Two
Taming the Revolution

Although the Rhenish Pfalz began to acquire its "consciousness of community" or Gemeinschaftsbewußtsein , as one local scholar described it, only in the first decades of the nineteenth century, already by the end of the century Pfälzer consciousness had become a condition of life as "natural" as the landscape itself.^[1] On the face of it, this late but thoroughgoing realization of local character should come as no surprise. Before the nineteenth century, the region consisted of forty-four different political units, most of them mere fragments of states centered elsewhere. There was, in other words, no community of which one could be conscious. Then in the two decades following 1815 the region became a single territory, acquiring a form and locus of political rule; its own religious administration, Protestant and Catholic; economic rights and obligations; and, not least important, a name. Also by the 1830s the region had an established middle class, several newspapers, a modest but thriving associational life, and many ties, educational, economic, and political, to other parts of Germany. All these factors made possible the rapid spread of both local and national feeling; by midcentury in the Pfalz one can find evidence of both. It would seem, then, to have been an easy step, or at most several easy steps, from the birth of the political unit to the establishment of the felt community—in the case of the Pfalz, from the setting of its

[1] Rudolf Schreiber, "Grundlagen der Entstehung eines Gemeinschaftsbewußtseins der Pfälzer im 19. Jahrhundert," in Die Raumbeziehungen der Pfalz in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Niederschrift über die Verhandlungen der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für westdeutsche Landes- und Volksforschung in Kaiserslautern 6–9. X. 1954 (Bonn, 1954), p. 35.

borders by Bavaria in 1816 to the recognition of its communal reality by its inhabitants over the course of the next half-century.

But the "consciousness of community" in the Pfalz was a far more contested phenomenon than that simple sequence of events suggests. A distinctive Pfälzer identity evolved not linearly, from infancy to maturity, but dialectically, from radicalism and volatility to a conciliatory stability in the Heimat associations of the 1880s. Its final form represented a delicate balance among the Pfalz's Rhenish heritage, its Bavarian governance, and its overwhelmingly German orientation. The traditions, the celebrations, the literature, folklore, and history writing that together gave substance to Pfälzer identity can each be traced to some conjuncture in the nineteenth century when they were first revived, discovered, invented, or promoted. Each helped to temper Pfälzer radicalism. Each helped to tame the revolutionary influence, first of French egalitarianism, then of Rhenish democratic liberalism, and finally of nationalism itself.

Pfälzer identity, as it took shape in the nineteenth century, did not wholly lack some genuine infusion from a prerevolutionary past. The existence of an "old Pfalz" mentality cannot be decisively proven because of the difficulty of distinguishing between the influence of the past itself and that of local historians, eagerly searching for a lost feudality. Nevertheless, it seems likely that at least two elements of the old regime contributed to the nature of "Pfälzerness," even after the thorough transformation of local society under French rule.^[2] The first was the religious heritage of the region; the second, closely related, its history of emigration. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, aggressively Calvinist princes had made the region a refuge for religious exiles and later a battleground for religious conflict.^[3] The influence of their Protestantism was still felt in the nineteenth century, when Pfälzer Protestants rejected the state Lutheranism (as well as, of course, the Catholicism) of Bavaria. Also significant was the effect of the massive emigrations from the Pfalz, which began by the early eighteenth century, at least partly in response to the devastation wrought by a century of religious wars, and continued to the end of the nineteenth century. The people from the area informally called the "Pfalz" were so numerous among the travelers both at points of departure and arrival that Pfälzer became a generic term for Ger-

[2] Schreiber would claim more: he sees a generalized consciousness both of being "subjects of the Kurpfalz" and of constituting "a community of distress," a Notgemeinschaft ; both these forms of Gemeinschaftsbewußtsein extended beyond the nineteenth-century borders of the Pfalz to other regions previously under Kurpfalz rule (ibid., p. 36).

[3] Hermann Schreibmüller, "Der Begriff Pfalz im Wandel der Jahrhunderte," Mannheimer Generalanzeiger , 13 November 1920; more recently, Claus-Peter Clasen, The Palatinate in European History, 1559–1660 (Oxford, 1963), on the role of the Calvinist princes in the religious strife in Central Europe.

man emigrants, even before the "Pfalz" in its modern sense existed.^[4] Emigration shaped Pfälzer identity in ironic ways: not only were some of the most self-conscious regionalists those struggling to preserve local customs and ties in strange lands, but the phenomenon of emigration also heightened awareness of local roots for those who stayed behind. By the late nineteenth century, almost every family could claim relatives in foreign lands. The extent of Pfälzer emigration fed local pride also, for it was said to be evidence of Pfälzer initiative and independence.

The ironies of a local identity that derives from a shared experience of disintegration and distress (the Notgemeinschaft , to use the German term) are compounded when one considers the overwhelming importance of a foreign power—the French—in shaping this particular version of Germanness. For the experience of French rule was undoubtedly the opening act in the prolonged drama of the Pfalz's identity crisis. Its transformative effects were felt only gradually: in the first year or so after the arrival in 1792 of the French revolutionary armies, local people probably saw their presence only as one more chapter in a depressingly familiar story of invasion and exploitation. After the military crisis of 1793, the French used the Rhineland as a source of much-needed income for the impoverished government in Paris. The looting and pillaging of an irregularly supplied army merely added to the burden of government levies and taxes on local inhabitants.^[5] The first glimmerings of a new order came only in 1797, when the Paris government created four new departments in the Rhineland. One of them, the Département Mont-Tonnerre, embraced most of the later Pfalz and areas to its north around Mainz. Within its borders, legal reforms established an independent judiciary, as well as a "clear and comprehensible set of rights" for all citizens. New civil and criminal law codes abolished the restrictive powers of guilds, the legal existence of the aristocracy, and the old town constitutions. The Catholic church lost both its privileges and its property; church and state

[4] At first paradoxical, that fact can probably be explained by the authorities' need for a short designation for place of origin: Pfalz is easier to write than the dozens of names and titles that would have been required to specify the exact political identity of a village or town. Daniel Häberle noted in his 1909 book on the subject of Pfälzer emigration that arrival records in Philadelphia show anomalous entries, such as "Pfälzer from Holstein," that indicate the confusion between Pfälzer and German (Auswanderung und Koloniegründung der Pfälzer im 18. Jahrhundert [Kaiserslautern, 1909], pp. v–vi). See also Fritz Trautz, Die Pfalz am Rhein in der deutschen Geschichte (Neustadt, 1959), p. 25; Karl Scherer, ed., Pfälzer-Palatines. Beiträge zur pfälzischen Ein- und Auswanderung (Kaiserslautern, 1981); Albert Pfeiffer, "Die Pfalz," MSS, 8 June 1947, Pfälzisches Landesarchiv Speyer (hereafter cited as PLAS) C 1382; Karl Kollnig, Wandlungen im Bevölkerungsbild des pfälzischen Oberrheingebietes (Heidelberg, 1952).

[5] T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983), esp. chap. 7; Max Braubach, "Vom Westfälischen Frieden bis zum Wiener Kongress (1648–1815)," in Rheinische Geschichte , ed. Franz Petri and Georg Droege, vol. 2 (Düsseldorf, 1976), p. 334; see also the polemical but carefully researched account by Max Springer, Die Franzosenherrschaft in der Pfalz 1792–1814 (Stuttgart, 1926).

were separated.^[6] In 1804, in an act that had enduring consequences for the structure of property ownership in the region, the French sold the former aristocratic and ecclesiastical lands to the highest bidder. Unlike in Baden, where the aristocracy survived and took over the bulk of church lands, the bourgeoisie bought most of this land in the Pfalz. The number of property holders doubled in some communities. Taken together, the effect of the sales and of partible inheritance (another French legacy) turned the Pfalz into a region of small landholders, with freehold as the absolute rule.^[7]

By 1814, the French had pushed the Pfalz not so much toward an independent identity as toward a "community of consciousness" with the Rhineland as a whole. The "Rhenish institutions," as they came to be called, represented the height of progress, the most radical political transformation of the time.^[8] Other German states, however much reformed, had achieved only partial emancipation from the feudal past.^[9] Less demonstrable but more important to travel writers and other contemporary observers were the consequences of French rule on the personality of the people. Whether they liked it or hated it, most observers found a spirit of liveliness (insolence), of matter-of-factness (heartless materialism), of equality (except as regards to money), and of flexibility (spiritual shallowness) to be characteristic of Pfälzers and Rhinelanders as a whole. But that such distinctiveness should receive the additional encouragement of political sovereignty was the wish only of Jacobins and other troublemakers. The victorious powers of 1815 adamantly opposed the formation of a single Rhenish state. The left-Rhenish lands were instead divided among a number of sovereign powers, with the bulk of the former Département Mont-Tonnerre going to the Bavarian state in 1816.

French reforms had created the possibility of Pfälzer distinctiveness; Bavarian political hegemony made it a reality. Within the Bavarian state, the Pfalz was a complete anomaly. The two regions had little, if anything, in

[6] Elisabeth Fehrenbach, "Die Einführung des französischen Rechts in der Pfalz und in Baden," in Strukturwandel im pfälzischen Raum von Ancien Régime bis zum Vormärz , ed. Friedrich Ludwig Wagner (Speyer, 1982); Wolfgang Hans Stein, Untertan-Citoyen-Staatsbürger. Die Auswirkungen der Französischen Revolution auf den rheinisch-pfälzischen Raum (Koblenz, 1981), p. 107; Braubach, "Vom Westfälischen Frieden," p. 335; Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany , p. 138.

[7] Wolfgang Hans Stein, "Französische Zeit," in Geschichte des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz , ed. Franz-Josef Heyen (Freiburg, 1981), p. 101; Erich Hehr, "Karte der Strukturverschiebungen im Grundbesitz der Gemeinde Klingenmünster 1750–1842," in Wagner, Strukturwandel im pfälzischen Raum , pp. 119–20; Max Spindler, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte , vol. 4, part 2 (Munich, 1975), p. 773.

[8] Karl-Georg Faber, "Die rheinischen Institutionen," in Hambacher Gespräche 1962 (Wiesbaden, 1964), pp. 20–40.

[9] Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte , pp. 74–78.

common in matters of religion, custom, dialect, or even geography. Bavaria's social and economic structure remained essentially unaltered throughout the years when Pfälzer society was revolutionized. State-sponsored reform had somewhat changed political-constitutional arrangements in Bavaria, though in this case also the Pfalz had gone much further.^[10] Adding to the social, political, and sheer geographical distance between the two regions was Bavaria's resentment at the settlement by which it had acquired the Pfalz. The Bavarian dynasty of the Wittelsbachs, indulging dreams of becoming the third great power in Central Europe, equal to Prussia and Austria, had wanted much more; disappointed, various Wittelsbachs schemed throughout the century to trade the Pfalz for other, more prestigious territory elsewhere. Soberer officials feared the region's disruptive potential. Only a few ardent reformers, admirers of Rhenish institutions and Rhenish prosperity under the French, actively welcomed the new territory.^[11]

These reformers, by lobbying for the survival of the Rhenish institutions, assured the Pfalz of its future identity. As a result of their influence, the Bavarian government chose to annex the region not as a regular district but as a client state, an arrangement that left the area's civil structure intact.^[12] When the leading reformer, Montgelas, fell from power in 1817, the region lost some of its special privileges. It became the "Rhenish district," subject to regular central administration. Yet even in the conservative reaction against the Montgelas era, its Rhenish institutions—and presumably the Rhenish personality—survived.^[13] The Bavarian state, however, made no further moves toward reform, so the new Rhine district remained isolated in its civil constitution from the state that in every other way ruled over it.

For the new "Rhenish Bavarians," the Bavarian state represented a standing insult to their independent-mindedness, as well as a potentially

[10] Ibid., p. 79; Walter Demel, Der Bayerische Staatsabsolutismus 1806/08–1817. Staats- und gesellschaftspolitische Motivationen und Hintergründe der Reformära; in der ersten Phase des Königreichs Bayerns (Munich, 1983).

[11] Kurt Baumann, "Bayern und die oberrheinischen Territorialfragen vom Wiener Kongress bis zum Ausgang des Ersten Weltkrieges," in Die Raumbeziehungen der Pfalz , pp. 32–35; Kurt Baumann, "Kronprinz Ludwig von Bayern, und die Oberrheinlande 1809–1819," in Abhandlungen zur saarpfälzischen Landes- und Volksforschung , vol. 1 (1937), p. 157; Kurt Baumann, "Probleme der pfälzischen Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert," Mitteilungen des Historischen Vereins der Pfalz 51 (1953): 242–43; Albert Becker, Die Wiedererstehung der Pfalz. Zur Erinnerung an die Begründung der bayerischen Herrschaft auf dem linken Rheinufer . . ., Beiträge zur Heimatkunde der Pfalz, 5 (Kaiserslautern, 1916), pp. 65–66.

