The image of the Interregnum period as Friedrich Schiller’s “Schreckliche, kaiserlose Zeit” and its role in German Medieval studies of 19th century

Abstract

The article  considers  the  origins  of beliefs in German-speaking historiography of the 19th  – 20th  centuries about  the Interregnum of 1250 / 1254-1273 in the Holy Roman Empire as a period of the deepest crisis and time of Germans  national  tragedy.  The author shows the  role of F. Schiller  in the formation and distribution of the image of “a terrible time without an emperor”, and also explores  the  concepts  of historians who adopted  and developed  the ideas of an eminent  poet and historian.  The image of the epoch clouded by the political crisis significantly influenced the perception of national  history by the Germans themselves  and was / is one of the problem areas for German nationalism, and therefore  it turns  out to be the focus of the researcher  relatively infrequently.  German medieval studies of 19th – 20th centuries are considered in the article both through the prism of intellectual history  and in the context of the ideological struggle, in which medieval history  is used as a kind of weapon. The article  demonstrated the  strict  continuity of the  Interregnum concepts: new generations of historians refer to  their  predecessors  and  reproduce the same model as a whole. Just in the 21st century this line can be described  as ended, and it is for the most part  affected by political  and global processes in Europe and the world nowadays.