This project will analyse how the concepts of minority, national identity, citizenship and power were constructed, transformed and communicated within several specific cosmopolitan milieus, 1870-1914.The project\u2019s main concern is the study of the concept \u201dcosmopolitan\u201d, and how this \u201duniversal\u201d concept was associated with different views on minorities and national identity. The nationalist awakening which characterised Europe at the end of the nineteenth century originated in early nineteenth-century German thought on the role of language and culture in constituting a people. This ideology gained particular strength in the northern borders of the Continent, where protests against existing social injustices were channelled into nationalist movements. This complicated the situation of Germans living in the Baltic area. The Baltic Germans and Russian Germans were culturally rooted in the German language and in German culture. They were, simultaneously, generally loyal subjects of the Russian Tsar. The Baltic and Russian Germans might experience their own \u201dGermanness\u201d as universal and cosmopolitan. This led, of course, to tension between the Baltic Germans, and the Baltic area\u2019s pan-Russian and nationalist movements. One might add that those Jews who fled Russia\u2019s pogroms by emigrating to the Baltic area played an important role both in K\u00f6nigsberg and in the Baltic area as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The project\u2019s guiding question is how identity is constructed and communicated in \u2013 specifically \u2013 a selection of German-language newspapers and periodicals. National identities, such as \u201dBaltic German\u201d, Russian German or Reichsdeutch (Germans belonging to the German Empire), will be problematised by relating them to other possible identities, expressed in social or gender terms. The question of majority and minority will be considered in the context of Russian identity and in relation to the growing nationalist movements in Livonia and Courland. How is the relation between the particular and the universal, and between nationalist, patriotic and cosmopolitan ideals constructed, in a milieu, which has, throughout history, been characterised, by a high degree of \u201dmulticulturalism\u201d? Are the milieus cosmopolitan clusters? Identity is viewed, here, according to a perspective, which is inspired, by Habermas\u2019s and Fichtes\u2019s view of the ego as something that is formed in an ongoing socialisation process during which it posits itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-467","project","type-project","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n