- Date
- Wednesday 13 Dec 2023, 10:00 - 11:30
- Type
- Symposium
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- C1-2 (1st floor)
- Building
- Theil Building
- Location
- Campus Woudestein
The Center for Historical Culture and History@Erasmus invite you cordially to attend the symposium Sacred Grounds and Embodied Histories: Engaging with War Heritage through Place and Performance on December 13th at 10:00. The symposium is organized at the occasion of the PhD ceremony of Lise Zurné, who will defend her dissertation Performing Contested Pasts: An Ethnography of Historical Re-enactments of War and Revolution the same day at 13:00 and will be moderated by dr. Robbert-Jan Adriaansen of ESHCC.
The symposium will delve deep into the intricate relationship between war heritage, the sacredness of historical landscapes, and the embodied practices of historical reenactment. In an era where the memories and legacies of conflicts are not just preserved in monuments and written narratives, but also relived and performed, this gathering aims to shed light on the significance of place and the human body in understanding and conveying history.
Our selected speakers, Mads Daugbjerg from Aarhus University (Denmark) and Juliane Tomann from Regensburg University (Germany), bring to the table unique perspectives on these themes. Daugbjerg’s exploration of Gettysburg as a “hallowed ground” and the efforts of the National Park Service in battlefield rehabilitation provide a profound understanding of how landscapes of war are revered, preserved, and interacted with. On the other hand, Tomann offers an insightful journey into the world of historical reenactment in the GDR, showcasing the transformative power of embodying the past, especially within the constraints of a restrictive political system.
After the symposium, attendees are encouraged to join us for Lise Zurné's PhD defense where she presents her comprehensive research on historical re-enactments of war and revolution in Europe and Indonesia, further enriching the discourse on how past conflicts are performed and perceived in contemporary settings.
Abstracts
The grounds of Gettysburg: Sacrality and rehabilitation in war heritage landscapes
Mads Daugbjerg, Aarhus University
In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a major battlefield of the American Civil War (1861–65), the landscape is routinely referred to as “hallowed ground”. Today, the Gettysburg National Military Park sees millions of annual visitors, mostly domestic, who come to tour the 6000-acre (24,4 km2) area kept and preserved by the US National Park Service. Its alleged sacrality is understood to derive from the mass death (or ‘sacrifice’) of thousands of soldiers who lost their lives here over three brutal days of battle in July 1863.
Sacredness, however, is also a more general feature taken to inhere in the American national park per se, including natural parks such as Yellowstone and Grand Canyon understood as landscapes somehow set apart, outside of time, and as locales where nature and nation merge in unique and supposedly fulfilling ways for (patriotic) visitors. In my paper, I inquire into the production and consumption of hallowed ground at Gettysburg and similar (war) heritage landscapes, and discuss how notions of the sacred, of time, and of nation are entangled in such setups. I devote particular attention to the National Park Service’s ongoing policy of ‘battlefield rehabilitation’, an ambitious landscaping program meant to not just preserve, modify and care for the landscape, but also, by implication, to help ‘rehabilitate’ its visitors and even – in the eyes of some – heal the torn American nation.
Embodied History from Below: Historical Reenactment in the GDR
Juliane Tomann, Regensburg University
As a popular-cultural practice, reenactment is currently an important part of historical culture as it attempts to recreate past realities and revive them in the present in an embodied, immersive and performative-sensory way. Analyzing reenactments scholars mainly focus on the large variety of present day phenomena. So far less attention has been paid to the developments of reenactment practices over time. Despite the fact that a few studies tackle the question how practices of reenacting the past evolved over time on the basis of the American Civil War (for instance Hochbruck, 2013), historicizing reenactments is still a desideratum.
In my presentation I will focus on how embodied practices of restaging the past emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). On the basis of reenactment groups which focused on the Napoleonic Wars I will engage with the political context in which the reenactors developed their activities in a restrictive political system. I will show how a change in the concept of regional and local history in the ideological system of the ruling party (SED) enabled immersive, embodied practices of restaging the past on a local level in state socialism. Restrictions and regulations of such forms of embodied and immersive history will be addressed by analyzing the role of the Ministry of State Security.