GHIL Lecture

Carsten Jahnke (Copenhagen)

The Hanseatic League as a National Project

13 February 2023

(0:35 h)

GHIL Lecture

Carsten Jahnke (Copenhagen)

The Hanseatic League as a National Project

GHIL Lecture, given 21 June 2022

Today, the Hanseatic League is anchored in the general consciousness of Germans as the ‘secret superpower’. Around 1800, however, the Göttingen professor Sartorius chose it as the subject of a major work because he could find nothing more irrelevant than this ‘half-forgotten antique’. How could a half-forgotten antique become a superpower? The lecture will trace the mnemonic strategies which were used by historians from 1830 to anchor the Hanseatic League in the minds of the Germans, first as a history of the Third Estate and the Free Cities, then as a (proto-)Protestant unifier against the hated Habsburgs, and finally as a Germanic national maritime power against England.

Carsten Jahnke (1968) is an Associate Professor of Medieval History at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. His main areas of interest are medieval economic and social history, and especially the history of the Hanseatic League. He is a member of the Board of the Hansischer Geschichtsverein and author of monographs and articles on the history of the Hanseatic League and Lübeck.

Don't miss the accompanying interview: GHIL Research Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius and PR Officer Kim König speak to Carsten Jahnke (Copenhagen) about his research on the history of the Hanseatic League and how historians have used it to shape Germans’ historical understanding.