Introduction

Summary

This introduction outlines the main questions and debates which the book addresses, followed by an overview of the history of the Heimat idea and the study’s methodological approach. While scholars have looked at post-war cinematic and literary Heimat tropes, the book argues for more attention to Heimat as specific sites of home. On the question of the concept’s Germanness, it steers a middle path that recognizes how the history of German-speaking Europe has shaped the concept, while acknowledging its connection to broader questions about place attachment. Rather than positing a single “German” understanding across time and space, the work approaches discussions about Heimat as an evolving and contested discourse about place attachments and their relationship to diverse political and social issues. The introduction continues by outlining the book’s contribution to debates about West German democratization, reconstruction, post-war confrontation with dissonant lives, and expellee history. It concludes by outlining the book’s findings on the history of efforts to eliminate the concept in the 1960s and left-wing attempts to re-engage with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1945, the sketch artist Heinrich Schröder walked through the streets of his native Cologne, surveying the destroyed local landscape and drawing in his sketchbook. The air wars levelled most of his hometown, with only 5 percent of the population remaining.¹ All twelve of the city’s famous Romanesque churches lay in ruins, with corpses strewn throughout the streets. Schröder left out images of the dead but drew several of the church ruins and the city bridges, which retreating Nazi forces had blown up after reporting that they were abandoning the “rubble pile Cologne.”² The Cologne Cathedral, which surprisingly suffered only minor damage, was left towering above the silent ruins. Schröder and other Cologners who walked through the ruins expressed a sense of shock. Their accounts centred on lost local communities, former personal existences, and once familiar places of Heimat. As the introduction to Schröder’s book of sketches noted, the ruins of Cologne appeared as a “desert-like absence of Heimat.” The account, however, was not simply about conveying a sense of suffering. Underneath the ruins of their hometown, the work concluded, slumbered the “seeds of new life.”³

Within months of the war’s end, hundreds of thousands of Cologners flooded back into the rubble city, baffling experts. Local discourses were filled with discussion about how deep desires for Heimat drove them back. Many described local Heimat as about leaving behind war and embracing peace, healing torn communities, and repairing ruptured lives. By 1946, the city administration reported how a “wild growing” revival of “Heimat” and local culture had gripped the city as Cologners sought sources of “new life.”⁴ Many citizens, local newspapers, and local publications similarly remarked on the revival of local Heimat culture. Cologners spearheaded a local cultural renaissance, founded numerous Heimat societies and publications, revived local traditions, observed special localist events, wrote dialect poetry about Heimat, and held “Heimat evenings” to get through daily life in the ruins.

Discussions about democracy could also be found throughout these discourses. Many democratically engaged localists wrote about how they believed Heimat should be about rejecting nationalism, facilitating participation, and promoting more federalist ideas of Germanness. New language about local identities also emerged relatively soon after the war. Many Cologners began to harness select local pasts to argue for “Cologne democracy” as a local value and to define their region as a “world-open bridge” to the West. Such new language hardly made Cologners into reformed democrats, though it illustrates the role of locality and region in some of the earliest attempts to identify with a vaguely conceived idea of democracy.

The significance of these developments is not simply that they took place in Cologne, but rather how they reflected similar patterns in other regions. Far to the north in the Hanseatic cities, many noted how local sentiment reached fresh heights and how local Heimat was about finding new lives. Democratically minded groups further developed discourses about Hanseatic “democracy,” and “world-openness,” while reframing ideas about their cities as “gates to the world” to interpret them as being about international reconciliation. Seven hundred kilometres to the Southwest, we find analogous reports of how “Heimat values” had become “all the more valuable than they ever were in peaceful times.”⁵ Regionalists discussed how they could realize new lives in the “small circle” of Heimat, while democratically minded regionalists argued that they should harness regional values of “democracy” and see their region as a bridge to France and Switzerland.

These accounts clearly conflict with narratives of Heimat as tainted after 1945. But they are also at odds with arguments that Heimat was always an anti-democratic, anti-western, or nationalist force.⁶ While exclusionary, anti-democratic, or nationalist strains of thinking about Heimat could easily be found in the post-war years, this book explores long overlooked attempts to conceive of Heimat in more democratic, open, and inclusive modes.

By probing the history of the Heimat idea in West Germany after 1945, this book also sheds light on other important debates in post-war German history. Reflection on Heimat was often about confronting dissonant biographies, repairing shattered communities, and pursuing new post-war lives – all issues which have loomed large in studies of early post-war history. For many, reflection on Heimat was also a starting point for thinking about democracy, federalism, European unification, and alternative ideas about nation. The role of Heimat in thinking through these issues provokes intriguing questions. Why did local Heimat have such deep emotional appeal and why did so many describe it as a site of new life? What impact did desires for Heimat have on democratization? Everyday West Germans often emphasized the importance of local communities in beginning anew. But what functions did they believe local communities should serve?

In focusing on Heimat, this book particularly engages with debates about West German democratization. It explores how local worlds offered flexible resources which many West Germans used to identificationally adjust to new political realities at a time when power structures and future expectations were shifting at a dizzying pace. Narratives of local democracy became surprisingly widespread by the end of the 1940s. This study does not question the many shortcomings of early West German democracy, nor does it suggest that democratization was anything but a long and arduous process. Instead, it argues for more attention to the role of identity in the process and shows the presence of unexpectedly early attempts to identify with the search for democracy and western rapprochement on a local level. The book further explores how such identifications existed alongside ongoing failures in democratic mentalities and practices.

