Trip 38 — Usedom Walk

Prologue
Friday, 10 November 2023

"You've won a trip to the sunny shores of...Germany and Poland!" isn't something I've ever heard in more than four decades of watching game shows. Yet the northeastern coast of Usedom (in German) or Uznam (in Polish) is a popular holiday area. An irregularly shaped splotch of land in the Baltic Sea, Usedom is shared by both countries, making it the first — and probably the only — island in the Abecedarian Walks with border crossings.

When I booked the outbound flight to Berlin one balmy August evening, I overlooked, or perhaps chose to resist, the fact that the late autumn up in the same latitude as Edmonton and Minsk would be short on daylight and warmth. And despite the place's moniker as "Sun Island" — no German or Polish region is statistically sunnier — the forecast has me expecting rain almost every day.

Perhaps that's why the room rates at the resorts were so reasonable. But at least being in Europe in November will guarantee me 11 days free from those interminable and impossibly vacuous television advertisements reminding me that it's the Medicare annual enrollment period. And that refuge, I must say, is worth any amount of daily soaking.

In 1838, the Reverend Johann Wilhelm Meinhold of Koserow, near Usedom's thinnest spot, published his compilation of a story from the time of the Thirty Years' War. Meinhold claimed that his sexton had extracted from under the musty seats of Koserow's church choir the remains of the 200-year-old pages written by Pastor Abraham Schweidler, who described his daughter's witchcraft trial and condemnation to death by burning.

Meinhold filled in the gaps and noted the omissions; the book starts with chapter 7. People were so moved and convinced by his account that they accepted it as truth. Then Meinhold revealed it to be a hoax — he made up the whole tale — but the public wouldn't accept that they'd been duped. In 1844, Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon, translated it into English so masterfully that others refused to believe it had originally been written in German.

The title character in "Mary Schweidler, the Amber Witch" is a precocious and pious young woman trying to get through the war with her father, a well-respected pastor. She finds a large deposit of amber on the Streckelsberg, a cliff near Koserow. Her charms arouse the attention of the sheriff from the castle at Pudagla, and when she rejects him, he scapegoats her with the assistance of her neighbor Lizzie Kolken, eloquently described as "Hinrich Seden his squint-eyed wife." (It's been 35 years since I learned that the possessive in English used to be written this way — "Hinrich his wife" instead of "Hinrich's wife" — but this is the first time I've seen it in a book.)

The Usedom of 1630 was an island of bandits, horse carriages, wolf hunts, intimidation by torture, and a war-ravaged population reduced to gathering blackberries for sustenance. Erosion has since claimed 250 meters of the Streckelsberg. The forests and marshes remain, along with some of the churches and castles. During World War II, PeenemÜnde, near the northwestern point, was a testing site for missiles developed by Wernher von Braun.

The vast majority of Usedom's land — more than 80% — is on the German side, but the Polish city of Świnoujście ("pig's mouth"), nestled in the southeast, has most of the people. That's where I'll start, when I arrive by a couple of trains from Berlin on Sunday.

Go on to day 1