Die Lomse” refers to an area in East Königsberg on the island with the same name located between the Old Pregel (Lipza) and the New Pregel. Lomse Island was connected to the North to the Altstadt district via the Holz Bridge, to the West via the Honig or Dom Bridge to Kneiphof Island, and to the South to the Haberberg district via the Kaiser Bridge.
Prior to 1945, only the West side of Lomse island was built up, and was the original warehousing district of the Old Town (Atlstadt), with the remaining part of it consisting mainly of wet meadows and gardens. On the North West bank of the Old Pregel and facing the back of the Dom Cathedral on Kneiphof Island on the other side of the Dom Bridge stood the New Synagogue on the Lindenstrasse. Built in 1896 on the site of an old warehouse, it was destroyed by fire in the aftermath of Kristallnacht in 1938. It was reconstructed and reopened in 2018 in its original location adjacent to the former Jewish orphanage built in 1905. Around the corner to corner to the South East you can find the Protestant Kreuzkirche on the Plantage that was built in 1930. In addition the Lomse housed a cattle market and a slaughterhouse.
The Lomse and its bridges were part of the famous Königsberg bridge problem, a mathematical question of the 18th century that led to the foundation of modern graph theory when in 1736 the Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler was able to show that the problem has no solution.
At the time – and likely because of it’s industrial heritage – citizens of Königsberg city tended to look down on anyone living on Lomse island, often referring to them as “Dummer von der Loms’ “, and which is the subject of a charming poem written by Karl Thomas and that goes as follows:
Die Lomse by U. K. Thomas
Ulrich Karl Thomas was born in Königsberg in 1925. He is the author of “We Will Be Free: Memoirs of an East Prussian Survivor”, published in August of 2015, and available from Amazon.
“For all my fellow Königsbergers who did not live to tell the story”