Klaipėdos universitetas

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.

Like many other towns in East Prussia, Klaipėda lost almost all its former population during World War II and was inhabited by newcomers after 1945. After an example of Klaipėda, the article analyzes the process of comprehension of a newly inhabited area and making it one’s own. Klaipėda became a former East Prussian city having returned to Lithuania and simultaneously incorporated into the Soviet Union. That caused the clash of interests, the development of which also changed the systems of meanings that provided a framework for the appropriation process. The city was gradually comprehended in the process of formation of unique interrelationships of the meanings of Soviet ideology, all-Union patriotism, Lithuanian national culture, and East Prussian cultural heritage. In the article, the author identifies the processes that affected different configurations of the said interrelationships in different post-war periods.

The paper analyses particular meanings which integrated the Germans and Lithuanians living in Prussian Lithuania, defined their regional patriotism, and constituted the fundamentals of the regional culture of remembrance in the 19th and the early 20th c. It also examines the circumstances which, at the turn of the 20th c., gave an opportunity for part of Prussian Lithuanians to create alternative meanings, based on the Lithuanian historical master narrative, and encouraged Prussian Lithuanians to maintain their ethnic peculiarity and to support their distinction from Germans. Since Lithuanian historical narrative, created in Prussian Lithuania, became a source of alternative meanings, its structure, as well as the sources of its formation, is exhaustively analysed in the article. The author tries to resolve the issue whether the alternative culture of remembrance, based on the structure of meanings which were consolidated in the Lithuanian historical narrative and characterized by its own ceremonies, rituals, and monument erection practices, had formed in Prussia Lithuania.

The paper analyses the context of the formation and the narrative structure of the borussianistic historical master narrative based on the myth of Prussia’s German mission. By examining the relationship between the master narrative and the culture of remembrance, the article shows how, during the period of 1871-1914, the meanings of the borussianistic historical master narrative were consolidated into public commemoration practices of East Prussia and how that consolidation changed the multiplicity of identity intrinsic to East Prussia in the first half of the 19th century. On the basis of a case study analysis (the erection of a national monument “Borussia” in Klaipeda/ Memel), the article investigates the forms of application of borussianistic historical master narrative meanings on the territory of East Prussia, inhabited by mixed Lithuanian and German population.