Armchair Travels to East Prussia

Königsberg and its hinterlands in the olden days of the early 1930s

And here you go—arriving by train, we turn around and take a look at the main train station, or Hauptbahnhof. For its ‘official’ history, see here (Wikipedia). I shall merely note that the photographs below all hail from before WW2, and these buildings no longer exist (you may also double-check with Google Maps).

On the reverse, the date 30 Jan. 1932 is given.

We travel onwards to see the castle, which was heavily destroyed in WW2 and its remnants were eventually demolished in the 1960s:

Königsberg in Prussia, southern wing.

The below picture of its demolition is found on Wikipedia:

‘Alte Speicher’ (Old Warehouses), dated 1931 on the reverse.

The above picture shows the ‘old warehouses’ on the waterfront; they, too, don’t exist anymore. They were, as the German Wikipedia explains, also destroyed in WW2 (also look at that site for more pictures, btw; translation and emphases mine):

In the course of the 750th anniversary of the city on 1 July 2005, a number of construction measures were carried out in the city. The cathedral was further restored, as was the south (main) railway station. Shopping centres were opened in the area of today's city centre on Siegesplatz, with more to follow. The square itself was redesigned as a representative city centre with a fountain. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the interior of which is still unfinished, was opened here as part of the celebrations.

In addition, a shopping, business and hotel centre called ‘Fish Village’ [orig. Fischdorf] was built on the former site of the fish market on the Pregel River not far from the cathedral in a historicising style in the architectural style of old Hanseatic cities as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg, including a pedestrian bascule bridge already built over a branch of the Pregel River (Jubilee Bridge, also in historicising style, in the area of the former Imperial Bridge).

Talk about fake history, but I digress.

Once the traveller leaves behind the city limits, one approaches the Curonian Split (orig. Kurische Nehrung), today a UNESCO-protected ‘world heritage site’.

‘Ship at the Haff’, i.e., the ‘East Prussian’ word for lagoon, the Curonian Lagoon.

Looking at this photograph makes me a bit nostalgic—and I recommend Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday for further reading.

Enjoy, if you will.