The Creation of National Spaces in a Pluricultural Region: The Case of Prussian Lithuania 9781618115256

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THE CREATION OF NATIONAL SPACES IN A PLURICULTURAL REGION THE CASE OF PRUSSIAN LITHUANIA

Lithuanian Studies without Borders Series Editor Darius Staliunas, Lithuanian Institute of History Editorial Board Zenonas Norkus, Vilnius University Shaul Stampfer, Hebrew University Giedrius Subacius, University of Illinois at Chicago

THE CREATION OF NATIONAL SPACES IN A PLURICULTURAL REGION THE CASE OF PRUSSIAN LITHUANIA

Boston 2016

The research for this book was funded by the European Social Fund under the Global Grant Initiative (Grant No. VP1-3.1-ŠMM-07-K-03-005). The publication was partly funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (Grant Reg. No. LEI-15039). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Safronovas, Vasilijus, author. Title: The creation of national spaces in a pluricultural region : the case of Prussian Lithuania / Vasilijus Safronovas. Other titles: Nacionalinių erdvių konstravimas daugiakultūriame regione. English Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2016. Series: Lithuanian studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016037760 (print) | LCCN 2016039200 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618115249 (hardback) | ISBN 9781618115256 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Multiculturalism—Lithuania Minor (Russia and Lithuania) | Multiculturalism—Prussia, East (Poland and Russia) | Ethnic groups—Lithuania Minor (Russia and Lithuania) | Ethnic groups—Prussia, East (Poland and Russia) | Nationalism—Lithuania Minor (Russia and Lithuania) | Nationalism—Prussia, East (Poland and Russia) | Lithuania—Boundaries—History. | Lithuania Minor (Russia and Lithuania)—History. | —Prussia, East (Poland and Russia)—History. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Regional Studies. | HISTORY / Europe / Germany. Classification: LCC HM1271. S33413 2015 (print) | LCC HM1271 (ebook) | DDC 305.800947/24—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037760 ISBN 978-1-61811-524-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-525-6 (electronic) ©Academic Studies Press, 2016 Cover design by Ivan Grave Book design by Kryon Publishing www.kryonpublishing.com Published by Academic Studies Press in 2016 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents Acknowledgments vii List of Figures

ix

Introduction

1

CHAPTER 1: East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflicts

17

CHAPTER 2: Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries 2.1. The Administrative Concept of Lithuania 2.2. The Ethnographic Concept of Lithuania 2.3. Two Mutually Unrelated Lithuanias

39 51 65 77

CHAPTER 3: Lithuania as a Peculiar Region of Germany (1850s–1910s) 3.1. Creation of Meanings of East Prussia in German Culture 3.2. National Appropriation through the Construction of Local Exceptionalism 3.3. Prussian Lithuania’s Transformation into a German National Space 3.4. The Change in Lithuania’s Boundaries and Criteria for Their Definition

87 90 103 120 140

CHAPTER 4: The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870–1910s) 155 4.1. The Lithuanian Historical Narrative as a Source of National Concepts of East Prussia 169 4.2. Lithuania Minor: From the Birth of the Idea to Terra Irredenta 186 4.3. The Transformation of Prussian Lithuania (Lithuania Minor) into a Lithuanian National Space 203 4.4. The Boundaries of Lithuania Minor 225 CHAPTER 5: Interaction of the German and Lithuanian Concepts of Prussian Lithuania in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 5.1. Interaction of Spatial Representations 5.2. Interaction of Spatial Names and Concepts of Space

241 243 255

Contents

CHAPTER 6:

vi

Battles over Spaces “of Their Own”: Changes after 1918 6.1. The Fate of “Prussian Lithuania” 6.2. In the Battle over Memel/Klaipėda 6.3. The After-Effects of the Second World War and the Long Inability to Come to Terms with Them

265 267 288 318

Concluding Remarks

363

Bibliography

375

Index of Names

430

Geographic Index

436

Subject Index

447

Acknowledgments This book is the result of a five-year preoccupation with the transformations that the concept of the Lithuanian region in Prussia underwent during several eras. I took my first steps in this direction as I entered the final stages of my doctoral research and became interested in how the appropriation of spaces functioned in the former German-Lithuanian border region. This interest was later elaborated into a separate undertaking while working on the research project “Mental Maps and Making of National Spaces: The Case of Lithuania.” Thus, the current study is an individual contribution to a larger research assignment that has been implemented in the Lithuanian Institute of History in 2013–2015. The project resulted in a monograph, which in a slightly revised version now appears in English for the first time. Its preparation and translation into English have benefited from the generous support of the European Social Fund and the Research Council of Lithuania. Over the years I have been aided in probing the findings and issues dealt with in this study by colleagues and friends. I am indebted to Alvydas Nikžentaitis, who granted me some freedom while I was working on my PhD project and thus allowed me to include this topic among my research interests. Darius Staliūnas encouraged my initial curiosity and was engaged in this research until its final stage. I collected the materials for this study in many European libraries and some archives, among which the Library of the Herder Institute in Marburg, the Berlin State Library, and the University Library of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin deserve special mention. This book, however, would never have appeared without the long-standing collection of materials in the Library of Klaipėda University and the Martynas Mažvydas Lithuanian National Library in Vilnius. The librarians of all these institutes and libraries were always very cooperative. I am grateful to Tamara Bairašauskaitė, Tomas Balkelis,

Acknowledgments

Vytautas Jokubauskas, Olga Mastianica, Zita Medišauskienė, Vytautas Petronis, Eva Pluhařová-Grigienė, Silva Pocytė, and Axel Ernst Walter, who offered their constructive feedback and observations on my conference presentations, individual chapters, and entire drafts of this manuscript. I would also like to express my gratitude to Albina Strunga, Kerry Kubilius, and Carolyn Pouncy for all the work that has been done in preparing the translation. Articles derived from my research appeared in print in the journals Ab Imperio (2014), Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte (2015), Istorija (2012), and in the series Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (2011, 2013). I am grateful to the members of the editorial boards and the peer reviewers of these publications for their comments. None of these articles are reprinted here in extenso. The book combines some of the previously published preliminary findings, elaborates on them, and supplements the earlier papers with new materials and insights.

viii

List of Figures FIGURE 1.

Boundaries of the Province of East Prussia on the eve of the Second World War and new borders formed in 1944–1945 when it was divided into three parts.

FIGURE 2.

Franz Ludwig Güssefeld, Tabula regni Borussiae, Borussiam orientalem exhibens.

FIGURE 3.

Fragment from the map Prussiae Regionis Sarmatiae Europeae Nobiliss. Vera et Nova Descriptio.

FIGURE 4.

Boundaries of districts and individual elderships as existed in the early eighteenth century in the domains of the Prussian king.

FIGURE 5.

Boundaries of provinces (departments) in the eastern domains of the Prussian king as they existed in 1785.

FIGURE 6.

The title page of the newspaper Schlesischen privilegirten Zeitung from March 20, 1813, proclaiming the appeal of the Prussian king “To My People” (An Mein Volk).

FIGURE 7.

Symbolism used by the student fraternity “Littuania” of the University of Königsberg.

FIGURE 8.

Cover of Lithuania and the Lithuanians, published by the Berlin journalist Otto Glagau, known for his nationalist attitudes.

FIGURE 9.

Fragment of the map Preussen und die Nachbarlaender von der Zeiten der Ordensherrschaft, prepared by Max Toeppen.

FIGURE 10.

Reference points to the southern and western boundaries of Lithuania as indicated in Toeppen’s and Bezzenberger’s studies.

FIGURE 11.

The map Slovanský zeměvid, prepared by Pavel Jozef Šafařík

FIGURE 12.

Fragment of European Ethnographic Map, compiled by the influential mid-­nineteenth-century German geographer and cartographer Heinrich Berghaus.

FIGURE 13.

Map supplementing the Grammar of the Lithuanian Language, prepared by the Königsberg priest and director of the Lithuanian Seminar Friedrich Kurschat.

FIGURE 14.

Marienburg Castle.

FIGURE 15.

Cover of Albert Zweck, Litauen: eine Landes- und Volkskunde, vol. I of Deutsches Land und Leben in Einzelschilderungen.

FIGURE 16.

Statue of  “The Recoverer of Lithuania,”  Frederick William I.

List of Figures

x

FIGURE 17.

An early twentieth-century postcard of the Lithuanian House in Tilsit.

FIGURE 18.

Early twentieth-century photo of a “Lithuanian” fisher house in Königsberg.

FIGURES 19–21.

Staged shots of Prussian Lithuanians from Robert Minzloff ’s 1894 Bilder aus Littauen

FIGURE 22.

Administrative division of the East Prussian Province into governmental districts and counties on the eve of the First World War after the new Allenstein governmental district was established in 1905.

FIGURE 23.

Fragment of a sheet showing the northern part of the Languages Map of the Prussian State, prepared by the statistician Richard Boeckh.

FIGURE 24.

Map showing the distribution of the Lithuanian language in Prussia in 1897 based on data gathered from parishes of the Lutheran Church.

FIGURE 25.

The Lithuanian Church in Tilsit.

FIGURE 26.

Early twentieth-century postcard depicting the German-­ Russian border.

FIGURE 27.

The so-called Waidewutus flag as depicted in Caspar Hennenberger’s treatise Kurtze vnd warhafftige Beschreibung des Landes zu Preussen.

FIGURE 28.

Map representing the space of Lithuanian practices.

FIGURE 29.

Map showing reference points to the furthermost distribution of the Lithuanian language based on data compiled by Vilius Kalvaitis.

FIGURE 30.

Fragment of Valerijonas Verbickis’s Map of Lithuania with Its Ethnographic Boundary.

FIGURES 31–32.

References to Lithuania in the newspapers aimed at Prussian Lithuanians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

FIGURE 33.

Boundaries of wilderness around 1400, as determined in Gertrud Heinrich’s doctoral dissertation.

FIGURE 34.

Atlas fragment from the Sprachenatlas der Grenzgebiete des Deutschen Reiches nach den Ergebnissen der Volkszählung vom 16.VI.1925.

FIGURE 35.

The cover of a 1931 tourist guide to East Prussia.

FIGURE 36.

Photograph of members of the Lithuanian State Drama Theater after a performance of The Fern Flower (Paparčio žiedas) on Rambynas.

List of Figures

FIGURE 37.

Distribution of nationalities in the Memel Territory based on the 1905 census data on Muttersprache usage.

FIGURE 38.

Poster demanding the unification of Germany according to its prewar boundaries.

FIGURES 39–40.

Maps of Lithuania Minor and The Size of Lithuania Minor in East Prussia.

FIGURE 41.

Envelope representing the boundaries of Lithuania “blessed” by Kristijonas Donelaitis.

FIGURE 42.

Photograph of the church rebuilt by the Lithuanian SSR government in Kaliningrad Oblast, where the Memorial Museum of Kristijonas Donelaitis was opened in 1979.

FIGURE 43.

The southern boundary of Lithuania Minor as determined by Algirdas Matulevičius in 1972.

FIGURE 44.

Map of Lithuanian Ethnographic Regions, commissioned by the Council for the Protection of Ethnic Culture and prepared by Žilvytis Šaknys and Danielius Pivoriūnas in 2003.

xi

Introduction An important and, it appears, paradigmatic change in historiography during the second half of the twentieth century was associated with historians’ interest in the dynamics of concepts and images regulating people’s self-conceptions and worldviews. The appearance of Begriffsgeschichte in Germany and the invention of mentalités and lieux de mémoire in France signaled a methodological turning point, where not just political, social, or economic phenomena but also the meanings given to these phenomena, as well as the perceptions of these phenomena, became an object of interest for historians. At the same time, historians paid more attention to the theme of space. For a long time, the spatial component, compared to the time component, was neglected by historians and other scholars. As Michel Foucault once said, “Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.”1 But since the time of Foucault, major advances have taken place in the humanities and social sciences in connecting space with the objects of research in these fields, primarily in justifying the social nature of space. As a result of the broad impact these ideas have had on cultural and social studies, sometimes scientists, using a term proposed by Edward Soja, speak of the so-called spatial turn—like a separate stage in the development of interest in these studies,2 which they encountered in the second   1 Quoted in Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 119.   2 Cf. Karl Schlögel, “Kartenlesen, Augenarbeit. Über die Fälligkeit des spatial turn in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften,” in Was sind Kulturwissenschaften? 13 Antworten, ed. Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004), 261–283; Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften, 2nd ed. (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2007), 284–328; Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann, “Einleitung: Was lesen wir im Raume? Der Spatial Turn und das

Introduction

half of the twentieth century after other “turns”—namely, the linguistic and the cultural. It was precisely in this context that space in research about the past started to play a more visible role: historians began to raise new questions about the spatial concepts of contemporary society and of societies that existed before us, as well as the categories used to express them. The concepts of “cognitive” and “mental maps,” which were already well established in psychology and geography, had a direct influence on the appearance of such a field of interest. Some historians tried to transfer their application from the individual to the social and from the present to the past.3 Indeed, with such transfers, the content of these concepts breaks away from the definitions given to them by psychologists and geographers.4 As a result, to maintain interdisciplinary relationships, the search for additional compatible research objects is worthwhile.5 Even so, the very idea of the existence of a spatial imagination and the body of knowledge that organizes this kind of view prompts us to raise new questions in historic awareness. Such questions are raised in this book. The idea is not to reveal someone’s cognitive maps or spatial imaginations, because these, I am certain, are not spheres of awareness that comply with historians’ methods. The object of this research is rather the systems of meanings that offer ways geheime Wissen der Geographen,” in Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kulturund Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008), 7–45; Barney Wolf and Santa Arias, “Introduction: The Reinsertion of Space in the Humanities and Social Sciences,” in The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Barney Wolf, and Santa Arias, vol. 26 of Routledge Studies in Human Geography (London: Routledge, 2009), 1–10. See also Peter Haslinger, “Der spatial turn und die Geschichtsschreibung zu Ostmitteleuropa in Deutschland,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 63, no. 1 (2014): 74–95.   3 See the special issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28, no. 3 (2002) on mental maps, in particular Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, “Mental Maps. Die Konstruktion von geographischen Räumen in Europa seit der Aufklärung,” 493–514.   4 See Scott Bell, “Mental Maps,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, ed. Bob Kitschin and Nigel Thrift, vol. 7 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009), 70–75.   5 Cf. Andreas Langenohl, “Mental Maps, Raum und Erinnerung. Zur kultursoziologischen Erschließung eines tranzdisziplinären Konzepts,” in Mental Maps—Raum—Erinnerung. Kulturwissenschaftliche Zugänge zum Verhältnis von Raum und Erinnerung, ed. Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf, Angelika Hartmann, and Béatrice Hendrich, vol. 1 of Kulturwissenschaft. Forschung und Wissenschaft (Münster: LIT, 2005), 51–72. 2

Introduction

and means of understanding space and aspects that regulate the spatial imagination. In that sense, this book is not so much about how people understood space but about how they were guided to understand that space. Of interest here is the information generated about space and the ways that made it possible to add meaning to space by harnessing that knowledge. The systems of meanings analyzed in this book were nationalistic in nature. Their formation was determined by the goal of ensuring national solidarity. This was a new form of community life typical of the modern era. However, its formation depended on ancient beliefs typical among clan cultures, where land was “the exclusive property of a clan, blessed with a certain sacredness.”6 Use of the concept “national space” instead of “national land” has the goal of accentuating the dynamics of the belief in question in the modern era. Exclusivity and sacredness were transferred away from the clearly tangible size of an area of land, whose arrangement and direction of continuity became relative. The point is that many past societies never had the opportunity to appreciate the physical spaces that open up before people living in today’s world, thanks to contemporary means of communication. Even in the early modern period, in Europe only representatives from relatively narrow social layers had a broader geographical outlook, such as merchants, pilgrims, or members of res publica literaria—the Republic of Letters.7 However, the spread of printing technologies, as Benedict Anderson once noted,8 changed this situation. Books, and later newspapers, spreading geographical knowledge and the meanings of national culture, had to become widespread and accessible to the lower layers of society so that their worldview would also extend beyond the limits of their parish. That worldview was broadened by the development of the public education system and the inclusion of geography into school curriculums. All of this made it possible to gain relative awareness of a   6 Florian Znaniecki, Modern Nationalities. A Sociological Study (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), 93.   7 Cf. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism. A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 8.   8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 46. 3

Introduction

physical space larger than one’s own land—to understand its relief, fields, and forests in a wider geographical context. The spread of this knowledge also broadened people’s understanding about the cultural differences in different spaces and made those concepts of territorialism that became entrenched in Europe in the early modern period the only “normal” ones.9 The idea that a territory had to belong to a particular nation should not be associated with the modern nationalism that started to spread after the French Revolution. A concept of territorial sovereignty that offered an alternative to the hierarchical ruling system and res publica christiana was already spreading in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia put into place the principles of territorial sovereignty and sovereign equality as the cornerstone of order in the new Europe.10 The idea of sovereign nations (political communities) was also related to the concept of sovereignty. Its application in different political systems on the continent in the early modern period varied, and its content gradually changed and expanded to include more of the lower social strata.11 The values of national culture in this enlightened milieu enculturated not just a standardized language and ideological mission in these social strata but also the concept of a national space (although the criteria for defining its boundaries differed in different parts of Europe). Probably the first challenge thrown at ancien régime Europe that encouraged the lower strata across the continent to defend such “national spaces” came from revolutionary France and later, Napoleon. During the Napoleonic Wars, spaces were already assigned to nations, and nations did not refer solely to the political elite of the day. Not only spaces were mythologized in those times. The wars themselves, despite being led by the old elite, now acquired a subtler meaning, being called battles for “liberation” and the “homeland.” Attempts at mobilizing the lower strata, which earlier had not even figured as part of the nation, were associated   9 Cf. Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality. Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 10 Peter J. Taylor, Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality (London: Longman, 1985), 96; Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society. A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992), 186–189. 11 For more about the development of the idea, see Kohn, Idea of Nationalism, 187–259. 4

Introduction

with a crisis in the legitimacy of ruling “by the Grace of God” and aimed at showing the people that the fate of the homeland depended on them as well. In Europe, this shift in viewpoint marked the beginning of the creation of national spaces, giving the old continent categories from today’s political map, and the understanding that a territory does not belong to a ruler but to the nation. In this book I analyze the creation of such territories, show how national space was formed in the long nineteenth and the short twentieth centuries, and how specific cultural and political challenges could have influenced the spatial imagination. When looking at the existing historiography, these questions are not new. They have already been discussed in terms of this or that nation’s efforts to grab territory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,12 or the attempts by certain nationalists to assign to different nations pluricultural border regions.13 Nevertheless, I believe it is important to investigate the construction of national spaces in pluricultural border regions because doing so both allows us to compare the strategies applied by different types of nationalisms against one another and clarifies the interactions among national cultures. This kind of research can demonstrate the different roles assigned to the same physical space 12 Cf. Katariina Kosonen, Kartta ja kansakunta: Suomalainen lehdistökartografia sorto­vuo­ sien protesteista Suur-Suomen kuviin 1899–1942, vol. 779 of Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran toimituksia (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2000); David Gugerli and Daniel Speich, Topografien der Nation: Politik, kartografische Ordnung und Landschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Zürich: Chronos, 2002); Vytautas Petronis, Constructing Lithuania. Ethnic Mapping in Tsarist Russia, ca. 1800–1914, vol. 91 of Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2007); Peter Haslinger, Nation und Territorium im tschechischen politischen Diskurs: 1880–1938 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2010); Jason D. Hansen, Mapping the Germans. Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 13 Cf. “Arbeit am nationalen Raum.” Deutsche und polnische Rand- und Grenzregionen im Nationalisierungsprozess, vol. 15, no. 2 (2005) of Comparativ: Leiziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung, ed. Peter Haslinger and Daniel Mollenhauer (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005); Anton Kotenko, “Construction of Ukrainian National Space by the Intellectuals of Russian Ukraine, 1860–70s,” in Osteuropa kartiert—Mapping Eastern Europe, ed. Jörn Happel and Christophe von Werdt, in cooperation with Mira Jovanović (Münster: LIT, 2010), 37–60; Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands. Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, Cartophilia: Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-German Borderland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 5

Introduction

that exist in different cultures and offer an understanding that these roles are not givens but reactions to these ongoing interactions. The border region on which this book focuses was called Lithuania for almost four centuries. It should not be confused with the Republic of Lithuania on today’s political map. Rather, this Lithuania was a pluricultural region in Prussia, later—in Germany, in its easternmost part, populated mostly by Prussian Lithuanians and Germans; it was a region where the population was for the most part separated from its land due to the outcomes of the Second World War and where “division” between the Lithuanians and the Germans for a long time brought into confrontation two cultures that had lived alongside one another for centuries. In a sense, this book can be considered a history of the changing meaning of this Lithuania, its spatial definition and the continuation of its national image in the “age of extremes.” I present an answer to the question of how, in the long nineteenth century, the same physical space was transformed into the “nation’s own” in two neighboring cultures, and what relationship formed between the different spatial imaginations regarding this space. I hope that this study contributes to understanding how the ways and means that are used to add meaning to and mark spaces and through which they are imagined depend on specific historical conditions. It is precisely these conditions that frame the spatial imagination, define the choice of possibilities for this imagination, and urge us to transfer that imagination to the map and from the map to the physical space itself. Being aware of these conditions is important if we are to understand the variety we sometimes fail to see when we use the concepts of “Lithuania” and “Lithuanian” only in today’s sense, and when we decide to project these meanings onto the past. Today’s concepts and today’s political boundaries should not be applied to the past. Historians adopted this view of Lithuania not long ago. Egidijus Aleksandravičius and Antanas Kulakauskas wrote the first synthesis offering a new approach to the nineteenth century in Lithuanian history after 1990 and were probably the first ones to raise the question of what Lithuania was in the nineteenth century.14 Other studies later raised this question in one way or another, starting with the works of Zita Medišauskienė and 14 Egidijus Aleksandravičius and Antanas Kulakauskas, Carų valdžioje: XIX amžiaus Lietuva (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996), 21–25. 6

Introduction

Paulius Subačius.15 But most often, the context has been the territory of the Romanovs’ Russia and includes only two alternatives for Lithuania—an early duchy or a national space defined by linguistic criteria, incorporating several Russian gubernias.16 Vytautas Petronis uses the methodological tools encouraged by the spatial turn to answer the question of how Lithuania was defined in the nineteenth century.17 Petronis revealed what influence the emergence and spread of linguistic (ethnic) territorialization had on the concept of Lithuania’s boundaries in cartography. However, the author nevertheless limited his research to the Russian imperial space. The search for the development of Lithuanian spatial concepts only within the territory of nineteenth-century Russia,18 in a sense, stops us from going beyond the conviction that only two alternatives for this concept existed. Orientation toward the temporal and spatial depictions of Lithuanias that were maintained in nineteenth-century Russia cast aside the existence of “another” Lithuania in Prussia (from 1871, in Germany). Even in the latest summarizing works, the latter type of Lithuania is given comparably less attention,19 although it was in Prussia that the name “Lithuania” was continually used throughout the whole nineteenth century. Only a handful of historians have allocated one or two sentences to the history of the 15 Zita Medišauskienė, “Lietuvos samprata XIX a. viduryje,” in Praeities baruose: Skiriama akademikui Vytautui Merkiui 70-ies metų jubiliejaus proga (Vilnius: Žara, 1999), 217–224; Paulius Subačius, Lietuvių tapatybės kalvė: Tautinio išsivadavimo kultūra (Vilnius: Aidai, 1999), 149–161. See also Rimantas Miknys and Darius Staliūnas, “Das Dilemma der Grenzen Litauens am Ende des 19. und Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Literatur und nationale Identität, vol. IV: Landschaft und Territorium. Zur Literatur, Kunst und Geschichte des 19. und Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts im Ostseeraum: Finnland, Estland, Lettland, Litauen und Polen, ed. Yrjö Varpio and Maria Zadencka, vol. 25 of Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Studia Baltica Stockholmiensis (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2004), 196–215; and Darius Staliūnas, “Lietuvos idėja Aušroje,” Archivum Lithuanicum 15 (2013): 271–292, especially 277–280. 16 For more on the variety of historic and ethnographic concepts of Lithuania in the mid-nineteenth century, see Medišauskienė, “Lietuvos samprata.” 17 Petronis, Constructing Lithuania. 18 See also Darius Staliūnas, “Territorializing Ethnicity in the Russian Empire? The Case of the Augustav/Suvalki Province,” Ab Imperio 3 (2011): 145–166. 19 Lietuvos istorija, ed. Jūratė Kiaupienė, vols. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7/1, 8/1, 10/1, 10/2 (Vilnius: Baltos lankos; Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2009–2015); Andres Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Alfonsas Eidintas, Alfredas Bumblauskas, Antanas Kulakauskas, and Mindaugas Tamošaitis, Lietuvos istorija (Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2013). 7

Introduction

concepts “Prussian Lithuania” and “Lithuania Minor,” relating to the same physical space.20 However, up until now this was usually done only because historians had to explain to their audiences that they had in mind not the Lithuania we recognize from today’s political map. A more comprehensive analysis has been made of the application of the term “Lithuania” in cartography presenting Prussia.21 A more detailed analysis demonstrating what “Prussian Lithuania” and “Lithuania Minor” meant to different cultures and how their understanding changed has not yet been carried out, which is what has motivated the innovativeness of this research. It is also new in another respect. Usually studies dedicated to mental geography map the spatial imagination and analyze its discourses and practical formation as well as the dynamics in concepts denoting space. Symbolic appropriation of spaces is becoming an ever-weightier field of research. One aim of this book is to try to connect a majority of these aspects, showing them to be elements of one macrolevel process. I have called that process the construction of national spaces, seeing it as the 20 Cf. Kurt Forstreuter, “Deutsche Kulturpolitik im sogenannten Preußischen Litauen,” [1933] in Kurt Forstreuter, Wirkungen des Preußenlandes, vol. 33 of Studien zur Geschichte Preussens (Cologne, Berlin: Grote, 1981), 335; Kurt Forstreuter, “Die Entwicklung der Grenze zwischen Preussen und Litauen seit 1422,” Altpreussische Forschungen 18 (1941): 67–68; Kurt Forstreuter, Deutschland und Litauen im Mittelalter, vol. 1 of Studien zum Deutschtum im Osten (Cologne, Graz: Böhlau, 1962), 17–18; Juozas Jakštas, “Žvilgsnis į Mažosios Lietuvos istoriografiją,” in [Lietuvių katalikų mokslo akademijos] Metraštis, vol. IV (Rome: Lietuvių katalikų mokslo akademija, 1968), 3–7; Algirdas Matulevičius, “Dėl lietuvių Prūsijoje pietinės etninės ribos XVIII a. pradžioje,” Lietuvos TSR Mokslų akademijos darbai, serija A 1 (1972): 103–105; Jochen D. Range, “Preußisch-Litauen in kulturhistorischer Sicht,” in Deutsche, Slawen und Balten. Aspekte des Zusammenlebens im Osten des Deutschen Reiches und in Ostmitteleuropa, ed. Hans Hecker and Silke Spieler (Bonn: Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen, 1989), 56; Algirdas Matulevičius, Mažoji Lietuva XVIII amžiuje. Lietuvių tautinė padėtis (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1989), 6–7; Ingė Lukšaitė, Reformacija Lietuvos Didžiojoje Kunigaikštystėje ir Mažojoje Lietuvoje: XVI a. trečias dešimtmetis–XVII a. pirmas dešimtmetis (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1999), 48; and Silva Pocytė, Mažlietuviai Vokietijos imperijoje, 1871–1914 (Vilnius: Vaga, 2002), 7–8. 21 Rudolf Nadolny, “Litauen und Masuren als Bezeichnungen ostpreußischer Landschaften,” Europäische Revue 12 (1936): 557–564; Povilas Reklaitis, “Kleinlitauen in der Kartographie Preussens. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Gebietsnames Litauen im ehemaligen Königreich Preussen,” in Lithuania Minor: A Collection of Studies on Her History and Ethnography, ed. Martin Brakas (New York, NY: Lithuanian Research Institute, 1976), 67–119; Rasa Seibutytė, “Kleinlitauen auf den preußischen Karten des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Annaberger Annalen 15 (2007): 89–113. 8

Introduction

sum of factors through which space was made “one’s own” within a certain national culture. Therefore, in this study, attention will be paid to not just the dynamics in concepts and the spaces defined by them but also to the systems of meanings via which the physical space was specifically given significance and described, as well as representation of spaces in the discourse and the representation of the spatial imagination in the physical space itself. The set of questions discussed in this book was determined by the theoretical approach based on which the research was conducted. Three main sources inspired it. The first one was already briefly mentioned. It is related to the experiments on orientation in space conducted in the postwar period by representatives of behavioral psychology and human geography, in the course of which concepts such as cognitive map and mental map appeared. The phrases are often used as synonyms; however, the different histories of their emergence alone signals that they are indeed different. Geographer Scott Bell offers the following descriptions: “Cognitive Map, the internal spatial representation of the world as we know it, and the accompanying affective responses that this knowledge evokes”; “Mental Map, preference surfaces generated by asking people about their attitudes and perceptions of different places.”22 In this way the cognitive map is understood as a spatial representation of the external world, carried in the mind until its manifestation (often, an illustration) is generated, and that manifestation is called the mental map. So cognitive mapping is the unexpressed, while mental mapping is the expressed part of the same process. As historians’ abilities to apply survey and observation methods to the past are limited, it would not be accurate to consider the aforementioned concepts, as they have been described in psychologists’ and geographers’ discourse, as the object of this research. Nevertheless, the idea used to describe that object, whereby people have a structurized spatial imagination functioning based on certain associations, is in itself beneficial. Other statements based on psychological and geographical research also help to give a more precise description of the object of this research. For example, in the beginning of the 1970s, when studies were 22 Bell, “Mental Maps,” 70. 9

Introduction

made in behavioral geography looking at the importance of cognitive maps and their influence on people’s behavior in a given space, the conclusion was reached that cognitive maps never matched the physical Earth or the map representing Earth that we usually imagine. Cognitive maps are always incomplete, the meaning of distances and directions is distorted, and they are schematized (simplified, conventionalized to a very limited amount of cognitive categories and concepts) and enhanced (embellished). This leads us to understand that the imagination of any space differs from the placement of objects in the physical space. “Cognitive maps are convenient sets of shorthand symbols that we all subscribe to, recognize, and employ: these symbols vary from group to group, and individual to individual, resulting from our biases, prejudices, and personal experiences.”23 It turns out, then, that a cognitive map is more of an individual than a collective expression, recognized via symbols that mark a particular space. This alone would suggest that a historical study has to be directed at that marking, at the systems of meanings that form a person’s spatial imagination, and it is precisely those systems that this book aims to reconstruct. To answer the question of how this should be done and what specific cognitive tasks had to be formulated, I searched through the social space interpretation and postcolonial studies discourses. Even though Foucault achieved a great deal in explaining the nature of social space, the greatest influence on the creation of the social space concept was made by Henri Lefebvre.24 This influence was first of all revealed in his statements that (1) space never exists of its own accord: it depends on the social organism and is a product of society; (2) as space, like time, is not universal, they can be 23 Roger M. Downs and David Stea, Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior (Chicago: Aldin, 1973), 9. 24 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Lefebvre’s theory is presented here based on the interpretation made by sociologist Christian Schmid. Cf. Christian Schmid, Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft—Henri Lefebvre und die Theorie der Produktion des Raumes, vol. 1 of Sozialgeographische Bibliothek (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005), 71–112; and Christian Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space: Towards a Three-Dimensional Dialectic,” in Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, ed. Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid (New York: Routledge, 2008), 27–45. 10

Introduction

understood only in the context of a specific society, that is, we must talk about someone’s time and someone’s space; and (3) the production of social space is a multidimensional phenomenon. Sociologist Christian Schmid interpreted Lefebvre’s theory as a proposition to analyze the (social) space in three dimensions. In the first, social space is seen in the spatial practice (la practique spatiale) dimension; it requires noticing how space is produced in the interaction and communication of everyday life that is substantiated on a defined material base (morphology, a constructed environment). This is the material social activity and relationship dimension. The second dimension gives a linguistic description and definition of spatial practice. These are representations of space (les représentations de l’espace)—knowledge, language, the written word, the discursive dimension where space is produced via descriptions, definitions, and especially (scientific) theories about space, maps, and plans and the actions of geography, architecture, and planning. “Representations of space” act in communication as an organizing scheme that makes spatial orientation possible. In the third dimension, the material “order” that exists on the Earth’s surface (objects of nature, artifacts, landscapes) is automatically seen as an impulse for the expression of meaning. Lefebvre called this symbolic dimension of space “the spaces of representation” (les espaces de représentation). In this case, in the production of space attention would ideally be turned to the symbolism that expresses and forms social norms, values, and desires.25 In his explanation of how these three spatial dimensions are accepted by individuals and societies, Lefebvre introduced a second triad of concepts that is directly related to the first. Perceived space (l’espace perçu) is associated with material artifacts, the materialism of space, which is rarely given much thought but is reflected via the senses. Conceived space (l’espace conçu) refers to contemplation, reasoning, and the production of knowledge about space. Lived space (l’espace vécu) signals the experience of space, revealing itself in the imagination and in feelings invested in materialism. 25 Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory,” 36–37. 11

Introduction

Lefebvre was the first to invite us to look at space as a multidimensional phenomenon. Soja, who some time later introduced the concepts “physical space,” “mental space,” and “social space,”26 tried to convey in effect the same thing: the three spatial dimensions are intertwined, and when interpreting space it is necessary to look at all three of them through certain interconnections. Lefebvre understood space in the active sense, as a complicated network of relationships that is constantly being produced and reproduced. For a historical study such as this, such an understanding offers significantly more than the ideas of Karl Schlögel on the reading of space.27 Using the foundation of Lefebvre’s theories, we can understand that space is socially produced, while its production is related to the creation of value (meaning) and its conferment to a space; when people talk about space, they are primarily talking about values (meanings) that, in their opinion, a space has—and so add meaning to a space, even as they overwhelm its interpretation, as meanings are related to values, while knowledge is related to power; and when people, guided by their values and knowledge, project certain claims onto a space, they do so to gain the values that in their view are typical to that space. Moreover, I believe that Lefebvre’s triad can be applied in formulating specific questions and aspects that historians can research in seeking to reveal the active production processes of space. The triad indicates the directions that need to be explored, which social activities and in which way influence the system of meanings in each of the mentioned dimensions. The first spatial dimension—social practices that take place in the materially understood space—is of interest to us because at this level we can determine the spread of these practices, or the de facto appropriated (or being appropriated) boundaries of space. We can mark on a map the space in which the group we are researching is socially active and where the boundaries of its active social practices lie. This is important because those boundaries do not always correspond with the space that is allocated to 26 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 120. 27 Karl Schlögel, Kartenlesen, oder: Die Wiederkehr des Raumes (Zürich: Vontobel-Stiftung, 2003); Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2003). 12

Introduction

the given group or that is imagined by the group as “its own” space. The second spatial dimension—the discourse constructed about space—is important because it denotes the necessity of raising questions about which space is allocated to whom; why and based on what criteria this is done; what symbols marking “one’s own” existence in that space are implemented and how they are interpreted; what arguments are applied in deciding why a space belongs to “us”; and finally, what boundaries of spaces that are supposed to belong to “us” are determined, that is, what is the imagined space said to be “ours” that is projected. The third spatial dimension—the place of material spatial objects, turned into symbols, in the discourse—is important because it signals the necessity of turning our attention toward what natural and material spatial objects are controlled and how they are interpreted. Having accepted this interpretation of space—along with its dialectic load implicating that space, which is marked by contradictions that determine our knowledge of it—in a methodological and contextual sense there is another aspect that is also important to this study, which comes from the postcolonial studies discourse. Lefebvre’s theory alone allows us to state that the same physical space in different societies and even among different parts of one society can be signified in different ways—if only because different social groups, who understand space in terms of different systems of meanings, act in the social space. But postcolonial studies allow us to see that amid those systems of meanings specific relationships are formed, and that those relationships are affected by specific power mechanisms. In the social space, it is as if we have a tournament between the different meanings of space, during the course of which those meanings come to a certain power conjucture: they can coexist and systems of meanings about the same geographical space can be adopted and adapted, but attempts may also be made to hegemonize one system of meanings, then to transform it into the dominant system and force it upon others. It is this last point that has particular relevance in the long nineteenth and short twentieth centuries in the region analyzed in this book. Moreover, the postcolonial studies discourse allows us to understand that the legitimization of any space’s belonging is relative to the legitimization of the other space. The predominance of one or 13

Introduction

another type of legitimization in a given period is merely the outcome of a given power relationship. To a great extent, this theoretical approach is based on the conclusions of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said once showed that concepts about the Orient or about the Near East are based on the “Western” world’s convictions, many of which are more than just misleading or imposed. In effect, the total of those convictions about the Orient functioned as an unexpressed legitimization of the European states’ and the United States’ colonial and imperial ambitions. “In my view,” stated Said, “orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West.”28 Said’s analysis became an example to many other similar studies. Thus, it was applied in the deconstruction of the “Eastern Europe” concept. This analytical action meant that concepts about Western and Eastern Europe were identified as a cultural construct entrenched by eighteenth-century philosophers from the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual work that had merely replaced the hitherto valid division of Europe into North and South. This thesis was raised and substantiated by Hans Lemberg in a paper read as early as in 1982.29 Some time later, Larry Wolff showed that this new division into West and East emerged from the Parisian intellectual environment, where “Eastern Europe” was understood as backward compared to the West.30 It was Said’s approach that allowed Wolff to demonstrate that this was the result of civilization mapping in the Parisian intellectual environment, a thesis that had been handed down and entrenched about the civilizational domination of one space over another. In another study by Wolff, 28 Edward Said, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 204. 29 Hans Lemberg, “Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert. Vom ‘Norden’ zum ‘Osten’ Europas,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas: Neue Folge 33, no. 1 (1985): 48–91. 30 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

14

Introduction

similar theses were discussed using the example of Galicia. The American historian showed how the Habsburgs’ imperial ideology, formed during the Enlightenment, reflecting the Josephinist religious policy’s goal of overcoming “barbarism” with “civilization,” affected and transformed images of Galicia in the nineteenth century until the decline of the Habsburg empire.31 Historian Maria Todorova used the same approach by Said to deconstruct the image of the Balkans and to reveal its contradictions and frequent negative assessment in Western culture. She also revealed the association of the “Balkans” concept with other space markings expressing the thrust of power from above, as, for example, “Central Europe.”32 The classic spatial imagination (de)construction studies listed here— all encouraged by the postcolonial approach—primarily allow us to understand the effect of power on systems of meanings applied to the same space. The application of this approach makes it possible to reveal the competition inherent in space construction in different social groups, in our case, the competition between the prenational and nationalist discourse, as well as between several nationalist discourse apologists. This particular theoretical approach in part explains the scope of the questions raised in this study and the structure of the work itself. In the two main chapters, the third and fourth, there is an analysis of the formation and content of systems of meanings related to Lithuania. The representation of Lithuania in the discourse and the representation of systems of meanings regarding the Lithuanian space in the physical space are analyzed there. Finally, these chapters contain an analysis of boundaries of national space, naming the main factors that influenced the dynamics of those boundaries. The fifth chapter explains the relationship that developed between two 31 Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 32 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997; rev. ed., 2009).

15

Introduction

varieties of nationalization of the same physical space—German and Lithuanian. The sixth chapter should be seen as an attempt to show the change and continuation of systems of meanings about space created in the long nineteenth century into the twentieth century, highlighting which conditions had the greatest impact on that continuity and change. The first two chapters are intended as an introduction to the issue. The second chapter shows the contexts of the appearance and application of the name “Lithuania” in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Prussia. The first chapter aims to show the appropriation processes related to that Lithuania in a more general context, first within East Prussia.

16

CHAPTER 1

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflicts

East Prussia, which once lay on the southeast edge of the Baltic Sea and included the Lithuania discussed in this book, vanished from the political map in 1945. Regardless, it continues to spur the imagination. That imagination is based on images created in different cultures that are related to this land, as well as on the aspirations of those states that envisaged a part of their territory here. East Prussia was always an arena for cultural meetings and conflicts; it was a space that was and still is of significance to more than just the national and subnational communities that lived in the province—the Germans, Masurians, Warmians, Prussian Lithuanians, and Jews, as well as to Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia—who saw and still see themselves in that space. It is not so difficult to explain this meaning of East Prussia. Its very appearance and disappearance were related to two acts of violence in which neighboring countries were forcibly or willingly involved. The term Ostpreußen started being used in the late eighteenth century, after the division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which took place despite the principle of territorial sovereignty already acknowledged in the “West” at the time. The Second World War and the geopolitical reorganization of East-Central Europe devised by the “winners” of this war became the reason for East Prussia’s disappearance.

18

Chapter 1

As a territorial unit ruled by the king of Prussia, East Prussia covered a large part of lands, formerly belonging to the Teutonic Order, that in 1525 were secularized and became the Duchy of Prussia, with the duke’s main residence in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). At the time, “Prussia” was the name given to the land controlled by the Ansbach line of the Hohenzollern dynasty, a fief of the king of Poland and the grand duke of Lithuania until 1657. Its first ruler was Albert, ruling in 1525–1568. Albert Frederick took over control of the duchy after his father’s death, but his health started to suffer and his term of independent rule was short lived. From 1578, rulership was transferred to a regent. Albert Frederick did not have a son, and his daughter Anna married John Sigismund, a representative of the Hohenzollern dynasty’s Brandenburg line, in 1594. He became the last regent; in 1618, upon the passing of Albert Frederick, control formerly passed into the hands of the Hohenzollern’s Brandenburg line. From that time, the ruler of this duchy resided in Berlin. In 1701, when the margrave of Brandenburg became king, all the king’s domains received the specially selected name of “Prussia” for political reasons, even though in the narrowest sense, for a long time Prussia was considered just the earlier domain with its center in Königsberg. In 1773, after the Prussian king’s domains that had been divided by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were physically joined, the easternmost province of the kingdom became known as East Prussia. The German Imperial Reich was founded in 1871 under the leadership of Minister President of Prussia Otto von Bismarck: the king of Prussia became Germany’s Kaiser, and the East Prussian territory became a part of Germany.1   1 There is a wealth of historiography on the East Prussia region. Some of the most important summarizing works to have appeared in the last several decades are Ernst Opgenoorth, ed., Handbuch der Geschichte Ost- und Westpreußens, vols. II/1, II/2, III, IV, vols. 10, 2.1, 2.2, 3, 4 of Einzelschriften der Historischen Kommission für ost- und westpreußische Landesforschung (Lüneburg: Institut Nordostdeutschen Kulturwerk, 1994, 1996, 1997); Andreas Kossert, Ostpreussen. Geschichte und Mythos (Munich: Siedler, 2005). They contain references to other relevant literature. The history of the Teutonic Order, which is still commonly associated with the “origins” of East Prussia, has a separate research tradition which shall not be mentioned due to the overly narrow links with the theme of this study. The German and Polish historiographical perspectives into this region were critically discussed and compared by Jörg

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflict

As we shall see, the neighboring countries’ claims to this territory, which expressed different concepts of national space, were first made evident during the First World War. In realizing the idea of creating a strong Poland between Germany and Soviet Russia, the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 physically separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany with what was called the Polish Corridor. According to the same peace treaty, in 1920 East Prussia’s northern part, then called the Memel Territory, was split off. In line with the mandate handed down by the Conference of Ambassadors, in 1920–1923 this land north of the Memel (Neman, Nemunas) and Russ (Rusnė) rivers was administered by France. After a military operation by the Lithuanian government, in 1923–1924 it was joined to the Republic of Lithuania and given autonomous rule.2 With changes to the power relationships in Europe and Germany’s ultimatum given to the Republic of Lithuania, in 1939 the land once again became part of the Province of East Prussia.3 However, by the end of the Second World War, East Prussia was divided into three parts—the northern part (the Memel Territory or the Klaipėda Region) was joined to the Lithuanian SSR, the southern part was given to Poland, and in 1946 an administrative Hackmann, Ostpreußen und Westpreußen in deutscher und polnischer Sicht. Landeshistorie als beziehungsgeschichtliches Problem, vol. 3 of Deutsches Historisches Institut Warschau. Quellen und Studien (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996). In this sense, Lithuanian historiographical perspectives have not yet been assessed in any complex way.   2 For the main research and sources on the joining of the Memel Territory to Lithuania, see Alfred Erich Senn, “Die Besetzung Memels im Januar 1923,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 10 (1965): 334–352; 1923 metų sausio įvykiai Klaipėdoje, ed. Alvydas Nikžentaitis, vol. IV of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 1995); Dalia Čičinienė, “Tautininkų ir krikščionių demokratų bendradarbiavimas sprendžiant Klaipėdos prijungimo problem,” Lietuvos istorijos metraštis 2001/ 2 (Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2002), 113–148; Klaipėdos kraštas 1920–1924 m. archyviniuose dokumentuose, ed. Silva Pocytė, vol. IX of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2003); Vygantas Vareikis, “Sukilėliai, šauliai, savanoriai,” in Nauji požiūriai į Klaipėdos miesto ir krašto praeitį, ed. Silva Pocytė and Vasilijus Safronovas, vol. XVII of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2008), 191–234; Vasilijus Safronovas, “Der Anschluss des Memelgebietes an Litauen. Die Tilsiter Akte und der ‘Aufstand’ als Symbole des Legitimationsmythos,” Annaberger Annalen 17 (2009): 5–40.   3 The latest research on this issue is revealed in Silva Pocytė, ed., Klaipėdos krašto aneksija 1939 m.: politiniai, ideologiniai, socialiniai ir kariniai aspektai, vol. XXI of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2010).

19

20

Chapter 1

unit of the Russian SFSR—Kaliningrad Oblast—was established in the central part. Two factors made these changes inevitable in the twentieth century. First, the great powers set out to reduce Germany’s influence to maintain the power balance in Europe. During the First World War, this influence along the southeastern shores of the Baltic Sea had to be reduced to benefit Russia. Indeed, although throughout the nineteenth century East Prussia

Figure 1  Boundaries of the Province of East Prussia on the eve of the Second World War and new borders formed in 1944–1945 when it was divided into three parts. The dashed line shows the prewar boundaries of governmental districts. Map by Vasilijus Safronovas.

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflict

expected its greatest threat to come from Russia, the onset of the world war meant that the highest levels of the Romanov empire could not agree on whether postwar Russia needed all those East Prussians. The Russian government seems to have thought that incorporating such a densely German populated region as far as the Vistula (Wisła, Weichsel) River would only create an “Achilles heel” for Russia in this space. The joining of the lower reaches of the Memel River area seemed a much more realistic prospect, basing it on a national (ethnographic) principle.4 Accurately assessing Prussia’s domination in Germany, Russia’s allies in the war agreed in principle with Prussia’s “trimming” in the east.5 However, only after the Romanov empire was shaken by the revolution of 1917 and the Bolsheviks gained control did the idea of the division of East Prussia take on a more distinct outline. Once Russia fell out of the game, its realization was associated with the creation of a strong Poland,6 which was meant to become the main guarantee of stability in the wide buffer zone between Germany and Bolshevik Russia. At the Paris Peace Conference, Poland’s diplomats suggested dividing East Prussia into three parts, joining the southern part to Poland and the northern to Lithuania and creating a   4 Russia’s planned territorial reorganization during the war is usually described based on the telegram sent by the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue to Paris on September 14 (1), 1914, where he is alleged to have passed on the “program” of Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Sazonov: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia v epokhu imperializma: dokumenty iz arkhivov tsarskogo i vremennogo pravitel’stv 1878–1917 gg. Series III: 1914–1917 gg., vol. VI, part 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1935), 247–249, no. 256. Cf. C. Jay Smith, Jr. The Russian Struggle for Power, 1914–1917. A Study of Russian Foreign Policy during the First World War (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 42–54; Gifford D. Malone, “War Aims toward Germany,” in Russian Diplomacy and Eastern Europe, 1914–1917, ed. Alexander Dallin et al. (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1963), 124–161. For authenticity and reliability of the “program,” see William A. Renzi, “Who Composed ‘Sazonov’s Thirteen Points’? A Re-Examination of Russia’s War Aims of 1914,” American Historical Review 88, no. 2 (1983): 347–357.   5 Cf. in particular Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 394–395, no. 385; Smith, Russian Struggle, 459–466; and Malone, “War Aims,” 136, 139–140, 146–147.   6 Česlovas Laurinavičius sees direct continuity between the Allies’ wartime approval of Russia’s clearly expressed goal, made in September 1914, of joining the lower reaches of the Memel River area and their favorable reactions in 1919 to Poland’s demands regarding the Memel matter, outlined at the Paris Peace Conference. Cf. Česlovas Laurinavičius, “Ką reiškia Lietuvai turėti Klaipėdą?” in Klaipėdos krašto aneksija, 14–18.

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protectorate of the League of Nations from the remainder—the “Autonomous Republic of Königsberg.”7 We could say that a modified version of this recommendation was implemented during and after the Second World War. Then the Allies, still treating the region as a “nest of Prussian militarism,” sanctioned the “resolution of the East Prussian problem” by steering the USSR’s geopolitical power against Germany and leaving the fate of the East Prussians in Stalin’s hands. However, there was a second, no less important reason as to why in the twentieth century this part of Europe experienced fundamental transformations. East Prussia was not a homogenous region, in either a linguistic or a confessional sense. In the late nineteenth century, it was still enthusiastically presented in Germany as an entity known for its unique elements. They included Sambia, Notanga, Warmia, Masuria, Lithuania, and Oberland. As we shall see, the uniqueness of these landscapes was exploited to create links between East Prussia and Germany and to show the significance of the East Prussians in Germany. The inclusion of the differences and varieties to ensure territorial integrity created a basis for imperial territorialism. However, the essence of the landscapes’ uniqueness in many cases lay in their cultural differences. Masuria, called the “Polish districts” or the “Polish area” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was unique for its Polish-speaking Evangelists. In Warmia—the former domains of the bishop of Warmia, which in 1466–1772 was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth— Polish-speaking Catholics predominated.8 Finally, in Lithuania, called   7 Akty i dokumenty dotyczące sprawy granic Polski na Konferencji Pokojowej w Paryżu 1918–1919, vol. 1: Program terytorjalny delegacji (Paris: Sekretarjat jeneralny delegacji polskiej, 1920), 122–123; Wojciech Wrzesiński, Prusy Wschodnie w polskiej myśli politycznej w latach 1864–1945, vol. 141 of Rozprawy i Materialy Ośrodka Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego w Olsztynie (Olsztyn: Towarzystwo Naukowe i Ośrodek Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego w Olsztynie, 1994), 188–189.   8 The history of the Warmia and Masuria regions, especially from the Polish perspective, is still often related as an account about one space. Some of the more significant examples are Stanisław Achremczyk, Historia Warmii i Mazur. Od pradziejów do 1945 roku, 2nd ed., vol. 166 of Rozprawy i Materialy Ośrodka Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego w Olsztynie (Olsztyn: Ośrodek Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego w Olsztynie, 1997); and Janusz Jasiński, Między Prusami a Polską. Rozprawy i szkice z dziejów Warmii i Mazur w XVIII–XX wieku (Olsztyn:

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflict

Figure 2.  Distinctive landscapes of East Prussia as shown in Franz Ludwig Güssefeld’s map Tabula regni Borussiae, Borussiam orientalem exhibens (Nuremberg: Homann Erben, 1775). Sambia (Samland) is marked in green; Notanga (Natangen) in jade; Oberland in purple; Warmia (Ermeland), which was newly incorporated in 1772, in yellow; and the Province of Lithuania in russet. The northern part of the last is named the “Lithuanian area” (Littauische Kreis), the southern—the “Polish area” (Polnische Kreis). Engraved map published as no.  60 in Sammlung von Land-Charten ErsterTheil 105 General-Charten enthaltend (Frankfurt a. M.: Homann Erben, 1788). The map is published with permission from the University of Bern (Switzerland) Library.

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the “Lithuanian districts” or the “Lithuanian area,” there were Lithuanian-speaking Evangelists. In the second half of the nineteenth century, with the spread of nationalism in East-Central Europe, the kind of pluriculturalism found in East Prussia posed a challenge to its solidity. The spread of nationalism using various strategies to appropriate East Prussia (to transform it into a nation’s own space) was encouraged not only in Germany. The Polish and Lithuanian national movements, at a time when statehood was not yet a factor, defined the spaces that they claimed belonged to them and, as a result, started to envisage the continuity of these spaces in the parts of East Prussia known for their uniqueness. With the spread of nationalism in the nineteenth century, as proponents of ruling mandates “by the Grace of God” and “by the Grace of the Nation” competed for political influence, the understanding of what was considered legitimate rule over a territory changed. Before the nineteenth century in “civilized” Europe, land governance was legitimized by the ruler’s law of succession. However, even in ancient Greece, the conquest of land by war was just as legitimate as inheritance, purchase, or acquisition as a gift in accordance with customary law.9 The law to conquer land, if it was sanctioned by God, was also acknowledged in the Middle Ages. Only in the early modern period, with the revival and strengthening influence of the Roman principle of territorial sovereignty, was conquest for conquest’s sake or in the name of honor increasingly considered unjustified, unless the act was a case of bellum justum—an honorable conquest in war in reaction to an unjust action.10 In short, up until the early modern Littera, 2003). A work dedicated especially to the history of Masuria that has still not lost its scientific value is Max Toeppen, Geschichte Masurens. Ein Beitrag zur preußischen Landes- und Kulturgeschichte (Danzig: Theodor Bertling, 1870); the latest synthesis on this theme is Andreas Kossert, Masuren. Ostpreußens vergessener Süden (Munich: Siedler, 2001). For a separate history of Warmia, see Stanisław Achremczyk, Warmia (Olsztyn: Littera, 2000). Cf. a historiographical overview: Brigitte Poschmann, “Das Ermland in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung der Gegenwart,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte und Altertumskunde Ermlands 44 (1988): 7–27.   9 Cf. Angelos Chaniotis, “Justifing Territorial Claims in Classical and Hellenistic Greece: The Beginnings of International Law,” in The Law and the Courts in Ancient Greece, ed. Edward M. Harris and Lene Rubinstein (London: Duckworth, 2004), 185–213. 10 Cf. Norman J. G. Pounds, “France and “Les Limites Naturelles” from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 44,

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflict

period it was a matter of course to legitimize a ruler’s acquisition of a territory, glorifying the ability to conquer that territory and to consider that conquest, sanctioned by others, as justified. But in the seventeenth century, along with the principle of territorial sovereignty the concepts of natural order and natural laws also spread. From them arose not just “state borders” but concepts such as limites naturelles, whose application in France and in the German-speaking lands in the late eighteenth century took different trajectories. In France, we see the spread of a new concept about France’s “natural” borders—rivers and mountains. The first annexations during the course of the revolutionary wars were motivated by the will to reach those “natural borders.” In the German-speaking lands, from the late eighteenth century a “naturally defined order” was used to explain the spread of a group of people unified by one language and culture in a certain space.11 With the growth of the idea of a nation in that part of Europe, where nationalism spread based on language and culture rather than territory, the boundaries of “nature-defined” linguistic groups became the imagined borders of these communities. In the nineteenth century, when throughout Europe the principle entrenched during the French Revolution that sovereignty belonged to the nation continued to flourish, a completely new concept emerged in which a community distinguished by its own language and culture and possessed of a certain degree of political structure had the right to become a nation. It became much more legitimate for a community unified by language and culture to express its national determination. In this way, the nation took over from the ruler the right to inherit territory. These territories in Central and Eastern Europe where nationalism rested on a linguistic and cultural foundation now had to be defined according to linguistic and cultural boundaries instead of those of existing political formations. As a result, in a large part of East-Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century two legitimate principles of territory acquisition and governance no. 1 (1954): 51–53; Alexander B. Murphy, “Historical Justifications for Territorial Claims,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80, no. 4 (1990): 534–535. 11 Cf. Pounds, “France and ‘Les Limites Naturelles,’” 54–58; and Jan Penrose, “Nations, States and Homelands: Territory and Territoriality in Nationalist Thought,” Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 3 (2002): 286.

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intersected: the maintenance of the early monarchical system and a ruler’s right to land based on a just conquest and/or inheritance; and the right of a nation unified by one language and culture to declare its decision to take sovereignty into its own hands within its own territory, as democratic and nationalist leaders urged. In the nineteenth century, East Prussia became a space where the application of these two principles collided. According to the first ideology, East Prussia legitimately belonged to Prussia because it was part of the inheritable domains of the king of Prussia, and the Teutonic Order’s military conquest in the thirteenth century was sanctioned by the existing European authorities of the time—the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope. Prussia’s rulers faced additional problems related to legitimacy— not so much because of the conquest itself but because the Teutonic Order, which still existed, refused to give up its claims to the lands that it had been forced to relinquish in 1525, when Albert converted to Lutheranism. Yet the new ideology offered a completely new foundation for legitimacy—the East Prussian territory had to belong to a nation defined by linguistic criteria in which the speakers of its main language made up the majority. It was precisely this legitimacy principle that encouraged the national appropriation of East Prussia as defined by nationalistic categories, as well as its symbolic control and nationalization. Indeed, in East Prussia until 1945 the new principle legitimizing territorial belonging (let us call it the nationalist principle) functioned only in the case of the Germans themselves. As we shall discover, in the appropriation of East Prussia using the resources of German nationalism, a new foundational myth of the territory was created, the German’s autochthonism thesis became entrenched, and the civilizational mission of East Prussia was developed. We know from Robert Traba’s study that the First World War became the most important impulse securing the significance of East Prussia in Germany’s national culture.12 The invasion of the Russian 12 Robert Traba, “Wschodniopruskość.” Tożsamość regionalna i narodowa w kulturze politycznej Niemiec (Poznań: Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk, 2005). Cf. the German edition: Robert Traba, Ostpreußen—die Konstruktion einer deutschen Provinz: eine Studie zur regionalen und nationalen Identität 1914–1933, vol. 12 of Klio in Polen (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2010).

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflict

army into this province and the war propaganda–exaggerated “victory at Tannenberg” of the German army in 1914 not only helped in the formation of the cult of Paul von Hindenburg,13 but it also allowed the strengthening of the East Prussians as a bastion of Germanness. The reconstruction of the province during and after the war, plus its territorial separation from Germany by the Polish Corridor, enlivened efforts to transform this territory into something “purely German.” The denial of claims on East Prussia by “others” and the strengthening of its German image were also bolstered by the results of a plebiscite held in 1920 in the southern East Prussian districts in accordance with the resolutions of the Treaty of Versailles. However, this study shows that in assessing the significance of East Prussia in German culture, the war should not be overrated. Many of the meanings that had defined “East Prussianism” that circulated after the First World War first emerged in the mid-nineteenth century when the need arose to give a national content to an old form—to transform this territory from the easternmost possessions of the king of Prussia into a “German land,” including it in the group of nationalist-vocabulary inspired “German spaces.” In Polish national culture, East Prussia also acquired relevant meanings in the second half of the nineteenth century. Born Adalbert von Winkler, the Galician historian Wojciech Kętrzyński started in 1868 to publish texts on Masuria and its history that urged the protagonists of the Polish national movement to turn their attention to this territory of Prussia.14 An indirect dispute between German and Polish authors over the autochthonism of West Prussia’s (which the Poles called Pomorze Wschodnie, East Pomerania) population was enlarged to include the territories of Warmia and Masuria.15 The protagonists of modern Polish national culture 13 Cf. Jesko von Hoegen, Der Held von Tannenberg: Genese und Funktion des Hindenburg-Mythos, vol. 4 of Stuttgarter Historische Forschungen (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), in particular 35–215. 14 Wrzesiński, Prusy Wschodnie, 31–45; Andreas Kossert, Preußen, Deutsche oder Polen? Die Masuren im Spannungsfeld des etnischen Nationalismus 1870–1956, vol. 12 of Deutsches Historisches Institut Warschau. Quellen und Studien (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 116–123. 15 For more on the origins of this dispute, see Jörg Hackmann, “Preußische Ursprungs­ mythen. Entstehung und Transformation vom 15. bis ins 20. Jahrhundert,” in Preussen

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saw a continuity of the Polish language and culture in these lands and dreamt about the inclusion of these two regions, regardless of how unique they were, in the future Poland. The differences between the German and Polish visions of the past and future of these regions are outlined quite well in two works that were released at almost the same time: Max Toeppen’s Geschichte Masurens (1870) and Wojciech Kętrzyński’s O Mazurach (1872).16 Toeppen described Masuria’s past in the context of the Teutonic Order and Prussia’s history, while Kętrzyński first had to prove the Polish roots of this region and its links to Polish culture. The most important symbols of Polish culture that were harnessed to accentuate the Polishness of Warmia and Masuria, the autochthonism of the Polish-speaking population in these lands, and their links with Poland’s history as early as the late nineteenth century became the figure of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and the Jagiellonian victory against the Teutonic Order near Grunwald (Tannenberg, Žalgiris) in 1410. The most important images became the struggles against the Teutonic Order (the “knights of the cross”) and Prussia’s protection, guaranteed by the Polish crown since the mid-fifteenth century. In Polish national culture these symbols and images were oriented toward denying the meaning of the German symbols of appropriation. Not until the First World War did Poles stress the irredentist significance of Warmia and Masuria. However, the Polish terra irredenta discourse in terms of this space did not yield results. France and Great Britain, in Paris in 1919, did not provide substantial support for Poland’s claims, leaving the deliberation of this issue to be revealed in the plebiscite. More important, in the southern Polish-speaking populated section of East Prussia a majority of the local inhabitants did not feel any strong cultural or political bonds with Poland. Already integrated into Germany’s confessional, social, communication, in Ostmitteleuropa: Geschehensgeschichte und Verstehensgeschichte, ed. Matthias Weber, vol. 21 of Schriften des Bundesinstituts für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2003), 163–165; and Christian Pletzing, “‘Deutsche Kultur’ und ‘polnische Zivilisation’. Geschichtsbilder in West- und Ostpreußen zwischen Vormärz und Kulturkampf,” in Preussen in Ostmitteleuropa, 189–205. 16 Toeppen, Geschichte Masurens; Wojciech Kętrzyński, O Mazurach (Poznań: Tygodnik Wielkopolski, 1872).

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflict

and political structures, they regarded Germany as their state. Only this can explain why, despite all the attempts to influence the results, Germany won the plebiscite of 1920 in southern East Prussia with 92.42 percent of voters who took part in the Marienwerder (Kwidzyn) Governmental District and 97.86 percent of those from the Allenstein (Olsztyn) Governmental District.17 Naturally, both Poland and Germany exploited the plebiscite’s results for their own benefit. These results worked beautifully in entrenching the myths of German oppression, “Germanized Poles,” and so on. Yet the reality was that the “Polish” nationalist principle of legitimizing territorial belonging did not work in Warmia and Masuria. By the late nineteenth century, Lithuanian national culture also began to articulate the dispersion of “its own” speakers on either side of the German and Russian border. Here meanings related to the Prussian Lithuanian landscape were also created, allowing this region to be seen as one of theirs.18 Paradoxically, these meanings were similar to those that the Poles continued to create about East Prussia at the time. At the beginning of the twentieth century, regions of Lithuanian speakers on opposite sides of the border gave rise to the myth of two Lithuanias—Minor and Major, once “divided” as a result of “German” influence. As in the German and Polish cases, Lithuanians supported the image of their nation’s continuation in Prussia, the thesis of autochthonism in this land, and the image of Lithuanians suffering at the hands of eternal Germanization. As with the Poles in Warmia and Masuria, for Lithuanians Lithuania Minor (Prussian Lithuania) became their terra irredenta during the First World War, and they hoped that this territory would be annexed to the Lithuanian nationstate. However, all that the Republic of Lithuania managed to win was a 17 Rocznik statystyki Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej 1, no. II (1920/22) (Warsaw: Główny Urząd Statystyczny Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, 1923), 358. 18 A history of the Prussian Lithuanian region that gives a critical assessment of this perspective has still not been released. Single themes have in recent decades drawn attention in historians’ studies (e.g., Lukšaitė, Reformacija; Pocytė, Mažlietuviai). However, in summaries of the region’s history, in an interpretational sense, in Lithuanian historiography there have not been any moves beyond these positions: Juozas Jakštas, “Mažosios Lietuvos istorija,” Lietuvių enciklopedija, vol. XV (Boston, MA: Lietuvių enciklopedijos leidykla, 1968), 401–414; the chapter ‘Mažoji Lietuva’ in Pranas Čepėnas, Naujųjų laikų Lietuvos istorija vol. II (Chicago: K. Griniaus fondas, 1986), 721–796; Matulevičius, Mažoji Lietuva.

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smaller part of this territory—the Memel Territory (Klaipėda Region) that had been separated from Germany in 1920. Moreover, Lithuania won this territory only by resorting to military force and its diplomatic abilities,19 as the number of people in the Memel Territory who would have enthusiastically backed the idea of joining Lithuania proper was small. The Lithuanian government’s occupation of Memel (Klaipėda) in 1923 in this sense was a typical territorial conquest, based on the premodern logic of justified conquest. Regardless, during the entire interwar period nationalist motives for including this territory in Lithuania were sustained, with the illusion maintained that the region was Lithuanian and Lithuanianness understood according to the only measure then being generated in Lithuania. In an economic sense, during the interwar period Lithuania gradually integrated the Memel Territory, adapting its port to meet its foreign trade needs. However, in a cultural and political sense this land became a thorn in the Republic of Lithuania’s side, with negative effects on the country’s relations with Germany and Lithuania’s geopolitical position that in 1939 significantly undermined the authority of Antanas Smetona’s authoritarian regime in society. In the interwar period, Lithuania faced disloyalty from the local population in the Memel Territory—not only from Germans but from local Lithuanians as well. In the duel over which side the region’s Lithuanians would take, Germany used various direct tools of intervention to emerge as the victor.20 19 Lithuania implemented the military operation of 1923 bolstered by the unofficial approval of Germany and Soviet Russia. The operation was aimed at disrupting the Versailles system. However, after the conclusion of the successful operation Lithuania performed a diplomatic maneuver by starting negotiations with the Conference of Ambassadors, in whose favor Germany denied sovereignty in the Memel Territory in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles and from whom Lithuania received recognition of its sovereignty in February 1923 (for more, see Safronovas, “Anschluss des Memelgebietes,” 18–37). The Memel Territory became an autonomous part of the Republic of Lithuania. Here—even after 1926, when a coup d’état took place in Lithuania and the regime became increasingly more authoritarian—democratic principles still applied, overseen by the signatories to the Convention concerning the Territory of Memel— Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. It was precisely this fact that ended up “curbing” Lithuania’s goals of quickly and determinedly integrating the territory it had received. 20 A relatively large quantity of literature that goes beyond the national perspective exists on this issue: Vytautas Žalys, Kova dėl identiteto: Kodėl Lietuvai nesisekė Klaipėdoje tarp 1923–1939 m./ Ringen um Identität: Warum Litauen zwischen 1923 und 1939 im

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflict

Due to the specific cultural structure before 1939, the nationalist principle of legitimizing territorial belonging thus could not be implemented in the cases of Polish and Lithuanian nationalism in East Prussia. However, the Second World War fundamentally changed the potential to act in resolving this issue. As early as 1942–1943, the Allies realized that the geopolitical power of the USSR would make a major contribution to stopping Germany and might even oust it from East-Central Europe. Already, one of the main negotiation points was the question of territorial reorganization in this part of Europe. The Polish government-in-exile, whose operation in London meant that Poland could be considered one of the Allies, made plans during the war according to which a large part of East Prussia, including Königsberg, would fall into Poland’s hands, motivated by strategic and nationalistic arguments. Only a small northern part was to be assigned to a future Lithuania.21 In Lithuania, naturally, there were also expectations that once Germany was crushed, the Memel Territory at least would be returned to Lithuania. It was the USSR, however, not Poland or Lithuania, that eventually determined East Prussia’s fate. Memelgebiet keinen Erfolg hatte (Lüneburg: Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1993); Manfred Klein, “Die versäumte Chance zweier Kulturen. Zum deutsch-litauischen Gegensatz im Memelgebiet,” in Zwischen Staatsnation und Minderheit. Litauen, das Memelland und das Wilnagebiet in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Joachim Tauber, vol. II, no. 2 (1993) of Nordost-Archiv (Lüneburg: Institut Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1993), 317–352; Karl-Heinz Ruffmann, Deutsche und Litauer in der Zwischenkriegszeit. Erinnerungen eines Memelländers, Überlegungen eines Historikers, 3rd exp. ed. (Lüneburg: Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1994); Joachim Tauber, “Die Memelfrage im Rahmen der deutsch-litauischen Beziehungen 1919–1939,” in Deutschland und Litauen. Bestandsaufnahmen und Aufgaben der historischen Forschung, ed. Norbert Angermann and Joachim Tauber (Lüneburg: Institut Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1995), 107–118; Joachim Tauber, “Das Dritte Reich und Litauen 1933–1940,” in Zwischen Lübeck und Novgorod. Wirtschaft, Politik und Kultur im Ostseeraum vom frühen Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert. Norbert Angermann zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Ortwin Pelc and Gertrud Pickhan (Lüneburg: Institut Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1996), 477–496; Silva Pocytė, “Klaipėdiškių / lietuvininkų ir didlietuvių sugyvenimas Klaipėdos krašte: Lietuviškųjų organizacijų komiteto veiklos 1934–1939 m. pavyzdys,” Lietuvos istorijos metraštis 2003/2 (Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2005), 77–90; Vasilijus Safronovas, Kampf um Identität. Die ideologische Auseinandersetzung in Memel/Klaipėda im 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 20 of Veröffentlichungen des Nordost-Instituts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015). 21 The Polish perspective from the Second World War years is comprehensively revealed here: Wrzesiński, Prusy Wschodnie, 336–432.

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As during the First World War, Moscow also utilized the nationalistic principle to justify its annexation of East Prussia, at least at first. Unlike Poland, the Lithuania had become one of the Soviet republics in 1940, which is why the Kremlin primarily instrumentalized Lithuanian nationalist arguments. In the autumn of 1943 and the spring of 1944, when the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of the USSR began to discuss how Germany would be handled in the postwar period, it regarded the demand to incorporate the Memel Territory into the Lithuanian SSR as sound, no matter how the East Prussia issue was to be resolved.22 In addition, there were recommendations to push the border of the Lithuanian SSR further west—first incorporating “an eastern region of East Prussia, mostly inhabited by Lithuanians, in accordance with the line prompted by our general headquarters,” later employing strategic devices to add Königsberg and even the eastern part of the Masurian lakes area to the Lithuanian SSR.23 To legitimize Lithuania’s possible extension into the west, a special commission formulated Lithuanians’ claims based on clearly nationalistic criteria—Lithuania was to be extended to include all places with Lithuanian names.24 However, when the Allies untied Stalin’s hands and freed him to operate as he liked in the region, such arguments were no longer required. At the Tehran Conference Stalin suggested dividing East Prussia in two, defining a preliminary boundary along the Königsberg–Eydtkuhnen (now Chernyshevskoye) railway line.25 On July 27, 1944, in Moscow, the 22 SSSR i Germanskii vopros 1941–1949: dokumenty iz Arkhiva vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii/ Die UdSSR und die Deutsche Frage 1941–1949: Dokumente aus dem Archiv für Außenpolitik der Russischen Federation, vol. 1: 22 iiunia 1941 g.–8 maia 1945 g., ed. Georgii Kynin and Jochen Laufer (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1996), 295, 440, see also  241, 433. 23 Ibid., 295, 440. 24 Vytautas Gudelis, “Ketinimai priskirti Lietuvai dalį buvusių Rytprūsių teritorijos,” Ramuva, no. 1 (1989): 42; Antanas Kulakauskas, “[Speech in a Discussion on Kaliningrad Oblast],” in Lietuva ir jos kaimynai: metinės konferencijos tekstai, Vilnius, 1996 m. lapkričio 22–23 d. (Vilnius: Pradai, 1997), 136–137; Česlovas Laurinavičius, “Lietuvos sienų raida XX amžiuje,” in Lietuvos sienos: tūkstantmečio istorija (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2009), 117. 25 US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States. Diplomatic Papers: The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Ofiice, 1961), 601, Polish Series, Map 12. Poland: Eastern Frontier.

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflict

USSR and its puppet Polish government (the so-called Lublin Committee) reached an agreement dividing East Prussia into a Polish part including Danzig (Gdańsk) and a Soviet section including Königsberg.26 Although Stalin was well aware of the requests of both the Polish government-inexile in London and the Lublin Committee to annex Königsberg to Poland, the Red Army’s occupation of the “nest of Prussian militarism” in 1944– 1945 ended discussion of this question. At the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Allies agreed to sanction this occupation at an impending peace conference that never actually met. As Winston Churchill wrote in a letter to Stalin a few months ahead of the conference, the addition of part of East Prussia to the USSR “was a justifiable claim by Russia … the land in this part of East Prussia had been stained with Russian blood, generously let in the name of a common goal,” which was why “Russians had an historic and well-motivated claim to this German territory.”27 Thus, Stalin masterminded a classic territorial conquest based on a Messiah-like view of liberation not unlike the one used by the Teutonic Order in the thirteenth century to justify its conquests as a means of spreading Christianity or twentieth-century Germany’s insistence that it was introducing Kultur into the barbaric east. This conquest earned even more legitimacy thanks to another premodern idea: the USSR claimed its war trophy as the side that had fought a bellum justum—a just war, as it was the country under attack. It was just a matter of time before nationalist arguments would no longer be needed to justify the conquest of East Prussia. After the leaders of the Lithuanian SSR balked at laying claim to all the territory acquired by the USSR, a unit of the RSFSR was founded there in 1946—Kaliningrad Oblast. It also proved impossible to apply the nationalist principle because most of East Prussia’s former inhabitants had either left the territory, fleeing the approaching Red Army toward the end 26 Ivan Khrenov and Vlodzimesh Koval’skii, eds., Dokumenty i materialy po istorii sovetsko-pol’skikh otnoshenii, vol. VIII: ianvar’ 1944 g.–dekabr’ 1945 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), 156. 27 Letter dated February 20, 1944, from Churchill to Stalin: Ministerstvo inostrannykh del SSSR, Perepiska predsedatelia Soveta Ministrov SSSR s prezidentami SShA i prem’er-ministrami Velikobritanii vo vremia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 gg., vol. 1: perepiska s U. Cherchillem i K. Ettli, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1986), 237.

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of the war, or had been forcibly evicted after the war. Despite the interest that the leaders of Poland and the Lithuanian SSR had in Polish and Lithuanian speakers remaining in Warmia, Masuria, and the Memel Territory, in all three cases much of the space needed to be colonized by new settlers, so little foundation remained to speak about any kind of continuity in the region. The withdrawal of “disloyal” inhabitants and the elimination of German influence from the shores of the eastern Baltic with the support of Soviet geopolitical might however have set up completely new conditions for East Prussia’s integration in the postwar period—which Lithuania, for example, had not previously had in relation to the Memel Territory.28 But neither Poles nor Lithuanians, never mind Germans, were happy about Stalin’s division of East Prussia. For several decades, East Prussia’s expatriated Germans nurtured the hope of one day returning to their former lands. With the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949), revisionism was actively encouraged by an East Prussian territorial organization and a German movement of expellees representing the millions that had been turned out of East-Central Europe. Scientific competency and appropriate academic networks were set up not long after the war to assert the Germanness of this territory and to keep alive meanings related to East Prussia in German national culture. With rightist governments in power, West Germany did not recognize the new western border of Poland, called the Oder-Neisse line, until 1970, and in this way did not deny its claims on East Prussia. The Poles objected not so much because their claims on Königsberg were not satisfied (they had received Warmia and Masuria) as because they ended up with Russia along their northern borders. The territories for which they had yearned became theirs in a way that made them dependent on 28 For the first attempts to compare similar processes that occurred in three different parts of East Prussia in the postwar years, see: Ostpreußen nach 1945, vol. 7 (1999) of Annaberger Annalen; Andrzej Sakson, Od Kłajpedy do Olsztyna. Wspólsześni mieszkańcy byłych Prus Wschodnich: Kraj Kłajpedzki, Obwód Kaliningradzki, Warmia i Mazury, vol. 25 of Ziemie Zachodnie. Studia i Materiały (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 2011); and Vasilijus Safronovas, ed., Erdvių pasisavinimas Rytų Prūsijoje XX amžiuje = Appropriation of Spaces in East Prussia during the 20th Century, vol. XXIV of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2012).

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflict

the USSR. Nevertheless, Poland focused its efforts on integrating its recently acquired territories rather than on its past and present causes for complaint. In 1945, the southern part of East Prussia was made part of communist Poland as “Warmia and Masuria.” The region was integrated into Poland not as a component of East Prussia but as a part of the “Recovered Territories” (Ziemie Odzyskane), using scientific arguments to prove the thesis that Poland had returned to the Piasts’ vision of an ethnically homogenous Poland within the borders that the founders of Poland, the Piasts, had envisaged.29 Certain Prussian Lithuanians who retreated from the Red Army into the depths of Germany, and later went to North America, transferred the title of Lithuania Minor to Kaliningrad Oblast as a whole. They then asserted territorial claims on this space, demanding that the Allies review the decisions made after the Second World War. The imagined identification of the Lithuania Minor region with Kaliningrad Oblast, employing the nationalist principle to legitimize territorial inclusion, eventually occurred in Soviet Lithuania as well. This set the scene for the further development of the irredentist discourse after 1990. Yet the group of cultures representing their existence in East Prussia— Germans, Poles, and Lithuanians—has since been joined by another, the inhabitants of Kaliningrad Oblast. A third generation of the population who settled here in the postwar years is creating its own association with this space. It was much more difficult for the new settlers to create such associations with Kaliningrad Oblast than for the Poles or Lithuanians,30 as there had been no need to develop a system of meanings for this space to ensure Russia’s territorial integrity prior to the Second World War. East Prussia held no universally recognizable meanings in Russia like those 29 Cf. Grzegorz Strauchold, “Der Westgedanke in der polnischen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945,” in Deutsche Ostforschung und polnische Westforschung im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft und Politik. Disziplinen im Vergleich, ed. Jan M. Piskorski, Jörg Hackmann, and Rudolf Jaworski (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2002), 47–80; and Andrzej Sakson, ed., Ziemie Odzyskane/ Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne 1945–2005. 60 lat w granicach państwa polskiego, vol. 23 of Ziemie Zachodnie. Studia i Materiały (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 2006). 30 For an attempt at a systemic look at this phenomenon, see Eckhard Matthes, Verbotene Erinnerung. Die Wiederentdeckung der ostpreußischen Geschichte und regionales Bewußtsein der russischen Bevölkerung im Gebiet Kaliningrad 1945–2001 (BietigheimBissingen: edition tertium, 2002).

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that were implemented in the Polish and Lithuanian national cultures. From 1945 on, such meanings had to be created from scratch.31 At the end of the Stalin period, nationalist arguments—in a form reminiscent of pan-Slavism—were applied to legitimize the assignment of Kaliningrad Oblast to Russia. In this case, an old theory about the Slavicism of Prussians was exploited until Soviet scientists rejected this notion in the late 1940s and early 1950s.32 The dominant narrative about Kaliningrad Oblast’s place in Russia, the only one remaining after Stalin’s death, was reworked according to the logic of justified conquest. Kaliningrad Oblast was seen as a reward earned by the USSR for the “Soviet people’s” blood shed during the war, mostly the blood of the “Russian people.” With the entrenchment of the monumental cult of the Great Patriotic War during Brezhnev’s time in power,33 the mythology associated with this cult served as the main source of argumentation for proving the association between Kaliningrad Oblast and Russia. The large number of still-living war veterans 31 To learn about the new settlers’ relationship with their postwar surroundings in the Polish and Russian parts of East Prussia, see Eckhard Matthes, ed., Als Russe in Ostpreußen: Sowjetische Umsiedler über ihren Neubeginn in Königsberg/Kaliningrad nach 1945 (Ostfildern: Tertium, 1999) (a translation of an original work that was released in Russia later than in Germany: Iurii Kostiashov, ed., Vostochnaia Prussiia glazami sovetskikh pereselentsev: Pervye gody Kaliningradskoi oblasti v vospominaniiakh i dokumentakh. [St. Petersburg: Bel‘veder, 2002]); Hans-Jürgen Karp and Robert Traba, eds., Nachkriegsalltag in Ostpreußen. Erinnerungen von Deutschen, Polen und Ukrainern (Münster: Aschendorff, 2004); and Ulrich Mai, ed., Masuren: Trauma, Sehnsucht, leichtes Leben. Zur Gefühlswelt einer Landschaft (Berlin: LIT, 2005). 32 Iurii Kostiashov, Izgnanie prusskogo dukha: Kak formirovalos‘ istoricheskoe soznanie naseleniia Kaliningradskoi oblasti v poslevoennye gody / Eckhard Matthes, Zapreshchennoe vospominanie: Vozvrashchenie istorii Vostochnoi Prussii i regional‘noe soznanie zhitelei Kaliningradskoi oblasti (1945–2001), vol. 3 of Terra Baltica (Kaliningrad: Izdatel‘stvo Kaliningradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2003), 28–31; Per Brodersen, Die Stadt im Westen. Wie Königsberg Kaliningrad wurde (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 93–100. 33 Without questioning the vital role played by the USSR in stopping Germany during the Second World War, still not entirely understood in the “West,” it is important to note that the narrative about this war in the USSR and in Russia itself still functions as an isolated segment of the war, known as the Great Patriotic War (based on the analogy with the Patriotic War of 1812). This segment is represented as a Soviet or Russian war against Germany, giving the USSR the mission of a “liberator of nations.” The role of the other Allies in this narrative is almost nonexistent; it also, naturally, overlooks the role that the USSR played from August 1939 to June 1941 when it cooperated with Nazi Germany.

East Prussia: An Arena for Cultural Meetings and Conflict

and military units who participated in the occupation of East Prussia only strengthened the relevance of this strategy of appropriation. An additional means of appropriation was the renaming of places in the early postwar years in Kaliningrad Oblast, during which the initiators tried to create the impression that this land was “as Russian as the others,” and almost 100 percent of cities, towns, villages, and even rivers received different names.34 In 1946, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in honor of Mikhail Kalinin, the deceased chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR; Tilsit became Sovietsk; and some of the regional centers were given names that memorialized generals who lost their lives during the occupation of East Prussia: Ivan Chernyakhovsky, Stepan Guriev, Sergei Gusev, Ivan Ladushkin, Stepan Nesterov, and others. Another means of appropriation became the search for links with Russian history in East Prussia’s past: plots from the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars were unearthed and utilized, as were the figures of generals Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov. In seeking to smooth over the district’s sense of exclave status and its distance from Russia, an analogue to the image of the German “fortress” (Bollwerk) was created during the Soviet years—an image of the “westernmost” region of Russia. Some attempts stressed Kaliningrad and its oblast’s significance to the economy of the USSR (Russia).35 Perhaps the most important resource for an alternative appropriation of Kaliningrad Oblast in the Soviet years became the “German” material heritage,36 interest in which grew markedly at the turn of the 1990s and shows no signs of decreasing. Appropriation via material heritage—a strategy that after the Second World War was more or less successfully applied in all three sections of the former East Prussia37—has been, since 34 A renaming campaign, though not as radical, also took place in the postwar years in the part of East Prussia allocated to Poland. Cf. Sakson, Od Kłajpedy do Olsztyna, 259–260. 35 For more about relationships with the past in Kaliningrad after the war, see Bert Hoppe, Auf den Trümmern von Königsberg. Kaliningrad 1946–1970, vol. 80 of Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Munich: R.  Oldenbourg, 2000); Kostiashov, Izgnanie; and Brodersen, Stadt im Westen. 36 For more, see Il‘ia Dement‘ev, “‘Riabinka u boinitsy:’ reabilitatsiia dovoennogo proshlogo v pamiati kaliningradtsev (1970-e – 1980-e gody),” in Erdvių pasisavinimas, 92–118. 37 Cf. Zbigniew Mazur, ed., Wokół niemieckiego dziedzictwa kulturowego na Ziemiach Zachodnich i Północnych, vol. 18 of Ziemie Zachodnie. Studia i Materiały (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 1997); Zbigniew Mazur, ed., Wspólne dziedzictwo? Ze studiów nad

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1991, competing with two “official” strategies in Kaliningrad Oblast. One involves strengthening the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kaliningrad Oblast and trying to develop the population’s links with Russia via religious institutions and practices. The other, revived after 2000, bases itself on the memory of the Great Patriotic War and highlights the significance of this war in the emergence of Kaliningrad Oblast. All of the above shows that East Prussia, although it no longer exists, remains an example of a space where the overlap of imagination and claims born of that imagination force the justified conquest and nationalist principles to intersect.38 At the same time, it remains an arena for the meeting and conflict of cultures. Taking as an example one region of East Prussia, later chapters of this book show how different systems of meanings were formed that entrenched collective perceptions about space and the place of different cultures therein. They reveal the interaction that encouraged the establishment of these perceptions and the vocabulary (language) that was used to represent the belonging of this space to the cultures in question.

stosunkiem do spuścizny kulturowej na Ziemiach Zachodnich i Północnych, vol. 22 of Ziemie Zachodnie. Studia i Materiały (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 2000). On the attempt to compare symbolic appropriation processes in the three parts of former East Prussia, see Erdvių pasisavinimas. 38 See the following for more about these intersections after 1990: Vasilijus Safronovas, “Vostochnaia Prussiia—nedodelennoe nasledstvo?” Ab Imperio 1 (2014): 205–243.

CHAPTER 2

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries The construction of national spaces in East Prussia that commenced in the nineteenth century could have been based on the cultural variation inherent to this Prussian province. The tradition of naming its landscapes with such great variation had existed for more than a century. Thus, the space occupying the eastern part of the Duchy of Prussia was known by the name of “Lithuania” for a long time. Although this name had already begun to be used in the mid-sixteenth century, “Lithuania” was not a concept implying a stable content. Its meaning in Prussia changed from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. It is important to understand the turning points in this change, primarily in order to disassociate oneself from the instrumental and teleological treatment of the concepts “Lithuania” and “Lithuanians” that was typical of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist imagination. And it is no less important to understand the context in which that name was first applied to this part of the Prussian dukes’ domains. The logic of linguistic nationalism of the nineteenth century would seem to suggest that the name “Lithuania” appeared in response to the number of Lithuanian-language users in Prussia. Indeed, although population change in the eastern parts of the Prussian dukes’ domains still leaves many unanswered questions, the idea that springs to mind is that the name “Lithuania” was already being applied to some of these areas

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after the land’s resettlement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the initial stages, this resettlement was expressed mostly via the relocation of populations from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) to Prussia, and later via internal colonization when farms were divided and new settlements created.1 Similar settlement processes took place in the sixteenth century, not just on the border regions of Prussia and the GDL but also in the Prussian-Polish border areas, which were also being rapidly appropriated at that time.2 However, regarding the appearance of the name “Lithuania,” it is important to recall the idea once expressed by Hans Kohn: “Before the era of nationalism, the masses very rarely became conscious of the fact that the same language was spoken over a large territory. In fact, it was not the same language; several dialects existed side by

1

A discussion of this issue in the historiography has been presented by Arthur Hermann, “Mažosios Lietuvos lietuviai: autochtonai ar ateiviai? Istoriografinė apžvalga,” in Arthur Hermann, Lietuvių ir vokiečių kaimynystė (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2000), 9–31. After that, the following authors have also shown interest in this theme: Bernhart Jähnig, “Litauische Einwanderung nach Preußen im 16. Jahrhundert. Ein Bericht zum ‘dritten Band’ von Hans und Gertrud Mortensen,” in Zur Siedlungs-, Bevölkerungs- und Kirchengeschichte Preußens, ed. Udo Arnold, vol. 12 of Tagungsberichte der Historischen Kommission für Ost- und Westpreussische Landesforschung (Lüneburg: Institut Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1999), 75–94; Stephen C. Rowell, “Aspects of Settlement in the Klaipėda District (Memelland) in the Late-Fifteenth and Early-Sixteenth Centuries,” in Klaipėdos visuomenės ir miesto struktūros, ed. Vacys Vaivada and Dainius Elertas, vol. XI of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2005), 22–34. For more on the changing forms of resettlement, see Hans Mortensen, “Einwanderung und innerer Ausbau in den Anfängen der Besiedlung des Hauptamtes Ragnit,” in Acta Prussica. Abhandlungen zur Geschichte Ost- und Westpreußens. Fritz Gause zum 75. Geburtstag, vol. XXIX of Beihefte zum Jahrbuch der Albertus-Universität Königsberg/ Pr. (Würzburg: Holzner, 1968), 67–76. When talking about the settlement of this area in Prussia, we should not forget the waves of relocation by peasants from Courland. The first such wave to the war-ravaged Memel district and Curonian Spit was at the turn of the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, and several more waves of migration of the peasantry from Courland were dated to the seventeenth century (Cf. Victor Diederichs, “Die kurische Nerung und die Kuren in Preußen,” Magazin der Lettisch Litterarischen Gesellschaft 17 (1883): 1–99; August Seraphim, “Ueber Auswanderungen lettischer Bauern aus Kurland nach Ostpreußen im 17. Jahrhundert,” Altpreussische Monatsschrift 29 (1892): 317–331). 2 Cf. Toeppen, Geschichte Masurens, i, 116–118; Wojciech Kętrzyński, O ludności polskiej w Prusiech niegdyś krzyżackich (Lviv: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1882), esp. 223–231.

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

side, sometimes incomprehensible to the man of a neighboring province.”3 The Lithuanian language, as we know it today, also did not exist then. Baltic dialects were still in the consolidation and integration stage.4 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the standardization and codification of these dialects took place in the Duchy of Prussia, the beginnings of which can be seen in Martynas Mažvydas’s Cathechismus (1547), continued in Jonas Bretkūnas’s collection of sermons Postilla (1591) and his translation of the Bible (1579–90) that remained unpublished for four centuries, and the appearance of Daniel Klein’s Grammatica Litvanica (1653), which testifies the level of dialect development that was reached.5 The name “Lithuanian language” was given to these dialects by a specific group of settlers—religious immigrants who belonged to the higher-ranking, educated social classes.6 Albert, the Duke of Prussia, willingly invited them to his domains from the GDL, which was then grappling with the Reformation. It was precisely this intellectual environment that not only created the understanding of what the “Lithuanian language” was but spread the very understanding of a “Lithuanian” as the user of this standardized language.7 However, at that time the concept of belonging to 3 Kohn, Idea of Nationalism, 6. 4 Cf. Zigmas Zinkevičius, Lietuvių kalbos istorija, vol. 2: Iki pirmųjų raštų (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1987), 272, 279–280. 5 Zigmas Zinkevičius, Lietuvių kalbos istorija, vol. 3: Senųjų raštų kalba (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1988), 40, 84, 88–94. 6 Identification of the use of “lingua Lituanica” was already noted in the preface of Mažvydas’s Cathechismus (Martynas Mažvydas, Katekizmas ir kiti raštai, ed. Giedrius Subačius (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1993), 53 [7]). However, for example, Bretkūnas wrote in a letter to the Prussian duke in 1563 that he had some knowledge of the “Lithuanian and Prussian language” (Lituanicam [et] Prutenicam linguam), which he generalized as being one language (Ona Aleknavičienė, “Jono Bretkūno Postilė Lietuvoje: sklaidos istorija,” in Jono Bretkūno Postilė, ed. Ona Aleknavičienė (Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas, 2005), 19–20). 7 One of the first documents related to Prussia from the sixteenth century that makes mention of “Lithuanians” is the Land Rules confirmed by the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in 1503. Here, in relation to “irer herschafft vnd hern,” alongside “prewsen” the “littawe” are also mentioned. However, in this context they could also mean inhabitants who had arrived from the GDL, and thus separate from the “Prussians,” i.e., the Prussian population (Cf. “Ordnung vnd Artikell wie es bey Herzog Friedrichs Zeitten aufgericht, wie man es mit dem Feiern und sonst allem Handel halten soll,” in Heinrich Friedrich Jacobson, Geschichte der Quellen des Kirchenrechts des Preussischen Staats, part 1: Die Provinzen Preussen und Posen, vol. 1: Das katholische Kirchenrecht

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Lithuania was not yet typical of the majority of the population made up of the lower social strata. They probably had a poor sense of themselves as “Lithuanians” speaking to one another in “Lithuanian.” The title “Lithuania” to designate a part of Prussia in turn started being used in the communication milieu that encompassed the clergy, which at the time was the only group that saw itself as belonging to “Lithuania.” We know of no ducal documents where part of Prussia’s domains would have been identified using the “Lithuania” concept. However, in 1573, during the matriculation of Nicolaus (Mikalojus) Blotno at the University of Königsberg, Blotno was identified as “pastor of the Church of God in the Lithuanian village of Pillupönen” (pastor ecclesiae Dei in pago Lithuaniae Pilupian).8 Bretkūnas in his Postilla also used the name

(Königsberg: Gebrüder Bornträger, 1837), 141 and 297 in Anhang). The appearance of “Lithuanians” as language speakers in Prussia is clearly associated with the appearance of Abraomas Kulvietis, Stanislovas Rapolionis, and other newcomers in Duke Albert’s circles in the 1540s. Thus, the church that was built in Memel in the sixteenth century that only later came to be called the Littauische Kirche was identified in the earliest documents (1538) as intended for “non-Germans” (unteutschen) (Erich Zurkalowski, “Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stadt Memel,” Altpreußische Monatsschift 46 (1909): 113). In the Church Provisions of 1544 the conception “für die littauen und undeudschen” emerges (Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, vol. 4 [Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1911], 67–68), while in the duke’s notice of 1550 on the University of Königsberg alumnate, he even writes about the “Lithuanian nation” (aus … litthauscher … Nation tüchtige Personen) (Daniel Heinrich Arnoldt, Ausführliche und mit Urkunden versehene Historie der Königsbergischen Universität, vol. 1 [Königsberg: Johann Heinrich Hartung, 1746], 471 in Beylage). Nevertheless, the use of the name “Lithuanian” in other cases did not necessarily mean users of the “Lithuanian language.” Attribution to a space, rather than a language, is mentioned in a notice regarding the matriculation of Georgius Holtz to the University of Königsberg in 1563, a student whose surname is obviously not Baltic: “the Lithuanian [presumably, from Lithuania—V. S.] was born in the village of Gawaiten, 7 miles from Insterburg” (Lituanus, natus in pago Gawaytten, qui 7 miliaribus abest Insterburgo) (Georg Erler, ed., Die Matrikel der Albertus-Universität zu Königsberg i. Pr., vol. I: Die Immatrikulationen von 1544–1656 [Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1910], 33). In two decrees regarding church visitations issued in Tilsit by the regent George Frederick on December 6, 1578, the residents of the Tilsit and Ragnit districts are summarized as “kurschai ir lietuwnikai” (Courlanders and Lithuanians) (Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann, “Eine littauische Urkunde vom Jahre 1578,” Neue Preußische Provinzial-Blätter, andere Folge 1 [1852]: 243; Adalbert Bezzenberger, “Eine neugefundene litauische Urkunde vom Jahre 1578,” Altpreussische Monatsschrift 14 [1877]: 464). 8 Matrikel der Albertus-Universität, 52.

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

“Lithuania” to identify a part of the Prussian domains.9 This would indicate the cultural transfer of the name “Lithuania,” its adaption to a region where the Prussian duke’s new subjects hailing from the GDL operated, and where gradually that name took on completely new meanings.10 This kind of transfer was determined by a rather small group of priests, many of whom relocated to Prussia from the GDL during the Reformation.11 Thus, in the letters of Mažvydas, originally from the GDL, Lituania is still in the same neighborhood as Samogitia, Samogithia.12 But in the preface of his Cathechismus, which was aimed at audiences in Prussia as much as in the GDL, he makes a general reference to the “pastors and servants of Lithuania’s churches” (pastoribus et ministris Ecclesiarum in Lituania). Two factors can explain this transfer. First, for this group of settlers, Lithuania would have been the space ruled by Sigismund Augustus both in the GDL and in Prussia. We should remember that the domains of the Prussian duke from 1525 to 1657 were formally the fief of the Polish king. In the sixteenth century, as in earlier epochs, the understanding of borders as distinct lines demarcating one “sovereign territory” from another was not yet common.13 Borders did not serve to demarcate one power from another, as those powers were related through links of hierarchical subordination. And so it was in this case: Mažvydas worked in the domains of the Prussian duke, but these were a fief of King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania Sigismund Augustus, who therefore was still Mažvydas’s king. In this way, the name “Lithuania” could have been applied to Sigismund 9 Mykolas Biržiška, Rinktiniai mūsų senovės raštai: medžiaga lietuvių raštijos mokslui aukštesniosiose mokyklose (Kaunas: Švietimo ministerijos knygų leidimo komisija, 1927), 22, 23; Jono Bretkūno Postilė, 151, 156, 158. 10 Cultural transfer is understood here as it has been described by Michel Espagne. Cf. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, “Deutsch-Französischer Kulturtransfer im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert: Zu einem neuen interdisziplinären Forschungsprogramm des C.N.R.S.,” Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte 13 (1985), 502–510; Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands (Paris: PUF, 1999). 11 Ingė Lukšaitė has calculated that eleven of the thirteen Lithuanian priests who worked in Prussia in the second half of the sixteenth century hailed from the GDL: Lukšaitė, Reformacija, 244. 12 Cf. Mažvydas’s letters (1551, 1558): Mažvydas, Katekizmas, 673, 677, 679, 699. 13 Cf. Norman J. G. Pounds, “The Origin of the Idea of Natural Frontiers in France,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 41, no. 2 (1951): 151.

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Augustus’s domains (equal to the domains of Duke Albert) in Prussia. We have no data that indicate whether this name was used later. However, the Budwethen (now Malomozhaiskoe) priest Theodor Lepner in his manuscript completed in 1690 also mentions the designations “Lithuanian area” (Littausche Kreyß) and “Prussian Lithuania.”14 This would show that at least within the ecclesiastical communication milieu, there was a certain continuity of the name “Lithuania.” However, by the seventeenth century that name did not mean just belonging to a space. It also referred to the users of the Lithuanian language that was being created in this space, and this connection of space with the language that was attributed to Prussian inhabitants who used Baltic dialects is the second factor that explains the transfer. The beginnings of this link can also be seen in the letters and works of Mažvydas. The concepts mentioned therein are Ecclesia Lituanica (the Lithuanian Church);15 concionator Lituanicus (Lithuanian preacher); nativam linguam Lituanicam (native Lithuanian language);16 and Pastores Lituanici (Lithuanian priests).17 All the pronomial adjectives “Lithuanian” here have two meanings—they express both belonging to a space and belonging to a language.18 The linkage of space with language within the clerical milieu reached the duke’s office relatively quickly. In a document issued by the duke in 1561, “Lithuanian language” users were already localized to the districts of Memel and Tilsit.19 The Insterburg (now Chernyakhovsk) district would have also had to have been attributed to such districts in the late sixteenth century, since, as testified by Caspar Hennenberger, a priest and one of the first to map 14 Theodoro Lepner, Der Preusche Littauer oder Vorstellung der Nahmens-Herleitung, Kind-Tauffen, Hochzeit, Leibes- und Gemüths-Beschaffenheit, Kleidung, Wohnung, Nahrung und Acker-Bau, Speise und Tranck, Sprachen, Gottes-Dienst, Begräbnisse und andere dergleichen Sachen der Littauer in Preussen kürtzlich zusammen getragen … im Jahr … 1690 (Danzig: Joh. Heinrich Rüdigern, 1744), 19–20. 15 Cf. “Giesmės krikščioniškos” (1566) by Mažvydas: Mažvydas, Katekizmas, 192–193 (150–151). 16 Cf. Mažvydas’s letter (1549), in Mažvydas, Katekizmas, 658. 17 Cf. Mažvydas’s letter (1561), in Mažvydas, Katekizmas, 716. 18 Bretkūnas’s duties as “Lithuanicus Consionator” we would today translate as “Lithuanian” priest, yet he himself translated his duties as “Lietuwos” [Lithuania’s] priest (cf. Jono Bretkūno Postilė, 151, 158). 19 Arnoldt, Historie der Königsbergischen Universität, 472 in Beylage.

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Prussia, this district was “almost purely” populated by “Lithuanians” (fast eitel Littawen).20 This is where the term “Lithuanian districts” appeared from—an obvious result of the identification of language users with the borders of the districts and elderships of the Duchy of Prussia. The appearance of this essentially administrative title does not mean that the concept of “Lithuania” had already gone beyond the limits of the ecclesiastical communication milieu, as the borders of districts and elderships in this period matched the borders of church dioceses. In the seventeenth century, the “Lithuanian districts” encompassed those dioceses where there was a need to hold Mass in the language that was then called “Lithuanian,” that is, where the so-called Lithuanian churches concentrated. It is no accident that we come across the name “Lithuanian districts” in the first half of the seventeenth century in documents related to the visitation of the “Lithuanian churches.” In the instructions given by Margrave of Brandenburg John Sigismund to the church visitators in 1618, we have the term Littauschen Embter, and in the report from the church visitation conducted in 1638 we find Littawischen Embter.21 Based on the latter report, it could be stated that the Lithuanian districts then spanned the area of the Insterburg, Tilsit, Ragnit (now Neman), Memel, Schaaken (Nekrasovo), and Labiau (Polessk) districts and the Taplacken (Talpaki), Georgenburg (Mayovka), and Saalau (Kamenskoe) elderships. This is in effect the area where in the early seventeenth century Mass would have been held in the language that was then generally called “Lithuanian.” Rev(d) Theodor Lepner called that same area the “Lithuanian area” or “Prussian Lithuania” in 1690. But glancing at the scientific literature from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, we do not come across such naming of this region. For example, Matthias Prätorius, originally from a priest’s family yet one who possessed a broader worldview due to his education, wrote a major work

20 Casparus Hennenberger, Ercleru[n]g der Preüssischen grössern Landtaffel oder Mappen (Königsberg: Georg Osterberger, 1595), 160. 21 Corpus Constitutionum Prutenicarum, Oder Königliche Preußische Reichs-Ordnungen, Edicta und Mandata Sambt unterschiedenen Rescripten, ed. George Grube, part I (Königsberg: Johann Stelter, [1721]), 23, 34–73.

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Figure 3.  Division of the eastern part of the Prussian Duchy into Scalovia (Schalavonia) and Nadrovia (Nadravia) typical of the universal body of knowledge in the sixteenth– seventeenth centuries. In cartography aimed at the European Republic of Letters, such a division was entrenched by Caspar Hennenberger. A fragment from the map Prussiae Regionis Sarmatiae Europeae Nobiliss. Vera et Nova Descriptio…, drawn using Hennenberger’s original and published for the first time in Abraham Ortelius’s (1527–1598) atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1584).

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

about Prussia that does not use the name “Lithuania” at all.22 This is unlikely to be an oversight, as Prätorius dedicated an unbelievable degree of attention to describing Prussia’s topography. The same can be said about Caspar Hennenberger23—or even Erhard Wagner, who wrote about the inhabitants of the Insterburg and Ragnit districts in the early seventeenth century.24 In cartography, ever since the first edition of Hennenberger’s map was published (1584) until the very beginning of the eighteenth century, the areas of the Duchy of Prussia were called only by the early titles of Prussian lands: Sambia, Nadrovia, and Scalovia.25 One of the region’s greatest erudites of his time, the Toruń Gymnasium professor, Christoph Hartknoch, also used these names.26 It seems that this testifies to the existence of two traditions regarding the naming of this region. The first was entrenched in the Prussian Church as an institution and maintained mostly by priests who felt they belonged to Lithuania and presided over services in Lithuanian. The second tradition rested on scientific knowledge. Up until the early eighteenth century, both traditions were typical of communication milieux that, although intertwined, had some major differences: one milieu featured a great deal of practical knowledge, arising from everyday needs and the proximate observation of the Lithuanian speakers’ area of residence in Prussia. The other was maintained by theoretical knowledge, often transfused by canons and other forms of clichéd science. So, as a result of the tradition of identifying Prussia’s regions that was formed in sixteenth-century 22 Matas Pretorijus, Prūsijos įdomybės, arba Prūsijos regykla = Deliciae Prussicae, oder Preussische Schaubühne, ed. Ingė Lukšaitė, vols. 1–4 (Vilnius: Pradai; Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 1999–2011). 23 Cf. Casparus Hennenberger, Kurtze vnd warhafftige Beschreibung des Landes zu Preussen … (Königsberg: Georg Osterberger, 1584); Hennenberger, Ercleru[n]g der Preüssischen grössern Landtaffel. 24 Erhardus Wagner, Vita et mores Lithvanorum in Borvssia. Sub districtu Insterburgensi & Ragnitensi degentium (Königsberg: Fabricius, 1621). An abridged version “Vita & mores Lithvanorvm, in Borvssia svb districtu Insterburgiensi & Ragnitensi degentium” has been published in Acta Borussica ecclesiastica, civilia, literaria I (1730): 532–550. 25 See the examples provided by Eckhard Jäger, Prussia-Karten 1542–1810: Geschichte der kartographischen Darstellung Ostpreußens vom 16. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Waißenhorn: Anton H. Konrad, 1982). Cf. Reklaitis, “Kleinlitauen in der Kartographie,” 69. 26 Christophorus Hartknoch, Alt- und Neues Preussen Oder Preussischer Historien Zwey Theile (Frankfurt: Martin Hallervorden, 1684), 442.

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cartography and topographic descriptions, the Lithuania that existed in the ecclesiastical communication milieu never figured in the universal body of knowledge of the day. Yet this situation changed in the early eighteenth century. Surveyors hired by the Brandenburg ruler, under the auspices of practical (usually military) purposes, took to improving the cartography and topographic descriptions of eastern Prussia. That meant that the tradition of naming certain Prussian districts as “Lithuanian” or “Lithuania’s” was in the early eighteenth century “transferred” onto the manuscript surveying maps of Prussian districts and already in the 1730s appeared on printed maps based on them.27 When practical and theoretical knowledge was combined, in cartography Lithuania ended up as a separate district of the former Duchy of Prussia (alongside Sambia, Notangia, and Oberland). This can be seen in maps prepared in the 1730s–1750s.28 But the more active use of “Lithuania” in the eighteenth century depended not only on this title’s transfer from practical knowledge to theoretical knowledge, as evidenced in the changes in cartography. That liveliness was related not only to the improvement of cartographic and topographic descriptions as a general trend in the development of Prussia, then becoming une armée qui a conquis une nation (Mirabeau). The livelier use was also determined by specific problems caused by the epidemic plague of 1709–1711. The plague in the districts of the former Duchy of Prussia took the lives of 241,200 people, of whom 146,800 (60.9 percent) were from the Lithuanian districts (Memel, Tilsit, Ragnit, Insterburg, Labiau, Georgenburg, Saalau, Tapiau [now Gvardeysk], and Taplacken).29 The epidemic cleared out a huge number of farms: in some of the worst-­ affected Lithuanian districts, the number of empty farms reached 70 percent.30 Naturally, to recreate the territory and the income it generated, rapid extraordinary measures were called for. These included the creation 27 Reklaitis, “Kleinlitauen in der Kartographie,” 70; Seibutytė “Kleinlitauen auf den preußischen Karten,” 95–96, 98, 102–104. 28 Reklaitis, “Kleinlitauen in der Kartographie,” 78, 85, fig. 5. 29 Wilhelm Sahm, Geschichte der Pest in Ostpreußen (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1905), 150. 30 Ibid., 83.

