Seven
From Homeland to Borderland

The National Socialists, in common with the shopkeeper who invented the Billigheim Purzelmarkt in 1907 or the artist who designed a Pfälzer flag in 1909, showed a propensity for public rituals and invented traditions that embodied some notion of Volksgemeinschaft. Like all Pfälzer Heimatlers, they claimed to value the soil of Germany, the customs and ways of its people, and the integrity of the whole. A festival of folk costume looked much the same under Nazi rule as it had in earlier times; the castles of the Pfalz got equal care and attention. To be sure, the National Socialists asserted the legitimacy of their rituals, revivals, and historical interpretations with rather more determination and single-mindedness than had the shopkeeper, artist, or amateur archeologist: no Georg Berthold of the Historical Association dared inform the Nazis that their swastika flag, their claims to the contrary notwithstanding, had no basis in German heraldry; no Albert Pfeiffer of the state archives could chide the choreographers of Nazi folk costume parades for the rank amateurism and historical inaccuracy of their efforts. But such distinctions may simply have been ones of power. If those thousands of Pfälzer Wäldlers, those hundreds of Heimat-historical enthusiasts, had possessed the power of the Nazis, would they not have behaved similarly? Perhaps in fact the Heimat movement prepared the ground for National Socialism, by denying the importance of individual identity and attempting to subordinate all Germans to an essentially patriarchal, authoritarian system of obedience and collective anonymity.^[1]

[1] This in essence is Ina-Maria Greverus's argument about the Heimatschutz and Heimatkunde phenomena (Auf der Suche nach Heimat , pp. 9–10).

In the agonized retrospection that the Nazi regime has occasioned, such a conclusion is not out of place. Indeed, the Nazis, with their grandiose claims to have brought to a culmination the culture of Central Europe, themselves insured that posterity would treat the German past as their prologue, judging it in light of their deeds and understanding its significance by their own standards. But clearly, the earlier entrepreneurs of tradition in the Pfalz aimed neither at complete domination of the German state nor at the destruction of all its enemies, domestic and foreign. Are their evident affinities in ideology and social understanding with the Nazis not then invalid, irrelevant, or coincidental? Somewhere in between the two extremes—Heimat as, on the one hand, necessary to Nazism and, on the other, irrelevant to it—lies the real history of the appropriation and exploitation of Heimat symbols, ideas, and people by the confused and self-contradictory political culture of Nazism. It is a history that brings together the revolutionary intent of the Nazi recasting of German local life with the ultimate failure of the regime to be anything but destructive.^[2] The integrity of local culture and identity that lay at the heart of the Heimat movement was an early and in some sense willing victim of the National Socialist revolution; its forms persisted, but now infused with the rhetoric of racial superiority and the rituals of German power.

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany; on 23 March, after two months of high-pitched propaganda and calculated terror in the streets, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act that made him in effect Germany's dictator, "created by democracy and appointed by parliament."^[3] Even before the passage of the Enabling Act, the dual process of Ausschaltung and Gleichschaltung —of excluding some groups from public life and bringing others into conformity with Nazi standards—had begun. The undesirables—Jews, Socialists, Communists, Catholics, and Freemasons, among others—were forced out of the civil service and judiciary; the Weimar party system was destroyed; the state governments and local councils were disbanded or robbed of any independence; all the associations, leagues, societies, unions, and circles that crowded the landscape of local and national German public life were either replaced by Nazi organizations or persuaded to pose no autonomous principle of their own against the National Socialist world view.

[2] A major trend in recent scholarship on Nazi rule has been to examine the patterns and pathologies of everyday life in an effort to determine the extent of Nazi transformation of society. The material in this chapter on the confusion and the incompleteness of Nazi intervention in social organizations bears affinities to Detlev Peukert's Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life , trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven, 1987). In his treatment of the Edelweiss Pirates, for instance, Peukert suggests that the retreat to groups based on the locality or the "territorial principle" was a form of rejection of Nazi centralization (p. 155).

[3] Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise to Power , trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston, 1944), p. 579.

In Bavaria, Heinrich Held's government resisted the Nazi takeover relatively strenuously, unsuccessfully appealing at the last minute to Hindenburg to block the appointment of a new Nazi Reichs commissioner.^[4] But the Bavarian government had already lost much of its authority in the Pfalz, and by early March Gauleiter Bürckel was flying the swastika flag from all public buildings in the district, in defiance of the explicit orders of the minister of the interior.^[5] After the elections of 5 March, Bürckel began in earnest to replace Bavarian authority in the region with his own, relying on the efficacy of his combination of anti-Bavarianism, arms, and intimidation. A rash of early retirements, job changes, and leaves of absence (in the case of socialist mayors, alarmingly literal ones) thinned the ranks of Pfälzer town mayors and regional officials.^[6] Bürckel himself appropriated no new titles, retaining his independence as the local party boss.^[7] His electioneering practices brought stunningly affirmative results in the plebiscites of the following years, and his programs of social relief and employment were popular if not as effective as was claimed.^[8] Deeply provincial in outlook, he did not aspire to much beyond the securing of his own personal fiefdom in the Pfalz and the promotion of its economic well-being.

Securing the fiefdom meant above all suppressing the opposition. The March elections had shown that despite Nazi efforts to intimidate the presses and break up public meetings, Social Democracy, Communism, and political Catholicism were all still alive in the Pfalz. By July, they were dead. In Kaiserslautern, the only Pfälzer town for which a study of any depth of the Nazi seizure of power has been undertaken, the SA and the Schutzstaffel (SS) seized the public buildings in early March 1933 and launched a series of raids against the socialist newspaper that ended in its closing on 13 March. Dissolution of the Reichsbanner and the Catholic Pfalzwacht followed, then of Social Democratic associations, trade unions, and finally, on 22 June, the Social Democratic party itself. In early July 1933, the Bavarian People's party and the Center party dissolved themselves.^[9] The Social Democratic

[4] Karl Schwend, Bayern zwischen Monarchie und Diktatur. Beiträge zur bayerischen Frage in der Zeit von 1918 bis 1933 (Munich, 1954), pp. 506ff

[5] Rothenberger, "Aus der Nationalsozialistischen Zeit," p. 352.

[6] Hüttenberger, Die Gauleiter , pp. 92, 98.

[7] On Bürckel's position, see Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," pp. 452–53; Hüttenberger, Die Gauleiter , pp. 39, 77–79, 119, 213; Sopade (1935), 2:1477.

[8] Rothenberger, "Aus der Nazionalsozialistischen Zeit," pp. 357–61; see also notices in Pfälzer in Berlin of the high Pfälzer turnouts and "yes" votes ([1933]:143; [1934]:98). The secret reports of the Social Democratic party contain numerous accounts of electioneering fraud and intimidation in the Pfalz—Bürckel's trademarks (Sopade [1934], 1:199, 279, 283, 349, 392). He took effective if not official control of the Bavarian Pfalzhilfe funds, insisting on a reduction in the interest rates on loans, hence a reduction in cultural expenditures (misc. docs., BHStAM, MK 15534–35).

[9] Friedel, Machtergreifung , pp. 50–69.

party's secret reports from the Pfalz attested throughout 1934 to widespread hatred of the regime and the imminence of revolt, but by the end of the year even an optimistic reporter had to acknowledge the disarray among his Social Democratic comrades, many of whom were in jail or in concentration camps, and the likelihood that the regime would survive for a while longer.^[10]

Accompanying the suppression of political opposition was the persecution of cultural diversity. The Protestant church organization in the Pfalz succumbed internally, gradually giving way to the influence of Nazi party members in the church officiate.^[11] The Catholic church and its organizations were more of a problem for the furiously anti-Catholic leaders of Nazism in the Pfalz. Catholicism was "the greatest and most dangerous opponent of our world view," declared a Nazi text on "the enemies of the movement."^[12] Acts of terror against Catholic clergy, a smear campaign against the Catholic church, and the forcible integration of Catholic youth groups into the Hitler Youth, all played a role in the marginalization of what had once been a politically potent minority in the Pfalz.^[13] The top church officials fluctuated between courageous opposition and what they thought was limited cooperation, always in the hope that conditions would improve for Catholics in the near future—once the SA was brought under control, once the Saar vote was over, once the defensive works of the Westwall had been built, and so on.^[14]

But Bürckel's particular obsession with Catholicism (he was himself the son of Catholics) did not lessen his anti-Semitism; the Jewish community of the Pfalz suffered the full measure of Nazi hatred. The first anti-Semitic campaigns in the Pfalz centered on the economic role of the Jews. As middlemen, they were blamed for the economic problems of small-scale producers: their businesses were boycotted and destroyed; their lawyers and doctors were barred from practice; some were arrested, some beaten, many harassed.^[15] In 1935, the Social Democrats reported that as many as four-fifths of the Pfälzer

[10] Sopade (1934), 1:396; for expressions of optimism, see pp. 111, 114, 187, 253 (here the reporter admits that "a quick end" to the regime cannot be expected).

[11] Karl-Georg Faber, "Überlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Pfälzischen Landeskirche unter dem Nationalsozialismus," Blätter für pfälzische Kirchengeschichte und religiöse Volkskunde 41 (1974): 29–58.

[12] 1935, PLAS, T65, no. 9; reprinted in Nationalsozialismus im Alltag. Quellen zur Geschichte der NS-Herrschaft im Gebiet des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz , ed. Anton Doll (Speyer, 1983).

[13] See esp. Helmut Prantl, "Zur Geschichte der katholischen Kirche in der Pfalz unter Nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft," Blätter für pfälzische Kirchengeschichte und religiöse Volkskunde 42 (1975): 79–117. The Sopade reports refer to incidents in the suppression of Catholic youth groups in the Pfalz ([1935], 2:680, 695).

[14] Sopade (1935), 2:235. In fact, Nazi attacks on the Catholic church and its hierarchy increased in number and intensity after the Saar vote.

