All for Nothing

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The Georgenhof estate was not far from Mitkau, a small town in East Prussia, and now, in winter, the Georgenhof, surrounded by old oaks, lay in the landscape like a black island in a white sea.

The estate was a small one. All the land apart from a remnant had been sold and the manor house was far from being a castle. It was built over two floors, crowned by a semicircular pediment with a battered metal finial in the shape of a spiked mace, the weapon also known as a morning star. The house stood behind an old stone wall that had once been painted yellow. It was now entirely overgrown by ivy in which the starlings nested in summer. Early in this January of 1945, the tiles on the roof were rattling in an icy wind that swept up fine snow from far away over the fields and against the estate buildings.

‘You’ll have to strip that ivy off some time,’ the owners had been told. ‘It’ll eat all the plaster away.’

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