Kristina Jõekalda

• German Monuments in the Baltic Heimat? A Historiography of Heritage in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’
• Tutor: Prof. Krista Kodres (Estonian Academy of Arts), Prof. Ulrike Plath (Tallinn University)
• Written thesis in the form of a compendium of articles, published as a book in the series Dissertationes Academiae Artium Estoniae 30

The Baltic Germans (Deutschbalten) are mostly addressed as a historical phenomenon, yet their architecture still shapes the local environment. This transdisciplinary and transnational dissertation looks at the representations of Baltic German identity from late eighteenth to mid-twentieth century. Rather than leaning on Estonian nationalism, the idea of a national heritage goes back to the Baltic German patriotic movement. The analysis has overlaps with nationalism studies and German diaspora studies, the key concepts being ʻheritageʼ, Heimat and ʻnationʼ, all seen as constructs. This is the first attempt in Estonian humanities to research the challenges that heritage studies have posed for the discipline of art history. This dissertation constitutes a critical historiography of the history and protection of local architecture in image, word and practice, looking at the visions of continuity and discontinuity, similarity and difference, localism and universalism, nationalism and internationalism, Balticness and Germanness (and Estonianness), scholarship and popularisation. FULL TEXT