[12] Heiner Haan, ed., Hauptstaat–Nebenstaat. Briefe und Akten zum Anschluß der Pfalz an Bayern, 1815/1817 (Koblenz, 1977), pp. 30–33.

[13] Heiner Haan, "Die Stellung der Pfalz in der bayerischen Verfassung von 1818," in Land und Reich, Stamm und Nation. Probleme und Perspektiven bayerischer Geschichte , ed. Andreas Kraus, vol. 2 (Munich, 1984), p. 458. See also Max Spindler, "Die Pfalz in ihrem Verhältnis zum bayerischen Staat in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Festgabe für seine königliche Hoheit Kronprinz Rupprecht von Bayern (Munich, 1953).

dangerous threat to their positions in society. Any effort by Bavaria to reinstate even a few of the ground rights and estate privileges of the old regime would have entailed loss of property and prestige for both prominent and ordinary citizen alike.^[14] And even though that threat was not realized, the relationship remained fraught with discomforts and injustices. Pfälzer Protestants, who comprised over half of the region's inhabitants, never felt comfortable within the Catholic state of Bavaria, despite having the independence of administering their own regional church.^[15] Exacerbating the Pfälzers' sense that they lacked any influence in the Bavarian state was the actual underrepresentation of the district as a whole in both the upper and lower houses of the Bavarian Landtag. Bavaria still clung to the old practice of representation by Stand or estate, of which the Pfalz no longer had any, neither aristocracy nor clergy nor university professors. Of the General Estate the Pfalz had plenty, but this body's theoretical universality was little acknowledged in Bavarian parliamentary practice.^[16]

Making the whole situation unbearable, finally, was the consistent insensitivity of the Bavarian state to the economic interests of its Rhine district. The year 1816 was a "hunger year," a period of crop failures and food shortages.^[17] The loss of the French market and sudden commercial isolation of the region from its immediate trading partners to the north and east drove many local industries into bankruptcy.^[18] Unwilling to put aside their jealousy of Baden for the sake of Pfälzer commerce, the Bavarians refused to negotiate toll reductions.^[19] Even the Zollverein (Customs Union) of 1834 brought no relief to the Pfalz. Its economy entered into a state of backwardness relative to the rest of the Rhineland. People clung to tiny plots of land because commercial ventures did not pay, or else, as in the eighteenth century, they emigrated.^[20] According to one contemporary observer, Bavaria had simply "left the Pfalz to choke in its own fat."^[21]

[14] Winfried Dotzauer, "Kontinuität und Wandel in den Führungsschichten des pfälzischen Raumes," in Wagner, Strukturwandel im pfälzischen Raum .

[15] The exact figures in 1825 were 56.9 percent Protestant, 29.8 percent Catholic, and 3.4 percent Mennonite, Anabaptist, and Jew; see Willi Alter, "Die Bevölkerung der Pfalz," in Pfalzatlas , ed. Willi Alter (Speyer, 1963–81), 1:180, 190. The scattered geographical distribution of the confessions is shown in Wolfgang Eger, "Die Konfessionsverteilung im Jahre 1825," in ibid., pp. 245–51.

[16] Haan, Hauptstaat–Nebenstaat , p. 378.

[17] Theodor Zink and Ludwig Mang, Das Wirtschaftsleben der Pfalz in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Munich, 1913), p. 107.

[18] Hermann Schreibmüller, Bayern und Pfalz (Kaiserslautern, 1916), pp. 23–24.

[19] Baumann, "Probleme," pp. 248–49.

[20] See especially Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); and Albert Zink, "Die pfälzische Auswanderung des 19. Jahrhunderte im Lichte des pfälzischen Wirtschaftslebens," Pfälzer Heimat (hereafter cited as PH ) 5 (1954): 56–60.

[21] Albert Becker, Wiedererstehung der Pfalz , p. 34.

Pfälzer identity, a shared consciousness of singleness and distinctiveness among the inhabitants of the Rhenish district, began rapidly to take shape under the pressure of such economic grievances against the Bavarian state. In the Bavarian Landtag, Pfälzer deputies formed a markedly left-wing block.^[22] The logic of their opposition to Bavarian policies led them, moreover, to an increasing enthusiasm for the idea of German nationhood. An economically unified nation, like that envisioned by Friedrich List, offered the obvious solution to the Pfalz's trade problems. Nor were Pfälzer leaders ignorant of what it was like to belong to a great nation. The era of Napoleonic rule, accompanied by war and taxes though it had been, had brought great prosperity to the left-Rhenish lands. It had also left its traces in popular memory: organizations of Napoleon's Rhenish veterans, the "Napoleon stones" that stood in many Rhenish cemeteries, folk legends and songs, all attested to a lingering affection for those days of glory.^[23] The continual need to defend their Rhenish-French institutions united the Pfälzers in the Bavarian parliament as much as did their opposition to Bavarian economic policy. Faced with trade barriers and a state officialdom far more imposing than those of the old regime, Pfälzer leaders and ordinary citizens alike looked back to the Napoleonic Empire for inspiration and turned toward the German nation for redress.

Sympathy for French liberalism did not, in other words, preclude the presence of German nationalism as an equally essential part of the Pfalz's growing "consciousness of community."^[24] Indeed, their German nationalism was if anything the more strident for their laboring under the chronic suspicion of Francophilia. But it was also undeniably radical, whether thanks to the French or not. Rhinelanders as a whole had not been much affected by the currents of patriotic awakening in the era of Prussian reform; consequently their national enthusiasm tended to be less oriented toward the state.^[25] The people, understood romantically and intuitively, would accomplish national unification for themselves.^[26] The state, at least in its Bavarian form, was seen not as the vessel but as the enemy of unification—oppressive, particularistic, and backward. Bavaria was, as Veit Valentin described it, the "classic state" of antinational reaction, "too small to be itself the flagship of

[22] Schreibmüller, Bayern und Pfalz , p. 24.

[23] Walther Klein, Der Napoleonkult in der Pfalz (Munich, 1934); Albert Becker, Wiedererstehung der Pfalz , p. 35; "Westpfälzer Napoleons-Veteranen," Pfälzisches Museum–Pfälzische Heimatkunde (hereafter cited as PM–PH ) (1928): 48.

[24] Baumann, "Probleme," pp. 246–47.

[25] Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte , pp. 29–30.

[26] Kurt Baumann, "Ludwig Roediger aus Neunkirchen am Potzberg, ein Vorkämpfer der Burschenschaft, 1798–1866," PH 2 (1951): 115. Baumann sees the change in the tone of regional grievance as a generational phenomenon. Young men like Roediger had absorbed the romantic nationalism of Fichte and Jahn at the universities and applied them to the problems of their "Heimat."

national unity" but "large enough to pose a serious obstacle" to its supporters.^[27] And, as Thomas Nipperdey has suggested, if people could no longer be Rhinelanders, then they wanted to be Germans, not Prussians or Bavarians.^[28]

The Pfälzers made their first open bid for such status in 1832. The Hambach Festival, the first and possibly the only large political demonstration of the liberal German bourgeoisie, expressed currents of economic grievance and popular radicalism in the region. It brought together a miscellaneous collection of over twenty thousand students, liberal activists, and local farmers and townspeople for two days of speeches in an old castle ruin outside the wine center of Neustadt-an-der-Haardt.^[29] Amid the calls for German unity, the denunciations of French aggression, and the proclamations of support for Polish nationalists there could also be heard a specifically Pfälzer demand for an autonomous government, separate from that of Bavaria. The significance of Hambach for early-nineteenth-century German liberalism surely transcended its local importance.^[30] Nevertheless, for the Pfalz the mass gathering demonstrated the extent to which anti-Bavarianism, indeed Pfälzer identity altogether, had crystallized into German nationalism. In 1832 regional consciousness had emerged as political in form, radical in style, and national in object.

Between the Hambach Festival in 1832 and the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, these tendencies became only more marked.^[31] All eleven of the Pfälzer representatives to the Frankfurt Parliament belonged to the left; all voted for a German constitution and against the election of the king of Prussia as emperor. Bavaria of course refused to recognize the constitution and, together with Prussia, put down the revolutionary uprisings of the following year. But again, as at Hambach, opposition to Bavarian policies and support for German unity were two sides of one coin. The national cause embraced both romantic ideals and pragmatic calculations. If some participated only out of idealism, others only out of economic grievance, the combination was nonetheless powerful, and the nationalist stamp it impressed on regional politics and regional identity nonetheless marked. As Carl Schurz, the

[27] Veit Valentin, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848–1849 , vol. 2 (Berlin, 1931), p. 565.

[28] Nipperdey, "Der deutsche Föderalismus zwischen 1815 und 1866 im Rückblick," in Kraus, Land und Reich, Stamm und Nation , p. 7.

[29] For a fuller account of the Hambacher Fest, see Veit Valentin, Das Hambacher Nationalfest (Berlin, 1932); and the recent facsimile reprint of Wilhelm Herzberg's Das Hambacher Fest (1908; reprint Darmstadt, 1982).

[30] Wolfgang Schieder, "Der rheinpfälzische Liberalismus von 1832 als politische Protest-bewegung," in Vom Staat des Ancien Régimes zum modernen Parteienstaat. Festschrift für Theodor Schieder , ed. Helmut Berding et al. (Munich, 1978), pp. 169–95.

[31] Baumann, "Probleme," p. 258.

German-American progressive, put it, "it is understood by the Pfälzers themselves that if the king of Bavaria does not want to be German, then the Pfalz must cease to be Bavarian.^[32]

Making its inconspicuous debut in the midst of all this political turmoil was the name Pfalz itself. This part of the southern Rhineland had been the "Pfalz" for centuries of popular usage, though the informal application of the term had never completely coincided with the formal political boundaries of, say, the Kurpfalz. When Bavaria acquired the land, it simply followed its own practice and named it after a river: "Rhine District," like "Isar District," was a designation of administrative convenience. But in 1837, in an act resonant of the Biedermeier turning-away from bureaucratic enlightenment, the government chose to rename all the districts after their Stamm , or tribe. The Isar District became Oberbayern (Upper Bavaria); the Rhine District became the Pfalz. In the region itself, the name was adopted "with an alacrity and enthusiasm granted to no other Munich directive: now for the first time it was possible to speak of oneself."^[33] From the point of view of the Pfälzers, then, the name strengthened their distinct political consciousness by giving legitimacy to their fully felt but only half-articulated sense of separateness. As for their German nationalism, the name with all its historical resonance represented a direct claim, unmediated by Bavaria, to participation in the cultural nation.

But the politics of the name included not just how the Pfälzers used it but what the Bavarians had intended by it. For the prestige-hungry Wittelsbachs, the term Pfalz brought to mind visions of Mannheim and Heidelberg, not Pirmasens and Kaiserslautern. The renaming revealed, in a minor way, their persistent desire to acquire more territory on the Upper Rhine, particularly at the expense of Baden, which, to their minds, had usurped the title to the Kurpfälzer inheritance. More generally, the name had an attractively conservative, dynastic ring to it in Bavarian ears. Renaming the Rhine district formed part of a broader effort to defeat Pfälzer radicalism by promoting a rival regional identity. Embedded within a variety of cultural projects, historical, literary, and folkloric, the "Pfalz" referred not to a land of liberal and democratic radicalism, but to a land of picturesque castle ruins and charming folkways. Between the failure of the Frankfurt Parliament and the crowning of a German emperor at Versailles, Pfälzer identity did lose most of its radical flavor. What it did not lose, however, was its nationalism.

The second stage, then, in the emergence of Pfälzer identity fell in the years of political repression and conservative nation-building after 1848. German

[32] Carl Schurz, Vormärz in Deutschland , reprint ed. Herbert Pönicke (Munich, 1948).

[33] R. Schreiber, "Grundlagen," p. 40.

national identity and Pfälzer local identity had never been entirely separate propositions in the Pfalz; after 1848, their interdependence became even clearer as the emphasis in both shifted from protest to integration. Localness, like nationness, became less and less a condition of grievances and unfulfilled desires. Neither of politics nor yet completely above it, the meaning of "Pfälzerness" changed in step with political expectations in the region, while at the same time gaining new extrapolitical content. Both trends worked against Pfälzer radicalism. A political rapprochement between the Pfalz and Bavaria, based on Bavaria's reluctant acquiescence in the Pfalz's now-tame German nationalism, conditioned a broadly cultural transformation of local identity. The Pfalz would never assimilate fully into Bavaria, but neither would it torment the larger state with its insolence and rebellion.

