Journal article

Publication year: 2008

Pages: 161-177

Journal: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

Volume number: 56

Issue number: 2

ISSN: 0021-4019

URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41052051

Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag

Abstract: 
The belief in "living corpses" is a universal phenomenon. In the central European imagination of the pre-modern age, the revenant threatens its relatives with spiritual forces, but does not leave the grave. In the southeastern European version, a bloodsucker visits members of his former community to terrorize them. Concerning this paganistic folklore Habsburg authorities invented in the first third of the 18(th) century in a few villages on the military border of the Ottoman Empire an ominous epidemic, as well as the phenomenon of non-composing bodies. Thereafter scholars, especially at the Protestant universities in central Germany, began to discuss the problem. Vampires owe their popularity to the Enlightenment. They were styled after expressions of a barbaric world that were contrasted with a civilized Europe. In what seems to be a response to the witch trials in the 16(th) and 17(th) centuries that expanded from west to east, exhumations and burning of alleged vampires spread from east to west during the 18(th) and 19(th) centuries. At the same time the notion of vampirism functioned as an imperial category within the border territories of central Europe's contiguous, multiethnic empires. In a colonial context, vampirism manifested an invasion of primitive forces that was bound up with slavophobic stereotypes. Under these circumstances, the home of the vampire in western discourse moved gradually eastward from Serbia and Hungary, over Moravia and Silesia to Poland and Lithuania.

Harvard Citation style: Bohn, T. (2008) Vampirismus in Österreich und Preußen. Von der Entdeckung einer Seuche zum Narrativ der Gegenkolonisation, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 56(2), pp. 161-177. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41052051

APA Citation style: Bohn, T. (2008). Vampirismus in Österreich und Preußen. Von der Entdeckung einer Seuche zum Narrativ der Gegenkolonisation. Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 56(2), 161-177. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41052051