Forgotten Land Read Online Free Page A

and that passionate slaughterer of all game, Hermann Göring. The tomb of Immanuel Kant survived the bombs and the changes, to become a sacred place where newly married Russian couples are photographed, the bride’s white dress brilliant against the memorial’s pale-pink stone and the cathedral’s dark-red Prussian brick. The students I first met in 1992 have done well, mostly through links to the west; Eduard and Olga look outwards from Kaliningrad, working for foreign companies or for the European Union. To them, it’s inconceivable that the place can be anything other than Russian. But they know that Königsberg is what makes this Russian place different.
    Probably the German city had never been beautiful – idiosyncratic perhaps, with its mysterious corners, self-conscious medievalism, crooked streets, gothic towers and dark blocks of warehouses along a slow, oily river. The former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt – who passed through Königsberg on his way to the eastern front – remembers a very provincial place. Most of the buildings – even the famous red-brick fortifications around it that guarded western civilization – were nineteenth century, making, at best, a place of character and memory, enfolding its people in a limited, comfortable world. The centre – the castle, cathedral and university district – was what the Soviets and the bombing changed most. After 1945, they blew up some of the churches; now the Juditterkirche, the oldest church in East Prussia, is a place of Russian Orthodox worship, with the old German cemetery next to it. German money has paid for much of what has been done since 1991, often – as with the cathedral
and its stiflingly inoffensive civic interior – alongside Russian government funds.
    In this post-Soviet age, black limousines and dark-suited bodyguards, former members of the special forces, wait outside the Kaliningrad clubs, restaurants and hotels; the show of money mocks any idea of communism. Most of the city government’s plans for tourism seem to leap over the Soviet years and, as you walk round, you sense their brevity. Across from the concrete are the sugary early twentieth-century baroque of the former courthouse (now the headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet), the red brick of the nineteenth-century copies of the medieval gates and the Dohna tower (now the Amber Museum). German or Prussian gothic is still a powerful presence, mostly nineteenth century, except in the outside of the restored cathedral, one of the largest brick gothic buildings in Europe. A lake, dark green and pungent in summer, stretches from where the castle once was before the Soviet triumph of the building of the high, still empty and asbestos-ridden old Communist Party headquarters. More recent buildings can seem stagey, crudely imitative, Königsberg in caricature; they are certainly not Soviet.
    The tourists are mostly German. When Kaliningrad first opened to the world in 1991, many of those who had lived there before 1945 came back for the first time since the expulsions. It’s said that several, standing perhaps where the castle once was, or in Victory Square (formerly Kochplatz, named after himself by the last National Socialist Gauleiter, Erich Koch) or what had been the main business street, the old Steindamm, or the former Lindenstrasse – where the former Jewish orphanage still stands – were overwhelmed, bursting into tears at the memory of terror or of loss.
    The street names are now changing back; Gorky Street has become Hoffmann Street again. Tour guides point out other obvious survivors – the neo-classical old stock exchange or the theatre, given a new pillared façade by the Soviets, with the statue of Friedrich Schiller in front of it, surviving 1945 apparently
because a soldier chalked on it that this was a great poet. Near the nineteenth-century university buildings, the guides lead their groups down into the bunker where the last German commander, General Lasch,