Five
Saving the Heimat

The ten-year occupation of Germany's western regions after its defeat in the First World War tested the strength of national integration in ways that students of the Weimar Republic have been slow to appreciate—much slower, indeed, than those who lived through it. That the occupation was a volatile diplomatic issue has not been doubted, nor that it was a condition easily exploited by rabid nationalists on all sides, nor even that it burdened the German economy with an extra load it could ill afford to carry. What has been lost, however, is the sense in which the occupation forced Germans to reassess the nature of their national belonging. Where German identity came from and what it implied about the most desirable form of national government were both issues thrown open by the obtrusive presence of foreign troops on soil long considered part of the national patrimony. The issue of loyalties was the easiest to address, and the chapter that follows tells the story of the successful efforts to maintain the Germanness of the Pfalz in the face of various contrary pressures, mostly from the French. Less easily settled was the question of whether loyalty to Germany and hatred of the occupation required allegiance to the new German republic: the local answers to that dilemma—some positive, some cautiously neutral, and some emphatically negative—form the subject of the next chapter. In every case, the language of Heimat, whether expressing national patriotism, local republicanism, or cultural privatism, remained central to the self-understanding of the participants.

The Pfalz and its French occupiers were, of course, only one part of a much larger scene. The occupied area of Germany stretched from the Pfalz's southern border several hundred miles to the north, encompassing five times

as much territory as the Pfalz and involving at least three other nations—the United States, Britain, and Belgium—whose representatives made scant appearance in the Pfalz. Some contemporaries nevertheless believed that the fate of the German republic hung on the occupation-induced identity crisis of a few hundred thousand Pfälzer grape growers and shopkeepers.^[1] Throughout the 1920s, officials of both Bavaria and the Reich expended considerable time and money to secure the loyalty of the Pfälzers, and indeed Pfälzers themselves mobilized all the patriotic resources at hand, important among them the Heimat associations, to build a solid wall of pro-German sentiment. To understand their alarm and their response, one must begin with the cause: the arrival in the Pfalz, once again, of the French army.

On 1 December 1918, twenty days after the signing of the armistice, French troops of the Eighth Army under General E. M. Gérard entered the Pfalz from the south and occupied Landau, the old fortified town of the Sun King. For the French, it was a moment richly historic, a moment to be savored and celebrated by speeches filled with reference to past association and present promise. "To a people bowed down under a hundred years of tyranny," Gérard declared to his troops on the eve of the occupation, "you will show what a nation conscious of its power and its honor can and wants to do. . . . Republican France shines not only in the brilliance of its bravery; it is and has remained throughout history the eternal Fatherland of Justice."^[2] Convinced, at least officially, that their mission was to liberate, not to occupy, French commanders immediately laid claim to the obedience and loyalty of the local population. In the heated rhetoric of the moment, le Palatinat rhénan was rejoining its spiritual homeland; Napoleon had returned. "You Pfälzers have the greatest happiness in store," Gérard repeated to the population itself; "after one hundred years of Germany tyranny, you return to the arms of generous mother France, who brings you Freedom and Justice."^[3]

Whatever the merits of the French appeal to history, it at least recognized on a propagandistic level the potentially volatile state of national and regional loyalties in the Pfalz at the end of 1918. In the Rhenish cities hunger approaching starvation was destroying health and morale. Within days of the events of 7 November in Munich, councils of workers, soldiers, and peasants had been founded all over the Pfalz; for much of the Pfälzer middle

[1] See, for instance, the assertion of Bavarian official Theodor von Winterstein in 1920 that the Pfalz was bearing the brunt of the French propagandistic attack and hence that the Pfalz was also the key to the defense of all Germany ("Niederschrift über die Besprechung im preus. Ministerium des Innern" [18 November 1920], Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv, München, Staatsministerium des Äussern [hereafter cited as BHStAM, MA] 108372).

[2] Cited by, among others, Albert Pfeiffer, "Die Pfalz unter französischer Besatzung, 1918–1930," Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 5 (1932): 110.

