I Remember Hövelhof

While Gary Moore remembers Paris in '49, Red Baron remembers Hövelhof, a community in the region Senne in east Westphalia between Bielefeld and Paderborn, in '44.

Under Napoleon, Hövelhof became part of the Kingdom of Westphalia, with Kassel as its capital.

  

Der Code Napoléon pour le Royaume de Westphalie

The French emperor appointed his youngest brother, Jérôme Bonaparte, as king of Westphalia (1807-1813), who signed a decree on Christmas Eve 1807 in which Hövelhof gained its independence as a municipality.

I lived in Hövelhof from July 1944 to fall of 1945 and went to elementary school there.

Before that, our family was in the Sudetenland, but as the Russian front in the east drew closer, my father thought it would be better if we lived further west.

He knew someone in Westphalia, Karl Epping, the uncrowned king of Hövelhof. Epping owned a meat processing plant and a sausage factory in the village. In 1944, he started with the help of Russian prisoners of war building accommodations for evacuees and bombed-out people far outside the village center. Today, the still-existing settlement is called Eppinghof.

Did my father buy the Westfälisches Volksblatt? (Click to enlarge)

In 1944, on July 21, our family stood on a platform in Paderborn station waiting for the train to Hövelhof to leave. My father went to buy a newspaper and returned with the news, "On July 20, an assassination attempt was made on Hitler."

We lived on the upper floor of the second house from the right.
My mother, wearing a white apron, looks out the kitchen/living room window.

In those houses of the settlement, there were two "apartments," each consisting of a kitchen/living room and a bedroom, with unit one on the first floor and a second on the second floor. Both apartments shared one toilet, which was located halfway up the stairs.

My father soon had to say goodbye since, as a specialized engineer, he had to continue in the distant Sudetenland to ensure the functionality of the X-ray facilities, which were frequently damaged by war impact.

Little Manfred, my mother, and my brother standing at the entrance door

The settlement was still under construction when we moved into one of the houses in our first-floor apartment. Every morning, Russian prisoners of war were driven in from the nearby POW camp "Stalag 326" Stuckenbrock-Senne. The men built the outer walls of the houses from large prefabricated bricks by filling the joints with mortar.

A row of finished Behelfsheime (temporary (?) accommodations)

They were a funny crowd, especially taking my two-year-old brother to their hearts. They greeted him with terms of endearment like Адреяашка парашка, whatever that meant. These Russian POWs were quite happy. They were not in the fire on the Eastern Front; they got their food and had work. A single older soldier, a constable with an old shotgun, was enough to guard them.

The secret of reconciliation is called memory.

During my current visit to Hövelhof, I read that from 1941 to 1945, prisoner-of-war transports arrived in freight cars at the train station. The POWs dragged themselves from there on the "Russenweg" six kilometers to the notorious "Stalag 326". Tens of thousands are said to have met their deaths there. Looking for the origin of the inscription, I found the following brochure:

Forced laborers and prisoners of war in the Third Reich (©Körber Stiftung)

A Russian Proverb states, "If you forget the war, then a new war arises." How true.

My reception as a nine-year-old on the grounds of the village school was one of curiosity and reluctance. Although I had the right prayer book, my classmates made me feel that, as a settlement resident, I did not belong to the village establishment. Today this would be called mobbing.

The first lesson in the morning was always devoted to religious education because Hövelhof belongs to the Archdiocese of Paderborn. In German, the comparative and superlative forms of the adjective "black" are jokingly Münster and Paderborn, where the color black stands for Catholicism.

It was taken for granted that pupils attended the Holy Mass at 7 AM before classes started at 8 AM. My walk from the settlement to the village school and the church next to it was over half an hour, so my mother had dispensed me from attending early mass.

The type of classroom I remember well (©Schulmuseum Riege near Hövelhof)

Looking at the photo from the school museum: No, we were no longer taught Sütterlin, but the heavy wooden desks with their inkwells and the satchels (Ranzen) we pupils carried are from yesteryear.

In the village school, we were educated strictly separated by sex and probably still according to the Prussian School Regulations of 1872. Corporal punishment with cane strokes on hands or buttocks was common.

A female teacher looked after the male classes one to three simultaneously, and an old male teacher cared for the boys from the 4th grade onwards. This "simultaneous teaching" worked out because some grades were "immobilized" with written work while the teachers at the front presented the program of another age group.

The teaching program of my year was so simple that I was more interested in the lessons for the older years. In religious education, I was the best anyway because I owned a children's Bible and had read it at least three times in the absence of other books, which I had to leave behind in the Sudetenland.

In the fall of 1944, I transferred to the "upper" section of the village school.

My blond-haired brother is in the foreground.

