Forgotten Land Read Online Free
Author: Max Egremont
to the new Germany from the old eastern territories. In the communist zone, they were controlled by the Soviet occupiers, but in the democratic west these people formed a large and active group. Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor of the new Federal
Republic, feared an island of anger and reaction. They were given money and, in places like the Duisburg and Lüneburg museums, memorialization of their former lives.
This didn’t put an end to resentment and demands for a return of what had gone; although my friends don’t say so, I think that the absorption of so many is an extraordinary achievement. We talked about the leader of the Bund der Vertriebenen (the largest organization of the expelled), Erika Steinbach – how she infuriates the Poles, particularly those who now live in what was, until 1945, the southern part of East Prussia. Should this be worrying? No, because her latest campaign is for a memorial in Berlin to the expelled people – not about property or frontiers. Frau Steinbach had wanted the memorial for the Germans whereas others, particularly in Poland, say victims throughout Europe should be commemorated. Much more important points had been settled at the time of reunification, when the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl accepted the post-1945 frontiers. The legal challenges brought by a few Germans who had left Poland in the communist time and now wished to reclaim land weren’t important. I remembered what a Polish politician said to me – how you could play on German guilt. Perhaps this could last for ever – an infinity of darkness.
When I first went there in 1992, Kaliningrad had also seemed darkly shocking. I got off the train into a parody of Soviet planning with cracked concrete, cratered streets, people bent against the cold and wet and a sleek German tour coach gliding past belching Ladas and dirty, dented trams. Rumours went round – that Helmut Kohl wanted to buy the place back for the newly reunited Germany: that the Germans, Poles, Lithuanians and Russians might run the enclave (now cut off from the rest of Russia) together. In a broken-down hotel that was patrolled by prostitutes and drug dealers, I asked two Russian students what they thought should happen. One said that the name must be changed; Mikhail Kalinin, Stalin’s henchman, represented the bad years (it jolted me to think that there had been a worse time). Now the place should
be called Kantgrad, to show that Russia’s most western land was now part of a new Europe.
Soviet housing on the river in Kaliningrad.
Those who write or talk about the city still stress its horror. It has ‘bad karma’, I was told – this hideous, failed Kaliningrad, forever doomed, stifled by a confused and bloody past, riddled with AIDS and drugs and smuggling and crime. Is it worse than many other Russian cities blighted by Soviet planning? I don’t think so. Kaliningrad does have its own inhuman centre, as if a great scoop had lifted up a whole quarter, replacing it with wide avenues and chipped concrete walkways, potholed highways and bridges over the slow dark river, often seen through a haze of pollution, across memorials, heroic statues and models of weapons commemorating the Great Patriotic War. On the trams, obviously over-burdened people make you feel ashamed to be rich and happy. But beyond this is a layered history, the sense of stones beneath concrete, of streets and houses of a foreign past not yet dissolved into a new identity. The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky,
when he came to Kaliningrad in the 1960s, wrote of the trees whispering in German.
In spite of Soviet destruction, the past can come suddenly back, like the quick lifting of a blanket. You see it in the neat pre-war German railway stations – resembling giant parts of an ancient train set – the paint not thick enough to hide the old names: Rominten, for instance, in black gothic lettering at the stop for the old imperial hunting lodge, once the preserve of the German emperors
Republic, feared an island of anger and reaction. They were given money and, in places like the Duisburg and Lüneburg museums, memorialization of their former lives.
This didn’t put an end to resentment and demands for a return of what had gone; although my friends don’t say so, I think that the absorption of so many is an extraordinary achievement. We talked about the leader of the Bund der Vertriebenen (the largest organization of the expelled), Erika Steinbach – how she infuriates the Poles, particularly those who now live in what was, until 1945, the southern part of East Prussia. Should this be worrying? No, because her latest campaign is for a memorial in Berlin to the expelled people – not about property or frontiers. Frau Steinbach had wanted the memorial for the Germans whereas others, particularly in Poland, say victims throughout Europe should be commemorated. Much more important points had been settled at the time of reunification, when the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl accepted the post-1945 frontiers. The legal challenges brought by a few Germans who had left Poland in the communist time and now wished to reclaim land weren’t important. I remembered what a Polish politician said to me – how you could play on German guilt. Perhaps this could last for ever – an infinity of darkness.
When I first went there in 1992, Kaliningrad had also seemed darkly shocking. I got off the train into a parody of Soviet planning with cracked concrete, cratered streets, people bent against the cold and wet and a sleek German tour coach gliding past belching Ladas and dirty, dented trams. Rumours went round – that Helmut Kohl wanted to buy the place back for the newly reunited Germany: that the Germans, Poles, Lithuanians and Russians might run the enclave (now cut off from the rest of Russia) together. In a broken-down hotel that was patrolled by prostitutes and drug dealers, I asked two Russian students what they thought should happen. One said that the name must be changed; Mikhail Kalinin, Stalin’s henchman, represented the bad years (it jolted me to think that there had been a worse time). Now the place should
be called Kantgrad, to show that Russia’s most western land was now part of a new Europe.
Soviet housing on the river in Kaliningrad.
Those who write or talk about the city still stress its horror. It has ‘bad karma’, I was told – this hideous, failed Kaliningrad, forever doomed, stifled by a confused and bloody past, riddled with AIDS and drugs and smuggling and crime. Is it worse than many other Russian cities blighted by Soviet planning? I don’t think so. Kaliningrad does have its own inhuman centre, as if a great scoop had lifted up a whole quarter, replacing it with wide avenues and chipped concrete walkways, potholed highways and bridges over the slow dark river, often seen through a haze of pollution, across memorials, heroic statues and models of weapons commemorating the Great Patriotic War. On the trams, obviously over-burdened people make you feel ashamed to be rich and happy. But beyond this is a layered history, the sense of stones beneath concrete, of streets and houses of a foreign past not yet dissolved into a new identity. The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky,
when he came to Kaliningrad in the 1960s, wrote of the trees whispering in German.
In spite of Soviet destruction, the past can come suddenly back, like the quick lifting of a blanket. You see it in the neat pre-war German railway stations – resembling giant parts of an ancient train set – the paint not thick enough to hide the old names: Rominten, for instance, in black gothic lettering at the stop for the old imperial hunting lodge, once the preserve of the German emperors
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