Few cities have been as thoroughly wiped off the map of modern consciousness as Königsberg. The city might sound vaguely familiar to you: wasn’t some famous philosopher born there? Or, if you’re more mathematically inclined, maybe your first thought is the famously unsolvable problem of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. Many people, when pressed, recall Königsberg as a place that existed at some point, and might be able to name at least one famous historical figure who was born there. Fewer know what actually became of it.

Shortly after I had been to see what was left of Königsberg, a friend of mine posted a joke online about the seven bridges problem. I couldn’t resist commenting that the problem now had a solution, since two of the bridges had been destroyed in the war. I’d just tested it for myself – in Kaliningrad.

In Kaliningrad?

‘Königsberg was taken by the Russians at the end of the war,’ I explained. ‘Then they turned it into Kaliningrad.’

‘Somehow I think I had known that,’ my friend wrote back. ‘But the pieces didn’t click into place until now.’

This wasn’t the only conversation I had like this around the time that I went to Kaliningrad. Even my German friends and coworkers had a similar reaction. Oh, right, Königsberg became Kaliningrad… or I think I knew that, but forgot…

It seems strange to me that the world forgot about Königsberg so quickly. It was the capital and largest city of East Prussia, and had been the primary intellectual, cultural, and economic centre of the region for centuries. Before the war, it had a population of nearly 375 000 people, mostly German-speaking, but with significant Lithuanian and Polish minorities.

Königsberg was famously a city of arts and sciences. The Königliche Albertus-Universität in Königsberg was one of the oldest universities in German-speaking Europe. Its long list of alumni included Immanuel Kant, Simon Dach, and E.T.A. Hoffman, as well as some of the most famous German-speaking mathematicians and natural scientists of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The philosopher and political scientist Hannah Arendt was born and raised in Königsberg. Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, and countless artists associated with the art colony on the Curonian Spit trained or taught at the Kunstakademie Königsberg, the Königsberg Art Academy.

That Königsberg disappeared entirely in 1945.

The completeness of the break between Königsberg and Kaliningrad is unique among formerly German cities in central and eastern Europe. You can hear it, for example, in the way that people speak. Many people in modern Germany still use the names Danzig and Breslau to refer to Gdańsk or Wrocław. I’ve taken regional German trains to the Czech Republic that still announce the German names of cities and towns in the Sudetenland. But I have never heard a single person in Germany refer to modern Kaliningrad as ‘Königsberg’.

You can see the difference yourself with a short online experiment. Look up any other major, formerly German city like Danzig (Gdańsk/PL), Breslau (Wrocław/PL), Memel (Klaipėda/LT) or Reichenberg (Liberec/CZ) on Wikipedia. You’ll be directed to one entry under the city’s current name that describes its development seamlessly from pre-medieval times to the present day, and that result holds whether you’re reading the site in English or German. But the Wikipedia entries on Königsberg stop in 1945.

Before I came to Kaliningrad, I had been warned that there was nothing left of Königsberg to see. Even so: I was shocked at the extent of the city’s physical disappearance.

The urban core of Königsberg centred around a small island in the Pregel river called Kneiphof. Today, this once heavily-populated and heavily built-up island is one large, flat park. Just north of the island, the area that was once the densely-packed Königsberg Altstadt is now a series of parks and empty lots, occasionally interspersed with cheap Soviet-era apartment blocks.

 

Essentially, the city centre of Königsberg has physically ceased to exist. The new city centre of Kaliningrad lies approximately 2km north of the destroyed centre of Königsberg, around what used to be the Königsberg Nordbahnhof.

There’s something surreal about walking through an empty field and knowing that you’re standing in the very heart of a city that no longer exists. Königsberg back then was larger than the city of Bonn today, and now there’s almost nothing left but dirt, weeds, and cracked concrete.

 

 

Within this story of the disappearance of Königsberg, the fate of the Königsberger Schloss (Königsberg Castle) is a particular tragedy. Its distinctive spired tower used to dominate the Königsberg skyline and was a symbol of Königsberg back then just as the TV Tower is a symbol of Berlin today. In the castle cellars, Blutgericht (‘Blood Court’) was the city’s best-known locale, serving up traditional Prussian dishes and drinks like Königsberger Klopse, Ochsenblut, and Bärenfang that are still known in Germany today.

