Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania borders the Baltic Sea to the north-west (90 km of coastline), Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south-east, Poland to the south, and the Russian Federation (the Kaliningrad exclave, formerly Königsberg) to the south-west.

Lithuania is a flat country. The western part is crossed by the Baltic Ridge (Lower Lithuania), whilst the hilly region of Upper Lithuania in the east (highest point 294 m) forms part of the Belarusian Ridge. The largest rivers are the Memel (Nemunas) and its tributary, the Neris; there are also many lakes, particularly in Upper Lithuania. To this day, the region is characterised by extensive woodlands, which cover more than 30 per cent of the country’s land area, and by large areas of farmland.

The borders of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania no longer served as a model for the Lithuanian Republic, which was established in 1918–19. However, the loss of the historic capital , Vilnius, to Poland placed a heavy burden on the young republic. Border adjustments in favour of the Lithuanian state took place in 1924, when the Memel region was placed under Lithuanian sovereignty, and in October 1939, when the Soviet Union transferred the Vilnius region to Lithuania pursuant to the provisions of the Hitler–Stalin Pact. Apart from a minor border adjustment in the Vilnius region following the Soviet occupation in June 1940, these borders correspond to the country’s current territory. Lithuania remained an agrarian country even after the end of the Second World War; it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that significant urbanisation took place; today, two-thirds of the population live in urban areas.

The history of the country can be divided into four major periods: the Grand Duchy, the Polish period beginning with the personal union of 1385–86, its affiliation with the Russian Empire, and finally the eventful history of the modern Lithuanian state in the 20th and 21st centuries.

As part of the Baltic peoples, the Lithuanian tribes were also farmers and cattle-breeders, whose settlements were often situated near hill forts. It is likely that the first territorial expansion took place under the lords of these castles, and this certainly involved violent expansion and conquest. In any case, the first decades of the 13th century saw the emergence of the names of Lithuanian princely families, the most significant of whom was undoubtedly Mindaugas, who was described as ruler of Lithuania around 1250. In 1253, the Grand Prince had himself crowned king and baptised, as he saw an alliance with the Livonian Order and the Curia as an important step against his internal Lithuanian opponents and adversaries. However, as early as 1261, Mindaugas broke away from the Order once more. Although his assassination in 1263 marked the end of the Christian monarchy, it did not spell the downfall of Lithuanian state-building. As the German Order, a powerful adversary, blocked the route to the Baltic Sea, Lithuanian expansion was directed eastwards. Grand Duke Gediminas, in particular, was responsible for the expansion of the realm, achieving both military successes (the conquest of Kyiv in 1320) and diplomatic achievements (marriage alliances), and founding the Gediminid dynasty. The population of the Grand Duchy consisted largely of Eastern Slavs, who inhabited a good 90 per cent of the territory.

The dynastic alliance between the Lithuanian ruling house and Poland had an impact that lasted well into the 20th century. The internal disputes between the cousins Vytautas and Jogaila came to an end with the Treaty of Krevo in 1385. Through his marriage to Jedwiga (Hedwig of Anjou), Jogaila became King of Poland as Władysław II Jagiełło, whilst Vytautas ruled over Lithuania as Grand Duke. Two conditions of the Union of Krevo are worth mentioning: the adoption of the Christian faith by the Gediminids (and their non-Slavic subjects) and the obligation to annex the lands of the Grand Duchy to the Polish Crown. Despite his oath of allegiance to the King of Poland, Vytautas managed to pursue a vigorous and independent policy. In the Russian territories of the Grand Duchy in particular, he stripped local rulers of their power and asserted his own prerogatives. It was during this phase, on 15 July 1410, that the Battle of Tannenberg/Žalgiris took place – an event later stylised by subsequent generations as a national triumph – in which the Polish-Lithuanian army inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the German Order. Finally, in 1422, the Treaty of Lake Melnosee established a border between Lithuania and the Order’s territory of Prussia, which was to remain in place until 1918.

Le royaume de Pologne comprenant les états de
Pologne et de Lithuanie (...) (1697) [Map: University
Library of Bern, Call number: ZB Ryh 6001: 25].

