01 January 2008

Gateways



Gateway to the former Royal Trakehner Stable, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia

I wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year!

I hope it is better than the last one, though 2008 begins unexpectedly. The story of my Ukrainian friend is incomplete, and is the last order of business from 2007, a sort of gateway to the new year.   The first note in the queue was a protest about my slur on the sexual orientation of Frederick the Great.

That is not how I intended this year to start. Friedrich is worth a book of his own, and his role in cementing Silesia into his kingdom is central to what came later, of course, as if anyone here knew where the old province was located, without looking at the map.

And maps lie, of course, and all the names have changed. I have no personal insight into the sexual orientation of the late German monarch, and rely on the opinion of Voltaire in that regard, though of course reliance on the French in any particular is problematic.

I do like the titillating little tidbits that history has given us. Certainly there is no doubt that later Prussian military men, with their carefully orchestrated dueling scars, had a tradition of association with what we would now call gay behavior; I read of one hero who was buried in a tutu, at his request to his comrades.

On the whole, though, it is probably more a human thing than a Prussian one, and attributable to the institutions more than anything else, like the old English Public School.

I have the Nancy Mitford biography about Frederick, and got it down with the idea of a thorough examination of the issue. I disremember if she was the Communist or the Nazi sister of the literary clan, though I know she was the one who also penned “Love in a Cold Climate,” which is what it is outside today, and warms my heart.

The girls are also worth a story at some point, but with a new year I feel the need to get the Prussians behind me. This whole adventure started by venturing through the gateway of the   horse papers, of course, which were in Russian.

The horse is remarkable, according to the people who know about such things, and the product of centuries of disciplined breeding. Most scientific, and probably practiced at the Royal Stables at Trakehner, in what used to be Prussia.

The great divide is where Great Friedrich has his part, since the barns became state property with his demise, and an instrument of Prussian military power. The Trakehner breed was the very fundament of the cavalry, alert, agile and decisively swift.

At the zenith of the stables there were sixty thousand horses in the district around Trakehner, right on the eve of the Great War that Wilhelm played so much a role in fomenting, and which his General Staff so nearly won.

The great opening battles of the war in the east were fought not far from Trakehner, the part of it that we do not consider much. The remarkable strategy that knocked the Czars armies out of the fight, pummeling the armies led by the sycophants of the court....the introduction of the bacillus of communism by sealed train...the ability to concentrate the power of Krupp and Essen in the hands of the Prussian officers who commanded on the Western Front.

Bismarck saw it coming, of course. There has been revisionism of late about the most German of the Germans. They say that the Iron Chancellor was not the master of unification, but only a sly opportunist who should have paid more attention to the doctrine of Immanuel Kant, and treated people as things of worth for their own sake.

I choose to recall Bismarck as the visionary who defeated France, and brought the Germanys together in a federation led by the firm hand of Prussia, and who concentrated on the real enemy, the Poles. He thought that Polish existence was a threat to the German State, and although he spoke their clumsy language, believed   "one shoots the wolves if one can."

He was speaking directly of the Poles, and I think that is one of the reasons he eschewed the incorporation of Austria into his new German state. The traditions and bulk of the southern Germans would counterbalance the more stern and focused Prussians, and he was having none of that.

His inability to control Wilhelm II, when he came to the throne, and his dismissal by the young autocrat is in my mind the pivot on which the next century- the American one- would balance. Having humiliated the proud French, it was inevitable that there would be a reckoning at some point; the weapons evolved more swiftly than the tactics. If only they had taken to heart the lessons of the Americans in their Civil War....

But they did not. The guns of August, 1914, had their own imperative, and ushered in the hundred years war of our time.

The late arrival of the Americans on the fields of France and Belgium turned the tide in the first act; the Germans understandably were dismayed, since all the blood and steel had nearly worked. Of course the troops must have been stabbed in the back by the cowardly politicians.

For all of that, had it not been for crotchety Senator Smoot in Washington and his tariff barrier that froze international trade, it might have worked out. The Trakehner stables had adjusted their breeding to produce horses more suited to the agricultural trade. The Poles stuck their own knife in the Prussians back. German had won the war in the east, and yet the Poles gained a land corridor to the great Hanseatic port city of Danzig, which they promptly re-named Gdansk.

