Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The article focuses on the role of the specificity related to East Prussia and its past in the current self-consciousness of the population of Kaliningrad Oblast and in the future strategies of the said territory of Russia. The author questions both the impact of the above mentioned specificity on the formation of uniqueness of Kaliningrad people in the context of other Russian territories and the existence of a special Kaliningradian identity. To his mind, for the population of Kaliningrad, East Prussia is a multidimensional symbol that provokes different social-cultural phenomena and simultaneously is used in order to trigger, maintain, and enhance the phenomena.

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 article intends to establish which images of East Prussia and its local population were maintained and what kind of relations with the “German heritage” was formed in the documents of the official military and civil authorities in Kaliningrad Oblast in the period of 1945 to 1950. The question of the impact of the cultural uniqueness of East Prussia made on the official propaganda-supported approach to East Prussia and the local population is raised. The author demonstrates that the said approach did not always coincide with the approach that was forming due to the daily social interaction between the newcomers and the old “German” residents with their cultural heritage.

The article compares historical literature that conveys the Soviet story of ‘liberation’ of Memel/Klaipėda during World War II, and compares them with post-war German publications dealing with the issue of seizure of Klaipėda that emerged in the post-war period. On the basis of this comparison, verification is sought of the story of ‘liberation’, highlighting its major factual and interpretational problems. The analysis corrects some episodes of the story of Klaipėda’s seizure, thoroughly covering the course of World War II events in the approach of the Eastern Front toward Klaipėda during the period from October 1944 till the end of January 1945.

The article analyzes the extent to which the historiographic topic of the post-World War II settlers of the Klaipeda region has been studied. Existing research is examined to determine which topics have been re-searched and which have not yet been studied. The research of the post-World War II settlers of the Klaipėda region is compared to research of the former East Prussian territories including the Kaliningrad region, Varmia and Masuria.