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Excerpt from the text:
In the mornings there was always a ceremony with Eichendorff,
Hölderlin, Kleist’s »Germania to her Children«,
followed by the hymn, sung softly, »Day has broken over
lagoon and moor. Light is risen in the East«. A map
was unrolled. How lovely the names of the places sounded:
Tannenberg, Allenstein, Cadinen. And of course Marienburg.
All in vain.
At night, they went off to the moors. There they waited »for
the sun to burn a hole in the clouds of night, for the moor
to awaken, throw off the veil of mist and begin to speak clearly
with the song of the lark, the beat of the meadow pipit’s
wing and the curlew’s whistle.«
And at that same moment, the cartographers began to speak
clearly too – of lost villages, vanished towns.
They spoke of places that no longer existed. Of places they
knew only from their maps. They spoke of the homeland and
the misfortune of being born too late. There they stood, knee-deep
in the mire, pining for home.
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