Three
The Heimat Movement

In 1916, while the distant boom of German shells exploding at Verdun was heard in the classrooms of Kaiserslautern, the local teacher and historian Hermann Schreibmüller reflected on the rebirth of local consciousness that had taken place in the Pfalz over the past twenty-five years: "All that embodies the nature of the people was carefully protected or newly revived: people sang the old songs of the Volk ; the old costumes, dances, and customs . . . were brought back to life, and outside in the forests everything was reanimated, the historic festivals of the people filled with fresh life."^[1] Taken together, these manifestations of Pfälzer Heimatsinn , or feeling for Heimat, amounted to a cultural phenomenon extensive enough to be called a movement; indeed, in the retrospective glance of Schreibmüller there was little question but that his subject was the "Heimat movement." Building on local traditions new and old, this movement devised new forms of celebrating the locality, and it involved unprecedented numbers of provincial people in the effort. It transformed people's conceptions of nature, of folklore, of history, and of localness—or Heimat—itself. By the fall of 1914 the celebrating had to end, but for the many thousands who had been drawn into the Heimat movement, their new Heimat sensibilities survived as the most intimate expression of their national loyalties.

The Heimat movement came together in the decades preceding the First World War amid significant changes in the economic and political landscape of the Pfalz, and it in turn affected cultural and natural landscapes, making

[1] Schreibmüller, Bayern und Pfalz , p. 62.

them conform to the current needs of Pfälzers. It was above all else a popular movement. Its associations claimed not hundreds but thousands of members; its journals boasted not of their erudition but of their circulation; and its most characteristic events were not ceremonial dinners but large public festivals and parades. In content also, the Heimat movement promoted a characterization of the German Pfälzer that relied on common folksiness. Pfälzer identity, the theme on which the Heimat movement devised so many variations, thus continued, as it had from its beginnings, to denote a "consciousness of community" attuned more to changes in that community than to the eternal call of a folk character. Advancing industrialization, commercialization, and urbanization all left their marks on the Pfälzer sense of community, as a fragmented but undoubtedly more dynamic society broke open the cramped consensus of Honoratioren hegemony.

By 1882, industry had begun to overtake agriculture in its share of the regional product in the Pfalz. Agriculture continued in importance, but its decline was hurried along by the small size of most businesses, their reliance on intensive labor, and their slowness to adopt new technologies.^[2] In the 1890s, a number of crises overtook formerly prosperous sectors of local agriculture: wine production fell victim to vine diseases; tobacco and grain production suffered from foreign competition.^[3] Politically, agricultural decline in the region pushed the small producer toward the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte), a movement that marked the first sign of crisis in the National Liberal party. Meanwhile, poor Catholic farmers in the southern Pfalz were mobilizing for the first time under the auspices of the Center party. Both political tendencies suggested the inability of the party of the Honoratioren to come to grips with economic change in the region.

The rise of population in the region as a whole, and in its cities in particular, was another challenge to which the established party proved unequal. Between 1871 and 1914 the population of the Pfalz nearly doubled, despite ongoing emigration, with the growth of the eight largest cities in the region accounting for over half of that total rise.^[4] These cities, not the declining small towns, would provide the mass support for the turn-of-the-century Heimat movement. They also were home to a new Pfälzer working class and, along with it, an increasingly powerful Social Democratic movement, which

[2] Zink and Mang, Wirtschaftsleben , pp. 126–27.

[3] In the region around Neustadt, the center of the Pfälzer wine industry, the volume of wine produced dropped 45 percent in one decade—from 214,287 hectoliters in 1890 to 100,240 in 1898 (Bräunche, Parteien und Reichstagswahlen , p. 33), and the number of independent tobacco growers in the Pfalz declined from nearly 20,000 in 1880 to a little under 7,000 in 1900 (ibid., p. 34). See also Zink and Mang, Wirtschaftsleben , pp. 132, 149.

[4] Between 1871 and 1905, the population grew from 624,619 to 885,833; see Theodor Zink, Deutsche Geschichte auf heimatkundlicher Grundlage (Kaiserslautern, 1909), 1:302; Willi Alter, "Die Bevölkerung der Pfalz," in Alter, Pfalzatlas 1:188; Zink and Mang, Wirtschaftsleben , p. 279.

spread to the Pfalz from Baden in the 1860s and 1870s, won its first major electoral victory in 1898, and by 1912 had become the single largest party in the region, with a full third of the popular vote.^[5] The industrial proletariat that voted for Social Democrat candidates grew not only in the region's few cities, but also in small towns and semirural areas, according to the decentralized and diverse nature of Pfälzer industrialization.^[6] This diffusion probably attenuated the social dislocation usually associated with industrialization. In any case, neither the industrial workers nor a new middle class of office workers fit easily into the old electoral strategies of the National Liberals. By 1900 the party found itself in search of an organization, a program, and, most desperately, a constituency.^[7]

The problem faced by Pfälzer National Liberalism after 1890 was common to all parties that had relied on the shared secrets of Honoratiorenpolitik. In the Pfalz as in the rest of Germany, voters began to express in their electoral choices not ties of patronage but religious, economic, or ethnic identities.^[8] The Pfälzer National Liberals tried to adjust to the new situation, but for every alliance they managed to forge with the Agrarian League there was a counteralliance between Catholics and Social Democrats. And when the agrarian strategy of the party fell part in 1904, efforts by Young Liberals to create a stronger, more centralized party structure, one responsive to public opinion and ideologically coherent, met with resistance from an old guard, who disliked the idea of entering the political mass market.^[9]

Like it or not, though, the nature of the political scene had changed since

[5] Schneider, "Anfänge der sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung," pp. 120–22, 149, 165–66, 182–189; see also Erich Schneider, "Franz Josef Ehrhardt," in Pfälzer Lebensbilder , ed. Kurt Baumann (Speyer, 1964), 1:273–319; Wolfgang Hartwich, "Die Ergebnisse der Reichstagsund Bundestagswahlen von 1890 bis 1969," in Alter, Pfalzatlas 2:665.

[6] By Frank Tipton's scale of regional differentiation, the Pfalz lagged behind much of the Rhineland in its industrialization but was close to the national average throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century; see his Regional Variations in the Economic Development of Germany During the Nineteenth Century (Middletown, Conn., 1976), pp. 3–17, 200. See also Schneider, "Anfänge der sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung," p. 20; Bräunche, Parteien und Reichstagswahlen , p. 35; Zink and Mang, Wirtschaftsleben , pp. 226, 230–31; Kermann, "Industrialisierung der Pfalz," pp. 280–304.

[7] Dan White sees this problem of representation as central to the National Liberal party as a whole; see his Splintered Party , p. 3. On the rising proportion of office workers as compared to the self-employed, see Zink and Mang, Wirtschaftsleben , p. 227. For definitions of the so-called new Mittelstand, see Vondung, "Zur Lage der Gebildeten," pp. 30–31; and Geoff Eley, "The Wilhelmine Right: How It Changed," in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany , ed. Richard Evans (London, 1978), p. 118.

[8] Stanley Suval, Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), p. 8.

[9] Bräunche, Parteien und Reichstagswahlen , pp. 83–85; Nipperdey, Organisation der deutschen Parteien , pp. 97–101. For the Young Liberals, "ideological coherence" meant a renewed insistence on the dangers of political Catholicism and a revival of the Kulturkampf spirit within the National Liberal party (Bräunche, Parteien und Reichstagswahlen , pp. 109–115).

unification. Elections, voters, campaigns, slogans, and rallies all came to play a much greater part in public life. The days when candidates could be chosen and, to all intents and purposes, elected during a cozy evening of wine and conversation at the estates of the Bottle Barons were past. Such influential circles of acquaintance still existed, but they no longer constituted the main forum of politics. Indeed, not just political life but associational life of all kinds expanded enormously in the late 1880s and 1890s.^[10] Societies of all sizes, classes, and purposes proliferated, as both the working class and the new middle class of industry and commerce caught the associational mania. Women, too, were more involved in associational life at the turn of the century, not just in their own clubs but in some of the older, predominantly male organizations as well.^[11]

The Heimat movement accounted for part of this expansion and democratization of public life in the Pfalz around the turn of the century, in effect rescuing German localism from the collapsing edifice of the localist political culture of the Honoratioren. Nevertheless, how and why the Heimat movement participated in trends toward urban living, industrial employment, and consumerism is not at first obvious. It celebrated local diversity simultaneous with the consolidation of central rule and the development of a genuinely national culture. It gloried in nature at a time when the city was changing the landscape, in ruins when new buildings were springing up everywhere, in handicrafts when factory work predominated. The Heimat movement reflected the reality of centralization, urbanization, and industrialization by reacting against each one of them. But even that is too simple a characterization of its contemporaneity, for its undoubted nostalgia for older ways of life and smaller communities could go hand in hand with an enthusiastic receptivity to present glories, to big, vital cities, to technological wonders, and, most of all, to national prestige. What appears to the historian as inconsistency—indeed, incoherence—was to the participants themselves simply patriotism. Whatever could be called "Pfälzer," whatever could reveal "Pfälzerness," whatever could enhance the Pfälzer reputation in Germany as a whole, was of interest to the Heimat movement. And if such solipsism seems somewhat childish, one should consider that the real enemies against which the Heimat movement struggled were homogeneity and anonymity. Insofar as one had to embrace them both to love modernity, Heimat enthusiasts were indeed antimodernists. But ambivalence would be a more accurate description of their stance, for while Heimat enthusiasts were

[10] In Nuremberg, for instance, the number of registered associations—which did not even begin to account for all the informal Kränzchen, Stammtische , and the like—doubled each decade, growing from 445 in 1880 to almost 2,000 by the turn of the century; see Meyer, "Vereinswesen," p. 265.

[11] Ibid., pp. 69, 259–61.

essentially content with their times, they were also determined—whether through nature, folk life, or history—to assert their own identity.

The Pfälzers of the Heimat movement set out the reclaim the nature of their region with the zeal and high-mindedness of their contemporaries the Arctic explorers. A small botanical and zoological association known as Pollichia had been in existence since 1847, investigating and classifying the local flora and fauna; yet the celebration of nature characteristic of the Heimat movement owed more to sentiment than to science. In a late flowering of romantic sensibilities, Pfälzers found in nature enduring testimony to Pfälzer distinctiveness. And happily for those wishing more than spiritual sustenance, they found in nature the basis for a new Pfälzer prosperity as well. The promotion of tourism would become an essential part of localist efforts to take over nature in the name of the Pfalz. Tourism and romanticism combined to make the out-of-doors into a public space, equally infused with local patriotism and national pride.

The pathbreakers in the naturalization of Heimat and the commercialization of nature were groups of civic promoters called Verschönerungsvereine , or beautification societies. Although the activities of such societies, which usually concentrated on restoring historic ruins or marking paths from ruin to town, had something in common with the interests of the Historical Association, the beautifiers tended to regard castles as decorations on the landscape.^[12] By fixing up the local ruin, they hoped to enhance the reputation of their particular town, strengthen its civic pride, and improve its appearance and recreational offerings. They also intended their activities to translate more or less directly into money for local businesses, particularly in areas of declining economic prosperity.^[13]

According to one (albeit partisan) estimate, fifty-two Pfälzer beautification societies were founded between 1872 and 1900, mostly in small towns; by 1898 they had managed to spend nearly 26,000 marks on path markings, maps, parklands, and castle maintenance.^[14] In 1891, the beautification societies made a combined effort to articulate what it was they were trying to

[12] They often named themselves after their local ruin or natural attraction. Thus the Trifels Verein of Annweiler was named for the imperial castles, and the Drachenfels Club of Bad Dürkheim was named for striking local rock formations.

[13] Bad Dürkheim, for instance, lay in the heart of the wine-producing district of the Vorderpfalz and had been a thriving center for the spa trade until lingering resentments over the Franco-Prussian War arrested the flow of French tourists and patients (Zink and Mang, Wirtschaftsleben , p. 217). The founders of its Drachenfels Club hoped to stimulate local pleasure in the surrounding sights and attract visitors from outside the Pfalz. See August Wilde, "60-jähriges Jubiläum des Drachenfelsclub," Die Pfalz am Rhein: Touristen-Zeitung 16 (June 1933): 285.

[14] Christian Mehlis, Touristische Erfahrungen in Rheinlande (Mannheim, 1900), p. 23; review of the book in PM 17 (1900): 62–63, 20–23; Christian Mehlis, Von den Burgen der Pfalz (Freiburg, 1902), pp. 97–100. Neither Ludwigshafen nor Speyer had such clubs.

do. The result, the so-called Landstuhler Theses, was hailed by its creators as the embodiment of a new "touristic principle."^[15] More than just a guide for the "systematic" development of local tourism, the "touristic principle" required of those who professed it an attachment to patriotic ideals. The beautification movement, according to Christian Mehlis, its self-appointed spokesman, was inseparable from the nationalist movement; hence, what could be more proper than to "beautify" nature by building a Moltke Tower and a Bismarck Tower atop the region's highest mountain?^[16] For Mehlis the revisionist, the Hambach Festival of 1832 had been "the first identifiable work of beautification of a Pfälzer castle": not only had the participants tidied up the place in preparation for the demonstration, but, most important, they had dedicated themselves to the cause of "a unified Germany, proud and free"—a dream finally fulfilled in 1871.^[17]

Mehlis also called the beautification movement a popular movement, "pushed forward from above and below, by princes and poets, by crown and people."^[18] Although wrong about the princes, whose support existed only in his wishful thinking, Mehlis was in one sense right about the people.^[19] Beautification had embodied the impulse to make local nature accessible and attractive to the public at large, and although initiated by small-town grandees, its popularity inevitably spread downward on the social scale as more

[15] Mehlis, Touristische Erfahrungen , p. 22.

[16] Mehlis claimed this was one of the first Bismarck Towers in all Germany (ibid., p. 20). It was also said to be possible to see Sedan from the top of the mountain on a clear day, a rare enough occurrence that the assertion may never have been tested.

[17] Ibid., p. 90. For Mehlis, ludicrously, Hambach was important not as the site of protests against Bavaria but as the expression of the long-standing interest of Maximilian I and his son Ludwig I in castles, an interest that continued after the Hambach "festivities" ended (p. 88).

[18] Ibid., p. 89.

[19] Mehlis was a uniquely colorful (which is to say disreputable) figure amongst the conventionally proper cheerleaders of Heimat patriotism. A poem written in 1910 by Paul Münch, a comic writer in the local dialect, gives a hint at the nature of his dubious reputation, referring to Mehlis's discovery of Noah's Ark in the Pfalz (Paul Münch, "For die Inweihung vum historisch Museum," PW 10, Sondernummer 2 [Spring 1910]: 85):

Die Arche Noah is noch do,
Nadeerlich alt und ganz verbo',
Am Dummerschberg vor Jahre schun
Hat se de Mehlis ufgefunn,
Un so e Mann, der weess geweiss
Ob das die Arch Noah is. . . .

Lukas Grünenwald, prominent Pfälzer scholar, purportedly said that Mehlis had undertaken the excavations "for himself" and predicted, sarcastically, "that he would brilliantly answer back to every criticism and test." A recent assessment grants him credit for having made Roman ruins and artifacts popular, "if often with inadequate expertise, doubtful methods, and meager means" (100 Jahre Museum , Festgabe of the MHVP [1969], pp. xviii, xix). Mehlis fell afoul of Bavaria in the 1920s, when he seems to have consorted with the French occupiers in a mild sort of way.

people took advantage of the new paths and promenades in the landscape. An important step in that process of popularization came in 1900, when the beautification societies of the Pfalz worked with a newspaper editor in Zwei-brücken, Eugen Croissant, to establish a periodical called Der Pfälzerwald (The Pfälzer Forest). A "Weekly Journal for Tourists, Bicyclists, and Travelers in the Pfalz and Its Surroundings," the paper appeared during the summer months as a free supplement to the local daily newspaper. Under the heading "What We Want," editor Croissant outlined a program to transform the collective image of the region: "Our glorious Rheinpfalz, with its vine-garlanded Haardt, its refreshing forests, its lovely valleys and castle-crested heights, deserves far more attention and recognition . . . than has heretofore been its portion. . . . The Pfälzers themselves know their own Pfalz too little, and the charms of its landscape are for the most part still unknown to outsiders." The beautification societies, with the aid of the "propagandistic tool" of the newspaper, would spread the name and enhance the beauties of "our glorious Pfälzerland."^[20]

But the societies themselves did not end up carrying on the task so confidently proclaimed by Croissant. After 1900 they faded into insignificance, in part the victims of population shifts that took people away from the small towns and into the region's few cities.^[21] Ludwigshafen was by 1900 the largest of these, having grown from nothing in 1844 to a population of eighty-five thousand in 1881 on the strength of the phenomenally expansive chemical industry.^[22] There in November 1902, a group of successful businessmen—railroad employees, chemists, bank tellers, and city administrators—announced by public advertisement in the city newspaper their intention to form a hiking and convivial club. On November 27, the founding assembly took place in a large city restaurant, with one hundred people in attendance.^[23] Statutes were drawn up, officers elected, a name chosen, and within a month the new Pfälzerwald Verein (Pfälzer Forest Association) had already enrolled three hundred members—as many as all the beautification societies combined could claim.

