I’m currently immersed in Ulla Lachauer’s book, Ostpreußische Lebensläufe (1998). It had been gathering dust on my bedside shelf for a long while. Not sure why I was avoiding it. Perhaps it was the effort required to read German. Perhaps it was the dark contents. After all the research I’d done for Crow Stone, about the downfall of East Prussia, I was leery of going into another dark abyss. But it’s January and full of resolution, I decided to get the dark, heavy reading over with first.
Turns out, I had nothing to fear. Ulla Lachauer writes in an engaging, easy-going style, that didn’t stress this English reader too much. It’s not a book about war, it’s about people and this book showcases her obvious empathy for the ten East Prussians featured here. She highlights the resilience of these characters shaped by their Baltic environment and the difficult decades of war and exile.
Photographs add to the depth of connection the reader gets to enjoy. I found myself turning, again and again, to the faces of youth and old age searching out the stories etched in their bodies like they were a landscapes of their lives.
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| Portrait of my mom done by Julia Penny |
As I read, I’m searching the internet for names of tiny, forgotten villages, checking to see if I might have cycled past back some of these ruins back in 2019 when I explored the Lithuanian and north Kaliningrad area near the city of Klaipeda (once Memel).
This beautiful, conflicted area comes to life for me again as I read this book and I can imagine my own family members living their simple, rustic lives … trying their best to survive. Aren’t we all? So grateful for books like this.
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| Ruins near the Baltic in former East Prussia |
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