[15] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 455; Sopade (1935), 2:921, 924–25, 1030; (1936), 3:1657. See also Hermann Arnold, Von den Juden in der Pfalz (Speyer, 1967).

vintners refused to participate in the anti-Jewish agitation and resented the boycott of Jewish merchants because it forced them to sell their grapes at deflated prices to the Nazi-controlled collective.^[16] But such opposition went mostly unexpressed. Even before the implementation of the Final Solution, Bürckel had devised his own answer to the Jewish question, the Aktion Bürckel , which by a series of massive deportations beginning in October 1940 had removed all Jews from the Pfalz within a year.^[17]

Bürckel's energy and inventiveness in the establishment of his own petty Pfälzer principality were mirrored in the gradual promotion of the region from a minor district of distant Bavaria to a major bulwark of the German western front.^[18] The promotion began in 1934, when Hitler chose Bürckel over several other Nazi loyalists to manage the Saar plebiscite of 1935 and bring the disputed territory back under German control.^[19] The Allies made scant effort to monitor the plebiscitary process, leaving Bürckel free to employ the electioneering practices he had used to such good effect in the Pfalz: massive propaganda, mobilization of non voters, intimidation and slandering of opponents, thuggery and fraud at the polls. The final vote was overwhelmingly in favor of a return to Germany, and Bürckel, more than ever a favorite of Hitler, became the new Reichs commissioner of the Saar and party leader of the new Reichsgau Pfalz-Saar. In 1937 the region metamorphosed again, this time into Gau Saarpfalz der NSDAP, a term that reflected the dominance of Bürckel's Nazi party over any other state authority in the region. This it remained until Bürckel returned from a temporary appointment in Vienna, where he had helped to engineer the annexation of Austria and to organize the first deportations of Austrian Jews.^[20] Finally, in 1940, the Pfalz disappeared altogether, replaced in official usage, if not in popular consciousness, by the appropriately grandiose and implicitly militaristic notion of the Westmark.

The evolution from Pfalz to Westmark in the space of about six years required the participation of the old Heimat associations in the destruction of a century's worth of Pfälzer invention. The Heimat museums, Heimat clubs,

[16] Sopade (1935), 2:1029.

[17] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 455; Karl-Heinz Debus, "Christen und Juden in der Pfalz zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus," Pfälzische Landeskunde , vol. 3 (Landau/Pfalz), pp. 377–82.

[18] One can follow this evolution in the maps of the period, from a depiction of the greater Pfalz, entitled "Rheinfront," in 1934 (Neustadt), which expressed the aspiration, to another entitled "Gau Westmark" in 1941 (Kaiserslautern), which reflected its realization.

[19] Hüttenberger, Die Gauleiter , pp. 139ff.

[20] Ibid. The SPD-in-exile reported overhearing in the Pfalz just prior to the Austrian plebiscite the remark that "der Bürckel wird schon 110 Prozent Stimmen herausholen, der ist geeignet für einen solchen Wahlschwindel" ("Bürckel will undoubtedly bring in 110 percent of the votes; he's the man for election fraud like this"; Sopade [1938], 5:262–63.)

and Heimat publications represented a distinctively Pfälzer version of the Volksgemeinschaft that was not entirely consonant with that of National Socialism. Having achieved power, the Nazis moved quickly to insure that all imaginings of the whole were in line with their own, and this meant bringing Heimat organizations under their control, along with singing clubs, youth groups, hiking fellowships, and all other expressions of German sociability. The Gleichschaltung, or coordination, of the German Heimat consciousness proceeded in the Pfalz in three stages, each a further intensification of Nazi influence on local institutions. From the consolidation and centralization of some groups to the transformation of others and finally the invention of new ones, the Nazis attempted to appropriate and organize the sentiments of hometown patriots.

The Pfälzer Heimat organizations subjected to the least amount of change after 1933 were the primarily convivial organizations, the most prominent of which was the Pfälzerwald Verein. Its hikes and its Heimat evenings seemed to take place as before, with only the occasional reference to the "national revolution" in progress. Yet more than the quiet hegemony of everyday life over political drama seems to have been responsible for this continuity, for members of such organizations often considered themselves to be active participants in Germany's fate as a nation—before and after 1933—and many enthusiastically endorsed what they called the regeneration of Germany under Nazi rule. Part of the answer lay in the common fund of German nationalist rhetoric from which both Nazis and groups like the Pfälzerwald Verein had long drawn. But part lay as well in the tendency of the Nazis, after 1933, to fashion their rhetorical Volksgemeinschaft out of the available materials, of which one of the most important was the highly developed infrastructure of German associational life. Hence, organizations like the Pfälzerwald Verein could go on as before because the Nazis approved of some of their activities and were indifferent to others. In minor matters the Verein even continued to assert a conviviality outside the grasp of the Nazi revolution: witness their continued preference in greeting one another for the simple "Deutsche Grüb e" (German greetings), or even "Fröhliche Pfalz, Gott erhalt's" (Happy Pfalz, may God preserve it), to "Heil Hitler."

The problem of interpreting the lack of change in certain Heimat associations is further complicated when one considers that their stability was in some sense only apparent, an assertion of normalcy in the face of a darker reality. In 1933, for instance, Pfälzer in Berlin , an organ of the Heimat association, printed a small notice between hometown news and subscription pleas entitled "Against the Atrocity Slanders Abroad": "We ask all our members and countrymen to help us in the battle against the atrocity stories; especially in letters to relatives and friends outside of Germany, everyone should emphasize that the national revolution has completed itself in a fully orderly fashion and that all the reports of horrors are mere inventions, in-

tended to damage our German Fatherland."^[21] Similarly, in 1935 a retrospective look at the twenty-five-year history of the Berlin club of Pfälzers emphasized the abnormality of the Weimar period, with its continual strikes and street battles (no mention that the Nazis had themselves been responsible for most of these): "Much of it today sounds to us like a fairy tale [Märchen ]; one can hardly believe that such times really existed."^[22] In both these examples, the truth of the matter is at least partly acknowledged by the protest itself; the effort to disguise that truth results in the ludicrous notion of a "revolution" (Umwälzung ) conducted in "an orderly fashion" and in the revealing comparison of the past to a fairy tale—a notion that resonates with suppressed longings.

In the specific context of club activities, the apparent lack of change could and did legitimate that Nazi regime by giving it an appearance of rootedness in the structure of everyday life. At the same time, to assert the continuity of their experience, as Heimat associations often did, allowed them self-servingly to claim to have prefigured the Nazi revolution. The effort to appear unchanged yet revolutionized inevitably involved people in more vague and self-contradictory assertions about the situation in Germany. In the same paragraph, the editor of Pfälzer in Berlin could refer to the profound "internal rebuilding and new organization" brought about by the "national transformation" and assert that "in outer form we are little changed" and in inner form "our Landsmannschaft has always been völkisch in outlook and dedicated to the service of Volkstum"^[23] —in other words, we have been through a profound change, but everything is the same as before. These eager conformists found themselves hopelessly caught in the contradictions of Nazi ideology itself, fruitlessly circling between the equally empty promises of revolution and of order.

For all was not, in fact, unchanged in the world of Heimat conviviality. The very fact that the new regime aspired to total control, regardless of whether they achieved it, altered the relation of association to state and with it the complexion of public life in Germany. The Nazis renamed and reorganized convivial associations as part of the drive to centralized administration that affected many other parts of institutionalized life in Germany. In 1934, for instance, a new Reichsbund Volkstum and Heimat absorbed the Berlin group of Pfälzers into its national structure.^[24] Justifying his notionally voluntary decision to join the Reichsbund, association leader Flickinger wrote that "the national-socialist revolution has inserted itself into all areas of public

[21] "Gegen die Greuelhetze im Ausland!" PB (25 April 1933): 48.

[22] "1910–1935: 25 Jahre Arbeit der Landsmannschaft der Rheinpfälzer in Berlin," PB (25 February 1935): 30.

[23] Ibid. On the distinction between völkisch and volkstümlich , see below, pp. 141–42.

[24] On the Reichsbund, see NSDAP Hauptarchiv, Hoover Institution Microfilm Collection, reel 14, folder no. 276.

life, and it must do so if it is to achieve a full redesigning of our collective life; everything that can be useful in this new building of the national character must put itself at the service of the revolution. Indeed, it would certainly have been a grave error had the Führer not turned to the Landsmannschaften, with all their experience in the work of Volkstum, to serve in the revolution."^[25] Flickinger went on to announce that since the new umbrella organization was part of the National Socialist party, so too had the Lands-mannschaft become National Socialist, and "its leadership will henceforth follow National Socialist principles." Adherence to the Führerprinzip justified reshuffling the internal organization of the club to give it a more hierarchical character than before—a change that went a long way toward destroying the spirit of egalitarian comradeship that Landsmannschaften had supposedly represented.^[26] Membership, too, would no longer be simply a question of one's Pfalztum; lip service to these so-called principles of National Socialism, if not actual membership in the party, became a requirement for admission to the now-exclusive group.^[27] Here, certainly, the Nazi regime had effected a profound, albeit invisible, transmutation in the purpose and spirit of the Landsmannschaft. Simply by altering the definition of a member from a Pfälzer to a Nazi (albeit a Pfälzer one), the Nazis reordered the priorities of the organization, and with them the balance between provincial identity and national consciousness.

The incipient chaos of Nazi administration, with its proliferating authorities and umbrella organizations, also undermined the localist autonomy of the Heimat associations. The Pfälzer Landsmannschaft in Berlin was swallowed up twice, first by the Reichsbund Volkstum und Heimat and then by the new Bund Deutscher Westen.^[28] In the Pfalz, the various historical and botanical associations amalgamated to become the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der völkischen Wissenschaft im Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur in der Westmark (Working Community of Völkisch Learning in the League of Struggle for German Culture in the Western March), itself part of several national organizations; the Literary Association became the Arbeitsgemeinschaft des deutschen Schrifttums in der Pfalz, part of a national literary organization; the many local singing groups became a single Sängerbund Westmark. All, in turn, became subsidiaries of the recast adult education association, which was itself subordinate to, among others, the Reichskulturkammer, the Landespropagandastelle Rheinpfalz, the Gaukulturamt der NSDAP, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the Deutsche Bühne, the "Kraft durch Freude" campaign, and

[25] J. Flickinger, "Im Reichsbund Volkstum und Heimat," PB (25 April 1934): 37–38.

[26] "Jahresbericht für 1934," PB (25 January 1935): 3.

[27] "Im Reichsbund Volkstum und Heimat," PB (25 April 1934): 38.