In the second half of the 15th century, the power of the Grand Duchy in the east eroded, whilst the influence of the Principality of Moscow grew steadily. Eventually, decades of military conflicts and skirmishes began, which increasingly led to a Lithuanian retreat westwards. The more difficult the situation on the eastern border became, the stronger the ties and reliance on Poland grew. As the advance from Moscow became increasingly threatening, Polish aspirations to achieve a de facto union between Lithuania and Poland finally prevailed in the Union of Lublin in 1569. The King of Poland became Grand Duke of Lithuania by personal union, there was a common foreign policy and a single currency for the entire state. The objective was clearly stated in the treaty: it was to create “a single and indivisible whole, a unified and inseparable republic, which is joined and united from two states and peoples into one nation”.^[1] By contrast, the remaining reservations regarding the legal codes, the administration and the army carried little weight.

Thus, in the decades that followed, a Polish-oriented and acculturated upper class became increasingly dominant, whilst the Lithuanian language was more or less confined to the rural population.

Although the Reformation in Lithuania was suppressed after a few years by the Catholic Counter-Reformation (the founding of a Jesuit college in Vilnius in 1569), it left a significant mark: the first book in the Lithuanian language, printed in Königsberg in 1547, was the Lutheran Catechism.

The Polish-Lithuanian state came to an end as a result of the partition treaties between Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795, bringing to a close a shared history that had lasted for centuries. With the exception of the Suvalkija region, which was only annexed to the Tsarist Empire following the Congress of Vienna and had previously belonged to Prussia for a short time, the entire Lithuanian-speaking territory had been under the rule of Tsarist Russia since the last partition of Poland. However drastic the loss of statehood may have been from a political perspective, the old social structure remained in place well into the 19th century: Polish-speaking aristocratic landowners and a few magnates continued to occupy the upper echelons of society, whilst the Lithuanian language was primarily spoken amongst the ordinary rural population.

It was only gradually that the Lithuanian national movement developed, with the ideas of the Enlightenment serving as an indispensable prerequisite, laying the foundations for a new perspective on folk art and the language of the peasant population. Enlightenment ideas reached the rural population via the Catholic clergy. The priests established primary schools where Lithuanian was the language of instruction, even though this by no means called Polish dominance into question. Another important impetus came from East Prussia. The Lithuanian-speaking minority in the north of the Prussian province, loyal to the King in Berlin and to Protestantism, became the pioneers of Lithuanian book printing and the Lithuanian written language. Kristijonas Donelaitis (Christian Donalitius), a parish priest in an East Prussian village, published the poem *Metai* (*Seasons*) at the end of the 18th century; this was the first epic in the Lithuanian language which, as the title suggests, dealt with the arduous and harsh agricultural year.

In the 19th century, the paths of the Poles and Lithuanians also diverged; the uprisings of 1830–31 and 1863–64 against Tsarist rule were the last events in which Poles and Lithuanians stood side by side.

The Tsarist administration now pursued a policy of radical Russification, the most striking manifestation of which was the ban on printing Lithuanian-language publications in the Latin alphabet; instead, the Cyrillic alphabet had to be used. Although modern Lithuanian research no longer views Russian policy solely through the prism of Russification and the suppression of Lithuanian and Polish identity,^[2] it must be noted that Tsarist rule was increasingly perceived as foreign domination. The more the Tsar’s governors sought to denationalise the Lithuanian minority, the more they thereby fostered the emergence of a Lithuanian national movement. Coupled with the emergence of Lithuanian-language primary schools, the raising of the general standard of education and the discovery of Lithuanian as an archaic and therefore particularly distinguished cultural language, the seminaries became the cradles of the national movement, which was complemented in the secular sphere by the first (Russian-founded) grammar schools. Social change brought the sons of Lithuanian peasants into contact with higher education, and from this pool emerged the founding generation of the Lithuanian state. This background also provided the essential foundation for a distinction from the Polish national movement: some later leading figures, such as the mentor of the Lithuanian nation, Jonas Basanavičius, began quite deliberately to use Lithuanian when communicating with one another and to stop speaking Polish. Basanavičius became the editor of the first Lithuanian-language magazine, *Aušra* (Dawn), which was published in Tilsit/Sovetsk in East Prussia and smuggled across the border. Although *Aušra* was more culturally and ethnologically oriented than politically, it became a symbol of a new ethnic group in whose self-image ethnological, folkloric and philological elements played a defining role. From this emerged the image of the Lithuanian people as a people close to nature and committed to rural life, who had retained their cultural autonomy throughout the (Polish-influenced) centuries and who speak one of the oldest cultural languages of the Indo-European family. Added to this was the historical legacy of the Grand Duchy, which was romanticised into a national heroic myth by the first generation of the Lithuanian national movement.