The Pfälzerwald Verein would become the Pfalz's Heimat association par

[20] "Was wir wollen," PW 1 (4 May 1900): 2.

[21] Total membership probably never reached much more than 340 (PW 1 [28 September 1900]: 3). Another reason for their decline was that the societies lost their hold on castle ruins, which in 1907 came under the care of the Konservatorium der Kunstdenkmale und Altertümer Bayern, an official organization of the Bavarian government. See Wolfgang Maria Schmid, Anleitung zur Denkmalpflege im Königreich Bayern (Munich, 1897), pp. 14–15; and "Denkmalpflege in Bayern: Sitzung in München," PM 24 (1907).

[22] Because of its rapid growth after 1871 the economic historians of the Pfalz, Zink and Mang, called it an "American-style city" (Wirtschaftsleben , 255–57). See also Bräunche, Parteien und Reichstagswahlen , pp. 35–36; Schneider, "Anfänge der sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung," p. 21; Zink and Mang, Wirtschaftsleben , p. 240.

[23] "Ersten Jahresbericht des Pfälzerwald Vereins," PW 5 (8 February 1904): 2–3.

excellence, taking over the projects and the propaganda of the small-town beautifiers.^[24] Its original statement of purpose pledged its members not only to the promotion of practical programs like hiking, conservation, and tourist advertising but, more ambiguously and ambitiously, to the cultivation of "Heimat sensibilities" as well.^[25] From organizing day-trippers to "serving the Pfalz," from a Wanderklub to a Heimatverein , the Pfälzerwald Verein had evolved within its first month into an association with an explicitly moral and communal mission, aimed particularly at city dwellers. Cities, declared a club founder at the first general meeting, provided the opportunity for work, education, and human contact, but unfortunately they also caused "nervousness" and lung diseases. The speaker, railroad clerk Alber Grimmeisen, believed that "there live[d] in every human heart, consciously or unconsciously, a joy in the beauties and eternal freshness of nature"; such joy drove people out into "God's garden" to "seek rest and recovery away from the pressures of daily work."^[26]

The appeal of this combination of civic and outdoor activity proved immediate and widespread. By the end of 1903 the Pfälzerwald Verein had two thousand members, over half of whom were from Ludwigshafen and Mannheim.^[27] By the end of 1904 there were three thousand members in sixteen chapters; a decade later, nearly seventeen thousand in over one hundred thirty chapters, not just in Pfälzer towns, but in many German cities, and even in Paris, New York, and San Francisco.^[28] By far the largest Heimat association in the region, it was also one of the largest associations of any kind in the Pfalz, and certainly the largest specifically Pfälzer organization.^[29] As its chairman, Oberforstrat Karl Albrecht von Ritter, observed in 1906, the Pfälzerwald Verein, like the city of Ludwigshafen itself, had grown with unprecedented speed to unimagined proportions.^[30]

Membership in the Verein required neither education, social position, nor wealth, but simply the desire to do one's walking and traveling in the company of others and to devote some of one's time to community affairs. The

[24] Whereas I use the English term for the more generic "Historischer Verein," for the Pfälzerwald Verein I retain the German title in order to preserve the aura of the "Pfälzerwald" itself.

[25] "Die Pflege des Heimatsinnes": see Heinrich Grass, "25 Jahre Pfälzerwald Verein: Gründungsgeschichte," Wanderbuch des Pfälzerwald Vereins (hereafter cited as Wanderbuch ) (1928): 40.

[26] PW 5 (8 February 1904): 1.

[27] There were also chapters in Kaiserslautern, Bergzabern, Landau, Neustadt, Kirchheimbolanden, Edenkoben, Bad Dürkheim, and Grünstadt (ibid., p. 3).

[28] "Zusammenschluß der auswärtigen Pfälzer," Des Pfälzers Heimat in Wort und Bild: Ein Heimatblatt für Ausland 1 (1910): 33.

[29] The Volksverein für Katholische Deutschland, for instance, had by 1913 more members in the Pfalz, but it was a national organization, not one specifically devoted to the Pfalz.

[30] Report of the steering committee of the Pfälzerwald Verein, PW 7 (15 June 1906): 127. An Oberforstrat was a high-ranking official in the Bavarian forest administration.

great majority of the membership came from the petty bourgeoisie, particularly the new white-collar workers of the cities, although some factory workers became involved through their employers.^[31] While the Verein actively recruited women, its enthusiasm for their participation in its activities did not extend to electing any to positions of even minor authority.^[32] Catholics, Protestants, and Jews all seem to have been represented. Among the founders, for instance, were a Catholic priest, a Protestant clerk, and a Jewish businessman.

To some extent, then, the Verein's egalitarian claim to exist for all Pfälzers, regardless of rank, confession, or sex, was justified.^[33] The inspirational but casual "Wald-Heil" with which members greeted one another consciously echoed the "Gut-Heil" of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn's gymnastic movement. Members were known as Wäldler or Wäldlerinnen , and nicknames abounded in reports of Verein hikes and committee meetings. At the large celebrations of the Verein, strangers could even use the familiar Du with one another. On the face of it, the Pfälzerwald Verein offered a real alternative to the formality and status-consciousness of organizations like the Historical Association.

Nevertheless, the Verein managed to give rank its due. The Honoratioren retained a certain priority in the association, even if its large size and petty-bourgeois membership contrasted sharply with smaller, more exclusive clubs. Its central leadership showed the persistence of the deferential arrangements that no longer characterized its local organizations.^[34] The first chairman, Anton Fasig, was a Geheimer Kommerzienrat , a title of honor granted by the government to particularly prominent businessmen. After Fasig retired, the position devolved on the top forestry official in the regional government, a practice that paralleled the Historical Association's honoring of the district president with its chairmanship.^[35] Notables contributed in

[31] In particular, the Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF) contributed both money and members to the Verein. Workers who were members of the Social Democratic party tended to have their own Social Democratic hiking organizations. See Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture (New York, 1986), pp. 64–65.

[32] In the words of the secretary of the Verein, "It is most gratifying that our members, above all the ladies, whom we see today in nearly every calling and can admire on every playing field, also honor the efforts of the Pfälzerwald Verein by their high participation" ("Vereins-nachrichten," PW 10 [1 April 1900]: 40).

[33] See, e.g., the encomium on its twenty-fifth birthday, which emphasized particularly its classlessness, its quality of being a true "Volksverein," in "25 Jahre Pfälzerwald Verein," PM–PH 45/24 (1928): 49.

[34] See the listing of the steering committee and chairmen of the local chapters, in the Wanderbuch (1907): 1–2. In the local chapters, about half the chairmen were of the educated upper middle class (Bildungsbürgertum ) and half from the lower middle class.

[35] L. Hartmann, "Der Pfälzer und das Wandern," in Pfalz-Bayerischer Heimgarten 1919–1920 , ed. Bayerischer Landesverein für Heimatschutz (Munich, 1919), p. 96; "Karl Albrecht von Ritter: 50-jährige Dienst Jubiläum," PW 8 (15 February 1907): 11.

traditionally paternalistic ways to the Verein, lending their names and patronage to its activities.^[36] Academics, like the geologist Daniel Häberle and the philologist Albert Becker, found in the Pfälzerwald Verein a broad and deferential audience for their work and more recognition than strictly academic circles had to offer them.

But deference always mixed with equality in the constitution and social norms of the Pfälzerwald Verein. Most voluntary associations in Germany had a more or less homogeneous social composition: in a town of moderate size, it would not have been uncommon to have many different singing groups, for instance, each with members from distinctly different social backgrounds.^[37] Yet throughout the Pfalz there was really only one hiking club, and as a consequence its members came from a wide range of social classes. Moreover, those of higher social rank who participated in the Pfälzerwald Verein were in fact adapting themselves to a new kind of association, one with its own, more democratic standards. As in politics, where even the National Liberals came to accept some degree of large-scale organization and broad voter participation, so too in civic and cultural affairs democratic standards began to prevail. Becker and Häberle, the scholars in the crowd, served ultimately as popularizers of ethnography, geography, and history. Similarly, Heinrich Kohl, the wealthy art patron, affected the dress of a simple outdoorsman in all his official photographs for the publications of the Verein. Most important, however, the activities to which the Verein was pledged, including the cultivation of Heimat sensibilities, all had an essentially inclusive, popular character. They reached out to draw people into the Pfälzerwald circle and win them over to its concerns. Where the Historical Association of the Pfalz had been content to preserve, the Pfälzerwald Verein wanted to convert. Activism contrasted to academic reserve, thousands of members to hundreds.

Even though the Pfälzerwald Verein soon expanded into the realms of history and folklore, it derived its name and its sense of purpose from nature—specifically, Pfälzer nature. The chief activity of the Verein always remained its sponsorship of hikes, and the monthly club-sponsored Ausflug , members agreed, was the key to the Verein's unity and progress.^[38] Club hikes would begin at a prearranged hour at the train station and, once in the countryside, follow paths laid out by foresters or (better for fine views) by the local beautification societies, with which the Pfälzerwald Verein cooperated

[36] For instance, Verein founder Heinrich Kohl was a patron of local artists both through the Verein and outside of it; see obituary of Kohl, Wanderbuch (1937): 6–7.

[37] Meyer, "Vereinswesen," p. 259.

[38] Report of the steering committee. PW 7 (15 February 1906): 14; schedules of walks, held even in the months of January and February, and reports on the weather conditions that prevailed on any given day were reported in Der Pfälzerwald each month.

in path marking, bench making, tower building, and nature conserving.^[39] Yet by far the most important contribution of the Pfälzerwald Verein was in filling the paths, the benches, the towers, and the nature with people. The Ludwigshafen chapter alone sent out eighteen hundred people to the Pfälzerwald in 1906, and nearly two thousand in 1907.^[40] In the larger towns, the average number of participants on each monthly outing was about one hundred fifty; the smaller chapters could mobilize about fifty.^[41] New members were recruited on these occasions, and old members were rewarded for outstanding records of participation with gold medals or an official Pfälzerwald Verein walking stick. (Again, these marks of distinction were both an imitation of and an egalitarian alternative to the awards and titles that marked one's position in society as a whole.) In 1908, the Verein extended its activities to school expeditions, combining pedagogy with the deep breathing of fresh air.^[42] The school hikes "awakened and maintained the feeling for Heimat among schoolchildren," while at the same time securing the loyalties of a future generation for the Verein itself.^[43]

The event that soon became the Verein's chief reason for being began as an "expedition," albeit a glorified one. The first so-called Gesamtausflug , or joint excursion, was held in 1906 in the south Pfälzer town of Bad Bergzabern. Over three thousand Wäldlers gathered on a Sunday, wandered around the town and into the surrounding hills, listened to speeches in the town square, ate, drank, and went back home.^[44] The event was repeated every year until the war, with increasing numbers of participants.^[45] Town councils vied for the honor—and profitability—of hosting the extravaganza, and the Verein used it to increase its own reputation and membership.^[46]

Certainly the leaders of the Pfälzerwald Verein found the explanation for the rapid growth and widespread popularity of their organization in the

[39] Report of the steering committee, PW 5 (8 February 1904): 3; "Wegebezeichnung im Pfälzerwald und Ausschuß für Wegebezeichnung," Wald-Heil! Mitteilungen der Pfälzerwald-Vereins der Ortsgruppe Ludwigshafen-Mannheim (hereafter cited as WH ), no. 32 (1919): 6.

[40] Report in PW 7 (15 December 1906): 230; PW 8 (15 December 1907): 189.

[41] PW 7 (15 February 1906): 14.

[42] In 1910, the Ludwigshafen chapter proudly led the first ever Mädchenwanderung , an expedition of four hundred schoolgirls to Heidelberg; before that time, school hikes had involved only boys. See PW 11 (1 August 1910): 134.

[43] Report of the main hiking committee PW 9 (15 April, 1908): 53 and 10 (15 July 1909): 113. For a complete account of the school expeditions, see L. Hartmann, "Jugendwandern," Wanderbuch (1928): 53–59.

[44] An account of the first Gesamtausflug may be found in PW 7 (15 May 1906): 93–95.

[45] The largest, in 1911, took place in Bad Dürkheim with over twelve thousand in attendance.

[46] In 1906, a debate over whether to hold the event in Edenkoben or Zweibrücken was decided in favor of the latter, despite vigorous lobbying by Edenkoben businessmen, because Heinrich Kohl thought that the Verein needed to expand into the Westrich. See the report of the main hiking committee in PW 7 (15 November 1906): 224.

special relationship to nature that such extravaganzas exemplified. Albert Grimmeisen, the first secretary of the association, believed that the great popularity of Wandersport revealed every man's "joy in hiking in God's free nature" as well as a "healthy reaction of the spirit [Gemüt ] against the victorious drive of intellect and technology."^[47] As the poet laureate and cofounder of the Verein, Fritz Claus, pronounced: "Hundreds of times have we felt the great importance of our beautiful Pfälzer Forest for the soul, the heart, and the spirit [Geist, Herz und Gemüt ]."^[48] The programs of the Pfälzerwald Verein, wrote Grimmeisen, "correspond to the wishes and tendencies of our times."^[49] They brought the city dweller out of workplace and cramped apartment into the open air; they offered rest and recovery from the prevailing nervousness and strain of urban living.^[50]

And yet, one would by no means do justice to the "timeliness" of the Pfälzerwald Verein if one viewed it simply as a romantic flight from the city into nature, an anti-urban, antitechnological, and anti-intellectual reaction against the modern world. Certainly a dissatisfaction with machines, cities, and factories, as well as with the routines of urban life, found expression in the Pfälzerwald Verein, but it was the dissatisfaction of people who desired to leave the cities once in a while, not abandon them altogether. Although the fact of the association's largely urban membership might be interpretable as a sign of deep resistance to urbanization in the Pfalz—and Germany—it more likely represented the particular needs of city dwellers for a recreational outlet compatible with their jobs and their way of life. The rise of the Pfälzerwald Verein is inconceivable without the existence both of the weekend and of leisure, definitions of time that emerged only in contrast to the working week and working time.^[51] The Verein organized the weekend for those who had one. In an important sense, then, it represented an urban, not an antiurban, phenomenon. Even its poets were engineers, and its single greatest patron was the largest business in the region.^[52]

Moreover, the approach of the Verein to the out-of-doors revealed far more careful planning than romantic fancy. Grimmeisen himself attributed the association's success as much to the "systematic and well-planned hikes"

[47] Report of the general convention, PW 8 (15 February 1907): 10.

[48] Speech at a Gesamtausflug PW 8 (15 May 1907): 83.

[49] Report of the general convention PW 8 (15 February 1907): 10.

[50] Wanderbuch (1928): 26.

[51] For a treatment of these issues in Germany, see Gerhard Huch, ed., Sozialgeschichte der Freizeit: Untersuchungen zum Wandel der Alltagskultur in Deutschland (Wuppertal, 1980). The focus of most of these essays is the regulation of workers' lives through recreational activity that took them out of the beer halls and into atmospheres more amenable to moral edification as well as social control (like the exercise hall).

