27 December 2007

Kant Touch That



Plaque near the tomb of Immanuel Kant, Kaliningrad

I got completely turned around this morning. It is difficult to have a foot in more than one decade. I have some current business to do with the Ukrainian Embassy, involving the translation of some post Soviet-era documents. That is how I got- vicariously- to the Kaliningrad Oblast, and the great expulsion.

Trying to find clues to the origin of my Ukrainian friend is a challenge. Bloodlines always are, and he is inarticulate, though he has large liquid brown eyes the size of golfballs. He is undeniably from the lands near the estuary of the Dnepr River, at the end of the Amber Road that follows the great streams south. But based on the confusion in Eastern Europe, his bloodlines lead somewhere else, to a place where there once were good Lutherans and diligent German workers.

That tale leads north, from the waters of near the Black Sea to those of the Baltic. Once, the great rivers were Neolithic trade routes for the remarkable yellow stones; later they were a path to the Crusades. Tracing the relation of blood and documents led me, inescapably, to one of the Great Powers, one that was overrun long ago, its owners scourged by the sword and rape and fire.

The legend in my Father's side of the family says that we were from there, our bloodlines leading to Prussia, long ago. Lutherans who took ship for the New Land and New Hope. If it is true, I am glad we did.

The fire burned most of what had stood on this sandy soil on the Balkan Coast. The sword and the rapine of the rampaging armies had forced the people who lived here west across the plains, and across the ice to the nearest safe crossing to German lines.

It was the winter of 1944. Two million people were in motion, mostly women, children and the elderly, since the men were mostly in uniform, supporting the needs of a mad state vastly overextended in its collapsing global aspirations.

The fleeing civilians were vulnerable. Reasonable people with self-will would have left long ago, before the sound of the guns could be heard to the east. The Authorities had prohibited movement out of the East Prussia, though, since the forfeiture of something so integral to the Reich's sense of self was unthinkable.

More than unthinkable. Disloyal.

Finally, though, reality penetrated. As the holidays of 1944 approached, the word was passed to the Gauleiters that an orderly departure might be prudent, in view of what Uncle Joe's Shock Armies were doing as they pressed forward.

There was little fuel for motor-cars or trucks, and little in the way of air support as the panic rose. The Reds knew that, and exploited it, thrusting columns north from the main body toward the Baltic to cut off pockets pf resistance along the rivers. Behind the lines there were abominations so unspeakable that a generation seared them off from memory.

It was justified by what had happened in the Black March east, three years before. Considering the evidence of what had been done to other civilians in the camps sprinkled across the Government General in what had been Poland, it is unthinkable to have any pity for those who served Berlin.

But it is still possible to take a moment to consider the screams of those who were treated as less than human, and only the spoils of war. The ethnic cleansing that occurred through direct action and forced relocation after hostilities is quite astonishing.

Post-war German sources claim the number of evacuated and expelled Prussians at 16 million, with between 1.7 and 2.5 million dead. Others consider these numbers to be extreme; more temperate estimates are only 14 million expelled and half a million dead.

It is certain that the Reds torpedoed the ships filled with civilians that were evacuating Memel, and thousands died. Further west along the coast, Konigsberg, was leveled. It had been the city where Immanuel Kant had preached.

Kant was the flower of the late Enlightenment, and it is said that he never traveled more than a hundred miles away from his home city. He formulated a doctrine of “Categorical Imperative,” by which he maintained that conformity to moral requirements can be shown to be essential to rational agency. His fundamental principle of morality was that each person is possessed of self-governing reason, and each is possessed of equal worth and deserving of equal respect.

The area around his tomb was leveled, a combination of bombing from the air by the British, and up close and personal by the Red Army. What had been German was no longer; not in word nor population.

Less than one percent of the original population of East Prussia remained when it was over. It was a replacement, in toto.

The old Prussia was eliminated, and transformed into a vast military garrison. Stalin was responsible for that, though every Soviet leader took a certain delight in grinding a boot grinding on the ashes of the heart of old   Prussian militarism.

Leonid Brezhnev was responsible for the razing of the last standing walls of Konigsberg castle, in 1969. He was the last man who actually attempted to wield the power of Uncle Joe. Brezhnev was a Ukrainian by birth, which is a coincidence, or would be if you believed in such things.

Leonid had served in the great struggle with distinction, leaving the Red Army in 1946 as a Major General. There was an article of faith in his decree that all symbols of the old enemy be removed from the earth. Elderly former residents would burst into tears, when permitted to visit the Olbast. Instead of the stately castle stood the world's most ugly building, unfinished, surrounded by shabby blocks of once-modern apartments left over from some other madman's vision.

Gone was the Knight's Hall. Gone was the glory, as though it had never existed. Leonid considered the area a potential nest of fascism, regardless if the Germans were all gone.

The tomb of Kant now stood in a place named for a minor Bolshevik. The pillared enclosure near the Cathedral on the Pregolya River is one of the few structures preserved by the Reds after the city was formally annexed in 1945.

There is a plaque near the tomb with raised letters in German and Russian that quotes from Kant's masterwork, the Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

Of course, the original tomb had been demolished. The statue of Kant that stands in front of the Kant Russian State University nearby was donated by an anonymous German in 1991, and placed on the original pediment. It had stood empty under the stars for over forty years.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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