East Prussia, once named after the Baltic-origin Prussians who lived here, was actually a rather remote but distinctive corner of Germany. According to the author, who was born in the East Prussian village of Jeglack (German Jäglack, now Jegławki), this province was very far from the “empire” – the main German lands, and was jokingly called the Germans’ “Little Siberia.” Not only Germans lived here, but also Lithuanian minorities, Kursenieki, and Polish-speaking Masurians. The region where the photographs were taken was characterized by extraordinary religious, linguistic, and ethnic diversity.
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It was precisely the region’s diversity, remoteness, and a certain mysteriousness that attracted photographers at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century to capture local landscapes and people’s lives. In 1893, representatives of the Cultural Heritage Service established in Königsberg (German Königsberg, now Kaliningrad) early realized that photography provided a unique opportunity to document cultural monuments and thus preserve them for future generations. Therefore, photography was encouraged and supported by the state, and photos were carefully collected in museums and archives.
It is truly a miracle that many of the photos published in this album were not destroyed during World War II. In 1944, when the Red Army invaded East Prussia, the photo archive was hurriedly transported from Königsberg to Toruń (German Thorn), but due to the war actions, the train did not reach the city and remained on the sidings. Eventually, after Germany’s capitulation, freight wagons with wooden crates containing the valuable collection were taken over by Polish art historians arriving from Warsaw. The surviving originals are still kept at the Polish Academy of Sciences Art Institute in Warsaw and the State Archive in Olsztyn, although about 40 percent of the photos were lost.
What is captured in these photos? These are East Prussian towns and villages, house decorations and agricultural work, fortresses reminiscent of the Teutonic Knights era, streets, rivers and roads, windmills, bridges, churches, harbors, Curonian Lagoon boats, lighthouses, meadows, forests, and cultivated fields. Some photos were taken in present-day Lithuanian territory, for example, in the Nemunas Delta, Nida, or Juodkrantė.
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Flipping through this album, as if one frame follows another, the image of the lost world of East Prussia unfolds before the reader. Barefoot children and their teachers, honorable gentlemen and ladies, officials, merchants, workers look at us. Hardly anyone can say what fate befell them after a few decades when all of East Prussia was engulfed by the flames of war, and the old inhabitants were almost completely replaced by new ones.
However, historical East Prussia did not disappear without a trace. In Poland and Lithuania – sometimes more successfully, sometimes less so – there is at least an effort to restore and maintain some historical buildings, while in the Kaliningrad region belonging to Russia, the heritage in many cases is completely neglected and is disappearing more and more every day. Therefore, this book – an echo of the past world captured in photographs – is a valuable testimony in itself, encompassing a part of the region we call Little Lithuania.
The book was translated from German by Asta Dvilaitienė.