A study of Heimat in West Germany would be incomplete without also considering the millions of expellees from the former eastern regions for whom return was impossible. While much has been written about their history, scholars have yet to ask how expellees and West Germans viewed the Heimat concept through the lens of their differing post-war fates. The impact of expellee-society rhetoric on broader appraisals of the concept also deserves more explicit attention. This study breaks new ground by probing public debates about the Heimat concept amongst both expellee and West German interlocutors.

If we are to finally dispense with the stubborn misconception of Heimat as tainted immediately after 1945 – and this book very much argues that we should – it begs the question of when certain groups began to argue that Heimat was irredeemably reactionary and should be struck from the public lexicon. The prolific repetition of the 1945 legend itself reflects the lack of a history of efforts to do away with the word “Heimat” and seemingly the phenomena it described.⁷ This book is the first to probe exactly when, amongst whom, and in what context such efforts first emerged. It traces their emergence to a surprisingly narrow time window and explains why they emerged during the Second Berlin Crisis in the early 1960s and proliferated after the construction of the Berlin Wall. This study uses a subsequent examination of the “anti-Heimat movement” of the 1960s as a springboard to offer a re-reading of the “Heimat Renaissance” of the 1970s and 1980s when many on the political left argued for re-engagement with Heimat.

Stepping back from the specific context of post-war German history, this study’s findings also speak to broader interdisciplinary debates about home and place attachment. In the English-language scholarship, humanistic geographers were among the first to put the topic on the map. Writing at the same time West Germans were speaking of a Heimat Renaissance, such scholars reacted against a technocratic way of seeing place and explored home as a site of meaning, protection, and field of care – though other scholars rightly noted that home could also be a site of oppression.⁸ Not unlike debates over Heimat, scholars in the English-speaking world have continued to disagree about whether local attachments and local identities can be shaped in inclusive and democratic ways or are intrinsically reactionary forces which should be transcended.⁹ These debates, as John Tomaney has noted, have often centred on more abstract forms of analysis.¹⁰ Taking a more empirical approach, this study contributes to these debates and challenges narratives about local attachments and identities as inevitably reactionary.

Between Trope, Places of Experience, and Future Visions

Studies of “Heimat” have inevitably faced the task of defining the concept and staking out a position on whether it refers to an aberrant German phenomenon. Most studies have offered at least a perfunctory definition, though some have dispensed with the task altogether to avoid adding to the “graveyard” of definitions.¹¹ The importance of definition, however, is often underestimated, with overly narrow assumptions about its meaning informing preconceptions about which sources and fields of investigation are assumed to be representative. While some scholars have probed thinking about Heimat as specific sites of home, others have approached it as a generic, idyllic, and rural trope in the mode of what the sociologist Hermann Bausinger has referred to as “Heimat from the rack.”¹² Some have denied that Heimat has ever referred to any real places at all, insisting that it is an imagined utopia or an empty signifier which was only about imagining nation.¹³ Such definitions, however, have tended to isolate a fragmentary strand of discourse about Heimat and take it as representative of the whole. Seemingly complicating the search for a definition, studies of the concept have invariably noted the dizzying array of sensual referents which individuals associate with Heimat – whether it be the sound of a familiar dialect or the sight of a familiar church tower.

There is a good argument for a broad descriptive definition which can accommodate how the concept has been used in diverse and contested ways throughout its history. This study, in turn, views Heimat as a concept which is broadly about place attachments and the diverse functions they serve. This dovetails with the definitions of scholars who have viewed Heimat as a place of experience, personal geography, a “satisfaction space,” “near space,” or an “internal relationship” to an experienced environment.¹⁴ Thinking about the concept historically encompassed reflection on real place attachments, future visions of them, and sometimes visions of a more ideal place of home as elsewhere. Many who evoked the concept in modern history described Heimat as a site of orientation, identity, and security, and a landscape of personal memory. Given its saturation with sites of personal memory, it should not surprise us that the sights, smells, or sounds that trigger memories of Heimat would be diverse and subjective.¹⁵ Most importantly, Heimat represented for many a geography where their personal relationships were most dense and could be most easily kept intact.¹⁶ Those who lost Heimat often described it as first and foremost about a loss of people.

This study, in short, rejects notions that Heimat was never anything more than an empty signifier, generic trope, or strategy of imagining nation. Its connection to the phenomenon of place attachment, moreover, is what makes study of Heimat relevant beyond German-speaking Europe. This is not to say that Heimat did not play a role in shaping ideas of nation or that generic Heimat tropes did not exist. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, German-speaking Europe was also unique in terms of the volume and vitality of public discourses on local place attachments which took place through discussion of Heimat. The long history of regional fragmentation in Central Europe certainly played a role here and informed a more robust federalist tradition of thinking about place. Claims that Heimat feeling was uniquely German can also be found in several sources, while English-language scholarship has pointed to the lack of a direct translation of the term. In focusing on sources that emphasize Heimat’s Germanness, however, scholars have tended to ignore frequent use of the word in ways which assumed or even explicitly argued that the Heimat phenomenon transcended national borders.¹⁷

