Fever Dreams – Traveling Tannenberg (Northern Poland & Berlin #36)

I can never pull the needle out of my arm. I do not need pills or boos or bets. I just need something obscure, something historical, something that brings the past back to life and makes me feel a connection to it. To find a place in history that I can mentally make my own. This is the equivalent for me of needle and vein. The power of a historic place when combined with information and imagination is a recipe for magic in its purest form. Too much can never be enough. After finally making it to the Tannenberg Memorial and the spot where General Alexander Samsonov shot himself on the final day of the battle, I felt an uncontrollable urge to find other sites associated with Tannenberg. I was experiencing the adrenaline rush from visiting two obscure and long sought after sites in a single morning. Now I knew finding more places associated with Tannenberg was in my immediate future.

Here was an opportunity to string together successes. Confidence can be contagious, and I suddenly had a burst of it. Anything seemed not only possible, but probable. My imagination went into overdrive. There had to be more needles in the haystack. Surely there were remnants of the battle hidden in the woods or half buried in the sandy soil. The journey of discovery had just begun. While my travel companion and I had only a single day to discover as much of Tannenberg as possible, I knew this was just the start of something that was likely to go on for years. I had been in this state of mind before in Lviv, Pecs, Transylvania and Carnuntum. These were places I returned to on multiple occasions.

On the road in northern Poland – Searching for Tannenberg

Time Travel – Searching For 1914
How can you return to a place you have never left? My special places felt like home, because they were. On a spiritual level, I had been to them long before my first visit. These were places that lived deep inside of me long before I ever laid eyes upon them. There is a certain feeling I get when visiting my favorite places in Eastern Europe. The feeling is instinctual, elemental, out of body and otherworldly. It feels as though I am floating on air. That is a feeling I am forever seeking. And when I cannot get to these intensely personal places physically, I go there intellectually by reading, writing, and Google Earth. And when I cannot not get there intellectually, I go there mentally by daydreaming my way back to a rendezvous with an obscure destiny. This is what Tannenberg felt like for me. A fever dream, that I wanted to suffer from forever. After all, the best times of my life have been lived in ecstatic obscurity.  

Now imagine if you will for a moment suffering from an addiction so powerful that it can pull you thousands of kilometers across an entire ocean, to a region where you cannot speak the language and have never been before. A place that has no family or personal connection to you whatsoever. The allure of a battlefield where none of your ancestors fought or ever even walked. And yet for reasons unknown you feel the urgent need to do whatever is necessary to go there and experience it for yourself. That is the addiction that drew me to Tannenberg and then drove me to go down nameless dirt roads, to crawl into the brush, to walk across suspect terrain in the hope of finding another piece of Tannenberg. To reach back in time and touch 1914, if only for a moment. On this journey across space and time, I pulled my travel companion along with me. Thankfully, he was as eager as me to travel back in time.

Mapping it out – The Battle of Tannenberg final phase (Credit: US Army)

Lost & Found – Signs of Battle
While standing at the Samsonov Monument, I stared into the surrounding forest trying to imagine what else awaited our discovery. What I would have given at that moment to have a local guide who grew up in those woods. Perhaps a forester or an outdoor enthusiast with intimate knowledge of the area. They would surely have come across signs of the battle. The area is still extremely rural and quite remote, especially by European standards. The amount of personal items from soldiers left on the field of battle has to be in the tens of thousands. Everything from coins to buttons to rifle butts would have been dropped or discarded while soldiers were fighting for their lives. The two opposing armies put 380,000 men into the field. There is no telling how many bullets and breadcrumbs were scattered to the wind. We will never know, but that has never stopped anyone from trying to find traces of the past.

Part of the allure of Tannenberg as a battlefield is its elusive nature. There is a decided lack of memorials and monuments compared to other famous battlefields in Europe. This only served to make me want to see it more. Tannenberg is one of the more remote battlefields, even for Eastern Europe. There is no dedicated national historic site with an information center to direct visitors. The Polish nation that now holds the battlefield within its borders was not one of the major combatants. Neither German nor Russians live in the area. The battlefield is an orphan, separated from those who fought over it. No wonder, there is so little focus on where the fighting actually took place.

Narrowing the options – The search for Tannenberg continues

Shifting Sands – Violence In Motion
One of the problems with discovering more of Tannenberg is that there are so many places to look. The battle was fought across a wide swathe of East Prussia. The region has not changed that much since 1914. This should mean there are still many areas of the fighting left relatively untouched. The problem is that these are just as remote as they were during the battle. Russian soldiers were constantly getting lost. The same thing can happen to tourists. GPS can only take you so far. Tannenberg was a very fluid battle, fought across vast spaces over multiple days. It is not easy to find focal points. The center of battle was constantly shifting. As was our journey.

