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Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia
Until the end of World War II, East Prussia was the German empire's farthest eastern redoubt, a thriving and beautiful land on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea. Now it lives only in history and in myth. Since 1945, the territory has been divided between Poland and Russia, stretching from the border between Russia and Lithuania in the east and south, and through Poland in the west. In "Forgotten"" Land," Max Egremont offers a vivid account of this region and its people through the stories of individuals who were intimately involved in and transformed by its tumultuous history, as well as accounts of his own travels and interviews he conducted along the way.
"Forgotten Land" is a story of historical identity and character, told through intimate portraits of people and places. It is a unique examination of the layers of history, of the changing perceptions and myths of homeland, of virtue and of wickedness, and of how a place can still overwhelm those who left it years before.
"Forgotten Land" is a story of historical identity and character, told through intimate portraits of people and places. It is a unique examination of the layers of history, of the changing perceptions and myths of homeland, of virtue and of wickedness, and of how a place can still overwhelm those who left it years before.
384 pages, ebook
First published June 1, 2011
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December 5, 2019
Many of the early colonists of South Australia came Silesia, Brandenburg and Posen, which became eastern territories of Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars. Previously these lands had been part of Poland or Austria. The first settlers were all conservative Lutherans, willing to migrate to the other side of the world rather than conform to liturgical changes the Prussian King wanted to make. To be fair, it’s doubtful that they actually knew where they were going – they certainly didn't expect it to be so far.
These first migrations were followed by others throughout the nineteenth century, and my own great-grandfather and his brother emigrated from the Baltic coast of Pomerania in 1880 to avoid being conscripted into the Prussian army so, like many South Australians, I have part-German descent as well as English and Cornish (yes, they’re different).
After World War II, many refugees from Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic countries found new lives in Australia, and people from all these backgrounds lived in the country town where I grew up, and where we lived next door to my Neuenkirchen grandparents. Loxton was known as Heine town by other towns in the region, because of the number of farmers and settlers with German backgrounds who lived there.
My father employed mostly refugees in his dry-cleaning business. My mother helped set up the Good Neighbour Council in our town and we got to know many refugee families, learning about some of their cultural traditions, especially food. And the local German culture remained strong in the Barossa Valley where my mother lived for about 35 years, and where my own immediate family lived for nearly 20 years.
All the South Australian histories talk about the German settlement and the German communities here. Once I internalised what part of Europe they actually came from, I couldn't understand why they were called Germans, because their lands had been part of the Polish or Austrian empires.
Over the last few years, as I have read more about eastern and central Europe, I have come to understand that there was great ethnic and cultural diversity through all these lands before the 20th century, and it really only began to change after World War I, and was radically destroyed during and after World War II by ravages of Nazis and Communists. Prussia as a state was expunged in post WWII treaties.
Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land has been a rich addition to my reading.
His time frame is mostly the first half of the twentieth century, but he gives us background on the medieval conquests of these lands by the Teutonic knights, and the feudal systems they set up.
As he threads his way through the changes of frontiers, wars, expulsions and migrations from the nineteenth century onwards, he tells the stories of selected individuals whose lives were uprooted as catastrophe descended again and again.
Many were from the great landholding class, the Junkers, but he also has two chapters on the great artist Käthe Kollwitz, about whom he has recently written a biography, together with art historian Frances Carey.
The Spectator review cited on the back cover reads: ‘East Prussia’s successful evocation demands both the mind of a poet who can delineate the scale of human loss, and the imagination of an historian who knows how to count the cost. Forgotten Land, a work of consummate artistry, blends both capacities to rare effect’.
There’s an excellent review by Neal Ascherson in LRB, May 2012
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n10/neal-as...
And one by Richard Calvocoressi in New Statesman
https://www.newstatesman.com/books/20...
These first migrations were followed by others throughout the nineteenth century, and my own great-grandfather and his brother emigrated from the Baltic coast of Pomerania in 1880 to avoid being conscripted into the Prussian army so, like many South Australians, I have part-German descent as well as English and Cornish (yes, they’re different).
After World War II, many refugees from Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic countries found new lives in Australia, and people from all these backgrounds lived in the country town where I grew up, and where we lived next door to my Neuenkirchen grandparents. Loxton was known as Heine town by other towns in the region, because of the number of farmers and settlers with German backgrounds who lived there.
My father employed mostly refugees in his dry-cleaning business. My mother helped set up the Good Neighbour Council in our town and we got to know many refugee families, learning about some of their cultural traditions, especially food. And the local German culture remained strong in the Barossa Valley where my mother lived for about 35 years, and where my own immediate family lived for nearly 20 years.
All the South Australian histories talk about the German settlement and the German communities here. Once I internalised what part of Europe they actually came from, I couldn't understand why they were called Germans, because their lands had been part of the Polish or Austrian empires.
Over the last few years, as I have read more about eastern and central Europe, I have come to understand that there was great ethnic and cultural diversity through all these lands before the 20th century, and it really only began to change after World War I, and was radically destroyed during and after World War II by ravages of Nazis and Communists. Prussia as a state was expunged in post WWII treaties.
Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land has been a rich addition to my reading.
His time frame is mostly the first half of the twentieth century, but he gives us background on the medieval conquests of these lands by the Teutonic knights, and the feudal systems they set up.
As he threads his way through the changes of frontiers, wars, expulsions and migrations from the nineteenth century onwards, he tells the stories of selected individuals whose lives were uprooted as catastrophe descended again and again.
Many were from the great landholding class, the Junkers, but he also has two chapters on the great artist Käthe Kollwitz, about whom he has recently written a biography, together with art historian Frances Carey.
The Spectator review cited on the back cover reads: ‘East Prussia’s successful evocation demands both the mind of a poet who can delineate the scale of human loss, and the imagination of an historian who knows how to count the cost. Forgotten Land, a work of consummate artistry, blends both capacities to rare effect’.