It would be problematic to assume that the phenomena Heimat has historically described were uniquely German. Notions of its aberrant Germanness have too often underpinned assumptions that eliminating the word is tantamount to transcending place attachments altogether. It goes without saying that the functions of local geographies as sites of orientation, personal biography, identity, collective memory, or dense social bonds were not unique to Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. Proliferating interdisciplinary studies on place attachment offer ample examples elsewhere.¹⁸ The difficulty of translating “Heimat” also does not make the term as unique as it may first appear. Most terms for home and place attachment in different languages reveal difficulties in finding direct translations with the same connotations and associations.¹⁹ This can also be seen in the geographic scales of terms for home in different languages which, as the Swedish philologist Stefan Brink has pointed out, have demonstrated great diversity and have changed over time.²⁰ The term “home,” for example, deviates from “Heimat” in its ability to refer to the smaller scale of the domestic abode, while it demonstrates convergences in how it can be extended to other geographies by referring to “hometown,” “feeling at home” in local places, or by referring to a “homeland.”²¹ The term “Memeklet” in Turkish demonstrates similarities with Heimat in its emotional reference to feeling at home in local places but is less likely to be used in reference to the region.²² The term “rodina” in Russian, which is often used as the closest translation for Heimat, similarly refers to a place of familiarity, personal experience, and emotional attachment. The term differs in the extent to which it is projected onto the nation, though not onto the state, politics, or a sense of nationalist obligation conveyed by the German term “Vaterland” – a function taken on by other Russian terms.²³ In Hebrew, “moledet” is typically the term offered for both home and Heimat. While it appears throughout the Bible to refer to local places of home, in modern history it has also been extended to refer to the state of Israel.²⁴ Terms for home and place attachment, in short, reveal tremendous diversity and there is not a universal standard from which the German language deviates.

Thinking about home and Heimat has always involved contested conceptualizations about how places of personal experience should relate to larger geographic scales.²⁵ Differing ideas about the appropriate scalar relationships of Heimat were often tied to differing political viewpoints. Amongst post-war democratic and pro-European federalists, for example, Heimat was described as about moderating national sentiment and supporting European unification. This diverged from the nationalist view that local Heimat sentiments should bolster and strengthen a sense of Germanness. For the rare separatist, Heimat meant rejecting the nation altogether – an act which some also described as harmonizing with European unification. Others argued that Heimat should be conceived as strictly local and private to realign the boundaries between the private and the political in the wake of National Socialism. It is not enough, therefore, to simply establish the multi-scalar nature of thinking about home and Heimat. The contested and variant perceptions of how these relationships should work proved crucial.

Regarding the question of Heimat’s “Germanness,” this study steers a middle path which both recognizes how unique historical experiences and ideas about place in German-speaking Europe have influenced the concept, while also acknowledging its connections to what the anthropologist Nigel Rapport has referred to as the universal human capacity for creating places of home.²⁶ Rather than positing a singular “German” understanding across time and space, I instead approach discussions of Heimat as parts of an evolving and contested discourse over the meaning of place attachments and their relation to diverse political and social issues. Definitions of the concept, however, are not simply assumed to be descriptive of spatial practices.²⁷ Quite often they represented active efforts to shape them. Whether it was the pro-European federalist who argued that Heimat was about decentring the nation, the East German propagandist who insisted it was about funnelling local sentiments into a new state identity, or the well-intended denizen who argued that Heimat feeling should generate empathy for the displaced, each conceptualization can be read as an effort to shape practices of homemaking and perceptions of Heimat’s relationship to broader geographies and matters of concern.

This study also rejects notions that Heimat has only ever described utopian visions of place. Visions of more ideal places of home often played a role in thinking about Heimat and in some instances could become utopian in nature. Taking them as representative of the whole, however, proves problematic. If anything, visions of Heimat in the early post-war years proved more mundane than utopian. The problem of viewing Heimat as simply a utopia that never existed becomes even more apparent in thinking through the loss of Heimat. In a utopian model, such loss would cease to mean much of anything beyond the loss of a dream.

The temporalities of Heimat were ultimately more complex. In addition to visions of future places, Heimat also had deep connections to memory and the past.²⁸ Individual history in a place provided the basis for orientation, a sense of personal biography, and locally situated human relationships. Denizens also evoked more distant pasts in shaping local identities. While the proper temporal orientations of Heimat sometimes became an explicit subject of debate, it was not a matter of progressive ideas of Heimat being oriented towards the future and conservative ones towards the past. The post-war years particularly demonstrated how evocation of historical memory could be used to accommodate change.

Heimat’s Diverse Histories

While this book focuses on the West German case after 1945, a brief look at the concept’s longer history is needed to put this work in perspective. Studies of Heimat have particularly focused on questions about the concept’s modernity and its relationship to politics and nation-building. While the word proliferated throughout the nineteenth century, it was used in the early modern period to refer to a legal right of abode, while religious discourses drew on the idea of one’s true “Heimat” being with God in the afterlife – a conceptual manoeuvre which admonished seeking home in the mortal realm.²⁹ By the end of the eighteenth century, religious discourses made more space for earthly Heimat, while literary figures in the age of sensibility and romanticism infused the concept with emotional depth. Though the romantics drew on aestheticized ideas of Heimat, they did not advance a significant nationalist Heimat discourse, which only emerged in a notable way in the latter half of the nineteenth century.³⁰

During the nineteenth century, turbulent modernization, industrialization, national unification, urbanization, and mass uprootedness all brought discussion of the concept to the fore. The “Heimat movement” – as the flowering of regional cultural societies is called – came into its own in the late nineteenth century. Celia Applegate’s work has particularly demonstrated how engagement with Heimat in the period played a role in bridging between realms of personal experience and the abstract nation.³¹ While some scholars have cast the Heimat movement as anti-modern, numerous studies have demonstrated how it was a modern movement that found appeal across the political spectrum.³² This position has been seconded by nineteenth-century studies which have shown how Heimat enthusiasts were amongst the earliest environmentalists.³³ Historians, however, have disagreed about whether the concept was only about imagining the nation. Alon Confino has argued that Heimat was an empty signifier that was exclusively about imagining the nation as a local metaphor. To advance this argument, Confino often focuses on generic tropes of locality in propaganda which represented both the local and the national.³⁴ Though providing an interesting perspective, such generic tropes reflect only a small fragment of broader thinking about Heimat.