[28] President Speiwok of the "Bund Deutscher Westen," speech printed in PB (25 July 1933): 77–79.

the Reichsbund Volkstum und Heimat.^[29] A preference for the gigantic and national in place of the small and local corresponded to this elaborate centralization and rationalization of institutions. In 1934, for instance, the central propaganda agency of the Reich staged a large exhibition in Berlin called "The Pfalz in the New Reich" to coincide with the intensification of the campaign to win the Saar plebiscite. The old Heimat associations of the Pfalz had little to do with the exhibition, apart from attending, publicizing, and praising it; indeed, the only local organization that had any hand at all in shaping the exhibition was the Nazified professional tourist association, headed by Bürckel's deputy, Richard Imbt.

The Nazi reorganization effectively robbed Heimat activities of their particularity and their local independence, both qualities at the heart of the idea of Heimat itself. At its most ridiculous, the subsumption of German Heimat sociability under myriad groups and subgroups could be simply unwieldy: take for example an announcement of a brief performance of Pfälzer folk customs put on not just by the local Landsmannschaft, but by "the Landsmannschaft of Rheinpfälzers in Berlin, in the Reichsbund Volk and Heimat," in conjunction with "the Office for Heimatkunde and Volkstum in the Cultural Division of the Berlin Area of the Hitler Youth" and "the Cultural Office of the NSDAP Rheinpfalz."^[30] Most manifestations of Nazi encroachment, however, ranged from the unpleasant to the vicious. In the literary organization, such old leaders as Ludwig Eid were forced to give way to men like Roland Betsch (the new chairman), Paul Ginthum, and Gerd Buchheit, all leading voices of disaffection in the Weimar period.^[31] The "Folk music movement" in Pirmasens, according to one report, was languishing under a proliferation and politicization of music clubs that had led to "the falling apart of associations, a drying up of interest, and a dying out of the joy in singing."^[32] In 1935, a Pfälzer group called the "Friends of Nature" had set out on a bus trip to the graves at Verdun, only to be stopped and arrested en masse by the Gestapo. The arrests were evidently a mistake, for everyone was soon released; as a parting gesture, the Gestapo revoked their passports and told them to keep their mouths shut.^[33] The message, in any case, was clear enough. Associational activities continued only on the forbearance of the regime; they could end at any time. In 1936, Bürckel's crony Imbt, the

[29] R. Jung, "Jahresbericht," Die Westmark: Monatsschrift des Volksbildungsverbandes Pfalz-Saar/Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur in der Westmark , Sonderdruck (1934): 4.

[30] "Jahresbericht für 1934," PB (25 January 1935): 3.

[31] Pfalz am Rhein 16 (June 1933): 272. See also Chapter 6 above.

[32] Attributed to the Pirmasenser Zeitung in Sopade (1935), 2:717–18. The SPD reporter was, of course, particularly concerned about the dissolution of workers' singing groups and folk music choirs, which he said had once been strong in the Pfalz and Baden.

[33] Sopade (1935), 2:831.

new director of the Dürkheimer Wurstmarkt, the most famous of the Pfalz's folk festivals, fired the publican in charge of provision because he had bought meats from a Jewish butcher. When the publican appealed the firing, some local SA men took matters into their own hands, forcing him to close his business and pillaging the house of the Jewish butcher.^[34] The festival went on.

The public world over which the Nazi regime presided may not have reflected the Nazi world view in all its parts and processes; but the principle of conformity had been propagated, and its consequences were significant. In January 1933, five days before Hitler was suddenly appointed Reichs chancellor, the editor of Pfälzer in Berlin had pleaded with members to respect the non-political character of the group by not wearing uniforms to club meetings and not turning meetings and outings into political gatherings: "Have consideration for the opinions of your neighbors. Everyone who belongs to the Verein loves his Heimat and serves its interest. With that, let us be content."^[35] That understanding of the notion of Überparteilichkeit , in which "suprapolitical" meant the toleration of political differences, did not long survive in National Socialist Germany. Within the year, überparteilich better described the position of the Nazi party itself—the party above parties—whose transcendence had been achieved at the cost of political and cultural dissent. The Pfälzer Landsmannschaft, in contrast, had become unterparteilich , just one more mouthpiece for the National Socialist "principles" now presumed to be at one with those of all Heimat-loving people. Perhaps the "apoliticism" of the association in the days of the Weimar Republic—its insistence then on remaining above the fray—had helped to make for Nazi success.^[36] Certainly it allowed groups like the Heimat associations to adjust to Nazi society with seeming effortlessness. But such continuities do not preclude change, and what began by destroying the old context in which Heimat associations had flourished quickly altered their internal tissue also.

The cultural organizations of the Pfalz felt the effects of Nazi power more immediately and directly. For those who in the Weimar period had devoted themselves to cultivating and preserving more than just the conviviality of countrymen, the advent of Nazism did not offer the possibility of life-as-usual, with a blind eye to one side and a blinkered one to the other. Nazi Kulturpolitik in the Pfalz was from the start aggressive and wide-ranging. Kurt Kölsch, the new Gaukulturwart , or warden of culture, declared that the entire culture of the region had been polluted by foreign propaganda over the past centuries, and by democracy and "racial chaos" in the past decade.

[34] Ibid. (1936), 3:1030.

[35] The stricture was almost certainly directed against Nazi party members, for whom the kind of behavior inveighed against here was usual. See "Jahresbericht für 1932," PB (25 January 1933): 4.

[36] See esp. Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism .

Since its inception, he asserted, National Socialism had tried to defend the true German culture of the region; in the "new Germany," it "went without saying" that "the propaganda apparatus of the party must be mobilized for cultural purposes, since not only is culture a task of propaganda, but propaganda is itself a cultural act and must be an essential piece of our völkisch reeducation."^[37]

The process of transforming Pfälzer culture, rather than merely centralizing it, began with the liberal adult educational league. Almost everything about the league, from its egalitarian structure to the repertoire of its theater company, was repugnant to the Nazis; there was never any question that it would have to change radically, if not close down entirely. In May 1933, Franz Hartmann, doubly implicated as head of the league and leader of the Pfälzer press club, went into quasi exile in Saarbrücken, where he carried on as a freelance journalist and anti-Nazi publicist until the Saar plebiscite made that region no longer a refuge.^[38] He was succeeded by two newcomers to Pfälzer cultural organization, Hermann Emrich and Kurt Kölsch—one a self-styled scholar, the other a local poet desiring larger audiences, and both willing agents of party bosses Bürckel and Imbt. Emrich at once discarded the offensive word frei from the organization's name, dubbing it instead the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur in der Westmark (League of Struggle for German Culture in the Western March). He purged the association's libraries of all undesirable literature; abolished the education courses; substituted dramas like Schlageter , the story of an occupation-period saboteur, for the classical offerings of the old theater company; and inserted Hitler's birthday, among other new events, into the popular almanac Jäger aus Kurpfalz .^[39] The Nazi wardens of culture in the Pfalz also tightened what had been the loosely associative structure of the old league into a hierarchy of titles and functions that underscored the militarism in the new organization's name.

The effect of the reforming zeal of Emrich and Kölsch was to gut the old adult educational league of its adult educational functions, turning it instead into a heavy-handed propaganda organization. "There is no longer an adult education movement in the old sense with so and so many contradictory and artificially integrated liberal organizations," wrote Kölsch in 1934; "there is only national-socialist and racially conscious cultural work, which has brought into conformity and subordination to it all organizations and associations."^[40] Another Kampfbund official described the organization as a

[37] Kurt Kölsch, "Kultur aus Volkstum und Heimat," Westmark , no. 12 (1933–34): 642.

[38] BavMinAus, "Betr. Pf. Volksbildungsverband" (1 June 1933) BHStAM, MA 106019. After the plebiscite of 1935, he moved on to Munich and then to a small village outside of Passau, where he died in 1944.

[39] Emrich to BavMinUK (summer 1933, 27 October 1933, 12 January 1934) BHStAM, MK 15534; "Jahresbericht," Westmark Sonderdruck (1934): 4–9.

[40] "Kultur aus Volkstum und Heimat," Westmark (September 1934): 642.

"cultural wall" against outside incursions. Behind this wall, Pfälzer culture would develop in ever greater conformity with the "German soul"; the cultural "new order" in the Pfalz would reflect "a single point of view."^[41] As both the new name and the new rhetoric accompanying it suggested, the distinctively Pfäzer—the "things of the Heimat and the things of the earth," as Hermann Fitz had written in 1919—now played a decidedly subordinate role to the national and the German. The balance had always been delicate, sustained by the belief that the national soul had many aspects, many forms. The Nazis spoke of their Volksnähe , or closeness to the people, but the Volk of the Nazis bore only one aspect. Indeed, the notion of diversity, the "many-sidedness" of W. H. Riehl, disappeared entirely from the public vocabulary of German culture. The distinctiveness of the Pfalz, at least in the new Kampfbund, survived only as the peculiar problems of a border region.

The Kampfbund gave an overall ideological shape to cultural promotion in the Pfalz; a transformed Pfälzer Society for the Promotion of Learning gave it intellectual underpinnings. The "new ordering" of the scholarly society involved a thoroughgoing replacement of old members with ideologically fit new ones, as well as a redefinition of its purpose. The exclusivity and elitism of the society persisted, a curious anomaly in the context of the "national revolution," which, strictly speaking, had rendered the distinction between high and low culture meaningless.^[42] Other scholarly institutions, like the old Historical Association, had gone the way of assimilation and centralization, disappearing into the anonymity of the ponderously titled Working Community for Vökisch Learning in the League of Struggle for German Culture in the Western March.^[43] But the Society for the Promotion of Learning remained, keeping its original name and structure throughout the 1930s. "The Neugestaltung [rearrangement] of the society was no Gleichschaltung [putting-in-the-same-gear]," wrote a new member, but rather a "Neuformung [reshaping]" that permitted its "Eingliederung [incorporation] into the new cultural tasks of our Heimat" and the "Anknüpfung [tying on]" to past traditions.^[44] The distinctions may have been more imagined than real, but that they were made at all was testimony to the new regime's desire for the imprimatur of the past.

Hermann Emrich, who took charge of this internal "rearrangement" of the society, drew inspiration from the radical critique of it in the 1920s.^[45] Its

[41] Emrich to BavMinUK (Summer 1933), BHStAM, MK 15534.

[42] For the invocation of the "revolution," see Hermann Emrich, "Denkschrift: Neuordnung der PGFW" (1 June 1933), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[43] Ibid.

