The most Lithuanian of all cities. That at least was left as pride for them, the residents of Kaunas. Kaunas, the eternal second, behind the capital Vilnius. But: Unlike in Vilnius, there are hardly any Russians, hardly any Poles, hardly any other ethnic groups among the almost 315,000 residents. A city that belonged solely to Lithuanians: in Soviet times that was suddenly a good thing. And then you babbled it on without thinking.
The most Lithuanian of all cities. Kaunas. Of all things.
The Park of Peace for example. Not far from the bus station. There is an old mosque built of bricks, and a few children are playing in front of it. It is the mosque of the Tatars that in Lithuania lived since the 14th century, many of them loyal soldiers of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania.
The park was once laid out as a cemetery, those were the good times, at least initially. When the different citizens of Kaunas did not fear each other in death, just as they shared life and the city with each other. When people weren’t yet killing each other, shooting, betraying, expelling, kidnapping. And in the end finally forgot.
Main post office in Kaunas from the interwar period.
(Photo: Walter Bibikow/imago images)
Here they still jump out at you today, the Europe of yesteryear, the Kaunas of yesteryear. It is only a few steps from the mosque to the orthodox church to the former German high school. Lithuanians lived here alongside Russians, Poles, Germans and Tatars. Jews made up about a third of the population in 1900. The south of the cemetery, opened in 1847, was left to the Orthodox, the Roman Catholics were buried in the middle, and the Lutherans and Muslims at the northern end.
Where have they all gone, those who didn’t call themselves Lithuanians? A site visit.
“We believe that culture can save our city from amnesia,” says Virginija Vitkiené in front of an audience from all over Europe. Kaunas will officially launch its year as one of the European Capitals of Culture this Saturday, sharing the title in 2022 with Luxembourg’s Esch-sur-Alzette and Serbia’s Novi Sad. Virginija Vitkiené is the head of the project in Kaunas. You have them The meaningfulness of the Capital of Culture program is often called into question, silly candidates and programs have fueled criticism.
Kaunas citizens have been uncovering layers that have been buried for years
But Kaunas is a discovery. Surrounded by nine mighty forts built by Tsarist Russia, located at the confluence of the Neris and Nemunas (Memel), “the whole kaleidoscope of epochs and political systems” can be studied here, as the Lithuanian Minister of Culture puts it. The whole panorama of historical greatness, political crimes and tragedies. But also the will for the future.
Kaunas, you can call it a stroke of luck, is also a discovery in itself. The city has a committed citizenry that has been uncovering layers that have been buried for a long time and sees itself inspired by the Capital of Culture year. “Kaunas was a troubled place,” says art historian Daiva Citvariene. “We didn’t know who we were and who we wanted to be.” She is one of those who, a few years ago, set out with others to rediscover the city’s DNA, for example with the CityTelling Festival, which allows contemporary witnesses to speak. “We want to remind people of the multi-ethnic life that was the norm in this part of Europe for centuries, and which has sadly disappeared.”
Church of the Resurrection in Kaunas, one of the modernist buildings from the city’s heyday.
(Photo: juriskraulis/imago images)
There is a lot of grief and trauma in this country, in this city that had to surrender to the Poles, to the Russians, to the Germans, where occupiers took turns with apparently God-given regularity, where Nazi henchmen dragged Jews from Munich and Vienna to to hand them over to extermination here, where under the Soviets treason and deportation hit all ethnic groups.
For a long time, the Lithuanians were fed up with their own pain. “There was and still is the feeling here that Europe has never cared about us, that Europe doesn’t care about us to this day,” says art historian Daiva Citvariene. “So many have cared for their trauma for a long time, felt like a victim”. Even her own mother, says Citvariene, asked her if, as one of the curators of the Capital of Culture program, she really really wanted to devote herself to the Holocaust again, instead of finally talking about the suffering of the Lithuanians, which is certainly far less well known in the rest of Europe.
One can walk through the history of the loss of this city along powerful paintings
The “Peace Park”, for example, has only been called that since the Soviet authorities declared war on the place: Vigils and candle commemorations by the Lithuanians – on the occasion of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, for example – had made the cemetery a place of silent protest, the Soviets dissolved the Graves then opened in 1959, misplaced bones, destroyed burial chambers.
Step by step, however, Daiva Citvariene and like-minded people began to feel that the time was ripe to devote themselves to the stories of others.
It’s a story of loss, and the city now carries it on its skin. You can hike along huge murals. In a parking lot off the central axis of the pedestrianized Laisvės alėja (Freedom Avenue), young Leah Goldberg can be seen dreaming into the distance, leaning from the wall of a tall building over the back of a chair. The Jewess Leah Goldberg grew up in Kaunas, studied in Berlin and Bonn and became one of the most famous poets of young Israel, where her picture now adorns the 100 shekel note. In addition, in Hebrew and Lithuanian, her poem “Kiefer”, the longing for the snow-covered Lithuanian homeland of her childhood that has become verse.
