KALININGRAD (dpa) – “The distant view of the town, be it from the sea or from land, is not dissatisfying: a broad expanse of houses, towering over them an imposing castle and crowned by several towers.
Getting closer to the town, one cannot help feel a sense of slight disappointment.
Upon arrival, even the train station and the square in front of it seem dispiriting, almost a bit Russian.”
This is how a guidebook described the German city of Koenigsberg as it was in 1927, long before the town was destroyed during World War II and became part of western Russia.
The description is only partly valid today. Gone are the homes and the castle. Where medieval churches and houses once crowded into the town centre, travellers are greeted by a bare expanse of ground punctuated by towering Soviet monuments to Lenin and the like.
Nine tenths of Koenigsberg, a key German naval base, were destroyed by Allied bombing during the war and when the Red Army surrounded and conquered the city in 1945. A year later the newly- built Russian city of Kaliningrad had taken its place.
The scores of Stalinist-style tower blocks mean the town no longer looks just “a bit” Russian: it definitely is Russian, barely indistinguishable from other cities such as Omsk or Irkutsk.
Politics razed much of the town that the war had not flattened. Kaliningrad’s German past was erased. The ruins of the castle where Prussian kings were crowned were bulldozed in the late 1960s.
Another ruin vanished from view as late as 1998, though this time it was restoration rather than demolition that caused the disappearance of all that jagged stone. The building in question is the cathedral.
The facade, scarred by war, was restored two years ago, and the copper-covered spire has graced the skyline since then. Philosopher Immanuel Kant, who in his entire life never once left the city of his birth, is buried on the south side of the cathedral’s chancel, something that saved the ruins from outright destruction: under Communism, he was revered as one of the first socialist thinkers.
Visitors can find traces of the old town if they go looking. Six of the city’s red brick gates survive, as does the Church of St. Louise. No longer a church, the building is now a puppet theatre. The town’s theatre also survived the war, though nowadays the colonnaded facade built by the Soviets lends it a distinctly Bolshoi-like air.
One unmissable sight is the former Dohna Tower. Built in the 19th century, it is home to the world’s largest amber museum, with an estimated 6,000 exhibits. Amber is still the visitors’ favourite holiday souvenir. Wherever tourists are likely to go, you will find at least one person hawking “Baltic gold”, usually at 10 per cent of the cost you would pay at a German jewellers.
Kaliningrad was off-limits to Western travellers until 1991, when president Mikhail Gorbachov’s perestroika finally opened up the Soviet half of former East Prussia, the western outpost of Moscow’s empire.
Hundreds of thousands of German tourists have since then made a trip to the province which Stalin annexed.
Not all of them are people who were born here and who fled from the advancing Red Army: increasing numbers are “normal” tourists, whose families never had anything to do with the place.
Anyone can get out into the surrounding countryside easily. Trains and buses are the cheapest ways to travel, but it is more comfortable to hire one of the town’s German-speaking cab drivers for about 6.60 dollars an hour.
Yasnaya Polyana is the most popular destination. Once the famous studfarms of Trakehnen, where royalty once bred horses, cows now graze between the ruined buildings. On the way it Yasnaya Polyana, it is worth making a stop in Gvardeysk: the Red Army left the hamlet untouched, so it still preserves a rough impression of what the area’s settlements once looked like.
Tourists with enough time should try and get to the Neman river, which separates Lithuania from the Russian enclave. The Germans referred to it as the Memel. Among the sights are the impressive ruins of the Teutonic Order’s medieval fortress in Neman, as well as the town of Sovetsk. Once the town of Tilsit, it was best known for its cheese.
These days, however, the only Tilsiter in Sovetsk is an expensive luxury imported from abroad. Instead, the town is now most famous as the home of one of the largest Lenin monuments west of Moscow.
Another trip will bring you north of Kaliningrad to the cliff coastline of the Samland. In bygone days this is where Koenigsberg’s well-to-do came to amuse themselves in the Baltic resorts of Svetlogorsk and Selenogradsk.
Now Kaliningrad’s nouveau riche have turned the old German villas into their dachas, where they spend the summer. Both towns possess breathtaking strands.
Leaving Selenogradsk, you can travel further along the Kurskaya Kosa, a sand spit almost 100 kilometres long, and now shared by Lithuania and Russia. The spit separates the Kurskiy Zaliv, a gigantic freshwater lagoon three times the size of Lake Constance, from the Baltic.
German author Thomas Mann was among the people captivated by the area’s beauty, whose dune landscape reminds all visitors of the Sahara. Mann acquired a holiday home in Nida in 1931: today, it houses a museum dedicated to him.
Further north, right at the very tip of the spit, a ferry can take you across to Klaipeda. A Prussian town for 500 years, it is today the third largest city in Lithuania. Unlike Kaliningrad, here the old town was preserved and systematically restored.
There are no Lenin monuments in Klaipeda either: the town was one of the first in the crumbling Soviet Union to remove the state’s founder from his pedestal.
Information: Russian National Tourism Office in your country.
