European Studies Council Symposium: “Bulwark against the East or Imperial Outpost? Baltic Germans in the Russian Empire”

Many Eastern European peoples whose homelands share a border with Russia developed narratives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that they were bastions of western civilization beyond which extended Russian imperial foreignness. The view within Russia proper was increasingly that the Baltic region was an “outpost of Russia.” This two-day symposium examines the Baltic region and its former German-speaking elite – Baltic Germans (Deutschbalten) – from this two-fold perspective. We seek to understand the development of these narratives among and about Baltic Germans in the late tsarist era, as well as their later afterlives.

Inhabiting from the thirteenth century the territories that today form Estonia and Latvia, German speakers constituted both the landed and urban elite in both the early modern and modern eras, including after these lands became part of the Russian Empire during the reign of Peter I. Germans continued to come to the area into the nineteenth century. In their case, it was precisely their Germanness that they held as a “bulwark against the East,” a common motif in both the Baltic German texts and, especially, propagandist texts published in Germany in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

And yet the Baltic Germans also served the Russian Empire in a multitude of ways – as the local governing elite, as officials in the imperial administration in the imperial capital and wider empire, as military officers, scientists, explorers, and a significant portion of the privileged tsarist educated elite. In addition to examining the narrative of Baltic Germans as guardians of a western border zone, this symposium will thus also consider how this topic was viewed by Russian officials and publicists. In many Russian-language publications, the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire were depicted as Russian “national territory.”

This symposium addresses new and recently uncovered perspectives and new research on these issues. It engages scholars who have recently finished new publications or research projects that put the relevant questions in a new light.