Königsberg

History

Königsberg ("king's mountain") was founded in 1255 by the Bohemian King Ottokar II that come to help Teutonic Knights during their conquest of Prussia in the adventure called Northern Crusade. This event started the genocide of local Baltic Prussians and German colonistion. German was the official language, however the old Prussian language was still in use by the 18th century.

Königsberg was the capitol of Sambia (Samland), one of the four dioceses into which Prussia had been divided in 1243 by papal legate William of Modena. Saint Adalbert of Prague became the main patron saint of the Königsberger Dom (cathedral). Königsberg became a member of the Hanse and important port for Prussia, later Province of Prussia and Lithuania as well.

During the war of Prussian Confederation allied with Poland, Königsberg also rebelled against the Teutonic knights. However, the rebellion was defeated and eventually, when the former capital Marienburg (Malbork) was sold to the king of Poland, Königsberg in 1457 became the seat of the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order state and since 1525 Protestant Ducal Prussia.

With the secularisation of the Order's territories (1525, the first Hohenzollern ruler, Albrecht of Brandenburg-Prussia, committed Prussian Tribut to his uncle, the Jagiello/Habsburg/Polish king and received Ducal Prussia with capital in Königsberg as a fief. Since the death of Albrecht Hohenzollern his son became co-ruler with the Brandenburg imperial electors as dukes of Ducal Prussia. Since 1618 in a personal union with Brandenburg under the latter's Hohenzollern rulers. In 1660 Hohenzollerns were released from the overlordship of Polish crown, with the exception of dynasty extinction, when it was supposed to return to Poland. By the act of coronation 1701 in Königsberg, Hohenzollern became kings of Prussia, finally independent from Poland and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. After dissolving of the empire, Königsberg was then capital of the Province of Prussia, outside the formal borders of German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) of 1815-66, until the German unification, when it was incorporated to the German Empire (1871).

With the founding of the university by Albrecht in 1544, Königsberg became a centre of learning for the surrounding countries as well. One of its noted sons was the leading mathematician and astronomer Johann Müller Regiomontanus (1436-76), naming himself after the Latin form of the city's name. It was also the birthplace (1690) of the famous mathematician Christian Goldbach and the home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. In 1736, the mathematician Leonhard Euler used the arrangement of bridges and islands at Königsberg as the basis for the Seven Bridges of Königsberg Problem which led to the mathematical branch of topology.

On January 31, 1773 King Friedrich II announced that the old Prussia was to be known as Ostpreussen East Prussia. After the first world war it was forced to became a German exclave due to the carving up of Germany.

The Prussian government under Otto Braun was by military coup ousted on July 20, 1932. and since 1933 East Prussia was ruled by Erich Koch, after the reannexion of the so-called Polish corridor in 1939 again with land connection to the rest of Germany.

Towards the end of World War II in 1945, the city was annexed by the Soviet Union and it was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 after the death of Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin. The city had been heavily bombarded by the British Royal Air Force in summer 1944. Some of the German population had fled the advancing Red Army in early 1945, and a few returned after the city was surrendered on April 9, 1945. However, all ethnic German residents who remained at the end of the war - estimated at about 200,000, out of the city's prewar population of 316,000 - were killed and brutally expelled by the Soviets in 1945-49. Many died of hunger during the war's closing stages or the shortages which followed, or during the arduous expulsion process.

Many surviving inhabitants joined the Landsmannschaft Ostpreussen. The city museum of Duisburg contains a little collection about the history of Königsberg.

The city was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 and closed for any foreign visitors for more than 40 years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union it has been discussed to give the city its old German name back, as it happened in St. Petersburg.

Sightseeing

• Königsberg Cathedral
• old fortifications

Famous people from Königsberg

• Immanuel Kant, philosopher
• Erich von Drygalski, explorer
• Christian Goldbach, mathematician
• Christoph Hartknoch, historian
• Gotthilf Heinrich Ludwig Hagen, physicist
• David Hilbert, mathematician
• Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, author
• Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, physicist
• Karl Rudolf König, physicist
• Agnes Miegel
• Otto Wallach, chemist

External links

• J. Lemmen's photos from current East Prussia and Königsberg territory
• Illustration of Königsberg 1679
• Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen - Informations on East Prussia (Land der dunklen Wälder und kristall'nen Seen)

• A town in the federal state of Bavaria, Germany: Königsberg, Bavaria
• A town in the federal state of Brandenburg, Germany: Königsberg, Brandenburg
• Königsberg in der Neumark was the former name of today's Chojna in Poland

Referenced By