Few cities have been as thoroughly wiped off the map of modern consciousness as Königsberg. The city might sound vaguely familiar to you: wasn’t some famous philosopher born there? Or, if you’re more mathematically inclined, maybe your first thought is the famously unsolvable problem of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. Many people, when pressed, recall Königsberg as a place that existed at some point, and might be able to name at least one famous historical figure who was born there. Fewer know what actually became of it.

Shortly after I had been to see what was left of Königsberg, a friend of mine posted a joke online about the seven bridges problem. I couldn’t resist commenting that the problem now had a solution, since two of the bridges had been destroyed in the war. I’d just tested it for myself – in Kaliningrad.

In Kaliningrad?

‘Königsberg was taken by the Russians at the end of the war,’ I explained. ‘Then they turned it into Kaliningrad.’

‘Somehow I think I had known that,’ my friend wrote back. ‘But the pieces didn’t click into place until now.’

This wasn’t the only conversation I had like this around the time that I went to Kaliningrad. Even my German friends and coworkers had a similar reaction. Oh, right, Königsberg became Kaliningrad… or I think I knew that, but forgot…

It seems strange to me that the world forgot about Königsberg so quickly. It was the capital and largest city of East Prussia, and had been the primary intellectual, cultural, and economic centre of the region for centuries. Before the war, it had a population of nearly 375 000 people, mostly German-speaking, but with significant Lithuanian and Polish minorities.

Königsberg was famously a city of arts and sciences. The Königliche Albertus-Universität in Königsberg was one of the oldest universities in German-speaking Europe. Its long list of alumni included Immanuel Kant, Simon Dach, and E.T.A. Hoffman, as well as some of the most famous German-speaking mathematicians and natural scientists of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The philosopher and political scientist Hannah Arendt was born and raised in Königsberg. Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, and countless artists associated with the art colony on the Curonian Spit trained or taught at the Kunstakademie Königsberg, the Königsberg Art Academy.

That Königsberg disappeared entirely in 1945.

The completeness of the break between Königsberg and Kaliningrad is unique among formerly German cities in central and eastern Europe. You can hear it, for example, in the way that people speak. Many people in modern Germany still use the names Danzig and Breslau to refer to Gdańsk or Wrocław. I’ve taken regional German trains to the Czech Republic that still announce the German names of cities and towns in the Sudetenland. But I have never heard a single person in Germany refer to modern Kaliningrad as ‘Königsberg’.

You can see the difference yourself with a short online experiment. Look up any other major, formerly German city like Danzig (Gdańsk/PL), Breslau (Wrocław/PL), Memel (Klaipėda/LT) or Reichenberg (Liberec/CZ) on Wikipedia. You’ll be directed to one entry under the city’s current name that describes its development seamlessly from pre-medieval times to the present day, and that result holds whether you’re reading the site in English or German. But the Wikipedia entries on Königsberg stop in 1945.

Before I came to Kaliningrad, I had been warned that there was nothing left of Königsberg to see. Even so: I was shocked at the extent of the city’s physical disappearance.

The urban core of Königsberg centred around a small island in the Pregel river called Kneiphof. Today, this once heavily-populated and heavily built-up island is one large, flat park. Just north of the island, the area that was once the densely-packed Königsberg Altstadt is now a series of parks and empty lots, occasionally interspersed with cheap Soviet-era apartment blocks.

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Essentially, the city centre of Königsberg has physically ceased to exist. The new city centre of Kaliningrad lies approximately 2km north of the destroyed centre of Königsberg, around what used to be the Königsberg Nordbahnhof.

There’s something surreal about walking through an empty field and knowing that you’re standing in the very heart of a city that no longer exists. Königsberg back then was larger than the city of Bonn today, and now there’s almost nothing left but dirt, weeds, and cracked concrete.

