Klaipėdos universitetas

The paper characterises the several-decades-long process of rehabilitation of the prewar cultural heritage in the Kaliningrad. After the northern part of the former East Prussia (Königsberg, and since 1946, the Kaliningrad Oblast) had been annexed by the USSR, and after basically a total change of the population had taken place, the authorities started to Sovietise the region. Knowledge of the prewar past was prohibited from the very beginning, and Stalin-era propaganda formed the founding myth of the Kaliningrad region with reference to the notion of ‘a Slavic land from time immemorial’. Despite the significant shifts that took place in the process of research into the history of the Kaliningrad Oblast during the Soviet period, carried out by historians from Russia and other countries, the adaptation by the postwar settlers to the socio-cultural landscape remains a poorly researched theme. The paper argues that the rehabilitation of the prewar (and primarily German) cultural heritage took place all through the Soviet era, by gradually converting the initially alien environment into their own. Ultimately, a fundamental shift took place in the cultural memory of Kaliningrad’s inhabitants; from the fear of staying ‘in an empty land’, they moved to the compatibility of ‘memory and desire’: the understanding that the metaphor of ‘paradise lost’, which revealed the nostalgia of the former inhabitants of East Prussia, also defined the feelings of Kaliningrad residents for the land that had become their home.

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.