While research on Heimat and nation reflected the surge of academic interest in nationalism over the past several decades, some evidence suggests that the centrality of German unification to the Heimat movement has been overstated. Tellingly, the movement peaked first in the 1890s and early 1900s, coinciding less with German unification and more with the Second Industrial Revolution, urbanization, and an unprecedented period of migration. It occurred, moreover, when regionalist movements began proliferating throughout western and central Europe.³⁵ Looking beyond sources that speak exclusively to questions about nation-building, we find deep concerns about Heimat in the period which centred less on nation and more on loss of community, social ties, and orientation amidst urbanization and mass migration.³⁶

The First World War, which famously saw the emergence of the idea of “total war,” concurrently saw the birth of other neologisms in English and German: “home front” and “Heimatfront.”³⁷ European states across the board engaged in intense efforts to connect the war effort to local places of home. While German propaganda called for the “protection of the Heimat,” similar trends could be seen in places like Britain, where citizens were presented with the slogan “Hun or home.”³⁸ The danger to the war efforts in both world wars was not that citizens would forget about home, but rather that local loyalties and desires for home would become detached from the national efforts which demanded constant sacrifices from them. Heimat, meanwhile, commanded significant appeal amidst the ensuing disorder of the Weimar years. The inter-war period also illustrated the diverse ways Heimat could be related to politics and the national idea, as can be seen in its divergent evocations by federalists, nationalists, separatists, and democrats.³⁹

The Nazi regime used the Heimat concept in propaganda to refer to the abstract nation and to funnel local energies into the war effort.⁴⁰ The history of the concept in the Third Reich, however, remains a subject of debate. Scholars have been divided between those who argue for the regime’s fundamental enthusiasm for Heimat and embrace of quasi-federalist structures and others who view Nazism as having more centralist convictions and see more ambivalence in its engagement with the concept. In thinking through this history, it is also worth considering what arenas and sources can shed light on thinking about Heimat in the round. Scholars who have focused on those Heimat societies and publications not shut down by the Nazis have particularly emphasized National Socialist enthusiasm for Heimat.⁴¹ Others who have advanced similar positions have looked to regional administrative structures, party structures, and use of regional origins in Germanization of eastern populations as stand-ins for Heimat.⁴² Looking at the case of the Palatinate, Applegate, by contrast, argues that the regime’s focus on centralization, Empire, and Lebensraum had points of tension with Heimat, though Heimat enthusiasts often remained “willing victims.”⁴³ Looking at the bombing of rubble cities, Jörg Arnold has argued that the regime demonstrated ever greater ambivalence towards Heimat the more it strayed away from the idea of a “home front.”⁴⁴

While this study focuses on the post-war years, the Third Reich and the war years represent an important prehistory which will be briefly considered in the first three case studies. My assessment of this history is based on the premise that shedding light on Heimat in the Nazi years requires more than looking at Heimat societies not shut down by the Nazis. More attention is needed to other arenas, including forced evacuations, homesick soldiers, top-down plans for mass resettlement, and the accounts of “non-Aryans” and German Jews in particular who fled for their lives and recounted the deep trauma of being robbed of Heimat.⁴⁵ I also argue that it is more helpful to think in terms of what kinds of ideas about Heimat the regime promoted and discouraged. The regime particularly emphasized the equivalence of Heimat with nation, rural idealism, and absolute devotion to national struggle. Understandings of Heimat which were too inward, out of sync with state goals, or decoupled from national struggle came in for strong denunciation. The regime also sought to control the narrative about Heimat by centralizing serial publications. In turn, the regime scaled back the number of localist Heimat books, while slashing the number of individual Heimat journals by almost half from 1933 to 1940.⁴⁶

The regime used Heimat in propaganda throughout the war years, though excessive attachment to local places of home and homesickness represented persistent problems. The war required soldiers to fight hundreds of kilometres from home and for citizens to evacuate, with the regime making surprisingly little effort to keep evacuees close to home.⁴⁷ As recent research has demonstrated, the regime saw nationally tethered mobility as essential to establishing a Greater German Empire.⁴⁸ The homesickness of soldiers, the illegal return of evacuees pining for Heimat, or the potential danger that local energies would become decoupled from national struggles all made engagement with Heimat crucial. By the end of the war, however, the destruction and dislocation generated by the bombings led to an exponential increase in accounts of lost Heimat. While the regime sought to cast the destruction of cities as points of new beginnings, most grieved the loss of their hometowns.⁴⁹

While dislocation and destruction triggered intense popular discussions about Heimat, both have played a surprisingly minor role in studies of the post-war concept. Rural Heimat tropes in 1950s film, tourism, and environmentalism, by contrast, have played a dominant role. Willi Oberkrome, looking at the rural environmental activities of one of the most conservative Heimat societies as representative, has argued that the post-war concept in West Germany was largely anti-modern, ethnocentric, and conservative.⁵⁰ Confino, looking at tourism, has argued that Heimat in the post-war years was first and foremost about magnifying a sense of national victimhood.⁵¹ Studies looking to the blithe world of Heimat films, meanwhile, have argued that Heimat was mostly escapist, regressive, or about repressing the past.⁵² An insightful work on these films by Johannes von Moltke, however, has challenged many of these assumptions, arguing that the Heimat trope in such films was about negotiation between modernity, mobility, and rootedness.⁵³

Other insights on Heimat in the post-war years can be gleaned from works on prisoners of war (POWs), evacuees, pedagogy, radio, and memory.⁵⁴ Scholars have also shed light on Heimat in post-war literature, in which the theme of “homecoming” proved salient.⁵⁵ Significant work has also been done on the Heimat concept in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where the regime drew on a socialist Heimat trope to promote identification with the new state.⁵⁶ Jan Palmowski’s work offers an innovative approach to analysing Heimat in dictatorship, shedding light on its use in GDR propaganda while also recognizing that many citizens maintained differing understandings of Heimat beneath the surface.⁵⁷