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Within this story of the disappearance of Königsberg, the fate of the Königsberger Schloss (Königsberg Castle) is a particular tragedy. Its distinctive spired tower used to dominate the Königsberg skyline and was a symbol of Königsberg back then just as the TV Tower is a symbol of Berlin today. In the castle cellars, Blutgericht (‘Blood Court’) was the city’s best-known locale, serving up traditional Prussian dishes and drinks like Königsberger Klopse, Ochsenblut, and Bärenfang that are still known in Germany today.

The Königsberger Schloss was also the last known location of the infamous Amber Room (Bernsteinzimmer), which disappeared from Königsberg in the final stages of World War II and has since sparked many conspiracy theories about its possible whereabouts. Rumours have circulated for years that the Amber Room was secretly smuggled back to Germany, or that it was hidden in a Polish bunker, or that it sunk with the ill-fated refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff when it was torpedoed by the Soviets off the Pomeranian coast in 1945.

The scenario supported by most historians, however, is that the Amber Room was most likely destroyed along with the rest of the Königsberger Schloss in April 1945, when the Red Army took the city.

The Schloss lay in ruins for more than two decades before it was finally demolished on Brezhnev’s orders in 1968. In its place, the Soviets constructed a monstrous government building in Brutalist style which was to be known as the ‘House of the Soviets’. In what some have called the Prussians’ Revenge, however, the extensive network of tunnels under the Königsberger Schloss caused the structure to begin sinking into the ground before the construction could be completed. The new building has never been occupied, and continues to stand on the former grounds of the Königsberger Schloss as a colossal, decaying ‘anti-landmark’ – a fitting symbol for the fate of Königsberg.

And yet, while Königsberg is without a doubt the ‘most disappeared’ city I’ve encountered in my travels around central and eastern Europe, it is also the city that has been the most vividly resurrected in local media.

It always interests me to see how the current occupants of such cities deal with the past. I could go on and on with observations on how the past is handled very differently in Gdańsk vs. in Wrocław, or in Poland vs. the Czech Republic or the Baltics. Most, however, tend to downplay the recent German period of their history. While German tourists might refer to the cities with their old German names, you won’t see them displayed much (if at all) in public. You’ll find evidence of that history in museums, obviously, but there’s not a significant effort to ‘bring the past to life’ – understandably so, especially in places where memories of occupation, deportation and violence are still painful.

In Kaliningrad, it’s a different story entirely. The imagery of old Königsberg is everywhere: on signs, on posters, on coffee cups. I was taken aback when I saw more magnets and postcards labelled with ‘Königsberg’ than with ‘Kaliningrad’ in souvenir kiosks. Just thirty minutes away on the Polish side of the border, such a thing would be unthinkable.

(This wasn’t only the case in the city of Kaliningrad, by the way, but applied throughout the region. I have magnets on my refrigerator labelled with the German names of some of the other places I visited in the Kaliningrad oblast: Rauschen [Svetlogorsk], Cranz [Zelenogradsk], Tilsit [Sovetsk].)

It’s tempting to take a cynical or pragmatic view and think, well, that’s just good marketing: Königsberg is easier to sell to tourists than Kaliningrad. But I believe that it’s deeper than that.

There are a couple of examples that stuck out from my time in Kaliningrad which left me thinking that they surely didn’t need to put in that level of effort, and yet they did.

At the Friedland Gate museum, for example, where you can visit a mock-up of a typical Königsberg street, and sit down in a darkened theatre to watch a 30-minute virtual walk through the no-longer-existent streets of central Königsberg, digitally patched together based on a series of rare high-resolution photographs taken in the mid-1930s.

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Or at the Bunker Museum, where you can pore over dioramas of the Battle of Königsberg (1945), constructed with an incredible attention to detail that replicate the exact look and feel of the Königsberg cityscape.

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After a few days of this deep immersion in the past, the sights and symbols of everyday life in Königsberg started to feel familiar, and nostalgic – like a place I had actually visited once.

