Masuria, or the Former East Prussia (Ostpreussen) (June 13, 2020)

If you have tired of history reading these pages, you may be forgiven. This country has had too much of it, and much of it painful, or ending badly.

But Masuria, the geographical name of what use to be known politically as ‘East Prussia’ or ‘Ostpreussen’ in German, can be approached just as a nature lover. For however hard man tried to destroy here, he cannot equal or undo the work of the Lord (or nature, whatever your beliefs). Some 20,000 years ago there was not a pandemic but something much more epoch-changing: the last ice age. Ice sheets covered Europe south as far as half of Poland. [there you go, even in nature you cannot get away from history and dates and maps]

East Prussia was an area known for its terminal moraines, large glaciers pushing sediment and large rocks, creating a landscape that is today, like southern Finland, home to rolling hills, meandering rivers, quiet marshes, and two thousand lakes among imperious pine forests and colourful fields. The Lord did well here, and its is as beautiful as it is famed.

My four days of motorcycle travel here were under overcast skies – none of the pictures thus render the brilliance of light and colour that one would usually encounter here. (click on the photos to move the gallery to the left or right)

The most cataclysmic historical event [there he goes again …] associated with these lands, to the modern mind, is the conquering by the Red Army in 1944/45, and the ensuing wholesale flight and deportation of the German-speaking majority to Germany. Six hundred years of existence brought to a sudden end, as described by Doehnhoff. But two earlier historical battles have left an equally important imprint, and I want to focus on them in this short account.

One relates to the decisive 1410 battle between the Teutonic Knights – fatefully invited by a Polish King in 1226 and not ever agreeing to leave again – and the Polish State, and this is one the Polish side won, and it has been celebrated ever since. Known as Tannenberg in the German literature and as Grunwald in Polish sources, it put constraints on the Teutonic Order’s ability to dominate events in these lands, inter alia ending its stranglehold on the mouth of the river Vistula at Gdansk (formerly Danzig), where punitive tariffs on wheat had limited Polish exports and wealth-creation, which this victory and the subsequent Treaty of Torun (1466) ended, as documented by Adam Zamoyski in his already-cited history “The Polish Way. A Thousand Year History of the Poles and Their Culture” (1987) (p. 47). As an English-educated historian, he used the intriguing comparison of the Teutonic Order ‘as a sort of monastic version of the East India Company’ (p.31), emphasizing its free-wheeling ways with very limited accountability (and early ethnic cleansing in its brutal suppression of the Prussian people that were to subsequently lend mighty Prussia its name).

The other battle happened a mere 100 years ago, at the beginning of WW1, when the Tsar’s mighty army invaded East Prussia to fight, and lose, a decisive battle – again at Tannenberg, some five hundred years later -- and one which would accelerate the demise of the Tsarist regime and accelerate the arrival of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union-to-be. Germany’s strategic war theatres nearly always assumed a two-front war, involving the huge Russian army in the east and the historic enemy France in the west – a fixation that played a role in both world wars of the 20th century.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1918 - 2008), whose life was shaped in important ways by his own experience in East Prussia in 1944/45 as an officer in the Red Army, wrote (in 1971) the defining book of that military conflict on the eastern front in WW1. ‘August 1914’ is a sweeping novel, a picture of Tsarist Russia in its twilight as much as a military account of a fateful campaign that led to the suicide of the Russian commander of the Russian 2nd Army, General Samsonov, after the key battle had been lost. (General Hindenburg, who with General Ludendorff is credited with the victory on the German side, was the hapless German president that fatefully appointed Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933.)

But East Prussia was not just a literary inspiration for Solzhenitsyn; it also shaped his own life in a major form, and arguably world history as a result. As Charlie Chaplin has amply demonstrated with his his first sound movie ‘The Great Dictator’ (1940), absolute rulers have no sense of humour. But humour has always been one of the best weapons against absolutism, and people in the socialist block had developed many ways of copying with an absurd lifestyle. One of the best literature references of our times in that vein is Milan Kundera’s novel ‘The Joke’ (1967), in which an irreverent Czech student is pursued by the humourless authorities of Czechoslovakia for writing on a postcard to his girlfriend “Optimism is the opium of mankind! A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!"

