(Cover image: My great-grandma with my grandma as a child)
On Wednesday, I met members of my family I'd never met before.
My mom and I wanted to visit the town Pasewalk where my grandma and her family had lived after having fled East Prussia during WW2. Three of her siblings still live there with their spouses. They're all quite estranged however, so had they declined our visit, we would've just enjoyed the city by ourselves.
Surprisingly, my grandma's brother and especially his wife were enthused to meet up. I'd never met either of them, but had zero concerns. This didn't feel like meeting strangers and there's very little left of my past social anxieties in general.
Besides, traveling East has always eased my body in ways I never understood. And the difference was stark because we mostly traveled West throughout my life. Now I know why, of course, since I've consciously connected with the ancestry written into every strand of my genes. That pull urging me East. That unreleting desire to go home.
Pasewalk lies East, so I felt elated to approach my homeland, even if it's just by 200 kilometers.
Good 40 minutes into the drive, I felt a sudden surge of electricity burst through my body. I interpreted this as simple anticipation to meet more of my family and wouldn't think of it again until the late evening.
After almost 2 hours, we drove past a sign announcing the town as "cuirassier city Pasewalk", complete with an illustration of a Prussian soldier from the time of the German Empire.
Now, that got my attention!
I didn't know there'd be signs of Prussian influence a two hour drive away! I felt even more excited by this unexpected surprise and already decided this wouldn't be my last trip there.
So, the family meeting happens and it's like we've always known each other. It was almost bizarre how effortlessly I got along with them. No awkwardness or shyness or "I don't know what to say to keep this conversation going" moments at all.
Together, we drove into town and I loved how clean the streets were. A tight-knit community of longstanding locals who are connected to the city and land, and respect it, tend to take care of their home.
In the middle of the market there's a fountain (which used to be huge and gorgeous decades ago, but the politicians demolished it for "water saving reasons", which is German for "delete our roots"). On each side, there's an arch, and snippets of the town's history are engraved on the inside of those arches.
In the 1700s section, they mentioned Friedrich Wilhelm I. (a Prussian king) as a provider to help the town rebuild after a devastating bout of plague deaths. There were mentions of the cuirassier regiment and even the Battle of Hohenfriedberg 1745 had a commemorative plaque (even though that city is miles away and now has a Polish name).
As I was taking pictures of everything (found on my IG in the "Prussia" collection), I heard my mom tell my great-uncle how identified with Prussia I am.
He was confused. "What do you mean? Prussia?"
This made my heart bleed.
He, just like my grandma and the rest of her siblings, are East Prussians. My grandma is the oldest, so she was still born in Königsberg, while the others were born in Pasewalk.
There's so many of us. But so many are not even aware of who we are and where we came from. That we stem from the same soil, the same environment, the same spirit of the land my great-grandparents called home, and so did their parents and grandparents.
78 years isn't that long ago at all.
My great-uncle's wife is different. Any mention of Prussia lit her up. She knew what I was talking about.
We didn't have enough time to visit much of the town's interior, so next time I want to check out the old military areas and museums. I returned home having made new connections— connections beyond the physical. My grandma was almost euphoric, having met her siblings and seen her old house, her friends' houses, and her school after so many years of estrangement.
Back home, we got curious. I'd looked up the route to Pasewalk on Google Maps, so I knew its location, but I wondered what older maps had to say about it.
To our collective bafflement, Pasewalk had been Prussian territory since 1720! It had formed part of the Prussian Province called Pommern. Modern Germany has but a sliver of the old territory, now called Fore Pommern, but Pasewalk is well within the new borders.
(The Königsberg on that map isn't the Königsberg my grandma was born in, by the way.)
Mecklenburg is the state I grew up in. See, Mecklenburg was never part of Prussia. It's one of the two Northern areas that remained independent (not because of any resistance though. Prussia just didn't need such a poor state and left them alone for the most part). Consequently, there's no Prussian influence anywhere.