[3] Franzosenzeit. 10 Aufsätze und 30 Bilder zur Räumung der Pfalz von den Franzosen , special edition of the Landauer Anzeiger (Landau/Pfalz, 1930), p. 3.

class these represented the beginnings of the chaos that seemed to rule over the rest of Germany. Indeed, Germany as a national state seemed to those people on its edges barely to exist. Bavaria, too, was floundering economically and politically and seemed prepared to jettison the Pfalz altogether, into whose embrace no one knew. Only the scheduled arrival of French troops was certain. Large sectors of the population came to associate their arrival with the restoration of political stability and the promise of economic advantage, expectations that the French hastened to reinforce.^[4]

The French hoped to use the time between the signing of the armistice and the convening of peace negotiations in Versailles to strengthen their position in Germany, and in particular to give substance to their claim that the natural state of the Rhineland was to be either French or neutral.^[5] Militarily, the French presence in the region had been ratified by the terms of the armistice. Gérard and his successors attempted to strengthen that presence economically, culturally, and politically through a policy they came to call the "peaceful penetration" of the Rhineland. Already by December, the French had forbidden trade between the left bank of the Rhine and the rest of Germany, supposedly substituting French trade for what was lost.^[6] Gérard also promised training programs to combat unemployment and emergency relief programs to bring food to the local people.^[7]

But his actions proved mere gestures of which the positive value was overshadowed by the real economic burdens that the occupation—not liberation—placed on local society. In fact, the Allied blockade continued for months after the armistice, effectively cutting off the Rhineland from trade to the east and west. French businessmen rushed into the vacuum and with Allied-backed French money and Allied concessions established themselves in the wreckage of the German economy.^[8] Occupation control of German railroads, water transport, post, telegraph, telephone, and presses further hindered recovery from wartime devastation. The quartering of troops and administrators in tens of thousands of apartments, rooms, and school buildings created resentment that promises of work programs could not over-

[4] Theodor von Winterstein, "Der 18. Mai 1919, ein Gedanktag der pfälzischen Geschichte," in Dokumente aus dem Befreiungskampf der Pfalz , special edition of the Pfälzische Rundschau (Ludwigshafen, 1930), p. 6.

[5] Klaus Reimer, Rheinlandfrage und Rheinlandbewegung, 1918–1933. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der regionalistischen Bestrebungen in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 62–63; see also the comprehensive account of French aims in the Rhineland in Walter McDougall, France's Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914–1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (Princeton, 1978).

[6] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 430.

[7] Josef Wysocki, "Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen: Wirtschaftliche Problem der Pfalz 1918–1939," in 125 Jahre Industrie- und Handelskammer für die Pfalz. Beitrag zur pfälzischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte , ed. Martin Denger (Speyer, 1968), pp. 259–60.

[8] Keith Nelson, Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918–1923 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), p. 44.

come.^[9] Finally, the formation in Paris of a central economic administration for the Rhineland undermined Gérard's efforts to treat the individual problems of the Pfalz.^[10]

His policy of peaceful penetration had to rely, then, on the appeal of French civilization. Over the next three years, the French brought their own language courses, concerts, theater, reading rooms, cinema, newspapers, magazines, and horse racing to the region. They sponsored German-language periodicals and tried to establish a local university.^[11] French cultural propaganda in the Pfalz itself, distinct in tone and in substance from the writings of such well-known nationalist publicists as Maurice Barrès, appealed to the peculiarities of Pfälzer character that had already been established by several generations of regional writers. It often relied on the folklorist and Heimat novelist August Becker, for instance, for descriptions of the allegedly Gallic character traits of the Pfälzers—their wit, argumentative liveliness, egalitarianism, devotion to Napoleon, and preference for wine over beer.^[12] Dredging up all evidence of Prussian and Bavarian suspicion of the region in the nineteenth century, French propagandists easily established the artificiality of the Pfalz's bonds with Germany east of the Rhine. Pfälzer sympathy for the French, then, seemed axiomatic.

But cultural programs and economic measures, however convincing or successful, served the French cause only if they led to firm political commitments, and in that respect Gérard, like his superiors, proved inept. Although he made the most of conservative fears of the German revolution, abolishing the fledgling council movement and spreading exaggerated accounts of the chaos in Bavaria, all he ever obtained of mainstream political commitment was an anodyne testimony from a local assembly in February 1919 to the "irreproachable conduct and benevolent correctness" of the French occupiers.^[13] Bishop Sebastian of Speyer may have greeted a French commander with the words "Avant tout catholique, mon Général," and another

[9] Wysocki, "Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen," p. 257.

