburg are popular destinations; a decision was taken in 2010 to ignore financial prudence and to rebuild the Hohenzollerns’ Stadtschloss or ‘City-centre Palace’, that was demolished by the GDR. With every day that passes, Preussentum, the ‘Prussian Spirit’, is taking on friendlier connotations.

  Nowhere can this wind of historical change be felt more keenly than on Museum Island, in the middle of the River Spree. The Altes Museum was founded there in 1830, and joined by the Neues Museum in 1859, the Alte Nationalgalerie in 1876, the Bode Museum in 1904, and finally the Pergamon Museum in 1930. Enthusiasts call it ‘Prussia’s Most Beautiful Jewel’:

  Museum island is a product of what was surely the happiest and most prestigious [of decades], around 1820–30… The philosopher, Hegel, regarded that Prussian heyday as evidence that the ‘world spirit’ thrives at a certain time, in a certain place, and with particular fervour…

  When you first step onto this island you cannot believe your eyes – right in the middle of the city you are surrounded on two sides by water and by five examples of monumental architecture. Sitting on a summer’s evening on the grass in front of the Altes Museum, on which the words ‘ALL ART IS AND WAS CONTEMPORARY’ [stand out] in neon lettering, you see the old reconciled with the new. You hear the bells of Berlin cathedral behind you, watch the glowing red sunset… and for a few moments are transported back to the Prussian Arcadia. The fact that the lawns and the flower-beds… are still known by the wonderful name of Lustgarten (literally, Garden of Pleasure) says a lot about the often underestimated sensual delights of supposedly ossified Prussianism.107

  Some dictionary definitions of ‘Prussianism’ still hold to outdated views. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines it as: ‘the despotic militarism and harsh discipline of the Prussian ruling class’.108 It will clearly have to be modified.

  Other exhibitions in Berlin display a similarly strong Prussian accent. The German Historical Museum (DHM) does not possess a separate Prussian section; but the Hohenzollern state takes second place there only to the Holy Roman Empire. The Prussia Exhibition of 1981 in West Berlin – Preussen Versuch einer Bilanz, ‘Prussia: an Attempted Balance Sheet’ – attracted enormous attention, not least because East Germany at the time was assuming shades of Prussian Blue.109 In 2001 Berlin and Brandenburg joined forces to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Prussian Kingdom’s foundation; and more than a hundred exhibitions were staged.110 A show on Prussia’s Women, for example, examined the neglected half of the Prussian story. Others explored ‘Prussia’s Sense of Art’, ‘Prussia: a European Story’ and ‘Prussian Science and Technology’.111 A more recent exhibition of Power and Friendship put on by the German foreign office about the relations between Prussia and Russia in the years 1800–1917 demonstrates what can achieved by discreet, diplomatic selectivity.112

  For selectivity, whether of location or date or theme, is the key to understanding all appeals to history, and one should not pretend that it is risk-free. From the historian’s standpoint, Berlin’s current Prussomania is harmless, but only as long as it does not assume monopolistic proportions. Two dangers come to mind. One is that Prussia’s multinational history be seen exclusively from the German perspective. The other is that Brandenburg’s image becomes so fused with Prussia’s that the two are thought inseparable. This would be an injustice. After all, Prussia’s origins lie far beyond Berlin, just as Berlin’s own origins lay outside the Hohenzollern and Prussian parameters. When the Hohenzollerns moved to Brandenburg in the early fifteenth century, Prussia was already a well-established state. When the Prussian label was first attached to Brandenburg in 1701, the Hohenzollerns had been sovereign rulers for only forty-four years. Before that, Brandenburg’s non-Prussian and initially non-German storyline tells of the early margraves, of the electorate, of the Nordmark, of Albert the Bear, and of the Slavic land of Brennibor.

