Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Kaunas

The Neris flows into the Nemunas at sunset.

More than twenty years ago, as an eighteen-year-old in 2003, I followed a lush carpet of green grass through the trees and into a clearing. Birds were singing, and the early autumn sun shone upon the scene with barely a cloud in the sky. In the centre of that clearing was a squat, red-brick cuboid that nature was doing its best to reclaim.

That building was a gas chamber where hundreds had been murdered, and I was a visitor at what remained of Dachau concentration camp.

It seems to be my luck that I get to visit the most nightmarish places on earth on the most achingly beautiful days imaginable. Today, after a winding bus journey to an unremarkable suburb of Kaunas, I make my way through a narrow concrete underpass to the city's Ninth Fort.

The fort.

Built as part of a system of fortifications in the early twentieth century, the site proved utterly useless for this purpose, and was taken by the Soviets within a couple of days. Today it is best known for being a prison and site of mass extermination of Jews during the Nazi occupation, the most horrifying of all such sites within Lithuania, its centripetal death-pull drawing in the doomed from as far away as France and Austria.

The fort sits atop a gentle rise. Though it's a low, ugly building, the site is monumental: the visitor centre, car parks, memorials, and the fort itself are laid out on a swathe of grassland punctuated by old, silent trees. The sky is a limpid blue, though there is a little mist on the grass. The focal point is not the fort itself but the dreadful, breathtaking memorial sculpture by Ambraziūnas, evoking something between a ruined power station and the clawed, desperate hands of a titanic buried humanoid, reaching a hundred feet up into that sky as if trying to grasp the winter sun. Perhaps an avatar of empathy or suchlike, whose time has passed.

Memorial.

The horror of the place can't really be put into words. Tens of thousands died here, this we know; but numbers also seem unable to capture what the place connotes (“Ninth Fort”, just one fort among many). When they burned the bodies, the heat was so fierce that glass began to melt. In one of the cells there's an exhibition where several people who narrowly escaped genocides across the world are quoted as saying the same thing: when you emerge from such a place, it's not always clear whether you really survived or are instead experiencing a different form of death.

The Japanese vice-consul at the time, Chiune Sugihara, helped thousands of Jews flee Lithuania in 1940 by writing exit visas for them, in defiance of protocol. Reportedly, he was still writing them until the moment his train departed (the consulate having been closed down). Even a bureaucrat can be a hero. Would I have the backbone to do something like this, if in a position to? More likely I'd take to Twitter to register my displeasure in a dry QT – if that. I hope that's not the case, obviously, but the atmosphere of this place isn't conducive to positivity.

After a while I head back into town. Kaunas is Lithuania's second city, but the small, quiet Old Town doesn't make it feel like a settlement with a population of three hundred thousand. I realize later that the heart of the modern city is elsewhere. Can't blame its inhabitants for wanting a clean break from the past. Unlike Vilnius, Kaunas is fairly geographically central in Lithuania. It lies at the confluence of the rivers Neris and Nemunas. These two rivers have quite different characters: the Neris brings hundreds of ice floes from Belarus via Vilnius, depositing them in the more sluggish Nemunas for transport to the Baltic. I walk to the end of the long spit of land that separates them and take in the view.

Troutworthy's Trakai Travel Blog

On my second day in Vilnius, I head out to Trakai, a small town at the end of a branch line through the woods. The path to my destination leads around the edge of a lake, which, it being -9 degrees C, is completely frozen over. I'm thankful for the thick layer of blubber that I, like a polar bear, very deliberately and intentionally accumulated over the winter.

Trakai castle.

Trakai is most notable for its two castles. The more impressive of these was built by Vytautas on an island, and completed in 1409, the year before the battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg. Vytautas himself has as much claim as anyone to be the legendary founder of Lithuania, though he never ruled it independently, but rather as a vassal, at least nominally, of the Polish king Jagiełło. The twist in the tale is that the two were cousins: Jagiełło, born Jogaila, was the son of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Algirdas, and Vytautas the son of his brother Kęstutis. Although not always on good terms, the two managed to put their differences aside long enough to stick it to the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald. The Teutonic connections don't end there: in 1377 the Order besieged an early incarnation of the castle, and in the years before Grunwald – during a period of peace – one of the Order's master masons, Radike, was supposedly involved in supervising the final construction works. Right now, with the lake frozen over, the situation puts me in mind of Alexander Nevsky's 1242 Battle on the Ice, which also didn't end well for the Teutonic Knights.

The castle is approached over a long bridge, which reminds me of the island of Mainau on Lake Constance. Surprisingly, Konstanz, too, features in the history of Lithuania and the Knights: the Council of Konstanz took place shortly after Grunwald, and the Order, trying desperately to rebuild, were active in petitioning Emperor Sigismund for various concessions against Poland-Lithuania. But Sigismund was more interested in resolving the crisis in the papacy, and Jagiełło's kingdom ended up with the better deal. The long overland journey of the Order's delegation from Lithuania to Konstanz must have been similar to mine, though perhaps slower and without quite as much free wifi.

Inner courtyard of the main tower.

The castle fell into disrepair in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was reconstructed in the twentieth. Its collections range from the random-but-elegant (an early glassware collection) to the purely random (a room full of nineteenth-century tobacco pipes), but there are also exhibitions about the castle's history, and two imposing new stained-glass windows depicting Vytautas and his father Kęstutis.

Vytautas.

As ever, it's tricky to distinguish between original and reconstruction, between “true facts” and Romantic imaginings, especially on an empty stomach. There's no cafe at the castle, and by the end of my visit I'm undercaffeinated and a little hungry. The latter problem is solvable by virtue of a food van sitting at the town end of the wooden bridge from the castle, selling what I perceive to be Cornish pasties. These, though, are a traditional thing for Karaim/Karaites to eat, one of Lithuania's nationally-recognized ethnic minorities, who've been dwelling in Trakai since before Grunwald. There were Tatars here, too, apparently much-feared mercenaries fighting on the Polish-Lithuanian side, though in the battle itself they ended up not playing much of a role.

My neighbour Totorių.

After a little exploration of Trakai town, it's time to head back to Vilnius. I make my way to the Museum of Occupations, housed in the grand, intimidating former KGB building. Not a cheery place, and I'll spare you the details. During World War 2, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again in the space of a few years, with neither side behaving generously towards the locals. And thinking back to the days of Trakai Island Castle and Grunwald, ultimately, the same dynamics are at work: for Lithuania and places like it, independence and prosperity – often even survival – was only to be achieved by playing off distant, powerful entities against each other, whether that be the Teutonic Order and Poland (at the turn of the fifteenth century), the Emperor and the church (at the Council of Konstanz), the Nazis and the Soviets (during the war), and now Brussels (or Washington?) and Moscow.

This last weekend, the three Baltic states ceremonially severed their power grid from that of Russia. After 24 hours of being allowed to stand unaided, like precocious, tottering toddlers, the network was connected to that of the EU: time to hold Daddy's hand again. The official line is that this arrangement drastically reduces the likelihood of malign foreign interference, certainly a concern, again, since February 2022. A. is cautious, though: Russian energy was cheap, and the Baltic governments have been tight-lipped about the costs of this transition and who will bear them.

Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Vilnius

Vilnius impresses me almost from the start. The grand entrance hall of the station draws your eyes upwards. When I arrive, a string quartet is playing in this space, and people have stopped to listen. It's dark by now, but buildings are well lit, and I'm able to see a lot of the city from the car. We drive down narrow cobbled streets and under arches. This part of town was transformed into a ghetto by the Germans during the war, simply by erecting gates across the mouths of some of these streets. Lithuanian Jews suffered horrifically during the war.

The architecture is a beautiful mixture, with quite a lot of baroque and also nineteenth-century eclecticism. The centre is dominated by three buildings: the neoclassical archcathedral, the recently reconstructed Palace of the Grand Dukes, and, rising above both of them, the Gediminas Tower.

Tower.

This tower sits on a hill that was constructed hundreds of years ago, and is all that remains of a larger fortification. In times past the hill was covered in trees, but more recently these have all been removed, and at the same time parts of the hill have started to collapse, needing to be patched up with concrete or metal struts. The sight puts me in mind of the hapless partygoer who wakes up on the sofa after a party to find that his erstwhile friends have shaved his head. But the tower itself is cute, and from the top of it there's a magnificent view over the city, speckled with snow.

View over Vilnius, looking towards the university.

The university, established in 1579, dominates its quarter of the old town, and its elderly buildings have been kept in fine condition: A. had taken me to see the frescoes and ceiling paintings the previous evening. In the afternoon, after a lunch of “zeppelins”, we visit the Palace of the Grand Dukes, a museum that, like the castle in Warsaw, is almost completely reconstructed, with the exception of the extensive foundations visible in the basement. Today it's mostly a museum, with parts of it serving for state functions. I can read here about Gediminas himself, along with Mindaugas, Algirdas, Kęstutis, Vytautas, Jogaila and others who play a role in the book I'm reading about the last years of the Teutonic Knights. A sense of history is clearly important to people, and even more so if it's accompanied by the appropriate pomp and circumstance.

Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Into Lithuania

A representative view from the train.

A bright and early start: there's only one connection from Warsaw to Vilnius each day, and it leaves at 7:55am. My conveyance is a comfortable, spacious loco-hauled beast, the brontosaurus of trains. Though stopping regularly, it powers along to Białystok in a couple of hours, but then stops there for over half an hour (“for technical reasons”, as the website has it). After that, its progress northward is notably slower, and it repeats its lengthy stop at Suwałki. But nothing can stop it as it lumbers towards and across the border. The scenery is much like what I remember from the Riga-Valga train: plains, mostly forests (alternating evergreen and birch), some farmland, occasional marshes, and even a few hills near Suwałki. I've been reading about the Battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg, a significant defeat for the Teutonic Knights against the combined forces of Poland and Lithuania in 1410, and it occurs to me that it must be around here somewhere, but when I check my maps it turns out that we're far too far east for that (close to Belarus).

I've been to Lithuania before, but only on a technicality: when I was travelling back by coach from Riga to Warsaw in 2019, I stepped off at Šiauliai bus station to stretch my legs for about twenty seconds. My quest to visit all the countries of Europe before my fortieth birthday will end in respectable failure: all the remaining countries – Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Cyprus – are currently out of reach for various reasons. So this trip to Lithuania is intended to set the record straight by doing (more) justice to the country.

It feels absurd to be winding my watch forward an hour while trundling through the woods. It strikes me that flying is the ultimate form of transport for the nation-state, allowing one to imagine a clear discontinuity between point of origin and point of arrival. Borders, paradoxically, are a lot more concrete and well-defined when you don't have to actually cross them on the ground.

Mockava.

A through train is not possible due to the switch to broad gauge, and so we have to stop at Mockava, whose station is a nowhere place in the forest. The change is easy – from one side of the island platform to the other – though it's a bit chilly. After a while the Lithuanian train comes in, a DMU, more of an allosaurus.

Lithuanian train.

Both trains are warm and welcoming inside, with power sockets, and catering. This one even has wifi, and is in more of a hurry. After Kaunas, it runs non-stop for over an hour before reaching Vilnius. Here I'm met by the kind and indefatigable A., who takes me in his car for a quick tour of the capital of Lithuania – but that's the topic of another blog post.

Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Warsaw

Warsaw is bitterly cold when I reach it; not surprising for February, I guess. Emerging groggily from a nice warm sleeper train on which I had had only a small amount of sleep, it takes me a while to orient myself enough to escape the catacombs of the city's central station. Eventually I find myself in the basement of some sort of corporate tower. Having played a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 recently (itself developed in Poland), I wonder if this is the point at which I get attacked by killer robots.

I've only been to Warsaw once before, in passing, when I was returning from Estonia. I'd only seen this area of the city, and only in darkness. It didn't strike me then as a lovely place, and, upon seeing it in sunlight, my first impression is confirmed: rectangles of Communist concrete between which a newer growth of capitalist steel-and-glass towers has taken root. Still, the area around stations is often depressing, so I hop on a tram and head to the old town.

Warsaw old town square.

It's still very quiet at 10am. Everyone's probably still in bed, or at church, or both (after all, many services can be streamed nowadays). That gives me the chance to observe the old town uninterrupted. Some of it is more toytown than old town: buildings of different heights, but still apparently built from the same blocks. The comparison to Krakow, where I was last year, is never far from my mind, but that's an unfair one: Warsaw suffered far worse in World War 2, especially after the Uprising in 1944, and almost everything here is reconstructed.

After getting some coffee and eggs, I roam the streets for a while, through the palace gardens, past churches and an unfathomably large theatre. Eventually I buy a ticket to visit the castle, and, grabbing an audioguide, am led through a series of opulent rooms decorated as they were in the time of King Stanisław August, the eighteenth century.

Throne.

Some of the furnishings are later gifts that date to the period, and some of the paintings were saved early in the war, but the reconstruction is still topmost on my mind: the whole building dates to the 1970s, when the Communist government (with understandable reluctance) agreed to rebuild it brick by brick, the original castle having been “blown up” by the Nazis in 1944.

It's interesting to evaluate the Warsaw Uprising from a present-day standpoint. Most today (especially since February 2022) would probably agree that violence in self-defence is justified, the Sermon on the Mount notwithstanding. Justified violence in the interest of liberation from tyranny is a popular position too, and the Nazi occupation was as straightforwardly tyrannical as it's possible for any actually existing force to be. Yet the outcome was catastrophic: the uprising failed (a fact for which many blame Stalin, apparently) and the Nazi military retaliation led to civilian casualties numbering in the five figures, as well as the wholesale destruction of the city centre. Nor were the resistance fighters angels: some Jewish fighters were murdered by antisemites who were nominally on the same side. The fact that Stalin's forces drove off the Nazis less than a year later makes the whole thing seem particularly futile – though of course that's the magic of hindsight. Was it worth it? Not my place to judge.

There was more I wanted to see, but sleepiness means that I have to retire early. Today I'm on the rails again, heading north.

Where do the rectors of German universities come from?

Where do the rectors of German universities come from? From Germany, largely, at least according to what I can make out. Of a total of 83 current rectors, 76 (85%) are German in origin. This is largely in proportion to the number of professors who are German, which according to this article is above 90%.

The idea to do this came from a Facebook post by Roberta D'Alessandro doing a similar thing for the Netherlands. This percentage is perhaps not hugely surprising in itself, but the overall low proportion of non-German professors did surprise me. I work in a department which currently has 11 professors, 5 of whom were not born in Germany.

Looking at the seven exceptions is interesting, too. Four of them are from Switzerland or Austria, where they would in all likelihood have spoken German from a very young age. The same may be true of Elizabeth Prommer, rector of the University of Rostock, who, although California-born, went to school in Bavaria. That leaves the president of the small private Constructor University in Bremen, Stanislav Protasov, who was born in Tashkent (then USSR), and the president of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Jan S. Hesthaven, who is Danish. Neither of these are hugely prototypical German universities, and in the former case it's been suggested that being mates with the man who owns the university may have played a significant role.

My feeling is that there's little antipathy to foreigners in the German academic system per se, but at the same time it's structurally quite difficult to penetrate due to its various idiosyncratic properties that the locals treat as self-evident natural truths about the universe. Actually running the show without German as one's native language would be a real challenge.

A quick note on methodology: I started with this list of universities, looked up who the rector or president is on Google, and tried to find their Wikipedia article. If this existed and stated where they were born or what their nationality was, I used that. Otherwise I tried to find another source, and this ultimately ended up being successful in all cases, so I didn't have to make inferences based on names. Unmarked entries in the list below are German.

Baden-Württemberg:

Kerstin Krieglstein

Frauke Melchior

Stephan Dabbert

(Danish) Jan S. Hesthaven

Thomas Fetzer

Peter Middendorf

Karla Pollmann

Michael Weber

Bayern:

Sabine Doering-Manteuffel

Kai Fischbach

Stefan Leible

Gabriele Gien

Joachim Hornegger

Thomas F. Hofmann

Bernd Huber

(Austrian) Eva-Maria Kern

Ulrich Bartosch

Udo Hebel

Paul Pauli

Berlin:

Günter M. Ziegler

Julia von Blumenthal

Geraldine Rauch

Brandenburg:

Gesine Grande

Eduard Mühle

Oliver Günther

Bremen:

Jutta Günther

(USSR) Stanislav Protasov

Hamburg:

Jörg Müller-Lietzkow

Andreas Timm-Giel

Hauke Heekeren

Klaus B. Beckmann

Hessen:

Tanja Brühl

Enrico Schleiff

Katharina Lorenz

Ute Clement

Thomas Nauss

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern:

Katharina Riedel

(American) Elizabeth Prommer

Niedersachsen:

Angela Ittel

Sylvia Schattauer

Metin Tolan

Volker Epping

(Swiss) Denise Hilfiker-Kleiner

Klaus Osterrieder

May-Britt Kallenrode

(German-Swiss) Sascha Spoun

Ralph Bruder

Susanne Menzel-Riedl

Verena Pietzner

Nordrhein-Westfalen:

Ulrich Rüdiger

Angelika Epple

Martin Paul

Michael Hoch

Manfred Bayer

Barbara Albert

Anja Steinbeck

Stefan Stürmer

Joybrato Mukherjee

Ansgar Thiel

Johannes Wessels

Birgitt Riegraf

Stefanie Reese

Martin Butzlaff

Birgitta Wolff

Rheinland-Pfalz:

Malte Drescher

Stefan Wehner

Georg Krausch

Holger Mühlenkamp

(Austrian) Eva Martha Eckkrammer

Saarland:

Ludger Santen

Sachsen:

Gerd Strohmeier

Ursula Staudinger

Klaus-Dieter Barbknecht

Eva Inés Obergfell

Sachsen-Anhalt:

Claudia Becker

Jens Strackeljan

Schleswig-Holstein:

Christiane Hipp

Insa Theesfeld

Enno Hartmann

Thüringen:

Walter Bauer-Wabnegg

Kai-Uwe Sattler

Andreas Marx

(Austrian) Peter Benz