The simplest explanation for the shifting import of Pfälzer identity was the waning of popular radicalism in the region. Bavaria's suppression of associations and the press in the wake of the 1849 rebellions effectively destroyed any independent public life in the Pfalz. The liberal, democratic leaders were all in exile or jail, and no other political faction had as yet coalesced.^[34] Economic misery throughout the midcentury years led this time to political passivity. Overpopulation placed unbearable pressure on food supplies and land, and an agricultural depression that included the all-important wine trade continued well into the 1850s.^[35] In 1846, ten thousand people emigrated from the Pfalz; in 1849, fourteen thousand; in 1852, nineteen thousand; and in 1855, twenty-two thousand.^[36] The overall population of the region sank from 600,000 to 575,000 between 1848 and 1855, and the number of registered poor doubled.^[37] In the 1850s, the Pfalz could claim a quarter of Bavaria's vagrants and beggars and a seventh of its suicides.^[38]

When political and economic life together began to revive in the 1860s, neither much resembled what they had been in the 1830s and 1840s. In the first place, the economy began to industrialize. The chemical, paper, and machine industries established themselves in the 1860s along the Rhine and in the less fertile western parts of the region; railroad building began in the late 1850s. Although their contribution to the region's productivity would

[34] Karl-Georg Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," in Petri and Droege, Rheinische Geschichte 2:412.

[35] Joachim Kermann, "Die Industrialisierung der Pfalz im 19. Jahrhundert," in Pfälzische Landeskunde. Beiträge zu Geographie, Biologie, Volkskunde und Geschichte , ed. Michael Geiger, Günter Preuß, and Karl-Heinz Rothenberger (Landau/Pfalz, 1981), 2:280–85; Zink, "Pfälzische Auswanderung," p. 57.

[36] These are rounded figures; the exact ones may be found in Zink, "Pfälzische Auswanderung," p. 57.

[37] Schreibmüller, Bayern und Pfalz , p. 50.

[38] Ibid., p. 52.

not equal that of agriculture until 1882, the new industries nevertheless heralded the arrival of a new political economy, less dependent on small producers with radical political inclinations.^[39] Those inclinations had in any case been broken in the 1850s. Despite the efforts of democrats like Georg Friedrich Kolb with his People's party, the political activity of the petty bourgeoisie did not revive until the 1880s, and then its radicalism was not of the left.^[40]

What emerged in the 1860s to fill the political void was a new, elitist, and decidedly Prussian variety of liberalism, one having little in common with the großdeutsch and democratic liberalism traditional to the region. The Deidesheimer circle of pro-Prussian liberals was led by the so-called Flaschenbaronen (Bottle Barons), a group of wealthy bourgeois landowners and vintners; it also included high-ranking officials of the state and even a few industrialists.^[41] In 1863 these Pfälzers participated in the founding of the kleindeutsch Bavarian Progressive party in Nuremberg; in 1866 they formed an "Association for the Protection of German Interests on the Left Bank of the Rhine," which incited local fears of another Napoleonic invasion; and in 1867, in the Bavarian Landtag, they called for immediate union with Prussia.^[42] In 1868 Deidesheimer National Liberals won all the Pfälzer seats in the German Zollparlament (Customs Parliament). A year later they won all but one of the district's seats in the Bavarian Landtag.^[43] The Franco-Prussian War, fought on the borders of the Pfalz, only reinforced the popularity of the National Liberals, who then helped Bismarck maneuver Bavaria into ratifying his treaty.^[44] Finally, at the first Reichstag election of 1871, Pfälzer National Liberals won all the local seats, establishing an absolute monopoly on political representation that they held until 1898.

What had happened by 1871 was not just a conservative turn in the Pfalz but a more liberal turn in Bavaria. Bavarian Progressives and Pfälzer National Liberals cooperated closely. Bavaria acquired some of the legal arrangements that had distinguished the Pfalz, and the Pfalz lost a few of its

[39] Kermann, "Industrialisierung," p. 280; Erich Schneider, "Die Anfänge der sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung in der Rheinpfalz, 1864–1899: Ein Beitrag der süddeutschen Parteiengeschichte" (diss., Universität Mainz, 1956), p. 4; Ernst Otto Bräunche, Parteien und Reichstagwahlen in der Rheinpfalz von der Reichsgründung 1871 bis zum Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges 1914 (Speyer, 1982), p. 29.

[40] On Kolb, a lifelong hater of Prussia, see Theodor Schieder, Die kleindeutsche Partei in Bayern in den Kämpfen um die nationale Einheit 1863–1871 (Munich, 1936), pp. 25ff.; and Schneider, p. 16.

[41] Schneider, "Anfänge der sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung," p. 27.

[42] Ibid., p. 15.

[43] For a complete account of that crucial election, see Ludwig Allmann, "Die Wahlbewegung zum Ersten Deutschen Zollparlament in der Rheinpfalz" (diss., Universität Strassburg, 1913).

[44] Baumann, "Probleme," p. 267.

administrative peculiarities.^[45] Anti-Bavarian sentiments in the Pfalz and anti-Pfälzer sentiments in Bavaria became exceptional. Most important, Bavaria at least superficially dropped its resistance to national unification, thus accepting a position that had long defined Pfälzer exceptionalism. Pfälzer politicians could with justification claim the outcome of 1870–71 as confirmation of the old political wisdom that in 1816 "Bavaria had surrendered to the Pfalz."^[46]

But the political pacification of the Pfalz can form only part of an explanation for the marked shift in emphasis in how Pfälzers described themselves or celebrated their Pfälzerness. In the first half of the nineteenth century, both self-description and celebration attested to an essentially political sense of identity: the Pfalz was understood above all as a political entity; hence, to be a Pfälzer implied a political attitude—that of radicalism—more than a cultural, religious, or even plainly geographical sensibility. But as the intensity of the Pfalz's political exceptionalism waned, the importance of those other factors in local identity grew—with the connivance of the Bavarian state and the now-hegemonic National Liberals. Beginning roughly in the 1850s, the region underwent a cultural awakening, which took the form of a new fascination with local history, local folklore, and the landscape. This politically inspired renaissance of Pfälzerness decisively reoriented the region away from France, toward full inclusion in German culture.

The Pfalz's turn toward a cultural identity also brings us in contact with the phenomenon of Heimat for the first time in the region's development. The Pfalz, after all, had no need for such Heimat legislation as eased many a Bavarian town's adjustment to state rule.^[47] All the old legal structures had abruptly ceased to exist at the beginning of the century, and the Pfalz's inhabitants had made a rapid acquaintance with the modern nation in its most dynamic and assertive form. Thus the usefulness of the idea of Heimat did not initially lie in the area of political education, where the Pfalz could for years claim a sophistication unusual for so small a region. The cultivation of the Heimat became instead a way to assert the Germanness of the Pfalz in the realm of culture. Like the strident nationalism of Pfälzer radicals and conservatives, expressions of Heimat love implicitly countered the widespread suspicion that Pfälzers were a little too fond of their French institutions, and hence not quite German. Indeed, throughout its history the Pfalz's cultivation of the Heimat might well have taken as its motto the words of Pfälzer Deputy Schmitt to the Frankfurt National Parliament in 1848: "We are Germans through and through, as much so as any inhabitant of a prov-

[45] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," pp. 414–15.

[46] Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Die Pfälzer. Ein rheinisches Volksbild (1857; rev. ed. Neustadt/Pfalz 1973), p. 235.

[47] See Chapter 1, pp. 8–9; Walker, German Home Towns , p. 254.

ince in the middle of Germany or on the Baltic Sea. We respect France, but we do not wish to be a part of it. We speak German; we have true German feeling."^[48]

Two early works of "Heimat discovery" from the 1830s suggest the subjects and strategies that later writers would also adopt. The first was a guide to the Pfalz's geography prepared by the secondary school teacher Christian Grünewald and published in 1833. His Beschreibung der Rheinbaiern (Description of Rhenish Bavaria) represented in its modest way the worldview of the General Estate, even as it centered on a single province. Drawing on the pioneering geographies of Carl Ritter and Wilhelm Harnisch, Grünewald depicted the region in terms that encouraged both comparison and generalization. Drawing on the pedagogical theory of Pestalozzi, he advocated actual physical contact with the land he descibed. He prepared a student for the big world by a thorough acquaintance with a small one: "He [the student] will not only get to know the conditions of his Heimat, and all that they offer to our contemplation and consciousness, but he will also retain a measuring stick with which to judge properly other places and other phenomena."^[49] Grünewald's method asserted that the locality could be understood and indeed experienced as the beginning of all knowledge, not as its exclusion; that belief informed all later works of Heimatkunde , or Heimat studies.

His work attempted, moreover, to classify the geography of the Pfalz, as though its borders had a geographical, not just a political, rationale. Although it was not Grünewald's own intention, study of the region's geography over the next seventy years would give a scientific solidity to the vaguer assertions of regional distinctiveness. In the words of Grünewald's most important successor in the field of Pfälzer geography, Daniel Häberle, "the being of the Pfälzer is to a certain extent the expression of the nature of the land itself."^[50] And if geography created personality, it followed that without a Pfälzer geography there could be no Pfälzer personality. Hence the study of the land, which began with Christian Grünewald, made possible an infinite elaboration on the theme of the people's distinctiveness. Moreover, if the Pfalz could be said to consist of two, or possibly three, basic geographical divisions, then perhaps the undeniably various nature of local people—a problem for the integrity of the single term Pfälzer —followed such a scheme also. Vorderpfalz and Hinterpfalz (literally, the Pfalz-in-front and the Pfalzbehind), or the Rhine Basin, the Haardt Mountains (at the dividing line be-

[48] Quoted in Baumann, "Probleme," p. 246.

[49] Kurt Reh, "Christian Grünewald: Beschreibung von Rheinbaiern," in Die Pfalz auf der Suche nach sich selbst. Über bedeutsame Pfalzbeschreibungen der letzten 150 Jahre , ed. Carl Heupel (Landau/Pfalz, 1983), p. 41.

[50] Daniel Häberle, "Pfälzer Land und Volk," in Die Pfalz am Rhein. Ein Heimatbuch , ed. Daniel Häberle, Albert Becker, and Theodor Zink (Berlin, 1924), p. 28.

tween "vorder" and "hinter" Pfalz), and, beyond them, the Westrich—these physical divisons formed an image of the Pfalz that appealed to all who sought to describe the region's individuality. One writer might distinguish, albeit tongue-in-cheek, between the "alluvial Pfälzers" of the Rhine plain, the "bedrock Pfälzers" of the Haardt, the "sandstone Pfälzers" of the wooded and mountainous areas, and the "coal Pfäzers" of the Saar corner.^[51] Another would contrast the lively and sunny character of the Rhine Valley dwellers with the dour reticence of the westerners. All were in some sense beneficiaries of the most basic insight of Grünewald: that the Pfalz had its own geography.

But all that was in the future. In his own time, Grünewald was too much of a liberal nationalist and a rationalist to be acceptable to the Bavarian school authorities, and although his teaching was evidently highly regarded and imitated locally, he never received state recognition.^[52] The opposite was true of the romantic pastor Friedrich Blaul, whose deeply conservative depiction of the Pfalz, first published in 1838, was little read or regarded by his Pfälzer contemporaries but fit right into the schemes of Bavarian cultural architects a few decades later. Blaul's Träume und Schäume vom Rhein (which can be inelegantly rendered as "Dreams and Froth of the Rhine"), written when Blaul was twenty-nine, took the form of an old man's account of his travels in the Pfalz, where he found as much to criticize as to admire. Later billed by a Heimat enthusiast of 1867 as "one of the loveliest pieces of tourist literature ever," the book combined already-tired romantic clichés about the landscape with politically loaded longings for the good old days before the French arrived.^[53] The Pfälzers themselves had many traits of personality and political behavior that this observer greatly regretted, in particular their apparently total lack of spirituality. But instead of attributing their unfortunate behavior to political grievance or ideological belief, Blaul trivialized Pfälzers radicalism by attributing it to their Stamm, or tribal tendencies. "Pfälzers tend to be complainers by nature" was the Blaul line of argument, and although the complainers themselves showed no sign of appreciating this analysis in the 1830s or 1840s, others seized on it enthusiastically in the next two decades. Blaul's work was at that time "discovered"; in 1882 it was reprinted to great fanfare in the Heimat periodicals.^[54] Its particular style of sentimentalizing the land and trivializing the people became characteristic of much, though by no means all, of Heimat writing. More important, the book represented a subtle kind of propaganda in its implication that Pfälzers could, if they would just pay more attention to their folk and feudal heritage,

[51] Riehl, Die Pfälzer , p. 30.

