An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky

Author:Judith Schalansky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811229647
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2020-10-15T19:57:33+00:00

Behrenhoff

The Von Behr Palace

* From the fourteenth century, the Gützkow branch of the old von Behr family, also known as the “Swans’ Necks” in reference to the motif on their coat of arms, owned a large amount of land in the area in Pomerania known as Busdorf, near Greifswald.

In 1804, with the approval of the Swedish-Pomeranian government in Stralsund, the place was renamed “Behrenhoff,” and cavalry captain Johann Carl Ulrich von Behr turned the farm estate into an entail in favor of his grandson Carl Felix Georg, with the stipulation that primogeniture should always apply in event of its inheritance.

The latter had a new, two-story mansion built behind the old farmhouse in the late classical style based on plans by Friedrich Hitzig, a pupil of Schinkel, which was completed in 1838. In 1896 the building was extended by Carl Felix Woldemar, who had been elevated to the Prussian rank of count in 1877, and the two single-story verandas enlarged, with another story added on top.

From 1936 to 1939, Countess Mechthild von Behr, widow of the last count, the Imperial District Administrator and longstanding member of parliament Carl Friedrich Felix von Behr, who died in 1933, placed the mansion at the disposal of the Confessing Church as a lecture venue. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is said to have been a guest there on several occasions.

† On May 8, 1945 the mansion went up in flames. The burned-out ruins were used by the local residents as a source of building materials for new farmhouses.

The nine-hectare landscaped park designed by Peter Joseph Lenné and laid out between 1840 and 1860 today has protected status.

I remember the open window. It is night, and the air is cool. An open window on a summer’s night. No moon in the sky. Only the diffuse light of the street lamp. It smells of earth. Perhaps it has rained. I cannot remember.

It was July 31, says my mother. She is quite certain, because July 31 is Tante Kerstin’s birthday, and that evening she was having a celebration in one of the old estate workers’ cottages opposite. It definitely didn’t rain, she adds. It was a fine day. Sunny the whole day. As you’d expect in July.

The weather records also show that it was a hot day, indeed that the whole summer was warm and exceptionally dry.

Summer 1984. It is my earliest memory: this I know, I think, I claim. I could telephone Tante Kerstin. She is still alive. As are my mother and both my fathers. The one who conceived me, and the one who, later that night, would cool my legs with ice and wrap them in gauze bandages.

I play in the cemetery between the mounds overrun with greenery. I hide behind the graves and headstones, I crouch between plants with tiny blue and white flowers. An elderly woman, shrunken from stooping, throws wilted blooms and dried-out wreaths onto the compost. She holds a tin watering can under the rusty water tap then disappears behind the box hedges.

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