Jureit, Ulrike Magie des Authentischen. Das Nachleben von Krieg und Gewalt im Reenactment

About a physical-emotional approach to history. Reenactments of historical battles and battles play an important role in reenactment. This popular form of appropriating history has spread rapidly around the world in the past fifty years. In the area of tension between ritual and play, reenactment aims at the individual and collective visualisation of historical events as an emotional experience. The participants want to approach the historical experience scenically and physically through authenticated contexts and detailed equipment, to experience history in the here and now. Reenactment currently represents a specific form of public use of history that is rather suspect to professional historiography. As a cultural phenomenon, however, ritualised play points to a society's growing need for a sensory experience of its own history.

Ulrike Jureit, born in 1964, is a historian and research associate at the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture. She researches and publishes on the social and cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Publications include: Umkämpfte Räume. Raumbilder, Ordnungswille und Gewaltmobilisierung (2016).