Debating German Heritage: An Introduction
Debating German Heritage: An Introduction

Summary/Abstract: The discipline of art history, the institution of heritage protection and nationalism are all ‘inventions’ or ‘products’ of the nineteenth century. The environment from which all of these emerged was the long nineteenth century, stretching from the French Revolution, the enlightenment and romanticism in the late eighteenth century up to the 1910s, i.e. World War I, the fall of empires and the declaration of many new nation-states. The fact that the rise of academic art history overlaps with the emergence of national movements and political aspirations of often previously oppressed (or unnoticed) ethnic communities is the point of departure for the topic of this special issue. Concerned with questions of heritage and identity, along with the writing of art history and the canon formation of the discipline(s), the volume intends to offer insights into various cases of Eastern and Central European art historiography, in which special emphasis is placed on the German ‘connection’.

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