Baltic Blues. And Other Colours.

A friend phones me and leaves messages and phones again, it all seems rather urgent, he is reading Baltic Souls by Jan Brokken, it is harrowing he says, he has been in tears, and – knowing I collect books about the Baltic – recommends it. I think he wants to share the experience with a fellow Balt. 

The Baltic Sea is a youngish body of water – paleoceanographer Dr Robert Spielhagen calls it a Geological Toddler – formed only 14,000 to 12,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. First it was a large glacial meltwater lake. Around 6,500 BC it began to drain westwards. Now it is a brackish sea fringed by Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany, and through the Danish Straits and the Kiel Canal it is connected to the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

A young body of water over old rocks. A flat sea floor. The Baltic is very much an above-and-below sort of place. A contiguity – or call it a sympathy – of land and water. Needle trees in the north and east, deciduous in the south. Amber forming 50 million years ago from the resin of conifers that once stood in mixed forest and became submerged. Black to brown to yellow to white nuggets, some with inclusions, still wash onto beaches. In mythologies they symbolise tears and memory. It’s said that as jewellery, amber takes on the soul of its owner.

There are lakes and islands and post-glacial rebound: new islands keep appearing. Last year a headline announced that Estonia had shrunk by 4 square kilometres but gained 95 new islands. Bornholm, belonging to Denmark, is one of the larger and older ones. Unearthings of arrowheads made of flint, axe heads made of elk antler, mean it was already settled around 9,000-8,000 BCE. Because it sits on a major tectonic zone, the Fennoscandian Border, it has spectacular granite cliffs in the north and meadowy flatlands in the south.

The marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson called the Baltic ‘a sea of complex and wonderful hydrography’. Geographically and historically, it is a much-studied and debated region. While the definition of the Baltic, and Baltic space, has varied, depending on the power-play of countries trying to control it, what is paramount – at a time when the freedom of some Baltic countries is once again threatened – is its potential for environmental and political collaboration, for unity.

In its oral histories – the Baltic, Finnic, and West Slavic legends and folk-songs that have been passed down – there is evidence that the earliest inhabitants were already recording some of the most ancient and cataclysmic events: the sea apparently rising or falling, fireballs streaking across the night sky, islands emerging, lakes wandering, foreshores shifting, and the mysterious disappearances and reappearances of herring shoals. From their various vantage points, in their different languages, Baltic peoples have always been singing their land and sea. Coastal and underwater archaeology looks at shipwrecks, middens and other debris, to reveal maritime activities, including the twelfth- to thirteenth-century routes of Teutonic crusaders – invaders arriving to subjugate and convert (Germanise, Christianise) the Baltic’s defiantly pagan tribes, of which the Pruzzen – indigenous Balts, also called Old Prussians – from an area that later became East Prussia, were the last stronghold against colonisation. Even after they were vanquished, they kept their language alive for another 500 years, until the early eighteenth century. It is now extinct.

There are many books about the Baltic, but good ones in English are rare. On my shelf I see Paul Scraton’s Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic Coast (2017). It is leisurely and learned. Sebaldian without the hangups. Like all the best travel writers, Scraton is a happy walker. Bad weather doesn’t seem to bother him. He observes nature and built environments – including Soviet-era architecture – as attentively as the people he meets along the way. He often stops for a beer. On the high cliffs near Sellin on the island of Rügen, he pays homage to the beech trees, which ‘tell the story of the German lands before people began to interfere and shape the landscape to their own needs’. Walking in a forest reminds him of the artist Caspar David Friedrich’s soldier who ‘stands alone ... attempting to make out movement or the blinking of an eye in the gloomy shadows’. Soldiers and watchfulness – brought to the point of pathological surveillance in the Soviet era – play an important part in this region’s history. And while Scraton mentions well-known seashore enthusiasts like Heinrich Mann and Thomas Mann, he also focuses on his own partner’s childhood in the GDR. He makes us aware of the lives of ordinary people. And is interested in those who stayed and those who didn’t, like Peter Döbler, a young doctor from Rostock who in 1971 swam forty-eight kilometres for twenty-four hours across the Baltic, between Kühlungsborn in the GDR and the island of Fehmarn in West Germany. Tapping into a wealth of untold Baltic narratives, Scraton notes that ‘if there were ghosts on this shore ... it was because we had brought them with us’. Some of those ghosts we know already, while others – they may even be kinfolk – await discovery. Their histories explain the new complexities we now face.