Well, Solzhenitsyn was part of the Red Army in 1944/45 that liberated eastern Europe (only to subjugate it to another illiberal regime) and which embarked on revenge cruelty in East Prussia, fomented by Stalin in the same life-disdaining fashion that Hitler has done to his troops and henchmen when moving east.

The experience instilled abhorrence and moral resistance in Solzhenitsyn, who was sufficiently incautious to state some of his repulsion in correspondence to a friend serving with another Soviet Army Unit further south, correspondence that did not escape the scrutiny of the Russian censors or the NKWD (the predecessor of the KGB); he later said it was a careless joke. Thus started his his long road of being imprisoned in the Gulag, becoming its most famous chronicler, and becoming the outspoken dissident who that would eventually fatally undermine the legitimacy of the Soviet system (for which, btw, generations of western liberals and intellectuals had fallen), and thus contribute materially to the fall of the Soviet ‘experiment’.

In one of the Gulag’s camps he re-wrote a poem to memory, ‘Prussian Nights’, which had been part of draft autobiographic work that did not survive, describing the gang rape of a Polish woman mistakenly held by to German by Russian troops in East Prussia in 1945:

The little daughter is on the mattress, Dead. How many have been on it?

A platoon, a company perhaps?

A girl’s been turned into a woman,

A woman turned into a corpse.

It's all come down to simple phrases:

Do not forget! Do not forgive! Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!

(One cannot mention military conflict in these lands and not draw attention to something that – until the Russian occupation by stealth ‘of little green men’ of Crimea in 2014 was of interest only to a few strategic planners and war game theorists at NATO and in western defence think tanks – the so-called ‘Suwalki Gap’. That (and the subsequent undeclared Russia war in Eastern Ukraine) plus the election of Trump to the office of POTUS and his mercantilist musings about who is deemed worthy of protection by US troops, questioning the very foundation on which NATO was formed in 1949 to counter Soviet aggression in the incipient Cold War, namely article 5 which states that an attack on any one member state is an attack on all members, brought this little stretch of Polish / Lithuanian borderland, measuring some mere 65 km or 1 day by fast tanks between Belarus and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad to military fame and attention. Given the sizeable Russian population in some Baltic States, and the Ukrainian precedent, there is now a growing defence literature on this strategic Achilles Heel.)

On the penultimate day of my trip, driving parallel and close to the Russian border (or the region famous for the city of Immanuel Kant in days long gone, i.e. Koenigsberg), the NATO concern becomes somewhat less theoretical … However, for what it’s worth, in my opinion, while Trump weakens western values and the cohesiveness of the multilateral institutions on which the preponderant peace and prosperity of the western hemisphere post-WW2 has been founded, Putin has no need to resort to further ‘green men exercises’ to destabilise his strategic foe while Trump does his work for him.)

But enough of war and conflict …

Another way to approach what is special about this region is through literature, through the works and the words of people touched by these lands. To my shame I will admit that I have still to do my homework in Polish literature (but two of my girls are sitting exams in that subject as I write this), but there are some good German accounts that I would like to highlight here, by Sigfried Lenz (1926-2014) and Marion Graefin Doehnhoff (1909-2002).

The German novelists who have most impelling written about these lands pre-1945 are those who have sought to describe – and thus somehow retain – the world that they have lost here. The German language has an untranslatable world for these places that we call home, with all that entails, it is: ‘Heimat’.