The Königsberger Schloss was also the last known location of the infamous Amber Room (Bernsteinzimmer), which disappeared from Königsberg in the final stages of World War II and has since sparked many conspiracy theories about its possible whereabouts. Rumours have circulated for years that the Amber Room was secretly smuggled back to Germany, or that it was hidden in a Polish bunker, or that it sunk with the ill-fated refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff when it was torpedoed by the Soviets off the Pomeranian coast in 1945.

The scenario supported by most historians, however, is that the Amber Room was most likely destroyed along with the rest of the Königsberger Schloss in April 1945, when the Red Army took the city.

The Schloss lay in ruins for more than two decades before it was finally demolished on Brezhnev’s orders in 1968. In its place, the Soviets constructed a monstrous government building in Brutalist style which was to be known as the ‘House of the Soviets’. In what some have called the Prussians’ Revenge, however, the extensive network of tunnels under the Königsberger Schloss caused the structure to begin sinking into the ground before the construction could be completed. The new building has never been occupied, and continues to stand on the former grounds of the Königsberger Schloss as a colossal, decaying ‘anti-landmark’ – a fitting symbol for the fate of Königsberg.

And yet, while Königsberg is without a doubt the ‘most disappeared’ city I’ve encountered in my travels around central and eastern Europe, it is also the city that has been the most vividly resurrected in local media.

It always interests me to see how the current occupants of such cities deal with the past. I could go on and on with observations on how the past is handled very differently in Gdańsk vs. in Wrocław, or in Poland vs. the Czech Republic or the Baltics. Most, however, tend to downplay the recent German period of their history. While German tourists might refer to the cities with their old German names, you won’t see them displayed much (if at all) in public. You’ll find evidence of that history in museums, obviously, but there’s not a significant effort to ‘bring the past to life’ – understandably so, especially in places where memories of occupation, deportation and violence are still painful.

In Kaliningrad, it’s a different story entirely. The imagery of old Königsberg is everywhere: on signs, on posters, on coffee cups. I was taken aback when I saw more magnets and postcards labelled with ‘Königsberg’ than with ‘Kaliningrad’ in souvenir kiosks. Just thirty minutes away on the Polish side of the border, such a thing would be unthinkable.

(This wasn’t only the case in the city of Kaliningrad, by the way, but applied throughout the region. I have magnets on my refrigerator labelled with the German names of some of the other places I visited in the Kaliningrad oblast: Rauschen [Svetlogorsk], Cranz [Zelenogradsk], Tilsit [Sovetsk].)

It’s tempting to take a cynical or pragmatic view and think, well, that’s just good marketing: Königsberg is easier to sell to tourists than Kaliningrad. But I believe that it’s deeper than that.

There are a couple of examples that stuck out from my time in Kaliningrad which left me thinking that they surely didn’t need to put in that level of effort, and yet they did.

At the Friedland Gate museum, for example, where you can visit a mock-up of a typical Königsberg street, and sit down in a darkened theatre to watch a 30-minute virtual walk through the no-longer-existent streets of central Königsberg, digitally patched together based on a series of rare high-resolution photographs taken in the mid-1930s.

Or at the Bunker Museum, where you can pore over dioramas of the Battle of Königsberg (1945), constructed with an incredible attention to detail that replicate the exact look and feel of the Königsberg cityscape.

 

After a few days of this deep immersion in the past, the sights and symbols of everyday life in Königsberg started to feel familiar, and nostalgic – like a place I had actually visited once.

I knew the German names of the main streets and knew exactly what they looked like, from the way the stones were arranged in the sidewalks to the patterns in the iron railings of the seven bridges.

I knew what specialties were served on the menu at Blutgericht and could picture its crown-like chandeliers and carved beer caskets clearly in my mind.

I could picture the skyline cut by the Königsberger Schloss. Its presence looming over the city felt just as self-evident to me as that of the TV Tower in Berlin.

