The American Fiancee by Eric Dupont

Author:Eric Dupont
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Magdalena Berg’s First Notebook

I HAVEN’T TOLD YOU about my parents, Kapriel. They loved me for the longest time. They still love me from where they are now, no doubt about it. You don’t know the first thing about my hometown, I’m sure. I’m from Königsberg. In East Prussia. Just try talking about East Prussia with a German, Kapriel. They know precious little about it. “It used to be part of Germany,” is about the best you’ll get. Most will tell you all they know about Königsberg is the meatballs, Königsberger Klopse. My father was from over there, from Cranz, on the shores of the Curonian Spit. Do you know of it? He was the one who wanted me to be called Magdalena. It was a common name in our family, he said. The Bergs always had to have at least one living Magdalena. But I can tell by your eyes that you couldn’t even place East Prussia on a map. The Baltic Sea? Lithuania? Ring any bells? Poland? Whatever do they teach you at school in Canada? Do you at least know where you are today? I’m talking about old Poland, not the country that the Russian tanks pushed westward in 1945. East Prussia was Germany on the Baltic Sea. Today it’s Russia. Three million Germans lived in that little country for centuries, beside the Masurian Lakes, in Königsberg, and on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Perhaps it looks like a country you already know beside the sea. To the north. In East Prussia, Kapriel, it’s one beautiful beach after another. Two long strips of land jut out into the Baltic: the Curonian Spit to the east and the Vistula Spit to the west. The two strips of sand are three hundred meters wide and at least one hundred kilometers long; between them there are two narrow stretches of fresh water that freeze over in winter. The peninsula’s sand dunes are like mountains. They shift slowly in the wind. Between those two enormous sand dunes, Kapriel, there are wonderful pine forests, where deer run wild. I saw them when I was small! My mother came from Königsberg. She was a real Prussian and learned French at school. “Every young girl should be able to speak French,” she’d tell me. I think she must have met the Kaiser himself when she was a child. The Prussian emperors were crowned in Königsberg, did you know that? That’s where I was born. On Schrötterstraße, not too far from the zoo. I remember the old city of Königsberg well. My father helped run a theater there. He was an entrepreneur, too, and he owned two cinemas. When I was fourteen, in 1934, he announced to my mother he’d been transferred to the Reich’s capital in Berlin. Well, not exactly transferred . . . He’d been taken on by Kraft durch Freude, ever heard of it? No? Kraft durch Freude was a big group of German workers from the Deutsche Arbeitsfront. Kraft durch Freude, or Strength through Joy, became the world’s biggest entertainment provider in the 1930s.

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