THE LURE OF THE EAST

Andrew Gimson goes to a region which Germans have renounced, but which entices their tourists and their imaginations

East Prussia IN THE first three and half weeks of September, a Nato power exercised in greater strength than ever before in Poland: 3,500 men and 450 armoured vehi- cles of the British Army's 7th Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats, crossed the bor- der at Szczecin (Stettin), commanded, as it happened, by Brigadier David Mont- gomery, a distant cousin of Field Marshal Montgomery.

This was in the peaceful days before General Lebed gave his astounding inter- view to the Daily Telegraph, in which he warned that Nato's eastward expansion was being driven by the German defence ministry, bent on building a Fourth Reich. But Poles living near the sparsely populat-

ed training area of Drawsko-Pomorskie suspected at first that the Desert Rats might be Germans in disguise. The sol- diers arrived by train and road convoy from Germany, they had vehicles with German number plates (originally a mea- sure to foil the IRA), they spent German currency and they tried to make them- selves understood by speaking German.

Even after it was established that the Desert Rats were British, disappointment was expressed by local barkeepers, who had stocked up with huge quantities of alcohol in the belief that British troops would be as drunken as the Russians used to be. Instead the exercise was entirely 'dry'.

Two call-girl agencies set up specially for the exercise in the local town reported disappointing business. Polish observers of the exercise also expressed amazement that the British officers slept out in the field, like the men, instead of retiring to a hotel for the night.

But, these curiosities apart, the rapport between the British and the Poles, who provided engineers to help cross a wide river in the middle of the training ground, was immediately apparent. 'This is a his- toric moment,' commented the Polish deputy defence minister, Andrzej Karkosz- ka, in an exhilarated tone, as he stood with Nicholas Soames, Minister for the Armed Forces, watching the Polish sappers con- struct a pontoon bridge. 'The same units were together in 1942 at Tobruk and El Alamein.'

The Poles were agreed that it would be too early to let the Germans use the train- ing area, an old stamping-ground of the Wehrmacht before and during the war, in anything like such strength. Anything like the spectacular demonstrations mounted for visitors by the Desert Rats would be intolerable to Polish public opinion. The Germans generally bring in a third party for operations with the Poles: the Danes for joint naval manoeuvres, the French for certain political purposes, 'Europe' for just about anything.

It is not simply that Britain and Poland were on the same side during the war, and are not neighbours, though both those fac- tors make it vastly easier to get on. It is also that our kind of nationalism is more compatible with the romantic, magnificent- ly unabashed Polish idea of nationhood, than with the pious, post-national concept of Europe peddled by the German politi- cal class.

Hitler himself spoke eloquently, in the pre-war years, of the importance of peace in Europe — a concept which ceased to be of much use to him after 1938, as the Poles have all too much reason to know.

'This is Hitler's bathroom,' the Polish guide said, pointing to a piece of concrete with dirty white tiles attached. It lay about 20 yards from the Fuhrer's East Prussian bunker, blown there by the German engi- neers who in January 1945 tried to destroy his Eastern headquarters the Wolfschanze ('the Wolf's Lair') before the enemy arrived.

They blew out the windows in the town of Rastenburg, a few miles to the west, but the bunkers were too massive. The walls of Hitler's were eight metres thick, and were still standing, although askew, when the Russians got there. Nowadays, they are an attraction for mostly Polish and German tourists, shuffling in guided parties through a spindly wood, stopping to look at Bormann's bunker, Goring's bunker, the guest bunker, shreds of original camou- flage netting hanging from the trees.

Hitler spent over 800 days here during the second world war: his preference for living in bunkers is one of the many repul- sive aspects of the man to whom the Ger- mans had entrusted their fortunes. It is fortunate, from his point of view, that he was not in a bunker on 20 July 1944, when Stauffenberg tried to assassinate him, but in a conference room of light construction, or the blast from the bomb would have been contained and he would certainly have perished. The criticism most often levelled against the German resistance to Hitler is that they left it a bit late, to which one might reply, better late than never. Had Stauf- fenberg succeeded, millions of lives could have been saved.

The Germans from East Prussia cannot help thinking their land might have been spared the horrors of the Russian invasion which broke over them in January 1945 women nailed to barn doors, that sort of thing. Of course, the Germans deserved to suffer for the unspeakable barbarities they had inflicted upon the Russians, the Poles, the Jews and others, but one cannot claim that the women and children who died in bitter cold on the trek westwards bore individual responsibility for those crimes.

Until I visited East Prussia — roughly speaking, the territory behind Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad, in the bottom right-hand corner of the Baltic — I could not under- stand the strength of its appeal to the Ger- mans. Just as one perhaps needs to go to Africa to gain some inkling of the way it entered the very marrow of some people who once lived there, so one must go to East Prussia, nowadays divided between Russia and Poland, to have a faint sense of the pull it exercises over the Germans driven out in 1945.

I stayed on a farm in a hamlet by one of the Masurian lakes, approached down a cobbled road which was lined like almost every road in East Prussia with trees. There was nothing unpleasantly pretty about the rolling countryside of woods, lakes and cornfields, In place of the mon- eyed claustrophobia of West Germany, there was a sense of abundant nature and illimitable space. The small, brick build- ings spoke of a decent frugality — an imposed frugality, for East Prussia was poor, and often fought over.