As I looked closer, I realized another shocker: the beach I'd fallen in love with in Summer 2019, the area where I felt such inexplicable peace and connection for the first time in my life, where I drove to by myself over and over, where I wanted to remain forever and melt into the soil, was also officially Prussian.
I was baffled.
I'd had no idea the official borders were so fucking close. Just an hour away!
In 2019, I'd barely started mainstream embodiment practices like yoga and meditation. My body sat full of unfelt grief about my childhood and I was still obsessed with my trauma bond whom I thought about every minute.
Until the moment I stepped out of the car and onto the Darß-ian ground.
There's nothing outwardly special about this region. Open fields with little creeks. A huge forest with stags and warthogs and tall pinetrees and bracken. High dunes.
It's beautiful, for sure. But it's still the Baltic sea and I've seen her beaches from all sorts of places. I'd seen many forests and fields and villages in the region as well.
So why did I feel like I could breathe for the first time?
My mind quieted like it never had before. My trauma bond ceased to occupy my thoughts, my worries about the future faded. For several hours, I simply existed on soil I'd never stepped on, but somehow knew. I gazed upon the sea, the fern, the sand, and felt a connection I couldn't explain.
That night, I laid in bed, listening to music as always, but my head brimmed with homecoming fantasies.
This made no sense to me. I'd never been to the Darß. No one in my family had lived there. There was nothing special about this area at all.
But it occupied my consciousness. I desired to spend time there as much as possible, to soak in whatever it was that spread such peace throughout my being. I wanted to lay on the soil, grass, sand, and breathe it all in.
I felt sentimental. I listened to songs about homecoming and reunions on loop. This wasn't particularly new since I'd always had a connection to those themes, but in my mind's eye, I saw the Darß, and rode across its beach and fields, reuniting with some unseen force I couldn't name.
As confusing as this was, I didn't question it. I was grateful for the experience. Its light grounded me during a time of massive turmoil and grief in my life.
Now, 5 years later, the puzzle piece clicked.
My body knew I'd stepped on home-related soil.
In some invisible way, through some unknown organ, my body knew.
It also knew when we crossed the border driving to Pasewalk. I checked where we were when my body had that burst of electricity, and it happened right by the edge.
By now, I've researched this topic. Our bodies store our lineage. Every unfelt pain, every joy, the specifics of the environment and crops, trauma, wisdom, skills, it's all available to us. We have a connection with the lands of our ancestors, and that land has a connection with us, because we emerged from those lands. It's in our bones and teeth and DNA. There's an imprint. And my homeland and soil is still alive with the collective consciousness of the people having lived there for centuries.
And in my genetic memory, this knowing is etched in.
My body has always known I wasn't home. That the dialect is wrong, the culture (nonexistent as it is in this state) is wrong, the people, the food, the environment, everything isn't as my body deeply knows it's supposed to be.
And my subconscious has constantly shown this to me, too. My whole life, I've felt the strongest pull towards stories and songs about homecoming, accepting one's lineage and family reunions. As a child, my favorite movies were Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Balto, Lion King, Anastasia, and The Ten Commandments—all because they shared those themes.
Romantic movies never touched me. I don't hate them, they just don't evoke anything in me. And whatever romance (or comedy or whatever else) is featured as a subplot in those films wasn't my focal point.
No. I cried for the protagonists in their struggle to return home and when they were finally back where they belonged.
This theme runs as a thread through my whole life.
I never belonged anywhere. My body had this innate stress that I was a stranger here since I can remember.
And I've been experimenting with this recently, too. In my embodiment practices, I've tried on different frequencies for years, to feel into what they do in my body. Just yesterday, we ate at an Italian restaurant owned by Romanians who always have Romanian TV on, and I chose to connect to "being Romanian", the language, what I saw on the screen (and had seen before because this restaurant isn't new to me).
And my body felt the exact same "No, this is wrong," kind of tension I'd constantly carried around as a child.
This sensation is a specific kind of pain. A mixture of dread and grief. A stone weighing down my stomach.
Homesickness.