Like Palmowski’s study of Heimat of the GDR, this book focuses on one of the two Germanies. In doing so, it is not my contention that there were not points of connection between West Germany, East Germany, and other war-torn European countries. To differing degrees, desires for post-war private lives and the appeal of home as a site of hope could be found throughout war-torn Europe.⁵⁸ The levels of dislocation and destruction which fuelled preoccupation with home were generally higher in occupied Germany and Eastern Europe. What made the German case perhaps unique was how thinking about home and locality intersected with the need to reconceptualize politics, identity, and the nation in the wake of National Socialism. Comparing this work with that of Palmowski demonstrates how Heimat was used for these purposes in both East and West Germany, albeit in different ways. Few other European countries had to fundamentally rethink ideas about nation and national politics.⁵⁹ Amongst the victors, national identity reached fresh heights, while most states retained sovereign political structures and rebuilt within national and ever-more centralized frameworks.⁶⁰

Comparative studies between West Germany, East Germany, and other war-torn European countries would undoubtedly yield their own insights. A comparison with the Italian case, for example, could provide an interesting perspective on the differing roles of regions in democratization. A comparison with the Austrian case could shed light on the different ways Heimat could be used to reformulate ideas of nation, with many using regionalism to express ideas of Austrianness as fundamentally separate from Germanness.⁶¹ A comparison with France could shed light on community and hometown in a context with far less destruction, dislocation, and need to reconceptualize the nation. But all of these would have been different books. My decision to focus on the West German case was informed by several factors, including the depth of popular misconceptions about Heimat in West German history, their role in current debates, and the strength of extant work on the East German case. In challenging prevailing narratives about this history, it also seemed important to consider multiple local case studies which could demonstrate the representativeness of the study’s findings. In considering the breadth of terrain which could be covered, I also believed it was crucial to consider German expellees and the unfolding influence of expellee politics on the concept’s development.

In examining ideas of the Heimat concept in the post-war West, this work focuses less on tropes and more on Heimat as specific sites of home – both lost and reimagined. Throughout my research, I found that early post-war discourses on Heimat seldom referenced touristic or cinematic clichés, while exceptions often involved questioning their representativeness. Rather than looking at a single Heimat society, set of thinkers, or vein of discussion as representative of the whole, this study is unapologetically broad, drawing on an array of sources from different provenances, genres, and actors, while considering diverse issues that intersected with thinking about Heimat. Consulted sources range from Heimat journals, Heimat books, society papers, poetry, and music to city government reports, state papers, speeches, amateur historical writings, local newspapers, autobiographies, private letters, and pamphlets and programmes from local Heimat reunions and festivals, amongst others.

This study’s focus on specific sites of Heimat also means examining both rural and urban spaces, the latter of which had their own tradition of Heimat feeling. The three case studies which make up the first half of this book focus on Cologne, the Hanseatic cities, and the regions of the Southwest in the first decade and a half after the war. The first case study offers a thick description of the turn to Heimat in early post-war Cologne and encompasses two chapters. Chapter 1 traces the revival of local culture in the ruins, ideas of hometown as a site of new life, and appeal to Heimat in repairing communities. Chapter 2 examines how democratically engaged localists advanced ideas about Heimat as a site for developing federalist, post-nationalist, and pro-European ideas of nation. It continues by examining emerging narratives about “democracy,” “openness to the world,” and “tolerance” as local values.

The second and third case studies demonstrate the breadth of similar trends in different regional contexts. The second case study on the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen appears in Chapter 3 and examines both the appeal to Heimat as a site of new life and the efforts of democratically engaged Hanseatic localists to argue for democracy and international reconciliation as local values. The third case study on the Southwest in Chapter 4 focuses on referendum debates about the federalist future of the region which generated sprawling discourses on Heimat and democracy. The chapter shows how competing democratically engaged groups developed similar ideas about regional values as rooted in “democracy,” federalism, and support of European unification. The referendums, however, simultaneously reflected the weaknesses of democratic practice. Together, these three case studies in the first half of the book cover a diverse cross-section of territories which differed in terms of demography, confession, and regional culture.

Geographies of Post-War Renewal

One of the first questions with which this book engages is how denizens after the war sought new lives after an era of mass death – an issue which has attracted significant scholarly rumination.⁶² Though some evidence of the hometown’s importance can be gleaned from works on local memory cultures, this study argues for more explicit attention to the geographic facet of the question.⁶³ The way citizens pursued new lives and the geographies in which they imagined them could both have a substantial impact on political reconstruction. This is nowhere more apparent than in looking back to the years after the partial defeat of the First World War. Many Germans of the inter-war years, as Peter Fritzsche notes, confronted their losses by “identifying their own fate with that of the nation” – a trend that informed the failure of cultural demobilization after 1918.⁶⁴ The National Socialist movement, meanwhile, insisted that new post-war lives could only be found by forging a national community of struggle (Volksgemeinschaft), perpetrating mass violence, and achieving national victory.