[10] Ibid., p. 260.

[11] "Kulturelle Durchdringung des besetzten Gebietes," misc. memoranda (1919–22), BHStAM, MA 108363; "Französische Kulturpropaganda in der Pfalz, Französische Wohltätig-keitsunternehmungen in besetzten Gebiet" (1922–28), BHStAM, Staatsministerium des Unterricht und Kultus (hereafter cited as MK) 15566; Paul Jacquot, Général Gérard et le Palatinat , trans. into German as Enthüllungen aus dem französischen Generalstabs , ed. Dr. Ritter [von Eberlein] (Berlin, 1920), p. 43.

[12] Jacquot, Enthüllungen , pp. 25–27, 34–35.

[13] Reimer, Rheinlandfrage , p. 136. The assembly also declared itself in favor of a separation from Bavaria, but the declaration was never put to a formal vote, even within this dubiously representative group of notables. See also Dietrich Schlegel, "Der Separatismus in der Pfalz nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg," MHVP 71 (1973): 223–25; Allan Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria, 1918–1919: The Eisner Regime and the Soviet Republic (Princeton, 1965), pp. 145–46; Albert Pfeiffer, "Die Pfalz unter französischer Besatzung," p. 91.

cleric may have declared the French far less objectionable than the Prussians, but on the whole, Pfälzers remained politically aloof.^[14] Indeed, working against any stable or powerful alliance with the French was the very volatility of political affairs from which the French had initially benefited. Anti-Bavarian, anti-Prussian, or anti-German, anti-Bolshevik or antibureaucratic, the rationale behind cooperation with the French was neither consistent nor clear. Conservative Catholics had little to gain by turning against the essentially Catholic state of Bavaria, despite its temporary control by the Socialists.^[15] Nor did Social Democrats, who in 1919 were the major political force in the Pfalz, see any appeal in the neutralism offered by the French, particularly at a time when Germany itself seemed to be moving toward a Social Democrat future.^[16] Moreover, the occupation rule came down with special severity on urban workers, leaving them with less food, less work, and less freedom of movement and expression than any other major social group.

The convening of the National Assembly in Weimar clinched the matter, undermining what little support had ever existed in the Pfalz for secession from the Reich itself.^[17] On 6 February 1919, the Association of Pfälzer Industrialists recognized the "indissoluble unity of the Pfalz and the German Reich" and further called for the quick restoration of central authority under a new constitution.^[18] By the end of March, the situation in Munich too had stabilized. The new prime minister was Johannes Hoffmann, a Pfälzer and a moderate Social Democrat, who might in Catholic eyes be guilty of militant secularism but could not be accused either of Bolshevism or of indifference to the Pfalz.^[19]

Meanwhile Gérard, alienated from the mainstream of political opinion in

[14] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 431; miscellaneous reports on Catholic activities in the Pfalz, Papers of the Staatskommissariat für die Pfalz (1919–20), BHStAM, MA 107710.

[15] Erwin Goebbel, Die pfälzische Presse im Abwehrkampf der Pfalz gegen Franzosen und Separatisten, 1918–1924 (Ludwigshafen, 1931), p. 88.

[16] For figures on the electoral strength of the SPD in the Pfalz, see Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria , p. 215.

[17] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 430.

[18] Minutes of meeting, Staatskommissariat für die Pfalz (6 February 1919), BHStAM, MA 107709. A Bavarian official entrusted with observing political developments in the Pfalz called this event "the first gathering in support of the unconditional unity of the Pfalz and Germany" and the "basis for the entrance of a united political front" into the struggle against French-sponsored separatism.