There’s an excellent review by Neal Ascherson in LRB, May 2012
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n10/neal-as...
And one by Richard Calvocoressi in New Statesman
https://www.newstatesman.com/books/20...
June 29, 2021
I'm quite exhausted by this book and I feel quite mean giving it just 3 stars. Egremont has written an in depth history of East Prussia, focusing mainly on WWI and II. He relates this history through the lives of various people who lived through these times, many of whom will be famous in their homelands of Russia, Germany, Poland or Lithuania but who were unknown to me and mainly, if I'm frankly honest, of little interest. What did I learn?
I learned that in the 13c, the Teutonic Knights - the German Order of Chivalry - were given a papal blessing to go on a crusade to Eastern Europe, a crusade just as brutal as those in the Holy Land and aimed principally at the pagan Prussians. Their symbol, the Black Cross, would be seen on German tanks and planes 6 centuries later.
I learned that the barbarism visited upon civilians in WWII was much worse than I had realised, particularly by German and Russian troops and often against their own people.
I learned that in 1945, SS troops marched 7,000 survivors of concentration camps across 30 miles towards the Baltic shore, shooting those who fell along the way, only to herd them onto a beach and drive them into the Baltic. Only 15 are known to have survived.
I learned that there is a Russian enclave lodged on the Baltic coast between Lithuania and Poland. I didn't know it was there.
Egremont writes well and in an easily read style. I found this book very repetitive, however. I enjoyed reading about the early history of Prussia as my knowledge and understanding of it was minimal. It was interesting to learn how Prussia had become involved in both wars but the level of detail was just too much for me. That explains my rating but I wouldn't argue with others giving it 4 or 5 because it's really down to just how interested you are in the subject.
I learned that in the 13c, the Teutonic Knights - the German Order of Chivalry - were given a papal blessing to go on a crusade to Eastern Europe, a crusade just as brutal as those in the Holy Land and aimed principally at the pagan Prussians. Their symbol, the Black Cross, would be seen on German tanks and planes 6 centuries later.
I learned that the barbarism visited upon civilians in WWII was much worse than I had realised, particularly by German and Russian troops and often against their own people.
I learned that in 1945, SS troops marched 7,000 survivors of concentration camps across 30 miles towards the Baltic shore, shooting those who fell along the way, only to herd them onto a beach and drive them into the Baltic. Only 15 are known to have survived.
I learned that there is a Russian enclave lodged on the Baltic coast between Lithuania and Poland. I didn't know it was there.
Egremont writes well and in an easily read style. I found this book very repetitive, however. I enjoyed reading about the early history of Prussia as my knowledge and understanding of it was minimal. It was interesting to learn how Prussia had become involved in both wars but the level of detail was just too much for me. That explains my rating but I wouldn't argue with others giving it 4 or 5 because it's really down to just how interested you are in the subject.
June 23, 2021
This book was not what I was expecting. From its title I thought it would be a survey of the former East Prussia, examining what fragments still remain, and how they exist in their new Russian or Polish contexts. There is some of that in the book, but it makes up only a fairly small percentage of the whole. I enjoyed the sections where, for instance, the author discusses Kant’s tomb and the adjacent cathedral in Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg), which survived the British bombings in August 1944 that largely obliterated the city center, and then somehow survived the post-war Communist “reconstruction” which resulted in endless blocks of ugly, poorly constructed apartment and office buildings. There is also an interesting section on the monument the Nazis raised to celebrate their 1914 victory at Tannenberg, with eight towers joined by massive walls and filled with statuary and memorials. Today it is just an empty field, and the brick and stone which survived its destruction by the Russians was taken away to build or repair other buildings.
Too often, however, the book wanders away from its focus on East Prussia and becomes a series of chapter-long biographies and accounts of historical events. I should not have been too surprised, though. If I had read all of the publisher’s blurb on the back cover I would have noted that it said “Forgotten Land is a story of historical identity and character, told through intimate portraits of people and places.” Okay, but why are there several chapters on the artist Käthe Kollwitz, who was born in East Prussia, but spent most of her career in Berlin? And why did the book need a chapter on the battle of Tannenberg, when a couple of paragraphs would have served to place it in the context of the land and its history? I felt that these chapter-length asides caused the book’s focus to drift, but in one place the author used this technique to brilliant effect: in recounting the horrors of the Soviet arrival in East Prussia, a hellish time of murder, rape, deportation to slave labor in Siberia, starvation, and bestial brutality. The fact that the Germans had been barbaric in their treatment of the Poles and Russians does not in any way justify this nightmare.
Why did Stalin insist on moving the borders? Both Poland and Germany had their borders pushed west to accommodate the land grab, and East Prussia ended up being split roughly equally between Russia and Poland. Part of it was sheer revenge, a form of humiliation the Germans would never forget. There was also a strategic reason, however, in that Kaliningrad is an ice-free port, which became and still remains the headquarters of the Baltic fleet.
The Soviets did not just take over and rule this new territory, they engaged in ruthless ethnic cleansing, pushing almost all the German residents out, from land which had been German for five hundred years, since the days of the Teutonic Knights. And thus, “in October 1947, Stalin ordered the deportation of the German former citizens of Königsberg; by November 1948 the Red Army General in charge was reporting that the exodus was over. A total of 102,125 Germans had left, leaving only a few hundred useful experts who stayed until 1951.” (p. 311)
The Poles were as vengeful as the Russians, and in some cases worse. The reader can imagine how bad things must have been for the refugees to turn to the Soviet Army for protection. Eventually, the survivors were packed onto slow trains going west. Many died before reaching Germany, and many that remained found themselves in East Germany, where Communism was more tolerable only by degrees than in Russia and Poland.
