Ganzkow · Mechenthin · Rützow

Three estates in the Kolberg-Körlin area that belonged to the family for two generations: Ganzkow since Captain Martin von Gerlach (1755), Rützow and Mechenthin since Friedrich Wilhelm. Carl Friedrich Leopold sold them in 1796/97 – with the proceeds he bought Rohrbeck in 1805.

Chronicle

1. 1182/83

   Older than anything else in this chronicle is Rützow. Duke Bogislaw I confirmed to the monastery of Stolpe on the Peene its possessions, among them a "villa Ruzowe". Further mentions follow in 1214, 1305 and 1316; in 1321 the knights Heinrich and Hermann Damnitz bought the place and obtained the duke’s recognition of it as a fief. With the von Damitz Rützow remained, with interruptions and ever more divided, into the eighteenth century.

2. 1755

   Ensign Heinrich Christian von Walter sells Ganzkow on 27 September 1755 and 15 January 1756 to Captain Martin von Gerlach (1715–1760); according to Bagmihl the estate was already in Gerlach hands in the early eighteenth century. The family history of 1903 gives the price: 11,500 Taler, paid from the pay of the Danish service that Martin left in the same year. It calls him the founder of the family's landholding.

3. um 1760

   The captain is killed during the siege of Kolberg (Bagmihl says 1762); his widow and sisters make Ganzkow over to his brother Friedrich Wilhelm on 18 July 1764. The estate, destroyed in the war, receives 11,700 Taler in royal reconstruction aid in 1773. The family history tells it differently: in the courtyard of his own estate in 1760 the shot of a plundering Russian soldier wounded him, and he died a few days later. Childless, he left Ganzkow by will to his widow Sophie Hedwig von Poyda, from whom her brother-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm bought it. In the field in 1813 Field Marshal Blücher told Leopold von Gerlach an anecdote about this Martin: at the county assembly he had quarrelled with a stone-blind fellow landowner who challenged him to a duel; both wanted to fight in a dark cellar, but Martin's second found that the blind man had the advantage of his fine hearing – in the end the opponents were reconciled.

4. 1768

   By an agreement of 30 December 1768 Lieutenant Eggerd George von Damitz cedes share (b) of Rützow to Friedrich Wilhelm; Ernst Wilhelm von Schöning makes over the upper manor of Mechenthin to him on 3 August 1775. That the deed speaks of a share has a reason: in the eighteenth century Rützow was divided into four farms, A to D. Three of them were held by von Damitz, share B now by the Gerlach. Only towards the end of the century did the village come into one hand again – that of a von Damitz.

5. 1780

   Division of the inheritance: Ganzkow, Mechenthin and the share in Rützow pass to Carl Friedrich Leopold von Gerlach.

6. 1792

   Carl Friedrich Leopold additionally acquires the upper manor of Mechenthin (Courtois 1909).

7. 1796/97

   Ganzkow and Mechenthin are sold together with Schötzow; the shares of Rützow had been given up earlier. Ganzkow goes to Haese in 1797, Rützow to Lieutenant von Müller in 1804, Mechenthin to von Stade in 1828. With the proceeds Carl Friedrich Leopold buys Rohrbeck in 1805.

8. 1807/1811

   What the family gave up in the Kolberg country a single man gathered in again: Ernst Friedrich Samuel Schroeder, merchant and consul at Kolberg, who had made a great fortune during Napoleon’s continental blockade. In 1807 he bought Rützow, in 1811 Schötzow; Klaptow and Fritzow were his as well. Rützow he made his family seat, and there about 1830 – his wife Charlotte Sophie Henriette came from Sweden – he had Peter Joseph Lenné lay out a park, with a pavilion, a neo-Gothic castle folly, a greenhouse and two fish ponds. The manor house he built after 1807 was classicist and U-shaped; it was plundered after 1945 and pulled down. The park survives, largely run wild.

