You can't go home again. In certain circumstances you shouldn't try. The millions of people displaced all over Europe, during and after World War Two, included many who wrote nostalgically of the former times. The Germans of East Prussia who had come west in early 1945, just ahead of the Russian Army, often in convoy of farm carts, and even with handcarts, have produced a quantity of literature that is still growing.
A woman who left her home on horseback and has made a great name for herself in newspapers, Marion Countess Donhoff, is the subject of a recent book which details her life after East Prussia in the hard world of post war German publishing. She has written and spoken about her life at Schloss, Friedrichstein, and the author of a book about the Prussians, repeat Prussians, who were executed after the 1944 attempt on Hitler's life. She relates her first return in 1989.
There was the lake, idyllic as before, with its backdrop of trees. But then what one saw, or didn't see, was unbelievable.
The huge castle was as if swallowed by the earth. Nothing was left of it, not even a heap of rubble. "We had to look around to find just where it had stood." The green lawn, the hedges, the paths, nothing to be seen. The old mill, the long horse boxes. Everything overgrown with shrubs, nettles, trees. "A primeval forest had swallowed up civilisation." Three years later she was in the area for the last time. She had the car bring her to the Baltic coast. On the journey she said: "There were farmsteads everywhere here... They have been systematically obliterated." This, she said, would be her last visit to her homeland.
Years before, she had written that, against all reason, she had hoped that somehow a miracle would happen. But when she flew back to Hamburg after her last visit, all that was gone. She had indeed once written: "Perhaps this is the highest degree of love to love without possessing.
A ferocious war had raged over East Prussia in 1944/5. Some of the finer buildings of the Germans were destroyed even after the fighting was over. A colleague was once in a part of that territory shortly after reading the story of one similar family to that of the Donhoff. There was the lake, just as in her case. On an island in it, the remains of a small hut or pavilion. No stones even of a big house.
Across the road was a white block of flats. A policeman passing knew nothing of the original house. He, like so many others, was new. Came from the East. The book, a Christmas present, is Marion Donho Ein Widerstandiges Leben by Alice Schwarzer.