Axel Sturm 🇩🇪

The vanished world of East Prussia English translation ⏬⏬⏬⏬⏬⏬ This is a story about a land that is unknown to us today. The East Prussians were a really quite cheerful people. A part of Germany, far to the east. If you wanted to develop a film in East Prussia, you had to send it to Berlin. That was 600 kilometres by train. Two and a half million people who fled westwards in January 1945. I sat on the sled and then we joined this refugee treck. A land that today exists only in memory. So it’s overgrown, it’s simply wild nature, nothing more. And I found nothing again. East Prussia was a province of the German Reich until 1945, an exclave separated from the rest of the country. This noble horse is today the pride and joy of Frank Schafhetter. The stallion is called Inchi Songline 2.0, a true Trakehner, a true East Prussian. In direct line from these horses, from the Kalwischken estate in East Prussia. At that time the Schafhetters had up to 150 horses here. They rescued part of them to northern Germany; here in Schwanewede there are now other horse breeds as well, but the Trakehners remain the heart of the stud to this day. Kalwischken lay about 90 kilometres east of Königsberg. Film footage of the family estate has now surfaced for the first time; we are showing the film to the Schafhetters for the first time. The boy leading the horse here is Hans Joachim Schafwetter, then seven years old, today 91. I wanted to say, that’s you, Dad, and Aunt Annemarie. No, that’s true too. No, that’s Annemarie, and that’s you. Yes. Proud as a peacock. You used to be really cute, Dad. My father always took me with him when he rode; he rode every day. I actually always sat on the horses. But life on the stud was also hard work. My father always slept a bit longer, and I was woken early and had to put out the feed. Every stable got feed in the morning, so there always had to be someone reliable there. Not far from the Schafhetters’ estate lay Trakehnen, the ancestral stud of the Trakehner horses. They were popular as riding horses, especially with the military. The Trakehners — there’s Arab blood in them, and they were always fast. They weren’t that big. Yes, they were robust horses that really held up. The history of the Trakehners and the history of East Prussia as a whole is now being retold in the cinema film. Assembled exclusively from historical material, most of which was previously unpublished. For ten years Hermann Pölking-Eiken dug and collected in archives; he and his team restored the footage in painstaking detail. The film is now almost finished; it comes to cinemas in March. It tells of a land that is at once foreign and familiar to us. For us northern Germans it’s a mixture of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. The Curonian Spit, a bit like Sylt. And the land is the North German lowland. Nothing that strikes us northern Germans as strange. And the small towns, the horses — it looks like Tilsit, if you like. Tilsit, then a town on the border with Lithuania. Right in the west of the province of East Prussia lay Elbing. Many people from these towns settled in northern Germany after the war. Bernd Neumann’s family is among them. Born in Elbing in 1942, he later became long-time CDU leader in Bremen and Minister of State for Culture in Berlin. Yes, I was baptised in the church. I don’t know if that’s the one; Elbing was badly destroyed. We lived at the time in Königsberger Straße, I think number 139. My father worked at the shipyard; he was a shipbuilder. Yes, I’d say they were down-to-earth people, not hotheads. The East Prussian dialect isn’t a hectic dialect either, but a deliberate one. People asked me, “Where do you come from, boy?” I said, “From Albing. I’m from Albing.” “Albing, yes, nice, Mensch, Majellche.” That’s how people talked — a dialect I found very beautiful, which is now almost completely dying out. Renate Wolf from Bremen-Schwachhausen also still spoke the dialect of her childhood. What still strikes me is that people still ask me where I come from. And that many can even name it — that they know I still have some accent that comes from there. So, it’s East Prussian. The rolling R. The rolling R. She grew up in the Elk Lowlands, a simple, agriculturally shaped area near Tilsit. My father was a customs officer and was transferred, I believe in 1938, to the Lithuanian border. And there we lived in the village called Schanzenkrug. There was a customs house; I lived there. Totally remote, completely lonely. There was actually nothing there. There was an inn where you could also buy bread and small things; I don’t know where the