  In short, those who are inspired to reflect on the past in the beguiling environment of Berlin’s Lustgarten should not allow their thoughts to be constrained by their immediate surroundings. They should certainly read and learn about the Hohenzollerns’ ‘Iron Kingdom’; but they should also read something about other Prussian worlds that have vanished even more comprehensively. On this subject, the popular poet Agnes Miegel (1879–1964), a KÖnigsberger, skilfully invokes the anguish of her compatriots:

  O kalt weht der Wind über leeres Land, Oh cold blows the wind o’er the empty land,

  O leichter weht Asche als Staub und Sand! Ashes waft lighter than dust and sand.

  Und die Nessel wächst hoch an geborstner Wand And nettles grow high on the broken wall,

  Aber höher die Distel am Acker rand! Higher yet is the thistle on the acre’s edge.

  Es war ein Land – wir liebten dies Land – There once was a land which we dearly loved;

  Aber Grauen sank drüber wie Dünensand. Horrors engulfed it like sand- dunes.

  Verweht wie im Bruch des Elches Spur As the spoor of the elk is dissolved in the bog,

  Ist die Fährte von Mensch und Kreatur So, too, is the passage of man and beast.

  Sie erstarrten in Schnee, sie verglühten im Brand, They froze in the snow, or burned in the fire,

  Sie verdarben elend in Feindes- land, Or perished in misery on hostile ground.

  Sie liegen tief auf der Ostsee Grund, Deep they lie on the East Sea’s bed,

  Flut wäscht ihr Gebein in Bucht und Sund, The tides wash their bones round bays and straits,

  Sie schlafen in Jütlands sandigem Schoss – They sleep in Jutland’s sandy lap –

  Und wir Letzten treiben heimat- los, And we, the last of them, wander homeless,

  Tang nach dem Sturm, Herbstlaub im Wind – Like storm-tossed seaweed, or wind-blown leaves.

  Vater, Du weisst, wie einsam wir sind! Father, You alone know Your children’s desolation.113

  Berliners in particular might keep constantly in mind that the Iron Kingdom was only one of several Prussias. In the not too distant future, they will be able to visit the exhibition and documentation centre of the proposed Centre for Flight and Expulsion, approved by the Bundestag in March 2008 amidst great controversy. The Centre is the brainchild of the League of German Expellees (BdV) and its doughty chairperson, Erika Steinbach, who is determined to add a story of German wartime suffering to the more familiar narrative of German guilt. Among the two million members of her League, there is a strong contingent of East Prussians and Königsbergers, whose perspective does not chime with that of the typical Berliner or casual visitor. For they and their descendants, like assorted Poles from the former Royal Prussia or Russians from Kaliningrad, are likely to show little inclination for nostalgic Prussian fashions. They will know that in the long centuries before Friedrich Wilhelm’s coronation in Königsberg, the land where Kaliningrad now stands was ruled by grand masters of the Teutonic Order, by dukes of Prussia, by duke-electors and by kings of Poland. They may even have heard of Tvangste and of the shadowy, anonymous, ‘People of the Lagoons’.

  All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a remainder, an irreducible residue.

  In this case, the residue is quite large. The last of the Prussias is not long dead. There are living people who remember it. There are men and women who were born Prussian and who, in part at least, have retained their Prussian identity. They have been scattered to the ends
of the earth, but some still belong to the associations of exiles and expellees, who talk of the old times, and who write books about the Unvergessene Heimat, the ‘Unforgettable Homeland’.114 There are even those who dream of Prussia’s resurrection. Yet these are all relicts from just the latest Prussian generation. They are descendants not only of German forebears but also of several earlier incarnations of Prussia. Somewhere among them roam the genes of the Prusai.

  * Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the predecessor of the present-day Russian Federation and prior to 1992 the largest of fifteen constituent Republics of the Soviet Union.

  * It is not true that Kaliningrad houses the mission control centre of the Russian Space Agency (ROSKOSMOS). Numerous misleading comments on this subject derive from the fact that prior to 1996 the small town of Korolev near Moscow, which does house the centre, also used the name of Kaliningrad.10

  * An anonymous author, the Geographus Bavarus, probably a monk of Reichenau; his work entitled Descriptio civitatum et regionum ad septentrionalem plagam Danubii was not discovered until 1772, in Munich in the Bavarian State Library.