What should happen with Kaliningrad?

Kaliningrad
hi sozobe: happy to meet you in the group! chicago and jazz - oh, how pleasant it was some some years ago to be down by the lake in the warm summerbreeze and hear some of chicago's great musicians blowing their horns! listen to some great blues singers - how i miss it! yea, it's been mighty cold the last couple of weeks - just like in the good old days, like the 60's and 70's. lake ontario is nicely frozen but we seem to have forgotten how to have fun in the winter; we used to go for walks on the lake, ebeth would sometimes strap on her skates on and perform the skater's waltz - at least i think she did - might check with her. time to listen to some good old jazz on the internet! hope to meet you again soon! hamburger

Skating! Now there's an idea. I should bundle myself up but good and go do some lake skating. I love being out by myself on an endless expanse and going VERY fast...

This sounds interesting:

The Problems of People's Identification in the Kaliningrad Region,
by Valery Galtsov,
in Anthropological Journal on European Cultures,
vol. 5 no. 2 (1996) 83-95
Switzerland, 1996, English

The author reviews the development of Kaliningrad, located in the northeast region of former Prussia, and demonstrates the difficulty experienced by the city's inhabitants in constructing a social identity. A historical overview of the development of Kaliningrad discusses the region's annexation to the USSR after WWII, emigration of the region's original inhabitants, in-migration of Russian citizens, the renaming process, religious activities, and the reconstruction of the region's industry. Although the local intelligentsia has demanded the restoration of pre-Kaliningrad cultural heritage, e.g., the Königsberg Cathedral, it is noted that communism has resurfaced in the region, obstructing the realization of regional self-determination.

This, another article, perhaps less so: http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/BaltSeaNet/Publications/Heft-5.pdf

great stuff again, nimh. i do appreciate it. i'm sure hamburger will be glad to see it when he comes back to the site <waves at hamburger and mrs. hamburger>.

it was truly a wonderful surprise to me when you posted the question - i've never really known anyone i wasn't related to who had any interest in this topic. <waves at nimh and anastasia>

sozobe, take the sozlet skating ! truly, some of the best memories i have of my childhood are of skating on lake ontario while hamburger and mrs. hamburger walked nearby. it was bloody bloody cold, but it was fun to be together, and skating is just such a joy. some old photos in the hamburger's possession suggest that hamburger had me on bob-skates before i could walk properly! <waves at soz and sozlet>

KALININGRAD
hi, nimh! thanks for your posting. sure is nice to meet all the participants that are interested in the topic. last summer mrs. h and i took a cruise out of dover, england. to the baltic sea. did not go to kaliningrad but visited tallin, st.petersburg and the scandinavian capitals. mrs. h liked the idea of being close to her birthplace without actually having to land there. wonderful cruise - the sites in st.petersburg and scandinavia are absolutely stunning! greetings from "the limestone capital of canada" where it has been bitterly cold for the last three weeks and today it's a blizzard! enough, i say - give me sun and wamth! looking forward to hearing more from you!

Interesting website as well:


Lithuania Minor

The Land des gruenen Waldes (northern part only, the south being temporarily located in Poland) was actually offered back in 1991 - of course against monetary consideration. There being at the time no peace treaty with Poland, plus vast confusion with the 4 new Laender (which hadn't yet voted to join), then Bundeskanzler Kohl had to turn the offer down. Poland gets paranoid whenever the Ostgebiete question comes up - if it weren't for them the problem would have been settled long ago <G>

Re: KALININGRAD

no prob! i was very glad to see somebody post on this thread with such a personal connection to the issue. for me, it's, you know, a newspaper-study object-kinda interest, and i was wondering what random thoughts others with a passing interest would have on it. of course, in doing so i perhaps overestimated the extent to which a topic like kaliningrad's fate has been in the news elsewhere at all - which makes me all the more happy to have attracted, with this topic, somebody to the forum with such a personal link to this piece of history!

i had a "lightbulb moment" right now, and remembered that, a few years ago, i started making a bibliography of books and articles in my university's library collection on "nationalism, minorities and ethnic relations in east-central & south-eastern europe". that was when i was doing an internship at a documentation center connected to the university. i quickly finished the part about the documentation centre's own collection, but never quite finished the one for the entire library - one of those things that i let slip away (still, i got to some 30 pages of citations).

so i was looking through those now. of course, kaliningrad is just outside its scope - i didnt include russia. and its true, what there is on the topic almost all seems to be in german.

not finding much in that bibliography either ...

here's one on related topic, might be interesting, unable to find a table of contents on the net tho:

Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914, by William W. Hagen

Prof. Hagen's webpage is at http://history.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Hagen_William and includes his e-mail address.

nope, nothing else <sighs>

Actually, I just worked peripherally with that history :wink:


Another English site with some information is this one:

http://www.genealogienetz.de/reg/OPRU/oprus.html

And not to forget the official govermental one:

Kaliningrad oblast

LOL Walter - are you the adviser who sent out Willy Brandt with instructions to start crying on the bridge at Frankfurt an der Oder? A more pathetic sight was rarely seen!

