For a long time the history of the German or Teutonic Order has caught the imaginations of historians, poets, painters, publicists, novelists and film-makers. A list would be long and would embrace obscure figures such as the early nineteenth-century narrative history painter Karl Wilhelm Kolbe as well as, to conjure with a few famous names, Eichendorff, Freytag, Treitschke, Sienkiewicz and Eisenstein. However, since 1945 in Germany, the circle of those interested in the history of the Order has narrowed to a small number of professional medievalists who, in the nature of things, are not household names. One major West German creative writer – Günter Grass – has touched on the subject, but then only to add some astute historical reference to his evocation of pre-war West Prussia: the Danzig of Mazerath and Jan Bronski, the Polish Post Office and the milieu of the Kashubian petite-bourgeoisie.

In the German Democratic Republic interest in the Order was minimal despite recent ‘differentiated’ reassessments of the Prussian heritage. In contrast to the large East German literature on the Hanseatic League, the Order was the subject of one article in the main historical journal of the GDR. There are a number of reasons, both pragmatic and ideological, for this apparent indifference. The territories once ruled by the Order were beyond the borders of the GDR and are now part of Poland and the Soviet Union.