[52] Reh, "Christian Grünewald," p. 37.

[53] See the excellent analysis of Blaul's work by Wolfgang Diehl in Heupel, Die Pfalz auf der Suche nach sich selbst , pp. 58–80.

[54] Ibid., pp. 77–79.

be other than they were. Blaul's was a strategy for explaining away their radicalism to the Pfälzers themselves, and whatever the failings of the book itself, it established an important precedent.

The writer who really grasped the political possibilities of an awakened folklorism and a personalized geography, both for the Pfalz and for Germany, was the so-called father of German Volkskunde (folklore studies or, grandly, anthropology), Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Trained originally in theology, Riehl's interests had turned quickly to the study of contemporary German society, which he pursued as a journalist, novelist, and independent scholar, outside the usual structure of academic disciplines. Before he arrived in Bavaria in 1854 to serve King Max II, he had already produced an astonishing 670 articles on music, theater, art, social policy, political theory, agricultural history, folklore, and contemporary politics.^[55] His outstanding accomplishment, however, was the three-volume Naturgeschichte des deutschen Volks (Natural History of the German People), in which he laid out his own scheme for classifying and describing German society and culture.^[56] Even though his thought derived much from others—Dahlmann, the brothers Grimm, Vischer, and Arndt, among others—Riehl's work had a grittiness and unpretentious sharpness of observation that brought him a wide audience. His opposition to cities, to industrial society, to France, all grew out of his objection to uniformity in social life. His favorite metaphor was a rainbow, and in the infinitely various shadings of customs, landscapes, and personalities that characterized traditional life Riehl found the essence and the vitality of Germany.

For all his conservative distaste for modern society, however, Riehl had something of the social planner in him—and this, one suspects, is what Max II of Bavaria found so attractive. Riehl was invited to Munich by Max ostensibly to develop a governmental press bureau, but he seems instead to have taken over a pet project of the king, an "Ethnography of Bavaria," then languishing under a surfeit of material and a severe shortage of coherence.^[57] Under Riehl's direction, the project became a complete "statistical, historical, topographical, and ethnographic description" of the "land and people of Bavaria."^[58] In Riehl's Bavaria , moreover, the contours of folkloric varia-

[55] Dennis McCort, Perspectives on Music in German Fiction: The Music Fiction of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (Frankfurt and Bern, 1974), p. 11.

[56] The finest account of the work in English is still that of George Eliot, whose article "The Natural History of German Life: Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl" (in The Essays of George Eliot , ed. Nathan Sheppard [New York, 1883]) is also the culmination of her work as an essayist.

[57] Victor von Geramb, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Leben und Wirken 1823–1897 (Salzburg, 1954), p. 238; Antonie Hornig, "Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl und König Max II von Bayern" (diss., Universität München, 1938), pp. 17, 47.

[58] From the draft proposals in the royal archives, cited in Hornig, "Riehl und König Max," p. 49.

tion followed the borders of modern Bavarian political districts, a design that reflected something more than convenience. In a memorandum to Max's cabinet in 1856, Riehl explained that "the most important requirement for a reasonable administration of the land. . . is for all authorities to possess knowledge of the land and its people—everything that promotes this knowledge is a victory for the whole state."^[59] Folklore could serve the state because it, more than any other discipline, revealed the German social essence. Riehl suggested that the king establish an "ethnographic cabinet" and expand university lectures on German customs and rural life, in addition to completing the volumes of Bavaria . In Riehl's opinion—which King Max seemed to share—the foundation of the best state lay not in uniformity of law (in contrast to the French example) but in flexibility of administration. Such government would take into account the individual characteristics of the people—or, to use Riehl's more expressive term, the Volkseigentümlichkeit .^[60]

Riehl's involvement with the troublesome character of the Pfälzers emerged from this confluence of ethnography and government. In 1854, shortly after coming to Munich, he began research for an ethnographic study of the region, which he published in 1857 as Die Pfälzer: Ein rheinisches Volksbild (The Pfälzer: a Portrait of Rhenish People). The Pfalz, he wrote, displayed "more clearly than almost any other land" the "motto" of middle Germany: "Diversity without unity."^[61] It belonged to what in his Naturgeschichte he had called the "individualized country."^[62] Riehl thought, moreover, that the Pfalz was the German province that "pulled together in the narrowest of spaces all the contradictions of the German nationality [Volkstum ], as well as the German landscape"; it was "a sampler of German nature, piecemeal, changeable, and unified only by its character of perplexing manifoldness."^[63] The book itself consisted of a journey from the earth to the spirit, from topography and farming to religion, pausing for food and politics along the way. Its organization reflected his belief that ethnography reiterated topography, that the land formed the people.^[64] His dissection of the Pfälzer people thus depended more than he might have admitted on the geographical work of Christian Grünewald.^[65]

[59] "Vorschläge zur Förderung der socialen [sic ] und staatswissenschaftlichen Studien," reprinted in ibid., pp. 121–24.

[60] Ibid., p. 121.

[61] Riehl, Die Pfälzer , p. 15.

[62] Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Land und Leute , vol. 2 of Naturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes (Stuttgart, 1853), pp. 75–204.

[63] "Eine Musterkarte deutscher Natur, zerstückt, wechselvoll, und nur in dem Charakter verwirrender Mannigfaltigkeit einheitlich" (Riehl, Die Pfälzer , p. 29).

[64] These are most clearly set out in Land und Leute , published just a few years before Riehl set out on his Pfälzer research. See also Hannes Ginzel, "Der Raumgedanke in der Volkskunde unter Berücksichtigung Wilhelm Heinrich Riehls" (diss, Universität Würzburg, 1971).

[65] On the existence of that influence, see Reh, "Christian Grünewald," p. 44.

In the introduction to Die Pfälzer , Riehl suggested that his method amounted to no more than observation and conversation and that his theoretical guide was common sense.^[66] As a child, he had sat at his Pfälzer grandfather's feet listening to the stories of the old man's childhood; as a student, he had wandered through the countryside acquainting himself with the simple people and their ways; as ethnographer to King Max, he spent several months walking from village to village and speaking with the local people.^[67] As for why he wrote the book, Riehl acknowledged only intellectual and sentimental motives.^[68]Die Pfälzer could stand as a case study of the individualized country, demonstrating the very connections between land, human nature, and social arrangements that Riehl had recently explained in Land und Leute (Land and People), the first volume of his Naturgeschichte .^[69]

But Die Pfälzer could stand equally well as a case study in Riehl's politics of ethnography and administration. The book represented an attempt to understand the Pfalz in its troublesome relation to Bavaria and thereby to change it.^[70] It was a document directed both at Bavarian officialdom and at the Pfälzers themselves, in the first instance to inform, in the second, to persuade and ultimately to convert. In the fall of 1854 and spring of 1855, Riehl had spent about four months in the Pfalz itself, walking (as he said in his introduction) from town to town during the crucial agricultural seasons, but also speaking extensively with Bavarian officials in the communities and in the district presidium. In the months between his field trips, he read the historical and geographical literature on the region. He came to two sets of conclusions, one published in the book itself and the other privately conveyed to King Max in a progress report late in 1854.^[71] Both sets of conclusions centered on the distinctive character of the Pfälzer people, but the moral signs reversed themselves in the process of publication. In his report to the king of Bavaria, Riehl had hardly a charitable word to say for the Pfälzers.

[66] Riehl, Die Pfälzer , foreword.

[67] Ibid. See also Wolf von Gropper, "Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl: Ein Gedenkblatt zum 50. Todestage," Pfälzer Bote: Volks- und Heimatkalender 1948 (Neustadt/Haardt, 1947), p. 72; and Walter Plümacher, "Der große Wanderer durch unsere Heimat: W. H. Riehl und die Pfälzer," Pfälzische Heimatblätter 1 (15 October 1952): 1.

[68] The intellectual and sentimental justifications were accepted by later Heimat writers. See Albert Becker's review of the new 1907 edition of the book, in Pfälzerwald (hereafter cited as PW ) 1 (15 December 1907): 191; and Karl Gruber, "W. H. Riehl und August Becker schreiben über die Pfalz," Kurpfalz (April 1953): 16.

[69] See, e.g., Riehl, Die Pfälzer , pp. 15, 31, 33, 211.

[70] The Pfälzer historian Kurt Baumann, whose insights are penetrating but often hidden in obscure local journals, suggested the possibility of such an interpretation in his review of Victor von Geramb's biography of Riehl; see PH 7 (February, 1956): 77.

[71] Hornig, "Riehl und König Max," happened to reprint the entire report in her appendix, though she made little of it in her text; see pp. 115–21, "Gutachten über die Pfälzer," from the Geheime Hausarchiv.

Their distinctive character was a curse, which had caused them between 1832 and 1849 practically to destroy the internal peace of Bavaria. To be sure, the Pfälzer was not entirely to blame for his bad behavior. A heritage of political fragmentation added to a contemporary experience of land division, industrialization, easy credit, and massive emigration had undermined the people's natural integrity. Above all, Riehl blamed the French interregnum for destroying the "genuine kernel" of folk life in the region. "The chief assignment of the Bavarian government should be," he concluded, "to tear the Pfälzers away from this false and destructive singularity [Sonderthümelei ]."^[72]

The report suggested ways in which firm administration could accomplish this task. What the Pfalz lacked was a "concentration both inward and outward, which it will find only in the closest relation to the Bavarian state."^[73] Riehl criticized earlier Bavarian disengagement from the region. The Bavarian government had allowed too many French laws to stand and had devolved too much authority on Pfälzer officials, who of course did all they could to retain their disgraceful "Sonderthümelei." What the region needed was a "strong regiment, a serious enforcement of law, and the authority of public power."^[74] The Pfälzer was potentially loyal, but his loyalty was passive and easily lost. Pfälzers harbored, moreover, an irrational hatred of Bavarians; the presence of intelligent and efficient Bavarian administrators, Riehl thought, would cure them of it.^[75]

In Die Pfälzer , Riehl professed far more affection for the people than he had in his report to King Max. He used the book to reveal that "true kernel" of folk life which political and social disruption had all but destroyed. His treatise on Pfälzer life consequently centered on landscape and tribe, not much on history, and hardly at all on the legacy of the French. Riehl's analysis of the Pfälzer character both in the book and in the report was informed by a distinction between his terms, Eigenthümelei and Sonderthümelei . The Eigentum of the Pfälzers was their heritage of genuine folk customs and beliefs, the true expression of a people, their "ownness" (the literal meaning of Eigentum ) and essence. Sondertum , a term of opprobrium in the report, was the collective curse of the French on a German folk group, distinctiveness without deeper justification, an aberration. The report, concerned as it was with governmental policy, concentrated on the disease—Sondertum. Die Pfälzer , in contrast, was really about a people's Eigentum. To save this quality from the aberrant influences of modernity and political liberalism was the foundation of all Riehl's social politics.

[72] Ibid., pp. 116, 119.

[73] Ibid., p. 116.

[74] Ibid., p. 117.

[75] Ibid.

The propagandistic task at the heart of Die Pfälzer reveals itself most clearly in Riehl's attempt to sanitize and disarm Pfälzer Sondertum, for which in the book he adopted the polite term Selbstbewußtsein , or "self-consciousness." He admitted both the strength of "self-consciousness" and the role that Napoleonic power and French institutions had played in its formation.^[76] But he then asked, could politics alone account for such a deeply held and sure sense of identity? He answered, not surprisingly, no, that in fact "landscape, upbringing, customs and morals, and communal life" were the essence not simply of Pfälzer identity but of a "strong and proud. . . Bavarian-Pfälzer" identity. The region's distinctive modern institutions were simply the "putty" that held all else together.^[77] In case the metaphor confused anyone, he became more explicit a few pages later: "With mistrust our forefathers took on the French laws; with love they have held fast to them. But in the process, they have transformed them and Germanized them. . . . Practically unnoticed," their German sensibility and morality "raised a hundred objections to these same conditions that their rational convictions tried to maintain."^[78]

The message of the book was "Pfälzers, you know yourselves not." All that they believed to be their distinction and its manifestations—liberality, Hambach—was at best the wayward counsel of a superficial rationality. If, as Riehl told King Max in his report, the Pfälzer wanted to be a Pfälzer and not a Bavarian, then the social politician and the ethnographer must redefine what "Pfälzer" meant. In his book, Riehl attempted to disengage regional distinctiveness from the French Revolution, from sixty years of recent political and economic experience, from politics in its entirety.

