Germany’s Ex-Gentry Is in a Bind

WINKWITZ, Germany — Give or take a few decades of political tyranny, wars and invasions, Georg zur Lippe and his noble forebears have produced quality wines from their family estate here in the fairy-tale Saxon highlands for 1,000 years.

For Lippe, the Communist expropriation of his father’s land and the neglect of its natural bounty for more than 50 years have been a few skipped heartbeats in centuries of dynastic tradition.

“As a family, we think in generations,” says Lippe, who has bought back enough of the land seized by Soviet troops in 1945 to nurse the vineyard back to life and restore Castle Proschwitz vintages to the region’s finest tables.

“If it takes two or three generations of work and investment to restore ourselves, that’s OK. Money isn’t everything,” says Lippe, who carries the hereditary title of prince and staggering debts he has accumulated during his determined transformation from Munich consultant to gentleman farmer.

But most erstwhile eastern land barons are discovering that rekindling the way of life that was snuffed out during the Communist era is as hindered by social prejudice and legal pitfalls as by monetary constraints.

In rural areas where territorial wealth was regarded as exploitation even before the Communists took over, resistance is strong to resurrecting a lifestyle of leisure and privilege, even though the would-be nobles vow to inspire a rebirth of culture and spirituality.

“Reconstruction of eastern Germany is about more than just modern telephones and wider freeways,” Lippe insists as he strolls the grounds of his recovered castle, gesturing toward a backdrop of majestic mountains and medieval spires. “Places like this are needed to get the creative juices flowing. This is the land of thinkers and poets, and the best use for this beautiful house is as some cross between business and culture.”

‘Red Barons’ Are Putting Up a Fight

Other survivors of the former nobility, such as the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family of Brandenburg state and the Von Rohrs of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, have similar projects in the works to restore their long-neglected country mansions as cultural centers. But even eight years after Germany’s reunification and amid the long work of undoing Communist damage, few have advanced as far as Lippe, who is still at least a year away from completing the cellar-to-weather-vane reconstruction of his estate.

Most descendants of the eastern German nobility that once populated hundreds of castles and mansions still gracing hilltop and grove are encountering organized resistance from the so-called “red barons”--former Communist bigwigs who engineered shady property transfers to the state agencies they controlled in the months before the reunification of Germany in 1990.

Even more frustrating, argue heirs of the dispossessed, is the federal government’s own vested interest in obstructing former landowners who seek the restoration of their seized property.

Proceeds from the sale of estates confiscated between 1945 and 1949, when Soviet troops occupied eastern Germany and expelled the most wealthy people as enemies of the workers’ state, go to the government to help with the reconstruction of the east. A Soviet stipulation at the time of reunification, reportedly demanded by then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, prevents those lands from being considered for restitution to former owners.

Those who lost eastern German property to the Nazis up until early 1945 or to the East German state after it was established in 1949 can apply to the German government for compensation for their losses or restoration of their lands if the properties haven’t been deeded to others who used them during the Communist era.

Why Gorbachev as the leader of a superpower was concerned about post-Communist property redistribution in Germany is now a matter of considerable debate and dispute. But German courts have upheld the exclusion, legitimizing the federal government’s claim to income at the expense of those dispossessed by the Russians.

That decision leaves heirs of those victimized during the Soviet occupation no alternative for recovering their families’ holdings except outright purchase. Even that is complicated by the government’s preference for selling to those with job-creating proposals, making it unlikely that even well-heeled former owners can win a competitive bid.

Twist of Fate Left One Set of Heirs Bereft

Julius H. Schoeps is one of four living descendants of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy banking family, whose assets were “aryanized” under Adolf Hitler but whose country estate in Brandenburg state’s Boernicke enclave was seized only after the Soviet Red Army arrived.

The once-lavish summer estate, Castle in the Mark, was spared Nazi expropriation when its onetime owner, Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, willed it to his non-Jewish wife for her lifetime and to his Jewish sisters thereafter. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who was childless, foresaw the Nazis’ anti-Semitic intentions before his death in 1935 and arranged the unusual bequest in hopes that the repression of Jews would pass by the time of his wife’s death, Schoeps says.

But in a twist of fate, the last Boernicke baron’s insight ended up leaving his heirs little chance of recovering the three-story mansion or its surrounding 4,500 acres. His willing it to his wife, Elsa, successfully protected it from Nazi confiscation only to keep it available for the Red Army and later for the local Communist government, whose former officials still hold it.

“My family’s property has been confiscated three times now--by the Soviets, by the East Germans and by the government of reunited Germany,” says Schoeps, who is fighting what he concedes is an uphill legal battle for restoration. His late mother, Marie, was one of the four Mendelssohn-Bartholdy sisters, who fled Germany during the war years.

