As they sail through Mecklenburg the author of Our Wherry in Wendish Lands has some interesting comments to make about the economic state of the countryside in 1890. Even now at the start of the twenty-first century Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is the poorest and least industrialised of the German Federal Länder. It has, of course, been much fought across and never really recovered from the Second World War and Russian occupation, when anything transportable was carried off to the Soviet Union as "reparations", but its economic problems go back much further.

Map of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Doughty, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, was evidently astonished by the poverty and old-fashioned way of life - "Civilisation in these regions seems sadly in arrear. The very country looks as England must have looked long centuries ago. The towns, each with its municipal estate about it, and the vast town barns at its gates; the open unfenced fields and roads; the great wastes and forests…..Fancy working people not in good hobnailed boots or sensible sabots, but shuffling in sandal-like soles, kept on merely by a strip of leather across the toes, their wooden soles dap-dapping as they walk, their stockings sopped with wet and dirt." No Agrarian Revolution to be seen, apparently. He is indignant about the primitive tools he sees in use - "Their harrows are rough wooden frames with pegs for teeth; their ploughs prehistoric. I saw advertisements of my friends Messrs. Richard Garrett and Sons' implements; but neither their reaping machines, nor even such archaic things as were used in Pliny the Younger's time, did I see in the harvest fields of Mecklenburg." One is conscious of the fact that Britain was then at the height of its industrial might and enjoying a level of prosperity which leads Doughty more than once to make critical comparisons with the rural parts of Germany not yet enjoying the industrial progress of German cities. Though Doughty was able to make good use of the railways in exploring the north of Germany he gives no mention of their bringing prosperity to the small towns and villages he passes. Indeed, it is more probable that they were helping to impoverish the countryside by transporting workers to the industries in the cities.

Doughty describes a rail trip to Neubrandenburg in the east of Mecklenburg. The family was impressed by the magnificent dark red brick Gothic architecture and the then complete town fortifications, which had already suffered numerous wars and fires and had worse to come in the twentieth century: "It is but a little city, in shape almost completely round, and about a quarter of a mile in diameter. Looking south from our point of view, a red brick gothic gate closed the vista; looking west, another lofty brick tower gate; looking east, a picturesque old brick watch tower; while between us and the south gate rose a beautiful church, the Marien Kirche. Moving but a few steps, one could see yet another ancient gate…."

"Such gates look to our modern eyes less like defensive works than architectural ornaments; yet in old proe-gunpowder times they were no doubt potent protectors of the town. They all stand now as they were built no less than 587 years ago; and all round the little city there yet stretches from gate to gate a girdle of coeval wall, perfect except one breach of sixty yards or so made for a road from the railway station. We walked round the complete circuit; now inside by a narrow lane, now on the great outer rampart of earth. There is an inner and an outer trench, with the earth-work between the two; and both the two ditches and the rampart are overgrown by venerable oaks…."

"Within the town few or no old houses survive, so ravaged has it been by storms and strifes. Fire, famine, war rapine, pestilence, ceased not in poor Neu Brandenburg for centuries"

"In the middle ages, such small cities as this, unlike the wealthy Hansa towns, were very meanly built. It is likely, that besides the churches, a Franciscan convent which is a poorhouse now, and the Rathhaus, there were but few houses of better building than wood, clay, and thatch. Such aggregations of inflammable material, huddles in narrow winding streets, needed no modern stimulation of insurances to get burned down. Then sanitation had not of course been heard of, no drains, or even pavements invented. In this very city, in the last half of the 17^th century, troops had to be called out to enforce the moving of muck-heaps from the streets. Hence, plague, even in the few intervals of peace, alternated with fire. Peace seldom smiled upon the land. To go no further back than the said mucky period, Swedes and Imperialists were killing each other and destroying the lives and livelihood of these Mecklenburgers. In 1638, no corn was or could be sowed in the land; men enough were not left alive to do the work. Dearth followed, few as were the mouths to feed; rye rose to ten times its previous price. Dearth deepened into actual famine; poor wretches resorted to loathsome food, dogs, cats, rats, mice; corpses were dug up out of graves and devoured; there are awful records of even murders committed by cannibals. Then to famine succeeded pestilence; eight thousand died in this one little town alone. The horrors committed by both the combatants were too dreadful for description. The Swedes had come to help the Protestants, but treated them like fiends. The poet von Logau called after them on their retreat from Germany:- 'The fat of all the beasts that you have robbed, with the ashes of all the homes that you have burned, will not yield soap enough, nor the river Oder water enough, to cleanse your consciences.'"

