Forgotten Land (25 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
In March 1939, Hitler obliged the Memel Germans. In the last of his pre-war triumphs, after a journey by sea, during which he was painfully sick, the Führer passed through hysterical crowds to the town square, where he spoke from the balcony of the little opera house. The rest of Europe did nothing to stop this. It was undeniable that the seizing by the Lithuanians of Memel from the League of Nations in 1923 had been as illegal as this coup some sixteen years later.
Today the bus from Riga to Klaip
da takes four hours, through forested country opening sometimes into long meadows or brightly painted wood villages where cows and geese graze by the road and you expect to see a horse and cart. At the journey’s end, as the bus goes through the suburbs past Klaip
da’s Soviet-era housing, which reaches far above old Memel’s German red-brick buildings, rain starts to come in from the Baltic.
da takes four hours, through forested country opening sometimes into long meadows or brightly painted wood villages where cows and geese graze by the road and you expect to see a horse and cart. At the journey’s end, as the bus goes through the suburbs past Klaipda’s Soviet-era housing, which reaches far above old Memel’s German red-brick buildings, rain starts to come in from the Baltic.In a Klaip
da restaurant, waitresses wear what look like monks’ habits, divided revealingly at the side. They glide through a dim room whose vaulted ceiling is probably meant to evoke medieval feasting but also has the air of a dungeon, appropriate to these turbulent borderlands. Crosses have been stitched onto the waitresses’ gowns and other banners and cushions, perhaps showing Christianity’s triumph; Lithuania was the last pagan country in Europe until it joined the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the fifteenth century. The restaurant’s fluting, soft
background music, like the slow seeping of a soapy fluid, could represent this late drift towards Western Europe. Yet there are no churches in Klaip
da’s old town – for the Soviets destroyed them all. As if to recall this past vulnerability, the European Union flag flies near the restaurant, to show that Lithuania is no longer alone.
da restaurant, waitresses wear what look like monks’ habits, divided revealingly at the side. They glide through a dim room whose vaulted ceiling is probably meant to evoke medieval feasting but also has the air of a dungeon, appropriate to these turbulent borderlands. Crosses have been stitched onto the waitresses’ gowns and other banners and cushions, perhaps showing Christianity’s triumph; Lithuania was the last pagan country in Europe until it joined the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the fifteenth century. The restaurant’s fluting, softbackground music, like the slow seeping of a soapy fluid, could represent this late drift towards Western Europe. Yet there are no churches in Klaip
da’s old town – for the Soviets destroyed them all. As if to recall this past vulnerability, the European Union flag flies near the restaurant, to show that Lithuania is no longer alone.Klaip
da is empty at night. Among the cobbled streets, pizza parlours, bars and old red-brick and half-timbered German houses and concrete apartment blocks, you sense the struggle to make Prussian Memel and Soviet Klaip
da into a Lithuanian place. But the past is oppressive and the ghosts remain. The little neo-classical opera house – where Wagner conducted and Hitler spoke – forms one side of the old town square behind a fountain with a sugary statue of the teenage girl who captivated Simon Dach, the seventeenth-century German poet from Memel. Across the bridge, you can look up at the heavily curving limbs of the caryatids sculpted on the art nouveau façades of Liep
Street’s smart late-nineteenth-century houses; as in Sovetsk (Tilsit), the German years are above as well as below, on the balconies and the pillars and in the soil.