Oh, the resentment. With the currency destroyed by the Depression that Smoot-Hawley brought upon the industrialized West, it was again not surprising that a man on horseback should appear, though the metaphor is flawed, of course. The man was a simple foot-soldier, an Austrian whose service to the Reich had been heroic, if unimaginative.

Joining him in the early days were some legitimate heroes, like dashing Hermann, who assumed the mantle of the Red Baron in the new cavalry of the air. He was not then the caricature he would become, and how is remembered now as part of the demonic hegemony: rat-like Goebbles, chicken-farming mass murderer Himmler, manic-mad Adolph himself, the anti-Christ.

The July declaration of the State of Emergency in Prussia is what sealed the deal, though so many might-have-beens remained. One could spend a lifetime with them, but each chance to avert the apocalypse was deferred or lost. Hermann, who was beginning the long road of dissolution with drugs and food, was appointed minister of the interior for Prussia.

He still cut a fine Prussian figure in those days, though, and you can see it in the official portraits of the time. The chin had not yet been lost in folds of fat, and his considerable energy went into the reform of the hunting and game laws, which are the only ones from Nazi times still on the books.

He immediately threw himself into upgrading the old imperial hunting lodge at Rominten, which he re-named the “Effihall” for his second wife. The Norwegian-themed building had been good enough for the Kaiser, but not for the plump Reichsminister.   With his famed Carinhall lodge named for his first spouse, north of Berlin.

That is the mark of things, I suppose. I have no idea of a spouse who would put up with the constant and garish presence of a predecessor, but that is the world of the Nazis.

The two hunting preserves typified the self-delusions of the new German leaders. The war was bad enough, but that is the path to which they were committed, and were going to take everything along with them, the people, the nation-states, the horses, the entire culture.

Evil heaped upon evil. The most delusional decision was to strike at Russia while Britain still lived and America had not yet committed to the great crusade. At the high water mark of the German advance, the Swastika briefly flew above the Catherine Palace, long enough for the precise Army engineers to remove the panels of the Amber Room and place them in 37 crates for return to Prussia.

This was intensely personal, and I use the word “crusade” advisedly, since it is so fraught with nuance these days. But Eisenhower called it that, the Crusade in Europe, and there was another coming from the East that would revenge itself unto the ultimate end of the Prussians.

What happened to the Prussians is unimaginable. The Red Armies entered the easternmost lands of the Prussians in late 1944, and the unimaginable began.

Anika is the little German woman who works at the desk in Big Pink on weekends. She was a GI war bride later, and that is how she came to Arlington. She was there, with her mothers and sisters. Her father was in uniform, somewhere, and she told me the other day how it was. The Nazi functionaries would not permit the population to relocate ahead of the Red Legions, who were scouring everything in their path.

She and her sister made their way to the boarding school where the youngest was still enrolled. The headmistress would not countenance her departure; it was not in accordance with the rules, regardless of the fact that Uncle Joe's Shock Armies were approaching. The sister had to jump from a window to escape what happened to the school when they arrived, and run though they might, they were overtaken.

The youngest sister was never right in the head after what the Red soldiers did to her, and that is what happened to almost every woman, young or old, who was in the Zone of Occupation. It was the little secret that most Germans carried to their graves, or to the desk at Big Pink, if they were lucky enough.

The evacuation of the Baltic was chaos. All available ships were pressed into service that bitter cold winter, and the Soviet submarines were in place to torpedo them. Long lines of civilians and livestock marched desperately onto the ice in their flight; the best breeding stock of the Trakehner stables was with them, as beasts of burden, thin with hunger. Those that died were eaten, if there was time. Those that could keep moving fled for their lives as the Red aircraft strafed the ragged columns and broke the ice beneath them.

The animals and women struggled and froze and drowned.

The officers shot some of the most famous stallions to prevent their fall to the Russians. Only a few hundred horses made it out, the sole survivors of a herd that had numbered 60,000 before the madmen commenced their adventure.

