Part Four - The Ominous Year 1914
The mineral water springs of Bad Nauheim, known as the Sprudelhof, early 1900s
This is the fourth part of an essay on the Schulz Clock by Liza Kroeger that we are publishing in instalments. Read the introduction here, the first instalment here, the second instalment here, and the third instalment here.
One day in 1914 Peter’s brother-in-law Isaak Zacharias called––by now it would have been on the telephone. He was planning to see a bone-setter (a chiropractor in today’s terms) and health practitioner about an ailment. Since this was a fair stretch from Zachariasfeld he asked to stop over in Osterwick for a change of horses. Peter decided to join Isaak. He was thinking of taking up life insurance for his family and that would require a medical examination.
For Peter the results were shocking. He was told he had a serious heart condition and that he would need treatment as soon as possible. With travel unrestricted, arrangements were made for Peter and Anna to go to Bad Nauheim, Germany, about thirty-five kilometres north of Frankfurt am Main, one of the most renowned heart treatment spas in Europe at the time. Osterwick to Bad Nauheim is a beeline distance of approximately 2,300 kilometres. Under the best of circumstances, the journey by train today takes a day and a half to almost two days. How long did it take in 1914? Certainly, considerably longer.
Postcards from Peter and Anna Schulz to their children, Bad Nauheum, Germany, 1914
In 1914 Peter and Anna would have been one of around four thousand Russian visitors that made the trip to Bad Nauheim that year, some gravely ill, as Peter was; many simply to summer, socialise and hob-knob among the high society that gathered there; all of this made possible thanks to the insistence of German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who regularly ‘took the waters’ in the area, that the railway connections to this little pearl of a town nestled in the foothills of the Taunus range be greatly extended and expanded.
By 1912, the year Russian Tsar Nicholas II and the royal family strolled in the spa parks and gardens of Bad Nauheim while his wife, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, took bath treatments, the spa was attracting patients and guests from around the world. I imagine that Anna and Peter must have travelled first from nearby Alexandrovsk (now Zaporizhia), which had been connected to the Russian Imperial railway network since 1875, via Kiev to Berlin and on from there on the then-newest connection to Bad Nauheim. And I am sure there must have been several stops to rest and regenerate along the way.
Anna and Peter would travel in June of what would turn out to be an ominous year, but like so many other Europeans they were most likely wholly unsuspecting of what awaited as they arranged their departure––‘sleepwalkers’, Cambridge historian Christopher Clark would come to call them a century later; sleepwalkers on the brink of war and revolution.
The home Anna and Peter left behind them the day they left for Bad Nauheim would never be the same for them.
But in early June 1914 Bad Nauheim was absolutely charming, picture perfect, awash with art nouveau splendour––just as one would expect from a world-renowned spa. It could have served as a backdrop for a belated honeymoon for Peter and Anna had the matter not been so grave for the couple. In a postcard to his daughter Margareta (‘Greta’), Peter will write: ‘You can see how beautiful it is here.’ He writes this on July 15! Barely more than two weeks after Austrian Archduke Ferdinand’s June 28 assassination in Sarajevo. In a cosmopolitan place such as Bad Nauheim, the air must have been abuzz with this news. Is Peter’s complacent note to his daughter on that day testimony of how unsuspecting the global community was about the dreadful forces that were about to be unleashed? Or was it sheer naïveté?
And, then, a mere two weeks later, on August 1, Tsar Nicholas II declares war on Germany. Overnight Peter and Anna become Russians in enemy territory, or––depending on perspective––enemies on German soil.
It is difficult to imagine how the two must have felt, their family, their home, everything they had worked for, everything they loved, suddenly very distant and behind war front lines.
Peter and Anna’s route from Bad Nauheim to Osterwick, 1914
Their only thoughts must have been to return to their loved ones, to their source of livelihood, to the one place they and their ancestors had called home for over 120 years. But Peter and Anna were cut off from the direct route back, from the way they had travelled to Bad Nauheim. Their only choice was an indirect route: north to Denmark and through Sweden, then east into Russian Finland and from there south to their home in southeastern Ukraine, far from the centres of St. Petersburg and Moscow––in all over 4,200 kilometres, almost twice the distance they had come.
Travelling by train, ferry, ship and again by train was arduous. On some stretches, only cattle cars were available to citizens. Regular passenger cars had already been requisitioned for the military. In addition, Peter and Anna must have struggled deep in their souls with the idea of war between two countries and cultures they held dear and the fear of not reaching home and their loved ones. Unbelievable, when you think of it now, that they were able to navigate this obstacle course. But Peter and Anna made it back safely to Osterwick.