ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the rise of cultural memory in recent decades as exemplified by the old German cities of the Southern Baltic in present-day Poland and Kaliningrad is typical not only of these regions. The evolution of heritage concepts and consensus in the cities and regions of the Southern Baltic through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be presented as a classic example of liminality in heritage construction. German-originated heritage structures have crossed borders that are both 'real' geographic and political and cognitive. From the thirteenth century, Germans and German culture had dominated the whole of the coast of the Southern Baltic from Lubeck to Reval (Tallinn). After the Second World War a battle for the cultural landscape and heritage of the Southern Baltic began. The gradual ending of the Cold War produced a once-'unimaginable resurrection' of former German heritages.
