Kristina Jõekalda: The „others“ of Estonian art history: Unveiling a historiography of heritage

• In Event: Panel series: Crossroads of Baltic Historical Research: Post-Soviet transformations and the real challenge of expanding the field / Panel I: Bringing theory into practice

Abstract

In addition to asking new questions, it is essential sometimes to return to the old ones, such as the historical relationship between the Estonians and the (Baltic) Germans. I propose that the perspective of heritage provides a fruitful framework to do that, one that has too rarely been employed in Estonian scholarship. While art history, as Christopher S. Wood writes (2019), ʻis more absorbed with its own origin and history than any other academic discipline’, many neglected topics begin to be uncovered, when one looks at the space between the disciplines of art history and heritage conservation. ‘Heritage’ has remained a marginal concept for Western (especially German) art history. Heritage Studies came into being in the 1980s, falling neatly into an era in Estonian history that was associated with monuments more closely than ever. According to the slogan of muinsuskaitseliikumine of late 1980s the movement’s ultimate goal was to restore nothing less than the most important of all the country’s antiquities – interwar independence. Heritage Studies indeed tends to limit itself to recent or contemporary concerns, the most pressing problems. But the questions the field of Heritage Studies raises – the connections between monuments and processes of identity formation, the changing valorisation of monuments, the ways they could unify a society through successful popularisation – are extremely relevant in historical, 19th-century contexts as well. In Estonian history this allows to unveil the similarities of the Baltic German and Estonian traditions of writing about and preserving the monuments, relating to nationalism and colonialism.

Author

• Kristina Jõekalda, Estonian Academy of Arts