I knew the German names of the main streets and knew exactly what they looked like, from the way the stones were arranged in the sidewalks to the patterns in the iron railings of the seven bridges.

I knew what specialties were served on the menu at Blutgericht and could picture its crown-like chandeliers and carved beer caskets clearly in my mind.

I could picture the skyline cut by the Königsberger Schloss. Its presence looming over the city felt just as self-evident to me as that of the TV Tower in Berlin.

I knew that D.O.K. stood for the Deutsche Ostmesse Königsberg. And I knew that its logo was still prominently displayed on the side of a building at Kaliningrad’s Victory Square (formerly: Hansaplatz).

Königsberg began to feel so real and so tangible, it seemed absurd that I couldn’t step out the door and into its streets.

This feeling peaked for me at the Kaliningrad Regional Museum of History and Arts. It’s nothing special, a modest little museum in the former Stadthalle; it doesn’t even translate its displays into English or German. When I went to buy my ticket at the counter, the woman asked if I would like to pay a few more cents to see ‘the panorama’. Why not, I thought.

‘The panorama’ turned out to be a life-size, walk-through diorama spread over two rooms, illustrating three scenes from the Battle of Königsberg: Soviet soldiers crossing the Grüne Brücke (Green Bridge) in front of the Börse (stock market), with the burning silhouette of the Königsberger Schloss in the background; a Nazi barricade in the flooded Blutgericht; and a battle on the quai of Kneiphof island across from the Krämerbrücke (Merchants’ Bridge).

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I combed through every corner of this diorama like someone possessed, eager to drink in every possible detail. And oh, what detail. The little bits and pieces of Königsberg that I had been soaking up over the last days all came together here, where they were marvelously brought to life. The streets, the lampposts, the manhole covers, even the patterns in the iron railings of the Krämerbrücke; D.O.M. posters on the walls interspersed with Volkssturm propaganda; the tables, chandeliers, and carved caskets of Blutgericht, with a few cheeky shards of amber in the corner hinting at the fate of the Amber Room. All here, all life-size and carefully replicated for my benefit.

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For a long time, I was completely lost to this world of the last moments of Königsberg. There was no one else on that floor of the museum; I had this moment entirely to myself. I spent so long in the diorama that the museum employees eventually came to look for me.

Maybe the fact that the Soviet forces were the ones to capture Berlin and force the Germans to capitulate makes modern Russians feel more secure in embracing their region’s German past than, say, the Poles or the Czechs.

Or maybe Kaliningrad has been able to so enthusiastically embrace its past because the disappearance of Königsberg was so complete. Maybe cities that have more continuity with their past, like Gdańsk or Wrocław, feel a greater need to distance themselves from it. But Kaliningrad has no reason to feel threatened by Königsberg: it has nothing to fear from a ghost.

I left the diorama feeling hungover and disoriented. As if I might step out of the museum and see the towers of the Königsberger Schloss on the horizon. But as real as it felt in that moment, I knew that it wasn’t possible; that it would never be possible. That Königsberg is gone.

Is it possible to feel nostalgic for a place you’ve never been and will never see?

I’ve written before about my love for the Baltic sea, and especially for the unique culture and natural beauty of the Curonian Spit, once just a short train or steamship ride away from the heart of Königsberg. Even before I decided to visit, I’d fallen in love with its writers and artists.

Part of me believes that I would have been happy in Königsberg. I can imagine a nice life for myself there. Studying at the university, strolling along the harbour in the evenings, practicing my Polish in its multicultural streets, spending long weekends on the Baltic coast. The museum curators of Kaliningrad have painted a very vivid picture for me.

I feel a strange kind of melancholy at the thought that as deeply as I immerse myself in the history of Königsberg, these recreations are the closest I’ll ever get. Still, it’s incredible that they exist at all. I’ve never seen such thorough documentation of a lost city and culture.