In Max Hastings’ Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944-45 he notes in passing that the Japanese wartime government was led by aristocrats, who were contemptuous of the hoodlums who ran Nazi Germany. This book has a good discussion of how East Prussia fell under the sway of Hitler and his cronies. The great landowners at first stayed at arm’s length from the boorish and uncouth brown shirts, but found themselves increasingly drawn to the Nazi promises of security. They were, after all, right on the border, the easternmost outpost of what they considered civilization, guarding the West against the Asiatic hordes. Arnold Wilson, one of those remarkable products of the British civil service, perceptively reviewed the situation:
History, of course, sides decisively with the understanding that the Nazi leadership were in fact gangsters, and depraved, murderous ones at that.
There is much of interest in this book, and Max Egremont has a good writing style. Earlier in his career he met and talked with many of the survivors of the expulsion, and used that information for this book, published in 2011. We should not be too elegiac about those olden days; the farm workers in East Prussia were largely Poles, mistreated and discriminated against, and the large landowners ran things entirely for their own benefit. Still, there was culture and community. For these people it was their home and had been for centuries, so to be torn from the land, to see their family and neighbors murdered, to see depravity replace civilization, was a deep and abiding trauma they never forgot. Seeing what was lost should strengthen our resolve to keep what we have.
Too often, however, the book wanders away from its focus on East Prussia and becomes a series of chapter-long biographies and accounts of historical events. I should not have been too surprised, though. If I had read all of the publisher’s blurb on the back cover I would have noted that it said “Forgotten Land is a story of historical identity and character, told through intimate portraits of people and places.” Okay, but why are there several chapters on the artist Käthe Kollwitz, who was born in East Prussia, but spent most of her career in Berlin? And why did the book need a chapter on the battle of Tannenberg, when a couple of paragraphs would have served to place it in the context of the land and its history? I felt that these chapter-length asides caused the book’s focus to drift, but in one place the author used this technique to brilliant effect: in recounting the horrors of the Soviet arrival in East Prussia, a hellish time of murder, rape, deportation to slave labor in Siberia, starvation, and bestial brutality. The fact that the Germans had been barbaric in their treatment of the Poles and Russians does not in any way justify this nightmare.
Why did Stalin insist on moving the borders? Both Poland and Germany had their borders pushed west to accommodate the land grab, and East Prussia ended up being split roughly equally between Russia and Poland. Part of it was sheer revenge, a form of humiliation the Germans would never forget. There was also a strategic reason, however, in that Kaliningrad is an ice-free port, which became and still remains the headquarters of the Baltic fleet.
The Soviets did not just take over and rule this new territory, they engaged in ruthless ethnic cleansing, pushing almost all the German residents out, from land which had been German for five hundred years, since the days of the Teutonic Knights. And thus, “in October 1947, Stalin ordered the deportation of the German former citizens of Königsberg; by November 1948 the Red Army General in charge was reporting that the exodus was over. A total of 102,125 Germans had left, leaving only a few hundred useful experts who stayed until 1951.” (p. 311)
The Poles were as vengeful as the Russians, and in some cases worse. The reader can imagine how bad things must have been for the refugees to turn to the Soviet Army for protection. Eventually, the survivors were packed onto slow trains going west. Many died before reaching Germany, and many that remained found themselves in East Germany, where Communism was more tolerable only by degrees than in Russia and Poland.
In Max Hastings’ Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944-45 he notes in passing that the Japanese wartime government was led by aristocrats, who were contemptuous of the hoodlums who ran Nazi Germany. This book has a good discussion of how East Prussia fell under the sway of Hitler and his cronies. The great landowners at first stayed at arm’s length from the boorish and uncouth brown shirts, but found themselves increasingly drawn to the Nazi promises of security. They were, after all, right on the border, the easternmost outpost of what they considered civilization, guarding the West against the Asiatic hordes. Arnold Wilson, one of those remarkable products of the British civil service, perceptively reviewed the situation:
[East Prussians] believed that a powerful Germany, including what was left of Austria, was unavoidable; that its stability and the maintenance of order in the centre of Europe were vital for peace; that Hitler was strong and popular enough to bring about these conditions. But [they] found it difficult to tell if the new state’s leader were responsible or just a collection of gangsters, especially when, during his visit, Hitler arranged the murder of his old colleague Ernst Röhm, the SA leader, and others in the Night of the Long Knives. (p. 213)
History, of course, sides decisively with the understanding that the Nazi leadership were in fact gangsters, and depraved, murderous ones at that.
There is much of interest in this book, and Max Egremont has a good writing style. Earlier in his career he met and talked with many of the survivors of the expulsion, and used that information for this book, published in 2011. We should not be too elegiac about those olden days; the farm workers in East Prussia were largely Poles, mistreated and discriminated against, and the large landowners ran things entirely for their own benefit. Still, there was culture and community. For these people it was their home and had been for centuries, so to be torn from the land, to see their family and neighbors murdered, to see depravity replace civilization, was a deep and abiding trauma they never forgot. Seeing what was lost should strengthen our resolve to keep what we have.
November 14, 2020
found this book very interesting of the former eastern Germany of east Prussia and in modern times it has become woven into other countries and how this part of the Reich empire was totally different to other parts of Germany and had different characters and culture maybe due to its origins.
May 12, 2015
This was a real curate's egg of a book. The broad sweep of the history was interesting and the author did a very good job of depicting the landscape, culture and feeling of the place. But, and it's a pretty big but, his insistence on reintroducing us to characters, families and places every other chapter was incredibly annoying and, even more annoying, was his habit of putting emotions and words into the mouths and minds of people he never met.
Still, I'd love to visit the place, even if it has gone to wrack and ruin.
Still, I'd love to visit the place, even if it has gone to wrack and ruin.
June 1, 2013
I’ve had this one on the pile for a year or so and got down to it while I was ill with flu (having a massive jones for something sentimental and ‘nostalgic’ and in a state incapable of dealing with fiction). Biographical note: some of my lot are originally from that neck of the woods, give or take the odd few hundred kilometres. The very words ‘Bernstein’ and ‘Bernsteinstrand’ for some reason send me into a bit of an ecstasy.
