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. ( )

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! ( )

Forgotten Land is an account of the history of German East Prussia from its beginnings through its partition and ethnic cleansing to the present day. Now divided between Lithuania, Russia, and Poland, East Prussia is in many ways a place lost to the winds; however, through this book Egremont manages to bring it back to life. Wanting to understand the land and the people who lived there, he travelled to Russian Kaliningrad, to the Lithuanian Memelland, and Polish Masuria as well as to the Königsberg Museum in Duisburg and the East Prussian Museum in Lüneburg. But it is the people he meets and the stories he recounts that truly makes the story shine. Even when it was still an integral part of Germany, East Prussia remained a place apart: still rural and semi-feudal and dominated by the Baltic and the forest. The bread-basket of Germany, it was a major center for trading with the lands to the east and a world apart from Cologne, Munich, or even Berlin. What existed there can never return, but it is good I think that people remember what once was, whether it is the hunting lodge at Rominten, Thomas Mann's seaside cottage at Nidden, or the middle class Königsberg society that produced both Kant and Käthe Kollwitz.

A nostalgic history of a land that is no more and yet can be visited to this day. Highly recommended. ( )

A rambling and anecdotal travelogue and history of East Prussia. In the end it beautifully conveys to non-German readers the sense of a lost civilization (warts and all). Who knew the Curonian Spit was such a special place! ( )