Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

The Georgenhof estate was not far from Mitkau, a small town in East Prussia, and now, in winter, the Georgenhof, surrounded by old oaks, lay in the landscape like a black island in a white sea.

The estate was a small one. All the land apart from a remnant had been sold and the manor house was far from being a castle. It was built over two floors, crowned by a semicircular pediment with a battered metal finial in the shape of a spiked mace, the weapon also known as a morning star. The house stood behind an old stone wall that had once been painted yellow. It was now entirely overgrown by ivy in which the starlings nested in summer. Early in this January of 1945, the tiles on the roof were rattling in an icy wind that swept up fine snow from far away over the fields and against the estate buildings.

‘You’ll have to strip that ivy off some time,’ the owners had been told. ‘It’ll eat all the plaster away.’

Rusty, discarded agricultural implements were propped against the crumbling stone wall, and scythes and rakes dangled from the tall black oaks. A harvest cart had collided with the farmyard gate long ago, and the gate had hung askew on its hinges ever since.

The home farm, with its stables, barns and a cottage, lay to one side of the manor house, a little way off. All that strangers driving along the road saw of the place was the main house. They wondered who lived there: why don’t we just stop and say hello? And then with a touch of envy they wondered: why don’t we live in a house like that ourselves, a place that must be full of stories? Life is unfair, thought the passers-by.

NO THROUGH ROAD, said a notice on the big barn: no one was allowed to go into the park. Peace reigned behind the house and in the little park and the wood beyond it. There has to be a place where you feel you belong.

4.5 KM, said the whitewashed milestone on the road that ran past the house to Mitkau, leading to Elbing in the other direction.

Opposite the property, on the other side of the road, a housing development known as the Settlement — or in full, the Albert Leo Schlageter Settlement — had been built in the thirties. All the houses were exactly alike, neatly aligned, each with its shed, fence and a small garden. The families who lived here had names like Schmidt, Meyer, Schröder and Hirscheidt. They were what you might call ordinary people.

The name of the owners of the Georgenhof was von Globig. Katharina and Eberhard von Globig, members of the civil service aristocracy set up under Kaiser Wilhelm II, ennobled in 1905. The estate had been bought for good money by old Herr von Globig before the First World War, and more pastures and woodland had been added to it in times of prosperity. Young Herr von Globig had sold all the land — meadows, fields and pasture — except for a small remnant, investing the money in English steel shares, and he had also financed a Romanian rice-flour factory, which enabled the couple to lead a life that, if not exactly luxurious, was comfortable. They bought a Wanderer, a car owned by no one else in the district, and they drove it mainly to the south.

*

Now Eberhard von Globig was a Sonderführer , a special officer in the German army, and at war. The uniform suited him, including the white coat worn in summer, although its narrower shoulder-boards marked him out from the officers of the regular army as an administrator who had nothing to do with weapons.

His wife was famous as a languorous beauty, black-haired and blue-eyed. It was not least for her sake that friends and neighbours visited the Georgenhof from time to time in summer, to sit in the garden and feast their eyes on her: Lothar Sarkander, the mayor of Mitkau — stiff leg and duelling scars on his cheeks — Uncle Josef and his family from Albertsdorf, Dr Wagner the schoolmaster, a bachelor with a goatee beard and gold-rimmed glasses. His beard made him look like someone you felt you knew, and even strangers would pass the time of day with him in the street. He taught German and history to the older boys at the monastery school in Mitkau, with Latin as a subsidiary subject.

In the summer holidays Cousin Ernestine from Berlin sometimes came to visit with her children Elisabeth and Anita, who always loved to go riding, and would steal away into the house and eat the curds of sour milk standing on the kitchen windowsill, flies hovering over the dish. They liked the hay wains that swayed as they came down the path and they enjoyed looking for blue berries in the wood.

Now that it was wartime, the Berlin family came mainly to forage for supplies. They arrived with empty bags and went away with full ones.

The two Globigs had a son whom they had called Peter: thin face, curly fair hair. He was twelve years old, as quiet as his mother and as serious as his father.

Hair all over the place, mind all over the place too, people said when they saw him, but the fact that his flyaway curly hair was blond made up for it.

His little sister Elfie had died of scarlet fever two years ago. Her room stood empty and untouched, her puppet theatre and the doll’s house gathering dust. Her clothes still hung in the wardrobe adorned with painted flowers.

Also on the farm were Jago the dog andZippus the tomcat, horses, cattle, pigs and a large flock of chickens, with Richard the rooster.

The Georgenhof even had a peacock, who kept himself to himself.

Katharina, the dark beauty dressed all in black, caressed her son’s hair, and Peter had liked it when his quiet mother did that until recently, when he would ward off the caress with an energetic shake of his head. Katharina never spent a long time standing beside the boy. She left him alone, just as she herself liked to be.

Another family member was ‘Auntie’, a sinewy old spinster with a wart on her chin. She was always on the go, and in summer went around the house in a limp, washable dress. Now that it was cold, she wore a pair of man’s trousers under the skirt of the dress and two cardigans over it. Since Eberhard had become a special officer ‘in the field’, although in fact he was behind the lines, she made sure that everything went smoothly at the Georgenhof. Nothing would have functioned without her. ‘Nothing’s easy,’ she would say, and with that attitude she ran the whole show.

‘You must keep the kitchen door closed!’ she called to everyone in the house; she had said the same thing thousands of times before. ‘There’s a draught blowing right through the rooms,’ meaning that you couldn’t heat the place. She complained of the cold: why had she ended up here in East Prussia? Why, for heaven’s sake, hadn’t she gone to Würzburg when she still had the option?

She kept a handkerchief tucked into her sleeve, and put it to her red nose again and again. None of it was as easy as the others might think.

At the outbreak of war, the flow of money dried up: shares in English steel? A rice-flour factory in Romania? It was a good thing that Eberhard had his position in the army, for they couldn’t have managed without the salary he drew. The few acres of land they still had, the three cows, three pigs and the poultry, provided something extra to eat, but they had to be looked after. Nothing would come of nothing.

Vladimir, a thoughtful Pole, and two cheerful Ukrainian women kept the farm going. The Ukrainians were stout Vera, and Sonya, a blonde girl with her hair braided and pinned up around her head. Crows circled over the oaks, and the ‘dicky-birds’ got their share on the bird tables, which were fairly regularly supplied with food in winter. ‘Dicky-birds’ was what Elfie, now two years dead, used to call them.