It’s a pretty likable, idiosyncratic piece, combining biography, history and travel writing. Its main focus is the territory in the 19th and early 20th century which it does through the experiences of a handful of standout figures (e.g. Kaethe Kollwitz, Marion Doenhoff and various other aristocrats), as well as present day voices (e.g. the guy who runs the Koenigsberg museum is Duisburg). I especially enjoyed the sections on Thomas Mann and Kaethe Kollwitz (big fan of both of them). I want to go and see Thomas Mann’s gaff now.
Of course it’s morbidly fascinating too. That Tannenberg monument sounds like an abomination. If I were in the area, I’d have to go and have a look at the grassed over remains. Equally, as with anything in the shadow of the Nazi experience, any evocation of the-time-before-that can feel sweetly sentimental. But let’s not forget why there isn’t an East Prussia any more. Obviously. He doesn't, though can be a little over-charitable sometimes.
It does hit a few bum notes. Ultimately the tale of Walter Frevert (naturalist writer and, oh, also just happened to run Hermann Goering’s hunting estate and hang out with him quite a lot) does get its sorry ending, but until you reach that (in the epilogue), I found myself wanting Egremont to show a little more disapproval of the man. Sure, he loved stags and trees. But you did say ‘Goering’, didn’t you? Jesus.
I was also a bit baffled by the place given to Sir Alfred Knox (British diplomatic and all round pompous Edwardian prick) in the story. Sure, he went to East Prussia a few times – but he’s a bit tangential to the subject (especially when we start on the Russian Civil War). If I’d have been editor, I’d have snipped him out.
Anyway. Flawed, but touching and well written.
It’s a pretty likable, idiosyncratic piece, combining biography, history and travel writing. Its main focus is the territory in the 19th and early 20th century which it does through the experiences of a handful of standout figures (e.g. Kaethe Kollwitz, Marion Doenhoff and various other aristocrats), as well as present day voices (e.g. the guy who runs the Koenigsberg museum is Duisburg). I especially enjoyed the sections on Thomas Mann and Kaethe Kollwitz (big fan of both of them). I want to go and see Thomas Mann’s gaff now.
Of course it’s morbidly fascinating too. That Tannenberg monument sounds like an abomination. If I were in the area, I’d have to go and have a look at the grassed over remains. Equally, as with anything in the shadow of the Nazi experience, any evocation of the-time-before-that can feel sweetly sentimental. But let’s not forget why there isn’t an East Prussia any more. Obviously. He doesn't, though can be a little over-charitable sometimes.
It does hit a few bum notes. Ultimately the tale of Walter Frevert (naturalist writer and, oh, also just happened to run Hermann Goering’s hunting estate and hang out with him quite a lot) does get its sorry ending, but until you reach that (in the epilogue), I found myself wanting Egremont to show a little more disapproval of the man. Sure, he loved stags and trees. But you did say ‘Goering’, didn’t you? Jesus.
I was also a bit baffled by the place given to Sir Alfred Knox (British diplomatic and all round pompous Edwardian prick) in the story. Sure, he went to East Prussia a few times – but he’s a bit tangential to the subject (especially when we start on the Russian Civil War). If I’d have been editor, I’d have snipped him out.
Anyway. Flawed, but touching and well written.
June 11, 2025
This is exactly what the title says it is, a journey among ghosts, because there is no Prussia anymore and there never will be (even if a Prussian state could be resurrected it would have no continuities with the Prussia that was, because Prussia, as it existed prior to 1945, was as thoroughly extirpated in the aftermath of WWII as Gaelic Ireland was by Cromwell in his 'To Hell or to Connaught' campaigns). This is a book for those who truly love German history and the history of German Eastern Europe and the place of Germans in the complex reality of people, cultures, languages, religions and people that once existed in that hard to define area known as Mitteleuropa. It should appeal to anyone who has read Norman Davies book on Breslau or Giles McDonogh's 'Prussia: the Perversion of Ideal' or even Neil Fergusson's 'Germany: Memoirs of a Nation'. It is not a celebration of Germany or Germans so much as a celebration of a vanished diversity and complexity. You don't need to be nostalgic to mourn the abandoned Protestant cemeteries and churches of Prussia anymore then to mourn East Europe's vanished shtetls, or the mosques of Thessaloniki and churches of Cappadocia.
Neither is this book, nor any of the others I've mentioned, trying to revise the past and even less to excuse or hide it. But there is more to the story of Prussia than simplistic notions of right and wrong and the idea that a just vengeance was visited upon an evil people when in the aftermath of WWII Prussia was 'abolished' people expelled is risible if not actually obscene. Even though this book could have been suffused with nostalgia it isn't. By avoiding it it helps bring to life a complex place and history.
I loved, and I think it is very fine book and I repeat if you are interested in Germany or World War II this is a fascinating and gripping book which ends up provoking questions rather then providing simplistic answers. If it taught me anything it was that old truths like 'ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant' (Tacitus - 'they create a desert and call it peace') are invariably the most apposite.
A real treat.
Neither is this book, nor any of the others I've mentioned, trying to revise the past and even less to excuse or hide it. But there is more to the story of Prussia than simplistic notions of right and wrong and the idea that a just vengeance was visited upon an evil people when in the aftermath of WWII Prussia was 'abolished' people expelled is risible if not actually obscene. Even though this book could have been suffused with nostalgia it isn't. By avoiding it it helps bring to life a complex place and history.
I loved, and I think it is very fine book and I repeat if you are interested in Germany or World War II this is a fascinating and gripping book which ends up provoking questions rather then providing simplistic answers. If it taught me anything it was that old truths like 'ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant' (Tacitus - 'they create a desert and call it peace') are invariably the most apposite.
A real treat.
May 16, 2020
This book had so much information it.East Prussia went through so much shit in their history.They were invaded by Germany,Russia,Poland,I think Latvia or Lithuania or both.So I think it's safe to say this area of Europe is Slavic.
The book was really good and informative,I actually read it because I learned my family heritage traces back to East Prussia.
