The New York Review Abroad (47 page)

In Germany, in recent years, there has been a revival of interest in Prussia and Prussianism. The bones of Frederick the Great, which had been evacuated by the Nazis to West Germany to escape falling into Russian hands, were carried back to Potsdam in 1993 and, in the presence of Chancellor Kohl, ceremoniously reinterred next to the Emperor’s greyhounds in the park of Sans Souci. Prussia continues to haunt the German imagination. It figures in all sorts of German myths, good and bad. The Prussian tradition of public service—the plotters against Hitler had been Prussian noblemen—is pitted against Prussian worship of discipline and authoritarianism. A powerful West German lobby advances the right of former Prussians to repossess the old
Heimat
, or at the very least, be compensated for lost property. The revival of interest in Prussia, highlighted recently also by three unusually extravagant exhibitions in Berlin—on Prussia in Europe, on Bismarck the Iron Chancellor, and on the last Kaiser, Wilhelm II—has been interpreted as possibly reflecting a revival of nationalism in Germany, especially since reunification.

In Kaliningrad I was told that since the city was opened to outsiders in 1991, some forty thousand German visitors had passed through, many of them former residents of Königsberg or members of former Königsberg families who wanted to see their Prussian homeland. The traffic was increasing all the time and was known in the trade as
Heimwehtourismus
—homesickness-tourism. To help German visitors find their way in the rebuilt city, a 1941 street plan, with its Herman-Goering-Strasse and Adolf-Hitler-Platz has recently been published, not by a German neo-Nazi but by an enterprising private printer in St. Petersburg.

When I joined a bus full of German tourists in Kaliningrad one morning, the Intourist guide on duty, a good-looking young woman borrowed for the day from the German department of Kaliningrad State University, systematically called out the names of old German streets—Hansaring, Steindamm, Junkerstrasse, Reichsplatz. Perhaps because the guide was so well informed, the tourists asked few questions. Like many young people in Kaliningrad today she referred to the city by its old name, Königsberg. She had never liked Kalinin anyway, she said. Kalinin had ordered that little children caught stealing a slice of bread be shot.

For many years, she said, talk about Kaliningrad’s German past had been frowned upon. As recently as 1984, the Party newspaper would not publish an article, written by a colleague of hers, a philosopher, on the occasion of Kant’s 260th birthday. She pointed resentfully into the empty air at long vanished landmarks. But, she said proudly, a number of concerned citizens of Kaliningrad had been successful in at least saving the ruined dome of the cathedral, even though Brezhnev himself, on a brief visit to the city in 1980, had given instructions to tear down the “rotten tooth.”

During my stay I came to know some of the
Heimweh
-tourists who stayed at the hotel. They were fairly well-to-do people, most of them past retirement age. Self-conscious, even a little cowed, they wandered about the dilapidated city, complaining only of the smell everywhere of unclean lavatories and rotting food. Every morning around nine they walked out of the hotel in smart sports clothes, living advertisements for a free market economy, armed with the latest miniature video cameras and pocketfuls of deutsche marks in small change to hand out as tips as they went along. Shirtless little boys ran after them crying, “
Bitte, bitte! Eine Mark, Eine Mark, Bitte!
” They also toured the nearby countryside around Kaliningrad, which has
changed the least. The roads, laid out long ago in seemingly endless straight lines by Prussian engineers, are lined with tall trees standing at exact intervals, like soldiers. Picturesque horse carts rattle on the old cobblestones and storks nest atop old telegraph poles. Flocks of white geese graze on the stubble fields. A woman from Düsseldorf said: “It’s the world of yesterday. You don’t see such sights any more in West Germany.” The ancient trees that surrounded the noble estates outside the city still stand but the manor houses were burned down or have collapsed.

In Kaliningrad itself word has gotten around that the
Heimweh-
tourists are in no way anxious, as some local people had feared, to reclaim their former family houses that are now part of the squalid housing estates of Kaliningrad. Hence encounters between former and present day residents of Kaliningrad are often quite friendly and sometimes Germans and Russians get rather emotional. The Germans often come to visit their old houses with American cigarettes, six-packs of German beer, Würstel, cosmetics, and other small presents.

At the common breakfast table in the hotel the
Heimweh
-tourists discussed their experiences and impressions. They were hardly a cross-section of ordinary Germans. A middle-aged lawyer from Munich said he represented an organization called Union of Propertied Nobleman (Verband des Besitzenden Adels). But the same
Heimat-
polemics that one hears in Germany are also heard in Kaliningrad. When a man in his sixties, who said he had escaped from the small East Prussian town of Allenstein (today the Polish Olsztyn), complained of Russian barbarism, another man in the group told him not to forget that Hitler had been the principal reason for his loss and had, at the same time, condemned all of Eastern Europe to forty-five years of Communist tyranny. When a Berlin businessman said that
Realpolitik
made it imperative that Königsberg revert to Germany, a woman from Hanover, a retired school teacher, burst out: “
Realpolitik
is just a nasty German word meaning the domination of the weak by the strong.”

