Text from Sigrun Putjenter
The golden 1920s often saw Berlin sailors holidaying on the Baltic Sea with their families. In the tour boat: everything for the long voyage on board - right down to the dress and club suit for the award ceremony of a sea regatta, which is sailed along the way. Lauterbach enjoys great popularity as a stopover, situated on the south coast of Rügen in the shelter of the island of Vilm. And so the little village had already become one of the ports of call for the Pomerania Week after the First World War.
Further anniversaries:
This event, which was initiated by the Szczecin Yacht Club in 1912 and was characterised by its mixture of triangular courses and races between individual venues in the waters of Rügen and Szczecin, was also very popular in combination with the summer family cruises. The members of the Potsdam Yacht Club (PYC) were among the enthusiastic participants. In July 1925, some of them witnessed a heavy thunderstorm in Lauterbach harbour when the very barn in which all the fishing equipment from four surrounding villages was stored went up in flames after being struck by lightning. The fishermen were already particularly destitute in these post-war years. Now they were literally left with nothing.
The next day, he and his friend Adolf Nissen approached the Princess of Putbus to set up a relief organisation to support the fishermen, Ernst Naumann later reported on the founding of the Princely Yacht Club of Putbus.
Said friend Adolf Nissen told the story in even more detail. According to the story, the Rügen Professional Fishermen's Association had supplemented its cash-strapped coffers with a fishing festival. Princess Marie zu Putbus was also in attendance, and during an intensive schnapps binge with the fishermen - the devastating effect of which Nissen and Naumann only escaped by piously cheating with schnapps glasses filled only with water especially for them - the idea was born to found a yacht club under the patronage of Princess zu Putbus in order to support the fishermen economically.
Foundation of the FYP to support fishermen in need
The Princely Yacht Club of Putbus was finally founded in Berlin on 28 October 1925. It is unanimously reported that the Princely House of Putbus enthusiastically supported this idea. According to Naumann, Princess Marie zu Putbus not only happily took over the protectorate, but also made the first donation herself.
Adolf Nissen also reported that her nephew, Prince Malte zu Putbus, who succeeded Marie's younger sister Asta, usually added the same amount from his own pocket when making payments to fishermen in need. In addition to donations, the money for this fund also came from the capitalisation of a much more lavish fishing festival. Lauterbach and the fishing festival were increasingly integrated into the Pomerania Week regatta programme in the years to come.
Teatime and eel dinner
The Princely House of Putbus was actively involved in the supporting programme every year. In addition to the extremely popular invitations to tea in the princely castle in Putbus or the Granitz hunting lodge, the programme also included a welcome party in the Putbus castle park followed by a torchlight procession to Lauterbach and an evening celebration in the castle. The Princely House also donated various prizes for the FYP regattas as part of the Pomerania Week.
The FYP commemorated its first patroness by awarding the Princess Marie Memorial Prize to the best equalising yacht. As a further sign of its gratitude, the club erected a memorial to Princess Marie zu Putbus, who died in 1930, with a large boulder adorned with a bronze bas-relief portrait of the princess. The monument was ceremoniously unveiled on 11 July 1931 as part of the Pomerania Week.
The eel dinners that took place in Berlin in winter were as legendary as the teas organised by the Princely House - and indispensable for the donation fund. Smoked eels, with which the Lauterbach fishermen thanked the members of the FYP, were eaten as part of a festive dinner to which the FYP always invited several time-honoured fishermen to Berlin. It was only fitting that a considerable sum of money should be raised during the course of the evening.
Membership of the FYP is an honour
Even the start of the Second World War did nothing to change this at first. The smoked eel dinner in the winter of 1940 brought another 1,500 Reichsmark into the fund. Two years later, however, it came to an end. The tradition came to an end with the eel dinner on 6 December 1942.
By then, the Princely Yacht Club had already been able to provide 40,000 Reichsmark in cash and in kind for the fishermen in need. A community nurse was paid for, a children's library was set up, the costs of operations were covered and baptisms, weddings and funerals were financially supported. This was made possible by philanthropists such as Adolf Nissen (an engineer specialising in car ignition systems), who was not only one of the initiators but also the long-standing, active chairman of the FYP, and his friend Ernst Naumann, who ran a fur house in Berlin.
Among the co-founders of the Fürstlicher Yacht-Club Putbus were Walter Metzing, councillor and master builder; Martin Wronsky, retired major and chairman of the PYC from 1926 to 1934, also second chairman of the cruiser division of the DSV; building contractor Asmus Bumann, jeweller Julius Dietloff and entrepreneur Friedrich Schröder. Within the first 15 years of the existence of this unusual, philanthropic sailing club, they found over 240 like-minded people who were honoured to become members.
