A short history of Kurland (Latvia)

Trying to get over some boring household-tasks that I've been lacking the energy to finish lately, I started to clean out a cupboard when I found all these old family albums, dating back to eighteenhundredsomething. Every birth, marriage and death of a family member is registered there, ending with the birth of my grandmother in 1914. The first entry is the marriage of my great-great-grandmother. She was a "von Kurland" and skimming over the pages I remembered my grandmother telling me her family were Baltic Germans from a place called Kurland (I think it's Courland in english), which now is a province of Latvia, up at the Baltic Sea. Judging from what I've been told as a kid, they must have been pretty distinguished people, being squires or barons or something like that, my great-great-grandmother was a "Freifrau von Kurland", - whatever that meant. After the formerly "german province" Kurland became independent from Russia and part of a sovereign Latvia, the family had been expropriated. "From squire to servant" as my grandmother always put it. They lost the "von" as part of their name and were made to work as domestic servants on an estate that was no longer their own. Like many others in their situation my grandmother's family emigrated and finally settled here, in the Ruhr area, a very rich industrial area back then, pulling up people from everywhere, looking for work. That's the bit of family history I am able to recollect without any computer help.

My grandparents were living with us and I remember how I loved to listen to their stories. I was pleading and begging for as long as it took to make them tell me about what I called "the past". "Go on, Grandma, please, please, tell me about the past. Just one more story, I promise ..." I was obsessed with the past and our history and I loved it more than any fairy tale or story book. My mum had all those antique family photos on the wall, what she called her "ancestral gallery", all great-aunts and great-great aunts, uncles and great-grandfathers and I asked my grandma about who every single one was and what his or her story was. My favourite story (surely not hers) was of how they fled from the east, with the little posessions they had left all stuffed into one big trunk. They walked for weeks, mostly by foot, with the trunk on a cart. I still have this trunk and all that fits in today is the bed linen and some towels. Unbelievable somehow.

Not too keen on finishing my cleaning anyway and wanting to do some research on my complicated family history (that consists of couronian, east prussian and american roots, which again lead back to Ireland and Austria) for quite some time already, I decided I might as well do it now.

So I took the old books and albums to the computer to google for Courland and I got quite absorbed. Whenever I end up in Wikipedia, I'm lost. Leaping from one subject to another and back again, I almost don't remember what it was that I initially tried to find. Instead you have a whole bunch of answers that you didn't even know the questions to.

So here is what I learned about Kurland (or Courland):
First of all, Kurland is a province of Latvia now, not Lithuania as I have mistakenly believed all these years. The original couronians were called the "Vikings of the Baltic Sea", they consisted of Kurshi (Kursiu in Lithuania) tribes, said to be excellent sailors, warriors and pirates. Now, if that doesn't sound exciting – I'm just pretty sure my ancestors didn't ascend from this tribe, for the Kurshi/Kursiu actually were no "German Balts" (Ethnic Germans who came to the Baltic region as traders and missionaries in the 12th century) but seem to have belonged to the various Latvian Balts, the native people there at the time. Together Latvians and Germans formed the protestant state of Kurland until all Baltic areas became provinces of Russia. Yet Kurland remained dominated, and self-governed, by the local German-speaking aristocracy, based on former knights and several newcomers from Continental Germany. The division in Latvians and Germans was not a question of nation, but of a certain class with the division being the education. The only available education higher than primary was German. So any educated person was "a German", while the Latvians were the uneducated. If a Latvian wanted to enter the "Germans", he had to break all relations with his fellow Latvians and only speak German, even at home. Although hated for this by other Latvians, he knew that was the only way to reach a higher social status. I guess it's no wonder the Latvians hated the German Balts! Anyway, this began to change at the end of the 19th century, when the first educated Latvians started to emerge. Funnily enough these first educated Latvians were sponsored by their German landlords who expected them to turn into proper "Germans". Looks like the Latvians had other plans, though ...

Wikipedia puts it this way: "Although Germans were a minority in Latvia, they were the ruling class until the end of the 19th century. The German gentry, clergy, and urban high society constituted this ruling class, which subjugated the native inhabitants - Latvians, Livs, and others - for more than 600 years. German economic influence lasted even longer, until 1919, when the large manors were liquidated and it's owners expropriated".

After reading all this, I'm no longer surprised about what happened to the Germans - and my family. Reminds me of what happened between the Anglo-Irish landowners and the native Irish. The Germans entered the baltic coast just around the same time as the Normans came to Ireland. And in both cases it lead to a war for independence at around the same time, 1920. Happily enough for Latvia, it was the oppressors who had to emigrate and today they speak their native language. In Ireland it's the other way around. In the case of my family this comes close to a travesty of justice: two families emigrating from their countries, but for totally opposite reasons - or rather from totally opposite backgrounds. The symptoms were the same, just the causes were quite contrary.

I have always thought of my family as being victims, now I see that what happened in Kurland back then was the result of hundreds of years of cultural and political oppression. As individuals they may have been innocent but they stood for a hated class. And to be honest, if they were some kind of aristocracy, I doubt they were so innocent after all. Another illusion gone down the drain.

Still, I'd really love to learn more about Kurland's (Latvia's) culture and maybe go there one day, see the landscape and architecture, see if it moves anything inside me the way Ireland did. Some kind of ancestral recognition, some strange and unexpected kind of homecoming maybe. It must be quite beautiful there from what I see on pictures. So many plans, so many dreams. Well, maybe one day.