Heritage Studies came into being in the 1980s, falling into an era in Estonian history that was associated with monuments more closely than ever. According to the slogan of the Soviet Estonian heritage movement (muinsuskaitseliikumine) of late 1980s its ultimate goal was to restore nothing less than the most important of the country’s antiquities – interwar independence. Where are the roots of these processes?

‘Heritage’ has remained a marginal concept for much of Western art history. There are cases, where a clear boundary between Art History and Heritage Studies can be drawn, and others, where this boundary is very ambivalent. My research material – early texts on the history of Baltic architecture and its preservation – tends to fall into the latter category, and this space in between is exactly what the talk will tackle. While Art History is a discipline that is very much absorbed with its own history and origins, Heritage Studies mostly tends to limit itself to recent or even contemporary concerns. Yet, as David C. Harvey has argued, the questions the field of Heritage Studies raises – the connections between monuments and processes of identity formation, the ever changing valorisation of monuments, the ways they could unify a society, the relationship between academic and popular research, up to dangerous kinds of connections to nationalism and colonialism – are extremely relevant in historical, 19th-century contexts as well.

My talk will address these disciplinary boundaries, looking at the transition from the Baltic German Heimat to the Estonian nation state, and how the arfterlives of these processes still keep affecting our approaches today. 19th- and early-20th-century Baltic German scholars of that era were following pace foremost with their German colleagues, but which ones and how exactly? Since the Estonian nation state was formed in 1918, Estonian scholars sought to widen their horizons of international role models. How far away from the narratives of previous German-language scholarship did the existing boundaries and hierarchies of the art historical discipline actually allow them to drift? How close were publications in both languages to openly political aims? And does the perspective of heritage enable to uncover any new or neglected topics?

Kristina Jõekalda ist Dozentin und Senior Researcher an der Estnischen Kunstakademie, Tallinn. Sie hat da Kunstwissenschaft und auch an der Universität Helsinki allgemeine Geschichte studiert. 2018 war sie Gastwissenschafterin an der Humbold-Universität zu Berlin (gefördert von Böckler-Mare-Balticum-Stiftung); 2022 Postdoctoral Associate an der Yale Universität. Sie wurde mit einer Arbeit über „German Monuments in the Baltic Heimat? A Historiography of Heritage in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’“ (Tallinn 2020) promoviert. Zu Ihren Lehr- und Forschungsschwerpunkte zählen Kunst- und Architekturgeschichte, -historiographie und Denkmalpflege im Baltikum, im Kontext des Nationalismus und Kolonialismus. Sie ist Mitherausgeberin des Sammelbandes „A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades“ (Wien/Köln/Weimar 2019) und der Sonderhefte „European Peripheries of Architectural Historiography“ (The Journal of Architecture 2020) und „Debating German Heritage: Art History and Nationalism during the Long Nineteenth Century“ (Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies of Art and Architecture 2014).