Die Stadt im Westen. Wie Königsberg Kaliningrad wurde

Lecture by Dr. Per Brodersen, Berlin, at the Haus der Heimat des Landes Baden-Württemberg. In the accompanying program of the exhibition "Pictures of Königsberg - The Fall of a Metropolis".

After the end of the Second World War, Königsberg received a Soviet administrative and transport infrastructure, was given a new name, Soviet citizens were resettled and the remaining German population resettled. Kaliningrad - as Königsberg was now called - was given a history and a present that would accompany it from then on. Moscow's knowledge of the new region was incomplete, and the population doubted that Kaliningrad would have a Soviet future. The lecture traces how the regional leadership developed a special identity policy under these conditions in the post-war decades and sheds light on the further development of the city.

Dr. Per Brodersen studied history, political science and Russian in Berlin, Frankfurt/Oder and St. Petersburg. Initially working as a freelance journalist in St. Petersburg and Almaty, he researched the post-war history of Königsberg-Kaliningrad in Kaliningrad, Moscow and Washington and received his doctorate in Eastern European history from Heinrich Heine University in 2006. A revised version of his dissertation was published in 2008 under the title "Die Stadt im Westen. How Königsberg became Kaliningrad". After holding various positions in international science funding (ZEIT Foundation, Humboldt Foundation, Max Planck Society, DIW Berlin), Brodersen is now Managing Director of the German Agribusiness Alliance at the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations in Berlin.