Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

As early as the 18th c., Archbishop Firmian of Salzburg sought to establish counter-Reformation in the area of his influence. As he failed to get any support from peasants, in 1731, he forcefully made about 20,000 of the local residents leave the Archdiocese of Salzburg. The Evangelical population of the Empire were the first to protest against that. Then, King of Prussia Friedrich Wilhelm I invited those displaced from home to come to his kingdom. About 16,000 of them accepted the invitation and, observed by the public, via Berlin arrived in the land later called East Prussia. In the 18th c., due to the famine and especially the Great Plague, the former Duchy of Prussia had lost about one third of its population, and the eastern region of the country was struck especially hard. For King Friedrich Wilhelm I, who was implementing the programme of repopulation of the deserted areas of his country, the opportunity to accomodate the Salzburgers deprived of their homeland was like a gift from God. It was impossible any more to accomodate them in individual villages, especially in the north-eastern part of the country, however, they still formed a colony (Colonie) which had for a long time cherished the sense of community, before in the end of the 19th c. their descendants assimilated with the local population and adopted their dialect.

The article presents the first programme of publishing Lithuanian secular literature in Prussian Lithuania proposed and carried out by Martin Ludwig Rhesa, professor of Königsberg University. The first publication of Donelaitis’ poem The Seasons prepared by Rhesa will be discussed by assessing Rhesa’s contribution to it: the editing, translation, and provision of the scientific part (a research study-article and scientific comments). The first reviews of The Seasons which started appearing in Königsberg and Germany in the period of 1818 to 1820 will be examined.

On the turn of the 19th c., the composition of the students in Königsberg University changed. After the 3rd Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1795), the number of Polish students in it went up, however, after the foundation of the Duchy of Warsaw, it immediately dropped again. The Polish students who had studied abroad grew up into famous figures of culture and science. They promoted the development of cultural and scientific centres and of their network in Europe.

The so-called “Group of Saints” (Heilige) formed in Mazury, in the County of Neidenburg (Kreis Neidenburg), in the late 18th c. and was most active in the parishes of Jerutki (Jerutten), Rozogi (Friedrichshof), and Wielbark (Willenberg). The present article, based on the documents stored in Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin-Dahlem, discusses its activities. In particular, an effort is made to present the reconstructions of the essential policies and postulates of the activity of the group members. The author tries to answer the question about the period of time that the activities of surinkimininkai (Gemeinschaftsbewegung; participants of prayer hours held in private homes by lay preachers) in the Land of Mazury started. The official secession from Church was the principal reason which made the author support the previous researchers of the phenomenon of the “Saints” who attributed the “Saints” to non-traditional religious groups. On the other hand, because of the pietist roots and the majority of their views, they can be considered to be direct predecessors of surinkimininkai.

Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714–1780), poet of Prussian Lithuania of the epoch of Enlightenment, who was first turned into a symbol in the late 19th c., for more than a century has been one of the brightest memory sites in the region. The paper analyzes the contexts in which the symbol was actualized in Prussian Lithuania and Klaipeda Region in the late 19th to the late 20th c. The change in the interpretations of Donelaitis is presented: from the resource for the maintenance of Prussian Lithuanian regional patriotism, a symbolic figure of Lithuanian national culture, to the Sovietization of Donelaitis and his turning into a resource for the maintenance of the Lithuanian national uniqueness within the boundaries of the USSR. The analysis of the meaningful content in which the symbol of Donelaitis functioned and of its symbolic expressions proves that, over all the analyzed period, Donelaitis has been a figure that encouraged not only the convergence of cultures, but also a conflict.

The article is devoted to the so-called “lessons of life” in “The Seasons” of Donelaitis, that simultaneously are also “lessons of survival”, both of spiritual-psychological and pure physical. In his epic piece, by relating God’s pedagogy of the Christian teaching to the pedagogy of the God of nature, Donelaitis got engaged in therapeutic education: that is an amazing synthesis of the Christocentric idea and pantheistic implications in which the ideal of the Christian hermetism clearly stands out. That is the ideal of a comprehensive unit which has links with the ontology of the epic poem. The ontology is based on the eternal recurrence with a constantly regenerating hope to finally have the genius of the totality able to operate ontological cosmic turning points.