Workshop // Kristina Jõekalda: ‘Baltic Propagandaʼ in Exhibitions: Instrumentalising Visual Culture during World War I
Termindetails
Wann
von 12:00 bis 13:00
Art
Wo
Fellows und Mitarbeitende des ZI sowie Gastwissenschaftlerinnen und Gastwissenschaftler berichten über laufende Arbeiten. Die offene Form des Workshops ermöglicht eine intensive Diskussion.
The wave of publications and newspaper articles introducing the Baltic German culture in all its aspects to the German reader during World War I – usually in highly politicised contexts – has been named ‘Baltic propagandaʼ by Wilhelm Lenz (1982). What kind of repercussions did that have for the art world? This workshop tackles the two travelling propaganda exhibitions held during the German occupation of the former Russian Baltic Sea provinces. In 1917–1918, the Kurland-Ausstellung toured through 11 then German cities. In 1918, by the time territories further north had been conquered, also a Livland-Estland-Ausstellung was prepared, shown three times – under Prince Henry of Prussia’s personal patronage.
Despite their vast extent, many printed materials, highly ideological character and scholarly appeal, hardly any research has been carried out on these exhibitions, not least owing to the fact that independence was declared in Estonia and Latvia in 1918, making them a very much ‘unwanted heritageʼ. Among soil, nutrition, hunting and economic data, not only Estonian and Latvian national costumes or handicrafts, but also original medieval and contemporary art works were transported to Germany, despite the turmoil of war. Could such propaganda exhibitions be seen as art history though?
Combining German and Baltic German aims, concerts, poetry evenings, lectures, varying by location, were held in course of the exhibitions. Were these exhibitions solely in the service of communicating the historical and contemporary Germanness of the newly acquired territories, or were there alternative narratives involved? Who were the protagonists behind them? Which kind of visual identity did the organisers seek to communicate? And how do these exhibition histories fit into the contemporaneous framework of Kunstschutz? Since the accompanying guidebooks only name the artists included, but not the exact works, the newly uncovered visual documentation helps to reconstruct the Livland-Estland-Ausstellung in particular, exploring its position in Baltic and German historiography.
Kristina Jõekalda is an associate professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn. She was previously a postdoctoral associate at Yale University, and a visiting fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her dissertation is published as “German Monuments in the Baltic Heimat? A Historiography of Heritage in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’” (Tallinn 2020). She edited “War on Monuments: Documenting the Debates over Russian and Soviet Heritage in Eastern and Central Europe” (special issue of kunsttexte.de 2024), and co-edited “A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades” (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 2019), “European Peripheries of Architectural Historiography” (special issue of The Journal of Architecture 2020) and “Debating German Heritage: Art History and Nationalism during the Long Nineteenth Century” (special issue of Studies on Art and Architecture 2014). She is an editor of EAHN’s Architectural Histories journal.
[Caption: Advertisement of the Livland-Estland-Ausstellung on the cover of the newspaper Baltische Illustrierte 1918, Nr. 4.]