After morning school, we "settlement children" played in the sand in the afternoon. The whole surrounding area, the Senne, consists of sand. People cited: Gott schuf in seinem Zorn den Sennesand bei Paderborn (In his anger, God created the sand of the Senne near Paderborn.)

And then they came. Silver air fleets of the Americans flew over Hövelhof at a great height. The planes hummed, glittered in the sun, and dropped strips of metal foils to interfere with German Radar. These strips we children collected as Lametta for future Christmas tree decorations.  

Once, we children experienced a high-up dogfight. Suddenly, plane parts fell from the sky. We took refuge in a nearby copse, held our breaths, and prayed many "Our Father."

The Western front was approaching, noticeable by the increased appearance of low-flying fighter planes. One day, we children were shot at by a board gun but were not hit playing in the shade of a house. I still remember looking downstream at how the sand was stirred up by the impact of the shells.

The house that protected us.
Red Baron is sitting on the right, directing the crowd.

At the beginning of May 1945, I witnessed the invasion of the American troops approaching Hövelhof on the road from Gütersloh. The Wehrmacht started building a tank barrage to prevent the village's capture but soon gave up, so the people of Hövelhof and their houses stayed unharmed.

Without schooling during the first weeks of the occupation, we settlement children spent part of our time in the village among the GIs. Here, I had my first contact with the English language.    

Soon, the British took command in Westphalia. Suddenly, as a nearly ten-year-old, I was accused of stealing cigarettes from the English officers' mess. I was in tears. My mother intervened, and the village chaplain took me to the task. Of course, there was nothing; a classmate had falsely accused me.

The war was over, my father had eventually made his way from Sudetenland to Hövelhof, and we, in our best clothes, had a photo taken on the edge of the forest in the summer of 1945. Although living in poor conditions, our family was overjoyed to have survived the war unharmed.

Here are the brothers with a friend and a better view of the houses of the Eppinghof

At the end of the summer of 1944, preparatory classes for my first Holy Communion began in the parish church. This meant walking from the settlement to Hövelhof again in the afternoon. Our chaplain thus supplemented the daily religious lessons at school with communion instructions in the church. I remember his stout and soft hands that stood out from the horny hands of my schoolmates who had to help their parents on Hövelhof farms. The chaplain stroked my hair sometimes, but that was all.

The atmosphere between the villagers and the inhabitants of the settlement deteriorated. I remember well that one Sunday, this same chaplain announced from the pulpit, "Those of you who put your feet under our tables," creating a pogrom atmosphere. Nothing happened because the settlement was too remote, far from the village.

In the fall of 1945, my father took me to Hamburg, where I attended secondary school while my mother and brother remained in Hövelhof. I slept in my father's office until he found appropriate housing for the whole family. But that is a different story.

I am incredibly grateful to my parents that they cared well for us children in those precarious times.

*

Rheinsberg

Rheinsberg Castle

Many people come to Rheinsberg, a castle near Potsdam, to feel the charm of the novella Rheinsberg, written by Kurt Tucholsky in 1922.

  

The Vossische Zeitung
published Kurt's preferences in their New Year's edition, 1928

They eventually end up in a small museum dedicated to the poet.

Crown Prince Frederick at the entrance to Rheisberg

Some others come because of Frederick the Great, who spent his honeymoon if you can call it that, at Rheinsberg with an unloved wife destined to him by his father.

Click to enlarge

Only a few hike the extensive park of the castle.

Our travel group experienced all. Following a tour of the rooms of Rheinsberg Castle, our guide took us on an excursion into the parks.

After a visit to the Tucholsky Museum, a boat trip through the extensive chain of Brandenburg lakes to the north across the border to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern concluded the last day of Red Baron's trip to Havelland.

Our specialized tour guide is already waiting for us.

When visiting Reinsberg Castle, one learns much about Frederick the Great's relatives. 

Prince Frederick William Henry Augustus of Prussia

While the king was a dud in terms of population policy, his cousin Frederick William Henry Augustus, with 11 illegitimate children, was just the contrary.

He probably strove to emulate his uncle, the Soldier King, who fathered 14 legitimate children with his wife, Sophie Dorothea.

Wikipedia knows, "Frederick William Henry Augustus' first mistress, Karoline Friederike Wichmann, with whom he cohabited from 1805 until 1817, bore him four children. She was ennobled as Baroness von Waldenburg."

Baroness von Prillwitz

"His second mistress was Auguste Arend, later ennobled as Baroness von Prillwitz. They were together from 1818 until her death in 1834 and had seven children. Shortly after Baroness Von Prillwitz's death, he began a relationship with and morganatically married Emilie von Ostrowska, a Polish noblewoman. They had a daughter, Charlotte, who was five when her father died and was raised by her father's Jewish tailor. "

Before we took off for our walk in the park, our guide showed us a grotto within the castle. The artificial cave later served as a laundry. So the romantic wall paintings are mostly destroyed.