P.S. my aunt has found online an Adel site for Ostpreussen, Schlesien, Pommern, etc, and spends her days triple-checking it and e-mailing the hapless organizers if they mistakenly omit some third cousin's "Freiherr", "von", "zu", decorations, etc. Once I told her nobody cares since the lands are lost, to which she seriously replied: "Zur Zeit". <G>

HofT

ALL the Eastprussians I know (quite some) have been at least "Gutsbesitzer" :wink:

No, I didn't send Willy out there. But, seriously, I do think this was meant honest.

KALININGRAD
hi, walter! thanks for all your research and replies! ebeth has spoken glowingly about you for the last several month; so we think we already know you - at least a little bit. the topic interested me because i had read a number of books about "ostpreussen", some of them gifts from my wife's side of the family(they came from insterburg), other books i had purchased when visiting in hamburg where i have a favourite bookstore. sorry i was not able to reply earlier this morning; we got about a foot of snow and we were out shovelling the driveway. hope we'll make it out this afternoon; the kingston symphony is giving a performance of la traviata and we hope we won't have to miss it. thanks again! i'll stay in touch - have to shovel a bit more - the snowplow just came through and gave us another load!

This is probably beyond the scope of the original post but as will be away from online forums for a while would like to note that I didn't vote in the poll because the real solution doesn't appear as an option:

It is quite simply to give Russia a date for starting negotiations to join the EU. The date can be conveniently distant - 2020, say. But for those unfamiliar with EU articles of establishment, all countries on the continent of Europe qualify, and Russia obviously has lots of territories in Europe, whose eastern limit is the Ural mountain range.

This will not only provide a convenient framework for ceding Königsberg and the northern part of Ostpreussen to Germany, it will also ensure - through the bureaucratic and legalistic logistics attendant to such negotiations - that Turkey, which keeps applying but doesn't qualify since it's in Asia, not in Europe - will be locked out of the EU for good. Turkey was never given a date for starting negotiations and Russia, once associated with the EU, will ensure such a date is never granted <G>

Well, HofT, Turkey may not be in Europe very much, But i'm sure the citizens of Edirne (formerly known as Adrianople), as well as all the other residents of the Turkish provinces of Edirne, Tekirdag and Kirklareli feel that they are Europeans. The topic of Turkish entry into the EU has been very popular on dicussion boards at European sites lately. The concensus i've seen (anecdotal evidence here, of course) is that the Turks should be let in only when they've shown a genuine commitment to ending human rights abuses. We shall see, n'est-ce pas?

(I've read that Adrianople has been fought over more than any city in history. I cannot vouch for whether or not this is true, but it has changed hands 17 times, mostly in the struggle between Turks on the one side, and Serbs/Bulgars on the other.)

Setanta - with an online name like mine you might suspect I'd know something about the area! Adrianople as its name indicates was founded by Adrian (Hadrian), not a well-known Turkish name, btw. The Byzantine Empire as you know spoke and wrote Greek, as did most educated Romans. Yes, it was fought over throughout all the centuries of the Byzantine empire; not sure which other city might compete with it for most-taken-over-and-retaken - though I can think of some hamlets near Tannenberg (though that's from my real name, I guess, which isn't Helen).

France doesn't claim to be a South Pacific nation because of its Muroroa atoll, neither does the U.K. claim to be a South Atlantic or Indian Ocean country in spite of islands in both. You're right though that the EU was wrong not to mention the evident geographical objection to Turkish membership and got bamboozled into mentioning only the Turks' atrocious human rights record.

Further: the Treaty of Sevres specifically granted Turkey the straits of Marmara - and thin sliver of land on their European side - but the straits themselves are international waters, not domestic Turkish waters; from an expert in the Law of the Seas am advised that clause can be used to challenge Turkey's rights to occupy ANY territory in Europe. Heck, if the Russians can be brought into this (think Crimea) we might as well call it the Law of the High Seas <G>

You'll please excuse me until sometime in February for not replying to any additional posts - will be unable to login due to overseas server/firewall limitations, but will be reading you and other people here with interest as always. Thanks.

Well, for the USA, the issue - re. Turkey - is essentially strategic. As it prepares for the war against Iraq, it sees Turkey as an invaluable country.

"The Europeans see that as only one issue among many - and resent the heavy pressure President Bush has brought to bear on them.
They see integrating Turkey as a huge challenge, and one that cannot be rushed. For some EU members, the priority is human rights.
Others fear that Turkish membership - and the free movement of Turkish workers throughout Europe - would fuel anti-immigrant sentiment.
When tempers have cooled, it may become possible for Turkey and the EU to realise the historic significance of what has been achieved at Copenhagen.
This is that Europe is preparing to redefine itself in an important way, and that this gives Turkey a unique chance to complete its transition to democracy and modernity.
But the other message from this summit is that historic change takes time, and needs imaginative leadership on all sides." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2572531.stm)

just read in this morning's paper(the kingston whig- standard ...that name should tell you something!) that turkey has agreed to let u.s. troops have access to iraq through turkey. in return "turkish troops will accompany the u.s. troops to hold back kurdish refugees and prevent the establishnent of an independent kurdis state". how covenient; i guess the u.s. will "allow" turkey to do some of the dirty work. now there is progress!

How convenient for the Turks to get access to the "priveleged sanctuary" of Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq, at any event.