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Authors: Max Egremont

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She herself wondered if her art might be too hopeless, and when Hans won the Iron Cross, her joy briefly eclipsed her horror at the war. To Hans, on New Year’s Eve, she wrote of sitting alone (for the first time on this night for twenty-six years), with a glass of wine, not sad now to think of the two sons and Karl, the people she loved most, as the bells celebrated the arrival of 1918 and the end of another year of war. But on 20 March, the day before the launch of the last German offensive in the west, she thought again of how Peter and many millions like him had been betrayed.
It was the eastern victories that made this huge attack possible. In September 1917 the Germans took Riga, in their last battle with the Russians. The October revolution made any further advance unnecessary, for the new Bolshevik government was pledged to seek peace. In Riga the conquerors found what looked like a German city, dominated by the Baltic Germans who could trace their origin there to the Teutonic Knights. Russian Latvia seemed to have had a colonial world imposed upon it of Lutheran churches, classical manor houses, ordered forestry and farms and a legal system mostly administered by landowners and businessmen who often barely spoke the local language. The Bolsheviks had abolished all this, but the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on 3 March 1918, revived it. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania came
under German control, as did Russian Poland and most of what is now Belarus; Finland and Ukraine were made independent, under German influence. The Baltic Germans found themselves once more in charge, under Ober-Ost.
In 1917 – and for the next three years – Alfred Knox saw the chaos that shaped his political views for the rest of his life. Communism would come to mean, for him, the end of civilization. His pre-Bolshevik Russian world – journeys to the front in the railway carriages of Grand Ducal army commanders, dinners in St Petersburg where whisky was served with real Schweppes soda, confidence in the decency and loyalty of the Russian soldier – was blown apart.
How hard it was, though, to foretell the terrifying violence of the collapse. Even in March 1917, Mikhail Rodzianko, the leader of the Duma, or parliament, told Knox not to worry about Russia making a separate peace with Germany because ‘Russia is a big country, and can wage war and manage a revolution at the same time.’ The ground shifted with extraordinary speed. The Tsar abdicated and Knox quickly became disenchanted with Alexander Kerensky, the most charismatic and visible member of the provisional government. From 3 June, Knox was at the south-west front, where another offensive failed; by the end of July he was writing of an economic and food crisis – with officials being murdered, peasants holding back grain because of plummeting prices, landowners being expelled, the railways paralysed.
Petrograd – as the German-sounding St Petersburg had been known since 1914 – descended further into chaos. When the Winter Palace fell to the mob, two Russians from the Women’s Battalion who had been part of its defence reached the British embassy and pleaded for help: a hundred and thirty-seven other women had been captured, beaten and tortured and were at risk
of rape and death. Knox drove to the Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute, once St Petersburg’s most fashionable girls’ school, and, in an astonishing display of browbeating, demanded the release of the women, threatening that he would set the opinion of the civilized world against the Bolsheviks. He fell into anti-Semitism again in his description of one of the revolutionaries – ‘a repulsive individual of Semitic type … of a race which has been oppressed for centuries but now holding all the cards, not arrogant but determined.’ Later, the women were freed.
In November, Lenin and the Bolsheviks formed a government. Counter-revolutionary moves failed; the coup held, and on 3 December, the new rulers met the Germans at Brest-Litovsk to discuss an armistice. Terror strengthened the Bolsheviks’ grip; Knox heard that several of his old friends, senior officers in the Russian army, had been murdered. Later he recalled the attacks published by Trotsky on the Allies, especially on British imperialism in India, to which Knox had given much of his working life. This proved, he thought, that Bolshevism was internationalist, intent on bringing world revolution. On 7 January, Knox and British diplomats and military and naval personnel left Petrograd for the last time, two bottles of brandy having secured them a comfortable carriage on the train. Only one Russian dared to be there to see them off, a woman whose name, even in 1921, Knox dared not reveal lest she face reprisals.