[52] BASF gave 100 marks yearly to the Verein; see biographical notices of H. Kiefer, railroad engineer and Heimat poet, in PM–PH 46/25 (1929): 58–59; and of Karl Räder in WH , no. 30 (1919): 7.

and "goal-oriented organization" as to man's deep longing for nature.^[53] Train schedules were printed weekly during the summer months in the journal Der Pfälzerwald . Every expedition was mapped out and even rehearsed ahead of time; weather forecasts were consulted, and maps and "hygienic tips" distributed.^[54] People were also instructed on how to behave in the out-of-doors. Whatever they might write about man's instinctual understanding of nature, the Verein's organizers assumed his ignorance. They cautioned hikers not to litter and not to carve their names in trees, under penalty of public humiliation in the pages of Der Pfälzerwald . Nor should hikers break off branches, pick flowers, or otherwise disturb nature's own order. Walkers "with even the least claim to education" should indeed condemn any behavior showing "such a great lack of any feeling for order."^[55]

The Pfälzerwald Verein also made important contributions to the organization and regulation of nature itself, which for all the forbearance of litterers was not entirely tidy. The ongoing construction of paths was the most important step toward conquering nature's contrariness. Benches, markers, and handrails further eased the transition from city to forest. Between 1903 and the war, the Pfälzerwald Verein and the beautification societies undertook several cartographic projects. These maps assured travelers that they would be as at home on the paths of the forest as on the city streets. When in 1913 the Bavarian government decided to begin a comprehensive remeasurement of the region, the Pfälzerwald Verein greeted the news with happy cries.^[56] Without the paths and the maps to guide the visitor to grottos, gulches, and mountaintops, wrote Lorenz Wappes, Verein chairman and ranking Pfälzer forestry official, the forests might just as well not exist.^[57]

Wappes's observation, sensible though it seems, must be read as a reflection of an essentially urban attitude toward the out-of-doors. Villagers and peasants had, after all, managed for centuries without the maps of the Pfälzerwald Verein or its hygienic hints. The Wäldlers were very far from being peasants, however they may have clothed themselves on festive occasions, and their nature was that of the tourist, not the farmer. From such a perspective, romantic effusions about God's garden were wholly compatible with the careful study of local train schedules. Indeed, what Grimmeisen referred to as the "timeliness" of the Pfälzerwald Verein derived not only from its compatibility with the routines, schedules, and mentalities of modern Germans but also from its self-created place within the structure of Pfälzer commerce.

[53] Report of the general convention, PW 8 (15 February 1907): 10.

[54] These tips included advice on what clothing to wear to avoid toothaches and earaches, catarrh, rheumatism, lung disease, and other likely (as well as unlikely) maladies that might result from hiking; see Fritz Hetz, "Hygienische Winke für Wanderer," PW 9 (10 May 1908).

[55] PW 7 (15 April 1906): 67; PW 9 (15 August 1905): 144.

[56] PW 10 (1 July 1909): 105.

[57] Wanderbuch (1928): 122.

From the beginning, the Verein's founders imagined for it a role in the development of tourism, an economic activity that in their opinion had been sadly neglected in the Pfalz. Their Main Committee on Commerce endeavored to attract tourists by placing advertisements for the Pfalz in newspapers all over Germany, printing picture postcards, and distributing travel brochures at tourist conventions.^[58] Committee meetings were taken up with questions of how to get the railroad directors to institute Sunday trains and tourist rates, or how to make Pfälzer hotels more elegant.^[59] Members were urged to invite cousins and colleagues to favorite Pfälzer haunts and to complain loudly about bad service in restaurants.

The extent of the Verein's success in stimulating tourism is difficult to gauge. The largest clientele for the hotels of the Pfalz was local, especially weekend visitors from Ludwigshafen and Mannheim. Tourist traffic to the local spas had never been the same since the Franco-Prussian War, and, one suspects, a Bad Gleisweiler or Bad Dürkheim would have had difficulty competing with a Bad Homburg, Marienbad, or Baden-Baden as these glamorous spots became accessible even to the burgher of moderate means.^[60] Nevertheless, the Pfälzerwald Verein, with a thoroughly modern complacency, had faith in the efficacy of a little advertising. The Pfalz, after all, had wine, and the Pfälzerwald Verein (despite its name) worked with vintner organizations to spread the reputation of this wine throughout Germany: "We value wine as the leading product of our blessed Heimat, and we are not ashamed to admit loudly that we love it."^[61] A purely commercial tourist bureau in Neustadt cooperated with the Verein in a joint tourist committee for the entire Pfalz, and Verein chapters in both Munich and Berlin were another crucial link in the dissemination of touristic propaganda. In 1911, the Pfälzerwald Verein represented the region at the enormous International Travel and Tourism Exhibition in Berlin. The term forester was taking on a whole new meaning.

If commerce could become a concern of Pfälzer nature-lovers, so could science and even technology. Albert Becker wrote in 1914 that "we have long yearned for a new deepening of life, for an ennobling of our pleasures, for a return to nature, without having to give up the sources and forms of our education."^[62] A poetic appreciation of nature did not, in other words, pre-

[58] These courses of action were determined as early as the first meeting in December of 1903; see Wanderbuch (1928): 40.

[59] See, e.g., PW 8 (15 February 1907): 20–21, on the Pfälzerwald Verein's set of standards for the restaurant trade, which included such recommendations as fresh fruit, cold butter, and clean linen.

[60] S. L. Bensusan, Some German Spas: A Holiday Record (London, 1925).

[61] WH , no. 18 (1919): 3.

[62] Transcript of lecture, in Albert Becker, Ziele und Aufgaben eines Heimatmuseums (Kaisers-lautern, 1914), p. 21.

clude a scientific one: indeed, the Verein magazine Der Pfälzerwald had as many articles on soil types and plant varieties as poems on the arrival of spring. Daniel Häberle, a professor of geology at Heidelberg University and an expert on the Pfalz, contributed regularly to Verein publications. His treatise Die natürlichen Landschaften der Rheinpfalz (The Natural Landscapes of the Rhenish Pfalz) was popular science at its local best; it was published, moreover, in the Pfälzerwald Verein's annual Hiking Handbook . Through its Committee on the Conservation of Nature, the Verein maintained an interest in up-to-date forestry methods.^[63] In 1906, the Verein and the Bavarian forestry administration together assembled a display of the varieties of Pfälzer wood for the Bavarian Exhibition of Agriculture, Industry, Commerce, and Art in Nuremberg.^[64] The Verein's building projects, finally, facilitated not only the admiration of nature but its exact measurement and study as well. Their most ambitious and highly touted scheme before the war was the construction of a weather station on the top of Kalmit Mountain.

Nor was the Pfälzerwald Verein alone in its simultaneously scientific and poetic representation of nature. The mixture characterized the treatment of nature in all Heimat textbooks, organizations, and periodicals and attested to both the comprehensiveness and the eclecticism of the Heimat synthesis. In Georg Baer's Die Pfalz am Rhein: Pfälzische Heimatkunde , for instance, a section on the geological, topographical, botanical, and zoological features of the region was interspersed with poetry on nature's beauties.^[65] In Bavaria, Heimatschutz —Heimat protection, that most vague of terms comprising everything from natural conservation to cultural promotion—included mountain railway building and rural electrification.^[66] Certainly the Heimat movement was romantic, but in its desire to find spiritual uplift in nature it did not reject science, technology, and rationality out of hand, but rather integrated them into its conception of the region.

The timetables, the rationality, and the business of the city shaped the Pfälzerwald Verein's discovery of nature, and to the city the Verein eventually came back, in a curious return trip of reconciliation and new appreciation.

[63] Lorenz Wappes, for instance, was not only the leading advocate of "modern" forestry practices in the Pfalz but also the author of an article, "Die aesthetische Bedeutung des Waldes" (reprinted in Theodor Künkele et al., eds., Festschrift zum 90. Geburtstag von Lorenz Wappes [Munich, 1950]), that took a scientific approach to the preservation of the natural beauty of the forest.

[64] "Der Pfälzerwald in der Bayerisches Jubiläums Landes-, Industrie-, Gewerbe-, und Kunstausstellung," PW 7 (15 May 1906): 93.

[65] Georg Baer, Die Pfalz am Rhein: Pfälzische Heimatkunde (Nuremberg, 1915). The inclusion of technological advance in the history of the Heimat was evident in Theodor Zink's Deutsche Geschichte auf heimatkundlicher Grundlage , vol. 1.

[66] "Der Deutsche Bund Heimatschutz und seine Landesvereine," in Der deutsche Heimatschutz: Ein Rückblick und Ausblick , ed. Gesellschaft der Freunde des deutschen Heimatschutzes (Munich, 1930), p. 200.

The homecoming took place gradually, but certainly by 1910 the city had become as much a part of the Pfälzer landscape as the vine-covered hills. In 1906, for instance, the Verein sponsored a citywide Parkfest in Ludwigshafen, which included a harbor tour of the industrial ports. In 1908, the annual business meeting in Ludwigshafen took the form of a festivity open to all members. Verein poet Eugen Croissant wrote an ode to the city, "Willkom-men in Ludwigshafen," that could be sung to the popular melody "Strömt herbei, Ihr Völkerscharen":^[67] "Not the sunny vineyard gardens," ran the lyrics, "but still with wondrous gifts."^[68] In the same year, the annual extravaganza was held in Lambrecht, an unremarkable, indeed somewhat ugly, industrial town on the Rhine plain; the following year it moved to Kaisers-lautern, the region's second industrial center, situated, as Verein flyers chose to describe it, in the "heart" of the Pfälzerwald. Verein-sponsored school outings also took industrial sites as their goal.^[69] Factories and forests shared the landscape, and the Pfälzerwald Verein, with the Heimat movement, embraced them all.

The sentiment that proved so receptive, honoring city and forest alike, was patriotism, or love of the Heimat. That "the love of Heimat bore and brought forth the Pfälzerwald Verein" was a common refrain of Wäldlers, and nature in turn received credit for awakening, nourishing, and sustaining this Heimatliebe.^[70] The natural attributes of the homeland inspired loyalty and pride; to appreciate nature was to feel the solemn joy of patriotism and to understand the deepest roots of local and national character.^[71] At the first joint excursion of the Verein, one of the speakers asserted that although "Wanderlust and joy in mountain and valley are the soul of our Verein," it was "the love . . . of the beautiful land that stretches from the Rhine over the Wasgau and Haardt to the west" that gave "[our efforts] their special content." Indeed, the speaker concluded, "the Pfalz deserves to be and must become Germany's national park."^[72]

Patriotism—for the Pfalz, Bavaria, and Germany—informed the building and preservation projects of the Verein and formed another avenue for the imposition of civic values on the out-of-doors. A striking rock formation

[67] PW 9 (5 July 1908): cover page.

[68] Ludwigshafen's rapid growth was also naturalized by comparison to the rising of a water nymph from the Rhine.

[69] Wanderbuch (1928): 57.

[70] "Die Liebe zur Heimat gebär dereinst den Pfälzerwald Verein"; see, e.g., yearly report, WH , no. 13 (1918): 4. See also the works of A. Schmidt, quoted in Georg Baer's Die Pfalz am Rhein: "Da draußen fließt der Born der Heimaterkenntnis, welcher die Heimatliebe nährt" (p. 1); or Fritz Claus, "Im Pfälzerwald": "in the outdoors . . . our senses and soul are awakened by our beautiful Pfälzer Heimat" (PW 1 [4 May 1900]: 2).

[71] See, e.g., Hartmann, "Der Pfälzer und das Wandern"; and Wappes, "Aesthetische Bedeutung des Waldes," p. 25.

[72] PW 7 (15 May 1906): 94.

would be designated a "natural monument."^[73] Natural settings became as popular as town squares for civic memorials. The "Ritter stones" that marked paths in the forests were named after the forestry director and Verein leader and were intended as a public monument to one man's public service.^[74] In 1907, the Pfälzerwald Verein, with the district president himself in attendance, held the dedication ceremony for its newly completed Luitpold Tower on the Weissenberg, in honor of the prince regent of Bavaria. Like the ubiquitous Bismarck Towers, the monument paid tribute to both man and nature: awesome natural beauty would be complemented by larger-than-life human accomplishment, and vice versa.^[75]

The integration of the patriotic monument into the natural world complemented the appropriation of the natural world itself by the public realm of ceremony and celebration. The annual gatherings of the Pfälzerwald Verein publicly affirmed the local and national loyalties of the Wäldlers. The day's activities and speechmaking dwelt on the Pfälzer's love for nature and for Germany. A feature of the festivities that became traditional, the singing of the "Pfalzlied," also drew together nature, public ceremony, and collective identity. Written by a Prussian, set to music by a Frenchman, first sung by a Swede, and first published in Hesse, the Pfalzlied derived legitimacy as a regional anthem entirely from its adoption by the Pfälzerwald Verein, but it nevertheless served both Verein and region well.^[76] The poem's speaker stands on a mountaintop with the Pfalz visible on all sides and is moved to deep love for this "speck of earth," its man made as well as its natural structures.^[77] The singing of the song was usually followed in the ceremony by

[73] Government attention to "natural monuments" did not satisfy the Pfälzerwald and Verschönerungs-Verein at the time, consisting as it did of the merest acknowledgment of the importance of natural conservation, without monetary support. See Palatinus (pseudonym, probably for Christian Mehlis), "Zur Pflege der Naturschönheiten in der Pfalz," PW 4 (15 August 1903).

[74] Wanderbuch (1928): 123.

[75] PM 30 (1913): 81; Fritz Claus, "Der Luitpoldturm im Pfälzerwald," PW 10 (15 October 1909): 152–53.

[76] See Albert Becker, "Der Pfalzlied," Der Pfälzer in Berlin: Mitteilungen des Pfälzerwald-Vereins, e.V. Ortsgruppe Berlin (hereafter cited as PB ) (1937): 74–75; and "Einiges über die Entste-hung des Pfälzer Liedes von Eduard Jost," WH , no. 17 (1918): 6.

[77] "Das Pfälzer Lied," by Eduard Jost:

Am deutschen Strom, am grünen Rheine
Ziehst du dich hin, O Pfälzer Land!
Wie lächelst du im Frühlingsschmucke,
Wie winkt des Stromes Silberband!
Da steh ich auf des Berges Gipfel
Und schau auf dich in süßer Ruh
Und jubelnd ruft's aus meinem Herzen:
O Pfälzer Land, wie schöne bist du!

the singing of the German national anthem in an affirmation of the compatibility of local and national identities.

School and government also promoted the kind of nature-oriented civics favored by the Pfälzerwald Verein. Heimatkunde, as it came increasingly to be adopted and taught in the lower schools, invariably began out-of-doors in order to establish children's relation to and proper feeling for their surroundings—a technique first promoted in the Pfalz by Christian Grünewald in the 1830s. A popular textbook writer of the early twentieth century wrote that "Heimatkunde must be imparted out in the open, with the lands and landscapes of the Heimat as the first object of attention. All else follows from that."^[78] Ludwig Zimmer, another writer whose elementary school text appeared in 1905, began by describing the schoolyard and the points of the compass, then proceeded from the public buildings of the town directly into the fields and uncultivated land surrounding it.^[79] Political and natural categories collapsed into each other; schoolchildren were to find their orientation in the world from both. The controlling metaphor of Pfälzer poetry, the Gesichtskreis or circle of vision that imaginatively comprised the entire Pfalz, also controlled the pattern of civic instruction.

Around the turn of the century, amateur Heimatschutz and Naturschutz (nature conservation), which included just about anything undertaken by the Pfälzerwald Verein, began to receive state approval and eventually state funds.^[80] And although the connection of nature with patriotic feeling was undoubtedly a general stage in the development of all nineteenth-century nationalisms, the Pfälzerwald Verein, and the Pfälzer Heimat movement of which it was the chief representative, achieved an especially close symbiosis between the two. Unlike the neighboring clubs on which it was modeled—the Odenwald Verein and the Schwarzwald Verein—the Pfälzerwald Verein promoted an exact identification between the political region and the nature they glorified. At the meetings of the League of German Mountain and Hiking Clubs, the conventioneers came as members of their Alpine clubs rather than as Bavarians, but the Wäldlers were still Pfälzers.^[81] The term Pfälzerwald itself attested to the primacy of political categories. Until the end of the nineteenth century, people knew of no one Pfälzerwald but of many different wooded areas, separately conceived and named.^[82] Forestry officials and rail-

[78] Baer, Die Pfalz am Rhein , p. 2.

[79] Ludwig Zimmer, Heimatkunde für die Schulen der Rheinpfalz (Pirmasens, 1905).

[80] Gustav von Kahr (state minister of the interior) to Albert Becker, 10 October 1909, on the ministry's support for the undertakings of the Pfälzerwald Verein, PLBS, Albert Becker Papers.