The book was really good and informative,I actually read it because I learned my family heritage traces back to East Prussia.
September 16, 2017
More like the land about to be forgotten. Egremont has interviewed a small selection of survivors of the post-WWII diaspora and their descendants as well as a few Russian, Polish, and Lithuanians who now live in former East Prussia with a sensitivity to the perspectives of each. These memoirs combined with his own research and travels make for engaging read. I wish I'd know about the Museum to the City of Koenigsberg when I was in that area, not that I would necessarily have been able to make it to Duisburg.
Those interviewed seem chosen somewhat at random. Obviously, survival, a willingness to talk, or the fact that one published one's memoirs were factors. I'm not sure Kathe Kollwitz's experiences really tell the story. I enjoyed reading about her, but I connect her with Berlin. Yes, she was born there but she left in her teens to study art in Berlin and Munich and lived most of her life in Berlin.
East Prussia, and Koenigsberg especially, were always on the edge of Germany, and now it seems one the edge of memory.
Is the word "vetriebene" only used for Prussians?
4 "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 as their country's (and civilization's) most eastern redoubt. A place of reconciliation, of fantasy or of hope: perhaps, after its last painters, this is now East Prussia's destiny."
320 "Soon Allenstein, Rauschen and the Kutsche Nehrung, even Koenigsberg, will be strange names on sepia photographs hung up for the tourists in Polish or Russian hotels or needing explanatory footnotes in history books; soon that wordless sense of what they meant to those who lived there--how they really looked or felt--will be gone, after the deaths of the last people who knew them.
322 Egremont ends with the words of Klaus Lunau, who may be the last living who knew the old Prussia. Klaus enjoys, even in his 80s, swimming in the Baltic and advises: "You need to learn, he says, when to let yourself be carried along rather than struggle against the relentless grey water: also when precisely to kick free, when to strike out or to make for home." Or be swept over by the wave of History.
Those interviewed seem chosen somewhat at random. Obviously, survival, a willingness to talk, or the fact that one published one's memoirs were factors. I'm not sure Kathe Kollwitz's experiences really tell the story. I enjoyed reading about her, but I connect her with Berlin. Yes, she was born there but she left in her teens to study art in Berlin and Munich and lived most of her life in Berlin.
East Prussia, and Koenigsberg especially, were always on the edge of Germany, and now it seems one the edge of memory.
Is the word "vetriebene" only used for Prussians?
4 "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 as their country's (and civilization's) most eastern redoubt. A place of reconciliation, of fantasy or of hope: perhaps, after its last painters, this is now East Prussia's destiny."
320 "Soon Allenstein, Rauschen and the Kutsche Nehrung, even Koenigsberg, will be strange names on sepia photographs hung up for the tourists in Polish or Russian hotels or needing explanatory footnotes in history books; soon that wordless sense of what they meant to those who lived there--how they really looked or felt--will be gone, after the deaths of the last people who knew them.
322 Egremont ends with the words of Klaus Lunau, who may be the last living who knew the old Prussia. Klaus enjoys, even in his 80s, swimming in the Baltic and advises: "You need to learn, he says, when to let yourself be carried along rather than struggle against the relentless grey water: also when precisely to kick free, when to strike out or to make for home." Or be swept over by the wave of History.
November 16, 2012
This book provides a view of East Prussia and the pain that accompanied its loss after World War II. The history of East Prussia is related episodically, with the author going into greater detail as this history intertwines with the lives of several of the people that he describes in the book. This led to a somewhat disjointed story, with people discussed and then dropped, only to be reengaged later on in the book. While I found it slightly distracting, this style fit with the author's attempts to describe different aspects of loss: loss of family members, loss of lands and ancestral homes, the loss and pain of memories.
October 13, 2014
This is a beautifully written, if a bit disjointed, historical travelogue of East Prussia, until the end of the 2nd world war a part of Germany but now divided between Poland and Russia. It is a region which has lived through some interesting times, no more so than in the first half of the 20th century. It is the story of this period and its aftermath which the author tells through the personal histories of some of its natives. It does jump around a bit and I found myself quite often having to go back through the book to check who someone was but if you like books on modern European history or the two world wars it's worth a read.
March 23, 2019
You can tell reading Egremont’s work that this was a labor of love, the culmination of decades of interest and travels in the former East Prussia. Being also a person immersed in the details of a sometimes obscure region, I understand the author’s interest in exploring every nook and cranny. Unfortunately, the organization of this book—weaving together many stories, characters, and places while jumping around 700 years of history—lost me. If you have some knowledge already of this region, you’ll enjoy Egremont’s lyrical prose and wanderings among the “ghosts of East Prussia.” Otherwise, be prepared for a surprisingly dense and impenetrable journey.
May 29, 2020
I was reminded of this when I read Alistair Bonnet's Off the Map where it was an example of a place that is real because it has an emotional resonance but which no longer appears on any maps. Prussia is also be familiar to anyone who has played Campaign, as a shade of blue, and its Latin form ('Borussia') to fans of the Bundesliga.
As a political entity it disappeared in 1945 but Max Egremont is in determined pursuit of its ghost, seeking out those who remember it and the remains, often in ruins of its material culture. It has a unique place in German history serving as both an outlier and a spiritual home. The true source of an emphasis on a life lived simply, with gods of order, duty, and discipline. However throughout Junker militarism is offset by the 'kulture' of figures like Kant, who never left the region, Thomas Mann, who visited the region latter in life, and Kathe Kolwitz who left the region to produce some of the most anti-war art ever created.
The focus is on C20th history, which for this region, is written in blood.
As a political entity it disappeared in 1945 but Max Egremont is in determined pursuit of its ghost, seeking out those who remember it and the remains, often in ruins of its material culture. It has a unique place in German history serving as both an outlier and a spiritual home. The true source of an emphasis on a life lived simply, with gods of order, duty, and discipline. However throughout Junker militarism is offset by the 'kulture' of figures like Kant, who never left the region, Thomas Mann, who visited the region latter in life, and Kathe Kolwitz who left the region to produce some of the most anti-war art ever created.