Alfred Knox believed that the Allies had to move quickly to stifle Bolshevism, for the sake not only of Russia but of the rest of the world. Leaving London again in the summer of 1918, he went east, as head of the British Military Mission to Siberia. Counterrevolution was thought to have a chance in Siberia partly because there were already the foundations of an anti-Bolshevik or ‘White’ force in the form of Japanese troops and the Czech Legions, released Czech prisoners of war who had been captured by the Russians while fighting for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from which they now wanted to be free. In Tokyo, Knox met the possible Russian leader of this force: Admiral Kolchak, whom he
knew slightly and respected as an honest man of reputedly strong character.
By September he was in Vladivostok and went on to Omsk. But gradually the White movement degenerated into corruption and brutality, with the Admiral – whose strength had proved to be an illusion – unable to control his grim subordinates. Knox, at odds with the French commander of the international force, General Janin, came to be seen as Kolchak’s puppet-master, especially when the Russian wore a British greatcoat and ‘God Save the King’ was played on formal occasions after the Tsarist anthem.
It was an extraordinary war, seemingly at the furthest end of the earth. Omsk filled up with exiled princes, vagrant writers, scheming politicians, black-marketeers, White officers with mistresses in private railway carriages and an enormous consignment of Tsarist gold. Knox had the title of
chef d’arrière
, in charge of supplies and training schools set up in Vladivostok, Irkutsk and Tomsk – officially under Janin but independently powerful because of the prodigious distances. In the rough world of White Russian politics he tolerated Kolchak’s suppression of dissent, fearing that the Admiral was in fact not tough enough. But a spring offensive, which Knox had opposed, failed. By August Kolchak seemed to be an obvious loser. The supply position was chaotic; consignments went astray or were captured or sold on the black market. In one of Kolchak’s army corps, the only equipment issued to the officers during six months was a thousand pairs of braces.
In all this, Knox symbolized order. A Russian diplomat praised his truthfulness and energy and a British colleague wrote, ‘This is a type of British officer one meets occasionally. They make one proud to belong to the same race and eager to spare no effort to work for the patriotic and unselfish ideals which evidently form the mainspring of their lives.’ Greed and weak leadership, however, wrecked Kolchak’s crusade. Both Whites and Reds were brutal – but the Reds were hard in pursuit of victory whereas the
Whites took what they could in what came to be seen as opportunism or a reminder of the old, unloved regime.
The end was bleak. Kolchak was captured and executed by the Bolsheviks in Irkutsk on 7 February 1920; his mistress, Anna Timireva, imprisoned nearby, heard the volley of the firing squad. The trainload of gold fell into the hands of Lenin’s revolutionary government, and the next month Knox and the British Military Mission left Russia. The truth was that after the armistice in November 1918, Allied governments had gradually lost interest in the expensive and unpopular military intervention in Russia. Only a few politicians like Winston Churchill pressed for a war against the Bolsheviks, who were often wildly underestimated, as Hitler would be a decade later. To Knox, the collapse seemed particularly grim. He had failed in everything, he told an American officer. Such a humiliation – for a man full of the pride and self-esteem of an Edwardian imperialist – was devastating. He had, he wrote, begun retreating at Tannenberg and had not stopped for the next six years.
 
 
In the west, the huge German spring offensive, after startling initial success, was contained and the Allies counter-attacked, crucially aided by growing numbers of American troops. On 1 October 1918, Käthe Kollwitz wrote that Germany had clearly lost the war. Enough: this was the feeling that overwhelmed her. On 28 October she protested in a letter to the paper
Vorwärts
against more young people being sent out to fight and quoted again from Goethe: ‘Seed corn is not for harvesting.’ At least Peter had been killed at a gentler time, before the slaughter of the great offensives.