Footnote: The same is true for the Jewish writers that have sought to describe and capture what life in the shtetl, the small Jewish towns and villlages in the Pale of Settlement, and in Galizia, the Austrian-occupied part of Poland post-1795, was like. We shall return to them in the last blog entry from this trip, but some of my favourites, read during my youth, are Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991), who wrote in Yiddish and was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1978; and Joseph Roth (1894-1939) (not the equally phenomenal American writer that should have gotten the Nobel, also of Jewish descent, Philip Roth (1933-2018)), a travelling journalist born in Galizia and writing in German whose novel ‘Hiob’ (1930) as well as his essays ‘The Wandering Jews’ (1927) describe the loss of the lifestyle and sui generis qualities of Jewish life in the border lands between Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine pre-WW2; he drank himself to death in Paris in the late 1930s, inconsolable about the loss of everything dear to him. If you don’t’ have time to read them, it is sufficient to look at the paintings of Marc Chagall, born in Vitebsk in 1887 what is now Belarus, to catch a glimpse of that magic and lost world – his best museum is in the lovely French town of Nice.[or online at: https://pl.pinterest.com/livafiel/marc-chagall/]

His most pertinent book for me is his ‘Heimatmuseum’ (1978). An oxymoron in many ways, you cannot put your Heimat into a museum. You either have it, or you are a rootless fellow. Lenz’ protagonist in that novel, who had fled East Prussia and created a new post-WW2 life in northern Germany (as both Lenz and Doehnhoff did in real life, the topography and adjacent North Sea as well as the familiar red brick gothic architecture of the Hanse trading cites similar to what they had involuntarily left behind), had founded a museum that held all of the treasures from the lost land that he had been able to secure, collect, restore, illustrate -- to hold onto, to preserve. Well, he goes on to burn the museum and all of its history to the ground … and then tells the story of his childhood in and around Lyck, the horrors of two world wars, of expulsion, of homelessness. He also accuses the Nazis of sacrificing the civil population of East Prussia in the last months of the war while preparing their own privileged flight plans. This reckoning with Nazi Germany, which is even stronger in his most famous book ‘Deutschstunde’ (1968), is one of the leitmotifs of Lenz, who as his teen was a member of a Nazi youth organisation and who manned a marine ship in 1944/45 as a very young man.

Lenz had accompanied Willy Brandt, one of the political heroes of my youth and the German Chancellor who, at his 1970 visit to Warsaw, knelt in front of the monument to the Jewish Ghetto to acknowledge, in his own meaningful way, some of the unspeakable ill inflicted by Germans on the inhabitants of Poland, Jews and Poles alike. During that visit, Brandt also signed the Treaty of Warsaw which recognized forever the current Oder-Neisse border between Germany and Poland – alleviating any Polish concerns that revanchist German demands may be made in the future against the borders post-WW2.

Lenz was vilified for his support of that political and legal abdication of any claims to past homelands by many other refugees from East Prussia, and in writing ‘Heitmatmuseum’ eight years later, he acknowledges the mix of emotions and the messages he wanted to convey in that novel (quoting from the attached article):

‘I have always tried to explain the bitterness of my fellow refugees and their state of resignation, which the postal service served up to me in letters with black framing […] There are many who have a right to their sense of loss, of pain. I respect that pain. And I honour the suffering that many of my fellow countrymen enduring during the escape. But [….] we also have to remember the suffering that we inflicted upon others. Both, the empathy for the pain of those driven from their Heimat as well as the insistent remembering of ‘how it all began’, when ‘a fifth of the Polish population […] was murdered by German’, are continuous themes in the novel by Lenz.’

