Losers! Failure and Frustration in Baltic History

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

At the 11th CBSE in Marburg in 2015, the “Baltische Historische Kommission” sponsored a panel on “The Traitor. Problems of Loyalty in Times of Transition”. Following up on this inquiry into the complex historiographical issue of treason, we intend to bring yet another group of disreputable – or in this case, unfortunate – individuals from Baltic history into the spotlight. By examining three case studies ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the panel will not only shed light on the unusual biographies of three alleged “losers” – King Magnus of Livonia, Duke Jakob Kettler of Courland and Nikolai Iudenich – but also address the methodological challenges inherent to an historiography of failure: Success and failure are concepts that have been employed regularly in academic historiography, and are even more prominent in popular accounts of the past. However, such assessments were and are often used with little reflection – based on the implicit assumption that success and the lack thereof can be measured by criteria set by modern historians in retrospect, and not by the putative “losers” or their contemporaries themselves. In the proposed panel, we intend to raise the question whether narratives of “losers” are inherently teleological and whether we can perceive failures of the past without the hindsight of the present.

Short Bio

KARSTEN BRÜGGEMANN is professor of Estonian and General History at Tallinn University and Vice-President of the Baltische Historische Kommission. He is co-editor of Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung and Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte. He received his Ph.D. in History from Hamburg University in 1999 with a study on the Russian Civil war on the Baltic theatre in 1918–1920. In 2013, he defended his Habilitation at the University of Gießen with an analysis of the changing image of the Baltic provinces of the tsarist empire in Russian imperial culture. His research interests within Russian and Soviet history include the history of the Baltic states, especially in times of Russian rule, the wars of independence and their afterlife in Baltic political culture of the interwar period, the cultural history of Stalinism and the post-Stalin period, national narratives and memory cultures, sport and tourism. A history of the Baltic states (with Norbert Angermann) is to be published in 2018 in German. He is co-editing a three-volume history of the Baltic states, with financing from VolkswagenStiftung (with Ralph Tuchtenhagen).

STEFAN DONECKER is Associated Researcher at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer at the University of Vienna. He studied History and Scandinavian Studies at the universities of Vienna and Umeå and received his Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence with a dissertation on early modern Livonian historiography and its theories on the origins of the Estonians and Latvians. Subsequently, he worked at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg, Greifswald, and the University of Konstanz as a postdoctoral researcher. Stefan Donecker is board member of the Baltische Historische Kommission and recipient of a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (2015). His research focuses on intellectual history and the history of historiography in North-Eastern Europe, on pre-modern forms of collective identity and social cohesion as well as on the perception of the supernatural in the European periphery (with a particular soft spot for the werewolves of Livonia).

MARTIN PABST is academic director of two key Baltic German institutions, the Deutsch-Baltisches Jugendwerk and the Deutsch-Baltisches Kulturwerk at Lüneburg. Between 2002 and 2009, he studied modern and medieval history, protestant theology as well as musicology at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. His master thesis examined Baltic German associations in the post-war era, 1954–52. In the course of his Ph.D. project under the supervision of Olaf Mörke at the Christian Albrechts Universität Kiel (2010–14), he developed a typology of protestant reformation in sixteenth-century cities, using the city of Riga as an example.

Sub Unit

• History and Memory

Chair

• Mart Kuldkepp, University College London

Individual Presentations

• The Tragedy of Magnus, First and Last King of Livonia - Stefan Donecker, Austrian Academy of Sciences

• Jakob Kettler: Success and Failure in Courland's Alleged "Golden Age" - Martin Pabst, Deutsch-Baltisches Kulturwerk, Lüneburg

• A Russian Imperial Hero Who Loses All: Nikolai Nikolaevich Iudenich and Estonia during the War of Independence 1918–1920 - Karsten Brüggemann, Tallinn University

Session Organizer

• Stefan Donecker, Austrian Academy of Sciences