[44] E. F. Rasche, "Die Neuordnung der Pfälzischen Gesellschaft zur Förderung Wissenschaften," Völkische Wissenschaft: Periodische Beilage zur Monatsschrift "Die Westmark " 1 (1934): 22.

[45] Gert Buchheit, the original critic, had himself become a subregional head of a department of the new literary association that was part of the new Kampfbund, no very exalted post;

(footnote continued on next page)

Bavarianism, its conservatism, its narrowness of vision and timidity of purpose, and most of all its provincialism aroused Emrich's scorn: the "purpose of the society," he asserted, had been "to control scholarly life to the benefit of the Bavarian People's party," and under such circumstances "no real progress in scholarship could take place, no real creative drive could exist."^[46] The many studies that the society had sponsored all suffered from the flaws of "literal-mindedness," "objectivity," and "specialization."^[47] Without sufficient regard to "philosophy" (which in this context meant National Socialism), "the consciousness of the whole," and "the requirements of the present," scholarship had degenerated into mere "Pfalzkunde," which was "a dead, museum-bound science."^[48] Most damning, the old leaders of Pfälzer scholarship, prejudiced by the "ruling liberal attitude toward learning," had neglected to study the importance of race in folk life; hence they had failed "to deepen the racial self-consciousness of the population."^[49] Emrich intended that future scholarship would deal only with the "living ties to the life problems of our people" and represent only "the ideological and racialist points of view."^[50] The "completely meaningless concept of a Pfalzkunde," he noted with unconcealed contempt for the Heimat tradition, would be abandoned; "purely Pfälzer themes" would henceforth attract the Society's attention only "as expressions of the Westmark, itself an organically adapted member of the Reichs-whole."^[51]

By the end of the summer of 1933, Emrich had accomplished at least part of his plan for the "spiritual renewal" of the Westmark: the replacement of "unacceptable" members of the society with "völkisch scholars."^[52] He apparently drew inspiration from the purging, then in process, of the Literature Section of the Prussian Academy of Arts. There a combination of internal pressure toward conformity and external threats had driven out half the membership, among them Germany's most distinguished writers.^[53] In the Pfalz, the blow to German culture may not have been as severe, but cultural integrity was equally compromised. Ten of the twenty-five members of the society resigned under various forms of pressure; several more were allowed

(footnote continued from previous page)

[*] in fact, Emrich referred to Buchheit's criticism of the PGFW in the 1920s as coming from "non-National Socialist sources." See Emrich to BavMinUk, "Denkschrift" (31 July 1933), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[46] Ibid.

[47] What Emrich seemed to mean by "ideel-sachlich" was simply that Pfälzer scholars had been too interested in the facts.

[48] Ibid.; Emrich and Kölsch (1 June 1933), "Denkschrift," BHStAM, MK 15551.

[49] Emrich, "Denkschrift" (31 July 1933), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[50] Emrich and Kölsch, "Denkschrift" (1 June 1933), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[51] Emrich (31 July 1933), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[52] Emrich and Kölsch (1 June 1933), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[53] On the Prussian Academy, see Craig, Germany , pp. 646–8.

to stay on only because they were expected to die soon, and those who did stay were relegated to minor subdivisions, where they discovered the benefits of obscurity and absenteeism.^[54] The president, Friedrich von Bassermann-Jordan, was given to understand that the society could not develop under his leadership; he resigned politely and promptly.^[55] As a reward, he was permitted to continue to attend meetings as "honorary president." The title gave far more credence to the Nazis than balm to his wounded self-esteem, for such apparent approval of the new order by the old did the Nazis no harm and their supine opponents no good.^[56] The secretary, archivist Albert Pfeiffer, of a prominent Catholic family, tendered his resignation at the same time as Bassermann-Jordan, but he received no false civilities in return, just a notice of reassignment to an obscure archive in rural eastern Bavaria. By the end of 1934, the turnover in membership since 1932 exceeded 50 percent, and if one counted the rate of chronic absenteeism at the frequent meetings called by Emrich, the figure would be even higher.^[57] The new members included a few prominent Nazi scholars: Eugen von Herrigel, philosopher and author of Zen and the Art of Archery ; Kurt von Raumer and K. A. von Müller, both historians, the latter the new editor of the Historische Zeitschrift .^[58] Others, like Karl Roth of Kaiserslautern, who had spent much of the 1920s measuring Pfälzer heads, had expertise in the arcana of intellectual racialism, or were simply disgruntled scholars whose accomplishments had received no recognition under the old regime.

In 1938, when Emrich finally got around to cleaning out the society's basement, he found piles of old publications from the Weimar period, most of them flawed by what he called "liberal attitudes" and "outdated approaches to Heimat research," and one even tainted by "the participation of Jews" in its preparation.^[59] Since the enthusiasm for public book burning had never been great and even such ineffectual preservers of culture as the Bavarian Ministry of Culture were raising objections to wholesale cultural destruction, Emrich decided to stamp the lot as "old paper" and sell it to

[54] BavMinUK to Präsidium Pfalz (23 June 1933), Präs. Pfalz to BavMinUK (4 July 1933), and Emrich to BavMinUK (1 September 1933), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[55] BavMinUK to Präsidium Pfalz (23 June 1933), Präs. Pfalz to BavMinUK (4 July 1933), BavMinUK to Bassermann-Jordan (23 July 1933), and Bassermann-Jordan to BavMinUK (4 August 1933), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[56] The new corresponding secretary of the society in fact boasted of this coup in his article, "Die Neuordnung der Pfälzischen Gesellschaft," p. 23.

[57] PGFW, Minutes of meeting of regular members (5 January 1935), BHStAM, MK 15552.

[58] Emrich to BavMinUK (1 September 1933), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[59] The volume so described was Fritz Heeger and Wilhelm Wüst's Pfälzische Volkslieder ; Emrich, "Begründung für den Antrag, betr. Revision der von der PGFW verlegten Veröffentlichung" (16 December 1938), BHStAM, MK 15553.

junk dealers.^[60] As he well knew, the designation aptly expressed the transformation in local scholarship that he had brought about. Völkische Wissenschaft, Die Westmark , and Unsere Heimat , the three periodicals that replaced the Heimat-historical journals of the Weimar period, were filled with shrilly racist and nationalist articles, programmatic statements and ideological harangues, and "reinterpretations" of Pfälzer figures of the past that recruited them to the ranks of Nazi heralds. The lecture offerings of the society were similarly transformed: in 1934 the subjects included "A View into Western Racial Chaos," "The Reich as Longing and Fulfillment of Pfälzer Volkstum," and "The Thousand-Year Struggle for the Rhine as a Struggle for the Reich."^[61] Amid all this weltanschaulich clamor, the notion of the Pfalz, too, was gradually becoming as obsolete as the old-paper publications that had sought to preserve it. Research may have taken as its conscious point of departure "the details of the landscape," but the "thematic, totalizing goal," as Emrich put it, effectively obscured one's view of anything else.

Nevertheless, even though centralized, consolidated, regulated, and revolutionized, the old institutions of Pfälzer Heimat cultivation evidently did not prove equal to the task of realizing the Nazi vision of the Pfalz, or Westmark, in a dynamic greater Germany. In 1936, Emrich created an entirely new scholarly organization, the Saarpfälzische Institut für Landes- und Volksforschung (Saar-Pfälzer Institute for Regional and Ethnographic Research), which was dedicated to the study of the racial characteristics and "fate" of the "Saar-Pfälzer" German type at home and abroad.^[62] The new institute's scholars were known as "experts" and "specialists" rather than simply "Heimatpfleger"—a terminological innovation that speaks generally to the Nazis' technocratic and ideological distance from local life.^[63] From the start, the Nazis systematically undercut the autonomy of associations by submerging them in national organizations and by substituting a language at once bureaucratic and grandiose for the locally rooted, deliberately nostalgic language of Heimat.^[64] The Nazi "revolution," as arbitrary and incomplete

[60] Ibid.; cf. Bavarian objections, BavMinUK to Präs. Pfalz (13 January 1939), BHStAM, MK 15553.

[61] PGFW, Minutes of meeting (24 March 1934), BHStAM, MK 15552.

[62] Correspondence between Emrich of PGFW and the BavMinUK (December 1935–37), in BHStAM, MK 15536, 15552, and MA 106035. One could possibly argue that ample precedent existed for such an institute in the various right-wing organizations devoted to the study of Alsace-Lorraine as well as the German "borderland" study groups, but none of these had specifically Pfälzer roots or Pfälzer interests. On the Westdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Bund der Elsaß-Lothringens im Reich, see esp. Lothar Kettenacker, Nationalsozialistische Volkstumspolitik im Elsaß (Stuttgart, 1973), pp. 39–49, 76.

[63] On the debates over nomenclature in the institute's hierarchy, see BavMinUK to Präs. Pfalz (6 February 1940), BHStAM, MK 15553.

[64] The question of language is a vexed one; for every example of a technocratic euphemism there is a counterexample of a deliberate archaism, like Gau or Wart .

as it was, did render the institutions of Heimat cultivation in Germany marginal to local society and unresponsive to the needs or desires of participants themselves. Moreover, the marginalization of Heimat cultivation was itself part of the larger process of the "fracturing or atomization of opinion" that in the long run reduced opposition to grumblings about bits and pieces of Nazism, rather than systematic resistance.^[65] Against the claims of locality, whether political, economic, or merely cultural, the Nazis insisted on the absolute priority of the nation, which they defined from a fictive center—the Führer—on outward and downward. In the face of such a world view there remained little point to the cultivation of Heimat at all.

Thus, although Heimat cultivation did persist in the Third Reich, its meaning—politicized, paganized, and nationalized—became ultimately abstract. All that had once been vital to Heimat cultivation, from civic pride to a respect for the particularity of local life and tradition, had little resonance in a regime attentive to national grandeur and racial, not simply local, pride. Heimat, because it implied little about race, tribe, or any other of the categories favored by Nazi ideology, became a term of distinctly subsidiary importance: the locus of race, perhaps, but not its essence, and not a concept with any intrinsically prior claim to the loyalties of the German Volk. Boden (earth), in the final analysis, meant nothing without Blut (blood).^[66] Moreover, one need not give undue credence to the incoherent ramblings of its ideology to see in the Nazi state the systematic undermining of local society and locally referential worldviews. In all aspects of their lives, as breadwinners, as churchgoers, as family members, as citizens, as human beings, Germans were told to see themselves in terms of the nation and the nation's destiny. And as practiced by the Nazi leadership, that national destiny had in fact an enormous capacity to disrupt the lives of even the most provincial of Germans.