(Btw, only earlier this year German TV screened a filmed version of one of his lost manuscripts; the story of ‘Der Ueberlaeufer’, (The Turncoat) written in 1951 but only published in 2016, was held by the west-German censors to be politically too sensitive in the early years of the developing cold war, as it entailed two young German soldier friends, appalled by the cruelty and senselessness of the German war machine, who ran over to the enemy, one falling in love with Polish partisan girl, before working with the Russians to bring order to the newly-occupied Germany, but then falling out with their new masters over the Stalinist methods, which were not so different from those employed by the Nazis ... The movie is well worth watching, available on free-to-air German TV at this link)

When one reads about Maria Graefin Doenhoff (1909 – 2002, exactly the birth and death years of my paternal grandmother from these lands – see below), and her stories about horse riding around this region in 1941 when (relative) peace still reigned (Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union, was to start in June 1941), one is tempted to dismiss her as an aloof aristocrat, descendant of the Teutonic Knights that invaded these lands in the 13th century at the invitation of a Polish king, ‘ein Maedchen aus gutem Hause’ as we say in Germany, derogatorily. (My maternal grandfather, Opa Kirchhoff, a professor of gynecology, told me of this surprise at being grouped on horseback with many soldiers in Allenstein (today Olsztyn) that summer of 1941; he was lucky to be a doctor and to just be operating friend and foe in Russia, and to have gotten out alive to tell me about it decades later.)

You might be forgiven to think that here is a privileged, nostalgic west-German, merchandising in nostalgia. For that certainly is the predominant sentiment in Germany among descendants of the approx. 2 million who fled from East Prussia westwards as the Red Army approached in 1945.

But it would be doing a disservice to this Grand Dame, in her time the political editor of ‘Die Zeit’, arguably Germany’s leading liberal and high-brow mass-circulation weekly newspaper post-WW2. Her books express ‘names that nobody articulates any more’ (‘Namen die Keiner mehr Nennt’, 1961), and her personal foundation has helped to restore the Kant statute in Kaliningrad and preserve some of the former possessions of her family, including the estate at Stynort (formerly Steinort, between Gyzycko and Ryn on my tour). In her aforementioned collection of essays, she also recounts her 1941 horse-back travel with her cousin from Allenstein (now Olsztyn, where my in-laws live) to her family’s estate. The love for this landscape jumps out at you from every page. The quote below captures the spirit of this ‘saudade’ better than most:

„Mein Vorfahren waren im 14. Jahrhundert im Westen aus der Gegend des Ruhr-Flusses aufgebrochen und gen Osten in die große Wildnis gezogen. 600 Jahre später habe ich – so wie sie zu Pferd – denselben Weg wieder zurückgelegt, zusammen mit Millionen anderen, die ihre Heimat verloren. Wir waren mit hineingerissen worden in jenes große Chaos, in dem freche Anmaßung, bedenkenlose Brutalität verbrämt mit phantastischen Illusionen zu schlichter Kopflosigkeit und entwaffnender Unfähigkeit geworden waren. Damals gingen in dem Gewirr vorwärts stürmender russischer Panzer, Zurückfluten der deutscher Einheiten, fliehender Frauen, Kinder und Greise 600 Jahre Geschichte unter. Sechs Jahrhunderte ausgelöscht.”

‘My ancestors had come in the 14th century from the river Ruhr to the East, into the great wilderness. 600 years later I covered the same route – on horseback just as they did – together with millions who also lost their Heimat. We had been swept up in that great chaos, in which impertinent arrogance, unconscientious brutality dressed up in fantastic illusions led to pure mindlessness and disarming incapability. Back then, in the maelstrom of attacking Russian tanks, ebbing German units, fleeing women, children and elders, 600 years of history were buried. Six centuries deleted.’

Well, it must also be said that you would not be reading this, if some 90 years ago my paternal grandmother and my paternal grandfather had not met here. Grandpa, or Opi Neuber, hails from Memel (now Klaipeda in Lithuania), north of Kaliningrad (formerly Koenigsberg), whereas grandma, Omi, was born but a stone throw from where I write this, in Ortelsburg (now Szczytno).

Dad preserved this pass from 1926 of her, Irma Schimanski, when she was around 16 years of age, and which she needed to travel from East Prussia to the Free City of Danzig in those inter-war years.

