A wherry was a boat used on the Norfolk Broads a hundred or so years ago. This particular drawing of a wherry provides me with a link to those regions of Germany which we in the West were not allowed to visit for 28 years between 1961 and 1989. When the Iron Curtain across Europe was finally removed in 1989 there was in the West an immense curiosity to see those long hidden territories. Had they changed completely? Were the cities ruined by Communist mass housing? Was the countryside irreparably damaged by collective farming or huge industrial complexes? Had history and traditions been forgotten or superseded or lost in re-education? Since then we have learnt to ask humbler questions. We have seen, much to our surprise, that Communism and Capitalism alike have had some fairly destructive effects on town and country. We have stopped looking at things through pro-Western filters and applied some of the same questions to ourselves, realising that any differences are a matter of degree rather than of stark black-white contrast.

Some of the first to rush in after 1989 were the German television camera teams, who made wonderful topographical series entitled Streifzüge or Reisewege or Bilder aus Deutschland, now, of course, already a valuable record of a state of things which has since moved on. We were fascinated, having lived in Germany for so many years and never having been able to travel through so much of Germany's historic territory. The area that seemed least changed as far as we could judge was what is now called Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It lies along the coast of the Baltic Sea and used to be divided up into a number of principalities such as the Grand Duchies of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz. It is covered by a chain of lakes and canals and is the home of a variety of wildlife we in England can only dream about.

The historical map above shows the area at about the time towards the end of the nineteenth century when the Norfolk wherry becomes involved in the story. One can make out the two Grand Duchies and to the east Pommern (Pomerania). The modern map gives a better idea of the many lakes which are linked together by rivers and canals, so that one can, in fact, travel through most of them without setting foot on land, which is what the wherry does, as we shall see.

In the midst of all our excitement in 1989 my older son, who has a knack of finding the right thing at just the right moment, discovered a splendid book in a local antique shop and made me a present of it for my birthday the following year. It came, he was told, from the collection belonging to a farming family from our area of southern England, who had just decided to go and farm in post-Communist Hungary and escape the difficulties of farming in England. Its title was Our Wherry in Wendish Lands - From Friesland through the Mecklenburg Lakes to Bohemia, and it was published in London by Jarrold & Sons of 3 Paternoster Buildings. No date is shown but it must have been in 1891 or 1892, for the journey took place in 1890. The author was H.M.Doughty and he had evidently written several other accounts of journeys in his boat. He must have kept detailed notes of everything they saw and experienced, since his book proves a real mine of information, very interesting to have to hand when watching the many television programmes about the same newly accessible regions. And the other splendid feature of the book is the collection of delightful pen illustrations by two of his daughters who accompanied him. The others on board were the butler, who also cooked, a Suffolk fisherman and a Friesian sailor. In 1985 the Ashford Press in Southampton published a facsimile reprint which is still obtainable. In 2001 a German translation with original illustrations appeared was published by Quick Maritim Medien.

The wherry was 53 feet long and 13½ feet wide with a mast that could be lowered to pass under bridges and a keel that could be removed for shallows. It had one sail, a large gaff and no boom. The deck house contained a kitchen and men's cabin at one end and two main cabins, a saloon and a ladies' cabin at the other end, with a bath in each companion way and plenty of storage space. The author's description makes it sound most inviting: "The ladies' cabin has four beds, not one above the other, but end on, two on each side; cold water is laid on, and there is a dressing table, a cheval glass, and two capacious chests of drawers. At the dining-table in the saloon is room for eight; hooks for two hammocks are in the beams overhead. In both cabins lockers and drawers are everywhere." The boat had been planned to accommodate all six children of the owner as well as three men. They began their journey on 26 July and voyaged more than 1600 miles through Germany before returning to the port of Hamburg on 21 October 1890.

The wherry cabin

The "Wendish Lands" in the book's title refers to the Wenden, a Slavonic tribe which settled in the region between the Elbe and Oder rivers from about 600 AD and of whom there are still traces to be found in the population of this area. They are famous for their beautiful old farmhouses built in a circle (Rundling) with the great end gable facing onto the village green to which there was traditionally only one entrance. Charlemagne fought several campaigns against them around the end of the eighth century, at least partly in the name of Christianity.

