The New York Review Abroad (46 page)

One cannot escape an uncanny feeling of the existence of the old Königsberg, like the negative of a damaged photograph, lying ten to twenty feet underneath the city’s surface, covered with rubble from the war and from Stalin’s bulldozers. If the huge mass of debris were cleared away the old topography, now flattened out, would come into view, with its natural hills and dips, its landscaped river basins and embankments. Buried under the Lumumba and Friedrich Engels Sport Centers, under the Gamal Abdul Nasser Park and Oktober Revolution Housing Estates Nos. 1–9, the old town has survived only in the city’s historical museum, where models of the 1945 street battles accompanied by sound effects convey an idea of the burning city’s center, drowned in gunfire, at the moment of its capture by the Red Army.

Until the spring of 1991, Kaliningrad was a Soviet “security zone,” known as the “Silent Swamp,” since it was very difficult to visit and
few people knew what was going on in the many military installations there. The region was closed to foreigners, except possibly spies, and even to most Russians except by special permit. Much of the rich farmland—before the war East Prussia was Germany’s corn granary—lay fallow. Some three hundred abandoned German villages that had engaged in farming before the war were never resettled. During the early Sixties, oil was found east of the city but it was hardly developed. Nor was Kaliningrad’s economic potential exploited, with its opportune geographic location at the westernmost point of the Soviet Union and its great port, as a link between Russia and Central Europe. Instead, the place was turned into one of the Soviet Union’s main military and naval bases.

According to a report published last spring in
Moscow News
, if war with the West had broken out, the main task of the Soviet Baltic fleet would have been to capture the Danish Straits and seal off the Baltic Sea. Between 1945 and 1991, no Western cargo ship was allowed into either Kaliningrad waters or those of nearby Baltijsk (the former Prussian Pillau). The city is still a military fiefdom, headquarters of the 11th Army of the Guards, and seat of the admiral commanding the Russian Baltic fleet. The Baltic fleet, according to Admiral Yegorov, is expected nowadays to cover part of its maintenance costs by transporting civilian and foreign cargo and renting out ships to Western entrepreneurs and organizers of entertainments such as company anniversaries or wedding parties.

Throughout the city and its environs, the traffic on the streets is largely military. In the countryside, one drives past parked tanks and camouflaged installations behind seemingly endless barbed-wire fences. Since the withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states, there is an even greater military presence. According to one Western estimate, close to a quarter million troops are now stationed here. All this, according to a Western diplomat in
Warsaw, may reflect not only the difficulties of absorbing the army into Russia, but the extent of the Russians’ self-consciousness and unease in this arch-Germanic spot.

Poland and the Soviet Union have treated the former German territories they took over after 1945 very differently. Many historic German cities in those territories suffered severe damage during the war. In the parts of Prussia (and Silesia) that fell under Polish rule (and from which some six million Germans were expelled) the Poles made a conscious effort to absorb the German past. Claiming that in these “regained Polish historical lands” Polish burghers and peasants had always been the majority, the Poles managed to make that past over into their own. Very carefully, even lovingly, and at great cost, they restored and in some cases rebuilt from scratch famous ancient German universities and Lutheran domed churches (they are now Catholic), castles, guildhouses, town halls, and Hanseatic burghers’ mansions. The effort at rebuilding German ruins as Polish national monuments has been going on for decades; by now, the brand new Gothic or Baroque buildings have acquired their own patina and look genuine and old. Even that great symbol of German military colonialism in the East, the palatial castle of the Grand Masters of the Order of Teutonic Knights at Malbork (the former Marienburg) in East Prussia, has been restored as a major Polish historical landmark.
¹

The Russians, apparently for ideological reasons, including their
hostility to religion, and perhaps also from a sense of insecurity that the Poles did not share, systematically effaced nearly every remaining trace of German art and history in Kaliningrad. Churches, in particular, were the object of Soviet distaste. The Lutheran Kreuzkirche, which had survived the war almost intact, served until recently as a factory for smoked fish. The main Catholic church in the city was converted into a concert hall. Other churches were blown up or dismantled. In the outskirts, an old city gate was left standing, the scene of long-forgotten skirmishes with the Swedes during the Seven Years’ War, last restored under “the gracious reign” of Wilhelm II in 1889, according to a still legible plaque on the wall; 1889, incidentally, was the year Hitler was born. A few medieval forts have also survived, as have some of the stately German villas in the suburbs, which are now occupied by high-ranking Russian army officers and members of the old Communist elite. With few exceptions, the major public monuments, including Kant’s statue, were melted down.