On my way up here I stopped for lunch in the lovely town of Pisz (formerly Johannisburg), where grandpa, a doctor of economics, was said to have managed the local saw mill and where – family rumour has it … – he had a Polish girlfriend (or mistress); maybe one of the reasons why my grandmother, whose maiden name is obviously of Polish heritage, did not take a liking to the Poles; until she met my Polish girlfriend in 1985, that is.

Pictures from Pisz (Johannisburg) (click on pictures to move left and right)

Grandpa worked in Berlin until late in the war, becoming a Canadian POW in France in 1944, and did not return from cutting wood in a Sheffield POW camp until Christmas 1948; he never regained his footing and -- although we are together in this picture of 1967 when I was a mere 2 years old -- he passed away prematurely the following year. Grandma came back to these lands for the first time in 1991 to attend our church wedding in a village near her place of birth. Her great-grandchildren have already made this their European Heimat, whatever nation state the lakes and forests lie in. The circle closes.

The last time I was in Gizycko on a sailing boat, in the hot summer of 1988 with my father Pit and my father-in-law Rysiu, fresh from the amazing and highly recommendable 3-day canoeing tour called the ‘Krutynia’ , we spent the night in this Polish capital of sailing, moored among dozens of similar sailing boats, most of them rented by Polish university students. We had our fair share of vodkas to wash down the Polish sausages, as well as thumbing card-playing, but eventually called it a night. But the university students had other ideas … and partied until 4am or so with all they had … it felt like sleeping on the dance floor, even before the age of Bluetooth-enabled ghetto blasters.

Since I don’t take lightly to sleep deprivation, this time around Gizycko was not getting the privilege of hosting me for the night. -- It promptly got even, with grey laden skies, barely 15 degrees, and hardly a sail on the Niegocin lake.

Pictures from Gizycko (click on pictures to move left and right)

I thus supposed that it was a good day to advance my visit to the ‘wolf’s lair’ (‘Wolfsschanze’) by a day – not that I had been looking forward to visiting these bunkers, spread over 800 hectares, where Hitler spend some 800 days between 1941 and 1944 as he was condemning the world around him to destruction -- thus probably best to get this behind me while the colour of the sky was like the colour of the bunker.

You don’t actually have to visit this depressing place, there is a decent website including a video tour that more or less does the job … https://wolfsschanze.pl/en/

The castle towns of Ryn, Ketrzyn and Bartoszyce, on the other hand, were very much worth stopping over in; in Ryn a fomrer castle of the Teutonic Knights has been turned into a luxurious hotel well worth the night.

Pictures from Ketrzyn and Bartoszyce (click on pictures to move left and right)

Listening to two Polish tour guides describe the most famous attack on Hitler’s life, led by a German resistance group and executed by lieutenant colonel Claus von Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944 at this bunker complex, they also note Stauffenberg’s disdain for Poles and his primary motivation to save his fatherland from destruction, when the front was still far from German lands. Upon checking, that blemish on Stauffenberg’s reputation turns out to be correct, and is a detail which is little known in Germany, where Stauffenberg and his deed, albeit unsuccessful, is celebrated as the ‘good conscience’ of the German people during the Third Reich. (In 1939 Stauffenberg had written to his wife that "It is essential that we begin a systemic colonisation in Poland. But I have no fear that this will not occur.") This ambivalent legacy caused a political uproar as late as 2015 when the last Polish president spoke to the Bundestag in Berlin.

