On the occasion of the 750th anniversary of the founding of the city of Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, Klaus Garber sheds new light on the great past of this metropolis in northeastern Europe. His highlights bring to life the cultural history of the East Prussian city, which fell irretrievably into ruins in 1945. The downfall of Königsberg in 1945 was total. With the silhouette of the city, its libraries, museums, and archives also sank. The old Prussian coronation city symbolizes the disasters that the 20th century brought upon the culture of Central Europe, and only from scattered testimonies can its tumultuous past be reconstructed. Klaus Garber has devoted a research life to exploring the buried traditions in the libraries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He presents here a memoir of a special kind. In twelve chapters, he...