I knew that D.O.K. stood for the Deutsche Ostmesse Königsberg. And I knew that its logo was still prominently displayed on the side of a building at Kaliningrad’s Victory Square (formerly: Hansaplatz).

Königsberg began to feel so real and so tangible, it seemed absurd that I couldn’t step out the door and into its streets.

This feeling peaked for me at the Kaliningrad Regional Museum of History and Arts. It’s nothing special, a modest little museum in the former Stadthalle; it doesn’t even translate its displays into English or German. When I went to buy my ticket at the counter, the woman asked if I would like to pay a few more cents to see ‘the panorama’. Why not, I thought.

‘The panorama’ turned out to be a life-size, walk-through diorama spread over two rooms, illustrating three scenes from the Battle of Königsberg: Soviet soldiers crossing the Grüne Brücke (Green Bridge) in front of the Börse (stock market), with the burning silhouette of the Königsberger Schloss in the background; a Nazi barricade in the flooded Blutgericht; and a battle on the quai of Kneiphof island across from the Krämerbrücke (Merchants’ Bridge).

I combed through every corner of this diorama like someone possessed, eager to drink in every possible detail. And oh, what detail. The little bits and pieces of Königsberg that I had been soaking up over the last days all came together here, where they were marvelously brought to life. The streets, the lampposts, the manhole covers, even the patterns in the iron railings of the Krämerbrücke; D.O.M. posters on the walls interspersed with Volkssturm propaganda; the tables, chandeliers, and carved caskets of Blutgericht, with a few cheeky shards of amber in the corner hinting at the fate of the Amber Room. All here, all life-size and carefully replicated for my benefit.

For a long time, I was completely lost to this world of the last moments of Königsberg. There was no one else on that floor of the museum; I had this moment entirely to myself. I spent so long in the diorama that the museum employees eventually came to look for me.

Maybe the fact that the Soviet forces were the ones to capture Berlin and force the Germans to capitulate makes modern Russians feel more secure in embracing their region’s German past than, say, the Poles or the Czechs.

Or maybe Kaliningrad has been able to so enthusiastically embrace its past because the disappearance of Königsberg was so complete. Maybe cities that have more continuity with their past, like Gdańsk or Wrocław, feel a greater need to distance themselves from it. But Kaliningrad has no reason to feel threatened by Königsberg: it has nothing to fear from a ghost.

I left the diorama feeling hungover and disoriented. As if I might step out of the museum and see the towers of the Königsberger Schloss on the horizon. But as real as it felt in that moment, I knew that it wasn’t possible; that it would never be possible. That Königsberg is gone.

Is it possible to feel nostalgic for a place you’ve never been and will never see?

I’ve written before about my love for the Baltic sea, and especially for the unique culture and natural beauty of the Curonian Spit, once just a short train or steamship ride away from the heart of Königsberg. Even before I decided to visit, I’d fallen in love with its writers and artists.

Part of me believes that I would have been happy in Königsberg. I can imagine a nice life for myself there. Studying at the university, strolling along the harbour in the evenings, practicing my Polish in its multicultural streets, spending long weekends on the Baltic coast. The museum curators of Kaliningrad have painted a very vivid picture for me.

I feel a strange kind of melancholy at the thought that as deeply as I immerse myself in the history of Königsberg, these recreations are the closest I’ll ever get. Still, it’s incredible that they exist at all. I’ve never seen such thorough documentation of a lost city and culture.

It reminds me that countries don’t just inherit territory when borders change; they also inherit the history that comes with it. They can tear it down, literally bury the past behind them, or minimise and distort that history for political gain – but it will still be there, lurking under the surface. In Kaliningrad, against all odds, it seems that they’ve made the choice to embrace it.

I found both less and more than what I expected in Kaliningrad. I wasn’t prepared for how little of Königsberg was left. But I was also surprised and deeply touched to see how its past had been painstakingly preserved by its new caretakers. Königsberg, die Stadt, die es nicht mehr gibt, the city that no longer exists – not outside the museums of Kaliningrad, at least.