Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

Changes in the political power and the population in the southern part of East Prussia, which went to Poland in 1945, led to the removal of traces of the German past in the region, and to its Polonisation immediately after the war. After discussing the de-Germanisation policy, typical of the postwar period, the removal of symbols of ‘German power’, the elimination of the ‘German spirit’, and trends in the adaptation of the new population to the cultural landscape, the author raises the question how relations between the population of the territory and the German heritage and past changed after 1989. The issue is considered in the context of the discussion among intellectuals in Poland as to what the relationship with the German heritage should be. The answer is based on the results of a sociological poll carried out by the Institute for Western Affairs in 2001.

The article analyzes the issue of East Prussian meanings in the environment of Prussian Lithuanians in terms of their “mental maps” and “symbolical geography”. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the communication channels that affected the process of mental appropriation of “our own region” – East Prussia – by the ethnic group of Prussian Lithuanians. The significance of the historical tradition related to the reformationist provision of protection of the status of the Lithuanian language in churches and schools of Prussian Lithuania, as well as of the periodicals published in Lithuanian at the turn of the 20th c. in East Prussia, is emphasized, as it is considered to be a significant communication channel that formed the conception of East Prussia, a close and “one’s own” space from the geographical, administrative-political, and civilization viewpoints. The analysis is oriented towards the problem of “appropriation of the past”, and it contributes to the understanding how the meanings of East Prussia topical for Prussian Lithuanians formed and which symbols marked the presently imaginary spaces identified with East Prussia and Prussian Lithuania/ Lithuania Minor as its part.

The article reveals the principal trends of changes in the relationship with the past in the city of Kaliningrad at the turn of the 21st c. It examines how different social groups and institutions – amateur and professional historians, veterans of World War II, museums, and interest groups abroad – were solving the dilemma that emerged in Kaliningrad during the Perestroika period and were trying to choose what was native and what was foreign in the past of the city. The author argues that the active formation of the relationship with the past of the city, especially during the last decade, by those groups intertwines with the efforts to strengthen ties between Russia and its exclave and makes an impact on the Russianization of the city areas and East Prussian cultural heritage.

The article analyzes the competition between the official and alternative discourses of the region’s past that formed in Kaliningrad over the 70s to the 80s of the 20th c. The author notes that, next to the efforts of the government to form a respective image of the past of the pre-war Kaliningrad Oblast, different behaviour strategies formed which enabled the preparation of the ground for the rehabilitation of the prewar cultural heritage even under the conditions of ideological dictate. The process of the formation of a mechanism of continuous interest in the past of the region is examined, and formal and informal groups that undertook to meet the interest in the years of Perestroika are characterized.

The paper gives an overview of military developments on the final stage of Second World War in the East Prussia territory. The events in this area had been sticked in collective German memory as an Apocalypse. The extensive crimes committed by the conqueror, the motives for the mass criminality in East Prussia are examined as well. These events left a collective trauma in the culture of German remembrance, but the consequences for the Soviet Union were also negative.