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

of new towns, the colonization of the territory with new settlers, melioration works, and the development of the educational system, but above all, the reorganization of domain farms (the king’s agricultural domains), and the concentration of administrative efforts to realize these changes. The Lithuanian districts that had suffered most from the plague demanded special administrative attention, and the name “Lithuania” finally moved from the ecclesiastical communication milieu, where it was supported mainly by priests, into the increasingly secular administrative milieu. The instructions given to the king’s domain administrators in 1717,31 as well as the patents regarding peasant serfdom of 1719–1720, argue for the appearance of the name “Lithuanian districts” in secular administrative use.32 These are among the first nonconfessional Prussian documents that testify not only to the division of the territories of the former Duchy of Prussia into German (Preußisch-Teusche) and Lithuanian (Litthauensche) districts but also to the existence of administrative bodies of the German districts in Königsberg and the Lithuanian equivalent in Tilsit (Teutsche Ambts-Kammer zu Königsberg, Littausche Ambts-Kammer zu Tilsit). Eventually, as part of the reformation of domain and military administration, a chamber managing domain and military affairs was founded in Gumbinnen (now Gusev), and the subordinate territory was called the “Lithuanian Chamber Department” (Littauische Kammerdepartement) or usually simply “Lithuania.” During the course of the eighteenth century, the designation “Lithuania” became an administrational concept in Prussia, so it is no wonder that this is the only form we find in Prussian government decrees from the early eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries published in Lithuanian.33 It is worth noticing that the eighteenth century was also a period of stabilization of the area where this concept was applied. The documents from 1710–1720 in which 31 Historische politisch-geographisch-statistisch- und militärische Beyträge, die KöniglichPreußische und benachbarte Staaten betreffend, [ed. Friedrich Fischbach], part 3, vol. 1 (Berlin: Joachim Pauli, 1784), 127–131. 32 Corpus Constitutionum Prutenicarum, part III, 352–353. 33 See decrees nos. 6, 28, 60, 62, 66, 76, 77, 78, 80, 94, 102, 103 in the collection of documents Prūsijos valdžios gromatos, pagraudenimai ir apsakymai lietuviams valstiečiams, ed. Povilas Pakarklis and Konstantinas Jablonskis (Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1960).

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it is clearly stated which domain districts are considered German suggest that the Lithuanian ones would therefore encompass the former territories of Memel, Tilsit, Ragnit, Insterburg, Labiau, Georgenburg, Saalau, Tapiau, and the Taplacken districts (Hauptamt) and elderships (Kammeramt).34

Figure 4. Boundaries of districts and individual elderships (in italics) as existed in the early eighteenth century in the domains of the Prussian king. Map by Vasilijus Safronovas based on Max Toeppen’s 1858 atlas (Atlas zur Historisch-Comparativen Geographie von Preussen) and Historisch-geographischer Atlas des Preußenlandes, part 13 (ed. Hans Mortensen, Gertrud Mortensen, Reinhard Wenskus, and Helmurt Jäger [Stuttgart, 1988]).

34 See the list in Corpus Constitutionum Prutenicarum, part III, 352.

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

The territory attributed to the Lithuanian districts in 1723, as we shall see, had already decreased in size, and several decades later it again increased at the expense of the Polish area. In this way, the name “Lithuania” took on completely new content: now it did not define just the area where Lithuanian churches were found but the area where the competences of the administrative office in Gumbinnen were valid.

2.1. THE ADMINISTRATIVE CONCEPT OF LITHUANIA The projection of concepts from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries onto the past had a great impact on imagining what constituted Prussian Lithuania in the eighteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, “Lithuania” in Prussia referred to one landscape that,35 along with other landscapes—Masuria, Warmia, Sambia, Oberland, and Notanga— formed the uniqueness of East Prussia. However, back in the early nineteenth century, and for the greater part of the eighteenth century, Lithuania’s status hierarchically speaking was significantly different from the other regions listed in East Prussia. Although the term “Polish districts” was used in Prussia from the seventeenth century on36—a kind of analogue of the “Lithuanian districts”—in the eighteenth century the 35 The concept of a Landschaft in German literature in the first half of the nineteenth century did not only refer to a landscape (scenery) as painted by man; it could be used to describe a country’s provinces, privileged regions, or the entirety of a particular region’s privileged estates (committees of a certain region who represented estate interests also could have been called Landschafts) (Cf. “Landschaft,“ in Bilder-Conversations-Lexikon für das deutsche Volk, vol. 2 (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1838), 697; “Landschaft,” in Herders Conversations-Lexikon, vol. 3 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder’sche Verlagshandlung, 1855), 703; and “Landschaft,” in Pierer’s Universal-Lexikon der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, vol. 10, 4th ed. (Altenburg: Verlagsbuchhandlung von H. A. Pierer, 1860), 88). From the middle of the nineteenth century, the word Landschaft started being understood more as a part of Earth’s surface, formed by nature and man. Joachim Ritter and Wilhelm von Humboldt are considered to have been the first to have described landscape as such in German literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, descriptions of landscapes in German literature implied not only geological but also historical-cultural aspects. 36 Toeppen, Geschichte Masurens, ii–iii. The title “Masuria” became most widespread only in the beginning of the nineteenth century (cf. Toeppen, Geschichte Masurens, v; Johannes Sembrzycki, “Über Ursprung und Bedeutung der Worte ‘Masur’ und ‘Masuren’,” Altpreussiche Monatsschrift 24 (1887): 256–262, in particular 260).

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Polish districts never gained the status that Lithuania had. On the contrary, the name “Lithuania” was applied to some of the Polish districts. Moreover, in some cases this name was used not just to mark some of East Prussia but also to denote Lithuania as a jurisdiction equal to East Prussia. The latter fact is also rarely mentioned. Instead, the establishment of the Province of East Prussia is usually dated to 1773 and connected to the First Partition of Poland.37 This partition made it possible to join the domains of the Prussian king that had been physically separated by Poland in Pomerania with those in Prussia proper (i.e., in the former Duchy of Prussia), and at the same time created a need to more accurately define the latter by the term “East Prussia.” A large part of the formerly Polish lands that fell under Prussian jurisdiction as a result of the first agreement between Frederick II, Catherine II, and Maria Theresa, were in turn called “West Prussia.” The appearance of these titles is often explained by the order given by Frederick II on January 31, 1773, to Ober-President Johann Friedrich von Domhardt, in which the king exclaimed: “I … wish, … that in future My old Prussian provinces should be called East Prussia, while the acquired lands should be called West Prussia.”38 Yet this statement should not be understood to imply that “East Prussia” was used from then on to identify the whole region lying between West Prussia and the Russian Empire. Indeed, in many sources from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries we find the region between West Prussia and Russia divided in two, East Prussia and Lithuania. In the first half of the eighteenth century, due to the universal influence of French language and culture in Europe at the time, as well as in Prussia, the French administrative unit title of

37 Hartmut Boockmann, “Einführung in die Geschichte des Landes,” in Kulturgeschichte Ostpreußens in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Garber, Manfred Komorowski, and Axel E. Walter (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), 185–186. 38 Urkundenbuch zu der Lebensgeschichte Friedrichs des Großen, ed. Johann David Erdmann Preuß, part 5 (Berlin: Nauck, 1834), 227, no. 69. The initiator of such titles, it appears, was Prussian minister Ewald Friedrich von Hertzberg. Cf. his letter dated October 22, 1772: Max Bär, Westpreussen unter Friedrich dem Grossen, vol. 1: Darstellung (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1909), 83–84; vol. 2: Quellen (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1909), 121, no. 113 (vols. 83–84 of Publikationen aus den K. Preussischen Staatsarchiven).

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

département was adopted to mark both these areas.39 Yet synonymously,40 based on the analogous Latin term provincia, known from Roman times, “province” was also used.41 This term was used until the Prussian administrative reforms of 1808–1815 and defined the territory where the governance of certain military and domains chambers applied. It should be noted that in many cases, the titles of both areas—(East) Prussia and Lithuania— were used alongside one another, forming one construct. This applied both to Frederick II and his administration and in other cases.42 So, from 39 The earliest sources where the title Litthauisches Cammer-Departement was encountered is a report from the visitations of districts in 1777 (Siegfried Hungerecker, Die Untersuchung der Ämter des Litauischen (Gumbinner) und des Ostpreußischen [Königsberger] Kammerdepartments im Jahre 1777, vol. 71 of Sonderschriften des Vereins für Familienforschung in Ost- und Westpreussen e.V. [Hamburg: Selbstverl. des Vereins, 1992]) and a topography and statistical list of East Prussia by the Schaaken archpriest Johann Friedrich Goldbeck, published in 1785. The title Lithauisches Kammerdepartement is also found on maps of Poland and Prussia from 1789 to 1807, prepared mostly by Daniel Friedrich Sotzmann. The area called by this title encompassed the whole area administered by Lithuania’s Military and Domains Chamber—i.e., a large part of the above-mentioned Lithuanian area (except from the environs of Labiau and the lower reaches of the Gilge River) and the Polish area. As Goldbeck himself wrote, the department consisted of “a large part of Lithuania and half of Notangia, or to be more precise, the so-called Polish Notangia” (Volständige Topographie des Königreichs Preussen, ed. Johann Friedrich Goldbeck, part 1: Topographie von Ost-Preussen [Königsberg, Leipzig: Verfasser, 1785], 29 of 1. Hauptstück). 40 For example, astronomer Johann Bernoulli, who left behind numerous travel accounts in one such account from 1783, synonymously called the Lithuanian Chamber Department Provinz Litthauen: Johann Bernoulli, Sammlung kurzer Reisebeschreibungen und anderer zur Erweiterung der Länder- und Menschkenntniß dienender Nachrichten, vol. 9 (Berlin, Leipzig: [s.n.], 1783), 445. 41 Cf. [Ludwig] Gervais, Notizen von Preussen, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Provinz Litthauen (Königsberg: G. L. Hartung, 1795–1796); “Kurze Nachricht über den Zustand der Schulen in der Preuß. Provinz Litthauen, mit einigen vorausgeschickten Bemerkungen über die Sorge eines Staates für Kirche und Schule,” Archiv Deutscher Nationalbildung 1 (1812): 464–484. 42 Back in 1768 in a recommendation from minister Ludwig Philipp vom Hagen it is written “Preußen und Litthauen”; in King Frederick II’s document from 1777 we find “Ostpreußen und Litthauen,” while in the king’s document from 1781 we again come across the double formula in the construction “Ost-Preußenschen und Litthaeunschen Domainen-Aemtern”; in a cabinet order from 1785 we again find mention of two different territories: “in denen Aemtern so wohl in Ost-Preußen wie in Litthauen” (Walter Mertineit, Die fridericianische Verwaltung in Ostpreussen. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der preußischen Staatsbildung, vol. 1 of Studien zur Geschichte Preussens [Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1958], 110, 164, 165, 174). The Schaaken archpriest

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Figure 5. Boundaries of provinces (departments) in the eastern domains of the Prussian king as they existed in 1785. From left to right: West Prussia, East Prussia, and Lithuania. Map by Vasilijus Safronovas showing the centers of the provinces (in capital letters) and court districts.

1773 until the administrative reforms, the term “East Prussia” was used in the broad (including Lithuania) and narrow (excluding Lithuania) sense. In the first case, the name referred to a territory of the former Duchy of Prussia that included Warmia, joined in 1772 (also sometimes called the “Province of Prussia”), in the second, to a territory administered by the Königsberg Military and Domains Chamber. Goldbeck clearly noticed: “Ost-Preussen wird in das Ost-Preußische und Litthauische Cammer-Departement eingetheilt” (Volständige Topographie, 3 of 1. Hauptstück).

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

How did the usage excluding Lithuania develop in the Prussian king’s hierarchy of domains? The name “Lithuania,” as noted above, entered the nomenclature of these domains after the calamitous effects of the epidemic plague of 1709–1711, when it was decided to form a separate administration for the region. The first such administrative instance, the Chamber for the Lithuanian Districts, operated in Tilsit from 1714 until it was dissolved in 1721. At that time, the administration of the Lithuanian districts was again concentrated in Königsberg.43 However, having established a Military and Domains Chamber here in 1723, by the king’s orders a separate Lithuanian Deputation was founded in the same year as a branch of the chamber. Its activities were first limited to the Insterburg, Ragnit, and Tilsit districts but later extended to the Memel District.44 Established in the city of Gumbinnen, founded by Frederick William I, the Lithuanian Deputation gradually grew more independent of Königsberg, taking over more and more functions from the Königsberg Chamber. On August 19, 1736, Frederick William ordered that the “Deputation’s Collegium (Deputations Collegium) in Lithuania would no longer be called such but go by the title of the Royal Military and Domains Chamber in Gumbinnen [Königliche Krieges- und Domainencammer zu Gumbinnen].”45 In this way, an administration of equal weight to the Königsberg Chamber was created in Gumbinnen. Unlike the area administered by the Königsberg Chamber, often simply called the “Königsberg Department,” the area administered from Gumbinnen often continued to be called the “Lithuanian Department.”46 It is not so difficult to understand the use of such a synonym if we consider the early eighteenth century as a period of overlap between two concepts 43 August Skalweit, Die ostpreussische Domänenverwaltung unter Friedrich Wilhelm I. und das Retablissement Litauens (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1906), 36, 86; Eduard Rudolf Uderstädt, “Die ostpreussische Kammerverwaltung, ihre Unterbehörden und Lokalorgane unter Friedrich Wilhelm I. und Friedrich II. bis zur Russenokkupation (1753–1756). Teil 1,” Altpreussische Monatsschrift 49 (1912): 665; Fritz Terveen, Gesamtstaat und Retablissement. Der Wiederaufbau des nördlichen Ostpreußen unter Friedrich Wilhelm I 1714–1740, vol. 16 of Göttinger Bausteine zur Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1954), 27–28. 44 Skalweit, Ostpreussische Domänenverwaltung, 89, 93. 45 Quoted in Terveen, Gesamtstaat und Retablissement, 80–81. 46 Cf. Alexander Horn, Die Verwaltung Ostpreussens seit der Säcularisation 1525–1875 (Königsberg: B. Teichert, 1890), 265.

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of Lithuania—the area of Lithuanian churches and the administrative territory. The local authorities also sought to create a separate administration for the so-called Polish area in the first half of the eighteenth century, that is, the southern part of the former Duchy of Prussia. However, this project was never realized, because Frederick II was not inclined to maintain yet another administration.47 In an attempt to produce a more equal distribution of the “poorly Polish area” between the two chambers, in 1747 the Gumbinnen Chamber took over the administration of part of this area from Königsberg.48 Regardless, the name of “Lithuania” continued to be applied to the Gumbinnen Department. Its entrenchment is best evidenced by the resolutions passed during the administrative reforms that occurred in Prussia in 1808–1815. When the military and domains chambers were dissolved in Prussia at the end of December 1808, power remained in the hands of the former department governments.49 Now the territories administered by these governments were termed simply provinces. However, with the introduction of the institution of permanent ober-presidents, an important step was taken toward the centralization of three provinces—East Prussia, West Prussia, and Lithuania—as one ober-president was appointed to head them all.50 The April 30, 1815, decree solidified the separateness of Lithuania and East Prussia, transforming both of the former provinces into governmental districts (Regierungsbezirk). Based on this amendment, the government of the former Royal Prussian Province of Lithuania (Königlich-Preußische Regierung der Provinz Litthauen) in Gumbinnen became the “Lithuanian Government in Gumbinnen” (Regierung in Litthauen zu Gumbinnen), which administered the Gumbinnen Governmental District (Regierungsbezirk Gumbinnen). Respectively, the administration of the Königsberg Governmental District was called the “East Prussian Government in 47 Mertineit, Fridericianische Verwaltung, 55. 48 Max Toeppen, Historisch-comparative Geographie von Preussen (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1858), 317; Mertineit, Fridericianische Verwaltung, 57–58. 49 Toeppen, Historisch-comparative Geographie, 337–338. 50 “Publikandum, betreffend die veränderte Verfassung der obersten Staatsbehörden der Preußischen Monarchie, in Beziehung auf die innere Landes- und Finanzverwaltung, No. 59 vom 16ten Dezember 1808,” Gesetz-Sammlung für die Königlich-Preußischen Staaten 1806–10: 361–373, here 372.

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Königsberg.” The amendment also regulated that the territories administered by the Königsberg and Gumbinnen governments were no longer to be called “provinces.”51 Now they both became components of the one Province of Prussia.52 Nevertheless, the newspaper that started being published in Tilsit in 1816, it appears out of inertia, for some time was still called the Gemeinnütziges Wochenblatt für die Provinz Litthauen. However, it would be wrong to think that the name “Lithuania” was used only by the officials of the Prussian king during this period. There is no doubt that an important group that identified itself with this title continued to be the priests who worked in the parishes of this region. During the eighteenth century they were joined by representatives from other, higher social strata. The concept of Lithuania that existed during the times of Mažvydas was, of course, no longer relevant to people in the eighteenth century. However, even in this period, identification with Lithuania nurtured unique systems of meanings that sparked the imagination. In the mid-eighteenth century, the estates-based regional particularism expressed in Prussia from the seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century increasingly became the source of constant interest in Lithuania and even identification with it. It formed the so-called Old Prussian patriotism and spread on this basis. From the seventeenth century on, the formation of a certain opposition to Berlin in these lands was ongoing. In the eighteenth century, appeals started being made to the Prussian-Lithuanian (then rarely seen as separate groups) heritage to support the particularism that encouraged that opposition, as well as interest in this heritage and even the goal of its spread and continuity. Old Prussian self-awareness grew significantly after the coronation of Frederick I in 1701, when the Brandenburg margrave’s goal of raising his status to king of Prussia had to be justified through appeals to the “Old Prussian”

51 In addition, the main Tilsit school, which prepared pupils for university studies, was in 1791–1812 known as the Royal Province and Town School (Königliche Provinzial- und Stadtschule) (Emil Knaake, Führer durch Tilsit und Umgebung [Tilsit: Richter, 1900], 3). 52 “Verordnung wegen verbesserter Einrichtung der Provinzial-Behörden. No. 287 vom 30sten April 1815,” Gesetz-Sammlung für die Königlichen Preußischen Staaten 9 (1815): 85–98, here 93; Toeppen, Historisch-comparative Geographie, 338–339.

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origins of the monarchy.53 The ruler’s legitimizing ideology made it possible to identify the coronation of 1701 with the legendary pagan Prussian “kingdom” ruled by Waidewutus (Widewuth, Vaidevutis). However, over the course of the eighteenth century this identification gradually spread amid the social elite of the former Duchy of Prussia, a process that is well attested in the magazine Erleutertes Preußen, published in Königsberg starting in 1724. As the Old Prussians were already considered as having died out by then, identification of oneself as a “Lithuanian” in this elite meant identification with the linguistically and culturally closest “relatives of the Prussians,” that is, an identification with the oldest (autochthonic) inhabitants of Prussia. Thus, the “autochthons” had the right to command the attention of the ruler residing in distant Berlin. So, in the eighteenth century we see a change in the main social strata according to which the Lithuanian region was recognized in Prussia. During and after the plague epidemic, “Lithuanians” were Prussian peasants noted for certain social and cultural distinctions. The Lithuanian Province never encompassed a territory inhabited solely by Lithuanian speakers; however, there is little doubt that they made up the most recognizable social groups associated with that name. But due to the increase in urban development and the spread of the central administration in eastern Prussia in the eighteenth century, representatives of the nobility and the 53 Josef Nadler, “Geistiges Leben von der Krönung Fridrich I. bis zum Tode Kants,” in Deutsche Staatenbildung und deutsche Kultur im Preußenlande (Königsberg: Gräfe & Unzer, 1931), 314–316; Theodor Schieder, “Die preußische Königskrönung von 1701 und die politische Ideengeschichte,” Altpreußische Forschungen 12 (1935): 64–86; Karin Friedrich, The Other Prussia. Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, 1569–1772 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 159–170. See also Skrupskelis’s dissertation from 1932 prepared under Josef Nadler’s supervision: Ignas Skrupskelis, Lietuviai XVIII a. vokiečių literatūroje (Rome: Lietuvių katalikų mokslo akademijos leidykla, 1967). About the origins of the Old Prussian self-awareness, see Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, “Das preußische Landesbewußtsein im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Kulturgeschichte Ostpreußens, 639–656; Andreas Keller, “Die Preußische Nation und ihre literarische Genese: Grundzüge eines regionalen Geschichtsbewußtseins und die internationale Vermittlung einer territorialen Identität in Michael Kongehls Roman Surbosia (1676),” in Kulturgeschichte Ostpreußens, 737–767; Axel E. Walter, “Die (Re-)Konstruktion altpreußischer Identität in der regionalen Kulturgeschichtsschreibung im Ostpreußen des 18. Jahrhunderts (Lilienthal, Arnoldt, Pisanski),” in Contact Zones in the Historical Area of East Prussia, ed. Vasilijus Safronovas and Klaus Richter, vol. XXX of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėda University Press, 2015), 39–73.

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towns identified themselves more with the Lithuanian region. These groups, in fact, henceforth became the most recognizable representatives of Lithuania. Understandably, the completely different communication milieus in which these social strata participated meant that identification with Lithuania at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries crossed the borders of the Lithuanian Province. Associating one’s origins with Lithuania in the lands of the former duke of Prussia meant identifying with the myth of the origins of Prussia as the land of the Old Prussians. Being a Lithuanian in this case often meant the same as being a Prussian—a supporter of Old Prussian patriotism. For many of those who declared this kind of identification, Lithuania meant one of the spatial references that defined their identity, integrated into Prussia as a territory of the old duchy and coexisting with other references, such as the Hohenzollern monarchy and, from the first half of the nineteenth century, Germany as a national space being newly created for German-speakers.54 This kind of identification with Lithuania is best illustrated by the character of Theodor von Schön, who was born at Schreitlaugken (Šereitlaukis) Manor. In 1809, this Prussian reformist became the president of the Gumbinnen government and, in 1813, the governor of the entire territory between the Vistula River and the Russian border. In 1816, the king appointed him ober-president of the West Prussian Province, and in this position Schön oversaw the reconstruction of the Marienburg (Malbork) Castle as a symbol of Old Prussian patriotism.55 In 1824, he became the ober-president of two provinces, Prussia and West Prussia, joining them for over five decades. In autobiographical texts, Schön often noted his links with Lithuania: back in 1789 in his notes he described it using the words Patria Lithuania,56 and on the way to Danzig to take up the post of ober-president, in one letter he stated with remorse, 54 Magdalena Niedzielska, “Tożsamość elit politycznych w Prusach Wschodnich w pierw­ szej połowie XIX wieku,” Zapiski Historyczne 62, no. 1 (1997): 53. 55 Cf. Hartmut Boockmann, “Das ehemalige Deutschordensschloß Marienburg 1772– 1945. Die Geschichte eines politischen Denkmals,” in Geschichtswissenschaft und Vereinswesen im 19. Jahrhundert: Beiträge zur Geschichte der historischen Forschung in Deutschland, vol. 1 of Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Institutes für Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), 115. 56 Niedzelska, “Tożsamość elit politycznych,” 54.

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“Now I have abandoned my be­loved Lithuania.”57 At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when new forms of estate representation were being created in Prussia, as far as the nobility was concerned, East Prussia and Lithuania were equal representational spaces. From 1789 to the 1820s–1830s, the main institution representing the estates in the Prussian Province, which was particularly active as a result of the power vacuum left in the eastern provinces after Prussia’s defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, Figure 6. The title page of the newspaper Schlesischen privilegirten Zeitung from March was called the Comité der Ost­pre20, 1813, proclaiming the appeal of the Prus- ussischen und Litthauischen sian king “To My People” (An Mein Volk). The Stände (Committee of East Prusfourth paragraph starts with a call to all the sian and Lithuanian Estates).58 It residents of the provinces of his realm, among whom the residents of the Province of Lithuappears from looking at this ania (Litthauer) are also indicated. particular role held by Lithuania that it was distinguished as a unique region—including in the proclamation made by the Prussian king in March 1813, which became a symbol of the beginning of the country’s War of Liberation. Inviting his subjects (first, of course, the social elites) to rise in the battle against French domination under Napoleon, the king not only appealed to the people of Brandenburg, Prussia, Silesia, and 57 “Schön an den Fürsten zu Wittgenstein, 26.6.1816,” in Aus den Papieren des Ministers und Burggrafen von Marienburg Theodor von Schön, part 1 (Halle a.S.: Lippert’sche Buchhandlung (Max Niemeyer), 1875), 191 in Anlage R. 58 For more on the committee, see Wolfgang Neugebauer, Politischer Wandel im Osten: Ostund Westpreussen von den alten Ständen zum Konstitutionalismus, vol. 36 of Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des östlichen Europa (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992), 123–124, 217–260.

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Pomerania but also made separate mention of Lithuania’s people (using the invocation Litthauer!).59 Regional patriotism encouraged more than identification with Lithuania or declarations of being Lithuanian. In the nineteenth century it provoked an interest in the “aboriginal,” or primeval, Lithuanian culture, searching for markers of “genuine Prussian spirit” contained within. This search explains the publications in Lithuanian steeped in regional patriotism rhetoric related to the Napoleonic Wars that appeared in the early nineteenth century.60 The University of Königsberg professor Ludwig Rhesa, who in 1818 translated into German and released for the first time a cycle of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Lithuanian poems, called it Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, adding ein ländliches Epos as the subtitle. The telling word ländliches in this subtitle is not to be understood merely as a reference to the “rural” or the “country,” but perhaps more as “rustic, unspoiled, educational.” In this epic, created in hexameter after the example of classical Greek and Roman works, Rhesa urged readers to consider the Lithuanian “nation’s genius” (Genius einer Nation).61 The integration of songs in Lithuanian related to the 1813–1814 War of Liberation into Rhesa’s published Dainos [Songs] (1825)62 was meant to show Lithuanians, with whom Rhesa identified, as patriots of Prussia. Such behavior by Rhesa, regardless of his reputation as an “eccentric,” should be viewed as evidence that being a Prussian and a Lithuanian in the early nineteenth century meant one and the same thing. Nor was Rhesa alone in this way of thinking. The most important Königsberg historian from the first half of the nineteenth century, Johannes Voigt, also unambiguously encouraged the formation 59 “An Mein Volk,” Schlesische-privilegirte Zeitung, March 20, 1813 (No. 34), 593. 60 An example here could be the works of fiction about participation in the Napoleonic Wars published in Lithuanian in the early nineteenth century: by the Piktupönen (Piktupėnai) priest, Christian Daniel Hassenstein, Nusidawimai szwento Karawimo [History of Holy Warfare] (Gumbinnen: [s.n.], 1814); or the anonymously written Apraßimas Ißwalnijimo Kowos, nů 1812 ikki 1815. Ant Atsiminnimo Karźigiems ir Tēwißkes Prieteliems [A Description of the War of Liberation, 1812–1815] (Tilsit: Knigi­ ninkas Urbat, [s.a.]). 61 Christian Donaleitis (Donalitius), Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, ein ländliches Epos, trans. L[udwig] J. Rhesa (Königsberg: Königl. Hartungsche Hofbuchdruckerei, 1818), v, vii. 62 Ludwig J. Rhesa, Dainos, oder Litthauische Volkslieder (Königsberg: Hartungsche Hofbuchdruckerei, 1825), 330.

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of regional patriotism in his publications, and together with other members of the Königsberg professorship joined Schön on his journeys to Lithuania to collect Lithuanian folklore.63 These activities were understood as the collection of material about a land and its earliest inhabitants that could contribute to the resolution of current issues (including political ones). The idealization of the Lithuanian-speaking “autochthons,” we could say, depended on the attempts to overcome the typical opposition between Kultur and “aboriginal culture.” It was meant to reveal Lithuanians as “noble savages,” a group who remained “unruined” by civilization, who could be used to justify primeval Prussianism. With this intention, in 1829 the educational magazine Preussische Provinzial-Blätter first appeared in Königsberg, where it continued for over a hundred years under various titles. The preface to the first issue presented Lithuania as a component of Prussia, equal in status to that of West and East Prussia, and noted that “Lithuania is like a loyal sister, participating in every [event] determining the fate of East Prussia for over five centuries.”64 Another example of the role played by Lithuania was the student fraternity Littuania, intermittently active at the University of Königsberg beginning in 1820, then in consistent operation from 1829 to 1935.65 This organization, whose origins are most likely associated with the nationes typical of medieval universities, united the students of Albertina on the basis of their homeland, Lithuania. A majority of the fraternity’s members were graduates of the gymnasiums of Tilsit, Gumbinnen, and Insterburg. Democratic ideas that were in opposition to the Prussian regime at the time predominated among the fraternity’s members and were expressed in the later political activities of former Albertina students, members of Littuania. Already in 1829, the fraternity adopted as its symbol a green-white-red tricolor combination (usually a sash) in an obvious identification with the 63 Autobiographie des ordentl. Professors der orientalischen Sprachen und Literatur an der Universität zu Königsberg Dr. Peter von Bohlen, ed. Johannes Voigt, 2nd ed. (Königsberg: Theodor Theile, 1842), 66–68. 64 “Vorwort,” Preussische Provinzial-Blätter 1 (1829): iv. 65 Walter Passauer, Corpstafel der Littuania zu Königsberg (Königsberg: Verein der Alten Herren des Corps Littuania, 1935), 3–4.

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

national flag born during the French Revolution. The fraternity’s natio in this case was understood as being Lithuania, as evidenced in the slogan that appeared on its flag, Littuania in aeternum, and in its motto Littuania, dir gehör’ ich, which sounded like an eternal oath. Figure 7.  Symbolism used by the Who were the members of this student fraternity “Littuania” of the student fraternity? Looking at its University of Königsberg. From Der composition, we find a fighter for Kösener S.C. Handbuch für deutsche Corps-Studenten (Würzburg: Franz Jewish emancipation and democratic Scheiner Verlag, 1912). reforms in Prussia, the Jewish physician Johann Jacoby (1805–1877); the politician and president of the North German Confederation Reichstag and the German Kaissereich’s first Reichstag Eduard Simson (1810–1889); and the writer best known for creating the Nibelunge epic Wilhelm Jordan (1819–1904). Altogether, eight former members of Littuania became delegates to the German National Assembly in Frankfurt am Main (1848–1849),66 including Simson, who chaired the assembly for five months. The relatively large number of politicians with ties to Lithuania at the Frankfurt parliament expressed the democratic ideas that were becoming increasingly popular in the mid-nineteenth century and formed the basis for regional opposition to Berlin, especially in Lithuania during the events of 1848–1849.67 In this way, “Lithuanians” in Prussia appeared 66 Lothar Selke, “Litauer in der Paulskirche. Ein Beitrag zur 150jährigen Geschichte der Littuania der ältesten Verbindung an der Albertus-Universität zu Königsberg in Preußen 1829–1979,” in 150 Jahre Littuania, 31.1.1829 – 31.1.1979. Zur Erinnerung an das 150jährige Bundesfest der Littuania (Munich: [s.n.], 1979), 37–56. 67 Cf. Reinhard Adam, “Der Liberalismus in der Provinz Preußen zur Zeit der neuen Ära und sein Anteil an der Entstehung der Deutschen Fortschrittspartei,” in Altpreußische Beiträge. Festschrift zur Hauptversammlung des Gesamtvereins der deutschen Geschichts- und Altertums-Vereine zu Königsberg Pr. vom 4. bis 7. September 1933 (Königsberg: Gräfe & Unzer, 1933), 155–158; Christian Pletzing, Vom Völkerfrühling zum nationalen Konflikt. Deutscher und polnischer Nationalismus in Ost- und Westpreußen 1830–1871, vol. 13 of Deutsches Historisches Institut Warschau. Quellen und Studien (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003), 191–193, 214.

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to be the most vehement advocates of regional particularism, based on the ideas of Old Prussian patriotism, which in the mid-nineteenth century transformed into the defense of liberal-democratic ideals. The Prussian Province’s nobility and urban citizens’ active identification with the Lithuanian region was noticeable until the middle of the nineteenth century. The continuity of this identification ended with the transformation of Old Prussian patriotism and the increased impact of German nationalist ideas. Attention to and identification with Lithuania, which in the early nineteenth century were still seen as an expression of Old Prussian patriotism, were by the middle of the nineteenth century treated as an orientation to a “backward” and “dying” culture. The leftist liberals who split from Baron Georg von Vincke’s faction in February 1861 and formed a new one in the Prussian Landtag that became the basis for the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei were called “Junglithauer” (young Lithuanians) already in a pejorative sense.68 Another circumstance that contributed significantly to this change of opinion was that in the academic discourse, Lithuanians were increasingly often regarded as a unique culture, whose origins, based on the popular view prevailing at the time, were associated with the Slavs. Indeed, doubts and even arguments over the origins of Lithuanians and Prussians lasted for more than a century. Representatives of Old Prussian patriotism in the early nineteenth century tried to link their origins with the Germans or considered them a completely unique culture. The aforementioned 68 Heinrich August Winkler, Preussischer Liberalismus und deutscher Nationalstaat. Studien zur Geschichte der Deutschen Fortschrittspartei, 1861–1866, vol. 17 of Tübinger Studien zur Geschichte und Politik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1964), 10. Of the eleven parliamentarians who splintered off, a majority originated in the Prussian (East and West) Province. In an ideological sense, the liberal Danzig environment had the greatest impact on their way of thinking. However, at first, the separatists called themselves the “Parlamentarischer Verein Ancker und Genossen,” naming themselves after the parliamentarian from the Memel and Heydekrug electoral county Johann Heinrich Ancker (Adam, “Liberalismus,” 170–171). The accent on the “Lithuanianness” of the separatists in this case should be viewed not just as a reference to Ancker’s origins (he was born in Russ where he worked as a dispatcher) but also as an allusion to the popularity of radical democratic ideas in Lithuania, for which this area was known in 1848–1849 and in the early 1860s (Adam, “Liberalismus in der Provinz Preußen,” 177–178; Pletzing, Vom Völkerfrühling, 328–329).

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Schön, then president of the Gumbinnen Governmental District, described in his memoirs a conversation with Napoleon that took place in 1812, during which the French emperor firmly stated that the Prussians were Slavs, while Schön defended the opposite position, saying that the Prussians and Slavs were separate tribes.69 All the same, in the mid-nineteenth century the greatest authorities in linguistics clearly defended the common origins of the Lithuanian and Slavic languages. During the period when Heinrich von Treitschke’s ideas about East Prussia as a German stronghold surrounded by Slavic barbarism were rife,70 people regarded Lithuanians and Lithuania with repugnance. Identification with that Lithuania now appeared anachronistic. Prussian Lithuania, the creation of administrative reasoning defined by administrative criteria, increasingly remained of interest only to members of the academic community. This in turn gradually provoked a change in the very concept of Lithuania.

2.2. THE ETHNOGRAPHIC CONCEPT OF LITHUANIA In the nineteenth century, identification with and interest in Prussian Lithuania, as well as scientific knowledge of Prussian Lithuanians, underwent a fundamental change. The East Prussian nobility and urban citizens who had in the early nineteenth century identified with the Lithuanian region and called themselves “Lithuanians” formed new identity guidelines by the middle of the century. The concept of “Lithuanian,” earlier used by the East Prussian nobility to express the specific territory to which they belonged, by the mid-nineteenth century took on ethnographic content. The spread of ethnography and nationalism based on language in the German-speaking lands clearly made a linguistic distinction between Lithuanians and Germans. This change, too, explains why in the mid-nineteenth century we notice another change in the main social strata—a shift toward an ethnographic understanding of Lithuanianness. Lithuania no longer meant an area of “Lithuanian churches” or an administrative territory but lands allocated to linguistically distinct Lithuanians. As a result, Lithuania only now began to encompass the space 69 Aus den Papieren, part 1, 71–72. 70 [Heinrich von Treitschke], “Das deutsche Ordensland Preußen,” Preußische Jahrbücher 10, no. 2 (1862): 95–151.

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where the Lithuanian language was in widespread use. When we talk about the origins of this concept for Lithuania, attention should be directed to the works of August Schlözer. The approach of this scientist, whose name is associated with the birth of ethnography in the Germanspeaking lands,71 was noted for the combination of historic and linguistic-­ ethnographic criteria in the description of the “northern” nations. The importance of language as a major criterion for recognizing nations’ uniqueness was highlighted in German-language literature through the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and other authors. Wilhelm von Humboldt formulated the thesis summarizing these ideas: “Language is, as it were, the outer appearance of the spirit of a people; the language is their spirit and the spirit their language; we can never think of them sufficiently as identical.”72 We can see one expression of these ideas in the thoughts voiced by cartographer Heinrich Berghaus in the mid-nineteenth century: “The total of all those people who speak one and the same language, called a people, the nation. … In language are the ties that form and create nationality [Volksthum]; language is a chain linking thousands and millions of individuals one to another.”73 But at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in German-language literature there was no unified agreement about where to place those Völker who spoke today’s so-called Baltic, then generally termed “Latvian” or “Lithuanian,” languages. The Prussians were already, as early as the sixteenth century, considered a mixed nation of Sarmatians (Slavs) and Goths (Germanic peoples).74 A popular theory in the late eighteenth century, first presented by Johann Erich Thunmann and Anton 71 Cf. Han F. Vermeulen, “The German Invention of Völkerkunde. Ethnological Discourse in Europe and Asia, 1740–1798,” in The German Invention of Race, ed. Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 128. 72 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihnen Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts (Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1836), 37. 73 [Heinrich Berghaus], Statistik des Preüssischen Staats; Versuch einer Darstellung seiner Grundmacht und Kultur, seiner Verfassung, Regierung und Verwaltung im Lichte der Gegenwart (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1845), 122, 123. 74 Cf. Hackmann, “Preußische Ursprungsmythen,” 151.

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Friedrich Büsching,75 considered all the “Latvian languages” to be a mix of Slavic, Finnish, and Gothic languages. This opinion was rather actively supported even in the early nineteenth century. In the famous Mithridates the “Latvian” language group was synonymously called “Germano-­ Slavic.”76 The Universal German Encyclopedia asserted that the “Lithuanian languages” should be considered Slavic languages, as two-thirds consisted of a Slavic part, with the remainder being mostly Germanic.77 Finally, in one of the first European ethnographic maps, Latvians and Lithuanians were assigned to the Northern Slavic family.78 Schlözer’s role in this case is that he, by supporting the linguistic criteria for describing a nation, considered the “Latvian nations” a separate tribe (Völkerstamm), to which he assigned two “nations” (Nationen) who used the main dialects of this tribe: the Latvian or Courlandish and the Lithuanian (an extinct “nation” that had spoken Prussian was also classified as a “Latvian nation”).79 Schlözer’s work by no means ended discussion on the origins of the “Latvian nations” or their links with the Slavic or Germanic peoples.80 However, it did spread the opinion about the “Latvian languages’ ” typological separateness,81   which in the early nineteenth century had been supported

75 Johann Thunmann, Untersuchungen über die alte Geschichte einiger Nordlichen Völker, ed. Anton Friedrich Büsching (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung der Realschule, 1772), v–xii, 3–92. 76 Johann Christoph Adelung, Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde mit dem Vater Unser als Sprachprobe in beynahe fünfhundert Sprachen und Mundarten, vol. 2 (Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung, 1809), 696–722. 77 “Sprachenkunde,” in Allgemeine deutsche Real-Encyclopeadie für die gebildete Ständen oder Conversations-Lexicon, vol. 9, 6th ed. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1824), 472–473. 78 “Ethnographische Karte von Europa, oder Darstellung der Hauptvertheilung der europäischer Völker nach ihren Sprachen und Religions-Verschiedenheiten,” in Constant Desjardins, Physisch-statistisch und politischer Atlas von Europa (Vienna: [Verfasser], 1837). 79 August Ludwig Schlözer, Allgemeine Nordische Geschichte (Halle: Johann Justinus Gebauer, 1771), 316–323. 80 For more on the course of this discussion in linguistics, see Vladimir Toporov, “Ocherk istorii izucheniia drevneishikh balto-slavianskikh iazykovykh otnoshenii,” Uchenye zapiski Instituta slavianovedeniia XVII (1958): 248–274. 81 Cf. “Historisches Verzeichniß aller itzigen europäischer Landessprachen,” Gelehrte Beyträge zu den Braunschweigischen Anzeigen, July 12, 1780 (54. Stück), 433–436.

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by influential figures such as Jacob Grimm82 and Wilhelm von Humboldt.83 That opinion was especially convenient for the supporters of Old Prussian patriotism in Prussia. Maintaining the particularist line, they identified themselves with the Old Prussians and their closest relatives, the Lithuanians, which is why they had an incentive to defend the separateness of languages that were identified as being “Latvian” or “Lithuanian,”84 and sometimes (as Voigt did with Tacitus’s aestorum gentes)85 even to regard the users of these languages exclusively as Germanic peoples. We could say that this was one of the most important stimuli, in the initial stages in the early nineteenth century, to have encouraged ethnographic interest in Lithuanians in the German-language discourse—to record their “aboriginal” culture, as yet unspoiled by civilization, and to research their language.86 The second such stimulus is considered to be the practical need to use Lithuanian in the Prussian Province. In the first half of the nineteenth century, in the Gumbinnen Governmental District and in Memel County, which was no longer part of it, there were still so many Lithuanian-speaking inhabitants that it still made sense to comply with the provisions set out during the Reformation for using their native language at church. Priests for the parishes of Prussian Lithuania were educated at the University of Königsberg’s Lithuanian Seminar, established in 1718 and directed by Ludwig Rhesa, his student Friedrich Kurschat, and the latter’s student Matthias Lackner in 1810–1840, 1841–1882, and 1882–1919 respectively. These three energetically supported, and in many cases, themselves inspired 82 [Jacob Grimm’s review of Johann Vater’s book]: Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, August 1, 1822 (121. Stück), 1201–1203. 83 Cf. [Berghaus], Statistik des Preüssischen Staats, 125. 84 Rhesa, appealing to the opposite opinion, wrote that the “Latvian nation,” living among Slavs, Goths, and Finns, adopted their influences, yet defended the thesis that this nation maintained its uniqueness (Ludwig J. Rhesa, Geschichte der litthauischen Bibel, ein Beytrag zur Religionsgeschichte der Nordischen Völker [Königsberg: Hartungsche Hofbuchdruckerei, 1816], 1–2). 85 Cf. Hackmann, “Preußische Ursprungsmythen,” 163. 86 Cf. the historical account steeped in the Old Prussian patriotic spirit about Sambia and Lithuania whose author explained distinguishing Lithuania in the title because the “Lithuanians” had “preserved the Old Prussian local dialect the longest”: Friedrich Zschokke, Wanderungen durch Littauen und Samland. Altpreußische Sagen und Denkmäler, historisch geordnet und erläutert, part 1: Die Ur-Geschichte Preußens bis auf Bruteno und Waidewut (Leipzig: August Robert Friese, 1845), xi.

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

research into Lithuania’s culture and especially its language.87 It was necessary for practical purposes such as the canonization, renewal, and adaptation of language in line with church dogma. Most Prussian Lithuanian priests associated with the Lithuanian Seminar supported these intentions and defended the continuing use of Lithuanian by the Church. All three seminar directors were themselves trained as priests, but in Prussian Lithuania entire clerical dynasties had formed, such as the Jordans and Ostermeyers, who themselves backed Lithuanian language and culture studies. For example, Rhesa’s student Karl August Jordan, whose last appointment was as the Ragnit superintendent (bishop) in 1851–1871, in 1848 in Danzig rereleased Theodor Lepner’s ethnographic text “Prussian Lithuanians,” written in the late seventeenth century. His son, Wilhelm Jordan, despite shunning the dynastic path to priesthood and choosing politics instead, received the most renown for creating the epic poem Die Nibelungen. But besides these points of note, Jordan is also credited with the compilation of Litthauische Volkslieder und Sagen (1844). Thus, we encounter here a social network that made relevant research on Lithuanian language and culture, a structure united by common interests, family, and to an extent institutional ties. A third stimulus that encouraged interest in Lithuanians, their culture, and language was the emergence of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies. In this regard, research on Sanskrit prompted attention to Lithuanian as well. Orientalist Peter von Bohlen (1796–1840) was one of the first to compare Lithuanian with Sanskrit, paving the way in this field at the University of Königsberg for his student Ferdinand Nesselmann and later for Adalbert Bezzenberger. In the context of 87 A Polish Seminar also functioned at the University of Königsberg. Cf. Danuta Bogdan, “Das Polnische und das Litauische Seminar an der Königsberger Universität vom 18. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Königsberg und seine Universität. Eine Stätte ostmitteleuropäischen Geisteslebens, ed. Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann, III, no. 2 (1994) of Nordost-Archiv (Lüneburg: Institut Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1994), 393–425; Christiane Schiller, “Die Litauischen Seminare in Königsberg und Halle. Eine Bilanz,” in Königsberg und seine Universität, 375–392; Martynas Liudvikas Rėza, Lietuvių kalbos seminaro istorija, ed. Liucija Citavičiūtė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2003); and Liucija Citavičiūtė, Karaliaučiaus universiteto Lietuvių kalbos seminaras: istorija ir reikšmė lietuvių kultūrai (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2004).

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comparative linguistics, Lithuanian was researched by the most outstanding early nineteenth-century Prussian linguists: Franz Bopp in Berlin and August Friedrich Pott in Halle. Their research findings spread the belief that it was important to know Lithuanian, a language that by the mid-nineteenth century was considered to be dying—much like Prussian, which had died out in the seventeenth century. Ferdinand Nesselmann ventured into the Baltic languages through his research on Sanskrit, and it was he who in 1845 is thought to have coined the long-shunned term “the Balts.”88 In the middle of the nineteenth century, he published the most important research on the Old Prussian and Lithuanian languages, releasing a collection of Lithuanian folk songs and becoming one of the main promoters of this kind of knowledge in Königsberg.89 August Schleicher, who together with Bopp laid the foundations for Indo-European studies, also encountered Lithuanian via comparative linguistics and released a significant collection of language studies, Lithuanian stories, sayings, riddles, and songs.90 Both Nesselmann and Schleicher contributed most to the academic study of the poetry of the Prussian Lithuanian priest Kristijonas Donelaitis, publishing his main works in different locations at almost the same time.91 These three partially interconnected social networks driven by different interests encompassed the supporters of Old Prussian patriotism, the priesthood, and the progressively more institutionalized community of scholars to form the relatively strong push toward ethnographic (linguistic) interest 88 Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann, Die Sprache der alten Preussen (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1845), xxix. 89 Ibid.; G. H. Ferdinand Nesselmann, Wörterbuch der littauischen Sprache (Königsberg: Gebrüder Bornträger, 1850); G. H. Ferdinand Nesselmann, Littauische Volkslieder (Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1853). 90 August Schleicher, Handbuch der litauischen Sprache, vol. I: Litauische Grammatik (Prague: J. G. Calve’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1856); vol. II: Lesebuch und Glossar (Prague: J. G. Calve’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1857); August Schleicher, Litauische Märchen, Sprichworte, Rätsel und Lieder (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1857). 91 Christian Donaleitis, Litauische Dichtungen. Erste volständige Ausgabe mit Glossar, [ed. and trans.] August Schleicher (Saint Petersburg: Buchdruckerei der Kaiserlichen Akade­mie der Wissenschaften, 1865); Christian Donalitius, Littauische Dichtungen nach den Königsberger Handschriften mit metrischer Uebersetzung, kritischen Anmerkungen und genauem Glossar, ed. and trans. G. H. Ferdinand Nesselmann (Königsberg: Hübner & Matz, 1869).

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

in Lithuanians. This push was important, because once Prussian Lithuania started being viewed as “backward,” it played a part in transforming the very approach to that which was called “Lithuania.” The Gumbinnen Governmental District hardly ever merited this title anymore. A new conception of Lithuania spread, which could be best described using the “cultural landscape” concept:92 in this case, culture became the main indicator of the landscape’s uniqueness and distinction. That was how Berlin journalist and writer Otto Glagau saw Lithuania,93 and long before him, Jodocus Temme, who worked as an assessor in the Ragnit county court.94 In this way, too, Eduard Gisevius—a Tilsit teacher who had observed, described, and lived among Prussian Lithuanians—imagined Lithuania,95 as did August Kuntze, the owner of Heinrichsdorf Manor (Gumbinnen County), who had revealed the uniqueness of Prussian Lithuania;96 George Froelich, the Insterburg Gymnasium professor;97 and the members of the Lithuanian Literary Society, founded in 1879 in Tilsit.98 The definition of this new Lithuania involved the application of purely ethnographic, usually linguistic, criteria, which understandably drew 92 This concept includes the idea that unique cultural groups form a particular surface of the Earth, noted for elements characteristic of a specific culture. 93 Otto Glagau, Litauen und die Littauer. Gesammelte Skizzen (Tilsit: J. Reyländer, 1869). 94 Cf. the chapter about Lithuania in his memoirs: Jocodus D. H. Temme, Erinnerungen, ed. Stefan Born (Leipzig: Ernst Keil, 1883), 141–175. Also see the collection compiled with Baron Wilhelm J. A. Tettau and later rereleased several times: Wilhelm J. A. von Tettau and Jodocus D. H. Temme, comps., Die Volkssagen Ostpreussens, Litthauens und Westpreußens (Berlin: Nicolaische Buchhandlung, 1837). 95 [Erdmann Julius Schiekopp, ed.,] Eduard Gisevius (Tilsit: J. Reyländer, 1881). 96 August Kuntze, Bilder aus dem Preußischen Littauen (Rostock: Wilh. Werther, 1884). When writing his work, Kuntze used the manuscript prepared by the Lasdehnen precentor Schultz in 1833, “Einige Bemerkungen über die Nationalität der Litthauer, gesammelt vom Präcentor Schultz zu Lasdehnen” (Adalbert Bezzenberger, “Über das litauische Haus,” Altpreussische Monatsschrift 23 [1886]: 45–46). 97 George Froehlich, Beiträge zur Volkskunde des preussischen Litauens (Beilage zum Osterprogramm des Königlichen Gymnasiums und Realgymnasium zu Insterburg) (Insterburg: Buchdruckerei Dr. A. Bittner, 1902). 98 For more about the society, see Kurt Forstreuter, “Die Entstehung von Geschichtsver­ einen in Altpreußen,” in Neue Forschungen zur Brandenburg-Preußischen Geschichte, vol. 1, ed. Friedrich Benninghoven and Cécile Lowenthal-Hensel, vol. 14 of Veröffentlichungen aus den Archiven Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Cologne: Böhlau, 1979), 245–246, 257–258; Vacys Milius, Mokslo draugijos ir lietuvių etnografija (XIX a. antroji pusė– XX a. pirmoji pusė) (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla, 1993), 42–87.

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Figure 8.  Cover of Lithuania and the Lithuanians, published by the Berlin journalist Otto Glagau, known for his nationalist attitudes. In Germany this book formed the stereotypical perceptions about the Lithuanian landscape. Reproduction (Tilsit: J. Reyländer, 1869).

attention to the question of where the limits of the Lithuanian language lay. In the German-language discourse, attempts were first made to define them within Prussia. It could be safely said that during the first half of the nineteenth century, these limits were still strongly affected by the concept of the old “Lithuanian area,” the limits of which had been defined by the dioceses (or districts). Thus, the Pillkallen (now Dobrovolsk) cantor Christian Gottlieb Mielcke in his dictionary associated the spread of the Lithuanian language in East Prussia with the former boundaries of the Labiau, Memel,

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Tilsit, Ragnit, and Insterburg districts.99 The University of Königsberg professor Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert, writing about the structure of the Prussian state, also described the spread of the Lithuanian language in terms of counties—administrative units that appeared after the reforms of 1815– 1818. He claimed that Lithuanians lived in Memel County and part of Labiau County east of the Deime (now Deyma) River of the Königsberg Governmental District, as well as in the following counties of the Gumbinnen Governmental District: Heydekrug (now Šilutė), Niederung, Tilsit, Ragnit, Pillkallen, Stallupönen (Nesterov), Gumbinnen, Insterburg, partly in Darkehmen (Ozyorsk), and Goldap (Gołdap).100 The same data were also initially used in linguistics. Schleicher, before commencing more thorough Lithuanian language studies, denoted the area where the language was used citing Mielcke.101 The first attempts to define the spread of the Lithuanian language in the Lithuanian Literary Society rested on church statistics, which also determined the number of Lithuanians in specific counties (the county and church diocese boundaries in Prussia matched one another).102 However, the academic community enhanced these data with new information that could be gathered by applying completely different methods for determining the distribution of the Lithuanian language— the historical and linguistic. An important role here was played by the study on historical geography written by the then director of the Hohenstein Gymnasium in Masuria, Voigt’s student Max Toeppen, who tried to describe the landscapes of Nadrovia and Scalovia, mentioned in sources from the times of the Teutonic Order. Toeppen laid the southeastern boundary of Nadrovia along the Deime, Alle (now Łyna, Lava), Swine (Putilovka, Oświnka), Angerapp (Angrapa, Węgorapa), and Goldap (Gołdapa) rivers, adding that there were no substantiating data to suggest that the territory northwest of these   99 Christian Gottlieb Mielcke, Littauisch-deutsches und Deutsch-littauisches Wörter-Buch (Königsberg: Hartungsche Hofbuchdruckerey, 1800), Erste Vorrede [un-numbered]. 100 Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert, Handbuch der Allgemeinen Staatskunde des Preussischen Staats, vol. 1 (Königsberg: Gebrüder Bornträger, 1846), 460–462. 101 August Schleicher, Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Übersicht (Bonn: H. B. König, 1850), 188–190. 102 Maximilian J. A. Voelkel, “Die heutige Verbreitung der Litauer,” Mitteilungen der Litauischen Litterarischen Gesellschaft (further MLLG) 7 (1883): 1–4.

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Figure 9. Atlas published to supplement Max Toeppen’s fundamental Historical-Comparative Geography of Prussia, which portrayed the period before the arrival of the Teutonic Order and attributed the landscape titles “Scalovia” and “Nadrovia” recorded by the Teutonic chroniclers to the “Lithuanian lands.” Fragment of the map Preussen und die Nachbarlaender von der Zeiten der Ordensherrschaft drawn by Georg Hirth and compiled by Toeppen (Gotha: Justus Perthes Verlag, 1858).

rivers—that is, Nadrovia and Scalovia—was not inhabited by Lithuanians prior to the settlement of the Teutonic Order. In the atlas that formed a part of his research he attributed the Scalovia and Nadrovia landscapes “Zum Lande der Littauer.”103 It appears that this concept was maintained in the circles of the Lithuanian Literary Society as 103 Toeppen, Historisch-comparative Geographie, 23–27, 34; map “Preussen und die Nachbarlaender vor den Zeiten der Ordensherrschaft,” in Max Toeppen, Atlas zur Historisch-Comparativen Geographie von Preussen (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1858).

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

well. The announcement read by the nephew of Friedrich Kurschat, Alexander Kurschat, during the society’s meeting in December 1892 testifies to this: agreeing with Toeppen, Kurschat cited Nadrovia and Scalovia as ancient Lithuanian landscapes.104 Another important contribution to resolving this question was made by the University of Königsberg professor Bezzenberger, who applied the place-name method. Agreeing with Toeppen’s thesis about the historic Lithuanianness of the Nadrovia and Scalovia landscapes, in articles from 1882 and 1883 he drew attention to the fact that when basing one’s research on historical sources, it was difficult to precisely localize the boundaries of these landscapes.105 Bezzenberger recommended they be checked as follows: in the western part of East Prussia place names ending in -keim, -kaim, -kam, -garben, ‑appe, ‑app, and -appen were more widespread; in the eastern part, the place-name endings ‑kehmen, -kallen, -upö(h)nen, -uppen, and -upchen were more popular. The first group of endings originate in the Old Prussian words kaimis, garbis, and aps (meaning village, mountain, and river), while the second comes from Lithuanian words with the same meaning—kiemas, kalnas, and upė. By differentiating between the areas where place names of Prussian and Lithuanian origin dominated, Bezzenberger denoted a line that he himself called “die alte litauisch-preussische Sprachgrenze.” It led “from the ‘great moss wetland’ [Labiau County] through Norkitten [now Mezhdurech’e] [Insterburg County] to the area containing Gleisgarben [Darkehmen County], Auxkallen [Darkehmen County], Ballupönen [Goldap County], and Barkehmen [Goldap County].”106 In Bezzenberger’s times, the question of when these place names, especially the Lithuanian ones, appeared in East Prussia had not yet been raised. Their “oldness” and mass distribution in the corresponding areas appeared to be a sufficiently convincing argument to confirm Toeppen’s thesis about the Lithuanianness of the Scalovia 104 Alexander Kurschat, “Zur Geschichte der Litauer in Ostpreußen,” MLLG 18 (1893): 497–498. 105 Adalbert Bezzenberger, “Die litauisch-preussische Grenze,” Altpreussische Monats­ schrift 19 (1882): 651–655; Adalbert Bezzenberger, “Über die Verbreitung einiger Ortsnamen in Ostpreussen,” Altpreussische Monatsschrift 20 (1883): 123–128. 106 Bezzenberger, “Über die Verbreitung,” 128.

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Figure 10.  Reference points to the southern and western boundaries of Lithuania as indicated in Toeppen’s and Bezzenberger’s studies. A bold dotted line shows the boundaries proposed by Toeppen, the names in italics—the reference points introduced by Bezzenberger. The dots show the boundaries of counties, a thin dashed line—the boundaries of governmental districts in the mid-nineteenth century. Map by Vasilijus Safronovas.

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

and Nadrovia landscapes. Thus, Bezzenberger’s insights were important because they made it possible to confirm the thesis about Lithuanians’ autochthonism in Prussia and, most important, to link nineteenth-century Prussian Lithuania with the historic Scalovia and Nadrovia landscapes. Toeppen’s and Bezzenberger’s insights led the way in describing the boundaries of ethnographic Lithuania in Prussia, and thus constructing for Lithuanians their own space in Prussia.107 Admittedly, as we shall see, this particular concept of Prussian Lithuania was by no means the only one.

2.3. TWO MUTUALLY UNRELATED LITHUANIAS Here we must consider the scale of application of ethnographic criteria for describing Lithuania. Attempts were first made, as we have seen, to define the area populated by Lithuanian speakers in Prussian Lithuania. This should not be surprising, as according to the prevailing opinion among expert minds in the mid-nineteenth century in Prussia, beyond the border in Russia lived Samogitians, not Lithuanians—that is, other carriers of the “Latvian” or “Lithuanian languages” or other types of culture (this distinction was still characteristic of, for example, Karl August Jordan or Nesselmann).108 An additional determining factor was, without a doubt, the fact that Prussian Lithuanian language and culture were more accessible, because of the region’s cultural proximity and better academic infrastructure, to such enthusiasts as Schleicher, who acquired funding from the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, then traveled to Lithuania to learn and study the language.109

107 For one of the early examples of Toeppen’s impact—the claim by Passarge, that Lithuania begins “on the other side of the Alle”—see Louis Passarge, Aus Baltischen Landen. Studien und Bilder (Glogau: Carl Flemming, 1878), 303. Another obvious example is Max Hecht, Aus der deutschen Ostmark. Wanderungen und Studien (Gumbinnen: Verlag von C. Sterzel’s Buchhandlung (Gebr. Reimer), 1897), 125. 108 Karl August Jordan, “Zur Kunde der littauischen Sprache,” Neue Preußische Provinzial-Blätter 8 (1849): 73; G. H. Ferdinand Nesselmann, “Drei Dainos mit Bemerkungen,” Neue Preußische Provinzial-Blätter 8 (1849): 411. 109 Cf. Schleicher, Handbuch der litauischen Sprache, vol. I, v–vii.

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Nevertheless, at least within the body of specialized knowledge, the existence of Lithuania on the other side of the border, and the spread of the Lithuanian language there, was acknowledged throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. This Lithuania was, of course, primarily understood as part of history, a land that existed at best until the Union of Lublin. A great influence on the spreading of this particular understanding among German scholars would have come from Schlözer’s history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) up to 1569, released in Halle.110 This treatise, based on Albertus Koialovicius-Wijuk’s seventeenth-century text, made it possible to imagine Lithuania as a historic territory, then still seen as an element of Poland (still officially called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), and from 1795 on—Russia. Thus, in cartographical terms the word “Lithuania” could mean more than just part of Prussia. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, some maps intended for a German-speaking audience used this name to designate a certain territory of the Russian Empire.111 Regardless, the dominant visualization of European Russia in nineteenth-century “German” cartography showed this country’s division into gubernias, with Poland distinguished and Lithuania usually not even indicated.112 So we can see that, although the 110 August Ludewig Schlözer, “Geschichte von Littauen, als einem eigenen Großfürstenthume, bis zum J. 1569,” in August Ludewig Schlözer and Ludewig Albrecht Gebhardi, Geschichte von Littauen, Kurland und Liefland (Halle: Johann Jacob Gebauer, 1785), 1–300. 111 “Russland,” in Vollständiger Hand-Atlas der neueren Erdbeschreibung über alle Theile der Erde in 82 Blattern, ed. Karl Sohr, 5th ed., expanded and revised by Heinrich Berghaus (Glogau, Leipzig: C. Flemming, 1855); Carl Ferdinand Weiland, “Das Europaeische Russland,” in Allgemeiner Hand-Atlas der Erde und des Himmels nach den besten astronomischen Bestimmungen, neuesten Entdeckungen und kritischen Untersuchungen entworfen (Weimar: Geographisches Institut, [1856?]); Carl Christian Franz Radefeld, “Europaeisches Russland, 1844,” in Grosser Hand-Atlas über alle Theile der Erde in 170 Karten, ed. Joseph Meyer (Hildburghausen: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, 1860); Carl Gräf, “Das Europäische Russland, revidirt 1864,” in Hand-Atlas der Erde und des Himmels. In siebzig Blättern, eds. Heinrich Kiepert, Carl Gräf, Adolf Gräf, and Carl Bruhns, 42nd ed. (Weimar: Geographisches Institut, [s.a.]). 112 For a few examples, see the maps “Ostsee-Lænder und Inneres Russland bis Moskau, Neue Bearbeitung 1834, revidirt 1851” and “Europæisches Russland auch Schweden u. Norwegen. Dabei Ueberricht des oesterrreichnischen u. preussischen Staats, 1833, Rev. 1850,” published in the popular atlas Hand-Atlas über alle Theile der Erde nach dem neuesten Zustande und über das Weltgebaude, ed. Adolf Stieler (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1851) (also in a later edition from 1853); August Petermann, “Russland und

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

German-language body of knowledge included the possibility of regarding the former territory of the GDL as an alternative concept of Lithuania, for a long time the name “Lithuania” was associated more with the Hohenzollern domains. On the one hand, this usage indicates how special Lithuania’s definition and understanding was in the German-speaking discourse. Unlike, for example, Galicia, which had a more or less clear connotation in the nineteenth century of lying within the boundaries of one (Habsburg) empire,113 Lithuania’s existence was constantly articulated to a greater or lesser degree within two monarchies: the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs. On the other hand, these two Lithuanias, at least until the middle of the nineteenth century, were almost completely separate. Only occasionally were data about the Lithuania that belonged to Prussia accidentally attributed to Russia in literature released in German.114 Still, the emergence of ethnography made it possible to establish links between the areas that existed on either side of the border. Schlözer himself was one of the first in the German-specific body of knowledge to have grouped ethnographic Lithuanians—that is, carriers of the Lithuanian language—into Prussian and Polish Lithuanians, thus clearly highlighting that they lived in both monarchies.115 Other encyclopedic and informative texts released in German in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also stated that Lithuanian was used as much in Prussia as in Poland (Samogitia).116 Jacob Grimm, writing a review for Johann Severin Vater’s book about the Old Prussian language also made the distinction between those Lithuanians who lived in Prussia and Poland’s Lithuanians (the Samogitians).117 Berghaus repeated the same thing.118 Schleicher, in his systemic Scandinavien, 1880” in another edition, Adolf Stieler’s Hand Atlas über alle Theile der Erde und über das Weltgebaude. 95 Karten (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1881); and Friedrich Handtke, “General Karte vom Europäischen Russland und den kaukasischen Ländern,” published in Vollständiger Hand-Atlas der neueren Erdbeschreibung. 113 Cf. Wolff, Idea of Galicia. 114 As cited by Glagau, Litauen und die Littauer, 2. 115 Schlözer, Allgemeine Nordische Geschichte, 316–323. 116 “Historisches Verzeichniß,” 435–436; Adelung, Mithridates, 706, 708–709; “Sprachenkunde,” 473. 117 Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, August 1, 1822 (121. Stück), 1201–1203. 118 [Berghaus], Statistik des Preüssischen Staats, 135.

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analysis of Europe’s languages, also denoted Lithuanian as being spoken not just in Prussia but in Russia as well.119 In this way, by the end of the eighteenth century, ethnographic knowledge provided an opportunity to understand Lithuania as an ethnographic, not a historic, territory where the Lithuanian language predominated. Scientific knowledge about where Lithuanian was spoken meant that the concept of Lithuania’s cultural landscape could be expanded to include not only the Hohenzollerns’ but also the Romanovs’ domains. A more precise description of the space where Lithuanian was spoken in Prussia and Russia was probably first made as part of attempts to define the territory inhabited by Slavs in Europe. Philologist and ethnographer Pavel Jozef Šafárik, who worked within the Habsburgs’ realms at the time, is to be merited with this attempt; his main work Slovanské starožitnosti (1837) was already translated into German in 1843. While Šafárik did not identify Lithuanians as Slavs, he did claim that the two peoples originated from one prehistoric root, which divided into two different families in historic times.120 Another of his works, Slovanský národopis (1842), gave the first description of the distribution of the Lithuanian language in Prussia and Russia.121 Although the second text did not appear in German after the first, its influence, and that of the accompanying map,122 on the German-specific body of knowledge is evident. We can assume that Šafárik’s boundaries, in particular, came to serve as the base model for other authors writing about and mapping the space where Lithuanian was spoken. A number of alternative distributions of the Lithuanian language were published in German somewhat later.123 They were primarily based on data gathered by Peter Koeppen and Alexander Rittich, scholars from 119 Schleicher, Sprachen Europas, 190–192. 120 Paul Joseph Schafarik, Slawische Alterthümer, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1843), 448. This opinion was later shared by [Berghaus], Statistik des Preüssischen Staats, 125–126. 121 See the Russian translation: Pavel Shafarik, Slavianskoe narodopisanie (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1843), 105–107. 122 Pavel Josef Šafárik, Slovanský zeměvid (Praha: Věnceslav Merklas ryl., 1842). 123 Cf. “Völkerkarte von Russland,” in Richard Andree’s Allgemeiner Handatlas in sechsund­ achtzig Karten mit erläuterndem Text, ed. Geographischer Anstalt von Velhagen & Klasing in Leipzig (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1881).

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

the Russian Empire.124 Yet their maps indicated the spread of Lithuanian only within the boundaries of the Russian Empire. Thus, it is likely that Šafárik’s distribution boundaries had the greatest influence on the German-language discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. Practically the same boundaries appear in Karl Bernhardi’s Map of the Languages of Germany of 1843 and the Ethnographic Map of Europe prepared by Berghaus in 1847 (the latter was released by the most important cartographic publishing house at the time in Gotha).125 Šafárik’s studies could have become a point of reference for showing the main orientation markers bordering the Lithuanian language area for linguist Schleicher as well.126 However, none of these descriptions was as yet directly related to the cultural landscape or applied to name the latter according to linguistic 124 Petr Keppen, Ob etnograficheskoi karte evropeiskoi Rossii (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia akademiia nauk, 1852), 14–15, 17, 31; Aleksandr Rittikh, Etnograficheskaia karta evropeiskoi Rossii (Saint Petersburg: Kartograficheskoe zavedenie A. A. Il’ina, 1875). The distribution of the Lithuanian language in the Russian Empire was shown probably for the first time in the manuscript atlas Etnograficheskii atlas evropeiskoi Rossii, ed. Petr Keppen (Saint Petersburg, 1848) produced in triplicate by the statistician Koeppen, and in Etnograficheskaia karta Evropeiskoi Rossii released by order of the Geographical Society in 1851, which was well received in Europe, albeit rather slowly (Cf. Vytautas Petronis, “Pinge, divide et impera: vzaimovliianie etnicheskoi kartografii i natsional’noi politiki v pozdneimperskoi Rossii (vtoraia polovina XIX veka),” in Imperium inter Pares: rol’ transferov v istorii Rossiiskoi imperii (1700–1917), ed. Martin Aust, Rikarda Vul’pius [Ricarda Vulpius], and Aleksei Miller (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010), 314). Koeppen also presented his research in “Der litauische Volksstamm. Ausbreitung und Stärke desselben in der Mitte des XIX. Jahrhunderts,” Bulletin de la classe historico-philologique de L’Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg VIII, no. 18–9 (1851): 273–292. 125 Karl Bernhardi, Sprachkarte von Deutschland (Kassel: J. J. Bohné, 1843). In the explanations released with the map, Bernhardi drew the boundary between the areas of spread of the German and “Latvian” languages in Prussia through Nordenburg, Wehlau, and up to Schaaken, noting that the “Latvian” language area also contained German islands, for example, around Gumbinnen (Karl Bernhardi, Sprachkarte von Deutschland [Kassel: J. J. Bohné, 1844], 77). In the second edition, the boundary had been pushed slightly northeast, now going through Nordenburg, Goldap, Gumbinnen, and Schaaken near the Curonian Lagoon and adding that near Nordenburg the boundary between the Slavic and “Latvian” languages began—which, as Šafárik also noted, reached the Memel (Neman) River below Grodno (Karl Bernhardi, Sprachkarte von Deutschland, 2nd ed. [Kassel: J. J. Bohné, 1849], 75). For the Berghaus map, see “Ethnographische Karte von Eüropa. Gotha, 1847,” in Dr. Heinrich Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas oder Sammlung von Karten, vol. 2 (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1848). 126 Schleicher, Handbuch der litauischen Sprache, vol. I, 3–4.

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Figure 11. Pavel Jozef Šafárik’s Slavic Ethnology, supplemented with the map Slovanský zeměvid (Prague: Věnceslav Merklas ryl., 1842), not only revolutionized the conception of the extent to which the Slavic languages were distributed throughout Europe. It also showed, for the first time on a map, the distribution of Lithuanian and Latvian languages, which was not based on the administrative boundaries. Simultaneously, it first indicated the boundary of distribution of the Lithuanian language in East Prussia. The fragment is published with permission from the Moravian Library in Brno (Czech Republic) (Moravská zemská knihovna, sign. 1-0514.747, 2).

Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Figure 12. Fragment of European Ethnographic Map, compiled by the influential mid-nineteenth-century German geographer and cartographer Heinrich Berghaus. The “Latvian” language family is attributed here to the Indo-Europeans but distinguished from the Slavs. The family, according to the author, consisted of two languages: “Latvian proper” and Lithuanian. The boundaries of distribution of Lithuanian are largely based here on Šafárik’s study. The map was prepared in 1845– 1846 (Gotha: Justus Perthes Verlag, 1847) and published in Dr. Heinrich Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas oder Sammlung von Karten, vol. 2 (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1848).

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Figure 13. Map supplementing the Grammar of the Lithuanian Language, prepared by the Königsberg priest and director of the Lithuanian Seminar Friedrich Kurschat (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1876), using the word “Lithuania” to name the whole space of the distribution of the Lithuanian language in both empires for the first time. The map later had a strong influence on Lithuanian nationalists’ conceptions about the ethnographic boundaries of the Lithuanians, particularly in East Prussia. Reproduction of lithograph by F. A. Brockhaus’ Geographic Institute in Leipzig.

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Lithuania in Prussia: Changing Concepts in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

groups. For these authors, the area where Lithuanian was widespread did not automatically mean Lithuania. Only in the 1860s did German scholars begin using “Lithuania” to refer to the territory where the Lithuanian language predominated in both monarchies. Prussian statistician Richard Böckh, in his study released in 1869, identified the “genuine Lithuania” (das eigentliche Littauen) as the gubernias of Kaunas (Kovno) and Vilnius (Vil’no), a small part of the Grodno (Hrodna) Gubernia (the counties of Grodno and Sokółka), and part of the Augustów (from 1866 Suwałki) Gubernia: the counties of Marijampolė (Mariampol), Kalvarija, Sejny, and partly Augustów (within the borders of the counties up to 1866). For the identification of the territories inhabited by Lithuanians in Prussia, he used the names of the historic Scalovia and Nadrovia landscapes and an alternative term Klein Littauen.127 However, probably the first German scientist to have identified the entire distribution of the Lithuanian language across both empires as being one Lithuania was the aforementioned Friedrich Kurschat. To gain a better understanding of the region inhabited by Lithuanians in Russia, he visited there in 1872, 1874, and 1875, and in his Grammar of the Lithuanian Language released in 1876 he defined the area where Lithuanian was used.128 On the map accompanying the study,129 he attributed the name Littauen to the whole space where the Lithuanian language was in use. This development suggests that in the academic milieu, mostly concentrated in Königsberg and the Lithuanian Literary Society, by the mid-nineteenth century people could conceive of the Lithuanian cultural landscape as lying within two monarchies. Indeed, commonality between the areas where Lithuanian was used on both sides of the border was reflected only in areas requiring specialized knowledge, mostly linguistics and statistics.130 The “activation” of German nationalism interfered with the further dissemination of such knowledge in Prussia and, as we shall 127 Richard Böckh, Der Deutschen Volkszahl und Sprachgebiet in den europäischen Staaten. Eine statistische Untersuchung (Berlin: J. Guttentag, 1869), 59–60, 63, 226. 128 Friedrich Kurschat, Grammatik der littauischen Sprache (Halle: Verlag der Buchhand­ lung des Waisenhauses, 1876), 1–2. 129 “Karte des littauischen Sprachgebiets,” in ibid. 130 Cf. Arthur von Fircks, “Die preussische Bevölkerung nach ihrer Muttersprache und Abstammung. Auf Grund des Ergebnisses der Volkszählung vom 1. Dezember 1890

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see, gave new relevance to postulations regarding the uniqueness of Prussian Lithuania. In this way, belief in the separateness of the two Lithuanias was strengthened, while perceptions of the Lithuanian cultural landscape as extending on both sides of the border remained limited to a narrow following. As a result, until the First World War German scholars rarely associated the name “Lithuania” with a complete region extending over the territory of two empires, the Hohenzollern and the Romanov.

und anderer statistischer Aufnahmen,” Zeitschrift des Königlich Preussischen Statistischen Bureaus 33 (1893): 237.

CHAPTER 3

Lithuania as a Peculiar Region of Germany (1850s–1910s) In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was a rare academic—Friedrich Kurschat being one example—who had a firm grasp of the “Lithuanian issue” and understood Lithuania as a space extending on both sides of what was then the Russian-German border. Even so, the name “Lithuania” was used on both sides of the border, with different meanings and usually without any connection between one Lithuania and the other. However, it would be incorrect to imagine that only two concepts of Lithuania existed in the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, the content of “Lithuania” as a concept, in both the Romanov and the Hohenzollern domains, underwent fundamental changes at this time. Among those who lived in the Romanov monarchy and used the name “Lithuania,” the concept as defined by administrative and historical criteria, at least in belles-lettres, was gradually replaced by an image of Lithuania defined by ethnographic criteria.1 In Prussia, especially its eastern parts, in the mid-nineteenth century, a similar collision of two concepts of Lithuania was also observed that was expressed on a somewhat broader scale. The first, administrative, concept of Lithuania did not have nationalist implications as yet. The other concept that was gradually emerging was nationalistic in nature and associated with specific carriers of culture who spoke Lithuanian. In fact, until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, the main ties between those identified as Lithuanian speakers in the sixteenth and 1

Cf. Medišauskienė, “Lietuvos samprata,” 217–224.

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seventeenth centuries were social and cultural rather than linguistic. At this time, it was a rare Prussian Lithuanian who would have understood language as an essential criterion of difference. In distinguishing themselves from landowners, officials, tavern owners, traders, and craftsmen (townspeople) who lived in the same vicinity and communicated in German, Lithuanian speakers referred to themselves as būrai (from the German Bauer—peasant); to speak būriškai meant to speak Lithuanian.2 This indicates that in premodern society, in which Prussian Lithuanians lived for quite a long time, language was a less important distinction than social status.3 Ultimately, social position defined the stereotypical understanding of what constituted a Lithuanian (a peasant, a village resident) and what constituted a German (a townsperson, a manor resident).4 That is why when we speak about the period until the mid-nineteenth century, we should look at Germans and Lithuanians in Prussian Lithuania as being different socio-cultural rather than national groups. The mid-nineteenth century improved communications in the Prussian lands and brought new opportunities to change social status. In addition, the political actualities of the period termed the Neue Ära, as we shall see, intensified nationalization in ever-wider strata of society in the eastern Prussian territories.5 As a result, the name “Lithuania” acquired multiple meanings in the 1860s, connecting two different approaches. This juncture of conceptions is clearly visible in the reference book on the eastern parts of the Province of Prussia released in 1863.6 Here the name 2 Cf. Friedrich Kurschat, Wörterbuch der littauischen Sprache, part 2: Littauischdeutsches Wörterbuch (Halle a. S.: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1883), 64; Adalbert Bezzenberger, Litauische Forschungen. Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Sprache und des Volkstumes der Litauer (Göttingen: Robert Peppmüller, 1882), 103; Wilius Kalwaitis, Lietuwiszkų Wardų Klėtele su 15,000 wardų (Tilsit: Otto v. Mauderodė, 1910), iii. 3 Cf. Gerhard Bauer, “Deutsch-litauische Sprachbeziehungen und nationale Identität im Memelland. Erkentnisse aus neueren etnograpischen Quellen,” Lietuvių Kultūros Institutas. Suvažiavimo darbai 1994/ Litauisches Kulturinstitut. Jahrestagung 1994 (Lampertheim: Litauisches Kulturinstitut, 1995), 73. 4 These observations are not absolute. For more on language use in various social strata, cf. Kurt Forstreuter, “Deutsche Kulturpolitik,” [1981], 339–340. 5 Pletzing, Vom Völkerfrühling, 320–346. 6 Cf. [Ludwig Christoph Franz] Kühnast, Statistische Mitthelungen über Littauen und Masuren, vol. 2: Nachrichten über Grundbesitz, Viehstand, Bevölkerung und öffentliche

Lithuania as a Peculiar Region of Germany (1850s–1910s)

“Lithuania” is given to the Gumbinnen Governmental District, yet only to its northern counties, obviously using ethnographic criteria to differentiate the southern part, which belonged to Masuria—that is, the counties inhabited by Polish speakers, which at this time had no separate administrative status. But in distinguishing Masuria based on ethnographic attributes, the compiler of this reference book did not apply the same attributes to the northern boundary of Lithuania. He equated that northern line with the administrative boundary of the Gumbinnen Governmental District, thus excluding from Lithuania Memel County, which had the most Lithuanian speakers but since 1815 had belonged to the Königsberg Governmental District. A similar collision of administrative and ethnographic criteria is visible in the rhetoric associated with the so-called young Lithuanians. Here there was a mixture of the tradition of seeing Lithuania as an outpost for radical defenders of democracy and the derisive association of Prussian parliamentarians, splintered from the Vincke faction, with Lithuanians personified in the topos of “noble savages.” This outline of Lithuanians that Otto Glagau was to use in his essays several years later had little in common with the tradition of their representation from the first half of the nineteenth century. This period’s attention to the “aboriginal” Lithuanian culture was determined by the goal of learning about layers of this culture, “untouched” by civilization, that could be exploited to substantiate the genuine Prussian spirit. Now accounts of Lithuanians’ “rustic customs” became a means for the appreciation of German “cultural advancement.”7 Over time, national affiliation replaced territorial self-affiliation with Lithuania. This also led to the growing dominance of a nationalist approach in defining what Lithuania was inside Prussia. Such increased dominance in the German-language discourse, one would think, must have meant the separation of “one’s own” from the “foreign.” Yet in fact Abgaben der Ortschaften in Littauen, in two parts (Gumbinnen: Selbstverlag, 1863). 7 Cf. Glagau’s description: Lithuanians are “in between Germans and Slavs; they are not as dirty and bedraggled as Masurians, yet nor are they as clean and farmerly as Germans; only the German example and German influence, expressed more and more from all sides obviously forces Lithuanians to also become a fond of order and cleanliness”: Glagau, Litauen und die Littauer, 113.

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this did not eliminate the use of the term “Lithuania.” On the contrary, Lithuania’s uniqueness became a means of maintaining links with Germany. In the beginning, the concept of “Lithuania” inside Prussia had an association not with Lithuanian nationalism, the appearance of which would have been hard to imagine at the time, but with German nationalism. In this way, Prussian Lithuania evolved into a German national space. Understandably, Lithuania’s inclusion in the boundaries of “German space” was directly related to the spread of ideas about German nationalism in Prussia’s eastern territories and with attempts to ensure the integrity of these territories, known for their variety. The German appropriation of Lithuania was not an independent phenomenon, and this is why it must be analyzed in the more general context of the appropriation of Prussia’s eastern territories, which in the mid-nineteenth century made up a Province of Prussia.

3.1. CREATION OF MEANINGS OF EAST PRUSSIA IN GERMAN CULTURE In the first half of the nineteenth century, in the lands that made up the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) in line with the new European order confirmed at the Congress of Vienna, the term “Prussia” was usually associated with the name of one of the Confederation’s monarchies, for a long time hierarchically second in line after Austria. Very few knew that somewhere in the eastern domains of the Prussian king there existed a Prussian Province with its administrative center in Königsberg. And this was not because that eastern province rarely “fitted” into the typical, non-Prussian-centered map of “Germany” published in the first half of the nineteenth century. For a majority, the territories that lay in the east were simply too unfamiliar and were thus cloaked in stereotypes of the civilized-uncivilized that were created about Europe’s “East” during the Enlightenment mostly in Parisian intellectual circles.8 For many German-language lands, the Prussian Province of the age was indeed “a foreign country.” In the territories that composed the Holy Roman Empire, 8 Cf. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe.

Lithuania as a Peculiar Region of Germany (1850s–1910s)

later the German Confederation, this “foreign country” was usually attributed to Russia, simply out of ignorance.9 Even in the 1860s, Berlin journalist Otto Glagau, appealing to stereotypes, reverted to irony, still writing that Prussian Lithuania was not yet Russia, and that bears and wolves did not run wild in the city of Gumbinnen.10 Similarly, in Königsberg in the first half of the nineteenth century, “Germany” as it was then imagined was also treated as a foreign country. It was said that he who dared to travel from Königsberg to Berlin had to prepare a will before departing. Someone who had returned from such a journey was considered an “extraordinary person” (merkwürdige Person). The central government paid less attention to the Prussian Province than the other parts of the monarchy, thus the locals viewed their territory almost like a “lost place.” It was thought that probably they received so little attention because sooner or later the province would be joined to Russia as far as the Vistula River.11 When implementing the Humboltian higher education reforms in Prussia, the University of Königsberg was not considered a priority, creating the impression that it too had been abandoned by the state. Königsberg’s inhabitants generally thought that “East Prussia was seen by Berlin as if it were a kind of Siberia.”12 Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, no Berlin-based artist would have even considered moving to Königsberg of his or her own free will. Those who were relocated here from Berlin felt like those in Russia who were relocated to Siberia from St. Petersburg.13 The term deutsche Sibirien was used 9 Paul Landau, Ostpreußische Wanderungen. Bilder aus Krieg und Frieden (Berlin: Reichsverlag Hermann Kalkoff, 1916), 5. 10 Glagau, Litauen und die Littauer, 1–3. The stereotype about “bears and wolves” was, apparently, quite entrenched. In his memoirs Jodocus Temme (1798–1881) described the reaction of those close to him in Westphalia to his departure in 1833 to take up the position of district justice adviser in East Prussian Ragnit, which was on the borders of Russia. He claims that those close to him believed that “near the Russian border bears and wolves feel right at home, and in the evenings wolves sneak right into the cities and drag children from their beds”: Temme, Erinnerungen, 142. 11 Karl Friedrich Bardach, Rückblick auf mein Leben. Selbstbiographie (Leipzig: Leopold Voß, 1848), 317–318. 12 Nachrichten über Leben und Schriften des Herrn Geheimraths Dr. Karl Ernst von Baer (St. Petersburg: Verlag der kaiserlichen Hofbuchhandlung H. Schmitzdorff (Karl Röttger), 1866), 235. 13 Ibid., 364.

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in other senses as well in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.14 But existence of the image where relocation into this territory was seen as “almost like deportation” was attested by Richard Dethlefsen even in the early twentieth century.15 Historian Hugo Bonk made this generalization in 1895: “Quite recently, as much was known about separate parts of East Prussia as about the darkest parts of Africa.” According to him, the East Prussian Province was for a long time seen in Germany as “a foreign country,” and exploration of it had commenced comparatively recently.16 Why was the inclusion of the Prussian Province in the orbit of “German spaces” so complicated? The main reason, it appears, was the fact that until 1867 this province was dissociated from any entities that could be identified using the term “Germany.” It had been part of the German Confederation for only a few years (1848–1851). At this time, supporters of liberal nationalism who had gathered in Frankfurt at the German National Assembly had temporarily taken over leadership of the Confederation, with the intention of reforming the Confederation into a constitutional German union. Up to then and afterwards, the Prussian Province’s territory lay beyond the boundaries of both the Holy Roman Empire (until 1806) and the German Confederation. Only a part of the Prussian domains belonged to the Confederation created at the Congress of Vienna according to the Habsburg government project, not counting the eastern Posen (Poznań) and Prussian Provinces. As a result, most East Prussians did not identify with either the idea of Germany or the German nationalist movement in the same way as other groups within the Confederation. Since the conclusion of the united Germany issue according to the “small German solution” (kleindeutsche Lösung) was not immediately obvious for a long time, for many East Prussians the question arose whether this territory would one day become part of Germany at all. 14 Cf. social-democrat Philipp Scheidemann’s speech at the Reichstag in May 1912 where due to Prussia’s strict policies he likened it to “Germany’s Siberia”: Philipp Scheidemann, Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten, with a preface by Andre Seegers, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Severus, 2013), 163. 15 Richard Dethlefsen, Das schöne Ostpreußen (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1916), 9. 16 Hugo Bonk, Die Städte und Burgen in Altpreussen (Ordensgründungen) in ihrer Beziehung zur Bodengestaltung (Königsberg: Verlag von Ferd. Beyer’s Buchhandlung [Thomas & Oppermann], 1895), 25.

Lithuania as a Peculiar Region of Germany (1850s–1910s)

In seeking to overcome the barrier existing between Prussia’s east and “Germanness,” German culture had to impart a particular significance to this territory, creating a special, even holy place for it. This level of significance, movement toward which accelerated around 1860, probably allowed East Prussians to feel important in the general German context for the first time, encouraging them to actively seek acknowledgment of their place. In turn, in Germany this significance extended links with this poorly known territory. The German appropriation of East Prussia did not occur by inventing new symbols, but by using those that already existed. In the creation of a special place for East Prussians in German culture, probably the most important linking role fell on the medieval society of the knights of the Teutonic Order and the Hohenzollern dynasty. Neither one of these two symbols was “German” in the linguistic nationalist sense. Yet there were already traditions of identifying with both in East Prussia. In addition, both symbols had been nationalized as part of the myth of Prussia’s German mission—the borussianistic myth created in the mid-nineteenth century in order to elevate the Messiah-like activities of the Hohenzollerns in creating a unified Germany and to legitimize Prussian power politics through the realization of the small German or great Prussian solution.17 Looking more closely at this process, we can see that the German signification of East Prussia was indeed nothing but the subordination of images that supported Old Prussian self-awareness in the Prussian Province in the first half of the nineteenth century, state patriotism, and to some degree an understanding of belonging to the German cultural area in the interests of entrenching the borussianistic myth. The Prussian Province’s special links with the Hohenzollerns were determined by the legitimization strategies once chosen by Frederick I. In 17 For a historical master narrative based on the borussianistic myth, see Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Von Preußens Aufgabe in Deutschland zu Deutschlands Aufgabe in der Welt. Liberalismus und borussianisches Geschichtsbild zwischen Revolution und Imperialismus,” Historische Zeitschrift 231, no. 2 (1980): 265–324; Vasilijus Safronovas, “Borusianistinio didžiojo istorinio pasakojimo aktualizavimas Rytų Prūsijos provincijoje XIX–XX amžių sandūroje. Atvejo analizė provincijos kontekste,“ in Daugiareikšmės tapatybės tarpuerdvėse. Rytų Prūsijos atvejis XIX–XX amžiais, ed. Vasilijus Safronovas, Nijolė Strakauskaitė, and Lina Motuzienė, vol. XXIII of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2011), 31–68.

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1701, Frederick, margrave of Brandenburg and duke of Prussia, declared himself “king of Prussia.” Even though his main residence at the time was in Berlin and thus within the empire’s boundaries, he was consciously seeking to demonstrate his independence from the emperor. That is why he assumed the status of king via his Prussian dynastic domains, selecting Königsberg as his coronation venue. Indeed, this choice also forced Frederick to demonstrate his position on the continuity of the Teutonic Order’s rule in this territory. The still-existing Teutonic Order questioned the 1525 secularization of its domains in Prussia, and members of the imperial family had the right to appoint the Teutonic Order’s grand master.18 All of this not only encouraged the ruler to emphasize his links to the Duchy of Prussia, which was never part of the imperial territories, but also strengthened the association of the monarchy with the pagan Prussian “kingdom.” It, not the Teutonic Order, was declared the true point of reference for the monarchy.19 In the nineteenth century, this legitimization strategy remained important, despite certain changes in its form. On the one hand, that “Old Prussia” gave its name to the entire state and that the Hohenzollerns became kings in Königsberg in 1701 were important elements of regional patriotism and particularism in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. They made it possible for the Prussian Province to be identified as the “cradle of the Prussian monarchy.”20 On the other hand, the dynasty also exploited these facts. Frederick William IV, who ascended the throne in 1840, called a separate Landtag on September 10 in Königsberg, where the estates from the Prussian and 18 Hartmut Boockmann, Der Deutsche Orden. Zwölf Kapitel aus seiner Geschichte, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 1989), 230. 19 Cf. Friedrich, Other Prussia, 159–170. This myth was most widespread in the eastern provinces of Prussia. For more on the context of historical myths employed for the 1701 coronation, see Wolfgang Neugebauer, “Das historische Argument um 1701. Politik und Geschichtspolitik,“ in Dreihundert Jahre Preußische Königskrönung. Eine Tagungsdokumentation, ed. Johannes Kunisch, suppl. no. 6 of Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen und Preußischen Geschichte. Neue Folge (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), 27–48. 20 Cf. Scriptores rerum prussicarum: Die Geschichtsquellen der preussischen Vorzeit bis zum Untergange der Ordensherrschaft, ed. Theodor Hirsch, Max Töppen, and Ernst Strehlke, vol. I (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1861), ix.

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Posen Provinces that were not within the boundaries of the German Confederation expressed oaths of allegiance to the new ruler.21 Only later, on October 15, did the remaining provinces express their loyalty to the ruler in Berlin.22 William I went even further. Projecting continuity, the ruler organized his coronation to be held in Königsberg in 1861—the second in the entire history of Prussia since the times of Frederick I. It is likely that this decision was determined not only by elements of the Old Prussian ideology, or the goal to demonstrate continuity with the coronation act of 1701, but also to highlight another important element that linked the ruling dynasty and the Prussian Province—the Napoleonic Wars. In 1806–1808 Frederick William III and the royal family (including the king’s son, the future William I) found refuge in this territory from Napoleon’s army, which was crushing Prussia. In 1807 Prussian reforms commenced here, and in 1813 it was here that the Prussian Liberation War started, aiming for freedom from the Napoleon-ruled French occupation. The coronation day of October 18 was chosen especially to commemorate the Battle of Nations of 1813 near Leipzig.23 It is obvious that the ruler, by being crowned in Königsberg on this “common German” anniversary day, demonstrated a certain position to the Prussian Province, then still something of an outpost for liberals and democrats. Similarly, the tradition of identifying with the Teutonic Order in the Prussian Province originated as far back as the Napoleonic Wars, which in part became a stimulus to return to the history of this society of knights, or more specifically, the Teutonic Order’s “state” as a certain prototype.24 This turnabout occurred for several reasons. First, when Napoleon’s army had 21 For more on the Landtag, see Magdalena Niedzielska, “Was heisst liberal?” Opozycja polityczna w Prusach Wschodnich w pierwszej połowie XIX wieku (do 1847 r.): program i działalność (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 1998), 182–201. 22 Karl Streckfuß, Der Preußen Huldigungsfest, nach amtlichen und andern sichern Nachrichten und eigener Anschauung zusammengestellt (Berlin: Enslin’sche Buchhandlung (Ferd. Müller); E. H. Schroeder, 1840). 23 Cf. Reinhard Elze, Die zweite preussische Königskrönung (Königsberg, 18. Oktober 1861) (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Kommission beim C. H. Beck, 2001), 15–16. 24 Hartmut Boockmann, “Preussen, der Deutsche Ritterorden und die Wiederherstellung der Marienburg,” in Acht Jahrhunderte Deutscher Orden in Einzeldarstellungen, ed. P. Klemens Wieser, vol. 1 of Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des Deutschen

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crushed Prussia, the goal to set it back on its feet prompted a rethinking not just of the practical foundations of its functioning but also the monarchy’s ideological base. As a result of the vacuum in the central government, which became apparent after 1806, reformists who had gathered in East and West Prussia took the initiative in forming a new concept to ensure the continuity of the monarchy. Seeking to establish the Old Prussian ideological vision, according to which the territory of East and West Prussia was considered the cradle of the entire monarchy, they had to prove that the prototype of the Prussian state had been created here and not in the Brandenburg region. A domain of the Teutonic Order was then been transformed into such a “state,” especially since, unlike one hundred years ago, the Teutonic Order’s existence no longer restricted this sort of projection of continuity: the Napoleonic Wars had severely weakened the influence of this society of knights in Europe. Second, following the divisions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the newly formed Province of West Prussia (1773) had to be integrated into Prussia. This territory had belonged to Poland since the beginning of the mid-fifteenth century, and when it was incorporated into Prussia the only system of meanings by which its integration could proceed was related to the period associated with the Teutonic Order25—more specifically, by harnessing images of the estates’ opposition to the Order that had survived in the self-images of the German-speaking political elite both in East and in West Prussia.26 Third, the goal of substantiating Prussia’s claims and denying any possible Polish claims on West Prussia encouraged the postulation of German autochthonism in the Prussian Province and an emphasis on the Order’s civilizational mission, transforming the Order into a “carrier of culture.” Fourth, since 1815 there had been attempts at joining the provinces of Prussia (with the governments of East Prussia and Ordens (Bad Godesberg: Verlag Wissenschaftliches Archiv, 1967), 547; Boockmann, “Das ehemalige Deutschordensschloß,” 117. 25 Hackmann, Ostpreußen und Westpreußen, 58. Interestingly, when joining the future West Prussia to Prussia in 1772, the argument about these lands’ earlier rule by the Teutonic Order did not yet have the legitimately based meaning it attained later on: cf. Bruno Schumacher, “Die staatsrechtliche Begründung der Erwerbung Westpreußens durch Friedrich den Großen und der Deutsche Orden,” Altpreußische Forschungen 11 (1934): 102. 26 Pletzing, “Deutsche Kultur,” 197.

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Figure 14.  Marienburg Castle—a quintessential symbol that was used to entrench the image of the Prussian Province as a “land of the Teutonic Order” (deutsches Ordensland). Early twentieth-century photo published in Ostpreussen. Seine Entwicklung—Seine Zukunft, vol. 1 of Deutsche Stadt—deutsches Land, ed. Erich Köhrer and Max Worgitzki (Berlin-Charlottenburg: Lima-Verlag, 1922).

Lithuania) and West Prussia. In 1824, the most active defender of this idea, the West Prussian ober-president Schön, was appointed to rule the Prussian Province as well. Until 1878, when the provinces were again separated, the common territory of the Prussian Province in effect correlated with the domain boundaries of the Teutonic Order that had once existed in these lands. The basis of regional self-awareness in the combined provinces in 1824 stressed their joint rule by the Teutonic Order’s “state.”27 Ober-president Schön himself took the lead in this campaign,28 including his support for restoring Marienburg Castle.29 27 Pletzing, Vom Völkerfrühling, 118. 28 Cf. Bernhart Jähnig, “Geschichtsverständnis und Preußenbild Theodor von Schöns,” in Preussen in Ostmitteleuropa, 173–187. 29 Cf. Boockmann, “Preussen, der Deutsche Ritterorden,” 548–549; Boockmann, “Das ehemalige Deutschordensschloß,” 120.

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Due to all the aforementioned circumstances, significant changes in the Prussian Province elite’s self-awareness took place in the first half of the nineteenth century in terms of their view of the Teutonic Order. The director of the Königsberg Archive, historian Johannes Voigt, who maintained close ties with Schön,30 was primarily responsible for entrenching these changes in the historiography. From the second half of the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, the condemnation of the Teutonic Order as a bloodthirsty structure that had organized the plunder and conquest of foreign lands and the murder of their populations—formulated by Herder under the influence of Enlightenment ideas—prevailed.31 Voigt’s nine volumes of The History of Prussia, which stopped with the end of the Teutonic Order’s rule,32 offered a different treatment of the Order. Although earlier authors’ works had already recognized that the Teutonic Order was a carrier of culture, it was Voigt who brought this “mission” of the Order to the fore, thereby correcting its assessment.33 He convinced many with his statement that the prehistoric Prussian world had in effect been created by the Germanic peoples,34 and it became the basis for later discussions on who had more “historic rights”—the Germanic people or the Slavs.35 Such corrections were needed to entrench the view that the social order that had once existed in the Order’s domains could be considered an example of Old Prussian liberalism. The Prussian Province’s liberals focused not on the entire history of the Order but on those moments from the past that displayed the estates’ struggles against the Teutonic Order in the fifteenth century over the expansion of their rights. It is similarly no accident that the restored Marienburg Castle in Schön’s vision had to 30 Cf. Niedzielska, “Tożsamość elit politycznych,” 75. 31 Cf. Wolfgang Wippermann, Der Ordenstaat als Ideologie. Das Bild des Deutschen Ordens in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung und Publizistik, vol. 24 of Einzelveröffent­ lichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin (Berlin: Colloquium, 1979), 104–119. 32 Johannes Voigt, Geschichte Preussens, von der ältesten Zeiten bis zum Untergange der Herrschaft des deutschen Ordens, 9 vols. (Königsberg: Gebrüder Bornträger, 1827–1839). 33 Wippermann, Ordenstaat als Ideologie, 108, 120–125. 34 Cf. Hackmann, “Preußische Ursprungsmythen,” 163–164. 35 To read about the beginning of these discussions, see Pletzing, “Deutsche Kultur,” 189–205.

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become (yet never did become) a place where the Prussian Landtag would convene.36 At the same time, the Prussian Province’s liberals, as mentioned, tried to instill the view that the Teutonic Order’s “state” was the forerunner of the Hohenzollern monarchy and thus entrench the Old Prussian version of its origins. After the Congress of Vienna, there was no longer any fear of promoting this interpretation, approved by the monarchs themselves, especially after the Teutonic Order had lost a large part of its influence and its claims on Prussian territory.37 This is attested by the adoption of the shape of the Teutonic Order’s cross into the Prussian Iron Cross Award, founded in 1813, and the dynasty’s ongoing interest in the restoration of Marienburg Castle.38 The then king of Prussia, it appears, also believed in the civilizational mission of the Order’s “state.” In a letter from 1842 to Schön, he described the Prussian Province as a land that “the Lord God had redeployed into the jumbled life of the Slavs and Sarmatians, as if it were a fortress (Bollwerk) of the German way of being.”39 So events associated with the Teutonic Order and the Hohenzollern dynasty in the first half of the nineteenth century already acted as links via which the Prussian Province could see its role in the larger entity. Images of the Prussian Province as a Bollwerk, “the Eastern march (Ostmark) of our common fatherland (Vaterland),”40 and the “cradle of the Prussian monarchy” that associated this province with the whole were widespread in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, what that whole referred to then was the Prussian monarchy, or at best Germans defined in a linguistic-cultural sense. This situation changed in the 1860s as the images that maintained the Prussian Province’s links with the Prussian monarchy were adapted on behalf of the borussianistic myth. The greatest contribution in this respect came from historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who published Das deutsche Ordensland Preussen (translated into English as “Origins of 36 Wippermann, Ordenstaat als Ideologie, 147. 37 The Teutonic Order did not acknowledge the 1525 secularization of its domains in Prussia even after the Congress of Vienna: Boockmann, “Preussen, der Deutsche Ritterorden,” 551, 554–555, 556–557. 38 Cf. Boockmann, “Das ehemalige Deutschordensschloß,” 121, 130. 39 Quoted in Wippermann, Ordenstaat als Ideologie, 137. 40 Scriptores rerum prussicarum, vol. I, ix.

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Prussianism” in 1942).41 This essay was initially published as a series of thoughts inspired by the appearance of volume I of a collection of sources on the history of the Teutonic Order’s domains in Prussia called Scriptores rerum Prussicarum in 1861 and was later reprinted many times until the mid-twentieth century. As other researchers have already noted,42 Treitschke reinterpreted the Prussian Province’s past based on the myth of Prussia’s German mission. Upholding Prussia as the successor of the Order’s “state,” Treitschke denoted that the new power of Germany had to be built (by Prussia) on the same foundations on which the Teutonic Order had once become the “Baltic great power of the Middle Ages.”43 At the same time, Prussia, in his opinion, had to continue the “mission” that was allegedly obvious to the Teutonic Order—to strengthen German power (first, in the east) and to spread high German culture in the eastern lands possessed by Slavic barbarism. In his essay, Treitschke glorified the “the most stupendous and fruitful occurrence of the later Middle Ages— the northward and eastward rush of the German spirit and the formidable activities of our people as conqueror, teacher, discipliner of its neighbors.”44 According to this influential Prussian historian, those who wanted to understand the essence of the Prussian state and nation had to immerse themselves in the merciless clash between races (schonungslosen Racenkämpfe) that had earlier taken place between the German carriers of culture (and the Order that was identified with them) and the barbarians.45 In short, those exclusive roles that had earlier been used to link the Prussian Province with the Prussian monarchy were harnessed by Treitschke into a quintessential text, also extending these roles from the Prussian kingdom to the new Germany, then only imagined, to be built on a Prussian foundation. The conferment of such a mission-carrying function on the Prussian Province could not pass unnoticed. In the 1860s enthusiasm grew 41 [Treitschke], “Das deutsche Ordensland,” 95–151. 42 Cf. Hackmann, Ostpreußen und Westpreußen, 102–108. 43 [Treitschke], “Das deutsche Ordensland,” 96 [quoted from Heinrich von Treitschke, Origins of Prussianism (The Teutonic Knights) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1942), 19]. 44 [Treitschke], “Das deutsche Ordensland,” 95 [cited after: Treitschke, Origins, 18]. 45 [Treitschke], “Das deutsche Ordensland,” 96.

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markedly, as it appeared that the province would finally become part of a united Germany. In 1859–1861 the strongest expression of this enthusiasm came from the germinal Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, the circle of the so-called young Lithuanians (the group of Heinrich Behrend, Leopold von Hoverbeck, and Max von Forckenbeck). The notions of a united Germany in this environment were based primarily on democratic ideals. Engagement with the issue of a united Germany took place through attempts to reform the German Confederation. There were plans to transform it into a union state with a strong central government, yet with clear democratic principles ensuring the nation’s representation.46 The main supporters of the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei’s ideas were found in Danzig, Elbing (Elbląg), and in the area bordering Russia—that is, in Prussian Lithuania—and ultimately those ideas found a strong foothold in Königsberg as well.47 After 1859, the liberal movement in the Prussian Province started to define itself as primarily a national movement.48 This shift was influenced by the arrival of a new generation of liberals, among other factors.49 The regency of William began in Berlin in 1858, and his initial political moves gave the liberals great hopes, allowing them to speak about the beginning of a Neue Ära. The events of 1859–1861 in Italy had even more importance in strengthening nationalist engagement, especially the more intense discussions on whether something could be learned from Sardinia’s success in creating a united Italy. The events in Italy also held great importance for the Prussian Province because the defeat of Austria finally led to hopes for a more active role for Prussia in taking over the Habsburgs’ initiative on the “German issue.” This increased the possibility of implementing the “small German solution,” and it was precisely the realization of this solution that foresaw a space for the Prussian Province in a united Germany. The Deutsche Fortschrittspartei liberals, of course, were not supporters of Bismarck’s policies. Their efforts to involve the inhabitants 46 Adam, “Liberalismus in der Provinz Preußen,” 168; Winkler, Preussischer Liberalismus, 7–9. 47 Adam, “Liberalismus in der Provinz Preußen,” 175–179. 48 Pletzing, Vom Völkerfrühling, 322–323, 439. 49 Cf. Ibid., 134.

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of the Prussian Province in the “resolution of the German issue,” however, legitimized Bismarck’s political line. A majority of these efforts were based on the myth of Prussia’s German mission established in the mid-nineteenth century by the most highly regarded Prussian historians, which Treitschke directly related to the Prussian Province. When the societal impact of the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei was reduced in this region with the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein, the victory of 1866 near Königgrätz (Hradec Králové), and the ultimate incorporation of the Prussian Province into the North German Confederation in 1867, which increased the influence of Bismarck’s supporters,50 the main trajectories for searching for the Prussian Province’s specific place in German culture had already been laid out. The symbolic entrenchment of these trajectories, based on the myth of Prussia’s German mission, took place in the province sometime after 1871.51 So, even if we were to agree with contemporaries’ claims and the historiographical thesis that the real discovery of East Prussia in Germany was a response to the events of the First World War and took place only during the war itself,52 it is obvious that the main images associated with East Prussia had already been formed in German culture well before the war. Their origins date mostly to the first half of the nineteenth century. During the Kaiserreich period, the uniting of the Germans into a nation within the framework of the Reichsnation vision furthered two images: one of East Prussia as the cradle of the Hohenzollerns’ power, and a second of the medieval “state” of the Teutonic Order (deutsches Ordensland) as the quintessence of primeval “German power” and the forerunner of East Prussia. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the development of an alternative vision for uniting Germans into the Volksnation, other images achieved continuity. They included East Prussia as the seedbed of German Kultur, the image of their Bollwerk in the barbaric East, and that of the Eastern march (Ostmark)—the Reich’s border territory, the land beyond the boundaries of the former empire, with its characteristic specific 50 Ibid., 338–340. 51 Cf. Safronovas, “Borusianistinio didžiojo istorinio pasakojimo aktualizavimas,” 39–42, 47–50. 52 Landau, Ostpreußische Wanderungen, 2; Cf. Traba, Ostpreußen, 214–215.

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functions of becoming a space for colonizational plans and the spread of “high” German culture. Due to the fact that during the formation of these images East and West Prussia formed one administrational unit—the Prussian Province— they were equally associated with both territories. But how did they help in the appropriation of separate parts of these territories, such as Lithuania?

