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Includes the name: Max Egremont

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The Duke's Children: The Complete Text (2015) — Introduktion, nogle udgaver103 eksemplarer
The English Landscape: Its Character and Diversity (1700) — Bidragyder — 76 eksemplarer

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This is the first book I've read that I couldn't get a grip on at all, no matter the many attempts. Seriously, I just couldn't even move from paragraph to paragraph. I couldn't figure out the structure of the book, it all seemed so random and confusing to me. I really wanted to learn something, but it was as if the matter was closed to me. Not sure if the problem is with the book or with me, trying to understand that book I never felt so incapable of something in my life, weird.
 
Markeret
ptimes | 1 anden anmeldelse | Jan 31, 2024 |
Egremont tries to recapture something of the pre-1939 world of German East Prussia, a region now divided between northern Poland and the Kaliningrad exclave of Russia. He visits East Prussian exiles and their—now rather neglected— museums in West Germany, does a bit of tentative travelling in the region itself, and digs into the published memoirs of a range of people who lived through some of the catastrophes of the twentieth century there.

As you might perhaps expect, he’s particularly interested in great landowning families (like his own), so we get to hear quite a lot about members of the Junker class who helped to enable Hitler’s rise to power and then decided that they didn’t entirely approve of his methods. As well as a few charming British adventurers of eccentric conservative views. There’s a rather token left-wing presence from Käthe Kollwitz, a Jewish musician and a Protestant pastor. But nothing about peasants and industrial workers who must have formed the great majority of the East Prussian population. Interesting as far as it goes, but rather haphazard.… (mere)
½
 
Markeret
thorold | 3 andre anmeldelser | Jul 28, 2023 |
Elegy for the Baltic Germans or Baltischdeutschedämmerung*
Review of the Picador UK hardcover edition (July 22, 2021)

[Rating 4.5 (some points off for errata, see below) from a Balto-Finnic point of view as there was plenty here that I had never known before, may be a 3 to 4 for other readers]
See photo at https://cdn.panos.co.uk/cache/mcache2/00222582.jpg
View of the Narva River on the border between Estonia and Russia viewed from the North. Ivangorod Castle (Russia) can see seen on the left and Hermann Castle (Estonia) can be viewed on the right. Photograph by Carlos Spottorno for Panos UK. Image sourced from Panos.Co.UK.

The Glass Wall is a curious mix of travelogue, memoir, historical anecdotes and the plot summaries of various fictional works. Writer Max Egremont travels to various cities in Estonia and Latvia and meets up with local friends & guides who take him primarily to visit various historic manor houses or their ruins from the times of the Baltic-German landowners who became dominant in Livonia since the Baltic Crusades of the 13th Century through to Tsarist times until Estonian & Latvian Independence in 1918. Lithuania, although a Baltic country, is not visited and is hardly mentioned, as it was more under Polish influence & domination during those times.

The structure of the book doesn't follow any geographical route or pattern that I could understand. Each chapter is usually based out of one city, town or manor. So the chapter themes jump from (in a simplified list) 1. Riga, 2. Narva, 3. Palmse, 4. Cēsis, 5. Narva, 6. Tallinn, 7. Orellen, 8. Rundāle, 9. Riga, 10. Jaunmoku / Liepāja, 11. Daugavpils [mostly about the Latvian heritage of the painter Mark Rothko], 12. Rēzekne, 13. Tallinn / Kolga, 14. Gut Blumbergshof (now Lobērģi), 15. [not centred on a town, mostly about German Army commanders], 16. Regen, Fortress Weißenstein in Bavaria [Vegesack family related], 17. [mostly about the Baltic years of Otto von Kursell & Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter], 18. Stāmeriena [home of Licy von Wolff, later wife of Sicilian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 19. Warthegau [the area of Poland expropriated by the Nazis for returning Baltic Germans], 20. Riga [about Jewish resistance to the Nazis), 21. [mostly about Siegfried von Vegesack] 22. Lestene, 23. [about the early Latvian & Estonian Presidents Ulmanis and Päts], 24. Lake Peipsi [about the Old Believers], 25. Saaremaa / Hiiumaa. Each chapter then usually focuses on a local historical personage, family, building of interest as in some of the examples i've detailed above.

