Werftpfuhl, Germany

In August 2008 I traveled with a group of women I have come to lovingly call "my feminists" to Germany for a conference on gender and emancipation in the diverse countries of Syria, Sudan, Germany, and the United States. It was, to say the least, a strange, unsettling experience. Though I have wrote sparingly about those thirteen days, it is something that hovers always present. Yesterday I was noodling around online looking for some WWII resources and began wondering if I could find anything related to the town in East Germany where we stayed. I kind of hit the mother-load.The building is now called the Kurt Lowenstein House and is a center for education in social justice, especially gender studies. The above picture was take by Say Carnahan, one of the women in our group. The area was originally settled by monks in the 1400s. The actual structure was built in the mid-1500s and served as part of the monastery complex. In the mid 1700s the Hirschfelde family took over the house and much of the land in the area. There is a town near by named Hirschfelde. I jogged there on my evening run on our last night in Germany. The manor house passed through the Hirschfelde family, each generation updating it and adding to it's grandeur. In the late 1700s August Wilhelm von Bismarck, Prussian Finance Minister, inherited the estate, followed in 1815 by Wilhelm Karl von Krocher, District Administrator and Regional Director of the Altmark. In 1845 the estate was passed to the Schmidt family. Otto Heinrich Schmidt was the one who took on the task of modernizing and updating the mansion. Below is an illustration by Alexander Duncker, a German publisher, artist, and writer, showing the house as it would have looked when the Schmidt family owned it.
The illustration comes from a 16 volume collection of illustrations by Duncker showing the castles and royal manor houses of Germany. The book is titled Die ländlichen Wohnsitze, Schloesser und Residenzen der ritterschaftlichen Grundbesitzer in der preussischen Monarchie... In 1904 Edouard Arnhold, a coal baron and a member of several advisory boards to the Prussian government, was appointed to the estate. He used the location as a home base for his arts patronage efforts. He added a sculpture garden and then converted the house into a girls orphanage called the Johanna House.Now here is where it starts to get exciting (at least for me). Recently I did a project at work about the movie M. The 1951 American version by Joseph Losey was banned in Ohio in 1954. This was at a turning point in our culture in regards to cinema. Studios were beginning the fight against movie censorship and the M lawsuit in Ohio served as a means to ramp-up the First Amendment rights battle. The original M was a 1931 German film directed by Fritz Lange. It was banned in Nazi Germany for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which for challenging the integrity of the government. Lange was forced to flee the country. Turns out, one of Lange's leading ladies in another film, Brigitte Helm, was a ward of the state here at Johanna House. The orphanage was dissolved in 1933 when the Arnhold fled Germany to avoid Nazi persecution.Which brings us to WWII. Let me preface this section by relating the one item I did write on my return. It was a one page essay about the embodied experience of walking the trails of what used to be the park lands of the estate. I was trying to explain the sensation one has of being in the woods, the feeling of presence and fear, anticipation and loaded silence. We all shared the experience of being watched or hunted, or constantly peeking over our shoulder. What was it? No one could quite say except one woman, a rigorous academic historian, who told me in a matter-of-fact tone, "It's haunted. There is so much blood in the ground here. The whole forest is haunted." It made perfect sense. And not in the Ghost Hunters sense of haunted with apparitions and EMF detectors. It is the deep haunting of the earth itself. The very trees are spooked and shell-shocked. They are young in some swaths, ancient in others. These are trees that have grown back after a clear-cutting. They are planted in neat rows. There were concentration camps for political prisoners a few towns over and maps from the Holocaust Museum suggest there might have been camps adjacent if not on this land - though that would take a great deal more research. Near the end of the war the Soviet army marched through this area in a show of massive force on their way to the Battle of Berlin, pushing back Nazi troops along the way. At the close of WWII this area became a part of East Germany and was under Soviet control. At this point the story gets murky but it seems it became an education center and residence in 1945. It was named for Kurt Lowenstein, a member of the Union of Radical School Reformers which had sought to socialize and equalize the education system in Germany during the years of the Wiemar Republic.So what is the conclusion to this very long blog post? Annie Price took this picture of me on our first day there. The ground had herb gardens and I was looking at some rosemary. I remember this moment both in my body and as it was to her when she took the image. I guess I am just glad to know that this bizarre collective experience has roots. I am able to place it in a context of history and feel more comfortable about how very uncomfortable we all were. It is also a jumping off point. Much of what I relate here I have gathered from poorly google-translated German web-based encyclopedias. There are resources in English that I discovered in this round about way that will enhance and round out the story, contextualize it even more. I am also pleased with the serendipitous connection to my present. As I have said before, these serendipitous moments completely delight me and remind me that life is interconnected and full of purpose.

Sources:

• Kurt Lowenstein House
• Germany's Past Contested: The Soviet-American Conflict in Berlin over History Curriculum Reform, 1945-48 by Gregory P. Wegner from History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 1-16
• Manor Hirschfelde (translated)