Bosda, next time you might want to consider closed captioning for the humor impaired.
Hey, Guinastasia, my family (on my father’s side) is from Alsace Lorraine, too. My middle name is even Lorraine. Just don’t try and tell us we’re from France!!
MomCat, German to the core and still ashamed of that “little unpleasantness” earlier this past century.
Hey, I’m not from France, either.
It was only CONTROLLED by the French after the Napoleonic wars, I think. But it was still German.
Prussia was a nuisance because of Kaiser Willy and Bismarck-what a Machiavellian tyrant!
The existence of post-Soviet Kaliningrad is an odd geographical anomaly, and what must ultimately become of it is a puzzle for which no one is offering an answer.
This little chip of territory the size of Connecticut is now part of the Russian Federation. The three Baltic states separate it from Russia proper. It was joined to Russia only as a result of World War II. For seven centuries previously, it had been a German state known as Königsberg. After the defeat of the Nazis, the Soviets expelled its German population, brought in some Soviet citizens to replace them, and renamed it Kaliningrad (after Kali, the Hindu black goddess of death, who drinks blood and wears a garland of skulls).
Although present-day Kaliningrad is geographically isolated from Russia to the east, the pre-WWII Koenigsberg was also isolated from Germany to the west. How did this isolated bit of Germany get to be in that location, between Poland and Lithuania? The history of the place was shaped by the Crusades in the faraway Middle East.
After the crusading knights were expelled from Palestine by Saladin in the 12th century, and they had to return to Europe, the Germans among them longed for further violent adventures, more booty to plunder, more territory to seize. The Saracens had proved too much for them, but away to the northeast was Lithuania–the last pagan country in Europe. The former crusaders could carry the battle for the Cross into Lithuania. So they formed the Order of the Teutonic Knights and attacked. The Lithuanians were hardy fighters too, and the fortunes of battle went now this way, now that. In the 14th century, the Grand Duke of Lithuania was baptized, and his realm became Christian. This did not deter the Teutonic Knights from continuing to attack. Eventually, though the greater part of Lithuania remained independent, the German crusaders were firmly implanted in a region of southwestern Lithuania, from which they could not be dislodged. They built castles, and their capital city they called Königsberg.
The region taken by the Teutonic Knights was known as East Prussia, but in fact the name of Prussia was of ancient Baltic origin. The Old Prussian language, now extinct, was closely related to Lithuanian and Latvian. The perspective of Lithuanian historians is that “Old Prussian” was actually just a southwest dialect of Lithuanian, but it appeared more different than it really was because it was put into writing by Germans who spelled it according to their system of orthography, which distorted it a bit.
Köningsberg went through the centuries as the northwestern outpost of the German people, renowned mainly for being the home of Immanuel Kant (whom the Lithuanians claim as one of their own), and the famous topographical puzzle of how to cross each of its seven bridges only once. During the times when the Germans conquered northern Poland, Köningsberg was contiguous with German territory, but during the times of Polish independence, it was cut off from the rest of Germany. Obviously this was a major incitement for German ambitions upon northern Poland. The town of Gdansk (called Danzig by the Germans) was awarded to Poland after World War I and, as it separated Königsberg from Germany once again, was made into a “casus belli” leading to the invasion of Poland which started World War II.
So now as a result of that war Russia occupies the northern part of the forlorn place (the southern part went to Poland), even though it had never been Russian at any time before. The rural regions of Kaliningrad are still largely depopulated, with former German farms overgrown and haunted by tumbledown barns. Some descendants of dispossessed Königsbergers have begun to trickle back there in the post-Soviet era. It doesn’t make much sense to keep it as part of Russia, since the Russians are outsiders there, intruders. The question of what is to be the ultimate fate of Kaliningrad is a topic that people are reluctant to open. The big Russian naval base there means that Russia has an interest in holding on to it, but otherwise the place is of no special significance to Russia. The Russian navy could be moved back to St. Petersburg or someplace, and Kaliningrad reunited with Lithuania again, after 700 years. Geographically, it is a continuation of Lithuanian terrain, and long ago it was Lithuanian (or at least Balt) to begin with. With the Germans out, and the reason for the Russian intrusion obsolete, let it be returned to Lithuania. Then this confused bit of land would finally have come home again, and be settled where it belongs.
Jaust a reference point - Kaliningrad, when it was part of East Prussia, was known as Konigsberg, the name by which you will find most historical references to the city. Currently, if you look at a map, Kaliningrad is in an odd bit of Russia separated from the rest of it by the Baltic States.
