Keel ja Kirjandus (Apr 2024)
Mõrtsukatöö Liiva järvel
Abstract
Renowned Estonian novelist Karl Ristikivi published a gothic short story titled Luigelaul (“Swansong”) in 1968, drawing inspiration from a true event from the Baltic Middle Ages. In 1428, Goswin von Aschenberg, a Vogt of the Teutonic Order stationed at Grobiņa Castle in the south-western corner of present-day Latvia, perpetrated the murder of Livonian bishops’ envoys en route to Rome to denounce the Order’s tyranny. The precise source of Ristikivi’s inspiration remains obscure. This article endeavours to trace the massacre on Lake Liepāja as a motif in Baltic German and Estonian fiction, exploring its significance as a lieu de mémoire. The historical episode gained widespread recognition through the publication of the famous Wandalia by Albertus Krantz in 1519. Baltic Enlightenment authors (Arndt, Bergmann, Merkel, Küttner) utilized it in their general polemics against medieval feudal barbarism. By the nineteenth century, the event had firmly entrenched itself in the collective understanding of the Livonian Middle Ages. Baltic German writers crafted ballads (Andrejanoff, Hirschheydt) and light fiction (Schneider) around the incident. In 1866 the first literary adaptation of the massacre on Lake Liepāja emerged as a sentimental novella in Estonian, akin to the tales of Genevieve of Brabant and Robinson Crusoe popular among Estonian readers at the time. Although the event took place relatively far from Estonia, it remained embedded in the memory of Estonian readers throughout the first half of the twentieth century, primarily through sporadic newspaper articles as well as history textbooks. Thus, the massacre on Lake Liepāja provides a good example of the intertwined cultural memories of Estonians and Baltic Germans. While these cultural memories have often been perceived as conflicting or, at best, mutually unaware, there are notable instances of overlap and consensus that warrant further exploration and consideration in future research.
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