In one case, a Prussian grand elector’s headless torso was turned into a Russian monument by sticking Field Marshal Kutuzov’s head on it; it can now be seen in the Oktober Revolution Quarter. Extensive remains of the former royal palace were still standing in 1969, and, according to Yuri Zabuga, a local architect, it could and should have been restored. Instead, it was bulldozed away. The bleak skeleton of a projected House of the Soviets has stood in its place unfinished for the past fifteen years, a monstrous eyesore twenty-two stories high, visible from nearly everywhere in the city. No trace is left of the many stone fountains that were still more or less intact after the war. “If I were dropped in this town by parachute, and asked where I was I would answer: perhaps in Irkutsk,” wrote Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, publisher of Hamburg’s liberal weekly
Die Zeit
, in 1989, on her first visit since 1945. She had grown up on an estate a few miles outside Königsberg. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, reminds
you of the old Königsberg. At no point could I have said, this was once the
Paradeplatz
[where Kant’s old university stood], or here stood the
Schloss
. It is as though a picture has been painted over; no one knows that underneath there had once been a different scene.”

2.

In the former Paradeplatz, now an open space of cement blocks and tarred walks and a few dusty trees, I followed a group of German tourists down a flight of stairs into an underground bunker, now preserved as a war museum, where the last German commander of “Festung (fortress) Königsberg” capitulated to the Russians on April 9, 1945. Maps, photographs, and a diorama with toy soldiers and flickering lights recall the fierce fighting in the burning streets and the heavy casualties on both sides. A photocopy of the capitulation agreement is on view, and it stipulates, among other things, that each German officer is allowed to take into captivity as many suitcases as he and his servant are able to carry.

The German tourists spent a few minutes in the bunker and soon climbed back up to take their seats on their bus. A few young boys crowded the exit outside and shyly tugged at their sleeves. They pulled from their sleeves. They pulled from their shabby coat pockets little German medallions and other souvenirs dug up in the rubble, old silver spoons, combs, coins, military buttons, and rank insignia they were hoping to sell. There was also an elderly, one-armed Russian, who was offering Red Army battle medals, his own, he claimed, at thirty-five deutsche marks each. He had won one at Kiev, he said, and another in April 1945, outside Berlin.

The Hotel Moskwa, where I was staying, was a crumbling old hostel with dusty curtains and threadbare carpets on wooden floorboards
that creaked underfoot. The seedy little rooms came with small radio loudspeakers screwed to the wall which could only be turned louder or softer, never completely off, and were wired to receive only one local station that endlessly repeated the hit tunes of a local rock group named American Boys. In the long corridors, the stale air smelled of cigarette butts and cleaning fluid. On the walls were photographs of Kant’s tomb and of the beaches at the nearby Baltic resorts of Zelednogradsk (the former Bad Crenz) and Svetlogorsk (Rauschen), where Thomas Mann is said to have vacationed in the Twenties and where high-ranking Russian naval officers now have their summer houses.

One day, coming out of my room on the second floor of the hotel, which was reserved for foreigners, I encountered an elderly German tourist from West Berlin who called out “
Guten Morgen
” and then told me in an assured tone that the Hotel Moskwa had been a German office building before the war, the headquarters of a big insurance company named Continental. This he knew for certain, he said. He himself was a Berliner but his wife was a native of Königsberg and knew the city. We walked down the stairs together and in a more casual tone he added that there was no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that Königsberg would soon be German again. “It is in the stars,” he said. “And in the books. As De Gaulle put it, everything in the world changes, except geography.” The Russians themselves must be conscious of this, he said. “They can’t really believe it possible for the city of Immanuel Kant to be a Russian city. It is an absurdity.”

“It’s happened before,” I suggested. In the eighteenth century, after the Seven Years’ War, when Königsberg fell briefly to the Russians, Kant himself and the entire university faculty voluntarily took an oath of allegiance to the “Illustrious and All Powerful Empress of All Russians, Elisabeth Petrovna etc etc” and to her heir, the future Peter III. I had just read that in a newly available English translation
of Arsenij Gulyga’s biography of Kant. He replied: “That doesn’t count. The wars of the eighteenth century never affected ordinary people. And there was no nationalism then.”