Baltic | Bulwark against the East or Imperial Outpost? Baltic Germans in the Russian Empire
Sponsored by:
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
Yale Baltic Studies Program
The Estonian Academy of the Arts
Photo Credit: Von Grünewaldt family in Mäo (Mexhof) manor, 1917. Photo: Karl Akel (Film Archives, National Archives of Estonia).
Many Eastern European peoples whose homelands share a border with Russia developed narratives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that they were bastions of western civilization beyond which extended Russian imperial foreignness. The view within Russia proper was increasingly that the Baltic region was an “outpost of Russia.” This two-day symposium examines the Baltic region and its former German-speaking elite – Baltic Germans (Deutschbalten) – from this two-fold perspective. We seek to understand the development of these narratives among and about Baltic Germans in the late tsarist era, as well as their later afterlives.
Inhabiting from the thirteenth century the territories that today form Estonia and Latvia, German speakers constituted both the landed and urban elite in both the early modern and modern eras, including after these lands became part of the Russian Empire during the reign of Peter I. Germans continued to come to the area into the nineteenth century. In their case, it was precisely their Germanness that they held as a “bulwark against the East,” a common motif in both the Baltic German texts and, especially, propagandist texts published in Germany in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
And yet the Baltic Germans also served the Russian Empire in a multitude of ways – as the local governing elite, as officials in the imperial administration in the imperial capital and wider empire, as military officers, scientists, explorers, and a significant portion of the privileged tsarist educated elite. In addition to examining the narrative of Baltic Germans as guardians of a western border zone, this symposium will thus also consider how this topic was viewed by Russian officials and publicists. In many Russian-language publications, the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire were depicted as Russian “national territory.”
This symposium addresses new and recently uncovered perspectives and new research on these issues. It engages scholars who have recently finished new publications or research projects that put the relevant questions in a new light.
Sponsors
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
Yale Baltic Studies Program
The Estonian Academy of the Arts
Speakers
Timo Aava is a historian of modern Europe focusing on the history of political thought and minority rights. Between 2023 and 2024, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the 2024-2025 academic year, he will hold academic positions at Yale University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Harvard University.
.
.
I am a researcher at the Estonian Maritime Museum where I am conducting a research project on the Baltic German
exploration in the early 19th century, focusing on Adam Johann von Krusenstern. I have defended my PhD thesis on
the Baltic German diplomats in the Russian service during the Napoleonic Wars at the University of Tartu in 2020.
.
Kristina Jõekalda is an associate professor (Doctoral School) and senior researcher (Institute of Art History and Visual Culture) at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn. She studied there and at the University of Helsinki. Her previous engagements include being a postdoctoral associate at Yale University, and a visiting fellow at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich and at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Jõekalda is interested in power relations behind art history. Her dissertation is published as “German Monuments in the Baltic Heimat? A Historiography of Heritage in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’” (Tallinn 2020). Her most recent publication is the edited volume “War on Monuments: Documenting the Debates over Russian and Soviet Heritage in Eastern and Central Europe” (special issue of kunsttexte.de 2024). She co-edited “A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades” (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 2019), as well as the special issues “European Peripheries of Architectural Historiography” (The Journal of Architecture 2020) and “Debating German Heritage: Art History and Nationalism during the Long Nineteenth Century” (Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on Art and Architecture 2014).
Mart Kuldkepp is an Estonian Scandinavianist and historian. He completed his PhD in Scandinavian Studies at University of Tartu, Estonia, in 2014, and in 2015 he joined University College London (UCL) where he is currently Professor of Estonian and Nordic History. Mart specialises on Scandinavian and Baltic history and politics – especially foreign and security policy – and early 20th century wars. He has published on the idea of Estonia's Nordic identity, German annexationism in the First World War, Swedish right-wing nationalism in 19th and early 20th century, and the experiences of soldiers in the First World War and the Estonian War of Independence. He is also interested in contemporary Baltic and Scandinavian politics, especially foreign and security policy. Furthermore, he has a side interest Medieval Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture.
Heidi Rifk is a junior researcher at Tallinn University and a PhD student specializing in contemporary history, focusing on the socioeconomic status of Baltic Germans in interwar Estonia. She has cooperated with the Herder-Institut, Dartmouth College, and the Böckler-Mare-Balticum-Stiftung. Heidi has presented at numerous international conferences and has published in several international journals, including Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte, Acta Historica Tallinnensia, and Zapiski Historyczne. Her doctoral studies are supervised by Prof. Karsten Brüggemann from Tallinn University and Prof. Ago Pajur from Tartu University.
Ragne Soosalu is a doctoral fellow, junior researcher and a lecturer at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture in the Estonian Academy of Arts. Before starting her doctoral studies, she worked at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, as a curator and project manager, editing and compiling several exhibition catalogues. Ragne’s doctoral thesis is focusing on minority women artists during the period of about 1890 to 1940 in the area of Estonia and later the Estonian Republic.
Dr. Baiba Vanaga studied art history and theory at the Art Academy of Latvia and museology at the Latvian Academy of Culture. In 2015, she defended her doctoral thesis at the Art Academy of Latvia, and the theme of her research work was ‘Women Artists in Latvia from the mid-19th Century until 1915’. Since 2024, Baiba Vanaga works at the Latvian National Museum of Art. She has worked at the National Archives of Latvia and at the Rundāle Palace Museum, and participated in a research project ‘Women Agency in Latvian Culture and Society (1870–1940)’ at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia (2021–2023). Since 2004, she has participated in conferences in Latvia (Riga, Rundāle), Estonia (Tallinn), Lithuania (Vilnius, Kaunas), Finland (Helsinki), Poland (Warsaw), Germany (Bremen, Greifswald, Berlin), Ireland (Cork) and Croatia (Zagreb), and has written several articles for Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, English and German publications. Her research interests are women artists, historical collections and artistic life in Latvia from the late 18th century until the middle of the 20th century.
Dr. Katja Wezel is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen, where she is currently working on a research project titled “At the Crossroads of Modernity: Double-Entry Accounting, Business, and Cultural Practices of Jews in Imperial Russia's Western Borderlands”. She studied History and English at the Universities of Heidelberg, Aberystwyth (UK) and the European University St. Petersburg (Russia) from 1999 to 2004. In 2011, she completed her PhD at the University of Heidelberg with a thesis on memory politics in Latvia (title: Geschichte als Politikum. Lettland und die Aufarbeitung nach der Diktatur, published in 2016 by Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag). From 2013 to 2018, she was the DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and subsequently senior researcher in Eastern European History at the University of Göttingen. From 2021 to 2023, she held a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Latvia in Riga. She is currently writing an economic history of Riga in the period 1855 to 1939.