Two million Germans left Prussia, and perhaps 14 million more were relocated when the shooting stopped. I am not going to tell you that I am sorry; this was personal on so many levels that I can only shake my head in wonder at the savagery. There were at least twenty million dead Russians, and they believed that it should never, ever, ever happen again.

Here is how it was done. Prussia disappeared. Konigsberg was re-named in honor of the Chairman of the Soviet All-Union Executive Committee, Mikhail Kalinin, and the territory was absorbed into Russia.

Everything of value was stripped and shipped east. That included the horses that survived or were captured.

The center of the old Prussian City was burned to a cinder, and it was allowed to stay that way for decades. The crates of the Amber Room were never recovered, though they had been in Konigsberg Castle when the Red Army arrived. A man who ran a bar in the old dungeon (the only safe place in town, at the end) said they were stacked neatly in the Knight's Hall, which still smelled of rich wax and old trapestries. The mystery of what happened to the priceless work of art has remained all these years, one of the ultimate buried treasure tales. It appears not to be that romantic. It seems that the Red troops, drunk with triumph and German schnapps, burned it all with the castle.

Everything in Prussia associated with the Nazi leadership was dynamited or burned. Goering's Effihall was looted, put to the torch, and dynamited to the foundations. So was virtually everything else.

The center of Kaliningrad is still largely an empty space, and a curious Soviet memorial is on the quayside, a real torpedo boat of the style that the Americans shipped to aid the Red Navy, posed heroically with bow pointed upward on concrete waves.

The grave of Immanuel Kant stayed in ruins for years near the cathedral. The shell of the old castle turret stayed in place as a depressing reminder until 1969, when Brezhnev had it bulldozed to the foundations.

There are no Germans in East Prussia. Every place name has been changed. The Trakehnen Stables were not destroyed, though the buildings were badly damaged and most remained as ruins. The villages around it are named for Heroes of the Soviet Union.

The horses that did survive were relocated to the Kirov Stables near Moscow, along with the Prussian stud books of ancestry and the great statue of the Trakehner stallion that stood in front of the administration building.

That is the thing about horses. Lineage is the essence of the breeding program, for all the erasure of history, the names and ancestry were important to preserve. Some of the Kirov Trakehners were further transferred to the Ukraine, in an effort to re-build the ravaged horse population there. The breed will never be the same, though there are a few specimens that echo the equine glory that was.

That is where my Ukrainian friend comes in. As it turns out, Taagie is royalty, connected by directed genetics to Friedrich the Great himself.

Of course, the family has been through some hard times since then, but there is a reason that he is a pretty damn good horse.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Note: With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kaliningrad was cut off from the rest of the Russian Federation. There was brief thought to incorporating into independent Lithuania, but negotiations collapsed. Lithuania and Poland have joined NATO, and now surround Russian soil. The Amber Room officially remains missing, though it was probably burned in Konigsberg Castle. Under negotiations conducted by Vladimir Putin, Russian craftsmen, assisted by German capital, have recreated the Amber Room in St. Petersburg from over 100,000 amber and gold objects, most of the yellow gemstone coming from the old Prussian mines in the former East Prussia. The room re-opened to the public in 2003.   Taagie, my Ukrainian friend, was foaled in 1997, just as Ukraine was beginning to assert its independence from Moscow. He was sold to equine professionals in Loudoun County, Virginia, who saw his promise, though they could not read his blood-lines. Kaliningrad, once headquarters of the Soviet Baltic Fleet, is the only ice-free port in the Russian Federation. It has become the destination of choice for the oligarchs of the New Russia. They arrive by sealed trains, which transit the territory of Poland, or by air or cruise ship from St. Petersburg when ice in the harbor there permits. The world's ugliest monument to Communism, the palace of the Soviet, was never completed and disintegrated for years. The local Russian leadership in the Kaliningrad Oblast, is tearing it down. Moscow has provided half the funds necessary to recreate the old Teutonic Castle. The new capital may even permit a small equestrian activity at the old Trakehner stable.

Many Russians consider Kaliningrad to be a prime holiday destination. Mr. Putin is said to be constructing a compound there of his own.

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