The new self-assurance of some Germans after reunification and the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe was also evident. One man said: “In 1945 we left Königsberg totally defeated. Now we come back completely victorious. We’ll just buy this place. How much do you think it’ll cost us in real money?” A woman said: “We saw our house. It’s in a terrible shape. The bathtub Father got shortly before the war is gone too.” The businessman from Berlin was the most militant. I asked him why he was so insistent that the lost territories in the East be returned to Germany. Wasn’t Germany a happier and more prosperous country nowadays than ever before in its history? “You don’t need East Prussia,” I said. He looked at me disdainfully. Then he said solemnly, as though reciting a wellknown text: “Need is not a historical category.”

A woman born in the Rhineland said that in 1941, as a six-year-old child, she had been evacuated to her aunt’s house in Königsberg because Königsberg was safer from air raids than Düsseldorf. When the Russians came she escaped with her aunt over the half-frozen Mazurian lakes. Her aunt fell through the ice and drowned. She said that she had now visited several times with the people who now occupied her aunt’s house. They felt “guilty” about living in someone else’s house, she said, but they were soulful, emotional people, and she was sentimental too and got along well with them. “We agreed,” she said, “that we are all losers.” Her
Heimat
was elsewhere now.

But
Heimat
continues to be a charged term in the German language. Even so liberal a writer as Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, who has devoted a lifetime to fighting right-wing romantic nationalism and to promoting responsible democratic citizenship, has cherished
Heimat
in her own way. The Federal Republic, she wrote in 1970, was well worth
supporting and defending because it is a free and open society “but it is not
Heimat
.” After diplomatic relations were established between Germany and Poland, with the implied recognition of the new frontiers, Countess Dönhoff, the former proprietor and heiress of vast estates in East Prussia, wrote:

When she publicly proposed last year the establishment of a Polish-Lithuanian-Russian-German condominium in Kaliningrad, the members of the editorial board of
Die Zeit
—including the former chancellor Helmut Schmidt—vehemently protested and, after reporting this reaction herself, she has not repeated her proposal in print.

“We call ourselves Russians, but we are not really Russians,” the Kaliningrad writer Yuri Ivanov told me. Ivanov is the author of several books on Kaliningrad and head of the apparently well-endowed Kaliningrad Cultural Foundation. He and an increasing number of Kaliningrad intellectuals would like to free the city from what they call its “historical unconsciousness.” Ivanov was born in Leningrad in 1929. He survived the German siege and famine there and arrived in Kaliningrad in 1945 as a sixteen-year-old soldier in the Soviet army and never left. “How could we be Russians, living where we do? I have no friends in Russia. We were never Soviets either. The so-called Soviet Man was an illusion. Our roots here are only forty-five years deep. We live in a historic German city. Those who lived here before us are our countrymen.” Still, he adds, “We are not Germans either. Perhaps we are Balts.”

Nevertheless he felt closer, he said, to Germans than to the highly
nationalistic Lithuanians and other Balts. And he did not like Marion Dönhoff’s plan of a Polish-Lithuanian-Russian-German condominium in Kaliningrad. “Who needs the Lithuanians?” he exclaimed. “I fear them much more than I fear the Germans.” He envied the Poles who had rebuilt Danzig in all its past splendor. “It could have been done here too … Kaliningrad ought to be an autonomous republic within the Russian federation. We must get rid of the name. Kalinin was an evil man,” Ivanov said. “As in Leningrad, we must bring back the old name of the city—Königsberg. It’s a historical necessity.”

In the countryside, German missionaries wander from town to town with mobile altars and electric organs and gift parcels from Germany. One Sunday morning, as I was passing through Chernyakhovsk (the former Insterburg), a small town near the Lithuanian border, I happened upon a German Apostolic Church revivalist meeting. Outside the old German Rathhaus some three hundred people were holding a prayer meeting. Many were young Russian soldiers in uniform. Electronic music wafted over a sea of bare heads. Banners and slogans hung between the dilapidated old buildings. The service was conducted in German from the back of a truck specially converted to serve as an altar and hold an electric organ. The minister paused frequently to allow for a Russian translation. Later, people lined up to receive small parcels filled with German biscuits or little plastic toys.

German Catholic missionaries are also active. They use as their headquarters an otherwise empty lot in the center of Kaliningrad where a priest and a dozen lay volunteers live in a few large metal boxes and prefabricated huts. Hans Schmidt, a layman from Wuppertal in West Germany, told me that they do social work in the city’s hospitals. Several times a week they hold services in the villages and
hear confessions in three languages, Russian, Lithuanian, and German. Tens of thousands of Russians who are ethnically German live in Kaliningrad, he said. More were arriving daily from Kazakhstan, where they had been deported from their historic villages on the Volga River by Stalin during the war. They hope that Kaliningrad will soon be restored to Germany or become an autonomous region.