[19] Hoffmann had earned the enmity of Catholic politicians before the war by his parliamentary harangues in the Bavarian Landtag against Catholic schooling. A radical in the prewar and war context, he began to seem moderate in the context of Eisner's cabinet, where he was minister of culture and education, and by March 1919 was welcomed even by the conservatives as a compromise candidate. See Peter Kritzer, Die bayerische Sozialdemokratie und die bayerische Politik in den Jahren 1918 bis 1923 (Munich, 1969), pp. 53; 100; Michaell, Revolution in Bavaria , p. 290; Ernst Müller-Meiningen, Aus Bayerns schwersten Tagen. Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen aus der Revolutionszeit (Berlin, 1923), p. 147.

the region, was thrown back on an otherwise insignificant group that grandly called itself the Free Pfalz movement. The inspiration of a chemist in Landau, Dr. Eberhard Haas, the Free Pfalz movement had only a handful of supporters—most of them small property owners from Landau and the surrounding villages—and virtually no ties to the northern Rhenish separatists of the Catholic and Francophilic Hans Adam Dorten. Gérard liked the Free Pfälzers chiefly for their utter dependence on French patronage. Dilettantish in its organization, the group would have sunk into obscurity among other immediate postwar wonders had not Gérard pressed it into publicly demanding Pfälzer neutrality.^[20] District president Theodor von Winterstein, together with the Pfälzer deputies to the local and Bavarian parliaments, responded with an unambiguous denunciation of all autonomist initiatives. The SPD leader Friedrich Profit made the keynote address to the assembled deputies, declaring that "in the midst of Germany's and Bavaria's deepest distress Pfälzer Social Democracy stands now just as it has always stood in the past, true to its Fatherland."^[21] "With great decisiveness," the assembly affirmed that "the Pfalz belong[ed] indissolubly to Germany" and that its relations with Bavaria were no concern of the French.^[22]

The episode did not end there, however, but continued with a series of arrests and retaliations, culminating in Winterstein's expulsion from the Pfalz and the seizure of the government building in Speyer by Haas and his followers, who then declared the foundation of the Free Pfalz Republic. On 1 June 1919, union leaders in Ludwigshafen and Speyer mobilized hundreds of workers to mill threateningly around the Free Pfalz headquarters. The next day ten thousand people, again mostly workers, gathered in the main square of Speyer, shouting threats at the putschists (invisible in the building heavily guarded by French soldiers) and singing the national anthem. These shows of resolve, accompanied by union leader Fischer's threats of a general strike, dislodged the putschists from the government building, if not altogether from government. For the next three months, governmental affairs limped along, conducted by an awkward combination of Free Pfälzers, French, and uncooperative Bavarian officials—a situation bearable only given the fact of occupation rule. Protest demonstrations and strikes became regular occurrences: in August, a violent and prolonged general strike in

[20] The day before the meeting of the local council, a Free Pfälzer pamphlet entitled "The Future of the Pfalz" was distributed throughout Speyer and other Pfälzer cities. It addressed itself to Winterstein, asserting that the Pfalz was doomed unless it sought neutrality under French protection. Its anonymous authors purported to be representatives of "agriculture, viniculture, the wine trade, industry, trade, commerce, and the workers." See "Die Zukunft der Pfalz" (17 May 1919), PLBS, collection of 1920s pamphlets (Flugblätter ).

[21] Goebbel, Die pfälzische Presse , p. 88.

[22] Karl-Heinz Lintz, Großkampftage aus der Separatistenzeit in der Pfalz (Edenkoben/Pfalz, 1930), p. 25.

Ludwigshafen; in Neustadt, a patriotic rallying of three thousand for "the Pfalz, the pearl of the Reich"; and so on.^[23] The French occupation authorities tried to discourage such actions through harsh reprisals.^[24] By now thoroughly divided on the best course of action, they had ceased to hide their rule behind the façade of the Free Pfalz Republic, which had in any case received no recognition and precious little attention from the rest of Germany. On 12 October, Gérard was relieved of his duties. His successor and former deputy, General de Metz, abandoned the political front temporarily in pursuit of further cultural and economic influence.

These events, shaped as much by folly and pride as by unfolding necessity, set the terms within which local affairs were conducted throughout the years of the republic—and indeed, well into the era of Nazi rule. The dichotomy thus established between traitor and patriot dominated political rhetoric, making it impossible to sustain public debate on any other terms. Although one finds in Pfälzer political rhetoric surprisingly little of the stab-in-the-back legend of internal betrayal and defeat (one wonders if the Pfälzers' proximity to the warfront made them better acquainted with the real state of the army), its place was fully taken up by the figure of the separatist, the autonomist, the traitor to the Heimat, conspiring with the French after the armistice to turn national defeat into national disintegration. Against this figure was posed a variety of defenders, from Social Democrats to agrarian conservatives. In common opposition to French interference in local affairs, they managed to achieve a fragile consensus that lasted until the French left in 1930.

