Kaliningrad in the news

Michael Wieck  taught the violin at Auckland University from 1961 to 1967. Perhaps he injected a little European tradition in a music school that was largely devoid of it despite the competent instrumentalists teaching there. After some years Michael Wieck missed Germany, that was where he felt at home, and returned there. He was leader of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.  I knew of him while he taught in New Zealand but I was not aware of his Jewish links. In his retirement he published his memoirs, A Childhood under Stalin and Hitler. From this I learned that he was the son of the second violin and viola players of the Konigsberg Quartet, one of the first to play Schoenberg's music. His mother was descended from a distinguished Jewish family, his father was related to eminent Germans, including Clara Wieck Schumann. Some of these relatives were good Nazis. Living in German occupied Konigberg, Michael was persecuted as a Jew, though spared deportation to a concentration camp because he was only half Jewish, After the Russian occupation he witnessed the systematic destruction of old Konigsberg, a centre of German culture in East Prussia. The city was completely destroyed, to be replaced by the Russian city of Kaliningrad. During the months after the war, while the city lay in ruins Michael, a teenager, supported himself and his family by thieving, by claiming to be a carpenter, an electrician, a specialist in demand by the Russian occupiers. He could resume his violin studies only after he and his family managed to get away and move to Berlin. His Konigsberg, a German enclave in the East, founded in the Middle Ages, a seat of leaning, where Emanuel Kant taught, became a Soviet city of strategic importance because it is the only Baltic port that is ice free. Now Kaliningrad is in the news again. A couple of low flying Russian jets buzzed repeatedly over an US destroyer, aggravating regional tension. You might wonder what the American destroyer was doing there, but Putin and his military were undoubtedly showing their muscle and asserting their dominance.