da is empty at night. Among the cobbled streets, pizza parlours, bars and old red-brick and half-timbered German houses and concrete apartment blocks, you sense the struggle to make Prussian Memel and Soviet Klaipda into a Lithuanian place. But the past is oppressive and the ghosts remain. The little neo-classical opera house – where Wagner conducted and Hitler spoke – forms one side of the old town square behind a fountain with a sugary statue of the teenage girl who captivated Simon Dach, the seventeenth-century German poet from Memel. Across the bridge, you can look up at the heavily curving limbs of the caryatids sculpted on the art nouveau façades of LiepStreet’s smart late-nineteenth-century houses; as in Sovetsk (Tilsit), the German years are above as well as below, on the balconies and the pillars and in the soil.Back across the river, black-clothed armed guards stand outside a casino: an undoubtedly contemporary scene; but away from the tourist parts, a foreign land surfaces again in the memorial to Lithuanians deported to Soviet Siberia – their names engraved on metal plates below the figure of a sitting man curled up in pain. This is now a softer place. People should come to see Klaip
da’s version of the
Cutty Sark
, a tall three-masted sailing ship berthed on the River Dan
. While looking at the statue in one of the squares of Martynas Mažvydas, they should reach back to 1547 – when Mažvydas’s Protestant catechism, the first book to be published in the Lithuanian language, was printed in Prussian Königsberg.
da’s version of theCutty Sark
, a tall three-masted sailing ship berthed on the River Dan
. While looking at the statue in one of the squares of Martynas Mažvydas, they should reach back to 1547 – when Mažvydas’s Protestant catechism, the first book to be published in the Lithuanian language, was printed in Prussian Königsberg.It was twentieth-century nationalism that brought symbolic demolition and new building, then demolition again, to Memel or Klaip
da. In 1807, the Prussian King Frederick William III and
the beautiful Queen Luise fled to Memel, their most eastern city, to escape Napoleon. In 1907, a century later, a huge bombastic monument called Borussia (the Latin word for Prussia), flanked by bronze busts of Prussian military and political leaders, was put up near where the tragic King and Queen had stayed. In 1923, in the new Lithuanian Memel, Borussia was removed; then restored in 1939, after Hitler’s coup; then carried away by the new Soviet rulers in 1945 to be replaced by a statue of Lenin that was taken down when Lithuania became independent.
da. In 1807, the Prussian King Frederick William III andthe beautiful Queen Luise fled to Memel, their most eastern city, to escape Napoleon. In 1907, a century later, a huge bombastic monument called Borussia (the Latin word for Prussia), flanked by bronze busts of Prussian military and political leaders, was put up near where the tragic King and Queen had stayed. In 1923, in the new Lithuanian Memel, Borussia was removed; then restored in 1939, after Hitler’s coup; then carried away by the new Soviet rulers in 1945 to be replaced by a statue of Lenin that was taken down when Lithuania became independent.
Outside one of the hotels – an Intourist-era tower block glowering behind flickering advertisements for its gym and solarium – the Klaip
da Motorcycle Club is assembling: a few middle-aged men and women in black leather. Some have dark glasses although it is raining, and they walk slowly, perhaps to avoid collision in the gloom; all carry big helmets, a contemporary version of medieval armour. The bikes are lined up by the kerb where the riders mount them, seeming like temporary warriors in the tranquil evening of what has been a violent place but is now disturbed only by these harmless engines. Bystanders watch the power; the noise stops; in the silence, a rider turns to ask what happens next. ‘We must go’ is the answer – and some thirty bikes leave in a ragged group, aiming for symmetry but soon pushed into a disjointed line by other traffic. A few yards on, they stop at a set of lights, subdued and controlled, the odd rev a little sad perhaps but reassuringly useless in the dusk.
da Motorcycle Club is assembling: a few middle-aged men and women in black leather. Some have dark glasses although it is raining, and they walk slowly, perhaps to avoid collision in the gloom; all carry big helmets, a contemporary version of medieval armour. The bikes are lined up by the kerb where the riders mount them, seeming like temporary warriors in the tranquil evening of what has been a violent place but is now disturbed only by these harmless engines. Bystanders watch the power; the noise stops; in the silence, a rider turns to ask what happens next. ‘We must go’ is the answer – and some thirty bikes leave in a ragged group, aiming for symmetry but soon pushed into a disjointed line by other traffic. A few yards on, they stop at a set of lights, subdued and controlled, the odd rev a little sad perhaps but reassuringly useless in the dusk.Other books
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