070281 GR Guided Reading (2016W)

For centuries, the lands inhabited by today’s Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians have been subject to expansionist and imperial ambitions. Since the medieval era, the territories along the eastern coastline of the Baltic Sea have been under the rule of the Livonian Order, the Kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden and Poland, the Russian Empire and its successor, the Soviet Union. Hence, the autochthonous population celebrated the restoration of full Baltic independence a quarter of a century ago as a historical turn that marked the end of centuries of ‘foreign rule’.
As during the short intermezzo of sovereign statehood in the interwar decades, throwing off the shackles of foreign domination also meant to reassess the past of the Baltic nations. For centuries, Baltic historiographies had been written from the point of view of Baltic German pastors, members of the Polish intelligentsia, Russian governors or apparatchiks of the Soviet Communist Party. Attempts to regain control over their own past thus has inspired generations of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians to rewrite their history from a national(ist) perspective.
The course aims at examining the clashes between competing and conflicting historical interpretations in the region and their repercussions on contemporary debates. Discussing different historiographical approaches to chosen aspects of Baltic history from the Middle Ages to the late Twentieth Century, the students are supposed to learn about the use and abuse of history writing as a means of power politics and domination, but also as a unifying and identity-shaping aspect of nation-building processes. The literature for this course discusses the variety of historical imagination and images in the region, analysing the complex set of political and ethnic conflicts that lay behind competing historiographical interpretations. Other sources such as excerpts from historiographical works on the region’s past, paintings, movie clips and further primary source material will be discussed during the sessions, offering additional training in critically accessing historiography and images of the past as a field that is subject to constant reinterpretation.