Performed Historicism. Practices of Re-enactment in the 19th Century

To represent historical personalities, events and epochs was popular in the 19. century. Tableaux vivants reproduced historical artworks, statues or historical events. During historical processions amateur actors mimed their ancestors. The guests at artists’ feasts enjoyed themselves in historical costumes. A realist historicist theatre brought accurately researched costumes and set designs to the stage. At the end of the century, pioneers of experimental archaeology tried to generate historical knowledge by reproducing past practices. In other words: practices and criteria for what we today call re-enactments have their roots in the 19th century. The aim of this project is to analyse why and how such practices and criteria for representing the past manifested themselves between ca. 1780 and 1900. In this way, the project also wants to contribute to the historicization of public history and cultural memory, which has so far been neglected. Three phases during which re-enactments slowly transformed from a medium of entertainment (ca. 1780-1840), over a means for education (ca. 1840-1870) to a practice that was also used for research purposes (since the 1890s) have been identified. The project postulates the thesis that since the turn towards the 19th century, re- enactments were a cultural praxis for working through fundamental societal changes. They were a reaction to : a changed conception of time after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (phase one), the age of revolutions (phase two), and the beginnings of high modernity (phase three). Eight examples from those phases will be analysed microhistorically: Lady Hamiltons attitudes and the court festivals at the Prussian court until the 1840s, the festivals of the artist circles Allotria in Munich and Malkasten in Düsseldorf, the historical processions organised on the occasion of the silver wedding of the Austrian emperor and empress 1879 and the completion of the Cologne Cathedral 1880, the performances of the Meiningen court theatre, as well as the journey of the rebuilt Viking ship Viking from Norway to the world exhibition in Chicago in 1893. Through the analyses of these examples, the project wants to contradict the thesis that re-enactments are a phenomenon of postmodernity. Instead, it will show that present-day re-enactments have their origin in practices for the authenticating, immersive and performative representation of the past as they evolved during the 19th century.