Tuesday, March 27, 2012
From Frankfurt to Plattland

This morning I leave Frankfurt behind and head for Rostock, in the former German Democratic Republic ("GDR"), as East Germany was known during the days of Communist rule. My train started in Stuttgart at 5:45 a.m., passing Karlsruhe, Heidelberg and Darmstadt in Germany's West, and going on to Frankfurt, Marburg, Kassel, Gottingen, Hanover and Hamburg on the Baltic sea. From Hamburg, the train's route turns West, passing Schwerin and Butzow before arriving in Rostock at 3:32 p.m.. From Rostock it continues East to Stralsund, not far from Rugen Island and its principal town, Sassnitz. South from Stralsund there is a train to Szczecin in Poland, which used to be known as Stettin, when it was German.

I share a compartment with a middle-aged woman from Schwerin, returning there after visiting her son in Frankfurt for four days. She speaks about as much English as I do German, so we cannot have an extended conversation, but she is friendly. After Hamburg, when we are in the vicinity of Schwerin she volunteers that we are now in the former East Germany, which prompts me to ask her what she thinks of Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor from there.

"I like her," she says definitely. She goes on to tell me that she thinks that "the Greeks took advantage of the Germans", but that she wants Germany to remain in the European Union. Her name is Kirsten and she works for as an administrator in an office in Schwerin. When I offer her my Financial Times to take home, she accepts it, saying she will give it to her husband. She pulls out a magazine about homeopathic medicine to give me in return, which I accept. It is a free exchange across the barrier of words.

Edda Schutte, the chatelaine of Grosse Siemen, an estate about thirty minutes from Rostock in Western Pomerania, recognizes me when I get off the train. I was there with my husband and a friend from Switzerland the year after Edda and her husband Dieter bought the property and decided to turn it into a family house cum guest accommodation. That was about nine years ago.

When I get out of the car I am greeted by the family dogs, a wire-haired dachshund and a wire-haired setter, both friendly and lively. Walking through the large front door, I see how beautiful the house has become again. Edda and Dieter are Hamburg natives, but the possibility of buying a large property in the East after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 tempted them. They have raised their four children here, taking on the burden of restoring what had been a derelict property and making it into a modern family home, preserving all the original features. The three eldest are either preparing for the entrance exams for university, or already enrolled. Their youngest, Lise, is at home, one year away from her entrance exams.

The property of Grosse Siemen was so large when Edda and Dieter bought it that they were able to sell parts off to farmers in the area who wanted to extend their acreage. Indeed, as we drive on the local road, farmers can be seen attending to horses in paddocks. Farmers also use the land for growing produce. Edda maintains the rose garden for which Grosse Siemen is famous, with several hundred rose varieties on almost 30 hectares. The trees on Grosse Siemen are ancient, being mentioned in an inventory done in 1768. The website advertises several organized events held on the property during the summer: a "Rose Day" when the grounds are open to the public; and two evenings of "Son et Lumiere" --not technologically-driven spectacles of light and sound, but evening walks by torchlight with classical music.

Idyllic as it may appear, being in the East is less comfortable than life in the West of Germany in important ways: the better teachers in local schools leave for jobs in Hamburg, leaving the less talented behind. WiFi was available in the village only recently: the Schuttes have only had service for two months: mobile broadband is some time away. The world of Eastern Europe Patrick Leigh Fermor described so vividly in "A Time Of Gifts" still has its traces here. When you are this far away from everything, even if you are prosperous relative to others in the area, as the Schuttes are, you must entertain yourself. Accordingly, the library at Grosse Siemen is enormous, as befits the manor house of a highly-educated family. The voice of Cesaria Evora, the late Cape Verdean singer, wafts over the first floor, borne by a modern sound system, but otherwise, the house is a fly in amber.

Rostock, Wismar and Stralsund are all in the vicinity of Grosse Siemen, Hanseatic trading cities. The Hanseatic League was a flexible alliance of trading cities lying near the Baltic Sea whose origins began with the founding in 1159 of Lubeck, the shipbuilding town where Nobel laureate in literature Thomas Mann was born. Beleaguered by pirates, Lubeck, whose shipbuilding industry made it wealthy, banded together with other cities to maximize trading opportunities with Russia when Kiev was its capital; and to protect goods from Swedish marauders. The origins of the German names of many Poles and Russians lie in this trading alliance, as traders established bases in Russian territory and remained there.

The city called Danzig before the Second World War was also a Hanseatic city. It became part of Poland at the war's end and is now called Gdansk. This shipbuilding city was where Lech Walesa joined with Pope John Paul II to bring down the government of General Jaruzelski, the Soviet-era leader of Communist Poland. However it had been part of Germany until the end of the First World War, when as part of the Versailles treaty, Germany was forced to acquiesce in Polish demands for an outlet to the sea. Seventy percent of Germany's province of West Prussia, in which Danzig lay, was absorbed into Poland.

More significantly for history, by giving Poland a port on the Baltic, Germany's remaining territory in West Prussia was cut off from East Prussia. After the Second World War, East Prussia was divided between the Poland and Lithuania, although the Soviet Union annexed then-Koenigsberg and renamed it Kaliningrad. Thereby present-day Russia established for itself a port on the Baltic that never freezes over and that it uses to maintain its Baltic Navy. This Hanseatic city was heavily bombed by Allied planes in 1945 before the annexation, leading to an estimated 300,000 civilian deaths, compounded by the Soviet annexation, whose goal was the expulsion of the majority ethnic German population. At the end of the war mainly only women and children were left. Horst, of whom I spoke when writing of Frankfurt, was one of those children. These ghosts have not all gone away.