Riehl's Pfälzer ethnography was a far more ambitious and deliberate undertaking than Blaul's Rhenish dreaming had been. One initial reaction to the book, from the very class of people that could be expected to read it and take it to heart, suggested that his message was received. In 1858, a Dean Scholler wrote to a friend that "no one has ever seen so deeply into our hearts. . . . He has opened the hidden springs out of which the natural strength of our lives flows; with a hundred. . . witnesses, he has explained the inner purpose of our essence."^[79] Certainly the Pfälzer historical, ethnographical, and geographical clubs that developed in the following decades took up Riehl's ideas with enthusiasm. His rediscovery—or invention—of Pfälzer folk life lay at the heart of the "Pfalz" volume of Bavaria , which finally appeared in 1868. That book, under Riehl's general editorship, collected,

[76] Riehl, Die Pfälzer , pp. 234, 243.

[77] Ibid., p. 234.

[78] Ibid., p. 253.

[79] Letter from Dekan Scholler to unknown correspondent, Johannisruhe, 9 March 1858; printed in PW 1 (15 December 1907): 190.

catalogued, and described all lingering traces of the "true kernel" of Pfälzer life.^[80] August Becker's book Die Pfalz und die Pfälzer extended Riehl's interpretation into the realm of popular travel literature, ultimately reaching a broader range of people than Riehl's more analytical work.

Riehl's efforts at conversion also gave new vigor to a long-standing but far less intellectually compelling attempt to transform Pfälzer consciousness through a reinterpretation of Pfälzer history. Riehl himself had proposed in his memorandum of 1854 that the Bavarian government further promote the association of the Bavarian king with the defunct office of Pfalzgraf (usually translated as Count Palatine), a ploy against unruly provinces reminiscent of the English creation of a Prince of Wales. The government had in fact attempted to cultivate such Bavarian "state consciousness" since the 1820s, with dubious success.^[81] Its key was the invention of a dynastic and historical tradition that could embrace not just the Bavarian heartland but all the Swabians, Franconians, and Pfälzers on its edges as well. In 1827, King Ludwig of Bavaria had announced that thenceforth "the animation of the national spirit, the study of the history of the Fatherland, and the spread of the discipline" of history and historical preservation would be official state policy.^[82] Local authorities, in cooperation with "friends of History and Art," were to begin at once to preserve the past, not omitting regular reports to the Ministry of the Interior and occasional historical gifts to the Bavarian Academy of Science.

At one level, the new policy had posed no problem for the Bavarian administrators of the Pfalz, which did have plenty of historical remains to be collected, particularly of the Roman era. In 1827, a new Historical Association of the Pfalz came into being, gathering together some forty men with a "love for history and antiquity."^[83] By 1839, the presidium of the district had recruited over five hundred men of appropriate "education and station" to join the association.^[84] The fledgling group belonged to what one historian has identified as a second phase of association building in Germany, in which associations took a conservative turn away from their initial Jacobinism, re-

[80] Ludwig Schandein et al., Rheinpfalz , in Bavaria. Landes und Volkskunde des Königreichs Bayern , ed. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (Munich, 1860–68).

[81] On Bavarian state-building in general, see Werner K. Blessing, Staat und Kirche in der Gesellschaft. Institutionelle Autorität und mentaler Wandel (Gölttingen, 1982), passim; see also Christa Stache, Bürgerlicher Liberalismus und katholischer Konservatismus in Bayern, 1867–1871 (Frankfurt, 1981), p. 70.

[82] Kabinettsbefehl, 29 May 1827, cited by Albert Becker, Hundert Jahre Pfälzer Geschichtsforschung, 1827–1927 (Speyer, 1927), p. 5; on Ludwig, see also Kurt Baumann, "Ludwig I," in Deutscher Westen—Deutsches Reich. Saarpfälzische Lebensbilder , ed. Karl von Raumer and Kurt Baumann (Kaiserslautern, 1938), vol. 1.

[83] Historicher Verein der Pfalz (hereafter cited as HVP), "Rechenschaftsbericht vom Jahre 1834–1842," PLAS, T1.

[84] Ibid.

publicanism, and radical nationalism.^[85] By their nature associations continued to attract and measure men by activity and talent rather than by birth, but particulary the historical associations increasingly affiliated themselves with the Englishtenment of rationalism and the state.^[86] King Ludwig had intended from the start that the new Historical Association be a "conservative element," to balance the radical associational tendencies so deeply rooted in the Pfalz, and consequently he discouraged large increases in membership.^[87] The association's members were not in any case rebellious types; they included high civil servants, jurists, and professors, priests and councillors, Bavarians and Pfälzers, but not the freelance journalists and small-town lawyers so prominent at Hambach and Frankfurt.^[88]

The encouragement of love for the Wittelsbachs did, however, pose a problem for the new Historical Association of the Pfalz. By 1816 the Wittelsbach connection, tenuous and unevenly distributed across the region as it had been, was twenty years in the past and vastly overshadowed by the Napoleonic phenomenon. The Bavarian dynasty never developed any popular following in the Pfalz, and by the time the two regions had drawn closer together politically, Wittelsbachism was everywhere losing ground to the charisma of Bismarck and his Reich.^[89] Nevertheless, the Historical Association did try to represent the Wittelsbach's claims on the loyalties of Pfälzers. Its charter called for the integration of local history into "history in general," in order to "animate. . . the attachment to the settings and customs of the Heimat and to the princely house which is part of our inheritance."^[90] The idea that the Kurpfalz was the historical predecessor to the contemporary Rhine District received some publicity. King Ludwig even went so far as to build himself a vacation estate in what he dubbed the "land of his fathers." After the region's renaming in 1838, the Historical Association began to refer to the Wittelsbach monarch exclusively as "His Royal Pfalzgraf."^[91] Perhaps most important, the mere existence of the association, however meager its

[85] Hermann Heimpel, "Geschichtsvereine einst und jetzt," Geschichtswissenschaft und Vereinswesen im 19. Jahrhundert , ed. Hermann Heimpel (Göttingen, 1972), p. 48.

[86] Ibid., p. 50. See also Thomas Nipperdey, "Verein als soziale Struktur in Deutschland im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert," in Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur neueren Geschichte (Göttingen, 1976).

[87] Hermann Heimpel, "Über Organisationsformen historischer Forschung in Deutschland," Historische Zeitschrift 189 (1959): 207.

[88] HVP, "Verzeichnis der Vereins-Mitgliedern" (1847), PLAS, T1.

[89] Werner K. Blessing, "The Cult of the Monarchy, Political Loyalty, and the Workers' Movement in Imperial Germany," Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978): 365–66.

[90] From section 1 of "Statuten des Vereins," in the HVP "Rechenschaftsbericht" (1839–42), Landesarchiv Speyer, T1.

[91] HVP, "Rechenschaftsbericht von Juli 1842 bis November 1846," Landesarchiv Speyer, T1.

production of scholarly works, preempted the propagation of alternate historical views. The Hambach Festival had demonstrated the symbolic power and the practical convenience of castle ruins for popular assemblies. After the foundation of the Historical Association, a repetition of that regrettable affair was rendered unlikely, if not impossible, for all castle ruins now came under the "protection" of a staunchly conservative and pro-Bavarian preservationism.^[92] Hambach itself was "given" to then Prince Max in 1839, in an act of supposedly spontaneous affection on the part of his loyal Pfälzer subjects.

Riehl himself was probably no more successful than the Historical Association had been in making Pfälzers love the Wittelsbachs, but by 1869 dynasticism had ceased to be an issue. The educated, politically active bourgeoisie had settled into a more or less comfortable compromise with the Bavarian state, the capstone of which was the unification of Germany in 1871. The resolution of political differences between the Pfalz and Bavaria, reinforced by the discovery of a distinctive Pfälzer history, folk life, and geography, cleared the way for new cultural institutions to flourish. In January 1869, on the eve of war and unification, the new administrative president of the Pfalz, Sigmund von Pfeufer, announced the refounding of the old Historical Association, which had dispersed in the 1850s. Pfeufer himself was an outspoken member of the kleindeutsch faction in Bavaria; his appointment to the Pfalz represented the willingness of Bavaria to accommodate its western province.^[93] The Historical Association inevitably reflected this state of affairs between the Pfalz and Bavaria. For the first time, its membership included both the local bourgeoisie and Bavarian officials. Its first-secretary was Riehl's associate in the writing of the Pfälzer volume in Bavaria , the folklorist Ludwig Schandein. For the next thirty years, the Historical Association and the National Liberal party reigned jointly over the cultural and political life of the province, sharing members and a common understanding of the Pfalz in both Bavaria and Germany as a whole. Their ascendancy represented a unique cohesion of Bavarian, Pfälzer, and German patriotism. The combination would never again be so stable.

What made this fusion of local, state, and national loyalties possible was the remarkable cohesion of the Honoratioren, a largely bourgeois elite whose essence was local but whose dreams had long been national. The worldview of these notables began at home and ended up at large in the national sphere, where it stopped, venturing into cosmopolitanism or imperialism only excep-

[92] Heimpel, "Geschichtsvereine einst und jetzt," p. 52. The point may seem trivial, but symbolism carries extra importance when power itself is in short supply, as it was for the popular movement.

[93] Werner Schineller, Die Regierungs-Präsidenten der Pfalz (Neustadt/Pfalz, 1980), p. 53.

tionally. This particular journey of the imagination, reiterated in Honoratioren politics as well as in social and cultural life, gave German identity its enduringly provincial character and gave provincial identities, like those of the Pfälzers, their unmistakable Germanness. The Honoratioren thus hold at least one key to understanding the way that Germans came together after 1871. Indispensable though war and diplomatic brilliance were in giving Germany its nationhood, they tell us much less about the nature of national consciousness than do these mental paths leading outward from every German province and hometown. Not bellicosity but provincialism was the hallmark of Honoratioren nationalism, and through their influence in the first years of national unity it impressed itself on popular apprehension of the nation as well.

This localist worldview—or perhaps more accurately, "nationview"—can be seen most clearly in the conduct of politics. The new national political scene took shape after 1871 without benefit of long-standing national traditions or men of truly national experience.^[94] Its leading figures, the first public men of a united Germany, were for the most part the local notables, and what they had to offer was their common experience of Germany's provincial diversity. Honoratiorenpolitik (notable politics), more a political style than a program, was a politics of both social privilege and provincial influence. The political power of the Honoratioren grew out of the coalescing of the many separate powers derived from local wealth or local bureaucratic office. It reproduced itself through circles of friendship, influence, and association among the locally prominent.^[95] Even the elite status of the Honoratioren, though it relied on commonly recognized standards of Bildung und Besitz (cultivation and property), had greater resonance in the locality than in the nation.^[96]

The National Liberals, who considered themselves the standard-bearers of unification, illustrate more clearly than any other political group this balance between local prestige and national ambition.^[97] Even at the level of national organization, the National Liberal party was essentially a collection of distinct regional groups. At the cost of coherence, the national party leader, Heinrich von Marquandsen, decided in 1870 to retain the "fluid boundaries" that enabled the party nominally to represent such presumably various constituencies. He argued, in words reminiscent of Riehl's social

[94] Sheehan, German Liberalism , p. 128.

[95] See the discussion by Geoff Eley in Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, 1980), p. 20.

[96] Klaus Vondung, "Zur Lage der Gebildeten in der wilhelminischen Zeit," in Das wilhelminische Bildungsbürgertum. Zur Sozialgeschichte seiner Ideen , ed. Klaus Vondung (Göttingen, 1976), p. 25.

[97] Dan S. White, The Splintered Party: National Liberalism in Hessen and the Reich, 1867–1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), esp. pp. 1–10.

politics, that "our deference to local diversity and to liberalism as a whole remains most important and forbids a more rigorous centralization."^[98] In the Pfalz, where National Liberals owned and ran most of the regional newspapers, controlled the region's district council, and provided most of its mayors, as well as all its representatives to the Reichstag and Bavarian Landtag, sympathy with von Marquandsen's national strategy did not preclude centralized and efficient control of regional politics.^[99] The Pfälzer National Liberals were also socially homogeneous: all wealthy and all privileged in both educational and professional terms.^[100]

But the Honoratioren brought more to national politics than decentralized parties rooted in carefully maintained provincial strongholds. They also brought the legacy of German associationalism, or Vereinswesen , for a long time the most important constituent of a German public sphere. To be a notable meant to belong to any number of voluntary associations, whether political, religious, professional, or simply avocational. The notables' associations were, moreover, testimony to a liberal tradition turned nationalist, then conservative. Voluntary associations had first flourished in Germany in the late eighteenth century as gathering places for the self-consciously enlightened. Free in their outward form from the constraints of station and rank, they created a space for a kind of inward freedom also: the freedom to speculate, to question, to speak of the common good, to consider oneself a member of the party of humanity and a representative of the general interests of mankind.^[101] As voluntary associations became both more widespread and socially inclusive, they also became more specific in their goals, often dedicated to a particular aspect of agricultural improvement or a particular group of the needy poor. The voluntary associations of the nineteenth century came to represent, as one historian has put it, the "mastery of life through the medium of association."^[102]

Voluntary associations were also closely allied to political liberalism and the nationalist movement, but after midcentury reaction and repression brought most under governmental ban. When they began to reappear in the 1860s, the majority had shed the legacy of enlightenment, of radicalism, and

[98] Cited in Thomas Nipperdey, Die Organisation der deutschen Parteien vor 1918 (Düsseldorf, 1961), p. 111.

