58 Kant: A Biographytrading port and the capital of Prussia. It still housed several important
institutions of the Prussian state. It was a city of merchants as well as of
bureaucrats, both rich and poor. Kant himself thought that a
great city, the central place of a realm, which houses the central institutions of its
government, which possesses (for culture and science) a university, and which has a
good location for marine trade, both through rivers, with the interior land and with
countries of different languages and customs close and far away, such a city can be a fit
place for the acquisition of knowledge of human nature as well as knowledge of the
world even without travel. Such a city was Königsberg on the river Pregel.^124
Contrary to many commentators, Königsberg was not a mere backwater.
Emanuel did not grow up in the city itself, but in its immediate envi¬
rons, the "vordere Vorstadt." Administratively, this section belonged to the
part of the city called the Kneiphof. It was a residential area and at the same
time a busy commercial center, housing many warehouses for grain and
other trading goods, and containing many pubs and boarding houses. The
Sattlerstraße, where the Kants lived after 1733, was precisely what the name
indicates. It was a street lined with the shops and workplaces of the har¬
ness and saddle makers, a busy, noisy, and somewhat uneven neighborhood.
There were also many swampy meadows, bordered by irrigation channels.
As one might expect, parents needed to keep a close eye on children in
these circumstances.
Emanuel's earliest playmates were from this neighborhood, and he played
with them in these surroundings. His childhood friends were thus for the
most part descendants of the skilled and independent tradesmen who lived
in the area and formed a relatively uniform stratum of the city of Königs¬
berg, but none of these playmates became a friend whom Kant would re¬
member in old age. He does not say much about his early childhood games,
but in one of the stories he tells us how he escaped falling into the water
while balancing on a floating log. We may assume that he played all of the
games that were typical for Königsberg children. Since there was water
everywhere, they involved playing on and by the water in summer and ice
skating in the winter.
The part of town in which Kant grew up was in other respects a dan¬
gerous place to live. Fires, floods, and storms often ravaged his neighbor¬
hood.^125 Königsberg, and especially the Vordere Vorstadt experienced many
fires during Kant's lifetime. The house in which Kant was born burned
down in 1769 during a fire that "destroyed 76 homes and 134 warehouses in
the Vordere Vorstadt."^126 The fire started in early March; ten weeks later