Journal:Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis
Volume 38 (2019): Creating Modern Nation-States in the Eastern Baltic = Šiuolaikinių tautinių valstybių kūrimas rytiniame Baltijos jūros regione, pp. 49–76
Abstract
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).
Journal:Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis
Volume 38 (2019): Creating Modern Nation-States in the Eastern Baltic = Šiuolaikinių tautinių valstybių kūrimas rytiniame Baltijos jūros regione, pp. 23–47
Abstract
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.
Journal:Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis
Volume 26 (2013): Kristijono Donelaičio epochos kultūrinės inovacijos = Cultural Innovations of the Epoch of Kristijonas Donelaitis, pp. 148–165
Abstract
Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714–1780), poet of Prussian Lithuania of the epoch of Enlightenment, who was first turned into a symbol in the late 19th c., for more than a century has been one of the brightest memory sites in the region. The paper analyzes the contexts in which the symbol was actualized in Prussian Lithuania and Klaipeda Region in the late 19th to the late 20th c. The change in the interpretations of Donelaitis is presented: from the resource for the maintenance of Prussian Lithuanian regional patriotism, a symbolic figure of Lithuanian national culture, to the Sovietization of Donelaitis and his turning into a resource for the maintenance of the Lithuanian national uniqueness within the boundaries of the USSR. The analysis of the meaningful content in which the symbol of Donelaitis functioned and of its symbolic expressions proves that, over all the analyzed period, Donelaitis has been a figure that encouraged not only the convergence of cultures, but also a conflict.
Journal:Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis
Volume 24 (2012): Erdvių pasisavinimas Rytų Prūsijoje XX amžiuje = Appropriation of Spaces in East Prussia during the 20th Century = Prisvoenie prostranstv v Vostochnoi Prussii v dvadtsatom stoletii, pp. 230–276
Abstract
Like many other towns in East Prussia, Klaipėda lost almost all its former population during World War II and was inhabited by newcomers after 1945. After an example of Klaipėda, the article analyzes the process of comprehension of a newly inhabited area and making it one’s own. Klaipėda became a former East Prussian city having returned to Lithuania and simultaneously incorporated into the Soviet Union. That caused the clash of interests, the development of which also changed the systems of meanings that provided a framework for the appropriation process. The city was gradually comprehended in the process of formation of unique interrelationships of the meanings of Soviet ideology, all-Union patriotism, Lithuanian national culture, and East Prussian cultural heritage. In the article, the author identifies the processes that affected different configurations of the said interrelationships in different post-war periods.
Journal:Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis
Volume 24 (2012): Erdvių pasisavinimas Rytų Prūsijoje XX amžiuje = Appropriation of Spaces in East Prussia during the 20th Century = Prisvoenie prostranstv v Vostochnoi Prussii v dvadtsatom stoletii, pp. 221–229
Abstract
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.
Journal:Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis
Volume 23 (2011): Daugiareikšmės tapatybės tarpuerdvėse: Rytų Prūsijos atvejis XIX–XX amžiais = Ambiguous Identities in the Interspaces: The Case of East Prussia in the 19th and 20th Centuries = Die vieldeutigen Identitäten in den Zwischenräumen: Der Fall Ostpreußen…, pp. 69–103
Abstract
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.