View into the main avenue in the direction of the garden portal

View from the hedge parterre in the direction of Lake Grienerick

Locked entrance to the Egeria Grotto

View from the park toward the obelisk

In the August Wilhelm Rondell, our guide told us the story of a quarrel between two Prussian brothers.

 
Prince Augustus William of Prussia was the eleventh child of the Soldier King and his wife Sophie Dorothea and Frederick the Great's younger brother. He served as all of the family in the army. It happened that his first own command was the unfortunate retreat of Prussian troops after the Battle of Kolín. The bombardment of Zittau by Austrian troops led his brother, the king, to rush to his aid with his army from Silesia. After the two armies were united at Bautzen, Frederick immediately reprimanded his brother sharply and ungraciously dismissed him from troop service. Less than a year later, Prince August Wilhelm died, broken in body and soul, presumably from a brain tumor.

Another brother of  King Frederick, Prince Henry of Prussia, the 13th and the one but last child of the Soldier King and Queen Sophia Dorothea, successfully led Prussian armies in the Silesian Wars and the Seven Years' War. He lived in Rheinsberg Palace after receiving it as a gift from his brother-king in 1744. 

Still, Henry could not bear Frederick's atrocity against August Wilhelm. So he had a memorial column erected for his humiliated brother bearing the Latin inscription: HINC VENVSTVM OS VIRI VERITATIS VIRTVTIS PATRIAE AMANTISSIMI. Fontane translated it into: Here is the friendly face of the favorite of truth, virtue, and of the fatherland. 

 It is not finished yet with Prince Henry for Red Baron read in Wikipedia, "In 1786, either Nathaniel Gorham, then-President of the Continental Congress, or Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the Prussian general who served in the Continental Army, suggested to Alexander Hamilton that Henry should become monarch of the United States, but the prince declined, and the new nation had no support for a monarchy."

Our guide reads the pyramid's inscription in German

Henry set himself a monument in the park formed like a pyramid. He left an inscription in French to posterity that reads:

Thrown from his birth into this vortex of adulation,
which the vulgar calls
glory and greatness,
but in which the wise man recognizes nothingness;
victim of all the evils of humanity;
tormented by the passions of others,
agitated by his own;
often confronted with slander
or victim of injustice;
still burdened
by the loss of cherished parents,
trusted and loyal friends,
but also often comforted by friendship;
happy in the recollection of his thoughts,
and happier still
when his services have been of benefit to his homeland
or a for suffering humanity.

This is the short version of the life
of Frederick Henry Ludwig
son of Frederick William I, King of Prussia,
and Sophie Dorothea, daughter of George I, King of Great Britain.

*

A Tour of an Unknown University

 The aim of a guided tour offered by the Badische Zeitung as part of their BZ vacation campaign was to visit out-of-the-way or hidden-from-view places at Freiburg's university.

Our group's* guide was Rudolf-Werner Dreier. He is the retired head of communications and press spokesman for the university and the university hospital, and recently wrote a book "Universität Freiburg."
*we were 27

©Thomas Kunz/BZ

The meeting point was at the Uniseum, the small museum of the university, where Mr. Dreier gave an introduction.

Above are some basic facts and current data. Read more about the foundation of the Albertina in German.

Standing wide-legged, Red Baron listens skeptically as usual (©Thomas Kunz/BZ)

The second point of our visit was the university church. This is a known place, but not so often visited these days. The church was part of the former Jesuit convent.

Starting in 1577, Freiburg's university resisted the influence of the Jesuits for more than 40 years. But in the early days of the 30-Years' War and with the universities of Basel, Strasbourg, and Tübingen dominated by Protestants, the defensive struggles no longer stood a chance. The "Sozietät" fathers began teaching the "right faith" in 1620. The University of Freiburg became the bulwark of Catholicism on the Upper Rhine. You may like to learn more about the struggle in German.

The Jesuit church, built in the baroque style of the Counter-Reformation, was consecrated in 1701. After the abolition of the Jesuit Order in 1773, the church passed to the University of Freiburg in 1793. It was destroyed during the war and rebuilt without baroque frills at the end of the nineteen fifties.

Today the interior is dominated by the five-and-a-half-meter monolithic Christ figure hanging from a steel girder. In the beginning, Franz Gutmann's sculpture showing a huge crown of thorns instead of a head caused fierce controversies. That is long forgotten.