9. 1899 bis 1929

   What was sung in the three villages is preserved in the Pomeranian folk-song archive of the Greifswald university archive. Three pieces are recorded from Ganzkow in the Kolberg-Körlin district: the Low German mocking rhyme on the name Hans, taken down in 1899 – "Hann, spann an fif Katte vär Waoge" – and, in 1929, collected by one Henke, the ballad "Es wollt ein Jäger wohl jagen" and the soldiers’ song "Mädchen meiner Seele". From Rützow, also in the Kolberg-Körlin district, Arthur Linht wrote down three songs: the ballad of the soldier who shoots his faithless sweetheart; "Als ich im Flügelkleide zur Mädchenschule ging"; and a version of Cinderella beginning "Heut ist im Schlosse großer Ball". The place names call for caution: the same archive holds a second Ganzkow in the Belgard district and two further Rützows, ten recordings from the Schivelbein district and one from Belgard.

10. 1937

    What became of the estate is told by a questionnaire of the Greifswald folklore archive, returned on 20 November: Ganzkow is neither a pure farming village nor a pure estate village, but a remnant estate of seven hundred Morgen beside thirty farms; no outside harvest workers come into the village. It was filled in by the schoolmaster Wilhelm Magdanz, born 1895, in the village since 1929; his informants are "long-settled labourers of the estate, born here". For Ganzkow the survey survives in two rounds, forty-six sheets on harvest customs, feasts, games and children’s rhymes.

11. 1937

    The binding was done only on the estate. When the owner, his family and the officials came out to the fields for the first time, a little wreath of ears was tied round them – by no particular person, but by whoever happened to be nearest to those not working. They bought themselves free with money, and the ransom was "drunk up together". The verse that went with it was known in 1937 to all the older long-settled estate labourers; where it came from, nobody knew: "Today is the day of honour, that I may bind the master with a coarse band about his delicate hand. And though the band be poor, the wish is good all the same. I do it not for beer and wine, but for the honour alone."

12. 1937

    The harvest festival at Ganzkow was called "Austköst" and was held at the end of October, again only on the estate: a procession to the manor house, the presentation of a single harvest crown of ears and autumn flowers, decorated with ribbons of tissue paper – the schoolmaster draws it small in the margin. The dancing was on the estate’s granary floor; old dances were gone, and so were special dishes. The "Alte", the figure bound from the last sheaf, was no longer made in 1937: before the World War it had still been usual on the estate. Of the last stalks they said "the hare is sitting in there!" or, in Low German, "look out, now the hare comes out!". The harvest poem was the same every year – according to the schoolmaster it was "written years ago to order by a dissolute former schoolmaster (a drinker) in the neighbouring village".

13. 1937

    On Christmas Eve young lads went from house to house between six and nine: the white horse, the bear, the stork and a rider, the last also serving as bear-leader. The bear danced in the hallways; money and baked goods were asked for. For the costumes they used old sacks, straw, fodder baskets and face masks. There was no Shrovetide procession, however – here Ganzkow differs from Parsow, where a year later both were recorded. Barrel-riding, Whitsun dove-throwing and the old throwing games were unknown as well; at Whitsun only the decorating with May greenery remained. Solstice fires by old custom the sheet expressly denies.

14. 1937

    The richest sheets are the children’s. The stork at Ganzkow is called "Odbor" or "Adobar", and four verses are called out to him, German and Low German side by side: "Stork, you best of birds, bring me a sister" – "Odbor üt, bring me a bride" – "Stork, you long-legs, my mother wants none". Then five knee-riding verses and six counting-out rhymes, among them one the schoolmaster wrote down without hesitation: "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, in the school there is writing, in the school there is laughter, because the master plays the fool. Window thrown open, master thrown out, cane thrown after him, so he cannot beat us." The "stieping" was done on Easter morning with loosely bound green birch twigs: the child stepped up to the bed and struck the cover – "Stiep, stiep Easter egg, if you give me no Easter egg, I shall cut your shirt in two." Easter water was fetched before sunrise from running water that ran south or east; on rising and on the way there and back not a word might be spoken.

15. 1938 (Mechenthin)

    From Mechenthin comes a grave find. The Stettin museum’s acquisition report of 1938 records on pages 24 f. and in figure 8 a jug with a spouted handle and three bronze brooches with gold pendants. Two glass positives of them lie in the papers of the Heidelberg prehistorian Ernst Wahle (1889–1981) in that university’s library – the only known photographs from the village.