Revisiting “Baltic Propaganda”: The Livland-Estland-Ausstellung of 1918

• In Event: Civic, Imperial, and Ethnic Histories in the Baltic Region, 1860-1950s

Abstract

The little researched Livland-Estland-Ausstellung was a propaganda exhibition during World War I, shown in Berlin, Hamburg and Lübeck in summer/autumn 1918. On the one hand, I look at the preparatory stage of that major undertaking, particularly from the side of the Baltic partners, who were no indifferent informants, but active participants in this. A perfect testimony to the political instrumentalisation of research, this exhibition could in many ways be seen as part of the German efforts that took advantage of existing debates on German colonialism, while preparing the ground for the later Nazi German Ostforschung. Indeed, this travelling exhibition is a textbook example of the colonial instrumentalisation of (art) history to justify plans for territorial expansion, skillfully combining the aims of the Germans and the Baltic Germans in this turmoil of the final years of World War I.
On the other hand, my focus will be on the results of the exhibition: its contemporary reception and media coverage, as well as the later reception of both the exhibition and the relating special publications. What was the fate of these hundreds of artefacts, transported to Germany in the middle of the ongoing war? How was this undertaking interpreted in various circles in both in Germany and in the Baltic region? Based on new findings in the archives in Estonia, Poland, and Germany, I aim to look at the wider cultural meaning of the Livland-Estland-Ausstellung and its aftereffects in the interwar era, and its position in Estonian and Latvian historiography.

Short Bio

Kristina Jõekalda is an Associate Professor (Doctoral School) and a 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. She was previously a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, and a visiting fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin. She has received grants from the AABS (2019), the Böckler-Mare-Balticum Foundation (2017) and others. Alongside many scholarly articles, she authored German Monuments in the Baltic Heimat? A Historiography of Heritage in the “Long Nineteenth Century” (Tallinn 2020), and co-edited e.g. European Peripheries of Architectural Historiography (special issue of The Journal of Architecture, 2020), and A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 2019).

Author

• Kristina Jõekalda, Estonian Academy of Arts