It reminds me that countries don’t just inherit territory when borders change; they also inherit the history that comes with it. They can tear it down, literally bury the past behind them, or minimise and distort that history for political gain – but it will still be there, lurking under the surface. In Kaliningrad, against all odds, it seems that they’ve made the choice to embrace it.

I found both less and more than what I expected in Kaliningrad. I wasn’t prepared for how little of Königsberg was left. But I was also surprised and deeply touched to see how its past had been painstakingly preserved by its new caretakers. Königsberg, die Stadt, die es nicht mehr gibt, the city that no longer exists – not outside the museums of Kaliningrad, at least.

“Nun standen die Russen an der Grenze, die Sirenen heulten jeden Tag, und durch die Siedlung schrillten die Todesschreie von Schweinen. Alles Vieh schlachten und das Hab und Gut schon mal probeweise aufpacken, obwohl’s streng verboten war, an Flucht zu denken. … Die Volksgenossen, die im Herbst aus dem Osten gekommen waren, aus Tilsit, aus Litauen und Lettland, konnte man nicht fragen, ob sie Vertrauen zur deutschen Wehrmacht hätten. Da hätte man die richtige Antwort bekommen oder gar keine.”

“Now the Russians were at the border, the sirens howled every day, and the settlement rang with the shrieking of pigs. Slaughter all the livestock, start packing up possessions, although it was strictly forbidden to think of fleeing. … The fellow Germans who had come in that autumn from the east, from Tilsit, from Lithuania and Latvia, couldn’t be asked whether they had faith in the German Wehrmacht. One would get the right answer, or none at all.”

Alles umsonst (“All for Nothing”), Walter Kempowski

The first I’d ever heard of a place called Tilsit was in Alles umsonst, Walter Kempowski’s haunting final novel, which follows the fate of an aristocratic German family in the East Prussian countryside as the Red Army closes in during the winter of 1945. The story takes place near the fictional town of Mitkau, somewhere between the real-life cities of Elbing (Elbląg) and Allenstein (Olsztyn). As the story starts, there is little communication from the outside world; the horizon glows at night from fires in the distance; rumors that the Russians are close circulate through the town, and yet no one seems to know how close. Life continues as usual on the surface, but underneath, the residents have the creeping feeling that perhaps they should start making preparations to leave – just in case.

Although Tilsit is only mentioned a few times, it becomes an ominous sign of what awaits the rest of German East Prussia. Already at the start of the novel, evacuees from Tilsit are being housed in the local school; a slow but not yet alarming trickle of families in wagons pass through town without stopping, fixated on pressing further west. It’s implied but rarely spoken out loud that things in the east – in Tilsit – have taken a dark turn, and the locals in town are growing more anxious every day.

Tilsit is – or was – a real place, a small East Prussian city located just across the Neman (Memel) river from Soviet Lithuania in the USSR. It thrived in its status as a border town: although majority German, it had a large ethnically Lithuanian minority and was an important centre of Lithuanian language publishing outside the reach of the censors in Russian-controlled Lithuania. The famous Queen Louise Bridge (Königin-Luise-Brücke) over the Memel river, built in honour of the 100th anniversary of the Napoleon-era Treaties of Tilsit, was – and still is – the most recognisable symbol of the city.

The bridge was blown up by the Germans in October 1944 to stall the advance of the Red Army. Nevertheless, as an important border town, Tilsit was one of the first German cities to be taken by the Red Army in the East Prussian Offensive of January 1945. After the war, it was annexed by the Soviet Union and incorporated into Russia’s Kaliningrad oblast, along with Königsberg and the northern part of East Prussia. As was the case all over the region, any surviving Germans were expelled west, and the city was repopulated – mostly by ethnic Russians. In 1946 it was renamed Sovetsk.

But who even remembers Tilsit these days?

That was the title of an article from 2007 in Die Welt, one of the first and only modern German articles on the city that came up when I searched for the city out of interest after coming across it in Alles umsonst. The author writes: ‘What lay on the other side of the Oder and was German until the Second World War has been blocked out, suppressed, forgotten.’