At the heart of this consensus was a commitment to the Germanness of the Pfalz, and the word, concept, and emotion that came to express this sense of loyalty and belonging was Heimat. Heimat and love for Heimat were not French but German—and only German—attributes. Referring to both regional loyalties and national patriotism, Heimat encapsulated the struggle against French efforts to invoke a regional heritage friendly to their own interests. Just as important, it symbolized the agreement of all conflicting parties on certain assumptions. As Friedrich Profit declared in his speech of 18 May 1919, "The party struggles must in this hour cease; today party passions must find no room in our midst. Beyond party programs, our hearts and minds sense other inspiring ideals in human life: the love for our Heimat, for our Pfalz ! [Bravo, cheers from the audience.] We desire to proclaim loudly and joyfully that we are not just good Pfälzers, but good and true Germans, now and always."^[25]

[23] Die Pfalz unter französischer Besatzung. Kalendarische Darstellung der Ereignisse vom Einmarsch 1918 bis November 1924 , ed. Lorenz Wappes, Bayerischer Staatskommissar für die Pfalz (Munich, 1925), pp. 28–30.

[24] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 431.

[25] Speech of Friedrich Profit in the form of a pamphlet entitled "Die Zukunft der Pfalz" (18 May 1919), PLBS.

The full mobilization of Heimat sentiments against the foreign invader, however, fell not to the local politicians but to the Bavarian government in the early years of the occupation. In 1919, shortly after the French expelled District President von Winterstein from the Pfalz, Bavaria established a new Central Office for Pfälzer Affairs across the Rhine in Mannheim; in the words of one official, its job would be "enlightenment, education, and encouragement," to promote the "economic and moral strengthening of the Pfälzers."^[26] The exiled Winterstein became its first head, with the title of Staatskommissar für die Pfalz (state commissioner for the Pfalz), and was given 10 million marks to administer as a "Pfälzer Aid Fund."^[27] At the outset the purposes to which this money would be put were clear to no one, but the new state commissioner tended to favor cultural propaganda, spending little more than 2 million marks on economic aid and welfare programs, in contrast to over 5.5 million on schools, teachers' colleges, scholarly and popular-educational organizations, theaters, orchestras, and libraries.^[28]

This initial preference for cultural programs owed much to the French themselves. For every language class, lecture, pamphlet, or piano recital that the French sponsored in the Pfalz, the Germans felt they ought to have one of their own. The evident slump into which such cultural activities had fallen since the war came to symbolize the decay of German loyalties and the eclipse of patriotic sensibilities. In the language of official reports and publications, concern for "culture" represented an implicit code for political, patriotic identity; cultural programs, however constituted, aimed to shore this identity up, to reaffirm the Germanness of those who happened to live on the wrong side of the Rhine. In this sense, the occupation represented for both French and Germans a continuation of the war, which had in any case only distracted people from the "real" struggle being waged between the propagandists of German and French culture, or, in the formulation made famous by Thomas Mann, between French civilisation and German Kultur .

But beyond this generally held attitude toward culture and its significance—the small change of patriotic discourse at the time—cultural programs were considerably cheaper than economic ones for an office like Winterstein's to administer. Without real political or constitutional legitimacy outside of Bavaria itself, Winterstein could not undertake extensive programs of economic aid to the region, even had he had the money, the inclination, or the staff to do so.^[29] In the Pfalz itself, he had only a secret network of Vertrauensmänner , or confidential agents, drawn mostly from sym-

[26] Secret memorandum of Wappes (8 August 1924), BHStAM, MA 107712.

[27] Johannes Hoffmann (Ministerpräsident ) to Winterstein (2 August 1919), BHStAM, MA 107709; "Bayerische finanzielle Leistungen aus Anlaß der Besetzung der Pfalz und der Abtrennung der Saarpfalz," BHStAM, MA 107785.

[28] Winterstein to the Reichsinnenministerium (Berlin) (21 February 1920), BHStAM, MK 15557.

