Miscellaneous

449 Ab Imperio, 1/2005 Co-sponsored by the the European Science Foundation, the 2004 annual conference of the Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe at the University of Leipzig brought together scholars from Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Baltic states, Sweden, Russia, and Ukraine to shed light on the origin and evolution of ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE RESEARCH CENTRE FOR THE HISTORY AND CULTURE OF EAST CENTRAL EUROPE AT LEIPZIG UNIVERSITY (GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTLICHES ZENTRUM GESCHICHTE UND KULTUR OSTMITTELEUROPAS AN DER UNIVERSITÄT LEIPZIG/ GWZO): LOST GREATNESS AND PAST OPPRESSION IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE. REPRESENTATIONS OF IMPERIAL EXPERIENCE IN HISTORIOGRAPHY SINCE 1918 Leipzig, December 10-12, 2004* * Anote from the editors: Ab Imperio editors welcome the publication of this report from the conference on historiographies of imperial past. Two editors, A. Semyonov and A. Kaplunovski, were able to attend this scholarly event and observe interesting discussion thanks to the effort of the conference organizers. On behalf of Ab Imperio they would like to thank Stefan Tröbst, Frank Hadler and Mathias Mesenhöller. Ab Imperio will continue to inform its readers of the work of different fora dedicated to discussion of imperial and nationalism studies and would like to solicit conference reports for publication on pages of the journal. 450 Miscellaneous the various interpretations of the imperial experience that have been produced by the national historiographies of East Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe after World War I. The idea was to confront the perspectives of the then newly created nation states with those of societies that may be regarded as the political “heirs” of former imperial centers.As the organizers Frank Hadler and Mathias Mesenhöller pointed out in their introduction, the way this imperial past has been treated in different traditions of historiography ever since the breakdown of the multinational empires has had a decisive influence on the formation of collective identities and memories: constructing images of real or supposed greatness (or oppression) in the past, historiography, as well as non-academic production, has provided an essential contribution to the formation of national identities in the societies in question. In order to gain a comparative perspective, six panels sought to explore the traces that the Russian, Ottoman, Habsburg, Prussian, Polish-Lithuanian, and Swedish Empires have left in the respective modern historiographies. The first panel dealt with the imperial legacy of the early modern Swedish empire. Ragnar Björk (Södertörn) spoke on the “imperial view” of 20th century Swedish historiography, pointing out that Swedish research on the kingdom’s dominium maris Baltici traditionally focused on the Swedish heartland itself. Only in the past two decades has the “Baltic dimension” of Sweden as an early modern great power been rediscovered in Swedish historical writing. With regard to Polish interpretations of the almost permanent fight for predominance in the Baltic region, which characterized Swedish-Polish relations in early modern times, Klaus Zernack (Berlin) showed how the traditional image of Sweden as Poland’s “archenemy” was replaced by a thoroughly anti-Prussian perception at the end of the 19th century. However , the interest of Polish historiography in the Swedish-Polish conflict has been constantly increasing since the end of the 1960s, especially in recent years. Ilgvars Misāns (Riga) then depicted the development of the myth of “the good Swedish times” in Latvian historiography since 1918, which, despite some modifications in recent years, still remains predominant in popular constructions of Latvian historical identity. This appears to be helped by the fact that current professional historiography, preoccupied with the more recent past, takes rather little interest in the subject. The second panel dealt with historiographic approaches to the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth. It was opened by Jūratė Kiaupienė (Vilnius), who illuminated the negative notions of the Rzeczpospolita that characterized Lithuanian historiography of the interwar and Soviet periods. Only lately have more differentiated interpretations of the Polish-dominated imperial 451 Ab Imperio, 1/2005 past been adopted. Drawing a similar picture, Wilfried Jilge (Leipzig) presented Ukrainian historiography on the era of Polish-Lithuanian rule: while ethnically-centred, negative assessments were predominant among former Communist historians, as well as among the representatives of what used to be the...