After the Second World War, many denizens described local community and Heimat as about finding new post-war lives. This is perhaps surprising given that many sites of Heimat lay in ruins. This book shows how several factors informed the appeal of local Heimat over national community in imagining new lives. One was the absolute nature of defeat. The idea of a national community of struggle as a means of finding renewal no longer made sense. Militarist national visions were associated with mass death like never before, while the sweeping away of national structures left citizens within “small spatial relationships.”⁶⁵ Localities, by contrast, offered sites of imagined everyday life for which many pined. Though local communities had not emerged from the war intact, many sought to effect their repair and described them as a therapeutic resource and tool in rebuilding.⁶⁶ Thinking about Heimat also came to the fore in efforts to bridge across ruptured personal biographies. While historians have shown how post-war Germans confronted a sense of having “dissonant lives,” this work shows how Heimat was often the foremost place where many sensed rupture and sought its repair.⁶⁷

The political ramifications of popular desires for local civilian lives deserve careful consideration, particularly given arguments that early post-war hunger for everyday life reflected apolitical, anti-modern, or escapist tendencies that inhibited democratization.⁶⁸ There have also been ongoing debates about continuities of Volksgemeinschaft in post-war community formation.⁶⁹ Rather than seeing desire for “normal” civilian lives of Heimat as a burden to democratization, this study makes the case for viewing them as part of a story about cultural demobilization.⁷⁰ In a pre-democratized state, nothing could have been more dangerous than emotional investment in the redemptive force of national political struggle. Equating local communities of reconstruction with Volksgemeinschaft, meanwhile, risks trivializing what the latter was all about. It mattered that Volksgemeinschaft promised new lives in a national racial utopia through an unprecedented outpouring of violence.⁷¹ The script of finding new life by renouncing national struggle and turning to local reconstruction was different.

For groups of democratically engaged denizens, Heimat often also came to the fore in thinking about democratization. Those Heimat enthusiasts who sought to rally support for a new democracy often described focus on Heimat as about rejecting national ambitions for power, promoting federalism, and creating accessible sites of political participation.⁷² Others argued that it should be about protecting spheres of local private life in the wake of National Socialism.⁷³ Federalists also underscored the importance of Heimat in reconceptualizing the nation. Historically, the relationship of regions to nations ranged from nationalist affirmation on one end of the spectrum to separatism on the other end and anywhere in between.⁷⁴ Democratic groups of Heimat enthusiasts after 1945 generally eschewed both extremes, arguing that focus on region should moderate and restrain the excesses of nationalism, thereby fostering a “better” idea of nation and promoting European unification.

Perhaps most notable is how democratically engaged locals across West Germany simultaneously began arguing for “democracy” as a tenet of local identity. Many Heimat enthusiasts in border and maritime regions also began emphasizing their historic connections to the West, abandoning earlier narratives of themselves as national fortresses.⁷⁵ Such narratives emerged almost immediately after the war and gained a surprisingly strong foothold even before the founding of the Federal Republic. It goes without saying that identification with local “democracy” did not suddenly transform citizens into reformed democrats.⁷⁶ Still, their early emergence speaks to important questions about post-war democratization. Historians have rightly rejected the idea of 1945 as a “zero hour” and scepticism towards narratives of absolute rupture is undoubtedly warranted.⁷⁷ Historians, however, have disagreed on the role of early confrontation with defeat. Some have argued that it represented at least a psychological “turning point” and a legitimizing force for a new order.⁷⁸ Scholars who highlight early advances in democratization simultaneously recognize that it was a decades-long process.⁷⁹ Other scholars, however, have argued that early post-war West Germany was characterized by overwhelming continuity with the Nazi years and the dominance of anti-democratic and anti-western sentiments. According to this school of thought, it was only in the 1960s that significant advancements were made beyond the imposition of formal constitutional structures.⁸⁰

Early prolific appeals to “democracy” as a local value speak to the importance of confrontation with defeat in triggering attempts to reconceptualize identities from the ground up. While the transformation of political culture took decades, the realities of defeat did result in an abrupt rupture in future horizons of expectation. By describing themselves as local or regional “democrats,” however, denizens had not suddenly taken on reformed mindsets or even developed a clear sense of what democracy meant. One Heimat enthusiast, who promoted identification with “Swabian-Alemannic democracy,” summed it up well in 1946 as he remarked on the eagerness of so many to identify as “democrats”: “Lovely … so we are all democrats; with or without intellectual reservations. But what is democracy?”⁸¹

This question has itself preoccupied historians of democracy, with changing contemporary answers to the question giving the historian an ever-evolving yardstick against which to measure historic practice. To address this issue, some have argued for a more historicizing approach. While Paul Nolte has advocated for looking at the history of democracy as a process of searching for definition, Till van Rahden has argued against broad universalized definitions, looking instead at the history of democracy as an “experiment with an open ending.”⁸² Compared to later ideas of democracy, early West Germans conceived of democratic participation in a more limited way as about formal participation in elections and believed that democracy could be advanced by eschewing partisan devotions, ameliorating political antagonisms, and rejecting utopian visions. They also typically understood democracy through the lens of the Western alliance structures in which the “totalitarianism of the East” represented a foil.⁸³ Many of these paralleled trends in other early post-war Western European democracies, which, as Martin Conway points out, were characterized by scepticism of ideology, emphasis on representation over activism, conservative gender norms, valuation of consensus, and persistent failures to confront guilt for the recent past.⁸⁴

A historicizing approach should entail clarifying how certain patterns related to thinking about democracy at the time. This should not, however, mean blotting out comparisons with later or contemporary ideas of democracy. Historians of early West German democracy have rightly highlighted persisting racist attitudes, lack of a critical press, the problem of conservative gender norms, and failures in prosecuting Nazi crimes.⁸⁵ Some of these were of a uniquely German provenance, while others overlapped with broader trends in western democracies.⁸⁶

Engaging in the “search” for democracy, however, first required a level of identification with the process. Thus, in addition to measuring democratic practice against different benchmarks, we must also probe how citizens beyond the intellectual elite talked about democracy.⁸⁷ In emphasizing the importance of identification, this work takes a critical view of arguments that German preoccupation with cultural renewal after 1945 inhibited democratization by diverting attention away from day-to-day politics.⁸⁸ Democratically engaged localists used two tools of cultural engagement to reshape identities: evocation of useable historical memories and reinvention of local traditions.⁸⁹ Regional histories were not simply passive bodies to be rescued from taint, representing tools leveraged at a time when many feared a second Weimar.⁹⁰ While academic historians of the period resisted weaving historical legends for a new political order, lay groups proved less hesitant.⁹¹