Complexities like the fact that Russia’s vagabondish shadow fleet – suspected of sabotage and espionage – has been lurking off the coast of the strategically situated Swedish island of Gotland. The Russian President is thought to have his eyes on this place, much as he had his eyes on Ukraine, before invading. He has openly declared his wish to reclaim the Baltic countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Russians still own properties there, including two buildings on Riga’s famous Alberta Street, cheek by jowl with the extraordinary apartment blocks designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, who is one of the Baltic souls of Brokken’s book. Of course the Russian President’s personal real estate is wrapped in secrecy; to reveal it leads to imprisonment in Siberia, or worse. But like Khrushchev and Brezhnev before him, it’s thought Putin has a fancy residence at Jūrmala in Latvia, on the so-called Baltic Riviera. Nor is Poland far from his sights. Those Baltic countries – now members of the EU and NATO – are on the alert. Already plagued by pro-Russian vandalism and hybrid warfare, by nuclear posturing and other forms of coercion, Baltic countries have increased their defence budgets, expanded their armed forces, fortified their borders, and disconnected from the Russian power grid, in preparation for the possibility (some say probability) of a war between Russia and NATO.

Next to Scraton on the bookshelf is Max Egremont’s magnificent Forgotten Land: Journeys among the Ghosts of East Prussia (2011), rich with history, curiosity, and emotion. At one point he describes a visit by the French writer Michel Tournier, whose prize-winning novel The Erl-King (1972) had been set in wartime East Prussia. Tournier was accompanying his friend, the surgeon and writer Hans von Lehndorff, who once lived and worked there and wrote East Prussian Diary (1963), considered one of the most moving war books of our time. Egremont points out that ‘Tournier had never been to the place he’d written about. Expecting a grim landscape, he found, in what were now Polish lands, a bright place of lakes and forests, full of young people on holiday’. But Lehndorff’s experience was very different; it was his first return ‘home’ since the war, and Tournier ‘watched with immense sympathy his friend’s confusion among the ruined houses and unrecognizable gardens of his childhood, the vanished trees and paths and the overgrown graves’.

Egremont’s more recent book The Glass Wall: Lives on the Baltic Frontier (2021) sits alongside Peter Unwin’s Baltic Approaches (1996), and (some in translation, some not) the work of Johannes Bobrowski, Theodor Fontane, Uwe Johnson, Andreas Kossert, Siegfried Lenz, Hans-Jürgen Liedtke, Arno Surminski. There’s Hansjörg Küster’s Die Ostsee: Eine Natur- und Kulturgeschichte (2002). And a gorgeous art book titled Baltic Light. And John Noble’s Baltic States and Kaliningrad (1994), a Lonely Planet Guide that has already taken on the charm of an old Baedeker. There’s a print-out about the world’s first bird observatory at Rositten (now Rybachy). Another of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), with passages I’ve highlighted to foreground her interest in nature. Wollstonecraft wrote, ‘I was unwilling to leave Gothenburg without visiting Trolhættæ. I wished not only to see the cascade, but to observe the progress of the stupendous attempt to form a canal through the rocks’. There are maps. Picture books. There’s a cookbook with dishes my grandmother used to make: herring with sour cream, summer cherry soup with sago, and Beetenbartsch, borscht. Books about wars, deportations, evacuations, deaths, atrocities, and their aftermaths. Lately my reading has been guided by The Baltic Sea Library, an online and multi-lingual treasure trove of texts. I’m not an expert in the field, nor sentimental, just very curious about a region my ancestors inhabited from east to west.

Also on the shelf are small pieces of flint I’ve collected on the Baltic coast. They are fossilised parts of cephalopods. Known as Hühnergötter – adder stones, hag stones, witch stones – people used them as tools and amulets and to make fire. Age 358-70 million years.

It is usually said the Baltic sea has no colour of its own. It mirrors its environment: a glassy green, a spectrum of grey, and rarely, memorably, on sunny days in summer the sea turns blue.

On my friend’s advice, I buy Baltic Souls, with its stunning cover image by the Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus. It shows a woman leaning precariously from a balcony, her body at ninety degrees, her head turned away from us. She stretches as far as she can, to catch a glimpse of something at the far end of a winding street. Titled ‘Marathon in University Street’ it is a visual expression of something invisible: the present moment, perhaps, as it passes into time. An endorsement describes the book as a gem in its genre. What genre is that? A skilful blend, I’m guessing, of travel, memoir, history, biogeography, and collective biography, not easy to classify.

I’m a little troubled by the word souls in the title. It is an old-fashioned term, hardly used these days. In this book, what is it supposed to mean, mortal or immortal souls, companionable (Kantian), phenomenological (Hegelian) or argumentative (Nietzschean) souls? Or am I unnecessarily distracted by this wafty word, is it simply interchangeable with ghosts, as in Scraton’s and Egremont’s titles, or with shadows, as in Bobrowski’s Shadow Lands? I ask my friend what he thinks. You’ll see when you read it, he replies.

Three epigraphs signpost the way. The first is about sons judging their fathers, the second about the importance of personalising impersonal histories, and the third is the well-known proverb, that it is a curse to live in interesting times, which Hannah Arendt, caught up in her own tumultuous era, liked to quote. Now, applied to a time closer to ours, the proverb illuminates that extraordinary moment in the early 1990s when the Berlin Wall had come down, history had cracked open the scabrous shell of Soviet dominance, and Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia emerged to reinherit their independence.

