My friend, take a seat. The bottle is on the table. It is autumn, dusk, the crows are shrieking outside, the winds are shrieking outside. Can’t you hear the poor souls moan in purgatory? I want to tell you a few stories: stories from an old town far up north, far up east, a town by the sea. But these are not stories of this town itself; these are stories of its dead.
Many writers who dominated German literature in the 1920s and 1930s, and then again in the decades after 1945 came from east of the River Oder, today the border of Germany. There are the Prague writers Franz Kafka and Johannes Urzidil, Mascha Kaléko and Joseph Roth from Galicia, and Romania’s Hertha Müller and Gregor von Rezzori. The Baltic coast and its hinterlands also have their writers in the German tongue: first and foremost, Noble Prize winner Günther Grass, but also Siegfried Lenz and Johannes Bobrowski, all writing about an north-eastern homeplace that today seems exotic to many in Germany.
Werner Bergengruen is another of those northern writers, and a literary representative of the Baltic Germans. Almost forgotten today, he was once one of the most widely read authors in the Weimar republic and post-war West Germany, a prolific writer who published 67 novels, children’s books, poetry collections and memoirs between 1923 and 1964. Werner was born in 1892 in Tsarist Riga into a Baltic German upper-class family, the son of doctor Paul Emil Bergengruen and his wife Helene von Boetticher. His childhood by the Baltic was short: aged ten, he was sent to Germany for his schooling as his parents were against the Russification policy of the Tsarist Empire in the Baltic states. Werner attended schools in Lübeck and Marburg, and went on to study in Munich.
His childhood by the sea remained a defining experience for him, though, and he later described the day he had to leave “as the most serious injury of my life”. He did return to the Baltic states after finishing school: Werner volunteered for the German army at the beginning of the First World War and served as a lieutenant in the Baltic states until 1918. In 1919 he joined the German Baltische Landwehr militia, which fought in the Estonian War of Independence against both the Red and Estonian armies. The Landwehr was disbanded in late 1919, and Werner left for Germany again to marry his girlfriend Charlotte Hensel, and started working as a writer in Berlin and Munich.
While most of his output over the next decades was concerned with historical themes in fables and parables, the Baltics kept reappearing in his short stories – and especially in his small book Der Tod von Reval (“Death in Reval”), first published in 1939 but “written 1931–1935”, according to the frontispiece. This is his macabre love letter to Tallinn, a small book of interconnected tales about happenings in Tallinn church crypts and boneyards, and a lovely autumnal portrait of the city. These are not ghost stories, however, but macabre tales of dying, death and corpses, full of dark humour and with a clear eye for the absurdities of life.
One of the reasons for Bergengruen’s obscurity in Germany today might be that his writing is rich and sometimes too colourful, almost baroque in his descriptions. His Tallinn tales have all the tropes of Gothic horror – old churches, graveyards, ships in storms – and the book itself is framed like an M.R. James story, a narrator spinning spooky tales of a city up north over a bottle while the autumn wind howls outside. Yet there is nothing supernatural in Bergengruen’s stories. There is the tale of Charles Eugène de Croÿ, for example: a German-Russian nobleman and famed drinker and gambler who died in Tallinn as a prisoner of war in 1702. He was left unburied, as nobody was willing to pay for the funeral. The air conditions in the chapel of St. Nicholas Church where the body was held protected the corpse from decaying and it became an attraction, remaining on display in a glass case until 1897, when authorities finally buried it.
And all of those who, as the decades ran by, had stood in front of the mummy with curiosity or a shudder – they also died and had to go into the ground and their bodies decayed. But Croÿ, the drunkard and gambler, the useless and ne’er-do-well, he outlasted them all.
Another story, told by three drinking companions at Leonorenhof Estate (it is bleak, rough and windy at Leonorenhof), is that of female ship captain Holmberg, who hates brandy but when dying at sea is preserved in it so she can be buried in firm ground in Tallinn. Her husband and the ships crew slowly drain the brandy from her casket and, as the journey progresses, drink it, but her teetotal body has soaked up enough booze to preserve it for a proper funeral. One of the reasons for Bergengruen’s choice of language can be found in his upbringing during the decline of the Baltic Germans as a class. He himself considered his childhood home a proto-medieval world, one outside the modern age. To him, it was still an “age of freedom, of taking life for granted, of horses, of servants, of social concepts of honour and of an undead state that intervened only tentatively and partially in individual lives”.
As a Christian conservative, Bergengruen was opposed to National Socialism. His most successful novel, Der Großtyrann und das Gericht (“The Great Tyrant and the Court”), a renaissance novel about an Italian tyrant, was published in 1935 and sold over a million copies. By some it was seen as criticising National Socialism, while pro-Nazi critics hailed it as a “great Führer novel”. Nevertheless, in 1937 he was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Writers “as […] not suitable to contribute to the development of German culture through literary publications”, but received a special licence to publish uncritical works. Some of his poetry collections and novels were banned in 1940, and he was also prohibited from radio broadcasts and lectures. He clandestinely copied and distributed some of the leaflets of the White Rose resistance group in Munich, some members of which also liked his poems. He survived the war and wrote in 1945 that “No one may say that they knew nothing of the atrocities. (…) Everyone knew what happened in the concentration camps, unless they forcibly closed their ears and faces.”
Bergengruen moved to Switzerland in 1946, then lived in Rome for two years and finally moved to Baden-Baden in 1958, where he lived until his death in 1964. He never visited Tallinn again, and nor did he see the Estonian and Latvian translations of his little death book published after the Baltic republics gained independence. The Estonian version translated by Rein Sepp and Mati Sirkel was published as Surm Tallinnas in 1999, and in 2000 a Latvian translation by Austra Aumale as Nāve Rēvelē. Dīvaini stāsti par kādu senu pilsētu. But Werner Bergengruen surely would have approved of his tales of a dead city finding new readers in the town he loved so much.
It is getting late, and the bottle is empty. The night is large outside the windows. The wind has ripped the last leaves from the trees. The cold drips through the blank branches, silver-coloured. The wind has quietened down, but it pushed the clouds away. Orion glitters. The town of which I told you is already lying in the snow. The needle-sharp points of the slim towers, the old-fashioned gables and roofs, the grey fortifications are all white as salt. Corners fill out, wall ledges, the rugged stair gables are being smoothed down, the thick white snow takes the sharpness out of all outlines. The people are getting their furs out, sleigh bells are ringing. It is as if the snow dampens all sounds. Are these really sleigh bells? Or maybe death knells?
Header image – Reval (Tallinn), 1900 [Public domain]
All excerpts from Death in Reval in the text (in italics) translated by Marcel Krueger. You can find out more about Krueger’s work at marcelkrueger.eu
Marcel Krueger is a German-Irish writer, editor and translator living in Berlin. Through the prism of family history he explores European memory and identity, especially focusing on Ireland, Germany and Poland. His essays have been published in the Guardian, Notes from Poland, 3:AM, CNN Travel, New Eastern Europe and the Irish Times, amongst others. Marcel is the co-editor of Elsewhere – A Journal of Place, and has published five non-fiction books in English and German.
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