https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=671 Veröffentlichungen von Auteurs Jean-François Laplénie fr 0 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=670 The sunken city of Vineta occupies a special place among the lost cities whose archaeological and imaginary traces punctuate the North Sea and the Baltic coasts. Its name refers both to a vague historical reality, a very important Slavic Baltic merchant port, probably founded between the 5th and 9th centuries and destroyed in the 11th century, and to the local basis of the European mytheme of the proud city sunk as a punishment for its sins, the model of which is ancient Atlantis. When it comes to locating Vineta, the main difficulty lies in the imprecision of the archival sources. The hypothesis of a single city in Wolin (in present–day Poland) eventually superseded the others when the excavations of the site in the 20th century uncovered an important port complex that had been in contact with Europe and Asia. However, minority hypotheses continue to be defended. In any case, Vineta appears to be one of the Slavic cities erased from the coastal geography—through outright destruction or a change of location or name—as part of a confrontation between pagans and Christians, as well as between Germans, Danes and Slavs. The abundance of catastrophic storm floods gives those coastal landscapes a constant natural reconfiguration: blurred, intermediate and moving places which, in the German geographical imagination, are opposed to the mountainous landscape of Middle Germany, well represented in romantic natural poetry. The legend of Vineta and its uncertain geography lent itself particularly well to diverse national resemantisations in modern times. The existence of an ancient Slavic metropolis of European relevance/dimensions could be seen as a proof of the greatness of these peoples, especially at a time (18th–19th centuries) when they were fighting for their autonomy or independence: this was the case with Johann Gottfried Herder, Pavel Jozef Šafárik, Juliusz Slowacki, Jaroslav Vrchlický or Feliks Nowowiejski. On the German side, nationalists have also tried to reclaim the Vineta legend to illustrate their cause, from Ludolf Wienbarg to the ‘ariosophical’ colony of “Neu-Vineta” in the 1940s. However, Romanticism also proceeded to detach the motif from its local background and elevate it to the status of a myth that evokes loss and remembrance of the past. From the 19th century onwards (Wilhelm Müller, Heinrich Heine), Vineta has abstracted itself from its geographical and national component and has come to signify, in a more universal and intimate way, either the return of the repressed (in the Freudian Wilhelm Stekel), the German Jewish world submerged in the flood of history (in Robert Schindel) or even the disappearance of the identity of the former GDR (in Uwe Kolbe). mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:08:33 +0200 mer., 03 déc. 2025 10:56:15 +0100 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=670