This also implies that the Lithuanian national movement was by no means a mass phenomenon to begin with; rather, its path led through the countryside: ‘…rural vicarages and the homes of primary school teachers became centres of educational work that increasingly captivated the youth’.^[3]

This development was bound to lead to conflict with the Polish national movement, for the latter regarded it as more or less certain that a revival of the old union under Polish dominance was out of the question. The Lithuanian aspirations were met with a lack of understanding: Polish was said to be the lingua franca in Lithuania’s educated circles, and the country was regarded as an anachronism without Polish culture and the Catholicism emanating from Poland. The rift soon spread throughout the entire clergy, although the lower clergy in particular – drawn mainly from the sons of Lithuanian peasants – were not opposed to the new national movement.

The path taken by the Lithuanian national movement was by no means a straightforward or radical one. Initially, the core issue was the recognition of cultural autonomy within a Russian and Polish-dominated environment. Social issues and demands soon emerged, relating above all to the position of Lithuanian peasants under the Tsarist administration, which was perceived as oppressive. The politicisation at the end of the 19th century culminated in the demand for political autonomy, although the idea of an independent state was regarded as a mere figment of the imagination. The first Russian Revolution in 1905 completely changed the situation. Even in the run-up to these events, the Russian government had lifted the ban on printing in the Latin alphabet; however, this measure – like the admission of Lithuanian as a language of instruction in May 1905 – came too late to win any credibility amongst the Lithuanian population. The famous October Manifesto, which granted the population freedom of assembly and association, led to the convening of the famous Great Seimas of Vil nius.^[4] In the heated atmosphere of October 1905, the editorial board of the * Vilniaus Žinios* (Vilnius Daily) decided to publish a call for a meeting of Lithuanians (29 October according to the Julian calendar) and to establish an organising committee. The enthusiastic response to the call exceeded all expectations; in November 1905, more than 1,800 delegates eventually gathered in Vilnius.

Although the memorandum to the Russian government spoke ‘only’ of autonomy and self-government for Lithuania, the discussions were already centring on independence. The question of borders was also debated at length: an autonomous Lithuania was to extend across the ethnographically Lithuanian areas, whilst surrounding territories were to be incorporated into the core area for economic, cultural, ethnic or other reasons, provided the inhabitants so wished. Thus, in 1905, mention was made for the first time of a map which, despite all subsequent historical vicissitudes and changes, corresponded approximately to today’s Lithuanian national borders. In connection with the border issue, the 1905 conference had also provided clarity in another respect: The new Lithuania was to be a state that was as ethnically homogeneous as possible. In this respect, too, the conference represented a fundamental decision that was to have a defining influence throughout the 20th century.

The focus on an ethnographic Lithuania also entailed a clear rejection of any revival of the Polish-Lithuanian dual state. The genesis of the Lithuanian nation developed more out of a Polish-Lithuanian than a Russian-Lithuanian opposition. In this respect, the events of 1905 should be interpreted not only as the culmination of a shared development, but even more so as the starting point of a confrontation between two ethnic groups under national auspices.

The First World War acted as a catalyst for the trends that had already begun to emerge in 1905. The country, which had been occupied by the German Empire since the summer/autumn of 1915, suffered under German occupation and exploitation by the German military administration. In 1917, the occupying forces permitted the establishment of a Lithuanian representative body, the Taryba (= Council), which they regarded as an instrument for their own hegemony over the country. After the Taryba had initially proclaimed the country’s independence in accordance with German ‘wishes’, whilst at the same time declaring an indissoluble bond with Germany (customs and military union, permanent alliance treaty), a second declaration of independence was issued on 16 February 1918, stating that the future Lithuanian state must be founded on democratic principles and that only a freely elected National Assembly could decide on its final form of government. Once the Bolshevik advance had been halted and the last German troops had been driven out of the country in 1919, the way was clear for the first modern Lithuanian state. However, the young Lithuanian Republic was burdened by foreign policy issues: in the dispute over Vilnius, the Poles had put an end to the constant back-and-forth in October 1920 by presenting a fait accompli and annexing the territory to the Polish state; in Memel/Klaipėda, although the Lithuanians were able to take possession of the territory administered by the Entente in January 1923 through an alleged uprising by the local population—which in reality was nothing more than a covert usurpation by Lithuanian groups— yet the Memel region had thereby become a target of German revisionism. The brief democratic experiment came to an end in 1926 with a coup by young officers, which brought to power an authoritarian regime under Antanas Smetona, one of the founders of the state between 1917 and 1919.