But the houses in the city also tell – behind a veil of sadness that can still be felt – of times of new beginnings, of glory and fame. Kaunas, once the seat of a Hanseatic office, has experienced such periods on several occasions, and probably never more so than in the period between the two world wars. Lithuania had just declared its independence when the Polish army occupied the capital, Vilnius. The still free Kaunas became the capital, remained so for twenty years from 1920 to 1940 – and reinvented itself in an outburst of tremendous creativity.
At that time, administrative buildings were needed overnight, ministries, consulates, embassies. Kaunas succumbed to a construction boom that created a small architectural marvel: a city built at breakneck speed in the spirit of modernism, aiming to be a pioneer for the rebirth of independent Lithuania, inspired by Art Deco as well as Bauhaus models: buildings made of reinforced concrete with clear Structures, light-flooded rooms and sometimes curved facades and balconies.
The city, once the seat of a Hanseatic office, has also experienced glory times, especially between the world wars, when the Polish army occupied the capital, Vilnius, and Kaunas became the capital for twenty years.
(Photo: Andrius Aleksandravičius/picture alliance/dpa/Organisatio)
The main post office, the Romuva cinema, the Church of the Savior on Resurrection overlooking the city are just a few of the landmarks from that period – the visitor cannot walk 50 steps without finding a building from that period: the city is steeped in modernist architecture of the interwar years Monument like otherwise probably only Tel Aviv.
German Wehrmacht and Red Army put an end to these years of hope. The Gestapo had its headquarters in the building on Vytauto Street, which is now home to the Kaunas Cultural Center. The KGB later seamlessly took over the Gestapo’s interrogation and torture cellar there.
“We tell the personal stories of former citizens, that goes down well.”
They try to balance in Kaunas. They want to celebrate the modernist architecture in 2022, they would like to see the whole ensemble as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The same goes for the Fluxus movement: George Mačiūnas is also a child of the city, the artist and author who later emigrated to the USA via Germany and founded the Fluxus movement there. Fluxus artist Yoko Ono will therefore open her exhibition “Ex it” in the central bank building on Sunday: 100 wooden coffins with fruit trees growing out of them. A symbol of the resilience of life in the face of death, as the artist says.
Death and destruction occupy a large space in the program for 2022, because they too have made Kaunas what it is today. The most Lithuanian of all cities. Several months will be devoted to remembering Jewish life in the city. A book about the Jews of Kaunas is to be published in autumn, it will be the first.
The Tatar Mosque in Kaunas Peace Park.
(Photo: Kai Strittmatter)
In the north of the city is Fort Number 9, a large complex of underground bunkers and brick fortress towers. After the Nazis marched into Kaunas in June 1941, there were initially pogroms against Jewish citizens in the open streets, but Jews were soon taken away to the fort. The Nazis shot 50,000 people here, not just citizens of the city. More than 1000 Jews who had been brought from Munich and the Allgäu died here. Name plaques on the old brick walls list the murdered: Margot Wiener, 11 years old, Anita Epstein, 15 years old, Heinz Zellberger, 16 years old. . . The role played by the Lithuanian murder battalions, who took part in the Holocaust as willing helpers, is not concealed. The exhibition identifies 1034 active collaborators who directly participated in shootings of Jews. Another reason why many later preferred to forget.
But no, says art historian Daiva Citvariene, there was hardly any opposition to her projects. “We tell the personal stories of former citizens,” she says. “That goes down well.” For them it is only logical that the history dives in the program lead to a debate about the future of Europe and the place Kaunas can find in it. Kaunas wants to grow again, become more open again, the university has long been welcoming students from all over the world. “In our polarized world, there is a lack of empathy,” says Citvariene. “What we track down here in terms of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural past shows us above all what we’re missing today in terms of togetherness.”
An optimism flashes through here and there that is not just defiant. “Oh, and you really think forgetting has the last word?” These lines by the poet Hirsch Oscherowitsch, also a Jew from Kaunas, are emblazoned meters high on the wall of a house in the city center – part of a mural, four stories high, showing little Rosian Bagriansky and her mother Gerta, two of whom are responsible for the persecution of the Jews in Kaunas survived because Lithuanians helped them. “Often it is an image that rises from the ashes / And there it stands, alive and real / Forever within the framework of each day that comes”.
Maybe it will work out this year, the signs are not bad: maybe not only the citizens of Kaunas will bring their history out of oblivion, maybe Europe will remember this spot that has so much to tell it.