The proverb’s wryness is also a good example of Arendt’s own intelligent sense of humour. She liked to laugh. Humour was one of her favourite strategies for critical thinking. She would demonstrate – to friends, to students – ways in which laughter questions, unsettles, lightens, liberates, how it is the opposite of repression.

Baltic Souls is made up of fifteen stories of repression and liberation, each following a life or set of lives begun, or played out, in these south-eastern countries of the Baltic Sea: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and one non-country, their bedraggled orphan-cousin, unhappily called Kaliningrad Oblast. Unhappily, because Russian had never been its language nor its culture, and now it finds itself named for Mikhail Kalinin, one of Joseph Stalin’s most obsequious puppets.

It was once Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, the German province partitioned at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, its southern half apportioned to Poland, its northern half to the Soviet Union. Later, during the USSR’s period of de-Stalinization – when slates were wiped clean, and names were changed, Stalingrad (for example) becoming Volgograd – at that moment Kaliningrad could also have been given a new name, but it was overlooked. And when the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and the three Baltic states became independent, Kaliningrad Oblast was again left behind. Positioned on the Baltic Sea, often described as wedged, sandwiched, nestled, or perched between Lithuania and Poland, it is now a Russian exclave hundreds of miles west of the so-called motherland. Moves for it to become independent have been quashed. The occupation continues, because this smidgen of a place (larger than Montenegro, smaller than Kuwait) provides Russia with a westernmost territory, therefore a convenient outpost and (at Baltiysk, formerly Pillau) its only ice-free harbour. Headquarters for the Russian Navy’s Baltic Fleet, it is also an arsenal for a large number of nuclear warheads and other weaponry. The Lonely Planet Guide from the 90s, when Kaliningrad was cautiously opening up to the lure of tourism, describes it as ‘a far from lovely city’ where ‘the traffic fumes are thick, and the Pregolya River flowing through the city’s heart is black as pitch and really stinks’.

Kaliningrad was flushing more wastewater and all kinds of industrial effluent into the sea, than any other Baltic community. Now – like St Petersburg, another major polluter – the Oblast at least has a new sewerage system and wastewater treatment plant. And a pulp and paper mill, once responsible for toxic chemical contamination, has stopped operation. In 2019 those former pollution sites were taken off the list of hot spots by HELCOM (the Helsinki Convention first held in 1974, also known as the Baltic Marine Environmental Protection Commission). Beyond Kaliningrad and the touristy coast, the Oblast is a shrouded place of military bases, small towns, long-abandoned villages and fallow farms. On the bright side, a region once described as a fearsome wilderness by conquering Teutonic knights is now rewilding. In increasing numbers, wolves, bears, boar, deer, elk, lynx, even bison roam the large and ancient Romincka forest and heath, which stretches between Poland, Kaliningrad and Lithuania. However, the forest is close to the Suwalki Corridor – dubbed ‘the tiny bit of Europe with big implications’ (World Economic Forum), and ‘NATO’s worst nightmare’ (Daily Express) – where Russia wants to build a land bridge to connect its ally Belarus with Kaliningrad, for easy access.

The Oblast’s abundant water bodies – groundwater, marshlands, streams, lagoons, lakes, ponds (especially ponds, used as dumps) – and seashores continue to be at risk of fouling, including (as elsewhere in the world) from agricultural and industrial waste, oil, dodgy landfill practices, plastics, microplastics, and radioactive waste. And in the Baltic Sea itself, there are still tens of thousands of unswept mines.

Globally, colonisation, conflict and migrations have given rise to a new interest in borders – natural and unnatural – their connotations, their shape-shiftings, crossings, dangers and alternatives. Thinking beyond borders, some communities are concentrating on the ecoregions they have in common – such as rivers and overlapping catchment areas – and under the auspices of HELCOM and similar organisations, are joining forces to protect their combined natural and cultural resources.

But if until recently the Baltic was becoming a key place for regional environmental cooperation, this was turned around by Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 and its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Russian war against Ukraine has been causing such severe environmental destruction that it amounts to ecocide: widespread transborder damage to nature which will be difficult or impossible to reverse. The Baltic Sea is one of the world’s busiest waters, with more than 2,000 vessels crossing it in all directions every day. Lately it has been plagued by acts of hybrid warfare. Russia’s rusty, uninsured, sanctions-evading shadow-fleet is an environmental hazard, threatening the sea with oil spills and wreckage, as well as being engaged in outright violations, including GPS jamming and AIS spoofing. This grey-zone aggression endangers both maritime and aviation safety in the area, it slows EU and global trade, and it jeopardises Baltic tourism. As I write – early 2025 – Baltic countries and NATO are investigating the serious damage to an undersea fibre optic cable between Latvia and Sweden. Previously, a Russian oil tanker was suspected of dragging its anchor along the seabed and severing telecom cables and a power line that connects Finland and Estonia. A ship sailing under a Panamanian flag from Russia to Egypt experienced engine failure and for a long time blocked shipping lanes. A Chinese bulk carrier cut communications cables between Sweden and Lithuania, Finland and Germany. Caught in the act, the pirates play dumb, ‘oh ... the anchor must have dropped’, an unlikely scenario.

