On Wednesday, October 28, at 15.00, David Lang – a doctoral candidate at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and recipient of the Tallinn University Baltica Grant for foreign researchers – will give a presentation titled Vom Zaren zum Kaiser? Deutschbaltische Identitäten und Loyalitäten im Ersten Weltkrieg (From Tsar to Kaiser? Baltic German Identities and Loyalties in the First World War).
By way of introducing his presentation, he says the following:
The First World War confronted the Baltic Germans with a fundamental identity conflict. The multi-layered constructs of Baltic German identity – which had long managed to reconcile an affiliation with German culture with loyalty to the Tsar – came under increasing pressure following the outbreak of the war. This presentation examines how the war, state repression, revolution, and the German occupation between 1914 and 1918 influenced Baltic German conceptions of identity, loyalties, and political visions for the future.
The first part of the presentation traces the most important events in the Baltics in chronological order and records the Baltic Germans’ reactions to them based on ego documents. In this regard, the question is of particular interest to what extent the more general change of loyalty of the Baltic Germans from Russia to Germany took place during the war and what interruptions can be identified for different parts of the Baltic German society.
In the second, systematically structured part, various Baltic German political discourses are reconstructed, encompassing nationalist, conservative, liberal-democratic, cosmopolitan, and Russophile positions. The focus lies on the conceptions of belonging, political order, and the future that underpinned these different orientations, and on determining which of these could be classified as hegemonic and which as peripheral.
The presentation will be in German and will take place in the seminar room Uno at the Academic Library of Tallinn University. Everyone is welcome to attend!
