Ex-Koenigsburgers return

  • 2002-09-12
  • Bernard Besserglik
KALININGRAD

"Nostalgia tourism" by former German residents of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is booming, but for most returnees the experience is bittersweet at best.

Little remains of the once-flourishing East Prussian city of Koenigsberg, seized by the Soviet Union after World War II, and as the elderly tourists do the rounds between the 14th century cathedral and the statue of the city's favorite son, Immanuel Kant, or inspect their former homes, they do not like what they see.

"It's been a shock," said Edith Becker who in 1944, as a 13-year-old girl, fled the Red Army artillery and Allied bombardments to settle in Stuttgart.

"I feel very sad. It's depressing. I dreamed for so long of coming here. I have beautiful memories of my childhood. But now I find the city is so dirty," she said.

According to local officials, some four-fifths of the 40,000 tourists Kaliningrad receives annually are German, many of them in the grip of "heimweh," a peculiarly German word signifying a longing to return to one's homeland.

The experience of Rudiger Bellersaiem, making a pilgrimage on behalf of his late father, was particularly poignant.

Bellersaiem, 48, sought out the town once known as Karlsrode, 50 kilometers northeast of then Koenigsberg, in memory of his father who taught there before the war and had been too ill to get there during his only return visit to the enclave in 1993.

The place had been wiped from the map. Trekking crosscountry from the nearby village of Gromovo, Bellersaiem found a tangle of undergrowth and a few foundation stones which local people told him were those of the former schoolhouse.

Karlsrode had simply been dismantled, brick by brick, and its materials used in the reconstruction of cities elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

Bellersaiem, from Ibbenbu-ren near Muenster, was born in postwar Germany and bore no animosity toward the Russians, but felt, like his older compatriots, that it was "disappointing" that there were so few historical traces, and regretted being unable to converse with local people either in their language or his own.

Harold Bergmann from Hanover is a former refugee from East Germany who fled to the West in 1957, aged 18. He was visiting the enclave out of curiosity, or perhaps to make a point.

"It's terrible. Completely screwed up. What a mess. But I just had to see it," he said with relish.

Younger Germans were more tolerant. Martin, 26, and Kirsten, 22, students from the Free University of Berlin, said that in their 10 days in the region they had grown to see its virtues.

They admitted that their initial reaction to Kaliningrad's dowdiness was one of dismay.

"But now we're enjoying it," Kirsten said. "It's a very green city, and not such a bustle as St. Petersburg" which they had visited previously.

"It's a normal, okay city, and the people are friendly and helpful," Martin said, stressing that it helped to be able to speak the language a little.

Two days previously they had slept on the beach at Svetlogorsk, 30 kilometers away, and had their evening enlivened by the arrival of a group of young Russians who proceeded to stage a mock duel, complete with swords.

They were invited to join in the festivities.

Bucking the trend of elderly disillusion was Dietrich Rohse, 75, a citizen of Kempten, in Bavaria, now making his fourth return visit to the city where he was born and raised and which he had last seen under the bombs of 1945.

He too, returning in 1992, had felt shock at his first sight of Russian Kaliningrad.

But he had been sufficiently encouraged to return for further visits and now, a decade on, expressed satisfaction "at seeing the city return slowly to life."

With his wife Hildegard he has made friends with local people and has begun taking lessons in Russian.

For some Germans however, despite the tug of "heimweh," the sense of loss is too great: His sister and two brothers have vowed never to set foot in their old home town.