Chapter 6 - Transcending the Need for Home?

Summary

This chapter examines the first systematic efforts to eliminate the Heimat concept. The chapter shows how they emerged in the early 1960s amidst a period of Cold War crisis. Expellee claims to a right to Heimat in the East lurched to the centre of the greatest foreign policy debate of the period and represented a major barrier to rapprochement with the Eastern bloc. Supporters of rapprochement took up two conflicting strategies in confronting expellee Heimat rhetoric. The first challenged how the expellee societies understood the concept, while the second involved arguing that desire for Heimat was inherently fascist. The chapter shows how other generational, demographic, and economic developments also shaped the anti-Heimat movement. While earlier focus on Heimat had been tied to its loss, long-term economic growth, completed reconstruction, and decline in mobility rates led earlier preoccupation with Heimat to ebb. A number of activists on the extra-parliamentary left, many of whom sought re-engagement in the 1970s, also described attachment to local Heimat as inherently exclusionary, reactionary, overly emotional, militarist, or a blockage to international revolutionary change.