Doughty does not exaggerate. The above account refers to the Thirty Years War 1618-1648. Worse followed in that war, then in the Seven Years War 1756-1763, again during the occupation by Napoleonic troops 1803-13 and finally in the Befreiungskriege to rid Germany of Napoleon which culminated in the Battle of Waterloo 1815. Thereafter followed the freeing of the serfs in 1820, which in the twenty-first century, when the word "freedom" has only positive connotations, sounds like a good thing. Far from it. Freedom meant being thrown upon a harsh world just trying to recover from the Napoleonic Wars. The former tied labourers, for the word "serf" is not wholly appropriate since in England it is more of a mediaeval term, often found themselves not so much "freed" as out of both home and job. Certain agrarian improvements, such as the eighteenth century saw in England, meant in fact that landowners could dispense with many of their workers who became vagrants and ended in the workhouse. Small towns such as Neubrandenburg lived mainly from agriculture and local industry producing farming equipment. Only Neubrandenburg's wool and horse markets brought the town countrywide fame.

The constitution of Mecklenburg, dating back to 1523, kept power in the hands of the Grand-Dukes, the nobility, and, in the cities, the guilds, who controlled and restricted the labour market. Not until 1918 when all Germany was engulfed in post-war revolution, the Kaiser had abdicated, the Grand-Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz had committed suicide and the Grand-Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin had abdicated and fled to Denmark, did the Dukedoms receive a democratic constitution.

As we know from the experience of Friedrich Daniel Bassermann (see the article A Liberal German), the attempt to give all Germany a democratically elected parliament had thoroughly failed in 1848. For many of the unenfranchised population of Mecklenburg this left only one way out: emigration. There are a number of web-sites, especially from North America, which document the huge wave of emigration to the New World right down to detailed lists of individual names. The Institute for Migration and Ancestral Reasearch e.V. in Rostock was founded in 1994 to help children of emigrants research their German origins (http://www.imar-mv.com/fm_startseite.htm) . According to this site, 250,000 Mecklenburgers left their homeland between 1850 and 1900, of whom 200,000 went overseas mainly to the USA, and this out of a total population recorded in 1875 as 645,000 over both the Grand Duchies.

During their explorations of Northern Germany the Doughty family visited and sketched a number of fine Brick Gothic buildings, including the Marienkirche in Neubrandenburg of which Doughty wrote "That rough brick and terra cotta could be coaxed into the delicate tracery of its windows is marvellous." The so-called Backsteingotik achieved its greatest magnificence in the North European Plain which stretches from the North Sea to Russia. Its rocks were ground to sand and clay by the last ice cap, occasionally leaving behind huge boulders but not enough natural stone for building more than the foundations. Any building that was intended to last and survive the frequent fires had thus to be made of brick. Few could afford private dwellings built entirely of hand-formed bricks. Those who could were the rich Hanseatic cities, the monasteries and the Teutonic Knights.

The website Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Discover North Germany http://www.all-in-all.com/english/index.htm has an excellent section on the Brick Gothic architecture of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in English as well as German. The Danzig/Gdansk-based website (in German, Polish and English) of the New Hanseatic League http://hanza.gdansk.gda.pl/index_n.html gives a comprehensive history of the Hanseatic League, including a list of 201 original Hanseatic cities and over 200 city members from 16 countries of the New Hanseatic League, with links to the individual website of each. There are also a number of books available on the subject of Brick Gothic. Worthy of mention are Hans Joachim Budeit: Backstein: Die schönsten Ziegelbauten zwischen Elbe und Oder (2001, ISBN: 3765812064) and Georg Piltz and Constantin Beyer: Backsteingotik zwischen Lübeck und Wolgast (2000
ISBN: 3881893415)

More Brick Gothic awaited the Doughty family on their railway excursion to Lübeck, once known as the Queen of the Hanseatic League. The first view even from the train is impressive; a mediaeval 'warmstorynge of heihe towres' and lofty spires; and as one steps from the station the impression deepens. What first attracts, is the mass of the Holsten Thor in the middle distance, with its two immense pointed spires, and that rude, rich, and strangely foreign look which buildings in this antique Baltic-Gothic style invariably wear. Beyond, one sees red roofs and lofty towers, among which rise conspicuous two pairs of great twin brethren, the double spires of two famous churches. We found our way to the picturesque market place, the ancient arcaded Rathhaus on two sides of the square, and over the roofs of housesthe huge bulk of St. Mary's Church. The same is true for Lübeck today. As you approach it you see the famous seven spires of its churches on the horizon. The old centre of Lübeck stands on an island in the Trave River and is crammed full with narrow, cobbled streets and tiny alleyways. Gabled merchants' houses line the main streets and the Town Hall is so magnificent as to leave you in no doubt about the city's mediaeval prosperity. It was badly bombed by us British on 28^th March 1942, Palm Sunday, in revenge for Hitler's bombing of Coventry, but, thanks to the efforts of Carl Jakob Burckhardt, and the banker Eric Warburg, it was saved from further attacks on the grounds that it was the centre for shipments of aid to the Allied prisoners-of-war.

