EPILOGUE

An Interrupted European Corridor

WAR AND DESTRUCTION

The Second World War saw the greatest movement of people and freight ever transported on the Ostbahn and its cross-border trunk lines. At the time, the railroad showed the ugly face of modernity: brutal war, genocide, and mass expulsions.

During six years of warfare, millions of German soldiers moved in both directions along this corridor of destruction—followed by the advancing Polish and Soviet troops. The historical link between Berlin and Leningrad served as a crucial supply line for the 872-day siege of the former capital of the Russian Empire. Germany deported prisoners of war and forced laborers from occupied territories, who had to work for the war effort in industry and agriculture, where many perished. During the war, another Ostbahn operated—the General Directorate of the East Railroad (Generaldirektion der Ostbahn, Gedob), with its headquarters in Cracow. It administered the railroad lines in the occupied Polish territory that formed the General Governorate.¹

The historical Ostbahn also had its part in the Holocaust, connecting Stutthof (Sztutowo) camp near Gdańsk to the concentration and extermination camp network. The National Socialists persecuted the long-established Königsberg Jewish community by forcing them into exile or murdering them. The Ostbahn was no longer part of a transatlantic migration route but had become a tool of destruction—transporting hundreds of thousands of Jewish Europeans to their deaths.²

The Prussian Ostbahn is a powerful symbol of Germany’s loss of its eastern territories: The last train leaving the besieged city of Königsberg for Berlin on January 22, 1945, is an image deeply imprinted in the psyche of German expellees from former East Prussia. Until early April 1945, the heavily destroyed city was under siege. Many inhabitants fled across the ice of the Vistula Lagoon (Frisches Haff) to the coast, where they boarded westbound vessels; thousands died in the attempt. This was the prelude to the mass expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe.

COLD WAR DISRUPTION

At first, the border changes following the Second World War seemed to put a definite end to the historical Ostbahn’s significance. After the Potsdam Conference of 1945, the Soviet Union annexed the northern part of East Prussia and renamed it Kaliningradskaia Oblast’ (Kaliningrad Region). The Soviet regime either deported the remaining German inhabitants to Siberia or expelled them to Germany.³ Subsequently, the railroad brought new settlers from all over the Soviet Union to the region, replacing the previous population. Since the newcomers had utterly different ethnic, social, economic, and historical backgrounds, they faced many difficulties trying to make themselves at home in the ruins of a former German city with its foreign inscriptions, monuments, and architecture.⁴

Since there were few settlers to populate the abandoned places, Eydtkuhnen and Virbalis (Verzhbolovo) ceased to exist as an entangled borderscape. Chernyshevskoe, the heavily destroyed former Eydtkuhnen, went into decline. The Lithuanian border station in Virbalis/Kybartai was heavily damaged at the war’s end. It was demolished, making room for a new, much smaller station built “on the fragments of a perished civilization.”⁵ Chernyshevskoe and Kybartai became irrelevant stations where most express trains no longer stopped. Still, thousands of Soviet draftees stationed in the highly militarized region had to get off at Chernyshevskoe. Many of them left their sign on the walls of the former post office, one of the few remaining station buildings. The inscriptions reflect the Soviet Union’s multicultural population and the recruits’ forced migration from all over the Soviet Empire.

For geostrategic reasons, the Soviet government closed the border between Poland and the Kaliningrad Region, to foreign and Soviet visitors alike. It turned into a “razor-sharp boundary.”⁶ Although in the interwar period Germany declared East Prussia a “bulwark of Germandom,” the Soviet rulers created the image of Königsberg as samaia zapadnaia, the westernmost outpost of the USSR. The administration altered the cultural context of the city’s urban texture, demolishing the remainder of the Teutonic Order’s castle, building new Soviet monuments, and highlighting the Soviet soldiers’ sacrifice in conquering this “center of German imperialism.”⁷ In 1946, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad, honoring Michail Kalinin, the formal head of state of the Soviet Union, who passed away that same year.