[99] Bräunche, Parteien und Reichstagswahlen , pp. 5, 42–43, 54ff.

[100] Schneider, "Anfänge der sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung," p. 86.

[101] See especially Nipperdey, "Verein als soziale Struktur"; Otto Dann, "Die Anfänge politischer Vereinsbildung in Deutschland," in Soziale Bewegung und politische Verfassung , ed. U. Engelhardt, Volker Sellin, and Horst Stuke (Stuttgart, 1976); Werner Conze, "Der Verein als Lebensform des 19. Jahrhunderts," Die Innere Mission: Zeitschrift des Werkes Innere Mission und Hilfswerk der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland 50 (1960): 226–34; Heinz Schmitt, Das Vereinswesen der Stadt Weinheim an der Bergstrabe (Weinheim, 1963), p. 8.

[102] Braun, Sozialer und Kultureller Wandel , p. 17.

of reform, hanging on only to their philanthropic and cultural guises and to their commitment to action by the few for the many.^[103] When those few had been a beleaguered minority—like the enlightened bourgeoisie of the old regime—their altruism had potentially revolutionary consequences; but when the few became the representatives of privilege itself, the Honoratioren of an increasingly mass society, the political coloration of voluntary associations was bound to change. Thus by the 1870s most voluntary associations tended to reproduce the social hierarchies that already existed, rather than to challenge the very notion of hierarchy. Associations provided the local notables with opportunities for the acquisition and exercise of influence; in their meetings people met, talked, disputed, planned, exchanged news, or simply showed themselves to one another.

The Pfälzer notables, for instance, saw one another at the political meetings of the National Liberal's regional association in Neustadt, at the regional Chamber of Commerce in Ludwigshafen, at associations of the United Protestant Church or Catholic associations in Speyer, and in countless other smaller associations in every town of the region. After 1869 they gathered also at the monthly meeting of the Historical Association of the Pfalz in Speyer. Beyond simply providing another forum for the enjoyment of exclusivity, the Historical Association created and in its activities promulgated a regional historical tradition that legitimated both their regional rootedness and their national aspirations. Just as Honoratiorenpolitik preserved and built on the essential political integrity of the locality, so the Historical Association preserved the region's cultural integrity and maintained it, invented or not, as the surest constituent of German nationhood.

The renewal of the Historical Association of the Pfalz in 1869 under the patronage of the Honoratioren marked a third stage in the emergence of Pfälzer identity. In it, the Honoratioren played the role of the consolidators, the builders of institutions and the founders of journals, both of which, for better or for worse, gave an official voice to provincial distinctiveness. The new association was the first of these group efforts and for a long time the most successful. It immediately exceeded the expectations of its founders.^[104] Within a few months of the public announcement of its reopening about six hundred people had joined, among whom could be counted the most important political, administrative, and religious leaders of the region. Led by the administrative president of the region himself, it quickly became a focus of elite society in the Pfalz and the leading guardian of regional culture in all its forms. The founders hoped that the association could bring recognition to a

[103] In 1869, for instance, Bavaria granted Rechtsfähigkeit , or legal standing, only to associations "pursuing idealistic goals"; see Wolfgang Meyer, "Das Vereinswesen der Stadt Nürnberg im 19. Jahrhundert" (diss., Universität Würzburg, 1970), pp. 14, 30.

[104] Albert Becker, Hundert Jahre Pfälzer Geschichtsforschung , p. 139.

region that had been "the continuous site of far-reaching and momentous historical events. . . from the earliest stirrings of German culture to the present" and yet still suffered under the opprobrium of its closeness to France.^[105] The Historical Association would prove to Pfälzers and Germans alike the region's importance to the nation.

The statutes of the Historical Association, approved on April 3, stated its purpose to be "the research of native [einheimisch ] history and the preservation and collection of its monuments amd remains."^[106] The property of the association would devolve on the Pfälzer district government in the case of dissolution—an unusual provision for voluntary associations in general but standard for historical ones, whose quasi-official status corresponded to their public role as guardians of the region's past. Other paragraphs made provision for open membership, dues, leadership, regular meetings, and local representatives to oversee historical business in each of the region's towns.^[107]

This administrative structure, unremarkable in every way, nevertheless had important affinities with the structure and operation of notable politics. First of all, the association's system of indirect voting reproduced the electoral procedures both of the local National Liberal party and of the Bavarian Landtag. The actual directors (or candidates or deputies) received their mandate from an ever-narrowing circle of electors. Indirect voting assured the influence of an elite at the expense of the active participation of ordinary members. Elections were held only to confirm decisions already made; they brought no surprises and contained little drama. For most offices the candidate went unopposed: neither intrigue nor dispute was permitted to disturb the operation of local affairs.

Since the 1830s, the position of chairman was held by whoever happened to be the Bavarian-appointed district president in the Pfalz. It was an arrangement as deferential as it was calculated, as inflexible as it was informal. The association received the benefits of official sponsorship, and the president multiplied his informal ties to local business and political leaders, who in turn joined in great numbers, at least in part because of his presence and patronage.^[108] On the symbolic level, Bavaria emphasized its commitment to the Pfalz by allowing its highest official to participate in matters of purely voluntary and local interest; the Pfalz in return put its very history at Bavaria's command. In this elitist setting, where harmony and unity were to

[105] "Einladung zur Betheiligung an einem historischen Vereine der Pfalz" (January 1869), Pfälzische Landesbibliothek Speyer (hereafter cited as PLBS).

[106] They were modelled on those of a Swabian historical club. Becker, Hundert Jahre , p. 143.

[107] "Satzungen des historischen Vereines der Pfalz," Mitteilungen des Historischen Vereins der Pfalz (hereafter cited as MHVP ) 1 (1870): 24–27.

[108] Or so speculated First-Secretary Ludwig Schandein, and his observation seems reasonable; Schandein is cited in Albert Becker, Hundert Jahre , p. 139.

everyone's advantage, the giving and receiving of benefits were circular and continuous. The historical Association provided such a setting, and the ex officio participation of the district president ensured its survival.

The ordinary membership to the Historical Association also reflected the distribution of power, wealth, and education in the region. High officials, clerics, educators, businessmen, minor bureaucrats, and other professionals each accounted for about 15 percent of the total membership of 586, but the distribution of the groups across the Pfalz varied widely, its pattern revealing the differentiated local structures of the notables.^[109] Doctors, lawyers, tax collectors, parsons, and teachers were to be found in every town, but military officers came only from Landau, engineers from Ludwigshafen, iron magnates from the corner by the Saar, and wine magnates from the Rhine hills. Speyer, capital of the province, offered the most glittering array of titles, from the heads of the Protestant general synod and the Catholic diocese to a large assortment of Regierungsdirektoren, Regierungsräte, Gymnasialprofessoren , and Konsistorialräte . The association also boasted fifteen mayors, a replication at the municipal level of the district president's leadership at the regional level. Thus, although theoretically anyone could join, the association maintained a clear social exclusivity.^[110] Perhaps a certain level of education was required of members to comprehend, if not to appreciate, the esoteric nature of the group's historical activities, and the dues and letter of application could have been an obstacle to some. But probably the process of exclusion operated less directly. Membership in the Historical Association was not, after all, so much an avenue to prominence and prestige as a symbol of having attained them. The association recognized those who had no need of its recognition, and the rewards for joining were intangible.

Certainly a club of this sort derived its coherence as much from its membership as from what it actually did. Indeed, the records of its regular meetings, undeniably dull affairs, would lead one to think that the only plausible explanation for the association's existence was its provision of a dignified forum for self-congratulation.^[111] But that would not do justice to the genuine enthusiasm the association's members had for local history, or to the public

[109] The calculations are rough: out of 586, high government officials and mayors accounted for 89 members, or 15 percent; minor bureaucrats, 115, or 19 percent; teachers of all levels, 80, or 14 percent; businessmen, including bankers, factory owners, and large estate owners, 105, or 18 percent; clerics, both Catholic and Protestant, 95, or 16 percent; and professionals, including doctors, lawyers, and engineers, 77, or 13 percent. In addition, the Verein included 16 men of independent means and 9 military officers. Only one woman belonged to the Verein; she was a landowner. See "Verzeichniss der Mitglieder," MHVP 1 (1870): 27–41.

[110] Letters requesting membership in the association, PLAS, T1, no. 14.

[111] See the "Jahresberichte" of the Historische Verein in MHVP 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9 (1871, 1872, 1875, 1877, 1878, 1880); and Protokollbücher, 1869–99, PLAS, T1, no. 4.

significance they attributed to pursuit of that history. Both the enthusiasm and the civic-mindedness are evident in the activity closest to the hearts of association members: the collection, excavation, and restoration of artifacts from the past. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, excavations were the playgrounds of eager amateurs. To see the past embedded within nature heightened its appeal, and digging things up—particularly Roman things—became the rage of the educated bourgeoisie.^[112] In the decades of Kulturkampf (Bismarck's anti-Catholic campaign), moreover, ancient coins and vessels served as the holy relics of enlightened Catholics and Protestants, both groups eager to distance themselves from the irrational excesses of popular religion. Outings to excavate and restore the past were like pilgrimages—collective rituals of which the Historical Association, divided between Protestants and Catholics, stood in symbolic need.

The Historical Association was able to organize much hitherto random excavation and direct it toward public ends. It sponsored its own archeological digs and its own restorations of ruined castles and abbeys. It brought in experts from Munich and Heidelberg to assist in excavation and restoration and organized the financial and physical support of local groups, in return for later public access to the findings.^[113] Yet lack of funds prevented the association from undertaking all it would have liked. In 1872, for instance, the association, in consultation with the Bavarian government, decided to abandon its efforts to restore the old and new castles of Wolfstein, neither of which could claim architectural or historical distinction. Association and state contented themselves, however, with a "true likeness in oil or a photographic image."^[114]

That the association should have settled for a painting in lieu of an actual restoration gives us a clue to the particular mentality of these gatherers of the past. The painting of "Alt und Neu Wolfstein" was more accessible than the castles themselves, which were hidden in a remote corner of the Pfalz, far from Speyer, far from the Rhine, far, indeed, from most places where Pfälzer notables tended to congregate. The painting, unlike the castles, could be moved to Speyer, where its testimony to the Pfälzer past could be properly absorbed and appreciated. Later generations of Heimatkundlers would extend their reach into the forests, but the Honoratioren historians were most

[112] Arnold Esch, "Limesforschung und Geschichtsvereine: Romanismus und Germanismus, Dilettantismus und Facharchäologie in der Bodenforschung des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Heimpel, Geschichtswissenschaft und Vereinswesen , p. 163.

[113] Occasionally complaints were raised against the historical clubs of Germany for being academically sloppy and isolated from real scholars; see, e.g., Gustav Bossert, Die Historische Vereine vor dem Tribunal der Wissenschaft (Berlin, 1883). Innovators they were not, but the scholarly respectability of their work has been generally acknowledged.

[114] "Jahresbericht," MHVP 3 (1872): 147.

interested in small objects that could be put in museums: a painting of a castle was better than the castle itself; an actual piece of the castle—if one could justify such removal—was best of all.

Indeed, for all their talk of restoration and preservation, what the association members really devoted themselves to was acquisition.^[115] In 1869, the same awakening of interest in regional history that produced the Historical Association sparked a renewed interest in an old and dusty collection of Roman artifacts that had sat in a shed by the Speyer cathedral since the 1830s.^[116] The city of Speyer and the Pfälzer district council voted to establish a district museum to house the pieces; the city also contributed some of its own historical objects, to which were added the private collections of several founding members of the association.^[117] A museum commission, representing city, state, and Historical Association, shared in the administration.^[118]

The museum gave the association a decidedly public face. Housed in rooms at the Gymnasium (university-preparatory secondary school), where it would be available "to any man and at any time," the museum's collection seemed to its founders to be a gift to the "friends of patriotic history" and an honor to the "whole Fatherland."^[119] With a taxonomic enthusiasm, they urged people to contribute inscribed stones, sculptures, altarpieces, Germanic and Roman tombs, vases, weapons, jewelry, coins, holy vessels, furniture, carpets, carved work, ornamental glass, portraits of historically significant people, books with miniatures, family trees and patents with heraldic drawings, guild emblems, documents, seals, and artistic depictions—of all sorts and from all eras—of festivals, battles, costumes, cities, public places, castles, palaces, churches, and ordinary houses. To those possessed of the acquisitive urge, the Pfalz was a treasure house tantalizingly full of lost and hidden objects. Ludwig Schandein, the association's secretary, encouraged

[115] The budgets of the association from 1869 through 1880 show that the largest single expenditure each year was "Anschaffungen für die Sammlungen und die Bibliothek." Other expenses came from mailing costs, servants' wages, and, above all, the costs of publishing the journal. But more than half the overall outlay of money throughout that decade was for acquisitions—an average of 555 florins per year, or 52 percent of annual expenditure. In contrast, the association spent only 200 florins on restoration during the whole decade. See "Auszüge aus der Rechnung des historischen Vereines," MHVP 1–9 (1870–80).

