BALTIC MEETINGS - Baltic Writers Council

(“Der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit”).
Kant’s Critiques are based on three elements: “Verstand” or “mind” (the tool of perception
and knowledge), “Vernunft” or “reason” (the tool of morality), and “Geschmack” or “taste”
(the tool that makes feelings possible to communicate). It is this taste that as a “sensus
communis aestheticus” also makes judgements possible and a common spirit, not only in Art.
is universality Kant experienced in his home city (which he never left). In a footnote
to his Anthropology, Kant gave his definition of the cosmopolitan character of the city of
Königsberg:
„Eine große Stadt, der Mittelpunkt eines großen Reichs, in welchem sich die Landescollegia der
Regierung desselben befinden, die eine Universität (zur Kultur der Wissenschaften) und dabei
noch die Lage zum Seehandel hat, welche durch Flüsse aus dem Inneren des Landes sowohl,
als auch mit angrenzenden entlegenen Ländern von verschiedenen Sprachen und Sitten einen
Verkehr begünstigt, - eine solche Stadt, wie etwa Königsberg am Pregelflusse, kann schon für
einen schicklichen Platz zu Erweiterung sowohl der Menschenkenntnis als auch der Weltkenntnis
genommen werden, wo diese, auch ohne zu reisen, erworben werden kann.“
“A large city like Königsberg on the river Pregel, the capital of a state, where the representative
National Assembly of the government resides, a city with a university (for the cultivation of the
sciences), a city also favored by its location for maritime commerce, and which, by way of rivers,
has the advantages of commerce both with the interior of the country as well as with neighboring
countries of different languages and customs, can well be taken as an appropriate place for
enlarging one’s knowledge of people as well as of the world at large, where such knowledge can
be acquired even without travel.” (Kant, Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. Transl. by
Victor Lyle Dowdell. Southern Illinois Univ. Press 1978)
e traffic most important for truly knowing the world and its peoples is both internal
and external, it is connected to universities and to trade with neighbouring and yet remote
countries.
Kant did not even consider clergy or nobility, he knew only the urban citizen, the citoyen who
was able to maintain a culture of conversation characterized by tolerance, as found at Kant’s
own daily dinner-parties. „Die Königsberger Geselligkeit war die einer Hafenstadt. Alles
– Kaufleute, Lehrer, Ärzte, Beamte – verkehrte von Gleich zu Gleich.“ (von Kuenheim) “e
social life of Königsberg was that of a harbor city. Everyone - merchants, teachers, doctors, civil
servants, interacted as equals.”
In the Prussia of that time, tolerance was a key word: let me remind you that this country was
marked by an early catastrophe: the terrible plague of the years 1709 and 1710, when 40%
of the population of 600,000 people died, which led to a new settlement by Lithuanians,
Poles, Dutch, Westphalians, Magdeburgers, Nassauers, Swiss Hugenottes, and from 1732
Protestant Salzburgers, in the “Repeuplierung”, as the Prussian King called it. Independent of
all differences in national origin, the country attracted colonizers from East and West, North
and South to repopulate mostly the rural areas.
What followed was a programme of public education. Public schools were introduced in Prussia
in 1740 - at the same time that Kristijonas Donelaitis became preacher in the small village of
Tollmingkehmen, where services were held in both Lithuanian and German. Further south in
Masuria, services were even held in three languages: Lithuanian, Polish and German.
Königsberg was the capital of a larger state that no longer exists. Today, this country that
existed for 700 years is divided by new borders – borders drawn and confirmed by Stalin - into
a Russian, a Polish and a Lithuanian part. is is the result of two World Wars and mostly
of the war Hitler’s Germany carried into Lithuania, into Czechoslovakia, Poland, France,
Denmark and Norway, the Balkans and the Soviet Union.
Wasn’t it Berdyayev who said that the landscape in which a people lives is a symbol of its soul? What
happens when a landscape is taken, captured? When it has become the prey of another power?
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