Figure 8.1. Soviet draftees’ signs on the wall of the former Eydtkuhnen post office in Chernyshevskoe. Photograph: Jan Musekamp, 2005.

With the post-1945 German border only eighty kilometers east of Berlin, the main section of the former Ostbahn was now under the Polish and Soviet State Railroads’ administration. The Soviet occupation forces dismantled the second track of the short remaining German section, thus downgrading it permanently. Apart from military transports of Soviet troops between the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the Kaliningrad Region, and other western parts of the Soviet Union, travelers could not easily cross the borderline between the German Democratic Republic and Poland, let alone enter the Kaliningrad Region. Still, between 1972 and 1981, Polish and East German authorities relaxed the border regime and allowed for visa-free travel between the socialist “brother states.”

THE OSTBAHN AFTER THE FALL: EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AND DISINTEGRATION

For both eastern and western Europe, 1989 was a new start. The subsequent years were an exercise in reintegrating a continent that had been divided for decades.⁸ Overgrown roads and railroad lines were reopened, and people once again crossed the borders between eastern and western Europe. The process of deglobalization for the eastern part of the continent had deepened after the Second World War; after 1989, the region gradually reintegrated into global developments of travel, trade, and mobility—a period Wolfgang Kaschuba describes as a “second globalization.”⁹ However, this was no longer the heyday of railroad transportation but of cars, scheduled buses, and airplanes.

Restored Links

When Kaliningrad opened to foreign visitors and trade at the beginning of the 1990s, German, Polish, and Russian railroad companies renewed service along the historical Ostbahn on a small scale. There was one daily through carriage running between Berlin and Kaliningrad until 2009, when the service was discontinued. In 1939, the distance was covered in six and a half hours, while the average travel time in 2009 was sixteen and a half hours. Consequently, the Ostbahn is an example of the extension of space caused by new borders and deteriorated railroad lines; it illustrates a process that runs counter to Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s characterization of early railroad development as an “annihilation of space and time.”¹⁰ In 2012, Air Berlin started an affordable daily flight service between Berlin and Kaliningrad, thus bringing the two historical endpoints of the Ostbahn closer together. However, the company canceled this service in 2015 because of the economic crisis in the Russian Federation and the company’s economic difficulties.

In 2008, I led a students’ field trip along the historical route of the Royal Prussian Eastern Railroad. We boarded the train in Berlin and traveled through Germany, Poland, and the Russian Federation. In Tczew, we visited the impressive remnants of the old railroad bridge—destroyed twice during the Second World War but rebuilt. Today, one-third of the bridge’s structure is still in its original shape. So far, the bridge has not attracted the attention a historic landmark deserves. Since 1997, the American Society of Civil Engineers has listed it as an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, alongside the Hoover Dam, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and the New York Grand Central Terminal.¹¹ Nevertheless, the bridge deteriorated and was closed to traffic in 2011. It is currently undergoing a costly renovation to hopefully restore this fruit of the nineteenth century’s international scientific community.¹² Today, only the remaining neo-Gothic towers are evidence of Prussia’s aspiration toward hegemony in this part of Europe.

Our last destination was the village of Chernyshevskoe on the Russian border with European Union member state Lithuania, the erstwhile Eydtkuhnen. Standing amid a field of demolished houses, the impressive ruins of the Protestant church are witnesses of the place’s former importance. Today, former Eydtkuhnen is a “no place,” one of many in east central Europe—a region devastated by (ideological) wars, border changes, killing fields, and forced migrations.¹³

Figure 8.2. The 1929 Königsberg Main Station, today’s Kaliningrad South Station (2008). Photograph: Sophie Schwarzmaier.

Figure 8.3. The Tczew Bridge in 2008. To the right, new bridge elements replace those parts destroyed during the war. Photograph: Jan Musekamp.