I hadn't felt it so clearly in years.
Contrary to when I was a child though, I now have the antidote as well, which is connecting to the fact that I'm Prussian.
Even writing it out relaxes my body, makes me take a deep breath and opens my heart all the way to the back.
Last week, I talked to my somatic therapist who I found out also happens to be of East Prussian descent, because of course she is. My ancestry has been guiding me for years without me ever realising it. And now all these aspects and investments in my life are revealing themselves like, "Surprise! This has been Prussian all along!". And I love it.
So, I told her about how much love and opening I feel connecting to my homeland, and this topic had many threads falling into place for her as well. Like how one somatic practitioner she knows chose a specific location near the Eastern border for his resort and now she understood what drove him there.
She told me she'd also never identified with being a Mecklenburger. Despite her father insisting to be referred to as an East Prussian all his life, she never realised being Prussian applied to her, too. "You're right. We don't ever hear anyone say, 'I'm a Prussian.' It's just not a thing."
I said, "Yeah. Because there's no permission."
Actually, I feel like there's another reason. I've talked to enough Prussians now to notice this "not realising" as a common theme. This applies to myself, too! Despite knowing factually that the family stems from literally a different country, the consequences on one's own life remain blocked out. It's like the embodied piece, the drop of "Holy fuck, this is me!", is cloaked.
Imagine abolishing China and telling the Chinese their culture never existed and they have no national identity. Good luck with that! Sounds ridiculous, right?
So why did exactly this happen for Prussians?
Because it was a coordinated effort to erase, villify and condemn us. Intention sets an energetic precedent. When several countries share the intention to destroy a nation's identity, this impacts the consciousness of millions of people. Add severe war trauma and guilt them into thinking it's all their fault, and you've got the perfect abuse and gaslighting recipe.
You'll be hard-pressed to find a Prussian, old or young, who'll cry victim and demand reparations or support or sympathy.
There's no woke concepts like "Prussophobia" or "Prussian pride".
There's no external, collective Prussian pain-body for people's egos to latch onto and feel sorry for themselves, like big social media accounts promoting people's stories. On one hand, I regard this as a good thing because the victimhood mindset is wreaking havoc in Western society enough already. But the lack of an externalisation doesn't mean the collective pain doesn't exist. It does. It's just invisible and suppressed. And suppressed pain targets one's own body, one's own existence, which is exactly what I see happening in this country.
And that I grew up in a German area without Prussian influence isn't a coincidence. It feels like this shielded me from something. Like how big souls incarnate into families with lots of trauma and pain as a protection against external hidden forces.
And despite the cloaking
the not realising
the inexplicable homesickness
the desire for a nation I've never known
my ancestry found me.
Because I didn't do anything except focus on my embodiment, investing in myself, and doing the work.
I wasn't thinking about my lineage at all.
It was just always there in the background.
In some way, shape or form, it was there, guiding me.
You know, I discovered something beautiful. The native word for "Prussia" is "Preußen" (the ß is a sharp s), but the word for "Prussians"is also "Preußen"—in German, you'd add the article 'die' [dee] before the word to clarify you're using the plural. This is an interesting ethymological development! The plural of Prussia is the exact same word, but it refers to the inhabitants. Many Prussians make the nation Prussia.
This linguistic peculiarity isn't the case for all countries' natives.
England — the English
America—the Americans
Deutschland—die Deutschen (Germany—the Germans)
Italia—gli Italiani
España—los Españoles
La France—les Français
Россия—русские (Russia—the Russians)
Norge—Nordmenn (Norway—Norwegians)
etc.
Whether intentional or not, there's a transmission of unity here. The simple sentence, "Wir sind Preußen," can be translated as "We are Prussians" and "We are Prussia". The original meaning remains the same, it just depends on your perspective.
All in all, this frequency is immense. It's multifaceted. It comes through many different avenues, steady and unstoppable. It asks me to hold more responsibility than I ever held before. And it's pure, unconditional love.
And I committed to this long ago.
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