3.2. NATIONAL APPROPRIATION THROUGH THE CONSTRUCTION OF LOCAL EXCEPTIONALISM The transformation of the Prussian Province into a German national space, although it began before the creation of the German Imperial Reich, developed most rapidly after 1871. In this respect, the province was no exception, because the dynastic unity achieved in 1871 did not ensure unity among all Germans. The consolidation of the nation required at least two to three more decades. Yet a single trajectory of such consolidation was still missing at this stage. In line with the scheme suggested by Otto Dann,53 the unification of Germans’ nationalist systems of meanings during the imperial period occurred in line with one of two visions: the Reichsnation and the Volksnation. The trajectories that led to both visions grew out of Otto von Bismarck’s formula, the implementation of which had dual outcomes. On the one hand, that Prussia, in creating Germany, realized (at least in part) the essential liberal goal of German nationalism did not immediately mean that its ruling elite considered rejecting its typical prenationalistic worldview, in which relations between the government and the governed were based on categories of “ruler” and “subjects.” The most obvious evidence of this is the refusal to fully implement the liberal nationalist principle in Germany of legitimizing the government via mandates granted by the nation. On the other hand, the unification of 1871 left open many points of contradiction on whether German unity had 53 Otto Dann, “Nationale Fragen in Deutschland: Kulturnation, Volksnation, Reichsnation,” in Nation und Emotion, ed. Etienne François, Hannes Siegrist, and Jakob Vogel, vol. 110 of Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 66–82. Cf. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3: 1849–1914 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 946–953.

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indeed been achieved. Not only did the Bavarians and Prussians still need to be transformed into Germans, but also the creation of Germany did not realize the essential principle of the nationalist worldview—the congruence of cultural and political boundaries.54 As Ernst Hasse, the chairman of Alldeutscher Verband, which promoted radical nationalism, wrote in the early twentieth century, only 67.99 percent of all Europe’s Germans lived in Germany, and Germany itself was not a purely German state, even though Germans made up 92.45 percent of its population.55 It was this duality that determined the spread of the nationalist meaning systems of German unification along the two aforementioned trajectories after 1871. The steps taken toward the Reichsnation ambition after 1871 were determined by the strengthening confrontation felt throughout Europe in the nineteenth century between the pre-nationalist and nationalist worldviews, and in a certain sense, they could be seen as an attempt to combine those worldviews. The idea of one nation was instrumentalized to primarily ensure territorial integrity. The nationalist logic was adapted to newly organize differences and variety, which characterized the territories that had come under the Reich’s umbrella, and in this sense, this was imperial behavior. In a political sense, the ambition of the Reichsnation provoked the transfer of traditional loyalty related to the Prussian monarch and the Hohenzollern dynasty (so-called Prussian patriotism) onto the level of the entire newly created empire. This ambition sought to “politically socialize” the empire’s population through the family, primary school, gymnasium, university, the military, and various societies.56 However, their commonality was entrenched essentially on the basis of the old system of meanings, where the most important role was played by the symbols of the Hohenzollern dynasty and the emperor. The common imperial institutions (the emperor, government, army, navy, etc.) used to unite Germany’s inhabitants had to primarily gather wider levels of the population into the nation’s 54 Cf. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 1, 43. 55 Ernst Hasse, Das Deutsche Reich als Nationalstaat, vol. 1/1 of Deutsche Politik (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1905), 4. 56 Cf. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 950; Peter Walkenhorst, Nation—Volk— Rasse. Radikaler Nationalismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1890–1914, vol. 176 of Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 43.

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boundaries and to overcome, or at least become a serious counterweight to, regional uniqueness and particularism in the new Reich. Meanwhile the ambition of the Volksnation, which was the Reichsnation’s competitor during the imperial period,57 was oriented not at territorial integrity but at the integrity of the “blood community.” Along these lines, the goal was to harness radical nationalist ideas, and on the basis of “one language” and “one blood,” to transform the variety of social strata and confessional communities into a single-culture community. “Pure” prehistoric Germanic community spirit described the race-based ideal. According to this ideal, the proponents of this ambition aspired to create a utopian version of it in the modern era—a racially (culturally) homogenous Volksgemeinschaft, not necessarily encircled by existing German borders. Radical nationalist ideas, oriented toward the Volksgemeinschaft ideal, were popular in places where Germany’s colonialist policy interests were involved or in territories inhabited by nationally mixed populations where there was interest in “Germanizing” the non-German inhabitants.58 East Prussia could hardly boast of having both of these features. Colonialist policy interests were characteristic of strata that had accumulated economic power, of which East Prussia had few. The level of industrialization in this province was among the lowest in Germany, as the province was agrarian.59 As such, aspirations to “Germanization” existed mostly in areas inhabited by Polish Catholics.60 It was true that many of them lived in Germany’s eastern regions. However, the necessary conditions for spreading German nationalism of the Volksnation type in East Prussia were different from those in West Prussia, which had belonged to Poland for over three centuries. 57  In his study, Walkenhorst (2007) sees radical German nationalism as expressed via the Volksnation principle as a competitor of the Reichsnation idea, which was supported by imperial institutions. 58 Walkenhorst, Nation—Volk—Rasse, 68–79. 59 In 1882 in the East Prussian Province 65.5 percent (in 1907, 58.2 percent) of all working members of the population were employed in the agricultural and forestry sectors. Cf. Thomas M. Bohn, “Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Urbanisierung in Ostpreußen im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung,” in Zwischen Lübeck und Novgorod, 362. 60 Cf. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 127–128, 128–132.

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Generally, when analyzing the use of images through which the Prussian Province was incorporated into German nationalist culture after 1871, we notice that some images were more relevant in defining West Prussia than East Prussia. There were attempts to inculcate the borussianistic myth-based system of meanings throughout Germany, which is why links with the Hohenzollerns were equally stressed in both provinces. They both shared the role of being the Hohenzollern monarchy’s “cradle” and accentuated the Teutonic Order’s “state” history as this monarchy’s prototype. However, for example, in the Ostmark image that bore colonialist implications, West Prussian motifs obviously dominated even though it was applied to East Prussia as well.61 Of more relevance in West Prussia was support for the image of Germans as “carriers of culture.” In the mid-nineteenth century, quarrels arose specifically in West Prussia over which nation had more “inheritance rights” according to the linguistically defined space inhabited by both Poles and Germans. This point was not of such great relevance in the East Prussian Province because here the Prussian government did not have the same level of national problems with Polish speakers or with Lithuanians as was the case in West Prussia. In a privy councilor’s notice addressed to the Prussian interior minister, which analyzed the Lithuanians’ cultural movement in East Prussia, Wilhelm Steputat, the deputy elected by Lithuanians themselves to the Prussian Landtag said in the spring of 1914 that “the number of Lithuanians is so miserly … that they will never pose any threat to Prussia.”62 The 61 Cf. Fritz Braun, Ostmärkische Städte und Landschaften (Weimar: Alexander Duncker, 1914); Fritz Braun, Die Ostmark. Ein Heimatbuch (Leipzig: Friedrich Brandstetter, 1919). See also the compendium by Deutscher Ostmarkenverein where the image of the Eastern march is clearly identified with the Poznan and West Prussian Provinces: Die deutsche Ostmark, ed. Deutscher Ostmarkenverein (Lissa i. P.: Oskar Eulitz, 1913). An exception in this case were the works by East Prussian authors themselves, who were inclined to apply the Eastern march image to their province also, e.g., Hecht, Aus der deutschen Ostmark. 62 “Schreiben des wirklichen geheimen Rats [Unterschrift unleserlich] an der Minister des Inneren über die nationale Haltung der litauisch sprechenden Bevölkerung in Ostpreußen,” May 9, 1914, in Selbstbewusstsein und Modernisierung. Soziokultureller Wandel in Preußisch-Litauen vor und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Robert Traba, vol. 3 of Einzelveröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Warschau (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2000), 36.

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interpretations based on belief in the German cultural mission in the East were also different in East Prussia. Unlike in West Prussia, most attention in these interpretations focused on the Rétablissement (economic reinstatement) that took place in Prussian Lithuania and to some extent in Masuria in the eighteenth century. This redistribution of wealth served as a basis not for the prioritization of “historic rights” of the Germanic peoples against the Slavs and not even for the Teutonic Order’s cultural “mission,” as was the case in West Prussia, but to promote eighteenth-century Prussian rulers’ merciful “state thinking,” the conviction of this country’s government apparatus that acceptance of the “gift” that was German culture was a positive shift.63 Thus, the unification of the German nationalist system of meanings based on the Reichsnation principle was more relevant in East Prussia and even dominated here, at least until the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To a large extent, these meanings had to encompass the messianism of the Hohenzollerns and the myth of Prussia’s German mission. As a result, in East Prussia during the Kaiserreich period, it was the nationalization trend from pre-1871 related to the transformation of traditional loyalty to the Prussian monarch that was most evident. Where did this trend lead? In the first half of the nineteenth century in the Prussian Province, we come across several identity levels among the provincial elite: (1) Prussian (East and West) provincial patriotism, based on an understanding of this province’s exceptionalism; (2) Prussian patriotism (of the king’s subjects); and (3) a sense of belonging to the German nation.64 By the second half of the nineteenth century, this configuration of identity components, for which East Prussia’s population stood out, changed: the third identity level overwhelmed the second’s significance. Nationalist ideas encroached ever deeper into society, and the nobility increasingly withdrew from the political stage, whereas townspeople became more entrenched here—they were, after all, the main group of nationalist adepts. As is stated in historiography, even prior to 1871 the erosion of Prussian patriotism was often 63 Cf. Hackmann, Ostpreußen und Westpreußen, 130; Kossert, Preußen, Deutsche oder Polen, 92–93. 64 Cf. Niedzielska, “Tożsamość elit politycznych,” 53.

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a necessary condition for strenghtening national identities.65 After 1871 German nationalism was supported not as an ideology competing against the pre-nationalist worldview but as one integrating and instrumentalizing this worldview. It concentrated on the dynasty as a symbol of German unity, stressing Prussia’s German mission and the priority of Germans’ consolidation into the Reichsnation. But what happened with the first identity level? In the first half of the nineteenth century the main carriers of Prussian provincial patriotism, which expressed the Old Prussian self-awareness, were the Prussian Province’s nobility and townspeople. Based on this self-awareness, but without questioning their loyalty to the ruler, the province’s elite embraced a type of particularism. Even in the 1860s, although the Prussian Province’s liberals were obviously in favor of Germany’s unification, the actions taken by their camp can be treated as an expression of the Prussian Province’s particularism. If in these actions there indeed was even a trace of this particularism, it, we could say, was erased in 1866 when Bismarck’s political moves shattered the liberal political opposition in the Prussian Landtag. Prussian Lithuania, most likely, remained one of the last bastions of support for the ideas of the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, as the reaction to the splintering of the party and the national liberals in 1866 was felt here even some time after 1866.66 In this way the milieu that extended the most support for Prussian provincial patriotism was either marginalized or itself engaged primarily behind the idea of national unity. Nevertheless, the system of meanings on which provincial patriotism rested did not disappear. It formed a certain information field whose further development was ensured by the University of Königsberg’s lecturers, educators, teachers, historians, regional amateur historians, other enthusiasts of the past—and even part of the officials’ network, which covered the entire province. Due to the efforts of this network, what happened in East Prussia could be likened to what occurred in other regions of the unified Germany67—the integration of local, unique identities into a common 65 Pletzing, Vom Völkerfrühling, 473. 66 Ibid., 373. 67 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials. The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1–19; Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local

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German identity. In the late nineteenth century, this integration was efficiently assisted by the critique of civilization, urbanization, and pauperism, as opposed to landscapes noted for their harmony in nature and culture and barely changed by civilization and the so-called home movement (Heimatbewegung).68 In this context, the system of meanings on which Prussian provincial patriotism had once rested was harnessed in the development of East Prussian Heimat self-awareness.69 The domination of the Reichsnation perspective during the Kaiserreich period allowed the construction of a Germany of many Heimats developing their exceptionalism yet not overstepping the Reich’s idea of unity. East Prussia became one such Heimat. Scholars of nationalism, interpreting its spread through the prism of communication and social mobilization,70 noted sometime ago that new forms of social communication and social mobilization ensured a new kind of social solidarity—specifically, the growth of national solidarity. The sense of belonging to the newly established Reich of 1871 spread through interaction with forward-thinking social groups gathered mostly in cities and via the change in communication forms that facilitated these interactions. The development of the railroad network, the functioning of the postal and telegraph systems, and the spread of periodicals into villages brought the most distant corners of the newly created Reich closer together, allowing them to feel like part of the larger whole. In the regions, this feeling unavoidably encouraged a symbolic inclusion into that whole through education, opening them up to “national” tourism, historical narratives, and various symbols. In all cases, this inclusion took place by relating local meanings to the common Metaphor. Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 97–189. 68 For more, see Karl Ditt, “Die deutsche Heimatbewegung 1871–1945,” in Heimat, ed. Will Cremer and Ansgar Klein, vol. I: Analysen, Themen, Perspektiven (Bielefeld: Westfalen, 1990), 135–154. 69 For more on the Heimat concept and its content, see Cremer and Klein, Heimat, vol. I (in particular, the contributions by Willy Cremer and Ansgar Klein, Christian von Krockow, and Bernhard Waldenfels). 70 Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966); Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Anderson, Imagined Communities.

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national content. Points of reference were thus formulated in places with which the nation could associate itself. The Heimat self-awareness spread on the basis of both the localization of national meanings and the nationalization of local meanings. This twofold process was chiefly noticeable in the education sphere, specifically in that sector of school learning that conveyed historical and geographical knowledge to the province’s pupils. It should be noted that that such knowledge was not the most important content that had to be taught to young people in East Prussia. However, a relatively large number of hours were dedicated to it in curriculums. Based on the number of hours, the teaching of history and geography in gymnasiums lay somewhere between the main languages (Latin, German, sometimes Greek) and mathematics at one end of the spectrum, and all the other subjects at the other.71 A smaller number of hours were allocated to history and geography only in those secondary schools for boys and especially girls that did not prepare their pupils for university studies. However, in all cases, the teaching of history and geography in schools started with familiarization with the Heimat. The pupils gained the essential time and space guidelines in folk schools (Volksschule) or the preparatory classes for higher schools (the so-called Vorschule) depending on whether their parents had selected free or paid education. At the latter, geography was often not a separate subject, but pupils’ “home knowledge” (Heimatkunde) was fostered. This was a discipline where spatial cognition was consecutively expanded from where one lived, where their school was located, to the location of their province. Historical and geographical information was presented in an integrated way in these Heimat lessons. In the lowest class (sixth grade) of secondary schools, this knowledge was in part repeated, and only later did teachers move on to presenting Europe and the other continents, with Prussia, Germany, and Austria always being given separate attention. For 71 Cf. Eduard Küsel, XXX. Jahres-Bericht 1890/91 über das Königliche Gymnasium zu Memel (Memel: F. W. Siebert, 1891), 31; K. Müller, Königliches Gymnasium zu Tilsit. Bericht über das Schuljahr 1897–1898 (Tilsit: Otto v. Mauderode, 1898), 13; Programm des Königlichen Gymnasiums und Realgymnasiums zu Insterburg (Insterburg: Dr. Albert Bittner’s Buchdruckerei, 1911), 3.

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example, in the gymnasium preparation classes in Memel, pupils were taught the geography of the Memel town and county, and of East Prussia, as well as the most important dates in Prussian history and the reign of the Hohenzollerns, and later on this information would be repeated in the lowest grade at gymnasium.72 In the lowest class at the Queen Louise Girls’ School in Tilsit, the pupils’ geographic horizon was also expanded, starting from the school bench and extending to the building, to the places of their birth, the town and its surrounds, Tilsit County, the Memel River basin, and individual landscapes found in East Prussia. At the same time pupils had to know about the role of Tilsit in critical events in Prussian history.73 In the lowest grades at the Insterburg Boys’ Secondary School, they would start by learning about the geography of Insterburg and its surrounds, plus East and West Prussia and the most general history of their fatherland, and only later would they progress to learning about the whole.74 Similarly, in the lowest grades at the Gumbinnen Girls’ Secondary School, geographic knowledge began with the school building and extended to the surrounding streets and the city, continue onto Gumbinnen County and Governmental District, the East Prussian Province, West Prussia, the Prussian state and the German Reich, and finally to Europe and the other continents. Historical knowledge in the lowest classes would also be gained from readings providing the most general information, particularly readings about Heimat, which in this case were related to the history of the Teutonic Order and the most important moments in its history.75 History and geography was taught according to similar principles at folk schools. In Tilsit County’s primary schools world knowledge (geography) lessons also began with learning what Heimat was and continued 72 Eduard Küsel, XXXIV. Jahres-Bericht 1894/95 über das Königliche Luisen-Gymnasium zu Memel (Memel: F. W. Siebert, 1895), 13–14. 73 Lehrplan der Königin Luisen-Schule Tilsit auf Grund der Bestimmungen vom 15. August und 12. December 1908 (Tilsit: Kaptuller, 1911), 52–53. 74 Bericht über die Knaben-Mittelschule in Insterburg für das Schuljahr 1901/1902 (Insterburg: Buchdruckerei Dr. A. Bittner, 1902), 10–11. 75 J. Bartezky, Vierunddreissigster Bericht über die Städtische höhere Töchterschule zu Gumbinnen (Gumbinnen: Wilhelm Krauseneck, 1905), 8–9; J. Bartezky, Ostern 1911. Vierzigster Bericht über die Cecilienschule (Städtische höhere Mädchenschule) zu Gumbinnen (Tilsit: [s.n.], 1911), 6–14.

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on to East and West Prussia, the other Prussian provinces, and ultimately the Prussian kingdom, Germany, and so on.76 Thus, in both primary and secondary curriculums of East Prussian schools, knowledge of Heimat acted as a key point of reference, further developing the trajectory of spatial cognition in pupils’ minds from one place to the whole (Germany), highlighting East Prussia’s links with that whole. Tourism also served to maintain such links with the whole, becoming livelier in the late nineteenth century due to improved communication and the opportunities it offered to combine economic interests with interest in local exceptionalism. It was in the nineteenth century that many locations in Europe developed marketing aimed at tourism, popularizing their “cultural capital” and seeking to stand out and demonstrate their uniqueness. In the nineteenth century, marketing that targeted tourists also appeared in East Prussia, but marketing aimed at “resort” (wellness center) guests was enhanced in the second half of the century with new activities directed at the national consumer. These activities had to show “Germans” what made East Prussia special in the common German context. East Prussia, of course, featured in descriptions of tourist destinations much earlier. But by the late nineteenth century, we observe the first efforts from East Prussia itself to exploit its uniqueness to draw tourists, to find local towns and locations that it could boast of. It was at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the first Heimat compendiums appeared aimed at a much wider audience than simply school pupils. Among them, we could mention a book which was released in several editions, written by the rector of the Wehlau (now Znamensk) Girls’ Secondary School, August Ambrassat,77 and various Heimatbuchs that were released focusing on separate East Prussian landscapes.78 At the 76 Ernst Pohl, Stoffverzeichnisse und Stundenpläne für die ein- und zweiklassigen Volksschulen sowie Studenpläne für die Halbtags- und dreiklassigen Schulen mit 2 Lehrern im Kreise Tilsit (Tilsit: Rud. Lösch, 1882), 10–11, 24–25. 77 August Ambrassat, Die Provinz Ostpreussen: Bilder aus der Geographie, Geschichte und Sage unserer Heimatprovinz (Königsberg: Wilh. Koch, 1896); August Ambrassat, Die Provinz Ostpreussen. Ein Handbuch der Heimatkunde, 2nd rev. ed. (Königsberg: J. H. Bon, 1912). 78 Cf. the four volumes from the series “Deutsches Land und Leben in Einzelschilderungen: Landschaftskunden und Städtegeschichten” about East Prussia’s landscapes: Albert

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Figure 15.  Working in schools of several East Prussian landscapes, Albert Zweck had an opportunity to observe their distinctive traits directly before spreading them to a German-speaking audience. The inclusion of a typical study on Heimat know­ledge of one East Prussian landscape (the Lithuanian) into the series “German Land and Living (italics mine—V. S.)” proves the strategy of turning these traits into “German” ones.

Zweck, Litauen: eine Landes- und Volkskunde (Stuttgart: Hobbing & Bühle, 1898); Albert Zweck, Masuren: eine Landes- und Volkskunde (Stuttgart: Hobbing & Bühle, 1900); Alois Bludau, Oberland, Ermeland, Natangen und Barten: eine Landes- und Volkskunde (Stuttgart: Hobbing & Bühle, 1901); Albert Zweck, Samland, Pregel- und Frischingthal (Stuttgart: Hobbing & Bühle, 1902)—the fifth volume was dedicated to Königsberg: Richard Armstedt, Geschichte der Königl. Haupt- und Residenzstadt Königsberg in Preussen (Stuttgart: Hobbing & Bühle, 1899). See also Wilhelm Obgartel, Der Regierungsbezirk Gumbinnen. Ein Heimatbuch (Insterburg: Selbstverlag, 1912). More on readings of this type: Wolfgang Kessler, “Von der Aneignung der Region als ‘Heimat’ zur Dokumentation des Verlorenen. Heimatbücher zum historischen Nordostdeutschland,” in Das

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same time, several East Prussian towns (Allenstein, Braunsberg [now Braniewo], Tilsit, Memel, Insterburg) released their first travel guides in the 1890s—a form of literature that in East Prussia had hitherto been confined to Königsberg and the Sambia peninsula resorts. Their compilation was usually the result of the activities of special societies established in these towns for the development of tourism. These kinds of societies actively operated in Memel, Tilsit, Osterode (now Ostróda), Rößel (Reszel), Allenstein, and Braunsberg, as well as the resorts of Cranz (Zelenogradsk) and Neukuhren (Pionersky) in the first years of the twentieth century. In January 1904, the University of Königsberg professor Eduard Koschwitz established a united East Prussian Society for Tourism Development (Verein zur Hebung des Fremdenverkehrs), which in 1907 along with other similar East and West Prussian societies became one of the founders of the Verband der Fremdenverkehrsvereine in Ost- und Westpreußen.79 In the first monthly issue, the East Prussian society clearly identified its goal of nurturing love for the home and the home feeling (Heimatgefühl),80 or simply, of strengthening the self-awareness of Heimat. Interest in tourism development gradually grew among the first public museums established in East Prussia. Museums that were established in Königsberg—the East Prussian Province Museum founded in 1876,81 the museum of the Prussia Society opened to the public in Königsberg Castle in 1881,82 or the East Prussian Home Open-Air Museum set up even before the First World War—were created as collections of exhibits of the past that could testify to the uniqueness of all of East Prussia.

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Heimatbuch: Geschichte, Methodik, Wirkung, ed. Mathias Beer (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2010), 101–127. Der Wanderer durch West- u. Ost-Preussen (further WDWOP), June 1904 (no. 3): [1]; WDWOP, June 1907 (no. 3): 47. “Was wir wollen,” WDWOP, April 1904 (no. 1): [1]. Christine Reich and Wilfried Menghin, “Prussia-Sammlung w Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte w Berlinie,” in Archeologiczne księgi inwentarzowe dawnego Prussia-Museum, ed. Anna Bitner-Wróblewska, vol. I of Aestorium Hereditas (Olsztyn: Archiwum Państwowe w Olsztynie, 2008), 69. Aleksandra Rzeszotarska-Nowakiewicz, “Prussia-Museum w Królewcu,” in Archeologiczne księgi inwentarzowe, 33–35; Ocalona historia Prus Wschodnich. Archaeologicyne księgi inwentarzowe dawnego Prussia-Museum, ed. Anna Bitner-Wróblewska, Tomasz Nowakiewicz, Aleksandra Rzeszotarska-Nowakiewicz, and Wojciech Wróblewski (Warsaw: [s.n.], 2008), 14.

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Archaeological and ethnographic exhibits made up the main part of these museums’ collections. They were used to try to explain what kind of particularities the easternmost province of Germany was known for in the context of the entire country. The systematic monument conservation activities initiated in the province in 1891 were more or less also dedicated to searching for and identifying these particularities. Let us glance at the first list of East Prussian monuments compiled by the province’s monument conservationist Adolf Boetticher.83 We can easily notice that via this list the monument conservationist gave each town, church village, and many other places at least one material representation of the past, usually selecting a local castle or church for this purpose. It was specifically castles and churches that formed the basis of Boetticher’s list of provincial monuments, and it was they that represented the unique features of East Prussia’s towns. These unique features were later used for educational tourism in travel guides, in Heimat literature, and ultimately in many of the photographs and postcards that represented these towns. Often identifying with the times of the Teutonic Order or the heritage of the Duchy of Prussia, these local monuments simultaneously showed each separate town’s or church village’s place in a more general narrative, where one of the foundations for the uniqueness of East Prussia’s Heimat existed in the identification of this province with the Teutonic Order’s “state” and the “cradle of the Prussian monarchy.” That same function was in effect carried out by the local histories of various towns and counties, constituting another genre in educational literature that became widespread in East Prussia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Especially in the cases of the larger cities—Königsberg, Tilsit, and Memel—these histories were often constructed by entwining local events into common German historical plots, demonstrating how the history of a specific place could be incorporated into the more general context. Finally, the practice of installing monuments, memorials, and places of commemoration in East Prussia characteristic of the 1871–1914 period 83 Adolf Boetticher, Die Bau- und Kunstdenkmäler der Provinz Ostpreußen, nos. I–IX (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1891–1899).

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also demonstrates this trend. The semantics of an absolute majority of them can be joined into three plots that entrenched the borussianistic historical master narrative. The first plot—its essential accent was the glorification of the Hohenzollerns and other individual representatives of this dynasty—embodied symbols dedicated to the different representatives of the ruling dynasty, especially Queen Louise. The second plot, which postulated the myth of the Reich’s founding in 1871, focused mainly on symbols related to the cult of Kaiser William I and Chancellor Bismarck. The third plot, where the main accent was on marking the 1813–1815 War of Liberation and the so-called unification wars (1864, 1866, 1870–1871), was conveyed by the memorial plaques bearing the surnames of parishioners who died in these wars and monuments to those who died in the unification wars that appeared in many churches and almost in every county center of the East Prussian Province. However, this actualization of common symbols characteristic to all of Kaiser Germany also had a local dimension. First, the appearance of monuments honoring the unification wars in East Prussian cities testifies not only to the scale to which this plot line had been developed but also to the interest in expressing a common-national memorialization practice according to its level of local relevance. People erected monuments not to unknown soldiers but specifically to those who sacrificed their lives in the unification wars and originated from their town or county. Second, the cult of Queen Louise in East Prussia was actualized not just anywhere but in those places where the queen had once visited. The citizens of Königsberg organized a memorial site dedicated to her in 1874 on the city’s outskirts in a former park where the queen used to go for walks. The motif of this memorialization was copied in 1900 in Memel: a memorial stone was laid for Louise here, not far from the city in the picturesque lands of Klein Tauerlaucken (Tauralaukis), which the royal couple had admired in 1807–1808. Construction of a monument to Louise in Tilsit in 1900 was also not accidental. This was where the so-called House of Louise had survived, an idea that related to one of the most important plots from the borussianistic historical master narrative (a diminished Prussia, personified in Queen Louise, retains its dignity in a meeting with Napoleon). Third, in the creation of the

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monument to William I in Königsberg, the kaiser was “dressed” the way he appeared during the coronation ceremony of 1861 that was held in Königsberg itself. Similarly, in Memel a bas-relief (1896) that appeared on the pedestal of a monument to William I depicted how the ten-year-old William, the future kaiser, was accepted into the Prussian army in Memel in 1807. Fourth, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in certain cities of East Prussia there were very clear initiatives of organized groups of people to erect monuments to various figures from the past who were essentially important to that city yet at the same time linked that city with the borussianistic concept of Germany’s past (or with the understanding of belonging to Germany via Prussia’s history). Such monuments were the one to poet Max von Schenkendorf unveiled in 1890 in Tilsit, the monument erected in 1891 in Königsberg to Duke Albert, the monuments to astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in Frauenberg (now Frombork) (1909) and Allenstein (1916), the monument-well unveiled in 1912 in Memel to poet Simon Dach and the heroine of a popular song (incorrectly) attributed to his pen, the monument in Pillau (now Baltiysk) (1913) to the Great Elector as the builder and developer of the Pillau fortress, and the monument to General Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg unveiled in 1913 in Königsberg. Fifth, on the monument to perished soldiers in Labiau two medallions were attached picturing not only Kaiser William I but also the Great Elector Frederick William with the inscription of the year 1656, during which the Labiau residents saw their part in the borussianistic master narrative (the Treaty of Labiau of 1656, according to which Sweden’s king withdrew the status of the Duchy of Prussia and Warmia as a Swedish fief on behalf of the Great Elector). Similarly, a memorial plaque was unveiled in 1907 on the Wehlau Town Hall building. It served as a reminder of the treaty signed in Wehlau in 1657 between the Great Elector and the Polish king, according to which the latter also gave up his feudal rights to the Duchy of Prussia to the benefit of the first. All of these cases show that local and national identity components in East Prussia always developed alongside one another during the Kaiserreich period. The bolstering of the local identity component allowed the creation of the feeling of bringing the nation closer to a specific place, expressing the sense of belonging primarily through symbols of relevance to it. However,

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the sense of belonging to Germany via activities fostering an understanding of Heimat spread not just by localization of nation-building meanings but also by increasing the richness of the latter through local unique features, which had to be actualized by searching for one’s place in the larger entity. The main source for postulating these kinds of unique features was not those cultural meanings that had already attained common German status but specific meanings characteristic of a given region, and thus brought out of the common German context. One source for such meanings was related to the Teutonic Order’s past in the territory of the Prussian Province. In the mid-nineteenth century this set of meanings, as mentioned, had been nationalized, allowing it to become a resource often used in determining a place’s relationship with the whole. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, another element giving the Prussian Province its uniqueness was harnessed during nationalization— the fact that in a cultural sense, that province’s territory was not homogenous. In the way that the Germany of 1871 was a conglomerate of territories possessing different experiences that now had to be organized in accordance with a new logic, so too with the Prussian Province which had once been pieced together from regions known for their particular unique aspects, which they still bore in the nineteenth century. The discussion here is not so much about the province’s division into West and East Prussia, formally reinstated in 1878, but until the very beginning of the twentieth century not as important in knowledge about Heimat as it was among officialdom. This refers to the unique features that East Prussia itself was known for, which formed as a result of the different histories of subordination of the separate parts of this province, their confessional differences, differences in language and dialect, ultimately even the natural differences which in the nineteenth century became an important criterion for distinguishing one landscape from another. Attempts at combining knowledge about peculiar territories in the province, to structurize those peculiar aspects in informative texts about Heimat, and to use these peculiar features to explain East Prussia’s unity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries encouraged an understanding of the province’s different landscapes. The first works describing these landscapes—prototypes of later knowledge about Heimat texts and

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tourism guides— combined topographical, statistical, and historical information. The earliest works of this kind to be released, already appearing in the early nineteenth century, were about Sambia.84 However, in the 1860s– 1870s new types of texts on landscapes started to appear, focusing primarily on Lithuania85 and Masuria.86 The fact that specifically these latter landscapes received attention first can be explained in that they carried the greatest potential for exceptionality. The province’s landscapes carrying this potential can also be determined based on the establishment of societies in East Prussia that focused on providing information about individual landscapes’ unique points. The earliest example, the Warmia History Society founded in 1856 in Frauenburg,87 testified to the major exceptionality of this part of East Prussia—Warmia was the “youngest” part of the province, joined only in 1772, which also stood out for possessing the largest concentration of Catholics and a significant number of Polish speakers. The Lithuanian Literary Society founded in 1879 in Tilsit was the second organization of this kind, dedicated to collecting and analyzing all material related to Lithuanians—the nation (Volk) that had once given the most exceptionality to another East Prussian landscape, Lithuania.88 The activities of the 84 G[otthilf] A[ugust] von M[altitz], Wegweiser in die schönsten Gegenden und auffal­ lens­ten Partieen des preussischen Ostseestrandes zwischen Kranz und Pillau (Königsberg: Schultz, 1818); K[arl] E[mil] G[ebauer], Die samländische Ostsee-Küste und ihre Umgebungen. Für Reisende (Königsberg: Hartungsche Hofbuckdruckerei, 1826; 1831; 1837); Karl Emil Gebauer, Kunde des Samlandes oder Geschichte und topographisch-statistisches Bild der ostpreussischen Landschaft Samland (Königsberg: Verlag der Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1844); Robert Bürkner, Wanderungen durch das Samland. Ein Wegweiser für Reisende (Königsberg: Verlag der Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1844). 85 Glagau, Litauen; Gustav Müller, “Preußisch Littauen und die Littauer,” Globus. Illustrirte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde XVI (1869): 25–28. Material on Lithuania’s landscape dominated in another two works also: Julius Schumann, Geologische Wanderungen durch Altpreussen. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Königsberg: Hübner & Matz, 1869) (it contained texts written in 1859–1864); Passarge, Aus Baltischen Landen. 86 “Die Landschaft Masuren in Ostpreußen,“ Globus. Illustrirte Zeitschrift für Länderund Völkerkunde XV (1869): 22–26; Toeppen, Geschichte Masurens. 87 For the prehistory of the society’s founding, its statutes, and list of first members, see [Andreas Thiel], “Historischer Verein für Ermland,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte und Altertumskunde Ermlands 1, no. 1 (1858–1860): 1–15. 88 For the prehistory of the society’s founding, its statutes and list of first members, see “Mittheilungen der Litauischen literarischen Gesellschaft,” Altpreussische Monats­ schrift 16 (1879): 659–669; MLLG 1 (1883): 1–14.

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Masovia Literary Society, established in 1894 in Lötzen (now Giżycko), paid most attention to the uniqueness of the Masuria region, distinctive for its Polish-speaking population.89 Finally, in 1898 the Oberland History Society was founded in Preussisch Holland (now Pasłęk), which examined the past of the Oberland region known for its unique dialect, and historically almost physically separated from Prussia for a very long time.90 Comparing the activities of these societies, it is obvious that all had somewhat different ways of activity and purposes. Regardless, in all four cases each sought to integrate the distinction of separate East Prussian regions into the system of meanings that prevailed in the Kaiserreich period, to open them up to the German-speaking audience, and, no less important, to make these distinctions recognizable as familiar, or “German.” This facilitated understanding East Prussia as “enriching Germanness” not just with the system of meanings associated with the Teutonic Order’s past but also by the fact that the East Prussian Heimat, like Germany itself, comprised several elements known for their unique features. These elements, including Lithuania, were as important as the meanings that suggested local exceptionalism were in the German version of East Prussia’s appropriation. The highlighting of the uniqueness of Lithuania’s landscape in this context became a resource for demonstrating East Prussia’s uniqueness and its place and importance in Germany.

3.3. PRUSSIAN LITHUANIA’S TRANSFORMATION INTO A GERMAN NATIONAL SPACE The symbolic appropriation of Lithuania’s landscape and its inclusion into the German nationalist system of meanings was a twofold process. On the one hand, Prussian Lithuania was transformed for the Germans into a space of “their own” through the creation and spread of symbolic representations of Germanness in that space—in other words, by marking the space. On the 89 In its first years, it was called the Society for Cognition of Masuria (Verein zur Kunde Masurens) but was renamed in late 1896. For the list of the society’s first members and statute, see Beiträge zur Kunde von Masuren 1 (1895): iii–iv, Beilage. See here for the circumstances of its renaming and new statutes: Mitteilungen der Litterarischen Gesellschaft Masovia 2 (1896): 64–66, 69–71. 90 Prehistory of the society’s founding and its statutes: Oberländische Geschichtsblätter 1 (1899): 1–13.

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other hand, this appropriation occurred by turning various representations of Lithuania into markers and entrenching them in informative texts about East Prussia, and in a wider sense in literature, which was recognized as being “East Prussian.” In the first case, the space became familiar through common German symbols, given sense in the landscape. In the second case, it became familiar through symbols typical of that landscape given sense in the common German context. The marking of space with German nationalist symbols in Prussian Lithuania was not identical to what happened in the other East Prussian landscapes. Compared to Sambia, Notangia, and Warmia, not to mention West Prussia, there were considerably fewer castles left over from the Teutonic Order period remaining in Lithuania. In this relatively large territory—such castles had once been built in Memel, Ragnit, Insterburg, Tilsit, and Windenburg (now Ventė), as well as in the bishop’s former domains in Georgenburg and Saalau—the density of castles was small, and by the mid-nineteenth century some of them had completely disintegrated. Many churches in Lithuania also dated to the sixteenth century and later. Due to the lack of material representations that could testify to the Order’s times, it was considerably more difficult to apply the German Ordensland image to Lithuania than to other East and West Prussian landscapes. The set of meanings related to the Order that was in the mid-nineteenth century nationalized and transformed into a measure for understanding the role of East and West Prussia in German national culture practically could not be applied to one East Prussian landscape— Lithuania. Prussian Lithuania’s lands were “cultivated” much later than other East Prussian territories. In the German narrative, the most important impulses in the “cultivation” of these lands were traditionally related to the times of the Reformation and Rétablissement. Both cases ideally suited depicting the spread of German Kultur into the “uncultivated” lands. Moreover, they were both oriented toward specific representatives of the Hohenzollern dynasty, the Prussian duke Albert and King Frederick William I, to whose merciful will Lithuania’s development was attributed, thus also the spread of German Kultur in Prussian Lithuania. Back in 1835 in Lithuania’s administrative center Gumbinnen, a monument to Frederick William I was erected, honoring him as the

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founder of Gumbinnen town and as the main hero who helped Lithuania back onto its feet after the epidemic plague of 1709–1711. This role of the monarch was marked with the inscription “the Recoverer of Lithuania” (Litthauens Wiederhersteller) on the monument as well.91 Similarly, in the city of Tilsit, special respect was nurtured for the city’s founder Duke Albert, who had a street and a square named after him in Tilsit in the early twentieth century, and in 1912 Duke Albert’s name was given to a boys’ secondary school. An unquestionable guardian of Albert’s memory in East Prussia was the Evangelical Lutheran Church, while in the Lithuanian landscape this memory was additionally specific in that many of the parishes here considered themselves as having been founded during Albert’s times. In the early twentieth century, of the 119 parishes in Gumbinnen Governmental District, 20 (17 percent) associated their founding with the period of Albert’s reign.92 Various representatives of the ruling dynasty, even after 1871, remained among the main symbols through which the relationship with Germany was entrenched in Lithuania. The narrative framework of their significance was from one side dictated by Prussia’s German mission and other legitimizing myths, and from the other by local meanings, attributed in Lithuania to specific members of the Hohenzollerns. One of the most important members of the dynasty in this context was, without a doubt, Queen Louise. She embodied the dignity of the Hohenzollern monarchy and its fortitude, and after the queen’s passing in 1810 her figure had already become a symbolic icon of the so-called War of Liberation (1813–1815), encouraging 91 “Die Enthüllung der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Statue in Gumbinnen,” Preußische Provinzial-Blätter 14 (1835): 286–295; “Beschreibung der Feierlichkeiten, welche bei der zum Geburtsfeste Friedrich Wilhlems III. von der Stadt Gumbinnen veranstal­ teren geschenkten Standbildes Friedrich Wilhelm I. stattgefunden haben,” ibid., 394–406, here 401. 92 Parishes often had substantiated facts justifying this kind of identification, but there were cases where only vague data existed about a parish’s establishment, yet it still identified with Albert’s reign. Thus, in the parish almanac of 1912, five out of twenty parishes—Stallupönen (Nesterov), Tollmingkehmen (Chistye Prudy), Werden (Verdainė), Wischwill (Viešvilė), and Tilsit Rural Parish—denoted their date of founding as “under the rule of Duke Albert” (unter Herzog Albrecht): Pfarr-Almanach für die Provinz Ostpreußen, ed. Schirrmann and Hirsch, 4th ed. (Königsberg: Selbstverlag, 1912), 33–55.

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Figure 16.  Nothing happens without the King’s will. “The Recoverer of Lithuania,” Frederick William I, blesses his domains in a sculpture by Christian Daniel Rauch erected in 1835 in the administrative center of Lithuania—Gumbinnen. Photograph from the collections of the East Prussian monument conservator, published in no. 5 of the accession book on East Prussian monuments (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1895).

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others to find support in her example. After 1871 the cult of Louise strengthened when the queen was associated with the dynasty’s cult, as a symbol uniting all of Germany, and the so-called myth of the founding of the Reich (Louise now became the mother of the first German kaiser, allegedly “blessing” his actions in unifying Germany).93 The strongest stimuli for signifying Louise in Lithuania were in those places where the queen had once visited—Memel and Tilsit.94 Tilsit was home to not just the legendary House of Louise where she met with Napoleon; her name was given to a bridge over the Memel River (consecrated in 1907), a girls’ school (named in 1895), a cinema, a pharmacy, and an avenue in Jakobsruhe Park, where a monument dedicated to Louise was unveiled in 1900. In Memel a street was named after Queen Louise in the early nineteenth century; in 1891 her name was given to a boys’ gymnasium, in 1905 to a pharmacy, and in 1911 to a rest home for disadvantaged children. In 1900 in Klein Tauerlaucken, not far from Memel, a memorial stone in her name was installed, close to “Louise’s oak,” under which she allegedly enjoyed sitting. Furthermore, in 1890 there was a proposal to erect a monument to Louise in the very center of Memel, in front of the city hall building where the king and queen lived in 1807– 1808. Instead of this monument, eventually in 1907 a monument expressing all the borussianistic historical master narrative plots was installed, titled

93 Philipp Demandt, Luisenkult. Die Unsterblichkeit der Königin von Preußen (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 9–10, 449–450. 94 In the first Memel tourist guides, places related to Queen Louise’s visit were already represented as worth visiting (Führer durch Memel und Umgebung [Woerl’s Reisehandbücher]) (Memel: Robert Schmidt’s Buchhandlung, 1892), 5, 6, 10–11, 12, 15–16; Führer durch Memel und Umgegend, ed. Verein zur Verschönerung von Memel und Umgegend und zur Hebung des Fremdenverkehrs (Memel: F. W. Siebert, 1898), 17–18, 22, 24–26, 28, 30, 34, 40–42, 44–48; Neuer illustrierter Führer durch Memel und Umgegend, ed. Verein zur Verschönerung von Memel und Umgegend und zur Hebung des Fremdenverkehrs, 2nd rev. ed. (Memel: F. W. Siebert, 1905), 19–20, 25–26, 28, 32, 42–45, 58–59), while in 1898 and 1905, tourism guides were released with a reproduction of a painting of Louise, kept in the Memel City Hall, on the cover. Later, Louise’s image was exploited by Tilsit as well: it was not yet used in the first tourism guide around this city (Führer durch Tilsit und Umgebung (Auszug aus dem Gewerbe-Austellungs-Katalog) [Tilsit: J. Reyländer & Sohn, 1891]). However, by 1900 a revelation of links between Louise and Tilsit starts to appear (Knaake, Führer durch Tilsit, 6, 9–11, 22).

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Borussia—the only monument in East Prussia erected prior to the First World War which had “national monument” status.95 Another example of the marking of the Prussian Lithuanian space with symbols linking local and national meanings was mentioned above. That was the monument to Kaiser William I, relocated from the city hall into the public space in Memel in 1896. However, the Prussian Lithuanian space was also marked by the actualization of other members of the dynasty who carried much less meaning in local narratives. In this way in 1910, having joined Heydekrug and Szibben (Žibai) into one community, the main street of the new Heydekrug settlement was named after Prince Joachim, the youngest son of William II, and in Memel in 1911 a newly opened girls’ lyceum received the name of the kaiser’s wife, Augusta Victoria. The logic behind the actualization of the latter representatives of the dynasty in Lithuania, as in other German territories, was mostly dictated by Prussia’s German mission myth, based on the borussianistic historical narrative. The marking of public spaces with symbols denoting the Hohenzollern dynasty had to demonstrate that this was indeed Germany. But throughout Germany, as noted, several main plots associated with this narrative were actualized, including not just the one which conveyed the “fruits of the deeds” of the Hohenzollerns but also another two that postulated the myth of the Reich’s establishment in 1871 and the Prussian wars of the nineteenth century, during which it allegedly sought German unity. Talking about the symbols that conveyed the myth of the Reich’s establishment in Lithuania, it should be stated that the figure of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was much more relevant here than that of Kaiser William. Back in 1874 a colony of settlers near Rupkalwen (Rupkalviai) Marsh in Heydekrug County was named after Bismarck. In the early twentieth century, in many Lithuanian places there was an instant response to an initiative of German students following the passing of the Reich’s chancellor, which touched the whole country—a “Bismarck towers” (Bismarck-Säulen) construction campaign, designed to function 95 For more on this monument in a broader context, see Safronovas, “Borusianistinio didžiojo istorinio pasakojimo aktualizavimas,” 52–60.

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as observation towers.96 Such towers were erected in Prussian Lithuania near Gumbinnen (1903), in Insterburg (1913) and Ober-Eisseln (now Gorino), near Ragnit (1912); while in 1914, to mark the centennial of Bismarck’s birth (1915), plans were made to build another two “Bismarck towers,” near Prökuls (Priekulė) and in Memel, at Sandkrug (Smiltynė).97 The commemoration of the 1813–1815 War of Liberation and the so-called unification wars (1864, 1866, 1870–1871) was conveyed in Prussian Lithuania, simultaneously marking the space with symbols of Germanness, via the erection of monuments to the war dead in many county centers. Based on data collected at this time, it can be said that such monuments arose in Gumbinnen (1876), Insterburg (1881), Pillkallen (around 1890), Angerburg (now Węgorzewo, 1893), Tilsit (1894), Darkehmen (before 1899), Ragnit (1890s), Stallupönen (1900), Skaisgirren (Bolshakovo) (1901), Labiau (1906), Norkitten (before 1906), Schirwindt (Kutuzovo) (1913), Goldap, Lasdehnen (Krasnoznamensk), Mehlauken (Zalesje), and Mehlkehmen (Kalinino); right before the First World War there were plans for the construction of this kind of monument in Heydekrug.98 A majority of these monuments, often erected in the central town squares, were of standard forms: they featured an obelisk above a pedestal, topped with an eagle, or a column with the goddess of victory Nike or Germania’s figure on top. Such forms expressed not just the memory of the dead but also victory and the achievements of the unification wars. Having discussed this marking of Prussian Lithuania, let us glance at how the other side of the appropriation proceded—the transformation of various representations of Lithuania into markers. There are many examples that illustrate this activity. The East Prussian Province’s monument conservation institution, from the appointment of the very first 96 Cf. Reinhard Allings, Monument und Nation. Das Bild vom Nationalstaat im Medium Denkmal—zum Verhältnis von Nation und Staat im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918, vol. 4 of Beiträge zur Kommunikationsgeschichte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 130–131. 97 See the proclamation: Apžvalga, April 3, 1914 (no. 27). Cf. Pagalba 7–8 (1914): 98. 98 The keystone for the Heydekrug County’s soldiers monument was laid to mark a hundred years since the Battle of Nations near Leipzig. Cf. Lietuwißka Ceitunga, October 23, 1913 (no. 88): 2; Johannes Sembritzki and Artur Bittens, Geschichte des Kreises Heydekrug (Memel: F. W. Siebert, 1920), 277.

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conservationist in 1893, attributed state-protected cultural treasures to separate landscapes in the province, including Lithuania.99 For a long time, following this principle (attributing treasures to the landscape they were found in), the institution’s activities were presented in its annual publication, Announcements.100 In the early twentieth century, the name “Lithuania” was given not only to Prussian army units deployed in this land.101 It was adopted by various organizations and establishments (the photography studio in Tilsit at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Lituania sports club founded there in 1907, and the sports society Litauen, founded in 1909 in Gumbinnen),102 and even in the formation of “trademarks” for separate cities. Thus, the city of Tilsit on the bank of the Memel River, surrounded by Lithuanian-populated settlements, was presented in many Heimatkunde textbooks at the time, in the city’s advertising publications, and even in Brockhaus’s Encyclopedia as the “capital of Prussian Lithuania.”103 The surrounding areas populated by Lithuanians were just as significant in the representation of the uniqueness of the city of Memel at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth   99 Cf. Boetticher, Bau- und Kunstdenkmäler, in particular no. 5: Litauen (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1895). 100 Cf. Bericht des Konservators der Kunstdenkmäler der Provinz Ostpreußen über seine Tätigkeit, nos. 1–34 (Königsberg: Ostpreußische Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt; Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert; Landesdruckerei, 1903–1936). 101 In 1902 a field artillery regiment formed in Gumbinnen in 1772 was renamed the First Lithuanian Artillery Regiment of Prince August. A field artillery regiment formed in Insterburg in 1899 received the name Second Lithuanian in 1902. This kind of marking of military units had earlier traditions: back in 1808, the word “Lithuanian” (meaning Lithuania’s) appeared in the title of a dragoon regiment formed in Tilsit in 1717, while in Insterburg in 1860 the Lithuanian Twelfth Lancers Regiment was assembled. 102 Knaake, Führer durch Tilsit, 63; Otto Gebauer, “Vor fünfzig Jahren Gründung des Fußballklubs Preußen Gumbinnen,” Das Ostpreußenblatt, September 7, 1957 (no. 36): 7. 103 Führer durch Tilsit und Umgebung, 5; “Tilsit,” in Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon, vol. 15, 14th ed. (Leipzig, Berlin, Vienna: F. A. Brockhaus, 1896), 850; H. Lettau, Kurze Heimatkunde der Provinz Ostpreussen, 7th ed. (Leipzig: Oswald Schmidt, 1906), 15; Fremdenfuehrer durch Tilsit, Litauens Hauptstadt, ed. [Rudolf] Kreutz (Tilsit: [Verfasser], 1912); Chr. Naujoks, “Die Provinz Ostpreußen,” in Kahnmeyer und Schulze Realienbuch. Mit Geschichte des Weltkrieges, revised by Fr[iedrich] Baade, E[mil] Borchers, A[lbert] Gieseler, Ausgabe für Ostpreußen [Ausgabe A. für evangelische Schulen] (Bielefeld, Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1917), 24; Unser Ostpreussen, ed. Franz Swillus, vol. 2: Bilder aus der Heimatkunde, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Julius Klinkhardt, 1922), 169.

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centuries. Tourist guidebooks about Memel and its surroundings featured an image of the Lithuanian farmers’ market that used to be held near the monument to William I in Memel.104 Such guidebooks would mention that the Memel surroundings stood out for the uniqueness of Lithuanians105 and included a photograph of a Lithuanian farmers’ homestead from the Memel area.106 In the late nineteenth century, the uniqueness of the Lithuanian region began to be represented by discovering, publicizing, and exhibiting that which in the nineteenth century was identified as “folk art” (Volks­ kunst)—usually village architecture, nonindustrial everyday household items, handmade textiles, embroidery, and clothing that was considered “historic,” if only for the archaic ways they were produced in contrast to mass-produced industrial goods. Due to the relatively strong traditional lifestyle existing in many locations of Prussian Lithuania in the late nineteenth century, there were plenty of such “folk art” examples in this land. Its collection and exhibition were soon drawn into the discourse contrasting the values of industrial society with Heimat. The ways of building houses and making clothes, household items, and other things characteristic to the Prussian Lithuanian region were associated with the archaic “folk” of this land, becoming examples of “Lithuanian folk art,” and even interpreted by some as revealing the Lithuanian character. A major contributor to the collection and public demonstration of such “Lithuanian folk art” was the Lithuanian Literary Society. At a meeting of the society in 1884, the suggestion was made, probably for the first time, to establish a museum where old-fashioned clothing, household items, and other typical products of the Lithuanian cultural landscape could be exhibited.107 In 1899 the society started forming a collection of such items,108 and in 1905 the society transformed its collection of exhibits into a public museum in the form of a house—built in Tilsit for a business expo—featuring village Neuer illustrierter Führer durch Memel, 7. Führer durch Memel und Umgebung, 13–14. Führer durch Memel und Umgegend, 57; Neuer illustrierter Führer durch Memel, 81. A. Thomas, “Bericht über die Sitzungen der Gesselschaft im Winter 1884/85,” MLLG 10 (1885): 270–271. 108 “Zur Geschichte der Gesellschaft,” MLLG 25 (1900): 95. 104 105 106 107

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architecture characteristic of the Lithuanian region. This “Lithuanian house,” which appeared in Tilsit’s Jakobsruhe Park, was probably the first museum representing the region’s ethnographic uniqueness. One of the assistants in fitting out the Tilsit Museum and a member of the Lithuanian Literary Society, Hugo Scheu, also installed a private museum exhibiting Lithuanian textiles, clothing, and other historic items on the premises of Heydekrug Manor, which he acquired in 1892.109 The municipal museum founded in Memel before the First World War had apparently to serve a similar function. In September 1910, having raised the idea of creating such a museum and already allotting a space for it to be set up,110 a special Museum Society was established. By December of that year, it already had over a hundred members. It was officially registered in early 1911, whereupon exhibits started being gathered. This future museum was meant to depict the cultural development of Memel and Heydekrug counties, which, of course, was unimaginable without the exhibition of the ethnographic uniqueness of the Lithuanian region. For this purpose, there were plans to establish a separate branch of the museum that would also collect and demonstrate historic Lithuanian work.111 However, the “folk art” typical of the Lithuanian region had to become more than just a museum exhibit. The same Lithuanian Literary Society, harnessing a wide network of influential sponsors and assistants, concerned itself with spreading this form of art, trying to make it represent all of the East Prussian Province at least in Germany. It even went so far as to trade in “traditional crafts” from the Lithuanian region. The society was helped along this path by the resolution passed in 1904 to realize the idea raised by the Tilsit construction councilor Hermann Heise to build the aforementioned “Lithuanian house” in the city. The society financed its construction from its own funds and those of sponsors, and had to ensure its further upkeep. As it was decided to build this house in Tilsit for the business expo to be held in June–September 1905 (Gewerbe-Ausstellung Tilsit 1905), a large flow of visitors was expected, suggesting potential financial returns. During the three months that the expo was held, at one end of the house a local Lithuanian girl wove aprons and hand 109 Sembritzki, Bittens, Geschichte des Kreises Heydekrug, 127. 110 Lietuwißka Ceitunga, September 27, 1910 (no. 77). 111 Lietuwißka Ceitunga, December 2, 1910 (no. 96); February 3, 1911 (no. 10).

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Figure 17.  The site of cultural encounters in the “capital” of Prussian Lithuania. The Lithuanian House, built in 1905 in Tilsit according to the principles of “folk architecture”—a symbol clearly contrasting with the idea of progress as an example of adapting to the needs of urban culture. An early twentieth-century postcard from the Otto Mauderode printing and publishing house.

towels that were available for sale, while at the other end visitors could purchase dairy products presented by the county’s farmers. As this decision proved to be justified, the society decided to keep the expo open every day even after the end of its run, whereupon it performed several functions: it was presented as an “open-air Prussian Lithuanian ethnographic museum,” and items woven by hand by Lithuanian weavers on location were still available for purchase.112 After the expo in Tilsit, the Lithuanian Literary Society presented the Prussian Lithuanian region’s “folk art” at expositions organized in various locations in Germany almost every year. For instance, the society did not hesitate to participate in the third organized German Applied Art Exhibition (Deutsche Kunstgewerbe-Ausstellung). During the exhibition held in Dresden in May–October 1906, the Lithuanian Literary Society 112 MLLG 29 (1907): 445, 476–480; Alexander Kurschat, Tilsit in seiner geschichtlichen Entwickelung, 2nd rev. ed. (Tilsit: Verlag der Buchdruckerei Pawlowski, 1911), 75–76.

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represented the entire East Prussian Province, demonstrating handmade furniture, household items, “Lithuanian” mittens, embroidered handcrafts, and more.113 On October 2–4, 1908, a “Lithuanian textiles” exhibition was also arranged in Marienburg.114 One of the most important expositional events of this kind became the “Lithuanian folk art” show organized in 1908 in Berlin by society member and Lower House deputy of the Prussian Landtag, Vilius Gaigalaitis (Wilhelm Gaigalat). With the assistance of Berlin’s Frauen-Erwerb-Verein and having secured the support of the former East Prussian ober-president, currently Prussia’s interior minister, Friedrich von Moltke, an exhibition was held on November 23–27, 1908, in the chambers of the Interior Ministry itself, attracting members of the government and Berlin’s aristocracy. The minister’s wife, Julie von Moltke, directed the Committee of Honor in whose name the exhibition was arranged. At the opening ceremony, she herself was dressed in traditional Lithuanian costume, while Professor Adalbert Bezzenberger arrived especially to read an official speech at the exhibition. All Prussian Lithuanians were encouraged in the press to send their handmade household items and clothing for the exhibition, where they would be sold.115 Yet in fact only a handful of farmers from Heydekrug County responded, and a large part of the exhibition had to be formed from exhibits provided by the national costume branch of the Royal Ethnology Museum in Berlin, Hugo Scheu, the Prussia Museum in Königsberg, and the Lithuanian Literary Society. During the event, a scholarship in Moltke’s name was founded, which had to be allocated to the folk master who had produced the finest work. In addition, it appears the exhibition was received with wide acclaim, as a store dedicated to work and textiles characteristic of Prussian Lithuania was opened in Berlin’s Rudolf Herzog Shopping Center immediately after it ended.116 In 1909 “folk art” from the Prussian Lithuanian region was exhibited simultaneously at several events. On January 20–February 28 there was an 113 Alexander Kurschat, “Die Litauische literarische Gesellschaft auf der 3. Deutschen Kunstgewerbe-Ausstellung Dresden 1906,” MLLG 29 (1907): 406–423. 114 MLLG 30 (1911): 634. 115 Pagalba 9 (1908): 98–99; 10 (1908): 110–112. 116 Pagalba 11–12 (1908): 124–126; MLLG 30 (1911): 634.

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international folk art exhibition (Internationale Volkskunst-Ausstellung) organized by the Berlin branch of the Deutscher Lyceum-Club, a women’s society, which exhibited handcrafts from various nations, as well as jewelry and household items. At this event Prussian Lithuania was represented by exhibits sent by the Lithuanian Literary Society.117 In the beginning of March, “folk art” attributed to Prussian Lithuanians was exhibited for the first time at the former administrative center of Lithuania, Gumbinnen. Around seventy people sent approximately six hundred “Lithuanian” exhibits to this show, many of which were sold. Cash prizes were offered for the finest exhibits. On May 1–9 at an expo held by the Frauen-ErwerbVerein in Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall, with the mediation of Gaigalaitis, one space was set aside for representation of the uniqueness of Prussian Lithuania. That uniqueness was revealed in the aprons characteristic of this region, as well as tablecloths, sashes, mittens, clothing, and furniture that the Berlin public could purchase during the expo. In July, handmade work was sold during participation at an exhibition organized at the popular East Prussian resort of Cranz.118 The “folk art” typical of Prussian Lithuania, as one of the main constituent parts demonstrating this region’s cultural uniqueness, was represented and available for purchase at many an exhibition organized later on: in 1910 in Allenstein, in 1911 again in Gumbinnen, and in 1913 in Memel. Some of the work provided for these exhibitions received prizes, and other work was even purchased for the Königsberg collections of the Prussia Museum.119 All these efforts to represent Lithuania’s cultural uniqueness should be viewed in a more general context. Prussian Lithuania was represented by teachers, academics, figures active in monument preservation and museum activities, and amateur regional historians—the same network of people who spread knowledge about Heimatkunde in East Prussia. Via representations of the Lithuanian landscape, the network aimed to enrich the East Prussian Heimat system of meanings, revealing the province’s 117 Pagalba 2–3 (1909): 33; MLLG 30 (1911): 634. 118 Pagalba 4 (1909): 47–49; 5–6 (1909): 72–73; 9 (1909): 115. 119 MLLG 30 (1911): 635; Allgemeine Litauische Rundschau 4 (1911): 120–124; 5 (1911): 154–155; Pagalba 1 (1911): 14; 5 (1911): 65; 3 (1913): 33; 4–5 (1913): 52.

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uniqueness in the context of Germany. This is very evident from the concept for the first open-air museum in Germany at the time, the so-called Ostpreußisches Heimatmuseum, created along the lines of the Skansen Museum. Richard Dethlefsen, acting as the East Prussian monument conservationist from 1902, became one of the most important initiators of the museum, which was set up in 1909 and opened its gates to visitors in 1913 in Königsberg’s Tiergarten. Although the museum had to exhibit all the landscapes of East Prussia, Lithuania received special attention. Two types of homesteads reflected Lithuania, displaying material collected by Bezzenberger and Dethlefsen’s own research—a peasant farm (based on an original from Memel County) and a fisherman’s homestead on the Curonian Lagoon (based on an original from Labiau County)— plus a Courish cemetery typical of the Lithuanian region.120 Their illustrations later decorated numerous issues of Announcements released by the conservationists’ institution.121 The Lithuanian region, as an important formative element of the province’s uniqueness, was represented in the early twentieth century in tourism-related literature as well. The East Prussian Society for Tourism Development, encouraged by Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, put together a publication representing the province in 1906. In this year alone, two thousand copies were distributed at events held in Königsberg, including at the general congress of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft itself, a mass society with branches throughout Germany, and at the conference of regional directors (regional hauptmanns).122 The first pages of this publication, which subsequently saw the release of several editions, were 120 [Richard Dethlefsen], Führer durch das Ostpreußische Heimatmuseum (Königsberg: Ostpreußische Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt, 1913), 5, 9–12, 16. 121 Cf. Bericht des Konservators der Kunstdenkmäler der Provinz Ostpreußen über seine Tätigkeit im Jahre 1910, vol. 9 (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1911), 4; … im Jahre 1911, vol. 10 (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1912), 5; … im Jahre 1914, vol. 13 (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1915), 8; … im Jahre 1915, vol. 14 (Königsberg: Kommissions–verlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1916), 7; … im Jahre 1929, vol. 28 (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1930), 6; … im Jahre 1930, vol. 29 (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1931), 7; … im Jahre 1933, vol. 32 (Königsberg: Landesdruckerei, 1934), 7; … im Jahre 1934, vol. 33 (Königsberg: Landesdruckerei, 1935), 7. 122 Cf. WDWOP, April 1907 (no. 1): 7–8.

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Figure 18.  A “Lithuanian” fisher house representing the distinctive landscape in the East Prussian Home Museum in Königsberg. Early twentieth-century photo published in Ostpreussen. Seine Entwicklung—Seine Zukunft, vol. 1 of Deutsche Stadt—deutsches Land, ed. Erich Köhrer and Max Worgitzki (Berlin-Charlottenburg: Lima-Verlag, 1922).

illustrated with the two most important symbols representing East Prussia’s uniqueness—the Königsberg Castle and the Lithuanian House in Tilsit;123 in it Lithuania was introduced in a text written by Professor Emil Knaake from the Tilsit Royal Realgymnasium, who stressed that “of all the parts of East Prussia, Lithuania is by far the most important in an ethnographic, national economy and historical respect.”124 In the monthly released by the Tourism Development Society in the early twentieth century, which represented interesting facts and places worth visiting in East and West Prussia, there were a number of texts on the Lithuanian

123 Ostpreussen, ed. Verein zur Hebung des Fremdenverkehrs (Königsberg: Verein zur Hebung des Fremdenverkehrs, 1906); Ostpreussen, ed. Verein zur Hebung des Fremdenverkehrs (Königsberg: Verein zur Hebung des Fremdenverkehrs, 1910). 124 Emil Knaake, “Litauen,” in Ostpreussen 1906, 77.

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landscape and its most important element—Prussian Lithuanian culture.125 By the early twentieth century two separate tourism development societies had formed, each focusing on the most unique landscapes in East Prussia—Lithuania and Masuria: Verkehsrverband Litauen für den Regierungsbezirk Gumbinnen and Verkehrsverband Masuren für das südliche Ostpreußen.126 The efforts to transform the uniqueness of Lithuania’s cultural landscape into a resource revealing the exceptional place of East Prussia in the new Reich and the German nation are also visible in the conversion of meanings given to Kristijonas Donelaitis. In the first half and middle of the nineteenth century, at least in professional literature circles, Donelaitis became the most important representative of Lithuanian culture. The first publishers of his works, Rhesa and Schleicher, presented him as a national Lithuanian poet and an exclusive exponent of the Lithuanian nation, such as it was understood back then.127 However, in the 1860s a somewhat corrected assessment of Donelaitis emerged. Nesselmann was probably the first to call Donelaitis no longer a Lithuanian national poet but Lithuania’s (the landscape’s) poet.128 It was this description, which, probably due to Nesselmann’s academic influence, quickly caught on in the literature.129 The Königsberg court councilor and author Ludwig Passarge went even 125 Karl Wieberneit, “Litauen und seine Bewohner,” WDWOP, July 1907 (no. 4): 83–87; Karl Wieberneit, “Eine Ferienreise in das Memeldelta,” WDWOP, September 1907 (no. 6): 135–138; E. Kühn, “Die litauische Handweberei und ihre Veredlung für den modernen Kunstgeschmack,” WDWOP, June 1909 (no. 3): 62–65; Max Romanowski, “Wanderungen eines Naturfreundes durch Ostpreußen,” WDWOP, June 1909 (no. 3): 66–69; “Ueber den heutigen Stand des litauischen Volkstums in Preußen,” WDWOP, April 1910 (no. 1): 19–20; Immanuel Loetzow, “Litauischer Hochzeitsbrauch,” WDWOP, September 1910 (no. 6): 153–156; “Das Memelgebiet,” WDWOP, July 1911 (no. 4): 70–72; Ferdinand Runkel, “Im litauischen Sprachgebiet,” WDWOP, August 1911 (no. 5): 103. 126 Hans Warnecke, Der Fremdenverkehr, seine volkswirtschaftliche Bedeutung und seine Regelung (Halle a. S.: Buchdruckerei Wilhelm Hendrichs, 1921), 123. 127 Donaleitis (Donalitius), Jahr in vier Gesängen, v; Donaleitis, Litauische Dichtungen, 1, 11. 128 Donalitius, Littauische Dichtungen, iii. 129 Cf., for instance, Alexander Alexandrow, Sprachliches aus dem Nationaldichter Litauens Donalitius, vol. I: Zur Semasiologie (Dorpat: Schnakenburg’s Buchdruckerei, 1886), 7; Alexander Horn, Christian Donalies (Separatabdruck aus der Insterburger Zeitung) (Insterburg: C. R. Wilhelmi, 1893), 3, 18–19.

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farther in a new edition of Donelaitis’s works in 1894.130 This was the first time that Donelaitis’s works were presented only in German, and thus they were oriented primarily to the German-reading public. In addition, as with Nesselmann, Passarge released Donelaitis’s works under the Latinized version of his surname “Donalitius,” thereby bringing him closer to “high” culture standards. Several decades prior to the First World War, Donelaitis, who remained the representative of Lithuania, or what Franz Tetzner now called East Prussia’s half-German, half-Lithuanian rural environment,131 was transformed into the symbol of all of East Prussia. In denoting East Prussia’s place in the context of Germany, Donelaitis started being compared to Immanuel Kant, Herder, Copernicus, Dach, and other examples of what East Prussia’s Heimat had given German culture.132 It was no accident that the most knowledgeable figure on Lithuania, the University of Königsberg professor Bezzenberger, giving a speech at Albertina in January 1914 to mark the anniversary of the German Reich’s founding, encouraged the university not to miss the opportunity to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Donelaitis. Bezzenberger claimed that Donelaitis could not be considered a poet just of the Lithuanian nation, as perhaps only several dozen actual Lithuanians would have read his works.133 Thus, the rural environment dominated by Lithuanian peasants in Prussia in the second half of the nineteenth century increasingly became an object of ethnographic, regional history, museum, and monument conservation interest. Due to this interest, the spread of the Prussian Lithuanian cultural landscape’s uniqueness made it possible to develop the East Prussian Heimat self-awareness in the context of Germany and to understand belonging to the German nation via belonging to a unique landscape. A unique literary genre contributed somewhat to this understanding, becoming popular in Germany in the 1880s, called Heimatliteratur. The 130 Christian Donalitius, Littauische Dichtungen, trans. Ludwig Passarge (Halle a. S.: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1894). 131 Franz Tetzner, “Donalitius und Tolminkemen,” Zeitschrift für Kulturgeschichte 3 (1896): 291. 132 Johannes Ziesemer, Die Provinzen Ost- und Westpreußen, no. XI of Landeskunde Preußens (Berlin, Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1901), 66, 95–100. 133 “Důnelaitis, didysis Lietuwos Eilininkas,” Apzwalga, January 23, 1914 (no. 7).

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rural, often underclass, environment was depicted as a counterweight to great cities and civilization. In the case of Prussian Lithuania, it gave rise to a number of works transfused with the unique features of the Lithuanian landscape, though not necessarily of great literary value. Born in Insterburg and having chosen the path of writer in Tilsit, Clara Nast (1866–1925) included Lithuanian motifs in many stories and novels aimed at children and young people: Altlitauische Erzählungen (1889), Litauisch Blut (1901), Die Sängerin und andere litauische Erzählungen (1903), In der Sumpfkate (1907), Die Vagabudin (1909), and Frau Skrabs auf Sturmen (1910). Another example is a Pomeranian-born Jewish author who found herself in Tilsit, Rosa Litten (1856–1909), who released her story Mano Miela: Eine Erzählung aus Litauen (1901) when she was already in Berlin. Elisabeth Hoepfner (married name Brönner-Hoepfner, 1880–1950), born in Ragnit County, later taking the route of politician and publicist, also published works conveying Prussian Lithuania in the pre–First World War periodical press.134 Clara Ratzka (1871–1928), who only traveled through Prussian Lithuania, used Lithuanian motifs in her novel Urte Kalwis (1917). Later on Prussian Lithuanian motifs were exalted most on the German stage and in literature by Jodocus Temme (1798–1881),135 Ernst Wichert (1831–1902),136 and 134 E.g., Elisabeth Hoepfner, “Ein Litauerbengel. Bilder aud Ostelbien,” WDWOP, October 1908 (no. 7): 213–214. Cf. a collection of her works: Elisabeth Brönner-Hoepfner, Geschichten aus dem Memelland (Berlin: Verlag Deutsch-litauischer Memellandbund, 1922). 135 See his works [Jodocus D. H. Temme] Verfasser der Neuen Deutschen Zeitbilder, Die schwarze Mare. Bilder aus Litthauen, vols. 1–3 (Leipzig: Hermann Schultze, 1854); [Jodocus D. H. Temme] Verfasser der neuen deutschen Zeitbilder, der Verbrecher usw., Anna Jogszis, vols. 1–4 (Leipzig: Hermann Schultze, 1856); Jodocus D. H. Temme, Schwarzort. Original-Roman, vols. 1–3 (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1863); Jodocus D. H. Temme, An der Memel. Roman (Berlin: Hausfreund-Expedition (G. Graetz), 1872); Jodocus D. H. Temme, In der Ballus. Kriminalgeschichte (Leipzig: Dürr’sche Buchhandlung, 1874). For more on Temme, see Herbert Kirrinnis, “Jodocus Donatus Hubertus Temme,” in Acta Prussica, 261–284; Manfred Klein, “Wer war Anna Jogszis??? J. D. H. Temmes ‘Bilder aus Litthauen,’” Lietuvių Kultūros Institutas. Suvažiavimo darbai 2000/Litauisches Kulturinstitut. Jahrestagung 2000 (Lampertheim: Litauisches Kulturinstitut, 2001), 78–94; Manfred Klein, “J. D. H. Temmes literarisches Denkmal für die ‘Kacksche Ball’ (Kakšių bala),” Annaberger Annalen 15 (2007): 120–141. 136 Ernst Wichert, Littauische Geschichten, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Carl Reißner, 1881, 1890) (reissued in 1901, 1904–1906, 1914, 1917, 1918, 1927, 1930, 1934), also Ernst Wichert,

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Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928). However, here they were depicted in an utterly different light from the works steeped in the spirit of Romanticism, such as the collection of novels about Lithuania by Leo Goldammer (1813– 1886)137 or the drama Waydote, Prinz von Litauen by Gottwald G. E. Schlieben (1831–1913), born in Gumbinnen, that was written to mark the six hundredth anniversary of the city of Königsberg (1855). Now Lithuania was depicted not as a historical territory but as a landscape renowned for its cultural uniqueness,138 with its main representatives Prussian Lithuanian peasants. Personalizing the uniqueness of the land they represented, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they became the main heroes in the depiction of Prussian Lithuania in German literature, theater, and art (especially in the works of artists from the Nidden [Nida] Artists’ Colony).139 It was in these art spheres that the topos of Lithuania’s representation was formed. It, as with the Prussian Lithuanians themselves, consisted mostly of natural elements, such as the Memel River and Delta, its marshes, the Curonian Lagoon and the spring ice floes, the Curonian Spit, and specific cultural elements such as the krikštai (Curonian carved wooden grave markers) or horses: Lithuania was a country of horse stud farms, with Trakehnen (now Yasnaya Polyana) raising the most associations. In this topos there was almost no space left for city culture, although many attempts were made to identify with the Lithuanian region in Gumbinnen, Tilsit, and Memel. All the means of representing Prussian Lithuania discussed here thus facilitated the nationalization of this landscape, its transformation into a Ansas und Grita und andere litauische Geschichten (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1937); Ernst Wichert, Die Schwestern: eine littauische Geschichte (Dresden u.a.: Carl Reißner, 1896). 137 Leo Goldammer, Litthauen. Völker- und Naturbilder, with a preface by Chr[istian] Friedrich Scherenberg (Berlin: Otto Janke, 1858). 138 Cf. excerpts from the works of Otto Glagau (1869), Ernest Wichert (1881), and Hermann Sudermann (1918) that were selected for the collection of readings about the German Ostmark: Braun, Die Ostmark, 262–291. 139 For more about this colony, see Jörn Barfod, Nidden—Künstlerort auf der Kurischen Nehrung (Fischerhude: Atelier im Bauernhaus, 2005). See also Lina Motuzienė and Živilė Etevičiūtė, eds., Menininkų kūrybos centrai ir jų bendruomenės Vidurio ir Rytų Europoje = Künstlergemeinschaften und ihre Ländlichen Schaffenszentren in Mittelund Osteuropa (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2011).

Lithuania as a Peculiar Region of Germany (1850s–1910s)

Figure 19-21. Typical images through which the perception of Lithuania and the Prussian Lithuanians as carriers of a way of life little touched by civilization was constructed in Germany in the early twentieth century and reproduced several times in the literature on East Prussia from that period: “Old Lithuanian Woman in Gala Dress” (two angles) and “Lithuanian Ladies on Horses.” The “folk art” and horses are portrayed here in opposition to progress and Kultur. Staged shots by Robert Minzloff, a photographer from Tilsit, published in his album Bilder aus Littauen (Tilsit: Otto von Mauderode, 1894).

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German national space. This process was not unique. Nevertheless, through the representation of meanings of Germanness in the landscape and of the landscape in the common German context, the meanings and associations differed in the case of Prussian Lithuania from other landscapes in East Prussia. Compared to Warmia and Masuria, in Lithuania there was much greater interest in recording and exhibiting the carriers of “another” culture that still lived here while basing the region’s uniqueness on these carriers. In Warmia and Masuria, Polish-speaking inhabitants were understood as being of a Slavic culture, one that was difficult to harness in spreading German Kultur. In linguistic and cultural terms Prussian Lithuanians, although long identified in various ways with Slavs, were predominantly treated as an independent “nation” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite occasional exceptions.140 This “nation” was considerably more pliable to spreading German Kultur, while Lithuanians’ cultural self-organization, which accelerated in the last decades of the nineteenth century, was not seen as a great threat. All of this formed quite favorable conditions for the exhibition of Lithuanians’ and Lithuania’s uniqueness in German national culture and attempts to recognize Lithuania in Germany as a unique East Prussian landscape. But how was this Lithuania defined?

3.4. THE CHANGE IN LITHUANIA’S BOUNDARIES AND CRITERIA FOR THEIR DEFINITION In the mid-nineteenth century, the new ethnographic concept of Lithuania was added to the hitherto dominant administrative concept. In both cases, this Lithuania had more or less stable boundaries. However, this situation changed in the late nineteenth century. The ethnographic and administrative concepts were joined by several more, based on the actual boundaries of where the Lithuanian language was spoken. Once they emerged, Lithuania’s boundaries became dynamic. This change probably depended most on the increased significance of statistical data. Statistical information, primarily the kind associated with 140 See Franz Tetzner, Die Slawen in Deutschland. Beiträge zur Volkskunde (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1902).

Lithuania as a Peculiar Region of Germany (1850s–1910s)

making land management more effective, had been collected in the eastern part of Prussia from the late eighteenth century.141 At that time it was not so much individual members of the population that were counted as economic units, the so-called fireplaces (Feuerstelle). During the census conducted in the Prussian Province in 1817, for the first time both individual inhabitants, or “souls,” were counted, and the use of different languages was also recorded.142 However, in the first stage only approximate data were collected, most likely to localize foreign language users. For example, to summarize the information collected in the Königsberg Governmental District in 1817, it was laconically stated that “Lithuanians [live] in the Memel and Labiau landratian counties.”143 Data from the Gumbinnen Governmental District was not even published overall.144 It could be that language distribution was not considered among the more important kinds of statistical information at the time. Data about this distribution were not announced publicly for a long time. This would suggest that information regarding this question was intended more for internal agency use, in order to determine just how widely the German language had spread and in which territories worship and classes still had to be held in other languages.145 Systemized statistical data about the languages of the East Prussian population were published only in 1839. That year the privy councilor of the Prussian government Baron August von Haxthausen released a study where he generalized language use based on unpublicized census data from 1825 and 1837 for all the counties and cities in the Prussian Province (he provided data on West Prussia only for the year 1837),146 while the senior district court refendarius H. Meyer provided statistics on language use from the 1837 census in a separate Gumbinnen Governmental District topographical and statistical 141 Cf. Volständige Topographie. 142 [Samuel Gottlieb Wald], Topographische Uebersicht des Verwaltungs-Bezirks der Königlichen Preussischen Regierung zu Königsberg in Preussen (Königsberg: Heinrich Degen, 1820), iii. 143 Ibid., xxiii. 144 Cf. Der Regierungs-Bezirk Gumbinnen nach seiner Lage, Begränzung, Grösse, Bevölkerung und Eintheilung nebst einem Ortschafts-Verzeichnisse und Register (Gumbinnen: Joh. Wilh. Valent. Krauseneck, 1818). 145 Cf. Böckh, Deutschen Volkszahl, 225. 146 August Freiherr von Haxthausen, Die ländliche Verfassung in den Provinzen Ost- und West-Preußen (Königsberg: Gebrüder Bornträger, 1839), chart to 81.

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Figure 22. Administrative division of the East Prussian Province into governmental districts and counties on the eve of the First World War after the new Allenstein Governmental District was established in 1905. The name of county center corresponds to the county title in a map unless otherwise indicated. The centers of governmental districts are shown in capital letters. Map by Vasilijus Safronovas.

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review. He provided specific numbers of language users for each county, and in the case of each community, only information on what languages were used in that community.147 Nevertheless, until 1861 statistical information about language distribution in the Prussian Province were collected based on rather unclear criteria, which raised doubts among contemporaries.148 Priests and officials were entrusted with providing the required data (priests provided data on their pupils) and then would draw up local population lists, including only civilians, not soldiers, while people in general did not participate directly or actively until 1890.149 Only in the instructions sent to all the landrats (heads of the counties) in Gumbinnen Governmental District in 1835 was there a description of what criteria to use to identify the population’s language. Then it was determined that this language was to be the so-called Familiensprache—the language family members used among themselves.150 The principle of attributing one language to an entire family, it appears, remained in use when determining language distribution later, and during the 1861 census the principle of the language a given family used at home had to be applied throughout Prussia for the first time.151 The so-called Muttersprache—the mother tongue—replaced Familiensprache in Prussian statistics only in 1890. For these reasons, all attempts prior to the 1860s to determine more accurately the distribution space of the Lithuanian language in Prussia 147 H. Meyer, Topographisch-statistische Uebersicht des Regierungs-Bezirks Gumbinnen (Insterburg: C. R. Wilhelmi, 1839). 148 Cf. Haxthausen, Ländliche Verfassung, 84; [Berghaus], Statistik des Preüssischen Staats, 138–139; Böckh, Deutschen Volkszahl, 225. 149 Cf. Preussische Statistik, no. V: Die Ergebnisse der Volkszählung und Volksbeschreibung nach den Aufnahmen vom 3. December 1861, resp. Anfang 1862 (Berlin: Königliche Geheime Ober-hofbuchdruckerei (R. v. Decker), 1864), v; Fircks, “Preussische Bevölkerung,” 190; Vincas Vileišis, Tautiniai santykiai Maž. Lietuvoje ligi Didžiojo karo istorijos ir statistikos šviesoje (Kaunas: Spindulys, 1935), 159–160; Kurt Forstreuter, “Die Anfänge der Sprachstatistik in Preußen und ihre Ergebnisse zur Litauerfrage,” Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 3 (1953): 336, 337. 150 Forstreuter, “Anfänge der Sprachstatistik,” 338. 151 Cf. Ernst Engel, Methoden der Volkszählung, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der im preussische Staate angewandten (Berlin: Königliche Geheime Ober-Hofbuchdru­ cke­rei, 1861).

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based on statistical data could only be considered approximate. As Haxthausen justifiably noted, it was not possible to set down accurate language distribution boundaries, as almost everywhere “Germans” lived mixed in with other “nations.”152 Thus, the result of all such attempts was the same: Hexhtausen, Berghaus, and Schubert allocated the territory of Lithuanian language distribution to the same space, bordered by the Königsberg Governmental District’s Memel County, part of the southern Curonian Lagoon, and part of Labiau County to the east of the Deima River, as well as the Gumbinnen Governmental District’s Heydekrug, Tilsit, Niederung, Insterburg, Ragnit, Pillkallen, Stallupönen, and Gumbinnen counties, noting that in Goldap and Darkehmen counties Lithuanians lived mixed in with Polish-speaking Masurians.153 As we can see, in all three cases this territory was defined based on administrative criteria or, to be more precise, on a combination of ethnographic and administrative criteria. That is why in the cartography from this time, the most distant distribution boundaries of the Lithuanian language in Prussia were denoted only approximately, orientated along the Labiau, Wehlau, Nordenburg (now Krylovo), and Goldap locales, as in the Ethnographic Map of Europe drafted by Berghaus himself in 1847,154 or even Angerburg a little further south, as shown in Heinrich Kiepert’s Map of Germany’s Nationalities.155 However, the Prussian population census of 1861 significantly changed the concept of the Lithuanian language’s distribution in Prussia. Its impact is important for several reasons. First of all, in the 1861 census, language was determined for the first time in all of Prussia based on uniform instructions formulated by the Prussian Statistical Bureau. In these instructions, language was regarded as “to a certain degree identical to nationality [Nationalität].”156 Until then, data about language distribution 152 Haxthausen, Ländliche Verfassung, 148. 153 Ibid., 81; [Berghaus], Statistik des Preüssischen Staats, 135, 138; Schubert, Handbuch der Allgemeinen Staatskunde, 461. 154 “Ethnographische Karte von Eüropa” (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1847), in Dr. Heinrich Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas. 155 See Heinrich Kiepert, Nationalitäts-Karte von Deutschland (Weimar: Verlag des Geograph. Instituts, 1848). 156 See Engel, Methoden der Volkszählung (quoted in https://www.destatis.de/DE /Publikationen/WirtschaftStatistik/Gastbeitraege/MethodenVolkszaehlung0111.pdf, 77).

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were collected mostly for internal agency use, in order to come to a reliable picture of where unusual administrative powers were required. These data did not play a larger role in formulating policies for separate population groups.157 Now in the census instructions themselves, there was a basis for interpreting data about language distribution by determining nationality distribution in Prussia. The principle of considering the language used by the population as an indicator of nationality remained when interpreting population censuses held at a later date as well.158 As we shall see in the next chapter, this change made it possible to instrumentalize Familiensprache distribution statistics after 1871 to create discriminatory laws. The so-called Familiensprache was still the criterion being used during the 1861 census. In this way it was calculated that in the Königsberg Governmental District 32,407 people used Lithuanian at home, while in the Gumbinnen Governmental District 104,583 people (or 7,323 and 23,447 families respectively), plus another 414 people from the Königsberg Governmental District (83 families) spoke Curonian.159 These figures, like those obtained earlier, measured people who did not understand German rather than those who used Lithuanian.160 After the census, the Prussian Statistical Bureau announced data on the distribution of languages used in the home at the governmental district level for the first time. Yet there was nothing new or unexpected learned, compared to earlier censuses, in either a methodological sense or in terms of the findings. Still, detailed data had been used for the first time to localize and map language distribution, identified with nationalities, in Prussia. At the Prussian Statistical Bureau, the government councilor who worked in Berlin, Richard Böckh, conducted a comprehensive analysis of census data about language distribution in Prussia, not limiting himself to the county level but extending to the village and manor 157 Cf. Michael C. Schneider, Wissensproduktion im Staat. Das königlich preußische statistische Bureau 1860–1914 (Frankfurt a.M., New York, NY: Campus, 2013), 309. 158 Cf. Karl Brämer, “Versuch einer Statistik der Nationalitäten im preussischen Staate für das Jahr 1867,” Zeitschrift des Königlich Preussischen Statistischen Bureaus 11, no. 3–4 (1871): 359–373; Fircks, “Preussische Bevölkerung,” 189. 159 Preussische Statistik, no. V, 54–55. 160 Leszek Belszyt, Sprachliche Minderheiten im preußischen Staat 1815–1914. Die preußische Sprachenstatistik in Bearbeitung und Kommentar, vol. 3 of Quellen zur Geschichte und Landeskunde Ostmitteleuropas (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 1998), 10.

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levels. Based on this analysis, a two-page map of the languages in Prussia’s eastern provinces was released in 1864.161 In 1869, using the analysis data, Böckh published a study on the size of the German-speaking community in Europe and the boundaries of its distribution.162 Especially important is that when compiling his analysis, during a period of elevation in nationalist moods in Prussia, Böckh was probably the first to apply the absolute majority principle to determine which territories were attributed to which language users. In other words, Prussian statistics could have been interpreted since Böckh’s time as a means of transforming foreign language speakers into foreign “minorities,” highlighting their domination in some territories, or to clearly denote in which territories “Germans” were already predominant. Haxthausen had already stated that after the epidemic plague of 1709– 1711 the number of Lithuanians in Prussia had fallen sharply, especially in the 1810s–1830s, when the Lithuanian language, customs, and “national costumes” disappeared, while people “Germanized” themselves. In 1839 he wrote, “there are doubts as to whether after another fifty years even a small part of the pure Lithuanian nation will exist, especially as far as language is concerned,” and “in the villages where twenty years ago half of the population still spoke Lithuanian, today one won’t hear anything but German.”163 However, this author still estimated the area of the Lithuanian language territory in Prussia as 200 sq. m. (around 11,300 km2).164 Introducing the majority principle, Böckh was the first to significantly reduce this area, leaving only 57.1 sq. m. (around 3,240 km2) where the Lithuanian language dominated, and a territory of 103 sq. m. (around 5,840 km2) in size where it was in regular use.165 He was the first to indicate that most Lithuanian language users were found only in Memel County and in several northern counties of the Gumbinnen Governmental District. A comparison of data from several earlier censuses with the results of the 1861 census also allowed Böckh to determine a decrease in the Lithuanian language’s distribution area.166 161 Richard Boeckh, Sprachkarte vom Preussischen Staat (Nördliche Hälfte; Südliche Hälfte) nach den Zählungs-Aufnahmen von 1861 ([Berlin: Dietrich Reimer in Komm., 1864]). 162 Böckh, Deutschen Volkszahl. 163 Haxthausen, Ländliche Verfassung, 82, 148. 164 Ibid., 82. 165 Böckh, Deutschen Volkszahl, 60. 166 Ibid.

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Figure 23.  Fragment of a sheet showing the northern part of the Languages Map of the Prussian State, prepared by the statistician Richard Boeckh by order of the Royal Statistical Bureau (Berlin: in Kommission bei Dietrich Reimer, 1864). The yellow color shows the area where the German language prevailed, the blue the Lithuanian language prevailaing, and the red the Polish language. One should note that forest areas are also depicted here as “belonging” to some nationality. The fragment is published with permission from the University of Graz (Austria) Library (SOSA, Landkarten, Sign. II 31687).

According to his collected data, the “Latvian nation” (as Böckh called the Balts) still dominated only in the Scalovia area north of the Memel and Szeszuppe (Šešupė) rivers, in Memel County, a large part of Heydekrug and Tilsit counties, and a smaller part of Ragnit and Pillkallen counties, as well as in several settlements in Niederung County. In the part of Scalovia south of these two rivers only one-third of village inhabitants used Lithuanian. In Nadrovia—to which belonged Gumbinnen, Stallupönen, and Insterburg counties and parts of Labiau and Wehlau counties east of the Deima River, as

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well as in part of Niederung County south of the Arge (now Zlaia) River— only one-tenth spoke Lithuanian, and even they were mostly concentrated in Labiau County, near the Niederung County boundary.167 In his description of the Lithuanian language distribution area, Böckh relied on administrative (Lithuania divided into counties) and ethnographic (Lithuania = Scalovia and Nadrovia) criteria even as he introduced a new criterion for what would constitute the Lithuanian language’s distribution in Prussian territory. Böckh’s analysis made it possible for the first time to produce a map showing a reduction in the territory where the Lithuanian language was distributed in Prussia. For this and other reasons, it would be difficult to overrate the impact of his analysis. We can see a clear effect of Böckh’s findings in the cartography denoting ethnographic territories that appeared in the 1870s aimed at the wider public, where the boundary of the Lithuanian language’s distribution in East Prussia had shifted for the first time slightly to the northeast, a shift that was explained essentially by Böckh’s argument.168 This impact was intensified because from 1861 until 1890 population censuses did not collect language data,169 so that Böckh’s data remained the reference point for a rather long time. Finally, after Böckh, it was rare for an author not to repeat that the territory inhabited by Lithuanians in Prussia was constantly decreasing. This point could be confirmed by looking at the official statistics from later censuses: during the 1890 census, in the Königsberg and Gumbinnen governmental districts there were still 118,085 people who identified their Muttersprache as Lithuanian or Lithuanian and German, while in 1910 only 94,345 such people remained.170 There is agreement today 167 Ibid., 59. 168 See Richard Andree and Oscar Peschel, eds. Physikalisch-statistischer Atlas des Deutschen Reichs (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1876), 27 and Karte 10; Richard Andree, “Völker-Karte des Deutschen Reichs und der angrenzenden Länder”; and Richard Andree, Völkerkarte Deutschlands (Leipzig: [s.n.], 1876), 26–27. 169 An exception was the census of 1867, during which civilians’ Familiensprache was recorded based on the old methodology only in individual, mostly eastern, governmental districts in Prussia, including those of Königsberg and Gumbinnen (Fircks, “Preussische Bevölkerung,” 190). The data from this census on language distribution were publicized by Brämer, “Versuch einer Statistik.” 170 Cf. Fircks, “Preussische Bevölkerung,” 238; Albert Hesse, Die Bevölkerung von Ostpreußen (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1916), 21. For criticism of the Muttersprache principle, see Schneider, Wissensproduktion im Staat, 305–306.

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among historians that during this period the anti-Polish political course had a great impact on the statistics of language distribution in the eastern Prussian provinces.171 This would suggest that in the case of Lithuanian speakers, the trend that becomes evident from the given figures indeed reflected not only a “natural” reduction but also conscious efforts to make Lithuanian speakers “less visible.” Thus, based on the 1900 census data about Muttersprache, in the Deutsche Erde magazine founded by Paul Langhans, which clearly promoted German nationalist ideas, another “map of nationalities” was published in 1907. Applying the principles introduced by Böckh, where one’s mother tongue was identified with one’s nationality,172 and territories were associated with particular nationalities where they made up the majority, the area inhabited by Prussian Lithuanians was reduced even further on this map. It included the Memel and Heydekrug counties and border territories in Tilsit County.173 This, of course, provided an alternative description of Lithuania. The extent to which this alternative was expressed in denoting the boundaries of the Lithuanian landscape in Prussia can be seen in several texts from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. August Ambrassat, the author of the popular East Prussian Heimat textbook, of which two editions were released, provided two options for describing Lithuania. He denoted a specific area for Lithuania in East Prussia (9,022.64 km2), associating it with the boundaries of ten counties, and thus conveyed the administrative concept of Lithuania. Yet at the same time, Ambrassat noted that the Lithuanian language space in East Prussia was constantly decreasing. According to him, in the early nineteenth century, besides these ten counties, Lithuanian was still spoken in part of Labiau County east (probably, he meant west) of the Deime, in the north of Goldap County, in the east of Wehlau County, and in a small part of Angerburg County, while by the time his book was released, the largest number of Lithuanians could be found 171 Belszyt, Sprachliche Minderheiten, 11–24; Schneider, Wissensproduktion im Staat, 305, 324–342. 172 For more on the transformation of people’s mother tongue into the main statistical criteria for identification of belonging to a particular nationality and on Böckh’s role in this process, see Hansen, Mapping the Germans, 22–33. 173 Paul Langhans, “Nationalitätenkarte der Provinz Ostpreussen,” Deutsche Erde: Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 6, no. 1 (1907).

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only in the Memel, Tilsit, Niederung, Heydekrug, and Labiau counties174—a clear influence of Böckh’s study. Albert Zweck provided similar boundaries, locating Lithuania with the Goldap River to the south and the Alle and Deime rivers to the west; thus, he still maintained Toeppen’s ethnographic concept of Lithuania. He also noted Bezzenberger’s boundaries yet at the same time stated the decrease in Lithuanian speakers. That reduction was illustrated on the map given in Zweck’s book, depicting the northeast territory of East Prussia divided into areas where Lithuanians still predominated and areas where Germans were already dominant.175 In this way, relying on statistical data, Lithuania’s description was clearly contrasted to the ethnographic concept of Lithuania. Members of the academic community who were interested in Lithuanians and the Lithuanian language had expressed some cautious doubts as to the reliability of statistical data collected about Lithuanians.176 Regardless, the effect of these data was so widespread that both in ethnography and in linguistics there was increasingly more orientation toward determining the actual situation of where Lithuanians could be found. Only interpreters of statistical data attributed territories to nationalities based on where those nationalities made up the majority, while ethnographers and linguists, in searching for new ways to describe Lithuania, continued to orient themselves toward setting down the furthest boundary of where Lithuanian was used, ignoring the majority criteria introduced by Böckh. The main source of such descriptions of Lithuania was the University of Leipzig, which was one of the main centers of Slavic and Baltic studies in Europe at the turn of the century. Thus, the University of Leipzig professor Franz Tetzner, despite still strangely attributing Lithuanians to the Slavic group in his ethnographic study,177 distinguished an area where Lithuanian was dominant (which was even smaller than that shown in Böckh’s 174 Ambrassat, Provinz Ostpreussen 1896, 171–172. 175 Zweck, Litauen, 3, 139–143, map on 140. 176 Alexander Doritsch, Beiträge zur litauischen Dialektologie, vol. 31 of MLLG (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung [in Kommission], 1912 [Tilsit: Otto v. Mauderode, 1911]), xviii. 177 This was viewed unfavorably in the Lithuanian Literary Society as well: “Zur Geschichte der Gesellschaft,” MLLG 29 (1907), 444.

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book) from a larger area where Mass was still held in Lithuanian.178 Tetzner also demonstrated some opportunities for using church statistics,179 as an alternative to the official state statistics that other authors had used to determine the distribution of Lithuanian even before the release of his own book.180 It is likely that Tetzner’s boundary was maintained at least for some time by the best Lithuanian studies expert in Leipzig, August Leskien.181 However, during expeditions to Prussian Lithuania in 1907 and 1908, Leskien’s student Alexander Doritsch expanded somewhat (compared to Tetzner’s line) the distribution area of Lithuanian to the southwest, adding that south of this line “there were no Lithuanian villages left anymore.”182 After the appearance of Doritsch’s study, Leskien also, in his work released posthumously, in principle maintained Doritsch’s newly suggested boundary. Leskien denoted it as follows: from Labiau by the Curonian Lagoon through the villages of Gertlauken (now Novaia Derevnia), Mehlauken, Obelischken (now Zelentsovo), and Darkehmen to Wystiter (Vyštytis) Lake.183 All of this shows that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were at least four descriptions of Lithuania in the literature of which the oldest, administrative version was applied less and less frequently. Many authors of East Prussian travel guides and Heimat and geography textbooks, plus other publications that appeared in the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, still understood Lithuania as a historically formed area and continued to identify it with 178 Tetzner, Slawen in Deutschland, 26–32. 179 When setting his line, Tetzner relied on an official Evangelical Lutheran Church publication—an almanac for priests that gave an approximate assessment of how many Lithuanian speakers lived in which parish, and based on this information the need for Mass to be held in Lithuanian was formulated. See Schirrmann and Hirsch, eds., Pfarr-Almanach für die Provinz Ostpreußen. 180 Adolf Rogge, “Statistische Nachweisung der litthauischen Bevölkerung in der Provinz Preußen,” Altpreußische Monatsschrift 8 (1871): 735–736; Voelkel, “Heutige Verbreitung der Litauer,” 1–4. 181 As indicated by a comment by Alexander Doritsch, who attended Leskien’s lectures in Leipzig in the early twentieth century. Cf. Doritsch, Beiträge zur litauischen Dialektologie, xiii–xiv. 182 Ibid., xiv. 183 August Leskien, Litauisches Lesebuch mit Grammatik und Wörterbuch (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1919), xvii.

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Figure 24.  Map showing the distribution of the Lithuanian language in Prussia in 1897 based on data gathered from parishes of the Lutheran Church. Green shows an area where Lithuanians still composed more than 50 percent of the congregation. The territory of parishes with mixed Lithuanian-German populations is depicted in light green. Black lines mark an area where the mixed Lithuanian-Curonian-German population lived (the southern boundary of this territory still reached Sarkau in 1719). The green dashed line shows the southern boundary of an area where both the Lithuanian and German languages were used in parishes in 1719 (based on Heinrich Lysius’s report). From Franz Tetzner, Die Slawen in Deutschland (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn Verlag, 1902).

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the ancient Nadrovian and Scalovian landscapes.184 However, alongside this concept, two other versions of the space inhabited by Lithuanians in East Prussia were being developed. They differed from each other in that the first emphasized the furthest spread of Lithuanians as determined by the need to satisfy Lithuanian language needs in churches,185 while the second described the zone where the Lithuanian language was dominant based on population census data. It appears that the effect of the statistical criteria in determining the territory where Lithuanians were found contributed to the introduction of a new term to describe the Lithuanian-inhabited landscape—Memelgebiet. The appearance of this term prior to the First World War should not be associated with the establishment of the Memel Territory as an administrative unit in 1919, as it would appear at first glance, but with the necessity of naming the lower reaches of the Memel River basin, where Lithuanian was still spoken or the Lithuanian language still prevailed in the early twentieth century. The term Memelgebiet at first emerged as a purely geographic concept, applied to six East Prussian counties (Memel, Heydekrug, Niederung, Tilsit, Ragnit, and Pillkallen), whose territory lay in the Memel River basin.186 As East Prussia’s Lithuanian speakers concentrated in these counties, by the early twentieth century that term was identified more often as the “Lithuanian” landscape. One of the first hints of this can be found in the regional geography (Landeskunde) textbook 184 Landeskunde von Ost- und Westpreußen (Heimatkunden. Ergänzung zu den Ausgaben A und B der Schulgeographie von E. v. Seydlitz), ed. Hans Lullies (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, Königliche Universitäts- und Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1891), 19, 21, and 3rd rev. ed. (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, Königliche Universitäts- und Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1896), 19, 21; Armstedt, Geschichte der Königl. Haupt- und Residenzstadt, 31–32; Ostpreussen, 1906, 77; Ostpreussen, 1910, 140–141; Richard Dethlefsen, Bauernhäuser und Holzkirchen in Ostpreußen, (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1911), 17; Obgartel, Regierungsbezirk, 3; Lan­des­ kunde von Ost- und Westpreußen, ed. Hans Lullies, 7th and 8th ed. (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1912 and 1919), 26, 28, 36; Wilhelm Sahm, Heimatkunde von Ostpreußen (Frankfurt am Main: Moritz Diesterweg, 1914), 20; Unser Ostpreussen, vol. 2, 87. 185 In East Prussia in the early twentieth century, there was a rule according to which Mass in Lithuanian had to be offered in places where at least fifty or more parishioners demanded it: [August Seraphim], Wohin gehört Preußisch-Litauen? [s.l.: s.n., 1919?]. However, in practice, compliance with this rule depended mostly on the particular priest in service. 186 This was how the term was used in the textbook Landeskunde von Ost- und Westpreußen (see editions 1 [1891] and 3 [1896], 27).

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released in 1901 by Johannes Ziesemer, a teacher at Marienburg’s Royal Seminary. He identified Lithuania with river basins, denoting that it spanned chiefly the area of the Pregel (now Pregolya) River’s headwaters, where the Inster (now Instruch), Pisse (now Pissa, Pisa), Rominte (now Krasnaya), and Angerapp rivers flowed; yet in a broader sense the “Memel area” was also deemed Prussian Lithuania.187 The thesis that Lithuania in East Prussia consisted of the Memel River basin and headwaters of the Pregel River basin areas was used in other prewar textbooks as well.188 Ultimately, in some of these textbooks and guidebooks, Lithuania and Lithuanians were associated exclusively with the term Memelgebiet.189 Expressions of identification with the name “Lithuania,” as we have seen, also existed in the early twentieth century in Gumbinnen, while Lithuania’s ethnographic uniqueness up until 1918 was willingly exploited to denote the place of the entire East Prussia in Germany. Regardless, introduction of the principle of the mother tongue speakers’ majority to determine where Lithuanians lived in Prussia “concentrated” Lithuania into several of the northernmost counties of East Prussia. This highlighted the reduction of Lithuanians’ distribution area and undoubtedly encouraged others to keep seeing Lithuanians as a disappearing nation that had to be at least described and recorded “before its death,” and one that would eventually be assimilated.190 The German appropriation of the Prussian Lithuanian space took place alongside other types of cultural contact, inspired by changes in industrialization, market economy, communications, and social roles. The effect of these processes, obvious even to contemporaries, did not allow consideration that Lithuanians, as prototypes of “noble savages” and recipients of German Kultur, would one day become active agents who could promote their own uniqueness. 187 Ziesemer, Provinzen Ost- und Westpreußen, 63. 188 Landeskunde von Ost- und Westpreußen, 7th ed., 36. 189 Rudolf Brückmann, Bilder aus der Heimatkunde Ostpreußens für die Mittelstufe (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, Königliche Universitäts- und Verlags-Buchhandlung, [1911]), 12–16; Ost- und Westpreussen. Führer durch das Verbandsgebiet, ed. Verkehrsverband für Ost- und Westpreussen (Danzig: Carl Bäcker, 1911), 54–55. 190 Cf. “Die Litthauer in Ostpreußen,” Globus. Illustrirte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völ­ker­ kunde XVI (1869): 143.

CHAPTER 4

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s) The crystallization of Lithuanian nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century eventually made it possible to develop an alternative to the German appropriation of Prussian Lithuania that to a large extent was based on the same premises. As in the German case, the new form of national community that was promoted by the inspirers of Lithuanian nationalism rested on the importance of language. In the mid-nineteenth century, experts noted the spread of the Lithuanian language on both sides of the Prussian-Russian border, while Jonas Basanavičius’s Lithuanian nationalism program, as outlined in Auszra (The Dawn), considered “Lithuanians transforming into Germans” just as bad as “Lithuanians transforming into Slavs (Poles and White Russians).”1 To Basanavičius, Lithuanians included “all people of Lithuanian origin, whether they live in Prussian Lithuania, Samogitia (Žemaitija), or Aukštaitija, whether they refer to themselves as Lietuvininkai, Žemaičiai [Samogitians], Aukštaičiai, or Highlanders.”2 Here we see that at least within the social network that instigated Lithuanians’ nationalist sentiments, the existence of Lithuanian speakers in both empires was clearly articulated. And it could not be otherwise: Auszra was a common project resulting from the cooperation of people living on both sides of the Russian-German border, which had begun even prior to its release. The only question was how far this articulation had spread.

1 Cf. [Jonas Basanavičius] B., “Priekalba,” Auszra 1 (1883): 3–4. 2 Jonas Bassanawiczius, “Apie senowes Lietuwos piles,” Auszra 1 (1883): 18.

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Lithuanian speakers’ attempts to create one national cross-border community faced almost insurmountable obstacles from the outset. The greatest challenge was the socio-cultural differences that existed between Prussian and Russian Lithuanians. Lithuanian speakers in both monarchies were alike in only a handful of ways. In both Prussia and Russia they were distributed mostly in villages and church villages and made up the peasant social stratum. Lithuanian was not the language of the city on either side of the border, and moving to the city often led to Lithuanian speakers’ lingual acculturation or assimilation. Yet despite belonging to the same social stratum, these peasants differed from one another. In Prussia, as in Augustów Gubernia, which belonged to Congress Poland, peasants had been emancipated from serfdom in 1807, whereas those living in Kaunas, Vilnius, and Grodno gubernias remained serfs until 1861. After 1807 free peasants in Prussia had the right to move to other estates, become landowners themselves, or engage in crafts; in Russia, meanwhile, the conditions for freedom in crafts and trade were created only in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Although the Lithuanian-inhabited districts in Prussia were among the poorest, and the Gumbinnen Governmental District was ranked one of the last in all of Germany in terms of income,3 Prussian Lithuanians became involved in market relations considerably earlier than Russian Lithuanians. A second similarity was the undeniably great influence of the Church in Lithuanian speakers’ environments. Yet Prussian Lithuanians were Evangelical Lutherans, while Catholics made up the majority of Lithuanian speakers in Russia. In addition, many Prussian Lithuanians were literate and had access to Lithuanian schools, the Mass, newspapers, and books in Lithuanian.4 In Russia, there were no schools (except in Augustów 3 Cf. Zweck, Litauen, 195–196. 4 There are no data about the literacy of Lithuanian speakers in Prussia as accurate as the statistics from the Russian Empire. By 1864, though, 84 percent of school-aged children in the Prussian Province attended school: Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, Modernisierung und Disziplinierung. Sozialgeschichte des preußischen Volksschulwesens 1794–1872, vol. 96 of Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), 107. Actual school attendance in the mid-nineteenth century was much lower in many places: cf. Albert Weiß, Preußisch-Litauen und Masuren. Historische und topographisch-statistische Studie betreffend den Regierungsbezirk

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

Gubernia) from 1865 to 1904–1905 where the Lithuanian language could legally be taught and no authorized publications printed in the Latin script. Lithuanian speakers in Russia were highly influenced by Polish culture. On the other side of the border, Lithuanians were loyal to the Prussian king and later became subjects of Germany’s kaiser. They were strongly influenced by the German discourse and often cast mocking glances across the border to backward “Samogitia” or “Muscovy.” Popular opinion in Prussia even in the late nineteenth century saw Lithuanian-speaking inhabitants of the Russian territories as “Poles,”5 whereas on the other side of the border the stereotype of Prussian Lithuanians at this time emphasized their “transformation into Germans.” All of these differences made it very difficult to create one Lithuanian national movement. Even in the first issues of Auszra, Prussian and Russian Lithuanians were described as “brothers” who still had to get to know one another,6 rather than as a genuinely existing unit. It would be hard to offer an unambiguous response as to whether such unity was ever achieved. Even after the joining of the Klaipėda region (Territory of Memel) to the Republic of Lithuania in 1923, this land remained almost completely unfamiliar to a large portion of the Lithuanian population. In the period before the First World War, a majority of Prussian Lithuanians had strong reservations regarding the potential of achieving cultural closeness to Lithuanian speakers from the Romanov empire.7 Russian Lithuanians similarly held a no less moderate opinion regarding this potential.