[81] Report of the gathering of the Verband Deutscher Gebirgs- und Wandervereine in the Pfalz, PW 11 (15 August 1910), cover page.

[82] There is no mention of the Pfälzerwald in the works of Riehl and August Becker in the 1850s.

road builders seem to have used the collective appellation occasionally in the second half of the century, but its adoption into everyday language was the work of the beautification societies and of the Pfälzerwald Verein itself.^[83] The latter increasingly used it to refer to all unsettled, uncultivated land in the political region—a convenient and evocative shorthand for that which contrasted to what man had built and sown. The train, too, spread the name, for in 1906 the Pfälzer railroad company named a new fast locomotive the "Pfälzerwald," in recognition of the Verein's promotion of travel as much as of the trees themselves.^[84]

The term Pfälzerwald soon lost its novelty, together with any lingering sense of artificiality. Its invention and promotion by foresters, entrepreneurs, Verein members, and railroad officials was emblematic of the role they had each played in reshaping the categories in which people conceived of nature. The existence of a single Pfälzerwald contributed in subtle ways to the integrity of the entity "Pfalz" altogether. Science followed sentiment and adopted the term in analysis and description of the land.^[85] Indeed, the whole natural world gave the impression of having arranged itself in accordance with the borders of the homeland and the demands of patriotism.

The Pfälzer men and women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century neither mystified nature nor deified it but rather remade it in their own urban-dwelling image. Their nature, filled with paths, huts, and castle ruins, constituted an alternative milieu that did not fundamentally challenge the necessity of cities or indeed their value. But the surge out from the cities into nature also represented a search for a source of collective identity not to be found in the urban environment. The movement was informed by the presumption that what all Pfälzers had in common was the land. Nature alone could be the appropriate symbol as well as source of Heimat feeling; love of nature, like love of Heimat, was not bound by social class or confession. Workers shared it with industrialists, old with young, uneducated with educated, Catholic with Protestant and Jew.

And though this vision of a social harmony following on a natural one remained the stuff of public rhetoric, the Heimat movement's appropriation of nature nevertheless represented an inclusive and tolerant impulse. Nature was to be neutral, above party and confessional strife.^[86] Its popularity at the end of the century represented not so much an inability to deal with political

[83] Daniel Häberle, Der Pfälzerwald. Entstehung seines Namens, seine geographische Abgrenzung und die Geologie seines Gebietes (Kaiserslautern, 1911), pp. 4-6; Georg Wagner, "Heißt es 'Pfälzerwald' oder 'Pfälzer Wald'? Ursprung, Bedeutung und Schreibung dieses geographischen Sammelnamens," Pälzer Feierowend 5 (1953).

[84] Wanderbuch (1928): 41.

[85] See Häberle's account of the name, whose novelty he explains then proceeds to use in his technical analyses (in Der Pfälzerwald ).

[86] See Lidtke, Alternative Culture , pp. 64-65, on workers and nature.

conflict as a desire to exclude it from some areas of endeavor and to create a public environment that all could share. The forest, wrote Wappes, was an Allgemeingut , a commonly held treasure of the people.^[87] Its preservation was everyone's duty; its enjoyment, everyone's right. Indeed, in its redefinition of nature and of man's relation to it, the Heimat movement in the Pfalz, and in particular the Pfälzerwald Verein, tentatively represented a concept of general citizenship in the region, at least in the sense of the rights and responsibilities of belonging.

The turn-of-the-century renewal of provincial culture in the Pfalz may have begun with the popular discovery of nature, but it soon led to a revival of folk custom, song, dance, and dress. One of the Heimat movement's protagonists, Albert Becker, later remembered the "ever-widening circle of interests" that were then "enclosed within the single word Heimat ." The term "expanded on all sides," he wrote, "all the way to the Pfälzer countrymen of German ethnicity outside the Heimat borders on the other side of the ocean."^[88] Indeed, the step from nature to folk life—and from there to the study of emigration—was a logical one. The same desires that led urban people to seek out nature drew them also to peasant and rural customs and to an interest in their preservation in strange environments, like the city or the foreign land. As filled with illusions in this context as in their approach to nature, as likely to transform the objects they admired, the members of Heimat associations found in "traditional" ways of life a simplicity and harmony they thought lacking in their own, another focus for their sociability, and another expression of their sense of collective identity.

In seeking a basis for Pfälzer identity within peasant life, the Heimat movement followed the example of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. In Die Pfälzer , Riehl had deliberately abandoned recent political definitions of the land and its inhabitants and dwelt instead on the insights into local character provided by styles of dwelling, eating, working, worshiping, and speaking.^[89] Riehl believed, as did his many followers in the fields of Volkskunde and Kulturgeschichte, that the land shaped and limited character. Hence those who lived closest to the land, in the "pure natural life," were also the clearest representatives of the Pfälzer type. Informed by a romantic dichotomy between nature and civilization, the bourgeois people who participated in the associational life of Heimat tried to emphasize their own sense of "Pfälzerness" by a self-conscious imitation of those whose lives were, they thought, more essentially "Pfälzer" than their own. Through scholarly investigation and

[87] Wanderbuch (1928): 125.

[88] Albert Becker, "Erinnerungen aus der Geschichte der Pfälzer Heimatbewegung," PB 19 (15 March 1939): 26.

[89] See Chapter 2.

popular festivity, they established folklore alongside nature as a defining, constitutive element of Pfälzer identity.

The scholarly efforts of Pfälzers to establish their ethnographic identity began within the Historical Association of the Pfalz, thanks to secretary Ludwig Schandein's close connections to Riehl. Volkskunde was a young discipline, barely recognized within the universities and uncertain whether its loyalties were to philology, history, or physical science. Its intellectual predecessors were nevertheless highly respected, from Johann Gottfried Herder to Jakob Grimm, and by the 1890s it could claim representation in a number of scholarly institutions throughout Germany. After Schandein, August Becker, and Riehl, a number of amateur scholars and historians carried on Pfälzer folk studies, and in 1894 the founding in Würzburg of the Verein für bayerische Volkskunde und Mundartforschung (Association for Bavarian Folk Studies and Dialect Research) gave regional folk studies in Bavaria an academic home.^[90]

Georg Heeger, a high school teacher who became one of the most prominent of the Pfälzer folklorists, had studied briefly with Oskar Brenner in Würzburg. Scholarly folk studies then consisted mainly of the systematic collecting of available evidence of peasant culture. Heeger initiated work on a dictionary of Pfälzer dialect and on a collection of Pfälzer folksongs—projects that contributed to the establishment of folklore as a field of scholarly study.^[91] In 1908 Heeger's published collection of Pfälzer folksongs received wide attention and praise in the Pfalz for its "exact study of the people's soul." None but a Pfälzer, "intimately grown up with the thinking and feeling of his Heimat," could have written this work, wrote one reviewer.^[92] Heeger himself believed that the study had afforded him "deep insight" into the Pfälzer people; he expressed his "joy" at discovering such "fullness of originality and strength" in the people, who had survived "storms . . . like no other land in the course of the centuries has endured."^[93]

The efforts of others, like Albert Becker (no relation to August Becker), were prolific but piecemeal. The serious study of Pfälzer folk life in this period achieved no synthesis comparable to Riehl's of a quarter century earlier. The material did not prove amenable to the framework and the assumptions folklorists brought to it: the classic peasant was hard to find in the Pfalz,

[90] For Pfälzer folk studies of the 1890s, see the characteristic articles by Ludwig Eid, "In Bürgers Haus und Hof im 1597: Ein Bild pfälzischer Kultur," MHVP 15 (1891): 41-80; and Lukas Grünenwald, "Ein Pfälzischer Bauernkalender: Beitrag zur Volkskunde der Hinterpfalz," MHVP 20 (1896): 181-237.

[91] Ernst Christmann, "Georg Heeger," PH 7 (1956): 114-15. In 1913, the Bavarian Academy of Learning took over the dialect project (PM 30 [1913]: 41).

[92] Theodor Zink, review of Volkslieder aus der Rheinpfalz , in PM 26 (1909): 28-29.

[93] Georg Heeger and Wilhelm Wüst, Volkslieder aus der Rheinpfalz, mit Singweisen (Kaiserslautern, 1908), foreword.

having dwelt in towns and produced for markets for centuries or having left for America, taking his leather breeches with him. Pockets of superstition and ancient peasant festivity were few and far between. As Riehl put it, the French had driven out the ghosts and spirits.^[94] The problem, by and large, was not that folk or popular culture did not exist, but that its scholars had an unreasonably narrow notion of what it in fact was. The research that proved most fruitful—the study of dialects and place-names—owed more to pure philology than to the neoromantic assumptions of its purveyors.

But what nature and history did not supply, man could always create. The turn-of-the-century revival of folklore demonstrated the inventiveness of the Pfälzers far more than either their investigative skills or their intrinsic folkiness. The liveliest of the branches of folklore was Mundart , or dialect, which in its forms of poetry, tale, dialogue, aphorism, essay, and even joke became the leading medium for a popular creation and celebration of folk identity. Dialect itself had always been present; the novelty was rather in a new consciousness of its existence and a new appreciation for its expressiveness. Dialect helped to "distinguish the Pfälzer Eigenart [originality or distinctive character] from the rest of the German population," wrote one proponent, railroad engineer and amateur dialect poet Emil Haas.^[95] To use dialect in any context was to signal one's self-consciousness as a Pfälzer, particularly among those who could just as well speak educated high German. In contrast to standard German, dialect was the "most genuine [ureigenst ] expression of a people's character." Its use, its proponents insisted, did not indicate an excess of regional feeling and a lack of national German feeling, but rather a general renewal of pride in the German language, in all its many forms. "Since Germany has become great and independent with the victory of 1870-71," wrote Haas in support of the value of dialect literature, "we hope some of this self-confidence will spread to the realm of speech, so that we can abandon our naive [michelhaft ] prejudice in favor of foreign things and forever throw off the Frederican yoke of foreign words."^[96] Germany's strength and distinction among nations was not its singleness but its diversity, and the cultivation of dialect, like the Heimat movement of which it was part, would attest to that truth.

Moreover, anyone could create within the medium of dialect; those who did were lauded not as the greatest writers of their time but as the truest representatives of the Pfalz and its people. Poets and writers in dialect, wrote Haas, "teach us to recognize, understand, and value the feeling and thinking

[94] Riehl, Die Pfälzer , p. 51.

[95] Emil Haas, "Die Pflege der Mundart und die Mundartabende in der Pfalz," part 3 in a series of articles by that name, PM 22 (1905): 97.

[96] Haas, "Die Pflege der Mundart," part 1, PM 22 (1905): 5. There are interesting anti-Prussian overtones in this statement that may reflect anticentralist thinking as much as antipathy to Prussia as such.

of the people."^[97] Daniel Kuhn, one of the most popular poets of this period, was praised for "deep insight into the being and character of the Pfälzer people."^[98] Another, Lina Sommer, had a "generous love for the beautiful Pfälzer Heimat, its land, people, and soul [Wesen ]."^[99] In their own personalities, the poets represented the Pfalz: "A whole man!" was the description of one, "contemptuous of all superficiality and pretentiousness"; another had the "ready mother wit" of the Vorderpfälzers; another, their characteristic "lively intelligence, self-irony, Gallic prejudice for novelties, and love of company."^[100] Paul Münch, the most celebrated dialect poet of his generation and author of a genuine Pfälzer bestseller, a collection of dialect poems called Die pälzisch Weltgeschicht , was the "embodied soul of our landscape": "Paul Münch was the Pfalz."^[101]

Dialect poets tended to return the compliment to the land that had formed them, making the characteristics of the Pfalz and the foibles and fancies of the typical Pfälzer their leading themes. A comic and somewhat vulgar genre, dialect portraits depicted the Pfälzer as a loud, contentious, backslapping, joke-telling, wine-guzzling, independent man, with a pure love for the land and the forests.^[102] Münch indeed poked fun at the intrinsic self-centeredness of the genre, and of Heimat sentiment altogether, in his Pälzisch Weltgeschicht , which told the story of the world in a series of short comic poems, beginning with God's creation of Paradise—the Pfalz.

The commercial success of dialect publications and an increasing number of "dialect evenings" attested to popular enthusiasm for the genre. Sponsored by a local publisher and a local professor, the first "dialect evening" in the Pfalz was held in March 1903 in Kaiserslautern. Featuring a number of poets who read their works out loud "in friendly competition," it was so successful that many local clubs, in particular the Pfälzerwald Verein, adopted the entertainment themselves.^[103] For the Verein, the cultivation of dialect followed logically from its role in the protection of the region's natural resources. Both endeavors sought to preserve the Eigenart or distinctive

[97] Ibid., p. 4.

[98] Review of Daniel Kuhn's "Aus der Hamet," PM 27 (1910): 190.

[99] Paul Münch, on Sommer's "E Pälzer Blumenstraißel," PM 30 (1913): Beilage 3.

[100] Haas, "Pflege der Mundart," part 2, PM 22 (1905): 20, on Karl Eduard Ney; obituary of Paul Gelbert, PM-PH 47/26 (1930): 98; Haas, "Pflege der Mundart," part 3, PM 22 (1905): 97, on Richard Müller.

[101] Peter Luginsland, "In Memoriam Paul Münch," PP 2 (February 1951): 1; see also Albert Becker's review of the first edition of the Weltgeschicht, PW 10 (1 July 1909): 106.

[102] See, e.g. Lina Sommer, "Pälzer Art," in Heimatgrüße den Pfälzer Landsleuten ins Feld , ed. Literarischer Verein der Pfalz (Speyer, 1916) (hereafter cited as Heimatgrüße [1916]); Fritz Claus, "Die Pälzer," in Baer, Die Pfalz am Rhein , p. 40; and Maximilian Pfeiffer, "Vom Handkäs," PW 11 (15 October 1910): p. 172.

[103] Report on the Mundartabend of the Ludwigshafen chapter of the Pfälzerwald Verein, PW 11 (1 May 1910): 63.

character, of the region, whether in the form of its landscape or its people. After all, the originality of both was threatened, according to a Pfälzer Heimatler, by the same "highly developed modes of transportation" whose tendency was to make everything the same.^[104]

In their desire to preserve the distinctiveness of Pfälzer ways in an increasingly homogeneous world, the activists of the Pfälzerwald Verein and related folklore groups became increasingly inventive. Without actually fabricating anything, they assembled under the rubric of Pfälzer folk culture a variety of simple styles of dress and dance, along with the songs and fables traditional to the various parts of the region. Some of this was genuine, some was not. But since the product—Pfälzer folklore—was not only greater but also more important than the sum of its parts, absolute authenticity was less critical than collective recognition. The Pfälzerwald Verein made itself both arbiter and sponsor of the revival. Its folkloric efforts had begun in 1906, mainly at the suggestion of Verein member Albert Becker, then teacher of philology at the Gymnasium in Ludwigshafen.^[105] A new committee for Heimatpflege, or Heimat care, was set up, and resolved at its first meeting in 1907 to "awaken the interests of the general public for Pfälzer beliefs, customs, and speech."

Typical of all the Pfälzerwald Verein's undertakings, this foray into the field of ethnography revealed a capacity to adapt the raw material, be it forest or folksong, to consumable forms. The Pfälzerwald Verein packaged peasant culture for its members just as it had packaged nature. Take, for instance, the case of the traditional costume, or Tracht , of the Pfalz. Tracht, in its usual definition as the distinctive regional dress of the peasantry and smalltownsmen, had not existed within the geographical bounds of that nineteenth-century creation, the Pfalz, since the eighteenth century.^[106] The area had experienced too much political and social upheaval to preserve styles of dress distinct from the rest of Germany, indeed of Europe. At the turn of the century a few remnants of peasant dress, still worn in villages to the north and west, were adopted by Tracht hobbyists from the towns and cities as a general Pfälzer Tracht.^[107] Tracht—the meaning of which depended

[104] Ibid. Note the irony here (one intrinsic to the undertakings of the Pfälzerwald Verein) that an organization so devoted to trains and the extension of train service should also be their critic. On the train as a threat to "local character," see also Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), pp. 38-42.

[105] Report of the steering committee meeting of 10 June 1906, PW 7 (15 June 1906): 126; Becker, "Erinnerungen aus der Geschichte der Heimatbewegung," 18-19.

[106] Riehl, Die Pfälzer , pp. 167-68; F. Gundelwein, "Pfälzer Volkstrachten," PW 11 (15 January 1910): 6-7.