Early post-war ideas about Heimat and democracy sometimes reflected what later critics described as shortcomings of the early Federal Republic. This included how they were embedded in Cold War mindsets. Heimat enthusiasts often described the Soviet bloc as the antithesis of Heimat – citing the lack of democratic freedoms and the Eastern bloc’s compelling of workers to relocate based on state needs.⁹² West German Heimat enthusiasts also demonstrated a limited understanding of the complicated decisions that had to be taken in constructing a new democratic state. Local “democratic” identifications also aggravated failures to confront guilt for Nazi crimes, even if those who evoked such ideas included advocates of greater confrontation with the Nazi past. Their focus on their own loss and recovery of Heimat reflected what Neil Gregor has aptly referred to as the “self-centeredness” of West German memory culture.⁹³ Heimat enthusiasts often failed to remember Jewish locals who described a more violent, unacknowledged, and searing loss of Heimat at the hands of their fellow citizens. Gendered ideas of Heimat also persisted and re-enforced the conservative gender norms of the period. While women hardly described loss of home through bombing and forced dislocation as liberating, they were often framed as facilitators of Heimat rather than those for whom it was created.

Another challenge of democratic practice in West Germany involved engagement with new outsider groups, including millions of expellees and growing numbers of immigrants who arrived in the wake of the Economic Miracle. Both groups faced hostility and exclusionary ideas about Heimat. More inclusively minded locals, however, used thinking about Heimat and more inclusive narratives of local identity to argue for greater embrace of both groups. A properly understood Heimat concept, they argued, should elicit greater empathy for the displaced. In larger cities like Cologne or Hamburg, some further argued for “tolerance” as a local value. Though locals clearly understood these ideas within the restraints of their own time, these histories are at odds with arguments that Heimat was invariably about promoting exclusion.

Expellee Politics and the Anti-Heimat Movement

There are several reasons why the German expellees cannot be left out of a post-war study of Heimat. One is the size of the population and their diverging experiences with place. Eight million expellees settled in West Germany and their views on Heimat were often deeply influenced by expulsion. Unlike West Germans, they could not return home, rebuild, repair torn communities, and revive durable local cultures. In thinking through the relationship of Heimat to the nation, many expellees were focused first and foremost on fears that the latter would never again contain the former. Though much has been written on the expellees, less attention has been given to expellee and West German conflicts over how Heimat should be understood.⁹⁴ There is much evidence that expulsion resulted in diverging trends in thinking. After twenty years of living in the West, one-third of expellees still agreed with the strongly worded assertion that “Heimat feeling and connection to Heimat is something that the West German knows nothing about.”⁹⁵ Loss of Heimat based on national ethnicity and redrawing national borders generally made the national category more prominent in expellee confrontation with their fate.⁹⁶ This book explores how politicized expellee groups emphasized the fundamental Germanness of their Heimat and generally argued that Heimat feeling should re-enforce rather than moderate national sentiments. In analysing these trends, this study disagrees with recent arguments that national politicization of expellee Heimat feeling required unwavering conviction in the feasibility of return.⁹⁷ Nationally assertive expellee claims to a right to the Heimat in the East were equally bound up in recognition politics.

Chapter 5 of the book explores these trends through a case study of annual expellee Heimat meetings which generated extensive debates about the concept. Such meetings have remained under-researched and were dynamic affairs which often involved personal reunion, sensual reconstruction of local landscapes, memorial events, regional cultural performances, and assertive national displays.⁹⁸ The case study examines the national politicization of local Heimat feeling in expellee meetings, ensuing medialized West German debates about Heimat, and contestations over expellee society efforts to articulate a hereditary Heimat concept to assert their children’s rights to the East.

Expellee-society Heimat rhetoric would come to play a key role in souring some West Germans towards the Heimat concept by the 1960s. The societies had used the concept in Cold War politics since the early post-war years, but it did not precipitate the type of political crisis that it would by the early 1960s. West Germans had more sympathy with their claims to a right to the Heimat when expulsion was fresh, while Adenauer adroitly used them to keep proposals for a neutral unified Germany at bay to pursue his real goal of tying the Federal Republic to the West. While West German sympathies for expellee claims slowly waned, the dynamics of expellee use of Heimat in Cold War politics changed more abruptly from 1959 to 1961. These years saw a major heating up of the Cold War, the construction of the Berlin Wall, and a new GDR propaganda campaign which depicted expellee claims to Heimat in the East as the foremost threat to peace in Europe. The vehemence of expellee rhetoric increased in kind. For many onlookers at the beginning of the 1960s, nothing short of war in a nuclear age was at risk and nothing less than expellee claims to a right to Heimat in the East stood in the way of peace.

Chapter 6 explores how this moment of Cold War crisis represented both the proximate trigger and a crucial co-factor in the emergence of the first real efforts to eliminate the Heimat concept. The chapter shows how supporters of rapprochement with the Eastern bloc took up two conflicting strategies in taking on expellee Heimat rhetoric. The first involved challenging how the expellee societies understood the concept, while the second involved arguments that desire for a place of Heimat was itself inherently fascist, militarist, and regressive. These Cold War debates intersected with other economic, demographic, and political trends which co-shaped the anti-Heimat movement of the 1960s. The long-term effects of the Economic Miracle, a sharp decrease in mobility, and the resulting stability of local place attachments all influenced public valuations of Heimat. For a new generation, attitudes towards Heimat were shaped less by experiences of displacement and more by expellee rhetoric. The anti-Heimat movement, in turn, had a generational inflection, as did the Heimat Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s.

