Tidal Recall. Maritime Sites of Memory in the Baltic Sea Region

The workshop refers to the concept of the memory of sites and seeks to combine the idea of collective memory with that of thassology, a maritime history. It intends to go beyond the comprehension of collective memories as a realm of stable constitution and to stimulate thinking about permanent flux and change as their inherent features. The sea, sometimes considered a space without history, as a fluid ‘non-site’ – to speak with Marc Augé –, can be perceived as figure, material, and media which allows us to interrogate identities, cultures, and societies in their global intertwinings.
We thus operate on the methodological ground elaborated by Pierre Nora, Pierre Bourdieu, Harald Welzer, and others. However, we also ask to what extent those approaches maintain today their topicality considering the perspective on the sea as a realm of fluctuation. As a global and non-permanent place, the sea, seen as a cultural concept, has been widely discussed in recent debates on maritime history, entangled history, and histoire croisée. Also, in environmental art history and history, we perceive the sea as a field of agency. As the sea always encompasses a global and planetary perspective, we examine which spaces of negotiation and discourses prevent or promote processes of conceptualisation, perpetuation, and framing of collective memories. Therefore, we would like to ask: are maritime memory sites suitable for understanding transit processes and spaces such as, e.g. migration and diaspora? In these terms, we are looking for counternarratives, new narratives, events, artefacts, and places or sites of collective memories shaped by the maritime space to shed light on other social and local communities, events, and artefacts. Regarding our approach to the shared cultural heritage of the Baltic Sea Region, we are interested in fractures, blurs, and oblivion – in the common and the divisive elements that foster the understanding of regional trajectories in a global framework.

The workshop is part of the subproject “Geteiltes Erbe/Shared Heritage” in the research phase “Fragmented Transformations” of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Baltic Sea Region Research (IFZO), University of Greifswald.

Friday 17/06/2022
3:30 pm
Welcome & Introduction
Gesa zur Nieden, Antje Kempe

3:45 pm
Marina Dmitrieva (Leipzig)
Staging the War: Sevastopol in Visual Media, 1850s – 1950s – 2014

4:30 pm
Break

5:00 pm
Beata Labuhn (Oslo)
Gdynia–An Inquiry into its Maritime Monuments (Joseph Conrad Monument)

Adrianna Brechelke (Poznań)
Kołobrzeg–the Seaside Town of Memory. Ville de memoire-lieu de memoire

6:00 pm
Break

6:20 pm
Keynote Lecture
Ulrike Plath (Tallinn)
Storms, Droughts, and Floods: Baltic Climate Memory between Land and Sea

Saturday 18/06/2022

9:30 am
Johannes von Müller (Kiel)
Reliquary to the Square: The Plaster Casts of the Cammin Shrine in Greifswald, Copenhagen and Szczecin

Laura Tack (Greifswald)
Shapes of Flood Memory Sites in the Baltic Sea Region – Material and Immaterial

Arne Segelke (Greifswald)
The German Revolution of 1918 as a Maritime Site of Memory in the two German States

11:15 am
Break

11:45 am
Roundtable
„Shifting Memories. How to Exhibit and Mediate Maritime Sites of Memory?”
Chair: Sünne Juterczenka (Göttingen)
With: Teele Saar, Feliks Gornischeff, Urmas Dresen (Eesti Meremuuseum Estonia/Estonian Maritime Museum, Tallinn), Ruth Schilling (Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum / German Maritime Museum, Bremerhaven), Benjamin Asmussen (Museet for Søfart / Maritime Museum of Denmark, Elsinore)

1:00 pm
Conclusion

Concept and organisation: Antje Kempe