As a result of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, Lithuania lost its independence in the summer of 1940. During the partition of Eastern Central Europe, the country had initially belonged to the German ‘sphere of interest’ before being allocated to the Soviet Union in exchange for Polish territories under the Secret Additional Protocol to the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Border Demarcation in September 1939. After the Soviet Union had already extorted extraterritorial bases for the Red Army in Lithuania in the autumn of 1939, the final occupation took place during the German victory over France in June 1940. Under these circumstances, even the joy at the Soviets’ handover of the Vilnius region to Lithuania in the autumn of 1939 was muted. One year of Stalinist rule was enough to ensure an enthusiastic welcome for the German troops in June 1941, who overran Lithuania in the early days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Despite its murderous consequences – almost all Lithuanian Jews were murdered – German rule remained a mere interlude, for the recapture of Lithuania from the summer of 1944 onwards marked the beginning of the second period of Soviet rule, which lasted almost 50 years. Lithuania became the ‘Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic’ (Lithuanian SSR). Following the early years, which were characterised on the one hand by mass deportations to Siberia and Stalinist terror, and on the other by armed resistance and partisan fighting in the forests, the era of de-Stalinisation ushered in decades of accommodation. However, within Lithuanian society there always existed a counter-narrative to the claims – propagated for decades – of a voluntary accession to the Soviet Union and the alleged benefits of the Soviet system. When, in the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev (Gorbačëv) set about reforming the system from within, a national independence movement, the Sąjudis (= ‘Movement’), developed within a few months. On 13 March 1990, the first freely elected Lithuanian parliament since 1926 unilaterally declared the country’s independence; however, with the exception of Iceland, the Western states were not prepared to allow a break with the Soviet leadership over the Baltic states. Through non-violent resistance and the immense power of a peaceful mass movement, all three Baltic states entered into a confrontation with the central authorities in Moscow, which did not always proceed peacefully: On 13 January 1991, Soviet special forces stormed the television tower in Vilnius, killing 13 Lithuanian civilians, including a 19-year-old woman. The failed Moscow coup in August 1991 finally paved the way for independence and recognition under international law.

The Republic of Lithuania today is a parliamentary democracy and has been a member of the EU and NATO since 2004. The country covers an area of 65,300 km² and has a population of 3.2 million. In 2012, 83.7 per cent of the population were ethnic Lithuanians; the largest ethnic minorities were Poles (6.6 per cent), Russians (5.3 per cent) and, some way behind, Belarusians (1.3 per cent).^[5]

The history of the German minority in Lithuania^[6] began in the Middle Ages, with an early centre emerging particularly in Kauen/Kaunas. In 1552, 124 German families lived in the town on the Memel. From the 16th century onwards, and increasingly during the first third of the 18th century, craftsmen and farmers arrived in the country, causing German settlement to become more concentrated in rural areas. Most German immigrants belonged to the Evangelical Lutheran denomination, which led to the establishment of their own parishes, such as those in Marijampol/Marijampolė or Raseinen/Rasieniai. Geographically, the ethnic group was concentrated in western and south-western Lithuania. Until the 20th century, there were no supra-regional connections based on regional associations; at a local level, the Protestant Church fostered a special sense of community. In the 1920s, the number of Lithuanian Germans stood at at least 30,000 (1.4 per cent of the total population), but precise figures are difficult to ascertain, as the data collection regarding nationality in the 1923 census was apparently inadequate in many cases, and consequently inaccurate entries were made in passports. Based on the number of people resettled in 1941/42, a figure of around 45,000 Lithuanian Germans prior to the outbreak of the Second World War appears realistic.

Apart from a small urban group, which was concentrated mainly in Kaunas and Marijampolė (in the 1930s there was a German grammar school in Kaunas), a clear majority (around 65 per cent) lived in rural areas and worked as farmers, farm labourers or craftsmen in the villages and small provincial towns. Almost 70 per cent of the ethnic group lived directly or indirectly from agriculture, whilst academic professions were the exception rather than the rule.

