Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

Wilsonianism, the political philosophy of President Woodrow Wilson of the USA, was seen in Europe in 1919 as a way out of the chaotic and almost hopeless situation in international relations that had emerged in the autumn of 1918. The philosophy established a new ideology of international relations based on the equality of sovereign states, a doctrine of collective security, and the preservation of peace and stability. In European and world political history, this was the beginning of a geo-political experiment that, to a large extent, continues to this day. New entities in international politics, such as the Lithuanian state, proclaimed in 1918, had to adapt to the new ideology as well. The essay provides an outline of the stimuli and obstacles to Lithuanian foreign policy in that direction in the period between the two world wars. Based on sources from Lithuanian and Russian archives, published documents and historical research, the author discusses the links between Lithuanian foreign policy and its controversial historical heritage, complex domestic political processes, and attempts to solve the problems it faced in its cooperation with Bolshevik Russia (the USSR).

In geo-political terms, Lithuania was never a maritime state. In 1916, however, its politicians formulated a clear claim to obtain access to the sea and have a commercial port for the first time. The claim appeared in a memorandum attributed to Antanas Smetona, but signed by 12 politicians and presented to the German military authorities of the Ober Ost. So far, historians have not questioned the intellectual origins of the claim. Discussing the emergence of the issue of Lithuania’s sea access, the article seeks to identify the reasons for the ventilation of this issue in the Lithuanian-language press, and to show how it arose and how it manifested itself in political practice. The main argument is that the origin of the idea of Lithuania as a maritime state should be associated with the period of the First World War, whereas Lithuania’s claim for access to the sea cannot be explained solely by the idea of uniting Prussian and Russian areas inhabited by Lithuanian speakers.

The creative heritage of Kristijonas Donelaitis makes us focus our attention on Prussian Lithuania as an ethnocultural region that provided the poet with significant creative impetuses; simultaneously, Donelaitis is associated with the Kingdom of Prussia as the space that formed his personality, the contours of his worldview, and his national self-awareness. To deeper understand the works of Kristijonas Donelaitis as a significant layer of Lithuanian cultural heritage, it is important to study in-depth the modern approaches to Prussian history and, in that context, the stereotypical interpretation of some aspects of the history of Prussian Lithuania in Lithuanian historiography of the 20th c., relevant to the present. The article analyzes the essential characteristic of Prussian history emphasized by its contemporary researchers, i.e. the spirit of contrast: the interchanging periods of modernity and regress have allegedly predetermined “the special way” of German history, Sonderweg, which preconditioned the dominance of nationalsocialism in 1933. Moreover, the issue of the contrast as the predominating motiff in the master narrative (Meistererzählung) which makes a strong impact on the collective memory is highlighted, as well as the reflection on the issue in the field of the studies of the history of Prussian Lithuania.

The article analyzes the aspiration of the interwar political and cultural elite of Lithuania to turn Klaipėda Region acquired in 1923 into integral part of the state of Lithuania by construing collective memory that would unify Lithuania Minor and Major. The attention is focussed exclusively on the initiatives whose authors were the political and cultural elite of Lithuania that identified itself with the tradition of Lithuania Major.

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.