As our immediate attention is drawn to the war in Ukraine, the Kaliningrad Question seems less pressing. Despite its menace, the Oblast retains a degree of vagueness: it is often unidentified on maps, and not included in geopolitical discussions. It is the elephant in the Baltic room. And it would indeed be alarming if – Russian guns blazing – Kaliningrad suddenly appeared in the limelight.

It wasn’t always unlovely. Now we can only base our impressions on texts, photos and hearsay. Its avenues were lined with trees, its gardens full of flowers. A traveller viewing it from a tower saw a spectacle of colour reflected in its waterways. Of her childhood in Königsberg, the artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) wrote that she was very grateful to her parents for trusting her and her sister to explore the town on their own, its parks, winding streets with gabled houses, busy riversides and docklands. The family spent summers in Rauschen (now Svetlogorsk), when it was still a small fishing village on the Samland Peninsula north of Königsberg. In 1929 Thomas Mann was in Rauschen (the word suggests a lightly sweeping or whispering movement, of wind or sea, sand or forest) and he wondered if there could ever be a more seductively named destination for a summer vacation. He fell in love with this coastline and promptly had a house built about 70 kilometres north-east, just across the border in Lithuania, at Nidden (Nida) on the narrow Curonian Spit, with its gleaming beaches and pine and birch woods. 1929 was also the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The Mann family spent three blissful summers in Nidden, before their escape into exile in 1933. For Kollwitz, Königsberg and Rauschen were the places of her first artistic inspirations, where she watched people: mothers and children, old women and men, carters, dockhands, fishermen. Her biographer writes: ‘Their hard-worked bodies, their plain, ageless clothes, but most of all, their lined faces held a mysterious beauty for her. They possessed a grandness of presence, manner and movement that she had seen in no others and that she wanted to see again and again. They at once stimulated and satisfied her young aesthetic eye’.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) also made Königsberg and surrounding places his own by walking: to the university where he taught, and on the paths around the Schlossteich, and to the port to admire ships from around the globe, to watch the unloading of their cargo, salute their merchants, and now and then invite one of them to his lunchtime gatherings. He thought while he walked. Sometimes he went further afield, to Juditten, or further still, to a small cottage he loved at Moditten. There he wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) and according to local lore, after a good day’s work, he enjoyed a wine made of red and black currants, Kopskiekelwein, its name indicating that your face will hit the floor if you have too much of it. Given all its links with the world, Kant saw Königsberg as ‘a suitable place for broadening one’s knowledge ... In such a city, this knowledge can be acquired even without travelling’. Though the Baltic was close, it’s unlikely that Kant ever dipped his toes in its shallows.

Kant’s philosophical offspring, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975,) also spent her early years in Königsberg and on the Baltic, where both sets of grandparents had holiday homes; she stayed mostly at Neukuhren, just east of Rauschen. I imagine that one day she jumped off the end of the pier, and started to swim. Because throughout her life, in many places, she swam whenever the opportunity arose, telling the psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers that swimming always reminded her of home. The philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, in recommending Arendt’s biography of the German-Jewish writer Rahel Varnhagen to Gershom Sholem, said her book ‘swims with powerful strokes against the current of edifying and apologetic Judaic studies.’

Jaspers and Benjamin were her friends. Jaspers she admired as someone for whom truth and communication were one and the same thing, and that he believed more in beginnings than endings. Benjamin she admired for his poetic vision, his sense of wonder, and that for him ‘the smaller the object, the more likely it seemed that it could contain in the most concentrated form everything else’. Before his tragic death Benjamin entrusted Arendt with manuscripts she would later edit, for the collection titled Illuminations. Friendship was a significant part of her philosophy and self-understanding. In her PhD thesis on Love and St Augustine (with Jaspers as her supervisor), she identified friendship as the highest form of love, because (manifesting as compassion, solidarity, loyalty, neighbourliness, and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you), friendship encompassed and surpassed all other forms of love, from the personal to the spiritual. And in this regard, Arendt thought of Rahel Varnhagen as her best friend, irrespective of the fact that they lived in different times, with Varnhagen born in 1771 and Arendt in 1906. In many ways her biography of Varnhagen was also an autobiography.

Some years ago at Neukuhren (now Pionersky) Putin began building a maritime complex, with passenger terminals for the lucrative Baltic cruise industry. The website for Norwegian Cruise Lines still invites us to ‘enjoy strolling along Pionersky’s extensive waterfront for sweeping views of the sea [and] shopping for amber jewellery’. I asked them if this destination is available. They replied, ‘Unfortunately we do not have any sailings visiting Pionersky, Russia at this time. The location is still available on our website as this used to be a port of call we would offer for certain sailings, and we hope to be able to include it again in future’.