The focus is on C20th history, which for this region, is written in blood.
August 27, 2022
First of all: there's nothing new. Egremont is just summarizing memoirs of others. If you have read them (and they're worth it!), you'll be disappointed. He adds nothing new.
Secondly, it is rather funny when the author stresses anti-Semitism of British diplomats of the 1920s and 1930s but does the exact same thing when writing about East Prussian lands now, being part of Poland, Russia, and Lithuania. The East is filthy, messy and uncivilized while the West is civilized, organized, and clean. The author makes no references to how these territories were destroyed during WW2 (it seems he doesn't even have proper knowledge), what the early Communists dealt with post-1945 (expelling the Germans, that's true but also dealing with unprecedented destruction), and that in fact the collectivization of rural areas was actually working quite well e.g. in Poland, while the huge blow to the region and a striking poverty are a result of shifting from Communism to Capitalism (the cooperatives were just dismantled and no help was offered to the people, of course it all had to decay).
Third of all, some parts of the book are irrelevant. Really, a whole story of Käthe Kollwitz's son which was in fact written only to focus on a cemetery of British soldiers who died in Belgium in WW1? How is that relevant to the story of East Prussia? I understand that this book is aimed mainly at English-speaking audiences but really, this is over the top.
Moreover, the author has no knowledge of pre-German history, dialects, the mixed heritage of East Prussia up to a point when he rants about changes of names of towns. Dude, if you asked a linguist who really knows the history of language in this region, you would know that Allenstein is the same as Olsztyn, and that they both come from an old Prussian root. In fact today's East Prussian parts which are part of Poland and Lithuania (less so Russia) are full of old Prussian names (many of which were Germanized, also in Nazi times, cause the names sounded too “Baltic” for Nazi ears).
The worst, however, is the fact that this is not a book about East Prussia. This is a book on how an older British man who has aristocratic roots views East Prussia. Therefore, as you can expect, he mainly rants about aristocrats, takes definite pleasure in the fact he knows Marion von Döhnhoff personally, brags about it for 300 pages, and doesn't go below the level of an artist or a professor. He doesn't speak to peasants as if it was below his dignity. To an old Masurian woman in Poland he refers only as “the old lady” (she doesn't even have a name!), if he speaks to a Polish professor, he's nameless as well.
It's funny how one-sided and biased is his view. He mentions Alfred Knox, a British diplomat who witnessed the shift from Tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union and righteously stresses Knox' anti-Semitism. Then he does the very same thing to non-Germans inhabiting these lands today. Communism is one of the main devils here, the author is completely terrified of its very existence (yeah, man, we get it, you're an aristocrat and you're friends with aristocrats. So what?)
Also, it is ridiculously funny when he is shocked and repulsed by how Poles hysterically react to Erika Steinbach, the leader of the Vertriebene in today's Germany. He doesn't go that far to express any sympathy for her but notes that she's been portrayed in one of Polish newspapers in an SS suit, riding on Chancellor Schröder's back. Well, you may be repulsed as much as you want. This book was written in 2011. Maybe, just maybe, someone should deliver a message to Mr. Egremont in 2022 that Ms. Steinbach is currently very much flirting with the neo-Nazi ADf? Perhaps it's not the Poles who are hysterical. Perhaps it's your bias and aristocratic heritage that makes you turn a blind eye to neo-Nazi sympathies and easily focus on the East which is straight from Edward Said's definition of Orientalism?
All in all, 2 stars for literary style. Egremont knows how to write. Stylistically this book is great.
What a pity it's also a reactionary rant of an old man who's not capable of accepting reality beyond the schemes and paths that he's known for decades.
This book should be sold with a huge “Ok Boomer” sticker on it.
Don't be fooled.
Get yourself the diaries of Michael Wieck, Hans von Lehndorff, and so forth.
Egremont is saying nothing that you don't already know from other books. And the evident fear of what's non-Western, Slavic, leftist, and middle to low-class makes this book the most bizarre read I had in years.
Don't waste your money. Don't waste your time.
Secondly, it is rather funny when the author stresses anti-Semitism of British diplomats of the 1920s and 1930s but does the exact same thing when writing about East Prussian lands now, being part of Poland, Russia, and Lithuania. The East is filthy, messy and uncivilized while the West is civilized, organized, and clean. The author makes no references to how these territories were destroyed during WW2 (it seems he doesn't even have proper knowledge), what the early Communists dealt with post-1945 (expelling the Germans, that's true but also dealing with unprecedented destruction), and that in fact the collectivization of rural areas was actually working quite well e.g. in Poland, while the huge blow to the region and a striking poverty are a result of shifting from Communism to Capitalism (the cooperatives were just dismantled and no help was offered to the people, of course it all had to decay).
Third of all, some parts of the book are irrelevant. Really, a whole story of Käthe Kollwitz's son which was in fact written only to focus on a cemetery of British soldiers who died in Belgium in WW1? How is that relevant to the story of East Prussia? I understand that this book is aimed mainly at English-speaking audiences but really, this is over the top.
Moreover, the author has no knowledge of pre-German history, dialects, the mixed heritage of East Prussia up to a point when he rants about changes of names of towns. Dude, if you asked a linguist who really knows the history of language in this region, you would know that Allenstein is the same as Olsztyn, and that they both come from an old Prussian root. In fact today's East Prussian parts which are part of Poland and Lithuania (less so Russia) are full of old Prussian names (many of which were Germanized, also in Nazi times, cause the names sounded too “Baltic” for Nazi ears).
