Le cas K. Königsberg, Kant, Kaliningrad… K, ou la métamorphose!

Abstract

«What’s in a name? », asked themselves Romeo and Juliet (II, ii: 45), forced by the patronymic logic of discrepancy, more powerful than that of a shared love. Within the heart of Europe after WWII, even The Name Berlin, written by Maurice Blanchot in an article for the “Gulliver”, a magazine owned by Italo Calvino and Elio Vittorini, is a place of disunion and metamorphosis – of amnesia – of those that, speaking the same language, transitioned from one world to another, from one story to another, from East to West. Today such metamorphosis is testified by Köningsberg, the city of Kant, the Moses of Europe according to Hölderlin, renamed Kaliningrad, by Kalinin, the bloody follower of Stalin. How is it possible to repeat and bring back to memory our cosmopolitan toponymy of our Modern world when facing such a complex picture of envisioning and oblivion of our present time?