The Most Authentic Germans of All? Baltic German and Estonian Views on Heritage and Colonialism in the Early 20th Century

New Room Location: Luce Hall, Rm 202 (2nd fl), 34 Hillhouse Ave.
This talk falls between art historiography and heritage studies and looks at a historical German minority in the Baltic region, in what is now Estonia and Latvia, where Germans formed the elite from the thirteenth century until 1939. Jõekalda discusses Baltic German approaches to monuments of architecture, the ways in which narratives of Baltic colonialism and German imperialism were constructed, and how Estonian art historians began to deal with these narratives in the independent Republic of Estonia in the interwar period. In particular, the role of the renowned German art historian Georg Dehio will be discussed in raising the dichotomies of high and low, center and periphery, German and Baltic, art and heritage. The Faculty Discussant of the talk is Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Assistant Dean and Professor at the Yale School of Architecture
Register to attend in person: https://bit.ly/YaleBaltic-EventRegistration
Join via Zoom: https://bit.ly/Yale-BalticMay11Zoom
Location: Rosenkranz Hall, Rm 202, 115 Prospect St.
Kristina Jõekalda is Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin, and has studied also at the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation is titled German Monuments in the Baltic Heimat? A Historiography of Heritage in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’ (Tallinn 2020). She is co-editor of special issues of journals such as The Journal of Architecture and the book A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 2019).