Stauffenberg only joined that resistance movement in 1943, and his high military rank, war hero status, and aristocratic pedigree gave him constant access to Hitler, making him the ideal point man; the head of the conservative-military circle that conceived of the attack, Henning von Tresckow, aware of the high risks that the conspirators were taking, noted at the time that: "The assassination must be attempted, coûte que coûte [whatever the cost]. [Then,] even if it fails, we must take action in Berlin. . .. [W]hat matters now is that the German resistance movement must take the plunge before the eyes of the world and of history. Compared to that, nothing else matters.” (quoted in J.C. Fest (1997), ‘Plotting Hitler’s Death. The Story of German Resistance’)

Tresckow was to commit suicide shortly after learning that the attack had failed, and Hitler, who was both paranoid and ruthless, used this pretext to weed out anybody suspected of resisting his absolute power and determination to fight to the end – over 5,000 people were killed in late 1944 during the hunt for members of the resistance, including many of the family members of the officers and others involved in the plot.

One does wonder, however, how it is that countries such as Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, France, Czechoslovakia and many others had widespread resistance and partisan movements throughout the war and occupation years, whereas Germany is less known for sustained organized resistance on a large scale against the Nazi regime of 12 years. (At the same time, one must note that many of the early opposition leaders, including communists, socialists, social democrats, trade unionists, civil society, clergy, parliamentarians and others were brutally crushed by the early creation of concentration camps in Germany (with Dachau near Munich, which I visited with the girls in 2015, the training ground for many of the yet-more-infamous death camps created post-1939) and extra-judicial killings, subsequent to the suspension of civil rights after the fire at the Reichstag in February 1933, only weeks after Hitler was nominated Chancellor by President Hindenburg – having won 37% of the popular vote in the July 1932 election.)

When queried on that, my (long-deceased) grandparents, who were not NSDAP party members but who also did not actively work against the regime, cited fear and a police state as reasons. One of my favourite American political commentators, Anne Applebaum, has recently written a large essay on ‘complicit’ silent majorities, in the context of contemporary political events in the US, but with pertinent historical parallels.

The penultimate stop on my Masurian trip was the innocuous little town of Frombork at the Baltic Sea, home to a castle, a magnificent cathedral, and a museum dedicated to its most famous son, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543).

Pictures from Frombork (click on pictures to move left and right)

We had seen how renaissance nobleman, statesman and general (Hetman) Jan Zamoyski had been a product of his times, and Copernicus is another example of the horizon-opening possibilities of that age, when Poland connected with Italy in particular to expand is cultural, artistic and scientific horizons. Kopernikus initially attended – which else? – the Jagiellonian University in [K….w], founded by – who else? – [K……rz] the Great. [You do know that there is a test at the end of this? Nothing is for free!] But then went on to study medicine in Padua/Italy, then the premier university for medical studies, qualifying to become a doctor in a mere two years. For good measure, he also attended Bologna University, as well as Ferrara (where I am proud to say I have a good professore friend in my LSE colleague St!).

As befits such a renaissance man, Kopernik was a polymath, knowledgeable in a number of fields. Having been trained in mathematics and the classics, his day job was as a doctor, attending both the bishopric higher echelons but also – for free –the poor people in his realm. He was officially working for the church as an administrator, good cover for his revolutionary ideas. But as the excellent museum to the man in Frombork castle attests, he was also an accomplished cartographer, and an economist (coming up with Gresham’s theory on bad money pushing out good money long before Gresham, if you must know), having qualified early in his career as a priest.

But his passion clearly was elsewhere, and he worked on his main theory for nearly 20 years on his own while living in Frombork (which is a very small place tugged away at the Baltic Sea). Like his fellow Italian astrologists and heliocentrists, Gallileo Gallilei (1564 – 1642) and Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600), he was an empiricist and keen observer of astronomy, and found that reality did not fit to the ecclesiastical dogma of the time, whereby the earth was the centre of the world. He was however, more politically astute than both Italian scientists, who have been put ‘to the sword ‘ by the Church for questioning accepted wisdom, Galileo Galileo having been tried by the Roman Inquisition, while a statue in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori square remembers the 1600 burning of the stake of Bruno further to his inquisition trial for heresy.