FYP disappears under the GDR government
Meanwhile, the Pomerania Week had taken place for the last time in July 1939, with a strong participation of 156 boats, but without stopping in Lauterbach. The Baltic Sea became a strategically important area and subsequently a battlefield in which private shipping no longer had a place.
The end of the war meant the end of self-determined club life and free sailing on the Baltic Sea for the more than 170 German sailing clubs based in the Soviet-occupied part of the former German state borders. Some of them fled to the West, such as the Szczecin Yacht Club, which fled to its twin city of Lübeck. Others became company sports groups (BSG). This included the BSG "Empor Putbus". In addition, sports clubs were founded that were subject to state control. It can be assumed that this also applied to the Putbus Sailing Association, which was founded in 1952 in Lauterbach on an old jetty on the railway embankment and has been called the Putbus Yacht Club since 1990.
In 1953, the GDR government decided to turn the "Insel Vilm" recreation centre into a "training centre for sailing" in order to train suitable instructors. Sailing was thus preserved in Lauterbach, but the Princely Yacht Club Putbus initially disappeared without a trace.
For a long time, FYP was just a memory
Malte von und zu Putbus was imprisoned one day after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler due to his proximity to leading officers of the resistance. He died in an unexplained manner on 10 February 1945 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His family fled to the West after the war and lost all the property that the House of Putbus had acquired on the island since the 14th century. This included around 15,000 hectares of land, equivalent to one sixth of the island of Rügen, real estate - including the famous Circus in Putbus with its classicist white houses - and the island of Vilm.
The Putbusser Schloss, which should have been demolished in 1947 according to the will of the Soviet military administration and true to the KPD's maxim "Junkerland in Bauernhand", was blown up and demolished in the early 1960s. The Potsdam Yacht Club initially remembered the FYP and the good times in Lauterbach wistfully and, after the club was allowed to return to its previously confiscated clubhouse on Wannsee in 1956, installed a magnificent glass mosaic with the coat of arms of the Princely Yacht Club of Putbus in one of its function rooms.
Ten years later, on the 75th anniversary of the PYC, Ernst Naumann expressed the hope that the FYP "could be re-established in its old form in the near future". At that time, the Fürstlicher Yacht-Club Putbus, which had been re-founded unnoticed on the Rhine, was already three years old. It was entered in the register of associations in Cologne on 7 November 1963. The membership list suggests that there were four founding members, and five new members appear to have been welcomed within the next ten years. Apparently there was neither a great affinity for sailing or philanthropy nor an active connection to the House of Putbus.
"Living and helping lives"
The number of members only increased noticeably after reunification, and then also with individual new members from Rügen. Some of the new Rügen residents who became members at the time, including the current commodore, Till Jaich, and the long-time purser Siegfried Fischer, ultimately ensured that the Fürstlicher Yacht-Club Putbus returned to the island on 27 April 2001.
Since then, sailing has been revitalised as a unifying element in the FYP. There has been participation in the Rügen triathlon and the Bodden stages, which the ASV Greifswald organises every year. The Goor Cup was sailed several times as a separate regatta, this year as an anniversary edition for the 100th birthday, which was celebrated as part of the Lauterbach harbour festival - just like the fishing festival used to be.
154 members have passed through the FYP's club books since it was re-established in 1963 - retaining members is not so easy without a clubhouse and harbour. The club currently has 55 members, including guest of honour Michaela zu Putbus, the widow of Franz zu Putbus, the son of Prince Malte zu Putbus who died in a concentration camp, who now lives on Rügen, and his grandson of the same name Malte zu Putbus as an honorary member. Incidentally, the bronze portrait of Princess Marie zu Putbus, which had been removed from the memorial during the GDR era, was reattached to the stone near Nissen-Naumann-Platz by the FYP as part of a commemorative ceremony on 3 October 1993, initially in a wooden version and then again as a bronze casting in 2019.
Contact with the Potsdam Yacht Club has also been revived since 2019, so it can be said that various lines of tradition that were interrupted by the Second World War are gradually being healed after fifty or more years. This also includes the FYP's motto, "Live and help live", which was brought to life this summer, primarily through Till Jaich's commitment to the FYP, which benefited numerous children from Rügen, as the days when there were professional fishermen in Lauterbach are sadly indeed over - with one exception. However, the smoked eel is still an indispensable tradition at the FYP's annual general meetings.
