bilingual East Prussians

A few things I learned from

Paradiesstraße
by Ulla Lachauer
3rd ed. 2001

This book I discovered randomly at Oxfam recounts the memories of the farmer Lena Grigoleit (1910-1995) from Bittehnen on the river Memel, which was part of East Prussia when she was born, then of Lithuania, then Soviet Union, now Lithuania again. Lachauer discovered her as the only surviving resident of the village from East Prussian time – and also a very enthusiastic story teller, so this is how this remarkable book came into being.

I bought it mainly because I know far too little about East Prussia (birthplace of my dad and half my grandparents-in-law), so I thought every little helps. Luckily, there wasn’t too much about agriculture and quite a lot about the fascinating bilingual / bicultural situation of the area known as Preußisch-Litauen or Lithuania Minor. So here’s what I learned about that (if you look it up on German Wikipedia, you’ll find Lachauer’s book cited as a source too):

We’re talking roughly about the northern third of East Prussia as it was before 1918 – of which the bit beyond the river Memel (including Bittehnen) was cut off after the Versailles Treaty. So that area always had a mix of Lithuanian and Prussian population, with the farming villages typically being more Lithuanian and the towns more Prussian.

Map of northern parts of East Prussia showing the spread of Lithuanian culture. The area shown in the deeper shade of green on the right bank of the river Memel, represents the highest proportion of Lithuanian speakers. It is nearly identical with the area that was cut off from East Prussia in the Versailles Treaty and put under French administration, then annexed by Lithuania. The dashed line marks the limits of the southernmost church districts using Lithuanian in their services. Alternatively, the outline of the district of Gumbinnen can be used as a definition of Prussian Lithuania. The area south of the Memel roughly to the bottom edge of the map is today in the Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. Map from Wikipedia.

A noteworthy detail for family history is that the area was depopulated by a plague epidemic in 1709-10 and then systematically resettled with people from western Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, with the Prussian offer of freedom of religion being a pull factor. Many came from Lithuania too, gaining their freedom from tsarist serfdom in the process. Note also that the Prussian Lithuanians were protestants, whereas those living under Russian rule and today in independent Lithuania are typically catholics. This cultural divide meant that Prussian Lithuanians, while keeping their separate cultural identity, were happy to support the German Empire and didn’t generally strive to reunite with the Lithuanians on the Russian side.

In the rural environment, Lithuanians were free to keep their language and cultural traditions, and the church services were typically held in Lithuanian too. As the towns were speaking German, and industrialisation happened far west in the Ruhr area, any move away from the farm would require speaking German. After 1871 the newly formed empire raised the pressure on adaptation a bit, and the Lithuanians wrote very polite petitions asking if they could please keep a little bit of school tuition in their language, but it all stayed very civilised and the culture only declined very gradually, in line with the shift from rural to urban life.

In 1910, the year Lena Grigoleit was born, the last census recorded around 100,000 East Prussians naming Lithuanian as their first language. After that, the peaceful and remote life of Lithuania Minor went through the shredder of 20th century history, and nothing survived – apart from the one person who, miraculously, was still around in 1990 to tell her story.

Some links to the relevant East Prussian inlaws previously mentioned in the Every picture series, they all lived near the southern border of the Prussian Lithuanian zone shown in the map:

1:14 a patchwork family in East Prussia (this family is most closely linked to the Lithuanian theme as the mother's maiden name was Domscheit, which is a Lithuanian name, but sadly we don't know anything about her language and culture background)

1:15 the missing grandmother Auguste Adschuk

1:25 Auguste at the bottom of the steps in Allenburg (a different Auguste this time)

1:26 a forester's family

1:33 a lost generation

2:19 patchwork portraits

by contrast, my ancestors only spent a decade in East Prussia, you can catch glimpses of this story in my entry about Königsberg in the Lost Cities series. Other places relevant to this story are Zinten (Kr. Heiligenbeil, now Kaliningrad Oblast) and Bischofsburg (Kr. Rößel, now Poland), neither of which is near Prussian Lithuania.