Schengen Borders

We did not have the time to discuss the town’s fate because a Russian border patrol detained us for traveling illegally to the border district of Kaliningrad. Our group had to stay in the border control barracks for two hours. After intense discussions and a phone call to our host, the Kaliningrad Russian Immanuel Kant State University, border police finally released us.

This border regime resulted from the developments at the European Union’s eastern borders. From 1989 to 1991, traveling from the Kaliningrad Region to Lithuania or Poland and vice versa was smooth. When Lithuania gained independence in 1990, Kaliningrad lost its borderless land connection to the Soviet-Russian mainland. As a result, new political, economic, and infrastructural ties had to be established. Still, for a short period in the early 1990s, there existed no tight border control between Lithuania and the Kaliningrad Region. Later, citizens of those countries only needed an inexpensive voucher to cross the border.

Lithuania’s and Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004 and the Schengen Agreement in 2007 sealed the new Schengen border. Kaliningrad became a Russian exclave challenging to access from the outside, part of a “rapid re-fortification of international boundaries.”¹⁴ While Kaliningrad is no longer closed to foreign visitors, crossing its border is now much more difficult and expensive. To enter the exclave, tourists from the United States and the European Union need a visa that comes at the cost of at least one hundred dollars. Few people are willing to pay the entrance fee to visit this tiny region. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the land border remains closed to ordinary travelers (as of mid-2023). Today, the abolition of visa requirements to open the exclave for both in- and outbound travel is illusory, with Russian-EU talks on the subject suspended indefinitely because of Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and its invasion of Ukraine.

Since Kaliningrad is an exclave enclosed by European Union territory, the Russian government and the EU negotiated a privileged transit regime to facilitate freight transportation and Kaliningraders’ travel to the Russian mainland. While freight trains cross Lithuanian territory unhindered, rail passengers need a free visa that is easy to obtain and is issued at the border. This is very relevant for the region’s inhabitants since, in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, 70 percent of the total passenger traffic between the exclave and the mainland was by rail.¹⁵ In sum, the situation is comparable to transit traffic to East Prussia in the interwar period. Once again, existing infrastructure forced governments to the negotiating table. Still, when the European Union imposed sanctions on Russia for attacking Ukraine, certain goods, like military materiel, were excluded from the transit traffic.¹⁶

Unlike the time before the Second World War, the trains now hardly stop at the border. Today, Chernyshevskoe is a mere five-second glimpse out the window of a passenger train linking Kaliningrad with the Russian mainland. Chernyshevskoe and Virbalis may prosper once again should Lithuania, the Russian Federation, and the European Union decide to ease the restrictions on local border traffic—a standard in this region some one hundred years ago. Indeed, from 2012 to 2016, the Russian Federation and Poland had a system of small border traffic permits in place. During this time, Poles smuggled cigarettes and gasoline out of the Russian territory, and Kaliningraders went grocery shopping or visited the big department stores in Gdańsk—IKEA’s parking lot was crowded with cars bearing Russian plates.¹⁷ These were signs that the Polish-Russian border zone was developing into an entangled borderscape again. However, in 2016, the Polish government suspended the system on claims that the small border traffic was a security threat to Poland.

A New International Tourist Class

The transnational “pan-European tourist class” has returned to eastern Europe, much larger than it was in the nineteenth century. It is not unusual to meet people from the region on Mediterranean beaches and at Alpine resorts. The railroad is no longer the primary carrier for these people. Still, Kaunas remains an essential stop on the former Paris–St. Petersburg line. Today, it is a central hub for low-cost airlines Ryanair and Wizz Air. Businesspeople and affluent tourists from all over the world fill the business classes of airplanes, replacing the luxury trains of the International Sleeping Car Company. As in the nineteenth century, it is a question of money and passports. Today, the conference centers of five-star hotels are substitutes for the Palace Hotels of the nineteenth century. Even the royal and first-class waiting rooms have their modern counterparts in the VIP lounges of airports. Individual travelers explicitly looking for the “Other” no longer use the Murray or Baedeker guidebooks but turn to the newest edition from Lonely Planet or browse TripAdvisor—sharing the same advantages and disadvantages as their nineteenth-century counterparts. With the war in Ukraine, though, Russian travelers face similar challenges as Lenin and others during the First World War. With air traffic between the Russian Federation and the European Union suspended, they must take a detour through Turkey or the United Arab Emirates—which is costly with regard to time and money.