With all of that in mind – my miscellaneous knowledge of the Baltic, and my specific interest in the Kaliningrad region, where some of my forebears lived – I began to read Baltic Souls. Jan Brokken is a very good storyteller. He has an eye for detail, and his adventures and probings hold the reader’s attention. The son of a Dutch theologian, he was born in 1947 in Leiden and grew up in the village of Rhoon, near Rotterdam. His novels, literary non-fiction and travel writing have been translated into many languages. They include The Reprisal (set during WW2 in Rhoon), The Cossack Garden (about the friendship between Alexander von Wrangel and Fyodor Dostoevsky), and The Just (about a Dutch diplomat in Lithuania who saved thousands of Jews by providing them with visas for the Dutch island of Curaçao). He has written about West Africa, China and Russia. And about Indonesia, where his parents and brothers lived and were incarcerated for over three years during the Japanese occupation. In an interview he explained that they never recovered from those experiences, that his father’s heart remained in Indonesia, and that he (the author, born later) was ‘marked by a war in which I had not participated’. Nor had Jan Brokken participated in Dutch colonialism, which precipitated Indonesia’s fight for independence. In Baltic Souls we find many echoes of Brokken’s predicament – of familial grief, and history revealing itself generationally – in his heartfelt biographies of others.

Between 1999 and 2010 Brokken travelled in the Baltic region, a ‘corner of Europe [that is] thick with shadows’. He coaxes some of those shadows into the light and introduces us to a motley crew: a family of booksellers, a famous architect father and his even more famous film-maker son, the violinist Gidon Kremer, the composer Arvo Pärt, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, the artist Mark Rothko, a novelist, a spy, some sailors, and a handful of aristocrats, among others. His style is more documentary than writerly; there are few literary affectations. There’s a sense that these are stories Brokken is compelled to tell. It brings to mind Benjamin’s observation: ‘More and more often there is embarrassment all around when we wish to hear a story expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences’. Within the context of recent Baltic history, Brokken builds each subject’s circumstances to points of great intensity, which (as I’d been warned) did indeed become harrowing. The book is best read one story at a time.

His chapter on ‘The Bookseller of Riga’ gives us Jānis Roze, born in 1878 when Latvia was part of the Russian Empire. He learned the publishing and book selling trade as an apprentice in a provincial town. When his employer was killed during the 1905 uprising against the czar and the czarist reprisals, Roze (arrested, awaiting execution, and released) moved to Riga and started his own publishing house. In the winter of 2007, over coffee and cake, Brokken meets Roze’s grandson, who shares his family stories: of Lenin granting independence to the Baltic countries, Latvia becoming a Republic in 1918, the joy of Latvians’ claiming their national identity, an economic and cultural revival, even inspiring Roze to start a literary magazine. The euphoria was short-lived. In 1939 Stalin and Hitler agreed that Baltic countries would be returned to the Soviet Union. Soviet forces invaded Latvia in 1940, rounded up opponents, and deported 100,000 Latvians. Another bookseller, Jānis Rapa, tore a map of Latvia from a map of Europe, and killed himself, clutching the scrap in his hand. In 1941 Roze, his wife and daughter were arrested as class enemies. His sons and other family members managed to escape. At the station where Roze was separated from his wife and daughter, an old carriage now stands as a memorial. The Nazis arrived and Latvian men were conscripted to fight against the Red Army. Most of Riga’s Jewish population was murdered. And a year later Roze died in a forced labour camp at Solikamsk in Siberia, from starvation and exhaustion. For six years his wife and daughter were in a different penal colony, in the Arctic Circle. The daughter was released in 1947, she was ill and her mother escaped to take care of her. They struggled for four weeks to reach Riga, where the mother had to go into hiding from authorities until 1958, when Khrushchev denounced Stalinist repression. Brokken also tells the story of Ināra Belinkaja, who was eighteen when she began work at Bookshop Number Three (formerly Roze’s) in 1962. She found boxes of old papers and photos, and lobbied for the shop to be named after its founder. One day she was visited by Jānis’ daughter, who introduced her to other members of the family; in November 1988 they were present at the emotional unveiling of a bronze bust of Jānis Roze. Nine months later on 23 August 1989 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians formed a human chain stretching 650 kilometres from Talinn to Vilnius. Lavia, Lithuania and Estonia officially regained their independence in 1991. Today Jānis Roze and Sons is one of Latvia’s leading bookshops, with 35 stores across the country. Ināra Belinkaja and Jānis’ grandson Ainars Roze are still at the helm. The story ends precariously, with Ainars’ son (Jānis III) anxious about introducing his father to his Russian girlfriend, and Ainars summoning the grace to put the family’s memory of traumas aside, for the sake of his son’s future happiness.