Copernicus thus initially published his theory in partial form under anonymous authorship. Only in November 1543, several months after his death, was the full work published in Amsterdam (in Latin), under the telling title: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. The man grew on me the more I read about him, combining a quest for the truth with the political nous required to deliver the message and to live the day.

Just like the French like to claim Chopin or Curie-Sklodowska as their own, so the Germans also think of Kopernik as one of theirs; born after all in Thorn (Torun), one of the strongholds of the Teutonic Knights, spending most of his working life in Frauenburg (Frombork) and Allenstein (Olsztyn), also major sites of their activity. And yet, history shows this man to have been quite firmly with the Polish side, writing to the Polish king to alert him of impending belligerent activity of the knights, and (in year) organizing the defence of Frombork against an incursion of the knights.

More pictures from Frombork (click on pictures to move left and right)

At the end of the Vistula Lagoon NW from Frombork is a little town, today called Baltijsk and then Pillau, which in early 1945 became the dramatic scene of months of human drama as refugees sought to flee by boats, since the fast-advancing Russian army had cut off the land route to Germany ... several hundred thousand people are said to have fled via the Baltic sea route to Germany ... with many tragic deaths due to sunk ships ... including some 3,000 inmates of Stutthof concentration camp, my last stop on this trip — just when they had reason to hope they might have survived their ordeal ...

In Frombork there is a moving monument to the 450,000 thousand who tried to flee over the Vistula Lagoon, over the ice to the Fresh Spit from which boats were still evacuating people in January and February 1945, many drowning or freezing along the way. Beauty and tragedy, yet again, are paired here.

Over the last 10+ days of this trip, the BMW has done more kilometers than in the previous ten years. While it would be an overstatement to say that its rider has learnt more about Poland in the last 14 days than in the 24 years before, the increment has not been minor; and it has been a pleasure to be able to share it with those of you persistent enough to read along.

While every journey must come to an end, there were a number of uplifting events along the way that have raised spirits further and gave rise to optimism:

i. Poland is famous for its storchs, particularly in the Masurian region, where in the summer you can see them stalking through their fields on their long, precarious-looking legs, looking for little frogs and other delicacies. Never have I seen so many young storchs sitting high in the nests above the electricity poles and the barns, eyeballing the new surroundings of their new life, and winking at the orange beast driving beneath.

ii. When I started my trip, the incumbent President appeared to have the elections in late June tied up – as the key opposition party candidate had decided to boycott the elections due originally on May 10th due to Coronavirus. Having been replaced as candidate by the current major of Warsaw, a multi-lingual well-educated young photogenic man, he has been on a whistle-stop tour of the country, collecting over 1.6m signatures for his election support list; the opposition has a new wind in their sails, which maybe has the capacity to demonstrate why Poland is famed for change and for not taking adversity lying down. (The run-off election is on July 12!)

iii. This trip was conceived to deal with a situation of confinement, of social isolation, of not-being-able to travel (abroad). And it has out fulfilled all of my expectations. So it is ironic and poetic that the Polish government has just announced that as of Saturday, June 13, Poland’s borders are open again. My first trip will be to Germany to bring mama over, who has had to deal with the lockdown all of our own the last 3+ months. And then we shall see, there are some friends I have been neglecting

Let me close with another quote from Doehnhoff (‘Namen die Keiner Mehr Nennt’, 1961, Preamble):

“Und jedes Mal, wenn ich die Alleen wiedersah, die einsamen Waelder und stillen Seen, meinte ich nach Hause zu kommen. Landschaft ist eben wichtiger und gewiss praegender als alles andere. Sie gehoert im letzten und hoeheren Sinne ohnehin niemandem, allenfalls vielleicht dem, der imstande ist zu lieben, ohne zu besitzen.“

‚Every time I came back and saw these tree-lined avenues, these solitary forests and quiet lakes, I had the sense of coming home. Landscapes are important and shape more than anything else. At any rate, they do not belong to anybody, maybe only to those who are capable of loving without needing to own.’