Despite the claim of the enlightening benefit of traveling abroad, even among globetrotters, stereotypes transmitted through guidebooks are still present today. One example of stereotypes about eastern Europe is the mock travel guide for the imagined eastern European country of Molvanîa.¹⁸ Western European ideas of a wild, undeveloped eastern Europe and Russian ideas of the profound otherness of “Europe” are still present in western European and Russian media today—exasperated by the (propaganda) war in Ukraine.

THE FUTURE OF THE LINE

How about the future of the historical railroad links between western and eastern Europe? Another important east–west transportation corridor linking Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, and Moscow has undergone modernization in previous years. Between the 1970s and the late 1990s, the Paris–Moscow express train served the route before inadequate service and airline competition forced the railroad companies to shut it down. The early 2000s saw the modernization of the line between Berlin and Warsaw. Today, several daily trains of the Berlin-Warszawa-Express serve the 563 kilometers between the German and Polish capitals in less than six hours. Between 2011 and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was one weekly direct night train between Moscow and Paris with a stopover in Berlin. A significant section of the former Paris–St. Petersburg line is included in a substantial European Union infrastructure project, the Rail Baltica. Beginning in 2026, this high-speed line will connect the Polish and Baltic capitals.¹⁹

Today, the different Ostbahn sections are in very different technical conditions. The Polish section between Kostrzyn and Bydgoszcz underwent partial modernization. As of now, the German section is still downgraded to a one-track nonelectrified line. The Russian section between the Polish border and Kaliningrad is currently not in use, while the Russian Railroads upgraded the section from Kaliningrad to the Lithuanian border to serve transit traffic. There are plans to use the line as a feeder for Chinese products transported by rail to the Kaliningrad port.

Currently, there are no signs of a restoration befitting the whole Ostbahn line’s former importance. The railroad runs through three different states and is administered by three railroad companies undergoing partial privatization and regionalization. As a result, modernization plans face significant obstacles. Again, it is a question of setting priorities for railroad companies and politicians of whether to invest in cross-border rail links. While the European Union supports such projects financially, it remains a question of economic and sometimes strategic relevance—as was the case in the nineteenth century.

However, there are signs of change on a regional level: in 2006, Polish and German towns along the line formed a European Interest Group Ostbahn (Interessengemeinschaft Ostbahn, IGOB). To promote rail service, the IGOB acted as a German-Polish pressure group in local, regional, national, and European politics, bundling the interests of towns and institutions between Berlin and Krzyż (Kreuz)—half the distance from Berlin to Kaliningrad. As the western Polish province Lubuskie is once again part of the German capital’s hinterland, public interest in cross-border transportation is rising.²⁰

Figure 8.4. Plan for a Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) in the Baltic Region (Rail Baltica). RB Rail AS (2017). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Access date July 3, 2023. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RB_infografiki_Karte_EN.jpg.

In 2007, German and Polish towns alongside the historic Ostbahn celebrated the line’s 150th anniversary. The celebrations broadened public interest in the largely defunct line, if only for a short time. It was not the big cities such as Berlin, Bydgoszcz, Toruń, or Kaliningrad that prepared conferences and expositions on the occasion of the anniversary but rather small towns or even villages on both sides of the vanishing German-Polish border. Again, we observe the emergence of an entangled borderscape. Regardless of nationality, people seem to be aware of their region’s past and the prospect of a revitalized direct connection to Berlin. In the last couple of years, several railroad stations on both the German and the Polish sides have been modernized and adapted to commuter needs. With modernization occurring and EU programs showing green lights, standard European technology (ERTMS) is being installed on both sides of the border. Meanwhile, in place of the IGOB, a new institutionalized European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) TransOderana is being established—a transnational European organization that aims at cross-border cooperation in infrastructure.²¹ Today, it seems as if questions of the region’s Polish or German character are becoming increasingly obsolete—just as in the case of Polish-German pressure groups in the province of Posen some 170 years ago.

