11.07.2023

Phantom Landscapes and Layers of History: Heritage Sites and Belonging in the Southern German Borderlands

Lecture, 17 July in the Fürstenzimmer, Castle Hohentübingen

Prof. H. Glenn Penny, Professor and Henry J. Bruman , Chair in German History, University of California

Hermann Bausinger often argued that Baden Württemberg’s polycentric landscape was filled with a multiplicity of cultures built on layers of history not everyone could see He was right, but he might have added that historians of Germany, overwhelmingly focused for generations on the nation state, have been unable to see much of anything in southern Germany If, for example, scholars have filled rooms with books about the eastern German border, the southern German border has received relatively little attention In part, that is because the eastern border appeared to historians to be a perennial problem, one demanding solutions, which led to a great deal of violence. In contrast, the southern German border has not appeared to be much of a problem at all, which might seem to make it less important, less worthy of inquiry.

In this talk Glenn Penny engages a series of heritage sites and museums in the area while arguing that the opposite is true: this neglected region and the scholars who have been working on it for generations may have more to tell us about the contours of a globalized German history than those regions that were animated for so long by a series of
titillating and often violent ruptures.