Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

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 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.

The present article is a contribution to the research in the intellectual biography of Kristijonas Donelaitis. It aims to discuss the environment of Königsberg libraries in mid-18th c. not only as an institutional, but also an intellectual environment of the studies of Donelaitis which ought to be analyzed more in depth than it had been analyzed before. The first part of the article summarizes the efforts of Lithuanian, German, and Russian schollars after 1945 to save and reconstruct the funds of Königsberg libraries destroyed during WW2. The second part presents the environment of the ancient Königsberg libraries as a space of communication opportunities where student Donelaitis could find the principal literature. The context raises another issue that is merely mentioned in the article: next to the “public“ libraries, there was a number of personal collections in Königsberg. Some of them belonged to professors of theology whose lectures were attended by Donelaitis. Therefore, one can reasonably raise a question about the impact of scholars in Königsberg on Donelaitis in the years of his studies.

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 purpose of this paper is to examine the solution (?) of the case. People, because of famine and the occupation of the East Prussia by the Stalinists, fled the Kaliningrad region to Lithuania and other regions in search of bread and work. How many were there? There are hypothesis that 5-7 thousand or more people from Kaliningrad roamed Lithuania in 1946-1947. After the deportation of the ethnic people from the Königsberg/Kaliningrad region in 1947-1949, the MGB and Soviet militia structures searched for them in the neighbouring territories. The net result of the action was the deportation of the so called “Kaliningrad Germans” in 10-12 May, 1951 from Lithuania to Germany. The total amount of deportees, who declared their birth place as East Prussia, was 3415 persons from Lithuania and 275 other regions. The principal result of these deportations of unnecessary, ideologically foreign people was that East Prussia became homogeneously Soviet and all that remained of Königsberg and East Prussia were historical facts.