Gumbinnen, part 2 (Rudolstadt: Buchhandlung der F. priv. Hofbuchdruckerei [G. Froebel], 1879), 200, 203, citing data from Heydekrug and Ragnit counties. The census of 1871 recorded illiteracy among 27.29 percent of men and 33.54 percent of women in the Prussian Province: Karl Brämer, “Religionsbekenntnis und Schulbildung der Bevölkerung des preußischen Staats,” Zeitschrift des Königlich Preussischen Statistischen Bureaus 14 (1874): 148. 5 Cf. -j-a-, “Mes ir lenkai,” Varpas 9 (1891): 129. One of the opinions circulating about the Ūkininkas (Farmer) monthly, first published for a Russian Lithuanian readership in 1890, stated that it provided “a Polish kind of education, and thus could not offer anything of benefit for Prussia” (J. Sidaras, “Stalupēnai,” Varpas 10 (1892): 148). 6 [Jurgis Mikšas] Parplis, “Dabar jau pradeda …” Auszra 8, 9, 10 (1883): 289–290. 7 Cf. Pocytė, Mažlietuviai Vokietijos imperijoje.

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All of this means that when speaking about the nationalization of Prussian Lithuania, or its transformation into a place Lithuanians could call their own, we are talking about two projected trends in the development of Lithuanian national culture. One integrated all Lithuanian speakers, regardless of their social, cultural, or economic differences; the other articulated those differences and saw them as an objective basis for disunity. The efforts to signify Prussian Lithuania and to transform it into a Lithuanian national space developed along both lines. Therefore, we must ask: What united these efforts? What was the social and cultural basis for such unity? The driving factor arose out of necessity: separate groups of Lithuanian speakers formed a cross-border alliance in response to policies of discrimination enacted more or less simultaneously by the Hohenzollern and Romanov governments. In neither case were these policies directly aimed at Lithuanians, but they did threaten the position of the Lithuanian language in public communication. These policies reflected both monarchies’ selection of an anti-Polish route—and in the case of Germany, efforts to consolidate the united Reich as well. In the Russian Empire, the government introduced an anti-Polish policy after quelling the uprising of 1863–1864. The new policy included measures intended to separate Lithuanian-speaking peasants from Polish influence, the “Polish script” (Latin letters) was taken out of circulation, and the influence of the Catholic Church was weakened, which is why measures were taken against church-controlled schools in Vilnius and Kaunas gubernias (these measures also affected the teaching of Lithuanian in schools). At the same time the goal was to Russianize the land, to consolidate the view introduced after the uprising of 1830–1831 that the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania were indeed Russian, only Polonized over time, and to strengthen the role of Russians and the Orthodox Church.8 This policy of 8

For more on this topic, see Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on Russia’s Western Frontier 1863–1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); “Forum: Reinterpreting Russification in Late Imperial Russia” (with contributions from Mikhail Dolbilov, Darius Staliūnas, and Andreas Kappeler), Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 2 (2004): 245–297; and Darius Staliūnas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification

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“reinstating the origins of Russianness” eventually turned social leaders such as the Samogitian bishop Motiejus Valančius (Maciej Wołonczew­ski), who could have influenced and mobilized Lithuanian-speaking peasants, against it. The beginnings of the book-smuggling phenomenon are associated with none other than this figure, when books in the Latin script otherwise banned in the Russian Empire started being printed in Prussian borderland locations and secretly smuggled into Russia. This phenomenon led to the formation of the first lasting contacts between Lithuanians living on either side of the border, which were related to the survival of the Lithuanian language. At first limited to contacts within the Catholic Church between Valančius and the Tilsit Catholic priest Johann Zabermann, gradually the business of printing books for Russian Lithuanians generated interest among more and more printers in the Prussian borderland, finally prompting Prussian Lithuanians to think about creating their own printing presses. In Germany, meanwhile, over the course of several years after the Reich’s establishment, a whole series of laws were passed that strengthened the influence of the German language in the Church, in schools, and in public communication yet also directly affected the status of the Lithuanian language. With the law on school supervision signed by the kaiser in March 1872, the government took control of all public and private learning institutions, removing from the Church its right to maintain primary schools. The law appeared in the context of the Kulturkampf policy, while in the instructions for its implementation released at the same time, special attention was directed at the poor level of teaching German in areas inhabited by Polish Catholics.9 However, this law also touched Prussian Lithuanians, as it gave Evangelical priests the right to teach pupils only religion. In this way the provision marginalized the institution that had for centuries served as bastion of the public use of Lithuanian in children’s education. A further step down this track was in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863, vol. 11 of On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics (New York: Rodopi, 2007). 9 “Gesetz betreffend die Beaufsichtigung des Unterrichts- und Erziehungswesens vom 11. März 1872,” in Gesetze und Verordnungen über das Volksschulwesen insbesondere im Regierungsbezirk Arnsberg, comp. Johann Sahler (Schwelm: Selbstverlag, 1888), 9–10.

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taken that October, when Education and Religious Affairs Minister Adalbert Falk signed the Universal Education Regulation. According to it, teaching of German became mandatory in all schools, while schools whose pupils spoke a language other than German were to receive a separate set of regulations.10 These regulations appeared in the Prussian Province after six months, and under the pretext of strengthening the status of German, they directly affected the rights of both Polish speakers and Lithuanian speakers in the province. In the briefing signed by Ober-President Karl von Horn, the language of instruction for all subjects in schools from the lowest grade was German, even in those cases where the school was attended by children who had absolutely no knowledge of German. Lithuanian was retained only to teach religion and church singing in the lowest grades, while non-German children could learn how to read and write in Polish and Lithuanian only in the higher grades, and only to the extent that Masurians and Lithuanians could read and understand the Bible and hymnal in their native tongue.11 Historians agree that this decision led to the initial attempts by Prussian Lithuanians to protect their rights to the public use of their language.12 The German government introduced this assimilationist education policy, which eventually grew into the so-called Kulturkampf, at a time when members of the Nationalliberale Partei were the main supporters of Bismarck’s government. This policy was essentially anti-Polish and antiCatholic;13 it was not aimed at Prussian Lithuanians. Even so, it pushed them 10 Allgemeine Bestimmungen über das preußiche Volksschul-, Präparanden- und Seminar-Wesen vom 15. Oktober 1872, nebst verschiedenen Prüfungs-Ordnungen, 11th ed. (Neuwied: Heuser’s Verlag [Louis Heuser], 1897), 7–8, 16. 11 “Bestimmungen über den Unterricht in der deutschen Sprache in den von Kindern polnischer und litauischer Zunge besuchten Volksschulen der Provinz Preussen,” July 24, 1873, in Walter Hubatsch, Masuren und Preußisch-Litthauen in der Nationalitätenpolitik Preußens 1870–1920 (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1966), 73–77. 12 Hubatsch, Masuren und Preußisch-Litthauen, 44–45; Range, “Preußisch-Litauen,” 75–76; Pocytė, Mažlietuviai Vokietijos imperijoje, 123. 13 For more on the anti-Polish policies of Kaiserreich Germany, see Martin Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik (Munich: Ehrenwirth, 1963); Lech Trzeciakowski, “The Prussian State and the Catholic Church in Prussian Poland, 1871–1914,” Slavic Review 26, no. 4 (1967): 618–637; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Die Polenpolitik im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918,” in Politische Ideologien und nationalstaatliche Ordnung. Studien zur Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahhunderts. Festschrift für Theodor

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to mobilize, present the government with their demands, and seek acknowledgment of them. In 1873, 1875, 1876, 1879, 1882, 1883, 1892, 1896, 1900, and 1904—in petitions bearing hundreds and thousands of signatures sent to governmental institutions at both the governmental district and provincial levels, ministers, and the kaiser himself—Prussian Lithuanians demanded the Lithuanian language be returned to schools.14 The Church energetically participated in the first phase of this mobilization: namely, the clergy from Evangelical parishes in the Prussian Province’s northeastern counties. Moreover, the more effective the attempts were to strengthen German at the expense of Polish, the more likely it became that Lithuanians would oppose such efforts, which also had a direct impact on them. The traditional space of Lithuanian was the Church, but by the early nineteenth century in most Lithuanian churches where Mass had been celebrated only in Lithuanian, masses in German were introduced in parallel. In the city of Memel, the Deutsche and Litauische Kirche that served two lingually different parishes were in 1858 renamed the Stadtkirche (City Church) and Landkirche (Rural Church), retracting from the principle of distinguishing parishes based on language.15 An analogous situation Schieder, ed. Kurt Kluxen and Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1968), 297–316; Lech Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf w zaborze pruskim (Poznań: Wydaw­nictwo Poznańskie, 1970); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Von den ‘Reichsfeinden’ zur ‘Reichskristallnacht’: Polenpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918. Studien zur deutschen Sozial- und Verfassungsgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970), 181–199; William W. Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews. The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Brigitte Balzer, Die preußische Polenpolitik 1894–1908 und die Haltung der deutschen konservativen und liberalen Parteien (unter besonder Berücksichtigung der Provinz Posen) (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1990); and Walkenhorst, Nation—Volk—Rasse, 252–281. For assessments, see Christoph Kleßmann and Johannes Frackowiak, “Die Polenpolitik des Deutschen Kaiserreichs 1871–1918,” in Nationalistische Politik und Ressentiments. Deutsche und Polen von 1871 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Johannes Frackowiak (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2013), 23–38. For the significance of the “Polish question” theretofore, see Klaus Zernack, ed., Polen und die polnische Frage in der Geschichte der Hohenzollernmonarchie 1701–1871 (Berlin: Colloquium, 1982). 14 [Ansas Bruožis], Prusu Lietuwei. Perzwalga lietuwißku Peticijonu, Deputacijonu bey polytißku Weikimu (Luźen: M. Kaitinis, 1906), 18–40. 15 Agathon Harnoch, Chronik und Statistik der evangelischen Kirchen in den Provinzen Ost- und Westpreußen (Neidenburg: S. Nipkow, 1890), 162–163; Johannes Sembritzki, Geschichte des Kreises Memel (Memel: Robert Schmidts Buchhandlung, 1918), 112.

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Figure 25.  The Lithuanian Church in Tilsit—one of the bastions of institutional usage of the Lithuanian language in East Prussia. Photo by Robert Minzloff, from Tilsit, published in the accession book by Adolf Boetticher Die Bau- und Kunstdenkmäler der Provinz Ostpreußen, no. 5: Litauen (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1895).

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existed in Tilsit, where the German and Lithuanian parishes, in accordance with the rescript of the minister of education and religious affairs of 1874, could no longer be formed or divided based on language.16 That is why in 1877 the local church also ceased being called “Lithuanian.”17 The use of Lithuanian in the 1870s was restricted in meetings as well. Again, amid the backdrop of its anti-Polish policy, in August 1876 the German Reichstag passed a law on the introduction of only German in all state offices, services, and political corporations. In separate counties or areas where another language predominated, within a term of twenty years from when the law came into effect, an exception was made for school boards, community and county representative meetings, and community and other communal body meetings to be held in another language.18 Yet in practice, this exception was applied only for five years in part of Heydekrug County,19 which stood out for having the largest number of Lithuanian speakers, based on statistical data.20 This case indeed shows how language statistics were used in the implementation of specific decisions to discriminate. Another such decision would be the law regulating public meetings passed in April 1908, the initial drafts of which reached the Reichstag in the 1870s.21 This law made certain people second-rate citizens, and regardless of all the exceptions outlined in the 16 “Hauptverwaltungs-Bericht des Königsberger Konsistoriums für 1874/75,” April 22, 1876, in Walter Hubatsch, Geschichte der evangelischen Kirche Ostpreussens, vol. 3: Dokumente (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 319. 17 Knaake, Führer durch Tilsit, 21; Jenny Kopp, Geschichte des Landkreises Tilsit (Tilsit: Buchdruckerei Pawlowski, 1918), 202. 18 “Gesetz, betreffend die Geschäftssprache der Behörden, Beamten und politischen Körperschaften des Staats, vom 28.8.1876,” Centralblatt für die gesammte Unterrichts-Verwaltung in Preußen, September 30, 1876 (no. 9): 513–516. 19 [Bruožis], Prusu Lietuwei, 16. 20 Based on the census data of 1861, use of the Lithuanian language within the family was 63 percent among families from Heydekrug County. In other counties, this indicator was less than half: 45 percent in Memel County, 43 percent in Tilsit County, 38 percent in Ragnit County, 35 percent in Niederung County, 26 percent in Pillkallen County, 20 percent in Labiau County, and less than 10 percent elsewhere in Prussian Lithuania (calculated based on Böckh, Deutschen Volkszahl, 234–235). 21 Fritz Goerhrke, ed., Reichsvereinsgesetz vom 19. April 1908. Text-Ausgabe mit erläuternden Anmerkungen, den Ausführungsbestimmungen für Preußen und ausführlichem Sachregister, 2nd ed. (Dortmund: W. Crüwell, 1908), 8–9.

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law, it facilitated further discrimination against “national minorities.”22 The new Law on Societies required that all deliberations at public meetings had to take place in German, except for international congresses and voters’ meetings for elections to the Reichstag or Landtag. So in this case, too, statistical data were used to support discriminatory decisions. In areas where the law was applied and more than 60 percent of the population were residents of long standing, according to the latest census, languages other than German could still be used in public meetings for twenty years after the law’s introduction; however, the police had to be informed of such meetings at least seventy-two hours in advance. Otherwise, police agencies had the right to disrupt such invalid meetings.23 In East Prussia, this exception applied only to the counties of Ortelsburg (Szczytno), Neidenburg (Nidzica), and Johannisburg (Pisz); the Lithuanian-inhabited counties of East Prussia never even appeared on the list of exceptions.24 Late in 1909, after relentless urging from Prussian Lithuanians, the government nevertheless decided to apply this exception to Lithuanians living in the Königsberg and Gumbinnen governmental districts, allowing them to organize meetings without notifying the police in advance.25 In short, when speakers of languages other than German started being seen as “minorities” based on statistical data, laws and declarations made by individuals occupying official posts in the 1870s–1880s started to push the Lithuanian language out of communication spaces where Prussian Lithuanians had been accustomed to using it—in schools, at church, and in court offices. This prompted Prussian Lithuanians to organize. A network of people formed that for the first time united Prussian Lithuanians who were concerned about their own (as Prussian Lithuanians) cultural needs. Although a unified approach was never achieved in this network, several groups that belonged to this network could be distinguished, in a very general (and therefore somewhat false) sense. The first group was distinguished by its conservative attitudes. Its main goal 22 Cf. Walkenhorst, Nation—Volk—Rasse, 280. 23 Reichsvereinsgesetz vom 19. April 1908, 13–14, 15–16, 66–67. 24 Ibid., 68–69. 25 Hubatsch, Masuren und Preußisch-Litthauen, 56–57.

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focused on the maintenance or reinstatement of the former order, when Lithuanian was the language of school, church, and public life. In the self-awareness of this group, Lithuania was still their homeland and Prussia/Germany was still their state, while the coexistence of Germans and Lithuanians in Lithuania was the norm. Lithuanian farmers from various counties, who made up the majority of this group acting as petition-writing activists, started participating in political activities in the last decade of the nineteenth century. They aimed to retain the old order, mounted an organized opposition to attempts at ignoring Lithuanians’ uniqueness, and later even encouraged the usage of Lithuanian in public in various forms as much as possible. Another group was noted for its moderate attitudes. According to the ideas it propagated, it was close to the first group yet held a significantly clearer position regarding Lithuanians’ cultural distinction and need for self-education. This group had taken on some of the nationalists’ attitudes; however, they did not oppose them to German nationalism. The main organizations that can be attributed to this group were the Tilsit Lithuanian Chanters Society, led by Vydūnas (Wilhelm Storosta), and Sandora, directed by priest Vilius Gaigalaitis.26 Gradually a third group emerged. It was not completely unrelated to the first two, especially the second, and frequently made contact with them. The third group stood out because its attitudes were strongly influenced by more lively communication with Lithuanians in other parts of the “Lithuanian world,” who were later regarded as the ideological pioneers of the Lithuanian national movement. Most of the links in this case were created via the first Lithuanian-controlled newspapers released in Prussia: Lietuwißka Ceitunga (Lithuanian Newspaper, from 1877), Niamuno sargas (Nemunas Guardian, 1884–1887), and the semireligious Naujasis Keleiwis (New Traveler, from 1880). The famous Auszra, published in Prussia in 1883–1886, emerged from these exchanges: it was the first secular magazine for Lithuanians in the Russian Empire and eventually became the platform of Lithuanian nationalism. Indeed, compared to the first two 26 For more on the Prussian Lithuanian societies and the orientation of their activities, see Pocytė, Mažlietuviai Vokietijos imperijoje.

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groups, the third was somewhat smaller and known for its more radical attitudes, which were provoked not just by Lithuanian nationalism but also by the ideas of socialism. Expressions of both were not hard to notice in the activities of Birutė, a society founded in 1885, as well as in various periodical publications that were initiated every few years by (or involved cooperation from) Jurgis Mikšas, Martynas Jankus, Jonas Vanagaitis, and to some extent Ansas Bruožis (Auszra, Niamuno Sargas, Garsas [Sound], Lietuviszkas Darbininkas [Lithuanian Worker], Saulēteka [Sunrise], Byrute, Sūkurys [Whirlwind], and others). This group was noteworthy for its significantly stronger contacts with Lithuanians engaged in the national idea who lived on the other side of the Prussian border. It was also characterized by the belief that the ideas suggested by the latter were universal in the sense that they could be (or had to be) applied in Prussian Lithuania as well. Loyalty to the kaiser and membership in the Prussian/German state was also demonstrated by this group’s members,27 as there was no realistic alternative. However, they had a completely different understanding of what was (or what had to be considered as) Lithuania. In their view, the term “Lithuania” had been nationalized or appropriated: to them Lithuania happened to be their homeland, but only their true homeland. In addition, Lithuania was not restricted to Prussia’s borders, and this was precisely the aspect that united the Prussian Lithuanians who belonged to this group with nationalist Lithuanians in Russia. Another particularity that distinguished this group’s attitudes was its assessment of the role of Germans in Prussian Lithuania. In their readings, Germans were depicted in an increasingly aggressive light, thereby seeking to encourage dissociation of Lithuanians and Germans. The members of this group regarded the “Germanization” of Lithuanians, responsibility for which was transferred onto “Germans,” as the most burning issue. Thus, the communication milieu that formed on the basis of the third social group was nationally engaged. Having declared Germans to blame for all of Prussian Lithuanians’ problems, it became potentially 27 Cf. “Szimtmetine Gimimo Diena Ciecoriaus Wiliaus Pirmojo,” Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, March 23, 1897 (no. 24); “Musu Ciecorius Tilzeje,” Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, September 25, 1900 (no. 77).

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anti-German. It would be difficult to assess the extent to which its ideas spread in Prussian Lithuania. The figures linked with this group practically admitted that the promotion of such ideas had marginalized them in Prussian Lithuania itself.28 The periodical publications Keleiwis (Traveler), Konzervatywû Draugystês-Laißkas (Conservative Party Press), Lietuwißka Ceitunga, and Tilžês Keleiwis (Tilsit Traveler),29 which had the greatest number of subscribers and were printed in Lithuanian for several decades, were not this third group’s initiative, but in the hands of the conservative and moderate Prussian Lithuanians. Only Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga (New Lithuanian Newspaper) sometimes stood out as the most influential newspaper engaging the more radical supporters of Lithuanian culture. The representatives of this group had no great success in getting their candidates elected to the Prussian Landtag or Germany’s Reichstag either: the moderate and conservative Prussian Lithuanians always gathered more votes. There is no doubt that the communication milieu in which this group’s ideas found support expanded prior to the First World War. An ever-increasing number of Lithuanians shared their ideas. Nevertheless, the influence of the social group that formed the basis of this communication milieu remained relatively minor. And it could not have been otherwise, as the ambassadors of nationalism who sought to become the new leaders of Lithuanian speakers in Russia could oppose imperial behavior not just by forming a national culture but also via their objective cultural differences. This behavior applied integrational and legitimizing strategies in the territory called the “Northwest Land,” based on the influence of the Orthodox Church, the spread of the Russian language, and the idea of “returning to Russian origins.” None of these strategies could be accepted by Russian Lithuanians—who practiced a different religion, spoke a different language, and had nationalized the historical narrative of the GDL, thus contrasting the imperial vision with their own idea of statehood. Prussian Lithuanians 28 Cf. [Ansas Bruožis] A. B. Klaipėdiškis, “Byrutė.” Dvidešimtmetinių sukaktuvių atmi­ nimui (Tilsit: Otto v. Mauderode, 1905), 23. 29 For the numbers of copies released, see Domas Kaunas, Mažosios Lietuvos knyga: lietuviškos knygos raida 1547–1940 (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996), 250, 252; and “Schreiben des wirklichen geheimen Rats,” 33.

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encountered difficulties in forming a similar opposition because in their culture, as in that of the Masurians, the potential for such an alternative was limited. United with Germans in the Evangelical Church, made loyal subjects of the monarch due to the impact of the same church as well as the educational system and the military, they were also often renowned for bilingualism. By 1871, 44.75 percent of Lithuanian-speaking pupils who were accepted into public primary schools in Prussia understood German. According to this indicator, across all of Prussia, Lithuanians were three times ahead of Polish and Danish pupils, only falling behind Sorbian (47.68 percent), Friesian (72.93 percent), and Dutch (98.59 percent) pupils.30 None of this sparked a need among Prussian Lithuanians to react rapidly to the changing challenges posed by German nationalism. Industrialization and the factors that accompanied it (the appearance of faster, broader, and more effective communications and political changes) had an immense effect on increasing the potential of Lithuanians born into a traditional village environment to change their social position. The evolutionary concept of culture and of being cultivated entrenched in the Enlightenment, plus the spread of the image instilled by thinkers and historians (e.g., Voigt) of Germans as “carriers of culture,” encouraged a majority of Prussian Lithuanians to gravitate toward that particular culture. The need to be an educated representative of German culture or to resemble one was increasingly dictated by the spread of “advanced” bourgeois culture. In turn, the village environment dominated by religious, god-fearing Lithuanian peasants appeared more and more conservative, closed, backward, and unlikely to change. Not just military service or education but even a job in the industrial sector, mastery of a craft or trade, or ultimately, the desire to join leading social groups urged many Prussian Lithuanians to use German much more frequently than Lithuanian as a means of public communication. It made them want to behave “like Germans,” while many of those who strove for an education were forced to break their ties with the traditional environment, to adapt to German culture to a much greater extent, and often even to regard 30 Jahrbuch für die amtliche Statistik des Preussischen Staats 4, 2nd half, part 3 (1876), 12–19.

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themselves as German. However, it was not so difficult for Prussian Lithuanians, who considered Prussia (Germany) their own state and did not see Lithuanians as a national entity equal to Germans, to take such a step. Understandably, these circumstances often blocked the anti-assimilation efforts of a small group of Prussian Lithuanian activists who aimed their campaign at a segment of the Prussian Lithuanian social organism defined solely in terms of language. Nevertheless, Prussian Lithuanian groups engaged in fostering Lithuanians’ cultural uniqueness continued to expand, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they generated meanings that made it possible to consider East Prussia, especially Prussian Lithuania, a space of their own. What system of meanings united these groups with the Lithuanian national culture being developed mostly in Russian Lithuania and by émigré Lithuanians?

4.1. THE LITHUANIAN HISTORICAL NARRATIVE AS A SOURCE OF NATIONAL CONCEPTS OF EAST PRUSSIA In describing the spatial imagination that many a Lithuanian speaker could boast of having in the pre-nationalistic era, historians often refer to a statement once formulated by Mykolas Biržiška: that an ordinary Lithuanian’s life from birth to death over the course of several centuries was spent within the boundaries of his parish.31 During that time, such a Lithuanian’s worldview hardly could have gone beyond those boundaries. This statement, despite not being based on anything but the insight of Biržiška, himself born in the late nineteenth century, could be considered as a kind of reference point. The application of his considerations could appear somewhat exaggerated when applied even to the mid-nineteenth century, as at that time the concept of ethnographic Lithuania was already being spread in literature aimed at peasant farmers.32 However, the scale of this dissemination of information had not reached any great proportions. 31 Mykolas Biržiška, Lietuvių tautos kelias į naująjį gyvenimą, vol. I: Galvojimai apie tautą savyje ir kaimynų tarpe (Los Angeles: Lietuvių dienos, 1952), 184; Subačius, Lietuvių tapatybės kalvė, 149; Petronis, Constructing Lithuania, 228. 32 Medišauskienė, “Lietuvos samprata,” 223–224.

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Thus, taking Biržiška’s statement as a jumping-off point, it makes sense to start keeping track of events in order to imagine just how much the ­worldview of an ordinary Lithuanian-speaking farmer had to be expanded before his spatial imagination could encompass a “Lithuania” possessing some kind of tangible guidelines. Keeping in mind the fact that geography textbooks aimed at Russian Lithuanians and regarded as “their own” appeared only at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,33 we could boldly postpone the point when this process gained momentum to the early twentieth century, when after 1905 Lithuanians set up an independent educational system beyond the jurisdiction of imperial structures. This could be said at least about Vilnius and Kaunas gubernias, as the educational situation in Suwałki Gubernia was different. At the same time, expanding on Biržiška’s thoughts, certain exceptions must be kept in mind. Paulius Subačius has drawn attention to some of them: the spatial imagination of an ordinary Lithuanian had to have been very different from “mobile people” who had traveled a lot—travelers and book smugglers, as well as those who had spent shorter or longer periods in more distant places (central Russia, Poland, Europe, or the United States).34 In addition to these exceptions, educated society, the well-read intelligentsia, or the clergy, we should note that Lithuanian-speaking farmers from Prussia must have had a quite different spatial imagination from that of Russian Lithuanians in the second half of the nineteenth century. Those who lived closer to the border would constitute another exception. It was among these “exceptions” that understanding grew that Lithuanians indeed lived on both sides of the border, which formed not a natural but a cultural boundary. That border had hardly changed since the fifteenth century, so it was too long-term a factor, with too much significance in everyday interaction, not to have existed in Lithuanian speakers’ spatial imagination. This point can be confirmed in secular magazines released in Lithuanian that appeared toward the end of the 1870s. Here we often come across the concepts Prusai (Prussia) (or Rytprusiai [East 33 For more detail, see Petronis, Constructing Lithuania, 229–235. 34 Subačius, Lietuvių tapatybės kalvė, 159–161.

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Figure 26.  The German-Russian border. Entrance to Germany near Eydtkuhnen. Early twentieth-century postcard from the Elisa Becker publishing house in Eydtkuhnen.

Prussia]) and Maskolija (Muscovy), which indicate that denoting the area of Lithuanian speakers along the border of two monarchies created an important reference point. The border had to be crossed, and beyond it one found a completely different world. The difference in everyday interaction between the spaces described by the concepts Prusai and Maskolija was so great that the representatives of one space found little that was “familiar” in the other. That interaction often took place through economic contact, as in the late nineteenth century East Prussia experienced a major labor force deficit. This province’s economy was agrarian; heavy industry was hardly developed here, while the laying of a railroad made it easier for many of the province’s inhabitants to travel to more industrially developed regions. During the forty years since the Reich’s founding, 700,400 people departed from East Prussia, or around 17,500 every year. The flow of departures from the province increased around 1880 and reached its peak in 1888–1889 and 1897–1899.35 A majority of those leaving were young men fit for work, who searched for employment in the industrial sector in other countries or in 35 Hesse, Bevölkerung von Ostpreußen, 46–47.

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the industrial regions of Germany. In Germany, apart from the East Prussian Province, in 1900 most of those who had been born in East Prussia lived in Westphalia Province36—in an industrial sense, one of the most developed regions. However, the major population outflows from East Prussia and the need for a low-cost labor force in the traditional agrarian sector forced those who remained to compensate somehow for their lost laborers and to seek short-term replacements mostly from Russia’s border area. Although the movement of hired laborers into East Prussia was a rather old phenomenon, it reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time there were seventy to eighty thousand hired Russian subjects in the Russian Empire’s consular districts of Königsberg, Memel, and Danzig, who mostly worked in the fields and at brick and other factories, installed and renovated irrigation systems, or constructed railroads and highways.37 Žemaičiai (Samogitians) and lenkai (Poles) from the border regions, as they were called by Lithuanians in Prussia, naturally, worked not just on German but also on Lithuanian farms, and these kinds of everyday interactions between the two Lithuanian-speaking cultures hardly would have promoted closer ties. For the hired laborers, Prusai would have raised associations not just with the possibility of earning something but also with the often strict behavior and disregard of humane norms they faced.38 In turn, for the East Prussians the žemaičiai were chiefly a cheap source of labor, and for their all too often excesses they were viewed in anything but a favorable light.39 In a cultural sense, these concepts, worlds apart, had to be overcome in creating a familiarity of both spaces in the “Lithuanian world.” In other 36 Ibid., 62. 37 Iurii Kostiashov, “Rossiiskie rabochie v Vostochnoi Prussii v kontse XIX–nachale XX veka,” Vestnik RGU im. I. Kanta 6 (2010): 148–149. 38 Cf. ibid., 150–151. 39 Petras Rimša gave perfect stereotypical assessments of workers from Russian Lithuania in Prussia: “You can tell the difference between one of our workers and a Prussian worker.… It’s a rare farmer here who takes in one of our side’s workers into their home, as they hear that he will infect them with diseases (trachoma, scabies), then beat someone up, steal, and run off ”: Petras Rymša, “Kelionės įspūdžiai,” Lietuvos žinios, September 29 (October 12), 1912 (no. 115): 3. Another similar testimony: “Prussian Lithuanians complain about the workers from Žemaitija, calling them outright whoremongers, drunks, bullies, thieves, etc. And it really is so!”: I. Ž., “Susiartinimas su Prusų lietuviais,” Lietuvos žinios, March 23 (April 5), 1913 (no. 35–36): 4.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

words, the Lithuanians articulated in Prusai and in Maskolija (less frequently called the Žemaičių kraštas [Samogitians’ land])40 had to be transformed into one Lithuania—a common space where the dominant Lithuanian speakers would be brought closer together by a suitable system of meanings. The creation and spread of such a system of meanings, hastened in the second half of the nineteenth century by the stimuli mentioned earlier on either side of the border, was a difficult process. The first attempts to promote the thoughts of Basanavičius, who encouraged the idea of Lithuanian national unity in a completely unprepared Prussian Lithuanian society, met with rejection. Due to pressure from readers, the editor of Lietuwißka Ceitunga, Martynas Šernius, was forced to cease cooperation with Basanavičius in 1882–1883. The editor of Naujasis Keleiwis, Adomas Einaras, had a similar reaction, and for the same reason.41 Jurgis Mikšas’s attempts at releasing the analogue of Auszra for Prussian Lithuanians—Niamuno Sargas—also resulted in rejection by its intended readership.42 By this stage it was rather clear that the same approach that worked with Russian Lithuanians would not influence Prussian Lithuanians. In everyday life, they understood all too well their differences from the žemaičiai who lived on the other side of the border. Accordingly, Russian Lithuanians left Lithuania for Prusai even in the early twentieth century,43 so the Lithuania that existed there, in Prussia, by no means existed in the spatial imagination of every Lithuanian living in Russia. Nevertheless, attempts were made to overcome opposition at the everyday level by forming and spreading uniting meanings that could be recognized and would be adopted by the Lithuanian-speaking audiences on either side of the border. In creating such meanings, the nurturers of Lithuanians’ uniqueness turned back to the past, which, alongside language, had to become another piece of evidence proving Lithuanians were a unique and united group. This kind of role for the past in providing the desired 40 Cf. “Lietuwei atßwito,” Lietuwißka Ceitunga, February 5, 1895 (no. 6). 41 See editor’s comment (Auszra 1 [1883]: 18). Cf. [Ansas Bruožis] Probočių anūkas, Mažosios Lietuvos buvusiejie rašytojai ir žymesniejie lietuvių kalbos mylėtojai (Tilsit: “Spaudos” [Pavlovskio] spaustuvė, 1920), 92–93; and Domas Kaunas, Iš lietuvių knygos istorijos: Klaipėdos krašto lietuvių knyga iki 1919 metų (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1986), 55–56. 42 Vincas [Mickevičius] Kapsukas, “‘Varpo’ užgimimas (1884–1889),” Varpas 12 (1903): 276. 43 See A. Jablonskis’s note: Vilniaus žinios, March 31 (April 13), 1905 (no. 82): 4.

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explanation of the present and forming present-day values was understood by both Basanavičius, who began the preface of the first issue of Auszra with the motto Homines historiarum ignari semper sunt pueri, and Prussian Lithuanian Vydūnas, to whom the past was the root of musû gywastis [our vitality]. According to him, ignorance of a nation’s past created conditions in which Lithuanians would be devoured and spurned by Germans, “Muscovitians,” and Poles.44 Understandably, the forefathers of Lithuanian nationalism and the Prussian Lithuanians who cooperated with them understood their activities in this field not as an actualization of the past per se but as the actualization of the “real” Lithuanian past. Everyone who had written about Lithuanians and Lithuania until then had done so incorrectly, if only because they were not Lithuanians themselves. Now Lithuanians had to reveal their “real” history—long, rich, heroic, monumental, but most important, “their own.” In short, a Lithuanian historical master narrative had to be created. The basis of this narrative became a concept of Lithuania’s past set out in the historic writings of Simonas Daukantas. It proved to be the most suitable foundation in the 1870s for the still germinating Lithuanian nationalism. In fact, of the four works by Daukantas only one was printed at the time, and not even his most important one (Budas Senowęs-Lëtuwiū – ámajtiû [The Manners of the Ancient Lithuanians, HighKalnienû ir Z  landers and Samogitians], 1845). Still, the manuscripts of his other works were available to those involved with Auszra, and they harnessed the ideas found in these texts to strengthen the Lithuanian national idea.45 The role they bestowed upon Daukantas and his work is also demonstrated in the fact that this historian’s biography and a list of his merits appeared in the first issues of Auszra.46 In the Russian Empire, the Daukantas-inspired 44 [Jonas Basanavičius] B., “Priekalba,” Auszra 1 (1883): 3; [Vilius Storosta], Senutē (Bitēnai: Prusu Lietuwiu Susiwienyjimas, 1904), 4, 70. 45 Juozas Jakštas, “Lietuvos aušrinė istoriografija,” [Lietuvių katalikų mokslo akademijos] Suvažiavimo darbai, vol. VIII (Rome: Lietuvių katalikų mokslo akademija, 1974), 221–240; Virgil Krapauskas, Nationalism and Historiography: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Historicism (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2000), 63, 110–112. Daukantas’s works were released to the wider public in the last decade of the nineteenth century when the two-volume Lietuvos istorija [History of Lithuania] up to the Union of Lublin was released (1893, 1897) and Daukantas’s Istorija Žemaitiška [History of Samogitia] in Plymouth, and in Bittehnen—Pasakojimai apie Veikalus Lietuvių tautos senovēje [Accounts of Events in the Lithuanian Nation’s Past] (1893, 1899). 46 “Simanas Daukantas, Lietuvos rasztininkas,” Auszra 1 (1883): 13–15; 2 (1883): 41–43.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

concept spread mostly through Jonas Mačiulis’s (Maironis’s) textbook,47 which was reissued three times, through Antanas Alekna’s version of this textbook that was first released in 1911 and reissued six times,48 and through Pranas Klimaitis’s textbook for primary schools reprinted four times after its first appearance in 1912.49 These textbooks instilled the Daukantas-Maironis concept from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries in Lithuanian primary and secondary schools in the compactly Lithuanian-inhabited area of Russia (and during the period of German occupation from 1915 as well). Konstancija Skirmuntt’s Lietuvos istorija (History of Lithuania), translated into Lithuanian and corrected by Jonas Šliūpas, should also be mentioned among those works that influenced the formation of the Lithuanian historical master narrative in its initial stages and written based on the same sources used by Daukantas.50 What East Prussian and Prussian associations were formed in these works conveying the Lithuanian historical master narrative? Only a handful can be distinguished: 1. When writing about the period prior to the 13th century, all authors supported the “ancient Lithuanians” concept evident in Daukantas’s writings, in other words, the myth of unity among the Balts that claimed that Balts were equivalent to Lithuanians, who in ancient times had been divided into 47 Cf. [Jonas Mačiulis] Stanyslovas Zanavykas, Apsakymai apie Lietuvos praeiga (Tilsit: O. v. Mauderode, 1891), 3rd exp. ed.: [Jonas Mačiulis] Maironis, Lietuvos istorija: su kunigaikščių paveikslais ir žemlapiu (Petropilis: [s.n.], 1906). Daukantas’s work is just one of the sources to have inspired Mačiulis’s version of the history of Lithuania. Daukantas’s and Mačiulis’s versions differed not just in their assessment of paganism and Christianity but in many other aspects also. They are discussed in Vanda Zaborskaitė, Maironis, 2nd ed. (Vilnius: Vaga, 1987), 32–36, 40–55. 48 Antanas Alekna, Lietuvos istorija (Kaunas: Šv. Kazimiero draugija, 1911). 49 Pranas [Klimaitis], Lietuvos istorija. Vadovėlis pradedamoms mokykloms (Vilnius: [s.n.], 1912). 50 Konstancija Skirmuntt, Istorija Lietuwos trumpai apsakyta (New York, NY: Spaustuwē “Lietuwiszkojo Bałso”, 1887) (original: Konstancja Skirmuntt, Dzieje Litwy opowie­ dziane w zarysie [Cracow: Księgarnia G. Gebethnera i Spółki, 1886]). This work, received to wide acclaim in the Lithuanian press (cf. A–z, [review], Varpas 1 [1889]: 10; see also [Vincas Kudirka] Q. D. ir K., “Tevyniszki varpai,” Varpas 9 [1890]: 136–137; and Basanavičius’s critique in Varpas 1 [1893]: 10), was known and considered exemplary in the Prussian Lithuanian Birutė Society’s circle as well (cf. Varpas 6 [1896]: 92).

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several branches or tribes, including the Curonians and Prussians. 2. Some authors tried to appropriate the legend, related to the Prussian land, of Waidewutus, which was recorded for the first time in the early sixteenth century by Erasmus Stella. Some authors even called Waidewutus Lithuania’s first king or duke,51 even though it is more likely that there was growing acknowledgment that all of this was just a fable that was, according to Maironis, “story-like, as little truth could be found.”52 3. In presenting the most important events of the past of the GDL in a “rulers and wars” historical style, all but one author emphasized “Lithuanians’ ” battles with the kardininkai (sword-bearers) and kryžiokai (cross-bearers), that is, with the Livonian and Teutonic orders that—importantly—were identified with Germans by all authors, sometimes even naming the several centuries-long conflict as “a battle against the Germans,”53 ending with the Battle of Grunwald. Rarely did authors mention Prussian Lithuania in these “histories of Lithuania.”54 Attempts at integrating the Evangelical component into the Lithuanian historical master narrative were also scarce. Maironis and Alekna paid only minimal attention to Prussian Lithuania, presenting it only in terms of its meaning to the Lithuanian language and the national movement. Maironis, assessing the fate of Lithuanian writing and language 51 Skirmuntt, Istorija Lietuwos, 19–20; [Klimaitis], Lietuvos istorija, 19–20. 52 [Mačiulis] Zanavykas, Apsakymai, 28. 53 Cf. [Klimaitis], Lietuvos istorija, 41–43. 54 On this occasion it should be noted that probably the first Lithuanian history textbook prepared in Lithuanian where Prussian Lithuanians were given a fair amount of attention was commissioned by the Ministry of Education in 1936 (Lietuvos istorija, ed. Adolfas Šapoka [Kaunas: Švietimo ministerijos Knygų leidimo komisija, 1936]). Yet even in this textbook the history of Prussian Lithuania was presented separately, at the end of the work, alongside the history of the Lithuanian diaspora, as if it were something Lithuanian but at the same time not part of the general Lithuanian identity project based on the tradition of identification with the GDL and Catholicism.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

in the first edition of his history, focused on books written and usually published in the GDL and the “disappearance” of the Lithuanian language in the GDL.55 In his rather thick 186-page book, barely a few lines were devoted to Prussian Lithuanians, and they mostly highlighted the achievements of the Lithuanian language where they lived: “The situation of western Lithuanians was a little different: having contact with western Europe earlier, they awoke earlier and in the eighteenth century Lithuanianness started being expressed here rather strongly. The written language appeared more appealing, more pure, and was already rather academically fine-tuned. It was here that our greatest poet Kristijonas Donelaitis saw the light of day.”56 Next, seven sentences were dedicated to Donelaitis and the meaning of his work, viewed by Maironis under the undeniable effect of Daukantas. Still, when in the third, corrected edition Maironis provided a longer overview of Lithuanian writing, he noted, “Our first writers were Prussian Lithuanians: Rapagelonis [Rapolionis], Masvydis-Vaitkunas [Mažvydas], Valentas [Vilentas], Bretkunas, Vaišnora.” Then he briefly described their merits and touched on Daniel Klein, Philipp Ruhig, Christian G. Mielcke, Rhesa, Friedrich Kurschat, and Georg Sauerwein, adding considerably to the section on Donelaitis.57 In this edition, Maironis also acknowledged Prussian Lithuania’s role in the Lithuanian national movement, despite having reservations about Prussian Lithuanians’ actual participation in this movement. Even though Maironis mentioned the Birutė Society in the context of the Lithuanian national movement, according to him all newspapers prior to Auszra “worked on the rather narrow Prussian soil with conservative German goals.”58 Alekna allocated a very similar position to Prussian Lithuania in his history of Lithuania. It found mention on three occasions in his book: the first time clearly noting that this land never belonged to the Lithuanian state but “always remained under German rule.”59 The second and third time, Alekna followed Maironis’s example when he remarked that “the 55 [Mačiulis] Zanavykas, Apsakymai, 178–179. 56 Ibid., 179–180. 57 [Mačiulis] Maironis, Lietuvos istorija, 213, 218–219, 220–221, 221–226, 230–233. 58 Ibid., 250–251. 59 Alekna, Lietuvos istorija, 75.

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first Lithuanian books appeared in Prussian Lithuania,” mentioned Mažvydas’s Catechism, and discussed the printing of books and the first newspapers for Russian Lithuanians in Prussia in the second half of the nineteenth century. He, too, noted that newspapers “released for Prussian Lithuanians appeared much earlier, but they lacked in national spirit and were not read in Lithuania Major.”60 To what extent could such a portrayal of East Prussia become a basis for uniting Lithuanian speakers living either side of the border? In order to answer this question, attention must be drawn primarily to the fact that the most influential authors of textbooks, Maironis and Alekna, were Catholic clergymen. Thus in their version of the historical narrative, the role of the Catholic Church and Catholic culture was especially strong. These authors barely mentioned the Evangelical component in Lithuanian culture and did not even try to integrate it into the narrative. Maironis even referred to Martin Luther as a sectarian and reprobate, and considered Duke Albert’s conversion to Reformism “profligacy.”61 Keeping in mind the importance of the Evangelical Church and this faith in the Prussian Lithuanian environment, it is obvious that such declarations would only serve to alienate them. Even that narrow circle of Prussian Lithuanian activists who supported the idea of national unity was viewed without any enthusiasm in the historical narrative created by Russian Lithuanians. Quite the opposite, in the aforementioned textbooks we see reproving remarks concerning the nonexistence of “national spirit” among Prussian Lithuanians. Such reproaches in the nationalistically engaged Lithuanian information space had become the prevailing topos representing Prussian Lithuanians at the time, on which more below. Thus, in many places the historical narrative that could have become a uniting factor only deepened the existing differences and in some cases even progressed into an open conflict of cultures. Only in the last edition of Maironis’s textbook was more attention given to the authors and scientists who created in Lithuanian in Prussian Lithuania, yet they were presented not as representatives of the Lithuanian culture different from the Catholic, specifically Evangelical, but as figures who highlighted the importance of the Lithuanian language. 60 Ibid., 87–88, 89–90, 93. 61 [Mačiulis] Zanavykas, Apsakymai, 145; [Mačiulis] Maironis, Lietuvos istorija, 166.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

True, we should not overlook the input from Prussian Lithuanians themselves into developing the Lithuanian historical master narrative. Due to the cultural differences on opposite sides of the border, in Prussian Lithuania this narrative developed along somewhat different lines from the last decade of the nineteenth century on. In particular, the two sides differed in their description of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, although both “versions” of the narrative shared a number of commonalities, mostly in how the period prior to the sixteenth century was described.62 The main plots from the Lithuanian historical narrative constructed in Prussian Lithuania, garnered from an analysis of several works written by Prussian Lithuanians themselves, were discussed in detail in an earlier study.63 Here I focus on how the “Prussian” version of the Lithuanian narrative gave special significance to the Prussian Lithuanians and their living space and on what ways that space was made their own in the narrative. Several trends in this exercise can be distinguished. 1. Images of East Prussia as their own space and the continuity of Lithuanians in that space were clearly formulated. The authors, supporting the meanings of the Lithuanian historical narrative in Prussia, treated Lithuanians and Germans as perennialist units,64 62 A version of Lithuania’s history integrating these similarities and differences never was created, although the idea was considered: the annual meeting of the Birutė Society in April 1896 hosted a discussion on whether to release a history of Lithuania aimed at Prussian Lithuanians that would not only give accounts of the past of Lithuania “Major” but would also integrate the history of Prussian Lithuania into this narrative (Jaunutis, “Iš Prusų Lietuvos,” Varpas 6 (1896): 91–92). Vydūnas came closest to realizing this idea. Already in Senutė [The Old Woman], albeit rather abstractly, he combined the presentation of the history of the GDL with Prussian Lithuanians’ history, even noting essential differences ([Storosta], Senutē, 56–57, 64–65). Vydūnas expressed an even greater degree of integrality in Mūsų uždavinys [Our Objective], where he presented deliberations on the Lithuanian nation, seeing its common language, blood, consciousness, and even a common “life of the nation” in the nineteenth century: [Vilius Storosta] Vîdûnas, Mûsû uzdavinîs (Tilsit: Rûta, 1911; 2nd ed., 1921), 101–167. 63 Vasilijus Safronovas, “Bandymas formuoti alternatyvą: lietuviškojo didžiojo istorinio pasakojimo aktualizavimas Prūsijos Lietuvoje XIX–XX amžių sandūroje,” in Daugiareikšmės tapatybės, 69–103. 64 The perennialist and modernist concepts of the nation and their main differences have been most thoroughly discussed by Anthony David Smith: Nationalism and Modernism. A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London:

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applying to the past categories (“Lithuanians” and “Germans”) that defined national kinship in the present. Maintaining Daukantas’s myth, almost all authors already envisaged Lithuanians in prehistoric times, while the evolution of Lithuanian-German relations was depicted as starting from the thirteenth century. The concepts lietuvininkai65 or even Prusų lietuviai,66 used to describe Lithuanians as viewed through a perennialist prism, were associated with this myth—these are the concepts by which, at least in the Lithuanian East Prussian press at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Prussian Lithuanians were themselves described. The goal was to accentuate their autochthonism in the area they inhabited at the time. As Basanavičius wrote in one newspaper intended for Prussian Lithuanians, in the past Lithuanians’ ancestors lived from Toruń to Königsberg and Goldap, while today not a single sign remained to suggest that “this land belonged to the lietuvi­ ninkai.”67 Kristupas Jurkšaitis wrote that the Lithuanians’ homeland was in Asia, but before the Migration Period they reached present-day Lithuania, and thus, “Lithuania belonged to us from the deepest past, as our true homeland.”68 Similarly, when describing Lithuanians’ customs and ways of the past, Vydūnas understood this as a description of “our land” and its population.69 2. In trying to deny the specific meaning which the term “Lithuanian” had in East Prussia, attempts were made to expand reference of the Lithuanians’ “own” territory. This was done by integrating in one way or another elements from the history of the GDL into a Lithuanian historical narrative adapted to Prussian Lithuanians. Routledge, 1998); and Myths and Memories of the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–27. 65 Martynas Jankus, Lietuwninku bei Lietuwos Nusidawimai (Bitēnai: M. Jankus, 1897); [Kristupas Jurkšaitis], “Lietuwininku Gimines Nusidawimai,” Tilžês Keleiwis, January 8–December 27, 1902 (nos. 2–103). 66 [Bruožis] Klaipėdiškis, “Byrutė,” 2. 67 J[onas] Bassanawiczus, “Apie Križokus,” Naujasis Keleiwis, October 7, 1881 (no. 40): 263. 68 [Jurkšaitis], “Lietuwininku Gimines Nusidawimai,” Tilžês Keleiwis, January 22, 1902 (no. 6): 3–4; January 29, 1902 (no. 8): 3. 69 [Storosta], Senutē, 5.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

Imitating, combining, and adapting historical works by Daukantas, Skirmuntt, and others accessible at the time that Lithuanians treated as “their own,”70 a majority of authors incorporated the history of the GDL before the Union of Krewo, Grand Duke Vytautas’s death, or the Union of Lublin into their narratives.71 The GDL was depicted as the common state of all Lithuanians, and thus the meanings related to it had to be of relevance to Prussian Lithuanians as well. They had to demonstrate that Lithuanians were a nation with a state (Staatsnation). The paganism period, after which “Lithuanians” encountered “Polish” and “German” influences, had to be understood as a period when the values, ways, and power of the “ancestors” or “ancient Lithuanians” (i.e., Prussians and Lithuanians) were dominant, a time when Lithuanians were strong because they were united. At the same time, the association of the former GDL with Lithuanians defined in the linguistic sense had to show that prior to the nineteenth-century period of Lithuanians’ “occupation” and their division into Prusai and Maskolija, Lithuania was in fact a united space, encompassing far more than just East Prussia. 3. Meanings through which East Prussia’s role in German national culture was conveyed were selected purposefully and attacked. Usually, during such attacks, meanings would be converted from the positive, which a certain symbol or element of the past had in plots of the borussianistic historical master narrative related to East Prussia, into the negative. This strategy was applied, first, in order to foster Lithuanians’ “resistance to Germanization” and at the same time to halt the minimization of the Lithuanian space in East Prussia, which was clearly articulated.72 In applying this strategy, attempts were made to deny the image of East Prussia as a German Ordensland and to establish a negative image of the Teutonic Order. 70 E.g., [Motiejus Čepas, Kazys Grinius, Feliksas Janušis, and Motiejus Venclovas,] Trumpa senovēs lietuviu istorija ([Tilsit, 1892] Vilnius: Juozupas Zavadzkis, 1864). 71 Jankus, Lietuwninku bei Lietuwos Nusidawimai; [Jurkšaitis], “Lietuwininku Gimines Nusidawimai,” Tilžês Keleiwis, September 17, 1902 (no. 74): 3; [Vilius] Gaigalaitis, Lietuwos Nusidawimai ir musû Raßliawa (Tilsit: “Sandoros” draugystė, [1912]), 4–8. 72 Cf. N. S., “Apie kalbos nykima ir Lietuwininku skaitliu,” Lietuwiszka Ceitunga, July 14, 1885 (no. 28).

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Following Prussian historiography at the time, an equal sign was placed between “cross-bearers” [Teutonic knights] and Germans. However, the assessment of the Order was based on a reproduction of the picture of it dominant in Prussian historiography (pre-Voigt) at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, allocating the Order the role of an emaciator and destroyer of Lithuanians.73 The creators of the Lithuanian historical narrative in Prussia also tried to convert the meanings given to the Hohenzollern dynasty and the German wars of unification. This was done to push out any remains of a pre-nationalistic worldview, convincing Prussian Lithuanians that they no longer had to be the Hohenzollerns’ loyal subjects awaiting the “government’s mercy” but had to fight for their rights and defend them themselves.74 Ultimately, the Lithuanian historical narrative even tried to deny the image of East Prussia as a core of German Kultur surrounded by barbaric nations, attributing to Germans the role of “carriers of culture.”75 By rights, the effort to compromise this role prior to the First World War was characteristic exclusively of Martynas Jankus. Generally, I should add that only a handful of authors chose the strategy of converting from positive to negative meanings associated with the most important plots of the borussianistic historical master narrative, while a majority adopted the strategy of completely eliminating or keeping quiet about these meanings. In the Lithuanian historical narrative we will not find a single mention of Queen Louise, Chancellor Bismarck, or other symbols that were given significance in East Prussia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a means of connecting this province to Germany. By keeping quiet about such symbols, many authors probably viewed the meanings 73 J[onas] Bassanawiczus, “Apie Križokus,” Naujasis Keleiwis, September 2–October 7, 1881 (nos. 35–40); Martynas Jankus, Trumpi nusidawimai Prusu Lietuwos (Tilsit: M. Jankus, 1891), 4–5; Jankus, Lietuwninku bei Lietuwos Nusidawimai, 38, 42, 43, 96; [Storosta], Senutē, 21; [Storosta] Vîdûnas, Mûsû uzdavinîs, 125. 74 Cf. Jankus, Trumpi nusidawimai, 12; [Bruožis] Klaipėdiškis, “Byrutė,” 8; [Bruožis], Prusu Lietuwei, 9–18; A. Buksnawiczius, “Zwilgsnis uz Mokyklos Duriu,” Byrutė 1 (1910): 4–9. 75 Jankus, Trumpi nusidawimai, 5.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

of the borussianistic historical narrative as “disorienting” and “foreign” to Lithuanians. Nevertheless, the fact that these meanings were not openly denied (except by Jankus) suggests that the authors understood perfectly well how important to the population of Prussian Lithuania they actually were. 4. By denying or at least overlooking those meanings through which the Lithuanian and in a wider sense the East Prussian regions were understood in German national culture, another collection of symbols was being formed at the same time through which Lithuanian national culture could comprehend that the territory was indeed “theirs.” The creation of such symbols was from the outset based on the tactic of “teaching by example,” which Jankus and Bruožis applied in their historical texts. This tactic was based on binary categorization according to the “black-white” principle, dividing Prussian Lithuanians into nationally “conscious” and “unconscious” groups and by elevating and legitimizing the former’s activities as positive, unconditionally imitable, and the only path to follow if Lithuanians were to survive.76 The search for “conscious” Lithuanians started then: they became the inspirers of the Lithuanian national movement or Tilsit’s Birutė Society, which Jankus even directed for a while. However, Lithuanians were divided into “conscious” and “unconscious” not just during the period discussed. Symbols that could set an example were sought in the past as well. Most attention, of course, went to Donelaitis, who was noticed by Prussian Lithuanians in the late nineteenth century. Yet he was not the only hero from the past whose activities could be harnessed to encourage Prussian Lithuanians to “remain Lithuanians” and to be proud of this fact. This list of examples from the past in the East Prussian Lithuanians’ environment grew particularly in the 1910s, when both Gaigalaitis and Bruožis released the information they had collected about East Prussian writing published in Lithuanian or somehow related to Lithuanian. In his brief overview that appeared in 76 Ibid., 13–15; [Bruožis] Klaipėdiškis, “Byrutė,” 11–18, 20, 35.

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1911–1912, Gaigalaitis wrote about and mentioned Mažvydas, Baltramiejus Vilentas, Lazarus Sengstock, Bretkūnas, Simonas Vaišnoras, Johann Behrendt, Christian G. Mielcke, Friedrich Kurschat, and numerous other authors, usually specializing in religious writing.77 Bruožis’s book released in 1913 carefully put together a register of all the authors, compilers, and translators into Lithuanian of hymnals, catechisms, prayer books, sermons, the Bible, and other religious books, as well as dictionaries, grammar books, textbooks, song collections, and other secular literature.78 In a publication released after the war dedicated to mentioning the merits of specific figures that had to, according to Bruožis, familiarize readers with “our writers and lovers of our language,”79 he wrote about almost eighty authors who had written in Lithuanian for Prussian Lithuanians or in German about them. The works and activities of Mažvydas, Donelaitis, Gottfried Ostermeyer, Rhesa, and Sauerwein received more attention in the book. This list of “lovers of language” by Bruožis even made room for the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who was identified as a Lithuanian back in 1900 in the Lithuanian press.80 “Although Kant did not highlight his Lithuanian origins, the Lithuanian feeling had still not frozen in him,”81 wrote Bruožis. All the figures who appeared in the cultural appropriation process were selected based on whether they had made a contribution to the Lithuanian language, or, like Kant, had originated from a Lithuanian-­inhabited environment, and had made positive 77 Gaigalaitis, Lietuwos Nusidawimai, 10–31. Gaigalaitis’s work was released in parts in the publication of the Sandora Society in 1911–1912: “Lietuwos Nusidawimai ir musu Raßliawa,” Pagalba 8 (1911): 99–102; 9–10 (1911): 118–122; 11 (1911): 139–145; 12 (1911): 154–159; 1–2 (1912): 4–9; 3 (1912): 27–32; 4–5 (1912): 43–45. 78 [Ansas Bruožis] A. B. Klaipėdiškis, Prūsų Lietuvių Raštija. Trumpa Prūsų lietuvių knygų ir kalendorių apžvalga (Tilsit: Birutė, 1913). 79 [Bruožis] Probočių anūkas, Mažosios Lietuvos buvusiejie rašytojai, 4. 80 [Jonas Basanavičius] D-r B-s, “Apie Immanuelių Kantą,” Varpas 5 (1900): 54; [Jonas Macys] M., “Immanuelius Kantas—Lietuwis,” Saulēteka 7 (1900): 181–183. See also V. Perkūnas, “Kur Kantas gimė?” Viltis, March 14, 1910 (no. 30): 1–2; Adomas Jakštas, “Prie Kanto kilmės klausimo,” Draugija 41 (1910): 74–75. 81 [Bruožis] Probočių anūkas, Mažosios Lietuvos buvusiejie rašytojai, 35.

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remarks about Lithuanians and their language.82 In this way, a collection of symbols was formed via which Lithuanian national culture could grasp the familiarity of the space where the historical figures in question lived and worked. All four of the trends discussed here made it possible to understand Lithuania as a familiar space that belonged to Lithuanians but had decreased in size over several centuries due solely to German influence. Lithuanians had to comprehend their autochthonism within this space. Historical examples had to have a preventive effect, stopping them from assimilating and encouraging them to treat their own language and customs as an essential element of their uniqueness. Ultimately, the goal was that the area where the Lithuanian language was used would cease to be divided between Prusai and Maskolija. It had to be understood as a shared linguistic and historical space whose inhabitants, the Lithuanian nation, were completely equal to their neighboring nations, in part because their former statehood had “vanished” only as a result of their neighbors’ influence. We cannot say how effective these efforts could have been. But this analysis shows that in the Prussian and Russian Lithuanian versions of the historical narrative there were common meanings associated with East Prussia. The concept of “ancient Lithuanians” that was maintained by both sides provided a foundation for a common space to which historic Lithuania and East Prussia belonged and for the comprehension of their autochthonism. Both identified the struggle against the Teutonic Order with Germans and presented it as a joint activity “protecting” their identity and could have potentially distanced Prussian Lithuanians from East Prussia as an understanding of Ordensland, implying the “eternal” efforts of Germans to get rid of Lithuanians. Both Russian and Prussian Lithuanians strived to highlight their side’s contribution to the nineteenth-century Lithuanian national movement. No matter what, these efforts made it possible to associate the nationalist movement with Prussian Lithuania, especially given the role it played during the ban on Latin characters 82 See Kant’s preface Nachschrift eines Freundes to the dictionary by the Pillkallen cantor Christian G. Mielcke (1800).

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affecting the Lithuanian press in the Russian Empire. Cultural appropriation through the creation of familiar symbols related to writing in Lithuanian, using various figures from East Prussia’s past, made it easier to see East Prussia as a bastion of the Lithuanian language and, in a wider sense, Lithuanian culture—thus unquestionably a space of one’s “own.” These common features identified in Lithuanian national culture then led to the formation of a canon of meanings associated with East Prussia. Many of those meanings, having undergone various transformations, remained vital until the very end of the twentieth century. In this context, it is not so important how many Lithuanian speakers were drawn into the circle of carriers of culture armed with these specific meanings in Prussia and Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how many rejected these meanings, as the latter (which may have included the majority of Prussian Lithuanians) were ultimately left outside the boundaries of national culture adepts.

4.2. LITHUANIA MINOR: FROM THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA TO TERRA IRREDENTA In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lithuanian national culture saw “its own world” in three spaces: Maskolija, Prusai, and išeivystė (emigration or diaspora). The third space in a physical sense was distant and spread over several countries. The first two were closer and thus joined (at least in the imagination) into one, even though the border drove a wedge between them. Basanavičius’s idea to call all Lithuanian speakers Lithuanians, at least in writing, appeared to work. But at the same time Lithuanians in Prusai understood perfectly well that different Lithuanians lived in Maskolija, and vice versa. A similar collision occurred with the term “Lithuania.” Ideologically, efforts were made to substantiate the existence of one Lithuania as a space inhabited by Lithuanian speakers. These efforts are especially evident in the monthly Auszra, which included messages from both sides of the border in the column “Isz Lietuvos” (From Lithuania). In fact, Russian Lithuanians saw Lithuania only in the Vilnius, Kaunas, and Suwałki gubernias, less so within the former boundaries of the GDL; for Prussian Lithuanians, Lithuania was often only the space where they lived.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

Nevertheless, in those cases when the “Lithuanian world” had to be shown as also existing on the other side of the border—this need was primarily dictated by the intensified contacts between Lithuanian speakers living in Prussia and Russia in the context of the Lithuanian national movement in the 1870s—usually the name of the state to which it belonged would be added to the term “Lithuania.” In this way in the Lithuanian discourse the terms Prusų Lietuva (Prussian Lithuania) and Maskolių Lietuva (Muscovian Lithuania) appeared, the latter more rarely known as Gudų Lietuva (White Russian Lithuania), Rusų Lietuva, or Rusijos Lietuva (Russian Lithuania).83 These terms were widely used in the Lithuanian press on both sides of the border, as well as among the Lithuanian diaspora in America from the 1880s to the early twentieth century. Interestingly, Maskolių Lietuva did not acquire an equivalent Vokiečių (or Vokietijos) Lietuva (German Lithuania). This must be explained by the long tradition of naming the land Prusai, which continued after 1871. However, the need to somehow name the different territories where the Lithuanian language had spread was not dictated just by the goal of specifying which state’s Lithuania was being referred to. No less important in this case was the system of meanings, analyzed above, according to which Lithuanian speakers, as carriers of the national culture, had to view East Prussia and the area where the Lithuanian language had spread. According to this system of meanings, in the last decade of the nineteenth century carriers of Lithuanian national culture, first in Prussia, already started to sporadically use the term Didžioji Lietuva (Lithuania Major) that was applied to the part of the “Lithuanian world” lying in the Russian Empire.84 Later, in 1910, the concept Mažoji Lietuva (Lithuania Minor) crept into use more often to name the space inhabited by Lithuanian 83 See Auszra 4–5 (1885): 112, 133; 6 (1885): 164; 10–11 (1885): 364; 1 (1886): 16; 5 (1886): 154, 160; Garsas, April 2, 1887 (no. 3), Suppl.; Varpas 5 (1889): 70; 2 (1893): 17; 6 (1893): 81, 86, and later mentions. 84 For the earliest known mentions of the term, see Varpas 8 (1893): 127; 5 (1896): 75; 6 (1896): 91–92; 2 (1897): 22; 1 (1900): 2; 5 (1901): 58; and 12 (1902): 257. For later examples, see Lietuwißka Ceitunga, October 23, 1894 (no. 43); August 13, 1895 (no. 33); and Saulēteka 13 (1901): 282.

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speakers in East Prussia.85 The earlier usage of the term “Lithuania Major,” at first synonymously unrelated to the corresponding “Minor” but still contrasted to “Prussian Lithuania,”86 would suggest a continuation of the concept of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. However, eventually the synonymous use of “Major” and “Minor” came to express the understanding that the majority of Lithuanian speakers were indeed concentrated in the Russian Empire, while a smaller part lived in Germany.87 But this is not the only important thing. In both cases, the content of the concept “Lithuania” was released from any political links with Prussia or Russia. The objective political realities had to be replaced by a romanticized and anachronistic idea of two sisters or two branches of the same tree, the larger and the smaller.88 This perspective required belief in the vision of a united Lithuania, which, following the story of the Lithuanian historical master narrative, “split” into two parts in the thirteenth or fifteenth century due to foreign influences. 85 The name Mažoji Lietuva (Lithuania Minor) appeared in 1910 in East Prussia: Allgemeine Litauische Rundschau, January 20, 1910 (no. 1): 3; March 1910 (no. 3): 65, 70; May 1910 (no. 5): 129, et al.; Birutė 7 (1910): 99; 8 (1910): 121; 1 (9) (1910): 12. The Lithuanian diaspora in the United States adopted the term at the same time: Jonas Šliupas, Mažoji arba Prūsiškoji Lietuva 19-tame šimtmetyje (Chicago: Lietuva, 1910), reprinted from a monthly released in Pennsylvania, Laisvoji mintis 7 (1910): 147–152. It also appeared in Russia in the same year: see Juozas Gabrys, Geografijos vadovėlis skiriamas Lietuvos mokyklai ([Vilnius, Tilsit]: [s.n.], 1910), 61; Lietuvos žinios, June 5 (18), 1910 (no. 44): 2; June 16 (29), 1910 (no. 47): 3; September 25 (October 8), 1910 (no. 76): 3; November 13 (26), 1910 (no. 90): 3—the latter issue contained for the first time a column titled “Lithuania Minor.” This coincidence suggests a coordinated effort, probably led by Vanagaitis. The active introduction of the term into Lithuanian usage did not push out “Prussian Lithuania” for some time; it was still often used even after 1918. 86 The only relatively early exception I have discovered where Lithuania Minor and Lithuania Major are used synonymously is a small message in the press: “Maźôsios ir Didźiôsios Lietuwôs Gelźkeliû Sujungimas,” Lietuwißka Ceitunga, October 23, 1894 (no. 43). 87 We find this logic in, e.g., the textbook by Mech adapted by Juozas Tūbelis for Lithuanian readers: “From 1795 a larger part of Lithuania was attributed to Russia. Lithuania Minor, so-called Prussian Lithuania, is part of Germany.” (Sergėjus Mečius, Trumpas Žemės aprašymas. Pirmieji geografijos uždaviniai su apsakymėliais ir kitais pasiskaitymais [Vilnius: Aušra, 1906], 35). The same comparison is in Gabrys, Geografijos vadovėlis, 61. The analogy with Greater and Lesser Poland would hardly be justified in this case. 88 Cf. Pr. Pen-tis, “Musų mažesnioji sesytė,” Lietuvos žinios, January 22 (February 4), 1914 (no. 17): 3.

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In fact, it should be said that the concepts “Lithuania Major” and “Lithuania Minor” could hardly be considered the invention of those who inspired the Lithuanian national movement. The term “Lithuania Minor” could also have been a translation from the German Klein Litauen, which was used from the mid-eighteenth century in various contexts as a synonym of the term “Prussian Lithuania.” In all cases, the mentioned German concept was harnessed upon encountering the necessity of somehow separating Lithuania, which belonged to Prussia (later Germany) from the lands of the GDL that later belonged to Russia. When in the late seventeenth century Theodor Lepner had to demonstrate the difference between the two Lithuanias, he divided Lithuania into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and “Prussian Lithuania.”89 August Hermann Lucanus, the Insterburg court councilor followed suit, not just by using the term Preußisch-Litthauen in 1748 but also in being probably the first to mention another possible version of separating Lithuania Major (Groß-Litthauen, meaning Großfürstentum Litauen, i.e., the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) from Lithuania Minor (Klein-Litthauen). Lucanus used both concepts in seeking to demonstrate which Lithuania he was writing about, while in other contexts he called his field of study only Litthauen.90 Nevertheless, in the late eighteenth century, the name “Lithuania Minor” was spread not so much by Lucanus’s work, released only in the early twentieth century, as by the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the works of August Schlözer, which offered completely different treatments of Lithuania and Lithuanian speakers.91 The partitions actualized recognition of this region of Europe for at least a while. Standing out for the combination of a historical and ethnographic approach, Schlözer’s works, where Lithuania was identified with the GDL,92 developed among German-language readers the concept that “Lithuania” was the name given not just to the territory belonging to Prussia but also to the GDL 89 Lepner, Der Preusche Littauer, 19. 90 August Hermann Lucanus, Preußens uralter und heutiger Zustand. 1748, part 3 (Lötzen: Paul Kühnel, 1912), 366–367. 91 Schlözer applied the Klein-Littauen concept to the Memel, Ragnit, Tilsit, and Insterburg districts: Schlözer, Allgemeine Nordische Geschichte, 322. 92 Schlözer, “Geschichte von Littauen,” 15–17.

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(hitherto called almost exclusively “Poland”), and at the same time encouraged the desire to separate the two Lithuanias.93 This explains why after the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the concept “Klein Litauen” appeared briefly in cartography. Eight maps are known, released from 1793 to 1824, where the territory inhabited by Lithuanians in East Prussia was called Klein Litauen,94 plus one English language map, where it was called Little Lithuania.95 All of these maps, in fact, were geographical clichés produced by several authors, mostly Franz Ludwig Güssefeld.96 In the mid-nineteenth century, the term Klein Littauen also briefly appeared in scientific literature; for example, it was used by statistician Böckh, who again wanted to separate two cultures and two, in a political dependency sense, different Lithuanian-inhabited areas,

93 Elsewhere in this period we find the division of the Lithuanian language into the major Lithuanian and minor Lithuanian “dialects,” which were used in Lithuania Major and Lithuania Minor respectively: “Historisches Verzeichniß,” 435–436. Peter Koeppen who used Schlözer’s work also noted that this land was synonymously called “Lithuania Minor”: Petr Keppen, O proiskhozhdenii, iazyke i literature litovskikh narodov (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Karla Kraiia, 1827), 12. 94 Franz Ludwig Güssefeld, Charte des Königreichs Polen (Weimar: Verlag des Industrie Comtoirs, 1793); Franz Ludwig Güssefeld, Charte von dem Königreich Preussen nach seiner Hauptabtheilung in Ost-, West- und Süd-Preussen (Nuremberg: Homann Erben, 1795; 1798); Franz Ludwig Güssefeld, Charte von dem königlich preussischen Landes Antheil nach der Theilung Polens im Jahr 1795 (Nuremberg: Homann Erben, 1796); Franz Ludwig Güssefeld, Polen nach seiner lezten und gänzlichen Theilung zwischen Oesterreich, Russland und Preussen im Jahr 1795 (Weimar: Verlag des Industrie Comtoirs, 1796); F[ranz] X[aver] Hutter, Polen nach seiner ersten, und lezten, oder gænzlichen Theilung (Augsburg: Joh[ann] Walch, 1796; 1807); Franz Ludwig Güssefeld, Charte vom Königreich Preussen nach seiner dermaligen Eintheilung in Ost- West- Süd- und Neu-Ost-Preussen (Nuremberg: Homanns Erben, 1805); Franz Ludwig Güssefeld, Charte von Polen. Nach dem Frieden zu Tilsit vom 9. Iuly 1807 (Weimar: Verlag des Geograph. Instituts, 1810); F[ranz] X[aver] Hutter, Charte vom Koenigreich Polen: nach seinen ehemaligen (1773) und dermahligen Grenzen (Augsburg: Joh[ann] Walch, 1820; 1824). 95 John Cary, “A new map of the Kingdom of Prussia, with its divisions into provinces and governments, 1799,” in Cary’s New Universal Atlas, Containing Distinct Maps of All the Principal States and Kingdoms Throughout the World. From the Latest and Best Authorities Extant (London: [s.n.], 1808; 1811; 1819; 1824; 1828). 96 For comparison it should be noted that around twenty-five maps by different authors are known of from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries where a region in Prussia is called “Litauen” (Lithuania). The nine mentioned maps cannot be compared to twenty-five, as all ten appeared at the same time and were prepared by three authors.

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most likely on the grounds of Schlözer’s findings.97 Yet the sporadic use of this term, including one-time use prior to 1910 in the Lithuanian discourse, do not suggest a consistent tradition of its application. It would suggest that this term existed only as a literary synonym for “Prussian Lithuania,” lacking any ideological subtext. Šliūpas also used the term “Lithuania Minor” in 1910 as a synonym for “Prussian Lithuania.”98 The direct continuity in the Lithuanian discourse from the German is so far only a hypothesis, based on the fact that Lucanus’s work was first published in 1901,99 so that before 1910 Lithuanians could have come across Klein Littauen used here or in Böckh’s work. But there is no basis whatsoever to claim that the concept “Lithuania Minor” is as old as the Lithuanian region itself in Prussia.100 This thesis, already widespread in contemporary knowledge, should be discarded as unfounded. 97 Böckh, Deutschen Volkszahl, 60, 226. 98 Šliupas, Mažoji arba Prūsiškoji Lietuva. 99 Although the third part of Lucanus’s work, where Klein Litthauen was described, was released only in 1912, the first two parts together with the beginning of the chapter about Klein Litthauen was published already in 1901: August Hermann Lucanus, Preußens uralter und heutiger Zustand. 1748, parts 1–2 (Loetzen: Ermländische Zeitungs- und Verlagsdruckerei [C. Skowronski], 1901). 100 What I have in mind here is the idea once raised by Lithuanian researchers Vincas Vileišis and Juozas Jakštas about the first mention of the term “Lithuania Minor” in the chronicles of Simon Grunau and Lucas David (Vileišis, Tautiniai santykiai, vi; Jakštas, “Žvilgsnis į Mažosios Lietuvos istoriografiją,” 4–6; Jakštas, “Mažosios Lietuvos istorija,” 401). Thanks to historian Algirdas Matulevičius, that idea has become an encyclopedic constant in Lithuania (cf. Algirdas Matulevičius, “Mažoji Lietuva,” in Mažosios Lietuvos enciklopedija, vol. II (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 2003), 761; Algirdas Matulevičius, “Mažoji Lietuva,” in Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija, vol. XIV (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 2008), 508), although it is obviously a typical case where a thesis expressed by earlier authors is repeated in historiography, without first checking the sources those authors used. In the chronicle of Simon Grunau, prepared in around 1517–1529, the title Kleinlittaw is indeed featured. However, to the chronicler it is simply a territory (which he more often calls Under-Littaw) beyond Prussia’s borders, in which he localizes cities such as Grodno and Kaunas (cf. Simon Grunau, Preussiche Chronik, vols. 1–3 of Die Preussichen Geschichtsschreiber des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, eds. Max Perlbach, Rudolf Philippi, Paul Wagner, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1876), 69, 387, 584, 676; vol. 2 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1889), 65, 126, 130, 364; vol. 3 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1896), 1). Lucas David, in his chronicle written in around 1573–1583, mentioning the name Klein Littauen simply passed on the plot given by Simon Grunau, thus also writing about lands that in his times belonged to the Grand Duchy

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Thus, the use of the terms “Lithuania Minor” and “Lithuania Major” expressed a view supported by the Lithuanian historical master narrative’s meanings about a Lithuania existing since times immemorial, which “split” into two parts due to the fault of the “Germans.” That is why beginning the history of Lithuania Minor with the thirteenth century appeared completely normal at the beginning of the last century.101 Yet this treatment of the past, where the existence of a united Lithuania was considered independently of a specific timeframe, unavoidably forced the acceptance of the existing “division” of Lithuania as temporary, and encouraged questions of how long it would last. In this way, the system of meanings in the context of which the concepts “Lithuania Minor” and “Lithuania Major” were used gradually gave rise to Lithuanian irredentism. As in other cases in Europe in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century,102 irredentism grew from the understanding that political borders left some of those linguistically defined Lithuanians beyond the boundaries of the space that Russian Lithuanians then increasingly viewed as the national territory of Lithuanians. True, we will not find any clear expressions of such irredentism in the Lithuanian discourse before the First World War. It cannot be any other way, as before the war irredentism to Lithuania Minor was sublimated by the attitudes toward “real politics” that Lithuanian political forces upheld. In the visions of almost all the Lithuanian political parties that were established in Russia from the 1890s, Lithuania was seen within its ethnographic boundaries; an exception could perhaps be the social democrats, who nurtured the idea of federalism.103 However, almost all their political platof Lithuania (Lucas David, Preussische Chronik nach der Handschrift des Verfassers, mit Beifügung historischer und etymologischer Anmerkungen, ed. Ernst Hennig, vol. 1 (Königsberg: Hartungsche Hofbuchdrukkerei, 1812), 59). Historian Kurt Forstreuter had already noticed this in the mid-twentieth century (Forstreuter, “Entwicklung der Grenze,” 68; Forstreuter, Deutschland und Litauen, 17–18). 101 Cf. Jonas Yčas, “Mažosios Lietuvos praeitis (XIII–XX amžių bruožai),” in Kovo 20 diena. Mažosios Lietuvos prisiglaudimui paminėti (Kaunas: [Lietuvos Valstybės Taryba], 1921), 24–86. 102 Cf. Andrew F. Burghardt, “The Bases of Territorial Claims,” Geographical Review 63, no. 2 (1973): 234. 103 Cf. Arūnas Vyšniauskas, “Socialdemokratijos politinė transformacija 1898 metais,” in Lietuvos valstybės idėja (XIX a.–XX a. pradžia), vol. 3 of Lietuvių Atgimimo istorijos studijos (Vilnius: Žaltvykslė, 1991), 67–131; Arvydas Gaidys, “Lietuvių

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forms were dedicated to expressing a position on Lithuanians’ problems in Maskolija; Prusai did not rate any mention. Almost all the political parties raised the slogan of autonomy, understood as the first step toward independence, yet that meant the autonomy of the Russian Empire’s Lithuanian territories. There are no data suggesting that any Lithuanian political force pre-1914 would have considered the issue of uniting with Lithuania Minor, or the latter’s ascension into the Lithuanian autonomous unit in some way. This question was also not raised by Prussian Lithuanians. Vanagaitis, having publicly spoken out at the Great Congress of Lithuanians in Vilnius in 1905, expressed only Prussian Lithuania’s sympathies toward Lithuania Major.104 Consideration of the political unity of the two Lithuanias was simply unrealistic: there were not even the slightest grounds for thinking that state borders would change. Nevertheless, the fact that the question of “convergence” with Lithuania Minor was raised as soon as the First World War began—a week after the Russian army invaded East Prussia—attests that conditions for Lithuanian irredentism, expressed upon “their own” space, started developing some time earlier. Pre-1914 that irredentism was simply not expressed in public. The invasion of Russia into East Prussia in the beginning of August 1914 channeled Lithuanian politicians’ and the press’s attention to this territory at lightning speed, allowing Lithuanian irredentism to be revealed. The trajectories along which that irredentism developed during the war, to a large extent, were determined by Lithuanian politicians’ attempts to adapt to the changing balance of power in the region. The leaders of Lithuanian political currents realistically assessed their chances at creating a state within the boundaries that Lithuanians themselves would set. That krikščio­nių-demokratų partijos kūrimosi aplinkybės (1905–1907 m.),” in ibid., 139–172 (see also the draft party platform in ibid., 327–340); Rimantas Miknys, Lietuvos demokratų partija 1902–1915 metais, vol. 10 of Lietuvių Atgimimo istorijos studijos (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1995) (for the platform texts, see 184–217); Gintaras Mitrulevičius, “Socialdemokratų vaidmuo Lietuvos valstybingumo (at)kūrimo idėjos atgimimo procese (XIX a. pabaiga—1918 m.),” Gairės 2 (2008): 35–44; Zita Medišauskienė, “Lietuva ir jos ribos 1795–1915 metais,” in Lietuvos sienos: tūkstantmečio istorija (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2009), 73–74. 104 L[iudas] G[ira], “Lietuvių susivažiavimas Vilniuje,” Vilniaus žinios, November 24 (December 7), 1905 (no. 274): 1.

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is why they had to associate the realization of their requirements with the side that would emerge as the winner after the war. As the publicist Albinas Rimka, then living in the United States, wrote: “if one side is completely crushed, then our situation could change and the border between Lithuania Minor and Major might vanish, especially if the Germans are defeated. Just the same, all of Lithuania Major could end up in the Germans’ hands.”105 As the role of that side varied during the war years, the Lithuanians’ plans on how to realize their irredentist ideal had to comply with these changes. During the initial stage of the war, Lithuanian politicians linked the achievement of their goals with Russian power and the possible expansion of its territory. Their hopes were no doubt raised by the Russian army’s successful attack on East Prussia in August 1914. It allowed them to hope that Russia would “capture” a piece of East Prussia that in the future could be joined to the Romanov monarchy’s domains. Another no less important factor was the proclamation made by the Russian Empire’s commander in chief, Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich on August 14 to the Polish nation, expressing the official position, which suggested that changes lay ahead for the Lithuanians as well. Already on August 8 during an extraordinary meeting of the Russian State Duma, the Lithuanian representative Martynas Yčas exclaimed that “our nation’s destiny has always been tied with the destiny of Slavicism.… The Lithuanian nation, on whose land the first shots were fired, which is forced to fight on the front lines, enters this war as if it were a holy affair. It forgets all its grievances, hoping to see Russia free and powerful after this war, and hoping that the torn-in-half Lithuanians will be united under one Russian flag [italics mine— V. S.].”106 In support of Yčas’s words, several weeks later the Lithuanian intelligentsia in Vilnius prepared a document, called by historians the Amber Declaration. It suggested that Russia should gather up “from the blows of Germanism” the shattered Lithuanian “amber beads” across the Russian-led union of

105 Albinas Rimka, Lietuvių tautos klausimas Europos karēs metu (New York: “Tēvynēs” spaustuvē, 1915), 34. 106 “Nepaprastasis Valstybės Dūmos posėdis,” Viltis, July 30 (August 12), 1914 (no. 168 [1116]): 1.

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nations.107 “We trust that our foreign blood brothers will be freed of the German yoke and united with us”108—so it was written in the declaration presented to the president of the Russian Council of Ministers.109 In late August, despite the important changes that had taken place in the East Prussian theater of war, the Lithuanian press in Vilnius continued to dream: “Now all we must do is desire that Russia, having won the war against the Germans, shall join to us Prussian Lithuania or Lithuania Minor. Lithuania Major, covering the Suwałki, Kaunas, parts of Courland, Vilnius, and Grodno gubernias, having lived for over a hundred years under the Russian government, has become accustomed and settled in with the Russian nation, its customs and language. Prussian Lithuanians, numbering significantly fewer than us, would not find it difficult to become used to Russian ways.”110 Even the so-called Chicago Lithuanian Seimas called on September 21–22, consisting mostly of US Lithuanian church organizations, also decided in favor of “demanding for Lithuania the broadest possible autonomy, based on the widely accepted ethnographic principle—not only in terms of language but also in terms of ways, traditions, and customs, incorporating not just Lithuania Major but also Prussian Lithuania Minor.”111 In a brochure released by the Lithuanian Information Bureau in Paris, Juozas Gabrys also exclaimed that Lithuania “had to seize the whole Memel River basin area: that is, the Vilnius, Kaunas, Grodno, Suwałki, part of Minsk gubernias and all of Prussian Lithuania.”112 It is not known what basis these Lithuanian hopes rested on. No sources have been found to support the idea, spread toward the end of the war by Lithuanians in the United States,113 that Russia planned to annex the lower 107 For more on it and the context of its adoption, see Raimundas Lopata, “Lietuvių inteligentijos politinė veikla 1914–1915 metais,” in Lietuvos valstybės idėja, 231–251, here 233–236. 108 “Lietuvių deklaracija,” Viltis, August 22 (September 4), 1914 (no. 187 [1135]): 1. 109 A[ntanas] Sm[etona], “Karo ženkle gyvenant,” Vairas 14 (1914): 2; Martynas Yčas, Atsiminimai. Nepriklausomybės keliais, vol. 1 (Kaunas: Spindulys, 1935), 229–232. 110 Z., “Ko dabar lietuviai privalo trokšti?” Viltis, August 13 (26), 1914 (no. 180 [1128]): 1. 111 Rimka, Lietuvių tautos klausimas, 50. 112 Juozas Gabrys, Kokia autonomija Lietuvai reikalinga? (Autonomija ar Savyvalda?) (Paris: Lietuvių informacijos biuras; Chicago: Draugas, 1914), 14. 113 Tomas Norus and Jonas Zilius, Lithuania’s Case for Independence (Washington, DC: B. F. Johnson, 1918), 41–42.

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reaches of the Memel River area based on Lithuanians’ demands and that Russia’s war allies had already approved this demand. Generally speaking, support for the “pro-Russian” trajectory in realizing the irredentist ideal was realistic until Germany took over the initiative on the Eastern Front in the spring and summer of 1915. From April 26, 1915, once the German army commenced attacks on Courland and Samogitia, until the end of September when it occupied Kaunas and Vilnius, the issue of uniting two Lithuanias took on a completely different developmental trajectory. Until that point, this question had never been directly raised, at least among Lithuanians living in Europe, but Prussian Lithuania’s social leaders sometimes proposed the idea of joining the territories inhabited by Russian Lithuanians, now occupied by Germany, to the latter. One of the first to raise this idea, even before the offensive by Otto von Lauenstein’s army against Russia, was the Lithuanian representative in the Prussian Landtag, Vilius Gaigalaitis. In an essay published in February 1915,114 he formulated the thesis that it was the German Reich’s moral duty to “liberate the Baltic Germans, the Latvian and Lithuanian nations,” creating in their territory a “wedge (buffer state) between the Germanic and Slavic worlds.” Keeping in mind East Prussia’s economic demands, Latvians and Russian Lithuanians had to be turned into subjects of the kaiser—these were Gaigalaitis’s suggestions, and he did not forget to add that Prussian Lithuanians “had no desire to belong to another state, another government than that of Prussia-Germany.”115 Vydūnas, another Prussian Lithuanian activist, criticizing the émigré Lithuanians’ sympathies for Russia and the latter’s conquests, in early 1915, also prior to Germany’s invasion of Russia, asked “would an impetus from the Russians 114 Wilhelm Gaigalat, “Die litauisch-baltische Frage,” Die Grenzboten 74, quarter 1 (1915): 204–214, 230–239. Gaigalaitis’s ideas were also used in a collection of speeches and quotes conveying Germany’s annexionist plans released during the war: Wilhelm Siegwart, Gross-Deutschland. Eine Sammlung von Dokumenten zum Verständniss deutschen Willens (Olten: Schwarzmann, [1916]), 198–199. Already after the war, the part where Gaigalaitis speaks about Prussian Lithuanians’ links with Germany was often cited in German propaganda publications. The point of these quotes was to show that even the Prussian Lithuanian political leader once admitted that the local Lithuanians did not wish to join any other state. 115 Citations from Gaigalat, “Litauisch-baltische Frage,” 236–239.

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raise us higher than an impetus from the Germans?” Indirectly supporting the idea that all Lithuanians had to become the kaiser’s subjects, Vydūnas appealed to the higher material well-being enjoyed by Prussian Lithuanians, compared to their Russian counterparts, and to the better “growth” conditions for Lithuanians that Germany could allegedly provide.116 Ultimately, after the Lithuanian-inhabited territory had been occupied by the German army, the Ober Ost command, seeking to justify its annexation plans, quickly demonstrated a lively interest in the “discovery” of Lithuanians in the occupied territories. It wanted to show that the occupied Russian lands were not part of Poland, and thus should not be annexed to one or another “Polish” derivative that the German leaders planned to create.117 In this way, with the mediation of the Ober Ost’s agent, another Prussian Lithuanian Steputat, the American Lithuanian Jonas Žilius, then studying in Berlin, was commissioned to define the boundaries of ethnographic Lithuania in line with the Ober Ost command’s requirements.118 The same Steputat, having contacted other émigré Lithuanians on behalf of the Ober Ost’s interests, in late 1915 suggested various options to Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on how to increase Germany’s influence in its occupied Russian territory.119 Finally, when in the spring of 1916 the Russian Lithuanian intelligentsia reoriented itself from being pro-Russian to being pro-German,120 it also discarded the idea of “assimilating” with East Prussian Lithuanians using Russia’s geopolitical influence. Believing they could sway the interest of the Ober Ost leadership and Berlin to use Lithuanians as a means of 116 [Vilius Storosta] Vds., “Lietuviai ir Lietuvos savivalda,” Naujovê 1–4 (1915): 38–41. 117 Cf. Vasilijus Safronovas, “Zum Wandel des räumlichen Begriffs ‘Litauen’ im deutschsprachigen Diskurs während und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte 10 (2015): 109–135. 118 Vaclovas Bielskis, “Kairiųjų vaidmuo siekiant Lietuvos nepriklausomybės,” Lietuvos žinios, May 3, 1930 (no. 99 [3298]), 3–4. We can guess how Žilius described ethnographic Lithuania based on his text that appeared later where Lithuania surprisingly correlated with the Ober Ost territory: Norus and Zilius, Lithuania’s Case, 25–46; Jonas Žilius, Lietuvos rubežiai: istoriškai etnografiška studija ([s.l.]: [s.n.], 1920). 119 Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht. Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/1918 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1967), 238, 404. 120 Raimundas Lopata, Lietuvos valstybingumo raida 1914–1918 metais, vol. 9 of Lietuvių Atgimimo istorijos studijos (Vilnius: Mintis, 1996), 92–93.

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entrenching Germany’s government in Ober Ost, Russian Lithuanians were inclined to subordinate themselves to those interests. Following the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, which, as the German chancellor noted, “made old-fashioned annexation politics impossible,”121 Germany had to change its strategy, agreeing to grant Lithuanians at least a minimal degree of independence if the future union was to associate Lithuania with Germany. All of this allowed the Lithuanian intelligentsia to maintain claims on Lithuania Minor, although they had to make those claims more specific. It is likely that an understanding was reached that in order to convince Germany to relinquish a part of East Prussia’s territory to a Lithuania that was somehow linked with it, the only viable argument would be economic—the necessity of a port. That would explain why from June 1916 until November 1918 in the speeches of the Lithuanian intelligentsia about the joining of Lithuania Minor,122 discussion increasingly turned toward the necessity of annexing the port of Memel (Klaipėda). This demand was raised at Lithuanian congresses in November 1917 held in Bern and Voronezh.123 When in the summer of 1918 the delegation of the State Council of Lithuania, in a meeting with German Foreign Minister Paul von Hintze, exclaimed that Lithuanians needed a port, an answer promising hope was received.124 Thus, Russian Lithuanians saw their geopolitical orientation toward Germany as an opportunity

121 Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht, 316. 122 What is referred to here is the memorandum of June 10, 1916, presented to Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of Germany’s armed forces in the east, on behalf of all of Lithuania’s intelligentsia, written by Antanas Smetona, where it was mentioned that Lithuania needed a gateway to the sea and a trading port. For the memorandum text, see Petras Klimas, Der Werdegang des litauischen Staates von 1915 bis zur Bildung der provisorischen Regierung im November 1918 (Berlin: Paß & Garleb, 1919), 2–19, 23–25; for the port, see 24. For the context, see Lopata, Lietuvos valstybingumo raida, 93. 123 Klimas, Werdegang des litauischen Staates, 97; Marija Urbšienė, “Klaipėdos krašto istorijos paraštėje,” Mūsų žinynas 26, no. 101 (1933): 123–124. 124 According to Martynas Yčas, Hintze exclaimed that “upon reaching an agreement with Lithuania over the conventions and having laid the foundations for Lithuania’s relations with the Reich, he did not envisage any insurmountable obstacles regarding the solution of the Memel question as a Lithuanian port. He believed that some form of condominium would be found”: Martynas Yčas, [review of R. Valsonokas’s book “Klaipėdos problema”], Vairas 11 (1932): 252.

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to join at least a part of Lithuania Minor, including the Memel port, to the Lithuanian state. This position lasted until October–November 1918. On October 20, the new chancellor of the German Reich, Prince Max von Baden, ordered the State Council of Lithuania to form a government itself and to manage Lithuania’s constitutional foundation, while highlighting that Germany would not interfere in border issues of Lithuania, now considered independent of Germany.125 The Armistice of Compiègne signed on November 11, which de facto recognized Germany as having lost the war, meant that the Lithuanians who sought to realize their claims on Lithuania Minor had to convince not Russia or Germany of the necessity of a port but France, the United States, and Great Britain. This explains why alongside the economic argument that had already been used in negotiations with Germany, other factors were invoked that would not have convinced Germany, such as the Lithuanian language’s distribution in this area, the nation’s inheritance rights, and national self-determination. I discuss the first argument below. The nation’s inheritance rights were mostly backed up by historical statements: considering the Nadrovia and Scalovia historical landscapes as inhabited by Lithuanians from the earliest times made it possible to imagine that Lithuanians were autochthons in East Prussia, while Germans were afforded only the role of conquerors. This suggested that Germany’s hold on Lithuanian territory was based solely on the right of conquest—a holdover that the First World War severely compromised. In 1918, in order to provide a basis for the nation’s inheritance right to Prussian Lithuania, the Lithuanians tried for the first time to apply historical data related to the early fifteenth-century conflict of Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania with the Teutonic Order,126 thereby transforming the Gediminids’ dynastic claims into Lithuanian national claims. But Lithuanians considered the most important argument, at least from 1918, to be national self-determination, as it was based on the “advanced” idea declared by one of the main allies themselves and explained in the program of US President Woodrow Wilson. In order to 125 Klimas, Werdegang des litauischen Staates, 119. 126 Cf. Norus and Zilius, Lithuania’s Case, 10; Žilius, Lietuvos rubežiai, 14–15.

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exploit the latter argument, the members of the State Council of Lithuania used their contacts established during the war with Prussian Lithuanians Erdmonas Simonaitis and Vilius Gaigalaitis. With their mediation, on November 16, 1918, five days after the Armistice of Compiègne, the National Council of Prussian Lithuania was founded in Tilsit. The organization, formally headed by Gaigalaitis, was created to declare Lithuania’s national self-determination “in the eyes of Germans and other nations, especially in the eyes of the Entente”;127 however, the decision had almost no support in Prussian Lithuania itself. After a brief excess during which Gaigalaitis, having undertaken to lead the council, publicly resigned from his activities after being influenced by the East Prussian ober-president, on November 30 the State Council of Lithuania nevertheless managed to elicit an oath of loyalty from the National Council’s members.128 However, the fifteen-member organization, almost all of whose activities were coordinated by an “executive branch” formed of three people—Viktoras Gailius, Simonaitis, and Vanagaitis—was obviously insufficient to create the impression that the council was indeed the true representative of Prussian Lithuanians. As a result, in early 1919 another impulse started to spread from Tilsit to establish the so-called Association of Prussian Lithuanians. All men and women over twenty years of age were urged to sign up. In seeking to create an organization representing all Prussian Lithuanians, they were encouraged to form their own county councils and to ultimately elect a National Council of Prussian Lithuanian Association. On April 25, 1919, the constituent assembly of this Council was held in Tilsit where its statutes were confirmed. According to information provided by the county councils, the alliance then had five thousand fee-paying members.129 Prussian Lithuanians had to be mobilized in this case in order to show the war’s “victors” that they themselves sought to join the newly 127 “Prusu Lietuwei isteige tautine Taryba,” Lietuwiszka Ceitunga, November 19, 1918 (no. 139): 3. 128 For more on the context of the declaration of November 30, see Safronovas, “Anschluss des Memelgebietes,” 11–18. 129 Cf. Prûsû Lietuwiû Balsas, March 6, 1919 (no. 17); March 8, 1919 (no. 18); March 11, 1919 (no. 19); March 13, 1919 (no. 20); April 24, 1919 (no. 37); April 29, 1919 (no. 39).

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created Lithuanian state. Letters were written on behalf of these organizations on January 9 and February 6, 1919, which had to affect the results of the Paris Peace Conference.130 Demands were made to join Lithuania Minor to Lithuania Major by the Lithuanian delegation’s address to the Paris Peace Conference on May 2, 1919, as well.131 However, because the destiny of the Lithuanian state was at that time hanging by a thread, given that it was not yet internationally recognized, the Lithuanians’ aspirations had no real impact in Paris. The question of separating part of the territory of East Prussia north of the Memel River from Germany was raised by Poland, and essentially a decision had already been made by the time Lithuanians started expressing their demands. This outcome had dual effects on the development of Lithuania Minor as an idea of Lithuanian irredenta. On the one hand, having passed the resolution at the Paris Peace Conference, at least in the Prussian Lithuanians’ own press, it was clearly understood that only the northern part of Lithuania Minor was being separated from Germany.132 This left the opportunity to lay claims on the remaining area on the left bank of the Memel River, claims that were expressed once in a while. In the leading article from Lietuvos žinios (Lithuanian News) in 1924, marking the first anniversary of the annexation of the Memel Territory, it was written: “Congratulating on this day all supporters of Lithuanian unity, we once again express our firm hope that the entire Nemunas River basin will belong to Lithuania!”133 Yet the expression of such hopes was more marginal than mainstream throughout the interwar period.134 Receiving the port of Memel (Klaipėda) and the right bank of the mouth of the 130 Henry de Chambon, La Lithuanie pendant la Conférence de la Paix (1919), vol. 4 of Collection “La nouvelle Europe” (Lille, Paris: Le Mercure universel, 1931), 55; Urbšienė, “Klaipėdos krašto istorijos paraštėje,” 136–137; Zita Genienė and Julius Žukas, Kova dėl Klaipėdos. 1923-ieji: Katalogas (Klaipėda: Mažosios Lietuvos istorijos muziejus, 2003), 47. 131 Urbšienė, “Klaipėdos krašto istorijos paraštėje,” 138. 132 “Mazosios Lietuwos Sziaure paeina po Tautu Sajunga!” Prûsû Lietuwiû Balsas, June 19, 1919 (no. 60): 1; “Prusu Lietuwa iki Niamuno pareis po swetima Waldze,“ Tilźês Keleiwis, June 19, 1919 (no. 73): 1. 133 K., “Klaipėdos Krašto prisijungimo sukaktuvės,” Lietuvos žinios, January 19, 1924 (no. 16): 1. 134 Cf. also Vytautas Žalys, Lietuvos diplomatijos istorija 1925–1940 metais, vol. II, part 1 (Vilnius: Edukologija, 2012), 322.

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Memel River, the issue of the remainder of Lithuania Minor was not so vitally important to Lithuania. However, the appearance in 1919–1920 of an objectively defined territory—the Memel Territory, which was not joined to Lithuania immediately—encouraged “transfer” of the irredentist discourse about Lithuania Minor to this particular territory. Such a transfer of meanings is evident from numerous facts. The situation of Lithuanians in the Memel Territory in 1920 was described in the Lithuanian press as the situation of Lithuanians in Lithuania Minor as a whole.135 On March 20, 1920, three representatives from the Memel Territory, delegated by the National Council of Prussian Lithuanian Association, were co-opted into the State Council of Lithuania. The co-opted individuals were identified as “representatives of Lithuania Minor,” while the co-optation itself was signified as the “celebration of the joining of Lithuania Minor and Lithuania Major.”136 Further articulation of this system of meanings was facilitated by the military occupation of the Memel Territory that was prepared and implemented at the juncture of 1922– 1923 and depicted as the “rescue” of Lithuania Minor. Those taking part in the operation were encouraged to don bands with the abbreviation MLS (standing for Mažosios Lietuvos sukilimas, Lithuania Minor’s Uprising).137 The organization that “covered” the military operation in the Memel Territory and in whose name this “uprising” was formally conducted named itself the Executive Rescue Committee of Lithuania Minor, while this committee’s proclamation of January 7, 1923, to the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union claimed that in 1919 “Lithuania Minor was separated from Germany” and was asking for the riflemen’s assistance.138 Lithuania’s political problems with Germany over the Memel Territory and its unsuccessful attempts to win over the disloyal Memel population later, especially in the 1930s, encouraged the diversion of the 135 “Iš Mažosios Lietuvos,” Lietuva, March 20, 1920 (no. 65 [347]): 1–2. 136 “XV-ji Valstybės Tarybos Sesija,” Lietuva, March 23, 1920 (no. 67 [349]): 1–2; Kovo 20 diena, 91, 93. 137 “Mažosios Lietuvos sukilimas,” Trimitas, January 18, 1923 (no. 123): 2. 138 Genienė and Žukas, Kova dėl Klaipėdos, 86.

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irredenta discourse related to “Lithuania Minor” toward this particular territory. Formally, it was part of Lithuania Major, but the state had yet to become established there. Thus, Lithuania Minor remained a space for which every nationalistically engaged Lithuanian had to fight. This explains why at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Lithuanian irredentism born of the idea of two Lithuanias, in terms of Lithuania Minor, continued for an extraordinarily long time.

4.3. THE TRANSFORMATION OF PRUSSIAN LITHUANIA (LITHUANIA MINOR) INTO A LITHUANIAN NATIONAL SPACE In analyzing the appropriation of Prussian Lithuania in German national culture, I treated it as a twofold process. I follow the same path in analyzing how this space was transformed into Lithuanian territory in their national system of meanings. On the one hand, we will see how Prussian Lithuania (Lithuania Minor) was represented in the Lithuanian discourse, and via what images and signs did Lithuanians engaged in national culture understand this space as familiar. On the other hand, I also examine how Prussian Lithuania was transformed into one’s own space by creating and spreading symbolic representations of Lithuanianness in that space—that is, by marking the space. To answer the first question, it would be worthwhile to focus first on the Lithuanian press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was not aimed at Prussian Lithuanians. The selection of this particular group of sources was determined by the majority of Prussian Lithuanians’ reservations over communication or cooperation with Lithuanians on the other side of the border. In addition, it was the meanings developed in Lithuania Major and to an extent by émigré Lithuanians in the United States that became the basis of the canon used to assess Prussian Lithuania in Lithuanian national culture. Indeed, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were efforts to create one information space dedicated to Lithuanians on opposite sides of the border. Auszra and Varpas (The Bell) tried to maintain a common discourse so long as these periodicals, which had encouraged Lithuanian nationalism, were published in Prussian

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Lithuania and Russian Lithuanians showed no signs of a clear political differentiation. However, Varpas soon started articulating political demands (very clearly by 1899); meanwhile, the Russian imperial government revoked its ban on publishing Lithuanian in the Latin script (1904), and the main Lithuanian political currents consolidated. For all these reasons, the issue of Prussian Lithuania became of secondary importance for Russian Lithuanians. They understood perfectly well that they had no chance of deciding Prussian Lithuanians’ issues, so they devoted a majority of their time to their own problems. Prussian Lithuanians’ reality, both in Auszra and in Varpas, were represented rather adequately. Yet the frequency of such material in both publications essentially depended on Prussian Lithuanians themselves, mostly on the degree of activity by the Birutė Society. Russian Lithuanian articles about Prussian Lithuanians were especially rare;139 in turn, Prussian Lithuanians were at times more, at times less active in these publications. For example, in 1892–1896 news items about Prussian Lithuanians were particularly rare in Varpas, while in 1899–1901 there were hardly any. The Varpas editorial office openly pleaded, “let us know more about the life of Prussian Lithuanians.”140 Yet even after the abolition of the ban on using Latin script, Russian Lithuanian newspaper editorial offices demonstrated an interest in Prussian Lithuanians only at first (as in Vilniaus žinios), because editors simply failed to establish long-term contacts with regular informants. Often this problem was overcome by reprinting reports from Prussian Lithuanian newspapers, but the information was taken out of context and difficult for Russian Lithuanians to understand. In addition, many publications appeared to mark a certain occasion; there was no actual constant stream of information. Thus there was no single communication milieu encompassing Lithuanians on both sides of the border. Newspapers on both sides first covered what happened to be relevant in the space “as far as the border.” So in fact two dissociated Lithuanian information spaces existed that communicated with one another only via intermediaries. In the early 139 Cf. Kvietaitis’s essay about the differences in attitudes toward education: Auszra 5 (1886): 154–155. 140 Varpas 8 (1904): 128.

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twentieth century, it was also usually individual Prussian Lithuanians who acted as intermediaries, like Vanagaitis or Vydūnas, who engaged in more active collaboration with Lithuanian newspapers released in Russia. However, even they did not provide information on a regular basis, so the Lithuanian newspapers released in Russia could not provide the opportunity to convey the already well-developed cultural intensity of Prussian Lithuanians as it was in the early twentieth century, at least not to the degree that this feeling would be regularly pulsating in the press in Lithuania Major. There were some exceptions—first and foremost, the newspaper Lietuvos žinios, which had a special correspondent for Prussian Lithuania from the end of 1911 up to just before the First World War.141 It published information from this region in every other edition or thereabouts. Yet in most cases, the Lithuanian press released in Russia only managed to acknowledge the lack of information from Prussian Lithuanians or to lay blame at the feet of Prussian Lithuanians themselves for this shortcoming.142 Incidentally, interest in Lithuania Major in the East Prussian Lithuanian press was also encouraged, for the most part, by the same individuals. However, the information they provided only reached marginal publications at best. The main newspapers aimed at Prussian Lithuanians provided hardly any information about the Lithuanian national movement unfolding in Russia,143 a fact that was clearly noticed by Russian Lithuanians.144 As a result, because there were no objective or stable social links between the two Lithuanian milieux that included most of the nationalists, 141 Lietuvos žinios, December 20, 1911 (no. 148): 4. 142 Cf. [Vilius Gaigalaitis] Chronopolitanus, “Iš Prusų Lietuvos,” Varpas 11 (1891): 175; “Tēvyniški varpai,” Varpas 2 (1892): 22–23; Jonas Jonila, “Mažai rašome apie Prūsų lietuvius,” Vilniaus žinios, September 2 (15), 1907 (no. 134 [743]): 3. 143 Pocytė has analyzed the potentials of integrating the two Lithuanias, based on the Prussian Lithuanian press: Silva Pocytė, “Mažosios ir Didžiosios Lietuvos integracijos problema XIX a.–XX a. pradžioje,” Sociologija. Mintis ir veiksmas 1–2 (2001): 77–89; Pocytė, Mažlietuviai Vokietijos imperijoje, 103–122; Silva Pocytė, “Mažosios ir Didžiosios Lietuvos integracijos XIX a. antroje pusėje klausimu—kultūrinis ir politinis aspektas,” in Raidžių draudimo metai: straipsnių rinkinys, ed. Darius Staliūnas (Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2004), 235–248. 144 Lietuvos žinios, September 25 (October 8), 1910 (no. 76): 3.