The ways by which the "Heimat" was cultivated during the Nazi years subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) discouraged the enjoyment of local particularism, even in its politically neutral aspects. The Nazi year of festivals, for instance, imposed itself on such traditional (at least since 1900) expressions of Heimat consciousness as the almanac and the town festival.^[67]

[65] Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 384–85. This is also an essential part of Peukert's perspective on everyday life in Inside Nazi Germany .

[66] See also Max Braubach, Landesgeschichtliche Bestrebungen und historische Vereine im Rheinland (Düsseldorf, 1954), p. 91.

[67] See Der Jäger aus Kurpfalz , the almanac put out by the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur, after 1933. Randall L. Bytwerk argues that the Nazi "Feier inflation," by which he means the proliferation of Nazi celebrations—on Hitler's birthday, on the day of "national Regeneration," on May Day, and so on—loosened local ties and transformed civic rituals into religious ones; see his "Rhetorical Aspects of Nazi Holidays," Journal of Popular Culture 13 (1979): 243.

In the Nazi period, the local almanacs featured swastikas and Nazi youth in the middle of the sketches of local nature, wisdom from the mouth of Hitler in place of the folk sayings, pseudopagan designations for the months, and announcements of dates significant in the history of the Nazi party alongside the Pfälzer anniversaries. Hermann Emrich justified the various paganisms the Nazis had introduced into the Jäger aus Kurpfalz as an expression of "the powerful movement toward renewal in the German people," which had awakened a longing "to connect with the eternal symbols of Being . . . the urdeutsch -mythical lore of the yearly cycle."^[68] Although the Nazis were simply replacing one set of invented traditions for another, theirs served a different principle. The pseudopaganisms tied Pfälzers into a cultural identity purportedly more ancient, more essential than the epiphenomena of regional distinctions. At the same time, the insistence on the non-Christian urdeutsch lore undermined the symbiosis between Christianity and Heimat that had been so crucial to its rootedness in local life.

A similar disruption of local patterns characterized the public festivals in provincial Nazi Germany. The celebration of Hitler's birthday with a mandatory flying of flags and banners is a case in point: it symbolized the power of the center distributed across the whole. The old local events, whose historical and cultural references did not extend beyond a limited geographical area, had, as I have argued, provided occasion to reflect on the larger communities to which one also belonged, but they had not celebrated a homogeneous set of values and political norms. Such genuinely local events as the Billigheim Purzelmarkt were infrequent in the frenetically festive 1930s, pushed to the margins on the one hand and decked out with swastika flags on the other. In 1938, the author of a dissertation on turn-of-the-century Heimat literature summed up the prevailing attitude when she concluded that "present-day literature is völkisch literature and belongs to a single-minded people, while the old Heimat poets [of the prewar period] were only weak and incomplete voices in the battle." And yet, she continued, "the Heimat art movement [was] certainly one of the most promising currents that indicated even before the war a spiritual preparation for what was coming, and hence should be honored for its service to a national future."^[69] Heimat was assimilable, but with reservations, alterations, and provisos.

The Nazi worldview and Nazi state dynamism made themselves felt throughout the threefold categories of local self-understanding that I have considered in the context of the Heimat movement: tourism and the promotion of local nature; folkloric activities and the interpretation of local culture; historical endeavors and the creation of a usable past. Of the three, tourism underwent by far the most banal and thus perhaps most enduring trans-

[68] Introduction, Der Jäger aus Kurpfalz (1934), p. 1.

[69] Dieck, "Die Literargeschichtliche Stellung der Heimatkunst," p. 85.

formation. Gone were the happily solipsistic days when the castle ruin was a local monument, site of picnics and goal of Sunday afternoon strolls, when the town fathers were the tourist agents, content with the occasional visitor from Mannheim or Karlsruhe. The Nazification of nature involved the subordination of the civic and communal to the economic exploitation of the outdoors—a tendency already evident, to be sure, in the first decade of the century, but not dominant.^[70] The effect of forcing local nature clubs, like the Pfälzerwald Verein, into national organizations and centralized patterns of administration was not, as Nazi rhetoric suggested, to deepen the German appreciation of nature's mysteries, but to bring greater sophistication—by way of greater awareness of the national market—into the promotion of the Pfalz's charms. The most mystical declarations of "the experience of landscape" would now appear in tourist magazines alongside crass calculations of its salability.^[71] The Nazis were naturally talented tourist agents and succeeded throughout the Pfalz in transforming civic boosterism into professional tourism.^[72] In tourism, as in many other aspects of social life, the Nazis achieved a degree of modernization that had eluded previous promoters of consumerism, and they laid the basis for the atomized but materially stated culture that flourished long after they had gone down in the flames of their own making.^[73]

Without question, the greatest triumph of Nazi touristic naturalism in the Pfalz was the construction of the Deutsche Weinstraße (German Wine Road), an assertion of national coherence on an unruly natural setting that persists to this day. Completed in 1935, the Weinstraße formed part of Bürckel's overall efforts toward the economic recovery of the region, the much-vaunted "socialism of the deed."^[74] Its building was a public works project of considerable proportions, and its completion promised to make accessible the tiny villages and vineyards of the Pfälzer wine-producing region, which were set far back from the Rhine in-the-hills of the Haardt and had thus never attracted many visitors. Its opening in October 1935 gave Bürckel a chance to boast of his recent successes and hint at his future ambitions. The midpoint of the Weinstraße just happened to coincide with his party headquar-

[70] See also analyses of everyday life that emphasize the acceleration of modernization under the Nazis (e.g., David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution [Garden City, N.Y., 1966]) and the structural contradictions that that entailed (e.g., Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany ; and, on female labor, Tim Mason, "Women in Germany, 1925–1940: Family, Welfare, and Work," History Workshop Journal , nos. 1 and 2 [1976]).

[71] Pfalz am Rhein was the professional tourist publication, but Unsere Heimat and Der Pfälzer in Berlin also served the functions of advertising hotels, wines, tourist spots, and the like.

[72] See, e.g., the speeches from Imbt of the Pfälzische Verkehrsverband, a new information guide to touristic promotion, and a variety of other schemes in PB (1934–38).

[73] See also Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany , pp. 241–42.

[74] See report on economic conditions in the Sudpfalz by local party official Karl Kleeman, BHStAM, MA 106035.

ters in Neustadt, no longer in the Haardt but now "an-der-Weinstraße." The road's starting point, where the opening ceremonies took place, lay as close to the French-Alsatian border as one could come without crossing over it, and it was marked by a gigantic gate, or Tor , in a modified monumental style with such oblique references to vernacular architecture as a gabled roof in stone atop massive pillars. Whether the Weintor faced inward, opening onto the Weinstraße as it headed north, or outward, a gateway to Alsace and to France, was left ambiguous; the town where it sat was appropriately named Schweigen (to keep silent), and Bürckel was not talking either, except to reiterate that thanks to him new times had arrived for the Pfalz. "In wine is truth," he declared, prefatory to a brief exposition of the historical development of the Westmark: "The political rises and falls, the Good and the Evil are mirrored in the wine itself." His point was not so much that men make wine and hence can spoil it; rather, wine was seen as manifestation of nature's own bounty, and its quality an expression of nature's approbation of the state of men's affairs. "Where a pure will clearly and deliberately serves the people, then purity again characterizes the life principle, and the corrupted and false are all the more hateful to us," he concluded.^[75] The wine of 1935 was by many accounts excellent—but then, after such a speech, one could hardly have suggested otherwise.

"Wine is the symbol of blood," added the chairman of the club of Pfälzers in Berlin at the time of the Deutsche Weinstraße's completion, and blood was the reality behind the deceptively diverse manifestations of German culture.^[76] The need to awaken Pfälzers to the significance of "blood" in their social identity, to, as Emrich put it, "deepen the racial self-consciousness of the population," informed the practice of Volkskunde in the Nazi period and its interpretation of local identity.^[77]

A recent scholar, Ernst Ritter, has struck a distinction between "volkstümlich" and "völkisch." The former, he argues, implied "historical and cultural shaping processes"; the latter reflected an "ahistorical and racist ideology" that in practice was "militantly anti-Semitic."^[78] The distinction is a telling one and crucial to understanding the path along which the interpreters of regional identity traveled in the years of Nazi rule. Unlike other parts of Germany, where anti-Semitism had long characterized the Heimatkunde genre, the Pfalz had until 1933 been mostly free of racialist, that is to say völkisch, interpretations of local culture. Karl Roth, who became the

[75] "Die deutsche Weinstraße: Rede des Gauleiters Bürckel beim Eröffnungsakt in Bad Dürkheim," PB (25 October 1935): 134–35.

[76] "Ansprache unseres Vorsitzenden J. Flickinger im Berliner Lustgarten am 21 Oct. 1935," PB (25 October 1935): 131.

[77] Emrich, "Denkschrift" (31 July 1933), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[78] Ernst Ritter, Das Deutsche Auslands-Institut in Stuttgart 1917–1945: Ein Beispiel deutscher Volkstumsarbeit zwischen den Weltkriegen (Wiesbaden, 1976), p. 3.

leading Pfälzer practitioner of Rassenkunde (racial ethnology) in the Nazi period, had campaigned unsuccessfully in the 1920s for recognition by the leading cultural organizations: the most he achieved was the acceptance of one article in the minor Heimat journal of Kaiserslautern, Unsere Pfalz , and one book review in Pfälzisches Museum –Pfälzische Heimatkunde in 1928. In the article, Roth laid out the results of his survey of Pfälzer heads, 62 percent of which, he revealed, were covered with brown hair.^[79] In the review, Roth argued that the discipline of Rassenkunde deserved more attention than it got in the Pfalz, where, significantly, none of the books under review had been published.^[80] To Roth's disappointment, the Volkskunde of men like Albert Becker and Emil Heuser amounted to mere cultural interpretation with eclectic theoretical tendencies. Pfälzer culture emerged in their works as the sum of many influences and cross-currents over the centuries that were engaged neither in a Darwinian process of cultural selection nor in a Spenglerian struggle with chaos and decline. Moreover, Pfälzer Heimat associations generally acknowledged the contributions of Jewish culture to that of the Pfalz and preserved its remains along with those of court and peasant culture.^[81] The ancient Judenbad in Speyer had been restored in the 1920s; the sufferings of the twelfth-century Jews of Speyer were the subject of a sympathetic novel in the Heimat-historical genre, published in 1925 by Maximilian Pfeiffer, a prominent Center party leader and well-known Pfälzer.^[82]

In short, when in 1933 Emrich and Kölsch announced the advent of a new science, a völkische Wissenschaft , their sense of a radical break with the past was for once accurate; indeed, in some ways the break with traditions of interpreting the Pfälzer character and culture was even more complete than they portrayed it. Here as elsewhere, the newly empowered Nazis were caught in a rhetorical battle between the wish to appear revolutionary and hence responsible for the complete regeneration of German society and the wish to

[79] One suspects that all dark-haired people were measured as brown-haired, in order to come up with the figure of 0.3 percent black-haired, proof for Roth of the essentially Nordic character of the local people; nevertheless, only 35.6 percent were blond-haired, and only 36.5 percent were blue-eyed. See "Über Rassenzugehörigkeit und Körperbauformen des Pfälzer Volkes," Unsere Pfalz (21 May 1926).

