The Fatherland Files

Author’s Note

This is a work of fiction, which means the vast majority of it is simply invented. There was not, for instance, a Luisenhöhe estate near Marggrabowa/Treuburg, just as there was no Mathée schnapps distillery or products. Nor did any of the events related in this novel occur on the Elisenhöhe estate (which served as the model for its fictional counterpart) or, indeed, in the city of Treuburg. Any similarities with living or dead people are, therefore, entirely coincidental. Of all the Treuburg citizens appearing in the story, only the district administrator and mayor do so under their historically documented names.

There was never a Masurian Indian called Artur Radlewski, and, though Masuria is rich in lakes and moorland, the little lake, and the Kaubuk’s impregnable patch of moor in the forest near Markowsken (which is today called Markowskie) exist in my imagination alone. The same is not true of the military cemetery, however, which is still to be found today, next to the road leading into Markowskie.

Likewise, it’s a fact that as early as 1928, that is to say before the onset of the Nazis’ wave of Germanisation, Marggrabowa changed its name to Treuburg. Anti-Polish and anti-German resentments on both sides of the East Prussian border were all too real. Sadly, it is also true that the Masurians, who ever since 1920 had been connected with the German Reich by a transit route that passed through Poland, the so-called Polish Corridor, felt abandoned by the Reich and its governments and, in the spring of 1932, acclaimed Adolf Hitler as though he were the saviour. The man, who in time, would become the death of their culture.

Also historically documented are the events which took place at Berlin Police Headquarters on 20th July 1932, the arrest of the Social Democrat Police Commissioner Grzesinski and the entire police executive. If not for the reactionary Reich government’s suppression of Prussian democracy and the Berlin police force, it is doubtful whether the Nazis would have seized power with quite such ease six months later.

Large parts of this novel are set in a world which has ceased to exist. The old Masuria, in which Polish and German cultures coincided with others, and achieved a happy symbiosis, was crushed between the millstones of Nationalism; between Germanisation and Polonisation. Masuria’s multi-ethnic culture, which could have served as a bridge between the cultures of Germany and of Poland, sadly had no place in a world enslaved by nationalist mania.