[107] Gundelwein, "Pfälzer Volkstrachten," p. 7. Otherwise a reliable observer, Gundelwein greeted this adaptation with pleasure.

to a large degree on the existence of its opposite, modern fashion—became the plaything of the big-city bourgeoisie, available in mail order catalogues and advertised in local magazines.^[108] Men and women dressed up in their urban-manufactured peasant costumes and went to the newly invented festivities sponsored by the Pfälzerwald Verein or the Verein zur Hebung des Billigheimer Purzelmarktes (Association for the Revival of the Billigheim Purzelmarkt). In its more serious aspect, interest in Tracht, as in dialect, represented a concern for the preservation of regional distinctions in an increasingly monochromatic world. Georg Berthold, a historical association member, hoped that the "upper levels of society" would soon be of the opinion that this "patriotic clothing, that is, Volkstracht ," was "the most genteel dress" and that the "modern fashions that reduce everything to sameness [were] an evil."^[109]

The festivities of the Pfälzerwald Verein and other clubs fastened similarly on a version of rural song, dance, and custom. Here the purpose of folklore was to give substance and focus to celebrations of regional and national pride. The attempt of a local chapter of the Pfälzerwald Verein to celebrate midsummer in authentically traditional fashion resulted in a unique blend of pagan bonfires and brass bands, joined together by poems and songs to the Pfalz and its forests: "O Pfälzerland, wie schön bist du!"^[110] In 1908, a "Pfälzer evening" sponsored by the Frankenthal chapter of the Verein für Fraueninteressen (Women's Club) began with a lecture by Georg Heeger on the importance of the word Heimat , with its evocation of the "poetry-filled past" of folksong and fairy tale. Women, Heeger urged, had an important role to play in the preservation of folklore, and through it of love for Heimat.^[111] "Everywhere we see a return to the simple, the volkstümlich [folksy], and the natural," said Heeger. After he finished, members of this urban women's club, most unnaturally garbed in their "Pfälzer Tracht," paraded across the stage, followed by more men and women dressed as vintners. A few stand-up comedians told some "Pfälzer jokes," and finally, the chairwoman of the club, wife of a local judge, read a poem of her own composition

[108] Cf. Palle Ove Christiansen, "Peasant Adaptation to Bourgeois Culture? Class Formation and Cultural Redefinition in the Danish Countryside," Ethnologia Scandinavica (1978): 128; cited in Hobsbawm, Invention of Tradition , p. 8. The author argues that the revival of traditional dress was a means for prosperous farmers to distinguish themselves from the poor agricultural day laborers and the urban dwellers. Theo Gantner sees the festive parades and Tracht displays in Switzerland as a "means of communication for the propagation of new economic consciousness as well as for the dissemination of the ideas of political aspirations"; see his "Brauchtums-vorführungen in Festumzügen des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Wiegelmann, Kultureller Wandel , p. 35.

[109] "Zur Einweihung des historischen Museums der Pfalz," PW 11, Sondernummer 2 (Spring 1910): 70.

[110] Account in PW 10 (15 July 1909): 109.

[111] "Der Pfälzer Abend zu Frankenthal am 14 März 1908," PM 25 (1908): 84.

about her devotion to the nature and the people of the Pfalz, whom, she admitted with unintended candor, she did not fully understand.^[112] The evening concluded with a display of Frankenthal porcelain—a genuine product of local culture, to be sure, but one whose origins lay in the eighteenth-century ducal court, not in the farmer's cottage. The whole evening, related the commentator, was "very pretty and arranged with taste."^[113]

In German and foreign cities, the many clubs of Pfälzer Landsleute , or countrymen, further demonstrated the cohesive and symbolic force of an invented folklore. These so-called Landsmannschaften were characteristic of all German regional groups and attested in part to the extent of internal migration and urbanization that had taken place.^[114] The Pfälzer Landsmannschaften were mostly founded in the first decade of the twentieth century. If not begun as such, most quickly became local chapters of the Pfälzerwald Verein.^[115] Besides forwarding the Verein's efforts in tourism through their connections to large urban populations, the groups sponsored social evenings, in the course of which members would sing local songs, dress up in local costume, sample the wines of the Pfalz, and listen to readings in Pfälzer dialect.^[116] Far away in both distance and culture from the folklore they celebrated, the groups used an urbanized folk culture as a pretext for socializing, for making important business connections, for establishing a civic profile,

[112] "Ein Beitrag zur Heimatkunde," by Frau Justizrat Merckle:

O daß ich dich so ganz verstehe
Du Pfälzer Land, mein Heimat Land
Wie Spätrot webt um deine Höhen
Vergangenheit ihr flatternd Band.
O daß ich dich so ganz verstehe
Mein Pfälzer Volk, so froh und frei
Du bliebst trotz aller Stürme Wehen
Dir selbst im tiefsten Grund getreu. . . .

See PM 25 (1908): 85.

[113] Ibid.

[114] Zink and Mang (Wirtschaftsleben , pp. 279-80) observed that areas with industry and patterns of small property ownership held their population better than areas of large estates. The Pfalz lost 12.5 percent of its population between 1882 and 1910; the Rhineland, 7 percent; and Posen, 33 percent. These groups of displaced natives are similar to but not the same as the traditional student groups, also called Landsmannschaften .

[115] The Verein Rheinpfälzer in Munich became a chapter of the Pfälzerwald Verein in 1910, with 113 members (PW 11 [15 August 1910]: 139); the Berlin group began as a local chapter and was soon the most important and politically significant Pfälzer Landsmannschaft (PW 11 [1 June 1910]: 107); there were also groups in Stuttgart, Cologne, Strasbourg, Würzburg, Saarbrücken, and Karlsruhe.

[116] A contemporary Pfälzer periodical contained a series of photographs of these activities that illustrate the urbanity of the folksiness. Seated in formal parlors on Victorian horsehair sofas, a group of large, elaborately coiffed bourgeois women model Pfälzer Trachten. In another photograph, the men, sporting leather pants, hiking sticks, and hats, stand in front of a large white rowhouse with Ionian columns, wrought-iron fences, and heavy brickwork. See Des Pfälzers Heimat in Wort und Bild 1 (1910): 47-48.

and indeed for preserving their ties to the place—if not precisely the culture—of their origin.

Perhaps, as Pfälzer writers from time to time suggested, the Pfälzer, being an emigrant and wanderer by nature and history, had a particular need for these clubs of countrymen and a special gift for forming them. "The Pfälzer spirit," wrote one who presumably had it, "everywhere unfolds itself in brotherly harmony and with an open, direct character"; both at home and abroad "a feeling of solidarity" has arisen.^[117] Certainly, at the turn of the century those actually in the Pfalz developed a new interest in their fellow countrymen who had left for other parts of Germany and the world and in the preservation of Pfälzer identity among those emigrants. In 1909, Daniel Häberle dedicated his classic account of the Pfälzer emigration to "Pfälzers in the Heimat and in strange lands." His emigrants, who "to the present day in the midst of a foreign population preserved their essential [eigentümlich ] character," implicitly affirmed the validity of that character.^[118] Their exploits in the New World were widely recounted in the Pfalz, and, in an odd reversal, they became a source of identity for those who remained at home. Though perhaps a dubious source of pride, Pfälzers considered their own the premier land of German emigrants: as Häberle pointed out, for a period in the eighteenth century all German emigrants were known as "Pfälzers." Yet their enthusiasm for Pfälzer emigration rarely spread to contemporary movements of colonization and foreign adventurism.^[119] The Pfälzer as such had not colonized Africa, and as far as the Heimat movement was concerned, the strongest affirmation of the Pfälzer character came from the prosperity of Pfälzer-Americans, not from German military predominance on the high seas.

For the hallmark of the Heimat movement, and of the cultivation of folklore within it, was its quality of referring all phenomena back to itself, back to the Pfalz. As a result, its participants tended to espouse a nationalism of which the most important determinants were internal: a nationalism defined by its constituent parts, not its opposing counterparts; by the regions within Germany, not the nations outside it. new colonial ventures and navies held little interest for those whose enthusiasms were all for the Heimat; nor did the aggressive, outward-turned nationalism of the Pan-German League, despite a superficially shared interest in German language and German folk culture in strange lands. The Heimat movement was above all concerned with the disappearance of distinctive regional cultures within Germany, and

[117] Ibid.

[118] Häberle, Auswanderung und Koloniegründung , p. 1. The occasion for the book was the two hundredth anniversary of the first mass emigration of Pfälzers to America in 1709.

[119] An exception is Georg Berthold, who delivered a speech, "Über kolonialgeschichtliche Beziehungen Speyers," to the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft on the occasion of their visit to Speyer in 1907; see PM 24 (1907): 73ff.

all its efforts and energies went toward the preservation of that Eigenart. In contrast, the Pan-Germans and the Navalists were too fixated on national predominance and national unity above all else to pay much heed to the internal constitution of that nation; all they required was that it be strong enough.

Hence, although Heimat enthusiasts were certainly nationalists, their emphases and their projects were not identical with those of the militarists, imperialists, and centralizers, who in turn were suspicious of the potential for particularism within the Heimat movement.^[120] The advocates of a navy or a colonial empire were, after all, the radicals, determined to break down the provincialism of Germans, the latecomers among the national peoples of Europe. The Heimat enthusiasts, in their belief in the Eigenart of Heimat as the key to both local and national identity, were articulating—in new contexts, to be sure—a more traditional conception of Germanness. A German was not a German without being a Pfälzer, a Bavarian, or a Silesian first. They were men who felt not only "most German," but most Pfälzer too.

Folklore, like nature, helped establish this dual identity by serving as a symbol for the diversity of cultures that existed within the German nation. The diversity of folk cultures was threatened by many of the same things that threatened the diversity of natural settings in Germany: mass technology and mass markets, centralized economies and governments, and social divisions and conflicts. In the face of a contemporary reality that was at once homogeneous and filled with contention, the cultivation of "folk identity" offered the promise of an egalitarian cooperation that would not suppress distinctiveness and particularity. From this perspective, the invented folk costume of the Pfalz was expressive of provincial solidarity across class and confessional divisions (though it perpetuated gender divisions to a striking degree); the folk costume parades and festivals, too, were celebrations of communalism itself. The very artificiality of the folk costume and of folklore revivalism at the turn of the century betrayed its essentially symbolic role in local society. To seek out evidence of folksiness—and to invent it where it did not actually exist—was to seek some common denominator, some cultural heritage available to all. Pfälzer folklore became the repository of a widespread longing, not for the bygone past as such, nor for the life of the farmer, peasant, or medieval artisan, but for the unalienated, undivided life. Germans in the Heimat movement thought they saw traces of such a life in the folksong and folktale; they demonstrated their belief in its realization in the modern world by wearing the Tracht, department store tags and all.

Thus, folk culture, like nature for the Heimat naturalists, became the

[120] Geoff Eley, "Nationalist Pressure Groups in Germany," in Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany Before 1914 , ed. Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (London, 1981), p. 59.

clearest embodiment of a "common good." Theodor Zink, praising Heeger's collection of folksongs, called the volume a "common treasure" that would bring "social reconciliation" to all Pfälzers: "for within it [the songbook] lies something that is or should be common to us all, the emotional life [Gemütsleben] of a people."^[121] For Albert Becker, folklore addressed the "social question" directly. Its cultivation and study offered the possibility of bridging the gap that had grown up between the educated and the uneducated, the country folk and the city folk. For the "practical statesman and the bureaucrat whose goal is the reconciliation of socially divided levels of the people," folklore could be a "mediator." He suggested its efficacy also for theologians, doctors, jurists, and any educated person who needed to understand the peasant.^[122]

For both Becker and Zink, the reconciling capacities of folklore were, ironically, embedded within the enlightening possibilities of education, both of the uneducated and of the already gebildet . They hoped, in Becker's words, to achieve their transformation of people's mentalities, to build new appreciation for the land and its people, "without having to give up the sources and the forms of our education."^[123] The same hope informed the attempt to awaken a historical consciousness in the Pfalz during the period of the Heimat movement. The Pfälzer activists, who had taken up and recast first nature, then custom, dress, and song, now sought to reshape memory itself.

The third main category of local efforts gathered under the rubric of the Heimat movement was historical, in particular the genre of Heimatgeschichte, or Heimat history. A specifically Pfälzer history had already emerged under the general authorship of the Historical Association of the Pfalz, and the founding of fifteen smaller historical clubs between 1884 and 1914 reflected the spread of interest in the subject throughout the towns of the region. Indeed, after the 1890s the cultivation of historical consciousness took more popular forms, aimed at a broader audience than the Historical Association had ever desired. Along with nature and folkore, history too now contributed to the emergence of a popularly held local identity, attesting both to the distinctiveness of the Pfalz and to its participation in a broadly German culture. "On every side in the Pfälzer lands," wrote the editor of the region's popular historical journal in 1911, "the feeling for the remains of prehistory and for the history of the Heimat stirs and awakens."^[124]

But the cultivation of history, unlike that of nature and folklore, generated

[121] PM 26 (1909): 28-29.

[122] "Volkskunde in der Pfalz," PM 20 (1903): 148-49.

[123] Albert Becker, Ziele und Aufgaben , p. 21.

[124] Friedrich Johann Hildenbrand, "Die Einweihung des Regino-Denkmals in Altrip," PM 28 (1911): 104.

a major tension within the Heimat movement. Historical studies had, after all, for many years been the territory of local elites. In contrast to the Historical Association, the tendency of the new organizations that made up the Heimat movement was toward mass participation, simplification, and popularization. Of little moment in and of themselves, the tensions within local historical studies and the Heimat movement in general reflected gradual loss of control by the Honoratioren over all aspects of provincial life. In their place, an increasingly diverse group of people began to take an active role, whether by voting or by joining associations, in shaping the public realm—its boundaries, its activities, and its collective identities.

The popularizers of Pfälzer history around the turn of the century built on the themes and forms of historical study already established in the Pfalz, adapting both to the requirements of mass consumption. The civic purposes of historical studies in the Historical Association had from the start been twofold: to establish local identity through the construction of a coherent historical past and to place that history and identity within the context of Germany, the Fatherland.^[125] Both purposes had nevertheless remained incidental to the actual historical scholarship, confined to introductory and concluding paragraphs or to ceremonial speeches. Around the turn of the century, however, Heimat history coalesced into a set of complementary themes and subjects in which the contribution of the region's own past to the German national character determined the whole way in which history was conceived. As Theodor Zink explained in the introduction to his "stories and descriptions for school and home," Deutsche Geschichte auf heimatkundlicher Grundlage (German History on the Foundation of Heimat Studies): "Heimat history is only a piece of the great world history, but just as without world history there is no Heimat history, so is world history alone useless. . . . [In this work] German history will be depicted as it appears bound . . . to the Pfalz and Bavaria, and in that way will German history be all the more comprehensible and Heimat history all the more grand."^[126]

Some subjects embodied the dual themes of nation and locality better than others. The favored historical figures of Heimat history displayed qualities not of greatness but of "Pfälzerness," in which "Germanness" was embedded. Liselotte von der Pfalz, trapped by marriage in the ritualized and rigid court life of Louis XIV, combined the frankness of Pfälzers with their sentimental love of home and country; moreover, she had been a victim, if an overfed one, of French iniquity. Franz von Sickingen, the evangelical knight of the sixteenth century, represented Pfälzer independent-mindedness and personal bravery. His skirmishes with Catholic princes were depicted as an

[125] See Chapter 2.

[126] Theodor Zink, Deutsche Geschichte , vol. 1, foreword.

early struggle against the enemies of German unity and strength.^[127] The largely mythical figure of the "Jäger aus Kurpfalz" (Huntsman of the Kurpfalz), subject of a widely known German folksong, embodied the Pfälzers' love of nature and of country.^[128] A variety of minor knights and brave peasants, Roman and Holy Roman emperors, and prominent emigrants also appeared in the literature and celebration of Heimat history from time to time. The particular figure was in any case less important than his or her representative qualities: Liselotte, von Sickingen, and the Huntsman were legendary as well as real figures in the popular imagination.

