1 - Childhood and Family

Summary

HINSEY: Why don't we start by speaking about your earliest memories, for example, the house where you were born?

VENCLOVA: The house was in Klaipėda (also called Memel), a harbor town on the Baltic Sea. But I don't have any memory of it since our family moved when I was less than two years old. The history of Memel is as complicated as any history in that part of Europe. The town started as a fortress established in 1252 by German knights on terrain inhabited by pagan Lithuanians (they also founded the much bigger and better-known Baltic cities, including Riga and Königsberg, at approximately the same time). The knights attempted to subdue and baptize the Lithuanians, but without much success; they only managed to impose their rule on a narrow strip of land around the town, a region that later acquired some fame as Memel Territory, or Memelgebiet. In any case, the land was considered to be part of Germany for seven hundred years. After World War I, it was separated from the German Reich by the Treaty of Versailles, and ended up as an autonomous region of Lithuania.

HINSEY: Could you describe what Klaipėda was like at that time?

VENCLOVA: In 1937, the town was small, provincial, and German-speaking. The architecture was typically Prussian: timber-framed houses and Lutheran churches with pointed steeples. Incidentally, Thomas Mann used to spend his summers in Nida, a village not far away (he started writing Joseph and His Brothers there), but he did not return after leaving for Switzerland in 1933. In the countryside around Klaipėda, as the town was now officially called, the people mainly spoke Lithuanian, but the Memellanders were Lutheran and looked down on the Catholic and definitely less civilized inhabitants of “Lithuania proper.” Most of them succumbed easily to Nazi sloganeering. In March 1939, Hitler took Memel and Memel Territory back: it is still remembered that he arrived on a warship and delivered a speech from the balcony of the old theater, heartily applauded by the majority of Memellanders (even if the speech was on the short side, due to his seasickness).