[116] The artifacts had been left to the old HVP by a departing Bavarian administrator and amateur archeologist, Joseph von Stichaner. For a more cheerful account of the museum's beginnings, see Albert Becker, Hundert Jahre , pp. 87–93; and Ludwig Schandein, "Kurze Geschichte des Historischen Vereines der Pfalz," MHVP 1 (1870): 129–30.

[117] Albert Becker, Hundert Jahre , p. 147.

[118] Karl Schultz, "Wesen und Wandel des pfälzischen Landesmuseum," PH 11 (1960): 116ff.

[119] "Die Verwaltung des historischen Museums der Pfalz in Speier an die Freunde der vaterländischen Geschichte" (January 1870), PLBS.

members to search the fields and attics of local people (with, of course, their consent and help). The various subdistrict representatives of the association were sent out to urge private collectors to give up their treasures to the public museum in Speyer.^[120] Association leaders persuaded city guilds to contribute their records, seals, historical tools, and whatever else might be deemed significant. The ongoing construction of the railroad in the Pfalz also proved a source of booty: early negotiations with the railroad authorities in Ludwigshafen brought the association a large and miscellaneous collection of old objects turned up by the railroad builders since the 1840s.^[121] And when in 1869 a piece of meteor fell near the Pfälzer village of Krähenberg, an association representative was quickly at the scene of the excitement to buy it for the museum.^[122] Piece by piece, the association brought the Pfälzer past to Speyer and put it on display, labeled, categorized, and open to the public. The vision was comprehensive and powerful: if it could retrieve a rock from the heavens and call it a piece of Pfälzer history, little else could remain alien for long.

In fact, what soon strikes one about the historical activities of the club is the remarkable absence of attention to conventional standards of historical "greatness." At a time when the self-proclaimed national historians were demonstrating a slavish devotion to questions of state power and prestige, these localists ran around the countryside in pursuit of the most trivial bits of everyday life in the past. Not only the museum but the club's annual journal as well was filled as much with information about local building and dress, local festivities and religious practices, and local folk customs as with testimonials to dead princes and bygone wars.^[123] Even the occasional accounts of wars dwelt far more on the disturbance of local life and the destruction of property than on the valor of kings and nobles.^[124] In an article in 1877, Christian Mehlis, teacher and association member, wrote that "each object, even the smallest, is a stone in a great building that mankind has alternately constructed and destroyed for thousands of years."^[125]

Pfälzer historians preferred this kind of broadly defined Kulturgeschichte

[120] "Jahresbericht, 1869/70," MHVP 2 (1871): 127ff.

[121] "Kurze Geschichte," MHVP 1 (1870): 19.

[122] Ibid.; and Albert Becker, Hundert Jahre , p. 147.

[123] See, e.g., Philipp Schneider, "Die Mähtergerechtigkeit und das Mähterbuch von Mussbach," MHVP , Festgabe (1874): 11ff.; or the regular reports by Ludwig Schandein on Weistümer : "Weisthum von Hagenbach, c. 1480," MHVP , Festgabe (1874), or "Weisthum von Neuhofen, 1534," MHVP 7 (1878).

[124] See, e.g., C. Weiss, "Der Kriegsschäden, welchen die freie Reichstadt Speier im XVII und XVIII Jahrhundert durch die Franzosen erlitten hat, nachgewiesen aus Urkunden der Speier Stadtarchiv," MHVP 2 (1871): 37ff.; or the same author's "Das Rechnungswesen der freien Reichstadt Speier im Mittelalter," MHVP 5 (1875): 27ff.

[125] Dr. C. Mehlis, "Die praehistorische Funde der Pfalz," MHVP 6 (1877): x.

(history of cultures) at least in part because of the nature of the available evidence. The important archival collections of the more prominent local rulers lay outside the Pfalz in Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Munich, Darmstadt, and Vienna. The only past for which records remained belonged to minor lords or to ordinary burghers and peasants. So perhaps the past political fragmentation of the Pfalz led the association to follow the intellectual model of the brothers Grimm rather than that of Heinrich von Treitschke.^[126] But the association's tendency to find its past not in tales of glory but in the land itself was also a conscious choice, for which Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl was indirectly responsible. He turned its attention away from political history to the Eigentum and everyday experience of the people. Schandein, a dialect poet who gave intellectual leadership to the association in its first decade, had studied with Riehl, under whose direction he wrote large portions of the "Pfalz" volume in the ethnographic blockbuster Bavaria .^[127] Christian Mehlis, too, had heard Riehl lecture, and he brought to his concern with prehistoric archeology a Riehlian mission to uncover the true essence of the people. The prehistoric past, thought Mehlis, contained the key to the "customs and morals' of man and revealed his "essential claims [Eigenthumsrechte ] to state, law, religion, art, and science."^[128] "Know thyself," admonished Mehlis, in attributing to the remnants of prehistory the same revelatory power that Riehl saw in folk life in general.

Most important, folk life, not politics, was what gave the Pfalz its most profound connection to the German essence. Ludwig Schandein's favorite project in these early years of the history club drew together folklore and history, the locality and the nation. Beginning in his first yearly report, he encouraged association members, especially teachers and parsons, to take on the writing of their town's or village's history. "Our goal," he wrote in 1870, "is to make possible in the future a comprehensive history of the Pfalz. . . A historical association should not concern itself only with the . . . history that is over and done with: it should also concern itself with history coming into being. We [are] the witnesses of the present."^[129] Schandein wanted the village chroniclers to record everything that happened in their village, from weather to religion, paying particular attention to the events of the war then in progress. Each chronicle was to have been preceded, moreover, by as full

[126] In fact, the association's interest in the collection and publication of Weistümer stemmed in part from Jakob Grimm's work on them, in which he used Pfälzer examples; see Ludwig Schandein, "Ganerbenweisthum von Hanhofen," MHVP 2 (1871): 21.

[127] The admiration was evidently mutual: Riehl cited Schandein in Die Pfälzer as one of three great dialect poets in the region; see Die Pfälzer , p. 226. For Schandein's work on the "Pfalz" volume, see Ernst Christmann, "Ludwig Schandein als Volkskundeforscher," PH 14 (1963): 78–79; see also above, pp. 34–35.

[128] Mehlis, "Die praehistorische Funde," p. 2.

[129] Ludwig Schandein, "Zur Einführung von Ortschroniken," MHVP 1 (1870): 42.

an account of the village's past as could be reconstructed. "Out of these many particular histories," Schandein argued, "in which the stamp of the whole is mirrored in the locality, emerges the history of the district, the region, the province, the whole land."^[130] To develop a "historical sensibility" in people of the present, one had to begin with "the narrow Heimat." This historical sensibility in turn was "the teacher of the future: the love of the Fatherland is rooted in the love of Heimat."^[131]

With such projects and such intellectual models, the Historical Association bestowed order on the random avocational pursuits of the local bourgeoisie and coherence on a chaotic collection of artifacts with dubious claim to the adjective Pfälzer . The Pfalz patently lacked a regional tradition to give substance to its regional identity, and without a regional tradition the achievements of its notable citizens suffered an intangible loss of dignity. What was the Pfalz, and who were the Pfälzers? One needed only to visit the museum to find a preliminary answer to the question—an answer pieced together from many artifacts of many pasts. It mattered less that the artifact was Roman or late medieval than that it had been found in the province and attested to past human settlement there. The museum made an argument for the historical existence of the Pfalz that also reinforced the region's contemporary existence, recent and arbitrary though its borders may have been. Walking through the rooms of the museum, a local notable could feel his position of influence securely rooted in ancient stones. Moreover, in his collecting and excavating, he had conquered that elusive past and brought it to Speyer, where its glories might shine to brighten his own.

The act of making whole a fragmented past must also have resonated for contemporaries with the politically parallel creation of national unity. The Heimatgeschichte practiced by Schandein and others revealed the connections that bound merely local artifacts and facts to a German national history. So too, on an institutional level, did the formal ties the club maintained with other regional history clubs and with the Gesamtverein der deutschen Geschichts- und Altertumsvereine (General Association of German Historical and Antiquarian Associations), founded "in order to bring the spirit of

[130] Ibid., pp. 44–45.

[131] Ibid., p. 48. Schandein envisioned these local chronicles filling the district archive, but apart from a few pieces published in the club's journal, there is little evidence that any were written. See, e.g., A. Stauber, "Kloster und Dorf Lamprecht," MHVP 9 (1880): 50–228, which not only discusses the social organization of the cloister but also includes a respectable social history of the village, with accounts of property relations, legal arrangements, the Wallonians and their cloth industry, economic matters, population change, church, schools, and conflicts between the Kurpfalz and the bishopric as they affected the village. See also Hermann Zapf, "Über die Zeit der Entstehung von Pirmasens: Eine geschichtliche, sprachliche und topographische Untersuchung, zugleich Beitrag zur ältesten westricher Landesgeschichte," MHVP 11 (1883): 99–144.

common German history to the various provincial and territorial efforts."^[132] In 1874, the national group held its annual convention in Speyer, a public celebration of the confluence of region and nation in the pursuit of Heimatgeschichte.^[133] The nationalism of such groups was rooted in the region; their purpose, the interweaving of all German histories. Regions—regional politics, culture, society—gave substance to the nation, and in the first years of unification both the parts and the whole that they constituted claimed their victory over the fragmentation of the past.

Although the Historical Association was the chief beneficiary of the civic activism of the Pfälzer notables, thus the chief guardian of Pfälzer identity, it was not the only collective effort to celebrate local distinctiveness in the first decades after unification. An expansive interest in local culture, history, monuments, and nature characterized local society in general, and hence a number of heterogeneous groups and individuals in particular. Other Heimat activists may not have had the comprehensive reach or the scholarly weight of the Historical Association, but they do tell us about tensions within Pfälzer society that affected the definition and celebration of Pfälzerness itself. Local identity, even though purged of radicalism and Francophilia, was not immune to a variety of interpretations. No matter how uncontroversial the Historical Association may have considered its keeping of the Pfälzer flame, there were others who objected either to its history or to its social exclusivity. Lines of geography, of class, of religion, and of politics all left subtle but recognizable marks on the emerging consciousness of a Pfälzer community.^[134]

Of these, the most important for the period in which Pfälzer identity was consolidated were the confessional differences. The precise effect on Pfälzer identity of religious conflict—between a bare majority of Protestants and a substantial Catholic minority—is hard to pin down, since associational

[132] Cited in Albert Becker, Hundert Jahre , p. 151. For a listing of all the local historical journals to which the Verein subscribed, see "Katalog der Bibliothek," MHVP , Festgabe (1874): 41–80; see also George Biundo, "Entwicklung und Stand der pfälzischen Heimatforschung," MHVP 51 (1953): 10–11.

[133] See the accounts in Albert Becker, Hundert Jahre , pp. 151–52; Speierer Anzeiger , no. 223 (24 September 1874); Unterhaltungsblatt zum Speierer Anzeiger , no. 110 (24 September 1874): Speierer Beobachter , no. 225 (26 September 1874).

