East Prussian Nights

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East Prussian Nights is a poem or a short story by Alexander Solzhenitsyn , the Russian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature . Like The Gulag Archipelago , it was only published after its expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974.

Solzhenitsyn wrote down his experiences during the occupation of East Prussia in poetry in the volume Ostpreußische Nights and as a story in Schwenkitten '45 .

He describes atrocities committed by soldiers such as robbery, mass rape and murder, including an experience in the city of Neidenburg in Masuria :

“Twenty-two, Höringstrasse.
No fire yet, but desolate, plundered.
Muffled by the wall - a groan:
I still find my mother alive.
Was there a lot on the mattress?
Company? Indent? What is it doing!
Daughter - still child, killed soon.
Everything simply according to the slogan:
FORGET NOTHING! FORGIVE NOTHING!
BLOOD FOR BLOOD! - and tooth for tooth.
Whoever is still a virgin becomes a woman,
and women - corpses soon.
Already foggy, eyes bloody,
begs: “Kill me, soldier!
Doesn't the clouded look see?
I belong to them too! «” (P. 35.)

In the last lines of his poetry, Solzhenitsyn confesses that he, too, abused a captured woman.

Solzhenitsyn's portrayal is characterized by criticism and self-criticism of what happened and sympathy for the victims. He therefore tried to prevent publication, fearing that he would be called a traitor to the fatherland in the Soviet Union.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ published under the title: Ostpreußische Nights. A poem in verse , Russian-German, translated by Nikolaus Ehlert, Luchterhand, Darmstadt and Neuwied 1976
  2. ↑ published by Langen Müller, from the Russian by Heddy Pross-Weerth and Fedor B. Pojakov, Munich 2004 ISBN 3784429645
  3. ↑ Russ'scher way . In: Der Spiegel . No. 9 , 1976, p. 152-154 ( online ).