Immanuel Kant museum in Kaliningrad and variations in representing Königsberg memory in Kaliningrad public museums.

• In Event: Building Identities: Exploring Memorialisation and Heritage

Abstract

The Kaliningrad region – is the part of Russia located on the Baltic Sea between EU member states Lithuania and Poland. Before the Kaliningrad oblast was founded in 1945 as a part of the Soviet Union under the Potsdam agreement it was a part of East Prussia and inhabited by mostly German population. Even though, significant part of German architecture was destroyed during and after the World War II, cultural memory of Königsberg still remains to be an essential element of Kaliningraders’ pronounced regional identity. Besides numerous representations of Königsberg memory in Kaliningrad urban space and commercial production for tourists, Kaliningrad museums appear to be intriguing examples demonstrating the spectrum of patterns and angles characteristic for different state and private actors narrating and interpreting Königsberg memory.

Based on the data collected during the fieldwork in Kaliningrad, the presentation will discuss the case of the Museum of Immanuel Kant in Königsberg Cathedral. In my research I am applying the contraposition of official and vernacular memory (Breuer 2014) in order to analyze how representations of German past differ in Kaliningrad private and public museums. In my analysis of Immanuel Kant Museum, I propose that despite the presence of exhibit items and texts signifying connection between Russian history and Königsberg, state museums of Kaliningrad do not demonstrate expected uniformity in the way they represent and interpret Königsberg memory. The presentation will question and discuss possible reasons which can explain variety in representing the memory of Königsberg in Kaliningrad state museums.

Literature
Lars Breuer (2014) Europeanized Vernacular Memory: A Case Study from Germany and Poland. In Lucy Bond and Jessika Rapson (ed.) The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders. Berlin & Boston: de Gruyter.

Short Bio

Rezeda Lyykorpi is a Doctoral Fellow in the International Research Training Group: Baltic Peripeties – Narratives of Reformations, Revolutions and Catastrophes at the University of Greifswald and a student in the Doctoral Programme in Social and Cultural Encounters at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interests include memory and migration studies. In the qualitative study on the Königsberg’s memory in Kaliningrad her ex-Kaliningrader background helps her to apply both insider and outsider positions while dealing with the multivocality of perspectives on the respective phenomenon.

Author

• Rezeda Lyykorpi, the University of Greifswald and the University of Eastern Finland