Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr. Fabian Baumann

Fabian Baumann is a historian of Eastern Europe, with a focus on the history of nationalism and empire in Russia, Ukraine, and East Central Europe. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Basel in 2020 and was a SNSF.Mobility postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and the University Vienna before joining the University of Heidelberg in 2023. His book Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism was published by NIU Press/Cornell University Press in August 2023. Tracing the story of a family that included both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists, Dynasty Divided analyzes what prompted nineteenth-century intellectuals to identify with either one or another imagined community. The book argues that these men and women consciously chose a political position and only then began their self-fashioning as members of a national community, defying the notion of nationalism as a consequence of a pre-existing ethnicity. Fabian has also worked on a postdoctoral research project about “banal” forms of nationalism and the promotion of republican statehood in late Soviet Ukraine. Fabian’s research project within the RTG Ambivalent Enmity aims to study enmities and revisionisms surrounding the First Czechoslovak Republic through the lens of espionage and treason trials. Trials against purported traitors and spies were transnational media spectacles that created an opportunity for societal debates about the meaning of loyalty and enmity towards the republic; they laid bare the anxieties of the state’s defenders and the hopes of its enemies. The proliferation of potentially hostile relationships between various ethno-political actors within and around Czechoslovakia was a source of ambivalence, as nationalists of all stripes were regularly forced to cooperate with one potential enemy against another. The research project will shed light on the intertwined dynamics of state-building and enemization on the transnational, national, and regional levels. In doing so, it will contribute to an ongoing reassessment of the region’s only stable democracy that nevertheless exhibited rising authoritarian tendencies and violent tensions, and to reflect on the question whether the Czechoslovak democracy could remain true to its proclaimed ideals while dealing with the threat posed by anti-liberal enemies within and abroad.