Practicing Public History: A Post-Conference Excursion to Dessau and Oranienbaum

“Its ghostly," remarked historian Johanna Ranmseier as we passed abandoned factories and barren apartment buildings on a bus ride from Wörlitz to Dessau, two towns in the state of Saxony-Anhalt.

The roadside scenery was a stark contrast to the Dutch-Baroque palace we visited that morning. Ransmeier, a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Chicago who delivered a keynote address at the "Children, Dependency, and Emotions in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800: Archival and Visual Narratives," conference the week before, was part of a group who joined a post-conference excursion from Bonn to Oranienbaum, Dessau, and Halle.

One might raise their eyebrows at the thought of taking nearly twenty international researchers to this area. It's not exactly a tourist destination. This is where the far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has recently made major electoral gains. While today, the region is seen as isolated and out of step with the rest of the country, it was once a major crossroads in Europe.

Just before starting a position as a cluster professor at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies in 2021, Claudia Jarzebowski visited the palace of Oranienbaum (Orange Tree Palace). This was not her first time in the area. While teaching history at the Freie Universität Berlin, Jarzebowski often took students to see historical sites located near enough to Berlin that they could be visited on day trips. Ask Jarzebowski about the area, and she will exclaim with passion that it "was one of the centers of Early Modern Europe and one of many centers in the early modern world."

The history is indeed multifaceted. The palace and the adjacent village were built by Henriette Catharina (1637-1708), a princess of the House of Orange-Nassau, in the seventeenth century. Henriette was the granddaughter of William the First (the Orange One). After marrying a German prince, the ambitious Catherina redeveloped the region, which had been devastated during the Thirty Years’ War. Much of the history is well-documented, but historians have neglected the important fact that inherited colonial wealth funded the entire project. As Professor Jarzebowski found in 2021, visual remnants of this history—including a wall panel depicting the sale of a child in a tropical setting– can be found throughout the property.

Fast forward two years to late summer 2023 at a meeting in Bonn. In an application to the DAAD to co-fund a project to research the global phenomenon of child slavery and dependency in the early modern period, we had underscored how the image referenced above inspired our theoretical intervention.

The sale of a child is one of many visual topoi that appear at different times and places throughout the early modern period, yet evidence of child slavery is often hard to find in archives. Addressing a methodological problem of sources with a public history angle, focusing on Oranienbaum, was definitely the added value of our application. We intended to keep our promise to the DAAD to engage somehow with the site. In an era of massive Deutsche Bahn failures, however, the idea of making the odyssey from Bonn to Oranienbaum with a large group of people after an intense three-day conference seemed daunting, to say the least.

We also never planned to have a baby on board! Our team member from Australia, Kristie Flannery, joined the excursion with her entire family, which included a baby, Gabby, whom we collectively adored from the first instance. Accommodating the needs of a young family was not something we had considered, but thanks to Julia Schmidt's expert planning, each minor detail was taken into consideration.

Predictably, the excursion started with train delays and cancellations. Miraculously, we made it from Bonn to Hanover to Magdeburg and finally to Dessau, only one hour or so later than scheduled. Our accommodation at the Dessau Bauhaus Hotel provided another historical layer. The Hotel is the former Walter Gropius studio building, built in the 1920s, where art and design students worked and lived to experience firsthand a modern way of living. Today, the site has UNESCO World Heritage status.

The Bauhaus Dessau Hotel, the former Walter Gropius studio building, was opened in 1926 and obtained UNESCO World Heritage Status in 1996.

After a good night's rest, we rose early and ventured to Oranienbaum. On arrival, we met the caretaker of the property, who led us on a tour through the palace and then to the gardens. In the house, our attention was directed to the material culture left by Henriette Catharina, including remnants of leather wallpaper, several hundred vases and other glassware, and an array of orientalist ephemera.

From 1683, Henriette Catharina, princes of Orange-Nassau, had the Oranienbaum palace erected according to the plans of Dutch architect Cornelius Ryckwaert. It is an example of Dutch-Baroque architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Oranienbaum is a Dutch-Baroque palace with an interior that speaks to the unique strategies of the House of Orange. Women like Henriette Catharina intentionally displayed objects of colonial wealth. In one room, for example, there is a portrait of Henriette's mother adorned with a feather, "recently imported from Brazil," historian Susan Broomhall speculated.

Broomhall, who, along with Claudia Jarzebowski, supervised the DAAD-UA project leading up to the excursion, has recently co-authored a book about dynastic colonialism and "Orangeism," titled Dynastic Colonialism: Gender Materiality and the Early Modern House of Orange-Nassau (Routledge, 2016). In the book she and co-author Jacqueline Van Gent argue for the centrality of women to the dynasty. Portraits, oil paintings, and other visual media like ceramic tiles connected with the house circulated widely throughout Europe as a form of propaganda for Orange power. Women were crucial to perpetuating this influence as major consumers and patrons of these works. This blend of conspicuous consumption, branding, and strategic patronage was unique, as Broomhall explained to me, because it flew against the grain of normative behavior for a Protestant dynasty.

The wall panel depicting the sale of a child found in Oranienbaum palace.

Art historian and Ph.D candidate Danielle Sensabaugh, University of Florida, interprets the wall panel.

As we made our way through the many rooms and halls of the palace, we finally reached the wall panel. Together, our group closely examined the piece and reflected on the potential meanings inscribed in the image. Henriette was actively involved in the construction of the house, and it is plausible that she personally chose, or at least approved of, the depiction and considered it to be congruent with the overall theme of her home, an implicit celebration of European colonialism. The other two panels depict coercive acts of labor, harvesting sugar and carrying materials, in a troubled tropical pastoral setting.

After the tour of the gardens, many of our group collapsed in the front grass of the palace for a hard-earned break, but a few of us were eager to see the village of Dessau. I ventured into town, which was built as a grid with an axial orientation to the palace and further to the main residence of Henriette Catharina and her husband, 12 km away in Wörlitz. I was challenged by the empty streets beyond the perimeter of the palace. At first, I chuckled after seeing a few cats, all of them orange. The only human activity I found was a few cyclists nursing beers at a sleepy cafe. I returned shortly to rejoin the group.

With the first leg of the excursion complete, we were already struck by the many layers of history found in the halls of Oranienbaum. In a single morning, we had confronted a Dutch-Baroque palace in the middle of Germany filled with evidence of a much more multi-sited story involving colonial wealth, dynastic ambition, and the sale and trade of children. Yet when we left the palace, we were again met with the emptiness of the region, part of yet another chapter of history. This present chapter of places left behind in the wake of German reunification has yet to be written.

Enslaved children are shadowy figures who rarely appear in archives and written documents. Our goal in traveling to Oranienbaum was to identify the strong links between material culture and colonialism to overcome this archival silence. While visually overwhelming, spaces like Oranianbaum contained frequently overlooked testaments to relationships of asymmetrical dependency and slavery. One of the potentialities of the research at the BCDSS is to follow in the footsteps of scholars of children and childhood to move beyond towering disciplinary boundaries. It is of paramount importance that we continue to incorporate different research methods, including engagement with public history, into our research practice.