[80] "Neue rassenkundliche Literatur in ihren Beziehungen zur rassenkundlichen Allgemeinsituation," PM 45/24 (1928): 270–71.

[81] In 1921, for instance, Albert Becker wrote that "it would be a gratefully received project for someone to undertake a thorough investigation of the far-ranging influences of the morals and customs of the Jews on heimatlich customs of the Rhineland—that our Mundart is filled with Jewish words and expressions is so well known that I need hardly even mention it" (PM–PH 38/17 [1921]: 119). In a similar spirit, the philanthropic activities in the Pfalz of the American-German-Jewish family of Strauss were often acknowledged in the Heimat press; see PM–PH 43/22 (1926): 244 and 47/26 (1931): 44; PB (25 June 1931): 55.

[82] Albert Becker, review of F. J. Hildenbrand's Das romanische Judenbad im alten Synagogenhofe zu Speyer am Rhein , in PM 37 (1920): 40; the title of the novel was Kyrie Eleison .

appear traditional and hence responsible for fulfilling German destiny. To further the latter self-image, an early article in Die Westmark credited Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl with directing German scholarship away from "false paths" and toward an understanding of "the unchangeable spirit of the people, rooted in blood and race," though even the extracts from Riehl's writings cited in the article hardly supported such an interpretation.^[83] Albert Becker, consciously or not, helped to legitimate the Nazi interpretation of Riehl, and of the whole discipline of Volkskunde, by continuing to publish short pieces in Nazi magazines and, more significantly, by allowing himself to be claimed as an early practitioner of völkische. Wissenschaft in spite of the fact that before and even during the Nazi period his writings were entirely cultural in emphasis and said nothing about race and blood, except in the most perfunctory fashion.^[84]

Although neither revolutionary nor regenerative, the Nazi folklorists in the Pfalz did manage to transform the categories within which local culture was understood and its significance judged. In their school textbooks, popular publications, and lectures, they encouraged the reading of folktales, the singing of folksongs, and the preservation of folk customs.^[85] So of course had the Heimat movement, but in the Nazi state folklore existed only to illuminate a mystified past of racially pure societies.^[86] Family research also was reestablished on the basis of investigation into one's racial background, a task with frighteningly practical consequences.^[87] German emigration, another area in which the Nazi scholars and teachers seemed merely to take over a long-established interest of Heimat research, now illustrated the principle of "blood ties," over and above the social and cultural affinities that had struck the Heimatkundlers of the Weimar period.^[88] Indeed, the example of

[83] Kurt von Raumer, "Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl und die Volkskunde der Pfalz," Westmark 1 (1933–34): 350.

[84] Brief biographical notice on his sixtieth birthday, Westmark 6 (1938–39): 754.

[85] Bason argues that while the writers of Nazi textbooks tried to wipe out any trace of the Weimar Republic, they were immeasurably helped in their task of securing national loyalty by the emphasis the Weimar schools had placed on homeland and nation, and in the end only shifted emphases and wordings, not substance (Study of the Homeland , pp. 38–45, 120–121). See also Gilmer W. Blackburn, Education in the Third Reich: A Study of Race and History in Nazi Textbooks (Albany, N.Y., 1985).

[86] For the Pfalz, see Hermann Kohl, Pfälzer Land und Volk in der Schule erlebt. Die neue Heimatkunde für die Westmark, auf nationalsozialistischer Grundlage (Pirmasens, 1935); "Blut und Boden als Grundlagen völkischer Erziehung des deutschen Volkes" (Speyer, ca. 1935), in Doll, Nationalsozialismus im Alltag ; statement on importance of Volkstumspflege in PB (25 June 1934): 53.

[87] E.g., "Vom Sinn und Wesen der Familienforschung"; and Antz, "Der Zweck der Geschlechterkunde"—both in PB (25 September 1933): 94, 104.

[88] See, e.g., Der Jäger aus Kurpfalz (1938), the theme of which was "Saarpfälzer da und dort und überall in der Welt"; or the Heimatbriefe (1938), a publication produced in the Pfalz to be sent to "Saarpfälzer Volk" outside of Germany, with greetings from Bürckel, Imbt, Kölsch, and Fritz Braun, head of the Mittelstelle.

emigrants, distant from their culture only in geographical terms, made clear that blood and race, not land, were the ultimate determinants of cultural identity: it was not the Pfalz that mattered, but the racial heritage of its inhabitants.^[89]

Ironically, the Nazi redefinition of the bases of cultural life did not in the end encourage the local celebration of folkways. In part Germans simply became feiermüdig , tired of the endless number of occasions on which they were to take to the streets in joyful celebration. Less obvious perhaps to those at the time was the growing irrelevance of local culture in the national state, despite the attention given it. Viewed from the perspective of blood and race, Pfälzer culture as such made little sense. Its particularities, so carefully catalogued over the decades, began to fade away under the light of the racial unity of the German people in their "blood-bound total community."^[90] A deepening of the racial consciousness of local people, as Emrich desired, necessarily involved a weakening of their Pfälzer consciousness.

Riehl, who had spent an entire book arguing for the cultural reality of the term Pfälzer , would hardly have appreciated its subsumption into the "racial-historical movements" of Nazi imagination, but he could not without hypocrisy have caviled at the political calculation that lay beyond this ideological performance.^[91] Just as the Bavarian government had used Riehl's interpretation to support its stake in the contemporary borders of the Pfalz, so too did the Nazis manipulate the categories of blood and race to support the political idea of the Westmark and the national policy of resettling Germans (among them Pfälzers) in unknown territories to the east. Race could be the basis for such expansion of political borders; attachment to a unit as enclosed and static as the Pfalz could not. The new völkische Wissenschaft thus sought finally to undermine that traditional inward-turning of the German, not just to his own soul but to his hometown, his province, his locality. In a state that had made expansion and aggression the basis of its economic recovery and political survival, such inwardness could not be allowed to persist.^[92]

The past also contributed to the National Socialist depiction of locality

[89] Emil Maenner, "Die Auswanderung aus dem pfälzischen Raum nach Galizien 1782–1785," in Abhandlungen zur saarpfälzischen Landes- und Volksforschung , ed. Günther Franz, Ernst Christmann, and Hermann Emrich (Kaiserslautern, 1937), pp. 129–53; Völkische Wissenschaft (1934–35), no. 12, an issue devoted to "Auslandsdeutschtum."

[90] Karl Herzog, "Schule und Volkskunde," Unsere Heimat (August 1935): 3.

[91] See, e.g., Fritz Hellwig, "Bevölkerungsgeschichte—Volksgeschichte," Völkische Wissenschaft (1936–37): 189–90.

[92] Ritter also points out that the expansionary policies of the Nazis contradicted the ideal of state boundaries corresponding exactly to racial boundaries, the "Volksboden." To this he adds, the Nazis' "drive to expand . . . also contradicted the sentimentally loaded Heimat-term in Germany" (Das Deutsche Auslands-Institut , p. 16).

and nationality, or rather, the past served the Nazis, as it had every generation of tradition inventors since the Pfalz began, as the ultimate affirmation of their creation. The Nazis set themselves apart from their predecessors not only in the content of their interpretations but also in the frankness with which they acknowledged the hold of the present upon them. Hermann Emrich, the Pfalz's Dr. Goebbels, whose opening remarks and closing interpretations framed every cultural production, said that "the essence of our time is history shaping to a degree hitherto unknown."^[93] He referred to the world-historical events and figures in whose midst he felt himself to be; things were happening, so it seemed, and Emrich sought to argue, in that inflated language characteristic of Nazi pronouncements, that people must be changing also, becoming "open" to history-in-the-making, submitting themselves to the "eternal racial-spiritual essence." But his words, taken together with the lecture they introduced, conveyed another meaning as well. The Nazis "shaped" history by rewriting it. History, Kurt von Raumer argued in his address to the new Saarpfälzische Institut für Landes- und Volksforschung, ought to reflect the political spirit of the period in which it was perceived. Raumer was not, however, encouraging a decidedly un-Nazi relativism. As he explained, politics had reached its final stage in the Nazi regime, in the ultimate union of the people and the state. Therefore, history writing also had achieved a state of perfection, not in its objective or truth-telling character, but in its capacity at last to depict the destiny of the German nation, in its perception of the final outcome that the events of the past had foreshadowed, and in its embodiment of the national will.^[94]

Landesgeschichte , or regional history, formed the subject of von Raumer's exhortation, because it posed a potentially troubling opposition to this national spirit and its historiography. To warn the members of the institute of the dangers of regional history and to instruct them in its proper application was his explicit purpose.^[95] The history of the Pfalz (or Saarpfalz) needed to be "seen anew" from the perspective of the "destiny of the German people." To this end von Raumer suggested that contemporary historians look at the Pfalz first as "keeper and protector of the idea of the Reich," second as "guardian of the border, bearer of the conflict with the west," and third as the embodiment of the Volksgemeinschaft, as the "history of the people."^[96] Certainly these first two would have been unlikely to give pause to a local historian, and the third was so vague as to be universally acceptable. But as recurrent themes of the local historical consciousness in the Pfalz, the impe-

[93] "Das Wesen unserer Zeit ist geschichtsbildend in einem bisher niegekannten Ausmaß" (introduction to Kurt von Raumer, Der politische Sinn der Landesgeschichte [Kaiserslautern, 1938], p. 5).

