"From the Maas to the Memel" handed the German settlement area in the 19th Century, but after two world wars is the verse from The Song of the Germans "frowned upon. Where exactly is the Neman at all? The journalist Uwe Rada is the 937 km long river course from the Baltic to the source in the present-day Belarus followed. The Memel now flows through Lithuania and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, as before through Poland and East Prussia. A purely German river, she was never any more than the Rhine. The Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, the rock idol Czeslaw Niemen and the German writer Johannes Bobrowski have sung the Memel country. Rada told with fluid ease the tangled history of a European culture that was forgotten behind the Iron Curtain. Last week he presented his book at the Foreign Office. However, it had not invited the ministry, but the enterprising operator of the bookstore in the foyer. Uwe Rada: The Memel. Cultural History of a European river. Siedler Verlag, 2010, 368 pages, 19,95 €.