Introduction: Staging the Pagan Past Ethnicist History Conceptions and Popular Culture in Central Europe Ralf Hoppadietz and Karin Reichenbach The Pagan past, as the prehistoric and early medieval time before Christianisation, appears to hold a great fascination. It is evoked in television series about Vikings and barbarians, in computer games transporting players to bygone empires, in comic books depicting adventures of great ancient heroes. This volume examines fields of popular history culture, in which the Pagan past obtains a significance that goes yet beyond that of entertaining leisure activities. The articles collected here centre on the three fields of historical reenactment, ethnic Neopaganism and the black metal music scene, which are framed by further practices and media of history appropriation. In historical reenactment, history enthusiasts simulate a specific event or period of the past, often warrior battles, but also historical ways of life. The reenactment of ancient spiritual life often coincides with Neopagan religiosity as part of Native Faith movements that seek to revive religious tradition from pre-Christian times. This spiritual sphere also finds expression in the often mythically obscured historical references made in black metal music, which has widely embraced Pagan themes and developed subgenres like Pagan, Viking or folk metal. These three strongly overlapping fields of reenactment, Neopaganism and black metal form a setting where we observe how the Pagan past can become a place of longing, a projection screen and an object of identification, a setting in which images of history can ultimately merge seamlessly with radical right-wing mindsets. The volume was inspired by a workshop hosted at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) entitled “Neo-völkisch Conceptions of History in Popular Appropriations of the Past in Eastern Europe. Modern Paganism – Historical Reenactment – Music Scene”.1 The articles it contains are papers presented at the workshop, updated and expanded by their authors. They are accompanied by a number of additional texts to complement and enhance the volume. The workshop and this book build on previous attempts to describe the politicised entanglement of historical reenactment and its multifarious links to Neopagan religious movements and the black metal music scene for the German context.2 We aimed to explore them in greater depth and place them in a broader, transnational framework. The comparison with other countries shows that the Pagan past is pivotal for many radical rightwing identity projects in Europe, which makes popular cultural formats of its appropriation for political exploitation particularly significant. Close links between circles of reenactors, Neopagans and black metal fans have been evident since the 1990s. It seems that the “Pagan element” not only unites them but feeds a specific understanding of history with a close affinity to far-right ideals, which we set out to examine more closely in this volume. Apart from individuals or groups who are actively involved in the reenactment scene as well as in metal bands or Neopagan groups, the tight-knit relationship between the three spheres is also reflected in the themes, symbols and general aesthetic that they adopt. Ideas about the Pagan past seem to flow through these fields, reinforce each other and find wide audiences at large-scale reenactment events or black metal shows. Without question, there has already been a wealth of academic studies on and investigative research into individual elements of this scene, be this from the perspective of museum education, religious studies or music sociology, each focusing on individual characteristics, social roles and political traits. They are too fragmented and specialised to list them here and all contributions provide insight into the current state of research in their respective areas. Up until now, however, there have been few if any attempts to explore what popular history practices dealing with the Pagan past have in common, what links them, and what makes them appealing and useful for the far right. We therefore saw great promise in focusing on how history is dealt with here, how the past is understood. Hence, this volume
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