Remember Königsberg: The capital of East Prussia was founded in 1255 on the site of the ancient Old Prussian settlement Twangste by the Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades, and it was named in honor of King Ottokar II of Bohemia. The literal meaning of the name Königsberg is Kings Mountain, and in the local dialect of its inhabitants the name was pronounced Königsbarg. A Baltic port, the city remained the capital of the monastic state established by the Teutonic Order until 1525, when it became the capital of the secular Duchy of Prussia. After the crowning of the first Hohenzollern King in Prussia in 1701, the capital of the duchy (now a kingdom) was moved to Berlin, and from then on Königsberg was the capital of the province of East Prussia, which it remained until 1945. Königsberg was a university city, the home of the Albertina University founded in 1544. It was an important intellectual and cultural center, the residence of Immanuel Kant, Simon Dach, Johann Georg Hamann, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Nicolai, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Agnes Miegel and many other poets, philosophers, scientists, artists and men of letters. Though a German city, Königsberg, as a center of publishing, also exercised a profound influence on the development of the Lithuanian and Polish cultures; the first book ever printed in the Lithuanian language was printed in Königsberg in 1547, while the first Polish translation of the New Testament was printed there in 1551. The libraries of Königsberg, in the university and the castle, were rich in music scores, medieval manuscripts and works on the history of the region, perhaps the most distinctive among these being the collection of silver-bound books that belonged to Duke Albrecht, himself the author of a 381-page treatise on warfare in 1555. In the eighteenth century, it was common practice for the families of the Baltic German nobility of the Russian Empire to send their sons to Königsberg for their educations. It was the Seven Bridges of Königsberg that were the key to a historically notable problem in mathematics that was resolved by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1735, which laid the foundations of graph theory and prefigured the idea of topology. For many centuries a member of the Hanseatic League, Königsberg was home to many prosperous merchant families (more than few with names of French-, English- or Scottish origin) who freely used their wealth to endow the city with culture and scholarship. Thanks to its eastern location, throughout most of World War II Königsberg was spared the Anglo-American area bombing that had ravaged the cities of Western- and Central Germany. Nevertheless, at the end of August 1944, the Royal Air Force launched two raids on the city that in a very real sense brought about the death of Königsberg. The center of the city between the Kneiphof and the Castle was destroyed and the districts of Altstadt, Löbenicht, and Kneiphof were badly damaged. Königsbergs 14th-century cathedral was reduced to a shell, and extensive damage was also done to the castle, all churches in the old city, the university, and the old shipping quarter. The majority of the estimated 150,000 civilians still in Königsberg when it fell to the Red Army on 9 April 1945 were killed by disease, hunger and rampaging Soviet soldiers bent on rape and murder. By December 1945 only about 20,000 Germans remained, while almost immediately after its fall, the Soviets began to move in Russian colonists. In 1946 Königsberg was cynically renamed Kaliningrad in honor of the deceased Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin, a septuagenarian Old Bolshevik who was often the butt of Stalins practical jokes, one of which consisted of making him sign the very deportation order that consigned his own wife to the gulags. With Stalins final edict ordering the expulsion of all remaining Germans in the city in October 1947, the seven hundred year history of a European city came to an end. Or did it? The very name Königsberg has now passed into the realm of legend, and as the Greek poet Homer taught us, legends can never truly die. © Brandenburg Historica
Posted on: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 16:34:34 +0000