The story of how the planned final destruction of Lübeck was prevented is an interesting one. Eric Warburg and his family were forced to leave National Socialist Germany in 1938, leaving behind them in Hamburg the bank founded by Eric's great-grandfather in 1798. When the United States entered the war Eric, who had taken American citizenship, entered the US Army. In 1943 he was sent to England where he acted as liaison officer between the US Army Air Force General Staff and the Royal Air Force. He was horrified to learn, shortly after his arrival in England, that Air Marshall Arthur Tedder was planning a raid on Lübeck with the intention of razing it to the ground. He knew there were few factories of any importance in the city and the destruction would mean the loss of centuries of Northern European cultural heritage, while bringing the Allies no military advantage. Three of the great Gothic churches had already been badly damaged in the first raid. Warburg approached Tedder and begged him to call off the action. He even contacted Tedder's lady-friend to see if she could persuade him to change his mind, but Tedder was implacable. With ten days to go Warburg remembered one of his cousins who was at that time working for the International Red Cross in Geneva, Carl Jakob Burckhardt. Using a line kept open for diplomatic purposes Warburg telephoned him at once and within forty-eight hours the British government received a message informing it that Lübeck was the port for shipments of Red Cross parcels for Scandinavian prisoners-of -war. Lübeck was saved and in June 1944, after much hard negotiation became the main port for Red Cross shipments until the end of the war. On 2^nd May 1945 British troops entered the city without meeting resistance. Burckhardt became President of the International Red Cross in 1945.

Anyone who knows a little about German literature will have encountered the Mann family, whose writings take up a significant amount of space in the literary life of Germany in the twentieth century. First comes Thomas, the best known, though not necessarily the one everybody puts first in order of preference; then his brother Heinrich, then Thomas' sons Golo and Klaus. More, much more, needs to be said about them in a future, but while we are looking at Lübeck we must note that the Mann family grew up here and that Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks was set in the family home, which still stands at Mengstrasse 4, one of those typical Hanseatic merchant's houses with the great drive-in doorway in the centre, the merchant's office, Kontor, and store-rooms to either side, and the living quarters on the floors above. The story of Buddenbrooks roughly coincides with the time when the Doughty family was exploring North Germany. What they saw would have been the situation in Lübeck just as the Buddenbrook family was in its famous decline. The Buddenbrooks represent that patrician merchant class to which Germany owes, among other things, its many proud historic cities, quite different in their development from such small towns as Neubrandenburg.

The Doughty family continued their journey through Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and up the Elbe to Bohemia, at that time part of Austria-Hungary. They were impressed like present-day tourists by the Albrechtsburg, that imposing castle at Meissen where the first European porcelain was created, and by the rocky cliffs of the Elbsandsteingebirge. The Doughty daughters made some fine drawings of this last part of the journey.

They found the Germans helpful when they got into difficulties trying to steer in the darkness, and recorded their thoughts on the colourful Bohemian peasants who passed them in the mountains on one of their last excursions: We climbed one day up to the Prebischthor. A swift stream flows through a narrow valley hemmed in by overhanging rocks. In the valley a long scattered village; houses, part stone part logs, each with its enclosed balcony, where clothes of many colours hang to dry. We walked beside the stream, through the village. Then a turn left-handed along a tributary stream. Ox-waggons laden with timber came lumbering along the road; fine-looking fellows driving them, clean dark faces with drooping moustaches, hanging pipes, high boots, blue aprons, and jackets bordered - trimmed, the girls called it - with red. And women of burden met us, bent under weighty loads of firewood; dirty enough poor things! But picturesque; a gay kerchief about their heads, short striped red and blue skirts, bare-legged, striped woollen footless socks round their ankles, and bare-footed. They looked as if they never had been young; yet never failing was the weary smile and courteous 'Tag,' as they staggered aside to let the pleasure-seekers pass.