The worst, however, is the fact that this is not a book about East Prussia. This is a book on how an older British man who has aristocratic roots views East Prussia. Therefore, as you can expect, he mainly rants about aristocrats, takes definite pleasure in the fact he knows Marion von Döhnhoff personally, brags about it for 300 pages, and doesn't go below the level of an artist or a professor. He doesn't speak to peasants as if it was below his dignity. To an old Masurian woman in Poland he refers only as “the old lady” (she doesn't even have a name!), if he speaks to a Polish professor, he's nameless as well.
It's funny how one-sided and biased is his view. He mentions Alfred Knox, a British diplomat who witnessed the shift from Tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union and righteously stresses Knox' anti-Semitism. Then he does the very same thing to non-Germans inhabiting these lands today. Communism is one of the main devils here, the author is completely terrified of its very existence (yeah, man, we get it, you're an aristocrat and you're friends with aristocrats. So what?)
Also, it is ridiculously funny when he is shocked and repulsed by how Poles hysterically react to Erika Steinbach, the leader of the Vertriebene in today's Germany. He doesn't go that far to express any sympathy for her but notes that she's been portrayed in one of Polish newspapers in an SS suit, riding on Chancellor Schröder's back. Well, you may be repulsed as much as you want. This book was written in 2011. Maybe, just maybe, someone should deliver a message to Mr. Egremont in 2022 that Ms. Steinbach is currently very much flirting with the neo-Nazi ADf? Perhaps it's not the Poles who are hysterical. Perhaps it's your bias and aristocratic heritage that makes you turn a blind eye to neo-Nazi sympathies and easily focus on the East which is straight from Edward Said's definition of Orientalism?
All in all, 2 stars for literary style. Egremont knows how to write. Stylistically this book is great.
What a pity it's also a reactionary rant of an old man who's not capable of accepting reality beyond the schemes and paths that he's known for decades.
This book should be sold with a huge “Ok Boomer” sticker on it.
Don't be fooled.
Get yourself the diaries of Michael Wieck, Hans von Lehndorff, and so forth.
Egremont is saying nothing that you don't already know from other books. And the evident fear of what's non-Western, Slavic, leftist, and middle to low-class makes this book the most bizarre read I had in years.
Don't waste your money. Don't waste your time.
September 25, 2023
Finding well-researched and documented information on German history can be difficult, and even more so when Prussia has been blacklisted by its historical rivals and adversaries. Egremont has offered us a unique glimpse of the final European frontier. This ranges from the lives of survivors who were exiled from the land at the end of the war. Patriots, nationalists, liberals, bohemians, Christian pastors and Jewish professionals retrace parts of their exodus, or as narrated by Egremont.
This book ultimately presented the grim reality that Prussia has been condemned to a forgotten or erased memory. Partitioned and renamed, not even the royal capital Königsberg was spared. It's actually insane to imagine London, Paris, Madrid or Rome suffering such a fate. Constantinople does come quite close, but Turkey as a whole has not enacted such wanton destruction and erasure of the past in the creation of a new, sterile state.
This book ultimately presented the grim reality that Prussia has been condemned to a forgotten or erased memory. Partitioned and renamed, not even the royal capital Königsberg was spared. It's actually insane to imagine London, Paris, Madrid or Rome suffering such a fate. Constantinople does come quite close, but Turkey as a whole has not enacted such wanton destruction and erasure of the past in the creation of a new, sterile state.
June 4, 2024
Often atmospheric and moving, the author has pieced together a vivid account of life, history and memory in the old East Prussia, with a focus on the devastation and loss suffered by Jews, Poles, Russians and Germans in the Second World War. The biographies recounted through the book reveal the potential for good and evil in humanity, often in the same individuals. National identities seem fluid, while national prejudices can inspire disaster. Even so: the structure of the book overall, and in places the structure within individual chapters, can be confusing and the earlier chapters in particular would have benefited from tighter editing. These slight annoyances apart, a worthwhile if sometimes challenging read.
March 20, 2013
I am happy that I won this book for free through Goodreads First Reads contest!! I love history but don't know a lot about Prussia so I was hoping to learn a bit more about the geographic area, the people, and their history. I found myself opening up to the pain and plight of those affected by war and fully engaged with their circumstances. Loss is terrible but having to live through the worst of times and perhaps wondering how you will survive another day really hits at the heart of such suffering. War is never kind, and to the survivors of war, nothing will ever be the same.
December 18, 2012
This is a mixed up book.
I bought it as a history of East Prussia but it is more like a travelogue with some bits of history thrown in. I liked the descriptions of the lost towns and castles, but not so much the conversations with octogenarian prussians about escapes across the snow in early '45.
I bought it as a history of East Prussia but it is more like a travelogue with some bits of history thrown in. I liked the descriptions of the lost towns and castles, but not so much the conversations with octogenarian prussians about escapes across the snow in early '45.
August 9, 2019
Max Egremont has written a good travelogue, mixing contemporary reportage and historical survey, of what is truly Europe's "forgotten land." There is a lot of jumping about - from the 1990s, to WWI, to the Nazi years, to the Teutonic Knights and post-war Sovietization. But in this pocket of Europe there are so many conflicting layers of history entwined with the present that such confusion reflects reality.
German culture, people, and legacy have been "erased" from the former East Prussia as thoroughly as Indians in North America. It was, in fact, the first example of postwar ethnic cleansing: first as flight from an advancing Soviet Army out for revenge, and then as a conscious policy decision by all the Allies. An inconvenient corner of the German Empire was divided between Poland and the USSR and wiped off the map. Egremont quotes Churchill's rhapsodic desire to see five million ethnic Germans forcibly displaced as a sort of Old Testament judgment, as well as a sop to the Poles in accepting loss of their own former east. (This particular act of imperial high-handedness is yet another of my reasons for disliking Churchill, whose worship is now de rigeur in the West.) This act would bite Britain from the rear, as its example "justified" contemporary expulsion of Arabs and British from Palestine.
With both WW II and the cold war now a part of the historical sediment, Egremont offered hope that its divergent past and present could become reconciled in a fresh, integrated Europe. Time hasn't dealt kindly with this aspiration: the former East Prussia remains a frontier zone of conflicting peoples and empires. Yet his account remains a good introduction to a small region that played so large a role in consolidating world orders old and new.
