Valentin Groebner
Nostalgie als historischer Bastelbogen
[Nostalgia as a cardboard cut-out of history]
Collective feelings of loss and nostalgia that have a strong effect on the public are usually reproachful and bitter. However, they are underpinned by a different, quite positive feeling, namely the celebration of the achievements and successes of a past that has come to seem irrevocably lost, broken, kaput, perdu. For the past two centuries, every sense of loss enables the retrospective enjoyment of the era to which the speaker bids a melancholy farewell. What new pasts do these laments create—and what makes these feelings so contagious?
Valentin Groebner has been Professor of Medieval and Renaissance History at the University of Lucerne since 2004. Before that, he served as an assistant at the Department of History of the University of Basel, a visiting professor in the Department of Art History at Harvard, and a professeur invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been a fellow at the Berliner Wissenschaftskolleg, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and at the Bild/Evidenz research group at the Freie Universität Berlin. Selected publications: Bin ich das? Eine kurze Geschichte der Selbstauskunft (2021); Ferienmüde: Als das Reisen nicht mehr geholfen hat (2020); Wer redet von der Reinheit? (2019); Retroland: Tourismus, Geschichte und die Sehnsucht nach dem Authentischen (2018); Ich-Plakate (2015); Das Mittelalter hört nicht auf: Über historisches Erzählen (2008); Der Schein der Person: Steckbrief, Ausweis und Kontrolle im Mittelalter (2004; Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe 2007); and Ungestalten: Die visuelle Kultur der Gewalt am Ende des Mittelalters (2003; Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the late Middle Ages 2004).