Efforts to eliminate the concept were largely limited to groups of intellectuals and activists – many of whom sought re-engagement with Heimat in the subsequent decade. Throughout the 1960s, advocates of eliminating the concept described local place attachment as a barrier to sweeping global change. Desire for Heimat, many argued, was regressive, militarist, nationalist, anti-democratic, excessively emotional, and steeped in desires for violence. Notions of Heimat as a blockage to progress could also be found in the culture of top-down technocratic planning.⁹⁹ Technocratic planners had little interest in semantic debates and very different notions of “progress,” but also viewed Heimat as a relic of a pre-modern era. Over time, citizens lamented how technocratic planning had destroyed the natural environment of Heimat, while creating inhospitable cities stripped of a sense of local community.

Attempts to eliminate the concept proved largely unsuccessful, with a segmented “Heimat taboo” never reaching beyond limited circles of left-wing intellectuals and activists. This book explores how attempted tabooization of “Heimat,” in turn, resulted less in transcendence of local place attachments and more in disengagement with the process of defining them. The calls of many on the left for re-engagement in the subsequent decade emerged in no small part out of growing feelings that banning the word had not eliminated the phenomena it described.

Reassessing the Heimat Renaissance

In contrast to the early post-war years, the “Heimat Renaissance” of the 1970s and 1980s is generally well-acknowledged throughout the historiography. That is not to say that a large body of scholarship has examined its history. Studies on environmentalism and urban planning have appreciated its relevance to local protest movements, while other scholars have examined Heimat in literature and film.¹⁰⁰ No overview work on the Heimat Renaissance, however, has been written since the period itself.¹⁰¹ Nor is broader awareness of its history the result of it having been a stronger turn than that of the early post-war years. Much evidence suggests it was more contested. The difference ultimately lay in its national medialization. The Heimat Renaissance was onlaid with a heated Heimat discussion amongst elite intellectuals, academics, and political activists who debated left-wing re-engagement. The revival also saw eye-catching protests which explicitly drew on the concept in challenging the technocratic overhaul of local landscapes. A range of less medialized developments can also be situated within the Heimat Renaissance, including the return of Heimatkunde (local studies) in schools, the building of Heimat museums, the flowering of dialect literature, and growing interest in regional history.

Prevailing narratives about the Heimat Renaissance derive chiefly from the intellectual discourses of the period itself. According to this narrative, these decades allegedly saw the first attempts to engage with the concept by individuals on the political left. In the process, a “new” forward-looking Heimat concept emerged for the first time, standing in contrast with an “old” one that was presumably always anti-democratic, nationalist, ruralist, and anti-western.¹⁰² Speculations about why these decades saw a Heimat revival have proven diverse. The 1970s are often described as a period of weak rupture, defined by structural change, economic downturn, temporal disorientation, reaction against technocratic planning, and the growth of environmental movements.¹⁰³ All of these developments shaped the Heimat Renaissance, and many of them have been referenced in explaining its emergence.¹⁰⁴

Chapter 7 re-evaluates the causes, contours, and misconceptions of the Heimat Renaissance by placing it within the context of a broader post-war history and by looking across different registers of the revival typically viewed in isolation. It begins by excavating intellectual debates and seeks to explain why so many on the left sought to re-engage with the concept. While economic downturn and the inspiration of local protest movements of the mid 1970s are often cited as causes, the book shows how the push for left-wing engagement emerged earlier amidst the fragmentation of the 68er movement and a growing sense of crisis about failures to achieve the rapid revolutionary changes which the movement had promised.¹⁰⁵ Left-wing advocacy for engagement, I argue, emerged in large part out of failed efforts to determine what relatively new rhetoric about rejecting Heimat meant in practice.

Engagist intellectuals and activists noted several problems in translating anti-Heimat rhetoric into practice. Spaces of personal biography could not simply be wished away by banning the word, and ignoring questions about local community, many argued, exposed those on the left to the loneliness of a bureaucratic capitalist society. Others noted that rhetorically framing global convictions as being about casting off the local did not miraculously eliminate the local or translocal nature of one’s individual experiences and left little room to think about how they related to politics. The failure of global revolutionary change to suddenly materialize after 1968 led others to argue that they had neglected local places as sites of reform. Engagist intellectuals, however, frequently drew on preconceptions about the concept’s past, juxtaposing their own calls for engagement against what they argued had theretofore been an old, anti-democratic, exclusionary, and backward idea of Heimat. Though they exaggerated the newness of many of their ideas, there were points of departure. This included intellectual arguments that a progressive Heimat concept needed to be completely divorced from an allegedly reactionary interest in history and reoriented towards future visions of home which could be achieved through political struggle.

For many intellectual observers, the local protest groups of the 1970s who evoked the concept against technocratic planning appeared to represent this type of radically new Heimat concept. This study challenges this narrative by looking at groups who evoked the Heimat idea in protesting against urban planning projects, centralist reforms, and environmentally destructive infrastructure projects. While the turn to protest as a form of political participation was new, such local groups drew on longer-standing ideas about Heimat as a site of decentralized participation and local democratic identity. Rather than abandoning an “old” Heimat concept’s connection to history, protestors continued a longer-standing approach of harnessing useable local historical memories. The Heimat Renaissance, however, did not see the end of attempts to eliminate the concept. A fracture on the left on engagement with Heimat persisted throughout the period and into post-reunification Germany. The final decade of the Heimat Renaissance, meanwhile, would see the consolidation of the now familiar legend of Heimat as having been taboo immediately after 1945.