Question de Memel — 2e Volume: Règlement de la Question de Memel par le Conseil de la Société des Nations
Tarpukaris
Interwar Republic · 1920–1940
Published in 1924 during the Interwar Republic period.
This is an official diplomatic document collection published by the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1924, compiling the complete international record of the Memel Territory transfer negotiations — including League of Nations Council proceedings, the Ambassadors' Conference correspondence, and the final Convention text signed by the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, and Lithuania. It is a primary source of the highest order: the Lithuanian state's own authoritative compilation of the diplomatic instruments that secured Klaipėda/Memel as Lithuanian territory, published in French and English as international treaty language. No other copy of this specific volume is known to exist in American diaspora collections, making it an extraordinary survival of interwar Lithuanian state publishing.
What It Is
This volume is a crystallized artifact of Lithuanian sovereign statehood: the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishing, in French — the language of international diplomacy — the complete documentary record of how Lithuania secured the Memel Territory through the League of Nations. The very act of compiling and publishing this dossier in 1924 was itself a performance of modern statehood, demonstrating that Lithuania possessed the institutional infrastructure to participate in international treaty-making and to document that participation for posterity. The choice of French as the primary language signals Lithuania's self-positioning as a fully European, internationally recognized state — not a peripheral nationality but a sovereign actor at the table with the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan. The survival of this volume in a Detroit Lithuanian heritage school collection speaks to the second cultural layer embedded in the object: its displacement from the Lithuanian state into the diaspora after 1944. For Lithuanian refugees who fled Soviet occupation, documents like this volume served as portable evidence of a sovereignty that had been illegally extinguished. The Memel Convention was particularly resonant because the territory it governed was itself lost — first to Nazi Germany in 1939 and then absorbed into Soviet Lithuania — making this document a record of what legitimate Lithuanian statehood had achieved and what had been stolen. Diaspora communities preserved such materials not merely as historical curiosities but as legal and moral arguments for the restoration of independence.
Why It Matters
The Memel/Klaipėda question was the defining territorial achievement of interwar Lithuanian diplomacy — the one successful offensive diplomatic campaign of the young republic, securing a port city and territory that gave Lithuania access to the Baltic Sea and economic viability as a state. The 1923 Lithuanian seizure of Memel from French-administered Allied control, and the subsequent 1924 Convention that legitimized that seizure through League of Nations mechanisms, represents a moment when a small, newly independent state successfully confronted great-power administration and prevailed. This volume is the Lithuanian state's own documentary record of that achievement, published in the language of international diplomacy and preserved by refugees across decades of Soviet occupation.