The Germans were here for six or seven centuries, first under the Teutonic Knights, who in 1309 moved their head- quarters from Venice to the mighty fortress they built at Marienburg, from which they controlled the Baltic trade in amber. Later on, East Prussia was united with Brandenburg under the Hohen- zollerns. One of the most distinguished local families were the Donhoffs, seated at Friedrichstein outside Konigsberg. A daughter of that house, Marion, Count- ess Donhoff, born in 1909 and a friend of many who paid with their lives for joining Stauffenberg, rode out of East Prussia on horseback in 1945, 600 years after her forefathers had arrived by horse from the Ruhr.

On her way west, she stayed at Varzin (in Pomerania, now also part of Poland) with Bismarck's daughter-in-law, 'a small, deli- cate, highly amusing old lady' who had decided in the face of all entreaty not to flee the Russians and had already had a grave dug for herself in the park, as no one would have time for that later. She was of such charm that Countess D6nhoff spent two days with her, while outside the refugees streamed west. The old butler, who was also disinclined to flee, waited on them, and served magnificent red wines. They did not say a word of what was going on outside, or of what would soon happen. Instead the old lady spoke of former times, her father-in-law, the imperial court and the time when her husband, Bill Bismarck, was president of East Prussia.

Immediately after the war, Countess Donhoff became one of the founders in Hamburg of Die Zeit, Germany's greatest liberal newspaper, in which her liberal but never soft or muddleheaded articles still appear. She has recounted how it took her decades to concede that her Heimat, East Prussia, was lost forever: 'Six hundred years dissolved. In the first years I could not believe it, did not want to admit it, still hoped against all reason for a miracle,'

In the end, she decided that if hatred and revenge were not to last forever, she must make the act of renunciation. 'Perhaps', she wrote, 'this is the highest degree of love: to love without possessing.'

Many Germans still feel a yearning for their lost eastern territories, from which 12 million of them were driven out at the end of the war. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer frequently appealed to this constituency of exiles by promising to return them to their pre-war homes. In 1973, Germany's consti- tutional court affirmed that the German Reich continued to exist within the fron- tiers of December 1937 — that it con- tained a great deal of present-day Poland — a judgment reaffirmed in 1987.

When German reunification took place in 1989-90, Chancellor Helmut Kohl delayed and delayed giving final recogni- tion to the present boundary between Ger- many and Poland — the Oder-Neisse line — until every liberal in Europe was aghast at his failure to do the right thing. This hesitation is only explicable with reference to Chancellor Kohl's brilliant insight into German public opinion.

In an ideal world, the Germans would like East Prussia and Silesia and Pomera- nia back. Even part of the Mark Branden- burg, the territory round Berlin, is now in Poland, an unprecedented state of affairs. Retrieving these lands is known to be an utterly impracticable aspiration. The par- liamentary vote for recognising the Oder- Neisse line was overwhelming.

But even the most impracticable aspira- tions — desires which no practical politi- cian, or political reporter, would see any advantage in espousing or examining may have effects in the long run. Poland would not now exist, if the aspiration to nationhood had not survived for well over a century when there was no Polish state.

East Prussia exercises a particular hold on the German imagination. German bookshops are full of books about it, and more and more Germans go on holiday there, worried though they are that the Poles will steal their cars. As early as 1988, the German banker Friedrich Wilhelm Christians suggested to the then Soviet prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, that the Russian enclave round Kaliningrad/Kanigsberg should become a special economic zone, a 'Baltic region K', in which ethnic Germans from other parts of the Soviet Union would be resettled. The region would not be German territo- ry, but German money and organisational talent would bring about its revival.

Scholars from Germany often visit Konigsberg. They know they are welcome partly because their universities have money to spend there, but hope it is also because of a shared interest in the city's greatest citizen, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. When I read and suggest amendments to the English texts of papers by my friend Professor Helmut Wagner of the Free University in Berlin, who speaks Polish, has many Polish friends and was himself driven out of East Prussia as a boy, I fmd that after arguing that the nation state is in the process of passing away, to be replaced by continental enti- ties such as the United States and the European Union, he usually ends with an apposite quotation from Kant's Zum Ewigen Frieden (Perpetual Peace).

The Poles regard themselves as a West- ern nation. A retired Polish engineer I met in the Tatra mountains, who as a teenager worked as a slave labourer on German railway embankments in Mecklenburg and in his dreams still remembers a Jewish worker beside him, shot by one of the guards, twitching in death like a fish on the ground, amazed me after this reminis- cence by saying he would be willing to let the Germans have back all the Polish ter- ritory they owned in 1937. As he got out an atlas to show what he meant, he explained that he had experience of both the Russians and the Germans, and pre- ferred the Germans because they were Westerners. His only condition for restor- ing Germany to its 1937 frontiers was that Poland should regain her own eastern lands, taken from her by Stalin, with most of the Baltic states thrown in for good measure.

Any such programme would be disas- trous. But there is no doubt that many Germans see the eastward expansion of the European Union to include Poland as a way of finessing, or abolishing, the whole agonising question of where the border between the two countries should be. 'In a united Europe, borders won't matter,' they proclaim, and in many cases believe.

That may or may not be so, but it is sober fact, according to figures published I don't have time to stop for brain surgery, Miss Luton. Take a letter ' in July by the Bundesbank, that German trade with eastern Europe has overtaken German trade with the United States. It is also sober fact that the Poles are anxious to guarantee their security — their member- ship of the West — by joining Nato and the European Union as quickly as possible.

The Germans want the Poles inside Nato and the EU as a buffer against possible trouble further east, but once inside, the Poles will not be inclined to dissolve Poland within Europe. In this, as in other respects, Poland is rather an encouraging place.

Andrew Gimson is Germany correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.