[134] The notables themselves were not a homogeneous group. Roger Chickering argues for a diversity of context—i.e., the notables of a villages versus the notables of a major city—and a diversity of social background, marking out particularly the "new men" of the late nineteenth century, who achieved a higher academic education than had their parents, at a time, moreover, of enormous increases in the ranks of the professions, technical services, and secondary education. See his We Men Who Feel Most German (Boston, 1984), pp. 111–13; see also Vondung, "Zur Lage der Gebildeten," pp. 26–27.

records acknowledged it only by silences and omissions, never by overt signs of hostility. Nevertheless, the official version of Pfälzer patriotism that took hold after unification had a distinctly Protestant bias. The Pfälzer bourgeoisie was a largely Protestant group and, to the extent that political and social characteristics coincided, largely liberal. At least in the eyes of conservative Catholics (whether the Pfälzer clergy or the Bavarian administration), liberalism, Protestantism, and the bourgeoisie had an unholy affinity for one another in the Pfalz. And since those who had longest and loudest proclaimed their loyalty to the Pfalz were precisely these liberal bourgeois Protestants, Catholic leaders kept their distance from local patriotism even in its toned-down form. Their own parishioners were mostly poor, often agricultural laborers rather than landowners, workers rather than storekeepers, rural people rather than town dwellers. They had not been active in the years of political agitation; their religious leaders had thus been free to support the conservative, monarchical cause without much popular Catholic resistance.^[135]

The decade of the 1850s was a high point for established Catholicism in the Pfalz, which was able to strengthen the church organization and church attendance with the support of a sympathetic Bavarian administration. However, the 1860s and above all the 1870s were marked by the confluence of a number of crises, all of which tended further to distance the Catholic establishment from the celebratory expressions of Pfälzer identity. In the first place, Pfälzer patriotism, under the patronage of the National Liberal notables, became increasingly tied to the Prussian-led nationalist movement in the 1860s. The Bavarian administration itself came under the control of liberals like Johann Lutz who were unsympathetic to Catholic independence. Kleindeutsch nationalism was already wreaking havoc among the German Catholics, placing them in the impossible position of having to choose between Rome and Germany at a time when Rome itself was demanding their absolute obedience. And unlike the Rhineland to the north of the Pfalz, where Catholicism and local patriotism could together make common cause against Prussia, the Pfalz, having found itself in resistance to a Catholic state, now asserted sympathy for a militantly Protestant one. Catholic alienation from official Pfälzerism became only more marked in the decade of Kulturkampf. To be sure, the liberal campaign against the political and cultural influence of Rome was, as one historian put it, only a cold war in Bavarian territories, one that rarely reached the extent or pitch of the Prussian campaign. Nevertheless, on issues of schooling and state influence it became hot enough, particularly in the Pfalz. There the clergy lacked the support of majority opinion in the Landtag and among the populace that protected it in

[135] Ludwig Stamer, Kirchengeschichte der Pfalz , vol. 4 (Speyer, 1964), pp. 150–57, 196–97.

old Bavaria. In the course of the conflict in the Pfalz, the bishopric of Speyer stood empty for much of the 1870s because a candidate acceptable to both church and state could not be found, and the one Catholic Gymnasium in the region was forced to abandon its confessional character.^[136]

The Catholic notables in the Pfalz played an equivocal role throughout these uncomfortable years. Many, including the man who briefly filled the Speyer bishopric in the early 1870s, participated in local affairs alongside their political opponents. The Historical Association, headed by the Bavarian, Protestant, and National Liberal von Pfeufer, attracted Catholic membership, even while it pursued a strenuously nonconfessional history and implicitly supported the teaching of such history in nonconfessional schools.^[137] Indeed, the Catholic Honoratioren, a small minority among their social and professional equals, seemed for the most part to have pursued an assimilationist course, even to the extent of sympathizing with the "old Catholic" movement against the tightening orthodoxy of Pope Pius IX.^[138]

One voice among the Catholic notability stands out both for its resistance to such assimilation and for its representation of a love for the Pfalz that did not hang on the Deidesheim-Berlin axis. For decades the only publication in the region dedicated to Heimat literature, Palatina was a belletristic supplement to the Catholic Pfälzer Zeitung , edited by the conservative politican Lukas Jäger and later by his son Eugen.^[139] Both were outspokenly anti-Prussian. Eugen supported the federalist case for a decentralized empire and, in 1878, made the paper an official organ of the Catholic Center party.^[140] He attempted, moreover, to raise the intellectual and aesthetic level of the Pfälzer Zeitung and Palatina , in order to win a readership of educated Catholics who might be diverted from their assimilationalist course.

Accordingly, Palatina 's editor in the 1870s, Eduard Geib, tried to make the magazine a "clean and noble" undertaking that "no one would be ashamed or embarrassed to read . . . no father, no mother, would have cause to put it aside for fear it fall into the hands of a daughter or a son."^[141] Like the nationally circulated Gartenlaube, Palatina was a paper with modest literary—but high moral—pretensions. Indeed, while the Gartenlaube sought to appeal to tastes and aspirations held in common by German middle-class society,

[136] Ibid., pp. 260–76.

[137] The issue of history teaching was central to the controversy over the Speyer Gymnasium ; see ibid., p. 264.

[138] Their position was distinctly in the minority among the Pfälzer Catholics, both clergy and laity, who stuck loyally to the pope; see Stamer, Kirchengeschichte , pp. 235-48.

[139] Lorenz Wingerter, Geschichte der "Palatina" (Speyer, 1926), pp. 6–12; Bräunche, Parteien und Reichstagswahlen , p. 113.

[140] Wingerter, Geschichte der "Palatina," p. 47.

[141] "Einführung," Palatina (1859).

Palatina took up the complementary provincial task of emphasizing the national in local life, literature, and folklore, of promoting "Fatherland thoughts"—in short, of "enlivening and deepening the feeling for Heimat" among Pfälzers.^[142]

But in common with its parent newspaper, Palatina also had a vision of the Pfalz and its place in Germany different from that of the Historical Association and its patrons among the National Liberals. The journal's editors held firmly to the ideal of a greater Germany, to their respect for Austria, and to their support for Catholicism.^[143] For instance, a group of poems by the Pfälzer Johannes Hüll, reviewed in Palatina in 1875, spoke out against the materialism and soullessness of contemporary German nationalism. According to the reviewer, the strongest proof of nationalism's philistinism was the "so-called Kulturkampf, which is really a struggle against culture, for social revolution and the destruction of German folk life."^[144] In the end, Palatina suffered from its failure to attract prominent local sponsors from the ranks of the wealthy Protestants and hence never became the local literary counterpart to the Historical Association. Nevertheless, its survival well into the 1920s attested to the existence of a Catholic minority in quiet dissent from the reigning institutions of local culture.

The politics of unification and national consolidation made allies out of unlikely combinations of forces; in the Pfalz, it brought together conservative political Catholicism with democratic liberalism and social democracy, in common cause against the reign of the National Liberals. Although the overtly political alliance of these groups did not emerge until the 1890s, when they cooperated to defeat National Liberal candidates in a few Pfälzer districts, as early as the 1870s the grounds for agreement, at least between the grob deutsch Catholics and Democrats, were clear enough to make the Pfälzer novelist and Democrat August Becker a frequent contributor to Palatina . Becker himself tried in the 1870s to establish a literary journal in the region but ran up against the same lack of sympathy among the Honoratioren that ultimately lessened the influence of Palatina as well.

Becker had been born in the Pfalz but had lived in Munich most of his creative life, whence he looked back on the Pfalz with more affection than he had felt while actually there. Indeed, this perpetual émigré devoted his entire literary output to the people and places of the Pfalz, becoming the region's favorite Heimat novelist and, with the publication of Die Pfalz und die Pfälzer

[142] Wingerter, Geschichte der "Palatina," p. 15.

[143] See, e.g., H. A. Schaufert, "Es gibt nichts Neues unter der Sonne," Palatina (1860): 91–92, 95–96, 103–4—essentially a call for German cultural diversity and political union with Austria.

[144] Eduard Geib, "Wächterrufe : Neue Gedichte von Johannes Hüll," Palatina (1874): 151.

in 1858, its best known folklorist also.^[145] More thorough in his examination of local culture than Riehl had been in Die Pfälzer , Becker also admired the democratic spirit of the Pfälzers more than had the monarchist Riehl—so much more, in fact, that the Bavarian establishment that had welcomed Riehl's work ignored Becker's. When Becker did finally decide to return to the region in 1868, he staked his fortunes on a literary journal, despite the Pfälzers' notorious indifference to the benefits of poetry for the better appreciation of life.^[146]

His faith in the eventual openness of Pfälzers to his plans was based on his faith in the essential goodness of the folk character, which was in turn the basis of his democratic politics. "All it would take," he confided to his son, "would be to offer the people something better out of their own house and yard, field and forest [than has up until now been available]: for the peasants, to depict their doings and desires engagingly, in an entertaining, descriptive, and instructive fashion, with humor and earnestness, lively and intelligible, and most of all, without learned pedantry.^[147] His offering was to be a low-priced weekly paper called Die Heimat . He went so far as to draw up the outline for a first issue and in 1878 sent it out to friends and potential patrons in the Pfalz. But despite his great enthusiasm ("traveling and working in the Pfalz would be my life," he wrote to a friend, "and one could make little more claim to happiness in life!"), the project failed to gain the support of the district president, Paul von Braun, and other high officials, whose patronage Becker's friends in the Pfalz thought to be crucial.^[148] "I see that he is also president in matters of taste, in the realm of ideas and intellectual undertakings!" wrote Becker, maddened that his potential supporters followed the judgment of the "all-prevailing" von Braun. "So it stands in the free-thinking, enlightened Pfalz!"^[149] When friends tried nevertheless to per-

[145] According to most accounts, Becker wrote the work as an entry for a royal contest for the best study of a Bavarian folk group, supposedly "won" by W. H. Riehl with his Die Pfälzer . The actual existence of this contest remains dubious and may have been no more than a public way of rewarding Riehl for a study he had been working on for years and of which King Max was fully informed. Becker's work more probably was commissioned as a travel guide. See Oskar Bischoff, introduction to the new edition of Becker's Die Pfalz und die Pfälzer (Landau/Pfalz, 1983), p. x.

[146] He often complained bitterly, for example, of the lack of appreciation his own works received there—a past neglect for which time has certainly made up. See Oskar Bischoff, "August Beckers Leben und Schaffen," in the 1983 edition of Die Pfalz und die Pfälzer , p. xxi; A. Schmitt, "August Beckers Leben und Werke," Pfälzisches Museum. Monatsschrift für heimatliche Literatur und Kunst, Geschichte und Volkskunde (hereafter cited as PM ) 19 (1902).

[147] Karl August Becker, "August Beckers 'Heimat' blieb Projekt. Stehen wir heute vor den gleichen Schwierigkeiten?" Pfalz und Pfälzer: Monatshefte für Kultur, Heimatpflege und Unterhaltung (hereafter cited as PP ) 1 (April 1950): 2.

[148] Ibid.

[149] Ibid.

suade him to move to the Pfalz, he replied: "My homesickness is not so great that I would take on the role of toady."

As Becker's final remarks reveal, the challenge implicit in the Heimatliterary efforts of both himself and Palatina was not so much to the politics of the National Liberals or to the religion of the Protestants as simply to the influence of the Honoratioren over all matters of local importance. Religious and political differences certainly informed that challenge, but in the case of Heimat activities they were less important than the mere fact of a narrow elite's unwillingness to give broader play to the expressions of local patriotism. After the passions of unification died down, the question became one of who was to have charge of the Pfälzer identity: under whose auspices its castles would be visited, its mountains climbed, its ruins excavated, its history investigated, its forests and villages extolled. Patronage, not ideology, was at stake.

In 1880, the paths to local cultural success still led through, if not to, the Protestant notables, the Bavarian state, and the Historical Association of the Pfalz. But the claims of the Historical Association and the notables to represent something that transcended the bounds of both their essential regionality and their social exclusivity would be undermined in the next decades of unrelenting popularization of the Heimat theme. It in turn followed on the heels of social, economic, and political changes that seriously weakened the traditional political practices of the notables. By 1880 the notables' position was questioned not just by the claims of the petty bourgeois and working classes but by the very existence of political conflict. Their unity was always more social than political, and in the last decades of the nineteenth century conflict over economic issues led to the attenuation of notables' power and prestige, particularly on the level of national politics but also regionally.^[150]

The Historical Association bore an ambiguous relation to the political and economic changes the Pfalz underwent after 1870. On the one hand, its removal from any explicitly political realm protected it from specifically political disruptions. But on the other, it still represented the triumph of a particular vision of Pfälzer identity, stripped of its revolutionary origins and tamed into assimilation with a nonliberal, nondemocratic, and certainly non-revolutionary national state. In fact, its articulation of local and national identity was too closely bound to the prestige of its members and to the legacy of Pfälzer pacification to protect it from either challenge or change. Although the association continued to promote the history of the Pfalz and even began to broaden its audience beyond the highly educated and prop-

[150] Blackbourn, "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," p. 261.

ertied notables, its monopoly over regional traditions was no longer absolute. Its position may have remained dominant and its academic preeminence uncontested, but these other associations, other publications, and other people all contributed to a transformation, one that would reach its climax in the two decades before the war, of the once-guarded landscape of Heimat.