Traveling through the former Memelland is an impressive undertaking – from Kaunas you soon drive along the important river Memel or the Nemunas (or Niemen), past castles, partly crumbling, partly renovated villages and small towns on the edge of the European Union, all of a sudden you are at the Russian border. Instead of fortifications, however, you see a lot of barely touched nature and floodplains that extend far into the plains. Above, a sky that appears larger and wider than elsewhere. The silent neighborhood with Kaliningrad, the former Königsberg, is finally turning the region into a periphery. Seen from the other side, it was already that way in Königsberg times and was perhaps therefore suitable for being elegiacally sung by Johannes Bobrowski (1917 to 1965), the poet of lost landscapes, as the peculiarly contemporary primeval land of Sarmatia.
