Klaipėdos universitetas

The German army entered the Russian Empire in the spring of 1915, and by the autumn it had occupied most of the territory on which later the independent state of Lithuania was founded. For almost three years, from the autumn of 1915, the area was governed by the Supreme Commander in the East (Oberbefehlshaber Ost), i.e. military administration. Mainly on the basis of the newspapers published in the Ober Ost area in the years of the First World War, as well as other sources, the author seeks to show how German soldiers, and Germans in a broader sense, saw the area of the prospective Lithuania and its population that it occupied in 1915. The paper analyses the impression the land and its inhabitants made on German soldiers and commentators, and examines how those impressions combined with previous ideas about Eastern Europe.

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 is devoted to the problem of time value in the context of contemporary Western culture and societies. This problem is put into context of whole contemporary culture and civilization. The main attention author gives to the general studies of social norms, values, stereotypes and traditions, known in contemporary Western societies. He points the raising importance of rational time organization of daily needs here. The actualities of real differentiation of daily time allocation are described here as well. The personal abilities to organize the actual time are named as high values in industrialized Western societies, year by year leaving less and less time for the same needs. The everyday stresses, unstable emotions became as the results of such process for a great number of individuals of Western culture. This situation is not so relevant just for less industrialized Eastern World cultures and societies.