Thomas Heidorn

The subject of this project is research into the Danish-Oldenburg Personal Union, which characterised Danish and north-western German history for over one hundred years from 1667 to 1773. Given the length of time involved, it is astonishing that this era has been largely neglected by research to date and that it still plays no role in the collective memory of Denmark or the former counties of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst. The historiography of the 19th and 20th centuries has almost completely one-sidedly characterised this Danish century as a time of decline and catastrophe, a narrative that is still powerful today.

In Denmark, after the negative experiences of two world wars and National Socialism in German, a century of shared Danish-German history was simply ignored. Across Europe, however, an increasing social and cultural interest in regional identities and the observation of regions for national or transnational contexts can be observed. For some years now, historians have been focussing on the interconnectedness of regions, thus methodically expanding traditional regional and national history to include a translocal, European and global perspective. This is where the planned project comes in. In this study, the predominantly dynasty- and rule-historically orientated research into early modern personal unions is methodologically and theoretically expanded to include the perspective of space. The personal union is not assumed to be a state entity in order to then focus on functional aspects of the organisation of rule, but rather to ask how the Danish-Oldenburg personal union was created, perceived and shaped as a political, economic and social space. The following focal points of investigation take centre stage: Space and rule, space and trade, space and order, space and communication.