Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The paper is a keynote address to the conference ‘Contacts and Cultural Transfer in the Historical Region of East Prussia (1700–2000)’ that took place in Nida in September 2013. It considers what the East Prussia region means, and what it is associated with today, after it stopped existing 70 years ago. The question is asked what the current situation of East Prussian historiography is, and potential directions for the development of new relevant research are outlined. The author argues that in the process of the cognition of East Prussia, a shift was made from the conservative system of meanings, developed mainly by the former local elites in Germany after the Second World War, to the cognition of regional diversity, which existed before the era of nationalism, and to coping with national narratives about East Prussia. Simultaneously, in the former territory of East Prussia, which currently belongs to Poland, Russia and Lithuania, individual elements of the past of the region continue to occupy an increasingly important role in layers of the local identity, and form opportunities for local cultures of remembrance.

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 analyzes the mechanisms of institutionalization of the collective memory of regional identity, as its significant dimension, and assesses discursive strategies used by different politicians. The author discloses the principal elements of the regional identity in the Soviet period and analyzes the practices of collective memory and historical consciousness in the period of 1945 to 1990. The relationship of the history policies of the Soviet period and the contemporary political processes is demonstrated.

The fact that the Curonian Spit is one of the most important landscape icons of East Prussia is substantiated by reports from the travels and literary works of numerous German authors. This paper analyses articles on the Curonian Spit that were published between 1920 and 1939 in the “Ostdeutsche Monatshefte” journal that was one of the most important cultural magazines focused on the issues of the “German East”. It served as the basis for a description of elements that created the “ambience” (Georg Simmel) of this East Prussian landscape icon (dunes, the sea, the bay, the world of birds, and the ubiquitous moose), and its perception as a specifically German landscape, particularly in the inter-war period.

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.