International heritage in the memorial landscape of the Kaliningrad region

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the structure of sites in the Kaliningrad region commemorating events, phenomena or figures of international history, as well as to reveal their symbolic significance. The study uses empirical data on the origin, time of construction and purpose of the monuments, memorials and other places of commemoration. Theoretically, it draws on the concepts of cultural memory and sites of memory. The idiographic and historiographic methods were employed along with general scientific methods. At the core of the region’s international memorial landscape structure are sites commemorating the German past of the area or linked to Lithuanian and, less frequently, Polish national cultures. The structure of the memorial heritage is largely a product of the selective preservation of pre-war monuments and constructions in the Soviet period and post-Soviet commemorative activities in the Kaliningrad region, ‘a region of cooperation’. Its most substantial, German, component is a complex symbolic system honouring the intellectual culture of East Prussia and its prominent figures. And, not unlike its Lithuanian and Polish components, it lacks inner unity. Most of the memorial objects examined have been integrated into all-Russian or regional historical narratives and corresponding discourses. Reflecting the ‘Russian story line’ in the local history, it has been appropriated by the local culture of memory.