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they developed no interest in each other until the First World War. Prussian Lithuanians were not very interested in the life led by Russian Lithuanians across the border, and vice versa. All of this explains why conditions for spreading the idea of two Lithuanias were very complicated indeed. At the time when Auszra and Varpas were approaching publication, the idea of Lithuania Minor and Lithuania Major had not yet completely crystallized. Articles dedicated to various Prussian Lithuanian issues appeared in Vilniaus žinios (Vilnius News) mostly in 1905, so at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, almost ten years had to pass before Lietuvos žinios again started to more actively represent Prussian Lithuanians and to spread the idea of Lithuania Minor. It should be noted that these publications were of a liberal, democratic, and even to an extent, socialist orientation, while in the influential Catholic press news about non-Catholic Lithuanians on the other side of the border was a rarity altogether. Also important is the fact that in many cases, the Russian Lithuanians who read newspapers received a very fragmented and, in a sense, distorted view about the Lithuanian speakers on the other side of the border. When that information was provided by Prussian Lithuanians, as it was in the absolute majority of cases, they were usually concerned with their contribution to Lithuanian cultural and political activities. That is why news items about meetings held by Birutė or the Tilsit Lithuanian Chanters Society, celebrations they had held, petitions signed by Prussian Lithuanians, or their participation in elections to the Prussian Landtag or German Reichstag predominated. Articles of this type did not allow a general picture to form about what was actually happening on the other side of the border and instead expressed the activities of only a few Prussian Lithuanians, erroneously suggesting that all East Prussian Lithuanians behaved and thought the same way. More comprehensive analyses explaining different cultural experiences, historical circumstances, Prussian Lithuanian streams of thought, or their cultural and political situation were quite rare. The majority, apart from a few exceptions,145 described Prussian Lithuanians’ cultural activities and the conditions that kept those 145 E.g., [Petras Matulaitis] Paulius, “Is Prusų Lietuvos,” Varpas 1 (1895): 21–22.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

activities from being not “sufficiently” lively and from taking place in parallel with Russian Lithuanians.146 And there were only occasional publications giving a positive assessment of the influence of the Reformation and the Evangelical Church on Lithuanian culture at best.147 It is likely that the lack of analytical publications about Prussian Lithuanians that would have given an accurate portrayal of the local context and the assessment of all Lithuanians based solely on how nationalistically engaged they were determined the formation of the stereotype by which Prussian Lithuanians were judged in both the Russian and the émigré Lithuanians’ information spaces. That stereotype declared the “insufficient” nationalistic engagement of Prussian Lithuanians, plus their constant assimilation and acculturation (termed “extinction,” “reduction,” or “Germanization”), and was in use for several decades until the First World War. In publications aimed at Russian Lithuanians it became probably the most frequent leitmotif describing Prussian Lithuanians. This stereotype formed the opinion that “there were no Lithuanians in Prussia that were concerned about Lithuanianness.”148 In another article we read: “the national movement [there] was rather weak. The 146 Cf. [Petras Matulaitis] Paulius, “Istorija Lietuvių krutējimo paskutiniame dešimtmetyje Maskolijos ir Prusų Lietuvoj,” Varpas 6 (1893): 81–87; L. Raudonis’s series of articles about Prussian Lithuania: Vilniaus žinios, January 5 (18), 1905 (no. 4): 3–4; January 6 (19), 1905 (no. 5): 2–3; January 12 (25), 1905 (no. 11): 2–3; January 18 (31), 1905 (no. 15): 2–3; February 1 (14), 1905 (no. 29): 2–3; February 16 (March 1), 1905 (no. 44): 3. Overviews of the first three issues of the Vanagaitis-initiated publication Allgemeine litauische Rundschau are in Lietuvos žinios, January 30 (February 12), 1910 (no. 9): 2–3; March 3 (16), 1910 (no. 18): 3; and April 3 (16), 1910 (no. 27): 2–3. A fourteen-article series by an author signing off as “M” titled “Laiškai iš Prusų Lietuvos” (Letters from Prussian Lithuania) can be found in Lietuvos žinios, December 20, 1911 (January 2, 1912) (no. 148): 4–5; February 23 (March 7), 1912 (no. 23): 4. For an article about Gaigalaitis, Vydūnas, and Vanagaitis, see M., “Mažosios Lietuvos veikėjai,” Lietuvos žinios, January 18 (31), 1914 (no. 14): 2; January 19 (February 1), 1914 (no. 15): 1–2; January 21 (February 3), 1914 (no. 16): 2; January 22 (February 4), 1914 (no. 17): 1; Albinas Rimka, “Prūsų Lietuva ir lietuviai,” Lietuvos žinios, July 1 (14), 1914 (no. 143): 2–3; July 20 (August 2), 1914 (no. 160): 2; and [Ansas Bruožis] A. B. Klaipėdiškis, “Prusų lietuvių laikraščiai,” Draugija 89–90 (1914): 69–82. Aside from these publications, we should also note the following pieces, extracted from periodicals and reprinted separately: Šliupas, Mažoji arba Prūsiškoji Lietuva; Michał Römer, Litwini w Prusiech Książęcych (Cracow: Swiat Słowiański, 1911) (reprinted from Swiat Słowiański 82–84 [1911]). 147 [Matulaitis] Paulius, “Istorija Lietuvių krutējimo.” 148 “Tēvyniški varpai,” Varpas 2 (1892): 22–23.

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influence of schools in Prussia is very great, and they are all, without exception, in the hands of the government, that is, in German hands. The German spirit is aroused in infants from their very first days. One of the most important tasks of Germans [as] teachers is to weed out every growing bud of the Lithuanian spirit. That is why it should come as no surprise that there are so few Lithuanians who still feel love for their fatherland.”149 The “slight national engagement” of Prussian Lithuanian newspapers was constantly criticized,150 and it was stated on many occasions that “Prussian Lithuanians were disappearing”; they were allegedly “soaking up the German spirit.”151 Due to the dominance of such motifs, Prussian Lithuanians started being seen in the liberal, democratic, and socialist Lithuanian political currents as incapable of implementing the national unity project, while the most influential Catholic group altogether avoided somehow mentioning representatives of the other— that is, Evangelical Lithuanian culture. This complicated any acknowledgment of Prussian Lithuanians’ aspirations and differences while making it possible to imagine Lithuania Minor from a liberal, democratic, or socialist perspective only via one criterion—the existence of Lithuanianness, which they had themselves created, in this territory. Understandably, this severely narrowed the opportunities for representing Prussian Lithuanians in Lithuanian national culture. Much can be said about this representation based on the fact that up until the First World War, not a single work of Lithuanian literature was created in Lithuania Major that featured the reality of Lithuania Minor. The only exception was works translated into Lithuanian from Polish that exploited the struggle against the Teutonic Order.152 Characteristic 149 Vilniaus žinios, June 30 (July 13), 1905 (no. 158): 3. 150 A., “Prusų Lietuvos laikraščių padėjimas,” Lietuvos žinios, September 1 (14), 1911 (no. 101): 2. 151 Varpas 9–10 (1903): 240. 152 A translated excerpt from Ludwik Kondratowicz’s (Władysław Syrokomla’s) poem Margier (1855) was published in Auszra 4 (1883): 92–97; 5 (1883): 124–129; 6 (1883): 158–163; 7 (1883): 197–200. A translation of Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s story Kunigas. Powieść z podań litewskich (1881) by Augustinas Zeicas first appeared in the United States: Kunigas. Pujkus apraszimas isz Padawymo Lietuwniku (Plymouth, PA: Juozapas Pauksztis, 1887). Fragments of Adam Mickiewicz’s poem Konrad Wallenrod (1828) translated into Lithuanian were released by Jankus in 1891 in Tilsit (translated by

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

yet concise explanations of Lithuania’s history in the Lithuanian press also concentrated on the past of Lithuanians in Maskolija,153 or at best, on that of Lithuanians and Latvians.154 There were attempts to apply a cultural appropriation strategy to East Prussia, based on the nationalization of everything that bore the slightest link to “Lithuanianness.” However, such efforts sometimes collided with phenomena that were completely out of sync with Lithuanian nationalist priorities. An example is the student fraternity Littuania of the University of Königsberg. For nationalistically engaged Lithuanians, this name attested to familiarity and Lithuanianness, but the fraternity soon lost its chance. As noted in the Lithuanian press, “This society, indeed, comprises not only Lithuanians but also Germans.”155 Figures who had created literature and nurtured the Lithuanian script in Prussia were more enthusiastically included in the “register” of national cultural meanings, being credited with the “preservation” of the Lithuanian language. This category included Mažvydas, Vilentas, Bretkūnas, Klein, Ruhig, Mielcke, and, of course, Donelaitis.156 Sauerwein was added to the canon of worthy Sta­nislovas Dagilis) and by Žilius in 1899 in Plymouth (PA) (translated by Žilius himself) (Lietuviszkas sziupinis isz svetimu skanskoniu ant naudos broliams Lietuviams pataisitas, vol. 2: Konradas Vallenrodas. Pasaka isz lietuviszku ir prusiszku nusidavimu [Tilsit: M. Jankus, 1891]; Jr. Jonas [Žilius], Vertimai iš Mickevyčiaus, vol. II: Konradas Valenrodas [Plymouth: S.L.A., 1899]). In 1896 Varpas featured the Lithuanian translation (by Vincas Kudirka) of Kiejstut. Tragedya w pięciu aktach (1878) by the Polish poet and playwright, Adam Asnyk: Varpas 2 (1896): 14 – 12 (1896): 177. 153 Cf. Varpas 12 (1891): 178–179; Juozas Gabrys, Trumpas Lietuvos aprašymas (Vilnius: Vilniaus Žinios, 1905), 5–13. 154 [Jonas Šliūpas] J. Szl., “Lietuviai kitą gadinę ir szendien,” Auszra 8–10 (1883): 221–231. 155 -a-b-, “Isz tevyniszkos dirvos,” Varpas 3 (1889): 39. 156 Probably the first time that all these figures were drawn into one list of those who wrote in Lithuanian was in a book compiled by Šliūpas and financed by the Baltimore Lithuanian Appreciation Society: [Jonas Šliūpas] Lietuvos mylėtojas, Lietuviszkiejie rasztai ir rasztininkai (Tilsit: Bałtimorės M.D.L.M. Draugystē, 1890). See also: [Matulaitis] Paulius, “Istorija Lietuvių krutējimo”; [Jonas Basanavičius] D-r B-s, “Apie Immanuelių Kantą,” Varpas 5 (1900): 54; L. Raudonis, [III laiškas iš Prūsų Lietuvos], Vilniaus žinios, January 12 (25), 1905 (no. 11): 2; [Mačiulis] Maironis, Lietuvos istorija, 213, 218–219, 220–221, 221–226, 230–233; Gaigalaitis, Lietuwos Nusidawimai. For information on how Donelaitis was initially received in the Russian Empire’s Lithuanian intellectual milieu in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Albinas Jovaišas, Liudvikas Rėza (Vilnius: Vaga, 1969), 149–156.

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Figure 27.  The so-called Waidewutus flag as depicted in Caspar Hennenberger’s treatise Kurtze vnd warhafftige Beschreibung des Landes zu Preussen … ­(Königsberg: Georg Osterberger, 1584).

“arousers of Lithuanianness” posthumously.157 Yet the actualization of their merits in the Lithuanian information space prior to the First World War could not be called frequent. 157 One of the first publications to have revealed his meaning to Lithuanian culture came out as Pro Memoria: Vilkaitis, “D-ras Jurgis Zauerveinas. (Girėnas) (1831–1904),” Vilniaus žinios, December 25, 1904 (January 7, 1905) (no. 15): 1–2.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

The “famous places of Lithuania” postcard collection distributed by the Vilniaus žinios editorial office beginning in 1906 is a good example of Prussian Lithuania’s place in Lithuanian national culture. Of the twenty-one postcards, only two images were indirectly related to the Lithuanian-inhabited territory in East Prussia. That would be the “flag” associated with the legendary Prussian character ­Waidewutus that depicted Perkūnas, Potrimpo, and Patollo (Peckols)158 and an image of the “ancient Lithuanian holy hill” on Rambynas (Rombinus) on the Memel riverside.159 Both these images integrated East Prussian motifs into the Lithuanian cultural layers, appealing to paganism—that is, the imagined period of Lithuanian unity. The legend of Waidewutus and Prutenis was, by the way, actualized on other ­occasions as well.160 Thus, we could say that in the Lithuanian information space, Prussian Lithuania was represented via the “unsuitable Lithuanianness” and “extinction” prism, even though the figures that were active in this space and contributed to the “preservation” of Lithuanian language and writing were willingly made familiar, or “our own.” The symbolic representations that were linked with that space, and that were circulated the most in the Lithuanian information space prior to the First World War, appealed to images of paganism and the struggles against the Teutonic Order, which were only indirectly associated with Lithuania Minor. Yet there were exceptions to these general trends that were determined not only by the liveliness of the representation of Prussian Lithuania during specific periods but also by the more active than usual participation of Prussian Lithuanians themselves in creating that which represented Lithuanianness. An example of this participation was the exposition organized by Lithuanians for the World Expo held in Paris’s Trocadéro Museum from April 15 to November 12, 1900 (Exposition universelle internationale de 1900). Although the main 158 Published by Hennenberger, Kurtze vnd warhafftige Beschreibung, 22; Hartknoch, Altund Neues Preussen, 226. 159 Vilniaus žinios, September 29 (October 12), 1906 (no. 215): 4. 160 V. P., “Trumpa Lietuvos istorija,” Vilniaus žinios, July 11 (24), 1907 (no. 89 [698]): 2–3.

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initiative for organizing this exposition came from émigré Lithuanians in the United States, the critical role in collecting funds, selecting exhibits, and managing the exposition’s finances in Europe fell on the shoulders of Prussian Lithuanians Marta Zauniūtė and Dovas Zaunius. A separate stand was arranged for representations of Prussian Lithuanianism, while one of the main conceptions for exhibiting Lithuanian culture was the presentation of Lithuanian language texts released in East Prussia.161 In addition, as time went on, Prussian Lithuania’s role in Lithuanian national culture during the ban on use of the Latin script was revealed ever more comprehensively. From this angle, the Lithuanian space in East Prussia was represented by gradually spreading the image of Auszra as the first platform raising the Lithuanian national idea, and by forming the aušrininkai cult (individuals involved in the release of Auszra), highlighting Basanavičius. For the tenth anniversary of Auszra, Prussian Lithuania’s role was still poorly distinguished; the contribution made by the local Lithuanians in the emergence of this monthly was silenced, basically highlighting the merits of Basana­ vičius alone.162 Yet by the twentieth anniversary, in a thematic issue of Varpas dedicated to mark the occasion, that contribution was now revealed, first in the memoirs of Basanavičius, Šliūpas, and Jankus.163 Special publications were similarly released emphasizing the importance of Prussian Lithuania,164 especially after 1904 when the prohibition on printing Lithuanian texts using Latin script in the Russian Empire was revoked and that, most likely, made it possible to

161 For more detail, see Jonas Žilinskis, Albumas lietuviškos parodos Paryžiuje, 1900 metuose (Plymouth, PA: Vienybė Lietuvininkų, 1902); Juozas Kriaučiūnas, “Lithuania at the Paris World’s Fair,” Lituanus 28, no. 4 (1982): 26–39; and Remigijus Misiūnas, ed., Lietuva pasaulinėje Paryžiaus parodoje 1900 m. (Vilnius: Versus aureus; Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2006). 162 Cf. Varpas 3 (1893). 163 Jonas Basanavičius, “Iš istorijos musų atsigaiveliavimo (1873–1883),” Varpas 3 (1903): 65–76; Jonas Szliupas, “Minės apie mano prietikius prie ‘Auszros’,” Varpas 3 (1903): 77–93; Martynas Jankus, “Šis-tas apie ‘Auszros’ išleidimą ir platinimą,” Varpas 3 (1903): 104–105. 164 [Vincas Mickevičius] K-as, “Kelios naujos žinios iš ‘Aušros’ gyvenimo,” Varpas 3 (1904): 33–42.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

rethink, from a distance of a certain period of time, this land’s significance in the Lithuanian national movement.165 Regardless of these exceptions, we would not be very wrong in stating that special signification of Lithuania Minor in Lithuania started only after 1919, when it became clear that a part of East Prussia would be separated from Germany, and a realistic need to integrate this part into the Lithuanian state became evident. It was precisely then, on the one hand, that major institutional efforts were made in order to instill the idea of this formerly German region’s cultural closeness to Lithuania, and the efforts themselves made it possible to signify Lithuania Minor using completely different measures. Moreover, in Prussian Lithuania itself, a rather large force was mobilized to convince the area’s Lithuanians that, given the opportunity to choose between Germany and Lithuania, they had to choose the latter. Commemorating the second Lithuanian Independence Day on February 16, alongside declarations made by the highest state officials and Catholic dignitaries in the state news release Lietuva, the ideas of Vydūnas and the president of the National Council of Prussian Lithuanian Association, Gaigalaitis, as the main representatives of Lithuania Minor, also featured.166 An essay by Juozas Pajaujis printed in that same issue expressed extraordinary approval of Lithuania Minor’s contribution to Lithuania’s independence, compared to the prewar period. Pajaujis noted that it was here that the first roots of “broader national consciousness” started to grow, and of course, the idea of irredentism was not forgotten: it was claimed that “for almost five hundred years” the two Lithuanias, Major and Minor, had been separated.167 After March 20, 1920, when three representatives of Lithuania Minor were co-opted into the State Council of Lithuania, the state’s semiofficial publication Lietuva featured plenty of panegyrics for Lithuania Minor,168 while the act of 165 [Konstantinas Šakenis] Augštaitis, “‘Auszra’ ir aušrininkai,” Vilniaus žinios, September 9 (22), 1905 (no. 219): 2–3; September 10 (23), 1905 (no. 220): 2–3; September 11 (24), 1905 (no. 221): 2–3; September 15 (28), 1905 (no. 224): 2–3; September 16 (29), 1905 (no. 225): 2–3; September 17 (30), 1905 (no. 226): 2–3. 166 “Lietuvos darbuotojų mintys del vasario 16 d.,” Lietuva, February 15, 1920 (no. 37 [319]). 167 Juoz[as] P[ajau]jis, “Mažoji Lietuva ir mūsų nepriklausomybė,” Lietuva, February 15, 1920 (no. 37 [319]). 168 “Didžiajai ir Mažajai Lietuvai susijungiant,” Lietuva, March 21, 1920 (no. 66 [648]); “XV-ji Valstybės Tarybos Sesija,” Lietuva, March 23, 1920 (no. 67 [349]).

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co-optation was organized in Kaunas with a grand session of the State Council and a military ceremony in the public city square.169 When forming irredentist attitudes in Lithuania’s society, all the hitherto developed representations of Lithuania Minor were harnessed for its signification: Memel (Klaipėda), Rambynas, “ancient Lithuanians’ ” struggles against the Teutonic Order, Donelaitis, and Vydūnas. Lithuania Minor was identified as “the cradle of the nation’s revival,” which gave “the fruits of revival” to Lithuania Major. Ultimately, moving toward the appropriation of Prussian Lithuanians’ culture, the ideologeme of the “cradle” of all Lithuanian culture was applied probably for the first time to Lithuania Minor, when it was claimed that it was “the cradle where religious and secular Lithuanian literature developed … Prussian Lithuania was also home to the beginning of our newspapers,” and it “fed our spirit with its books and newspapers.” These images became the most stable representations of Lithuania Minor and continued to be exploited for a long time in Lithuanian national culture. The exploitation of these images is easily recognizable crossing over to another dimension of the symbolic appropriation of Prussian Lithuania—the marking of this space with the respective representations. In this dimension, unlike the one already analyzed, up until the First World War, due to well-known reasons, it was a rather small group of Prussian Lithuanians who were most active, not Russian Lithuanians. Despite this, the images they actualized in marking this, their own space, were in effect the same ones: paganism as the “golden age” of Lithuanians, the battles against the Teutonic Order, and the “renaissance” of Lithuanian culture and language. From the late nineteenth century on, Prussian Lithuanians tried to create the main representation of the first image using a scarp 40 m above the Memel River between Bittehnen (Bitėnai) and Bardehnen (Bardinai), known as Rambynas “Hill.” The actualization of the second image did not take on any symbolic expressions; however, commemoration of the five hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald in 1910 suggests that this image could have been signified. The most important 169 “Antroji Lietuvių Tautos šventė—Mažosios Lietuvos su Didžiąja Lietuva susijungimas,” Lietuva, March 23, 1920 (no. 67 [349]).

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

representations of the third image for Prussian Lithuanians were Donelaitis and the societies that themselves expressed the cultural “revival” of Prussian Lithuanians. Rambynas gained its representational status due to the tradition already alive in the last decade of the nineteenth century among Lithuanians in the area, who celebrated St. John’s Midsummer Feast with song and dance on this legendary scarp.170 The gathering of several hundred people, mostly Lithuanians, in one place for a Midsummer celebration was extraordinarily useful for those who wanted to quickly spread one idea or another, which is why in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century we can see the efforts of various Prussian Lithuanian societies to symbolically appropriate this space. The Birutė Society is considered the very first to have decided to use this tradition to spread its ideas. In seeking to avoid problems with the local gendarmes, who happened to appear during the earlier gatherings,171 in 1896 the Birutė Society received a loan to acquire a plot of land on Rambynas 11 Morgen in size (1 Prussian Morgen = 0.2553 ha).172 The St. John’s Day Feast was held on this plot of land in 1896 under the “patronage” of the Birutė Society. At least in a description of the celebration Rambynas was transformed into an “ancestral” and “sacred place” noted for its “pure” Lithuanianism,173 which had to continue to be visited to symbolically communicate with the “ancestors” (the Birutė Society continued to need a large audience to spread its ideas). The celebration in 1896 was called the first “real” Lithuanian St. John’s Day, while Birutė was the society that had organized the celebrations and thus earned the blessing of the “ancestors” for all its participants. For various reasons the Birutė Society’s attempts to further exploit the celebration of St. John’s Day on Rambynas in order to entrench such ideas were not successful. In 1897, the Birutė Society had to organize St. John’s Day celebrations, as earlier, in Tilsit, in the garden of the Riflemens’ House. 170 In 1895 it was written in Varpas: “This custom of gathering on John’s night on Rambynas has been alive in Prussian Lithuania for several years” (Varpas 6 (1895): 104). 171 Cf. Varpas 6 (1895): 104. 172 Varpas 12 (1896): 185; [Bruožis] Klaipėdiškis, “Byrutė,” 30; Kovos keliais: Klaipėdos krašto prisijungimui prie Lietuvos 15-kos metų sukakčiai paminėti almanachas, ed. Jonas Vanagaitis (Klaipėda: Jonas Vanagaitis, 1938), 66. 173 “Kilkim ant Rambynkalnio!” Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, June 26, 1896 (no. 51).

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In 1899 it was again organized in Tilsit, in Jakobsruhe Park, but in 1900 it was held on Rambynas again.174 In addition, the Lithuanian Chanters Society headed by Vydūnas, which had developed to a greater degree in Tilsit, also organized St. John’s Day celebrations that competed with those organized by the Birutė Society. Finally, once two creditors who had issued the loan to the Birutė Society for acquisition of the plot of land on Rambynas became bankrupt, an auctioneer started threatening the latter, which is why in 1903 the plot was transferred to builder Enzys Gaigalaitis (Ensies Gaigalat), who lived in Leipzig. He took over the property under the condition that he would not interfere in the organization of the St. John’s Day celebrations.175 And indeed, in 1904 this celebration was again held on Rambynas.176 Nevertheless, some time later Gaigalaitis transferred the plot to his brother, the priest Vilius Gaigalaitis, who decided to exploit the tradition of celebrating St. John’s Day on Rambynas for other purposes. In 1908 on St. John’s Day, missionary festivals of religious content started being held on Rambynas that had hitherto usually taken place in Schwarzort (Juodkrantė) and Försterei (Giruliai), near Memel. These festivals, during which the main speakers were Lithuanian and German priests and missionaries, were held on Rambynas in 1908, 1909, and 1914,177 and in August 1912, the festival was held there by the Sandora organization for evangelical education, headed by Vilius Gaigalaitis.178 Only in 1910, when integrational trends emerged in Prussian Lithuanians’ activities, did Rambynas start to become a place for annual youth gatherings. The first such gathering took place on June 19, 1910.179 Youth festivals of similar content were held in 1911 and 1912,180 while at

174 Cf. Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, June 22, 1896 (no. 50); June 27, 1899 (no. 51); June 19, 1900 (no. 49); Saulēteka 7 (1900): 196–197. 175 Cf. [Bruožis] Klaipėdiškis, “Byrutė,” 30; Kovos keliais, 67. 176 Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, June 21, 1904 (no. 50); June 28, 1904 (no. 52). 177 Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, June 23, 1908 (no. 50); June 30, 1908 (no. 52); June 18, 1909 (no. 49); Pagalba 5–6 (1909): 68; 7–8 (1914): 93. 178 Pagalba 9 (1912): 112. 179 Byrute 7 (1910): 100–101. 180 Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, June 20, 1911 (no. 73); June 22, 1911 (no. 74); Apzwalga, June 21, 1912 (no. 49).

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

the end of 1912 when the Santara organization formed,181 Rambynas became the location for its annual summer gatherings.182 These manifestations of Lithuanianness, held at the same place at almost the same time every year, appealed to the Lithuanianness attributed to Lithuanians’ “ancestors,” the Lithuanians’ “golden age” of paganism. All of this suggests that even before the First World War, Rambynas sought to become a cultish location for maintaining Prussian Lithuanians’ cultural self-awareness and its various resources, almost like a “pantheon” of “pure” Lithuanianness. The image of the “ancestors’ ” struggles against the Teutonic knights was actualized not just during the St. John’s Day celebrations on Rambynas but also during the five hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald (1410), when the “Lithuanians” defeated the Teutonic Order. In the beginning of 1910 the Birutė Society made a proclamation “to all Lithuanians” living on either side of the German-Russian border, inviting them to join in the commemoration, to be held in Tilsit.183 Moreover, the Birutė Society’s initiative to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald was related to another anniversary—twenty-five years since the founding of the society itself. The association of these two dates alone rather clearly showed that when organizing the celebration, the aim was to relate the values of the past with the present, perhaps even comparing the importance of the Battle of Grunwald and the activities of the Birutė Society in the present. It should be added that the commemoration of the Battle of Grunwald and twenty-five years of the Birutė Society had not just an educational function but also the goal to encourage Lithuanians to be proud of their present achievements. The goal was to entrench the understanding of what Lithuanians had already achieved and what they still could achieve.184 Prussian Lithuanians’ efforts to signify the “renaissance of Lithuanian culture and language” was most evident in the Gaigalaitis-directed Sandora Society’s attempts to open a museum in Memel with a library of 181 The Santara Society that was founded on October 16, 1912, in Tilsit incorporated ten youth organizations, Birutė, the Tilsit Lithuanian Chanters Society, and the Lithuanian Society from Gumbinnen. 182 Kovos keliais, 67–68; Apzwalga, June 28, 1914 (no. 39); July 17, 1914 (no. 42). 183 “Atsißaukimas i wisus Lietuwius,” Byrute 4 (1910): 61–62. 184 [Vilius Storosta] Vds., “Didysis Mūßis,” Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, July 14, 1910 (no. 83).

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Lithuanian books, which was devised as a “glorifying monument to Lithuanian writing,”185 as well as the oft-expressed yet unrealized idea (until the First World War) to erect a monument to Donelaitis. In October 1912, the museum opened in the Sandora Society’s building with a library to demonstrate the vitality of the region’s Lithuanian culture, rather than a fading phenomenon.186 Donelaitis had to be actualized as a hero of the Lithuanian nation, who with his texts written in Lithuanian tried to “arouse” and “awaken” its “spirit.”187 Incidentally, from the very first expressions of the idea to build a monument to Donelaitis in 1899, Prussian Lithuanian societies envisaged this monument atop Rambynas.188 One can assume that this choice was primarily determined by the ownership rights to the land on Rambynas that were first held by the Birutė Society and later by Gaigalaitis. Keeping in mind the annual gatherings on Rambynas, it was at the same time the most suitable place to form and maintain the annual ritual of honoring Donelaitis. The fact that Prussian Lithuanians chose Rambynas to signify Donelaitis is important in terms of assessing the space’s nationalization in another sense also.189 Attention should be drawn to the fact that the Russian Lithuanian press urged the placement of the Donelaitis monument not on Rambynas but in Memel or Tilsit.190 The initiators behind the monument’s construction had even received an official recommendation from Tilsit’s city council to build the monument there. However, in April 1914, when this recommendation was being deliberated, the earlier suggestion of erecting the monument on Rambynas won. The justification was that “Lithuanians were not city folk, and it would be most suitable if the 185 Pagalba 8 (1911): 104; 9–10 (1911): 128–129. 186 Pagalba 9 (1912): 114. 187 Cf. the proclamation for the construction of a monument to Donelaitis: [Vilius Gaigalaitis], Kristijonas Důnelaitis, jo Gywastis ir Darbai. Iß Priežasties dußimtmetinių Sukaktuwių jo Gimtinēs Dienos 1. Januarijaus 1914 (Tilsit: Komitėtas dėl statymo jo [K. Donelaičio] paminklo, [1914]), 3. 188 “Donelaiczio Paminklas,” Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, May 16, 1899 (no. 39). 189 On the idea behind and construction of the monument, see Domas Kaunas, Donelaičio žemės knygiai: bibliofilijos apybraižos (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla, 1993), 147–152; and Pocytė, Mažlietuviai Vokietijos imperijoje, 110–116. 190 Cf. “Atwiras Laißkas į Prusų Lietuwius, Důnelaiczio Paminklą statanczius,” Apzwalga, February 3, 1914 (no. 10).

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Donelaitis monument were to be on Rambynas.”191 This quotation, it is believed, expresses one of the conjunctural elements of the monument’s construction, but at the same time it also shows a unique element of Prussian Lithuanians’ self-representation—the city was not considered one of “their” spaces. Many Prussian Lithuanians did not live in that space; it was merely visited on occasion. To a traditionally agrarian society, the city was important only as a place for buying or selling, attending church, or visiting a government office. The city space had to be associated with a completely different kind of community life, beyond the understanding of Lithuanians used to village communities. The city culture in Germany was transferred and maintained within the framework of German culture, that is, by communicating in German. Of the larger cities of Prussian Lithuania, based on official Prussian census statistics from 1905, Lithuanian speakers (apart from bilingual individuals) had a tangible presence only in Memel (5.18 percent) and Tilsit (3.83 percent); in addition, they made up 4.03 percent of the population of Ragnit.192 Nevertheless, before the First World War we see evidence that Prussian Lithuanians, mostly the younger generation, sought to become established in cities and somehow make them their own. This behavior was typical of other national movements led in East-Central Europe by peasants. Usually they refused to cooperate with the social strata dominant in the cities because of cultural differences; instead, they conquered cities on their own terms, pushing out competitors. For pre–First World War Prussian Lithuanians, Tilsit was one such city, as was Memel in 1911– 1914, if to a lesser extent.193 At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the first Prussian Lithuanian secular social activists gathered in 191 Lietuwißka Ceitunga, April 18, 1914 (no. 46). 192 Calculated based on data from Gemeindelexikon für das Königreich Preußen. Auf Grund der Materialen der Volkszählung vom 1. Dezember 1905 und anderer amtlicher Quellen, no. 1: Gemeindelexikon für die Provinz Ostpreußen (Berlin: Verlag des königlichen Statistischen Landesamts, 1907), 152–153, 248–249, 292–293. 193 For more on Lithuanians’ efforts to become more established in Memel before and after the First World War, see Vasilijus Safronovas, “Modernieji lietuviai įsitvirtina mieste. Kaip tai vyko Klaipėdoje XIX–XX amžių sandūroje?” in Klaipėda Europos istorijos kontekstuose, ed. Vasilijus Safronovas (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2013), 126–151.

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Tilsit, founding the first Lithuanian-run printing houses that supported the Lithuanian national movement. It was here that educational Lithuanian societies operated, some of which, especially the Birutė and Tilsit Lithuanian Chanters Society, arranged annual Lithuanian festivals in the city. Probably the first Lithuanian press reading room was founded in Tilsit, plus a Lithuanian Club, and finally in 1890, the first Prussian Lithuanian political organization was created here. The answer to the question of why Tilsit and not Memel first experienced Prussian Lithuanians’ efforts to become established in the city, it appears, hides in the unequal development of these cities. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, due to specific economic conditions in the region, the city of Memel was in stagnation, while Tilsit’s prospects appeared much more favorable. In the year of the founding of the German Reich, both cities were almost equal in population. However, in 1871–1910 the growth of Memel’s population (1.13 times) was quite insignificant compared to the growth experienced in Tilsit (1.93 times) in the same period, and prior to the First World War, Tilsit was already close to twice the size of Memel. Thus, there were more incentives to establish oneself and engage in some sort of activities in Tilsit. However, Lithuanians’ efforts to become established in Memel also went in a similar direction. Secular Lithuanians’ aspirations to symbolically control Memel led to the development of a network of familiar gathering places, self-education, the founding of “Lithuanians’ own” press organ, and attempts at developing “Lithuanian” business. In 1914, the society of local Lithuanians called Vienybė even raised the idea of building a National House for Lithuanians in Memel that could be dedicated to the then most dominant representative of the uniqueness of Prussian Lithuanians—Donelaitis (this was how the bicentennial of his birth was to be signified). This house was to be built using funds collected from Lithuanians themselves.194 Indeed, it should be said that in both cases, Prussian Lithuanians were more interested in elections and political affairs on the German or Prussian scale, and they did not yet participate in elections to the Tilsit or 194 “‘Tautos namai’ Klaipėdoje,” Lietuvos žinios, February 12 (25), 1914 (no. 35): 3; “Tautißkas Namas,” Apzwalga, March 6, 1914 (no. 19).

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Memel City Council. There were no determined efforts to create alternative educational facilities either, although it appears this was under consideration at least in Memel.195 Public manifestations of Lithuanianness also appeared in Tilsit, but they were rarer in Memel. Regardless of this, in a cultural sense, both cities, Tilsit and Memel, were from the late nineteenth century represented in the Lithuanian information space as cities Lithuanians could call “their own.” This is quite evident from the fact that the Auszra monthly, which rarely printed illustrations, used lithographs of these two cities in several of its issues.196 Already in 1881, Naujasis Keleiwis, a weekly aimed at Prussian Lithuanians, published the first overview of the history of Memel in Lithuanian.197 Its author clearly assigned the city of Memel to the Lithuanian space, adding that although the city was founded by the Livonian Order and the bishop of Courland, “the Lithuanian settlement called ‘Klaipēda’ in the earliest pagan times already lay there, and its inhabitants, as is said in old stories, developed a great trade.”198 Publications appearing in Auszra also maintained the unfounded idea that a “Lithuanian castle” existed in Memel prior to the Teutonic Order’s arrival.199 Memel itself was called a Lithuanian city, where Lithuanians could not be seen only because they, unlike Germans or Jews, did not engage in trade or business.200 The idea that Memel was “truly” a Lithuanian city was supported also in the Russian Lithuanian press up to the eve of the First World War. So it was that in 1910 it was announced in Lietuvos žinios, without any clear substantiation, that “Klaipėda was like the heart of Prussian Lithuania, as here there was barely 20 percent of Germans and the majority of inhabitants were Lithuanians.”201 Petras Rimša, who visited Prussian Lithuania, also decided that Memel 195 A. Kl., “Klaipėdoje ligi Didžiojo Karo,” Lietuvos Keleivis, March 4, 1931 (no. 51): Suppl. 196 Auszra 4 (1886): 128 (figure and comment); 6 (1886): 192 (figure and comment). 197 The identification of the author and his sources of this continuing publication featured in thirteen issues of the weekly demands separate research. See Lck., “Iß Nusidawimû Klaipēdos Miesto,” Naujasis Keleiwis, July 1, 1881 (no. 26): 171–172 through November 25, 1881 (no. 47): 306–307. 198 Lck., “Iß Nusidawimû Klaipēdos Miesto,” Naujasis Keleiwis, July 1, 1881 (no. 26): 171. 199 [Jonas Basanavičius], “Apie senovēs Lietuvos pilis,” Auszra 1–3 (1884): 37. 200 [Kristupas Voska] K. V., “Klaipēda,” Auszra 10–11 (1885): 360–362. 201 “Klaipėda,” Lietuvos žinios, May 29 (June 11), 1910 (no. 42): 3.

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left the impression of a Lithuanian city: “although the people appear to be more German-like … it is possible to communicate in Lithuanian almost everywhere here.”202 Also, in the geography textbook released by Gabrys in 1910 it was noted that Memel was “one of Lithuania’s more famous cities” despite being “severely Germanized.”203 The importance of Tilsit to the “Lithuanian world” in the Lithuanian information space was also clearly conveyed. First of all, it was presented as the main center of Prussian Lithuanians, having special significance as a result of the Lithuanian text ban in the Russian Empire, and because it was a city that undoubtedly belonged to the Lithuanian space. It was written in Auszra that products were transported to Prussia through Tilsit that were “supplied by our Lithuania, and … the diligence of the Lithuanians,” it was home to the Birutė Society, Lithuanian was taught in schools, Lithuanian newspapers circulated there, and finally, “in Tilsit the Lithuanian was a welcome figure.”204 The history of Tilsit, as in the case of Memel, was rather comprehensively presented in the press aimed at Lithuanians,205 in which Tilsit, applying the concept of the capital of Lithuania to the Lithuanian discourse, was named “Lithuania’s capital city,”206 while a large part of the historical account was dedicated to the role of “Lithuanians” in battles against the Teutonic Order. In the geography textbook released abroad by Juozas Adomaitis, Tilsit was presented as the “city most known to Lithuanians” and where “the most Lithuanian newspapers and books were released” and that therefore was “the center of today’s Lithuanian book trade in Europe.”207 And a Lietuvos žinios correspondent who actually visited Tilsit compared the city to Vilnius in terms of its importance to Lithuanian national culture, as it was where “the most famous newspapers were published, and where the most famous Lithuanian societies 202 Petras Rymša, “Kelionės įspūdžiai,” Lietuvos žinios, September 29 (October 12), 1912 (no. 115): 2. 203 Gabrys, Geografijos vadovėlis, 70. 204 Auszra 4 (1886): 128. 205 Cf. the continuing publication “Tilzes Miesto Nusidawimai”: Tilžês Keleiwis, January 11, 1899 (no. 3) through August 2, 1899 (no. 61). 206 “Tilzes Miesto Nusidawimai,” Tilžês Keleiwis, January 11, 1899 (no. 3). 207 [Juozas Adomaitis] Szernas, Geografija arba Żemēs apraszymas (Chicago, IL: Lietuva, 1899), 428.

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were established—the Tilsit Lithuanian Chanters Society, … Birutė—the first Prussian Lithuanian society,” and so on. The domination of German in this city that had to become almost sacred to every Lithuanian, the fact that “you’ll rarely overhear a person speaking Lithuanian,” was explained by a motif typical to Lithuanian national culture, that Lithuanians in Tilsit had “lost their national engagement,” and had allegedly “Germanized.” Citing knowledgeable locals, the correspondent nevertheless calculated that a quarter of Tilsit’s population (!), specifically, around ten thousand people “at home still used or at least understood Lithuanian, but in the street they were ‘Germans.’”208 The fact that of all the cities of Prussian Lithuania only Tilsit and Memel experienced the efforts of nationalistically engaged Lithuanians to make these two cities “their own” should come as no surprise. They were the only larger cities that at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries found themselves within the boundaries where Lithuanian speakers in Prussia actually lived, where the Lithuanian national idea could still produce a response. Testimony of this lies not just in the geographic distribution of youth societies established in East Prussia in 1911–1914. Apart from the Lithuanian society founded in 1910 in Gumbinnen, they were all in the surroundings of Tilsit and Memel,209 and several sources have named the Tilsit Lithuanian Club and Memel’s Vienybė [Unity] as the strongest of these societies.210 In the early twentieth century, the Prussian Lithuanian communication milieu, an environment 208 “Laiškai iš Prusų Lietuvos. (Iš musų korespondento). IV,” Lietuvos žinios, January 2 (15), 1912 (no. 1): 3. 209 These societies are referred to (the date of their founding is shown in parentheses): Groß Lenkeningken’s (now Lesnoe) Lelija (June 1, 1913), Dawillen’s (Dovilai) Liepa (Dec. 1913), Gröszpelken’s (Griežpelkiai) Žiedas (before Aug. 1912), Coadjuthen’s (Katyčiai) Vainikas (October 1, 1911), Memel’s Vienybė (February 19, 1913), Kullmen’s (Kulmenai) Spindulys (July 7, 1912), Lankuppen’s (Lankupiai) Jaunimas (May 5, 1912), Laugszargen’s (Lauksargiai) Žiedas (June 30, 1912), Pogegen’s (Pagėgiai) Rūta (April 28, 1912), Paskallwen’s (now Dubki) Aušra (May 28, 1912), Plicken’s (Plikiai) Beržas (September 15, 1912), Rucken’s (Rukai) Ąžuolas (May 29, 1912), Tilsit’s Lithuanian Club (April 13, 1913), Weynothen’s (now Oktiabrskoe) Dobilas (July 14, 1912), Wieszen’s (Vyžiai) Vainikas (May 28, 1912). Cf. Pocytė, Mažlietuviai Vokietijos imperijoje, 250–253. 210 Cf. “Schreiben des wirklichen geheimen Rats,” 35; [Christoph] Kairies, Die Litauer in Preussen und ihre Bestrebungen—eine historisch-kritische Betrachtung, typescript (Tilsit, 1922), 147.

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Figure 28.  The space of Lithuanian practices. Black dots mark the localities where Prussian Lithuanian societies were established before the First World War. The pentagram shows the Lithuanian ritual place—Rambynas. Map by Vasilijus Safronovas.

for sharing information of relevance to Lithuanians, that encouraged their unique cultural, and in part political, self-consciousness was already limited by the boundaries of the northern East Prussian counties around Tilsit and Memel. The most information featured in the Prussian Lithuanian newspapers released in Memel and Tilsit came from these

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

areas—Memel, Heydekrug, Tilsit, and in part Ragnit and Niederung counties. For example, the progressive secular Lithuanian newspaper released in Memel in 1911–1914 called Apzwalga [Overview] published most of its announcements from Memel, Tilsit, Heydekrug, Prökuls, Ruß (Rusnė), Coadjuthen, Lankuppen, Plicken, Wieszen, Karkeln (now Mysovka), Heinrichswalde (now Slavsk), and other places, most of which were located in the aforementioned counties. In that way, the places that Prussian Lithuanians undoubtedly regarded as their own, where they saw a purpose in becoming established and manifesting their existence there happened to lie within only a handful of the northernmost counties of East Prussia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Regardless, these particular boundaries of the space inhabited by Lithuanian speakers, as we shall see, in no way inhibited the aspirations of Lithuanian nationalism.

4.4. THE BOUNDARIES OF LITHUANIA MINOR How were the boundaries of the Lithuanians’ “own” region in East Prussia defined in the Lithuanian information space? What was the basis for these definitions? Considering the cultural differences, were there any fundamental variations between how these boundaries were understood by Prussian Lithuanians living in the region and how they were viewed in the Russian Lithuanian and North American Lithuanian information space? Glancing through sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is obvious that the Lithuanian press territorialized the Lithuanian space in East Prussia in various ways, of which the language distribution criteria always played the most important role. Both Germans and Lithuanian nationalists assigned territories to nations based on language distribution, seen as the main characteristic defining a nation. One of the earliest nationalists who attempted to define the distribution of the Lithuanian language in East Prussia was Basanavičius. As with some other authors from this early period, in an article published in 1880 Basanavičius identified a territory covering Russia and Germany inhabited by Lithuanian and Latvian speakers as the area belonging to the Lithuanian nation. In East Prussia the boundary of this territory reached Nordenburg and Labiau by the Curonian Lagoon. He added that in Prussia “only a

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minor portion of their once great land had remained for Lithuanians, which today has been separated from the Germans by the border going from the village Norkitten to the Oletzko (Olecko) County, through Dar­keh­men and Labiau; in this way, today Lithuania’s border remains a distance of around 7–8 miles from Königsberg.”211 Here Basanavičius did not invent anything new, as this line was completely the same as the boundary lines earlier defined by Šafárik, Koeppen, and Kurschat.212 It would also be wrong to think that these ideas of Basanavičius, at least in the initial stages, had any great influence, as they were shared in a publication aimed solely at Prussian Lithuanians and remained unknown to Lithuanians as a whole. In 1905 Gabrys could still state that “Lithuania today has no clear borders,” and imagine “our” land as lying between the Vistula, Daugava (Western Dvina), Pripyat, and Berezina rivers.213 In this sense, it would appear that Subačius’s thoughts about rivers as the most important guidelines for Lithuania’s boundaries in writing at the time would apply.214 Yet the above statement by Gabrys would also have to be explained by the fact that many Lithuanians who lived in the Russian Empire had difficulty in accessing accurate data about the distribution of Lithuanian in Russia, much less in Germany. That is why the spread of Lithuanians in the latter was explained by identifying specific locations or counties where it was probably known that Lithuanians still lived. In one of the first descriptions of the space inhabited by Lithuanians based on the language criterion, made by Mikalojus Akelaitis, it was written that “Lithuanians lived around Memel, Tilsit, Ragnit, Insterburg, Gumbinnen, Stallupönen, Schirwindt, and 211 Jon’s Bassenowicz, “Rubeźej ir skajtlus Lietuwiû tautôs,” Naujasis Keleiwis, July 23, 1880 (no. 17), Suppl., 103. 212 Here Basanavičius appears to have simply copied Šafárik (cf. Shafarik, Slavianskoe narodopisanie, 106). The latter in turn took his data from Koeppen, who when traveling from Königsberg to the Russian border in 1824 had the opportunity to see for himself how far Lithuanian had spread in Prussia. Koeppen, like Šafarik, denotes Norkitten near Taplacken as the most distant church where Mass was still held in Lithuanian (cf. Koeppen, “Der litauische Volksstamm,” 283–284). We find the same motif with Basanavičius. For more information about Šafarik’s cooperation with Koeppen in collecting material about Lithuanians and Latvians, see Petronis, Constructing Lithuania, 178, 180. 213 Gabrys, Trumpas Lietuvos aprašymas, 13–14. 214 Subačius, Lietuvių tapatybės kalvė, 151–152, 156.

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Prökuls.”215 In Varpas in 1889, it was noted that Lithuanians still lived in the counties of Memel, Heydekrug, Ragnit, Stallupönen, and Tilsit.216 It would appear that all five counties were listed here by accident, but in fact, they all lay closest to the Russian border; as a result, they made up the territory that Russian Lithuanians could visit most frequently. The boundaries of the counties belonging to the Königsberg and Gumbinnen governmental districts also served as a measure for “framing” the spread of the Lithuanian language for Vilius Kalvaitis. This Prussian Lithuanian stood out from the rest in his attempts to define the distribution of Lithuanian: in 1888–1894 he spent twenty-five months traveling through the easternmost part of East Prussia. During his travels, he recorded Lithuanian folklore, wrote down inhabitants’ surnames, and noted the names that Lithuanians used to identify inhabited places and rivers. In total, he wrote down 2,023 Lithuanian oikonyms that he recorded across thirteen counties: in Darkehmen, Goldap, Gumbinnen, Insterburg, Memel, Labiau, Niederung, Pilkallen, Ragnit, Stallupönen, Heydekrug, Tilsit, and Wehlau. In addition to the county lines, Kalvaitis used the boundaries of Evangelical Lutheran Church parishes as a reference point. On this basis, he tried to define the farthest extent of Lithuanian usage: “The farthest to the south and west church villages where the Lord’s word is still spoken in churches in Lithuanian are Dubininkai [Dubeningken; here and hereafter my insertions—V. S.], Mielkiemis [Mehlkehmen], Trempai [Trempen], Darkiemis [Darkehmen], Encunai [Enzuhnen], Stalupėnai [Stallupönen], Katinawa [Kattenau], Nibudžei [Niebudszen], Malwiszkas [Mallwischken], Kraupiszkas [Kraupischken], Peleninkai [Pelleningken], Papelkei [Popelken], Oleksai [Alexen], Lauknei [Lauknen], Laukiszka [Laukischken], Labgawa [Labiau], and Nide [Nidden]—the border of the Lithuanian language.”217 Using this line, which differed somewhat from that made by Tetzner based on priests’ almanac data from 1897,218 Kalvaitis assigned 215 [Mikalojus Akelaitis], Kwestorius po Lietuwą ważinedamas żmonis bemokinąsis (Vilnius: A. H. Kirkoras, 1860), 21. 216 a-b, “Isz tevyniszkos dirvos,” Varpas 4 (1889): 58. 217 Kalwaitis, Lietuwiszkų Wardų Klėtele, v. 218 Darkehmen County was no longer included in the area defined by Tetzner’s line. It did encompass a smaller portion of Labiau County; on the other hand, Tetzner’s line took

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Figure 29.  Reference points to the furthermost distribution of the Lithuanian language based on data compiled by Vilius Kalvaitis. Black dots mark the westernmost and southernmost parochial churches where Mass was still held in Lithuanian. Map by Vasilijus Safronovas.

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Memel, Heydekrug, Tilsit, and Niederung counties; a large part of Ragnit and Pillkallen counties; some of Labiau and Stallupönen counties; a small part of Insterburg, Gumbinnen, and Goldap counties; plus an island in Darkehmen County to the Lithuanian language region. But the data collected by Kalvaitis were published relatively late,219 which is why he had only limited impact on how Lithuanians comprehended the boundaries of their own space right before the First World War. Nevertheless, these few examples already show that definition of the boundary of the Lithuanian language region in East Prussia rested on both administrative and ethnographic-linguistic criteria. Waffling between these two criteria is also visible in geography textbooks released in Lithuanian, which started being published in the late nineteenth century in Russia and the United States.220 One of the first such textbooks, which came out in 1896 and was viewed with particular disapproval by the national movement press,221 contained no information whatsoever about Lithuania. However, two years later in a textbook from Chicago released and funded entirely by Petras Vileišis, he declared, “Our land, or Lithuania Proper we call the land inhabited by Lithuanians,” while this land’s western boundary extended from Grodno in a straight line to the Baltic Sea, “a distance 5 miles east of the city of Königsberg.” Judging by the map where this line was made, Vileišis simply adopted the boundary maintained by Šafárik, Kurschat, and Basanavičius.222 In this way in the first half of the nineteenth century, the understanding of the Lithuanian territory in East Prussia based on ethnographic data enjoyed greater currency in the Lithuanian information space. In 1899 Adomaitis reprinted Vileišis’s map in his geography textbook,223 in Insterburg, which was not mentioned by Kalvaitis. Cf. Tetzner, Slawen in Deutschland, 29–30 and fig. 8. 219 A very small number of hydronyms and toponyms collected by Kalvaitis were featured in MLLG 20 (1895): 164–165. 220 A good overview of how these textbooks conveyed the Lithuanians’ territory comes from Petronis, Constructing Lithuania, 229–235, 241–253, 263–268. 221 Juozas Žebrys, Trumpas aprašymas apё žemę arba žemrašys (Tilsit: [J. Schoenke], 1896). Cf. the review: Varpas 12 (1896): 182–184. 222 See [Petras Vileišis] Neris, Trumpa Geografija arba Żemēs apraszymas (Chicago: [the author], 1898), 46, 101. 223 [Adomaitis] Szernas, Geografija, 429.

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in 1905 it was published in the Vilnius newspaper Vilniaus žinios,224 and that same year in a children’s reader Jadvyga Juškytė denoted the same line of Lithuanians’ distribution in Prussia as Vileišis.225 The same boundary was also reproduced in the first Lithuanian map-postcard released by Mečislovas Davainis-Silvestraitis in 1908. The understanding of the distribution of the Lithuanian language in East Prussia that was based on these data is in part revealed in Antanas Macijauskas’s Žemlapis lietuviškai latviško krašto (Map of the Lithuanian Latvian Land) (1900). Although it did not depict any specific boundary line for where Lithuanians were distributed, based on the largest concentration of Lithuanian place names in East Prussia featured on the map, the “Lithuanian land” fit within the existing construct. Indeed, judging by how Prussian Lithuania is presented in the geography textbook prepared by Macijauskas himself, we can see that the author did not have any more reliable data about the distribution of Lithuanians in East Prussia. Compared to the information presented about the Lithuanian space in the Russian Empire, the Lithuanian-inhabited landscape in Prussia was described rather meagerly and was limited to unclearly identified county boundaries. Much like Varpas almost twenty years earlier, in several places Macijauskas simply listed the names of counties where, according to him, Prussian Lithuanians lived, not even mentioning them all.226 Sergei Mech’s geography textbook, translated from Russian and supplemented with information about Lithuania by Juozas Tūbelis, was also known for its particularly poor representation of the Lithuanian space’s boundaries in Germany.227 Of all the Lithuanian geography textbooks that emerged prior to 1918, only three—by Adomaitis in 1899, by Gabrys in 1910 (awarded in the Lithuanian Science Society’s best geography textbook competition), and the textbook by Biržiška from 1917 released by the Lithuanian Science Society— gave a more comprehensive description of Prussian Lithuania and the spread of the Lithuanian language therein. Adomaitis listed all the counties inhabited by Lithuanians—including his own invented counties of 224 “Lietuvių kalbos ploto žemialapis,” Vilniaus žinios, June 19, 1905 (no. 149): 3. 225 [Jadvyga Juškytė], Vaikų skaitymeliai su Lietuvos žemlapėliu (Vilnius: Vilniaus Žinios, 1905), the map included with the book. 226 [Antanas Macijauskas] A. Adata, Pradinė Geografija. Trumpa paržvalga žemės rutulio ir Lietuvos ([Tilsit] Riga: Knygų parduotuvė A. Macejevskio, 1905), 60, 63. 227 Mečius, Trumpas Žemės aprašymas.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

Trakehnen and Tapiau, as well as Insterburg County, mistakenly given two different names in the same text228—which shows that the author, who by then already lived in the United States, was not very familiar with the Prussian Lithuanian landscape. Gabrys, unlike in the book released four years earlier,229 had now amassed considerable information about the spread of the Lithuanian language, yet even so he did not really have a final answer to this question (“It is difficult to say just how large an area Prussian Lithuania occupies”). He, like some earlier Lithuanian authors who utilized the administrative divisions to describe the Lithuanian language region in East Prussia,230 introduced a certain gradation of counties based on how many Lithuanians were there: the counties of Memel and Heydekrug were declared among the most Lithuanian, in Tilsit County Lithuanians were “more Germanized than in the first two counties,” nothing was said about Niederung, Gumbinnen, and Darkehmen counties, while Ragnit County was “severely Germanized,” Labiau even more so, and Insterburg “almost completely Germanized.” Pilkallen, Stallupönen, and Goldap counties rated a mere mention by Gabrys, who said that “there were not many Lithuanians.”231 Biržiška distinguished the “national” or ethnographic Lithuania into two parts: Major, which was “usually called Russian Lithuania,” and Prussian, or Lithuania Minor. The latter, according to the author, included Memel, Heydekrug, Tilsit, Ragnit, Niederung, Labiau, Pillkallen, “also Insterburg, Stallupönen, Goldap, and earlier Gumbinnen, Darkehmen and Wehlau counties, or only parts of them.”232 Here there are also signs of differing assessments of counties, with truly “Lithuanian” counties listed first, followed by those that appear to belong to Prussian Lithuania as well. But the author has some doubts, as farther along he writes, “the area inhabited by Lithuania Minor’s Lithuanians, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, continues to be narrowed down.”233 228 [Adomaitis] Szernas, Geografija, 427. 229 Gabrys, Trumpas Lietuvos aprašymas. 230 Cf. L. Raudonis, [III laiškas iš Prūsų Lietuvos], Vilniaus žinios, January 12 (25), 1905 (no. 11): 2. 231 Gabrys, Geografijos vadovėlis, 70–71. 232 Mykolas Biržiška, Lietuvos geografija (Vidurinėms mokykloms vadovėlis), part 1: Prigimtis (Vilnius: Lietuvių mokslo draugija, 1917), 10. 233 Ibid., 10–11.

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Figure 30.  Fragment of Valerijonas Verbickis’s Map of Lithuania with Its Ethnographic Boundary. The area where the Lithuanian language prevailed is marked in red (Vilnius: Lietuvos ūkininkas, 1911). The fragment is published with permission from the Wróblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

It is likely that the understanding of what constituted Lithuanian territory in East Prussia could have been influenced by the ethnographic map of Lithuania prepared by Valerijonas Verbickis and released in 1911 by Lietuvos ūkininkas (Lithuanian Farmer).234 Five thousand copies were printed and distributed to the public,235 especially since the popular newspapers Lietuvos žinios and Lietuvos ūkininkas offered their subscribers the chance to purchase this map at half price.236 This suggests that the cartographical work by Verbickis had a great deal of influence in spreading information about where the Lithuanian ethnographic territory in East Prussia lay. Compared to the maps and textbooks discussed above, Verbickis’s map drew accurate and original boundaries around the region where Lithuanians were found in East Prussia. He drew a straight line from Labiau north of Insterburg, Gumbinnen, and Stallupönen, whereupon his line immediately turned southward, leaving just a few border parishes within the Lithuanian ethnographic territory. We do not have more detailed information about the circumstances behind the preparation of this map or the data that Verbickis used to demarcate his line. Nevertheless, we get the impression that the line was based on church statistics and could be considered a variant of the boundaries produced by Tetzner and Kalvaitis. Once the First World War began and Lithuanians began to assert their territorial claims on Lithuania Minor, of all the definitions of the Lithuanian area in East Prussia mentioned here, two were most influential: the first, supported by Basanavičius and Vileišis, based on the information of Šafárik and Kurschat; and the second as shown in Verbickis’s map. So it was that in one of the first essays to appear once the war was under way that thoroughly analyzed Lithuania’s ethnographic boundaries, Antanas Smetona identified the Lithuanian region in East Prussia by completely relying on Kurschat’s data. Smetona was not so concerned over showing a 234 Valerijonas Verbickis, Lietuvos Žemlapis su etnografijos siena [Map of Lithuania with Ethnographic Border], M 1:1050000 (25 bindings) (St. Petersburg: Kartogr. zav. A. Il’ina, 1911). 235 Cf. Antanas Krikščiūnas, “Lietuvos nuotraukų ir kartografijos istorija,” Mūsų žinynas 14, no. 41 (1928): 140. 236 Cf. Lietuvos žinios, December 24, 1910 (January 7, 1911) (no. 102–103): 1; Lietuvos ūkininkas, January 6 (19), 1911 (no. 1): 1.

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wider distribution of Prussian Lithuanians, although a comparison of Kurschat’s data with Verbickis’s map allowed him to state that the area inhabited by Lithuanians was narrowing because they “had been nationalized … by Germans.”237 Gaigalaitis also defined Prussian Lithuania as far as the Labiau–Wehlau–Darkehmen–Goldap line, in this case basing his decision on Bezzenberger, while the latter also pointed to a map from Kurschat’s book.238 Erich Zechlin, an officer in the Ober Ost administration’s Fifth (Political) Department who prepared an analysis about Lithuania in 1915, appears to have trusted these authorities, as he identified the same guidelines for the most distant distribution of Lithuanians in East Prussia.239 Kurschat’s data were also the basis for an overview of Lithuania released in English by the United States’ Lithuanian National Council in late 1918.240 In contrast, a map included in a book about Lithuania released in 1918 by the German Tenth Army, then deployed in Ober Ost (the book was prepared with active cooperation from Lithuanians), assigned a large part of Prussian Lithuania to the “mixed language border areas” (sprachlich gemischte Grenzgebiete), while its southern line was demarcated as per Verbickis’s map.241 The State Council of Lithuania articulated Lithuanians’ ethnographic border based on a study by Petras Klimas conducted in 1916,242 but Prussian Lithuania was not even mentioned in Klimas’s research. 237 A[ntanas] Sm[etona], “Lietuvos etnografijos ribos,” Vairas 16 (1914): 2–8, here 7–8. 238 Cf. Adalbert Bezzenberger, “Die ostpreußischen Grenzlande,” Zeitschrift für Politik 8 (1915): 30; Gaigalat, “Litauisch-baltische Frage,” 208; Wilhelm Gaigalat, Litauen, das besetzte Gebiet, sein Volk und dessen Strömungen (Frankfurt a. M.: Frankfurter Vereins­ druckerei, Verlag, 1917), 22. 239 Erich Zechlin, “Litauen und seine Probleme,” Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 10 (1915): 262. 240 Norus and Zilius, Lithuania’s Case, 41. 241 Das Litauen-Buch. Eine Auslese aus der Zeitung der 10. Armee ([Vilnius]: Zeitung der 10. Armee, 1918), 1 in Anhang. 242 [Petras Klimas] K. Werbelis, Russisch-Litauen. Statistisch-ethnographische Betrachtungen (Stuttgart: J. Schrader Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1916). The arguments in this study most likely were presented by Klimas in the Vilnius Conference held in September 1917. In addition, the Lithuanian delegation also referred to statistics, accounts, and testimonies collected by Klimas in presenting their demands at the Paris Peace Conference and in developing their negotiating position in the peace negotiations of 1920 with Soviet Russia (Petras Klimas, Iš mano atsiminimų (Boston: Lietuvių enciklopedijos leidykla, 1979): 86; Petras Klimas, Dienoraštis (1915.XII.1–1919.I.19) (Chicago: Algimanto Mackaus Knygų leidimo fondas, 1988), 416).

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

However, the director of the first Lithuanian gymnasium in Vilnius and member of the State Council of Lithuania, Mykolas Biržiška, in his geography textbook also appeared to define Lithuania Minor along the lines provided in Verbickis’s map.243 Similarly, in 1920 a map for internal documentation in the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, the (ethnographic) boundary of the East Prussian territory inhabited by Lithuanians, which was considered the “likely Lithuanian state border,” more or less corresponded with the boundary depicted in Verbickis’s map.244 Although more definitions of the Lithuanian territory in East Prussia appeared during the First World War,245 they were marginal in their influence. Two versions dominated. One was based on the data accessible to Šafarik in the early nineteenth century, which came from various, not necessarily reliable, sources, and Kurschat’s expert opinion; the other, it appears, was based on the late nineteenth-century church statistics or on parishes where Mass was held in Lithuanian. The fact that both these versions existed at the same time should not be so surprising, as in the Lithuanian information space in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries we come across an unbelievable amount of contradictory data about the number and distribution of Lithuanians in East Prussia. Alongside the Prussian statistical data that was reproduced on numerous occasions in the Lithuanian press, an assessment existed in the Lithuanian discourse that two, or even three, hundred thousand Lithuanians lived in East Prussia.246 This assessment 243 Biržiška, Lietuvos geografija, 10. 244 See the map: Laurinavičius, “Lietuvos sienų raida,” 127. 245 Matas Šalčius claimed that Prussian Lithuania consisted of twelve northern counties (a typographical error in the original shows twenty-one), of which ten compose a territory “that is acknowledged by Germans themselves as inhabited by Lithuanians” (Matas Šalčius, Dešimt Metų Tautiniai-Kulturinio Darbo Lietuvoje (1905–1915) (Chicago: Tēvynēs mylētojų draugija, 1917), 12–14). Cf. also [Antanas Viskantas] Antoine Viscont, La Lituanie et la guerre (Geneva: Atar, 1917), 158–160, who refers to Tetzner’s line. In maps released by the Lithuanian Information Bureau in Lausanne, the territory in East Prussia belonging to Lithuania was expanded the most, but that expansion was based on criteria that made little sense ([Vladas Daumantas], Carte de la Lituanie, ed., Bureau d’informations Lituanien (Berne: Institut Géograph[ique de] Kümmerly & Frey, 1918); J[uozas] Gabrys, Carte ethnographique de L’Europe (Berne: Institut Géographique [de] Kümmerly & Frey, 1918). 246 “Kiek yra lietuvių iš viso,” Auszra 7–8 (1884): 274–275; “Ką Rusai rašo apie Lietuvius,” Varpas 10 (1893): 153; Laikas, “Tilžė,” Vilniaus žinios, June 30 (July 13), 1905 (no. 158):

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probably originated with Laurynas Ivinskis in 1860.247 Ivinkis’s published table presented data from December 1846 that he took from Koeppen’s article and that was based on information Koeppen received from the Prussian historian Schubert.248 According to these statistics, Koeppen calculated that there were 252,700 Lithuanian speakers in East Prussia, while Ivinskis, using the same data, made an error in his calculations and ended up with 288,500 Lithuanian speakers. Rounding up—as the Lithuanian press did, because it considered official census data unreliable—one would get three hundred thousand Lithuanians. For instance, Auszra in 1884 stated that 200,000 Lithuanians lived in Prussia, while the “Germans” provided a smaller figure (150,000) “because they assigned every Lithuanian who could speak German to the German kin.”249 Varpas stated that census takers openly recorded “real Lithuanians” who “could not understand a word of German” as Germans,250 while prior to census time, the local newspapers were urged to influence Prussian Lithuanians to clearly state that they were Lithuanian in the census.251 In 1910 Lietuvos žinios wrote that when Lithuanians tried to articulate the size of their nation, they did not have to trust official statistics gathered by others: “we must ourselves ensure a trustworthy collection of our own nation’s statistics.”252 Yet Lithuanians had no chance to organize a separate census. Just before the First World War the first attempts appeared in the Lithuanian press at solving this issue, to recommend an alternative to the official Prussian Statistical Bureau data—to contrast it to the church statistics that were allegedly more reliable. Probably the first to have voiced this recommendation in the press aimed at Prussian Lithuanians was Mikelis Ašmys.253 3; Kalwaitis, Lietuwiszkų Wardų Klėtele, iv. 247 “Suskajtimas Lietuwos gimines,” in Ł[aurynas] Iwińskis, Kalendorius arba metskajtlus ukiszskasis nuog uźgimima Wieszpaties 1860 Metu … (Vilnius: Juozapas Zawadzkis, 1860), 58. 248 Cf. Koeppen, “Der litauische Volksstamm,” 284–286. 249 “Kiek yra lietuvių iš viso,” Auszra 7–8 (1884): 275. 250 J., “Tilżē,” Varpas 1 (1893): 16. 251 [Jurgis Lapinas] J. L., “Surašas liaudės Prusų Lietuvoje (resp. Vokietijoje.),” Varpas 11 (1895): 179–180. 252 “Statistikos mums reikia,” Lietuvos žinios, April 28 (May 11), 1910 (no. 33): 1–2. 253 M[ikelis] A[šmy]s, “Lietuwių Skaitlius Prusijoje,” Pagalba 1–2 (1913): 12–14. In a study in Polish released in 1911, Michał Römer (Mykolas Römeris) already used church statistics: Römer, Litwini w Prusiech Książęcych, 7.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

Following him, in 1914 Rimka did the same in the Russian Lithuanian press (Ašmys was one of Rimka’s informants).254 But up until the appearance of both these texts, the most typical trend in describing the size of the Lithuanian-speaking population in East Prussia was still to present official Prussian statistical data255—which, incidentally, were conveyed without distinguishing between state and church statistical data—and to concede, based on this information, that the number of Lithuanians was decreasing. This decrease was articulated in both the Prussian and Russian press aimed at Lithuanians with an understanding that as a result of the population decrease, Lithuanians were constantly losing part of “their” territory. A Varpas article in 1889 used official Prussian statistics as the basis for stating that the number of Lithuanians had been “significantly reduced” in Gumbinnen, Goldap, Stallupönen, Insterburg, Pillkallen, and Ragnit counties. According to the author, only in the northern counties—Tilsit, Niederung, Heydekrug, Memel, and Labiau—had the “Lithuanian element lingered on in its earlier strength, in some places even growing stronger.”256 Descriptions of the southern part of Prussian Lithuania in the press often stated that Lithuanians were “disappearing” from individual places and counties, even from Donelaitis’s Tollmingkehmen, where “today only some surnames and place names testify that Lithuanians once lived there.”257 The rather clear understanding that “disappearance” or “Germanization”—that is, the loss of Lithuanians’ “own” space in East Prussia—was 254 Rimka, “Prūsų Lietuva,” Lietuvos žinios, July 1 (14), 1914 (no. 143): 2–3; July 2 (15), 1914 (no. 144): 2–3. Rimka gave the following explanation for why church statistics were prioritized: “I would prefer to believe in this information, as opposed to the government’s [statistics—V. S.], as the mentioned almanac … must serve as an indicator to the local priest as to the parishes where Lithuanian is demanded of priests, and where he can submit his candidacy without knowing Lithuanian”: Lietuvos žinios, July 1 (14), 1914 (no. 143): 3. 255 P. Vaidilas, “Mitteilungen der Litauischen litterarischen Gesellschaft (18. Heft, Heidelberg, in 8o, p. 497–568) ir Prūsų Lietuviai,” Varpas 12 (1893): 184; Varpas 4 (1895): 75; L. Raudonis, [III laiškas iš Prūsų Lietuvos], Vilniaus žinios, January 12 (25), 1905 (no. 11): 2–3; A., “Prusų Lietuvos laikraščių padėjimas,” Lietuvos žinios, September 1 (14), 1911 (no. 101): 2; R. Matas, “Prusų lietuviai (Statistikos žinių žiupsnelis),” Lietuvos žinios, February 21 (March 6), 1914 (no. 42): 3–4. 256 [Vincas Kudirka] Q. D. ir K., “Audeatur et altera pars,” Varpas 11 (1889): 166–167. 257 J. Sidaras, “Stalupēnai,” Varpas 10 (1892): 148; J. Sl., “Bildviečiai,” Varpas 4 (1893): 60–61; J. Š-s, “Iš Pilekalnio,” Varpas 2 (1896): 27; R. Matas, “Kaip nyko Tolminkiemio lietuviai,” Lietuvos žinios, January 29 (February 11), 1914 (no. 23): 2.

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occurring along a south-north trajectory most probably contributed greatly to the fact that the line from Verbickis’s map became an alternative to the Koeppen-Šafarik-Kurschat line, based on data from the first half of the nineteenth century. One of the most knowledgeable people on Prussian Lithuania, Rimka, when projecting the future ethnographic Lithuania’s boundaries among émigré Lithuanians in 1915 and debating this issue with Gabrys, recommended including not the entire territory once inhabited by Lithuanians but just Memel, Heydekrug, Niederung, Tilsit, Ragnit, and Pillkallen counties, as well as part of Labiau and Stallupönen counties, along the so-called Tetzner line;258 the limits of this territory mutatis mutandis coincided with those defined by Verbickis and Kalvaitis. In arguing for this proposal, Rimka suggested guidelines that went beyond the “real ethnographic principle,” according to which a territory belonged to the nation that made up the majority of the population there. According to Rimka, it was necessary to look to the past, the communication factor, and the accessibility of centers of education and culture: In Prussian Lithuania, ethnographic Lithuania cannot end where official statistics show an absolute majority of Lithuanians. In that case, ethnographic Lithuania would include mostly Memel and Heydekrug counties. But with this kind of boundary, Niederung, Tilsit, Ragnit, Pillkallen, and Stallupönen counties would enter with small keel into ethnographic Lithuania and still could not avoid frequent points of contact. In addition, the Memel River watercourse would become fragmented and for Lithuania would lose its worth as a transport route and thus be of no benefit to Germans either. In favor of the inclusion in ethnographic Lithuania of some Prussian Lithuanian counties … that are less inhabited by Lithuanians speaks not just to the circumstance that there Lithuanians have become de-nationalized and that under different conditions this process would cease (unless a reaction were to occur) but also to the fact that even though almost all inhabitants of those places do not see themselves as Lithuanians, a 258 Rimka, Lietuvių tautos klausimas, 76.

The Invention of Lithuania Minor (1870s–1910s)

majority still speak Lithuanian, and thus they would not experience any difficulties in belonging to an autonomous Lithuania.259 Although Rimka did not directly participate in realizing these ideas, this long quotation excellently reveals the arguments that Lithuanians were prepared to offer in motivating their claims to an autonomous territory. The quotation ideally shows how, in forming these claims, Lithuanians resisted the criterion of the statistical majority. In describing “their own” territory, the introduction of an additional criterion regarding the description of a “Lithuanian” played an increasingly larger role. From this viewpoint, a “Lithuanian” was not just someone whose mother tongue was recorded as Lithuanian in the census but also someone whose origins were Lithuanian and who more or less still spoke that language, despite being “Germanized.” We encounter similar arguments after November 1918 amid Prussian Lithuanians who had clearly declared their goal of joining Lithuania. Gaigalaitis, who in 1918 adopted the role of this group’s political leader, published texts during the war in which he maintained the Koeppen-Šafarik-Kurschat line. In declarations coming from the circle of Prussian Lithuanians surrounding Gaigalaitis (two letters addressed to the Entente states, dated January 9 and February 6, 1919), Lithuanian and “to an extent, Germanized Lithuanians’ ” lands were also envisaged as far as Labiau, Wehlau, Darkehmen, and Goldap.260 Essentially the same territory, only bounded by specific counties (Memel, Heydekrug, Niederung, Labiau, Tilsit, Ragnit, Pillkallen, Wehlau, Insterburg, Gumbinnen, Stallupönen, Darkehmen, and Goldap), was demanded by the Lithuanian delegation’s appeal of May 2, 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference,261 based on Prussian Lithuanian “national self-determination.” However, assertions that Lithuania Minor extended as far as the Koeppen-Šafarik-Kurschat line, which rested on data from the first half of the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century had to be based on something other than official statistics. In this context the “Lithuanian origins” argument attained significance within 259 Ibid., 75–76. 260 Urbšienė, “Klaipėdos krašto istorijos paraštėje,” 136–137; Genienė and Žukas, Kova dėl Klaipėdos, 47. 261 Urbšienė, “Klaipėdos krašto istorijos paraštėje,” 138.

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the Prussian Lithuanian milieu as well. In the first proclamation of the National Council of Prussian Lithuanians, announced on November 16, 1918, the demand was presented simply by using the past tense: “There, where Labiau, Wehlau, Insterburg, Darkehmen, [and] Goldap are, these are still all Lithuanian lands, where our fathers’ fathers spoke their beautiful language and lived by Lithuanian customs [italics mine—V. S.].”262 This argument remained relevant until May 1919, when it became obvious that the Paris Peace Conference strove to separate from Germany only part of the East Prussian territory that Lithuanians claimed. The smaller the territory to be separated from Germany, the fewer problems the National Council of Prussian Lithuanian Association would have in substantiating its rights to it. Official data from the Prussian Statistical Bureau no longer showed a Lithuanian majority in Memel County. Nevertheless, Prussian Lithuanians—and Ašmys and Rimka in 1913–1914—made numerous appeals based on the data recorded in the 1912 Evangelical Lutheran church parish almanac concerning the distribution of Lithuanians among counties.263 Based on those calculations in Memel and Heydekrug counties, and in parts of Tilsit and Ragnit counties north of the Memel River, Lithuanians still made up 51.84 percent of all Evangelical Lutheran Church parishioners.264 Understandably, Prussian Lithuanians knew full well that the Memel and Russ rivers were not the southern boundary of “their” territory. However, the after-effects of the First World War made it impossible to set a different boundary. With the separation of only the Memel region from Germany, the question of Lithuania Minor’s southern boundary was left “aloft” in the Lithuanian discourse. This meant that the “Lithuania Minor” concept could continue to be linked to those territories where, realizing the Lithuanian irredentist ideal, at a specific moment Lithuanians’ own claims had to be substantiated.

262 Genienė and Žukas, Kova dėl Klaipėdos, 43. 263 Pfarr-Almanach, 4th ed. 264 Prûsû Lietuwiû Balsas, May 27, 1919 (no. 51): 1; June 14, 1919 (no. 58): 2.

CHAPTER 5

Interaction of the German and Lithuanian Concepts of Prussian Lithuania in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries The analysis presented here of German and Lithuanian attempts at transforming Prussian Lithuania into a space each group wished to call its own clearly shows that in the same physical space, from the 1880s at the latest, at least two different understandings disseminated as to who that space actually belonged to. In both cases, the most important characteristic of that space’s exclusivity that allowed the Germans and Lithuanians, while sharing their respective national cultural meanings, to assert that the space belonged to them in the second half of the nineteenth century became Prussian Lithuanians themselves. Only the perspectives that each futuristic nationalist idea foresaw for them differed. In the case of German nationalism, Prussian Lithuanians were seen as similar to any other attractive resource from the past, giving exclusivity to the area and all of East Prussia. For the Germans, Prussian Lithuanians were seen as a nation noted for their uniqueness, whose fate was completely clear—to accept the “gift” of German Kultur and to assimilate. Before assimilation, however, the characteristics of this nation had to be recorded. In the case of Lithuanian nationalism, the least that was foreseen for Prussia was a future for

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the Lithuanian language and culture, with attempts at convincing Prussian Lithuanians that they had to “resist Germanization.” One of the most important centers for spreading the attitudes of the first perspective at the turn of the century was the Lithuanian Literary Society, established in Tilsit in 1879, an organization whose reputation extended far beyond the boundaries of the East Prussian region. The figures most active in this organization’s activities were those who were most interested in Prussian Lithuanians and in forming an East Prussian Heimat uniqueness, activities that to a large extent formed attitudes about Lithuanians in the German-language body of knowledge. The second perspective was mostly spread by the Russian and, to some extent, the Prussian Lithuanian activists’ network discussed in chapter 4. Neither perspective was limited to the nationalist imagination of the fin de siècle. Those perspectives continued to serve as guidelines even after the First World War. They formed long-term behavior patterns in the same physical space. Thus a certain kind of competition could emerge between the two different systems of meanings. There are several testimonies of this competition evident in mutual assessments. One of the ideological forefathers of Lithuanian nationalism, Šliūpas, wrote in his memoirs that when he visited Prussia in 1882, he hoped to find a place there where he could publish a Lithuanian-language newspaper. Firstly he hoped to find agreement for this idea among the Lithuanian Literary Society, and so he met with its members. But the latter, in the words of Šliūpas, “poured cold water over my heated heart, surprised that I wanted to revive Lithuania … there are no such people in Prussia … All they care about is collecting a handful of our stories, riddles, and songs, so that they’d survive as remnants of the dying Lithuanian nation!”1 Although the merits of the society were recognized in the Lithuanian press, its activities received a far from positive assessment. The monthly Garsas [Sound] released by Jankus criticized its approach regarding the future of Lithuanian culture and language. The society was accused of attacks against Auszra and the activities of Birutė and reproached for not supporting Lithuanian language rights.2 In turn, in the milieu of the 1 Szliupas, “Minės,” 79. 2 “‘Lietuviszka rasztu draugyste.’ Tilžēje,” Garsas, June 20, 1887 (no. 6), Suppl.; July 20, 1887 (no. 7), Suppl.

Interaction of the German and Lithuanian Concepts

Lithuanian Literary Society in the 1880s, the Nationallitauer concept,3 which was to be later replaced by Grosslitauer,4 began to spread, usually used in the pejorative sense. This concept was used to describe nationally engaged Lithuanians, making it increasingly clear to Prussian Lithuanians that their methods were not to be followed. The aforementioned society’s position is shown rather well in the actions of one of its founders and long-standing members, the University of Königsberg professor Bezzenberger, when he, the primary expert in East Prussian Lithuanian language and culture, was asked to prepare recommendations for the government’s measures regulating the teaching of religion in the language of education in schools. In the project sent in May 1892 to the East Prussian ober-president Count Udo zu Stolberg, Bezzenberger dismissed the necessity of using Lithuanian to teach the subject of religion. According to him, a closer association of the Lithuanian language with religion would simply encourage Lithuanians’ national self-awareness and thereby distance Prussian Lithuanians from Germans.5 These few examples ideally show that the object of both competing powers was the same—Prussian Lithuanians. Both competing powers tried to impress upon them their own understanding of the space inhabited by Prussian Lithuanians, whose prospects of survival directly depended on the spread of and identification with this understanding. Let us try to find out the interrelation of these two systems of meanings, as well as the spatial images linked to them, and what opportunities for self-awareness were formed for Prussian Lithuanians as a result.

5.1. INTERACTION OF SPATIAL REPRESENTATIONS As is evident from the material presented in chapters 3 and 4, in both the German and Lithuanian national cultures, the East Prussian space was 3 At an official meeting of the Lithuanian Literary Society, the members expressed surprise over the fact that it was being attacked without grounds by the Lithuanian press and that the society’s activities were viewed with suspicion in the eyes of the Nationallitauer: MLLG 11 (1886): 358. 4 Cf. Sembritzki’s notice about Lithuanians’ movement in East Prussia, attached to the letter from Count Heinrich von Keyserlingk, the adviser of the West Prussian ober-president, to the Prussian interior minister, March 1909: Selbstbewusstsein und Modernisierung, 27, 29. 5 Hubatsch, Masuren und Preußisch-Litthauen, 58.

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appropriated using representations that made it possible for each side to imagine ownership of their shared territory. Although the Germans increasingly sought to restrict Prussian Lithuanians from communicating with those whom they themselves started calling Nationallitauer, and the nationalistically engaged Lithuanians sought to restrict Lithuanian speakers’ contact with Germans, restriction was by no means the only kind of interaction between these two cultures. At least four types of interaction can be distinguished that show how the two systems of meanings affected one another via their representations. 1. Transfer. In forming their own understanding about East Prussia and the Lithuanian space existing there, the protagonists of Lithuanian national culture to a large extent adopted information from the German-specific body of knowledge. Daukantas contributed most to the postulation of the image of paganism as the Lithuanian “golden age.” However, this image was partly adopted from Prussian historiography. Another image that had to remind Lithuanians of East Prussia—the battles against the Teutonic Order—also grew out of information provided by Prussian historiography from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century about the order’s deeds in the eastern Baltic region. This was also the source of negative assessments of the Teutonic Order. The third image that facilitated signifying East Prussia to Lithuanians—the “renaissance” of Lithuanian culture and language—was also strongly based on products of the German-language body of knowledge. Such works had encouraged ethnographic, mostly Prussian Lithuanian, knowledge from the late eighteenth century, and it was here that the first collection and processing of material about Lithuanian culture took place. The first studies were born of this work, which revealed the history of Lithuanian writing in Prussia, beginning with the treatises of Gottfried Ostermeyer and Rhesa and ending with research by Nesselmann, Bezzenberger, and other members of the Lithuanian Literary Society.6 The creators 6

I list only the more significant works that appeared up to the end of the nineteenth century: Gottfried Ostermeyer, Erste Littauische Liedergeschichte (Königsberg: gedruckt mit Driestischen Schriften, 1793); Rhesa, Geschichte der litthauischen Bibel; Donaleitis (Donalitius), Jahr in vier Gesängen; Donaleitis, Litauische Dichtungen; Donalitius, Littauische Dichtungen; Litauische und Lettische Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Adalbert Bezzenberger,

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of Lithuanian national culture relied on these works for their knowledge about the activities of Mažvydas, Vilentas, Bretkūnas, Klein, Donelaitis, and others, transforming such figures into nurturers of Lithuanian culture. How this continuity functioned is shown quite well in Lithuanians’ efforts to make the philosopher Kant one of “their own.” As noted in chapter 4, the first publications along these lines appeared in the Lithuanian press immediately after an amateur historian from Memel, Johannes Sembritzki, published his findings about the origins of the philosopher’s ancestors in the annual released in Königsberg, Altpreußische Monatsschrift [Old Prussian Monthly].7 The transfer from the German-language body of knowledge into the discourse encouraging Lithuanian nationalism and the use of that knowledge to consolidate Lithuanian representations of East Prussia involved not only scientific information. Equally worthy of mention is that Lithuanians adopted symbols typical of the German-language discourse. The best example of this would be the adaptation of the colors that represented the Lithuanian region in Prussia (green, white, and red) in postulating Lithuanian uniqueness, observed from as late as the end of the nineteenth century, firstly within the Birutė Society.8 But practices characteristic of the German-language discourse were also adapted for their own purposes by Lithuanians, appropriating specific areas of East Prussia. This applies, above all, to Rambynas. Eduard Gisevius of Tilsit was the first to describe the meaning of Rambynas, the ritual stone that lay there, and the legends Fritz Bechtel, and Richard Garbe, vols. 1–4 (Göttingen: Robert Peppmüller, 1874, 1875, 1882; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1884); Adalbert Bezzenberger, Beiträge zur Geschichte der litauischen Sprache, auf Grund litauischer Texte des XVI. und des XVII. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Robert Peppmüller, 1877); Karl Theodor Waldemar Hoffheinz, “Bericht über einen litterarischen Fund,” MLLG 5 (1882): 263–275; Adalbert Bezzenberger, “Zur litauischen Literaturgeschichte,” MLLG 14 (1889): 121–129; and R. Schwede, “Zur Geschichte der litauischen Gesangbücher,” MLLG 16 (1891): 396–406. 7 Cf. Johannes Sembritzki, “Kant’s Vorfahren,” Altpreussische Monatsschrift 36 (1899): 469–471; “Noch etwas über Kant’s Vorfahren,” Altpreussische Monatsschrift 36 (1899): 645; Johannes Sembritzki, “Neue Nachrichten über Kant’s Großvater,” Altpreussische Monatsschrift 37 (1900): 139–141; and Johannes Sembritzki, “Kant’s Großvater,” Altpreus­ sische Monatsschrift 38 (1901): 312–313. 8 “Szimtmetine Gimimo Diena Ciecoriaus Wiliaus Pirmojo,” Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, March 23, 1897 (no. 24).

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and myths maintained in the area related to the scarp.9 His attention was drawn to this place after part of the scarp crumbled away in 1835. Although he admitted that the lack of historical data meant that nothing more reliable than his own claims could be offered,10 Gisevius was the first to consider Rambynas a sacred place for Lithuanians. Thirty years later Glagau simply repeated the information gathered by Gisevius, with some additions of his own.11 Most knowledge about Rambynas that circulated in the Lithuanian information space from the late nineteenth century was based on the images created by Gisevius and Glagau.12 Also important is the fact that the Birutė Society, which actively disseminated these images, was not the first organization to hold St. John’s Day celebrations on Rambynas in 1896. Members of the Littuania student corporation that operated at the University of Königsberg, most likely also inspired by the legends gathered by Gisevius, held their annual summer festivals on Rambynas in the mid-nineteenth century.13 The last such festival took place in the summer of 1861.14 Searching for traces of direct continuity here would hardly be worthwhile. Still the very tradition of summer festivals on Rambynas, it appears, continued, taking on the format of a celebration for the surrounding communities. The Lithuanian press featured information on such celebrations, held even prior to 1896.15 A significantly more obvious example of the transfer of practices is seen in the efforts of the Sandora Society to establish a museum of Lithuanian antiquities in Memel. The president of this society, Gaigalaitis, as mentioned in Chapter 3, had participated for numerous years in the organization of various “Lithuanian folk art” exhibitions in Germany. Being a priest, 9 Eduard Gisevius, “Der Rombinus,” Preussische Provinzial-Blätter 18 (1837): 3–32, in particular 18–32. 10 Ibid., 24. 11 Glagau, Litauen und die Littauer, 101–106. Cf. also Temme, Erinnerungen, 149. 12 An additional source of information about Rambynas was Alfred Thomas, “Rombinus,” MLLG 8 (1884): 111–121. 13 Cf. information about the participation of Leopold von Hoverbeck and other members of Littuania in this kind of festival in July 1842: Ludolf Parisius, Leopold Freiherr von Hoverbeck (geboren 1822, gestorben 1875). Ein Beitrag zur vaterländischen Geschichte, part 1 (Berlin: J. Guttentag, Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1897), 48. 14 Passauer, Corpstafel der Littuania, 4. 15 Cf. Varpas 6 (1895): 104.

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carrying great authority among Prussian Lithuanians, and leading Sandora, the largest of their organizations in the early twentieth century, Gaigalaitis often urged people to send various items to these exhibitions such as antique handmade furniture or blacksmithing work, while Lithuanian women were urged to send textiles, hand-woven linen items, tablecloths, sashes, gloves, aprons, pocket pouches, elaborately darned shirts, curtains, and so on.16 The initiative for exhibiting Lithuanian “folk art” originated within the Lithuanian Literary Society’s milieu, of which Gaigalaitis himself was a member. Exhibits of this nature were already being collected in Tilsit, as part of Hugo Scheu’s private collection in Heydekrug Manor, and the Museum Society established in the city of Memel intended to gather and exhibit them in the municipal museum. While mentioning all these collections, the Sandora Society appealed to Prussian Lithuanians in the spring of 1911, encouraging them to create “their own museum.” Now they were all called upon to present their own antiques (tables, chests, work tools, clothing, fabrics, sashes, books, paintings, finds discovered in the ground, etc.) to the Sandora Museum.17 This institution was open from the beginning of October 1912 in the Sandora Society’s building in Memel.18 The Sandora Museum case was the first where the exhibition of Prussian Lithuanians’ “folk art” was aimed at developing Lithuanians’ own sense of cultural uniqueness. This change in meaning meant that “Lithuanian” items were now understood not as work from the Lithuanian region but as the work of one of its population groups— Lithuanians, and only Lithuanians: “they place before our eyes our forefathers’, the ancient Lithuanians’ knowledge and expertise in handmade crafts, their ways, and customs,” and without preserving them “our children will be left knowing nothing about the industry, work, and ways of their fathers and fathers’ fathers”19 [italics mine—V. S.]. And so, from 1912 on, Gaigalaitis sent exhibits to the folk art exhibitions not through the Lithuanian Literary Society but through Sandora; such exhibits featured in exhibitions held that year in Allenstein and Wehlau.20 Of course, another 16 Cf. Pagalba 9 (1908): 98–99; 10 (1908): 110–112; 4 (1909): 47–49. 17 Pagalba 5 (1911): 65–66. 18 Pagalba 9 (1912): 114. 19 Pagalba 5 (1911): 65. 20 Pagalba 7–8 (1912): 101–102.

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way of interacting with Prussian Lithuania’s representations was rather evident in the implementation of these ideas—it was also an attempt to form an alternative. 2. Formation of an alternative. From the discussion of the Lithuanian historical master narrative as a source of the meanings of Lithuanian national culture in reference to East Prussia, it should have become clear that this narrative in many cases was constructed as an alternative to the dominant borussianistic master narrative. The largest newspapers aimed at Prussian Lithuanians constantly emphasized the dominant narrative. Those who wanted to transform Lithuanians into “nationally conscious” beings had to develop a contrasting approach. That is why the formation of an alternative was expressed not just on the discourse level but also in attempts to lure Prussian Lithuanians away from symbols that represented the space through which East Prussians were understood in German national culture. Toward this aim, alternative symbols were formed, as is best seen in the frequent efforts to arouse Prussian Lithuanians’ interest in Donelaitis, who had to become the main hero from their past. At the turn of the century, Lithuanians in Prussia were far from passive in their efforts to support the representations expressing the dominant culture of remembrance. When a monument was being erected in honor of Queen Louise in Tilsit, Lithuanians also contributed to its construction. In May 1899 the Lithuanian Chanters Society led by Vydūnas, together with the infantry regiment band, organized a concert of Lithuanian songs in Tilsit. The proceeds of this concert went toward the monument’s construction.21 During the unveiling of the monument in 1900, it was not just German women but also local Lithuanian women who rode on horseback dressed in Prussian Lithuanian costumes in front of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had arrived for the occasion.22 In 1907, when the monument Borussia was being unveiled in Memel, Lithuanian representatives presented the kaiser, who had again arrived to mark the occasion, with a four-page note that expressed their “patriotic feelings” in 21 Cf. Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, May 12, 1899 (no. 38); May 16, 1899 (no. 39). 22 Cf. “Iß Lietuwininku krutējimo,” Saulēteka 10–11 (1900): 252; [Bruožis], Prusu Lietuwei, 11.

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verse.23 Local Lithuanians willingly contributed to the collection of funds for the construction of a monument to poet Simon Dach in Memel.24 In light of these trends, representations nationalized by Lithuanians were contrasted to those that allowed understanding of East Prussia’s significance in the German national culture. Attempts were made to raise interest among Prussian Lithuanians in “their own” heroes, encouraging them to mark the space with signs that represented specifically them. The exploitation of Donelaitis in this role was probably first recorded in 1885–1886, when the idea was raised in Tilsit to again collect funds for the construction of a monument to Maximilian von Schenkendorf, who was born in this city and was one of the most important lyricists from the period of Prussia’s liberation from the Napoleonic Wars. In the steps of Tilźês Keleiwis, Auszra used the occasion to exclaim, “How great it would be that the Lietuvininkai [Prussian Lithuanians—V. S.] would build a monument, even one not so expensive, to their great hymn writer Donelaitis, a former priest from Tollmingkehmen. The Lietuvininkai need a monument such as this much more, so that it could remind them what Donelaitis has written in our beloved language.”25 Prussian Lithuanians were again reminded of their duty to contribute to a monument to Donelaitis when in 1913 funds started being collected for construction of a monument on Rambynas. The press that encouraged the Lithuanian cultural movement on this occasion highlighted that Prussian Lithuanians had hitherto contributed only toward the erection of monuments to “German heroes,” but now they had to honor the memory of one of their own.26 3. Blocking. Not only promoters of Lithuanian national culture reacted to the German representations of East Prussia. Defenders of the dominant discourse also tried to sway Prussian Lithuanians, to keep them within their “orbit” so that they would not surrender to the agitations of those who had started being called Nationallitauer in this discourse. This 23 “Tautißkasis Paminklas Klaipedoj,” Lietuwißka Ceitunga, September 24, 1907 (no. 77): 1; “Atdengimas Tautißkojo Paminklo Klaipedoj,” Lietuwißka Ceitunga, September 24, 1907 (no. 77): 2; “Ciecorius Klaipedoj,” Tilźês Keleiwis, September 27, 1907 (no. 78): 1. 24 Lietuwißka Ceitunga, August 22, 1911 (no. 68). 25 Auszra 1 (1886): 22. 26 Kaimietis, “Dēlei Paminklo Důnelaicziui,” Apzwalga, September 16, 1913 (no. 73).

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was done in order to try to belittle or simply block the latter’s initiatives. We can identify several examples of such blocking. One is related to the World Expo held in Paris in 1900. As mentioned, nationalistically engaged Lithuanians who lived in North America and Europe saw to it that Lithuanian culture would also be demonstrated at this expo. Attempts were also made to arouse the interest of Prussian Lithuanians in the purpose of this exhibition; they were asked to support the initiative both in terms of funds and providing exhibits. However, the influential newspaper Tilźês Keleiwis expressed rather clear doubts as to the purpose of this initiative. There were claims that Prussian Lithuanians, contributing to a separate Lithuanian exposition, would be confused with Žemaičiai [Samogitians], while plans were already under way for exhibits related to Prussian Lithuanians in Germany’s exposition.27 Indeed, as far as can be ascertained from the official catalogue,28 at the expo Germany was represented by exhibits testifying to the country’s progress and technical, mechanical, industrial, art, and cultural achievements. Space for Lithuania in this exposition never appeared. Once the exhibition began, even Tilźês Keleiwis made no further mention of such a space.29 Another example is related to the attempt in 1910 to rally together Lithuanians living in Russia, Germany, and the diaspora to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald. It is likely that the groups that tried maintaining anti-Polish policy trends, including the more conservative Prussian Lithuanians, wanted to suppress the commemoration of the Battle of Grunwald. That urge to suppress most probably was encouraged by the fact that Poles also marked the anniversary in 1910. Thus there were fears that the Lithuanian cultural movement, tolerated by the Prussian government, could be associated with the Polish movement, which the government tried to quell. Commenting on a proclamation from the Birutė Society to mark the Grunwald anniversary, the Lietuwißka Ceitunga urged readers not to anger Germans and the government with 27 Tilźês Keleiwis, January 20, 1900 (no. 6). 28 Weltausstellung in Paris 1900. Amtlicher Katalog der Ausstellung des Deutschen Reichs, ed. Otto N. Witt (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1900). 29 Cf. Tilźês Keleiwis, April 21, 1900 (no. 32); April 25, 1900 (no. 33); April 28, 1900 (no. 34).

Interaction of the German and Lithuanian Concepts

such commemorations, an urging that in addition supported the American Lithuanians’ position, “In no way can Lithuanians and Poles go as one in the Grunwald celebration.”30 Expressions of the same reaction are evident in the historical essays that featured in Lietuwißka Ceitunga and Tilžês Keleiwis to mark the Grunwald anniversary.31 We should note that the aforementioned publications tried to some degree to turn attention away from the Grunwald date of July 15 toward another anniversary—the centennial of the death of Queen Louise on July 19, an important date for all Prussians, Germans, and the majority of Germany’s population, and thereby Prussian Lithuanians as well.32 All of this shows that some Lithuanians, seconding the state’s policies, believed that public actualization of the Lithuanian representations of East Prussia was possible only where it did not deny or threaten the meanings dominating in East Prussia. A certain threat of blocking, it appears, was envisaged by the press, which encouraged the Lithuanian national movement in the government’s efforts to buy up the plots of land surrounding Rambynas. When the Tilsit county administration bought one farmer’s land in 1911, the press noted that only one plot of land remained available for Lithuanian gatherings, which then belonged to Gaigalaitis.33 4. Attempts at reconciliation. The activities of Gaigalaitis give an excellent example of another means of interaction between spatial representations—the reconciliation of different meanings given to those representations. Initiating the construction of the monument to Donelaitis on Rambynas in 1913, Gaigalaitis exploited both the work already done in presenting Donelaitis as a source of East Prussia’s uniqueness and tried to convince Prussian Lithuanians of his significance, so that Donelaitis might “teach” the latter “by example.” On the one hand, at a meeting that took place on Rambynas on August 3, 1913, where Gaigalaitis again 30 “Dēl Atsiminimo Mußio prie Zalgirio,” Lietuwißka Ceitunga, February 8, 1910 (no. 11): 3. 31 “Mußis prie Tannenbergo,” Lietuwißka Ceitunga, July 15, 1910 (no. 56): 1; “Mußis prie Zalgirio,” Tilžês Keleiwis, July 16, 1910 (no. 71): 1; July 19, 1910 (no. 72): 2; July 21, 1910 (no. 73): 2. 32 Cf. “Atsiminimui Karalienes Luizes,” Lietuwißka Ceitunga, July 19, 1910 (no. 57): 1; “Prusu Karalene Luize,” Tilžês Keleiwis, July 21, 1910 (no. 73): 1–2. 33 Pagalba 4 (1911): 55.

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raised this idea, it was not just representatives of Lithuanian organizations that participated but also the Heydekrug Landrat (county head), Heinrich Peters, and the president of the Lithuanian Literary Society, Alexander Kurschat. Also, the committee that was to handle the monument’s construction included not only Lithuanians but also representatives from the Lithuanian Literary Society’s milieu. Proclamations that urged contributing to the monument’s construction were printed in both Lithuanian and German,34 in the hope of participation from Lithuanians as much as Germans. On this occasion, it was written in Lietuwißka Ceitunga: “Having built the monument and released his [Donelaitis’s—V. S.] writing anew, long will he live among not only Lithuanians but Germans as well.”35 Commenting on the participation of Germans in the monument’s construction in even more pro-Lithuanian press releases than Lietuwißka Ceitunga, there were attempts at defending this right of theirs, saying that everything is being organized such that “nothing harming the national Lithuanian feelings would occur.”36 On the other hand, in presenting the idea of Donelaitis’s monument to Lithuanians, it was stressed in various ways that Lithuanians were obliged to contribute, that this had to be their offering to a representative of their “kin.” The committee’s proclamation for the monument’s construction in Lithuanian presented Donelaitis as “one of our own,” something that the committee sought to instill in Lithuanians. Thus, when collecting funds, most hopes rested on input from Lithuanians themselves. The proclamation strongly accentuated that Lithuanians had to build the monument in order to demonstrate how much they “respected … their Hero, the Poet.”37 It would be difficult to give an unambiguous assessment of whether this balancing act of Gaigalaitis was conjunctural, determined by the goal of ensuring support from as many layers of society as possible for the monument idea, the realization of which required a certain amount of 34 Kaunas, Donelaičio žemės knygiai, 150. 35 “Kristijons Donelaitis,” Lietuwißka Ceitunga, November 25, 1913 (no. 101): 2. 36 “Duonelaiczio paminklas,” Prusų Lietuvos savaitraštis, December 19, 1913 (no. 3): 10–11. 37 “Paßaukimas,” in Kaunas, Donelaičio žemės knygiai, 151.

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capital, or whether it was a position determined by Gaigalaitis’s active participation in both the Lithuanian Literary Society and Lithuanian cultural organizations. Representing Lithuanians at the Prussian Landtag, he hardly could have viewed them as a “dying nation.” On the other hand, his position in the Landtag and his work as a priest opened the doors to the milieu where specifically that attitude to Prussian Lithuanians prevailed, and wanting to achieve something in that milieu, he had to reconcile himself to its attitudes. But Donelaitis was not the only figure that represented East Prussia in both national cultures, whose meanings activists tried to reconcile. Another such figure could be Duke Albert. Donelaitis was not so important to Germans but had to become particularly relevant to Lithuanians, and vice versa in terms of Duke Albert’s relevance. Unlike many of the other Hohenzollerns, who were simply silenced or even attained negative meanings in the historical master narrative created by Prussian Lithuanians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the positive assessment of Albert, the Teutonic Order’s grand master and first duke of Prussia, remained in the Lithuanian narrative. What differed were the criteria for assessment. Because the figure of Albert was used to highlight the place and importance of East Prussia in Germany, it developed a key significance in supporting the ideologeme of this province as the “cradle” of the entire monarchy, accentuating his role, as the first Protestant ruler in Germany, in spreading Lutheranism. Ultimately, an important achievement with which he was credited in East Prussia itself was the founding of a Lutheran university in Königsberg in 1544. All of these meanings, we could say, were conveyed in the statue of Albert by Friedrich Reusch unveiled in Königsberg on May 19, 1891. The sculptor placed imitations of the church agenda of 1525 (the book outlining the order of rituals in church), as a symbol of the Reformation, and the University of Königsberg foundation act in Albert’s right hand,38 in his left—a sword, as a symbol of the Hohenzollerns’ (and Prussia’s) power, while the monument pedestal bore the inscription “Albrecht von Brandenburg—letzter 38 Cf. Fritz Gause, “Denkmäler des Preußenlandes (4): Die Standbilder der Hohenzollern,” Das Ostpreußenblatt, March 1, 1969 (no. 9): 13.

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Hochmeister—erster Herzog von Preussen.” The East Prussian press aimed at Lithuanian readers also emphasized in accounts of the monument’s unveiling that Albert was the first ruler from the Hohenzollern dynasty in the East Prussian Province, and that he introduced church and political reforms in this province (of course, the East Prussian Province did not yet exist in the sixteenth century).39 However, in the historical narrative constructed by Lithuanians themselves, Albert attained a positive assessment above all because he stopped the cultural destruction enacted against the Prussians and Lithuanians that prevailed during the times of the Teutonic Order and created the conditions for the development of Lithuanian culture and writing. Both Gaigalaitis and Bruožis had a positive view of Albert’s educational activities,40 the latter even saying that in Albert’s times, “there was a determination to rebuild everything that the Crusaders had destroyed.”41 These four types of interaction between representations of East Prussia clearly show several things. First, the representations incorporated into Lithuanian national culture could not simply be mechanically transferred into the Prussian Lithuanian context. That context dictated the need for a different behavior and different strategies, a need that hardly any of those engaged in the Lithuanian national movement comprehended. Second, the Prussian Lithuanian context meant there had to be a consolidation of German and Lithuanian national meanings about East Prussia and a transfer of discourses and practices, and in this sense it formed as the result of the interaction of two national cultures. Third, most of these types of interaction were determined by the dominance of German representations and the Lithuanians’ goal of overcoming that dominance. In other words, the competition between the meanings afforded to the spatial representations was to a large extent fostered by 39 “Nudengimas Ercikio Albrechto Paminklo Karaliaucziuje,” Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, May 22, 1891 (no. 41): 202. 40 Gaigalaitis, Lietuwos Nusidawimai, 10; Ansas Bruožis, Mažosios Lietuvos mokyklos ir lietuvių kova dėl gimtosios kalbos, ed. Vincas Vileišis (Kaunas: Didžiosios ir Mažosios Lietuvos kultūrinio bendradarbiavimo sąjunga, 1935), 11 (this work by Bruožis was published for the first time under the same title in Mūsų žinynas 4, no. 10 [1923]: 108–124; no. 11[(1923]: 354–366; no. 12 [1923]: 508–538; 5, no. 13 [1923]: 101–129). 41 [Bruožis], Prusu Lietuwei, 6.

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Lithuanian activities, but the result of that competition—the dominance of German representations—could not be changed by those activities. Can this thesis be applied to the concepts of space as well?

5.2. INTERACTION OF SPATIAL NAMES AND CONCEPTS OF SPACE When two cultures where one physical space is given different significance collide in this space, competition develops not just between the images and symbols that represent that space but also between the names given to that space, as well as the meaning they carry. At the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, in the region being discussed three terms used to identify that space collided: “Lithuania,” “Prussian Lithuania,” and “Lithuania Minor.” The name “Lithuania” predominated in the German discourse, and in very rare cases “Prussian Lithuania” was also used. These titles were by no means widespread in everyday use, and similarly the German discourse where they were used did not encompass all of Germany. In a territorial sense, it was mostly limited to Prussia, especially the West and East Prussian Provinces. Moreover, the titles circulated within the rather narrow fields of the discourse in question: in ethnography, monument conservation, museum activities, and in knowledge of Heimat, the development of tourism, and the creation of brands. A somewhat different situation existed in the Lithuanian-language discourse, where the name “Lithuania” belonged to concepts in everyday use. This can be gathered from the periodical press aimed at Prussian Lithuanians, where use of the term “Lithuania” was observed from the mid-nineteenth century at the latest.42 Press publications then released in East Prussia, as elsewhere, grouped news from all over the world and Germany-related, regional, and local information into special columns that were identified based on the space to which a specific column’s information was attributed. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, local information included in 42 The first historian to highlight the influence of the Lithuanian language periodicals released in East Prussia on the formation of Prussian Lithuanians’ geographical images was Nijolė Strakauskaitė, “Rytų Prūsijos reikšmės Prūsijos lietuvių aplinkoje XIX–XX amžių sandūroje,” in Erdvių pasisavinimas, 206–208.

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German-language newspapers released in East Prussia would be inserted into columns titled Lokales, or Lokales und Allgemeines, information from the (East) Prussian Province would appear in the Provinzielles column, and news from Germany would have a separate column, while announcements from other countries would be distributed among columns named after the corresponding state or be placed into one column.43 What is important is that even after the separation of the Prussian Province into two provinces of East and West Prussia in 1878, the Provinzielles column in East Prussian newspapers continued to span the territory of West Prussia. This point confirms the instillation of the image that both provinces made up a common space into German readers’ spatial concepts and could be considered one means by which the Ordensland image was sustained amid the East Prussian audience. The periodicals aimed at Prussian Lithuanians appear even more interesting in this regard. Looking at the newspapers for Lithuanians in widest circulation that were published for the longest time, it is obvious that in 1849–1880 in Königsberg, Keleiwis [Traveler], published by F. Kurschat, very rarely structured information according to locations. Yet we may agree with Nijolė Strakauskaitė’s conclusion that already in this publication the concept of the (East) Prussian Province as a region Lithuanians could call “their own” started being formed.44 The ideological successor of this influential publication that dedicated most attention to religious matters and formed the conservative attitudes held by the majority of Prussian Lithuanians was Konzervatywû Draugystês-Laißkas [Conservative Party Paper] released by Georg Trauschies in 1882–1918 in Prökuls. This weekly (twice weekly from 1899), from its inception until almost the last issues, ran the column Iß Prusu Prowincu [From the Prussian Province(s)], which included mostly information from locations closest to where the newspaper was released and from various other locations in Prussian Lithuania. Yet the name “Lithuania” was not used as the title of that column. A somewhat different appearance in this regard was Lietuwißka Ceitunga, released in Memel from 1877; Tilžês Keleiwis, released 43 Cf. Memeler Dampfboot, January 1, 1873 (no. 1); October 15, 1879 (no. 241); Tilsiter Zeitung, May 1, 1894 (no. 100); June 26, 1894 (no. 146). 44 Strakauskaitė, “Rytų Prūsijos reikšmės,” 207–208.

