BALTIC MEETINGS - Baltic Writers Council

After Napoleon’s ousting, in the period of political liberalism, the writers who joined the
“Young Germany” movement, denying romanticism, were quite popular in Königsberg. e
best-known representatives of this movement in Königsberg were Ferdinand Gregorovius and
Wilhelm Jordan.
In the first quarter of the 20th century new talented authors such as Adolf Petrenz, Walther
Heymann and Agnes Miegel came to literature. omas Mann wrote his short story Mario
and the Magician in the sea resort of Rauschen (now Svetlogorsk). In 1931, the writer moved
to Nida where he wrote the novel Joseph and His Brothers.
Ernst Wiechert, one of the most talented German prose writers of the 20th century, created his
first works in Königsberg. Wiechert came out against fascism and for this he was thrown into
the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938. His novels Wälder und Menschen, Die Majorin
and Die Jerominkinder are considered to be classics and are still to be translated into Russian.
Fascism did everything possible to oust literature from Königsberg. Different literary societies
were dismissed; newspapers were closed one by one; terror and censorship made any kind of
creative work impossible.
Many famous writers such as omas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger were compelled to leave
the country. Still there were some who supported the fascist ideology, and Agnes Miegel
was among them. Johannes Bobrowski, one of the outstanding writers of post-war German
literature, survived the war, was held in captivity, and in the post-war years managed to create
poetry full of picturesqueness and an elegant metaphoric prose where Prussian motifs are
vividly seen.
In 1945, Königsberg and the Königsberg Region became a part of the Soviet Union. During
the following two years the German population was replaced by migrants from different Soviet
republics. e post-war development of Russian literature in the region began in the last year
of the war, when many famous writers participated in the battles for East Prussia within the
Soviet army. East Prussia inflamed with war and the tragedy of the war are reflected in the
poems of Alexander Tvardovsky, in the poem e Prussian Nights by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
and in the prose of Lev Kopelev.
e first migrants, amongst whom were people seeking the word and eager to realize their
creativity, started the process of the literary development in the region as well. e first literary
societies emerged in Kaliningrad, Neman, Ladushkin and Gusev as early as 1948. e war was
the theme for many fledgling writers as they had fought in it, survived the horrors of it, felt
the tragedy of losses and the joy of victories. But under the existing censorship, works truly
depicting life could not be published then. So the novel by Nadezhda Grjazeva, a prisoner of
the fascist camp Ravensbrück, remained unpublished, and the stories by Vsevolod Osten, who
survived the hades of Mauthausen, caused a storm of criticism. e theme of Nazi camps was
considered to be forbidden, since it could involve undesirable allusions - the country still had
its own camps.
e period of 1959-1960 became a turning point in the development of literature. First, the
Kaliningrad Publishing House was established and later a branch of the Union of Writers of
the RSFSR opened during these years. In 1958 one of the major writers, Sergei Snegov, who
linked his life and work with this city, moved to Kaliningrad. He was a physicist, who had gone
through the turmoil of the Gulag hell, and after being rehabilitated he published one of his
first novels in the magazine “Novy Mir” (e New World). Kaliningrad became a place where
many of his later books were published.One of them was the science fiction work e People
Like Gods that was awarded the prestigious “Aelita” prize and made Snegov one of the leading
writers of the country working in the field of science fiction. e city of Hoffmann had found
its new fiction writer.
12