Abstract

Historical scholarship in the GDR was based on the idea, borrowed from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, of successive social formations from (Germanic) primitive society to ancient slave-owning society and feudalism to capitalism and its subsequent redemption in socialism/communism. However, while the terms “feudalism” and “Middle Ages” were equated in Soviet historiography, this nomenclature did not prevail in the GDR. Instead, the classical, “bourgeois” epochal triad of “Antiquity – Middle Ages – Modernity” was generally adhered to, for example with regard to chair nominations. The “Middle Ages” remained as a meronymy (sometimes also as an approximate synonym) of “feudalism” and denoted an epoch in the conventional organisation of the historical disciplines term (although it was sometimes relativised as “so-called”). “Feudalism”, which goes further in both time and space, therefore did not represent the exclusive domain of medieval studies as an object of investigation, but rather an interdisciplinary “object of research”. Consequently, not all statements on feudalism referred to the Middle Ages, but all statements on the Middle Ages were integrated into the contexts of feudalism.

Against this background, the article explores the institutional consequences of this tension with regard to the disciplinary self-understanding of medieval studies in three steps. First, the irritations that resulted from feudalism as a new object of study are presented, subsequently the Middle Ages as a traditional field of work is discussed, and finally one substantive consequence is examined that results from the presumed distance of medieval studies to the ideological framework conditions. The final question is what advantages and disadvantages a traditional subject area such as medieval history gained from this new configuration. It appears that the possibilities of conceiving an integrating concept of feudalism able to transcend the classical epochal boundaries were left untapped.