The fate of the Lithuanian Germans was sealed by a German-Soviet resettlement agreement dated 10 January 1941. Following the Baltic German minorities in Estonia and Latvia, the Germans in Lithuania were now also resettled. A total of 50,142 people turned their backs on the Lithuanian SSR, but for most, the journey ‘home to the Reich’ initially ended in reception camps in the ‘Warthegau’. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the conquest of Lithuania, an ideologically motivated resettlement of Lithuanian-German farmers took place in 1942, forcing local farmers to make way for them, which led to considerable tensions between the returnees and their neighbours. The exact number of returnees can no longer be determined, but is thought to have been between 17,000 and 20,000 people.

After 1945, many Lithuanian Germans found a new home in the Federal Republic of Germany. Another group lived in the GDR, whilst a not inconsiderable number turned their backs on Europe and settled in North and South America, and in a few cases also in Australia.^[7]

• Arvydas Anušauskas: Lietuva 1940–1990. Okupuotos Lietuvos istorija [Lithuania 1940–1999. A History of Occupied Lithuania]. 2nd revised and expanded edition. Vilnius 2007.
• Alfonsas Eidintas, Vytautas Žalys: Lithuania in European Politics. The Years of the First Republic, 1918–1940. New York 1998.
• Manfred Hellmann: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania until 1569. In: Ibid. (ed.): Handbook of Russian History. Vol. 1, II: Until 1613. From the Founding of the Kievan Rus’ to the Moscow Tsardom. Stuttgart 1989, pp. 717–851.
• Manfred Hellmann: An Outline of the History of Lithuania and the Lithuanian People. 4th ed. Darmstadt 1990.
• Mešislovas Jučas: Lietuvos Didžioji Kunygaikštystė – istorijos bruožai [The Grand Duchy of Lithuania – Historical Outlines]. Vilnius 2010.
• Zigmantas Kiaupa: *Lietuvos valstybės istorija* [History of the Lithuanian State]. Vilnius 2004.
• Zigmantas Kiaupa, Juratė Kiaupienė, Albinas Kuncevičius: The History of Lithuania before 1795. Vilnius 2000.
• Gerhard Schulz: The Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom. Decline and Partition. Munich 1995 (History and Auxiliary Historical Sciences 63).
• Claudia Sinnig: Lithuania – A Literary Travel Companion. Frankfurt am Main 2002.
• Harry Stossun: The Resettlement of Germans from Lithuania during the Second World War. Studies on the Fate of a German Ethnic Group in the East. Marburg/L. 1993 (Historical and Regional Studies on East Central Europe 12).
• Joachim Tauber, Tobias Weger (eds.), Christian Gahlbeck, Vacys Vaivada (comp.): Archive Guide to the History of the Memel Region and German-Lithuanian Relations. Oldenburg 2006 (Publications of the Federal Institute for the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe 27).
• Stanley V. Vardys, Judith B. Sedaitis: *Lithuania – The Rebel Nation*. Boulder, Col. 1997.

• Lietuvos Istorijos Metraštis [Yearbook of Lithuanian History]

• Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania (www2.lnb.lt/lt/)
• Lithuanian Historical Institute (www.istorija.lt)
• Vilnius University (www.vu.lt/lt/)
• Kaunas University (www.vdu.lt/)
• Klaipėda University (www.ku.lt/)

[1] Section 3 of the Union, quoted from Hellmann: Grundzüge, p. 77.

[2] Cf. Egidijus Aleksandravičius, Antanas Kulakauskas: Carų valdžioje Lietuva XIX. amžiuje [Lithuania under Tsarist Rule in the 19th Century]. Vilnius 1996; Darius Staliūnas: *Making Russians. Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863*. Amsterdam 2007.

[3] Hellmann: Grundzüge, p. 112.

[4] For the events of 1905, see Egidijus Motieka: Didysis Vilniaus Seimas [The Great Seimas of Vilnius]. Vilnius 1996.

[5] See data from the Lithuanian Department of Statistics; www.stat.gov.lt/en.

[6] The population of the Memel region is not discussed further in the article ‘Lithuania’; see the article ‘Memel/Klaipėda’ for more on this. It suffices to note that the Memel Germans always regarded themselves as Imperial Germans and perceived Lithuanian rule between 1923 and 1939 as an occupation. There were no political or social contacts between the Lithuanians of German descent and the inhabitants of the Memel region, which clearly illustrates the divide between the two ethnic groups.

[7] The information on the Germans in Lithuania is based on Harry Stossun’s relevant monograph on the resettlement of the Lithuanian Germans. For the situation of the Germans in Lithuania after 1945, see the article by Ruth Leiserowitz.

Joachim Tauber: Lithuania. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2013. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32619 (accessed 20 August 2021).