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directed the drawn-out defence of Königsberg; then perhaps they go to the Oceanographic Museum (a Soviet addition, with whole ships and submarines docked on the Pregel) or to the zoo, a tired place where slow-breathing animals lie beside murky pools. The zoo is the place for Hans’s story: how astonishing care was lavished upon one hippopotamus during the horrific human suffering after the siege’s end. More than forty bits of shell and bullets were pulled from Hans’s armoured skin and a Red Army vet slept alongside him, tending the wounds or massaging the hippopotamus’s heaving stomach as it endured chronic indigestion. What could be done? Eventually, after massive infusions of vodka, Hans walked, or staggered, again.
    Eighteenth-century warehouses in pre-1945 Königsberg, with the castle tower in the distance.
     
     

    In 2007, fifteen years after my first visit, I call on the German Consul in Kaliningrad in the bright, newly built villa where he has his office. Guido Herz explains how uninterested he was previously in this part of the world, anxious perhaps to block out any imagined plot of a surreptitious German retaking of Königsberg. Short, dark-haired, tanned and dapper, quick in speech and gesture, he is, he says, a Roman Catholic from Heidelberg: not a Prussian or with any emotional attachment to the old East Prussia or the eastern former German lands – none at all. His face shows distaste, as if these places give him pain.
    He looks at me sharply. He and Berlin accept completely that this region is Russian – and he sees the city as divided into two parts: the Russian present and the German (or Prussian) past. Did I know that Kaliningrad is booming – booming, booming, booming? he repeats, breaking briefly into English. There is 10 per cent growth per annum and very low unemployment. Which German firms are here? I ask. The Consul is sensitive perhaps to the charge of commercial imperialism. He says only that there are several: one that makes children’s goods. The BMW assembly plant is nothing to do with Germany and is a Russian company. It also assembles KIA cars from Korea.
    Booming, booming, booming – a volley of triumph. This may be true of the city. But out in the country I remember the pools of green-brown water on fields where the old drainage systems have broken down; the old woman in the stained headscarf who had offered me shrivelled grapes from her garden in a near-derelict house by a red-brick former Lutheran church; then, in Kaliningrad, at the furthest end of the old castle pond (past the two memorials to the Soviet submarine captain who had sunk the German liner the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945, with the loss of thousands of civilian lives) the lighted windows of dilapidated industrial buildings at night, as if people work or live there.
    Guido Herz says it’s true that the Russians had not wanted a consul – but he’s the second and they have welcomed him. When I ask about the groups in Germany that are pressing for recognition
of what they or their expelled ancestors lost or suffered, he explains that East Prussia is not so strongly represented among these as the Sudeten Germans or Silesians. Had I heard of Erika Steinbach, their leader? Guido Herz smiles. She has little influence now, he thinks, in Germany. It suits the Poles to use her – and again he breaks into English – as a bogeywoman. I think also that it suits those who move among the ghosts to remember that Chancellor Helmut Kohl, just before German reunification, had told the Vertriebene (expelled people) that they had been treated very unjustly.
    One must get things into perspective, Herz says. The former East Prussia makes up only 0.4 per cent of Russian territory. The Russians have no fear of the Germans. Why should they? It’s the Czechs and the Poles who are anxious. Kaliningrad is a place of victims, he thinks: victims of the air raids, of Hitler, of the Red Army, of Stalin, of environmental disaster, of poor urban