Heimat history also lingered in the epoch of castle building, the period from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries when the geographical area of the Pfalz was at the center of the Holy Roman Empire. The Speyer cathedral, the imperial castle of Trifels and its satellites, and the abbey of Limburg all symbolized the greatness of the old German empire and, by association, the importance of the Pfalz itself.^[129] But the tale of national triumph was countered by the even more compelling tale of never-ending war, devastation, and disaster. The worthiness of the Pfalz followed also from its witness to the sufferings of Germany. Roman wars, barbarian invasions, medieval princely feuding, religious strife, and the ordeal of the Thirty Years' War—the Pfalz's survival of these horrors was eloquent testimony to the immortality of the national community itself. Their suffering at the hands of the French, from the Sun King to the emperor, gave further proof of the Pfälzers' embodiment of the greater German fate. Moreover, despite the efforts of the French to conquer and convert, the Pfälzers had remained steadfastly German. The French threat secured the no-longer-beleaguered Pfälzers' identification with their nation; indeed, had France not existed, the Pfälzer Heimat movement may well have had to invent it.

Yet despite the omnipresent French, Heimat historians rarely favored the recent past as a subject for their tales. The events and decisions that had really formed the Pfalz into the political entity it was made scant appearance in the record of the Heimat. The Hambach Festival was acknowledged only as a celebration of German national sentiment. As it had in Riehl's work, the influence of French law and constitutional practice was obscured. In place of

[127] Ferdinand Lassalle, who had extensive contacts and experience in the Pfalz, wrote a historical play on the figure: an illustration, among other things, of Vernon Lidtke's assertion that regional patriotism was compatible with political radicalism (Alternative Culture , p. 92).

[128] Pfälzers devoted much time to proving that the actual historical figure came from the Pfälzerwald, not some other forested region of Germany. See, e.g., Ernst Bilfinger, "Zur Geschichte des Jägers aus Kurpfalz," PW 8 (15 October 1907): 154–55.

[129] Interestingly, the Trifels theme of German glory became much more prominent in Heimat literature and, not coincidentally, under the Nazis, who made a cult of the castle. See Chapter 7 below.

any account of the actual origins of the region, Pfälzer Heimat enthusiasts substituted a historical cult of the Bavarian house of Wittelsbach, whose contemporary rule was legitimated by the existence of dynastic links stretching back tenuously to the twelfth century. The recently fought war of 1870–71 could also be assimilated into patriotic history, though not as the chroniclers of a triumphant Prusso-German destiny depicted it. For the Pfälzer Heimat historian, the war became yet another enactment of the French threat to the homeland, this time victoriously repulsed.^[130] The Pfalz and the Rhineland, not Berlin, were at the center of such an understanding of German history, and while Pfälzers may have been willing to admit their marginality to some events of the German past, they would never concede their irrelevance to the struggle with France: in fact, many Pfälzers were inclined to credit the very achievement of the German nation to the Rhenish spirit of resistance to French influence.

But the popular medium in which Heimat-historical consciousness dwelt imposed constraints of its own on the provincial remembrance of things past. While monuments and memorials, the favored expression of historical consciousness in the beautification societies, could commemorate great figures, princely houses, and wars, they could stand less easily for political fragmentation or constitutional change. Beautification societies had emphasized castles and the past that these represented at least partly because castles were fine tourist attractions. Similarly, the history promoted by the Pfälzerwald Verein was restricted to the tales told by castle ruins, war memorials, and shrines to the Wittelsbachs. In June 1914, the Verein staged its most "historical" event: an enormous celebration of the Hambach Festival in the castle grounds themselves. The spirit of Hambach in its 1914 revival was one of Heimatgefühl , or Heimat sentiment. "A true people's festival" and a "celebration of our united German Fatherland," the commemoration involved all the costumes and props the Verein could assemble, more or less regardless of epoch. Social harmony, local patriotism, and national pride were the themes of the event, wine barrels, historical costume parades, and folk dancing their manifestation. Any resemblance to the revival's historical precursor remained purely coincidental.^[131]

Even more revealing of the Pfälzerwald Verein's appreciation of the past

[130] See, e.g., Emil Müller, Die Pfalz im Jahre 1870 , reviewed in PM 24 (1907): 45 by Philipp Keiper, who wrote that the book would ignite in the younger generation the "fire of noble, self-sacrificing excitement for Germany's power and greatness, tied together with love for the narrow Heimat and interest in its history."

[131] See Kurt Baumann, "Hambacher Erinnerungsfeiern: Das Hambacher Fest und die politische Tradition der Pfalz," PH 2 (1951): 54. Baumann quotes a contemporary, and ironic, commentary in the Frankfurter Zeitung : "Not as though one declared oneself in solidarity with ideas propagated back then or even with the means of their realization. No, we do not want to be 'revolutionaries,' but we can with confidence declare that whatever happened back then that was not just bombast, well, of that we may approve."

was the historical parade, or Festzug —an event that reached its zenith of popularity in the Second Empire, at least partly because it gave the bourgeoisie a suitably public but nonpolitical occasion to demonstrate its contribution to, as one historian put it, "the great house of the German national state."^[132] These parades became an important feature of the yearly mass gatherings and involved elaborate costuming and parade floats. At festivities in Kaiserslautern in 1910, for instance, the Kurpfälzer Huntsman with his own hunting party led the parade, followed by a minstrel (a reminder of Richard Lion-Heart's brief stay in the Pfälzer castle of Trifels), several Pfälzer knights of uncertain epoch, and then the Kaiser himself, Friedrich Barbarossa, with consort Beatrice and pages. (Barbarossa had reputedly founded the town of Kaiserslautern on the spot where he liked to fish.) After the twelfth-century emperor came the sixteenth-century knight von Sickingen—also with his wife. The rest of the parade consisted of large groups of men and women dressed as artisans, old-time vintners, soldiers, and peasant maidens.^[133]

Although chronologically chaotic, historical parades were not without rhyme and reason; their sense simply did not reside in a conventional historical narrative. Rather than telling the story of the Pfalz—which might have proved impossible—the parade strung together the most evocative and colorful moments from the region's past as a group portrait of Pfälzer identity. The position of the Huntsman at the front, literally blowing the Pfälzers' own horn, established the enduring presence of the forest and of nature at the center of Pfälzer identity. The luminaries who followed represented the historical importance of the region to Germany as a whole; the curious presence of their wives suggested the image of a Pfälzer family, in the best nineteenth-century bourgeois style. Despite the presence of the emperor at the center of the parade, the Wäldlers who participated, good townsfolk all, were not dressing up as nobility because they longed for the reinstatement of feudal arrangements, nor did they seem—in the spirit of the Rhenish Karneval , with which the parade shared obvious physical characteristics—to be turning upside down an otherwise oppressive social order to achieve a fleeting moment of power and self-expression.^[134] On the contrary, the historical

[132] Hermann Glaser, Die Kultur der wilhelminischen Zeit. Topographie einer Epoche (Frankfurt, 1984), pp. 215–16; see also Wolfgang Hartmann, Der historische Festzug. Seine Entstehung und Entwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1976).

[133] Full account with photographs may be found in PW 11 (1 July 1910): 109–12.

[134] One is tempted to interpret these revelers along the lines suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin, wishing, perhaps, that something of the seductively attractive chaos of medieval society lingered in these annual extravaganzas. But the evidence of careful planning and highly regimented choreography does not support such an argument. Indeed, resemblances to the medieval Karneval were striking precisely because they were deliberate; the reasons for the well-planned imitation, not for the spontaneous expression of popular sociability, are what need to be explained.

parades were entirely affirmative occasions: affirmative of the prevailing social order, of the national past, and, most of all, of the historical integrity of the Pfälzers themselves. The past they evoked was an idealized portrait of the Pfälzer present, and the egalitarian mixing of kings, peasants, and guildsmen, like the invented Tracht itself, symbolized a wished-for harmony among all classes. By dressing up in the trappings of the old order, the hometownsmen only emphasized the triumph of the new, not just over the land-scape of the Pfalz, but over its unruly and disorganized past as well, now contained within a festive celebration of the contemporary life of the Pfälzer.^[135]

Staging festivals, building monuments, and touring castles typified the preference of the Pfälzerwald Verein for history as drama. Popular Heimat history also took the form of Geschichtsblätter , or historical pages, that appeared as supplements to many local newspapers. Between 1893 and the war, twelve small newspapers in the Pfalz started their own historical pages, which included short articles on local sites, local artifacts, or famous people who had lived in the area. The editor of one such publication wrote in 1903 that "the desire for knowledge of the early history of our Heimat grows among the people and will certainly have a good influence on mind and temperament."^[136] The Pfälzerwald Verein's own Pfälzerwald included short articles on historical themes alongside its pieces on nature and folklore, and in 1900 even the Historical Association took over sponsorship of a popular periodical, Pfälzisches Museum —a decision that doubled association membership within a few years.^[137]

Popular history in its printed form also encompassed textbooks and short pamphlets on historical subjects, a genre of which the local masters were Theodor Zink and Albert Becker. Zink, who by the time of his death in 1934 had written seventeen books and 532 articles on his Pfälzer Heimat, was a teacher by profession, though his research, writing, and collecting become so engrossing that in 1907 he took the position of city archivist in Kaiserslautern in order to pursue them full time. Zink's most important work was the school and home text Deutsche Geschichte auf heimatkundlicher Grundlage (German History on the Foundations of Heimat Studies), which provided an unbroken

[135] In a more social-psychological vein, Glaser believes that "those who collected on the festival fields . . . were actually costumed bourgeois citizens of the Machine Age, who sought to overcome their anxiety about the way things are with the help of magically loaded images of the way things were" (Kultur der wilhelminischen Zeit , p. 219).

[136] From the Leininger Geschichtsblätter : review of local historical literature in PM 20 (1903): 62.

[137] Report at the Mitglieder Versammlung, Historischer Verein der Pfalz, PM 30 (1913): 29. Its editor from 1903 to 1918, Friedrich Johann Hildenbrand, credited the paper's coverage of archeological digs with keeping it financially "above water"—a testimonial to the popularity of amateur excavations in the period (PM 35 [1918]).

narrative account of the Pfalz from the time of the Celts, through Julius Caesar, ending with Bismarck, Prince Regent Luitpold, and the railroad. "Our Heimat," he wrote, "looked different in the time of Julius Caesar than it does today"—but that it was the same Heimat throughout could not be doubted.^[138] Zink assimilated all the many pasts of the region within the unifying idea of Heimat, and he used artifacts, folktales, and natural formations to demonstrate the existence of that past even in the present.^[139] Becker was the master of the "George-Washington-slept-here" variety of local history. His popular series of short works, "Contributions to the Heimat Lore of the Pfalz," included, for instance, an account of Schiller's brief period of residence in the Pfalz; according to Becker, "even the tiny and insignificant gains high value when tied to the history of the greats."^[140]

But for all the popularity of parades and pamphlets, the local museum—the Heimatmuseum —provided the fullest expression of the historical consciousness of the period. Local museums, with collections representing areas smaller than that of the Historical Association's museum in Speyer, spread throughout the region in the two decades before the war. The town of Bad Dürkheim had been precocious, founding its museum in 1872. By 1914, seven more Pfälzer towns had their own local museums, which meant that a region of only nine hundred thousand inhabitants and no major city could claim eleven museums—or more, if one counted the guild and natural history museums.^[141]

The museums reflected a popular and inclusive conception of local culture that had much in common with the civic activism of the beautification societies and the Pfälzerwald Verein. The "modern museum," asserted Albert Becker in a 1914 lecture on the goals and tasks of a Heimat museum, should be a "people's school . . . open to every man": "our museums, for a long time places only of pure learning, have become places for the people's education"; further, "from creations of a private, aristocratic type, our museums today have become volkstümlich , democratic institutions."^[142] The Heimat museum in Neustadt, for instance, was the project of the chamber of commerce, a minister, and a teacher, in conjunction, so said the town mayor in his dedicatory speech, "with the entire citizenry of our town."^[143] Becker too, in his lecture on the foundation of a Heimat museum in Zweibrücken,

[138] Zink, Deutsche Geschichte , p. 9.

[139] Review of Zink's book by Albert Becker, PM 26 (1907): 152.

[140] Albert Becker, Schiller und die Pfalz , Beiträge zur Heimatkunde der Pfalz, 1 (Ludwigshafen, 1907), foreword.

[141] Friedrich Sprater, "Pfälzische Geschichtsvereine und Heimatmuseen," in 25 Jahre "Pfälzische Rundschau," Bedeutendste Zeitung der Pfalz , ed. Pfälzische Rundschau (Ludwigshafen, 1924).

[142] Albert Becker, Ziele und Aufgaben , pp. 3, 7, 10.

[143] "Das Heimatmuseum für Neustadt a.d. Haardt und Umgebung," PM 32 (1915): 71.

called on the citizenry to contribute their time and artifacts to the project, out of a sense of public duty as well as civic pride.^[144] The Heimat museum, he emphasized, would be "not a showpiece for the increase of tourism" but "for us, for our closest Heimat."^[145]

Because they saw their museums as a means of popular education, local museum builders were guided by demands less of beauty than of pedagogy. Daylight through windows, thought to enhance one's powers of concentration, was preferred to electric light, and the "friendly, light, and wide" rooms were not to be so filled with objects as to bore the visitor.^[146] Becker recommended a strong principle of organization to lead people through the museum. His own preference was to proceed in a Riehlian fashion from natural history to the cultural history of private life and then to economic and political (and here he included military and judicial) history.^[147] The Neustadt museum had a strictly chronological organization that culminated in the Hambach Festival, a "local" event that gave Neustadt a claim to national prominence.^[148]

More revealingly, Becker distinguished the new democratic Heimat museum from earlier aristocratic museums, insofar as Heimat museums sought neither high quality nor originality but representativeness in their collections: "here [in the Heimat museum] association and origin lend especial charm even to things of little value; even the least valuable items of our cultural heritage can fructify our being with ideal worth, just as our written speech gains ever new life from our Mundart."^[149] The curators of Heimat museums, as a consequence, laid no particular stress on the genuine article: many museums contained as many casts and copies and even paintings of items as originals. Becker recommended plaster casts, not just because they were easier to maintain, but because they allowed a more complete collection of the past to be displayed—an obvious advantage for a pedagogical institution.^[150] Truly superb pieces, he thought, should reside in the district museum, or even in the state or national museums in Munich and Nuremberg, where they would receive proper care and still redound to the credit of the Heimat.

Perhaps, too, the willingness of local Heimat museums to fill their rooms with copies reflected a growing belief—shared with the Pfälzerwald Verein—that the genuine article was to be found not in museums at all, but

[144] Albert Becker, Ziele und Aufgaben , pp. 6–7, 36.

[145] Ibid., p. 20.

[146] Description of the Neustadt Heimatmuseum, PM 32 (1915); Becker, Ziele und Aufgaben , p. 24.

[147] Becker, Ziele und Aufgaben , pp. 29–32.

[148] "Das Heimatmuseum für Neustadt," PM 32 (1915).

[149] Becker, Ziele und Aufgaben , p. 18.

[150] Ibid., pp. 27–29.

rather out-of-doors. Through their mapmaking and path building, the Pfälzerwald Verein had physically opened up castle ruins and natural wonders to the day-tripper; there was no longer any practical need to depend solely on museums for one's acquaintance with the region as a whole. The intellectual argument for the authenticity of things experienced in the open, in their original settings—an argument that can be encountered in every European country in this period—seems to have followed from the new accessibility of ruins and nature to the casual participant. For Albert Becker, what could be left in its original setting, whether it be a stone carving or a native insect, should be left there. Citing the rise of modern Denkmalpflege , or monument preservation, he argued that "the time is past when one shows a piece the greatest honor by uprooting it and sticking it—or burying it—in a museum."^[151] He urged instead the imaginative use of paintings and descriptions of the reality, which would supplement visits to actual sites.^[152]

Supplementary to hiking expeditions, and secondary to regional and state museums, the Heimat museum may not seem all that important, and yet, with Becker leading the way, many Heimat activists of the period laid great stress on the need for every town to have one. Heimat museums did something that no other museum, indeed no book, castle, or even pretty view, could do, and that was depict the local genius "more clearly, more intensely . . . than the reality itself." Large museums, moreover, lacked the "relation with the soil" that Heimat museums cultivated above all else. The smaller their area of representation, the "finer and more sympathetic" their portrait of the Heimat would be and the better their "illumination" of "local coloring." Therein, believed Becker, lay the "charms, the justification, and the assignments" of a Heimat museum."^[153]

Therein lay the democratic and popular role of the Heimat museum as well. The "little man," "for whom museums were too often windows to peer through," could be led from the soil of Heimat to an appreciation of and even pleasure in the highest offerings of culture.^[154] Becker spoke approvingly of a Social Democratic motion in the Saxon Landtag to make museum collections more accessible, open in the evenings and welcoming to the working class.^[155] For Becker, the social-democratic impulse to include all classes in an appreciation of culture could be nowhere better answered than in local museums that sought to educate the people and welcomed into German culture every

[151] Ibid., p. 34.

