Alles umsonst (“All for Nothing”), Walter Kempowski

The first I’d ever heard of a place called Tilsit was in Alles umsonst, Walter Kempowski’s haunting final novel, which follows the fate of an aristocratic German family in the East Prussian countryside as the Red Army closes in during the winter of 1945. The story takes place near the fictional town of Mitkau, somewhere between the real-life cities of Elbing (Elbląg) and Allenstein (Olsztyn). As the story starts, there is little communication from the outside world; the horizon glows at night from fires in the distance; rumors that the Russians are close circulate through the town, and yet no one seems to know how close. Life continues as usual on the surface, but underneath, the residents have the creeping feeling that perhaps they should start making preparations to leave – just in case.

Although Tilsit is only mentioned a few times, it becomes an ominous sign of what awaits the rest of German East Prussia. Already at the start of the novel, evacuees from Tilsit are being housed in the local school; a slow but not yet alarming trickle of families in wagons pass through town without stopping, fixated on pressing further west. It’s implied but rarely spoken out loud that things in the east – in Tilsit – have taken a dark turn, and the locals in town are growing more anxious every day.

Tilsit is – or was – a real place, a small East Prussian city located just across the Neman (Memel) river from Soviet Lithuania in the USSR. It thrived in its status as a border town: although majority German, it had a large ethnically Lithuanian minority and was an important centre of Lithuanian language publishing outside the reach of the censors in Russian-controlled Lithuania. The famous Queen Louise Bridge (Königin-Luise-Brücke) over the Memel river, built in honour of the 100th anniversary of the Napoleon-era Treaties of Tilsit, was – and still is – the most recognisable symbol of the city.

The bridge was blown up by the Germans in October 1944 to stall the advance of the Red Army. Nevertheless, as an important border town, Tilsit was one of the first German cities to be taken by the Red Army in the East Prussian Offensive of January 1945. After the war, it was annexed by the Soviet Union and incorporated into Russia’s Kaliningrad oblast, along with Königsberg and the northern part of East Prussia. As was the case all over the region, any surviving Germans were expelled west, and the city was repopulated – mostly by ethnic Russians. In 1946 it was renamed Sovetsk.

But who even remembers Tilsit these days?

That was the title of an article from 2007 in Die Welt, one of the first and only modern German articles on the city that came up when I searched for the city out of interest after coming across it in Alles umsonst. The author writes: ‘What lay on the other side of the Oder and was German until the Second World War has been blocked out, suppressed, forgotten.’

In Germany, that may be true. Curiously though, it doesn’t appear to be true these days in ‘Tilsit’ itself.

I came to Sovetsk in June 2019 as part of a larger trip around the Kaliningrad oblast. I wanted to experience it for myself, to see and feel what history there was to be seen and felt. It wasn’t mentioned in my guidebook and there’s not much more information to be found online (in English or German at least), so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Sovetsk greets its visitors right away with an assertion of its Russian-ness on the plaza in front of the train and bus station. The First Settlers Monument commemorates the Soviet citizens (mostly ethnic Russians) who arrived in 1945 to repopulate the region as a Soviet territory.

And yet, just five minutes away at the start of the main street through the old city centre is a sort of parallel monument – a streetcar from the old Tilsit. On one side, the windows are plastered with images from modern Sovetsk – public notices, photos from community events and local sports teams. On the other side, the windows are filled with old photos of Tilsit.

Old photos of Tilsit are in fact common throughout the city centre of Sovetsk. Postcards and other souvenirs are just as likely to say Tilsit as Sovetsk. If you have ever traveled through formerly-German cities on the other side of the border in Poland, where the German history of the area is acknowledged but largely kept under the surface, the openness with which Sovetsk shows off its German history is a bit stunning.

Even more stunning, perhaps, if you consider that Tilsit has largely been forgotten by Germans themselves. (‘As far as I was concerned, Tilsit could have been on the Mississippi or on Mars,’ as the author cited in the above Welt article recalls.) While there are ‘Heimat’ tours that take groups of German tourists around to major sites in the former East Prussia, including Tilsit, the clientele are usually limited to older generations with ancestral roots in the area. When I mentioned to German friends and coworkers that I was going to visit Tilsit, none knew what or where it was, and one responded, ‘Tilsit like the cheese? I didn’t realise that was a real place.’

Having so many visible representations of old Tilsit around modern Sovetsk makes it impossible to avoid comparing the past with the present. And unfortunately, the conclusion is often that the city has seen far better days. This is nowhere more clear than at the waterfront, which has decayed almost beyond recognition.

As in other smaller cities of the Kaliningrad region, the city centre itself is full of pre-war buildings. Some have been well-maintained or renovated, but most appear to be in some state of disrepair.

As a side note, it’s remarkable how easy it is to identify the German buildings – especially when you come to Sovetsk from the thoroughly-rebuilt city of Kaliningrad, or from any other part of Russia, where the contrast is striking. The architectural style of the pre-war buildings in Sovetsk is very similar to the kinds of buildings you see in northeastern Germany today, e.g. in Brandenburg or Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.

What I love about places like Sovetsk – about the Kaliningrad region as a whole, in fact – is that its history is seeping out of every pore. The previous residents are gone and the city has been thoroughly Russified: streets renamed, facades painted over, stone reliefs chiseled away, monuments replaced, large parts of town torn down or rebuilt. But the history of the city is still there, lurking just beneath the surface.

In some places, you can literally see the past peeking through into the present. Like this building facade, which has crumbled away to reveal the original German text underneath: ‘Lebensmittel’, a grocery store.

I feel sometimes like I shouldn’t be as excited by this as I really am. After all, there’s a reason that postwar Germany chose to forget about places like Tilsit. There’s no point in chasing that past any longer, because it belongs to a part of history that is over now and not coming back. In a certain light, the near-complete lack of memory of Tilsit in Germany today speaks to an impressive ability to let go of the past and focus on moving forward.

But letting go of the past should never be the same as forgetting it. There’s something both unnerving and comforting in the way that the past persists through the present in a place like Sovetsk; in the way that a city’s history is still there even if you change its name and exchange its entire population. Unnerving because it means that it’s impossible to erase the past and start over with a clean slate. Comforting for exactly the same reason: That the past is always going to be there in some form or another to seek out and learn from. No one has the power to erase its presence entirely.