A strange journey into the past, into what was East Prussia; earlier it was Poland and anyway a territory with a long disputed history. Which doesn't come into the present story, about a party of former East Prussian Germans who took advantage of a new luxury train service running from Berlin to Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg. The article by Oliver Maria Schmitt presupposes a certain amount of special knowledge on the part of non-Germans, but it is enough to say that when Germany lost East Prussia after the second World War, there are many who fled in front of the Russian advancing army, and are still conscious of the wound. This appeared in Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper. But one point seems clear, as stated in the article: East Prussia has this time really been amputated from Germany. All of the passengers on this luxury train, a throwback to earlier times, made up from various sources, with its observation carriage in all-around glass, its dining car in the art deco style of the late 1920s, journeys from Berlin to Kaliningrad, most of the passengers on this occasion anyway, being, it appears, former inhabitiants of East Prussia or relatives of those who were. Or at least interested in its history. Many books were written by former members of the Prussian elite after the war; here names are not given but some of them were able to find their previous houses, or at least the remains. Or maybe only the tree their grandfather planted. And in one case there was a reminder of the fact that it wasn't only Germans who had to get out. One man, photographing his ancestors' house, was invited in by the current residents for a vodka. They told him that they were ordered by the secret police to leave their house in the Ukraine and settle in this district of what had been German territory. Driven out, you might say, by their own.
So what were these travellers experiencing? Was it just a nostalgia trip? What else could it have been? Things change. What was once Konigsberg, home of Emmanuel Kant, the great philosopher, has for some time been Kaliningrad. The guide (Polish) to the tour suggested that one day it might be Kantstadt. And was Copernicus, the astronomer, known in Polish as Mikolaj Kopernik and to Germans as Nikolaus Kopernikus, a German or a Pole? Will young Germans, the writer asks, who jet off to the Caribbean, be interested in the place, other than for the cheapness of amber there? He'd like to think they could find it worthwhile.