[152] Becker, not coincidentally, was an avid member of the Pfälzerwald Verein, active in all its undertakings and for a short time editor of its magazine Der Pfälzerwald. The Neustadt Heimatmuseum, among others, used numerous paintings in its displays (see description of the museum, PM 32 [1915]).

[153] Becker, Ziele und Aufgaben , p. 34, 17.

[154] Ibid., pp. 7, 10.

[155] Ibid., p. 8.

conceivable artifact of the past. Popularization, in other words, involved both form and content. The Heimat museum represented a setting for a new emphasis on comprehensive, folkloric history, whose starting point was not the king but the people, not the state but the land itself. Moreover, the Heimat museum encouraged a patriotic enthusiasm that began at the source, at the Heimat, and grew from there to include every man, "without regard to class or profession." In a society "ever more split by birth, rank, and profession," he concluded, "all classes of people can be reunited in the past that is common to us all."^[156]

Even the Historical Association of the Pfalz, that bastion of Honoratioren power and patronage in the region, participated (haltingly, to be sure) in the popularization of the region's past and the development of new forms for the cultivation of history. A popular magazine, tours of historic sites for the general public, and joint meetings with the Pfälzerwald Verein were all tentative efforts to appeal to the historically uneducated.^[157] The largest undertaking of the association, one that expressed both the increasingly public nature of its role and the persistence of its elite position, was the building of a new museum for the entire region. "The last great manifestation of the Heimat movement," as a Pfälzer historian of a later era put it, "before the dying out of the bourgeois spirit of patronage led to a life-or-death crisis in provincial culture," the new Historical Museum of the Pfalz was at the same time the least representative manifestation of that Heimat movement.^[158] Certainly it affirmed the existence and the vitality of Pfälzer self-consciousness, but its planners meant also to secure their exclusive role as the guardians of that culture, a role called into question by the Pfälzerwald Verein as well as by local Heimat museums.^[159] The new museum, then, was organized, built, and opened in a spirit as much of resistance to the tendencies of the Heimat movement as of participation in it.

The process began in 1898, when Georg Berthold, a government financial official of high rank, helped to establish an association to lobby state and "people" for a new building to house the Historical Association's modest public collection.^[160] The group, which called itself the Verein Historisches Museum der Pfalz, already had 1,533 members by 1900; by 1903 it had raised some 300,000 marks, both from the government and from the region's

[156] Ibid., pp. 35–36.

[157] Historischer Verein der Pfalz, record of general convention (1906), PLAS, T1, no. 14; report of the monthly meeting, PM 28 (1911): 76; report in PM 30 (1913): 88.

[158] Kurt Baumann, "Festveranstaltung zum Museumsjubiläum," PH 11 (1960): 113.

[159] Becker, significantly, played no part in the building of the new museum, and was not even a member of the Historical Association until many years later.

[160] "Denkschrift," MHVP (1899): 8, 17, 23; Karl Schultz, introduction to 100 Jahre Feier Historisches Museum der Pfalz (special volume), MHVP 67 (1969): xxiii.

businesses and wealthy families.^[161] The Museum Association also secured the contribution of several major historical collections from private owners. For the most part remnants of elite culture, these artifacts suited Berthold's ambition to build a "first-class" collection for the Pfalz, one that would make a "fine impression upon fine-minded people."^[162] When in 1900 a prestigious group of scholars, commissioned by the Bavarian government, opened up the medieval emperors' crypt in the Speyer cathedral, Berthold seized the chance to acquire some of the project's findings—these "jewels of Germany," "the principal symbol of the strength of German unity"—for display in the future Historical Museum of the Pfalz.^[163] He also managed to attract the patronage and the services of Gabriel von Seidl, official architect to the Bavarian government and designer of the Bavarian National Museum in Munich, who called it "the finest assignment of my life to build a museum for the Pfalz."^[164] In 1905, after a keynote address by Reichsrat Franz von Buhl, one of the Pfalz's few men of title, the general assembly of the Historical Association of the Pfalz approved a budget of 585,000 marks, twice that projected half a decade earlier.

The new building's location in Speyer asserted unequivocally the centrality of regional historical consciousness to contemporary civic culture. Occupying a large plot of city land next to the classical Gymnasium, it stood across from the regional archives and the Protestant consistory of the Pfalz on one side, and the presidial building of the Bavarian regional government on the other. Its elaborate front façade faced across a city street to the emperors' cathedral itself. A ceremonial entrance, flanked by two large equestrian statues of Roman origin, reminded one poetically minded observer of "the forum of a city in a conquered province of the Roman world empire."^[165] Atop the broad oaken doors stood another equestrian statue, the "Herald of

[161] The Landrat, for example, contributed 100,000 marks per year to the project. See yearly reports of the Historical Association, MHVP 23 (1899): 286 and 25 (1901): 134–35; HVP miscellaneous records, PLAS, T1, no. 4.

[162] The artifacts included the Roman Terra-Sigillata collection of Kommerzienrat Wilhelm Ludowici; the collection of Frankenthaler porcelain, from his brother August Ludowici; the historic clothing collection of the Bassermann-Jordans; as well as the major part of the collection for the wine museum, also from that family. Along with the group of artifacts from the cathedral crypt of the Holy Roman emperors, these constituted the main holdings of the museum. See Karl Schultz, "Wesen und Wandel des Pfälzischen Landesmuseum," PH 11 (1960): 117.

[163] Yearly report, MHVP 26 (1903): 112.

[164] Berthold, "Das Historische Museum der Pfalz," PM 25 (1908): 68; "Zum Museumsbau in Speyer," PM 21 (1904): 193.

[165] Franz Jung, "Das Historische Museum in Speyer," PM 26 (1909). Another observer, Friedrich Johann Hildenbrand, considered that the statues "allowed one to recognize the importance of the building on first glance"; see "Der Neubau und die Sammlungen des Historischen Museums der Pfalz zur Zeit der Einweihung," PM 27 (1910): 74.

the Pfalz" (invented, not unearthed), with on either side of him the shields of Bavaria and the Kurpfalz. Two towers, in the style of the Heidelberg castle, were another pointed reminder of the Kurpfälzer heritage.^[166] Fortresslike, the museum appeared as a formidable and literal guardian of Pfälzer culture, "ever victorious despite all storms."^[167] For Pfälzer poets inspired by the occasion, it was a "secure place . . . a sign of the Pfälzer past and present and future," a "true place . . ./ What once lay upon billowing earth, / Among golden brilliance of the Rhenish treasure, / Now rests here for ever more, / The Heimat's treasures in secure port."^[168] Altogether a mishmash of images and chronologies, the building's exterior was nevertheless a fair representation of the Pfalz itself: a few Roman remains and an indistinct medieval and princely heritage, all united in a distinctly nineteenth-century construction.

Within the two-storied building, a series of rooms around a central court-yard showed the "historical course of the development of culture on Pfälzer earth," each room replicating the period it depicted in a kind of fin-de-siècle fantasy about the region's past.^[169] From prehistoric fossils and relics of the Stone and Bronze Ages to an imitation of the Baths of Caracalla, on to the severe Romanesque of the Speyer cathedral and the high Gothic vaulting of an imagined medieval Speyer, the progression ended upstairs in a series of "theme" rooms: for poor Liselotte, a reproduction of her prison—an elegant French salon; for the Pfälzer "people," the "Tracht Room," in which peasant and bourgeois dress were displayed; for the patriots, a room dedicated to the war of 1870–71; and so on, including even the meteor of 1869. Through the courtyard, past eighteenth-century statues of Fortuna, Bacchus, and a female figure dubbed "Palatina," and down into a series of low cellar-like rooms, a visitor would enter the wine museum—the first of its kind in Germany, as museum officials would have been quick to point out. Wine, that "noblest product of our sunny Pfalz," embodied the region's distinc-

[166] "Das neue Historische Museum der Pfalz zur Zeit des Richtfestes in Juni 1908," PM 25 (1908): 67.

[167] Albert Becker, "Dem Pfälzer Weinmuseum zum Gruß" PW , Sondernummer (Spring 1909).

[168] E. Baer-Ritter, "Festgruß der Palatia zum 22. Mai 1910," PW Sondernummer 2 (Spring 1910): 70. Verses 2 and 3:

Es reckt der Türme ragende Warte
sich bis zum Rheine und kündet's laut
Seht hier, hier ist die treue Stätte
Die sich ein sehnendes Volk erbaut.
Wie einstmals lag auf wagendem Grunde
Im güld'nem Glanze des Rheines Hort
So ruh'n auch hier für alle Zeiten
Der Heimat Schätze in sicherm Port.

[169] "Neue Museum der Pfalz," PM 25 (1908): 77.

tiveness.^[170] And like Pfälzer character itself, wrote Friedrich Bassermann-Jordan, wine magnate and scholar, in an evocation of Schiller, the essence of wine had not changed in a thousand or more years: "As we hold the Roman glass in our hand, we think, and look, the sun of Homer, it smiles also on us!"^[171]

In the festivities that accompanied the museum's opening in 1910, Pfälzer dignitaries and poets celebrated the institution as a symbol of Pfälzer identity, of national pride, of unity, of harmony, and of strength—in short, as the embodiment of the Heimat. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria declared at the dedication on 22 May 1910: the museum "stands before us to awaken a feeling and a knowledge of the Heimat, to promote love for it, and to increase and maintain our memories of both glorious and miserable times."^[172] District president von Neuffer asserted that the museum had been built "out of love for the Heimat and enthusiasm for its two-thousand-year development."^[173] Albert Pfeiffer wrote in Der Pfälzerwald that love for the Heimat was the "tie that united all people," Heimat pride and Heimat loyalty its "finest flowers," and the Pfälzer museum the expression of the strength of that love, pride, and loyalty. Love for the Heimat, the continued, provided a "bridge between present and past," and the past lived on in the present through the museum: "We greet you, Life of the Past."^[174] In a rewriting of the "Pfalzlied" into prose suitable to the celebration of the museum's opening, Franz Jung assumed the farseeing attitude of the singer/poet, whose view from the museum encompassed the whole Pfalz—across to the cathedral and to the Rhine, then, imaginatively, across all the comings and goings of centuries. "The past is alive," he concluded.^[175] And so it was at the dedication ceremonies, when Prince Rupprecht was greeted by Palatina herself, the embodied spirit of the Pfalz, crowned in vine leaves and reciting a poem to the Pfalz, the Pfälzers, and their "beloved" Wittelsbachs.^[176]

Yet for all the talk of the past, the museum stood most significantly as a symbol of the present and of its own constructive powers. As an assemblage of all the region's many and fragmented pasts, it was a massive, irrefutable

[170] "Aufruf an alle Freunde des Pfälzers Wein," from Von Neuffer, Bassermann-Jordan, and Berthold, in PM 26 (1909): 49.

[171] F. Bassermann-Jordan, "Das Weinmuseum der Pfalz," PW Sondernummer 1 (Spring 1909): 75.

[172] PM 32 (1915): 62.

[173] Ibid.

[174] "Zum Geleit!" PW , Sondernummer 2 (Spring 1910).

[175] Jung, "Das Historische Museum in Speyer," pp. 177–78.

[176] Palatina was depicted by Fräulein Elisabeth Ferckel, her "Festgruß" written by Albert Kennel, head of the Gymnasium in Kaiserslautern. See Albert Pfeiffer, "Von der Einweihung des Historischen Museum der Pfalz," PW 11 (1 July 1910): 112–13.

demonstration of the reality of the Pfalz. Memory, as Prince Rupprecht himself said, was to be prompted, shaped, and indeed created. The Wittelsbachs and the Bavarian state were of course the beneficiaries of a past reconstituted to emphasize their centuries-old ties to the geographical area. Along with them came the recognition (reluctant?) of Catholicism. The emphasis on the Kurpfälzer theme served Protestants and ever-hungry Wittelsbachs equally, and even the Jews were tentatively drawn in through their contributions to the city and bishopric of Speyer: an ancient Jewish bath down the street from the new museum testified to this closeness, as well as to a distance continually reasserted.^[177] Agriculture, commerce, and industry each received its due, as Georg Berthold pointed out to the wealthy businessmen and estate owners who were the museum's patrons. Wine, ceramics, and other artifacts "gave evidence," he wrote, "that for more than two thousand years industry and commerce have had a home here and have pulsated powerfully."^[178] In short, the museum promoted a collective memory of unity, coherence, and continuity: a "two-thousand-year-development," in the words of von Neuffer; a single and ancient historical state, in the person of "Palatina."

Three years after being opened to the public, the museum had received seventy-five thousand visitors, mostly from the Pfalz itself.^[179] The Museum Commission had instituted free tours for groups of schoolchildren from all over the Pfalz, and it maintained extensive open hours. The Museum Association issued an annual "Call to All Friends of Pfälzer Heimatkunde," which encouraged people to join the organization for a minimal fee and to contribute to the museum collections.^[180] These gestures, taken together with the rhetoric of Heimat and Volk that accompanied the museum's opening, helped to establish its role as an educational institution for the whole Pfalz. As Georg Berthold wrote in Pfälzisches Museum at the time of the dedication, the Pfälzer visitor "will be able to say with pride of this museum on the German Rhine that what here we see united is rooted in the soil and represents the history of our region and people."^[181]

And yet the new Historical Museum differed in significant ways from the ideal Heimat museum envisioned by Albert Becker. Its collections of fine furniture and delicate porcelain were hardly the stuff of Becker's folklore museum, with its plaster casts and paintings of (Pfälzer) insects. Moreover, despite the rhetoric of Pfälzer unity, despite the encouragement of all to visit and contribute, the museum's founders were intent on its being an institution

[177] No references were made to the persecution of Jews in Speyer. The point is not that the museum's recognition was complete or even balanced, simply that such recognition of Jewish culture existed at all.

[178] Yearly report of HVP, MHVP 24 (1900): 303.

[179] Miscellaneous records of the Historische Museum, PLAS, T1, no. 4.

[180] PM 22 (1910): 143; the call was also published in local newspapers.

[181] Berthold, "Das Historische Museum der Pfalz," PM 25 (1908): 77.

above the participatory enthusiasms of the Heimat movement as a whole. In 1912, George Berthold wrote confidentially to the district president about the need to maintain the high quality of the collection, with its appeal to men of education and refinement.^[182] He argued against allowing any members of the Museum Commission—a select board of overseers, separate from the Museum Association—to be elected by secret ballot from the Landrat or the general public: "The . . . organization will be competent and manageable only if the possibility of useful men being voted out or unwanted men being voted in is excluded." Our collections, he concluded, are "somewhat aristocratic and require therefore an administration that will not be reduced to vulgarity through slapdash measures and secret votes."^[183] The dependence of the museum on wealthy donors and its correspondingly elitist governance were in sharp contrast to such local museums as Becker's in Zweibrücken, which survived on city and members' contributions. In 1912, the Museum Association raised over 74,000 marks in gifts and dues, of which 66,000 represented gifts from only twenty-eight donors, many of whom subsequently sat on the Museum Commission.^[184] Indeed, the very arrangement of the museum rooms corresponded to donorship as much as to provenance or chronology: the Ludowici and Bassermann-Jordan collections received their own rooms, as did the Neumayer, the Joseph Stichaner, and the Heydenreich collections.

The enhancing of Honoratioren prestige was inherent in the entire museum project. Both the guardian of the Pfälzer past and the guarantor of the Pfälzer present, the museum suggested an ideal of social order and identity that was not only different from but also at odds with much of the rest of the Heimat movement. More hierarchic, more deferential to position and title, more exclusively devoted to the culture of elites both past and present, the Pfalz of the Historical Museum bore little resemblance to the Pfalz of the Pfälzerwald Verein or even of the local Heimat museum. Certainly all three shared a language—that of Heimat and one's devotion to it—but the common language did not preclude conflict over who could use it or how it was to be used.

