Preface
Prefaces will often feel as annoying. It bore the reader and to become therefore gladly to estimate. The reader sees it as an unnecessary obstacle before the actual text, and not a necessary explanation of the text. It is unfortunately really like that, because some authors do in this regard of the good one too much, by them the reader with a not-end-wanting preface to already fatigue before they come to the actual thing. They are essential to understand our chronicle a few short assertions nevertheless.
The intention, that after now 43 years still remaining knowledge about our homeland municipality Rügenwaldermünde to hold once in writing, is so new not. I already drew a village plan for in the middle of the 60's and created - with the help of my at that time still living aunt - a house list, in which however excluding the owner sequence of properties. Besides we limited to those buildings, which had developed before the turn of the century. This "old plan" with list was situated thereafter over two decades long unconsidered between other papers.
Now was at that time Mrs. Helene Haeck, maiden name Scharping, here on holiday. She reports again her daughter, Mrs. Trude Scherbarth, maiden name Haeck, of its production. She asked me thereafter several times for a copy of that list, however which never came from different reasons. Up to the last meeting, in the September 1988, at which Mrs. Scherbarth was likewise present.
Now I copied the hand-written existing list cleanly with the machine and let the plan copying by copier on DIN A4. I let make a blueprint in tenfold execution from list and map. That was the start.
After I already begun some years ago a more global history about Rügenwaldermünde, but had it not completed, they put me now near to do this. That was in the autumn of the previous year. The work advanced well and now it is finished.
To the individual paragraphs:
The preface is an explanation to assist in the understanding of the whole one, abbreviations and so on. The two historic contributions speak for itself and therefore it needs no comment.
Which is to be said about the "old list", I already said above. The appropriate "old map" could help everybody, who do not know the Münde from before 1900 of own opinion (and those are today most of us), to make themself a sign from it.
To the "new list": It is the largest and actual main part. Into their specified houses are characterized by numbers, which do not have to do anything, however, with the former house numbers - like equally already in the "old list" -. These we would not probably put together, since everyone still knows its own at best. Each property on the maps has a number, which is to be looked up into the pertinent list. The individual information on property concerned defines again numbers, whose meaning is hereby explained.
All that I must make the however following restriction:
All numerical data are as approximate only to regard, with other predicates are always reproached mistakes! Since we considered it unnecessary and unnecessarily confusing to repeat this each time, I tell it here once and for all. Everyone knows, that almost a half century passed since then, and likewise that we possess neither reason nor church books or similar documents, in which we could look up. All data are based therefore it requires almost exclusively on memories. Therefore it is probably possible that one or the other one knows some things better and knows more exactly than we.
He may correct it gladly for itself in its acquired copy.
That "new list" following "register of fishing-boats", with all specification concerning the vehicles, does not require a further explanation.
A short epilog of me, forms the conclusion of the written section over the time after our exodus. One regards it as one with the other sections of the book are only loosely connected, tragic, ended. It contains no broad-created report, but wants only the outstanding occurrence and the course of the thing's n large courses to sketch. Nobody also may feel reset, himself or his family in this paragraph is not mentioned.
The tables already discussed follow by the epilog.
At the conclusion of the complete work is the photograph section. The figures contained in it are photocopies of old and new photos. It concerns around the entire, port and road opinions as well as the individual houses. By old photos we understand such, which originate before German time ends, under newer such, which were taken up with attendance in the Poland times. The firsts are marked by a large "A", the laters by a large "N". Photographs with whole panoramas are described by signatures. The numbers under the photographs refer to the house numbers of the "new list". On the basis of that the position of the respective building can be determined within the village. I do not need to stress probably that we could not procure an accommodation of each house, of each road. Thus the last part of the book remained in certain sense unfortunately only imperfect work. It remains however open after the end too, so that still pages can be possibly later.
Finally, I would like to thank you in the name of the former people of Rügenwaldermünde, still all those, which were involved by her advice, their assistance, by hiring of old photographs and other allowances in coming out this work.
However to our eldest fellow citizen, Paul Brandhoff is entitled to completely special praise in this connection, without whose extensive memories the production would have been hardly possible.
Dietrich Hemme,
in January 1989