Loss, absence and nostalgia: these are well-trodden themes in the expansive literature on Königsberg/Kaliningrad, one of the more enigmatic cities in the cultural memory of post-war Europe. In his new book, Kaliningrad and Cultural Memory: Cold War and Post-Soviet Representations of a Resettled City, Edward Saunders adds to this corpus with a study that interrogates how Kaliningrad's past has been reflected in literary and visual works since 1945. Drawing richly on theories of memory and nostalgia, Saunders poses as his overarching research question: ‘What is the significance of Kaliningrad as a site of cultural memory?’ (p. 4). But, in some ways, the question reveals itself as deceptive. For, as the author repeatedly suggests throughout the course of his analysis, it is difficult to speak of these subjects in the singular. Rather, one must acknowledge a multiplicity of significances and overlapping ‘sites’ of memory. Indeed, from reading this study, one gets the sense that it is meaningless to speak simply of ‘Kaliningrad’, but must instead refer to many ‘Kaliningrads’.

The book broadly follows a chronological structure. In Part 1, titled ‘Resettled city: Königsberg/Kaliningrad as a memory site’, Saunders fixes his attention on the fractured ‘collective-autobiographical memory’ of the post-war city, drawing some intriguing juxtapositions between official forms of memorialization and commemoration in the newly named Kaliningrad (including a short-lived Soviet plan to musealize the ruined city à la Oradour-sur-Glane) and the ways that Königsberg's expelled former German population, now predominantly living in West Germany, navigated the loss of their city in their own memory discourses. Acknowledging this loss, Saunders expertly shows, was a remarkably difficult process. Even long after 1945, Königsberg was not a peripheral city in the imagined community of the German nation, but continued to retain its centrality as a site of intellectual, cultural and dynastic significance. This was manifested at all levels of private, collective and national memory. In 1964, for instance, Hannah Arendt could still reflect: ‘In my way of thinking and judging, I still come from Königsberg. Sometimes I hide it from myself. But that's how it is’ (p. 38). For many Germans, adjusting to the new, restricted borders of post-war Europe also meant acknowledging ‘the loss of part of the nation's symbolic geography’ (p. 4). For some time, Germany's imagined geography was far from coterminous with its physical borders.

Part 2, ‘Literary allegories of the philosophical canon’, is markedly narrower in its thematic focus. It concerns the legend of Immanuel Kant – Königsberg's most famous son – as a trope in Cold War-era literature. Central to this part of Saunders’ analysis is the notion of ‘biographical tourism’, stimulated by the cult of Kant that began to emerge immediately after the philosopher's death in the early nineteenth century. In the post-war context, Saunders analyses the ‘Kant myth’ in the works of Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Bernhard, Frédéric Pagès and Johannes Bobrowski. Sometimes, Saunders argues, these variations or subversions of the ‘Kant and Königsberg’ trope can be interpreted as statements on the ineffability of place memory. They critique the very ‘process of finding stories of collected/collective memory’ (p. 261) that drives the perpetuation of the Kant ‘biomyth’ even despite the absence of the city that traditionally framed it.

Part 3, ‘Intertextual memory’, is perhaps the most original section of Saunders’ study. Here, the author concentrates on the ‘psychogeography’ of Kaliningrad through literary works including the poems of the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, and the photography of Joachim Koester and Norbert Wiesneth. Each of these artists visited Kaliningrad in person, and Saunders’ purpose here is to demonstrate how their aesthetic representations of their Kaliningrad experiences cleverly subverted certain prevailing narratives. It is in this part of the study that he is best able to demonstrate the depth of contestation to which Kaliningrad's ‘historical symbolism’ has been subjected since 1945 (p. 265).

The overall picture produced by Kaliningrad and Cultural Memory is of a fractured and diffuse cultural memory, in which processes of imagination and creation fluidly intersect. However, readers searching for a comprehensive study of Königsberg's post-war transfiguration into Kaliningrad would not be advised to start here. Saunders has managed to muster a truly impressive wealth of sources, but only rarely do they seem to be in a sustained thematic dialogue with one another. The result is an intriguing analysis of the subjectivities of cultural memory in this most complex of places, but one that reads better in fragments than as a cohesive whole.