Interaction of the German and Lithuanian Concepts

Figure 31-32. References to Lithuania in the newspapers aimed at Prussian Lithuanians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Header of the September 25, 1897, issue of Tilźês Keleiwis and the column “Iß Lietuwos” (From Lithuania) in the October 28, 1913, issue of Apzwalga.

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in Tilsit from 1883; and Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, from 1890. All these newspapers featured local announcements in columns that retained the word “Lithuania” as part of their names even as the titles changed. In the first two newspapers, such columns appeared from the very beginning, while in Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga one was introduced in May 1899. We should note that Lithuania was almost always part of something greater. As a result, Lithuania did not have to be understood as a separate space, but only (usually) within the provincial context. That is rather clearly seen in the title of the column running longest under one title, Iß Lietuwos bey musu Prowinco [From Lithuania and Our Province], that Lietuwißka Ceitunga used. Provincas (or the plural Provincai), Apygardis [governmental district] which appeared in Tilžês Keleiwis in 1899, or Prusai [Prussia], as featured in Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga from the end of 1911—these were all references to a context much broader than that of the East Prussian Province. In Lietuwißka Ceitunga’s column Iß Lietuwos bey musu Prowinco, news from Memel and its closest areas and counties predominated. Further on, information not just from East Prussia would be presented but also from West Prussia, and in some cases the same column would include news from other eastern provinces, primarily Posen, and on rare occasions even from Silesia.45 The other two newspapers represented the contextual region of Lithuania in an analogous way. This suggests that the concept of “their own space” being formed in the main newspapers aimed at Prussian Lithuanians was applied to the same territory to which the Ordensland and the Ostmark images were applied. “Lithuania” had to be understood as an inseparable part of the space that these images from German national culture described. 45 Based on a review of random issues: Lietuwißka Ceitunga, March 2, 1886 (no. 9); March 16, 1886 (no. 11); November 9, 1886 (no. 45); November 16, 1886 (no. 46); November 23, 1886 (no. 47); November 30, 1886 (no. 48); June 18, 1895 (no. 25); October 1, 1895 (no. 40); October 15, 1895 (no. 42); October 22, 1895 (no. 43); December 24, 1895 (no. 52); January 1, 1904 (no. 1); January 8, 1904 (no. 3); January 29, 1904 (no. 9); April 15, 1904 (no. 31); April 22, 1904 (no. 33); April 29, 1904 (no. 35); July 1, 1904 (no. 53); July 15, 1904 (no. 57); July 29, 1904 (no. 61); September 27, 1904 (no. 78); December 6, 1904 (no. 98); December 27, 1904 (no. 104); February 4, 1913 (no. 10); February 11, 1913 (no. 12); February 18, 1913 (no. 14); February 25, 1913 (no. 16); May 16, 1913 (no. 39); August 8, 1913 (no. 63); August 15, 1913 (no. 65); August 29, 1913 (no. 69).

Interaction of the German and Lithuanian Concepts

Moreover, Prussian Lithuanians had to view living with Germans in that Lithuania as the norm. They were not meant to see this landscape as a space solely of their own. We can guess as to the impact of such efforts from comments made by Bruožis. Back in 1906, he still needed to write, “It’s a shame to see that our ordinary fellow nationals lack the understanding that Lithuania is our land, that we are its inhabitants.”46 All of this would suggest that the spatial images aimed at both the German-reading and the Lithuanian-reading audiences were not so different in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition, Lithuanian bilingualism in Prussian Lithuania at that time was a regular occurrence,47 and a majority would have had easy access to publications released in German. From this, it becomes clear that East Prussian Germans and a majority of Prussian Lithuanians had to be bound by the common images of “their own space” that belonged to the German national culture. Nevertheless, the Lithuanian concept of “their own” space in East Prussia based on Lithuanian national culture meanings also filtered into the Prussian Lithuanians’ environment, so can we speak about the interaction of two spatial concepts amid Prussian Lithuanians? Most likely, examples of such interaction could be certain cases of conformance, seemingly in efforts to attract a larger audience, in the press aimed at Prussian Lithuanians. The Tilžês Keleiwis column Iß Lietuwôs bey abiejû Prusû Prowincû (From Lithuania and Both Prussian Provinces) gained a new title in 1894–1899, Iß Lietuwos (From Lithuania). Similarly, in Lietuwißka Ceitunga, the column in question was renamed Iß Lietuwôs in 46 [Bruožis], Prusu Lietuwei, 3. 47 Cf. Bauer, “Deutsch-litauische Sprachbeziehungen,” 69–70; Manfred Klein, “Ein interkulturelles Produkt: der ‘Putzmalūnas.’ Etnische Identität und Sprache in PreußischLitauen,” in Selbstbewusstsein und Modernisierung, 151–171, especially 158–160; Manfred Klein, “Wann ‘schämt’ man sich seiner Muttersprache? Aspekte der Sprachwahl bei Preußisch-Litauern,” in Baltisch-deutsche Sprachen- und Kulturkontakte in Nord-Ostpreußen, ed. Jochen D. Range (Essen: Die blaue Eule, 2002), 67–80, especially 73–74; Christiane Schiller, Bilinguismus. Zur Darstellung eines soziolinguistischen Phänomens in der Literatur, dargestellt an Beispielen der regionalen Literatur PreußischLitauens: Hermann Sudermann “Litauische Geschichten,” Ieva Simonaitytė “Vilius Karalius”, vol. 7 of Hallesche Sprach- und Textforschung (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2000).

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October 1913, although this title lasted for just a short time. Immediately after the beginning of the First World War, its earlier title, Iß Lietuwos bey musu Prowinco, was reinstated. These changes are difficult to explain, but they were most likely related to the attempts of both periodicals to demonstrate their orientation to the audience living in Lithuania (Tilžês Keleiwis, which for a long time featured the subheading “Lithuania’s Useful Signpost,” did this constantly). In the case of Tilžês Keleiwis this could have been an outcome of the appointment of Jurgis Arnašius, who visibly supported the postulation of Lithuanians’ uniqueness, as the new editor in 1893. The change in Lietuwißka Ceitunga could also be explained as a kind of reaction against the increased Lithuanian cultural activities in Memel prior to the First World War and the competition this newspaper faced from Apzwalga. In both cases, however, the column Iß Lietuwôs continued to feature announcements not just from Prussian Lithuania but also from the main cities and towns of East and West Prussia—Königsberg, Allenstein, Danzig, Elbing, Marienwerder, Marienburg, and Thorn.48 In this way, even limiting the local news section to the most understandable identification of the “Lithuanian space” as “Lithuania” did not exclude East and West Prussia from this “Lithuanian space.” A somewhat different kind of adaptation to their audience’s needs is seen in the newspapers that distinctly encouraged Lithuania’s cultural separateness—such as Apzwalga, released in Memel in 1911–1914. The nature of this newspaper’s intended audience is clearly shown by the fact that in a majority of its issues, local news featured in the column titled Iß Lietuwos. Only in April 1912 did the title typical of other Prussian Lithuanian newspapers, Iß Lietuvos ir Prusu Prowinco, make a brief appearance. Nevertheless, later the one column Iß Lietuwos incorporated information from both Prussian Lithuania and East and West Prussia, sometimes distinguishing announcements from these provinces in the subcolumn Iß 48 Cf. Tilžês Keleiwis, February 1, 1899 (no. 9); June 30, 1899 (no. 52); Lietuwißka Ceitunga, October 23, 1913 (no. 88); December 9, 1913 (no. 107); December 11, 1913 (no. 108); December 30, 1913 (no. 115); January 8, 1914 (no. 4); February 19, 1914 (no. 22); February 26, 1914 (no. 25); March 3, 1914 (no. 27); March 7, 1914 (no. 29); March 19, 1914 (no. 34); April 21, 1914 (no. 41); May 5, 1914 (no. 53); May 9, 1914 (no. 55); May 14, 1914 (no. 57); May 19, 1914 (no. 59); June 11, 1914 (no. 69); June 13, 1914 (no. 70); June 18, 1914 (no. 72); June 25, 1914 (no. 75); July 11, 1914 (no. 82); July 16, 1914 (no. 84).

Interaction of the German and Lithuanian Concepts

Prusu Prowincu. Judging from this behavior by Apzwalga’s editors, Ansas Baltris and Mikelis Ašmys, the view of Lithuania as part of at least the East and West Prussian areas in the Prussian Lithuanian press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had become canonical. In how many cases, then, would did the concept promoted by nationalistically engaged Lithuanians of two Lithuanias actually catch on in Prussian Lithuania? The terms that expressed that concept were unpopular in East Prussia, as was the concept “Prussian Lithuania,” which was not used so often here as in the Russian Lithuanian press. The use of the terms “Lithuania Minor” and “Lithuania Major” in the Prussian Lithuanian press was a complete rarity for a long time. Even in the monthly released by Jankus himself, Saulēteka [Sunrise], he deemed it necessary to give an additional explanation that “Lithuania Major” was indeed “Russian Lithuania.”49 Probably the first person to use both terms alongside one another in East Prussia was Vanagaitis in Birutė, the monthly he edited in 1910. The latter also became, most likely, the first periodical publication for Prussian Lithuanians that regularly featured information from Lithuania Major. This should come as no surprise if we recall that Vanagaitis, who announced news items from Prussian Lithuanians to the newspapers released for Russian Lithuanians, was one of the most active figures in the common Lithuanian information space. Yet Birutė was nevertheless an exception. In other periodicals aimed at the Prussian Lithuanian audience, the term “Lithuania Major” caught on more than “Lithuania Minor.” Even in the most pro-Lithuanian-oriented Prusų Lietuvos savaitraštis [Prussian Lithuanian Weekly], released in Tilsit beginning in December 1913, all the most important announcements were accommodated in three columns: Iš Prusų Lietuvos [From Prussian Lithuania], which also featured news from places such as Berlin; Iš Didžiosios Lietuvos [From Lithuania Major]; and Lietuviai kitur [Lithuanians Elsewhere]. Apzwalga, published in Memel, also started printing news Iß didziosios Lietuwos [From Lithuania Major] in 1913 in a separate section of the main column Iß Lietuwos [From Lithuania]; in April 1914 they were reorganized into completely separate columns.50 Even Lietuwißka Ceitunga in 1913 49 Cf. Saulēteka 13 (1901): 282. 50 Cf. Apzwalga, February 18, 1913 (no. 14); October 28, 1913 (no. 85); and April 3, 1914 (no. 27).

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sometimes included news from Lithuania Major in its “From Lithuania” column.51 The news featured here, incidentally, came after the coverage of East and West Prussia. All of this would suggest that even for a majority of those Prussian Lithuanians who promoted the separateness of Lithuanian culture, imagining themselves as living in the “minor” Lithuania was alien. Although the increase in attention given to “Lithuania Major” in some Prussian Lithuanian publications on the eve of the First World War testified that the conception of “two Lithuanias” was spreading, in East Prussia the limitation of Lithuania by the Prussian (German) border continued to dominate. Moreover, the “two Lithuanias” concept and the terms that expressed it remained marginal in the German-language discourse. An attempt at popularizing this conception and these terms was the annual Allgemeine Litauische Rundschau, published in Tilsit by Vanagaitis in 1910–1912. This monthly publication aimed at the German-speaking audience, primarily Lithuanians and those interested in Lithuania, dedicated a great deal of space to Lithuania Major, presenting it via themes that could bring the latter closer to Prussian Lithuanians. For example, its first issues featured articles on the history of Protestantism in Lithuania Major, highlighting East Prussia’s role during the years when the Russian Empire banned the use of the Latin alphabet, and the like. Other than this publication, however, there were no expressions of the popularization of the “two Lithuanias” concept in the German-language discourse before the Great War. Only Lithuanians’ more active participation in this discourse during the war started to entrench the thesis that Prussian and Russian Lithuanians were to be considered carriers of one and the same culture. The Mitau (Jelgava) priest Kazimieras Jasėnas, in an overview about Lithuania published in Munich, probably via internal links in the Catholic Church, attributed territories on either side of the border to the Lithuanian-inhabited space and integrated Mažvydas, Bretkūnas, and Donelaitis into one Lithuanian culture.52 Prussian Lithuanian Ašmys, who was drawn into the 51 Lietuwißka Ceitunga, October 7, 1913 (no. 81); October 25, 1913 (no. 89); February 5, 1914 (no. 16). 52 [Kazimieras Jasėnas] Kasimir Brunavietis, Der Weltkrieg und Litauen, no. 44 of Der Weltkrieg, ed. Sekretariat Sozialer Studentenarbeit (Munich-Gladbach: Volksvereins-­ Druckerei, [1916]), 5–7.

Interaction of the German and Lithuanian Concepts

Swiss Lithuanian milieu during the war and whose life there ended prematurely, mentioned in a description of Lithuania in German released in 1918 that Prussian Lithuania was also called Klein Litauen (despite himself giving preference to the first term).53 He also wrote about one Lithuanian culture where Mažvydas and Donelaitis had exceptional significance, while in a book that had to present all types of Lithuanians, peasants and even a Lithuanian-style barn were illustrated using photographs from the Memel area. Having become a colleague of Ašmys, and being drawn into the representation of Lithuania, the Swiss national Joseph Ehret, who later settled in Lithuania and became Juozas Eretas—the founder of Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs telegram agency ELTA and a Lithuanian University in Kaunas lecturer—in probably the most thorough German-­ language description of the country that defended the Lithuanian version of Lithuania released in Bern in 1919 used the concepts Preussisch-Litauen and Klein Litauen in parallel.54 As soon as the war started, Wilhelm Steputat used the term Klein Litauen and promised to closely follow the development of the idea of two Lithuanias in the Lithuanian press to Prussian Interior Minister Friedrich Wilhelm von Loebell.55 Nevertheless, it is obvious that in the general context these cases were more exceptions than the rule and testified to the complicated penetration of the “two Lithuanias” conception into the Lithuanian-speaking discourse. The Great War, or more precisely the offensive in Žemaitija (Samogitia) and Courland by the army group of General Otto von Lauenstein in 1915, encouraged Germans to “discover” Lithuania in the territory that in the German-language discourse was usually connected with Russia or with Poland. Due to the German leadership’s annexationist plans in this war, references to the concept of Lithuania were “pushed” to the east in the German-language discourse, clearly identifying its content with several 53 Michael Aschmies, Land und Leute in Litauen (Breslau: Priebatsch’s Verlagsbuchhand­ lung, 1918), 7. 54 Joseph Ehret, Litauen in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft (Bern: Kommissionsverlag von A. Francke, 1919), 20, 22, 28, 32, 134, 148, 341, 397–399, 423. 55 See “Das geheime Schreiben des Regierungsrat [Steputat] an den Minister des Inneren von Loebell,” October 30, 1914, in Selbstbewusstsein und Modernisierung, 38–39.

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western gubernias of the former Russian Empire.56 This, it would appear, had to have a favorable impact on the establishment of the “two Lithuanias” concept in the German-language discourse, as well as in the Prussian Lithuanian milieu. However, the war’s outcome ultimately produced the exact opposite results. The “two Lithuanias” concept was distinctly associated with Lithuanian irredentism. That irredentism gave rise to a discussion on historic rights and finally led to the deliberate elimination of the name “Lithuania,” as we shall see, from the nomenclature of East Prussian cultural landscapes.

56 For more see: Safronovas, “Zum Wandel des räumlichen Begriffs,” 125–129.

CHAPTER 6

Battles over Spaces “of Their Own”: Changes after 1918 The competition between the spatial imagination and spatial perceptions, as discussed in chapter 5, involved two unequal participants. The German national idea was realized, and national culture was spread through social networks supported by state power. The nationalization of spaces, based on these national culture meanings, could take place because the resources were adequate. Analogous support for the Lithuanian national idea and national culture was lacking. In addition, in many cases Germans and Prussian Lithuanians in East Prussia had more in common than did Lithuanian speakers on opposite sides of the Russian-German border. That meant that there was just one active group driving this competition—the Lithuanian nationalists. Because they had little influence in East Prussia in the early twentieth century, their opponents did not need to react forcefully, even though they tracked the impact of the nationalists’ actions.1 Nevertheless, it is important to note that tensions existed prior to the First World War, and that the Lithuanian nationalists were already preparing the soil for challenges that could not be ignored after the war. The ideal fostered by Lithuanian nationalism was an ethnically homogenous and linguistically “pure” nation-state. Many variants of linguistic nationalism in East-Central Europe adopted similar ideals as they tried to nationalize a space to which they laid claim. But the 1 Cf. documents published in the collection Selbstbewusstsein und Modernisierung, 25–53.

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realization of the ideal—not just in the case of Lithuanians but also throughout the region in the early twentieth century—encountered a problem that was difficult to overcome. Pluricultural cities were less than willing to yield to the peasantry’s nationalist ambitions of becoming established there, pushing out foreign competitors, and in almost every case the speakers of a certain language dominated only within the core of “their” space. On the fringes of their linguistic area they lived mixed together with representatives of other linguistic and cultural groups. During and immediately after the Great War the obstacles to realizing the nationalist ideal became fully visible as the elite of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern monarchies strove to use national self-determination campaigns for their own purposes, then fell “victim” to the very movements they had formerly encouraged. In 1917–1918, with the demise of these three monarchies, new nationstates were created in their place, and that alone changed the playing field for the competition between nations that did and did not have states before the war. Now both competing sides attained similar opportunities to mobilize resources and nationalize “their own” spaces. The outcomes of the First World War also changed the established order, in the sense that the right to national self-determination now received support from most of the Versailles System’s decisions regarding territorial reorganization in East-Central Europe. However, it was rare to find ruling circles of nationstates in this region that liked how these principles were being implemented. The main centers of discord became the border areas lying between several national groups. Silesia, West Prussia (or East Pomerania), the Vilnius Region (or Middle Lithuania), Galicia, Transylvania, Trieste—these are but a few of the better-known examples of spaces where some national ideas were met with territorial dependence certified by the Versailles System, while others were not. Prussian Lithuania stands out among these border areas in that the resolution foreseen by the Versailles System did not satisfy either Germany or Lithuania, both the nation-states that had claimed it. Formally, the decision to separate the territory north of the Memel and Russ rivers from East Prussia should have satisfied Lithuanians’ national aspirations, as it meant that a territory would be torn from Germany where Lithuanian

Battles over Spaces “of Their Own”: Changes after 1918

speakers still made up the majority of the population.2 However, the transformation of the Memel and Russ into a border—which was mostly dictated by the goal of internationalizing these rivers and “hooking up” East Prussia from two sides by Danzig and Memel, territories controlled by the victors in the war3—did not much suit the Lithuanians.4 Nor were the Germans receptive to such a decision. At the end of May 1919, Germany clearly expressed its dissatisfaction with the, in its view, unmotivated separation of the Memel Territory.5 For its part, Lithuania did not like it that the separated area was not handed over to its jurisdiction immediately. All of this shifted the tensions over the same physical space that had become evident prior to the war to a qualitatively new level, where the polemic between Germans and Lithuanians would continue until the very end of the twentieth century. This chapter shows how these tensions exploited and altered the spatial concepts about Prussian Lithuania created in the long nineteenth century. To get to the change in concepts, I explore which conditions had the most influence on the spatial imagination.

6.1. THE FATE OF “PRUSSIAN LITHUANIA” When the announcement came that Germany had lost the war and peace talks would begin, certain groups in Germany found it hard to believe that 2 The first violins of the Paris Peace Conference were convinced of this. For example, a secret study prepared by the Historical Section of the Foreign Office for the British delegation at the conference admitted that the “Germans” had conquered Prussia in the thirteenth century. “The Lithuanian language was formerly spoken in the whole of East Prussia to the north-east of a line drawn from Labiau to Goldap, and extended to the Russian frontier,” but now “It is … mainly confined to the district north of the Memel, and west of its tributary the Jura. Here, except for the port of Memel itself, over 50 per cent of the population still speak Lithuanian”: East and West Prussia, no. 34 of Handbooks Prepared under the Direction of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office ([s.l.]: [s.n.], 1919), 11. 3 Cf. Piotr Łossowski, Kłajpeda kontra Memel. Problem Kłajpedy w latach 1918–1939– 1945 (Warsaw: Neriton; Instytut Historii PAN, 2007), 16–17. 4 Cf. Žilius, Lietuvos rubežiai, 15. 5 “Les négociations de paix. Les contre-propositions allemandes du 29 mai,” Le Temps, June 17, 1919 (no. 21163): 2; “Comments by the German Delegation on the Conditions of Peace,” International Conciliation 143 (1919): 1245–1246.

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they would lose their conquered eastern territories, especially when German ground forces continued to be stationed there throughout 1919. During the war the thesis was entrenched that Germany’s right to these territories would be recognized as legitimate, since “German blood was spilt” in their conquest. When defeat forced the country to relinquish all its conquered lands, many Germans experienced intense dissatisfaction. An even greater slap in the face came from the realization that the new nations in the east—widely regarded in Germany as having been “liberated” by the Germans themselves6—then lodged territorial claims against their “liberator.”7 This comment applies to Lithuania and to Poland, both of whose images in the German, and especially the East Prussian press gradually worsened in the second half of 1918 and in 1919. To the astonishment of Germans, the cultural landscapes of West and East Prussia, institutionalized during the Kaiserreich period in the German body of knowledge concerning Heimat, now became the object of Poland’s and Lithuania’s territorial claims. Drawing on the authority of German scholars such as Bezzenberger, Lithuanians postulated the ethnographic prehistoric Lithuanianness of Prussian Lithuania, which had at least from the times of Toeppen been identified with the ancient landscapes of Nadrovia and Scalovia.8 This formed the basis of their conviction regarding Lithuanian autochthonism in Prussia. The reaction to these Lithuanian demands and the attempts in East Prussia from November 1918 on to mobilize Prussian Lithuanians inclined toward a greater closeness to Lithuania were chiefly expressed in countermobilization and counterpropaganda campaigns.9 As soon as 6 In a speech given to the Reichstag on August 19, 1915, German Reichschancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg announced that Poland, Galicia, Lithuania, and Courland had been “liberated” from Russia by Germany: Verhandlungen des Reichstags, XIII. Legislaturperiode, II. Session, vol. 306: Stenographische Berichte (Berlin: Norddeutsche Buchdruckerei und Verlags-Anstalt, 1916), 213. 7 Cf. Emil Hollack, Haben die Polen und Litauer ein historisches Recht auf Altpreußen? (Königsberg: Ostpreußische Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt, 1919), 3, 37. 8 For one of the first attempts, see Alpha, “Sind die preussischen Litauer Nachkommen von Kriegsgefangenen?” Allgemeine Litauische Rundschau 6/7 (1912): 161–170. 9 Cf. Bohdan Koziełło-Poklewski, “Litwini pruscy między Litwą a Prusami (1918–1920),” in Zagadnienia narodowościowe w Prusach Wschodnich w XIX i XX wieku, ed. Janusz Jasiński, vol. 133 of Rozprawy i Materiały Ośrodka Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha

Battles over Spaces “of Their Own”: Changes after 1918

rumors spread in the province that a large part of it could be joined to Lithuania,10 resolutions objecting to such plans were passed on November 13 at two public meetings in Memel (one attracted 627 participants, the other 2,604).11 A brochure by two Lithuanians from Heydekrug County was distributed in the Memel Territory arguing that joining Lithuania did not serve the interests of Prussian Lithuanians; incidentally, this argument was also based on a text from 1915 written by Gaigalaitis, the president of the National Council of Prussian Lithuanians. The brochure alleged that the two regions had different languages, religions, and cultures that differed in both their economies and their history: Russian Lithuania had been “Polonized,” while its political situation was in question, so that a union would mean incorporation into “Russia” or “Russian Lithuania.”12 At the juncture of 1918–1919, in Memel, Heydekrug, Tilsit, Ragnit, and Labiau counties, where statistics still indicated a more significant percentage of Lithuanians, the county councils asked inhabitants with voting rights about the intended union with Lithuania. Without going into depth on the methods used in this survey, one may state that the campaign’s initiators succeeded in convincing 75–90 percent of prospective voters to sign lists against separation from Germany and union with “Russian Lithuania.” The organizers of the campaign mostly bore Lithuanian surnames, and this material, along with protests from the county boards and city magistrates, had to be sent to the Paris Peace Conference in April 1919 via the East Prussian Province’s ober-president.13

10

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Kętrzyńskiego (Olsztyn: Ośrodek Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego, 1993), 103–119. In the first days of November rumors had already spread throughout the region that US President Woodrow Wilson had assured the president of the Lithuanian Council in Washington, DC, that before the peace negotiations “all the Lithuanian regions along with East Prussia as far as Königsberg should be united into one national State”: Lietuwißka Ceitunga, November 2, 1918 (no. 132). Lietuwißka Ceitunga, November 30, 1918 (no. 144). Blosze-Gurgsden and Pagalies-Bruiß-Pakull, Ist es für die preußischen Litauer von Vorteil, wenn sie von Deutschland getrennt und mit Rußland vereint werden? (Heydekrug: F. W. Siebert, [1918]). [Hugo Scheu, ed.,] Die nordöstlichen Grenzkreise der Provinz Ostpreußen gegen den Anschluß an Russisch-Litauen (Heydekrug: F. W. Siebert, [1919]).

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These measures in the public discourse led to a distancing from such “great Lithuanian pretenses” and to the first attempts at instilling the “pure Germanness” of the lands that Lithuania claimed. This turnaround in moods is very visible in a presentation of Tilsit formulated in early 1919, a city that had until then been endearingly described as the capital of Prussian Lithuania.14 The signature collection campaign emphasized that the city’s founder was not Duke Albert but the Teutonic Order, that this city had grown and developed only as a result of German traders’ activities, that Lithuanians had always been marginal there, and now almost none remained.15 The clear identification of the region as “purely German” and the efforts to distance it from any links with Lithuania to the point where not even the smallest part of East Prussia would be called by this name, in 1919 already distinguished a new direction in the formation of the spatial concept in East Prussia. It was claimed that the former cultural landscape of this province called “Lithuania” no longer had any links with the political derivative that had emerged in the neighborhood, had the same name, and dared to express its territorial claims on this landscape. In this way the exhibition and exploitation of the main element that had represented this landscape’s uniqueness—Prussian Lithuanians—in forming the East Prussian Heimat self-awareness became irrelevant. Several facts clearly show this choice of direction. Let us return to the publication representing the province prepared in the early twentieth century by the East Prussian Society for Tourism Development, the first two editions of which were released before the war. In the third edition, published in 1926, Lithuania was removed. The photograph of the Lithuanian House in Tilsit on the front cover was replaced with a photograph of Marienburg Castle, which had to strengthen the Ordensland image, while the essay by Professor Knaake of the Tilsit Gymnasium, published in the first two editions under the title Litauen was renamed Das Grenzgebiet im Nordosten (The Northeastern Border Region), with corrections made in 14 Probably the last time that this kind of identification of Tilsit was recorded was in a book released in 1919: Eberhard Quentin and Curt Reylaender, Tilsit 1914–1919. Die Schicksale der Hauptstadt Preußisch-Litauens in den Stürmen des Weltkrieges und der Revolution in Wort und Bild (Tilsit: J. Reylaender & Sohn, 1919). 15 [Scheu, ed.], Die nordöstlichen Grenzkreise, 4.

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its content as well. Now the book said that the area had been called Preußisch-Litauen only because of the Lithuanians who had settled there in the seventeenth century, that the term Preußisch-Litauen was merely a geographical concept, that before the Order’s arrival no Lithuanians lived there, and that the inhabitants of the ancient Nadrovia and Scalovia landscapes were Prussians.16 Similarly, in the postwar editions of Wilhelm Sahm’s Heimat textbook the former Lithuanian landscape was renamed Nadrovia and Scalovia. In this edition, Sahm wrote that Lithuanians settled here only in the sixteenth century, while photographs that in the first edition were called Litauisches Bauernhaus (Lithuanian peasant’s house) and Alte Litauerin (An elderly Lithuanian woman) were retitled Altes Bauernhaus (Old peasant’s house) and Alte Bäuerin (An elderly peasant woman).17 The Tilsit councilor for education, Hugo Jankuhn, in a brochure released in 1926 claimed that the name “Prussian Lithuania” had appeared during the reign of Frederick William I and that it had been actively used in recent years to highlight the Lithuanianness of one part of East Prussia, although Lithuanians had moved into this area that had been Germanic since time immemorial only in the sixteenth century.18 In another example, Announcements, the East Prussian Province’s publication on monument preservation, retained the old means of presenting monuments according to cultural landscapes, including Lithuania as a distinct landscape, for some time after the war. But the presentation principle was changed in 1928: monuments were regrouped according to governmental districts—Königsberg, Gumbinnen, and Allenstein—instead.19 Although one-off usages of the title “Lithuania” to name the East Prussian landscape in Heimat texts still arose in the 1920s,20 instead a majority of 16 Emil Knaake, “Das Grenzgebiet im Nordosten,” in Ostpreußen, ed. Paul Stettiner, 3rd exp. ed. (Königsberg: Gräfe und Unzer, 1926), 185. 17 Cf. Sahm, Heimatkunde, 1914, 23–24; Wilhelm Sahm, Heimatkunde von Ostpreussen, 7th ed. (Frankfurt a. M.: Moritz Diesterweg, 1931), 25–26. 18 Hugo Jankuhn, Gibt es ein Preußisch-Litauen? (Berlin: Zentral-Verlag, 1926). 19 Bericht des Konservators der Kunstdenkmäler der Provinz Ostpreußen über seine Tätigkeit im Jahre 1928, vol. 27 (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert, 1929). 20 See, e.g., Ludwig Nehring, Heimatkunde der Provinz Ostpreußen. Ein Merk- und Ar­beits­ buch für die Hand der Volksschüler (Breslau: Heinrich Handel, 1928), 2, 5–7.

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authors started using new, usually purely geographically constructed titles, of which the “most popular” was “Northern East Prussia.”21 All of this meant much more than that “Prussian Lithuania” became a historical category used only reluctantly.22 In fact, Lithuania as a reference to an internal territory of East Prussia had to vanish from this province’s inhabitants’ spatial imagination. Several factors provided the greatest ideological foundation for this trend toward “expulsion.” The first was the employment of scientific competencies to legitimize territorial claims and the resulting rhetoric over which territory belonged to which “nationality” in a “historical” sense. In East-Central Europe, the polemic that developed on this issue usually involved a contrast between two positions that were grounded in different historical master narratives, where each side simultaneously believed itself to be justified. The Lithuanians did not need to do this, as they had adopted the opinion that Lithuanians lived in Prussian Lithuania since time immemorial from the German-specific body of knowledge. When, in 1919, Germans moved away from the hitherto accepted narrative, substituting their own “historical rights” argument for the Lithuanians’ “historical lands” rhetoric that began to be applied in November 1918, Lithuanians did not respond for over a decade. 21 For example, Nieth called the former Lithuania in East Prussia Nordostpreußen [Northern East Prussia] (M. Nieth, “Die Provinz Ostpreussen. Eine Heimatkunde,” [suppl. for East Prussian schools to:] Kahnmeyer und Schulze Realienbuch [Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1935?]). This purely geographical term, it appears, had become a rather widespread variant for the replacement of the “Prussian Lithuania” concept. We come across it in a later issue of Nehring’s textbook in place of the earlier used Litauen. Cf. Nehring, Heimatkunde der Provinz Ostpreußen, 2, 5–7; Ludwig Nehring, Heimatkunde von Ostpreußen. Ein Merk- und Arbeitsbuch. Neubearbeitung (Breslau: Heinrich Handel, 1938), 12, 16–18. This title is also found in Herbert Kirrinnis, “Litauen und das nordöstliche Ostpreußen,” Geographische Wochenschrift 3 (1935): 329–331; and Hans Mortensen and Gertrud Mortensen, Die Besiedlung des nordöstlichen Ostpreußens bis zum Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts, 2 parts (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1937–1938). Another substitute for naming the Lithuanian landscape was simply Ostgebiet [Eastern area]: Walther Franz and Erich Krause, Deutsches Grenzland Ostpreußen: Land und Volk in Wort und Bild, 3rd ed. (Pillkallen: Grenzlandverlag Gustav Boettcher, [1936]), 258–268. 22 Historian Kurt Forstreuter in 1933 wrote about the northern east counties of East Prussia “that some time ago were often also called Prussian Lithuania in Germany”: Kurt Forstreuter, “Deutsche Kulturpolitik im sogenannten Preußischen Litauen,” Deutsche Hefte für Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung 3 (1933): 259.

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One of the first proponents of change in early 1919 was the wellknown Prussian archaeologist Emil Hollack.23 He identified the first inhabitants of this land mentioned in historical sources, the aestorum gentes, with the Balts. Nevertheless, he insisted that the existence of Germanic peoples in this territory was recorded already in prehistoric times. Basing his claims on historical sources, the archaeologist argued that the attribution of Memel County to Prussian Lithuania “by custom” was wrong, as this city had been founded in Courlandish, not in the Lithuanian lands. Therefore, the assignment of those territories where, based on statistics from 1910, Lithuanians still constituted a noticeable percentage of the population (53 percent in Heydekrug County, 44 percent in Memel County) to Lithuania was mere historical speculation. Prussian Lithuania as such comprised the historical Scalovia and Nadrovia landscapes, whose western border was to this day unclear, but those landscapes had been recognized by Lithuanian’s own king Mindaugas as belonging to the Teutonic Order in the middle of the thirteenth century, Hollack asserted. Historical arguments were also widely used by the then director of the Königsberg archive, August Seraphim, in a brochure released around the same time, titled To Whom Does Prussian Lithuania Belong?24 He highlighted confessional, dialectical, and historical differences, as a result of which Prussian Lithuanians could not claim to have any links with Russian Lithuanians. According to him, five hundred years after the Treaty of Melno no one had questioned Prussian Lithuania’s being part of the “territory of the Prussian state” (zum preußischen Staatsgebiet), and after the colonization of the eighteenth century it had become “an essentially German land” (zu einem in der Hauptsache deutschen Lande). In addition, according to the statistical Muttersprache data, Lithuanians made up a majority only in Heydekrug County; elsewhere so few of them were left that “Prussian Lithuania” had become merely a geographical concept. Germans, meanwhile, were said to have always shown respect for 23 Hollack, Haben die Polen. In a preface written for this booklet on January 12 (NB!), 1919, Hollack expressed concern over the unfounded claims of Lithuania Major and Poland and claimed that his work could reveal the falsity of historic argumentation being formulated by the Poles and Lithuanians (ibid., 3). 24 [Seraphim], Wohin gehört Preußisch-Litauen.

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Lithuanian culture and language in East Prussia, so, said A. Seraphim, “Prussia deserved to retain this patch of land also in return for its loyal concern over its own Lithuanian citizens.”25 At the same time, at the University of Königsberg Gertrud Heinrich was preparing a doctoral dissertation, defended in 1921, that opened up completely new opportunities for discussions about “historical rights” in Prussian Lithuania.26 Understandably, Heinrich’s research was influenced by the political realities of the day. Her degree of engagement was shown not just in her selection of Prussian Lithuanian settlement as her topic in such a politically tense period but also in her goal: to verify Bezzenberger’s research findings, which had become established in the historiography from 1882–1883 and concerned “the old Prusso-Lithuanian linguistic boundary.” It should be added that the author anachronistically projected the “nationalities” of her period into prehistory and the time of the Teutonic Order, but this was common practice among academics then. Otherwise, however, Heinrich presented an extraordinarily original and carefully researched paper based on the Teutonic Order’s written sources. Her main theses that later influenced the Prussian Lithuanian spatial concept could be described as follows: (1) she asserted that the historical landscapes of Scalovia and Nadrovia had been inhabited by Prussians, not Lithuanians, prior to the Order’s arrival; and (2) she insisted that a practically uninhabited wilderness extended in the border zone between the areas inhabited by “Lithuanians” and “Germans” during the battles between the Teutonic Order and the GDL. Its western border in effect corresponded with the western boundary of ethnographic Prussian Lithuania, while the eastern boundary of the wilderness, also the western boundary of Lithuanians’ distribution, based on accounts of the Order’s passages to Lithuania in 1384–1402, were localized by Heinrich as running along the Nemunas (in the section between Grodno and Kaunas) and the Dubysa rivers. Expanding on these claims, Heinrich’s spouse—the geographer Hans Mortensen, with whom she continued to develop her knowledge on this 25 Ibid., 2, 3, 5. 26 Gertrud Mortensen, Beiträge zu den Nationalitäten- und Siedlungsverhältnissen von Pr. Litauen (Berlin/Nowawes: Memelland-Verlag, 1927).

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Figure 33. Boundaries of wilderness around 1400, as determined in Gertrud Heinrich’s doctoral dissertation. Map from her husband Hans Mortensen’s article “The Lithuanian Question in East Prussia,” published in Mitteilungen der Geograph. Fachschaft der Univ. Freiburg (1932–1933, no. 13/14).

topic and who was the first to publish her research findings27—proposed the hypothesis about Lithuanians’ late settlement in Prussia, dated to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This attitude, which the East Prussian public discourse adopted with remarkable rapidity, was used for political 27 Hans Mortensen, “Die Nationalitätengrenze zwischen Alt-Preußen und Litauen,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin 1–2 (1922): 53–56; Hans Mortensen, “Die litauische Wanderung,” Nachrichten der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Philologisch-Historische Klasse (1927): 177–195. See also Hans’as Mortensen’as, “Žemaičių augštės reikšmė žemaičių giminės sienai nustatyti,” Švietimo darbas 1–2 (1922): 32–35.

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purposes probably for the first time by the then director of the Königsberg archive, Paul Karge. Indications of this usage are the titles of some of the chapters in his book, released in 1925, on the “Lithuanian question in Old Prussia,”28 such as “Deime—by no means a national border. Prussia on both sides of the river.” In this book, Karge made reference to the history of the “Deime River boundary,” a question that grew out of arguments provided by Toeppen and Bezzenberger, praised Heinrich for denying the existence of the “Deime River boundary,” and was the first to present many of his own collected archival data to prove the assumption that Lithuanians’ “immigration” (Einwanderung) into East Prussia and this area’s colonization commenced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is obvious that relying on these theses and applying modern community-defining categories to medieval peoples enabled the authors to conclude that “Lithuanians” appeared in East Prussia later than “Germans.” Hence Lithuania was not the eternal, timeless title of the territory, as such titles were commonly considered up to the mid-twentieth century, but merely a name that emerged due to the Prussian administration’s need to handle affairs with Lithuanians. According to this logic, since Lithuanian speakers had almost become extinct in East Prussia, there was no longer any point in applying the name “Lithuania” to this territory. The second factor that influenced Lithuania’s “expulsion” from the East Prussian spatial imagination was a series of new challenges, in response to which “East Prussianism,”29 so termed by Robert Traba, developed in the province after the Great War—that is, a specific regional self-awareness based mostly on the application of radical German nationalism to local features. East Prussia was the only territory of Germany that the Russian army had invaded and ravaged in 1914–1915. These events were highlighted, as a means of signifying the province, even before the war’s end. They were exploited not just to develop the new field of “military tourism.” In the province itself, they allowed the formation of East Prussia’s “rebuilding from the rubble” myth, in this way reactualizing Germans’ Kultur achievements in places where the “barbarians from the 28 Paul Karge, Die Litauerfrage in Altpreußen in geschichtlicher Beleuchtung (Königsberg: Bruno Meyer & Co., 1925). 29 Traba, Ostpreußen.

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east” had destroyed them. The fact that East Prussia had resisted attack from the “Asiatic hordes” also made it possible to assign a missionary function to this province, strengthening its image as a Bollwerk, or fortress of Germanness. That image was further actualized by the fact that according to the Peace Treaty of Versailles East Prussia was physically and symbolically separated from Germany, isolated and encircled by states that threatened to grab a piece of “German territory.” In addition, having formed the Polish Corridor, parts of the former West Prussian Province’s territory with Marienburg, Marienwerder, and Elbing became part of the East Prussian Province in 1920 as the fourth governmental district of this province, called “West Prussia” from 1922 on. The joining of the most important symbol of the Teutonic Order—Marienburg Castle30—to the province’s territory undoubtedly encouraged a much more active dissemination of the deutsches Ordensland image than prior to the First World War. It could be said that as the Teutonic Order’s “state” was once physically separated from the empire, so too now East Prussia was separated from Germany by the Polish Corridor. The same confrontational neighbors, Poles and Lithuanians, surrounded East Prussia, just as they had then. In the spatial imagination, all of this established a continuity based on the Ordensland image, which could be actualized by escalated parallels between the “Battles of Grunwald (Tannenberg)” of 1410 and 1914,31 as well as the pompous commemoration in 1930 of the Teutonic Order’s arrival in these lands seven hundred years before. 30 For more about the exploitation of Marienburg for political aims after 1918, see Boockmann, “Das ehemalige Deutschordensschloß,” 147–158. 31 Cf. Paul Fischer-Graudenz, Bei Tannenberg 1410 und 1914. Die Schlacht bei Tannenberg-Grünfelde am 15.  Juli 1410 und die Schlachten bei Gilgenburg-Hohenstein-Ortelsburg (Schlacht bei Tannenberg) 27., 28., 29. August 1914, 2nd ed. (Lissa i. P.: Oskar Eulitz, 1915); Franz Wiehler, “1410—Tannenberg—1914,” in Festschrift zur Einweihung des Tannenberg-Denkmals am 18. September 1927 ([Königsberg: Stetzuhn, 1927]), 25–30; Hermann von François, “Tannenberg,” in Hindenburg-Denkmal für das deutsche Volk. Eine Ehrenabe zum 80. Geburtstage des Reichspräsidenten, ed. Paul Lindenberg (Berlin: Vaterländischer Verlag C. A. Weller, 1927), 106; Rudolf Schmidt, “Tannenberg 1410— 1914—1933—Ein Ehrentag des deutschen Volkes,” in Tannenberg 1914–1933. Ein Gedenkbuch für das deutsche Volk (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, [1933]), 31–36; and Jürgen Tietz, Das Tannenberg-Nationaldenkmal. Architektur, Geschichte, Kontext (Berlin: Bauwesen, 1999), 16–17, 69–70.

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The basis of this system of meanings, with mostly rightist organizations supporting the “East Prussianism” content, was in many cases a reinterpretation of prewar images of the province, adapted to the new circumstances. The difference was that they no longer played a role in the competition between the Reichsnation and Volksnation projections. The Grenzland, Bollwerk, and Ordensland images and the symbols of Marienburg and Tannenberg, most associated with East Prussia in the interwar period, were now turned toward the aims of the radical, so-called völkischer nationalism. That meant that in the spatial imagination the entire province had to be understood as a monolithic derivative of Germanness, eliminating or leveling all other cultural elements, transforming all of the province’s cultures into “German” culture and all landscapes into “German” landscapes. The political resolutions on the former East Prussian landscapes, on which Poland and Lithuania had made claims, differed. In the southern districts of East Prussia, in Masuria, during a plebiscite held in 1920, regardless of how it was conducted, the results showed that a majority of the population was in favor of remaining part of Germany. The Memel Territory, meanwhile, was separated from Germany without taking the population’s opinion into account, and in 1923 it was incorporated into Lithuania. Despite this difference in outcome, the strategies used with both the Masurian and Prussian Lithuanian landscapes were the same. Both had to become “German” landscapes, where neither Polish nor Lithuanian components could be exhibited. Throughout the whole territory where the plebiscite of 1920 took place, monuments were erected in the interwar period bearing the typical inscription Dies Land bleibt deutsch (This land remains German). The monuments had to symbolize the eternal element of the population’s decision in 1920, although the name “Masuria” was still in use. With “Prussian Lithuania” it was not just the name that had to become obsolete. Even more than before, the landscape itself had to become integrated into the system of meanings via which East Prussia’s Germanness was now acknowledged. This change is particularly evident in Tilsit and the surrounding region, where Lithuanians could still be found after 1920, and where East

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Prussian Lithuanians’ cultural activities continued to concentrate after the separation of the Memel Territory, despite being much more passive than up to 1919.32 Before the war, German speakers’ interest in Prussian Lithuanians in this city was mostly encouraged by the Lithuanian Literary Society. The society’s activities had practically stopped during the war, but according to its last president, Alexander Kurschat, it planned to revive its activities after the war.33 Nevertheless, at the society’s first postwar meeting there were calls to keep Gaigalaitis, who was leading the movement to separate Prussian Lithuanians from Germany, off the board.34 Due to financial difficulties (postwar inflation in Germany) and because in the border areas “contradictions between Germanness and Lithuanianness” had grown, the society could not afford to continue its activities—printing texts and maintaining the ethnographic museum, the so-called Lithuanian House in Tilsit.35 The political tensions of the postwar period produced skepticism toward the society’s collection of materials related to Lithuania. During its last years of activity, the society even changed its name to the more neutral Tilsiter Gesellschaft für Volkskunde (Tilsit Ethnographic Society). However, this did not help matters either, so in 1927 it was decided to disband the society. It is likely that the board was pressured into doing this. That would explain why the Lithuanian House and library were transferred to the Tilsit branch of the Ostdeutscher Heimatdienst organization, founded in 1919 in Marienburg to uphold East Prussia’s territorial unity.36 Some of the ethnographic museum’s exhibits 32 The decision made in the spring of 1919 to separate the Memel Territory from Germany encouraged a majority of the more active Prussian Lithuanians to transfer their activities from Tilsit to Memel. Amid the Prussian Lithuanians inclined toward closeness with Lithuania, this decision planted the hope that the region would sooner or later be joined to the Lithuanian state. This, understandably, encouraged them to put all their efforts toward activities no longer happening in Tilsit but in the Memel Territory; thus trying to justify the incorporation of the latter into Lithuania itself would help. That is why hardly any Prussian Lithuanian society leaders remained in Tilsit after the war. The exceptions were Vydūnas and Enzys Jagomastas. 33 Alexander Kurschat, “Litauische Literarische Gesellschaft in Tilsit,” Altpreußische Forschungen 5 (1928): 144. 34 Kovos keliais, 121. 35 Kurschat, “Litauische Literarische Gesellschaft,” 144. 36 Ibid.

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later found their way to the Home Museum (Heimatmuseum) that opened its doors in Tilsit on August 23, 1930,37 while the Lithuanian House ultimately became the property of the city of Tilsit. In tourist guides about Tilsit from the 1930s, this object that had represented the city prior to the war was no longer mentioned.38 There is testimony that in the 1930s this house was officially called “Home House” (Heimat-Häuschen).39 “Now the house’s interior has been updated, leaving no trace of what it contained earlier,” one witness wrote in 1938.40 This expulsion of meanings related to Prussian Lithuanians’ culture came about because they were no longer suited to the new image of Tilsit formed at the juncture of the 1920s and 1930s. Already during the Home Feast Days (Heimatfest) held in August 1930 this city’s Germanness was accentuated, as well as its associations with the Teutonic Order and the German Kultur mission in the East.41 The earlier set of meanings that had described Lithuania’s landscape (including the Lithuanian region’s colors: green-white-red) were utilized during these Feast Days for new aims, without any mention of the name “Lithuania.”42 In 1933 the German church in Tilsit was renamed the Deutschordenskirche (German Order’s Church),43 the city theatre was reorganized and renamed the Grenzland­ theater (Border Area Theater),44 and the Home Museum was renamed the 37 Heimatfest Tilsit 1930: vom 22. bis 24. August (Tilsit: Otto v. Mauderode, 1930), [4]. The museum’s founding was financed by the city of Tilsit, the state, and from private donations. It was formed by joining the city’s and private collections: Tilsit-Ragnit. Stadt und Landkreis. Ein ostpreußisches Heimatbuch, comp. and ed. Fritz Brix (Würzburg: Holzner, 1971), 104–105, 131. 38 Cf. Adolf Bartel, Kleiner Führer durch Tilsit u. Umgebung (Tilsit: Buchdruckerei Otto Fülleborn, [1933]). 39 Unsere Stimme 3 (August 1930), Sp. issue: Zum Heimatfest Tilsit, 22. bis 24. August 1930: 56–57; O. Wilmantienė, “Tilžės lietuwißko Namelio Istorija,” Lietuwos Keleiwis, September 25, 1938 (no. 222): 6. 40 Wilmantienė, “Tilžės lietuwißko Namelio,” 6. 41 Cf. Ernst Salge, “Im 700. Jahre des deutschen Ostpreußen,” Tilsiter Zeitung, August 23, 1930, Suppl.: Heimatfest Tilsit; Festschrift zum Heimatfest Tilsit vom 22. bis 24. August 1930 ([Tilsit: Otto v. Mauderode, 1930]), 5. 42 For the reaction of East Prussia’s Lithuanian activists to this, see the special issue of the Unsere Stimme [Our Voice] monthly prepared by Vydūnas and others: Unsere Stimme 3 (August 1930). 43 Naujasis Tilźês Keleiwis, June 28, 1933 (no. 51). 44 Tilsit-Ragnit. Stadt und Landkreis, 123–124.

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Grenzlandmuseum (Border Area Museum) in 1934.45 In a new tourism guide, Tilsit was now called “the city furthest to the northeast of Germany” (Nordöstlichste Stadt Deutschlands),46 with the following introductory presentation: “TILSIT, the German stronghold in the east from the earliest times, a fortress of the culture-bearing Teutonic Order, a preserver of German culture to our days.”47 We can see that Tilsit, a city that had prior to the war shown its uniqueness in the German context in terms of its Lithuanian regional particularities, now had to be viewed as part of one inseparable East Prussia, described in the interwar period through the Grenzland, Bollwerk, and Ordensland images. Endeavors were made that this city would had no more potentially “disintegrating” associations in terms of belonging to Prussian Lithuania. The most drastic case of a change in meanings related to reinforcing the Germanness of East Prussia—one that encompassed the entire province—took place several years after the National Socialists had become established in the government. It involved the “Germanization” of place names that marked this space and allowed it to be considered “their own.” In the province’s eastern part, the area of Lithuanian culture was marked by place names that clearly had meanings in Lithuanian, while in southern East Prussia there were still a number of toponyms that meant something in Polish. Officially, they were all used with German word endings or by applying German pronunciation, but the non-German origin of the place names, and the fact that the words did not mean anything in German, was obvious. Efforts to change such place names became more active in East Prussia in 1928–1931, when manor communities began to be eliminated in the province, causing a number of neighboring settlements and villages to be combined into village communities. These communities received new names that had meanings only in German, while since the eighteenth century, state institutions had been required to sanction the adoption of

45 Erwin Nadolny, “Der Neuaufbau des Tilsiter Grenzlandmuseums,” Alt-Preußen 4, no. 3 (1939): 87–89. I thank Rasa Banytė-Rowell for this reference. 46 Bartel, Kleiner Führer durch Tilsit. 47 Ibid., 2. This description was first encountered in 1930 in a publication released on the occasion of the Home Feast Days: Heimatfest Tilsit 1930, [1].

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new place names.48 In 1928–1931, however, the tendency to Germanize place names was less notable. Germanization accelerated in 1937–1938. On the order of the East Prussian gauleiter and ober-president Erich Koch, a massive place renaming campaign was declared in July 1937. For its implementation the Prussian Ministry of Science, Training, and Folk Education assembled an expert commission “for the Germanization of foreign place names in East Prussia,” which was directed by the ministry councilor, NSDAP member, ethnologist, and linguistics professor of the University of Königsberg Heinrich Harmjanz. Other members of the commission included Karl Heinrich Meyer, professor of Slavic philology at the University of Königsberg; Walther Ziesemer, a German-language specialist and director of the Home Research Institute (Institut für Heimatforschung) at the University of Königsberg; Max Hein, the director of the Königsberg State Archive, who was included in the commission as “knowledgeable in historical names confirmed in documents from the Order’s times”; and the university lecturer Viktor Falkenhahn.49 Falkenhahn, because he knew Lithuanian, was recommended by the Baltic studies specialist Georg Gerullis, who served as the rector of the University of Königsberg for two terms in a row in 1935–1937 but stood down in March 1937 over a conflict with Koch and left for Berlin. According to Falkenhahn himself, the gauleiter Koch ordered the commission to eliminate “Lithuanian” and “Polish” place names in East Prussia but to leave the “Prussian” names, as Koch was convinced that “the Prussians were a Germanic people.”50 Guided by the commission’s recommendations, on June 48 Fritz Gause, Neue Ortsnamen in Ostpreußen seit 1800, vol. 6 of Einzelschriften der Historischen Kommission für ost- und westpreußische Landesforschung (Königsberg: Kommissionsverlag Gräfe und Unzer, 1935), 5. 49 Kossert, Preußen, Deutsche oder Polen, 243–249; Andreas Kossert, “‘Grenzlandpolitik’ und Ostforschung an der Peripherie des Reiches. Das ostpreußische Masuren 1919– 1945,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 51, no. 2 (2003): 137–138. 50 [Testimony of Viktor Falkenhahn, presented to B. Aleknavičius in 1983, published in] Bernardas Aleknavičius, “Vietovardžių germanizavimas Mažojoje Lietuvoje,” Mažoji Lietuva, April 1, 1989 (no. 7 [20]): 7. This opinion may have been based on speculations that followed the appearance of Nils Åberg’s book (1919) arguing that the first inhabitants of East Prussia were Germanic. Jankuhn, resting on Åberg’s study, claimed that even before the Migration Period territories north and south of the Memel River were inhabited by Germanic peoples, while Prussians, who were “very different” from

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3, 1938, the ober-president released an order that 1,626 new settlement names would come into use beginning on July 16. In some cases, the spelling was changed, yet most of the toponyms were completely different. Of greatest relevance to our theme is the geographical distribution of the changed toponyms: 22 in the West Prussian Governmental District, 105 in Königsberg, 341 in Allenstein, and as many as 1,158 in Gumbinnen.51 These numbers clearly show that the place renaming campaign mostly affected the area once inhabited by Lithuanian speakers; after the campaign, only a handful of names that still carried meanings in Lithuanian remained (Tilsit, Ragnit, Gumbinnen, and some others). Pillkallen became Schloßberg, Stallupönen— Ebenrode, Tollmingkehmen—Tollmingen, Escherningken—Neupassau, Kallnen—­Bismarckshöh, Schilleningken—Ostdorf, and so on. Because “Prussian” place names, as mentioned, were tolerated, there were also cases where Lithuanian-sounding names were replaced by Prussian variants: thus, Dar­keh­men became Angerapp and the like. One other factor should be distinguished that contributed to Lithuania’s expulsion from the East Prussian spatial imagination. Lithuanian irredentism had a great influence on this trend, especially in the initial stages, from the end of 1918 to the mid-1920s. Although the title “Lithuania Minor” did not really catch on in East Prussia, the “two Lithuanias” conception continued to spread, and as time went on, that conception could not be easily ignored. In 1921 in Tilsit, Vydūnas’s brother, Georg Storost, published the History of Lithuania aimed at a German-speaking audience. It presented separate histories for Russian and Prussian Lithuania. Storost equated Prussian Lithuania with the historical landscapes of Scalovia and Nadrovia, and thus he supported the boundary once suggested by Toeppen. He depicted the battles of the GDL against the Teutonic Order as “Battles over the new Lithuanian and Prussian borders,” while the Treaty of Melno of 1422 that established the “border” between the GDL and the Teutonic Order, was seen as having

Lithuanians, and Latvians arrived only during the Migration Period (Jankuhn, Gibt es ein Preußisch-Litauen, 5). 51 Calculated based on lists of place name titles, presented in Fritz R. Barran, Städte-Atlas Ostpreussen, 2nd ed. (Leer: Rautenberg, 1991), 200–212.

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introduced a divide between the two Lithuanias that was later deepened by the Reformation.52 Reacting to similar ideas that expressed Lithuanian irredentism, after the separation of the Memel Territory from Germany instructions were issued to collect information about the distribution of Lithuanians and their activities in the remaining part of East Prussia. This initiative came from Count Georg Franz Wilhelm von Lambsdorff, appointed in August 1919 to act as the commissar of the German Reich and Prussian State in the Memel Territory, who oversaw this territory’s transfer to the jurisdiction of the Entente states and made sure that the Reich’s interests were safeguarded there after the region’s separation from Germany. In the summer of 1921, the commissar, who then resided in Gumbinnen, charged the Tilsit county councilor for education Christoph Kairies with collecting this information. Kairies led the Ostdeutscher Heimatdienst organization in Tilsit until 1933 and headed the Tilsit branch of Memellandbund, a union that sought to recover the Memel Territory. An obvious supporter of East Prussia’s uniformity, Kairies prepared two memorandums regarding his task: the first was about the situation of “Lithuanianhood” in the territory south of the Memel River;53 the second, broader in scope, addressed Prussian Lithuanians’ activities and goals in general.54 These two documents are of interest to us in several respects. First, in presenting the historical overview, Kairies still believed that the Teutonic Order had encountered Lithuanians in Scalovia and Nadrovia in the thirteenth century; more so, he had adopted verbatim Georg Storost’s claim that the Treaty of Melno of 1422 had divided the two Lithuanias.55 Thus, here we see the obvious spread of the “two Lithuanias” conception. Kairies was entrusted with collecting data about the spread of the Lithuanian language in East Prussia, and here it is important to note that in carrying out this task, he did not rely on official statistics but gathered information about parishes 52 Georg Storost, Litauische Geschichte. Von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart (Tilsit: Buchdruckerei Pawlowski, 1921), 133, 136–138. 53 It has been published: Christoph Kairies, “Denkschrift ‘Das Litauertum in Ostpreus­sen südlich des Memelstromes,’ August 1921,” Annaberger Annalen 2 (1994): 76–110. 54 The typewritten copy of this memorandum is kept at the Herder Institute Library in Marburg: Kairies, Litauer in Preussen. 55 Kairies, Litauer in Preussen, 3, 11.

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where Mass was still held in Lithuanian. Thus, Kairies used the “alternative” method conceived by Prussian Lithuanians themselves. This suggests that counterarguments were being prepared for any potential Lithuanian claims. Having himself visited parishes in five northern East Prussian counties and received information from the others via surveys, Kairies found that Mass in Lithuanian in the summer of 1921 was still held north of the line denoted by the villages of Gilge (now Matrosovo), Laukischken (Saranskoe), Mehlauken, Popelken (Vysokoe), Gr. Skaisgirren (Bolshakovo), Szillen (Zhilino), Grünheide (Kaluzhskoe), Kussen (Vesnovo), Pillkallen, Gr. Schorellen (Saratovskoe), Schillehnen (Pobedino).56 This territory spanned a small northeastern part of Labiau County, almost all of Niederung County, the remains of Tilsit County that were not joined to the Memel Territory, a majority of Ragnit County, and a majority of Pillkallen County. Like the authors who faced this question before him, Kairies highlighted the decrease of the Lithuanian territory in Prussia and stressed that “now it was just a question of time as to when its fate would be finally determined.”57 Nevertheless, his analysis allowed the levels of government to localize a territory in which, as Kairies suggested, it was necessary to concentrate efforts to influence Lithuanians so that they would finally accept the “gift” of German Kultur. The local administration closely followed the Lithuanian mood in this territory. They were especially concerned over the revived tradition of Prussian Lithuanian festivals held on Rambynas, which ended up in the Memel Territory, as they attracted Lithuanians from both Memel and Tilsit.58 The maintenance of communication between Lithuanians on opposite sides of the new border, as well as signals coming from the German embassy in Kaunas in August 1923 that Lithuanians might not be satisfied with the Memel Territory and might march on Tilsit encouraged not only the vigilance of the diplomatic corps, especially of Germany’s consulate general in Memel, but also closer attention to the movement of Lithuanians on both sides of the border.59 56 Ibid., 6–7. 57 Ibid., 153. 58 Joachim Tauber, “Überlegungen zur Bedeutung der kleinlitauischen Bewegungen in Ostpreußen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Selbstbewusstsein und Modernisierung, 115, 118. 59 Ibid., 119–122.

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All of this suggests that, in contrast to the situation before the Great War, Lithuanian irredentism was causing Prussian Lithuanians’ activities to be regarded as “suspicious,” at a minimum, and in some cases even potentially threatening. The growing belief in two Lithuanias meant that Prussian Lithuanians’ actions could at any time be associated with “greater Lithuanian insinuations.” As a result, interest in Lithuanians’ uniqueness and further statements on the existence of the Lithuanian region in East Prussia became impossible. Finally, a no less important factor that encouraged Lithuania’s expulsion was that when the Memel Territory was separated from Germany, almost no Lithuanian speakers remained in East Prussia. A German-wide census conducted in June 1925, using prewar statistical methods, allowed the actual number left in the postwar period to be determined. During this census, only 5,593 people in East Prussia denoted the Lithuanian language as their Muttersprache or two native languages—Lithuanian and German—of whom 1,159 were from Niederung, 1,102 from Tilsit-Ragnit, 961 from Labiau, and 868 from Pillkallen counties, with 524 in the city of Tilsit.60 Based on The German Atlas of Border Region Languages,61 which was prepared from this census data, Lithuanians simply “amalgamated” into the German-speaking population’s territory: their distribution in diagrams presented in the atlas was in effect indiscernible. As representatives of the Lithuanian nationality in East Prussia were thus transformed into a marginal minority that no longer stood out in any way, the further use of the name “Prussian Lithuania” and this region’s existence in East Prussia also proved to be inadequate. In this way, the conditions were created to erase from Germans’ spatial imagination the existence of a unique region in East Prussia. No longer was there a Prussian Lithuania on the left bank of the Memel River. However, it would be wrong to think that strategies applied before the war 60 Calculated based on Karl Keller, Die fremdsprachige Bevölkerung in den Grenzgebieten des Deutschen Reiches, Begleitschrift zum Kartenwerk: Sprachenatlas der deutschen Grenzgebiete (Berlin: Zentralverlag, 1929), 69–71. 61 Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst, ed., Sprachenatlas der Grenzgebiete des Deutschen Reiches nach den Ergebnissen der Volkszählung vom 16.VI.1925 (Berlin: Zentralverlag, 1929), 4: Provinz Ostpreußen.

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Figure 34. A new means of depicting nationalities statistics graphically highlighting German domination. It was used in an atlas from the interwar period that presented the 1925 German census data. The current sheet, Ostpreußen, shows the Germans’ portion in every concrete county in red, the bilingual (German and Lithuanian) population in dark brown, and the Lithuanians in brown. Fragment from the Sprachenatlas der Grenzgebiete des Deutschen Reiches nach den Ergebnissen der Volkszählung vom 16.VI.1925, ed. Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst (Berlin: Zentralverlag, 1929). The fragment is published with permission from the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin–Preussischer Kulturbesitz), Kart. W 25191/64 – Blatt 4.

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by which it could be appropriated became irrelevant all of a sudden. Indeed, these strategies were simply concentrated on a newly defined area—the Memel Territory.

6.2. IN THE BATTLE OVER MEMEL/KLAIPĖDA On January 9, 1920, when Germany signed the agreement for the transfer of Memel and Danzig territories and ratified the Treaty of Versailles the next day, the flow of the Memel and Russ rivers, which had never before served as a border, divided two territories of unequal political status.62 One—East Prussia—was physically isolated from Germany itself, the other—the land north of the mentioned rivers—was for the first time termed Territoire de Memel, Territory of Memel in Paris Peace Conference documents; Germans started calling it Memelgebiet or Memelland and Lithuanians Klaipėdos kraštas. Governance was transferred on February 15, 1920, to the newly arrived French high commissioner, appointed on behalf of the Council of Ambassadors to act as an administrative body there. In the space where a part of Prussian Lithuania was once found, political changes created a new territorial derivate for a term of nineteen years that had unique meanings applied to it at lightning speed in both the Lithuanian and German spatial imaginations, allowing both cultures to consider this space “their own” and to fight over it in political and propaganda battles for close to seven decades.63 What changes to specifically German and Lithuanian national culture meanings, related to the former Prussian Lithuanian region, and their spatial imaginations did the appearance of the Memel Territory produce? With the emergence of this territory, in a surprising way, the same appropriation models were applied to this space in both German and 62 Many of the ideas expressed in this subsection come from an earlier book that thoroughly analyzed the confrontations of Germans and Lithuanians over Memel/ Klaipėda in the interwar period (Safronovas, Kampf um Identität). Thus, additional references have been omitted. For more on the “competition” between Lithuania and Germany over Memel, see Klein, “Versäumte Chance zweier Kulturen”; Žalys, Kova dėl identiteto; and Ruffmann, Deutsche und Litauer. 63 See Giedrė Milerytė, Mažosios Lietuvos lietuvių egziliniai likimai: 1944–1959 metai (Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2009), 98–108; Silva Pocytė, “Die Suche nach der verlorenen Heimat und Geschichte in der Periodika der deutschen und litauischen Memelländer außerhalb des Landes nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Annaberger Annalen 18 (2010): 22–43; Safronovas, Kampf um Identität.

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Lithuanian national cultures that had earlier been applied in both cases to Prussian Lithuania. Lithuanians started applying the name “Lithuania Minor” to this area with increasing frequency. The local Germans, reacting to this land’s separation from Germany and the “greater Lithuanian propaganda,” developed in the first half of 1919 a “pure German” land discourse, which had no implications for Prussian Lithuanians’ existence nearby.64 However, as soon as the Treaty of Versailles was signed and it became evident that the decision to separate Memel from Germany was irrevocable, the area’s “pure German” discourse was replaced, especially in the region itself, by appeals to return to the order of the old Prussian Lithuanian landscape, in which Germans and Lithuanians lived together, the latter “enjoying” the “protection” of Germans’ Kultur. In both cases, this application of meanings, once used in reference to Prussian Lithuania, onto the Memel Territory is not so difficult to explain. Lithuania was interested in maintaining the irredentism that encouraged the “two Lithuanias” idea, thus convincing society of this land’s vital importance. The Memel Territory’s political and economic leaders, seeking to avoid its incorporation into Lithuania, wanted to keep Prussian Lithuanians, who made up a significant part of its population, within their sphere of influence, stopping Lithuania from persuading Prussian Lithuanians to side with Lithuania Major and thus “protecting” them from any potential “greater Lithuanian” impact. When the Council of Ambassadors agreed to hand over jurisdiction of this territory to Lithuania, following the coup d’état staged by the Lithuanian government in 1923, these appropriation models gained strength. In the German case, the rightist political and economic elite that emerged during the French administration period in the Memel Territory sought to maintain its influence by subordinating itself to Germany’s impact and financial support. In Germany itself, few actually reconciled themselves to the loss of Memel, and although the recovery of Memel was far from the Reich’s main aspiration, tensions remained alive over this territory during the entire interwar period. In seeking to avoid declaring the Memel 64 Cf. Prûsû Lietuwiû Balsas, April 3, 1919 (no. 29); May 15, 1919 (no. 46); May 17, 1919 (no. 47); May 22, 1919 (no. 49).

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Territory a free state—a project that, with the support of France’s high commissioner, was initiated in 1921 by the local trade and industry elite— Germany sent Lithuania various signals in 1922 suggesting that it would not object if Lithuania occupied this land.65 However, as soon as Lithuania was bold enough to take such a step, and Memel’s autonomous status within Lithuania was confirmed, the German leaders understood that by exerting constant pressure over “Germans’ rights” in Memel, they could to a certain extent keep Lithuania as a whole in their pockets. This realization prevented the elimination of the Memel Territory from Germans’ spatial imagination and encouraged anti-integration moods among inhabitants in the region itself that in the local milieu were meant to quell the concept that Lithuania was “ours” and that “we” were Lithuania’s for eternity. All of this partially explains why amid the meanings about the Memel Territory that circulated throughout Lithuania in the interwar period, the irredentism trajectory continued to develop. Due to the Convention concerning the Territory of Memel regulating its autonomous status within Lithuania, which—as the Lithuanian government understood perfectly well—was actually a thorn in the side for Lithuania in integrating this territory, and due to the disloyalty of the bulk of the local population, and ultimately due to not wanting to worsen ties with Germany, Lithuanians still behaved as if occupied Memel was not theirs. We might see this reluctance as a continuation of the prewar integrality problem between Prussian Lithuanians and “Lithuania Major” nationals that to a large degree determined the complications in appropriating the Memel Territory during the interwar period. Having conducted an ingenious military and diplomatic operation in 1923, Lithuania physically transformed the Memel Territory into a space “of its own.” The belief continued to be upheld in the country that a majority of the region’s population were 65 Rudolfas Valsonokas, Klaipėdos problema (Klaipėda: Rytas, 1932), 84; Alfred E. Senn, The Great Powers: Lithuania and the Vilna Question 1920–1928, vol. XI of Studies in East European History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), 109; Vytautas Žalys, “Das Memelproblem in der litauischen Außenpolitik (1923–1939),” in Zwischen Staatsnation und Minderheit, 251–252; Alfred E. Senn, “Detalės ir asmenybės,” in 1923 metų sausio įvykiai, 53.

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Lithuanians, while the narrative masking the real circumstances behind the operation of 1923, although admitting participation of volunteers from Lithuania, stressed a local uprising demanding to be joined to Lithuania. So the very goal of legitimizing the addition of Memel to Lithuania forced the government to maintain the idea of “our own” Memel Territory. Yet the sovereignty of Lithuania in this land was restricted by the Convention and the factor of dependence on Germany, while voting results at the local Landtag (parliament which Lithuanians called seimelis) showed that three-quarters or even four-fifths of the population sympathized with anti-integration political forces ill-disposed toward Lithuania. So the locals, who, as it was imagined in Lithuania, made up the majority and were Lithuanians, behaved in an utterly “non-Lithuanian” way. To the contrary, they clearly demonstrated disloyalty to Lithuania. What measures then were used to keep Memel/Klaipėda within the orbit of “our own” spaces in the German and Lithuanian national cultures, and how many links did those measures have with the appropriation strategies applied before the war? In the German case, in the Memel Territory itself, these strategies were exploited to further postulate, only more forcefully, the territory’s uniqueness while entrenching in the imagination a new framework of such uniqueness in place of the Prussian Lithuanian landscape—the Memel Territory. The system of meanings that allowed identification with the Prussian Lithuania region, that up to the war was maintained in order to enrich with this landscape’s uniqueness the East Prussian Heimat self-awareness, now had to be adapted to facilitate the development of the Memel Territory’s Heimat self-awareness. Toward this end, after the region’s separation from Germany there were attempts to apply the Memelländer concept, which in a purely geographical sense referred to all of those people who lived in Memelland, that is, the Memel Territory. The Memelländer category was defined for probably the first time and used as a basis to mobilize the region’s population in 1921,66 when its rightist, pro-German political and economic leaders, in seeking to have this territory declared a “free state” after the Danzig example, decided to 66 “Ein Aufruf der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für den Freisstaat Memelland,” Memeler Dampfboot, December 11, 1921 (no. 290).

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hold a plebiscite wherein their determination would be confirmed by the will of the majority. After the land was joined to Lithuania, the Memelländer concept became an anti-integration tool of the political parties established there. It was used to mobilize the local population—Germans and Prussian Lithuanians alike. This kind of mobilization was required in order to ensure that in the elections to the local Landtag, whose rights were defined in the Convention of 1924, Germany’s secretly supported anti-integrationist political powers would win a majority. They presented their activities as if they showed concern over protecting the region’s autonomy, guaranteed by the Convention, from those whom it continued to deride, calling them Großlitauer—that is, from the impingement of Lithuania’s central government. This was how the system of meanings related to the Prussian Lithuanian landscape up to the war gravitated toward that which I have termed the Memellanderism ideology. This name, given to the system of meanings in circulation in the Memel Territory during the interwar period, is based on an analogy to Traba’s suggested “East Prussianism.” This parallel is not accidental. Indeed, the main prerequisites for the development of both systems of meanings were the same, and the vocabulary they used did not differ a great deal either. The three main concepts by which the Memelländer peculiarity and uniqueness were denoted in this ideology’s discourse were Kultur, Volk, and Heimat. It was claimed that one Memel Territory Volk existed that consisted of the local population, Germans and Prussian Lithuanians, united by a common Heimat self-awareness and the same German Kultur, which the region’s anti-integrationist political forces continually insisted had to be protected from “greater Lithuanian Lithuanianization.” Here we can also see an analogy with East Prussia, as there these concepts played the same role in defining “East Prussianism” (only there the Bollwerk image of a fortress of culture and civilization was used instead of the Kultur concept).67 After 1933, as in East Prussia,68 the Memel Territory’s inhabitants were increasingly oriented toward the National Socialists’ newly created Volksgemeinschaft—the pursuit of an ethnically, racially, and even socially 67 Traba, Ostpreußen, 144–288. 68 Ralf Meindl, “Vorposten und Grenzland. Ostpreussische Identitäten 1933–1945,” in Daugiareikšmės tapatybės, 179–187.

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uniform nation. That is why earlier meaning elements related to the Prussian Lithuanian landscape gradually faded into the background. Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1938, with preparations under way for the Memel Territory’s “return to the Reich,” they were required again. The content given to the Memelländer concept and the system of meanings related to that concept was at that time suited to another unifying category, Memeldeutsche. It was used to describe every member of the Volksgemeinschaft being created in the Memel Territory after Nazi Germany’s social control model, whose support had to guarantee the region’s smooth Anschluss, enacted by Germany in March 1939. This time the old system of meanings related to Prussian Lithuania was exploited, essentially giving Prussian Lithuanians “a chance” —not blocking their opportunity to honorably join the mentioned Volksgemeinschaft. The Memelländer ideology combined German national culture meanings oriented to the Volksnation perspective, and in this way it created an opportunity for the Memel Territory’s population to remain within this culture’s orbit. That alone must have acted as a preventive measure in the population’s spatial imagination, minimizing any reasons for considering oneself a part of Lithuania. Moreover, looking at the main periodicals that promoted the Memelländer ideology (especially Memeler Dampfboot, but also Lietuwißka Ceitunga), it is clear that these newspapers vibrantly and efficiently reacted to events in Germany and East Prussia. Indeed, news from Germany was usually presented here before news from Lithuania, while information from East Prussia received at least as much attention as information from Lithuania. This coverage continued to uphold the sense of closeness with Germany and East Prussia, and the Memel Territory’s residents were kept within the same information space with East Prussia. The spread of the Memelländer ideology and the unimpeded communication links with Germany and East Prussia formed the spatial imagination of those Germans and Prussian Lithuanians affected by this information field, in which the function of “their own” space hardly belonged to the Republic of Lithuania. Negative attitudes toward the republic were consciously instilled in the region. With the educational system in the jurisdiction of the autonomous government, this point applies especially to the younger generation. According to data from 1934, only 9 percent of

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primary school children in the region were being taught in Lithuanian; the remainder had their lessons in German.69 In a majority of schools, there were teachers who did not even understand Lithuanian, whose responses about Lithuania were in many cases mocking and had to instill in pupils’ minds the image of the Memel Territory as a part of German Kultur in the barbarian lands. In 1929, when the Lithuanian Ministry of Education inspected primary schools in the Memel Territory, there were occasions where pupils were convinced that President Paul von Hindenburg of Germany was the ruler of the Memel Territory, that the central office of the Memel Territory’s government was in Berlin, and that Lithuania’s capital city was Moscow.70 This should come as little surprise, keeping in mind that in the history and geography textbooks used in the Memel Territory’s schools in the interwar period, the region’s annexation by Lithuania in 1923 was depicted as an occupation against the people’s will, and schools promoted the view that the region would not always belong to Lithuania. Some schools saw no problem in teaching from prewar maps that depicted the Memel Territory as a part of Germany, and certain schools used maps of the region itself that flaunted the name “Russia” instead of “Lithuania.”71 It should be said that not just the Memel Territory’s population in many cases saw East Prussia and Germany as their own space. The system of meanings formed in Germany itself, which determined its inhabitants’ spatial imagination, expressed intransigence with the Versailles System, and after 1920 Memel’s place in the “German space” was expressed in various ways. Judging by the texts that were used to foster knowledge of the Heimat in the East Prussian Province during the interwar period, the Memel Territory was still associated with East Prussia. In many cases the 69 Jonas Jablonskis, “Kelios pastabos dėl mokyklų Klaipėdos krašte,” Vairas 10, no. 4 (1934): 418. 70 Ibid., 421; Albertas Juška, Mažosios Lietuvos mokykla (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2003), 311. 71 [Report by the Head of Klaipėda district department of the Lithuanian security police J. Kazlauskas on the pro-German moods in Klaipėda region, second half of 1934.], Lietuvos centrinis valstybės archyvas [Lithuanian Central State Archives], f. 377, ap. 9, b. 112, l. 46, 52.

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Figure 35.  A graphic of the shape of East Prussia integrating the Memel Territory. The cover of a tourist guide to East Prussia published in the popular series Grieben Grenzlandführer für die wandernde Jugend (Berlin: Grieben-Verlag, 1931).

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maps of the East Prussian Province used in these teaching texts were printed to include the Memel Territory, whose clear “protrusion” to the north must logically have contraindicated such a plan. Hence we can assume that the choice was deliberate. The Memel Territory’s political dependence, in fact, was in almost all cases denoted, but only rarely were graphical measures used to mark its territory other than those used to depict East Prussia. In some cases, these texts were illustrated simply by marking a graphical contour of East Prussia, into which the Memel Territory was incorporated.72 The territory was depicted in a similar way in the Heimat atlas used in the province’s schools.73 The same strategies were applied in tourist literature regarding East Prussia. Here the Memel Territory was shown as a kind of continuation of East Prussia that everyone traveling through the province was recommended to stop and visit. As with the Free City of Danzig, the Memel Territory was included in the main tourist guides for East Prussia, while the province’s territory in such guides was cartographically always represented including the Danzig and Memel areas.74 We can guess how the “ordinary German” had to imagine the Memel Territory based on the 72 Cf. maps published in Ludwig Nehring, Kurzgefaßte Landeskunde von Ostpreußen. Ein Merk- und Wiederholungsbuch für die Hand der Volksschüler (Braunsberg: Benders Buchhandlung [Hans Grimme], 1924); Nehring, Heimatkunde der Provinz Ostpreußen, 20–21; Sahm, Heimatkunde 1931, 61; Nieth, “Provinz Ostpreussen,” 2, 7; and Nehring, Heimatkunde von Ostpreußen, 28–29. 73 Otto Harms-Wiechert, ed., Heimatatlas für Ostpreußen, on behalf of and in cooperation with the Ostpreußischer Lehrerverein (Leipzig: List und von Bressensdorf, 1926). 74 Ostpreussen, Danzig, Memelgebiet (Meyers Reisebücher) (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1931; 2nd ed. 1934); Fritz Taeuber, ed., Ostpreußen (Grieben Grenzlandführer für die wandernde Jugend) (Berlin: Grieben-Verlag Albert Goldschmidt, 1931); Ernst Thomaschky, Wasserwanderführer durch das nördliche Ostpreußen und das Memelland (Tilsit: Selbstverl., [1933]); Hans Zippel, Das schöne Ostpreußen, no. 21 of Mit Rucksack und Nagelschuh (Berlin: Triasdruck, 1933); Wanderführer durch Ostpreußen, Memelland, Danzig. Jugendherbergen 1934 (Königsberg: [s.n.], 1934); Ostpreußen, vol. 54 of Grieben Reiseführer (Berlin: Grieben-Verlag, 1935); Ernst Thomaschky, Wasserwanderführer durch Ostpreußen, Danzig, Memelland, vol. 25 of Stromheilreihe des deutschen Kanuverbandes (Munich: Deutscher Kanuverband; Königsberg: Ost-Europa-Verlag, 1935); Reichsverband für Deutsche Jugendherbergen, ed., Wanderführer durch Ostpreußen, vol. 2 of DJH-Wanderführer (Berlin: Limpert, 1936); Landesfremdver­ kehrsverband Ostpreußen, ed., Wir reisen nach Ostpreussen, Danzig und dem Memelgebiet (Königsberg: Königsberger Verlagsanstalt, [1937]).

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geographic guide for East Prussia aimed at a German-speaking audience, published in 1926 as part of a popular series that started to appear even before the war. It was presented as being inhabited by Germans, a land separated from Germany that was ruled by Lithuanians illegitimately and arbitrarily. Memel itself was called a “German” city, older than Königsberg, while the spatial links with the Memel Territory went through the “German” Curonian Spit,75 whose southern section remained part of Germany, while the northern section protruded into the boundary of the Memel Territory. All of this, understandably, testifies that the territory separated from Germany in 1919 was not meant to disappear from Germans’ spatial imagination. Moreover, it had to continue to be understood as linked to East Prussia, thus, interpreting the Memel Territory in the context of meanings about the German space “severed and hacked away by the enemies,” and the German Bollwerk and Grenzland. A much more complicated task in the interwar period was the integration of the Memel Territory, or Klaipėda Region, into Lithuanians’ spatial imagination: it was not just Lithuania’s inhabitants that had to make this territory their own, but Prussian Lithuanians also had to start seeing themselves in the new Lithuanian state context. It should be said that at least ten years after Memel’s addition, no noticeable changes in this regard had taken place. Throughout the 1920s, society in Lithuania was mobilized to fight for another irredentist territory, the Vilnius Region, while more attention was shown to Memel in an economic sense only at the end of the 1920s. In an ideological sense, the shift in focus happened even later—only in 1933, when Lithuania’s political course changed in the Memel Territory in response to the National Socialist challenges that made Germany’s interference into Lithuania’s affairs no longer bearable for Kaunas, the state’s provisional capital. This change was visible in the country’s oppositional (Popular Peasants’ Union) press to mark the tenth anniversary of the region’s joining to Lithuania: “Vilnius is the most important center of life from our past … But Klaipėda—as we can all now see—is one of the most important, perhaps most vital center of Lithuania’s future. Now Klaipėda is incomparably more 75 Fritz Mielert, Ostpreußen nebst dem Memelgebiet und der Freien Stadt Danzig, vol. 35 of Monographien zur Erdkunde (Bielefeld: Verhagen & Klasing, 1926), 139–148.

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Figure 36. Members of the Lithuanian State Drama Theater after a performance of The Fern Flower (Paparčio žiedas) on Rambynas, June 22, 1931. Photograph published in Lietuvos Pajūris (1987, no. 65, p. 519).

important to Lithuania than Vilnius. Klaipėda … is a necessity of Lithuania’s independence, the ticket to its future.”76 The measures that were taken to defend and strengthen the country’s authority in the eyes of Lithuania’s population, and to finally make the Klaipėda Region feel like it belonged to Lithuanians, led to several changes in the spatial imagination. One was briefly mentioned above: the discourse about Lithuania Minor was transferred to the Klaipėda Region. A large part of the meanings that made this territory familiar in Lithuania in the interwar period, that legitimized its belonging to Lithuania and ultimately fostered anti-German attitudes, was adapted from the prewar system of meanings. Paganism as the Lithuanian golden age, the battles against the Teutonic Order, images of the “renaissance” of Lithuanian culture and language in Lithuania Minor, and the act of strengthening the anti-German factor in them continued to be exploited by applying them to the Klaipėda Region.77 Rambynas—next to which Martynas Jankus, now promoted as the “Lithuania Minor patriarch,” 76 Lietuvos žinios, January 14, 1933 (no. 11 [4101]): 1. 77 Cf. Safronovas, Kampf um Identität, 93–108.

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settled—continued to carry out the function of a place for symbolic communication with the “ancestors,” becoming a location for the annual symbolic declaration of unity between Lithuania Major and Minor.78 The efforts that Lithuanians had until now directed toward the appropriation of Lithuania Minor were now concentrated on the Memel Territory. It is no wonder that the concept “Lithuania Minor” itself started being applied more frequently to identify this land.79 In 1933, during the tenth anniversary of the region’s joining to Lithuania, some of the press called this occasion the anniversary of “unity between Lithuania Major and Minor,” stating that in 1923 it was not just Klaipėda that Lithuania “attached,” but “all” of Lithuania Minor.80 The Lithuania and Klaipėda Cultural Cooperation Union, founded in 1933 and uniting Kaunas’s and Klaipėda’s public figures, who engaged in extremely intensive activities, declared its goal of “strengthening cultural ties between Lithuania Major and Minor” (that is, the Klaipėda Region);81 in addition, sometimes it also called itself the Lithuania Major and Minor Cultural Cooperation Union (at the juncture of 1935 and 1936 it was renamed the West Lithuania Union).82 Unlike the term “Klaipėda Region,” which primarily had the connotations of an autonomous administrative unit, the name “Lithuania Minor” arose from the “two Lithuanias” concept, thus showing a direct link with Lithuania Major, and carried the meaning of a sacred space for every Lithuanian, where centuries-long “battles” took place over positions of “Lithuanianness.” It was important to transfer this meaning to the Klaipėda Region, as with the strengthening of revisionist moods in Germany and in the Memel Territory itself, the question of this territory’s integration became ever more relevant. Another, related change to the Lithuanian spatial imagination was implemented in the interwar period: the Klaipėda Region’s association with 78 Dangiras Mačiulis, “Pasisavinant Mažąją Lietuvą. Vienijančios kolektyvinės atminties konstravimas Lietuvoje tarpukariu,” in Erdvių pasisavinimas, 220–225. 79 Cf. “Įžangos žodis,” Mažoji Lietuva 1 (1932): 1. 80 Lietuvos žinios, January 14, 1933 (no. 11 [4101]): 1–2. 81 Kazys Pakštas, “Kodėl įsisteigė Lietuvos Klaipėdos kultūrinio bendradarbiavimo sąjunga,” Tėvų žemė, January 16, 1934 (no. 1): 2. 82 Cf. Didžiosios ir Mažosios Lietuvos Kultūrinio Bendradarbiavimo S-gos Biuletenis, April 5, 1935 (no. 1).

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the sea, the attempt to instill the understanding that Lithuania was a “maritime state,” related to the sea via economic and even political images calling it the “wage earner,” “guarantee of independence,” and so on. These measures not only aimed to overcome and potentially change the mentality of Lithuanians as an “agrarian nation” (or, as was often claimed during the interwar period using classical geopolitical concepts, a “continental nation”),83 but also to foster in society the awareness of how vitally important the inclusion of the Klaipėda Region was to Lithuania. In the Lithuanian information space, in the interwar period this territory increasingly became known as “Lithuania’s coast.” Lithuania’s idea of an “exit to the sea” was in 1923–1939 almost exclusively identified with use of the Klaipėda port, while the strip of coastline with Palanga and Šventoji that belonged to Lithuania, which was not included in the boundary of the Memel Territory, featured much less often and was not considered of equal importance. The links between Klaipėda and the sea are also well demonstrated by the start of the forced integration of the Memel Territory, when great efforts were made to spread maritime images and to introduce Lithuanians to the sea (many of whom had never actually seen it before). The promotion of maritime culture in Lithuania—starting with a mass event, the organization of Sea Day in Memel in 1934, where the conditions were created for several tens of thousands of participants from all of Lithuania to attend, and ending with the founding of a maritime magazine, the creation of a sailing school, and ultimately the formation of Lithuania’s maritime trade fleet—had to entrench the image in Lithuanians’ spatial imagination that Lithuania’s “exit to the sea” in Klaipėda was a natural fact in line with its economic needs and even its culture. But the existence of the Memel Territory in the interwar period also changed the spatial imagination of Prussian Lithuanians, at least among those who were inclined to grow closer to Lithuania. This territory’s separation from Germany ultimately encouraged the pro-Lithuanian Prussian 83 Cf. Kazys Pakštas, Baltijos Respublikų politinė geografija: politinės geografijos problemos, nagrinėjamos atsižvelgiant į Baltijos tautų likimą (Kaunas: Spindulys, 1929), 103; Jūratis, “Mūsų pajūrys turi būti apgyvendintas, kad svetimi smėlys jo neužpiltų,” Lietuvos aidas, August 8, 1934 (no. 179 [2146]): 3; Kazys Pakštas, Baltijos jūra: jos fizinė ir antropogeografinė studija (Klaipėda: Jūros dienos komitetas, 1934), 6, 70–80; “Spausdintu jūrišku žodžiu į lietuvių tautą (Leidėjų pasisakymas),” Jūra, August 1, 1935 (no. 1): 6.

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Lithuanians to accept a concept almost unused before the war, “Lithuania Minor,” to identify their region. Clearly, by refusing the term “Prussian Lithuania,” the aim was to push out the concept “Prussian” with its links to another state and another culture, instead instilling the term “Minor” which expressed claims to one culture’s existence. The objectively existing strangeness of two Lithuanias had to be overwhelmed by the idea of “close Lithuanias.” A distinct and specific event fostered change in these concepts as the idea of national unity, related to the integration of the two Lithuanias, began to be realized. Evidence of this change can be found in the newspaper of the National Council of Prussian Lithuanian Association, Prûsû Lietuwiû Balsas (The Prussian Lithuanian Voice). The periodical, first published in January 1919, initially divided information into two columns, “Prusu Lietuwa” (Prussian Lithuania) and “Didzioji Lietuwa” (Lithuania Major). By the end of May 1919, once the results of the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference started to emerge, the column “Prussian Lithuania” was replaced by the column “Iß Lietuwos” (From Lithuania). Finally, in late June, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, which the newspaper interpreted as evidence that Lithuania’s claims had been heard and that the Klaipėda Region would be separated from Germany and added to Lithuania,84 the columns were titled “Iß Didziosios Lietuwos” (From Lithuania Major) and “Iß Mazosios Lietuwos” (From Lithuania Minor), even though neither the titles of the mentioned association nor the publication itself were changed. Although the understanding that the term “Prussian Lithuania” was more widely accepted by the area’s inhabitants alone did not lead to changing the newspaper’s name, the goal was to “familiarize” readers with the new term. Another aspect related to the Memel Territory’s incorporation into Lithuania, however, was that the Lithuanians remaining in part of Germany (on the left bank of the Memel) lost their right to state that they lived in Lithuania. News from the Memel Territory and remaining parts of Prussian Lithuania in Tilsit was included in the column “Iß Lietuwos ir Apygardzio” (From Lithuania and the District); Nauja Lietuwißka Ceitunga, released until 1923, titled a similar column “Iß Lietuwos ir Prusu” (From Lithuania and Prussia). Immediately after the Memel Territory’s addition to Lithuania, Tilźês Keleiwis 84 Prûsû Lietuwiû Balsas, June 24, 1919 (no. 62); July 20, 1919 (no. 79).

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changed its column’s title to “Iß Tilzes ir kitu Kraßtu” (From Tilsit and Other Regions). In Naujasis Tilźês Keleiwis, published from 1924, the change in attitudes that formed the spatial imagination can be seen even more clearly: the column “Iß musu Kraßto” (From Our Region) contained announcements related to East Prussia (i.e., not Prussian Lithuania but East Prussia became “our” region), while under the heading “Iß Klaipedos Kraßto ir Lietuwos” (From the Klaipeda Region and Lithuania) were announcements from the Lithuanian state and the Memel Territory. This new description of “our” and “not quite our” land, which remained in the publication throughout the interwar period, did not depend entirely on the Memel Territory’s addition to Lithuania. Rather it seems to have expressed the need not to provoke society in East Prussia, whose attitudes to the continued use of the word “Lithuania” we already discussed. There is not necessarily one unambiguous answer to the question—to what extent were these changes effective in the interwar period? In Lithuania Major the concept “Lithuania Minor” was instilled consciously, in order to shake off references to the term “Prussian Lithuania” that implied foreign dependence.85 However, in the Prussian Lithuanian milieu, this change in concepts, it appears, continued to exacerbate tensions. Judging from the comments of Adomas Brakas, who edited the magazine Mažoji Lietuva (Lithuania Minor) in 1932,86 this tension arose because (1) even though the term “Lithuania Minor” was in effect approved, the usage tradition of the term “Prussian Lithuania” still had to be considered; 85 In 1935, Vincas Vileišis tried to give logical arguments for the change in terminology. According to him, “Lithuania Minor” was more suitable than “Prussian Lithuania” as the latter had lost its political relevance when Lithuania Major united with part of Lithuania Minor, while the Prussian state “factually vanished in 1871 with the creation of the German Reich” (the argument was unfounded because, as is known, Prussia existed from 1871 as a constituent part of Germany and was officially eliminated only in 1947); and the older usage could not be supported using “ethnographic motives … as, had there been any differences in dialect between Prussians and Lithuanians, even so Scalovians and Nadrovians were called Lithuanians, not Prussians, in the earliest historical sources” (here we come across an unfounded yet popular interwar belief that the word “Prussian” in “Prussian Lithuania” was not a reference to Prussia itself but to the Prussian tribe). Finally, again without foundation, Vileišis claimed that the name of Lithuania Minor “had always dominated in Lithuanian literature”: Vileišis, Tautiniai santykiai, v–vi. 86 “Įžangos žodis,” Mažoji Lietuva 1 (1932): 1.

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(2) the use of the name “Lithuania Minor” was further complicated by the fact that it no longer denoted one region—those Lithuanians living on the left bank of the Memel remained “overboard”; and (3) people had to come to terms with the appearance of the new name “Klaipėda Region” that gained an objective foundation in political geography and prompted thinking about the possibility of a newly named territory on the left bank of the Memel. According to the most important topographic orientation marker left on the other side of the river, Brakas suggested the latter be known as the “Tilsit Region” (in public announcements, the titles “tilžiškė Lietuva” [Tilsitian Lithuania], or “tilžiškė Mažosios Lietuvos dalis” [the Tilsitian part of Lithuania Minor], appeared in other cases as well).87 True, these changes cannot be applied to all Prussian Lithuanians. The integration of their majority was probably the main obstacle to appropriation of the Lithuanian terra irredenta. We find evidence of this integration in the results of elections to the local Landtag or the Memel City Council, where the pro-Lithuanian candidates collected at best 20–30 percent of the votes, as well as in the census data of 1925, where only a quarter of the residents identified themselves as “Lithuanians.” On the German side, such data suggested that the greater-Lithuanian orientation in the Memel Territory did not have the support of the local population. The Lithuanian side explained these numbers testifying to cultural disintegration by treating Prussian Lithuanians in a way typical of the late nineteenth century, including allegations that the latter were “insufficiently” engaged in line with the national idea and had succumbed to German influence. Such differences in treatment perfectly show the interface of both sides’ spatial images related to the Memel Territory, which started in the interwar period and lasted for a number of decades after the Second World War. Both sides tried to convince their audiences (yet often not one another) of the “correctness” of the meanings and data used as a basis for their spatial imaginations. Among the data used to argue that the Memel Territory belonged to “us” on ethnographic grounds, statistics probably played the most important role. It was the exploitation of statistics that could provide 87 Cf. Text of Mykolas Römeris’ speech delivered in Klaipėda “Gindami mūsų Laiswę, giname ir Jūsų, Lenkai, Latwiai, Estai!” Lietuwos Keleiwis, May 6, 1934 (no. 103): 1; May 8, 1934 (no. 104), Suppl.

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Figure 37. Distribution of nationalities in the Memel Territory based on the 1905 census data on Muttersprache usage. Red marks the distribution of Germans, and green Lithuanians. Dark colors show areas with more than 90 percent of the dominant nationality, and light colors regions where it made up 50–90 percent. Fragment of Paul Langhans’s map, published in 1921 in Dr.  A.  Petermanns Mitteilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1921).

an answer to the question of who constituted the “majority” in the Memel Territory, and to whom, consequently, that land should belong. In the first stage, the Lithuanian side, operating with prewar church statistics, was convinced that the larger part of the area’s population were Lithuanians;88 the German side, conversely, resting on official census results, declared that Lithuanians were in the minority.89 A census held on January 88 See, for instance, Žilius, Lietuvos rubežiai, 14–15. 89 Already in 1921, having adapted data from the 1905 census to the newly defined Memel Territory, the influential journal edited by Paul Langhans titled Dr. A. Petermanns

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20, 1925, in the Memel Territory provided a new opportunity to manipulate figures on this issue. This was the first census where people in the region were asked to name not their Muttersprache but their nationality (Natio­ nali­tät). As indicated in the census instructions, one’s nationality had to be distinguished from citizenship and native language and understood as membership in one race (Volksart), united by a common history, culture, and customs.90 The census was conducted at a time when the Memellanderism ideology was already being actively promoted, and that had a direct influence on its results. In addition to the 41.88 percent who declared themselves Germans (another 3.4 percent of inhabitants were so-called Reich Germans, i.e., individuals who did not have Lithuanian citizenship) and 26.56 percent Lithuanians, 24.24 percent of the region’s inhabitants denoted their nationality, or national affiliation, as Memelländer.91 The 1925 census was the only survey-based research of the structure of the Memel Territory’s population conducted during the years of Lithuania’s rule, as well as the only study that could provide reliable data about the national composition of the region’s population.92 Regardless, the census results, first published in 1927, created a certain degree of uncertainty that arose directly from the treatment of the Memelländer category. Essentially, this category from the 1925 census should be treated not as an objectively existing group of people who held themselves to be Memelländers but as a certain part of the population that, affected by the Mitteilungen announced that in the Memel Territory Germans made up 72,160 of the total population of 141,455, thus 51 percent. The status of the Lithuanian “minority” was visualized in a cartographical work by Langhans added to the article: P[aul] L[anghans], “Deutsche und Litauer im Memelgebiet,” Dr. A. Petermanns Mitteilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt 67 (1921): 27 and the map: Tafel 2: Das litauische Sprachgebiet in Ostpreußen auf Grund der Zählung vom 1. Dez. 1905. Scale 1:200 000, drafted by Prof. Paul Langhans. 90 Cf. “Gyventojų ir pramonės įmonių surašymas Klaipėdos krašte 1925 m. sausio mėn. 20 d.,” Statistinės žinios 7, no. 9 (May 27, 1927): 165, 185. 91 Ibid., 171. 92 Historiography presents other qualitative indicators that would reveal the situation in 1939: Petronėlė Žostautaitė, Klaipėdos kraštas 1923–1939 (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1992), 54–55. However, we must keep in mind that the latter indicators were reached by applying statistical calculation methods, i.e., by drawing them from the situation as of 1925 (cf. Statistikos biuletenis 2 [1939]: 87), not from a new census taken in 1939, which is why their representability does raise some doubts.

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dissemination of this ideology, happened to express self-identification with that ideology’s meanings in a specific communication situation. Even so, the thought-clichés that became established during the interwar period, understandably, did not recognize any situational identity, and thus the emergence of Memelländers among the region’s population’s nationally composed nomenclature first raised the question—what was the “real” identity of people who entered Memelländer during the census? Combining the census data with other statistical information, interwar interpretations tried to prove that Memelländers were indeed Germans or Lithuanians, and this means of “decodification” extended even after the Second World War. Only such arbitrary attribution in the politicized polemic as to who had greater rights to the Memel Territory made it possible to argue that the Germans (including Germans and Memelländers, 69.5 percent in total) or Lithuanians (51 percent respectively) had better rights to this territory. Understandably, pro-German authors tended to support the first position,93 whereas pro-Lithuanian authors preferred the second.94 For example, one of the first authors to have expressed a pro-German approach to the Memelländer category, the Memel County Court councilor Albrecht Rogge, discussing the data of the 1925 census, said that Memelländers could justifiably be considered Germans, since hardly any Nationallitauer would call him- or herself a Memelländer; the very name implies an association with the German cultural milieu.95 The pro-German politicized literature also expressed the attitude that the Memel Territory’s Germans called themselves Memelländers in response to strong pressure 93 See, for instance, Wilhelm Winkler, Statistisches Handbuch der europäischen Nationalitäten (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1931), 136–152; Johannes Ganß, Das Memelland, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Deutscher Schutzbund Verlag, 1934), 20; and Hellmuth Lenz, Deutsches Schicksal an der Memel: die Wahrheit über das Memelland (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1935), 60. 94 See, for instance, Mykolas Šlaža, “Mažosios Lietuvos lietuvių tautinė būklė,” Vairas 6 (1932): 164–165; Valsonokas, Klaipėdos, 266–273; and “Tautybiniai santykiai Klaipėdos krašte,” Vakarai, November 18, 1938 (no. 268 [874]): 5. 95 Albrecht Rogge, Die Verfassung des Memelgebiets: ein Kommentar zur Memelkonvention (Berlin: Deutsche Rundschau, 1928), 39.

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from Lithuania Major.96 Probably the most comprehensive approach (yet without any known basis) to this issue was presented in 1939 at the Institute for Eastern European Economics (Institut für Osteuropäische Wirtschaft) founded in 1933 at the University of Königsberg, by the researcher Eginhard Walter. According to him, Memelländers were (1) German-speaking individuals who identified themselves as such in the name of personal safety or from fear of losing their official state service positions, where they could not admit to being Germans—they often included offspring from mixed marriages; (2) individuals of Lithuanian origin who did not associate themselves with Lithuania or Lithuanianness, as they had belonged to the Reich and German culture for a long time—they viewed association with Lithuania and Lithuanianness as a threat to their culture and economy; (3) Courlanders from the Curonian lagoon-shore villages, who spoke the Courlander dialect among themselves—however, “almost all without exception thought in German”; or (4) elements that did not have a clear understanding about their nationality.97 In Lithuania, conversely, the appearance of the Memelländer category during the census was treated as the decision of certain Lithuanians who were “Germanized,” “nationally undecided,” or simply “not courageous enough to call themselves Lithuanians.”98 This rather clearly shows that not only Germans but Lithuanians too tried to explain this category’s appearance by stereotypical treatments, related to Prussian Lithuania—some were haunted by the all-encompassing savior, German Kultur, that the barbarian Lithuanians wished to crush, while others saw it as the Germanization and voluntary assimilation of “real Lithuanians,” defined as such based on only one criterion (a Lithuanian is a Lithuanian speaker and normally Catholic). Perceiving “hidden Lithuanians” in the 24 percent cited in the statistics, Lithuanians in the interwar period behaved as if this was an 96 Cf. Johann von Leers, Memelland (Munich: Frz. Eher Nachf., 1932), 8. 97 Eginhard Walter, Das Memelgebiet: Bevölkerung und Wirtschaft eines Grenzlandes (Königsberg: Institut für Osteuropäische Wirtschaft, 1939), 23. 98 “Dėl lietuvių skaičiaus Klaipėdos krašte ir okup. Vilniaus srityse,” Lietuvos ūkis ir rinka 8 (1931): 37–39; B. M., “Pažinkime Klaipėdos kraštą,” Lietuvos aidas, April 7, 1932 (no. 77 [1452]): 3; P. P., “Klaipėdos kraštas,” Biržų žinios, January 22, 1933 (no. 4 [435]): 1; L. Ainis, “Ir buvo padarytas ryžtingas žingsnis…,” Jaunoji karta, January 17, 1937 (no. 3 [296]): 42.

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objectively existing element of the region’s population—the “imagined Lithuanians,” who in the Lithuanian interwar texts were called klaipėdiečiai or klaipėdiškiai (local residents of Klaipėda). Exploiting this uncertainty, the Memel Territory’s Lithuanians, incidentally, tried to project that they were indeed those klaipėdiškiai.99 On this basis, they even suggested certain integration strategies.100 In attuning themselves to the Kaunas-based nationalist discourse, they once in a while publicly expressed thoughts about the necessity of earning the Klaipėda locals’ favor if Lithuania were to become more influential in the Klaipėda Region with the help of the local Lithuanians. In this way they could establish a distance from the Klaipėda Region’s “Germanites.” However, research conducted up to this point does not indicate that any government-supported project would have crystallized in Lithuania on how to steer these Memelländers in a direction more in line with the state’s needs.101 The variety of approaches toward Memelländers and their dynamics in the Lithuanian public discourse have not yet been researched in any great detail, but it is likely that during the Tautininkai regime years, the more radical layers of the nationalists did not recognize any other alternative for the Memelländers but to integrate into the united Lithuanian nation. This attitude is very evident from the declaration made during the Sea Day festivities in Memel by the influential Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union’s commander Lieutenant-Colonel Mykolas Kalmantas: “The Memellandish catchcry announced from abroad— Klaipėda for klaipėdiškiai [meaning Memel for Memelländer], has to disappear, because it was conceived as a provocation.”102 Another field where the juncture of two spatial imaginations was felt was related to the polemic over so-called historic rights. After the appearance of the dissertation by Heinrich, the position that was firmly upheld in the German discourse was that this territory never belonged to Lithuania, that Lithuanians in East Prussia were colonizers who settled in the 99 Cf. Klaipėdiškiai po tautos vado vėliava (Klaipėda: Lietuvių organizacijų ­vykdomasis komitetas, [1935]); “Atsisekti pas Sawuosius,” Lietuwos Keleiwis, March 2, 1937 (no. 49): 6. 100 Cf. Šlaža, “Mažosios Lietuvos,” 356. 101 Žalys, Kova dėl identiteto. 102 “Jūros dienos iškilmės Klaipėdoje,” Trimitas, August 16, 1934 (no. 33): 648.

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fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that the Teutonic Order was responsible for bringing Kultur to these lands, and that until the Order’s settlement here, the area was home not to Lithuanians but to Prussians and Courlanders. Johannes Ganß directly transferred these attitudes into the polemic over the Memel Territory in his dissertation defended at the University of Königsberg, “National Relations in the Memel Territory,” in 1923. His main idea was more or less as follows: Lithuanians colonized a land that Germans cultivated and where they did everything for the wellbeing of Lithuanians, while the ungrateful Lithuanians, affected by greater-Lithuanian insinuations, mistakenly decided that the land was theirs, and with volunteer assistance from Lithuania, they overthrew a legitimate government. In 1925, with the appearance of the book by Karge, who defended the Lithuanian colonization idea, the main Memel daily newspaper Memeler Dampfboot wrote: “Every library, every outstanding institution, every wise Heimat family has to acquire this book, while every friend of Heimat had better read it.”103 Archaeological data also happened to be politically instrumentalized. A lecture by the Prussia Museum’s archaeologist from Königsberg, Carl Engel, on the prehistoric culture of the Memel Territory, given in Memel in March 1931,104 was released by the Memeler Dampfboot publishing house in the daily journal,105 as well as a separate book,106 while the Memel Territory’s Directorium (government) released a special order that all the region’s schools had to acquire as many copies as possible of Engel’s book.107 Such major interest in Engel’s text depended not just on its unsurpassable informative qualities. During his lecture the author spoke out in favor of the existence of a unique “Memel culture” (Memelkultur) in prehistoric times and claimed essentially the 103 “Die Litauer in Preußen,” Memeler Dampfboot, July 11, 1925 (no. 160). 104 “Apie prießistorinę Kultūrą Klaipėdos Kraßte,” Lietuwos Keleiwis, March 10, 1931 (no. 56). 105 Carl Engel, “Die Kultur des Memellandes in vorgeschichtlicher Zeit,” Der Grenzgarten (Beilage des “Memeler Dampfboots”), March 27, 1931 (no. 3); May 1, 1931 (no. 4); May 29, 1931 (no. 5); July 3, 1931 (no. 6); July 31, 1931 (no. 7); September 2, 1931 (no. 8); October 7, 1931 (no. 9). 106 Carl Engel, Die Kultur des Memellandes in vorgeschichtlicher Zeit. Einführung in die vorgeschichtliche Kultur des Memellandes (Memel: F. W. Siebert Memeler Dampfboot, 1931). 107 Klaipėdos Kraßto Waldžios Žinios, February 2, 1932 (no. 14): 105.

