ABSTRACT
‘Königsberg is dead’—thus is the title of a 2004 documentary which relates today’s narratives about the Russian city of Kaliningrad to yesterday’s narratives about the German city of Königsberg. 1 The city has a long history. In German history books one will usually find the information that it was founded in 1255 by knights of the Teutonic Order who built a castle there. However, contested places rarely have uncontested foundational moments. Hence, many Lithuanian and Polish accounts of the area emphasize that the Prussians 2 had built settlements on the spot long before the arrival of the ‘German’ knights. What to the Polish historians is Królewiec and to their Lithuanian counterparts is Karaliaučius, the Germans called Königsberg. 3 It was nineteenth-century German, Polish, and Lithuanian nationalism which created national master narratives, which effectively nationalized the city and its surrounding territory.
