The New York Review Abroad (48 page)
Read The New York Review Abroad Online
Authors: Robert B. Silvers
“We are here to reconcile Germans and Russians through Jesus Christ,” said Mr. Schmidt. “If the industry of the Germans doesn’t make them arrogant and if the Russians’ naiveté—they are like children—doesn’t lead them into mistakes, the love of God will cause the establishment here of an independent state. It will be modeled on the ancient Order of Teutonic Knights—not because the Knights were German but because, like us now, they spread the word of God in the pagan darkness of Königsberg.”
The new magic words in Kaliningrad are Königsberg and Immanuel Kant. There are recurring calls for a referendum on going back to the city’s former name. “We are all of us Kant’s
Landsmänner
,” Ivanov said. He spoke Russian through a translator but he used the word
Landsmänner
in German. One of the first things a tourist sees upon landing at Kaliningrad’s newly opened international airport is a big sign “Welcome to Kant’s City.”
2
At the tomb outside the ruined cathedral Kant is now venerated as a local saint. Newlywed couples go directly from the municipal Marriage Palace to the tomb to pose for photographs. (In the past, the preferred site had been the bust of Karl Marx in a nearby park.) A new monument to Kant, the copy of an original that was demolished after the war, was solemnly inaugurated
last summer in the former Paradeplatz by the heads of the city and regional government and a plane-load of distinguished West Germans. There was some talk of renaming the city Kantgrad and I saw a T-shirt inscribed “I
Kant.” Königsberg and Kant are, of course, also code names for German money. German power, German influence; Yeltsin’s conservative opponents in the city, many of them Russian nationalists, know this. That is why N.A. Medvedev, the university rector, who says he sided with the instigators of the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, is against Kantgrad as a possible new name. “It’s not pleasant to the ear,” he says. Medvedev prefers a Slavic name that does not hark back to the German past, perhaps Baltijsk.
“Young people here don’t know who they are,” said Yuri Zabugin, the architect and a native of the city. “Or they want to be someone else. So would you,” he told me, “if you had grown up under communism in this awful place.” Zabugin is restoring old churches in the city with German money. He is also the curator of an exhibition on the history of Königsberg-Kaliningrad in the local museum. Put together by local arts and crafts students, it is the first independently conceived show in a museum that used to specialize in glorifying the Soviet petroleum or shoe industry. Its title is simply the number “236000,” the city’s zip-code. “It defines the city’s existence,” said Zabugin. In the catalog he described the city as a “spot on the map. Its historical name is not forgotten nor is it still valid. The new name is irrelevant and immaterial.… Who are we?”
The regional Kaliningrad government issues warnings that Russia’s sovereignty over Kaliningrad must not be questioned, but it is leading the efforts to form cultural and economic links with Germany. It wants Germany to open a consulate and a Goethe Institute in Kaliningrad, and is soliciting German public and private funds to finance
industries, tourism, mining, and transportation. It has turned, among others, to Friedrich Christians, the chairman of the powerful Deutsche Bank and the most prominent German financier currently negotiating with the Kaliningrad authorities. A German diplomat in Bonn jokingly calls Christians the
Heimweh
-banker. Christians’s connections with Königsberg go back to 1945 when, as a young German soldier, he saw the Red Army’s final assault on the city. If Königsberg is rebuilt, he said recently, it “would no longer be a monument to cruel destruction. Rebuilt, it will reflect the hope for peace and reconciliation in Europe.”
Mr. Christians has also put forward the idea of making Kaliningrad a free economic zone between East and West, a European Hong Kong or Singapore. The Russian Federation parliament has approved the idea in principle, but arrangements for abolishing customs duties remain to be worked out. The conservative bureaucracy opposes the scheme and the conservatives make up a majority in the regional Kaliningrad parliament. Some of them accuse Vladimir Matutshkin, the head of the regional administration who favors a free-trade zone, of being a “German agent.” One of them told a local journalist recently: “If we are not careful we’ll soon be governed by old SS men and Japanese samurai.” The police chief, Viktor Shoshnikov, recently published an article in
Kaliningradskaya Pravda
claiming that the free-trade zone would only bring in more criminals and drugs.
The military, on the other hand, favors the free-trade zone, since, as Admiral Vladimir Yegorov, the officer commanding the Russian fleet in the Baltic, told me, “the free-trade zone will supply good jobs for retired officers.” Few joint ventures with foreigners have been agreed upon. The most serious so far is the rebuilding of Hitler’s old Autobahn connecting Königsberg with Berlin. (The Poles are unhappy about this project. Work has begun so far only north of the Polish border.) On the day I met the admiral, ceremonies were taking
place on Russian ships in the Baltic celebrating the reintroduction of the old tsarist banner as the official flag of the Russian navy. “Everyone in Kaliningrad is looking forward to the free-trade zone,” the admiral said. “Everyone looks forward to big
bizness
.”
