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Winner of the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History German Blood, Slavic Soil reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe's two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes. Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost bastion of Hitler's Third Reich and the launching point for the Nazis' genocidal war in the East. She then describes how, after being destroyed by bombing and siege warfare in 1945, Königsberg became Kaliningrad, the westernmost city of Stalin's Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own—in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes. German Blood, Slavic Soil presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II. Eaton impressively shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.

This book deals with the spatial concepts that two erstwhile neighboring cultures, Lithuanian and German, associated with one physical space--a Lithuanian region in Prussia. Covering a period of five centuries, it explores how, when, and why these concepts have been developed and transformed regulating the spatial imagination of several generations.

This paper presents historical data about tile manufacturers in the northern part of East Prussia, collected from address books from the nineteenth- to the mid-twentieth-century from Königsberg, Tilsit, Insterburg, Gumbinnen, and the surrounding areas, mid-twentieth-century ceramics industry directories, and advertisements in German periodicals. The paper gives an account of activity periods of tile factories and workshops, their manufacturing sites, and the names of the owners. The data is expected to facilitate identification of tile products and their back-marking in future research efforts.

Dieser Band bietet erstmalig eine auf umfangreichem Quellenmaterial basierende Übersicht über das Pressewesen in Ostpreußen von den Anfängen im 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Vorgestellt werden über 2.000 Periodika inkl. Bestandsnachweisen sowie Verleger, Drucker und Journalisten. Register erschließen das Material und machen es zu einem unentbehrlichen Nachschlagewerk für alle, die zur Geschichte Preußens forschen.

The paper analyses the formation of Specially Protected Areas (SPAs) in the south-east of the Baltic region within the borders of modern Kaliningrad region over the last century. The purpose was to update the look at the continuity in the field of environmental conservation. The study draws on previously unpublished post-war archive data and on the evidence of recent changes in the SPA system of the region. To investigate the continuity of environmental activities in the area, original German sources on the key SPAs of East Prussia and the reasons for their formation were analysed.

The main purpose of this article was to present contemporary narratives (social and scientific discourse) about the Evangelical cemeteries of Masuria, based on the examples of the activities under two projects, whose common denominator are the restoration of memory and the protection of cultural heritage. The present elaboration concerns selected issues of the functioning of the tangible cultural heritage in the Masuria region (in Pasym and one of the deserted villages). This piece of writing also describes how the spaces of Protestant cemeteries can be interpreted anew, especially as a result of documentative works.

With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants--almost all of them ethnic Germans--were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland.Uprootedexamines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants. In this pioneering work, Gregor Thum tells the story of how the city's new Polish settlers found themselves in a place that was not only unfamiliar to them but outright repellent given Wroclaw's Prussian-German appearance and the enormous scope of wartime destruction. The immediate consequences were an unstable society, an extremely high crime rate, rapid dilapidation of the building stock, and economic stagnation. This changed only after the city's authorities and a new intellectual elite provided Wroclaw with a Polish founding myth and reshaped the city's appearance to fit the postwar legend that it was an age-old Polish city. Thum also shows how the end of the Cold War and Poland's democratization triggered a public debate about Wroclaw's \"amputated memory.\" Rediscovering the German past, Wroclaw's Poles reinvented their city for the second time since World War II. Uprootedtraces the complex historical process by which Wroclaw's new inhabitants revitalized their city and made it their own.

Political, economic and social changes brought about by the dissolution of the Soviet Union have had a significant impact on Kaliningrad Oblast, the empire’s westernmost territory of geostrategic importance. Formerly belonging to the German province of East Prussia, the region was meant to become Sovietised completely. The end of the Cold War led to a complete bankruptcy of such policies. At the turn of the 80s and 90s the emergence of a grass-roots interest in the officially forbidden parts of the Oblast’s history made the question of the relation between its pre-war and postwar past up-to-date. Its topicality was strengthened after the 2005-06 commemorations of founding the city of Königsberg and Kaliningrad Oblast, in which both central and regional authorities were heavily involved. This paper aims at identifying how elements of the history of East Prussia have been selected, interpreted and incorporated into the regional history education course books in contemporary Kaliningrad Oblast. It argues that the growing criticism of the course books’ contents has been related to Russia’s domestic situation since the 2012 presidential election and the tensions with the West after 2014. Both events have hastened the process of forming and cementing the so-called new Russian conservatism which has had a growing influence on the Baltic semiexclave.

During World War I, Martynas Jankus became the most well-known deportee in the Lithuanian-speaking world. This article uses a variety of sources, including his wartime letters, diary, and postwar memoirs, to explore which factors were the most important in enabling him to survive deportation, how representative he is of the larger population of deportees from East Prussia and their experiences, and how his life as a deportee was affected by laws and agreements at the international and domestic levels.

This book is essential reading on the spatial concepts that two erstwhile neighboring cultures, Lithuanian and German, once associated with one physical space—a Lithuanian region in Prussia. Covering a period of five centuries, the author explores how, when, and, most importantly, why these concepts have been developed and transformed, regulating the spatial imagination of several generations. The study focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presenting the narratives, representations, and geographic conceptions of the region that existed in these two national cultures. The volume shows how knowledge about “their own\" space ended up serving as a tool for both Lithuanian and German political aspirations and how it challenged the spatial concepts about this area in the previous century.