A Rundling and a Wendish farmhouse

The Saxon King Henry I conquered the Wends in 928 and by setting up new bishoprics and walled towns, was able to consolidate his success. But, as with Slavonic tribes generally, the subjugation did not last and Christian ambitions combined with the need for more land led to crusades being undertaken not only to Palestine. At the time of the Second Crusade against Islam 1147-1149 Heinrich der Löwe (Henry the Lion), King of Saxony and Bavaria, was much more interested in expanding his territory eastwards with what is known as the Wendish Crusade which lasted intermittently from 1147 to 1185. He continued to strengthen his influence by founding more bishoprics in Ratzeburg, Oldenburg and Mecklenburg, which latter derives its name from the Wendish fortification Michelenburg south of Wismar on the Baltic coast.

Henry the Lion was married to Mathilda, or Maud, daughter of Henry II (Plantagenet) of England, at whose court he was forced to spend a few years in exile after quarrelling with the German Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. After the latter had drowned during the Third Crusade, Henry made his peace with the next Emperor, Heinrich VI. All of this was really a dynastic struggle about land and influence in the Holy Roman Empire, that hegemony which was in fact a revival of the original Roman Empire with a distinctly Christian mission, hence the inspiration it gave to the cause of defeating the heathen in northern and eastern Europe.

Thus the region, through which the crew of the wherry Gipsy travelled, while free of any actual Roman history, since the Romans never conquered the north and east of Germany, was thickly covered in layers of past tribal movements, settlements, kingdoms, dukedoms, battlefields and burial grounds. The North German Plain owes its existence to the last great Ice Age. It stretches with hardly a hillock for hundreds of miles under a vast sky with fantastic cloud formations. It is criss-crossed by streams, channels, rivers and lakes all with their attendant mists and the peculiar light effects caused by the moisture content of the air. The silent movement of the wherry could hardly have disturbed the mysterious countryside as they passed. The book contains a map of their journey, red lines showing their route by water up the Elbe, through the lakes of Mecklenburg and back up the Elbe into Bohemia. Dotted red lines indicate extra excursions made by rail.

That the author of the book, H. M. Doughty, was conscious all the time of the historical links between Germany and England is illustrated particularly well in a passage he wrote about their arrival in the "Wendish Lands" along the Elbe, just after leaving Lauenburg, south-east of Hamburg. "We were now well within the ancient 'Wendish Land' - for no less than 800 years the home of a wild race of Sclav (sic) hunters and fighters 'over sea and sand', the Wends. For generations, Christian Saxons and heathen Wends had slaughtered each other, by way of pious missionary argument, till at length Henry the Lion conquered and killed Niklot Prince of the Wends, in a battle by the river Warnow. The interest of this fight, fought so long - 700 years - ago, is of more than mere academic interest to Englishmen; for it is strange as true, that the blood of both the Christian and heathen chiefs, the conqueror and the conquered, runs united in the veins of our English royal family. Our Queen is a direct descendant of both Henry the Lion and Prince Niklot. Henry was a Guelph prince - Her Majesty has no more famous ancestor _ and the Queen's grandmother, good Queen Charlotte - a Mecklenburg princess - was descended directly from the Obotrite Niklot. That ancient house of Mecklenburg is the one reigning family in Germany which is in the male line descended from the Wends. It has, except one short usurpation by Wallenstein, reigned since the heathen times (or rather since Niklot's son was restored) without a break; and to this day its members keep the old title of Princes of Wenden." The Queen Charlotte he refers to was the wife of George III and mother of Edward, Duke of Kent and Victoria's father. She was of the Mecklenburg-Strelitz line.

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.

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 the President of the International Red Cross, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, and the banker Eric Warburg, it was saved from further attacks because it was the centre for shipments of aid to the Allied prisoners-of-war.

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.