—May 13, 1993
1
Until 1918 the castle was one of the Kaiser’s official residences. Wilhelm II is said to have stayed in it more than fifty times. In an often quoted speech he delivered there on May 5, 1902, he referred to the Marienburg as Germany’s “old bastion in the East … a monument that testifies to Germany’s task [there]: Once again Polish insolence offends Germany and I am constrained to call upon the nation to safeguard its national inheritance.” Quoted in
Der Letzte Kaiser
, catalog of an exhibition at the Historical Museum, Berlin (Berlin: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1991), p. 314.
2.
Another philosopher from a local family was Hannah Arendt, who grew up in Königsberg. No one I talked to had heard of her, including Vitaly V. Shipov, mayor of Kaliningrad, and Yuri Ivanov.
Love and Misery in Cuba
Alma Guillermoprieto
So much hope was invested in Cuba, by people all over the world. Cuba was the romantic face of revolution. Handsome men in battle fatigues had fought against decadent despots who had turned their poor country into a giant brothel for rich capitalist gringos. They fought successfully and chased the despots out. And they promised self-respect, dignity, equality. They did not promise instant riches, but even a poor man can have his dignity
.
But they turned out to be despots too, who chose to forget that there can be no self-respect without democratic rights. And when the money ran out with the collapse of their Soviet patrons, Cubans were forced to fall back on the old ways that once helped to spark the revolution. Once more Cuba is becoming a giant brothel, for tourists from richer countries who can afford to live like kings for a week
.
And so the old promises have been betrayed. The best people have been silenced, or rot in jails. And women sell their bodies for a bowl of rice and beans
.
—I.B
.
FOR MANY OF
the long years that the Revolution has been in power in Cuba much of it was off-limits to the potentially unfriendly gaze. Not only were all sorts of facts and procedures kept secret; all foreigners were barred from access to large portions of Cuba’s territory and even Cubans were told where they could travel, and therefore where they could look. The reason stated for so much secrecy was the imperative of the cold war, but another reason was not given, and perhaps those who established the limits never formulated it clearly to themselves—it was simply understood that the way the Revolution was seen was critical to its survival. Its failures were hardly a secret but it was important that they not be visible.
So it comes as a double shock to arrive in Cuba as a tourist and see so much of it open to one’s foreign stare, and to see also how brutal in many cases the new stare of the foreign visitor is. On a tour bus, the modest and articulate young woman who is our guide attempts to explain the currency system, but she is interrupted by a hefty middle-aged Mexican of some means who has been looking frankly at her body. “You’re very good-looking,
Cubanita
,” he says. “I like your hair.” She thanks him less than graciously for the compliment, but he is unfazed. He makes a few comments about the pitiful state of the economy, and a short while later interrupts again. “Where can we see some table-dancing?” he wants to know.
Airports and airplanes, natural collection points for foreigners, are in other parts of the world centers of regimented behavior: no smoking, fasten your seat belts, step up to the counter. At the brand new international departures lounge in Havana these rules don’t hold: hundreds of young men on charter tours—Mexican, Italian, and Spanish, on this occasion—sprawl on the floor, spill beer on the just-polished marble and throw the cans at each other, boast openly about their diminished supply of condoms after an Easter weekend
sex holiday in sunny Havana, and blow cigar smoke in the face of the women at the check-in counter.
In the old days guerrilla apprentices from Brazil and Uruguay and El Salvador came here and treated each brick laid by the Revolution with reverence, and nevertheless were kept within strict boundaries during their stay. With an ordinary tourist visa provided with any charter tour package, however, the new type of foreigner can rent a car or buy a domestic plane ticket and travel just about anywhere he pleases in Cuba. On a decrepit plane that miraculously survives its daily run from Havana to Santiago and back, two Italians join the other tourists and Cubans who have already fastened their seat belts. They are late, it would seem, because they are less than coherent, or more than a little drunk. Convulsed with giggles, they make their way up the aisle, and then one of them decides that the jokey thing to do is to sit himself heavily in the lap of another traveler—a Cuban. “I’m sorry,” the Italian slurs in deliberate English. He does not look at all repentant, and his friend is howling with laughter. Gently, the stewardess tugs the offender away from his victim and pushes him toward an empty seat.