In ‘The Architect’s Shoes: Eisenstein vs Eisenstein’, Brokken begins with Mikhail Eisenstein, the architect of several eccentric apartment complexes built between 1901 and 1906 in Riga. Born Moisey Eisenstein in 1867 in Bila Tserkva, a Ukrainian town with a large Jewish population, he studied engineering in St Petersburg, converted to Russian Orthodoxy and married a wealthy woman. The couple moved to Riga and established a cultured household of books, music, and hospitality. He was a jovial fellow, bombastic, admired Napoleon, played tennis, enjoyed horse riding. Summers were spent in a grand house on the coast. He owned 40 pairs of patent-leather shoes and kept a register for their different occasions.

Mikhail Eisenstein is sometimes called the Gaudi of Latvia. His yellow, pink, blue, and turquoise buildings were influenced by Art Nouveau and the Secession designs of Otto Wagner. Their most striking feature is an excess of ornamentation: nymphs, mermaids, sphinxes, dragons, peacocks, eagles, lions and giant heads, all vying for the passer-by’s attention. But on the cusp of widespread social upheaval, it was a style that could not last. And perhaps its demise was accelerated by Adolf Loos’s essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ in 1908, which accuses anyone fond of unnecessary ornamentation of being unmodern – that was the crime. Modernisms were advancing; there was no turning back. Regrettably, the plans of Eisenstein’s buildings were all the same: stairs and kitchens for domestic staff at the back, showy living rooms at the front. Brokken comments that ‘this layout alone gave Eisenstein Jr enough reason to despise his father’ for his snobbery.

Mikhail’s son Sergei was born in 1898. An only child, precocious, he had no trouble learning English, German, French and Russian. He was desperately unhappy about his father, who (in his view) was much too busy designing awful buildings. Although Mikhail sometimes took his son to the circus, opera, or theatre, he was domineering, and in public Sergei was embarrassed by his father’s pomposity. From his window in Riga, when he was seven, Sergei witnessed the uproar and violence of the workers’ revolt. It excited him. When his parents’ marriage ended, he was devastated. Like his father, he later studied engineering in St Petersburg, and also showed talent as a designer, which he applied to stage design and montage. When Sergei Eisenstein found himself in the middle of the Revolution, because of his own rebellion against his father he felt he had a special affinity with this great moment in history.

In 1920 Mikhail died in exile in Berlin. Sergei, who believed the Revolution had made him an artist, became one of the twentieth century’s most important film-makers. Despite their opposition, father and son were very much alike. Both had a strong visual style. Both were embellishers. The pathos of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) is not unlike the melodrama presented across the surfaces of his father’s buildings. Biographers and film critics have found rich strata of autobiography in Sergei Eisenstein’s work, including a preserved state of childishness. In the end he lived in Moscow with his mother and his Latvian nanny. But Stalin, the father figure he had to impress, mistrusted him and censored his work. After Eisenstein’s death in 1948, Stalin (not aesthetically gifted) derided him as an avant-gardist, a bourgeois, a Jew, and a traitor.

At the start of the twentieth century, half the population of Baltic cities was Jewish. Arendt said that like all Jewish children she experienced anti-Semitism, but she was not poisoned by it, because her mother ‘insisted that I not humble myself’. If teachers made anti-Semitic remarks, her mother told her ‘to stand up immediately, leave the class, go home’ and let the school deal with the situation. ‘I had a day off from school, and that was, of course, very nice’. If the slur came from another child, she had to face up to it, then and there. She grew up politically astute, but her heightened awareness of history – her premonition of what was to come, foreshadowed by the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht – took its toll on her health. There was a time when she was fearful and never wanted to leave Königsberg.

In ‘Hannah Arendt’s City’, Brokken laments all that was destroyed in Königsberg during the RAF bombings of August 1944 and the Soviet shellings and German defence of April 1945: entire districts were erased, including the historic centre, the fourteenth-century cathedral, most churches, the university founded in the sixteenth century, the warehouses which gave Königsberg its Hanseatic atmosphere – such as the warehouse where Arendt’s grandfather Jacob Cohn stored the tea he imported from Russia – and the house on Tiergartenstrasse where Arendt’s family lived. The city was emptied of much more than its beloved buildings. It was entirely emptied of its people. If they could, the Lithuanians returned to Lithuania, Poles to Poland. Due to increasing anti-Semitism and violence, a large part of the Jewish community had left Königsberg in the 1920s and 30s. In 1938, during Kristallnacht, the city’s Jewish sites, its synagogues, cemeteries, schools, orphanages, homes and businesses, were vandalised or burned and as soon as possible, people fled, including Arendt’s mother. Of the Jews who stayed, few survived what followed: deprivation, forced labour, murder. Nor did others survive the ravages of war and dangers of evacuation. In early 1945, the sinking of MV Wilhelm Gustloff killed 9,400 evacuees in the deadliest marine disaster of all time. Anyone who remained was expelled by the Soviets.