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same thing that other researchers (e.g., the already mentioned Hollack and Ganß) had overlooked: that in the Memel Territory prior to the Teutonic Order’s arrival, it was not Lithuanians and Samogitians who lived there but Courlanders. The response to these ideas, which were justified through adoption of scientific competencies but crushed Lithuanians’ “historic rights” arguments in Lithuania, expressed itself for a long time through silence, even amid the pro-Lithuanian-inspired Memel locals’ milieu. This lack of response was determined not just by the fact, noted above, that the belief in Lithuanians’ autochthonism in the Memel Territory derived not from their own arguments but had been adopted from German prewar science. Lithuania’s own scientists clearly lacked the ability to develop a competent response, while certain scholars supported and even disseminated at least some of the arguments in question. The linguists Kazimieras Būga and Antanas Salys and the historian Zenonas Ivinskis were in the latter group.108 Polemics incorporating the innovations coming from the German and in part Lithuanian historiography started only in early 1933. However, the greatest impetus for this polemic undoubtedly arose from the change in course of Lithuanian politics in the Memel Territory in late 1933. It was, after all, no accident that the “nation’s leader” Antanas Smetona, at a ruling Tautininkai party meeting called the theory of Lithuanian colonization in East Prussia a “direct sin.”109 The most vocal in this polemic were a pair of amateur historians from Kaunas, Vladas Pryšmantas and Povilas Pakarklis.110 Their essays were mostly in a publicistic 108 Kazimieras Būga, Aisčių praeitis vietų vardų šviesoje (Kaunas: Aut. leid., 1924), 7–8, 13–15; Kazimieras Būga, “Lietuvių įsikūrimas šių dienų Lietuvoje,” Tauta ir žodis II (1924): 3, 7; Anton Salys, Die žemaitischen Mundarten, part I: Geschichte des žemaiti­ schen Sprachgebiets (Kaunas: Spindulys, 1930), especially 20–30, 74–82, 90–141; Zenonas Ivinskis, Geschichte des Bauernstandes in Litauen. Von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts. Beiträge zur sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung des Bauernstandes in Litauen im Mittelalter, no. 236 of Historische Studien (Berlin: E. Ebering, 1933), 145–153; Zenonas Ivinskis, “Lietuvos valstiečių luomo susiformavimas ir raida,” Athenaeum 4 (1933): 41–42. 109 “Tautos Vado A. Smetonos kalba, 1933.XII.15 pasakyta visuotiniame Lietuvos Tautininkų Sąjungos suvažiavime,” Vairas 1 (1934): 12. 110 Vladas Pryšmantas, “Ne kuršiai, bet žemaičiai,” Vairas 1 (1933): 100–109; 2 (1933): 223–232; Povilas Pakarklis, “Klaipėdos srities gyventojų tautybė prieš Vok. ordino atėjimą,” Mūsų žinynas 26, no. 101 (1933): 171–185; Povilas Pakarklis, “Dėl Klaipėdos apylinkių praeities kuršinimo,” Trimitas, May 3, 1934 (no. 18): 356; Povilas Pakarklis, “Nuo kada Lietuva

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style, oriented to the goal of showing how “Germans” had tricked everyone, disproving Lithuanians’ rights to the Memel Territory. However, the most the two authors managed to do was to contrast the old German historiography’s authority against new interpretations, discrediting the latter as politicized, and claiming that the Teutonic Order, settling in the future Memel Territory, indeed discovered Lithuanians or Samogitians whose ancestors had lived there from the earliest times. The Institute of Social and Political Sciences at Vytautas Magnus University released several papers on this topic in 1935: the extended (“Mažoji Lietuva vokiečių mokslo šviesoje,” Lithuania Minor in the Light of German Science) and abridged (“Vokiečiai apie Mažąją Lietuvą,” Germans on Lithuania Minor) versions of the polemic by Pakarklis, where he argued against the claims coming from the latest German historiography,111 and the study by statistician Vincas Vileišis aimed at “national relations in Lithuania Minor.”112 Vileišis’s work, which was supported by the then prime minister of Lithuania and minister of finance Juozas Tūbelis,113 was probably the most serious attempt at defending Lithuania’s “historic rights” to Memel. Lithuanians’ autochthonism was also defended at public lectures and even in German-language publications of a similar profile.114 One of them was The Memel Territory: Is It Really the Germans’ Land? released under the name Felix Arvydas in Kaunas;115 another came out in Memel under the pen name of Franz-Constantin von Karp.116 It is likely that with the last lietuvių gyvenamas kraštas,” Trimitas, October 25, 1934 (no. 43): 840–841; Povilas Pakarklis, “Kas gyveno Klaipėdos krašte maždaug prieš 700 m.,” Trimitas, February 21, 1935 (no. 8): 137; Povilas Pakarklis, “Maž. Lietuva bei Karaliaučiaus apylinkės buvo lietuviškas kraštas. Sako dr. Franz Tetzner,” Trimitas, March 7, 1935 (no. 10): 177. 111 Povilas Pakarklis, Mažoji Lietuva vokiečių mokslo šviesoje (Kaunas: Socialinių ir politinių mokslų institutas, 1935); Povilas Pakarklis, Vokiečiai apie Mažąją Lietuvą (Kaunas: Socialinių ir politinių mokslų institutas, 1935). 112 Vileišis, Tautiniai santykiai. 113 Cf. Jonas Aničas, Vytautas, Juozas ir Vincas Vileišiai. Trečioji karta (Vilnius: Alma littera, 2000), 312. 114 See, for example, the lecture by lawyer Jablonskis from 1935: Konstantinas Jablonskis, Istorija ir jos šaltiniai, ed. Vytautas Merkys (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1979), 131–139. 115 Felix Arvydas, Das Memelland: ist es wirklich deutsches Land? Die Anrechte Litauens im Spiegel der Geschichte (Kaunas: Spaudos fondas, 1934). 116 Franz-Constatin von Karp, Beiträge zur ältesten Geschichte des Memellandes und Preussisch-Litauens. Eine kritische Betrachtung der neuesten deutschen Forschungs-Resultate (Memel: Ostsee-Verlag, 1934). The actual author of this work is still unknown. It is thought that it could have been one of the Lithuanian historians, as the individual

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two works the goal was in part to familiarize the German-reading public with the Lithuanian side’s arguments. At the same time, by devising nonexisting German authors, the aim was to create the impression that Germans themselves critically viewed texts that raise doubts over Lithuania’s “historic rights” to the Memel Territory. Such extraordinary measures were adopted in response to the volumes of propaganda and informative texts released in Germany about the Memel Territory. The region’s separation from Germany and its addition to Lithuania, in the opinion of the German side, occurred against the will of the population of the region, and that encouraged them to defend this position. Additional support for this view came from Lithuania’s later integration policy, in which the local Germans envisaged a threat to their rights, going so far as to spread the myth of German martyrdom. When speaking about the period up to the National Socialists’ rise to power, the texts defending these attitudes on the German side can be grouped into several overlapping categories. (1) Works based on dissertations on historical, geopolitical, or international law themes, characteristic of the 1920s, that suggested suitable scientific competency to justify the thesis that Lithuania did not have the right to control the Memel Territory, while this region’s assignment to Lithuania was not in the real interests of its population in terms of history, geopolitics, or international law.117 (2) Publicistic writings, actively released in Germany until 1933 by the network of organizations formerly created by Memel Territory inhabitants that had branches established in various locations in Germany. Their activities concentrated on the goal of not allowing Germany’s population to going by the name von Karp was well aware of historiographical issues and works written in Lithuanian and demonstrated historiographical critique abilities. The publishing house in Memel Ostsee-Verlag, denoted in the information about the book’s publishing, was founded by the governor (a representative of the central Lithuanian authorities) of the Memel Territory and had already been closed by 1935. 117 Cf. Johannes Ganß, Die völkischen Verhältnisse des Memellandes (Berlin-Nowawes: Memelland-Verlag, 1925); Rolf Schierenberg, Die Memelfrage als Randstaatenproblem (Berlin-Grunewald: Kurt Vowinkel, 1925); Ernst Friesecke, Das Memelgebiet. Eine völkerrechtsgeschichtliche und politische Studie, no. 13 of Tübinger Abhandlungen zum öffentlichen Recht (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1928).

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forget about their countrymen in the Memel Territory. The most active organizations that belonged to this network operated out of Berlin (DeutschLitauischer Memellandbund) and Tilsit (first called Memelgaubund Tilsit, later renamed Memellandbund Tilsit Branch). The Berlin-based organization released its own periodical, Das Memelland, and this organization’s leaders Elisabeth Brönner-Hoepfner and Felix Borchardt published several brochures on the Memel issue.118 In addition, the studies by Ganß and Heinrich-Mortensen mentioned earlier were released by the organization’s Berlin publishing house, in Nowawes (near Potsdam) in 1925 and 1927. The Tilsitbased organization’s activities were mostly oriented to public demonstrations and the preparation of various petitions. However, there were also figures from its circle, like the former Gudden (Gudai; in Tilsit County pre-1920) teacher Alfred Katschinski, who published works that explained to the German-speaking audience the “real” narrative of the Memel issue.119 3. Works about the Memel Territory exhibiting a more reserved tone, which appeared in the leftist political environment, initially aimed at depicting changes that occurred in the region after 1919 but also contributing to the spread of suitable images. The first of these was Fred Hermann Deu’s book,120 which also contains propaganda images (especially those expressed in photographic material), yet which later drew critical attention under National Socialism.121 118 Elisabeth Brönner-Hoepfner, Das Memelland, no. 1 of Sammlung von Aufklärungs- und Werbe-Vorträgen (Berlin-Nowawes: Reichsverband der heimattreuen Ost- und Westpreußen, [s.a.]); Elisabeth Brönner-Hoepfner, Die Leiden des Memelgebiets (Berlin-Nowawes: Memelland-Verlag, 1927); Nachtrag: Die Zeit von Ende April 1927 bis Ende Juli 1929 (Berlin-Nowawes: Memelland-Verlag, [1929]); 2. Nachtrag: Die Zeit seit Juli 1929 bis März 1932 (Berlin-Nowawes: Memelland-Verlag, [1932]); 3. Nachtrag: Die Zeit seit März 1932 bis September 1934 (Berlin-Nowawes: Memelland-Verlag, [1934]); Elisabeth Brönner-Hoepfner, Der mißglückte Hilfsversuch (der Garantiemächte des Memelgebiets) 1932 im Haag (Berlin-Nowawes: Memelland-Verlag, 1932); Felix Borchardt, Das politische Schicksal des deutschen Memellandes in den ersten zehn Jahren nach Versailles, offprint from vol. 3 of Zehn Jahre Versailles (Berlin: Brückenverlag, [1930]). 119 Alfred Katschinski, Das Schicksal des Memellandes. Eine vergleichende und zusammenfassende Heimatgeschichte (Tilsit: Selbstverlag des Memelgau-Bundes Tilsit, 1923). 120 Fred-Hermann Deu, Das Schicksal des deutschen Memelgebietes. Seine wirtschaftliche und politische Entwickelung seit der Revolution (Berlin-Hessenwinkel: Verlag der Neuen Gesellschaft, 1927). 121 Cf. Friedrich Kopp, Der Kampf um das Memelland (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1935), 66.

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When relations between Lithuania and Germany grew complicated over Memel at the juncture of the 1920s and 1930s, and the National Socialists became increasingly entrenched in the German Reichstag and later in the government, representation of the Memel Territory’s Germans as “suffering” under Lithuania’s “oppression” became more intense among the strata who supported the ideas of the NSDAP. One of the earliest brochures coming from these strata appeared in 1928 amid a series of books representing Germans beyond Germany’s borders; members of the NSDAP were directly involved in its preparation.122 One of the earliest texts by NSDAP member Johann von Leers, who later became an important Nazi ideologue, was also dedicated to the Memel question and appeared in another series of brochures describing “Germans abroad” in 1932.123 After 1933 the number of these texts in Germany increased due to stricter Lithuanian policies in the Memel Territory, and because organizations under the NSDAP’s control (Bund Deutscher Osten; Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland) became more actively engaged in spreading the revisionist discourse.124 The propaganda press of these organizations dedicated a number of thematic issues or special brochures to Memel,125 122 Johannes Ganß, Das Memelland (Berlin: Deutscher Schutzbund Verlag, [1928]; 2nd ed. 1934). This twice-released brochure by an author we are already familiar with appeared as part of the Taschenbuch des Grenz- u. Auslanddeutschtums series released by Deutscher Schutzbund, where one of the editors was Arnold Hillen-Ziegfeld. This member of Schutzbund belonged to the NSDAP from 1921 on and was one of the key figures in German propaganda cartography in the interwar years. He ended up working in the Ministry of Propaganda in the late 1930s (cf. Guntram Henrik Herb, Under the Map of Germany. Nationalism and Propaganda, 1918–1945 (London: Routledge, 1997), 82–84, 88–91, 159–160). Another brochure on the Memel issue appeared some time later in another series edited by Hillen-Ziegfeld: Kurt Gloger, Deutsches Memelland, no. 14 of Grenzkamp-Schriften (Berlin-Neutempelhof: Edwin Runge, 1935). 123 Leers, Memelland. In the series with the telling title Großdeutsche Forderungen. Schriftenreihe zur Frage der nationalen Ansprüche des deutschen Volkes four brochures appeared in 1932 dedicated to the Memel Territory, the Polish Corridor, Sudeten Germans, and Upper Silesia, respectively. 124 In February 1937 both these organizations came under the jurisdiction of a new structure within the SS called Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle. 125 Memelland, no. 3 of Volksdeutsche Abende. Blätter für Schulungs- und Feierstunden, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland, [s.a.]); Der Volksdeutsche 11 (1935), special issue: Memelwahlen 1935; [Richard Meyer] Reinhold Pregel, Memelfrage heute, no. 2 of Kämpfendes Volk (Berlin: Volksbund für das Deutschtum im

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but it is also important that they apparently dictated the narrative about the Memel Germans’ problems to other authors as well.126 According to the NSDAP social control methods, interest in the “suffering” of Memel’s Germans was encouraged even in student competitions in Nazi Germany organized by Deutsche Arbeitsfront together with the Hitler Youth and the National Socialist German Students’ League. In the first student professional competitions that took place in the winter semester of 1935/1936, mostly law students from the University of Königsberg prepared a brochure about the Memel Territory,127 in which material about Lithuania’s “infringements” of the Convention concerning the Territory of Memel, the Neumann and Sass cause (1934–1935), and so on was carefully registered. Incidentally, the latter cause—one of the most important steps taken by the Lithuanian government in forcing the integration of the Memel Territory128—undoubtedly activated the appearance of propaganda literature about this area and even instigated a separate series of brochures about the “suffering” of the Memel Germans. Such brochures were prepared by the former Memel city councilor for education, the region’s Landtag vice-president, and one of the most important Memellanderism ideologues, Richard Meyer.129 In 1934, while Meyer was on holiday at a German resort, Lithuania placed a legal case before him, incriminating him of antistate activities, Ausland, 1936); Das Memelgebiet—Die Geschichte seiner Besiedlung, no. 34 of Bund Deutscher Osten (Berlin-Lichtenrade: Bund Deutscher Osten, [s.a.]). 126 Kopp, Kampf um das Memelland; Lenz, Deutsches Schicksal; Wilhelm Grotelueschen, Das Memelland. Schicksal eines deutschen Grenzlandes, no. 12 of Neuland in der Deutschen Schule (Leipzig: Julius Klinkhardt, Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1937); Theodor Oberlaender, Nationalität und Volkswille im Memelgebiet (Greifswald: Universitätsverlag Ratsbuchhandlung L. Bamberg, 1939). 127 Memelland. Deutsches Land: im Rahmen des Reichsleistungswettkampfes der Deutschen Studentenschaft im Wintersemester 1935/36, ed. Horst-Günter Benkmann (Königsberg: Rudolf Gruel Inh. Paul Bork, [1936]). 128 For more on this campaign and the Neumann-Sass cause in the context of a change in direction of Lithuania’s foreign policy, see Vasilijus Safronovas, “Neumann-SassProzess als Ausdruck fundamentalen Wandels in den Beziehungen zwischen Litauen und Deutschland,” Annaberger Annalen 21 (2013): 9–34. 129 [Richard Meyer] Reinhold Pregel, Die litauische Willkürherrschaft im Memelgebiet (Berlin: Grenze und Ausland, 1934); [Richard Meyer] Reinhold Pregel, Das Schicksal des Memelgebietes, no. 12 of Volk und Welt (Langensalza-Berlin-Leipzig: Julius Beltz, 1935; 1936); [Richard Meyer] Reinhold Pregel, Das Kownoer Bluturteil: Die Wahrheit über den Prozeß gegen 126 Memelländer vor dem Kriegsgericht in Kowno (Berlin: Grenze und Ausland, [1935]); [Meyer] Pregel, Memelfrage.

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and as a result he never returned to the Memel Territory yet contributed quite a lot to forming public opinion in Germany. All of this rather clearly shows that the German side was reacting to Lithuania’s demands, argumentation, and specific political moves in the Memel Territory, and that proves that the competition encouraged by the juncture of two spatial imaginations had reached a completely different level. It was this stream of propaganda that Lithuanians had to react to if they wanted to promote the “legitimacy” of their governance in the Memel Territory. Aside from the counterpropaganda publications that defended Lithuanians’ “historic rights” to the region, in the 1920s–1930s the Lithuanians’ reaction was mostly expressed in the efforts of isolated public organizations. The first of these was the paramilitary Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union (Lietuvos šaulių sąjunga). Its weekly, Trimitas [Trumpet], contained the most varied anti-German rhetoric, starting with texts and ending with caricatures that became particularly lively when at the end of 1933 Lithuania reverted to a forced integration of the Memel Territory. Another such organization was the already mentioned West Lithuania Union (Lietuvos vakarų sąjunga). At its initiative, the outline Germany’s Propaganda against Lithuania, prepared by Juozas Tijūnelis, was released in 1935.130 It defended Lithuanians’ rights to the Memel Territory, revealed the strengthening of revisionist moods over Memel felt in Germany, presented many examples testifying to Germany’s interference in matters related to the Memel Territory and therefore into the domestic affairs of the Republic of Lithuania, exposed hooligan attacks to which Germans resorted after 1933 against Lithuanians who still remained in East Prussia, and ultimately explained the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry’s official position on the Memel issue. The publication of this counterpropaganda in both Lithuanian and French as well clearly shows that it was directed at an international audience that Lithuania then still expected to intervene.131 From Germans’ and Lithuanians’ responses to each other, we can see that there were two active sides struggling in the “battle” over Memel, yet 130 [Juozas Tijūnelis] J. T. Jonaitis, Vokietijos propaganda prieš Lietuvą (Kaunas: Didžiosios ir Mažosios Lietuvos kultūrinio bendradarbiavimo sąjunga, 1935). 131 [Juozas Tijūnelis] J. T. Jonaitis, La propagande allemande contre la Lithuanie (Kaunas: Association pour l’ouest Lithuanien, 1936).

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in contrast to the situation before the war, Germany had now taken the offensive. The two sides’ ability to influence the depiction of Memel-­ related issues in the spatial imagination was unequal in the interwar period. Through financial and other types of pressure, Germany managed to subordinate to its will the main anti-integration political forces in the Memel Territory. Lithuania adopted similar tactics only in the mid-1930s. Revisionist social networks active in the Memel Territory itself, and in the Reich, ensured constant reminders of the region’s “German problems.” There was a lack of such public organizations in Lithuania; in addition, Lithuania did not take an active interest in the Memel Territory until it was already obviously slipping out of Lithuanian control. Furthermore, the revision of the Versailles System in 1933 became a rallying point for the German ruling party, which had also infiltrated the Memel Territory. The Lithuanian side could only react by searching for backing in the international arena, where in 1935–1939, to Lithuania’s distress, inclinations to go along with Germany’s schemes predominated. Nevertheless, the interwar “battle over Memel” should not be assessed only through the hegemony prism. That experience is also important in that it left stamps in both the German and Lithuanian national cultures that had long-lasting influence on the change in spatial imaginations. In the German case, an image of the space called Memelland, Memelgebiet, or less often Memelgau, a space related to East Prussia but at the same time separate from it, remained in memory for a long time. In that image, the space in question was understood in a way that increasingly eliminated its Lithuanian component and up to the First World War was still willingly exploited. Ultimately, the image that assumed prominence was the “purely German” Memelländer, turned Memeldeutsche, community, and even in the later period this encouraged Germans to see only that which was German in this space—in other words, to see it through nationalistic glasses. However, the Lithuanian side viewed the Klaipėda Region through very similar glasses. It, conversely, saw this space as Lithuanian, only “Germanized”—as “their own land”—and the interwar experience in particular meant that there were no opportunities to retreat from this position. Meanwhile, the application of the “inferior Lithuanians” topos, which had started circulating in Lithuanian national culture in the late

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nineteenth century, to the Klaipėda Region’s Lithuanians made the already complicated integration process even more difficult. In Lithuanian national culture, the Klaipėda Region became “their” space, but a majority of the population that gave it its “Lithuanianness,” refusing to acknowledge the possible existence of another kind of Lithuanianness, was lost.

6.3. THE AFTER-EFFECTS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE LONG INABILITY TO COME TO TERMS WITH THEM The critical aspects of the impact of the Second World War on East Prussia were briefly presented in chapter 1. The war’s after-effects did more than wipe East Prussia off the political map. Of much more importance to our theme is that with the retreat of the Wehrmacht and the entry of the Red Army into its territory in 1944–1945, a majority of East Prussia’s inhabitants had to spontaneously or in an organized manner abandon their former places of residence. Those who did not leave in time or did not want to flee either in the East Prussian part, which came under Poland’s jurisdiction at the end of the war, or in Kaliningrad Oblast, were forcibly expatriated in the postwar period.132 In this way East Prussia became one of those territories of East-Central Europe that was fundamentally restructured by border shifts, mass population relocations, and the formation of new zones of influence of the 1940s. 132 Stanisław Żyromski, “Przesiedlenia ludności niemieckiej z województwa olsztyńskiego poza granice Polski w latach 1945–1950,” Komunikaty Mazursko-Warmińskie 3 (1969): 395–412; Iurii Kostiashov, “Vyselenie nemtsev iz Kaliningradskoi oblasti v poslevoennye gody,” Voprosy istorii 6 (1994): 186–188; Arūnė Arbušauskaitė, “Karaliau­ čiaus-Kaliningrado srities civilių gyventojų padėtis 1945–1951 metais,” in Klaipėdos ir Karaliaučiaus kraštų XVI–XX a. istorijos problemos, ed. Alvydas Nikžentaitis, vol. VIII of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2001), 91–124; Stanisław Jankowiak, Wysiedlenie i emigracja ludności niemieckiej w polityce władz polskich w latach 1945–1970 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2005); Arūnė Liucija Arbušauskaitė, “‘Kaliningrado vokiečių’ klausimo išsprendimas (?): Lietuva, 1951-ieji,” in Antrojo pasaulinio karo pabaiga Rytų Prūsijoje: faktai ir istorinės įžvalgos, ed. A. L. Arbušauskaitė, vol. XVIII of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2009), 207–230; Sakson, Od Kłajpedy do Olsztyna, 219–228.

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What impact did these changes have on the continuity of spatial concepts related to the Lithuanian region in Prussia? Without a doubt, among the most important changes was the almost complete disappearance of the Prussian Lithuanians who had defined the region’s uniqueness. To escape the encroaching Red Army, they withdrew with the Germans from the territory on the left bank of the Memel River into the depths of East Prussia, and later Germany. Some local Lithuanians remained only in the former Memel Territory. However, by 1946–1947 they had become a minority among the new settlers. Like the Polish government, which was interested in the fate of its so-called autochthons in Warmia and Masuria, the Lithuanian SSR leadership also made efforts to keep the old inhabitants of the Memel Territory in the USSR or repatriate them to their former lands. However, the integration strategy implemented in the postwar Lithuanian SSR transformed all the early inhabitants of the land into “Lithuanians” and in effect did not allow for the possibility of a “different,” “Prussian” Lithuanianness to exist.133 Prussian Lithuanians were marginalized, which may be one of the reasons that determined the decision of a majority of the old inhabitants in the Memel Territory to depart for Germany, especially when negotiations between Germany and the USSR in 1958 made this departure more possible. Thus, Prussian Lithuanian culture—the main means of construction of national spaces in Prussian Lithuania before the Great War—was pushed to the sidelines after the Second World War, and Prussian Lithuanians, the social basis of this culture, either moved out of their former places of residence or assimilated amid the new settlers. Thus, the meanings that were instilled concerning this region in the German and Lithuanian national cultures were to a large extent dissociated from the carriers of each culture living in the region itself, with whom those meanings could be associated and who would give them vitality and the potential for further development. In the postwar period, a Lithuanian cultural element in the former East Prussia still played a certain role both 133 See Arthur Hermann, “Klaipėdiškių likimas Lietuvoje po 1945 metų,” Akiračiai 5 (1988) (repr. Hermann, Lietuvių ir vokiečių kaimynystė, 73–94); Arūnė Arbušauskaitė, “Die alteingesessene Zivilbevölkerung des Memelgebietes während der sowjetischen Okkupation,” Annaberger Annalen 7 (1999): 39–64.

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in the German and especially in the Lithuanian national cultures. Yet the reproduced meanings became increasingly static and were relegated to the sphere of the imagination, while the vocabulary (language) used to talk about this culture became less and less subject to change. The “conservation” of systems of meanings, related to “our own” or “their own” regions located in the same physical space can be explained both by population composition changes in the space and by the former population’s experiences of the last stages of war and the first postwar years. Forced withdrawal from their living space did not just mean the loss of ties with “their own” land but also of the social bonds that existed in that land, their disruption and in many cases, their termination. Nevertheless, in the postwar period, among both those pro-German expellees who had been driven out and were organizing themselves in Germany, plus those pro-Lithuanian Prussian Lithuanians who retreated farther into Germany, and later to North America, there were attempts at reestablishing those disrupted social bonds. As a result, a social basis for the continuity of feeling of belonging to “one’s own” region, East Prussia or Lithuania Minor, formed. However, in both cases, these regions could exist only in the imagination, in the memory, and in the respective national cultures. That is why meanings related to “our own” or “their own” national spaces in the former East Prussia circulated on two levels in the postwar period, as well as among two rather different audiences in terms of how subject they were to influences. One level encompassed national cultures, was dissociated from any realistically existing communities, and functioned via education, literature, historiography, and other means of reproducing national culture meanings. On the other level those meanings still played a consolidating role, as they were used to uphold community spirit among the expelled Germans and in the Lithuanian diaspora communities from Lithuania Minor. It is important that, at the end of the war, the trauma experienced by inhabitants on both sides over their dispossession and being turned out of their homes encouraged them to forget such traumatic experiences and to keep the period of “normalcy” as their imagination’s reference point regarding “their own” spaces. In the German case, this attitude was

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encouraged by the general condemnation of the National Socialists and their period in power and by de-Nazification. In this context, questions of who did what and whether someone was responsible during the NSDAP years of rule were “uncomfortable” and hence not raised for a long time. As a result, in the expelled German communities the “normalcy” period, or reference point that “halted” and “framed” the development of the system of meanings about their own national spaces in the former East Prussia, was related to the pre-trauma situation—that is, the situation prior to the war.134 In this situation, the Lithuanian landscape was already eliminated from the set of meanings describing East Prussia. That is why among the expelled Germans, (non)testimony about Prussian Lithuania was “conserved” within the framework of interwar rhetoric. During the four postwar decades, texts that actualized the Prussian Lithuania region in one or another way hardly appeared at all in Germany. From another perspective, in the situation prior to the war, the Memel Territory was an area separate from East Prussia, despite being linked in terms of numerous factors, while in the region itself, the Prussian Lithuanian cultural element had been completely integrated into the German and subordinated. To a large degree, that presupposed the meanings that circulated in the postwar period in Germany about the Memel Territory—in many publications, it was described within the framework of the interwar Memellanderism ideology, blaming Lithuania and Großlitauer for their unfounded claims on this land.135 No less important is that the prewar territorial separation of East Prussia and the Memel Territory allowed for an ongoing separation in the 134 Rafał Żytyniec, who analyzed the depiction of East Prussia in literature appearing in postwar Germany, shows that the prewar situation in the province was idealized as if it were “a lost paradise.” See Rafał Żytyniec, Zwischen Verlust und Wiedergewinn. Ostpreußen als Erinnerungslandschaft der deutschen und polnischen Literatur nach 1945 (Olsztyn: Borussia; Osnabrück: Fibre, 2007), 36–156; and Eva Pluhařová-Grigienė, “Die Migration der Bilder. Das ‘Memelgebiet’ in fotografisch illustrierten Büchern 1889–1991” (PhD diss., University of Leipzig, 2012), 349–367. 135 Cf. Ernst Wermke, Bibliographie der Geschichte von Ost- und Westpreussen für die Jahre 1939–1970 (Bonn-Godesberg: Wissenschaftliches Archiv, 1974); Ernst Wermke, Bibliographie der Geschichte von Ost- und Westpreussen für die Jahre 1971–1974 (Marburg/Lahn: J. G. Herder Institut, 1978). For more on the depiction of the Memel Territory, see Pocytė, “Suche nach der verlorenen Heimat.”

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spatial imagination in the postwar period. The Memel Territory, even if it was not separated from East Prussia, in the postwar discourse of those who had been expelled, circulated as a unique East Prussian area, like Sambia, Natanga, and other landscapes. In turn, in Germany the expellees from the Memel Territory joined a separate organization, however closely connected with the East Prussian Territorial Association (Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen).136 Similar “conservation” of the system of meanings about “their own” region can also be seen among Prussian Lithuanian expellees and in a broader sense, in the Lithuanian émigré communities. Here their own space, the Klaipėda Region, where they had not become entrenched in the interwar period, and which Lithuania lost after the “shameful” acceptance of Germany’s ultimatum of 1939, is still viewed within the framework of that system of meanings which functioned in the interwar years. A large portion of the Lithuanian diaspora’s argumentation was thus fixed and “conserved” within the framework of the unrealized terra irredenta. Moreover, Germany’s status as the defeated party, the elimination of the German state as such, and the geopolitical restructuring of East Prussia forced the Lithuanian diaspora to transfer the unrealized irredentist discourse to the “remaining” part of Lithuania Minor on the left bank of the Memel River. Thus, specific social networks formed in Germany and North America that viewed the former East Prussian space through a revisionist prism and still treated their own territories associated with this space through the systems of meanings that were in circulation during the 136 In August 1948 those who had fled the Memel Territory founded the organization Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Memellandkreise, which involved mostly pro-German prewar activists from the region. The organization’s relationship with the East Prussian Territorial Association founded in October 1948 was complicated. An expellee from Memel, the first chairman of the Memel Territory’s organization, Ottomar Schreiber, also became the first leader of the East Prussian Territorial Association, while another Memel resident, Martin Kakies, was the first editor of the latter’s official organ Das Ostpreußenblatt. Although county representatives from the former Memel Territory participated in the East Prussian Territorial Association’s activities, the Memel Territory’s organization remained independent throughout. Its separateness, however, was never entrenched to the degree that the Upper Silesia Territorial Association’s organization was, which functioned in postwar Germany alongside the Silesia Territorial Association.

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interwar period. Various situations continued to provoke the collision of these systems of meanings, as was especially evident in terms of the Memel Territory’s past and future. Nevertheless, the “conservation” of these systems of meanings did not mean that there were no changes to the concepts of “their own” spaces. The main trajectories of change in both cases, for the expelled Germans and Lithuanian émigrés, were dictated by the new contexts in which they functioned. The pro-German population that withdrew from East Prussia and the Memel Territory sided with other expelled Germans from East-Central Europe in Germany after the war. That meant that in the dominant spatial concept, East Prussia became another of the lost “German territories.” The latter acquired new titles, Ostdeutschland [Eastern Germany], and especially deutsche Ostgebiete [German Eastern areas]. Due to the complicated process of adaptation and the feeling of not wanting to be a burden in their new milieu, the expelled nurtured the hope of returning to their former lands and were considered revisionists. However, this was characteristic not just of the population of former East Prussia or the Memel Territory. In Germany in the postwar years, expellees’ organizations from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia, and elsewhere united millions of other people who had suffered the same fate. Those who had fled East Prussia viewed membership in this force, and the activities of expellees in general, as an opportunity to find a political solution to the “return to the Heimat” issue.137 The first document of all the German expellees, a charter signed on August 5, 1950, was the joint project of an expellee from Memel who then headed the Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen, Ottomar Schreiber, and Estonian German Axel de Vries.138 The cooperation of all the expellees demonstrated in this charter not only shaped the feeling of belonging to a group united by its specific needs. No less important was the fact that this kind of cooperation created the concept of belonging to a constructed common space, deutsche Ostgebiete, thereby placing East Prussia into a completely new spatial framework. 137 See, for example, the first issue of the Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen press organ: “Die Gesamtvertretung der Ostvertriebenen,” Wir Ostpreußen, February 1, 1949: 6. 138 Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen 1948–1958 (Leer: Gerhard Rautenberg, 1958), 33–35.

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At the same time, the millions of expellees in postwar Germany formed a powerful force that the leading Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union, CDU) of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), created in 1949, could not ignore. The impact of the organized force undoubtedly had an influence on the government’s position, leading to, among other things, the employment of scientific competency in the so-called Ostforschung (investigation of the East) studies. In 1946 some of the scientists, officials, and representatives from the economic sphere who had fled East Prussia formed, still of their own initiative, a so-called Göttinger Arbeitskreis—probably the first such assembly in the postwar period that spread the importance of not forgetting “their” spaces, above all in East Prussia. However, around 1950 in the FRG a network of government-supported scientific organizations that dictated the main directions of Ostforschung was formed whose research object was not only East Prussia but the entire space “in the East” where even the slightest trace of German Kultur once existed.139 The academic writings of specifically this network formed a new “lost German spaces” context in which the early meanings about East Prussia circulated. The main changes to the spatial imagination of Lithuanian émigrés, including those pro-Lithuanians from the Prussian Lithuanian milieu who found themselves in emigration were in turn provoked by the placing of the former “Lithuanian space” in East Prussia at Russia’s disposal. Already in 1945–1946, these Lithuanians named the territory that ended up as part of the USSR “Lithuania Minor,” which is difficult to explain other than by saying that in the context of the icy tensions preceding the Cold War, this must have been a conscious attempt by the Lithuanian diaspora to convince the Western states of this territory’s Lithuanianness, and therefore the right to demand a review of earlier territorial reorganization. This hope was fostered by the fact that the Potsdam Conference did not become a “finite” Second World War peace conference, as was initially planned. Its communiqué contained the statement that the future state borders would be determined at a future peace conference. Thus, émigré Lithuanians from 139 Cf. Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 303, 313–314; and Hackmann, Ostpreußen und Westpreußen, 305–321.

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Figure 38.  Poster demanding the unification of Germany according to its prewar boundaries in “peace and free will,” based on the right of nations to self-determination. It is interesting that claims for a unified Germany also included the former Memel Territory as well as the Free City of Danzig as integral parts of this new Germany. The poster was seen in some authorities’ offices and schools in the FRG and sent in postcard form to Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the representative of US President John F. Kennedy in West Berlin. Early 1960s. Reproduction from Lietuvos pajūris (1962, no. 1 [9], p. 3).

the very beginning treated the resolutions from the Potsdam Conference as temporary. In their opinion, the USSR could support its claims using only Lithuanian arguments.140 In the Potsdam communiqué, however, the United States and Great Britain promised to support the USSR’s claims on northern East Prussia during the peace conference, and it was precisely this attitude that émigré Lithuanians hoped to change.

140 Cf. Grigas Valančius, Lietuva ir Karaliaučiaus kraštas (Kirchheim-Teck: Grigas Valančius, 1946), 10, 80.

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They could accept that the southern part of East Prussia went to Poland (based on the principle that this part was inhabited by Polish speakers) but not the USSR’s claims to Lithuania and northern East Prussia, which to émigré Lithuanians seemed illegitimate. They were also troubled by the reinstatement of the FRG in 1948–1949, which again brought into the spotlight the question of its future borders. For this reason, in the early postwar years émigré Lithuanians tried to make use of Cold War tensions to influence the United States, Great Britain, and France to regard the status of “Kaliningrad Oblast = Lithuania Minor” as their own interest and to subject it to review at the coming peace conference. The higher tensions rose between the emerging Eastern and Western blocs, the more chances émigré Lithuanians envisaged for such a review. In the programmatic document of its activities—the Memorandum on the Restoration of Lithuania’s Independence written up by the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania in 1950—presented to the governments of the United States, Great Britain, and France, it was written: “because of its role of bastion of German militarism and aggressive imperialism in the past, [East Prussia—V. S.] will hardly be left within the confines of the future German State. Accordingly, the Lithuanian nation files its claim to that part of East Prussia known as Lithuania Minor or Prussian Lithuania, which is still inhabited by Lithuanians to a considerable degree. Lithuania Minor corresponds mutatis mutandis to the territory given over by the Potsdam Conference to Soviet administration.”141 The different desires of the German expellees and Lithuanian émigrés related to the postwar geopolitical transformations are well expressed in texts prepared in advance to the session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the United States, the USSR, Great Britain, and France, founded in 1945 in Potsdam, that met in March–April 1947 in Moscow.142 It had to determine the “foundations for the final solution of the German question.” In preparation for this meeting that ultimately had no tangible political results, Göttinger Arbeitskreis compiled special notices about East Prussia in 141 Memorandum on the Restoration of Lithuania’s Independence ([Woodhaven, NY]: The Lithuanian National Foundation, 1988), 14. 142 For more on this session, see SSSR i germanskii vopros 1941–1949, vol. III: 6 oktiabria 1946 g.–15 iiunia 1948 g. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2003), 69–72.

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Figure 39-40.  The concept of “Lithuania Minor” applied to the area of Kaliningrad Oblast within the Lithuanian émigré communities. 1. Map of Kaliningrad Oblast titled Lithuania Minor, published in the 4th vol. of Bronius Kviklys’s handbook Our Lithuania (Mūsų Lietuva) (Boston, MA: Lietuvių enciklopedijos leidykla, 1968, p. 631). 2. The Size of Lithuania Minor in East Prussia, a map used by the American Lithuanian monthly Lietuvos pajūris to illustrate Algirdas Gustaitis’s article “Lietuva siektina iki Vyslos” (One Should Strive for Lithuania till the Vistula River), Lietuvos pajūris (1985, no. 46, p. 369).

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English and German.143 These documents, in which the historical section was written by historian Walter Hubatsch, underlined East Prussia’s economic and historical ties with Germany, stressing that “East Prussia’s union with Germany is based on a historical right sanctioned in centuries-old work of civilization.”144 Looking at East Prussia in the framework of the system of meanings established in the interwar period, the authors of these notices put most effort into denying the “Slavs’ claims” to this space; the existence of the Lithuanian factor in that space was practically left unmentioned.145 This was the basis for a potential review of the Allies’ decisions regarding East Prussia. The Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania prepared a similar memorandum about Lithuania Minor (northern East Prussia) in early 1947. It was addressed to the United Nations Organization.146 The arguments contained in the memorandum started coming together at the end of the war. Let us discuss those arguments in more detail, as they refer specifically to the question of the Lithuanian region in Prussia. Unlike the Germans, émigré Lithuanians were satisfied with the elimination of Germany’s influence from East Prussia. But at the same time, they expressed dissatisfaction over the Allies’ decisions and tried to include the matter of placing Königsberg at Lithuania’s disposal into their negotiation schedule. In this situation émigré Lithuanians behaved much as American Lithuanians had during the Great War in formulating their claims on Königsberg.147 As was the case then, so too now, when formulating 143 Cf. Burgleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, 313; and Hackmann, Ostpreußen und Westpreußen, 306–307. 144 East Prussia (Göttingen: [s.n.], 1947), 33. 145 Cf. ibid.; and Russlands und Polens Ansprüche auf Ostpreußen (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 1947). 146 Juozas Banionis, “Lietuvos laisvinimo veikla XX a. penktajame dešimtmetyje Vakaruose: Vyriausiasis Lietuvos išlaisvinimo komitetas 1944–1950 m.,” Genocidas ir rezistencija 1 (2007): 93. This memorandum later became an appendix to the “great” Memorandum of 1950 (for the text, see Memorandum on the Restoration, 83–89). 147 When the American Lithuanian Council delegates to Lithuania in 1916 arrived in Königsberg from Berlin, they announced: “This is already Lithuania! This is our dear Homeland” (Jonas Julius Bielskis, Delegatų Kelionē Lietuvon 1916 m. (Boston: Darbininkas, 1916), 16). An essay on Lithuanians’ political goals, prepared in the United States in 1918, noted that Lithuanians living in the United States considered not just the usual thirteen counties attributed to Prussian Lithuania as Lithuanian but also

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such claims, the émigrés’ goal was that Lithuania should come out the winner in the face of developing tensions between the larger states. It was not until Russia fell out of the game during the First World War that American Lithuanians tried to convince the American audience that the agreements and promises that the Allies had allegedly made to Russia had to be implemented in favor of Lithuania by placing Königsberg under its jurisdiction.148 When tensions between the USSR and the United States rose after the Second World War, émigré Lithuanians again tried to exploit the situation by developing certain alternatives to the handover of a part of East Prussia to the USSR.149 The formulation of these alternatives, naturally, was directly associated with another issue—the refusal to recognize the USSR’s annexation of Lithuania. In 1946 the geographer Kazys Pakštas, who was then working in the United States, offered one such alternative in a hundred copies of a typewritten text about the Lithuania Minor “problem.”150 Pakštas recommended solving this “problem” by facing up to the new geopolitical reality of the postwar years—the need to manage Russia’s (as he referred to the USSR) influence in the Baltic region and its newly extended entrenchment in part of the former East Prussia. In his view, it was obvious that Russia did not need ice-free ports in the Baltic Sea (Stalin used this argument at the negotiations in Tehran; President Harry S. Truman repeated it to his US audience,

the counties of Wehlau, Gerdauen, Fischhausen, and Königsberg (Norus and Zilius, Lithuania’s Case, 42). In the same essay, the authors also exclaimed: “Possession of the Niemen [Memel] where it debouches into the Baltic and the Port of Klaipeda (Memel), and to a lesser degree the mouth of the Pregel and the Port of Karaliaucius (Koenigsberg) are vitally important to Lithuania and she cannot renounce them. She therefore demands that they be incorporated into her territory as a conditio sine qua non of a united and prosperous Lithuania” (Norus and Zilius, Lithuania’s Case, 93). 148 Norus and Zilius, Lithuania’s Case, 41–42, 92–93. 149 It would be difficult to assert whether there were indeed any other explanations for this behavior except that émigré Lithuanians tried to operate under the premise of “where two bicker, the third wins.” It is likely that at least some of them understood that Russia’s being on Lithuania’s western frontier, despite it having always been on its eastern side, fundamentally changed Lithuania’s geopolitical situation. However, so far we know of no evidence expressing this understanding. 150 Kazys Pakštas, The Problem of Lithuania Minor (The Northern East Prussia) (Santa Monica, CA, 1946).

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motivating the decisions reached at Potsdam).151 Basing his views on interwar statistics, Pakštas demonstrated that a large portion of Russia’s trade at that time was directed to its Black Sea ports, which is why Russia’s true goal in the Baltics was to create a military base in the ports of Königsberg and Pillau.152 Pakštas justified the decision to separate East Prussia from Germany but offered alternative scenarios for the growth of Russia’s influence as a means of finding a solution for the former province’s status. He saw two options. The first was a compromise between Poland and Lithuania, dividing East Prussia between these two countries along a line that started 5 km south of Neutief on the Vistula Spit, then extended to Brandenburg, along the Frisching (now Prokhladnaya) River, and in a straight line to Friedland (Pravdinsk) on the Polish side, along the Alle and Omet (Zheleznodorozhnaya, Stogovka) rivers to Lake Mauer (Mamry), and from there along a line leading through Benkheim (Banie Mazurskie), Grabowen (Grabowo), and Gurnen (Górne). Implementation of this option would see both sides resettle their acquired territories. The second option was a compromise between Poland, Lithuania, and the local population: in order to avoid the removal of Germans from East Prussia, they would be left with a territory of 15,000 km2 around Königsberg between the Cranz-Goldap and Elbing-Lyck (Ełk) lines, with the remainder given to Lithuania and Poland, respectively. In this case, the territory left for the Germans should not enter into any political union with Germany but should form a federation of Baltic States with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.153 Economist Grigas Valančius was the one who suggested orienting toward the Potsdam line as a potential basis for negotiations regarding the future border between Poland and Lithuania in a booklet released after the war in Germany.154 Historian Zenonas Ivinskis also urged a correction of Lithuania’s western 151 United States Department of State, Foreign Relations, 604; “Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference, August 9, 1945 [Delivered from the White House at 10 p.m.],” in Harry S. Truman. Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President: April 12 to December 31, 1945 (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States) (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1961), 203–214, here 210. 152 Pakštas, Problem of Lithuania Minor, 79. 153 Ibid., 83–94. 154 Valančius, Lietuva ir Karaliaučiaus kraštas, 11–12, 93.

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border in a manuscript compiled in Tübingen in 1946. He suggested Lithuania’s border “go along the Warmian border through Bartenstein [now Bartoszyce—V. S.] and Schippenbeil [now Sępopol—V. S.] (attributable to Lithuania). Further along, the border would abut Lake Mauer.”155 Obviously, both authors’ proposals simply expressed common attitudes that circulated in the milieu of the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania, operating in the aftermath of war in Germany. From the very beginning, a small group of Prussian Lithuanians who had moved to Germany in 1944 (later some left for America) and were interested in fostering closeness with Lithuania became involved in the motivation of such claims generated in the diaspora. In its first declaration the Lithuania Minor Council, which began operating in Germany in 1946, announced that not just the historic Prussian Lithuanian region as far as Gerdauen and Goldap had to belong to the Lithuanian state but also Königsberg and Pillau156—ports that Prussian Lithuanians interested in closeness with Lithuania had never laid claims to before in any context. In 1954 this organization’s president, Erdmonas Simonaitis, exclaimed that the “liberation” of this entire territory was the main purpose of the Lithuania Minor Council.157 The declaration from the representatives of Lithuania Minor was attached to the Memorandum of the Restoration of Lithuanian Independence compiled by the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania in 1950. The declaration passed on behalf of five representatives from the Lithuania Minor Council in November 1946 in Fulda and, as we know today, prepared by the members of the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania,158 was presented as an appendix to the Memorandum. It demanded the “Separation of Lithuania Minor (within the frontiers extending from Aismarės [Frisches Haff], near Braunsberg, passing through Schippenbeil and ending with Sventainiai [Schwentainen, now Świętajno—V. S.] [near Suvalkai (Suwałki—V. S.)]),

155 Zenonas Ivinskis, Lietuvos sienų klausimu (Tübingen, March 4, 1946) (a copy of the typewritten text is kept at the Klaipėda University Library), 48–49. 156 Milerytė, Mažosios Lietuvos lietuvių, 125. 157 Ibid., 159. 158 Alfonsas Eidintas, Gyvenimas Lietuvai. Vincas Mašalaitis ir jo darbai (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos centras, 2015), 91–97.

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from the rest of Germany, in order that it may be reunited with a Lithuania delivered from foreign occupation.”159 These demands clearly show that the title “Lithuania Minor,” which carried an irredentist meaning in Lithuanian national culture, was in the postwar years applied to a territory that had never been called that before. A system of meanings related to Lithuania Minor in that culture was in turn harnessed to facilitate the expression of claims on it. Understandably, seeing Königsberg as a part of Lithuania featured in the visions of émigré Lithuanians primarily for economic reasons: the need to control the railroad Königsberg–Eydtkuhnen–Kaunas and to acquire a new port that was suitable for shipping along the Pregel River and the entire Curonian Lagoon, not to mention the whole mouth of the Memel River area. All of these were considered important factors in ensuring Lithuania’s economic independence.160 It is difficult to say whether the question of security carried as much importance in these motivations, something that became more relevant once Lithuania came under the influence of the USSR and the Soviet refusal to leave the part of Europe that the Red Army had “liberated.” Nevertheless, these were not the above-mentioned arguments prompted by émigré Lithuanians but ones that emerged from the system of meanings that had been associated with Lithuania Minor before the war. Ivinskis devoted a great deal of attention to the history of Lithuanians’ claims to Lithuania Minor, adding that in 1919 only part of Prussian Lithuania was separated from Germany, which is why “a major correction is needed along the western sector of Lithuania’s borders.”161 The necessity for these correctives was supported by four arguments. First, Lithuanians in Prussian Lithuania had once made up the majority, and only as a result of relatively late colonization and Germanization had they become a minority. However, this factor did not have much significance for Ivinskis. According to him, the handover of Germany’s former territories to Poland in the postwar years showed that “the largeness or smallness of the

159 Memorandum on the Restoration, 92–93. 160 For this argumentation, see especially Pakštas, Problem of Lithuania Minor; and Valančius, Lietuva ir Karaliaučiaus kraštas. 161 Ivinskis, Lietuvos sienų klausimu, 13.

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percentage of local inhabitants is not a factor that is ever finally decided.”162 Second, the earliest inhabitants of this territory, the Prussians, were the closest relatives of Lithuanians, so even acceptance of the thesis that was established in German historiography after the Great War about the Prussianness of Scalovia and Nadrovia in no way denies Lithuanians’ claims. Third, in the northern part of East Prussia Lithuanian “folk art” and the “Lithuanian style” of village construction dominated. Only after exploring all these arguments did Ivinskis note that, fourth, Lithuania’s economic and geopolitical demands also required correction.163 Pakštas too justified Lithuanians’ claims using “traditional” nationalistic arguments despite presenting economic and geopolitical arguments in his work. Here he again stated the similarity of the Lithuanian and Prussian dialects, criticized the attribution of Scalovians and Nadrovians to “Prussians,” and rather more insistently that Ivinskis contested the theory of Lithuanian colonization in Prussia, noting that it rested on individual facts and did not take into account the natural increase of the population. The fact that in a large part of East Prussia place names meant something in Lithuanian showed Pakštas that “the Lithuanians were the first sedentary and agricultural occupants of northern East Prussia and that they gave the shape to the cultural physiognomy of this land.”164 Moreover, Pakštas claimed that the new boundary of Lithuania that he suggested in his first option corresponded with the area where Lithuanian was spoken as far back as Hennenberger’s records testify.165 In the aforementioned Memorandum of 1950 the substantiation of Lithuania’s rights to the broader terra irredenta was also proven using meanings related to Lithuania Minor. It was claimed that this territory “was inhabited by Lithuanian peoples from prehistoric times”; in order to demonstrate the existence of the terra irredenta from early historic times, the arguments of Vytautas’s dynastic claims were used; ethnographic descriptions were utilized that were said to testify to the 162 Ibid., 43. 163 Ibid., 24–57. 164 Pakštas, Problem of Lithuania Minor, 25. 165 Ibid., 37–38, 87. In fact, apart from the reference that Lithuanians lived in the Insterburg district, Hennenberger did not provide any other boundaries where the Lithuanian language was distributed.

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­ russian-Lithuanian nature of the territory from the sixteenth and sevenP teenth centuries; appeals were made to Bezzenberger’s boundary argument; the decrease of the space inhabited by Lithuanians was explained by systemic Germanization; finally, the unfounded claim was made that Lithuania Minor “was still populated by Lithuanians to a large degree.”166 Thus, amid émigré Lithuanians the identification of Kaliningrad Oblast with Lithuania Minor facilitated keeping the irredentist connotations of this concept. On this basis, claims associating the resolution of the Kaliningrad Oblast problem with the Lithuania Minor issue were publicly expressed by the Lithuania Minor Council, the Lithuania Minor Resistance Movement, and ultimately, the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania, and representatives of other émigré organizations on many occasions.167 Yet we would be wrong to assume that the prewar system of meanings associated with Lithuania Minor and its irredentist implications acquired continuity only among émigré Lithuanians. In fact, even in the Lithuania now under the USSR’s influence, the system of meanings under discussion formed attitudes toward the Lithuanian national space in East Prussia that had first been imagined in the late nineteenth century. In Soviet Lithuania, the actualization of meanings associated with that space underwent several stages that differed both in terms of the intensity of the actualization and in the desired goals. Within the communication milieu supporting the continuity of the “Soviet government” in Lithuania, meanings related to Lithuania Minor were applied both to the Klaipėda Region and to Kaliningrad Oblast. Yet the purposes of this application, much like the circumstances for exploitation of the system of meanings itself, differed. In the initial stage during the war, Lithuanian national culture meanings associated with Lithuania Minor were used by supporters of Soviet Lithuania who had retreated far into Russia in the more general context of the USSR’s anti-German propaganda. Adapting to the propaganda clichés that were particularly relevant 166 Memorandum on the Restoration, 14, 83–89. 167 For more detail, see Paulius Jankauskas, “Kaliningrado srities problematika Lietuvos spaudoje (1945–1995 m.),” in Klaipėdos ir Karaliaučiaus kraštų XVI–XX a. istorijos, 133–138; and Milerytė, Mažosios Lietuvos lietuvių.

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during the war years, a sizable number of history writers loyal to Soviet Lithuania (Antanas Venclova, Kazys Sideravičius, Juozas Žiugžda) engaged in their reproduction. A special Lithuanian SSR State Publishing House in Moscow released small format booklets in which accounts of Lithuania’s history adapted to the “friendship of nations” dogma were published in the Lithuanian language. In creating these accounts, Lithuanian national culture meanings were used selectively, trying to adapt and if needed, to alter the traditions of their use, first of all by creating a role for the USSR or the “Russian people” in the history of Lithuanian and German relations. Canonical late nineteenth-century Lithuanian and German relations history plots (“the battle against the Crusaders,” “the opposition to Germanization”), through which the Lithuanian space was comprehended in East Prussia, were ideal for this purpose. Now these tales were transformed to apply to Lithuanians in general and adapted to the Union-wide “battle against the German fascists” narrative. Povilas Pakarklis played an important role in “finding” a space for Lithuanians in the broader narrative about the Soviet nations’ eternal battle against the Germans. As noted above, in the interwar years he created texts that supported the idea of the Klaipėda Region as a Lithuanian terra irredenta. In June 1940, with the formation of a puppet “government of the people” in Lithuania by the USSR’s request, Pakarklis was appointed as minister of justice, and after retreating far into the depths of the USSR in 1941 he again started writing on the theme of Lithuania Minor. It is not entirely clear whether he “remembered” this theme on his own initiative. Nevertheless, the Lithuanian publisher in Moscow printed his essays as part of a broader propaganda campaign, and in them he actualized the usual Lithuanian and German relations motifs typical of the Lithuanian nationalistic narrative of the past, calling Lithuania Minor a land “robbed from the Lithuanians.”168 I would say that these facts could be considered as a kind of “lead” suggesting that the Lithuanian SSR

168 Povilas Pakarklis, Lietuvių vokietinimas Mažojoj Lietuvoj (Moscow: LTSR valstybinė leidykla, 1942); Povilas Pakarklis, Kryžiuočių valstybinė santvarka pagrobtose iš lietuvių srityse (Moscow: LTSR valstybinė leidykla, 1944).

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leadership tried to exploit the wartime anti-German conjuncture in preparation for justifying the incorporation of East Prussia into Lithuania.169 The question remains, just which part of East Prussia did they have in mind? Keeping in mind the activities of the commission formed in early 1944 for the western borders of the Lithuanian SSR that was headed by a linguist from Leningrad University, Boris Larin, and the earlier plans of the USSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs on this issue, it would appear that Soviet intentions went beyond the Klaipėda Region. Nevertheless, it was none other than this region of all the East Prussian territories that was of most interest to the Lithuanian SSR leadership. It viewed the “recovery” of Klaipėda, lost in 1939, as a means of resolving the Soviet regime’s insufficient legitimacy in Lithuania. The return of Klaipėda could demonstrate that the “Soviet government” in Lithuania was not a “Russian government” and that the Lithuanian SSR was the Lithuanians’ own political derivative, whose membership in the Soviet Union served their interests. This recovery of land could add a degree of symbolic capital that was desperately needed by those ruling the Lithuanian SSR. That is why, hoping that the war would provide a solution to the Klaipėda question that favored Lithuania, the supporters of Soviet Lithuania who had fled into the depths of the USSR in 1941 discredited the ancien régime overthrown in 1940 in Lithuania, saying that it had simply given away Klaipėda to Adolf Hitler, while now, thanks to the USSR, it would again be returned to Lithuania. However, these hopes, it appears, were not firmly backed, as the Lithuanian SSR leadership that had spent 1941–1944 in the depths of the USSR was for a long time uncertain whether Klaipėda would actually be joined to Lithuania. The Soviet leaders entertained no doubts of the

169 Incidentally, Dangiras Mačiulis explains the “revival” of motifs from Prussian Lithuania’s past by arguing that they were aimed at showing Lithuanians that they could anticipate the same fate as the Prussians who fell “under the Crusaders’ slavery” (Dangiras Mačiulis, “Lietuvių kolektyvinės atminties vaizdiniai sovietinėje propagandoje Sovietų Sąjungos–Vokietijos karo metu,” Lietuvos istorijos metraštis, 2010/2 [Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2011], 105). However, I must note that the subject matter of Pakarklis’s works that appeared during the war years was wider and encompassed not just representation of the Prussians’ fate.

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outcome,170 but they did not hurry to inform the leaders of the Lithuanian SSR.171 It seems that Moscow’s final actions on this issue were dictated by the decision passed by the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR on September 12, 1944, in London to see postwar Germany within the borders that applied on December 31, 1937.172 In any case, it is hardly likely that this decision and the Kremlin’s intentions in general were coordinated in any way with the Lithuanian SSR leadership. The uncertainty explains why the exploitation of Lithuanian national culture meanings related to Lithuania Minor was to be understood as an effort aimed not just at a larger part of East Prussia but primarily at the Klaipėda Region. It is no accident that a writer from this region, Ieva Simonaitytė, after the Red Army’s entrance into Klaipėda in January 1945, wrote in the Lithuanian SSR semiofficial newspaper that, “Lithuania Minor has returned under the Soviet flag to its historic roots— Lithuania Major,”173 while Pakarklis also hurried to release a notice about 170 Based on material from the Tehran Conference published in the Soviet years it was traditionally claimed that Stalin also demanded Memel (Klaipėda). It is quite possible that while preparing this publication, the names of the Memel River and the city were confused. In the US protocol it was written that Stalin talked about “the northern part of East Prussia, running along the left bank of the Niemen and includ[ing] Tils[i]t and the City of Königsberg,” and thus Klaipėda was not mentioned. Further evidence would be the map attached to the protocol where Stalin himself marked the new Polish-USSR border in red pencil. The map depicted states within their prewar borders, including the Memel Territory that was then part of Lithuania. Cf. United States Department of State, Foreign Relations, 601, 604 and Polish Series, Map 12 “Poland: Eastern Frontier”; and Sovetskii Soiuz na mezhdunarodnykh konferentsiiakh perioda Velikoi otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 gg., vol. 2: Tegeranskaia konferentsiia rukovoditelei trekh soiuznykh derzhav—SSSR, SShA i Velikobritanii 28 noiabria–1 dekabria 1943 g. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1984), 150. 171 In postwar memoirs, the then leaders of the Lithuanian SSR repeated that they had received from Stalin himself an oral agreement to join to the Lithuanian SSR both Vilnius and Klaipėda in early July 1944 or on October 10 (Cf. [Minutes of the Meeting between Sniečkus and Vilnius Artists, 1973]. Lietuvos ypatingasis archyvas [LYA, Lithuanian Special Archives], f. 3377, ap. 51, b. 80, l. 15; Iustas Paletskis, V dvukh mirakh (Moscow: Politizdat, 1974), 442–443; and Mečislovas Gedvilas, Lemiamas posūkis: 1940–1945 metai (Vilnius: Vaga, 1975), 238–239). This clearly formed the erroneous impression that Klaipėda’s addition to Lithuania was “Stalin’s gift.” 172 Committee on Foreign Relations, Documents on Germany, 1944–1959: Background Documents on Germany, 1944–1959, and a Chronology of Political Developments Affecting Berlin, 1945–1956 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1959), 1–3. 173 Eva Simonaitite, “Rodimyi krai,” Sovetskaia Litva, January 30, 1945 (no. 16 [454]), 3.

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this land’s “historic Lithuanianness.”174 After several years, this obvious application of nationalistic rhetoric for the description of “their own” spaces became completely unimaginable in Lithuania. In identifying the reasons for this change, we should note a certain kind of competition between Moscow and Vilnius, as well as the German factor. In the postwar years there was no longer a great need to apply Lithuanian national culture meanings associated with Lithuania Minor to the Klaipėda Region. The Lithuanian sense of continuity in terms of controlling this region was formed by its relatively brief experience of having Klaipėda. Most people saw this experience as a justified expression of continuity that did not require additional legitimization. In addition, German claims to Klaipėda were neutralized by Germany’s defeat. Above all, the completely new geopolitical situation of the postwar years meant that not only did Lithuania for the first time not have to share a border with Germany but also that Germany itself (at least for a while) no longer remained on Europe’s political map. As a result, no conditions arose in which postulation of the Klaipėda Region’s belonging to “Lithuanians’ own spaces” based on the meanings related to Lithuania Minor entrenched in Lithuanian national culture were necessary. This postulation was revived much later in response to changing conditions in Soviet Lithuania and the distinct strengthening of revisionist attitudes in the FRG in the 1950s, which in the Cold War context provoked in the USSR a need to “make a riposte.”175 Meanings related to Lithuania Minor were applied somewhat differently in Soviet Lithuania to the USSR’s newly acquired territory on the left bank of the Memel River that became known as Kaliningrad Oblast after July 4, 1946. In the initial stages, the most significant factor was the Soviet leadership’s plans, at least in 1943–1944, to incorporate this territory into the Lithuanian SSR after the war. From the beginning of 1943 on, the Ethnography Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, under orders from the General Staff, collected statistical and ethnographical information about the 174 Povilas Pakarklis, “Klaipedskaia oblast‘—litovskaia zemlia,” Sovetskaia Litva, January 30, 1945 (no. 16 [454]), 3. 175 See Safronovas, Kampf um Identität, 218–219.

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Lithuanian and German border area in complete secrecy.176 Žiugdža and Pakarklis assisted in its collection.177 The information addressed to the General Staff was first collected for military purposes. However, it was also passed on to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, reaching Maksim Litvinov,178 who was the chairman of the commission for preparing peace treaties and the postwar order.179 At the initiative of Litvinov’s chief, Vyacheslav Molotov, in early 1944 a commission was formed under the permanent mission of the Lithuanian SSR in Moscow in order to set the new western border of the Lithuanian SSR, as noted above.180 Basing its decision on the distribution of place names, the commission recommended assigning Tilsit, Insterburg, Gumbinnen, and Tollmingkehmen to Lithuania. Nevertheless, the commission rejected the possibility of incorporating Königsberg into the Lithuanian SSR, and based on the prewar example of 176 The first given responsibility to collect this kind of data was ethnographer Sergei Tokarev, and from 1944 this task was taken over by Pavel Kushner. The institute’s scientists prepared and presented to the General Headquarters a collective study called “Research of Central and South-Eastern Europe’s Ethnic Composition,” the first part from which, “The Western Part of Lithuania’s Ethnographic Territory,” was defended by Kushner as his candidate dissertation in March 1945. In June 1947, supplementing this research with a theoretical part, Kushner defended his doctoral dissertation “Ethnic Territories and Ethnic Boundaries,” which was published in Moscow in 1951 (Pavel Kushner, Etnicheskie territorii i etnicheskie granitsy, vol. XV of Trudy Instituta etnografii im. N. N. Miklukho-Maklaia. Novaia seriia [Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1951]): Sergei Alymov, P. I. Kushner i razvitie sovetskoi etnografii v 1920 – 1950-e gody (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 2006), 44, 46, 147–148, 151–152. The Lithuanian-initiated re-release of this part of the study dedicated to Lithuania Minor (P. I. Kušneris [Knyševas], Pietryčių Pabaltijo etninė praeitis: istorinė etninės teritorijos studija [Chicago, IL: Lietuvių miškininkų sąjunga, 1979]; P. I. Kushner /Knyshev/, Etnicheskoe proshloe iugo-vostochnoi Pribaltiki. Opyt istoricheskogo izucheniia etnicheskoi territorii [Vil’nius: Mintis, 1991]) indicated completely erroneous political reasons for its appearance, the author of which was the émigré Lithuanian Domas Micuta (Kušneris, Pietryčių Pabaltijo etninė praeitis, 161). 177 The USSR Academy of Sciences Ethnography Institute’s archive contained the manuscript by Žiugžda Western Lithuanians and Pakarklis’s notice Lithuanian Inhabitants in Prussia. Kushner referred to them in his studies. 178 Alymov, Kushner i razvitie, 45, 147. 179 The commission was formed in September, 1943: SSSR i germanskii vopros, vol. 1, 26. 180 We know about these activities of the commission from an entry dated February 27, 1944, in Romas Šarmaitis’s journal and from the memoirs written after the war by Juozas Vaišnoras, who maintained constant ties with the commission. Cf. LYA, f. 17635, ap. 1, b. 15, l. 107; LYA, f. 3377, ap. 5, b. 251, l. 62.

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Danzig, it recommended making Königsberg a free city.181 In this way, it mutatis mutandis suggested the implementation of Poland’s recommendations for East Prussia, formulated after the First World War. It is not entirely clear why the commission then backed away from recommending that Königsberg be allocated to Lithuania. In memoirs written at a later time, Juozas Vaišnoras—then a member of the CPSU, deputy chairman of the Council of the People’s Commissars of the Lithuanian SSR, and this council’s permanent representative to the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR—wrote that the resettlement of Königsberg, in the opinion of the commission’s members, would have been too great a challenge for Lithuania: the size of its population had decreased during the war, and besides, the commission foresaw the need to assemble great efforts in settling the “centuries-long Polonized city of Vilnius.”182 So far it is unclear when exactly the commission presented its recommendations, but if this took place in the spring of 1944, its members would not have clearly understood the scale of the Vilnius problem, which became evident only in the summer. That is why the linking of the Königsberg and Vilnius questions in Vaišnoras’s memoirs may be a hint confirming the interpretation of Česlovas Laurinavičius: that Königsberg may have been rejected in the belief that Stalin would treat it as compensation to Lithuania in exchange for Vilnius, which then might have been sacrificed to Poland.183 There are more arguments that could confirm this version,184 yet it needs more research. Either way, this version does not explain why none 181 Juozas Vaišnoras’s memoirs, LYA, f. 3377, ap. 51, b. 251, l. 63. Antanas Kulakauskas was the first to publish information based on these memoirs: Lietuva ir jos kaimynai: Metinės konferencijos tekstai, Vilnius, 1996 m. lapkričio 22–23 d. (Vilnius: Pradai, 1997), 136–138. 182 Juozas Vaišnoras’s memoirs, LYA, f. 3377, ap. 51, b. 251, l. 64. 183 Česlovas Laurinavičius, “Lietuvos valstybingumo galimybių mozaika: 1944 metai,” in Lietuva Antrajame pasauliniame kare, ed. Arvydas Anušauskas and Česlovas Laurinavičius (Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2007), 190, 193. 184 This version may also be confirmed by the fact that the USSR leadership, even before forming the commission for setting the western border of the Lithuanian SSR, envisaged which territory Lithuanians could lay claim to. We can assume this based on the reaction from the Red Army’s Senior Political Board to a notice prepared by the Geography Institute’s staff member Dobrov in March 1944. In it Dobrov, giving an uncritical assessment of interwar German statistics, provided a completely unexpected assessment of East Prussia’s population, where allegedly 98 percent of the province’s

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of the commission’s recommendations were ever implemented, or why representatives of the Lithuanian SSR were included in making decisions regarding Kaliningrad Oblast for several years after the war. It is not clear what was meant by Pakarklis’s articles in the Lithuanian SSR semiofficial newspaper Tiesa [Truth] in May 1945, where he gave evidence of East Prussia’s Lithuanianness.185 And why in February 1947 was Pakarklis invited to Moscow to participate in a meeting of representatives from different institutions where the matter of renaming place names in Kaliningrad Oblast was discussed and where he openly exclaimed that in the future Kaliningrad Oblast would be joined to the Lithuanian SSR?186 Another fact also needs an explanation. In the former Klaipėda Region and the part of East Prussia that was allocated to Poland, representatives of the Lithuanian and Polish governments were appointed while the Red Army was still carrying out attack operations: in the case of Klaipėda in the beginning of October 1944, and in the southern part of East Prussia in the beginning of February 1945.187 But this kind of representative was not appointed to the future Kaliningrad Oblast, even though a majority of its territory was under Red Army control until the beginning of February 1945 (Königsberg was occupied on April 9, while Pillau port was occupied on April 25). We should also note that at the end of November 1944, the Lithuanian SSR leadership had already deliberated the question of the Klaipėda Region’s administrative division (although Klaipėda was in fact occupied inhabitants were Germans: Alymov, Kushner i razvitie, 149–150. The reaction to this notice suggests that the proposal from early 1944 for the Lithuanian SSR leadership to present their claims was an attempt to bring the Lithuanians to the negotiation table. 185 Povilas Pakarklis, “Iš lietuviškosios Rytprūsių praeities,” Tiesa, May 20, 22, 23, 1945 (nos. 116–118 [646–648]). 186 Brodersen, Stadt im Westen, 65, 272. Cf. “Zamechaniia k proektu Ukaza Prezidiuma Verhovnogo Soveta RSFSR o pereimenovanii naselennyh punktov Kaliningradskoi oblasti,” February 10, 1947, in Lietuvos mokslų akademijos Vrublevskių biblioteka (LMAVB, The Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences), F221–83, l. 84–85. 187 Cf. Vasilijus Safronovas, “Vykdomoji valdžia ir jos kadrų politika Klaipėdos mieste 1945–1957 m.,” in Klaipėdos miesto ir visuomenės struktūros, ed. Vacys Vaivada and Dainius Elertas, vol. XI of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis (Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2005), 117; Rudolf Neumann, Ostpreussen 1945–1955: Ostpreussen unter polnischer und sowjetischer Verwaltung, vol. 1 of Ostdeutschland unter fremder Verwaltung 1945–1955 (Frankfurt a. M.: Alfred Metzner, 1955), 1.

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only on January 28, 1945). Poland, naming its part of East Prussia the “Masurian District” (Okręg Mazurski) on March 14, 1945, also passed acts regulating administrative divisions after the celebration of its takeover of military structures from the USSR were held in Olsztyn on May 23.188 However, a formal act giving northern East Prussia the status of a separate district and incorporating it into the Russian SFSR was released only on April 7, 1946, and only then was a civil government apparatus formed in the district (until then, administrative functions were carried out by temporary organs formed from special military structures within the district). In explaining what determined the relatively late creation of a civil administration in the future Kaliningrad Oblast, the possibility that delays were made in expectation of the outcome of the Potsdam Conference should be rejected, since the nonexistence of such decisions did not stop the USSR from handing over part of East Prussia to Poland. So it is most likely that at least until the spring of 1946 the USSR leadership indeed lacked a final resolution as to how Königsberg would be integrated into the USSR. In addition, up until 1947–1948, which marked a turn toward the “two Germanys” path in the geopolitical arena, relations between the USSR and its former allies had not yet completely fallen apart. For several years after the war, at least in a declarative sense, the vision was still upheld that all four Allies would accept a common resolution regarding Germany. If during the passing of such a resolution any question had arisen over the legitimacy of East Prussia’s division, the USSR would have had a vested interest in maintaining the nationalist (ethnographic) motivation for this territory’s assignment to the USSR. That motivation, most clearly formulated by Pavel Kushner, rested on the idea of Lithuanian irredentism. Only that explains the inclusion of Pakarklis in the group charged with discussing place names in Kaliningrad Oblast. And the fact that the group had a meeting only one month ahead of the Allies’ session of the Council of Foreign Ministers in Moscow in March– April 1947 also does not appear to have been a coincidence. The decision to turn away from reliance on Lithuanian irredentism came about in part because of potential opposition from the leaders of the Lithuanian SSR to joining with Kaliningrad Oblast, but in part in response 188 Neumann, Ostpreussen 1945–1955, 2.

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to the deepening divide between the Western and Eastern blocs in 1947 over the German question, aimed at maintaining the status quo. Moreover, on February 18, 1947, the authorities of Kaliningrad Oblast reported to Moscow that its territory had no more “citizens of Lithuanian nationality.”189 This announcement, which immediately reached the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, urged the final rejection of Pakarklis’s recommendations to take into consideration the Lithuanian origins of the toponyms when changing place names in Kaliningrad Oblast.190 The announcement also strengthened the position that there were no grounds for relying on Lithuanian claims in resolving the Kaliningrad Oblast question. Interestingly, it was after this announcement, in the summer of 1947, that Moscow took the first steps toward integrating the area and financing its needs.191 In a certain sense, these changes of 1947 disrupted the ongoing rhetoric related to Lithuania Minor in Lithuania itself. Despite not directly expressing any territorial claims in his Tiesa publication of 1945, Pakarklis did argue for part of East Prussia’s “Lithuanianness” in ways that hardly differed from those used by Ivinskis or Pakštas in emigration in 1946. Keeping in mind Pakarklis’s duties at the time (he was the director of the Lithuanian Institute of History) and his influence, the appearance of such ideas in the Lithuanian SSR semiofficial newspaper comes as no surprise. But even then, his ideas would not have won support from a majority of the Lithuanian SSR leadership.192 Pakarklis also used nationalistic arguments related to Lithuania Minor in his recommendations in 1947 regarding the toponymics of Kaliningrad Oblast.193 However, when the search began for “bourgeois nationalists” within the Lithuanian SSR ruling apparatus in 1946, it was made rather clear to Pakarklis that his overly 189 Brodersen, Stadt im Westen, 68. 190 Cf. “Zamechaniia k proektu” and its appendix “Spisok starolitovskikh nazvanii naselennykh punktov Kaliningradskoi oblasti RSFSR,” LMAVB, F221–84, which contains a list of 125 renaming proposals in total. 191 Cf. Iurii Kostiashov, “Stalin i Kaliningradskaia oblast’: popytka istoricheskoi rekonstruktsii,” in Antrojo pasaulinio karo pabaiga, 57–70. 192 Pakarklis was also described as dedicated to his ideals by Soviet Lithuanian historiography researcher Aurimas Švedas, In the Captivity of the Matrix: Soviet Lithuanian Historiography, 1944–1985, vol. 38 of On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 61, 87–88. 193 “Zamechaniia k proektu.” The content of the proposal was summarized by Brodersen, Stadt im Westen, 68–69.

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nationalistic rhetoric was no longer suitable. Ultimately, in 1948, he lost his post as director of the Institute of History.194 Moscow’s clear signal in 1947 that Lithuanian toponymics, thus also the idea of Lithuanian irredentism in Kaliningrad Oblast, would not be considered became an additional reason why the actualization of rhetoric related to this idea in Lithuania lost its relevance. During the first postwar years in Lithuania, attention was still paid to symbols related to Lithuania Minor in Lithuanian national culture, such as Donelaitis and Mažvydas. However, after the quadricentennial of Mažvydas’s Cathechismus in 1947 the actualization of meanings that represented Lithuania Minor decreased in Soviet Lithuania.195 The name “Lithuania Minor” itself, still used for some time after the war—for example, in 1946 in the first Russian translation of Donelaitis’s Seasons196— also soon became marginalized. In literature released or prepared in Lithuania, the inhabitants of Prussian Lithuania started being called “western Lithuanians,”197 though commonly—“Prussian Lithuanians” or “East Prussian Lithuanians.”198 It is quite possible that this was a way of stabilizing the content of Lithuania’s spatial concept, relating it exclusively to the existing boundaries of the Lithuanian SSR. No longer mentioning the region called “Lithuania” that existed in Prussia, the physical space 194 For more on the formation of an unfavorable conjuncture for Pakarklis and the criticism he received from the Central Committee’s first secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania, Antanas Sniečkus, see Švedas, In the Captivity, 89–91. 195 Vladas Žukas, “Lietuviškos knygos 400 metų sukakties minėjimas,” Lietuvos TSR aukštųjų mokyklų mokslo darbai: Knygotyra 15 (22), no. 1 (1988), special issue: Lietuvos knygotyrinė mintis ir jos kūrėjai: 85–96. 196 Cf. Iuozas Zhiugzhda, “Sud’ba zapadnykh litovtsev i Kristionas Donelaitis,” in Kristionas Donelaitis, Vremena goda: poema, trans. D.  Brodskii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1946), 99–102; and Vintsas Mikolaitis-Putinas, “Poema Kristionasa Donelaitisa ‘Vremena goda,’” in ibid., 103–110. 197 Zhiugzhda, “Sud’ba zapadnykh litovtsev”; Lietuvos TSR istorija, ed. Juozas Žiugžda, vol. I (Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1957), 175; Petronėlė Žostautaitė, “Prūsijos lietuvių valstiečių padėtis XVIII a. antrojoje pusėje,” Lietuvos TSR Mokslų akademijos darbai, serija A 1 (1962): 93; Stanislovas Tarvydas, “Vakarinių lietuvių genčių teritorijos istoriniai geografiniai landšaftai,” Geografinis metraštis 8 (1967), special issue: Lietuvos TSR landšaftai: 53–64. 198 Lietuvos TSR istorija, vol. I, 178, 360; Žostautaitė, “Prūsijos lietuvių valstiečių padėtis,” 91–113; Petronėlė Žostautaitė, “Prūsijos lietuvių vokietinimas ir pasipriešinimas jam 1848–1914 m.,” Lietuvos TSR Mokslų akademijos darbai, serija A 1 (1968): 59–73; “Rytų Prūsijos lietuviai, vakariniai lietuviai,” in Mažoji lietuviškoji tarybinė enciklopedija, vol. III (Vilnius: Mintis, 1971), 90–93.

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with which that name was identified, was an attempt at freedom from the irredentist connotations that were applied in Lithuanian national culture. Nevertheless, this effort was only temporary: as soon as the actualization of national culture meanings was revived in Soviet Lithuania during the de-Stalinization period, so too was a system of meanings prevalent in that culture related to Lithuania Minor generated. This revival was the result of a need that had crystallized in Sniečkus’s circle after Stalin’s death to more clearly demonstrate its “national engagement.” Due to the fight over influence that had been brought to the surface in Moscow, the Lithuanian SSR government was unable to rely on repressive structures as much as before. Seeking wider support from society, the Lithuanian leaders searched for points of contact with the intelligentsia, and such searches brought on the need to present itself suitably, at least in the eyes of that intelligentsia. It was then that a course was set to more actively use Lithuanian national culture meanings for “socialist culture needs.” This gave the green light to further exploit meanings related to Lithuania Minor in Lithuanian culture, adapting them to the “advanced” Soviet ideology dogmas. This is very evident in the works that saw the light of day in the 1950s, The History of Lithuanian Literature and The History of the Lithuanian SSR.199 These multivolume editions—prepared by the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature and Institute of History of the Lithuanian SSR Academy of Sciences, respectively—continued to actualize the system of meanings related to Lithuania Minor, paradoxically denying the uniqueness of Lithuania Minor and forming an image of Lithuanian folk having a common culture. In the new Lithuanian historical narrative, Lithuania Minor and symbols related to it were integrated to the extent that the latter became almost more Lithuania-wide than, for example, in the narrative created in interwar Lithuania and edited by Adolfas Šapoka.200 199 Kostas Korsakas, ed., Lietuvių literatūros istorija, vols. 1–4 (Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla; Mintis, 1957–1968); Juozas Žiugžda, ed., Lietuvos TSR istorija, vols. 1–4 (Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1957–1975). 200 Historian Šapoka was the editor of a popular Lithuanian history textbook written by several authors from interwar Lithuania aimed at gymnasium students.

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In the Šapoka narrative, the history of Lithuanians in Lithuania Minor was presented at the end of the work, along with the history of the Lithuanian diaspora in other continents, like something that was at the same time “Lithuanians’ own” yet removed from the general context. In the Soviet history narrative, Lithuanians were held to be the entire Lithuanian-speaking “working people.” “Lithuanians in Prussia” were integrated into the general legitimizing narrative in such a way that probably the only distinct difference that remained between Lithuanians and East Prussian Lithuanians was that the first struggled against their “exploiters” in the context of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Russian Empire, while the second were always forced to struggle in the Prussian/German context. With the revival of the trend to integrate East Prussian Lithuanians into the Lithuanian literature and history context, the “Prussian Lithuanian” concepts used in the postwar years were gradually rejected, with the term lietuvininkai being adopted instead. In turn, the administrative term “Lithuanian Province,” first applied in historiography at the juncture of the 1950s and 1960s,201 was gradually replaced by “Lithuania Minor.” The intensive use of “Lithuania Minor” had, as noted above, abated in the postwar years: after 1947 sporadic cases of its use were recorded only around 1956–1958.202 But the mere fact that in the officially sanctioned The History of the Lithuanian SSR this space was still called “the Lithuanian lands in Prussia” shows that regardless of 201 In volume I of The History of the Lithuanian SSR it was stated without any certainty of the grounds for such claims that part of Prussia had been called the “Lithuanian Province” or simply “Lithuania” since 1600. This claim was repeated, especially by historian Žostautaitė, who in 1968 even brought forward the beginning of the use of these terms to the sixteenth century. Cf. Lietuvos TSR istorija, vol. I, 357; Prūsijos valdžios gromatos, 13, 36, 37, 54; Žostautaitė, “Prūsijos lietuvių valstiečių padėtis,” 91, 94, 95, 97, 98 et al.; and Žostautaitė, “Prūsijos lietuvių vokietinimas,” 60. 202 With the release in 1956 of the first volume of Simonaitytė’s writing, her novel Aukštujų Šimonių likimas (The Fate of Šimoniai from Aukštujai) still had the subtitle “A Novel about Life in Lithuania Minor.” In a historic publication featured in the local Klaipėda press this term was also used in 1957: Bronė Elertienė, “Iš mūsų miesto istorijos,” Tarybinė Klaipėda, November 12, 1957 (no. 223 [3128]). What is most strange is that in one place it “broke through” into the content of the academic History of the Lithuanian SSR (Lietuvos TSR istorija, vol. I, 360), where priority was otherwise given to the official titles “Prussia,” “East Prussia,” or the “Klaipėda Region.”

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the use of the “Lithuania Minor” concept, its irredentist implications were being reactualized.203 This development appears to show that by the late 1950s the official discourse in Soviet Lithuania had yet to decide which criterion, the administrative or the ethnographic, to use in defining the Lithuanian space in the former East Prussia. Ultimately the ethnographic criterion was selected, as demonstrated in the article about Vydūnas by the influential historian Juozas Jurginis that appeared in 1969, in which Lithuania Minor and lietuvininkai appeared together, probably for the first time since the Second World War.204 The collection of ethnographic accounts called Lietuvininkai that was released one year later repeated this usage.205 Once Jurginis broke the ice, in the 1970s younger historians such as Petronėlė Žostautaitė and Algirdas Matulevičius used the term “Lithuania Minor” as if it were a matter of course, while in 1972 Matulevičius went so far as to say that none other than this term was the “most suitable” for identifying the territory of the “western Lithuanians.”206 In the 1980s these terms finally pushed aside concepts that implied the land’s association with the “foreign” tradition of belonging to Prussia/Germany.207 Comments hinting (correctly) at the fact that from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries the land inhabited by Lithuanian speakers in 203 Lietuvos TSR istorija, vol. I, 356, 357. 204 Juozas Jurginis, “Amžinoji ugnis ant lietuvninkų kapo,” in Juozas Jurginis, Istorija ir poezija: kultūros istorijos etiudai (Vilnius: Vaga, 1969), 301–312. 205 Vacys Milius, ed., Lietuvininkai: apie Vakarų Lietuvą ir jos gyventojus devynioliktajame amžiuje (Vilnius: Vaga, 1970). 206 See Petronėlė Žostautaitė, “Vilius Gaigalaitis,” Kraštotyra 7 (1971): 101–107; Matulevičius, “Dėl lietuvių Prūsijoje,” 103–105; Algirdas Matulevičius, “Kolonistų skaičius ir jų pasiskirstymas Mažojoje Lietuvoje XVIII a. I pusėje,” Lietuvos TSR Mokslų akademijos darbai, serija A 1 (1975): 63–77; and Algirdas Matulevičius, “Prūsijos valdžios socialinės ekonominės ir teisinės lietuvių nutautinimo priemonės XVIII a.,” in Tarybinės Klaipėdos istorijos klausimai, ed. Mečislovas Jučas and Stanislava Overaitė (Vilnius: Lietuvos TSR Mokslų akademijos Istorijos institutas, 1977), 99–109. 207 In volumes of the Lithuanian Soviet Encyclopedia released in 1980–1981 articles dedicated to Lithuania Minor and the lietuvininkai appeared; the encyclopedia released ten years earlier described only “East Prussian Lithuanians.” Cf. “Rytų Prūsijos lietuviai,” 90–93; [Algirdas Matulevičius], “Lietuvininkai, vakariniai lietuviai, Prūsijos lietuviai, Rytų Prūsijos lietuviai,” in Lietuviškoji tarybinė enciklopedija, vol. VI (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1980), 527–528; and [Algirdas Matulevičius], “Mažoji Lietuva,” in Lietuviškoji tarybinė enciklopedija, vol. VII (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1981), 338–340.

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Prussia was called “Lithuania” and the “Lithuania Minor term only came into wider use in Lithuanian literature in the first half of the twentieth century” had become a rarity.208 The actions of Jurginis and perhaps of Žostautaitė could be explained by the continuity of the interwar experience—they both grew up in the period when the “two Lithuanias” conception was being actively instilled in Lithuanian national culture. In the interwar period, the system of meanings associated with Lithuania Minor circulated among the Lithuanian intelligentsia, including the leftist intelligentsia, which occupied important posts in Soviet Lithuania. One of the most distinctive examples of this intelligentsia was none other than Jurginis. However, the continuity of culture, transferred through specific figures, is just one explanation. In fact, it is difficult to ignore the intensification of the stream of publications about the former Lithuanian space in East Prussia from the second half of the 1960s in Soviet Lithuania. The space that had until then received only meager attention started being actualized in texts on various themes. Archaeologist Adolfas Tautavičius, writing about the Prussians, continued the prewar polemic, even finding the need to debate Gertrud Heinrich-Mortensen’s concept.209 In 1967, when the Geography Society of the Lithuanian SSR released its thematic annual issue on “Landscapes of the Lithuanian SSR,” it featured an article dedicated to the landscape of the “western Lithuanians.”210 The article, which geographer Stanislovas Tarvydas had prepared back in 1965, attributed all (!) the territories once inhabited by Prussian tribes to the “western Lithuanians’ ” landscape. Historian Žostautaitė, as if reproducing interwar rhetoric, wrote about the Germanization of Prussian Lithuanians and the “opposition” it faced.211 Jurginis, in his essay about Vydūnas, again seemed to reproduce interwar rhetoric, asserting to the existence of two Lithuanias, Major 208 Lietuvininkai, 5, 440. 209 Adolfas Tautavičius, “Mūsų giminaičiai prūsai,” Mokslas ir gyvenimas 6 (1968): 17–22; Adolfas Tautavičius, “Lietuvių tautos protėviai,” Mokslas ir gyvenimas 8 (1968): 12–17. 210 Tarvydas, “Vakarinių lietuvių genčių,” 53–64. 211 Žostautaitė, “Prūsijos lietuvių vokietinimas,” 59–73.

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and Minor, and again offering the ideologeme already exploited in 1920 about Lithuania Minor as the “cradle of Lithuanian culture.”212 It was claimed that Lithuania Minor was the “cradle” of many phenomena of Lithuanian culture (not Prussian Lithuanian, but all Lithuanian culture), as this was where many of the “first” phenomena of Lithuanian writing were born: this was where the first book in Lithuanian was prepared and printed, where the first copy of the Holy Writ was translated into Lithuanian, where the first grammar of the Lithuanian language was published, where the first work of fiction in Lithuanian appeared, where the first Lithuanian newspaper was published, and so on. In 1970, historian Matulevičius was accepted as a postgraduate student at the Institute of History, where he started work on his candidate’s dissertation about the national situation of Lithuanians in Prussia in the eighteenth century. There, according to his academic supervisor, “ethnic aspects had to be covered up by the agrarian relations of the autochthon Lithuanians and colonial Germans, by their inequality.”213 Such expressions of intensified interest in the Lithuanian space in East Prussia would be incomplete and hard to comprehend if it were not for two more works: the monograph by Leonas Gineitis from 1964 about the epoch of Donelaitis, for which he received the academic title of doctor one year later, and the monograph by Albinas Jovaišas on Rhesa, written based on his candidate’s dissertation defended back in 1963.214 Neither of these two works used the term “Lithuania Minor,” but both were very significant in instilling the integrality of Lithuanian culture in the GDL and Prussia. The themes of the works on Donelaitis suggest that the “wave” of interest in “Lithuanians’ own” space in East Prussia seen in Soviet Lithuania was not accidental. It was encouraged by the long-term impact of 212 Jurginis, “Amžinoji ugnis,” 301. 213 Vytautas Merkys, “Istorijos ir enciklopedijų darbų baruose,” in Algirdas Matulevičius apie Mažąją Lietuvą, ed. Audronė Matijošienė (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 2008), 11. 214 Leonas Gineitis, Kristijonas Donelaitis ir jo epocha (Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1964); Jovaišas, Liudvikas Rėza.

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Figure 41.  Boundaries of Lithuania “blessed” by Kristijonas Donelaitis. A festive envelope published in the United States by the Lithuania Philatelic Society on the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth reflecting the image of Lithuanian boundaries that circulated within the Lithuanian émigré communities in that period. In the east and south these boundaries are portrayed in accordance with the borderline determined by the 1920 Moscow peace treaty between Lithuania and Soviet Russia; the dashed line “border” in Prussian Lithuania delimits an area of eventual Lithuanian interest. From Bernardas Aleknavičius, Donelaitis ir mes (Vilnius: Mintis, 1989).

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a process begun during de-Stalinization in which national culture meanings were harnessed to legitimize the Soviet government. Donelaitis, whose global significance no one was prepared to deny in the Soviet years, was one of those tools that was most convenient for reactualizing these meanings. It was similarly no accident that the 250th anniversary of Donelaitis’s birth was marked in 1964 by order of the Lithuanian SSR leadership, with events held not just in Vilnius and many of Lithuania’s cities and towns but in Moscow, Leningrad, Kaliningrad, and even in Berlin, Cracow, and the United States. But the actualization of Donelaitis, making him into a famous figure representing Lithuanian culture and Lithuania itself, probably the main figure in Lithuanian national culture, unavoidably drew attention to a system of meanings codified in culture that was associated with Lithuania Minor. At the same time, the exploitation of prewar meanings about Lithuania Minor and the idea of two Lithuanias, despite being adapted to the norms of an ethnographic vocabulary and Soviet dogma, stimulated irredentist connotations related to this space.215 As these meanings invoked an imagined region and one that realistically no longer existed, the only possible geographic reference to Lithuania Minor even in Soviet Lithuania was Kaliningrad Oblast. The role that the symbol of Donelaitis played out in Soviet Lithuania to identify Lithuania Minor with Kaliningrad Oblast is hard to overrate. In the 1950s, Lithuanian intellectuals close to the regime, such as Antanas Venclova, already visited objects important to Lithuanian culture located in Kaliningrad Oblast.216 Observing the declining state of churches and places related to Lithuanian national culture symbols, they endorsed the view that concern over the Lithuanian national heritage should fall on the shoulders of Soviet Lithuania, even if that heritage lay 215 The anniversary of the birth of Donelaitis also stimulated irredentist connotations related to Lithuania Minor in the Lithuanian diaspora. To mark the 250th anniversary jubilee, an envelope depicted the two Lithuanias, where Lithuania Minor was defined by the border that was proposed by émigré Lithuanians after 1945. See the illustration in Bernardas Aleknavičius, Donelaitis ir mes (Vilnius: Mintis, 1989), 269. 216 Napoleonas Kitkauskas, Laimute Kitkauskene, and Boris Bartfel’d, Memorial Kristionasa Donelaitisa v p. Chistye Prudy (Toll’mingkemen, Tolminkemis). Istoriia sozdaniia (Vil’nius: Standartu spaustuve; Kaliningrad: Aksios, 2013), 345.

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beyond its borders. In 1960 the Ministry of Culture of the Lithuanian SSR formulated a complex program for the creation of ritual sites dedicated to Donelaitis in Kaliningrad Oblast. It envisaged the restoration of the church constructed by Donelaitis in Tollmingkehmen (Chistye Prudy); a search for his remains and, having found them, the use of his skull to recreate a portrait and set up a memorial exposition dedicated to him; and in his birthplace, Lasdinehlen, which had not even been localized at the time, plans to install a monument boulder.217 The implementation of this program was stretched out over thirty years. The creation of ritual places dedicated to Donelaitis in Kaliningrad Oblast— during which, incidentally, the Soviet Lithuanian authorities reconstructed a church (!)—was financed by the Lithuanian SSR government and involved the participation of hundreds of volunteers from Lithuania. The visiting of national “holy places” and interest in the memorialization of Donelaitis in Kaliningrad Oblast was expressed more as a public than as an official initiative. Amateur regional historians, school pupils, students from Lithuania, and members of the clubs Alkas and Atgaja, founded in Vilnius and Kaunas, were involved. At the time, only the internal Soviet border separated Kaliningrad Oblast from Lithuania, so no major problems were faced in actually reaching these places. In fact, Chistye Prudy belonged to the border zone, visits to which for a long time required special permission. This circumstance complicated tourism of this type. However, one year prior to opening the Donelaitis Museum in the Tollmingkehmen church, in 1978, the border zone was moved significantly southward from Chistye Prudy, closer to the border with Poland.218 This had the effect of undoubtedly increasing the stream of visitors from Lithuania to this place. This tourist activity, which tried to uncover “traces of Lithuanian culture” in Kaliningrad Oblast,219 and the visiting of related objects and 217 Ibid., 60–61, 269–271. 218 Ibid., 360–361. 219 The excursions produced the abstracts by amateur regional historians Vytautas Šilas and Henrikas Sambora, which went “from hand to hand” in the late Soviet era and were finally released as a separate book in 1990. Its title, Traces of Lithuania Minor in Kaliningrad Oblast, reveals everything about their content and intentions: Vytautas

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Figure 42. The church rebuilt by the Lithuanian SSR government in Kaliningrad Oblast, where the Memorial Museum of Kristijonas Donelaitis was opened in 1979. Photograph by Vasilijus Safronovas, 2014.

sites such as Tollmingkehmen and Lasdinehlen recreated especially by the Lithuanian government, formed the concept of a space of “Lithuanians’ own.” The space, called “Lithuania Minor” in Lithuanian national culture, Šilas, Henrikas Sambora, Mažosios Lietuvos kultūros pėdsakai Kaliningrado srityje (Vilnius: Mintis, 1990).

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was identified with Kaliningrad Oblast even in Soviet Lithuania. But unlike in the Lithuanian diaspora, Lithuanian irredentism regarding this space was quashed in Soviet Lithuania and could not be publicly displayed; instead it was channeled into cultural images and symbols and maintained by actualization of these images and symbols. In this sense, the irredentist connotations of Lithuania Minor developed along similar lines to those that characterized the irredentism of the Vilnius Region in interwar Lithuania. In both cases, despite the marginal numbers of Lithuanian speakers in the irredentist spaces, their importance to Lithuanians was argued based on the thesis that Lithuanians were the first to settle there and the exceptional importance that these spaces had in terms of the national group’s culture and identity.220 The final, yet no less significant step in Soviet Lithuania in identifying Lithuania Minor with Kaliningrad Oblast was taken by historian Matulevičius. In the journal of the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR in 1972, this author released an article that suggested that it was possible (even necessary) to apply Lithuania’s name retrospectively to that territory where the Lithuanian language was once used. Based on this approach, Matulevičius formulated his main thesis: “The entire territory inhabited by western Lithuanians had to be called Lithuania Minor.”221 The historian urged treating the concept of “Lithuania Minor” as a broader historical-ethnic and geographical category, which encompassed a much larger territory than “Prussian Lithuania,” which in his view corresponded with the historic region of Lithuania as far as the Deime-Alle line.222 Upholding the traditional view that the epidemic plague of 1709–1711 reduced the area where Lithuanian was used, Matulevičius proposed handling the southern border of Lithuania Minor as “the boundary of the spread of the Lithuanian language in the south of East Prussia until the plague of 1709–1711

220 Cf. Chaim Gans, “Historical Rights: The Evaluation of Nationalist Claims to Sovereignty,” Political Theory 29, no. 1 (2001): 59–60. 221 Matulevičius, “Dėl lietuvių Prūsijoje,” 108. 222 Ibid., 105, 118.

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and the ensuing great colonization of German farmers who settled in the emptier Lithuanian villages.”223 When forming these proposals, Matulevičius took the path that in Soviet ethnography had already been explored by Kushner.224 He combined the ever-more entrenched theory of the ethnos with claims from Lithuanian literature released in the interwar period filled with irredentist connotations. Much like Kushner, when determining his border, Matulevičius made use of contrasting methods, such the “method for spreading national rural architecture,” travelers’ memoirs, and churches about which there only had to be one hint that before 1709 the Mass there was held in Lithuanian. The author’s final conclusion in this case was as follows: “the border of Lithuania Minor can be set down approximately, so that it, or in other words, the Lithuanians’ southern ethnic border extended from the Vistula Lagoon shores near Heiligenbeil [now Mamonovo (here and hereafter, all authorial insertions mine)—V. S.], after Zinten [now Kornevo], Preussisch Eylau [now Bagrationovsk], Bartenstein, Laggarben [now Garbno], Barten [now Barciany], Engelstein [now Węgielsztyn], Angerburg, Kutten [now Kuty], Mierunsken [now Mieruniszki], Gurnen as far as Dubeningken [now Dubeninki],” even though the region south of this line “was inhabited by a few Lithuanians.”225 Looking at the territory this “border” defines, it becomes clear that Matulevičius had attributed to Lithuania Minor not just almost the entire Kaliningrad Oblast, but that it also encompassed a large part of a Polish region close to the contemporary Soviet-Polish border. In this respect, the newly proposed boundary of Lithuania Minor was very similar to those that were determined in the Lithuanian diaspora immediately after 1945. The importance of Matulevičius’s proposal was not limited to articles in a journal that was not even read by the wider public. The author, who after defending his candidate’s dissertation worked in the editorial office for encyclopedias released in the Lithuanian SSR, made his 223 Ibid., 103. 224 See Kushner, Etnicheskie territorii, especially 70–77, 160–185, 193–201, 241–265. 225 Matulevičius, “Dėl lietuvių Prūsijoje,” 117–118, 119.

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Figure 43.  The southern boundary of Lithuania Minor (marked in dots) as determined by Algirdas Matulevičius in 1972. It nearly coincides with the postwar Russian-Polish border in East Prussia. Map by Vasilijus Safronovas based on Algirdas Matulevičius’s map Lithuanian Territory in Prussia before Plague and German Colonization (Early Eighteenth Century) (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1989).

proposal into an encyclopedic constant. And so, in an encyclopedia article about Lithuania Minor that appeared in 1981, its territory (albeit rather reservedly) was still defined along the Deime-Alle line.226 But in rewriting the same article six years later for a newer encyclopedia, Matulevičius extended his territorial definition, providing grounds for the 226 [Matulevičius], “Mažoji Lietuva” 1981, 338.

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line as the southern boundary of Lithuania Minor from his own research.227 It was this step in particular that, at the juncture of the 1980s and 1990s without any major interruptions, allowed the hegemonization in Lithuania of the concept of Lithuania Minor’s boundary, which upheld irredentist implications that were entrenched in the Lithuanian diaspora. Making a major impact in Lithuania in this period, the irredentist implications from the diaspora’s discourse were mostly echoed among those amateur regional history researchers who had hitherto been most active in visiting “national places” in Kaliningrad Oblast. During the years of perestroika and glasnost, the search for “Lithuanian traces” of Lithuania Minor took place there even more intensively than before. Having made clear what was “ours” (Lithuanians’) in Kaliningrad Oblast, in Lithuania this area was transformed into the “Karaliaučiaus kraštas.” Around 1989 discussions had already commenced in the Lithuanian press about its future, where the idea was frequently raised that it would be a good move for it to be joined to Lithuania.228 Finally, in the changed geopolitical situation of 1989–1991, when the future of Kaliningrad Oblast became relevant to many Baltic states, in Lithuania there were attempts to actualize the resolution of this problem by applying irredentist rhetoric. One of the events arranged for this purpose was a conference held in 1995, where, with the participation of 227 Algirdas Matulevičius, Juozas Tumelis, et al., “Mažoji Lietuva,” in Tarybų Lietuvos enciklopedija, vol. III (Vilnius: Vyriausioji enciklopedijų redakcija, 1987), 26–27. This conception was taken from here and transferred into encyclopedias released after 1990. Cf. Matulevičius, “Mažoji Lietuva,” 2003, 761; and Matulevičius, “Mažoji Lietuva,” 2008, 507–508. 228 Jankauskas, “Kaliningrado srities problematika,” 137–138, 141–143. In articles appearing in Lithuania in the 1990s many more options for Kaliningrad Oblast were proposed, starting with a Russian German republic and ending with a Euroregion or a condominium of Germany, Poland, and Lithuania. Cf. Alvydas Nikžentaitis, “Kaliningrado problema Lietuvos ir Vokietijos politikoje,” Mokslas ir gyvenimas 1 (1995): 6–7; 2 (1995): 26–27; Jankauskas, “Kaliningrado srities problematika,” 138–145. See also Lietuva ir jos kaimynai, 107–139.

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rightist Lithuanian politicians who then made up the opposition, and based on the thesis that Kaliningrad Oblast “had been temporarily handed over to the administration” of the USSR, the unfounded thesis was put forth that the Karaliaučiaus kraštas had been handed over to the USSR only for fifty years, and Russia had no right to claim it.229 At this conference, the author of the new boundaries of Lithuania Minor, Matulevičius, now expressed without hesitation that his line corresponded with the present border of Kaliningrad Oblast and Poland, that “autochthons lietuvininkai” once lived in the territory of Kaliningrad Oblast, that this was their “promised land,” to which “their right, as masters, … would never cease to be valid,” that Lithuania was “the successor of the Baltic ancestors’ rights and duties,” and that the “growing closeness” of Kaliningrad Oblast “to the neighboring Republic of Lithuania” would suit its own interests.230 Thus here we can observe similar intentions to those that were expressed in the postwar years in the Lithuanian diaspora. Right after the war, there were attempts to exploit the favorable geopolitical conjuncture to actualize Lithuanian irredentism. A lack of reliable information and the adoption of arguments dating to the Great War then for the first time allowed identification of Lithuania Minor with Kaliningrad Oblast, in the belief that the Western bloc would agree to review the decisions of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. Lithuania’s amateur regional historians went down a similar path, in effect, consciously spreading an understanding of the Lithuania Minor that existed in their imaginations. Some of them gathered to form the Lithuania Minor Council in 1989 and transformed the new “border” of Lithuania Minor suggested by Matulevičius in 1972 into a political tool. Thus, the unique Prussian territory that once existed has been made to “fit” the present political map. This result can be explained in part by the vitality of the irredentist implications of the “Lithuania Minor” concept. However, Lithuanians’ identification of Lithuania Minor with Kaliningrad Oblast is also 229 Algirdas Matulevičius, “Remkimės lietuvininkais,” in Potsdamas ir Karaliaučiaus kraštas, ed. Danutė Bakanienė (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla, 1996), 116. 230 Ibid., 108, 114, 122.

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determined by the inability to accept the altered geopolitical reality from 1945, a reluctance to acknowledge the reality of the oblast’s creation. Since 1990, people in Lithuania have increasingly come to believe that Kaliningrad Oblast should be seen as an anomaly that satisfied the unfounded claims of the USSR, and this approach in part blocked any other shifts in the system of meanings upheld in the humanities discourse related to this space. One could assume that this reluctance was also influenced by insufficient awareness of the postwar reality of Kaliningrad Oblast. The myth that here was the “cradle” of Lithuanian national culture as a whole, which became entrenched in Lithuania and was difficult to alter, forced people to acknowledge only that which was defined as “our own” in this oblast.231 An inability to accept the outcomes of the Second World War was not specifically a Lithuanian phenomenon. It encouraged revisionism for a long time in Germany as well. However, the leftist government’s rise to power in 1969 in the FRG significantly reduced the political influence of the expellees and the weight of their revisionist voices regarding East Prussia. In 1969 the federal government’s special ministry that had handled expellees and refugee matters since 1949 was abolished. Willy Brandt’s new Ostpolitik, implemented in the signing of the Moscow and Warsaw agreements in August and December 1970, meant that official Bonn had finally rejected claims to the eastern territories and recognized the new borders—including Poland’s western border, the so-called Oder-Neisse line. This did not make the expellees less active in the public discourse or reduce their intention to revise the borders established by the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, but a willingness to accept the war’s outcomes strengthened in West Germany. In 1980 the impact of this attitude was already rather strong, even though the CDU returned to power in 1982. The changes then under way in Germany were related to a gradual movement away from nationalistic attitudes and the use of the deutsche 231 See also Diana Janušauskienė, “Lithuanian Perspectives on Kaliningrad’s Past, Present and Future,” in Kaliningrad in Europa. Nachbarschaftliche Perspektiven nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges, ed. Stefan Berger, vol. 14 of Veröffentlichungen des Nordost-Instituts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 147–151; and Hektoras Vitkus, “Mažoji Lietuva kaip lietuvių atminties vieta: teorinis modelis,” in Daugiareikšmės tapatybės, 203–233.