German culture, people, and legacy have been "erased" from the former East Prussia as thoroughly as Indians in North America. It was, in fact, the first example of postwar ethnic cleansing: first as flight from an advancing Soviet Army out for revenge, and then as a conscious policy decision by all the Allies. An inconvenient corner of the German Empire was divided between Poland and the USSR and wiped off the map. Egremont quotes Churchill's rhapsodic desire to see five million ethnic Germans forcibly displaced as a sort of Old Testament judgment, as well as a sop to the Poles in accepting loss of their own former east. (This particular act of imperial high-handedness is yet another of my reasons for disliking Churchill, whose worship is now de rigeur in the West.) This act would bite Britain from the rear, as its example "justified" contemporary expulsion of Arabs and British from Palestine.
With both WW II and the cold war now a part of the historical sediment, Egremont offered hope that its divergent past and present could become reconciled in a fresh, integrated Europe. Time hasn't dealt kindly with this aspiration: the former East Prussia remains a frontier zone of conflicting peoples and empires. Yet his account remains a good introduction to a small region that played so large a role in consolidating world orders old and new.
June 7, 2018
A library patron recommended this to me. Pomerania, where my dad’s family is from, is actually not East Prussia but West Prussia, but I figured I should read it anyway. It started out fine, there was certainly a lot of research done and lots of people make an appearance here, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Kaete Kollwitz. The problem is that some of those descriptions are too “fictional” for a book of nonfiction. When he talks about someone standing in the middle of the room, staring at the wall and contemplating whatever, how the hell does he know that? There are lots of end notes, but nothing is marked, so it looks like he just made that up. I don’t like nonfiction books that do that. Also, I had trouble figuring out whether he was in WWI or WWII, because it just kept shifting back and forth and all over the place. There were way too many people mentioned, over and over again, different time periods and places. It was just too all over for me. I can’t say it was dry, it was relatively easy to read, but my brain just had problems distinguishing between all the places, people and time periods. People who love fiction would most likely really enjoy this book.
January 19, 2021
Well-written book in my opinion, but it felt that there was a lot of "filler" material, and I got the feeling that was because East Prussia was, to be blunt, not a very interesting place to begin with. Seems like there was a lot of forests, lakes, etc. But once past the all too brief discussion of Immanuel Kant, not much there. Spent a lot of time writing about the artist Kathe Kollwitz, evidently a favorite of the author, but her story didn't really fit the rest of the book - granted she was originally from East Prussia, but her adulthood and artistic career occurred mostly in Berlin. I liked the references to the prominent families of East Prussia - Dohna, Lehndorff, etc. - and there great manor houses. The erasing of the German heritage of East Prussia - now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad - deserved more mention; not enough on the trek lead by Dohna to the West, or how Lehndorff survived the Russian invasion.
December 22, 2025
A book that is both fascinating and rather frustrating. Egremont has clearly done a significant amount of research, both interviewing former and current inhabitants of East Prussia / Kaliningrad and exploring the literature about them and the place. He is very effective in giving a sense of the place and of the horrors through which its culture was largely erased in 1945. On the other hand, there feels little by way of a clear direction or purpose to his accounts, with chapters jumping from the nineteenth century to the present. Lots of intriguing and moving stories, both of the terrible suffering of the East Prussians but also of the Poles and Jews whom they inflicted suffering upon. It all feels like a world very much in the past.
September 9, 2019
This book started off by enthralling me - so many impressions of East Prussia, which is indeed a forgotten land; however, the author's device of interweaving interviews, histories, locations to create an impressionistic description of the region ultimately failed for me. There is too much that I do not know, and I felt in need of a firmer framework on which to hang the impressions. Ultimately, the style in which the author addresses the readership mistakes action for progress. I did not press on to the end.
June 11, 2020
A somewhat rambling reconstruction of the easternmost part of pre-war Germany. Now part of modern Poland, traditionally home to the Junker aristocrats. The story is told via the reminisces of the few Ost Preussen who care about the land they lost. This is a somewhat nostalgic paean for a land now lost, and is only saved from a sentimental mawkishness by the sound research that supports the tale.
If nostalgia about what might have been if the second great war had never happened interest you, then this is for you. A good read.
If nostalgia about what might have been if the second great war had never happened interest you, then this is for you. A good read.
May 2, 2018
Moving series of accounts (of individual, events and places) mainly concentrating on the history of east Prussia from the early twentieth century through to its absorption into Poland and Russia post World War Two. Some of the narrative does jump around a bit and some of the stories are more relevant than others, but overall I found it to be an interesting account of a place and a piece of history that has largely been forgotten.
March 29, 2021
Fascinating account of the loss of East Prussia and it's place-names to Russia, Poland and Lithuania following the end of WWII. The author recounts what was lost with the end of the German presence at the eastern edge of the Baltic Sea through the accounts of former residents. Would have made an even better book if the author had a small chapter on the Teutonic Knights and the conquest of these lands in the Middle Ages. Interesting book!
January 20, 2023
A great book on eastern Prussia that can be considered historical, biographical, and documentary at the same time. Most interesting are the interviews the author conducts with members of 3 families of nobility which provide valuable insight into the present and past of this turbulent region, with its rich cultures, town and ethnic groups that have lived through hell in the past century. The author does an excellent job in presenting different perspectives on the bitter history of the region.
June 24, 2024
Almost three stars. A lot of information, but poorly organized. The author jumps around so much . He should have just had a section on each person he was referencing instead of mixing them altogether.
November 21, 2024
Mix between a travelogue, history book, biographies. Very interesting and gripping, the unimaginable atrocities are shocking. If you are interested in this area, or want to visit, it this book is well recommended.
May 11, 2020
Great book about a land whose identity has been wrestled over for over 500 years, and now is only a memory in the minds of those who formerly called it home.
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