A memorial would be the best expiation. Into it went her guilt at having let Peter go, the loss and an offering of regret from an older generation to the young. She worked against doubt, difficulty, depression and pain – with intervals of inactivity, as if to regain her strength. Her duty was to finish this expression of
what she and millions of others throughout Europe had felt: the enshrining of a moment in lasting art. Käthe Kollwitz held to a scene: the dead boy lying between the father and the mother who kneel below the body – whose eyes gaze at the sky, as on those romantic wanderings before the war. The lips part as if in laughter; on his breast is a representation of a flower that she had once given him.
She thought of possible inscriptions: ‘The Death for the Fatherland’ or ‘No more beautiful death in the world’. The group is like a Christian image – the mourning for Christ or the farewell of Mary to her dead son – a secularization of her own childhood faith, also giving a sacredness to Peter’s belief in the Fatherland. The mourners show humility as well as grief at what he had sacrificed. The group brought back the enthusiasm of August 1914, a selfless, innocent joy. Surely she had been right to speak up for this on that August evening, even if it had led to his death. In a more intimate study – a tablet for Peter’s gravestone above his body in Flanders – the parents bow low so that their faces are hidden as the mother clasps the apparently overwhelmed father who seems still isolated, the prehensile hands and heavy limbs showing raw misery. It is a shared mourning but also the pain of solitude and incommunicable memory.
All this at first brought a sense of ‘good and calm’. But the war began to seem too much like madness; by 1919, in revolutionary times, Käthe Kollwitz had ceased work on the large memorial. After reading accounts of the pre-war crisis that contradicted Germany’s claims of self-defence, she felt the idealism of 1914 had become tainted. What Peter had died for – a threatened country – seemed to have been at least partly a lie. She still worked on images of loss, of mourning and of isolation;
The Parents
of 1919, for instance, shows the man’s knee awkwardly touching the thigh of the woman with the rest of their bodies apart in the empty air. In February 1916 she had gone to a Secession exhibition in Berlin and seen the wooden sculpture by Ernst Barlach of
Grief
– of a man and a woman facing emptiness,
staring ahead without hope. Barlach resembled her also in his depictions of the poor and a romantic fascination with Russia which Käthe Kollwitz thought in her case came from her origins in the east.
She knew that East Prussia was the country of Kant, not of Tolstoy – more rational, cooler – yet she had a spasmodic longing to fling this off, to seek a wilder place. Like Barlach, she welcomed the Bolshevik revolution of 1917; like Barlach too she thought that writing and music – Goethe and Beethoven – were stronger than her own art. Although he said it was coincidental, Barlach made one of his carved figures in Gustrow cathedral resemble Käthe Kollwitz. After the armistice in November 1918, with Germany in a state of revolution, Käthe instinctively feared society’s breakdown and what revolution might bring. When the Emperor abdicated and Hindenburg was said to be working to prevent chaos, she wrote, ‘Bravo Hindenburg.’ At the war’s end, the Germans, still occupying large parts of Belgium, were not far from where Peter had fallen.
At Słobity I become lost while driving in a car rented in Olsztyn for the day, having turned off the highway down an old cobbled road, the tyres on the stones sounding like low thunder. The Dohnas had once owned thousands of acres here. They planted woods – partly for forestry, partly for sport – that still break up the rolling landscape; their trees are an older presence than the group of abandoned buildings, of corrugated iron and pre-fabricated blocks, low like long chicken sheds, that marks the remains of communist collectivization. It has started to rain, bringing desolation to the scene. In a nearby field, a man on a tractor is ploughing, up and down, reaching the end, where I am, before moving off again. To ask him to stop is inconsiderate yet I raise my hand. He will have to get out of the tractor’s cab if he wants to help me and soon become as soaked as I am – for the rain is heavier: relentless. Now I see him clearly – a wide, brown-reddish face, his hand now raised as well, as he smiles and gets down.