During the Austria-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars of the late 1860’s and early 1870’s, the Prussian objective (as has been well established in previous posts) was to “unify” the German-speaking peoples into a unified Germany. The Austria-Prussian war rounded up most of them and placed them under Prussia’s (as opposed to Austria’s) sphere of influence. After Prussia/Germany took care of that matter, they invaded France (resulting in the Franco-Prussian war, ca. 1870-1), mostly to flex a little Prussian military muscle. While they were at it, King Willie decided to get a little more unification in on the side (while he was in the neighborhood) and “repatriate” the Germanic French folk of Alsace-Lorraine, the little notch of France that “V”'s into Germany. (Note: he did this against Bismark’s advice.) Swiping a piece of France did nothing to help relations between the new German nation and France, of course, and some of this leftover bidness helped spark The Great War, after which France reclaimed Alsace-Lorraine.
That’s the Cliff’s Notes version, anyway.
And (to help endear myself to the Alsacian constituency on this board), several times en route from San Antonion to points west on Highway 90, I’ve driven through Castroville, the largest Alsacian settlement in Texas, where French/German buildings sit comfortably beside Mexican restaurants!
Oh, I see a lengthy explanation arrived in the meantime. Never mind.
I don’t think Kaliningrad was named for the Hindu goddess Kali, about whom Europeans probably didn’t even know back in the old days. Also, Konigsberg was called Konigsberg in honor of a prince or king who went there for some reason I forget, so the inhabitants named their town King’s Fortress, or in German, Konigsberg. I loved the image of the abandoned farms all over the place, and weeds. Aren’t some of the heirs trying to get these places back? And what about Swedish Pomerania, Istria, Regular Pomerania, and Ruthenia? Or should this be another thread? (Ruthenia was the birthplace of Andrew Warhola’s parents). I think Ruthenia was a whole country at one point with a king even.
Pantellerite wrote:
It is true that this is the reason for the Franco-Prussian war most believed in English-speaking countries, but let’s look at a few facts:
One, France declared war on Prussia, not the other way around. The immediate pretext for the war was the succession to the throne of Spain. France wanted Prussia to declare that no Prussian prince would ever ascend to that position; Prussia said ‘no’. France announced that this was intolerable, and declared war on 19 July 1870. (Of course the real reason for the war was that Prussia was a rising, rapidly industrializing Power, and a potential threat to France’s traditional role as hegemon of western and central Europe.)
Two, France invaded German soil long before Prussia attacked France. The first battle of the war was at Wiessenburg on 4 August. The French invasion was checked at Froschwiller on 6 August, and the Prussian counter-invasion was launched on 20 August, with a decisive defeat of the main French army at Sedan on 1 September.
How these events got twisted into the ‘Prussian agressors’ attacking peace-loving France, I leave as an excercise for the reader.
Bill
Napoleon III, I read in a book, wanted to do things because he was an emperor. For instance he put the brother of the Austrian Emperor on the Throne of Mexico for no reason other than his own gloire. He just thought an emperor should do things, like most of these rulers. There are many other examples.
Hmm…I had always thought it was named after Mikhail Kalinin, who was President of the Supreme Soviet during World War II (1938 to his death in 1946).
Probably because in the end, they lost the two follow-ups to the Franco-Prussian war. Nonetheless, I stand corrected (and pleased to have learned a new thing or two). I suppose claiming a “Euro-centric” upbringing ain’t gonna help me outta this one.
But note that everything else I said was true!
For those of you fluent in German, Gunther Grass’ novels contain many examples of Prussian German. It seems to have been another Low German dialect (i.e. Plattdeutsch).
I’m sorry to say I don’t remember any of these examples.
Oh heck, as long as we’re at it…
Were not the Franco-Prussian hostilities of the 1870s the worldwide launching party for the guns of Krupp?
The base Prussian German was indeed Low German (Plattdeutsch), but since this was an area with a lot of mixed migration from the rest of Germany, it became a bit of a mixture over the years, and today’s Prussian dialects (including Guenther Grass’) are somewhere in-between the two.
Sorry, I almost missed this little joke. Funny indeed. No, I’m too allergic to boring sterotypes to laugh at them – a strange impairment, I must admit.
Yeah, I suppose in the major city of the area, Danzig, the
dialects were more mixed. But that dialect is now dead, isn’t it? Isn’t it true that the expulsion of all Germans
from the region was quite thorough? Though now that I come to think of it, I do remember reading how some extraterritorial Germans in Russia and Poland, after the
war, pleaded with the authorities to be allowed to emigrate
to Germany–even East Germany would have been OK–but
were denied permission.
All the aforementioned dialects are nearly extinct, although there are many older people who still speak them (one does still hear them more than you’d think.)
As for emigration, most did, but those who stayed behind have more or less assimilated into the majority Polish population. As for Kaliningrad/Koenigsberg, I haven’t heard of any German population still being there or even having assimilated. It is likely that many were sent off into the vast, cold stretches of Russia’s East, but I don’t remember hearing anything else about that.
Btw, in the past decade hundreds of thousands of (more or less) ethnic Germans have “returned” to Germany from Russia and Eastern Europe, creating some difficult cultural situations as most of the new immigrants no longer spoke any German, and many have yet to attain social acceptance in Germany.
This guy is so stiff & wooden you’d think he was Al Gore. :wally