After the war, the Oblast was resettled with groups from Central Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, and later Lithuanians, and ethnic Germans from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Brokken writes, ‘The merchant city was transformed into a hermetically sealed Soviet garrison town, and by the century’s end it had become a mob town, as lawless as Al Capone’s Chicago’. Not only crime, but also poverty and disease were rife. The best-known landmark of the post-war years was a monumental ruin called House of Soviets, or The Monster. It had been built near the old site of the thirteenth-century castle, and – on unstable foundations – it was left unfinished for decades. Considered one of the ugliest buildings in the world, it has recently been demolished.

Arendt had left Königsberg to pursue her studies. She had an affair with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and lived in Berlin, Marburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg, where her doctorate was conferred in 1929; that year she married the philosopher and journalist Günther (Stern) Anders. She became a political activist, and went into exile, first to France, then to America, where she arrived in 1941 with her second husband, the historian and philosopher Heinrich Blücher, and her mother. She taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Chicago and other universities, and was Professor of Political Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York City. Her works include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Rahel Varnhagen – The Life of a Jewess (1957), The Human Condition (1958), and most controversially (coining the phrase ‘banality of evil’) Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). In an interview in 1964 she said, ‘In the way I think and form judgements, I’m still from Königsberg’. She died in New York in 1975. The Life of the Mind was her last work, incomplete at the time of her death and published posthumously in 1978.

When Brokken visited Kaliningrad in 2009, he noticed signs of change – the restoration of Kant’s tomb, and of the Cathedral – and he left ‘with the impression that this was a city in waiting, impatient for a new purpose, a new future, and a new name ... the door appeared to be opening, if only a chink’.

For a few years it did begin to open up to tourism and trade, and even to Kaliningraders doing their weekly shopping in Poland. Now the Oblast is again difficult to enter. Online there are chats on how to get in – by air, train, bus, car, water, bike – advising that you need an invitation which is hard to obtain, as well as a visa. There are reports of odd bureaucratic twists: like not being allowed to exit in the same way you entered. This seems apt, for a city famous in its former life for the eighteenth-century mathematician Leonhard Euler’s Seven Bridges puzzle. Once seven bridges over the Pregel river connected islands and the mainland and Euler wondered – in theory, not in situ; he was never in Königsberg – if it was possible to complete a circuit by crossing each bridge only once. He concluded that ‘after we have determined that a route actually exists, we are left with the question how to find it’.

Perhaps the problem has been solved by the fact that now there are only five bridges and two of them are new. Given the current risk of military activity, terrorism, and arbitrary detention, many governments warn against traveling to any part of Russia, including Kaliningrad. Occasionally a lone cyclist reports a pleasant and problem-free holiday. Online someone (perhaps a stooge) writes a review, saying he’d been there and it’s a place everyone should visit it has a lot of history and probably gets overlooked though it shouldnt. Marzipan along with centuries old bridge.

Poland now makes a point of calling the city Królewiec (its old Polish name), Lithuania calls it Karaliaučius, and Latvia and Estonia favour Königsberg. The Kremlin sees these as hostile acts. Repeated calls for the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Oblast, and for Kaliningrad/Königsberg to be placed under EU jurisdiction have gone unheeded and its attempts to achieve sovereignty have failed. In limbo, it now stands as an example of what must not be allowed to happen to Ukraine.

The friend who urged me to read Baltic Souls is the Latvian-Australian artist Imants Tillers. In his essay collection Credo, he recounts his parents’ post-war arrival in Australia as displaced persons – ‘penniless but grateful after the tribulations of wartime to start a new and better life’. Initially, to repay their passage, his father was a labourer for the Water Board, his mother a live-in domestic. His father then studied, while working as a draughtsman, and became a mechanical engineer, hoping his Australian-born children would choose similarly reliable professions. Tillers writes, ‘Although Latvian was my first language and English my second, being of Latvian descent in Australia was of such little consequence that I did not register I was bilingual until I was in my twenties’. When he made his own first trip to Latvia in 1976, it was ‘a country I thought I was already familiar with even though I had never been there before’, and it needs to be qualified, ‘that at the time Latvia as such did not exist. It was part of the Soviet Union and therefore did not appear differentiated in any way on world maps’. Tillers’ artworks speak of connections and displacements and global turbulence. Journeys to Nowhere. Poles of inaccessibility. Failed localities. Places like Liepāja (Liebau) where his mother was born. And because it was the nearest city to Karosta, a naval base for the Soviet submarine fleet, it was strictly forbidden to go there.

The phrase strictly forbidden has me remembering my own visit to Russia in 1970, when it was still the Soviet Union – flying Aeroflot from London to Moscow, a surprisingly short trip; thankful for the shiny red apple given to each passenger as a snack; an hour or so into the flight (over Kaliningrad), being ordered to lower the blinds and put away our cameras.