I manage some questions, in phrase-book Polish: his land? Yes. Good? OK. What next? he must have thought, his smile fixed; and I ask for Słobity. ‘Locomotive?’ he replies, thinking of the train station close by and I said no,
Zamek
or castle. It is clearly the least likely place of the two – the castle and the station – for people to want to find. I say the name ‘Dohna’ and he again looks mystified; then I add ‘German’ and he knows and points me on my way. It’s the same with some young people whom I ask for directions, in the village now called Słobity, only a few hundred yards from the Dohna house’s wrecked lodge gates. At first they look at me as if I’m mad.
The land around the ruins is soft and muddy after the rain. Weeds and high brambles and bushes grow through the pane-less windows of the side pavilions that, unlike the mansion, still have the remains of roofs. The wide, three-storey-high façade faces me – the oblong holes of windows revealing vegetation and a blank, crumbling rear wall, like a stage set’s contrived glimpse of decay. At the centre, above the façade, are the remains of a decorative trophy, a last sign of ownership and power, its carved stonework framing an empty circle where once, probably, the Dohna arms had been. On the house, the stone stucco had chipped or peeled back, revealing patches of red brick beneath, harsher than the pink that had once been thought soft and beautiful. Thin saplings sprout from the walls. Among the ruins are some young birches, the tree of the endless lands of Russia, whose frontier is just a few miles away.
Two wings break the monotony of the façade at each end of Schlobitten; green foliage spills out of the top of a high chimney, a good place for a stork’s nest. The formal gardens are on the other side. At the front, facing me, is a damp ditch and some ploughed land perhaps used by the villagers. Above the ditch and a shallow pond is a cracked three-arched bridge, lined on top with stunted pillars, that leads to the centre of the house, the point of entry for guests or returning members of the Dohna family. The Emperor William II had arrived here, the last of a succession of Hohenzollerns who had royal apartments set aside for them at Schlobitten. These visits must have seemed to confirm the place’s solidity through the presence of a high, even sacred, hereditary force that, like the Dohnas, had survived.
The desolation has a beauty, partly in the wild growth over an earlier formality that, as bullet or shrapnel scars on the walls reveal, had ended in terror. The rain stops and the house is struck briefly by sunlight, before stifling white and then grey cloud drifts in; again the place seems like theatre, an idea of what once had been. To the left, in front of one wing, some soil, perhaps dug
from the pond or simply dumped on a now useless space, forms a mound that is already speckled with weeds.
The village is small: really just one curving street, the big house set apart, up what has become a track, yet near enough for small children to be able to play among the ruins. The next most prominent building is the church, again red brick, once under the patronage of the Dohnas, now, in its Polish identity, Roman Catholic. Outside the church – opposite the short spire at its eastern end – a smartly dressed middle-aged woman is getting out of a car with some flowers. She has a key that opens the church door, and when I walk in behind her, she turns, surprised, not pleased. But she smiles when I ask some questions, and we speak together, in a mixture of English, German and my phrase-book Polish.
The Dohnas? She shrugs. I look at the church’s interior, now adapted to its new Roman Catholic identity. There had been, I recall from Alexander Dohna’s memoirs, an altercation with one of the Roman Catholic priests who had been out of sympathy with the idea that the Dohna monuments should be uncovered or partly restored. She took me outside again, and pointed to the wall of the church and a grey stone tablet on which is a carved tree, with roots below. On either side of the tree’s trunk are branches with birds in them and a curving stone pennant or banner with the words ‘In the world war 1914 – 1918, they died for the Fatherland’ – then, under the roots, ‘to our fallen heroes’. Several Dohnas have their names on the stone.