If the Historical Museum showed the extent to which the old Honoratioren elite could still exclude popular participation from shaping the shibboleths of regional identity, the case of the Pfälzer flag illustrated the limits of

[182] Georg Berthold, "Auszug aus der Denkschrift betreffend Historischen Museum der Pfalz, 1912" (14 March 1912), PLAS, T1, no. 4.

[183] "Die Kreissammlung ist etwas aristokratisches und bedarf daher eine Verfassung, die nicht durch Schablone und geheime Wahlen geistlos wird" (Ibid).

[184] These included wealthy individuals, Berthold himself among them, and banks and industries in the region. See Budget of the Verein Historisches Museum (1 January 1912–31 December 1912); and Minutes of Mitgliederversammlung, Verein Historisches Museum (6 July 1913), PLAS, T1, no. 4.

such power in the face of popular enthusiasm. In 1909, Dr. F. Heitz of Billigheim introduced to the Pfälzer public a flag based, he said, on the old Kurpfälzer flag and newly designed by the local artist August Croissant. Heitz, already a master of creative symbolism, was inspired to this new project by the wild success of Pfälzer Tracht, which he had introduced to the public in 1906 at the first Billigheim Purzelmarkt. He wrote of the "powerful movement coursing through the Pfälzer land . . . the reawakening of Pfälzer fellow-feeling [Volksempfinden ]. . . . Who does not know," he asked, rhetorically, of all the "promotion and increasing appreciation" of Pfälzer folksong, sayings and customs, Trachten and folk festivals, Pfälzer art, history, antiquity, handwork, the Pfälzer forest, and, not least of all, Pfälzer wine? And yet, he lamented, we have no outward sign of our commonality: "We sing, 'I am a Pfälzer, do you know my colors,' and most must answer, 'No, they are totally strange and unknown to us!'" A flag to bedeck house and castle, "symbol of our Heimat," would do just honor to members of this "old and powerful tribe," the Pfälzers.^[185]

The flag was endorsed by the ubiquitous Albert Becker in Der Pfälzerwald , advertised in the general press, and rapidly adopted in the festivities of the Pfälzerwald Verein. It was soon "joyfully waving in the Pfälzer breeze [note that the winds themselves have loyalties] on every festive occasion . . . in cities and villages, from castles and towers."^[186] Unforunately, neither the Bavarian authorities nor their proxies in the Historical Association accepted the banner. At a meeting in 1910, Albert Pfeiffer and Hans Oberseider (both of the regional archives), Georg Berthold, and Friedrich Bassermann-Jordan expressed concern about its authenticity, even while professing sympathy for the lively Pfälzer sentiment that prompted its creation.^[187] At their behest, experts in both Munich and Karlsruhe objected to the heraldry and colors of the new flag, and an expert in Heidelberg published a thorough refutation of the flag's claims to authenticity. Both Croissant and Heitz responded in print, the former arguing that heraldic rules were not binding on a modern artist, the latter producing his own expert opinion, from Berlin, on the scholarly legitimacy of the design.^[188] In 1915, the controversy still not resolved, Albert Pfeiffer wrote in Pfälzisches Museum that "we stand now before the fact that a new district flag has been introduced. . . . The question remains, are

[185] "Des Pfälzers Fahne," PW 10 (1 July 1909): cover page.

[186] Des Pfälzers Heimat 1 (1910): 24. A month after the publication of the announcement and its endorsement, Becker received a letter from a man who had written a poem to the new Pfälzer colors and hoped Becker could arrange to have it published or even set to music: "it will also perhaps contribute to the awakening of Pfälzer fellow feeling." See August Vollmer to Albert Becker, 31 August 1909, PLBS, Albert Becker Papers.

[187] Report of meeting, PM 27 (1910): 60.

[188] A summary of the controversy was published several years later by Albert Pfeiffer: "Die Pfälzer Fahne," PM 34 (1917): 91–93.

there authentic regional arms or regional colors or a regional flag promulgated or approved by the competent authority? The answer is No!" The new flag, he asserted, had neither "official nor historical legitimacy."^[189]

The controversy did indeed have its roots in questions of legitimacy, but ones to which historical accuracy in and of itself was incidental. Heitz's flag was black and gold with a rampant red lion, a "provincial banner," he argued, "that distinguished itself as sharply as possible from the white-blue Bavarian flag."^[190] This of course is precisely what bothered the Bavarian authorities, and with them the Historical Association. The official statement on the issue in the Bayerische Reichsherold asserted that no individual Bavarian district should have its own colors, "because in the face of proliferating regional and city colors, the colors of Bavaria would be ever further pushed into the background."^[191] Pfeiffer and the Historical Association agreed, but despite their efforts to discredit the flag, it continued to make its appearance at festive occasions. In 1916, capitulating in the face of decided public preference, national emergency, and official distraction, Pfeiffer conceded that the "new creation" was "certainly well suited to strengthen a feeling of togetherness and Heimat pride that will strengthen a more general national courage."^[192] A victory for Heitz? Or for the Pfälzerwald Verein? Perhaps, but certainly a defeat for the Historical Association. The incident illustrated the extent to which popular participation was shaping the symbols of regional identity and, conversely, the extent to which the Honoratioren could no longer rule over regional culture as they had a few decades before.

In the end, the controversy over the Pfälzer flag petered out with the onset of the war, and in that particular form the tensions within the Heimat movement never again made themselves felt. War, defeat, revolution, and occupation altered the issues that were at stake in celebrations of Pfälzer pride. In the backward and filtered glance of Albert Becker in 1939, the Heimat movement before the war had been sincere and sometimes even practical, but often "naive," "unconscious of itself," and "dreamy."^[193] Although his words reveal more about the highly charged and politicized atmosphere in which Heimat activities survived in the 1920s and 1930s than about the period of his remembrances, the contrast is nevertheless instructive. The Heimat movement before the war was more inventive and creative than manipulative, more genuinely inclusive than exclusive.

The particular strength of the Pfälzer movement at the turn of the century

[189] "Die Pfälzer Fahne," PM 32 (1915): 54–55.

[190] PM 34 (1917): 95.

[191] Cited in PM 32 (1915): 55.

[192] PM 33 (1916): 10–11.

[193] "Erinnerungen aus der Geschichte der Pfälzer Heimatbewegung," Der Pfälzer in Berlin 19 (15 March 1939): 29.

was its embeddedness in the institutions and concerns of one locality—in short, its provincialism. As an essentially provincial movement, it had surprisingly little to do with the only "Heimat movements" recognized by the historical literature: the Heimatkunst (Heimat art) movement of Adolf Bartels and Friedrich Lienhard, the Heimatschutz (Heimat protection) movement of Ernst Rudorff and Paul Schultze-Naumburg, and Heinrich Sohnrey's Deutscher Verein für ländliche Wohlfahrts- und Heimatpflege (German Association for Agrarian Welfare and Heimat Care), all founded in the late 1890s and flourishing after 1900. Like those in the Pfalz, these national groups espoused a definition of Heimat that emphasized its roots in rural society, but otherwise their alienation from genuine provincialism was profound.^[194] Sohnrey fought to improve rural living conditions in order to halt the so-called Zug vom Lande or flight from the countryside—something the Pfälzerwald Verein never even contemplated. Like Albert Becker, he saw the potential for social reconciliation in Heimatpflege, but unlike Becker and the Heimat movement that Becker represented, Sohnrey believed that such reconciliation required a return to old structures of social organization. His was a completely reactionary social program.^[195] Bartels and Lienhard, whose work fluctuated between populist anti-Semitism and highbrow aestheticism, turned their attention to refuting the naturalist vision of society and promoting a romantic, rosy view of rural life in the pages of their periodicals and pamphlets.^[196] Ernst Rudorff, an eccentric and extreme figure who originated the Bund Heimatschutz (League of Heimat Protection), shared with Bartels a virulent hatred for Berlin, with its cafés, litterateurs, and socialists, but also with its trains, travelers, technologies, and everything that seeped out from the city, polluting and destroying the pure life of the peasant.^[197]

This obsessive hatred for Berlin, indeed for all big cities, did not, however, play the determining role in the evolution of the term Heimat that some have suggested it did.^[198] Heimat did not suddenly emerge as a concept of cultural activism and organization in the 1890s, nor was its role in German society confined to reaction and opposition—even if one looks only at its few na-

[194] See esp. Klaus Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft (Meisenheim am Glan, 1970), an insightful if tendentious account of these movements.

[195] Ibid., p. 94.

[196] Martin Greiner, "Heimatkunst," in Real-lexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte , ed. Klaus Kanzog et al., vol. 1 (Berlin, 1958), pp. 629–31; Jenny, "Die Heimatkunstbewegung"; Dieck, "Die literargeschichtliche Stellung der Heimatkunst."

[197] Bergmann, Agrarromantik , p. 124.

[198] Bergmann states unequivocally that all the neoromantic movements of renewal grew out of "Großstadtfeindschaft" (ibid. p. 87) and that discovery of the word Heimat came suddenly in the mid-1890s; it constituted, he belives, "the most important result" of cultural pessimism tied to "patriotic-conservative political pessimism" (p. 88).

tional manifestations. The Bund Heimatschutz, despite its association with the right-wing radical Rudorff, found all its support among the Honoratioren of the big cities, something that reflected as much the compatibility of its programs with bourgeois aspirations and self-consciousness as the inability of the German bourgeoisie "fully to identify with their own form of existence."^[199] Rudorff's reactionary ideas had limited influence in the shaping of the league, whose work included the maintenance of monuments—national, "natural," and otherwise—the preservation of old buildings and picturesque ruins, and the cultivation of folk dress, custom, and art.^[200] "Rationality" was to be reconciled with "feeling," and "intellect" with "emotion." "We do not have the foolish intention of trying to push back the extraordinary achievements of the present in practical matters," said Freiherr von Keckerinck-Borg at the opening of the Westphalian Commission for Heimatschutz in 1910; what they wanted, rather, was to achieve a "balance" between the "heartless exploitation of the Heimat earth and the demands of Gemüt. "^[201]

For although anti-urbanism, anti-Semitism, and antimodernism may have been reactions to some of the same transformations in German society that the Heimat movement attempted to shape and control, antimodernism and the Heimat movement were not the same thing, nor were the movements of Bartels, Sohnrey, and Rudorff as representative of attitudes toward Heimat and provincialism in Germany as they wished to claim. The influence of Bartels and his Heimatkunst movement was confined to northern and some of middle Germany; Sohnrey collected endorsements from groups as prestigious as the Verein für Sozialpolitik but had limited impact on the provinces whose cause he espoused; and the functions of the Bund Heimatschutz were limited to a kind of ceremonial supervision of work done in independently founded and organized provincial associations.^[202] Those many local associations in turn reflected a diversity of programs, priorities, and origins that was not inimical but essential to the meaning of Heimat itself. The original charter of the Bund Heimatschutz declared its mission to be the protection "of the German Heimat in its naturally and historically developed diversity," and indeed the positive content of Heimat endeavors, no matter how various, was their concern for the preservation of distinctiveness and diversity, of Eigenart and Vielgestaltigkeit , within the overarching frame of the

[199] Ibid., p. 82. The 120 members of the Deutsche Bund Heimatschutz, which was founded in 1904 in Dresden, were from the same social and educational background as members of local historical associations like that in the Pfalz. See "Der Deutsche Bund Heimatschutz," in Gesellschaft Heimatshutz, Der deutsche Heimatschutz , p. 187.

[200] "Der Deutsche Bund Heimatschutz," in Gesellschaft Heimatschutz, Der deutsche Heimatschutz , pp. 187–204.

[201] Ibid, p. 187.

[202] Greiner, "Heimatkunst," p. 630; Bergmann, Agrarromantik , p. 89.

German nation.^[203] Certainly, by the end of the century opposition to the leveling, homogenizing, and centralizing forces of modernity came to be one characteristic of Heimat endeavors and, with it, distrust of Berlin as the representative of the forces of centralization. The city as such, however, could be and was both the seat of Heimat activities and a Heimat itself for its own inhabitants, just as technology, particularly in the form of trains, was welcomed by the Heimat movement, and science utilized in its understanding of the world.^[204] Indeed, the original impulse, the informing and defining concept behind Heimat, was not antimodernism at all but belief in the importance of regional identity.

To the extent that propagandists like Sohnrey and Bartels subordinated distinct regional identities to their own romantic and negatively shaped vision of the peasantry, they alienated themselves from the many regional Heimat organizations, whose ties to national groups and to these self-appointed national spokesmen tended in any case to be extremely loose. In 1906, an encounter between Albert Becker and Wilhelm Schubring, a representative of the Deutsche Verein für ländliche Wohlfahrts- und Heimatpflege, revealed the extent to which Sohnrey and his associates had failed to grasp the point of local Heimat activities. Schubring asked Becker if he would be interested in supplying them with a "selection of southwest German Heimat literature."^[205] Becker agreed and soon received more specific directions. Schubring wanted "no ties to political borders but only to tribal units [Stammeseinheit ]." He announced therefore that he was lumping the Pfalz together with lower Saxony, Baden, and Alsace-Lorraine, and closed with the coy remark, "Are you very shocked at this idea? I hope not!"^[206]

Whether or not Becker was shocked, Schubring's idea undermined the carefully constructed edifice of the Pfälzer Heimat movement, and, though he was perhaps no more arbitrary in his categories of local identity, Schubring's notion that the Pfalz, Baden, Alsace, and Saxony could form one tribal unit flew in the face of all Heimat assumptions of the preceding forty years. Heimat, as a movement and as an object of civic organization, had represented the political unit's attempt to root itself firmly in local life while at the same time claiming membership in the nation. The local civic context of Heimat activities emerges from this perspective as not only the most impor-

[203] "Der Deutsche Bund Heimatschutz," in Gesellschaft Heimatschutz, Der Deutsche Heimatschutz , p. 188. See also Dieck: "To overcome [particularism] but to preserve the distinctiveness of the individual Heimat and indeed to bring together organically all of Germany was for Germans a great concern at that time" ("Die literargeschichtliche Stellung der Heimatkunst," p. 13).

[204] For instance, members of the Verein der Pfälzer in Berlin spoke of the city as the "second Heimat."

[205] W. Schubring to A. Becker, 10 October 1906, PLBS, Albert Becker Papers.

[206] Schubring to Becker, 16 October 1906, PLBS, Albert Becker Papers.

tant context in which to understand the Heimat movement, but perhaps the only one. For the many Beckers, Bertholds, and Bassermann-Jordans of Germany, it mattered hardly at all that Lienhard, Bartels, Sohnrey, and Langbehn were singing the praises of provincial life in the abstract. What mattered was the Pfalz and, with the Pfalz, Germany in its entirety.

Moreover, that Heimat referred to a political unit—in this case, the Pfalz, and in the broader case, Germany—suggests its relevance not to an understanding of antimodernism in Germany but to the development and transformation of public life in the decades before the war. The conduct of politics in the narrow sense was changing with the rising importance of campaigns, the political press, large party organizations, and the mass electorate. Surrounding that arena of electoral politics was public life in general, defined by where and how people associated with one another and what assumptions and beliefs informed that association. As an increasing number of people participated in public life, its spaces and symbols acquired new significance and took on new forms. The Heimat movement formed part of the process of shaping a new public realm, a process also encompassing the Social Democratic culture, the culture of voluntary associations and nationalist pressure groups, and the national culture as such.

The particular contribution of the Heimat movement was to redefine the meaning of provincial culture at a time when national and international movements and classes were rendering it, if not moribund, then certainly of secondary importance. As civic education, Heimatkunde insisted on the priority of local belonging and local political and social units in constituting the first step to any larger categories of patriotism. As civic activism, Heimat promotion infused nature, "tradition," and history with a new patriotic significance and a new role of forming the stuff of local consciousness and local identity. And as a popular movement, the Heimat movement asserted the right of anyone to participate in the cultivation of a common tradition.

But if it succeeded in preserving the vitality of local culture, the Heimat movement did not succeed, as some of its members had hoped it would, in reconciling all classes and factions on the common ground of Heimat. To be sure, most seem to have participated in the public culture of Heimat—even the Social Democrats approved of local loyalty and began at this time to incorporate the symbols and figures of local tradition into their own festivities.^[207] But what everyone shared, each could also claim to be his or her own. The conflicts of the political realm came increasingly to obtrude on the deliberately nonpolitical activities of Heimat, and the politicization that before the war was only implicit in the movement began after the war to dominate it entirely.

[207] Lidtke, Alternative Culture , p. 92.