[94] Ibid., esp. pp. 17–21.

[95] Ibid., p. 7.

[96] Ibid., p. 22.

rial and, perhaps perversely, the war-ridden, many-times-invaded past had been sources of pride and claims to local distinction. This tendency toward solipsism, or Selbstbespiegelung , was precisely what von Raumer detested: "Local patriotism," he pronounced, "is the most dangerous restraint on regional history."^[97] The Nazi rewriting of Pfälzer history thus set out to free it from its entrapment in local self-regard so that it might become the more appropriate reflection of the Nazis' supralocal grandeur. In 1938, the editors of a volume devoted to the lives of famous Pfälzers described their "duty" similarly: "We seek to depict the heimatlich past in the mirror of its great and its typical personalities in order that a supra-individual quality will find expression in all the many-sidedness and diversity of the individuals, that is to say, [we seek to depict] the share of our region in the historic destiny of the German nation."^[98]

Accordingly, the Pfälzers' new historical identity would encourage them not in the "Heimat idea" but in the "Reich idea" and the "borderland idea." The promotion of the "Reich idea" took the form of extensive writings about the so-called First Reich, in particular the medieval empire of the Hohen-staufens that had its geographical fulcrum in the lands of the Pfalz. Even earlier manifestations of Germanic peoples in the area of the Rhine acquired new significance and a wholly undeserved imperial mystique.^[99] These diffuse and often doggedly factual accounts of excavations and emperors received some much-needed glamor from the castle of Trifels in the south Pfalz. A medieval stronghold that for a few years in the twelfth century had housed the imperial crown jewels, Trifels came to serve the Nazis in an equally transitory and symbolic fashion. In 1934, the Bavarian historian Johannes Bühler published a long article entitled "Trifels as a Symbol of German Power" in the yearly Wanderbuch of the Pfälzerwald Verein.^[100] Adopting the then-current clichés, Bühler argued that strength (Kraft ) was the essential attribute of German peoples, but that in the last few centuries it had become tragically divorced from power (Macht ), a state of affairs contrary to what nature had intended and hence responsible for the extreme tension in Europe. The recent developments in Germany had finally brought about the proper relations between German Kraft and political Macht. In the wake of this reordering, Germany needed a symbol, and Trifels, as the

[97] Ibid.

[98] Raumer and Baumann, Deutscher Westen—Deutsches Reich 1: iv.

[99] For some accounts of the early history of the Pfalz, see the articles by Ernst Wahle, Hermann Graf, and Friedrich Sprater in Franz, Christmann, and Emrich, Abhandlungen; Wanderbuch (1939): 25ff.; and articles by Dr. Keith, Wilhelm Tendt, and Sprater in Völkische Wissenschaft (1934).

[100] "Der Trifels als Symbol deutscher Macht," Wanderbuch (1934): 55–80. Bühler was also the author of the official Bavarian history of the Hambach Festival, published at the time of its centenary in 1932 (see Chapter 6 above).

most important survival from the time when German Kraft and Macht had first come together, ought to be it.

Bühler's article came to the attention of Kurt Kölsch, Gaukulturwart of the Pfalz, who began in 1935 to lobby for the ruined castle's extensive renovation to make it accessible to tourists.^[101] Simultaneously, the archeologist and head of the Historical Museum, Friedrich Sprater, began excavations in the castle that yielded important, if politicized, results. By 1937, the Bavarian and Pfälzer authorities had spent 2 million marks on renovation, excavation, and construction of a new tower atop the castle. Whether or not Trifels really became, as one writer suggested, "a national place of consecration to the German people," the Nazis did succeed in linking its glorified imperial past to their imperial present.^[102] And with Trifels came all the castles of the Pfalz, no longer as monuments to local distinctiveness but, as Bavarian prime minister Siebert put it, as "witnesses to the attachment between the long-gone imperial glory of the First Reich and the bold new Reich of Adolf Hitler."^[103]

For categorical thinkers like the Nazis, every absolute good required the existence of its opposite, and the opposite of the Reichsidee was Kleinstaaterei , petty-statism. The Nazi image of the Pfälzer past consequently divided neatly at the Thirty Years' War, after which—until the Nazi seizure of power—Germany suffered to a greater or lesser degree under the "arbitrary rule" of petty princely particularism.^[104] This "Germany of three hundred Fatherlands" was a perversion incapable of expressing the will of the German people—what Kurt von Raumer meant when he referred to the eighteenth century as "states without a people."^[105] Princely mismanagement led, moreover, to the financial domination of the German people by Jews.^[106] A few, like Franz von Sickingen, stood out by virtue of having struggled for the idea of a unified Reich, but for the most part the Nazi historians condemned the last centuries of localized rule and with it the whole idea of federalism.^[107]

Kleinstaaterei also indirectly illuminated the second of von Raumer's

[101] Correspondence between Kölsch, Sprater of the Historisches Museum, and the BavMinUK and BavMinAus (fall of 1935), BHStAM, MA 106018.

[102] Albert Zink, Die Pfalz am Rhein: Heimatkunde des Gaues Westmark (Saarbrücken, 1943), p. 82. See also the issue of Völkische Wissenschaft (1937) devoted to Trifels, with Hermann Schreibmüller, "Der Trifels als Reichsburg"; Carl Pöhlmann, "Der Trifels als Territorialburg"; Johannes Postius, "Die Burg als politische Erscheinung"; and others.

[103] Ludwig Siebert, quoted in Völkische Wissenschaft no. 10 (1937).

[104] See, e.g., the depiction of Pfälzer sufferings in the eighteenth century in Maenner, "Auswanderung aus dem pfälzischen Raum," pp. 129, 153.

[105] Raumer, Politischer Sinn der Landesgeschichte , p. 22.

[106] The argument of Kurt Baumann, "Aaron Elias Seeligmanns Aufstieg: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Judenemanzipation in der Kurpfalz," Unsere Heimat 1 (1935–36): 360–64.

[107] On von Sickingen, see Albert Becker, Hutten-Sickingen im Zeitenwandel: Ein Beitrag zur Pfälzer Geistesgeschichte , Beiträge zur Heimatkunde der Pfalz, 16 (Heidelberg, 1936).

themes: the Pfalz as Germany's borderland in struggle with the west. The fact of German disunity linked together two essences that seemed at least discordant, if not actually contradictory—the depiction of the Pfalz as the heart of the German Reich on the one hand, and its long suffering as a border region on the other. The squabbles of princes and the ambitions of the French had destroyed the Reichsidee and condemned the lands on the Rhine to centuries of "bitter suffering and dreadful need."^[108] The Reich, in other words, was a past that had been lost, then recovered; the borderland was a past that lived on, in Emrich's terms, as both "experience and assignment."^[109] For Kurt von Raumer, the history of the Pfalz helped to illuminate the "struggle between peoples" on the Rhine, which since the "breakthrough of National Socialism" had become a "struggle of worldviews."^[110] On a more mundane level, towns commemorated the many times they had been attacked, burned, or looted by the French; hiking clubs lamented the destruction of the Pfälzer forest; entire organizations and institutes—like the Westdeutsche Grenzlandsmannschaft (West German Borderland Association)—devoted themselves exclusively to the representation of a besieged existence.^[111]

The most recent chapter in this sorry tale of suffering had of course been the French occupation, along with the doings of those latter-day petty princes and mercenaries, the separatists. In the organic and predestined whole that was history, the separatists played the crucial role of ushering the Nazis onto the stage as the saviors, once and for all, of the western Reich. The Nazis' unusual insistence on the teaching of contemporary history in the schools stemmed from their recognition that here was an opportunity too good to be passed up—an immediate yet historically resonant demonstration of their absolute right to power. The obsessive commemorations of the killings at Speyer and Pirmasens also partook of that propaganda technique attributed to Goebbels as the Big Lie; recited often enough and with sufficient fervor, the heroic role of the Nazis in saving the Pfalz from Frenchness and particularism came to seem credible, even if not in fact true.^[112]

Finally, the past revealed for the Nazis what the Bavarians had been

[108] A. Zink, Die Pfalz: Heimatkunde des Gaues Westmark , p. 35.

[109] Emrich, "Grenze als Erlebnis und Aufgabe," Westmark , no. 1 (1933); see also article by Raumer in the same issue. The border fate also provided the themes for the Jäger aus Kurpfalz in 1935 and 1937, and for Unsere Heimat in August 1936.

[110] Kurt von Raumer, Der Rhein im deutschen Schicksal. Reden und Aufsätze zur Westfrage (Berlin, 1936).

[111] For accounts of town festivals, see PB (1934): 86–87 and (1939): 16; on the various Grenzlandsmannschaften, see, e.g., PB (1933): 62–63, 71, 77–81, 86; Unsere Heimat (12 July 36); and Völkische Wissenschaft (1936–37): 147–50.

[112] A. Zink, Die Pfalz: Heimatkunde des Gaues Westmark , pp. 36, 113–15; accounts of commemorations in PB (1933): 143, (1934): 2, (1935): 6–7, (1938): 6–8, (1939): 88–89, 98–99, (1940–41): 29–30, 89. The most ambitious intellectual account of the separatists as the culmina-

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trying to obscure for more than a hundred years—that the Pfalz was just an invention, and one that had long outlived its usefulness. "In these times, when the internal border-stakes of Germany have all fallen and a decisive new territorial order has been prepared," wrote Kurt von Raumer about his book of biographies, Deutscher Westen —Deutsches Reich , "it was impossible to take as the basis of a significant study the accidental borders of 1816 from which the Rheinpfalz derived, more as an administrative unit than as an organic unity."^[113] The Westmark, not the Pfalz, von Raumer argued, was just such an organic unity; "the chief task" of his book would be "to demonstrate to the people of the Südwestmark how clearly their past pointed to their common fate to act as guardians of the border, to do service for Volk and Reich."^[114] Such assertions became ever more insistent with each new political event. By 1943 Albert Zink claimed that the seizure of Lorraine had "at last made possible the union of the two sides of the eternal east-west axis"—whatever that was.^[115]

But what all the talk of history and destiny failed in the end to obscure was that the Nazi regime was bound by none of it. The Nazis demonstrated from the start an essential disregard for history, except as a reflection of their own ambitions and desires. The "community of fate" that supposedly bound together the land and the people of Bürckel's fiefdom in the west existed only as an expression of their common vulnerability to what the future would bring. And what the future brought was war.