Alexander, the last Dohna to live at Schlobitten, went west in the snow in 1945 – leading a great trek of hundreds of refugees, some driving tractors, some in carts or on horses, others on foot. For the rest of his life he was proud not to have abandoned his people, although this paternalism now has few admirers. In 2003, a critic wrote in Germany’s conservative newspaper, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, that no one likes the Junkers, the landlords who once had their way east of the Elbe. He may have been thinking of the caricature, based on Alexander Dohna’s grandfather, in a 1912 issue of the satirical magazine
Simplicissimus
, of
a booted and spurred fat man drawn from the rear – with a bulging neck, a small hat jaunty over close-cropped hair, some loud-checked jodhpurs and a horseman’s bow legs; at his feet, a thin greyhound has its tail down, perhaps in reaction to abuse. We don’t see the man’s face – only those of some fawning workers in rags in front of him, two doffing their caps. Behind them is Schlobitten, East Prussia’s Versailles, with its pavilions, its mansard roof, its tall symmetrical chimneys and broad immaculate lawns.
In East Prussia the castles of the Teutonic Knights had evolved into country houses, their fortifications softening into elegance and art. But farming – principally cattle, horses and corn – and forestry were the lifeblood of families like the Dohnas, the Dönhoffs and the Lehndorffs. In other parts of eastern Germany, notably in Silesia, coal, iron ore and other minerals made landowners vastly rich; in East Prussia there was none of this. Alexander Dohna’s ancestor, for whom Schlobitten was enlarged at the end of the seventeenth century and start of the eighteenth, had asked for a plain exterior, as if to keep the place grounded on the earth that had yielded up the money with which to build it. The resulting façade was coolly classical: what Marion Dönhoff, in her book on her old homeland, claimed was the essence of Prussia.
Schlobitten: East Prussia’s Versailles.
Inside, however, Schlobitten erupted into a palace. There was elaborate plaster work, sculpted decoration and large murals; and over the centuries the house filled up with Chinese and German porcelain; English, Bohemian, German and Dutch glassware; faience and seventeenth-century Danzig and Elbing silver; furniture that included a seventeenth-century amber chest from Königsberg; armour, coins and medals and one of Frederick the Great’s snuff boxes. Berlin tapestries of oriental scenes were commissioned for the royal apartments. There was a library of over fifty-five thousand volumes and an archive that included a book of songs by the English composer John Dowland, correspondence with the Vatican (where a Dohna had gone on a mission in the seventeenth century) and with the Reformer Philipp Melanchthon and the rulers of Brandenburg, Prussia and other German princely states. There were family and royal portraits – one of King William III of England and Orange, to show the family’s Dutch links – and pictures by Jan Mytens, van Loo, Madame Vigée-Lebrun and a small silverpoint drawing of Kant.
The Dohnas had served the Hohenzollerns, as generals and courtiers and ministers. A reminder of the last years of this was a warlike image of the last Emperor leading a cavalry charge in 1895, leaning back in the saddle, apparently complacent rather than aggressive – which was appropriate, for he never saw action. William II showered gifts on the family – ornately framed land and seascapes, a silver Jugenstil tankard, an enormous heraldically decorated window and a massive portrait of the Emperor himself in uniform thought to be too warlike for the German embassy in London. Even in a house as large as Schlobitten the imperial generosity tested the limits of the storage space, for the Dohnas had kept almost everything, accumulating a mass
of clothes and costumes (used in performances in the house’s small theatre), kitchenware, the papers and books and keepsakes and gifts from over four centuries – an astonishingly complete record.
Some of this mass of possessions was destroyed in the looting and fires after 1945; some was sent west early enough and can be seen in the Berlin Schönhausen Museum or a former town house of the Dohnas in the Polish town of Mor
g (formerly the German Mohrungen). In Berlin and Mor
g, visitors tend to pass quickly through the Dohna rooms, for there are no obvious masterpieces. In Berlin, an attendant stared at me when I made notes, a sign perhaps of the rarity of such interest; at Mor
g, in the restored town house, it is the section dedicated to the philosopher Herder – who was born in the town – that is popular, not the Dohna china or family portraits. Sometimes a piece from Schlobitten surfaces at an auction or in a dealer’s catalogue; there may be questions of looting or dubious ownership, but usually a new owner gets what he or she wants before silence once again engulfs an old idea.
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