All Abstracts

Christian Lübke

Ostmitteleuropa und die Steppe. Annotationen zu einer ungewöhnlichen Beziehungsgeschichte, 5-18

The lack of serious consideration of the Steppe as a central feature in historical accounts of East Central Europe (and of East Europe as well) may be rooted in the experience of violent conflicts originating from lands even further to the east, but could also be understood as grounded in a subconscious or open rejection of the unknown, strange forms of life which totally differ from the culture of settled Europeans. As such, this essay attempts a more complex examination of this problem and reveals some different aspects of the relationship, for example, the charter of warriors and guards by East Central European rulers, who, like painters and poets in modern times, might succumb to the fascination of the alterity of the Steppe.

Matthias Hardt

Attila – Atli – Etzel. Über den Wandel der Erinnerung an einen Hunnenkönig im europäischen Mittelalter, 19-28

During the European early and high Middle Ages the memory of the Migration period Hun ruler Attila
was different and in flux. While Eastern Germanic groups in heroic poetry and historiography draw the picture of a noble and gift-giving king, Western Germanic tribes made him responsible for the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom in the Middle Rhine area. For Latin authors of Late Antiquity he was a flagellum dei and an enemy of Christianity. In medieval Cologne Attila was said to have been the murderer of 11,000 virgins. This article shall analyse these representations equally on the basis of historiography, heroic poetry and archaeological material as sources of the nomadic influence on the history of the Migration period.

Olaf Günther

Acker oder Weide? Die Zivilisation der Steppe und die Administration der Nomaden, 63-82

The article is about the interactions between the Russian Empire and the nomadic tribes in the steppes of Central Asia. Nomadic economies and culture were urged by the Russian colonial administration to change to the sedentary lifestyle of an agrarian society. The aim was to introduce the advantages of agrarian economies through agrarian schooling. This experiment failed however, and the permanent settlement of the Steppes was only successful after the education of Russian settlers. The article follows the implementation of the school models through the debate on sedentarisation.

Sylvia Hipp

Sehnsuchtsort, Risikolebensraum, Nomaden-Highway. Die Steppe als Ort der Erkenntnis, 83-98

The geographical perspective is one possible view of a landscape which generally presents the ecological characteristics of the steppe in order to access an account of the steppe via its natural conditions and factors. Forms of nomadism as a “socio-ecological mode of culture” and spatial mobility as a “strategy of human existence” can be seen as ideas immanent to this region. In this context the difficulties associated with historical placement and the detection of spatial mobility and temporary or seasonal settlement in the archaeological record should be discussed in connection with questions concerning the origin of that very old life form.

Alfrun Kliems / Mathias Mesenhöller

Ein Kampf um Ordnung. Europa, die Steppe, die Leinwand und das Nichts, 29-44

Analysing five Eastern European History films that in one way or another are set in the steppe, this essay suggests that there is an intricate connection between setting and narrative structure. The historical “Steppe” appears as a projection screen that invites a conversion of the historical material into myths of utopian, or dystopian, content. Thus, the steppe movies under scrutiny deal with “struggles for order” in a very basal sense: that is, for order as such versus existential nothingness. This mythopoetic potential of the steppe topos appears to rely on the established and densely connoted meta-narrative of East vs. West, while its actualisation seems to be provoked by an encompassing consciousness of historical discontinuity.

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Marina Dmitrieva

Skythen, Amazonen und Futuristen. Der Steppendiskurs der 1910-1920er Jahre und seine heutigen Implikationen, 45-62

Due to the archaeological discovery of Greek and Scythian culture in the south of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century and the scientific exploration of Russia’s own Orient – i.e. the non-European peoples of Siberia, Central Asia, Caucasus and middle-Volga – the Eurasian paradigm became more and more influential among Russian intellectuals and artists. For the adherents of Eurasianism, the steppe, broadly considered as a crossroad between Orient and Occident, embodied their concept of the ‘multiethnic imaginary cultural imperial entity’ as its ultimate legitimation.
This article investigates the impact of the perception of the steppe on theorists and artists during the
decades of the 1910 and 1920.

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Kathrin Franke

Editorial, 1-4