Santykio su praeitimi bruožai Klaipėdos mieste XX–XXI a. sandūroje
Features of the Relationship with the Past in Klaipėda City at the Turn of the 20th – 21st Centuries

Summary/Abstract: The author of the article, applying the research methodology of public remembrance culture, goes deep into the orientations and changes of the relationship with the past in Klaipėda at the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries. In order to characterize the development of Klaipėda’s mental appropriation in the 20th century, the last decade of this century is viewed as the final and culminating stage in the city’s Lithuanianization. Three factors were important for Klaipėda’s mental appropriation: 1) the content and direction of public communication, authorized by the regime; 2) favourable social medium in Klaipėda, in which the specific meanings that maintained this content could actively circulate; 3) the influence of this social medium on local communication. These three factors merged together in the late 1960s – early 1970s, and Klaipėda’s “Lithuanian” past established itself in the city’s public communication, reaching the culmination in the last decade of the 20th century. During 1988–1991, the function of date legitimating subordination of Klaipėda region to Lithuania was reinstated to January 15, 1923; the so-called ‘Act of Tilsit’ became relevant as additional basis of legitimacy. These facts, together with the change of the street names, building monuments, the conception of the first exposition of the local Museum (after the restoration of independence) and other data reviewed in the article clearly indicate that the past of Klaipėda was placed in the time and space of the region of ‘Lithuania Minor’ while the past of this region was conceived as the past of the ‘Lithuanians’ only. Lithuanization of the understanding of the public past was initiated by certain associations, formed in Brezhnev era, and the members of these associations were ethnographers, intellectuals, and some part of the city administration nomenclature. These associations, members of which still hold important positions in the city, strongly affected the culture of public remembrance at the end of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st centuries. The fact that the identity ideology of these associations is based on the inter-war national way of thinking, on the one hand, and that in the professional Klaipėda’s historiography denationalization tendencies became obvious at the beginning of the last decade, on the other hand, very clearly distinguishes different conceptions, concerning Klaipėda’s past, by ethnographers and professional historians and provokes their conflict. While the ‘Lithuanian’ conception of Klaipėda’s past dominates, it seems that interests of this structure of associations to let in the ‘German’ past of the city are still to a large extent utilitarian. The most conspicuous change in the remembrance culture itself could be considered its decentralization; with glasnost, the remembrance policy which supported the Soviet identity orientation was replaced by public remembrance culture of different groups,

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