With Napoleon's creation of the Grand Duchy of Baden, the university's existence was in danger for financial reasons.

However, Karl von Rotteck's argument that it would be good to have a Protestant (Heidelberg) and a Catholic university on the territory of the state of Baden convinced the ruler. Today Freiburg's university is called Albertina-Ludoviciana out of gratitude to Grand Duke Ludwig.

The next stop was the third floor of the new University Library (UB). Mr. Krause, head of the University Media Center, proudly showed us batteries, audio recording equipment, and professional cameras that students can borrow for video productions of a thesis. 

The university produces a radio program and television films in the UB's audio and TV studios.

Fourth stop, the Haus zu lieben Hand. In the late Middle Ages, the rich monasteries in Freiburg's surroundings had residences in the city. With the secularization at the beginning of the 19th century, the buildings often fell to the university.

For example, the Haus zur lieben Hand served as a town residence for the provost of the Benedictine monastery of St. Gall, who had his duty station in Ebringen. The building is now used for colloquia and symposia. The cellar of the house is still preserved in its original state.

Another example is the Peterhof, the last stop of our guided tour. The extensive building complex was the town residence of the abbot of the monastery of St. Peter in the Black Forest. It now holds university offices.

©Joergens.mi/Wikipedia

The former residence chapel was preserved and is now used by Freiburg's Greek Orthodox community.

Conclusion: To Red Baron these places were neither out-of-the-way nor hidden-from-view. Except for the audiovisual facilities of the university library, I had already visited them all. Well, it doesn't hurt to see them again occasionally.

*

Queen Luise at Paretz Manor

Paretz Manor in Havelland is synonymous with Queen Luise of Prussia, who spent the most fulfilling summers of her life there. 

Because of Luise's resistance to Napoleon and her early death – heroes die young, and she lived only 34 years - the queen was soon ennobled the German Joan of Arc.

   

Paretz Manor today

From 1797 to 1804, Architect David Gilly designed and executed the manor and village of Paretz as a summer residence with high aesthetic standards for Crown Prince Frederick William (III) and his wife, Luise.

The Royal Country Manor in Paretz in 1805 by Franz Hillner.
The royal couple is seen with some members of the court.
I identify the man with a walking stick approaching the group as David Gilly.

The crown prince inculcated his architect, "Just always think that you are building for a poor landowner." So Gilly kept the construction of the manor simple.

The lady of the house. Unknown painter. Queen Luise after 1810

The crown princess was immediately fond of the place and wrote to her father, "I can't wait to go to Paretz."

   

Today Paretz is supported by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation.

Later in his Walks through the March of Brandenburg, Theodor Fontane called Paretz the still-in-the-country manor.

The Paretz domain: Manor and village

As a prime example of Prussian rural architecture around 1800, the ensemble fulfilled both the desire for a royal country residence and the requirements of a functioning farming village. It blends harmoniously into the broad landscape along the Havel River, in the secluded idyll of the peaceful Havelland, 

Queen Luise and her family enjoyed those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, although not those of soda and pretzels and beer but those of bourgeois family life. Far from courtly etiquette and the pomp and pageantry of the Prussian residential city of Berlin, they enjoyed a life in Paretz that became a model for an entire generation in a time of profound change.

Entering the manor through the entrance hall

View through the suite of rooms in the entrance wing.

View through the suite of rooms in the residential wing.

The royal music room. Note the painted wallpapers in the various rooms.

The royal chamber pot is one of the few preserved original items.

The royal reading room.

A masterpiece of the Royal Porcelain Manufactory founded in 1753 by Frederick the Great.
The vase shows Paretz Manor.

Breakfast will soon be served.

Look into the park or rather the countryside behind the manor.

Look out of the front door in the direction of the "dead churchyard."

Why "dead churchyard? When Paretz was built, the old churchyard lay directly within the view of the royal living room. So from 1800 onwards, on the demand of the royal couple, burials were only allowed without gravestones.

Paretz church

And it had changed entirely when Fontane visited Paretz, "Around the church lies a so-called, "dead churchyard;" the "living" one, the place where people are buried, lies outside, on the edge of the village"... Paretz is a place of remembrance and reverence, even the "dead churchyard." He indeed referred to Luise.

  

The interior of the little village church is simple, but it houses the most important monument to Queen Luise, her Apotheosis, a terracotta relief by Johann Gottfried Schadow.

Luise glorified, deified, ennobled, you name it.

Fontane was not impressed: "The 'King's Chair' is separated from the nave by a balustrade. It has the dimensions of a small room; the furnishing is simple; on the west wall rises ... a work by Schadow, which has become known through the engraving, 'The Apotheosis of Queen Luise.' More peculiar than beautiful."

*