Schoeps disparages the waste of property as much as the injustice, noting that what was once an elegant cultural forum is now a firetrap and juvenile hangout. Mushrooms sprout in the cracks and crevices of the molding wainscoting, and every window in the three-story mansion is broken. Graffiti have replaced priceless artworks, and birds nest in an attic exposed by holes in the roof.

“There are 400 country estates just in the state of Brandenburg, and most of them are just sitting there empty and rotting,” says Schoeps, a professor of history who maintains the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam, a foundation for European Jewish studies named after the noted 18th century philosopher from whom he is descended.

A Business Invasion Crowded Lavish Estate

During the Communist era, Castle in the Mark and its grounds were invaded by workshops and factories, including the plumbing business run by Boernicke’s current deputy mayor, Karl-Heinz Posselt. Because the former Communist official’s business already occupies part of the estate grounds and he has promised to create dozens of new jobs if allowed to buy the mansion, Posselt’s proposal won approval from the regional property committee last year over Schoeps’ plan to create a private academy for musically gifted children.

Posselt has been unable to make the purchase for lack of financing, and Schoeps is working his way through lengthy legal appeals, leaving the property in limbo.

Schoeps’ lawyer, Lutz Krueger, contends that because the government gets the proceeds from sale of properties nationalized between 1945 and 1949, there is strong incentive to deny former owners’ claims for restitution.

“It’s all about money,” says Krueger. “Every estate returned to its owners is that much less the government has [in hand] to pay for the costs of unification.”

Documents Attest to Last-Minute Transfers

In his sleek offices on Berlin’s Kurfuerstendamm shopping street, Krueger has amassed documents attesting to last-minute property transfers on Mendelssohn-Bartholdy land in the weeks before reunification that allowed local Communist authorities, like Posselt’s colleagues on the community council, to claim to be the rightful owners.

Small plots doled out to industrial workers for gardening and recreation became the property of their last Communist-era stewards and aren’t vulnerable to restitution.

Those responsible for reviving the economically disadvantaged eastern states, where unemployment averages nearly 20%, see the restitution inequities as a necessary sacrifice by the few to benefit the many.

“After reunification, there were 10 million claims made on different properties in eastern Germany, and, during the first few years, that was clearly the biggest obstacle to attracting investment and rebuilding. Clearly, no one was going to invest with all these unsettled ownership questions,” says John Zindar, chief strategist for the Industrial Investment Council, a government-supported agency marketing eastern opportunities for investors.

But after the federal court ruling in 1993 that disqualified former owners of Soviet-seized property from any form of compensation, money began flooding into the region, Zindar says. Investment in Berlin and the five current states that once made up East Germany has now reached a stunning $765 billion since reunification, 83% of it from private sources.

Germany’s intricate privacy laws prohibit disclosure of details about restitution or sales of individual properties inherited by the state. But the Treuhand privatization company, which began work as a government agency after reunification but became private two years ago, reports that it has so far sold more than 100 estates of the former nobility in the eastern states.

Those sales have earned government coffers only about $35 million, but the new owners also have made commitments to invest another $100 million, Treuhand spokesman Uwe Stemmler says.

That would make the proceeds from properties only a drop in the ocean of funding washing into the east. But with an estimated 6,000 property owners having been dispossessed during the Soviet occupation, many of the castles and mansions are disintegrating while heirs clash with bureaucrats.

Ruins Litter Site Where Castle Stood

On the northeastern island of Ruegen, where the family of Franz von Putbus owned the largest estate in eastern Germany before the war, the centuries-old castle was dynamited decades ago, and its lavish outbuildings have fallen into ruin.

“German governments have been trying since World War I to get rid of the big property owners,” contends Putbus, who lost the final round of his legal bid for restitution in October. “They want to find a way of saying the time for nobility has passed, even though these families were responsible for supporting many of the cultural achievements of this region.”

Putbus argued unsuccessfully that his family’s 25,000 acres and surviving buildings were confiscated by the Nazis, not the Soviets. His father, Malte, died in February 1945 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where, according to Putbus, he was imprisoned for supporting a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler the previous July.

Officials widely agree that the 1993 court ruling leaves them little room for reversing Soviet expropriations, but some concede that the policy is unjust.

“I do not agree with this because it treats one part of this group who were deprived of their property differently from the rest for no valid reason,” says Hagen Graf Lambsdorff, head of foreign affairs for the federal Press and Information Office and a descendant of western German nobility.

For most of the long-banished aristocrats of the east, the only option for recovering family standing is the capitalist way: cash.

“I’m actually the minority owner,” the 41-year-old Lippe says of the vineyard and mansion in which he has invested $2 million. “The bank is the real owner.”