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Ostgebiete spatial concept and toward recognition of the pluricultural past of different regions. These changes had an influence even on the activities of organizations such as the German Expellees Culture Foundation. In 1986 this foundation raised the theme of the linguistic, cultural, and ethnic features that were typical of Germany’s “eastern territories” in their annual conference schedule.232 The deutsche Ostgebiete, “national minority,” and “majority” concepts still served as guidelines at this conference. Regardless, Germans’ growing willingness to acknowledge that the heritage of the East-Central European regions where German Kultur was once spread was not purely German sparked scientific interest in East Prussia’s cultural variety. An excellent example was an article published by linguist Jochen Dieter Range in 1989,233 in which the author, grounding his approach in cultural studies, tried to describe the constructive sides of various cultural groups’ coexistence in Prussian Lithuania. This, incidentally, was one of the first texts in postwar Germany that focused on this once-existing German region, acknowledging the role of Lithuanian culture there. One of the first German historians who tried to reexamine the treatment of German and Lithuanian relations associated with the Memel Territory or Klaipėda Region was the Erlangen-Nürnberg University professor Karl-Heinz Ruffmann (1922–1996). In 1989 the Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk institute, once founded within the early Ostforschung system of institutions, released his booklet Germans and Lithuanians in the Interwar Period: Memories of a Memelländer, Contemplations of a Historian.234 The tone of the publication was in no way reminiscent of earlier historiography, because Ruffmann took a neutral position and did not try to justify either side in the battle over “their own” spaces. 232 Hans Hecker, “Das Besondere und das Allgemeine bei Minderheiten und Mehrheiten im Osten des Deutschen Reiches vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg und im Ostmitteleuropa der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Deutsche, Slawen und Balten, 7. 233 Range, “Preußisch-Litauen,” 55–81. 234 Karl-Heinz Ruffmann, Deutsche und Litauer in der Zwischenkriegszeit. Erinnerungen eines Memelländers, Überlegungen eines Historikers, no. 12 of Lüneburger Vorträge zur Geschichte Ostdeutschlands und der Deutschen in Osteuropa (Lüneburg: Verlag Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1989) (3rd ed.: Lüneburg: Institut Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1994).

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Joint conferences attended by German and Lithuanian historians and devoted to searching for such treatments and mutual understanding were first organized at the initiative of the Lithuanian side. The first conference of this kind, “Prussia in the History of Lithuania and Germany,” was held in Vilnius on November 12–19, 1990; the second, “The Border as a Place of Coming Together,” was held in Bonn on October 4–6, 1991; the third took place in Lübeck in March 1992; the fourth at the end of July in Klaipėda; and the fifth in October of that year in Lüneburg. Initially participants at these conferences sought to defend the positions of their national historiography, which naturally gave rise to heated discussions. Nevertheless, later historians managed to reach a mutual understanding or at least admit that this kind of understanding would be a promising goal. Commenting on the essence of such conferences, one participant, Arthur Hermann, wrote: “Much will depend on how we resolve and evaluate nations’ and states’ past relations today. Will we stop at conflicts and continue to sow strife between each other, or the opposite: will we try to analyze the brighter periods of relations and denote the potential for peace in the future? Just as important is trying to avoid a closed national horizon. Europe has no future if each one of us raises only our own national interests and ignores the others. We have to learn how to speak to our neighbors with respect.”235 Like Bonn, which signed an agreement with the USSR on November 9, 1990, in which both sides recognized that neither had territorial claims on the other, official Vilnius adopted a pragmatic position regarding Kaliningrad Oblast after 1990. In the agreements made with Russia on July 29, 1991, both sides recognized the inviolability of borders as a foundation for the further development of neighborly relations. All the subsequent Lithuanian governments maintained this attitude, although a majority declared concern over what was happening in the semi-exclave region in Lithuania’s neighborhood. In fact, the spatial understanding of Lithuania Minor oriented toward Kaliningrad Oblast in the public discourse and its 235 Arthur Hermann, “Antroji lietuvių-vokiečių istorikų konferencija Lübeck’e,” Akiračiai 7 (1992): 6.

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irredentist implications are still in circulation, and Russia’s existence on Lithuania’s western fringes is still hard to accept, though this is more characteristic of marginal groups. As is the case with radical right-wing marginal groups in Germany, they are still determined to actualize the political empowerment of spatial concepts born of twentieth-century conflicts, risking peaceful coexistence. Regardless of this fact, the experience of Lithuania’s and Germany’s relations from recent decades suggests that battles over “their own” spaces as a form of such empowerment, at least between these two countries, is a thing of the past.

Concluding Remarks When in 2000–2001 discussions began regarding the possibility of the division of the territory of the Republic of Lithuania into self-governing regions, a group of Lithuanian scientists defended the necessity of forming such regions on an ethnographical basis. Stimulus for this was the Law on the Principles of State Protection for Ethnic Culture passed by the Lithuanian Parliament (Seimas) in 1999. The question then arose of what should be done with the former Klaipėda Region. Some experts did not see any reasons for distinguishing it as a separate region and recommended it should be integrated into Žemaitija (Samogitia), others urged that it be transformed into a subregion within Žemaitija, or even a separate region altogether. Partly due to the active reaction to such “Vilnius-centered scheming” from the region itself, a decision was finally made to keep it as a separate ethnographic region. With the founding of the Council for the Protection of Ethnic Culture under the Seimas in 2000, in 2002 five of its branches were established in the regions, including one in the territory of the former Klaipėda Region. In this context, the fifth region was named “Lithuania Minor.” Moreover, on a map of Lithuania’s ethnographic regions commissioned by the council in 2003 and prepared by Žilvytis Šaknys and Danielius Pivoriūnas, Lithuania Minor was identified with the area occupied by the cities of Neringa and Klaipėda and eighteen other elderships (seniūnija) that only partly corresponded with the territory of the former Klaipėda Region. This is how the Lithuania Minor region is presented today on the Council for the Protection of Ethnic Culture homepage of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania website. The official Seimas website also notes, “Another part of Lithuania Minor (the Karaliaučiaus kraštas) currently belongs to Russia.”1 A new controversy regarding the Lithuania Minor region arose when in February 2013 another institution under the Seimas—the State 1

Regina Jokubaitytė, “Lietuvos etnografinis regionas MAŽOJI LIETUVA,” last modified April 30, 2014, accessed February 11, 2015, http://www3.lrs.lt/pls/inter /w5_show?p_r=7039&p_d=95439&p_k=1.

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Figure 44.  Map of Lithuanian Ethnographic Regions, commissioned by the Council for the Protection of Ethnic Culture and prepared by Žilvytis Šaknys and Danielius Pivoriūnas (2003). It reflects how the concept of “Lithuania Minor” was applied to entitle some administrative units of contemporary Lithuania, whose boundaries no longer correspond with the former border of the Territory of Memel. Available on the website of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania, http://www3.lrs.lt/pls/inter/ w5_show?p_r=2231&p_d=33289&p_k=1.

Commission of the Lithuanian Language—supplemented its own official list of Lithuanian place names certified in 1997, including four regions, Aukštaitija, Dzūkija, Suvalkija, and Žemaitija (Samogitia) yet omitting the fifth region. It was mainly residents of Šilutė who raised the greatest fuss over this omission, demanding “Lithuania Minor” be added to the list.2 The Lithuanian Academy of Sciences backed this demand in January 2014. The State Commission of the Lithuanian Language had to comply. Most interesting is that the commission’s resolution, which carries the validity of a law, found room for this description: “Lithuania Minor, a historic district, a territory between the lower reaches of the Pregel and Nemunas 2 In the map of 2003, Šilutė was named the center of the Lithuania Minor ethnographic region.

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[Memel] rivers; an ethnographic region of Lithuania.”3 The lower reaches of the Nemunas begin around Kaunas and end beyond Sovietsk (formerly Tilsit), where the Nemunas branches out into the Rusnė (Russ) and Gilija (Gilge) rivers. The end of the lower reaches of the Pregel River is in Kaliningrad. According to the commission’s resolution, Lithuania Minor is the northern part of Kaliningrad Oblast between Sovietsk and Kaliningrad, which is (sic!) “an ethnographic region of Lithuania,”4 whereas the former Klaipėda Region does not even feature in the boundaries of this region. Overjoyed at the legalization of the name “Lithuania Minor,”5 even those who initiated this decision from Šilutė and had argued that they should be considered Lithuania Minor’s center, did not understand that their town, according to the commission, was not part of Lithuania Minor. Such decisions give an excellent illustration of the absence of any physical component in the notion of “Lithuania Minor” based on Lithuanian national culture. As the situation changes, so too does the meaning of the concept. Only the irredentist implications that this concept attained in the early twentieth century have not vanished but continually resurface. Primarily, this persistence is an outgrowth of the Second World War— that is, of the altered borders and people expelled from their homes. Although almost no Prussian Lithuanians remained in that Lithuania, in the postwar years the system of meanings created about “our own” national space in the former East Prussia did not disappear. Instead, the challenges that the carriers of that system of meanings encountered at the end of the war and in the first postwar years sent it into “conservation” mode.

3 “Valstybinės lietuvių kalbos komisijos nutarimas N-1 (150) ‘Dėl Valstybinės lietuvių kalbos komisijos prie Lietuvos Respublikos Seimo 1997 m. rugpjūčio 28 d. nutarimo Nr. 63 ‘Dėl Lietuvos vietovardžių sąrašo’ pakeitimo’” (January 30, 2014): Teisės aktų registras, February 3, 2014 (no. 2014-00901). 4 According to the official definition valid in Lithuania, “An ethnographic region is a part of a historically formed territory where a unique dialect, traditions, and customs have been preserved, and the heritage of the Baltic tribes has been integrated.” (“Lietuvos Respublikos etninės kultūros valstybinės globos pagrindų įstatymas” [September 21, 1999, no. VIII-1328]: Valstybės žinios 82–2414 [1999]). In this case, it appears to be claiming part of the Kaliningrad Oblast as Lithuanian territory. 5 Daiva Baronienė, “Mažoji Lietuva triumfuoja,” February 6, 2014, accessed February 11, 2015, http://lzinios.lt/lzinios/Gimtasis-krastas/mazoji-lietuva-triumfuoja/173072.

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This development explains why the concept of “Lithuania Minor” still has irredentist implications, and why there is still a search for that which is “Lithuanian” in the space described by that concept. For those who maintain the idea of “Lithuania Minor” in Lithuania, the concept still refers to a space that must be fought for and at the same time a space that, above all, retains links with that which is “our own.” The framework for that “own-ness” is still formed by the idea, developed by late nineteenth-century Lithuanian linguistic nationalists, about two Lithuanias once split apart due to “foreign” influences. Similarly, in Germany, for a large part of the twentieth century the existence of Prussian Lithuania was overwhelmed by the image of a German and only German East Prussia—a fortress of Germanness in the east that defended German borders and created the conditions for the most noble of civilizing missions—to spread German Kultur eastward. The concept of “Prussian Lithuania” itself, which marked the uniqueness willingly exploited in Germany in the early twentieth century, almost disappeared from use due to the political circumstances of the “age of extremes.” In Germany and in Lithuania after the Great War, the objective to integrate this region into a “purely German” or “purely Lithuanian” national space, respectively, encouraged the nonrecognition and rejection of features of otherness. Meanings of national cultures, used in the “battles over spaces of their own” in East Prussia allowed nationalistic categories to dominate the treatment of these spaces and the aspirations resulting from them in the twentieth century. Even today, these meanings do not allow marginal groups in Lithuania to rest easy over the political status of Kaliningrad Oblast, while the ultraright in Germany is encouraged to earn political capital from revisionism over the deutsche Ostgebiete. All of this, understandably, goes far toward overwhelming the uniqueness and variety that typified the Lithuanian region in Prussia in the long nineteenth century. In the German and Lithuanian academic milieux, that variety started being rediscovered only at the very end of the twentieth century. Generally, however, the variety of concepts of Lithuania for which the nineteenth century was known should be considered null and void. The realization of Lithuanians’ national aspirations after the First World

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War contributed to this as much as did German intent to prevent the realization of those aspirations. Nevertheless, the research presented in this book shows that the nationalist systems of meanings, through which Germany and Lithuania alike perceived a region of “their own” in twentieth-century East Prussia, were inspired by a specific social and political context. They took form no earlier than the mid-nineteenth century and were “conserved” within the framework of early twentieth-century rhetoric and political goals. However, having raised the fundamental question about change and diverting that question toward spatial concepts and the meanings that maintain them, it becomes clear that from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries far more than the concept of the Lithuanian region in Prussia underwent change. Systems of meanings through which that region was understood also changed; the carriers who maintained these systems of meanings changed; and the understanding of the Lithuanian region’s ­boundaries changed. Those who are clever enough to fit historical regions onto the current political map and those who assess historical regions only from the perspective of their own national culture often overlook and ignore such changes. My research shows that the earliest use of the title “Lithuania” in Prussia in the sixteenth century should be considered a cultural transfer from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was first used in communications between priests, allowing them to define the area where “Lithuanian churches” had spread in Prussia. This was one of those cases when the criterion of the language spoken was applied to describe a space in early modern Europe. That application was determined by the Reformation and the pluricultural nature of the Prussian duke’s domains, which encouraged the search for a way to ensure the spread of Lutheran ideas among all his subjects while guaranteeing the loyalty of all subjects to the duke. Nevertheless, the universal body of knowledge and information that then circulated within Europe’s res publica literaria did not include this particular concept of Lithuania. In the early eighteenth century, a new concept gradually supplemented the earlier one, and Lithuania in Prussia increasingly meant an

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area where the competencies of specific administrative offices in Gumbinnen were held valid. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that area was called the “Lithuanian Province” and treated not just as part of East Prussia but also as a unit equal to East Prussia. It was specifically this administrative meaning of “Lithuania” that became widespread, first in the body of knowledge of the German-language lands, then throughout Europe. At least in the German-language discourse, this title was applied to that part of Prussia much more often than to the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Although local priests still constituted an important group who identified with the title “Lithuania,” during the eighteenth century they were joined by representatives of other higher social strata—the nobility and urban citizens. Their activities explain the comparison of Lithuania to East Prussia, which completely vanished only during the nineteenth century. Identification with Lithuania in these strata was viewed not only as an expression prioritizing the territorial component of identity but also as a demonstration of a certain position that came from estate-backed regional particularism and Old Prussian self-awareness. In the former lands of the Duchy of Prussia, identification with Old Prussians and the “kingdom of Waidewutus” that allegedly gave rise to Prussia became an ideology that provided a basis for their own particularism in the eighteenth century. Precisely this tradition of particularism meant that the name “Lithuania,” even in the first half of the nineteenth century, was associated with requirements for democratic reforms and the spread of liberal ideas. In this context, in the case of Lithuania, the linguistic criterion was least important in terms of defining identity and space. The Lithuanian Province never encompassed an area inhabited only by Lithuanian speakers, while to most carriers of that view of Lithuania in Prussia in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, the Lithuanian-speaking peasantry was important only as representatives of the “aboriginal,” or primeval, culture, hardly touched by civilization. Knowing about their ways and learning something from them was considered beneficial in order to come closer to the virtues of “genuine Prussian spirit.” The linguistic criteria for defining space in this part of Europe became established no earlier than in the mid-nineteenth century. Its entrenchment

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was accompanied not only by the spread of the idea that a territory’s sovereign is the nation but also by the spread of the notion that language is the main criterion for describing that nation. In East-Central Europe this idea first influenced ethnography, then gradually infiltrated other spheres of knowledge—history, statistics, and geography. The further spread and hegemonization of the concept that a Lithuanian was someone who communicated in Lithuanian began in the late nineteenth century. Ethnographic interest in Lithuanians, encouraged not just by regional particularism and the requirements of the Evangelical Church but also by the increasingly serious study of linguistics in the first half of the nineteenth century meant that a new concept of Lithuania spread in Prussia. To describe this Lithuania, historical and ethnographical data were primarily applied, which is why at the beginning Lithuania in Prussia was not associated with a space where Lithuanian speakers dominated. This concept arrived somewhat later, in the 1860s, and was indirectly related to the more intensive spread of German nationalism in Prussia observed at the time. Nationalistically engaged Prussian statisticians defined the “German” space based on language. In this case, speakers of other languages were transformed into “minorities,” attributed to only those territories where their dominance was still beyond question. Hence, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various concepts of Lithuania emerged in Prussia. Lithuania could mean the historic landscapes of Scalovia and Nadrovia (Toeppen’s and Bezzenberger’s concept), the zone where there were still Lithuanians (the ethnographic approach), or ultimately the area where the Lithuanian language was still dominant (the statistical approach). The spread of German nationalism, it would appear, could only deny non-German cultural traits. However, during the Kaiserreich, German nationalism spread along two trajectories, gravitating toward the Volksnation and the Reichsnation perspectives. The preference for the Reichsnation in East Prussia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to a somewhat different strategy being applied to Lithuanian speakers from that based on the Volksnation perspective and applied primarily to Polish Catholics in other regions. A discursive strategy spread in East Prussia that allowed the appropriation and integration of the Lithuanian landscape. Prussian Lithuanians—the main representatives of this

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landscape—were employed to strengthen the idea of a (Reich’s) nation, first of all by exploiting the idea about East Prussia’s Heimat comprising unique landscapes that enriched Germany. This strategy for appropriating Lithuania could be applied so long as the imperial structures that supported the Reichsnation perspective existed. Although the demise of the Hohenzollern monarchy in 1918 and the declaration that Germany had been defeated in the war marked the appearance of the Republic of Lithuania’s territorial claims on Prussian Lithuania, the earlier strategy retained a certain continuity in the Memel Territory, separated from Germany. But even there, German nationalism increasingly gravitated toward the Volksnation perspective. Eventually, the “pure Germaness” of that space became the main criterion—whether a given space belonged to the nation. For this reason, in the interwar period the former Prussian Lithuanian space was integrated into German national culture via Ordensland, Bollwerk, and other images that had hardly ever been applied to that space before but had instead been associated more with East Prussia as a whole. The former Lithuanian space had to become as “German” as other East Prussian landscapes; toward this end, it acquired the name “Northern East Prussia.” This deliberate elimination of Lithuania as a concept from East Prussia again altered the content of this idea in the German-language discourse. Over a relatively short time, the concept was identified with a completely different space in which Lithuania was “discovered” by Germans during the advance of Otto von Lauenstein’s army into Russia in 1915 and where the Ober Ost military administration played the main role in forming its borders at least until 1918. Up until the Great War, the fact that there were Lithuanian speakers in the Romanov monarchy was not unknown in the German-language discourse. The appearance of the ethnographic approach to describe spaces in the body of knowledge that demanded special competencies and among experts allowed the distribution of the Lithuanian language across two monarchies from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be visible. However, it did not eliminate the main characteristic of the recognition of Lithuania in the German-language discourse—the orientation toward just its Prussian part. Moreover, in this body of knowledge,

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only exceptional experts such as the director of the Lithuanian Seminar at the University of Königsberg, Friedrich Kurschat, could permit himself to call the entire area where Lithuanian was used by the one name, “Lithuania.” The existence of one Lithuania located where Lithuanian speakers actually lived in the 1850s–1870s was an idea supported by the protagonists of burgeoning Lithuanian nationalism. However, even they thought it obvious that there was little objective foundation for this idea, as the Romanov and Hohenzollern domains contained two quite different Lithuanian-speaking areas. In order to overcome these differences, the burgeoning Lithuanian national culture suggested the “two Lithuanias” idea, which became a key tool in the creation and appropriation of “our own” national space in East Prussia. That idea projected the association of language with a certain space back to prehistoric times. It rested on views about Lithuania’s eternal existence and thus proposed that Lithuania “split” in the thirteenth or fifteenth century due to “German” (the Teutonic Order’s) influence. This is another concept of Lithuania that during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was hegemonized in Lithuanian national culture. However, prior to the First World War and for some time thereafter, that concept was used only by nationalistic Lithuanian activists, provoking almost no interest among Prussian Lithuanians. For the majority of Prussian Lithuanians, the concept of “their own” space on the eve of the Great War had to be different from that struggling for a foothold in Lithuanian national culture. Prussian Lithuanians, for example, were far more inclined to regard Lithuania as “their own” than were East Prussian Germans. Even so, they had to view Lithuania as part of a broader category, “East Prussia,” which was in turn understandable only within the framework of Prussia and Germany. On the one hand, Lithuanian nationalists created their own national space in East Prussia without the active involvement of Prussian Lithuanians themselves. This is illustrated rather well by the latter’s longstanding disapproval of the term “Lithuania Minor,” which expressed the “two Lithuanias” idea. On the other hand, the concept of a “common space” belonging to Prussian Lithuanians and Germans alike, characteristic of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, clearly testifies to a range

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of cultural interaction. The impact of those examples of interaction was quite extensive, not just on Prussian Lithuanians but on Lithuanian national culture as well. Lithuanians developed many of the meanings associated with “their own” space in East Prussia and even the understanding of that space’s boundaries by appropriating or transforming concepts suited to their needs from the German-specific body of knowledge, and it is here that we see the most cultural interaction and transfer of knowledge. What is more, these appropriation strategies before the First World War already gave rise to the first attempts to deny data that were deemed disadvantageous to the Lithuanian perspective—a strategy that due to its goals to defend its claims to “its own” spaces took root in the twentieth century. At least until the Great War, the concept of a “common space” for Prussian Lithuanians and Germans, thrust upon Lithuanians by German national culture in East Prussia itself (significantly more so than “across the border”), complicated the definition of the Lithuanian space. The Lithuanian spaces—as separate from the German space, if such spaces can even be considered among Prussian Lithuanians—physically spanned two different territories. One functioned as a space allocated to Lithuanians and was basically grounded on research by Toeppen and Bezzenberger, who attributed areas to the Lithuanian ethnographic territory as far as the boundary that practically corresponded with the Labiau–Goldap line denoted by Koeppen, Šafarik, and Kurschat. Prussian Lithuanians engaged in the national idea defined this space as “their own” in political demands expressed after the First World War. The second functioned as a space of Prussian Lithuanians’ actual practices and encompassed mostly the northern counties of East Prussia—essentially Tilsit, Memel, and these cities’ surroundings. In a similar way, two means of defining “their own” space gained force in the milieu that supported Lithuanian national culture, mostly concentrated in Russia and among émigrés in the United States. In that milieu, Lithuania was associated with a space as far as the Koeppen-Šafarik-Kurschat line according to one concept, whereas another equated “their own” space in East Prussia with the areas where the existence of Lithuanians could still be proven according

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to the records maintained by Prussia’s Evangelical Church. This observation suggests that the notion of Lithuania was transformed in both the German-language discourse and in Lithuanian national culture as of the late nineteenth century. Up until the First World War, the greatest factor influencing that change was the control of space. Its marking with symbols of Lithuanian national culture and self-establishment took place over a much smaller territory than that attributed to Lithuania by Toeppen’s and Bezzenberger’s concept or by church statistics based on the spread of the Lithuanian language. After the Great War, the change in the content of the “Lithuania Minor” concept depended most on this space’s political transformation into a Lithuanian terra irredenta and the ever-changing geopolitical contexts in which the irredentist idea was actualized. These contexts encouraged identifying the space of Lithuania Minor, which had never attained universally accepted boundaries, with the territory that had to be identified based on a particular geopolitical situation. After 1919 the term “Lithuania Minor” was applied more and more often to the Memel Territory (Klaipėda Region), separated from Germany, whose boundaries mutatis mutandis “framed” Prussian Lithuanians’ prewar area of spatial practices. After 1945, that term was used more often in regards to Kaliningrad Oblast. The geopolitical expulsion of Germany’s influence from the space Lithuanians had attributed to themselves in East Prussia was in both cases a mandatory condition for the change in content of the “Lithuania Minor” concept. However, both cases gave that concept irredentist implications, and it is difficult to state whether the concept has managed to shrug them off to this day. We could say that this research, taking the example of one region of Europe, has disclosed the role that nationalism plays in changing spatial concepts. It shows how, under specific conditions, the creation of national spaces in a pluricultural region (that is, the appropriation of a pluricultural region) functions in different national cultures. It appears that the research confirms the role of expert knowledge in this region in defining such national spaces. It was precisely those experts who highlighted the significance of the language factor in defining a space and transformed

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Concluding Remarks

statistics into an instrument powerful enough to define a nation’s “own” space. If statistical data could not provide the result needed to denote where a space belonged, other arguments and historic sources would be found to give basis for one or another claim to that same space. However, in addition to all this, the research has demonstrated the extraordinarily important and often underrated role of culture and its continuity, and of systems of meanings applied to a specific space, in forming images and representations that become a lasting means of recognizing and marking “our own” spaces.

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Bibliography Verhandlungen des Reichstags, XIII. Legislaturperiode, II. Session, vol. 306: Stenographische Berichte. Berlin: Norddeutsche Buchdruckerei und Verlags-Anstalt, 1916. Die Volkssagen Ostpreussens, Litthauens und Westpreußens, coll. Wilhelm J. A. von Tettau and Jodocus D. H. Temme. Berlin: Nicolaische Buchhandlung, 1837. Vostochnaia Prussiia glazami sovetskikh pereselentsev: Pervye gody Kaliningradskoi oblasti v vospominaniiakh i dokumentakh, ed. Iurii Kostiashov. Saint Petersburg: Bel’veder, 2002. Wagner, Erhardus. “Vita & mores Lithvanorvm, in Borvssia svb districtu Insterburgiensi & Ragnitensi degentium.” Acta Borussica ecclesiastica, civilia, literaria … I (1730): 532–550. Weltausstellung in Paris 1900. Amtlicher Katalog der Ausstellung des Deutschen Reichs, ed. Otto N. Witt. Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1900. Žilinskis, Jonas. Albumas lietuviškos parodos Paryžiuje, 1900 metuose. Plymouth, PA: Vienybė Lietuvininkų, 1902.

PUBLISHED MEMOIRS AND (AUTO)BIOGRAPHIES Autobiographie des ordentl. Professors der orientalischen Sprachen und Literatur an der Universität zu Königsberg Dr. Peter von Bohlen, ed. Johannes Voigt, 2nd ed. Königsberg: Theodor Theile, 1842. Bardach, Karl Friedrich. Rückblick auf mein Leben. Selbstbiographie. Leipzig: Leopold Voß, 1848. Basanavičius, Jonas. “Iš istorijos musų atsigaiveliavimo (1873–1883).” Varpas 3 (1903): 65–76. Gedvilas, Mečislovas. Lemiamas posūkis: 1940–1945 metai. Vilnius: Vaga, 1975. Gudelis, Vytautas. “Ketinimai priskirti Lietuvai dalį buvusių Rytprūsių teritorijos.” Ramuva 1 (1989): 42. Jankus, Martynas. “Šis-tas apie ‘Auszros’ išleidimą ir platinimą.” Varpas 3 (1903): 104–105. Klimas, Petras. Dienoraštis. 1915.XII.1–1919.I.19. Chicago: Algimanto Mackaus Knygų leidimo fondas, 1988. Klimas, Petras. Iš mano atsiminimų. Boston: Lietuvių enciklopedijos leidykla, 1979. Merkys, Vytautas. “Istorijos ir enciklopedijų darbų baruose.” In Algirdas Matulevičius apie Mažąją Lietuvą, ed. Audronė Matijošienė, 11–12. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 2008. Paletskis, Iustas. V dvukh mirakh. Moscow: Politizdat, 1974. Scheidemann, Philipp. Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten, with a preface by Andre Seegers, vol. 1. Hamburg: Severus, 2013. Szliupas, Jonas. “Minės apie mano prietikius prie ‘Auszros.’” Varpas 3 (1903): 77–93. Temme, Jocodus D. H. Erinnerungen, ed. Stefan Born. Leipzig: Ernst Keil, 1883. Yčas, Martynas. Atsiminimai. Nepriklausomybės keliais, vol. 1. Kaunas: Spindulys, 1935.

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Bibliography Wanderführer durch Ostpreußen, vol. 2 of DJH-Wanderführer, ed. Reichsverband für Deutsche Jugendherbergen. Berlin: Limpert, 1936. Wir reisen nach Ostpreussen, Danzig und dem Memelgebiet, ed. Landesfremdverkehrsverband Ostpreußen. Königsberg: Königsberger Verlagsanstalt, [1937]. Zippel, Hans. Das schöne Ostpreußen, no. 21 of Mit Rucksack und Nagelschuh. Berlin: Triasdruck, 1933. Zschokke, Friedrich. Wanderungen durch Littauen und Samland. Altpreußische Sagen und Denkmäler, historisch geordnet und erläutert, part 1: Die Ur-Geschichte Preußens bis auf Bruteno und Waidewut. Leipzig: August Robert Friese, 1845.

TEACHING PROGRAMS AND SCHOOL CURRICULUMS Lehrplan der Königin Luisen-Schule Tilsit auf Grund der Bestimmungen vom 15. August und 12. December 1908. Tilsit: Kaptuller, 1911. Pohl, Ernst. Stoffverzeichnisse und Stundenpläne für die ein- und zweiklassigen Volksschulen sowie Studenpläne für die Halbtags- und dreiklassigen Schulen mit 2 Lehrern im Kreise Tilsit. Tilsit: Rud. Lösch, 1882. Programm des Königlichen Gymnasiums und Realgymnasiums zu Insterburg. Insterburg: Dr. Albert Bittner’s Buchdruckerei, 1911.

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY TEXTBOOKS. HANDBOOKS ON “HOME KNOWLEDGE” (HEIMATKUNDE) [Adomaitis, Juozas] Szernas. Geografija arba Żemēs apraszymas. Chicago: Lietuva, 1899. Alekna, Antanas. Lietuvos istorija. Kaunas: Šv. Kazimiero draugija, 1911. Ambrassat, August. Die Provinz Ostpreussen: Bilder aus der Geographie, Geschichte und Sage unserer Heimatprovinz. Königsberg: Wilh. Koch, 1896. Ambrassat, August. Die Provinz Ostpreussen. Ein Handbuch der Heimatkunde, 2nd revised ed. Königsberg: J. H. Bon, 1912. Armstedt, Richard. Geschichte der Königl. Haupt- und Residenzstadt Königsberg in Preussen. Deutsches Land und Leben in Einzelschilderungen: Landschaftskunden und Städtege­ schichten—II. Städtegeschichten. Stuttgart: Hobbing & Bühle, 1899. Biržiška, Mykolas. Lietuvos geografija (Vidurinėms mokykloms vadovėlis), part 1: Prigimtis. Vilnius: Lietuvių mokslo draugija, 1917.

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Bibliography A[lbert] Gieseler, Ausgabe für Ostpreußen [Ausgabe A. für evangelische Schulen]. Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1917. Nehring, Ludwig. Heimatkunde der Provinz Ostpreußen. Ein Merk- und Arbeitsbuch für die Hand der Volksschüler. Breslau: Heinrich Handel, 1928. Nehring, Ludwig. Heimatkunde von Ostpreußen. Ein Merk- und Arbeitsbuch. Neubearbeitung. Breslau: Heinrich Handel, 1938. Nehring, Ludwig. Kurzgefaßte Landeskunde von Ostpreußen. Ein Merk- und Wiederho­ lungsbuch für die Hand der Volksschüler. Braunsberg: Benders Buchhandlung. Hans Grimme), 1924. Nieth, M. “Die Provinz Ostpreussen. Eine Heimatkunde,” [suppl. for East Prussian schools to:] Kahnmeyer und Schulze Realienbuch. Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1935? Obgartel, Wilhelm. Der Regierungsbezirk Gumbinnen. Ein Heimatbuch. Insterburg: Selbstverlag, 1912. Ostpreussen, ed. Verein zur Hebung des Fremdenverkehrs. Königsberg: Verein zur Hebung des Fremdenverkehrs, 1906; 1910. Sahm, Wilhelm. Heimatkunde von Ostpreußen. Frankfurt am Main: Moritz Diesterweg, 1914. 7th ed., 1931. Storost, Georg. Litauische Geschichte. Von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart. Tilsit: Buchdruckerei Pawlowski, 1921. Unser Ostpreussen, ed. Franz Swillus, vol. 2: Bilder aus der Heimatkunde, 3rd ed. Leipzig: Julius Klinkhardt, 1922. [Vileišis, Petras] Neris. Trumpa Geografija arba Żemēs apraszymas. Chicago: [the author], 1898. Žebrys, Juozas. Trumpas aprašymas apё žemę arba žemrašys. Tilsit: [J. Schoenke], 1896. Ziesemer, Johannes. Die Provinzen Ost- und Westpreußen, no. XI of Landeskunde Preußens. Berlin, Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1901. Zweck, Albert. Litauen: eine Landes- und Volkskunde, vol. I of Deutsches Land und Leben in Einzelschilderungen: Landschaftskunden und Städtegeschichten—I. Landschaftskunden; Deutsches Land und Leben. Ostpreussen. Land und Volk. Stuttgart: Hobbing & Bühle, 1898. Zweck, Albert. Masuren: eine Landes- und Volkskunde, vol. II of Deutsches Land und Leben in Einzelschilderungen: Landschaftskunden und Städtegeschichten – I. Landschaftskunden; Deutsches Land und Leben. Ostpreussen. Land und Volk. Stuttgart: Hobbing & Bühle, 1900. Zweck, Albert. Samland, Pregel- und Frischingthal, vol. III of Deutsches Land und Leben in Einzelschilderungen: Landschaftskunden und Städtegeschichten—I. Landschaftskunden;

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ANNUAL REPORTS Bartezky, J. Ostern 1911. Vierzigster Bericht über die Cecilienschule. Städtische höhere Mädchenschule) zu Gumbinnen. Tilsit: [s.n.], 1911. Bartezky, J. Vierunddreissigster Bericht über die Städtische höhere Töchterschule zu Gumbinnen. Gumbinnen: Wilhelm Krauseneck, 1905. Bericht des Konservators der Kunstdenkmäler der Provinz Ostpreußen über seine Tätigkeit, nos. 1–34. Königsberg: Ostpreußische Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt; Kommissionsverlag von Bernh. Teichert; Landesdruckerei, 1903–1936. Bericht über die Knaben-Mittelschule in Insterburg für das Schuljahr 1901/1902. Insterburg: Buchdruckerei Dr. A. Bittner, 1902. Küsel, Eduard. XXX. Jahres-Bericht 1890/91 über das Königliche Gymnasium zu Memel. Memel: F. W. Siebert, 1891. Küsel, Eduard. XXXIV. Jahres-Bericht 1894/95 über das Königliche Luisen-Gymnasium zu Memel. Memel: F. W. Siebert, 1895. Müller, K. Königliches Gymnasium zu Tilsit. Bericht über das Schuljahr 1897–1898. Tilsit: Otto v. Mauderode, 1898.

LEGISLATION Allgemeine Bestimmungen über das preußiche Volksschul-, Präparanden- und Seminar-Wesen vom 15. Oktober 1872, nebst verschiedenen Prüfungs-Ordnungen, 11th ed. Neuwied, Leipzig: Heuser’s Verlag. Louis Heuser, 1897. “Gesetz, betreffend die Geschäftssprache der Behörden, Beamten und politischen Körperschaften des Staats, vom 28.8.1876.” Centralblatt für die gesammte Unterrichts-Verwaltung in Preußen, September 30, 1876 (no. 9): 513–516. Gesetze und Verordnungen über das Volksschulwesen insbesondere im Regierungsbezirk Arnsberg, comp. Johann Sahler. Schwelm: Selbstverlag, 1888. “Lietuvos Respublikos etninės kultūros valstybinės globos pagrindų įstatymas” (September 21, 1999, no. VIII-1328). Valstybės žinios 82–2414 (1999). “Publikandum, betreffend die veränderte Verfassung der obersten Staatsbehörden der Preußischen Monarchie, in Beziehung auf die innere Landes- und Finanzverwaltung, No. 59 vom 16ten Dezember 1808.” Gesetz-Sammlung für die Königlich-Preußischen Staaten 1806–10: 361–373.

Bibliography Reichsvereinsgesetz vom 19. April 1908. Text-Ausgabe mit erläuternden Anmerkungen, den Ausführungsbestimmungen für Preußen und ausführlichem Sachregister, ed. Fritz Goerhrke, 2nd ed. Dortmund: W. Crüwell, 1908. “Valstybinės lietuvių kalbos komisijos nutarimas N-1. (150) ‘Dėl Valstybinės lietuvių kalbos komisijos prie Lietuvos Respublikos Seimo 1997 m. rugpjūčio 28 d. nutarimo Nr. 63 “Dėl Lietuvos vietovardžių sąrašo” pakeitimo’” (January 30, 2014). Teisės aktų registras, February 3, 2014 (no. 2014-00901). “Verordnung wegen verbesserter Einrichtung der Provinzial-Behörden. No. 287 vom 30sten April 1815.” Gesetz-Sammlung für die Königlichen Preußischen Staaten 9 (1815): 85–98.

WORKS OF FICTION Apraßimas Ißwalnijimo Kowos, nů 1812 ikki 1815. Ant Atsiminnimo Karźigiems ir Tēwißkes Prieteliems. Tilsit: Knigininkas Urbat, [s.a.]. Brönner-Hoepfner, Elisabeth. Geschichten aus dem Memelland. Berlin: Verlag Deutschlitauischer Memellandbund, 1922. Donaleitis [Donalitius], Christian. Das Jahr in vier Gesängen, ein ländliches Epos, trans. L[udwig] J. Rhesa. Königsberg: Königl. Hartungsche Hofbuchdruckerei, 1818. Donaleitis, Christian. Litauische Dichtungen. Erste volständige Ausgabe mit Glossar, ed. and trans. August Schleicher. St. Petersburg: Buchdruckerei der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1865. Donalitius, Christian. Littauische Dichtungen, trans. Ludwig Passarge. Halle a. S.: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1894. Donalitius, Christian. Littauische Dichtungen nach den Königsberger Handschriften mit metrischer Uebersetzung, kritischen Anmerkungen und genauem Glossar, ed. and trans. G. H. Ferdinand Nesselmann. Königsberg: Hübner & Matz, 1869. Hassenstein, Christian Daniel. Nusidawimai szwento Karawimo. Gumbinnen: [s.n.], 1814. Goldammer, Leo. Litthauen. Völker- und Naturbilder, with a preface by Chr[istian] Friedrich Scherenberg. Berlin: Otto Janke, 1858. Kunigas. Pujkus apraszimas isz Padawymo Lietuwniku. Plymouth, PA: Juozapas Pauksztis, 1887. Lietuviszkas sziupinis isz svetimu skanskoniu ant naudos broliams Lietuviams pataisitas, vol. 2: Konradas Vallenrodas. Pasaka isz lietuviszku ir prusiszku nusidavimu. Tilsit: M. Jankus, 1891. Temme, Jodocus D. H. An der Memel. Roman. Berlin: Hausfreund-Expedition (G. Graetz), 1872.

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COMMENTARIES AND SCHOLARLY TEXTS 1923 metų sausio įvykiai Klaipėdoje, ed. Alvydas Nikžentaitis, vol. IV of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis. Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 1995. Achremczyk, Stanisław. Historia Warmii i Mazur. Od pradziejów do 1945 roku, 2nd ed., vol. 166 of Rozprawy i Materialy Ośrodka Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego w Olsztynie. Olsztyn: Ośrodek Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego w Olsztynie, 1997. Achremczyk, Stanisław. Warmia. Olsztyn: Littera, 2000. Adam, Reinhard. “Der Liberalismus in der Provinz Preußen zur Zeit der neuen Ära und sein Anteil an der Entstehung der Deutschen Fortschrittspartei.” In Altpreußische Beiträge. Festschrift zur Hauptversammlung des Gesamtvereins der deutschen Geschichts- und Altertums-Vereine zu Königsberg Pr. vom 4. bis 7. September 1933, 145–181. Königsberg: Gräfe & Unzer, 1933. Adelung, Johann Christoph. Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde mit dem Vater Unser als Sprachprobe in beynahe fünfhundert Sprachen und Mundarten, vol. 2. Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung, 1809. [Akelaitis, Mikalojus.] Kwestorius po Lietuwą ważinedamas żmonis bemokinąsis. Vilnius: A. H. Kirkoras, 1860. Aleknavičienė, Ona. “Jono Bretkūno Postilė Lietuvoje: sklaidos istorija.” In Jono Bretkūno Postilė, ed. Ona Aleknavičienė, 13–143. Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas, 2005.

Bibliography Aleknavičius, Bernardas. Donelaitis ir mes. Vilnius: Mintis, 1989. Aleknavičius, Bernardas. “Vietovardžių germanizavimas Mažojoje Lietuvoje.” Mažoji Lietuva, April 1, 1989 (no. 7 [20]): 7. Aleksandravičius, Egidijus, and Antanas Kulakauskas. Carų valdžioje: XIX amžiaus Lietuva. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996. Alexandrow, Alexander. Sprachliches aus dem Nationaldichter Litauens Donalitius, vol. I: Zur Semasiologie. Dorpat: Schnakenburg’s Buchdruckerei, 1886. Allings, Reinhard. Monument und Nation. Das Bild vom Nationalstaat im Medium Denkmal— zum Verhältnis von Nation und Staat im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918, vol. 4 of Beiträge zur Kommunikationsgeschichte. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996. Alpha. “Sind die preussischen Litauer Nachkommen von Kriegsgefangenen?” Allgemeine Litauische Rundschau 6/7 (1912): 161–170. Alymov, Sergei. P. I. Kushner i razvitie sovetskoi etnografii v 1920–1950-e gody. Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 2006. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991. Aničas, Jonas. Vytautas, Juozas ir Vincas Vileišiai. Trečioji karta. Vilnius: Alma littera, 2000. Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials. The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. “Arbeit am nationalen Raum.” Deutsche und polnische Rand- und Grenzregionen im Nationali­ sierungsprozess, vol. 15, no. 2 (2005) of Comparativ: Leiziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung, ed. Peter Haslinger and Daniel Mollenhauer. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005. Arbušauskaitė, Arūnė. “Die alteingesessene Zivilbevölkerung des Memelgebietes während der sowjetischen Okkupation.” Annaberger Annalen 7 (1999): 39–64. Arbušauskaitė, Arūnė. “Karaliaučiaus-Kaliningrado srities civilių gyventojų padėtis 1945– 1951 metais.” In Klaipėdos ir Karaliaučiaus kraštų XVI–XX a. istorijos problemos, ed. Alvydas Nikžentaitis, vol. VIII of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis, 91–124. Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2001. Arbušauskaitė, Arūnė Liucija. “‘Kaliningrado vokiečių’ klausimo išsprendimas (?): Lietuva, 1951-ieji.” In Antrojo pasaulinio karo pabaiga Rytų Prūsijoje: faktai ir istorinės įžvalgos, ed. A. L. Arbušauskaitė, vol. XVIII of Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis, 207–230. Klaipėda: Klaipėdos universiteto leidykla, 2009. Arnoldt, Daniel Heinrich. Ausführliche und mit Urkunden versehene Historie der Königsbergischen Universität, vol. 1. Königsberg: Johann Heinrich Hartung, 1746.

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429

Index of Names A

Adomaitis, Juozas, 222, 229, 230 Akelaitis, Mikalojus, 226 Albert, Duke of Prussia, 18, 26, 41, 42n7, 44, 117, 121, 122, 122n92, 178, 253–254, 270 Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia, 18 Alekna, Antanas, 175, 176, 177, 178 Aleknavičius, Bernardas, 282n50, 350f Aleksandravičius, Egidijus, 6 Ambrassat, August, 112, 149 Ancker, Johann Heinrich, 64n68 Anderson, Benedict, 3 Anna, princess of Prussia and wife of Margrave of Brandenburg, 18 Arnašius, Jurgis, 260 Arvydas, Felix [ps.], 311 Asnyk, Adam, 209n152 Ašmys, Mikelis [Aschmies, Michel], 236–237, 240, 261–263 Augusta Victoria, German Empress Consort, 125 Åberg, Nils, 282n50

B

Baden, Max von, 199 Bairašauskaitė, Tamara, vii Balkelis, Tomas, vii Baltris, Ansas, 261 Basanavičius, Jonas, 155, 173–174, 175n50, 180, 186, 212, 225–226, 226n212, 229, 233 Becker, Elisa, 171f Behrend, Johann, 184 Behrend, Heinrich, 101 Bell, Scott, 9

Berghaus, Heinrich, 66, 79, 80n120, 81, 81n125, 83f, 144 Bernhardi, Karl, 81, 81n125 Bernoulli, Johann, 53n40 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 268n6 Bezzenberger, Adalbert, 69, 75, 76f, 77, 131, 133, 136, 150, 234, 243–244, 268, 274, 276, 334, 369, 372–373 Biržiška, Mykolas, 169–170, 230–231, 235 Bismarck, Otto von, 18, 101–103, 108, 116, 125–126, 160, 182 Blotno, Nicolaus [Mikalojus], 42 Boetticher, Adolf, 115, 162f Bohlen, Peter von, 69 Bonk, Hugo, 92 Bopp, Franz, 70 Borchardt, Felix, 313 Böckh, Richard [also Boeckh], 85, 145–150, 147f, 190–191 Brakas, Adomas, 302–303 Brandt, Willy, 359 Bretkūnas, Jonas, 41, 41n6, 42, 44n18, 177, 184, 209, 245, 262 Brezhnev, Leonid, 36 Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold, 127 Bruožis, Ansas, 166, 183–184, 254, 254n40, 259 Būga, Kazimieras, 310 Büsching, Anton Friedrich, 67

C

Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 52 Chernyakhovsky, Ivan, 37 Churchill, Winston, 33 Clay, Lucius D., 325f Copernicus, Nicolaus, 28, 117, 136

Index of Names

D

Dach, Simon, 117, 136, 249 Dagilis, Stanislovas, 209n152 Dann, Otto, 103 Daukantas, Simonas, 174, 174n45, 175, 175n47, 177, 180–181, 244 Davainis-Silvestraitis, Mečislovas, 230 David, Lucas, 191n100 Dethlefsen, Richard, 92, 133 Deu, Fred Hermann, 313 Dobrov, A., 340n184 Domhard, Johann Friedrich von, 52 Donelaitis, Kristijonas, 61, 70, 135–136, 177, 183–184, 209, 209n156, 214–215, 218, 218n187, 219–220, 237, 245, 248–249, 251–253, 262–263, 344, 349, 350f, 351, 315n215, 352, 353f Doritsch, Alexander, 151, 151n181

E

Ehret, Joseph [Eretas, Juozas], 263 Einaras, Adomas, 173 Engel, Carl, 309 Espagne, Michel, 43n10

F

Falk, Adalbert, 160 Falkenhahn, Viktor, 282 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 66 Forckenbeck, Max von, 101 Forstreuter, Kurt, 192n100, 272n22 Foucault, Michel, 1, 10 Frederick I, King in Prussia, 57, 93–95 Frederick II, King of Prussia, 52–53, 53n42, 56 Frederick William, Margrave of Brandenburg, 117 Frederick William I, King in Prussia, 55, 121, 123f, 271 Frederick William III, King of Prussia, 95 Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, 94 Froelich, George, 71

G

Gabrys, Juozas, 195, 222, 226, 230–231, 238 Gaigalaitis, Enzys [Gaigalat, Ensies], 216

Gaigalaitis, Vilius [Gaigalat, Wilhelm], 131–132, 165, 183–184, 184n77, 196, 196n114, 200, 207n146, 213, 216–218, 234, 239, 246–247, 251–254, 269, 279 Gailius, Viktoras, 200 Ganß, Johannes, 309–310, 313 Gediminids, House of, 199 George Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg, 42n7 Gerullis, Georg, 282 Gineitis, Leonas, 349 Gisevius, Eduard, 71, 245–246 Glagau, Otto, 71, 72f, 89, 89n7, 91, 138n138, 246 Goldammer, Leo, 138 Goldbeck, Johann Friedrich, 53–54n39 Grimm, Jacob, 68, 79 Grunau, Simon, 191n100 Guriev, Stepan, 37 Gusev, Sergei, 37 Gustaitis, Algirdas, 327f Güssefeld, Franz Ludwig, 23f, 190

H

Habsburg, House of, 15, 79, 80, 92, 101 Hagen, Ludwig Philipp vom, 53n42 Hamann, Johann Georg, 66 Harmjanz, Heinrich, 282 Hartknoch, Christoph, 47 Hassenstein, Christian Daniel, 61n60 Hasse, Ernst, 104 Haxthausen, August von, 141, 144, 146 Hein, Max, 282 Heinrich, Gertrud (see Mortensen, Gertrud) Heise, Hermann, 129 Hennenberger, Caspar, 44, 46f, 47, 210f, 333, 333n165 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 66, 98, 136 Hermann, Arthur, 40n1, 361 Hertzberg, Ewald Friedrich von, 52n38 Hillen-Ziegfeld, Arnold, 314n122 Hindenburg, Paul von, 27, 198n122, 294 Hintze, Paul von, 198, 198n124 Hirth, Georg, 74f Hitler, Adolf, 336 Hoepfner [marr. Brönner-Hoepfner], Elisabeth, 137, 313

431

432

Index of Names Hohenzollern, House of, 18, 59, 79, 80, 86, 87, 93, 94, 99, 102, 104, 106, 107, 111, 116, 121, 122, 125, 158, 182, 253, 254, 266, 370, 371 Hollack, Emil, 273, 273n23, 310 Holtz, Georgius, 42n7 Horn, Karl von, 160 Hoverbeck, Leopold von, 101, 246n13 Hubatsch, Walter, 328 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 51n35, 66, 68

I

Ivinskis, Laurynas, 236 Ivinskis, Zenonas, 310, 330, 332–333, 343

J

Jablonskis, Konstantinas, 311n114 Jacoby, Johann, 63 Jagomastas, Enzys, 279n32 Jakštas, Juozas, 191n100 Jankuhn, Hugo, 271, 282n50 Jankus, Martynas, 166, 182–183, 208n152, 212, 242, 261, 298 Jasėnas, Kazimieras, 262 Joachim, prince of Prussia and son of German Emperor, 125 Jagiellonians, House of, 28 John Sigismund, Margrave of Brandenburg and regent of the Prussian Duchy, 18, 45 Jokubauskas, Vytautas, viii Jordan, Karl August, 69, 77 Jordan, Wilhelm, 63, 69 Jordans, dynasty, 69 Jovaišas, Albinas, 349 Jurginis, Juozas, 347–348 Jurkšaitis, Kristupas [ Jurkschat, Christoph], 180 Juškytė, Jadvyga, 230

K

Kairies, Christoph, 284–285 Kakies, Martin, 322n136 Kalinin, Mikhail, 37 Kalmantas, Mykolas, 308 Kalvaitis, Vilius, 227, 228f, 229, 229n218–219, 233, 238 Kant, Immanuel, 136, 184, 185n82, 245

Karge, Paul, 276, 309 Karp, Franz-Constantin von [ps.], 311, 312n116 Katschinski, Alfred, 313 Keyserlingk, Heinrich von, 243n4 Kennedy, John, 325f Kętrzyński, Wojciech, 27–28 Kiepert, Heinrich, 144 Klein, Daniel, 41, 177, 209, 245 Klimaitis, Pranas, 175 Klimas, Petras, 234, 234n242 Knaake, Emil, 134, 270 Koch, Erich, 282 Koeppen, Peter [Keppen, Petr], 80, 81n124, 190n93, 226, 226n212, 236, 238–239, 372 Kohn, Hans, 40 Koialovicius-Wijuk, Albertus, 78 Kondratowicz, Ludwik, 208n152 Koschwitz, Eduard, 114 Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy, 208n152 Kubilius, Kerry, viii Kudirka, Vincas, 209n152 Kulakauskas, Antanas, 6, 340n181 Kulvietis, Abraomas, 42n7 Kuntze, August, 71, 71n96 Kurschat, Alexander, 75, 252, 279 Kurschat, Friedrich, 68, 75, 84f, 85, 87, 177, 184, 226, 229, 233–235, 238–239, 256, 371–372 Kushner, Pavel, 339n176–177, 342, 355 Kutuzov, Michail, 37 Kviklys, Bronius, 327f

L

Lackner, Matthias, 68 Ladushkin, Ivan, 37 Lambsdorff, Georg Franz Wilhelm von, 284 Langhans, Paul, 149, 304f, 304–305n89 Larin, Boris, 336 Lauenstein, Otto von, 196, 263, 370 Laurinavičius, Česlovas, 21n6, 340 Leers, Johann von, 314 Lefebvre, Henri, 10, 10n24, 11–13 Lemberg, Hans, 14 Lepner, Theodor, 44–45, 69, 189 Leskien, August, 151, 151n181

Index of Names Litten, Rosa, 137 Litvinov, Maksim, 339 Lysius, Heinrich, 152f Loebell, Friedrich Wilhelm von, 263 Louise, Prussian Queen Consort, 111, 116, 122, 124, 182, 284 Lucanus, August Hermann, 189, 191, 191n99 Lukšaitė, Ingė, 43n11 Luther, Martin, 178

M

Macijauskas, Antanas, 230 Mačiulis, Dangiras, 336n169 Mačiulis, Jonas [Maironis], 175, 175n47, 176–178 Maironis (see Mačiulis, Jonas) Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress, Archduchess of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Croatia and Queen of Bohemia, 52 Mastianica, Olga, viii Matulevičius, Algirdas, 191n100, 347, 349, 354–356, 356f, 358 Mauderode, Otto, 130f, 139f Mažvydas, Martynas, 41, 43–44, 57, 177–178, 184, 209, 245, 262–263, 344 Mech, Sergei, 188n87, 230 Medišauskienė, Zita, viii, 6 Meyer, Karl Heinrich, 282 Meyer, H., 141 Meyer, Richard, 315 Mickiewicz, Adam, 208n152 Micuta, Domas, 339n176 Mielcke, Christian Gottlieb, 72–73, 177, 184, 185n82, 209 Mikšas, Jurgis, 166, 173 Minzloff, Robert, 139f, 162f Mirabeau [Riqueti, Honoré Gabriel], 48 Moltke, Friedrich von, 131 Moltke, Julie von, 131 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 339 Mortensen [maiden name Heinrich], Gertrud, 50f, 274, 275f, 276, 308, 313, 348 Mortensen, Hans, 50f, 274, 275f

N

Nadler, Josef, 58n53 Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 4, 60, 65, 95, 116, 124 Nast, Clara, 137 Nehring, Ludwig, 272n21 Nesselmann, Ferdinand, 69–70, 77, 135–136, 244 Nesterov, Stepan, 37 Neumann, Ernst, 315, 315n128 Nicholas Nikolaevich, Duke and the Russian Empire’s commander in chief, 194 Nieth, M., 272n21 Nike [mythol.], 126 Nikžentaitis, Alvydas, vii

O

Ortelius, Abraham, 46f Ostermeyer, Gottfried, 184, 244 Ostermeyers, dynasty, 69

P

Pajaujis, Juozas, 213 Paléologue, Maurice, 21n4 Pakarklis, Povilas, 310–311, 335, 336n169, 337, 339, 339n177, 341–343, 343n192, 344n194 Pakštas, Kazys, 329–330, 333, 343 Passarge, Louis [Ludwig], 77n107, 135–136 Pattolo [mythol.], 211 Peckols (see Patollo) Perkūnas [mythol.], 211 Peters, Heinrich, 252 Petronis, Vytautas, viii, 7 Piasts, House of, 35 Pivoriūnas, Danielius, 363, 364f Pluhařová-Grigienė, Eva, viii Prätorius, Matthias [Pretorijus, Matas], 45, 47 Pryšmantas, Vladas, 310 Pocytė, Silva, viii, 205n143 Potrimpo [mythol.], 211 Pott, August Friedrich, 70 Pouncy, Carolyn, ix Prutenis [mythol.], 211

433

434

Index of Names

R

Range, Jochen Dieter, 360 Rapolionis, Stanislovas, 42n7, 177 Ratzka, Clara, 137 Rauch, Christian Daniel, 123f Reusch, Friedrich, 253 Rhesa, Ludwig Martin, 61, 68, 68n84, 69, 135, 177, 184, 244, 349 Rimka, Albinas, 194, 237, 237n254, 238–240 Rimša, Petras, 172n39, 221 Ritter, Joachim, 51n35 Rittich, Aleksandr, 80 Rogge, Albrecht, 306 Romanov, House of, 7, 21, 79–80, 86–87, 157–158, 194, 266, 370–371 Römer, Michał (Römeris, Mykolas), 236n253 Ruffmann, Karl-Heinz, 360 Ruhig, Philipp, 177, 209

S

Sahm, Wilhelm, 271 Said, Edward, 14–15 Salys, Antanas, 310 Sambora, Henrikas, 352n219 Sass, Theodor von, 315, 315n128 Sauerwein, Georg, 177, 184, 209 Sazonov, Sergei, 21n4 Scheidemann, Philipp, 92n14 Schenkendorf, Maximilian von, 117, 249 Scheu, Hugo, 129, 131, 247 Schleicher, August, 70, 73, 77, 79, 81, 135 Schlieben, Gottwald G. E., 138 Schlögel, Karl, 12 Schlözer, August, 66–67, 78–79, 189, 189n91, 190n93, 191 Schmid, Christian, 10n24, 11 Schön, Theodor von, 59, 62, 65, 97–99 Schreiber, Ottomar, 322n136, 323 Schubert, Friedrich Wilhelm, 73, 144, 236 Schultz, precentor in Lasdehnen, 71n96 Sembritzki, Johannes, 243n4, 245 Sengstock, Lazarus, 184 Seraphim, August, 273–274 Sideravičius, Kazys, 335 Sigismund Augustus, Polish King and Grand Duke of Lithuania, 43–44

Simonaitis, Erdmonas, 200, 331 Simonaitytė, Ieva, 337, 346n202 Simson, Eduard, 63 Syrokomla, Władysław (see Kondratowicz, Ludwik) Skirmuntt, Konstancija, 175, 181 Skrupskelis, Ignas, 58n53 Smetona, Antanas, 198n122, 233, 310 Sniečkus, Antanas, 344n194, 345 Soja, Edward, 1, 12 Sotzmann, Daniel Friedrich, 53n39 Stalin, Joseph, 22, 32–34, 36, 329, 337n170–171, 340, 345 Staliūnas, Darius, vii Stella, Erasmus, 176 Steputat, Wilhelm, 106, 197, 263 Stolberg, Udo zu, 243 Storost, Georg, 283–284 Storosta, Wilhelm (Vydūnas), 165, 174, 179n62, 180, 196–197, 205, 207n146, 213–214, 216, 248, 279n32, 280n42, 283, 347–348 Strakauskaitė, Nijolė, 255n42, 256 Strunga, Albina, viii Subačius, Paulius, 7, 170, 226 Sudermann, Hermann, 138, 138n138 Suvorov, Aleksandr, 37 Šalčius, Matas, 235n245 Šafárik, Pavel Jozef, 80–81, 81n125, 82f, 83f, 226, 226n212, 229, 233, 235, 238–239, 372 Šaknys, Žilvytis, 363, 364f Šapoka, Adolfas, 345, 345n200, 346 Šarmaitis, Romas, 339n180 Šernius, Martynas [Schernus, Martin], 173 Šilas, Vytautas, 352n219 Šliūpas, Jonas, 175, 191, 209n156, 212, 242

T

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 68 Tarvydas, Stanislovas, 348 Tautavičius, Adolfas, 348 Temme, Jodocus, 71, 91n10, 137, 137n135 Tetzner, Franz, 136, 150–151, 151n179, 152f, 227, 227n218, 233, 235n245, 238 Thunmann, Johann Erich, 66 Tijūnelis, Juozas, 316 Todorova, Maria, 15

Index of Names Toeppen, Max, 28, 50f, 51n36, 73, 74f, 75, 76f, 77, 77n107, 150, 268, 276, 283, 369, 372–373 Tokarev, Sergei, 339n176 Traba, Robert, 26, 276, 292 Trauschies, Georg, 256 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 65, 99–100, 102 Truman, Harry S., 329 Tūbelis, Juozas, 188n87, 230, 311

V

Vaišnoras, Juozas, 339n180, 340 Vaišnoras, Simonas, 184 Valančius, Grigas, 330 Valančius, Motiejus, 159 Vanagaitis, Jonas, 166, 188n85, 193, 200, 205, 207n146, 261–262 Vater, Johann Severin, 79 Venclova, Antanas, 335, 351 Verbickis, Valerijonas, 232f, 233–235, 238 Vileišis, Petras, 229–230, 233 Vileišis, Vincas, 191n100, 302n85, 311 Vilentas, Baltramiejus, 177, 184, 209, 245 Vincke, Georg von, 64, 89 Vydūnas (see Storosta, Wilhelm) Vytautas, Grand Duke of Lithuania, 181, 199, 333 Voigt, Johannes, 61, 68, 73, 98, 168, 182 Vries, Axel de, 323

W

Wagner, Erhard, 47

Waidewutus, also Widewuth, Vaidevutis [mythol.], 58, 176, 210f, 211, 368 Walter, Axel Ernst, viii Walter, Eginhard, 307 Wichert, Ernst, 137, 138n138 William I, King of Prussia and German Emperor, 95, 101, 116–117, 125, 128 William II, King of Prussia and German Emperor, 125 Wilson, Woodrow, 199, 269n10 Winkler, Adalbert von (see Kętrzyński, Wojciech) Wolff, Larry, 14

Y

Yčas, Martynas, 194, 198n124 Yorck von Wartenburg, Ludwig, 117

Z

Zabermann, Johann, 159 Zaunius, Dovas, 212 Zauniūtė, Marta, 212 Zechlin, Erich, 234 Zeicas, Augustinas, 208n152 Ziesemer, Johannes, 154 Ziesemer, Walther, 282 Zweck, Albert, 113f, 150 Žilius, Jonas, 197, 197n118, 209n152 Žiugžda, Juozas, 335, 339n177 Žostautaitė, Petronėlė, 346n201, 347–348 Żytyniec, Rafał, 321n134

435

Geographic index

The belonging of villages, manors and settlements to the counties is indicated according to the situation in 1910.

A

Africa, 92 Alexen [Aleksandrovka], vil. in Labiau County, 227 Alle [Łyna, Lava], river, 73, 77n107, 150, 330, 354, 356 Allenstein [Olsztyn], 114, 117, 132, 247, 260; see also Olsztyn Allenstein Governmental District, 29, 142f, 271, 283 America, 187, 331 America, Northern, 35, 225, 250, 320, 322 Angerapp [Angrapa, Węgorapa], river, 73, 154 Angerapp, town, see Darkehmen Angerburg [Węgorzewo], 126, 144, 355 Angerburg County, 149 Ansbach, 18 Antwerp, 46f Arge [Zlaia], river, 148 Asia, 180 Augustów County, 85 Augustów Gubernia, 85, 156–157 Aukštaitija, region of Lithuania, 155, 364 Austria, also Habsburg monarchy, empire, 15, 79, 80, 90, 92, 101, 110, 147f, 266 Auxkallen [ext.], vil. in Darkehmen County, 75

B

Ballupönen [Bałupiany], vil. in Goldap County, 75 Baltic Sea, 17, 20, 229, 329 Baltic States, 330, 357 Baltics (also Baltic region), 244, 329, 330 Bardehnen [Bardinai], vil. in Tilsit County, 214 Barkehmen [Barkowo], vil. in Goldap County, 75 Barten [Barciany], 355 Bartenstein [Bartoszyce], 331, 355 Benkheim [Banie Mazurskie], vil. in Angerburg County, 330 Berezina, river, 226 Berlin, vii, 18, 57–58, 63, 70–71, 72f, 91, 94–95, 101, 131, 132, 137, 145, 197, 261, 282, 287f, 294, 313, 328n147, 351 Berlin, West, 325f Bern, 23f, 198, 263 Bismarck [Žalgiriai], manor in Heydekrug County, 125 Bismarckshöh, see Kallnen Bittehnen [Bitėnai], vil. in Ragnit County, 174n45, 214 Bonn, 359, 361 Black Sea, 330 Brandenburg, territory, 18, 45, 48, 57, 60, 94, 96, 253

Geographic index Brandenburg, town, 330 Braunsberg [Braniewo], 114, 331 Brno, 82f Budwethen [Malomozhaiskoe], vil. in Ragnit County, 44

C

Chicago, 195, 229 Chistye Prudy, 352; see also Tollmingkehmen Coadjuthen [Katyčiai], vil. in Tilsit County, 223, 225 Compiègne, 199–200 Cracow [Kraków], 351 Cranz [Zelenogradsk], vil. in Fischhausen County, 114, 132, 330 Curonian Lagoon, 81n125, 133, 138, 144, 151, 225, 307, 332 Curonian Spit, 40n1, 138, 297 Courland, 40n1, 196, 221, 263, 268n6 Courland Gubernia, 195 Czech Republic, 82f Czechoslovakia, 323

D

Danzig [Gdańsk], 33, 59, 64n68, 69, 101, 172, 260, Danzig, Free City of, 267, 288, 291, 296, 325f, 340 Darkehmen [Ozyorsk], 126, 151, 226–227, 234, 239–240, 283 Darkehmen County, 73, 75, 144, 227, 227n218, 229, 231 Daugava [Western Dvina], river, 226 Dawillen [Dovilai], vil. in Memel County, 223n209 Deime [Deyma], river, 73, 149–150, 276, 354, 356 deutsche Ostgebiete, see German Eastern Areas Dresden, 130 Dubeningken [Dubeninki], vil. in Goldap County, 227, 355 Dubysa, river, 274 Dzūkija, region of Lithuania, 364

E

East, Near, 14 Eastern area [Ostgebiet], 272n21

Eastern march [Ostmark], 99, 102, 106, 106n61, 138n138, 258 Ebenrode, see Stallupönen Elbing [Elbląg], 101, 260, 277, 330 Engelstein [Węgielsztyn], vil. in Angerburg County, 355 Enzuhnen [Chkalovo], vil. in Stallupönen County, 227 Erlangen, 360 Escherningken [Mikhailovo], vil. in Gumbinnen County, 283 Estonia, 323, 330 Europe, 3–5, 14, 19–20, 22, 24–25, 31, 52, 80–81, 81n124, 82f, 90, 96, 104, 110–112, 144, 146, 150, 170, 189, 192, 196, 212, 222, 250, 332, 338, 339n176, 361, 367–368, 373 Europe, Eastern, 14, 25 Europe, Western, 14, 177 Europe, Central, 15, 25 Europe, East-Central, 17, 24–25, 31, 34, 219, 265–266, 272, 318, 323, 360, 369 Eydtkuhnen [Chernyshevskoye], 32, 171f, 332

F

Fischhausen County, 329n147 Försterei [Giruliai], resort in vil. Mellneraggen of Memel County, 216 France, 1, 4, 19, 25, 28, 30n19, 199, 290, 326 Frankfurt am Main, 23f, 63, 92 Frauenburg [Frombork], 119 Friedland [Pravdinsk], 330 Frisches Haff (Vistula Lagoon), 331 Frisching [Prokhladnaya], river, 330

G

Galicia, 15, 79, 266, 268n6 Gawaiten [Gavrilovo], vil. in Goldap County, 42n7 Georgenburg [Mayovka], manor in Insterburg County, 121 Georgenburg Eldership, 45, 48, 50 Gerdauen [Zheleznodorozhny], 331 Gerdauen County, 329n147 German Eastern Areas [deutsche Ostgebiete, Ostdeutschland], 323, 359–360, 366

437

438

Geographic index German (Teutonic) Order, land of the [Ordensland], 97f, 99, 102, 121, 181, 185, 256, 258, 270, 277–278, 281, 370; see also Prussia (as dominions of the Teutonic Order) Germany (generally), 1, 6, 7, 17, 19–22, 27–30, 32, 33, 35, 36n31, 81, 90, 92–93, 100–102, 117–118, 120, 125, 213, 219, 253, 272n22, 281, 293, 299, 302n85, 312, 314, 319, 320–321, 321n134, 322, 325f, 328, 330–332, 337–338, 342, 347, 360–361, 366–367, 371, 373 Germany (as German-speaking countries), 25, 59, 65, 81, 90–92, 108, 144, 146 Germany (as the 1871–1918 Reich, also Kaiserreich, Empire), 7, 18, 21–22, 24, 26, 72f, 92, 92n14, 93, 103–106, 108–112, 115–116, 118, 120, 122, 124–125, 129–130, 133, 135–136, 139f, 140, 154, 156–160n13, 165, 167, 169, 171f, 172, 182, 188n87, 189, 196, 196n114, 197–198, 198n122, 199, 220, 225–226, 230, 246, 250–251, 255–256, 267–268, 268n6, 276, 302n85, 307, 366, 370 Germany (as the 1919–1933 Reich) 29, 30n19, 201–202, 213, 240, 266–267, 269, 277–279, 279n32, 284–286, 288, 288n62, 289–292, 294, 297, 300–301, 312, 314, 332, 366, 370, 373 Germany (as the 1933–1945 Reich, also Nazi Germany), 19–20, 22, 31, 36n33, 293, 297, 314–317, 322, 338 Germany (as North German Confederation) 63, 102 Germany (as German Confederation), 47, 73, 75, 84–85, 90–92, 95, 101 Germany (as German Federal Republic, West Germany), 34, 319, 322, 322n136, 323–325, 357n228, 359–360, 362, 366

Gertlauken [Novaia Derevnia], manor in Labiau County, 151 Gilge [Matrosovo], vil. in Labiau County, 285 Gilge [Matrosovka], river, 53n39, 365 Gleisgarben [Jagoczany], manor in Darkehmen County, 75 Goldap [Gołdap], river, 73, 150 Goldap [Gołdap], town, 81n125, 126, 144, 180, 234, 239–240, 267n2, 330–331, 372 Goldap County, 73, 75, 144, 149, 227, 229, 231, 237, 239 Gotha, 74f, 81 Grabowen [Grabowo], vil. in Goldap County, 330 Graz, 147f Great Britain, 28, 30n19, 199, 325–326, 337 Greece, 24 Grodno [Hrodna], 81n125, 191n100, 229, 274 Grodno County, 85, 191n100 Grodno Gubernia, 85, 156, 195 Groß Lenkeningken [Lesnoe], vil. in Ragnit County, 223n209 Groß Schorellen [Saratovskoe], vil. in Pillkallen County, 285 Groß Skaisgirren [Bolshakovo], vil. in Niederung County, 285 Gröszpelken [Griežpelkiai], vil. in Tilsit County, 223n209 Grunwald, area near former Grünfelde vil., Osterode County, 28, 176, 214, 217, 250–251, 277 Grünheide [Kaluzhskoe], manor in Insterburg County, 285 Gudden [Gudai], vil. in Tilsit County, 313 Gumbinnen [Gusev], 49, 51, 55–56, 57, 59, 62, 81n125, 91, 111, 121–122, 123f, 126–127, 127n101, 132, 138, 154, 217n181, 223, 226, 231, 233, 283–284, 339, 368 Gumbinnen County, 71, 73, 111, 144, 147, 227, 229, 231, 237, 239 Gumbinnen Governmental District, 56, 65, 68, 71, 73, 89, 111, 122, 135, 141, 143–146, 148, 148n169, 156, 164, 227, 271, 283

Geographic index Gurnen [Górne], manor in Goldap County, 330, 355

H

Halle, 70, 78 Heiligenbeil [Mamonovo], 355 Heinrichsdorf [ext.], manor in Gumbinnen County, 71 Heinrichswalde [Slavsk], vil. in Niederung County and county centre, 225 Heydekrug [Šilutė], manor and settlement, 64n68, 125–126, 126n98, 129, 225, 247, 252; see also Šilutė Heydekrug County, 73, 125, 126n98, 129, 131, 144, 147, 149–150, 153, 157n4, 163, 163n20, 225, 227, 229, 231, 237–240, 269, 273 Hohenstein [Olsztynek], 73 Holstein, 102 Holy Roman Empire, 90, 92 Hungary, 323

I

Inster [Instruch], river, 154 Insterburg [Chernyakhovsk], 42n7, 62, 71, 111, 114, 121, 126, 127n101, 137, 189, 226, 229n218, 233, 240, 339 Insterburg County, 73, 75, 144, 147, 227, 229, 231, 237, 239 Insterburg District, 44–45, 47–48, 50, 55, 73, 189n91, 333n165 Italy, 30n19, 101

J

Jakobsruhe, see Tilsit, Jakobsruhe Park Japan, 30n19 Johannisburg County, 164 Jura [Jūra], river, 267n2

K

Kaliningrad, 37, 37n35, 351, 365; see also Königsberg Kaliningrad Oblast, 20, 33, 35–38, 318, 326, 327f, 334, 338, 341–344, 351–352, 353f, 354–355, 357, 357n228, 358–359, 361, 365, 365n4, 366, 373; see also Karaliaučiaus kraštas

Kallnen [ext.], vil. in Gumbinnen County, 283 Kalvarija County, 85 Karaliaučiaus kraštas, 357–358, 363; see also Kaliningrad Oblast Karkeln [Mysovka], vil. in Heydekrug County, 225 Kattenau [Zavety], vil. in Stallupönen County, 227 Kaunas, 191n100, 196, 214, 263, 274, 285, 297, 299, 308, 310–311, 332, 352, 365 Kaunas (Kovno) Gubernia, 85, 156, 158, 170, 186, 195 Klaipėda, vii, 30, 198, 201, 214, 221, 288n62, 291, 297–300, 308, 329n147, 336–337, 337n170–171, 338, 341, 346n202, 361, 363; see also Memel Klaipėda Region, 19, 30, 157, 297–303, 308, 317–318, 322, 334–338, 341, 346n202, 360, 363, 365, 373; see also Memel, Territory of Klein Tauerlaucken [Tauralaukis], manor in Memel County, 116, 124 Königsberg [Kaliningrad], also Karaliaučius, 18, 22, 31–34, 37, 49, 54–58, 61–62, 70, 84f, 85, 90–91, 94–95, 98, 101, 113n78, 114–117, 131–134, 134f, 135, 138, 164, 172, 180, 226, 226n212, 229, 245, 253, 256, 260, 269n10, 273, 276, 282, 297, 309, 328, 328–329n147, 329–332, 337n170, 339–342; see also Kaliningrad Königsberg County, 329n147 Königsberg Governmental District, 56, 73, 89, 141, 144–145, 148, 148n169, 164, 227, 271, 283 Königsberg Tiergarten, 133 Königsberg University (Albertina), University of Konigsberg, 42, 42n7, 61–62, 63f, 68–69, 69n87, 73, 75, 91, 108, 114, 136, 209, 243, 246, 253, 274, 282, 307, 309, 315, 371 Kraupischken [Ul’ianovo], vil. in Ragnit county, 227 Kremlin (Moscow), 32, 337; see also Moscow

439

440

Geographic index Krewo [Kreva], 181 Kullmen [Kulmenai], villages in Tilsit County, 223n209 Kutten [Kuty], vil. in Angerburg County, 355 Kussen [Vesnovo], vil. in Pillkallen County, 285

L

Labiau [Polessk], 53n39, 117, 126, 144, 151, 225–227, 233–234, 239, –240, 267n2, 372 Labiau County, 73, 75, 133, 138, 141, 144, 147–150, 163n20, 227, 227n218, 229, 231, 237–239, 269, 285–286 Labiau District, 45, 48, 50, 72 Laggarben [Garbno], manor in Gerdauen County, 355 Lankuppen [Lankupiai], vil. in Memel County, 223n209, 225 Lasdehnen [Krasnoznamensk], vil. in Pillkallen County, 71n96, 126 Lasdinehlen [ext.], vil. in Gumbinnen County, 352–353 Latvia, 323, 330 Laukischken [Saranskoe], vil. in Labiau County, 227, 285 Lauknen [Gromovo], vil. in Labiau County, 227 Laugszargen [Lauksargiai], vil. in Tilsit County, 223n209 Lausanne, 235n245 Leipzig, 84f, 95, 150–151, 151n181, 216 Leningrad, 336, 351; see also St. Petersburg Lithuania (generally), vii, 6, 7, 7n16, 8, 15–17, 31–32, 39–40, 42, 42n7, 43, 45, 47–49, 51–52, 55–57, 65–66, 71, 77, 77n107, 78–80, 84f, 85–90, 166, 169, 170, 173–174, 175n47, 176, 179n62, 181, 185–186, 189–190, 192, 195–197, 197n118, 198, 198n122, 203, 205n143, 211, 222, 229, 231, 232f, 233–234, 238–239, 262–264, 268n6, 273, 276, 283–284, 286, 308, 326, 327f, 328–329n147, 329, 329n149, 330–336, 337n170, 339n176, 346n201, 350f, 354, 361, 366–369, 371–373

Lithuania (as Grand Duchy of Lithuania), 18, 40–41, 41n7, 43, 43n11, 44, 78–79, 158, 167, 176, 176n54, 177, 179n62, 180–181, 186, 188–189, 189, 191–192n100, 274, 283, 346, 349, 367–368 Lithuania (as Republic of Lithuania), 6, 19, 19n2, 21, 29–30, 30n19, 34, 157, 199–202, 213–214, 234–235, 268–270, 278, 279n32, 288n62, 289–294, 297–298, 300–303, 305, 307–308, 310–312, 314–315, 315n128, 316–317, 321–322, 345, 345n200, 350f, 357, 357n228, 358–359, 361–363, 364f, 365, 365n4, 366, 370 Lithuania (as Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania, also Soviet Lithuania), 19, 32–35, 319, 334–337, 337n171, 338–340, 340–341n184, 341––349, 351–353, 353f, 354–355, 357 Lithuania (as Prussian landscape), 22, 51, 62–64, 64n68, 65, 68, 68n86, 69, 71, 71n94, 72f, 76f, 77, 86, 89–91, 101, 103, 107–108, 113f, 119, 119n85, 120–122, 123f, 124–130, 130f, 131–138, 139f, 140, 148–151, 154–155, 158, 163n20, 165–167, 169, 173, 190n96, 231, 255–256, 257f, 258–263, 271–272, 272n21–22, 273–274, 276, 279–281, 283, 286, 289, 292–293, 301, 321, 348, 368–370 Lithuania (as Department, Province of Prussia), 23f, 52–54, 54f, 55–56, 58–61, 97, 346, 346n201, 368 Lithuania, Klein Litauen (Littauen, Litthauen), 189–190, 263 Lithuania, Little Lithuania, 190 Lithuania Major (Didžioji Lietuva), 29, 178, 179n62, 187–188, 188n86, 189, 191–195, 201–203, 205–206, 208, 213, 255, 261–262, 273n23,

Geographic index 289–290, 299, 301–302, 302n85, 307, 337, 348 Lietuva, Middle (Litwa Środkowa), 266 Lithuania Minor (Mažoji Lietuva), 8, 29, 35, 187, 188n85–86, 189, 191, 191n100, 192–195, 198–199, 201–203, 206, 208, 211, 213–214, 231, 233, 235, 240, 255, 261, 283, 298–299, 301–302, 302n85, 303, 311, 320, 322, 324, 326, 327f, 328–329, 332–335, 337–338, 339n176, 343–346, 346n202, 347, 347n207, 348–349, 351, 351n215, 353–356, 356f, 357–358, 363–364, 364f, 365–366, 371, 373 Lithuania, Prussian, 8, 29, 44–45, 51, 176, 176n54, 176–179, 181, 183, 185, 187–190, 194–195, 199, 203–204, 207n146, 211–214, 215n170, 221, 223, 226, 230–231, 234, 235n245, 237–238, 242, 255–256, 259, 261, 263, 266–268, 270–271, 278, 283, 286, 288–289, 291, 293, 301–302, 302n85, 307, 319, 321, 326, 328n147, 332, 336n169, 344, 354, 360, 366, 370 Lithuania, Russian, Muscovian (Maskolių Lietuva), 172n39, 187, 231, 261, 269 Lithuania, White Russian (Gudų Lietuva), 187 Lithuanian districts, 24, 45, 48–49, 51, 55 Lithuanian area, 6–7, 15–16, 23f, 24, 44–45, 53n39, 72, 233 London, 31, 33, 337 Lötzen [Giżycko], 120 Lublin, 33, 78, 174n45,181 Lübeck, 361 Lüneburg, 361 Lyck [Ełk], 330

M

Mallwischken [Maiskoe], vil. in Pillkallen County, 227 Marburg, vii

Marienburg [Malbork], 59, 97, 97f, 98–99, 131, 154, 260, 270, 277, 277n30, 278–279 Marienwerder [Kwidzyn], 260, 277 Marienwerder Governmental District, 29 Marijampolė County, 85 Masovia, 120 Masuria (as Prussian landscape), 22, 22–24n8, 27–29, 32, 51, 51n36, 73, 89, 107, 119–120, 120n89, 135, 140, 278, 319 Masurian District [Okręg Mazurski], 342 Mauer [Mamry], Lake, 330–331 Mehlkehmen [Kalinino], vil. in Stallupönen County, 126, 227 Mehlauken [Zalesje], vil. and manor in Labiau County, 126, 151, 285 Melno [Mełno], Lake, 273, 283, 284 Memel area [Memelgebiet], 153–154 Memel [Klaipėda], city, 30, 42n7, 64n68, 111, 114–117, 121, 124, 124n94, 125–129, 132, 138, 161, 172, 198, 198n124, 199, 201, 214, 216–219, 219n193, 220–223, 223n209, 224–226, 245–249, 256, 258, 260, 261, 263, 267n2, 269, 279n32, 285, 291, 297, 300, 303, 308–311, 312n116, 315, 322n136, 323, 329n147, 337n170, 372; see also Klaipėda Memel [Neman, Nemunas], river, 19, 21, 21n6, 81n125, 111, 124, 127, 138, 147, 153, 196, 201–202, 214, 238, 240, 266–267, 267n2, 274, 282n50, 288, 319, 322, 329n147, 332, 337n170, 364–365 Memel River basin, 153–154, 195, 201 Memel River, delta or mouth of the, 138 Memel River, left bank of the, 201–202, 284, 286, 301, 303, 319, 322, 337n170, 338 Memel, Territory of, 19, 19n2, 30, 30n19, 31–32, 34, 153, 157, 201–202, 240, 267, 269, 278–279, 279n32, 284–286, 288, 288n62, 289–294, 295f, 296–297, 299–304, 304f, 304–305n89, 305–306, 308–312, 312n116, 314, 314n123, 315–317, 319, 321, 321n135, 322, 322n136, 323,

441

442

Geographic index 325f, 337n170, 360, 364f, 370, 373; see also Klaipėda Region Memel County, 68, 73, 89, 129, 133, 138, 144, 146–147, 149–150, 153, 163n20, 225, 227, 229, 231, 237–240, 273, 306 Memel District, 40n1, 44–45, 48, 50, 55, 72–73, 189n91 Memelgebiet, see Memel area or Memel, Territory of Mierunsken [Mieruniszki], vil. in Olecko County, 355 Minsk Gubernia, 195 Mitau [Jelgava], 262 Moravia, 82 Moscow, 32, 294, 326, 335, 337–339, 339n176, 341–345, 350f, 351, 359; see also Kremlin Munich [München], 262 Muscovy, see Russia

N

Nadrovia, 46f, 47, 73–74, 74f, 75, 77, 85, 147–148, 153, 199, 268, 271, 273–274, 283–284, 333, 369 Neidenburg County, 164 Neisse [Lausitzer Neiße, Nysa Łużycka], river, 34, 359 Neringa, 363 Neukuhren [Pionersky], vil. in Fischhausen County, 114 Neupassau, see Escherningken Neutief [Kossa], settl. in Fischhausen County, 330 Niebudszen [Krasnogorskoe], vil. in Gumbinnen County, 227 Niederung County, 73, 144, 147–148, 150, 153, 163n20, 223, 227, 231, 237–239, 285–286 Nidden [Nida], vil. in Memel County, 138, 227 Nordenburg [Krylowo], 81n125, 144, 225 Norkitten [Mezhdurech’e], vil. in Insterburg County, 75, 126, 226, 226n212 Notanga, 22, 23f, 51 Nowawes, 313 Nuremberg [Nürnberg], 23f

O

Obelischken [Zelentsovo], vil. in Insterburg County, 151 Ober-Eisseln [Gorino], vil. in Ragnit County, 126 Ober Ost, as a territory of the Supreme Commander of All German Forces in the East, 197n118, 198, 234, 370 Oberland, 22, 23f, 48, 51, 120 Oder [Odra], river, 34, 359 Olecko County, 226 Olsztyn, 342; see also Allenstein Omet [Zheleznodorozhnaya, Stogovka], river, 330 Ordensland, see German (Teutonic) Order, land of Orient, 14 Ortelsburg County, 164 Osterode [Ostróda], 114 Ostdeutschland, see German Eastern Areas Ostdorf, see Schilleningken Ostmark, see Eastern march

P

Palanga, 300 Paris, 14, 21, 21n4, 21n6, 28, 90, 195, 201, 211, 212n161, 234n242, 239–240, 250, 267n2, 269, 288, 301 Paskallwen [Dubki], vil. in Ragnit County, 223n209 Pelleningken [Zagorskoe], vil. in Insterburg County, 227 Pennsylvania, 188n85 Piktupönen [Piktupėnai], vil. in Tilsit County, 61n60 Pillau [Baltiysk], 117, 330–331, 341 Pillkallen [Dobrovolsk], 72, 126, 185n82, 283, 285 Pillkallen County, 73, 144, 147, 153, 163n20, 229, 231, 237–239, 285–286 Pillupönen [Nevskoe], vil. in Stallupönen County, 42 Pisse [Pissa, Pisa], river, 154 Plicken [Plikiai], vil. in Memel County, 223n209 Plymouth, 174n45, 209n152 Pogegen [Pagėgiai], vil. in Tilsit County, 223n209

Geographic index Poland, 17–19, 21, 21n6, 28–29, 31–35, 37n34, 43, 52, 53n39, 78–79, 96, 105, 156, 170, 188n87, 190, 197, 201, 263, 268, 268n6, 273n23, 278, 318, 323, 326, 330, 332, 340–342, 352, 357n228, 358–359 Polish area, 22, 23f, 51, 53n39, 56 Polish Corridor, 19, 27, 277, 314n123 Polish districts, 22, 51–52 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 17–18, 22, 78, 96, 189–190 Pomerania [Pommern], 52, 61 Pomerania, East [Pomorze Wschodnie], 27, 266 Popelken [Vysokoe], vil. in Labiau County, 227, 285 Posen [Poznań], Province of, 92, 95, 258 Potsdam, 33, 313, 324–326, 330, 342, 358–359 Pregel [Pregolya], river, 154, 329n147, 332, 364–365 Pregel River basin, 154 Preussisch Eylau [Bagrationovsk], 355 Preussisch Holland [Pasłęk], 120 Pripyat, river, 226 Prökuls [Priekulė], vil. in Memel County, 126, 225, 227, 256 Prussia (generally), vii, 6, 8, 16, 28, 39, 58–59, 90, 136 Prussia (as dominions of the Teutonic Order), 28, 40n7, 41n7, 99, 99n37, 267n2, 275–276 Prussia (as dominions of Prussian Duke), 18, 39–42, 42n7, 43, 43n11, 44–45, 46f, 47–49, 52, 54, 56–59, 94, 115, 117, 191n100, 253, 367–368 Prussia (as dominions of Prussian King; Kingdom of Prussia; since 1871 part of the German Empire; Hohenzollern monarchy), 7, 18, 21–22, 26–27, 29, 48, 50f, 51–52, 53n39, 54f, 55–63, 68, 72–73, 77–80, 81n125, 85, 87, 89–94, 94n19, 95–96, 96n25, 99–103, 106–108, 110–112, 115–117, 120, 122, 125, 131, 141, 143–146,

148, 148n169, 149, 152f, 154, 156, 156n4, 157, 157n5, 165–166, 168–170, 172, 172n39, 173, 178–179, 182, 186–189, 190n96, 191, 196, 207–209, 222–223, 225, 226n212, 230, 236, 241–242, 244–245, 248, 253, 255, 268, 273–274, 284–285, 301, 302n85, 319, 328, 344, 346, 346n201–202, 347–349, 366–371 Prussia (as joint province of East and West Prussia), 53–54, 57, 59–60, 62, 64, 64n68, 68, 74f, 77, 88, 90–97, 97f, 98–103, 106–108, 118, 141, 143, 156–157n4, 160–161, 256, 258 Prussia, East (as province), 17–18, 18n1, 19–20, 20f, 21–22, 23f, 24, 26–29, 31–34, 34n28, 35, 36n31, 37, 37n34, 38, 38n37, 39, 51–53, 53n39, 54f, 54, 56, 60, 62, 65, 72, 75, 82f, 84f, 90–94, 96, 102–103, 105, 105n59, 106, 106n61, 107–112, 112n78, 113f, 114–122, 125–126, 129, 131–136, 139f, 140, 142f, 148–150, 153, 153n185, 154, 162f, 164, 170–172, 178–182, 185–188, 188n85, 190, 193–194, 196, 198–199, 201, 208–209, 211–213, 223, 225, 227, 229–231, 233–235, 235n245, 236–237, 240–243, 243n4, 244–245, 248–249, 251, 253–255, 255n42, 256, 258–262, 265–267, 267n2, 268–269, 269n10, 270–272, 272n21–22, 274, 275f, 276–279, 280n42, 281–282, 282n50, 283–284, 286, 288, 292–294, 295f, 296–297, 302, 308, 310, 316–321, 321n134, 322–326, 327f, 328–330, 333–337, 337n170, 340, 340n184, 341–342, 346n202, 347–349, 354, 356f, 359–360, 365–373

443

444

Geographic index Prussia, Northern East, 272, 272n21, 370 Prussia, West (as governmental district), 277, 283 Prussia, West (as province), 27, 52, 54f, 56, 59, 62, 96, 96n25, 97, 103, 105–106, 106n61, 107, 111–112, 121, 134, 141, 255–256, 258, 260–262, 266, 268, 277

R

Ragnit [Neman], 69, 71, 91n10, 121, 126, 219, 226, 283 Ragnit County, 73, 137, 144, 147, 153, 157n4, 163n20, 225, 227, 229, 231, 237–240, 269, 285 Ragnit District, 42n7, 45, 47–48, 50, 55, 73, 189n91 Rambynas [Rombinus], scarp above the Memel River, 211, 214–215, 215n170, 216–219, 224f, 245–246, 246n12, 249, 251, 285, 298, 298f Rominte [Krasnaya], river, 154 Rößel [Reszel], 114 Rucken [Rukai], vil. in Tilsit County, 223n209 Russ [Rusnė], river, 19, 240, 267, 288, 365 Ruß [Rusnė], vil. in Heydekrug County, 64n68, 225 Russia (as Romanov monarchy; Empire; contemp. Russian Federation): 7, 17, 20–21, 21n4, 21n6, 34–36, 36n33, 37–38, 52, 77–81, 81n124, 85–87, 91, 91n10, 101, 156, 156n4, 157, 159, 170, 172–175, 186–188, 188n85, 188n87, 189, 192–194, 196–199, 205, 209n156, 212, 222, 225–226, 229–230, 250, 262–264, 266, 268n6, 269, 294, 324, 329, 329n149, 330, 358, 361–363, 370–372; (as Muscovy, Maskolija), 157, 171, 173, 181, 185–186, 193, 209

S

St. Petersburg, 91; see also Leningrad Saalau [Kamenskoe], vil. in Insterburg County, 121

Saalau Eldership, 45, 48, 50 Sambia, peninsula and landscape, 22, 23f, 47–48, 51, 68n86, 114, 119, 121, 322 Samogitia, see Žemaitija Sandkrug [Smiltynė], part of the City of Memel, 126 Sardinia, 101 Sarkau [Lesnoy], vil. in Fischhausen County, 152f Scalovia, 46f, 47, 73–74, 74f, 75, 77, 85, 147–148, 153, 199, 268, 271, 273–274, 283–284, 333, 369 Schaaken [Nekrasovo], manor in Königsberg Rural County, 53n39, 53n42, 81n125 Schaaken District, 45 Schillehnen [Pobedino], vil. in Pillkallen County, 285 Schilleningken [Samarskoe], vil. in Pillkallen County, 283 Schippenbeil [Sępopol], 331 Schirwindt [Kutuzovo], 126, 226 Schleswig, 102 Schloßberg, see Pillkallen Schreitlaugken [Šereitlaukis], manor in Tilsit County, 59 Schwarzort [Juodkrantė], vil. in Memel County, 216 Schwentainen [Świętajno], vil. in Olecko County, 331 Sejny County, 85 Siberia, German, 91, 92n14 Silesia (generally), 60, 266 Silesia, Province of, 258, 322n136 Silesia, Upper, 314n123, 322n136 Sokółka County, 85 Sovietsk, 37, 365; see also Tilsit Stallupönen [Nesterov], 122n92, 126, 226–227, 233, 283 Stallupönen County, 73, 144, 147, 227, 229, 231, 237–239 Sudetenland, 314n123 Suvalkija, region of Lithuania, 364 Suwałki, 331 Suwałki Gubernia, 85, 170, 186, 195 Sweden, 117 Swine [Putilovka, Oświnka], river, 73

Geographic index Switzerland, 23f Szeszuppe [Šešupė], river, 147 Szibben [Žibai], vil. in Heydekrug County, 125 Szillen [Zhilino], vil. in Ragnit County, 285 Šilutė, 364, 364n2, 365; see also Heydekrug Šventoji, 300

T

Tannenberg [Stębark], vil. in Osterode County, 27–28, 277–278 Tapiau [Gvardeysk], 231 Tapiau District, 48, 50 Taplacken [Talpaki], 226n212 Taplacken Eldership, 45, 48, 50 Tilsit [Sovietsk], 37, 42n7, 49, 55, 57, 57n51, 62, 71, 111, 114–117, 119, 121–122, 122n92, 124, 124n94, 126–127, 127n101, 128–129, 130f, 130, 134, 137–138, 139f, 159, 162f, 163, 165, 167, 183, 200, 206, 208n152, 215–217, 217n181, 218–223, 223n209, 224–226, 242, 245, 247–249, 258, 261–262, 270, 270n14, 271, 278–279, 279n32, 280, 280n37, 281, 283–286, 301–303, 313, 339, 365, 372; see also Sovietsk Tilsit, Jakobsruhe Park of, 124, 129, 215 Tilsit, Lithuanian House of, 129, 130f, 134, 270, 279–280 Tilsit, Garden of the Riflemen’s House of, 215 Tilsit County, 73, 111, 144, 147, 149–150, 153, 163n20, 225, 227, 231, 237–240, 251, 269, 284–285, 313 Tilsit District, 42n7, 44–45, 48, 50, 55, 73, 144, 189n91, 237 Tilsit Region, 303 Tilsit-Ragnit County, 286 Tollmingen, see Tollmingkehmen Tollmingkehmen [Chistye Prudy], vil. in Goldap County, 122n92, 237, 249, 283, 339, 352–353; see also Chistye Prudy Toruń, also Thorn, 47, 180, 260

Trakehnen [Yasnaya Polyana], manor in Stallupönen County, 138, 231 Transylvania, 266 Trempen [Novostroevo], manor in Darkehmen County, 227 Trieste Region, 266 USA, United States of America, 14, 170, 188n85, 194–195, 199, 203, 208n152, 212, 229, 231, 234, 325–326, 328n147, 329, 337, 350f, 351, 372 USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (also Soviet Russia; Russian SFSR), 19–20, 22, 30n19, 31–36, 36n33, 37, 234n242, 319, 324–326, 329, 332, 334–337, 337n170, 338, 339n177, 340, 340n184, 342–343, 350f, 358–359, 361 Versailles, 19, 27, 30n19, 266, 277, 288–289, 294, 301, 317 Vienna [Wien], 77, 90, 92, 99 Vilnius, vii, 193–196, 206, 222, 230, 234n242, 235, 297–298, 337n171, 338, 340, 351–352, 361, 363 Vilnius (Vil’no) Gubernia, 85, 156, 158, 170, 186, 195 Vilnius Region, 266, 297, 354 Vistula [Wisła, Weichsel], river, 21, 59, 91, 226, 327f, 355 Vistula Lagoon, see Frisches Haff Vistula Spit, 330 Voronezh, 198 Warmia (as Prussian landscape), 22, 22–24n8, 23f, 27–29, 34, 51, 54, 117, 119, 121, 140, 331 Warmia and Masuria [Warmia i Mazury], 22n8, 29, 34–35, 319 Warsaw [Warszawa], 359 Washington, 269n10 Wehlau [Znamensk], 81n125, 112, 117, 144, 234, 239–240, 247 Wehlau County, 147, 149, 227, 231, 239, 329n147 Werden [Verdainė], vil. in Heydekrug County, 122n92 Westphalia, 4, 91n10

445

446

Geographic index Westphalia, Province of, 172 Weynothen [Oktiabrskoe], vil. in Tilsit County, 223n209 Wieszen [Vyžiai], vil. in Heydekrug County, 223n209, 225 Windenburg [Ventė], manor in Heydekrug County, 121

Wischwill [Viešvilė], vil. in Ragnit County, 122n92 Wystiter [Vyštytis], Lake, 151 Yalta, 358–359 Zinten [Kornevo], 355 Žemaitija (also Samogitia), region of Lithuania, 43, 79, 155, 157, 172n39, 173, 174n45, 196, 263, 363–364

Subject Index

Concepts explanations are indexed in italics.

Administrative reforms in Prussia, 49, 51–54, 56–57, 73, 89 Arguments for justification of territorial claims ethnic composition (nationalist or ethnographic principle), 24–26, 31–32, 38, 332–333, 338–340 inheritance, 24, 26, 106, 199 historical rights, 98, 107, 264, 272–276, 308, 310–312, 316, 328, 333–334, 354 just conquest, 24–26, 30, 33, 36, 38, 199, 268 national self-determination, 199–200, 239, 266, 325f Assimilation and acculturation of Lithuanians, 154, 156, 160, 169, 185, 207, 241, 307 Autochthonism, 26–29, 58, 62, 77, 96, 180, 185, 199, 268, 310–311, 319, 349, 358 Baltic languages (also Latvian languages; Lithuanian languages), 66–67, 70, 77, 81n125, 83f Bilingualism of the Prussian Lithuanians, 168, 219, 259 Birutė, society, 166, 175n50, 177, 179n62, 183, 204, 206, 215–217, 217n181, 218, 220, 222–223, 242, 245–246, 250

Boundaries of Lithuanian region in Prussia Lithuanian approach during the interwar period, 201–203, 298–299 late 19th—early 20th c., 225–227, 228f, 229–231, 232f, 233–240 post-World War II period, 324–326, 327f, 329–332, 354–356, 356f scholarly approaches to their definition administrative, 72–73, 149–150 ethnographic (historical), 73–74, 74f, 76f, 150–151, 152f linguistic, 75–76, 76f, 81n125, 82f, 83f, 84f, 150–151 statistical, 140–141, 143–147, 147f, 148–151, 152f, 286, 287f space of Lithuanian practices (late 19th—early 20th c.), 215–224, 224f, 225, 372 Colonization, 34, 40, 40n1, 49, 103, 273, 276, 308–310, 332–333, 355, 356f Cognitive maps, 2, 9–10 Communication milieu, 42, 44–45, 47–49, 59, 166–167, 204, 223, 334 Concepts of Lithuania in Prussia administrative, 48–54, 54f, 55–65 ecclesiastical, 39–45, 47, 65 ethnographic, 65–75, 76f, 77, 149–151, 153

448

Subject Index nationalist Lithuanian (“two Lithuanias”), 186–192, 205f, 206, 261–264, 289, 299–301 of the post-World War II expellees and émigrés, 322–326, 327f, 328–334, 350f, 351n215 Soviet Lithuanian, 334–336, 338–341, 343–349, 351–357 interaction of German and Lithuanian concepts, 283–284 Construction of national spaces, 8–9 Cultural transfer, 43n10 Definitions of “Lithuanian space” in general, 80–81, 82f, 83f, 84f, 85–86, 186–188, 225–226, 229–230 in Prussia, 71–75, 76f, 77, 143–144, 146–147, 147f, 148–151, 152f, 153–154, 225–227, 228f, 229–231, 232f, 233–235, 301–302, 339–340, 354–355, 356f, 364–365 Discourses of national appropriation of Prussian Lithuania German, 106–107, 113f, 120–122, 124–138, 140, 249–254, 270–283 Lithuanian, 173–186, 203–225, 244–249, 251–254, 344–349, 351–357, 359 East Prussia and German unification, 90–92, 101–107 discourses of its national appropriation, 26–31, 35–38, 93–100, 102–103, 106–112, 114–120, 323–324 division and division plans, 19–22, 31–33, 324–325, 329–330, 341–342 historical background, 18 resettlement (1940s), 34, 318–319 sociocultural composition, 22, 24 territorial claims to, 28–33, 34–35, 193–201, 266–270, 284–285, 322–324, 325f, 326, 327f, 328–336, 338–343, 357–358, 361–362, 364–365

“East Prussianism”, 27, 276, 278, 292 and the “expulsion” of Lithuania from the East Prussian spatial imagination, 270–288 Education, 3, 49, 91, 109–112, 159–161, 163, 165, 168, 170, 204n139, 220–221, 238, 243, 254, 293–294, 320 Evangelical Lutheran Church, 47, 68–69, 122, 151n179, 152f, 156–157, 159–161, 164–165, 168, 178, 207, 219, 227, 240, 369, 373 Exhibitions, expositions, 128–132, 211–212, 246–247, 250, 352 Folk art, 128–132, 139f, 246–247, 333 German National Assembly in Frankfurt (1848–1849), 63, 92 German nationalism, 26, 85, 90, 103, 105, 105n57, 108, 165, 168, 241, 276, 369–370 German unification (unified Germans), 103–104, 107–108 small German solution, 92–93, 101 vision of Reichsnation, 102–105, 105n57, 107–109, 278, 369–370 vision of Volksnation, 102–103, 105n57, 278, 293, 369–370 Home literature (Heimatliteratur), 136–137 Home movement (Heimatbewegung), 109 Irredentism, 28–29, 35, 192–203, 213–214, 240, 264, 283–284, 286, 289–290, 297, 303, 322, 332–335, 342, 344–345, 347, 351, 351n215, 354–355, 357–358, 362, 365–366, 373 Landscape, 51, 51n35, 71, 71n92 Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen, 34, 322, 322n136, 323 Liberal-democratic movement in Prussia, 64, 64n68, 95, 98–99, 101, 108 Lithuanian cultural movement in Prussia, 106, 164–167, 219–221, 223–224, 224f, 225, 249–250 Lithuanian Deputation, 55 Lithuanian language codification of, 41 study of, 69–70

Subject Index Lithuanian Literary Society, 71, 73–74, 85, 119, 128–132, 132n137, 242–243, 243n3, 244, 247, 252–253, 279 Lithuanian nationalism, 31, 90, 155, 165–166, 174, 203, 225, 241–242, 245, 265, 371 Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, 202, 308, 316 Lithuanian self-awareness in Prussia among the priesthood, 40–45, 47, 57 among nobility and urban citizens, 57–64 among peasants, 87–88, 164–166, 179–185, 219–225 Lithuanian Seminar (of the University of Königsberg), 68–69, 84f, 371 Lithuanians in Prussia and Russia attitudes towards each other, 157, 157n5, 172, 172n39, 173, 176–178, 185–186, 203–214 border role, 170–171, 171f, 172–173, 204–205, 283–284 cross-border communication, 155, 165–166, 204–206 similarities and differences, 156–164, 167–168 unification of, 192–201 Littuania, student fraternity, 62–63, 63f, 209, 246, 246n13 Memel military operation (1923 “Uprising”), 19, 19n2, 30, 30n19, 157, 202, 278, 289–291, 294, 299 Memellanderism, 292–293, 305, 315, 321 Memelländers, 291–293, 305–308, 317 Mental maps, 2, 2n3, 9 Military and Domains Chamber in Gumbinnen, 49, 53n39, 55–56 in Königsberg, 49, 54–56 Monument conservation activities, 115, 126–127, 132–133, 136, 255, 271 Monuments and memorials, 115–117, 121–122, 123f, 124–126, 128, 218, 218n187, 218n189, 219, 248–249, 251–254, 278, 351–352 Museums and museum activities, 114–115, 128–130, 130f, 131–133, 134f, 136,

211, 217–218, 246–247, 255, 279–280, 280n37, 281, 309, 352, 353f Myths of the origins (foundational myths), 26, 59 Napoleonic Wars, 4, 37, 60–61, 61n60, 95–96, 249 National Council of Prussian Lithuania, 200, 240, 269 National Council of Prussian Lithuanian Association, 200, 202, 213, 240, 301 National Socialists (Nazi Party, NSDAP), 281–282, 292, 297, 312–314, 314n122, 315, 321 Old Prussian self-awareness, 57–58, 58n53, 59, 64, 68, 70, 93, 95, 96, 99, 108, 368 Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1772–1795), 52, 96, 189–190 Place names (toponyms) change of, 37, 281–283, 341–343 Lithuanian p. in East Prussia, 230, 237, 333 use for defining “national areas”, 75, 76f, 339–341 Plague of 1709–1711, 48–49, 55, 58, 122, 146, 354–355, 356f Propaganda literature, 273–276, 308–316 Prussian Liberation War (1813–1814/15), 60–61, 95, 116, 122, 126 Reformation, 41, 43, 68, 121, 207, 253, 284, 367 Regional particularism in East Prussia, 57, 64, 94, 108, 368–369 Rétablissement, 107, 121 Revolutions 1789–1799 in France, 4, 25, 63 February 1917 in Russia, 21, 198 Sandora, society, 165, 184n77, 216–218, 246–247 Secularization of the Teutonic Order’s domains in Prussia, 18, 26, 94 Space, 1, 3, 9–13 Spatial imagination, 2–3, 5, 9–10 Spatial names for the Lithuanian region in Prussia, 39–45, 186–192,

449

450

Subject Index 255–264, 271–272, 272n21, 300–302, 302n85, 303 Spatial representations interaction of, 243–255 of German culture in Prussian Lithuania, 121–126 of Lithuanian culture in Prussian Lithuania, 214–219 of Prussian Lithuania in German culture, 126–140 of Prussian Lithuania in Lithuanian culture, 203–214 Statistics church, 73, 151, 151n179, 152f, 233, 235–236, 237n254, 240, 304 official (state), 85, 140–141, 143–147, 147f, 148–151, 163–164, 219, 235–240, 269, 273, 284, 286, 287f, 304, 304f, 304–305n89, 305–307, 338, 340n184, 369, 373–374 Systems of meanings, 12–13 post-World War II “conservation” of, 319–323 Teutonic Order, 18, 18n1, 26, 28, 33, 41n7, 73–74, 74f, 93–96, 96n25, 97, 97f, 98–100, 102, 106–107, 111, 115, 118, 120–121, 176, 181–182, 185, 199, 208, 211, 214, 217, 221–222, 244, 253–254, 270,

273–274, 277, 280–281, 283–284, 298, 309–311, 371 and Lithuanian landscape, 121 changes in its treatment, 93–96, 98–100, 106–107, 176, 181–182 its territorial claims to the former domains in Prussia, 94, 99n37 the “state” of, as a prototype for nobility, 95–97 Tilsit Lithuanian Chanters Society, 165, 206, 216, 217n181, 220, 223, 248 Tourism and tourist literature, 109, 112, 114–115, 119, 124n94, 128, 133–135, 255, 270, 276, 280–281, 295f, 296, 352 Wars of German unification (1864–1871), 116, 126, 182 World War I, 19–21, 26–29, 32, 86, 102, 114, 125–126, 129, 136–137, 142f, 153, 157, 167, 182, 192–193, 199, 205–208, 211, 214, 217–219, 219n193, 220–221, 224f, 229, 233, 235–236, 240, 242, 260, 262–263, 265–266, 276–277, 286, 317, 319, 328–329, 333, 340, 358, 366, 370–373 World War II, 6, 17, 19, 20f, 22, 31, 31n21, 35, 36n33, 37, 303, 306, 318–319, 324, 329, 347, 359, 365 “Young Lithuanians”, 64, 89, 101