In Germany, that may be true. Curiously though, it doesn’t appear to be true these days in ‘Tilsit’ itself.

I came to Sovetsk in June 2019 as part of a larger trip around the Kaliningrad oblast. I wanted to experience it for myself, to see and feel what history there was to be seen and felt. It wasn’t mentioned in my guidebook and there’s not much more information to be found online (in English or German at least), so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Sovetsk greets its visitors right away with an assertion of its Russian-ness on the plaza in front of the train and bus station. The First Settlers Monument commemorates the Soviet citizens (mostly ethnic Russians) who arrived in 1945 to repopulate the region as a Soviet territory.

And yet, just five minutes away at the start of the main street through the old city centre is a sort of parallel monument – a streetcar from the old Tilsit. On one side, the windows are plastered with images from modern Sovetsk – public notices, photos from community events and local sports teams. On the other side, the windows are filled with old photos of Tilsit.

Old photos of Tilsit are in fact common throughout the city centre of Sovetsk. Postcards and other souvenirs are just as likely to say Tilsit as Sovetsk. If you have ever traveled through formerly-German cities on the other side of the border in Poland, where the German history of the area is acknowledged but largely kept under the surface, the openness with which Sovetsk shows off its German history is a bit stunning.

Even more stunning, perhaps, if you consider that Tilsit has largely been forgotten by Germans themselves. (‘As far as I was concerned, Tilsit could have been on the Mississippi or on Mars,’ as the author cited in the above Welt article recalls.) While there are ‘Heimat’ tours that take groups of German tourists around to major sites in the former East Prussia, including Tilsit, the clientele are usually limited to older generations with ancestral roots in the area. When I mentioned to German friends and coworkers that I was going to visit Tilsit, none knew what or where it was, and one responded, ‘Tilsit like the cheese? I didn’t realise that was a real place.’

Having so many visible representations of old Tilsit around modern Sovetsk makes it impossible to avoid comparing the past with the present. And unfortunately, the conclusion is often that the city has seen far better days. This is nowhere more clear than at the waterfront, which has decayed almost beyond recognition.

As in other smaller cities of the Kaliningrad region, the city centre itself is full of pre-war buildings. Some have been well-maintained or renovated, but most appear to be in some state of disrepair.

As a side note, it’s remarkable how easy it is to identify the German buildings – especially when you come to Sovetsk from the thoroughly-rebuilt city of Kaliningrad, or from any other part of Russia, where the contrast is striking. The architectural style of the pre-war buildings in Sovetsk is very similar to the kinds of buildings you see in northeastern Germany today, e.g. in Brandenburg or Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.

What I love about places like Sovetsk – about the Kaliningrad region as a whole, in fact – is that its history is seeping out of every pore. The previous residents are gone and the city has been thoroughly Russified: streets renamed, facades painted over, stone reliefs chiseled away, monuments replaced, large parts of town torn down or rebuilt. But the history of the city is still there, lurking just beneath the surface.

In some places, you can literally see the past peeking through into the present. Like this building facade, which has crumbled away to reveal the original German text underneath: ‘Lebensmittel’, a grocery store.

I feel sometimes like I shouldn’t be as excited by this as I really am. After all, there’s a reason that postwar Germany chose to forget about places like Tilsit. There’s no point in chasing that past any longer, because it belongs to a part of history that is over now and not coming back. In a certain light, the near-complete lack of memory of Tilsit in Germany today speaks to an impressive ability to let go of the past and focus on moving forward.

But letting go of the past should never be the same as forgetting it. There’s something both unnerving and comforting in the way that the past persists through the present in a place like Sovetsk; in the way that a city’s history is still there even if you change its name and exchange its entire population. Unnerving because it means that it’s impossible to erase the past and start over with a clean slate. Comforting for exactly the same reason: That the past is always going to be there in some form or another to seek out and learn from. No one has the power to erase its presence entirely.