070025 UE Guided Reading Austrian History I - Places and Non-Places of Remembrance in the Austrian Middle Ages (2024S)

Everyone thinks they understand what places of remembrance are; for example, monuments to great men (and a homeopathic dose of women), at which prominent figures perform symbolic acts on memorial days and in the presence of selected members of the public. Furthermore, spaces of more personal remembrance, such as stumbling blocks and gravestones, ceremonies and memorial days, to which specific rituals or a concrete materiality is often linked. And not to forget: Very personal forms of commemoration of family members, important dates in life and events. Various forms of memorial culture have accompanied people since at least ancient times. Both are central to the individual, but also to the sovereign identity of states. In the Middle Ages, manifestations of propaganda were strongly dependent on the Christian understanding of culture, but at the same time they also reflected the respective ideas of society and rule. As this memory is selective, it also has a dark side: that of forgetting, or deliberate forgetting (decreed by the authorities) - also known as damnatio in memoriae. This deliberate erasure of the memory of politically unfavorable events, or the exaggeration of factually marginal events, is a field of research that is rich in controversial examples, especially in states that struggle with a thoroughly heterogeneous culture of remembrance - Medieval Austria offers particularly rich illustrative material for this.
Medieval memoria was often used to support and legitimize existing monarchical structures, especially during the period of nation-state formation. Moreover, in the Habsburg Monarchy, whose centralized power was constantly challenged by its individual members, there was sometimes a competition between memorial sites and non-places, which often dated back to medieval events. The aim of the event is to present the concept of places of remembrance using selected texts and sources and to apply it to the sometimes challenging architecture of power in the medieval Duchy of Austria. Various examples will be discussed (e.g. battle commemorations, state documents, individual political and clerical actors, catastrophes or pogroms), with the help of which the transformations of this concept can be traced.

The approach will include the following aspects:

1. What social concepts are associated with collective and individual memory and its counterpart, prescribed forgetting (damnatio in memoriae)? What methods, ideas and terms are connected to this idea and how have they developed since they were first formulated in the 1980s (by Pierre Nora, Aleida and Jan Assmann)?
2. What did concrete forms of medieval remembrance look like (e.g. processions, places of pilgrimage, portraits of rulers, battle anniversaries, etc.), how do they differ from their modern manifestations and what is specific to the Austrian situation? This also involves their possible further use or further development in the (duchy and archduchy as well as the later empire) in the early modern and modern periods.
3. How is memorial culture linked to image and identity cultivation? Which actors in the Duchy use this instrument particularly extensively and with what intentions? How do geographical (e.g. monuments and other architectural buildings and elements), individual (e.g. 'cults' around historical figures) and material places of remembrance (e.g. insignia, war trophies) function and how are they used publicly?
4. What are non-places and what role and how do they come about (e.g. through the deliberate destruction of memory or simple forgetting)? What transformations can they undergo and what effect do they have on the main discourse?