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Notes05/11/2018
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loewenherz
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loewenherz
Silent years in Gertlauken
In 1941 - when the Second World War had already devastated and devastated the continent - a young girl from the Rhineland was sent to a small East Prussian village as an 'apprentice'. For three years she wrote letters to her parents from there to Cologne, a thousand kilometres away and in ruins - already not a short distance today, at that time an almost three-day journey into another, foreign world. In 1985 Marianne Peyinghaus published her letters from East Prussia to her parents under the title 'Stille Jahre in Gertlauken'.
Much does not happen in these letters. Peyinghaus writes how she teaches the village children. Walking on the beach. I'm invited for lunch. How the seed is sown and then the harvest is harvested. How the lime trees bloom and then no more and then again. In an uncomplicated, albeit trained language - as a teacher writes letters. And in this description of everyday life, which at that time was a great privilege to be able to describe, and in this unagitated language lies the beauty of the book.
Like some of Harry Lehmann's fragrances, Lindenblüte bears the olfactory signature of the everyday life of a time that seems to have gone far too long for anyone to really remember its actual fragrances - when a journey from Cologne to Berlin took a day, and from Berlin to Königsberg another - and this faded melancholy is perhaps Lehmann's highest attraction. Linden blossom's essence is based on, no: its essence IS the monochrome sweetness of perhaps the most old-fashioned scent of any tree blossom: staggering like honey-drunk snow and sometimes almost stunning, but never suffocating - like the costume of the lime tree smells. Flowery-green' hardly does justice to the densely sweet aromas, especially in the beginning, and even in the after-dark (if you like to call a light green 'after-dark') it keeps its lovely melting character, the gently herbaceous never becomes dominant. The Lehmannsche Lindenblüte is nostalgic, old-fashioned and yet uncomplicated - like Linde smells, authentic and yet (or is that why?) almost a bit out of time. As if it were the scent of the village lime tree of that time, which perhaps still stands today in Gertlauken, which is now called Nowaja Derewnja and lies in the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad.
Conclusion, in the last sentences of Marianne Peyinghaus' last diary entry, a kind of epilogue to the letters addressed to her parents: 'I think of Gertlauken. (...) The silent, dark forests, the dunes, the song of the waves on the beach of the spit, and above all the wide, wide sky.'
Much does not happen in these letters. Peyinghaus writes how she teaches the village children. Walking on the beach. I'm invited for lunch. How the seed is sown and then the harvest is harvested. How the lime trees bloom and then no more and then again. In an uncomplicated, albeit trained language - as a teacher writes letters. And in this description of everyday life, which at that time was a great privilege to be able to describe, and in this unagitated language lies the beauty of the book.
Like some of Harry Lehmann's fragrances, Lindenblüte bears the olfactory signature of the everyday life of a time that seems to have gone far too long for anyone to really remember its actual fragrances - when a journey from Cologne to Berlin took a day, and from Berlin to Königsberg another - and this faded melancholy is perhaps Lehmann's highest attraction. Linden blossom's essence is based on, no: its essence IS the monochrome sweetness of perhaps the most old-fashioned scent of any tree blossom: staggering like honey-drunk snow and sometimes almost stunning, but never suffocating - like the costume of the lime tree smells. Flowery-green' hardly does justice to the densely sweet aromas, especially in the beginning, and even in the after-dark (if you like to call a light green 'after-dark') it keeps its lovely melting character, the gently herbaceous never becomes dominant. The Lehmannsche Lindenblüte is nostalgic, old-fashioned and yet uncomplicated - like Linde smells, authentic and yet (or is that why?) almost a bit out of time. As if it were the scent of the village lime tree of that time, which perhaps still stands today in Gertlauken, which is now called Nowaja Derewnja and lies in the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad.
Conclusion, in the last sentences of Marianne Peyinghaus' last diary entry, a kind of epilogue to the letters addressed to her parents: 'I think of Gertlauken. (...) The silent, dark forests, the dunes, the song of the waves on the beach of the spit, and above all the wide, wide sky.'
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