Fever Dreams – Traveling Tannenberg (Northern Poland & Berlin #36)

I can never pull the needle out of my arm. I do not need pills or boos or bets. I just need something obscure, something historical, something that brings the past back to life and makes me feel a connection to it. To find a place in history that I can mentally make my own. This is the equivalent for me of needle and vein. The power of a historic place when combined with information and imagination is a recipe for magic in its purest form. Too much can never be enough. After finally making it to the Tannenberg Memorial and the spot where General Alexander Samsonov shot himself on the final day of the battle, I felt an uncontrollable urge to find other sites associated with Tannenberg. I was experiencing the adrenaline rush from visiting two obscure and long sought after sites in a single morning. Now I knew finding more places associated with Tannenberg was in my immediate future.

Here was an opportunity to string together successes. Confidence can be contagious, and I suddenly had a burst of it. Anything seemed not only possible, but probable. My imagination went into overdrive. There had to be more needles in the haystack. Surely there were remnants of the battle hidden in the woods or half buried in the sandy soil. The journey of discovery had just begun. While my travel companion and I had only a single day to discover as much of Tannenberg as possible, I knew this was just the start of something that was likely to go on for years. I had been in this state of mind before in Lviv, Pecs, Transylvania and Carnuntum. These were places I returned to on multiple occasions.

Time Travel – Searching For 1914

How can you return to a place you have never left? My special places felt like home, because they were. On a spiritual level, I had been to them long before my first visit. These were places that lived deep inside of me long before I ever laid eyes upon them. There is a certain feeling I get when visiting my favorite places in Eastern Europe. The feeling is instinctual, elemental, out of body and otherworldly. It feels as though I am floating on air. That is a feeling I am forever seeking. And when I cannot get to these intensely personal places physically, I go there intellectually by reading, writing, and Google Earth. And when I cannot not get there intellectually, I go there mentally by daydreaming my way back to a rendezvous with an obscure destiny. This is what Tannenberg felt like for me. A fever dream, that I wanted to suffer from forever. After all, the best times of my life have been lived in ecstatic obscurity. ?

Now imagine if you will for a moment suffering from an addiction so powerful that it can pull you thousands of kilometers across an entire ocean, to a region where you cannot speak the language and have never been before. A place that has no family or personal connection to you whatsoever. The allure of a battlefield where none of your ancestors fought or ever even walked. And yet for reasons unknown you feel the urgent need to do whatever is necessary to go there and experience it for yourself. That is the addiction that drew me to Tannenberg and then drove me to go down nameless dirt roads, to crawl into the brush, to walk across suspect terrain in the hope of finding another piece of Tannenberg. To reach back in time and touch 1914, if only for a moment. On this journey across space and time, I pulled my travel companion along with me. Thankfully, he was as eager as me to travel back in time.

Lost & Found - Signs of Battle

While standing at the Samsonov Monument, I stared into the surrounding forest trying to imagine what else awaited our discovery. They would surely have come across signs of the battle. The area is still extremely rural and quite remote, especially by European standards. The amount of personal items from soldiers left on the field of battle has to be in the tens of thousands. Everything from coins to buttons to rifle butts would have been dropped or discarded while soldiers were fighting for their lives. The two opposing armies put 380,000 men into the field. There is no telling how many bullets and breadcrumbs were scattered to the wind. We will never know, but that has never stopped anyone from trying to find traces of the past.

Part of the allure of Tannenberg as a battlefield is its elusive nature. There is a decided lack of memorials and monuments compared to other famous battlefields in Europe. This only served to make me want to see it more. Tannenberg is one of the more remote battlefields, even for Eastern Europe. There is no dedicated national historic site with an information center to direct visitors. The Polish nation that now holds the battlefield within its borders was not one of the major combatants. Neither German nor Russians live in the area. The battlefield is an orphan, separated from those who fought over it. No wonder, there is so little focus on where the fighting actually took place.

Shifting Sands – Violence In Motion

One of the problems with discovering more of Tannenberg is that there are so many places to look. The battle was fought across a wide swathe of East Prussia. The region has not changed that much since 1914. This should mean there are still many areas of the fighting left relatively untouched. The problem is that these are just as remote as they were during the battle. Russian soldiers were constantly getting lost. The same thing can happen to tourists. GPS can only take you so far. Tannenberg was a very fluid battle, fought across vast spaces over multiple days. It is not easy to find focal points. The center of battle was constantly shifting. As was our journey.