The aristocratic self at the end of the Ancien Régime

The project uses the diaries of the Gotha guard commander and chamberlain Christian Georg von Helmolt (1728-1805) from 1783 to 1788 and the journals of the court junketer and publicist Karl Heinrich Julius Graf von Salisch (1769-1833) from 1794 to 1806 to analyse the self-conceptions of (lower) aristocratic writers in Gotha around 1800.

The aim is to trace processes of self-constitution in the diaries in order to work out how aristocratic identity was formed in the face of social change at the end of the 18th century. One focus here is on aristocratic concepts of masculinity. In this way, the work generates insights into various aspects of everyday life in residential towns and at court and makes a contribution to research into the Thuringian aristocratic landscape, which - especially with regard to the 18th century - has been comparatively little studied.