Bismarck famously remarked that if revolution broke out across the world it would hit Mecklenburg a century later. Today, the eastern German state hugging the Baltic coast still seems behind the times. The taciturn ways of the local people have earned them a reputation for being introverted, if not simple. There are few transport links, only a couple of universities and barely any cultural monuments. The beautiful landscape of rolling hills, lakes and forests is largely given over to agriculture.
Since unification there has been much job-letting in agriculture as the agricultural production co-operatives-known as LPGs in East German days-have been broken up or slimmed down.
One of those LPGs covered much of an estate owned by my family until 1945. A forefather bought the land in the 18th century out of an inheritance from a successful (and childless) relative who made a career as a field-marshal-for-hire in the service of Venice. A century later, my grandfather's grandfather left the heavy ancestral castle in Saxony and moved to Mecklenburg where he built a light, neo-classical house inspired by his love of Italy. The family left the house just before the end of the second world war, when my newly widowed grandmother and her seven children fled west in a cart with millions of other German refugees, crowding into what became the Federal Republic. The flight was sudden. Everyone thought Mecklenburg would be safe.
The main fear was of the Russians. In the end it was the British who reached the house first. Upsetting expectations, it was the Russian prisoners-of-war (who had been forced to work on the land) who toured the vacated house with the respect of museum visitors, and it was the British who shat in the old Chinese vases, used the library for kindling and made off with the best part of an ancestor's collection of medals.
The house and land were soon turned over to the Russians as it lay in their zone and was formally expropriated in the course of the land reform carried out in the east from 1945-49. Under communism the house-which despite its status as a symbol of despised Junkerdom was upgraded to a palace-was initially used as a college and later as a school for the mentally handicapped. It took badly to the conversion, which was shoddily done, and rot set in. For the last decade of the GDR it stood empty.
I first saw the house in early 1990, a few months after the fall of the wall. It was a curious experience, arriving with a head full of handed-down memories to see a crumbling, empty building whose only use was as a venue for illicit parties held by daring local youths.
My grandmother vowed she would never return, despite the fact that for more than 40 years she dutifully kept all the keys with which she had methodically locked the place up in 1945. In fact, she broke her promise, sneaking over with a friend in early 1990 without letting on to anyone in the family. Later that year I drove her and two aunts up for a more official visit. Refusing to see the house, she spent her time searching out people who had once worked on the estate or been neighbouring small-holders for hours of tea, cake and chatter.
The only place she did visit was the small graveyard in a cluster of trees just behind the house, where her husband was buried. Some of the original grave stones had disappeared after the war and the bombastic tomb of a great-uncle had been vandalised. But many of the stones had been replaced in the 1970s, when my grandmother found a way of sending money for repairs via the protestant church. She was not wholly convinced with the result and uncertain whether some of the stones had not been placed over the wrong graves. The other question in her mind was whether there would be space for her there.
Barely three months later the family made the trek north again to bury my grandmother next to her husband. It was a bitter, cold day, loaded with symbolism. My grandfather died months before the end of the war when the utter defeat of Nazi Germany was clear. The country was in chaos as the Allies closed in and bombing raids drove hundreds of thousands out of the cities. My grandmother was buried on the opening day of the Gulf war, when the airwaves were full of precision bombing and missiles cruising their way past Baghdad hotel rooms.
Since then the graves have been the cause of countless return visits. The house continues to crumble, the land is still farmed, and much of it remains in the hands of the state. Under the half-baked policy for the restitution of property confiscated under communism, those expropriated in 1945-49, between the demise of the Reich and the founding of the German Democratic Republic, have no right to get their land back. The government says that this was a condition for Soviet approval of unification. This is contested by some people. Whatever the truth, the German state has profited handsomely from the acquisition of huge real estate assets in the east.
Over the years a favourite stopping-off point en route to the house has been a restaurant in the nearby village of Zickhusen. It began shortly after the fall of communism as an informal coffee and cake outfit in a front room. It soon expanded into a proper caf? and has continued to grow over the years to become a restaurant complete with grill garden, car park, playground and rooms-to-let. The young couple who started it are now fully-fledged members of Germany's middle-class, as the Mercedes outside the house testifies. Zickhusen is one of my favourite micro-economic anecdotes of the transformation of eastern Germany in the 1990s. The broad brush picture often depicts the region as a landscape of gloom and despair. But when you look at events on the ground, things are not all bad. I think my grandmother would have been pleased.