Tillers notes that Liepāja was also the port from which young Markus Rothkowitz left this homeland for America in 1913. He became Mark Rothko, one of the twentieth century’s foremost artists, but as Brokken says in ‘The Story of an Unknown Adventure’, Rothko always ‘felt like an outcast in America ... never able to forgive having been relocated (“transplantation” was the word he used) to a country where he never felt at home’. It has been suggested that Rothko’s luminous colour-field abstractions are inspired by the diffused Baltic light he remembered from his Latvian childhood – in the words of his biographer, ‘a light longed for but beyond reach’. At the end of his life, what Rothko most wished for was a one-man show in his hometown Dvinsk (now Daugavpils).

Baltic light is a phenomenon peculiar to the region, it gives the impression, mostly in summer, that daylight has been powdered and a delicately-warm blue has found its way into all other colours, into everything.

When I ask Tillers what, in Baltic Souls, affected him so deeply, he says, ‘well ... everything’ – the crushing weight of history, the individual stories, and especially the one called ‘The Will of the Father – Kremer vs Kremer’, featuring the Latvian (also Jewish, German and Swedish) violinist Gidon Kremer, about a tormented father tormenting his son. Gidon’s father was the violinist Markus Kremer, who was hidden under the floorboards of a shed by the mistress of a Nazi officer, and survived the Holocaust, to find that thirty-five members of his family, including his first wife and young daughter, had been killed. He married again and spent the rest of his life compulsively reading and talking about the Holocaust – he needed to know it all – and transferring his overwhelming pain and guilt to his son. Gidon Kremer tried to explain the burden of that legacy in his 1993 book Kindheitssplitter. The title is translated as Fragments of a Childhood, though Splitter also suggests splinter, the kind that is embedded and impossible to remove.

Brokken points out that Kremer and his friend, the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, had similar childhoods, or according to Baryshnikov, no childhood. And Brokken himself admits that ‘the war weighed just as heavily on my own father’s shoulders, cast just as much gloom over my childhood’. This in turn resonates with Tillers’ experience. His father, also called Imants Tillers (Eisenstein vs Eisenstein, Kremer vs Kremer, Tillers vs Tillers), had a deeply unhappy youth followed by the horrors of war, so that later he could never express his emotions, which puzzled and upset his son. Sometimes father and son played chess together, in silence, or went fishing. Where, I asked. ‘On Botany Bay in a tinny, very early before sunrise. I don’t remember catching any fish.’ His father wanted him to succeed in life – to excel (the migrant’s mantra) without drawing too much attention to himself – and was horrified by his son’s wish for the challenges of a rockier path.

The inability to express oneself – no longer knowing how to turn experiences into stories – Walter Benjamin notes, began with World War I. He paints a picture of war changing the world, changing all but the clouds, ‘and beneath these clouds, in a forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body’.

Tillers’ paintings are made up of modestly sized canvas boards. On each board, he puts down layers, and also cuts them back, achieving a dynamic, quakelike surface. ‘The first layer is the blue text around the perimeter of each work. Next is the white text, whatever that might be. Last comes the imagery. This usually inolves an under layer, then metallic paint, and lastly a wash of black gouache’. When the finished boards are placed together there is a play (or battle), of text, image, texture and colour. One of the persistent phrases that appear in his work is Nature Speaks.

Tillers is perpetually in dialogue, with himself, with the artworld, with the past. Another phrase, Reversible Destiny (borrowed from the artists Madeline Gins and Arakawa), appears in a number of his paintings, because ‘being incorporated into the Soviet Union for 50 years, Latvians always hoped for a miracle. For Reversible Destiny’.

Still unsure about the term ‘souls’, I contact Jan Brokken. He explains that in choosing his title he was thinking of Gogol’s Dead Souls and wanted to bring some of the dead souls of the Baltic back to life, but he also sees the term ‘more broadly, as a common destiny experienced by Baltic peoples over centuries of sorrow and oppression’.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol’s picaresque novel Dead Souls is a shaggy dog story: a circular debate about the meaning of souls, which was a term used synonymously with serfs, who could be bought and sold, dead or alive, in tsarist Russia. Though Gogol is often considered quintessentially Russian, it should be remembered that he was Ukrainian and played an important part in the revival of Ukraine’s national identity. His novel is a satirical hammering of Russian bureaucracy and corruption, greed and heartlessness.

The destructive forces of heartlessness were on Kant’s mind when he argued against ‘soulless despotism’ and stressed the urgent need for peace in his radical essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’. He warned that peace treaties are invalid if they are made in preparation for another war. That ‘no independent states, large or small, shall come under the dominion of another state’ in any way whatsoever. That existing armies ‘shall in time be totally abolished’. In 1795 he was writing as if he were writing now.

But perhaps the Swedish Nobel Prize laureate Tomas Tranströmer should have the last word, with these lines from his narrative poem ‘Baltics’: