East Prussia: on Europes edge

No country embodied the turbulence of twentieth century Europe more than East Prussia, once Germany's most eastern redoubt and now divided between Poland and Russia. A land of apparent contradictions, it produced astonishing intellectual achievement, raw militarism and anxiety, cruelty and suffering, tolerance and extremism, domineering red brick castles left by the Teutonic knights and neat villages and productive farming and a symbolic identity as a beleaguered bastion of western European civilisation. Max Egremont's most recent book is Forgotten Land - Journeys among the Ghosts of East Prussia. His lecture will tell of a frequently troubled and now mythical place.