other things came from. We had a garden; in those days you had to provide for yourself for the winter — store potatoes and make sauerkraut and so on. But the idyll soon came to an end. The war of aggression begun by the National Socialists turns against the Germans and the civilian population. In the autumn of 1944, the Soviet offensive in East Prussia begins; the Red Army advances. But civilians are only allowed to flee westwards when there is really no other choice. We sat there in this fear and didn’t know what would happen now. We were told, “You don’t have to take much; in 14 days you’ll be home again.” We set off at night; I assume so that we wouldn’t be seen so quickly. And that the farmer stood in the yard and cried out loud — I still have that completely in my ear. He had to leave everything behind, his animals, and he knew they would now die. Staying is not an option. At that time everyone was afraid of the Russians, and I know women in my family who were raped. That fear existed. By then winter has broken over East Prussia. Yes, that was the 19th of January; then the word was: “Go.” There was snow and ice and minus 30 degrees. Minus 30 degrees. Afterwards I don’t know how many layers of clothes we put on to protect ourselves against the cold. It was really bad. The whole road was blocked with horse-drawn wagons. Cut off by the Red Army, for many the only way left is across the frozen Frisches Haff, a freshwater area separated from the sea. That’s the ice here. Yes, I still remember that quite well. And then those terrible things happened — people lost sight of each other; children were left behind alone. That happened very quickly in this long trek. They all looked the same; you couldn’t find them again easily, could you? So I had my mother, and that was so important. Hans Joachim Schafwetter’s father takes 26 Trakehners on the life-threatening path across the ice. They are fired upon by the Red Army, but their own soldiers also pose a danger. A man from the Wehrmacht came and wanted to confiscate his horses. And then my father said no. “No horse is leaving here shod or anything.” He had a pistol and said, “I’m not giving up a single horse here.” If he shoots, he’ll shoot again, right? And then both of us are dead. Then he thought it over and asked if he could come along. For East Prussia has long since been reduced to rubble and ashes. Many towns are destroyed. An estimated 300,000 people lost their lives during the flight. And those who survive arrive in the west in equally destroyed towns and are billeted alongside people who themselves have little. In every house some refugees were living. So, you had to pull together, and the relationship was difficult. They were standoffish. They called us “Fluchlinge.” “Fluchlinge.” So not “Flüchtlinge” (refugees), but “Fluchlinge.” That we came from far away and somehow needed refuge, that we had fled from the Russians. And that that was why we were there was ignored. “What do they actually want here?” This attitude is also visible in documents from that time stored in the state archive. In Bremen the Senate already decided on an influx ban in 1945. There is also discussion about how to deal with the many criminal underage refugees. In a letter to the police the welfare office demands stricter handling. The early period is therefore hard, but many refugees build a new life. Bernd Neumann’s father gets a job as a shipbuilder at the Bremer Vulkan shipyard. Renate Wolf trains as a foreign-language correspondent and works for many years in a large Bremen company. And Hans-Joachim Schafetter begins a new horse-breeding operation with one of the mares rescued from East Prussia. Did you think for a long time about whether you could return there one day? Well, if it had been possible, I would have gone back too, wouldn’t I? But I no longer had a cheque, you know. Decades later many families undertake journeys to former East Prussia, today Poland, Russia or Lithuania. Renate Wolf also set out at the time in search of her old homeland. But I found nothing. The house is no longer standing, the village no longer exists; everything is overgrown, gone wild. East Prussia no longer exists. These images now bring this vanished world to life once more.

Die GPS-Störungen in der Ostsee sind Teil der hybriden Kriegsführung Russlands gegen uns. Es ist davon auszugehen, dass der sog. "Baltic Jammer" von einer Militäranlage in Kaliningrad ausgeht. Russland lässt sich nur durch Stärke und Konsequenz zu einer Handlungsänderung beeindrucken. Es bedarf endlich Gegenmaßnahmen gegen den hybriden Krieg, wir sollten das nicht länger hinnehmen @welt