ABSTRACT
How should the heritage of the ‘German diaspora’ in Eastern Europe be addressed? How might Estonia be positioned in the dominant centre–periphery dialectics? This chapter looks at these issues through the periodization used in five surveys: Wilhelm Neumann’s and Heinz Pirang’s histories of Baltic art (1887, 1926–30), Alfred Vaga’s and Voldemar Vaga’s histories of Estonian art (1932, 1940–41) and the latter’s general history of art (1937–38). Using international vocabulary, the scholars faced difficulties in terms of ‘latency’ early on: the same kind of Romanesque, Gothic or Renaissance forms could hardly ever be found in the region. Looking at these books’ structural similarities with international surveys by authors such as Franz Kugler and Wilhelm Lübke, I address the ‘gap’ between the local and the general (or Western) in the first longer overviews of Baltic history of art. Interested in how Estonian scholars responded to these during the interwar independent republic, I seek to contextualize the narratives stretching from the earlier ‘alien’ heritage to ‘our own’, a layer that the art of the latter part of the nineteenth century was thought to represent.
