Living History und Reenactment: Erste Ergebnisse einer Umfrage

Abstract

Since 2011 the project “Living History: Reenacted Prehistory between Research and Popular Performance”, conducted at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam and at the University of Tübingen, analyzes different popular living-history performances of prehistory in a multidisciplinary manner. One of the subprojects initiated a web-based questionnaire on reenactors’ motives, their amount of work and their understanding of the terms ‘living history’ and ‘reenactment’ as well as their concept of ‘authenticity’. About 170 reenactors from all over Germany completed the questionnaire, which ran for thirty days in June 2013.
In this paper we present some pivotal results of this survey which illustrate that there exists neither a prototypical reenactor nor a homogeneous subculture but a wide spectrum of different groups, actors and, viewpoints. Living history respectively reenactment is not a phenomenon whose single aspects can be examined uncoupled and independent from each other. It becomes rather clear that the actors’ specialties, activities, personal preferences and engagements are linked to each other and are mutually dependent.

supplemental material: questionnaire used for the survey in June 2013