What noble life in the Baltic States once was, the novels of Eduard von Keyserlings tell sitting with your hold-souls in the old country, surrounded by a large Park, velvet light gravel paths and dark alleys. The Name “Keyserling” comes in the small, but the picture booklet is not concise “noble life in the Baltic States” by Agnese Bergolde-Wolf, but a lot of other names, Baltic German families that left in the cultural and scientific history of Europe traces: Uexküll, Krusenstern, of roses, Lambsdorff, von Campenhausen. The Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of the “leopard”, with a Deutschbaltin was married to the psychoanalyst Alexandra Wolff, and that he visited several times Stomersee, the ancestral seat of the family in today’s Latvia, castle, one learns rather en passant when reading the captions.
Jan Brachmann
editor in the features section.
F. A. Z.
It opulentere books like the Baltic German manor houses. This one, published by the German cultural forum for Eastern Europe in Potsdam, and the Herder-Institut Marburg, with its selection of forty examples is not encyclopedic, but it is with the brief texts of the Latvian-German art historian and philologist, a factual introduction to this lost world.
“the Baltic States”, this term from the nineteenth century, refers to something different today than at the time of his revenue. While we understand that the republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, was originally so “Old Livonia” meant the territory of the Livonian order, later the “German order”, with the three provinces of Estonia, Livonia and Courland, which make up today about the territory of the republics of Latvia and Estonia.
Among the owners of the goods also families from Poland-Lithuania, Sweden and Russia were found; however, families originally came from Northern Germany or Westphalia, put the majority of the land owners, to the creation of the independent States of Latvia and Estonia in 1918 and the resettlement of Baltic German population in 1939, in the Wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, finished the preparation of the Soviet occupation – the story of this family in the Baltic States. The minimum size for a Well-amounted to 328 acres. Particularly in the nineteenth century, with the beginning of a-tech agriculture brought considerable trade in grain, brandy, milk and meat products, many landowners prosperity.
An economic and social history is not able to provide this booklet. It leads mainly through the history: of the first residential towers above the wooden houses, because Zar Peter I., of Estonia and Livonia in 1721, had been annexed by the construction of stone houses for the time of the establishment of St. Petersburg’s ban to the country-sitting at a later time. Simple Two-storey building with a thatched roof, as well as in Pomerania, are also included, as are flamboyante locks. At the time of Catherine the Great, had also annexed the still Courland, were employed by the German-Baltic men’s Italian architects such as Francesco Carlo Boffo, and Giacomo Quarenghi. Later, the English models were in fashion; the Prussian neo-Gothic style by Friedrich August Stüler, was also in the Baltic States school. In the interior, one could find ancient wall paintings on wood, large libraries, or marble statues from the workshop of Bertel Thorvaldsen.
In the early days of state independence, especially under Soviet occupation, was not appreciated the legacy of these mansions much. Only after the second independence in 1991 awoke an rekonstruktives interest in the buildings, not least of all, a nostalgia in encouraging tourism and benefiting from it. If Agnese mount holde-Wolf overwrites the turning point of 1918-1920 as “the Baltic tragedy”, takes the point of view of the German-Baltic families, went of their privileges, deprived of a large part of their income is lost. Anyone familiar with the Estonian literature of Eduard Vilde and Anton Hansen Tammsaare, also the historical novel “The Mad Tsar” by Jaan Kross about Timotheus von Bock, who knows, however, that from the Estonian and Latvian point of view, the old times were also a cruel slavery.