POSTSCRIPT

While I am finishing these lines, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is ongoing. Amid the thousands of casualties among soldiers and the civilian population, crucial infrastructure is severed again. Travel is interrupted, and governments impose new border regimes. Kaliningrad’s land borders are largely closed to travelers, and freight transit to the Russian mainland faces restrictions. The Russian blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports has an effect similar to that of the Ottoman blockade of 1878: grain cannot easily be exported, and producers are looking for alternative routes to prevent a global food crisis. While a Ukrainian-Russian agreement allows for renewed maritime export, politicians and economists discuss alternative rail transportation to ports on the Danube—rerouting the staple like Ukrainian grain to Königsberg some 150 years ago.

NOTES

1.Mierzejewski, Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, 2:79–82.

2.On the role of the Reichsbahn in war and the Holocaust, refer to Mierzejewski, Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, 2:77–161; Browning, Hayes, and Hilberg, German Railroads, Jewish Souls; Gigliotti, Train Journey. On the fate of the Lithuanian Jews, refer to Weeks, “Vilnius and Kaunas Ghettos and the Fate of Lithuanian Jewry.”

3.On the hardships of a Jewish German who lived in Königsberg until 1948, refer to Wieck, Zeugnis vom Untergang Königsbergs.

4.On the experiences of the new settlers coming into the region, refer to Kostiashov, Vostochnaia Prussiia glazami sovetskikh pereselentsev.

5.Ivaškevičius, “Die Zivilisation Wershbolowo,” 58.

6.Schlögel, In Space We Read Time, 105–114.

7.On the recoding of Kaliningrad’s urban landscape, refer to Brodersen, Die Stadt im Westen.

8.On European challenges concerning the integration of eastern Europe, refer to Karl Schlögel’s essays in Schlögel, Die Mitte liegt ostwärts.

9.Kaschuba, “Europäischer Verkehrsraum nach 1989.”

10.Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 33.

11.Refer to American Society of Civil Engineers, Old Wisla Bridge.

12.Brancewicz, “Bezpański most.” On the sluggish reconstruction, refer to Malinowski et al., “Zur Wiedergeburt einer historischen Gitterbrücke”; Pietrzak, “Zabytkowy most w Tczewie zostanie odbudowany.”

13.Brown, Biography of No Place, 1. Timothy Snyder coined the accurate term “Bloodlands” for the region. Refer to Snyder, Bloodlands.

14.Linhard and Parsons, “Introduction: How Does Migration Take Place?,” 2.

15.European Commission, Report from the Commission on the Functioning of the Facilitated Transit.

16.Cokelaere, “EU: Transit to Kaliningrad Allowed.”

17.On illicit trade between the Kaliningrad Region and northeastern Poland before Poland’s accession to the Schengen Agreement in 2007, refer to Bruns, Grenze als Ressource.

18.Cilauro, Gleisner, and Sitch, Molvanîa, 117.

19.Refer to Rail Baltica, official website of the Rail Baltica Global Project, accessed January 28, 2023, https://www.railbaltica.org/.

20.Waldmann, “Vorstoß für die Ostbahn.”

21.For greater detail on EGTC TransOderana, refer to Ulrich, Participatory Governance in the Europe of Cross-Border Regions, 528–599. As of early 2023, the EGTC was not yet accomplished. However, a new European Interest Group Ostbahn was founded in 2020.