Few Pfälzers failed to read the message behind the historical posing and the racial boasting of the Nazi regime. The renovation of Trifels in 1937 was seen by many simply as part of the ongoing war preparations; already going up less than ten kilometers from Trifels, after all, was a line of border fortifications known as the Westwall.^[116] This perception of the actual purpose of Trifels accounted for the destruction one night of the neatly landscaped grounds around the castle—one of the minor acts of resistance so character-

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[*] tion of a "thousand-year struggle" was a dissertation by Robert Oberhauser (1932), republished in 1934 with a foreword by Bürckel as Kampf der Westmark. Frankreich, Separatismus und Abwehrbewegung 1918–1922 (Neustadt, 1934). Compare the accounts in the Sopade Berichten of the Saar campaign in 1935, when old SPDers reported their disgust that the role of the Social Democrats and free unions in fighting separatism had been completely suppressed, allowing the Nazis to take all the credit (Sopade [1935], 2:11, 13, 16).

[113] Raumer and Baumann, Deutscher Westen—Deutsches Reich 1: iv–v.

[114] Ibid., p. v.

[115] A. Zink, Die Pfalz: Heimatkunde des Gaues Westmark , p. 11; see also Franz Steinbach, "Das Land zwischen Saar und Rhein als Kernstellung der deutschen Westgrenze" and "Die Einheit der Oberrheinlande," Völkische Wissenschaft , no. 11 (1934–35).

[116] The new tower the Nazis built onto the medieval ruins looked to the astute observer like an observation post; Sopade (1937), 4:1374.

istic of the Nazi period.^[117] The Pfälzers' "borderland-consciousness," well developed, so it seemed, long before the Nazis coined the term, did not extend to a willingness to sacrifice themselves that the German race might survive. Instead it made them sensitive to signs of preparation for war and susceptible to war panics. Already in 1934 rumors of impending war were widespread in the region, as quasi-military exercises and increasingly stringent economic controls began to remind the local population of a not-sobygone past.^[118] The rumors reached a climax right before the Saar vote, in the form of fears of an imminent French invasion. Throughout the 1930s Nazi propaganda itself contributed to the growing Kriegspsychose by deliberately exaggerating the hostility and strength of other powers in order to justify German rearmament. Those who took Nazi propaganda literally, especially those in vulnerable border areas, beame first fearful, then fatalistic; those who took it all with a grain of salt still dreaded the seemingly inevitable conflict.^[119]

When Hitler managed to pull off first the Saar Anschluß , then in 1936 the remilitarization of the Rhineland, without provoking a French response, such fears abated, though they were not replaced by uncritical acclamation.^[120] From the perspective of the Rhenish population such "victories" had been accomplished at the cost of an unfree labor market, ever-broader controls over movement around the Pfalz, and shortages in food and raw materials for industry.^[121] The usual grumblings about the privileges of Nazi Bonzen (bigwigs) and the high prices of goods were now met with arrests and even executions; constant troop movements and maneuvers put local people into an uproar; and by 1936 the public works projects of which Bürckel was so boastful consisted entirely of war-related construction: three new bridges over the Rhine, barracks, airstrips, new railroad lines, the celebrated Autobahn , and, most dramatically, the Westwall.^[122] True, unemployment had practically

[117] Ibid., p. 609.

[118] Farmers were reportedly talking of seven-year cycles, first drought, as in 1911, then "soldier games," as in 1912, and then, "well, who knows what will happen next?" (ibid. [1934], 1:59, 114, 327).

[119] Ibid., (1937), 4:1090. In March 1936, shortly after the remilitarization of the Rhineland, there were even some reports of rushes on banks and savings and loan associations; see ibid. (1936), 3:304.

[120] Indeed, one report claimed there were "no signs of celebration" at the remilitarization, only "an intensification of the already existing fear of war and of the sacrifices it would require" (Sopade [1936], 3:300, 304). On acclamation for Hitler's foreign policy accomplishments, see Marlis G. Steinert, Hilter's War and the Germans: Public Mood and Attitude During the Second World War , trans. Thomas E. J. DeWitt (Athens, Ohio, 1977), p. 38.

[121] Rothenberger, "Aus der Nationalsozialistischen Zeit," pp. 365–68.

[122] Kershaw includes the grumbling phenomenon in his useful term popular dissent ; the Nazis called it "popular mood," and it worried them (Steinert, Hitler's War , pp. 5–14). On the rising terror against the population, see Sopade (1937), 4:1086–87, 1374; (1938), 5:682.

disappeared, but in its place had come the institution of forced labor, often in mobile units completely cut off from family and home by the need for military security. The Westwall involved, moreover, a tremendous disruption of the patterns of everyday movement in the border area. In the twenty kilometers between Pirmasens and Zweibrücken, for instance, the labor and army units built nine hundred bunkers, sometimes between houses in villages; by the completion of the project, more than six thousand bunkers dotted the Pfalz.^[123] Around them were barbed wire and zones of restricted access to civilians, including farmers. The mobile construction units had also to be housed and fed, the burden of which was all borne by the local population.

The coming of war, so long anticipated and so little celebrated, might have relieved the tension of waiting, but certainly it brought no other advantage. The fate of a borderland, as the Nazis had so often pointed out, was to experience war from its beginning to its end. On 1 September 1939, Hitler announced the invasion of Poland in response to the alleged Polish attack on a German radio station in Gleiwitz; two days and hundreds of miles from Poland, the entire population of a designated "Red Zone," an area about twenty kilometers deep in the southern Pfalz along the French border, was forcibly evacuated to rural areas east of the Rhine.^[124] When these Pfälzers finally returned in July 1940, after a year of sporadic, sometimes intense fighting in the region, they found wrecked houses, fields of rotting crops, and empty yards where factories had been dimantled and moved farther into Germany. In the midst of his Aktion Bürckel—by which all the Pfälzer Jews were transported first to France, then to the death camps in Poland—Bürckel offered the returning Pfälzers yet another of his projects, this one called the "Village Renewal Action." He also forced many to relocate into newly conquered Lorraine, where he meant for them to replace the indigenous population of racially inferior "Celts." Certainly, the spectacular German victories had not brought back to the region that fleeting prosperity of 1935, nor had they secured it from war's destruction. The first enemy bombing raids hit the Pfalz, in particular its industrial areas along the Rhine, in the fall of 1940, intensifying gradually until their high point in the fall of 1944, when not just Ludwigshafen and Frankenthal but every other sizable town of the region went up in flames. In March and April 1945, heralded by several days of carpet bombings, American troops crossed over the French border into the Pfalz and established a second rule of occupation, fifteen years almost to the day since the last one had ended.

The Red Zone, the forced resettlement of Pfälzers, and the war itself each in its own way symbolized the ultimate perversion of the idea of Heimat,

[123] Rothenberger, "Aus der Nationalsozialistischen Zeit," pp. 366–68.

[124] Johannes Nosbüsch and Karl-Heinz Rothenberger, "Die Pfalz im Zweiten Weltkrieg," in Pfälzische Landeskunde , vol. 3 (Landau/Pfalz), pp. 386–87.

even while each was a logical extension of the policies and ideology of the Nazi years. Each required of Germans a nationalism that was literally uprooted from the local and familiar world, a nationalism to which all bonds of locality had necessarily to be sacrificed. Together they exposed the extent to which Nazism had broken with the German past and the German people, in the matter not only of hometown sentimentality but also of national traditions of far graver import. To be sure, past, people, nation, and homeland were socially constructed and socially maintained abstractions, by which the Nazis, no different from any other regime or collectivity, had understood themselves and justified their actions. Nazism, moreover, was of Germany, undeniably and tragically. And not just any past, but the German past, not any homeland, but the German Heimat, not any people, but the German Volk, had been its starting point and, one must presume, inspiration. Nevertheless, somewhere along the way to total war those symbolic representations of society had ceased to have any point of reference in the actions of the regime; in the end, the only "idea" with any force left to it was that of anti-Semitism, with its corresponding imperative to destroy the Jewish people. Heimat, Volk, and Nation had long since become just empty words.

Yet Heimat may finally have had the last word, for in the midst of the massive destruction that the war brought, the lines of obedience and submission to a central will inevitably broke down, leaving people in the rubble not of their nation, but of their locality. The full significance of that Nazi neologism Heimatfront revealed itself in the localization of experience—and survival—in the last year of the war.^[125] Loyalties, too, underwent a kind of redirection under those circumstances, shrinking down to the visible world of one's immediate surroundings and companions. Oddly, the clearest representative of that process was Gauleiter Bürckel himself. With a long history of conflict with such figures of centralized authority as Bormann, Speer, and various SS commanders already behind him, Bürckel became almost rebellious during the last years of the war. He refused to send Pfälzer farmers to colonize Russia, concocting instead the Lorraine scheme; he discouraged Pfälzers from joining the SS because it "only did dishonorable things"; he tried to prevent the building of the Westwall, a "pointless work of fortification" that would almost certainly turn his region into a theater of war. Finally, in September 1944 two SS officers, under orders from Bormann, came to his office and purportedly offered him a pistol; by the next day, according to official reports, he was dead of pneumonia.^[126] A fanatical racist and anti-

[125] On the Nazi etymology of Heimatfront , see Das Große Lexikon des Dritten Reiches , ed. Christian Zentner and Fridemann Bedürftig (Munich, 1985), p. 244.

[126] On Bürckel, see Hüttenberger, Die Gauleiter , pp. 179–80, 184–86, 195, 202, 210–11; Rothenberger, "Aus der Nationalsozialistischen Zeit, p. 363; Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs , trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York, 1970), pp. 313, 402n .

Catholic, a brutal opponent of dissent in any form, a swindler, a liar, a braggart, and a blindly obedient follower of Hitler himself, Bürckel was by no reasonable standard of morality a good man. Yet he is remembered as a "Pfälzer patriot," and for all his talk of the Westmark, he would not have denied the title. As an epitaph for the Nazi regime it could hardly be less adequate, but as a tribute to the resilience of the hometownsman it says all.