Click here for: The Hindenburg – Ghost Hunting At Tannenberg (Northern Poland & Berlin #37)

An Abandoned Field – Unearthing The Tannenberg Memorial (Poland & Berlin #34b)

The entire history of the German experience between 1914 – 1945 is symbolized by an empty field in northern Poland. This was where the Tannenberg Memorial stood for almost twenty years. The Memorial was the spiritual home of interwar German militarism in East Prussia, a German province seething with reactionary revanchism. The memorial commemorated the German victory at the Battle of Tannenberg in the opening weeks of World War One. The Germans went on to lose the war and famously lost postwar peace. The Tannenberg Memorial was a response to those losses. It proclaimed victory in defeat. The memorial was the scene of huge nationalistic and Nazi-inspired rallies. It provided the Germans with a rallying point during the interwar period. One that goaded them on to the next war and where they suffered total defeat. The Tannenberg Memorial did not last either. It suffered partial demolition and looting until there was barely anything left except an empty field.

Piece of history – Remnant of the Tannenberg Memorial

Surreal Experience – Interest & Indifference
A couple of days before visiting where the Tannenberg Memorial once stood, my travel companion and I went to the ruined Wolf’s Lair (Wolfsschanze), Adolf Hitler’s military headquarters for the Eastern Front in the Masurian Lakes region of northeastern Poland. I expected the site to seem sinister and creepy. Instead, it felt overwrought and useless. To me, the Wolf’s Lair was little more than a novelty. Worth seeing, but of no lasting value. Everything that happened there was without success. From defeat on the Eastern Front, to the botched assassination attempt on Hitler’s life by Claus von Stauffenberg. The Wolf’s Lair was ultimately a monument to failure. One large ruin after another, devoid of any redeeming value other than as curious relics of a regime in catastrophic decline. My interest soon turned to indifference.

I had the opposite experience picking through the scant remains of the Tannenberg Memorial. A walk around the site was a surreal experience. Weeds, tufts of grass, and unsightly brush were conspicuous. By the standards of landscapes, the setting was intensely mediocre. It was hard to imagine that tens of thousands of people once stood in this same space for the dedication of the Memorial in 1927. Or that Hitler and his henchmen held some of their most sinister ceremonies on this ground. I could not even imagine bird watching here, let alone a torch light procession. To be quite honest, it was hard to imagine anything of note had ever happened on such an average piece of property. This sacred ground for the Nazis was now shrouded in obscurity.

In the trenches – Tannenberg Memorial

Open Wounds – Grounds For Dismissal
Time had not been good to the Tannenberg Memorial’s remains. While some like to say that time heals all wounds, in the memorial’s case, time had only covered most of the wounds in moss and weeds. A closer inspection showed that the ground here had yet to heal from the monumental monstrosity which once covered it. In several places, the remnants of brick work were randomly scattered across the ground. Every so often something crunched beneath my feet. This signaled that I was standing on small pieces of the monument. Some of the pieces were easily visible. Stooping down, I would see a bit of brick that had once been part of a much larger structure. Trying to make sense of what part of the former memorial my friend and I were standing on was impossible. We did not have a map of the memorial’s layout. This oversight did have a good side effect, we were forced to use our imagination. 

More and more pieces of the Memorial began to materialize the further we walked into the site. On one end of the property. I discovered what appeared to be a ditch. I soon plunged several meters into an overgrown trench. My friend soon joined me. We found pieces of brick strewn across the bottom and a larger portion on one side. Some of these pieces were still embedded in the ground. The ditch may have been part of the original structure, or it might have been part of earthworks that were sculpted around the memorial. The architects wanted to create a perception of the Memorial as an impregnable fortress. One that would honor some unknown German soldiers who had fallen in the Battle of Tannenberg. Later, Paul von Hindenburg, the commanding general at Tannenberg would be deified at the Memorial, when Hitler decided to have his body buried here.

The Memorial’s aesthetics were militaristic in the extreme. It was difficult to imagine that at one time there had been eight 20-meter-high towers as part of an octagonal shaped structure. The Memorial was designed to look like a medieval castle used by the Teutonic Knights. My travel companion and I had already visited Malbork Castle, which was once the magnificent headquarters of the Teutonic Knights. It also happens to be the largest castle in the world measured by land area. The Tannenberg Memorial attempted to mimic a semblance of its style and size. While Malbork Castle has survived, the Memorial has not. This was not for want of trying. The Memorial was built to last. Ironically, the Germans would be the ones initially responsible for demolishing parts of it. They could not even succeed at that task. With the Red Army closing in, they fled the area. It would take several generations for the Poles to pick the Memorial apart.

Standing its ground – Remnant of the Tannenberg Memorial

Faith & Fear – A National Shrine
My travel companion soon was urging me to see a different part of the property. That was where he found the most prominent remnant of the Memorial. A hip high square of brick stood by itself. I found the use of brick fascinating. An overwhelming majority of the historic churches in northern Poland are built out of brick. In my opinion, this was not just a case of the Germans using local materials for the Memorial. Whether purposely or subconsciously, much of the structure was built out of brick. The Tannenberg Memorial was in harmony with other sacred structures throughout the region. The Memorial was considered a national shrine, a quasi-religious site for Germany’s uber-nationalists and Nazis. Thankfully, the Memorial has now all but vanished. Nonetheless, there was just enough of it remaining to understand what once stood here and what it stood for. That made the site worth visiting, but only once. That would be enough.

Click here for: Riding The Tannenberg Cycle – August 1914, 1933, 1934 & 1939 (Northern Poland & Berlin #35)