When local site and historical anecdotes have been exhausted, Egremont turns regularly to various International, Baltic-German, Estonian and (hardly any) Latvian authors to bump up the content by inserting the plot summaries of works such as Georges Simenon's Pietr the Latvian (1931), Anthony Powell's Venusberg (1932) [about a fictional Baltic city], Siegfried von Vegesack's Die baltische Tragödie (The Baltic Tragedy: a trilogy of novels from 1933-1936) and Jaan Kross's Keisri hull (The Tsar's Madman) (1978). While those works may be based on historical characters and events, they are still fiction, so it was odd to read so much about them. It was especially interesting though to learn about the books that I had never read or heard of previously.

Errata (These are mostly Estonian misspellings, someone who knows Latvian should copyedit this book for further possible corrections)
Page xiii "Jaan Kross, who in the 1970s was considered for the Nobel Prize." > incorrect information, as Jaan Kross had published only a few book by the 1970s. It would be more correct to say it was during the 1990's to 2000s, by which time he had published a few dozen books and additionally had several international translations.
Page 14 "Sinnimae or Blue Hills" s/b Sinimäe or Blue Hills
Page 15 "The Sinnimae battles" s/b The Sinimãe battles
Page 53 "Kalew" s/b Kalev
Page 131 "There'd had been previous deaths..." s/b There had been previous deaths...
Page 159 "Alexander is spruce, out on the land or seated in negotiations ..." s/b ? doesn't make sense, perhaps meant to mean "spruced up"?
Page 223 "Ivars Avask" s/b "Ivar Ivask" (an Estonian poet, although perhaps his Latvian wife called him Ivars, the last name is wrong in any case)
Page 230 "such as such as" s/b such as
Page 240 "Kalivipoeg" s/b Kalevipoeg
Page 265 "Okasanen" s/b Oksanen (i.e. the Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen).

Other Reviews
Life on the Edge of Europe by Tom Ball, The TImes, July 17, 2021.
A Baltic travelogue unearths a forgotten past by Edward Lucas, The Economist, July 24, 2021.
Icy Edge of Empires by Ian Thomson, Financial Times, July 30, 2021.
Knights and Commissars by Keith Lowe, Literary Review, no date.

Trivia and Links
The cover photograph for the Picador UK edition, although it is in Black & White and printed on a rather ancient looking piece of paper, is actually from a modern day photographic essay project by Carlos Spottorno which has been incorporated into a non-fiction graphic novel La grieta (The Crack) (2016) about the European immigration crisis. You can read more about the project and view some sample pages from the graphic novel at https://spottorno.com/la-grieta

* Baltischdeutschedämmerung = Twilight of the Baltic Germans, after Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung = Twilight of the Gods.
… (mere)
½
 
Markeret
alanteder | 1 anden anmeldelse | Sep 8, 2021 |
Egremont traces the experiences of a moderate sized group of East Prussians across the two 20th Century world wars. The book is a bit scattered - he jumps around between the stories rather than telling them one by one. We get little snippets and then he'll back up and give the story leading up to the snippet, with maybe a few more stories in between. It doesn't get too far out of hand though.

Probably the main theme is the contrast between a kind of idyllic memory of folks from East Prussia, versus the brutal realities that are lost with that kind of air brush vision. It reminds me of how plantations in the USA south get romanticized and the cruelty of the slave holding system gets left out.

I like learning big history through attention to smaller details. For sure 1914-1945 concerned a lot more than East Prussia, but East Prussia provides a reasonable vantage point from which to look at those events. And it's a pretty interesting area anyway. One tidbit stood out for me - the largest bookstore in Germany was in Konigsburg!
… (mere)
1 stem
Markeret
kukulaj | 3 andre anmeldelser | Sep 10, 2019 |

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15
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449
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