Gunter Nitsch's Eine lange Flucht aus Ostpreußen

This has been a busy year for Gunter Nitsch.  In January he released Stretch, his memoir of coming of age as a refugee in the postwar rubble of Cologne.  Now comes the German version of Weeds Like Us, the gripping true story of his fleeing his East Prussian home as a young boy in that fateful winter of 1945.  Eine lange Flucht aus Ostpreußen differs from other accounts of that human tragedy both in its narrative power - Nitsch's skillful use of dialogue provides the reader a sense of immediacy - and the actual experience of his family.  They didn't make it beyond Koenigsberg, and were transported by the Soviets to a collective farm where they nearly starved to death.  The family eventually was able to flee again several years later to the British Occupied Zone.

In the book Gunter Nitsch also provides some rare historical insight into the massacre of Jewish prisoners on the beach at Palmnicken. Nitsch's historical research was instrumental in uncovering the truth of that Nazi atrocity. 

In his introduction to Eine lange Flucht aus Ostpreußen, Arno Surminski, author of the masterful Jokehnen, writes about why the events of 1945 extracted such a high human toll on the population of East Prussia.  For one, the population was fooled by its recollection of the occupation by the Russians in the early stages of the Great War.  Back in 1915 those who fled stayed away for only a brief period, and those who remain on their farms found the Russians to be a relatively benign occupying force.  And then in 1944 - when the Red Army was drawing nearer -  the Nazi regime made it a crime to flee one's home in East Prussia.  The rural isolation and general naivete of the population also played a role in delaying the evacuation until it was too late: What could they (the Soviets) do to us if we hadn't done anything wrong? 

Es zeigte sich, dass der alte Satz: Ich habe nichts Böses getan, also kann mir nichts Böses widerfahren, seine Gültigkeit verloren hatte . Die neue Zeit frage nicht nach persönlicher Schuld, sondern bestrafte die Angehörigen eines betimmten Volkes, einer bestimmeten Rasse oder Klasse ohne Rücksicht auf das eigene Vehalten.

(It turned out that tthe old saying - I've done nothing bad, therefore nothing bad can happen to me - was no longer true.  The new age cared nothing about personal guilt, but rather punished those who belonged to a specific people, a certain race or class, without any regard for ones own actions.)

And finally there was the stubborn refusal of people to leave the land and the animals they cherished. By the time Gunter Nitsch's family and the millions of others began their trek for survival it is the dead of winter, the Red Army is at their heels and British planes are strafing the long lines of refugees from the front.  Eine lange Flucht aus Ostpreußen is a remarkable story of survival as experienced through the eyes of a young boy.

Gunter Nitsch's memoir inspired Arno Surminski's most recent novel:  Winter 1945 oder die Frauen von Palmnicken.

Read my interview with Gunter Nitsch.

Comments

[grand özgül termal]

I found your blog very late.Had a good read now and I'll check your other blog posts.Keep up...

[John in Michigan, USA]

This is a great post. More like this, please!