[29] Memorandum of Wappes (8 August 1924), BHStAM, MA 107712.

pathetic trade unionists and Social Democrats, other bureaucrats, teachers, and not least of all, members of patriotic associations like the Pfälzerwald Verein or the Historical Association.^[30] His chief of operations in the Pfalz, Lorenz Wappes, was a ranking forestry official, well known locally for his civic and patriotic activities as chairman of the ten-thousand-member Pfälzerwald Verein.^[31] Voluntary associations provided networks of friendship ready-made for the discreet gathering and dissemination of information—both primary functions of Winterstein's office. Their membership included all those who might be expected to have a strong interest in the Pfalz remaining German; indeed, the leaders of the Pfalz in economic and political terms, with a few exceptions, might just as well have devised their plans at meetings of the historical Association, where they all met regularly throughout the successive crises of the early 1920s, ostensibly to discuss such subjects as the seventeenth-century hunting accomplishments of Pfalzgraf Johann Casimir.^[32] Then too, voluntary associations like the Pfälzerwald Verein had been able to pay their own way before the war. Winterstein's limited funds had only to supplement the regular structure of private dues and contributions, thereby shifting much of the expense of cultural defense away from the state and onto the shoulders of the besieged themselves.

Nor were Pfälzer Heimat associations at all unwilling to put themselves at the service of the Bavarian government's anti-French actions. During the war, they had shown their worth as guardians of civilian morale, and after the war, when funds were needed even for a limited resumption of everyday activities, the promise of small government subventions meant a great deal.^[33] In short, a near-perfect mutuality of interests characterized the relations between Bavarian government and Pfälzer associations. The Heimat associations could go on doing what they had always done, with the added fillip of

[30] Winterstein, "Bericht über die Sitzung zw. Mitglieder der Reichsregierung und Herren aus dem französisch-besetzten links-rhein. Gebiet" (28 August 1919), BHStAM, MA 107709.

[31] See, e.g., WH , no. 5 (18 May 1917): 3–4. On Wappes's career, see PH 3 (1952): 90; and Pfälzische Heimatblätter 7 (1960): 5. In January 1920, in a letter recommending Wappes for promotion to the high rank of Geheimer Rat "for extraordinary service in the political defense of the Pfalz," Winterstein emphasized the importance of Wappes's local standing in gaining the trust of the middle class in the Pfalz; see Winterstein to Bayerischer Ministerpräsident (30 January 1920), BHStAM, MA 107709.

[32] Ernst Bilfinger, "Schießregister des Pfalzgrafen Johann Casimir," MHVP 37/38 (1918): 129–46; lecture by Albert Becker, reported in PM 36 (1919): 17. Even after his removal from the Pfalz, Winterstein retained close ties to the Historical Association, of which he was the former chairman; see Miscellaneous records of membership and correspondence (1918–22), PLAS, T1, no. 4.

[33] Monthly meetings of the HVP, for instance, were filled with references to the "hard times" and the difficulties of meeting even routine expenditures; see "Vereinsnachrichten," PM 36–38 (1919, 1920, 1921): passim; miscellaneous records of the museum and historical associations, PLAS, T1, no. 4.

defying the French. Government sponsorship, kept discreetly in the background, also made possible the undertaking of new projects—like the establishment of a central Pfälzer research library or an inventory of local castles—and the founding of new organizations—like a league for adult education.^[34]

Bavaria was not, however, the only state concerned about the popular mood in the Rhineland. In 1920, with the immediate political crisis of Rhenish separatism passed, the Reich Ministry of the Interior had begun to take some interest in the "cultivation and preservation of German culture and German traditions [Volkstum ]" in the occupied territories.^[35] Operating through the innocuously named Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst (National Center for Heimat Services)—an organization founded in 1918 to invigorate civilian morale—the German government aimed to reestablish a strong German presence in the Rhineland and eventually to restore full German sovereignty.^[36] In Frankfurt, Darmstadt, and Heidelberg, the Center established "information centers" and maintained a group of "Heimat Service" agents—mostly people whose work regularly took them into the occupied areas—to disseminate German news, propaganda tracts, and posters on the other side of the Rhine. These traveling salesmen, railroad workers, and union and party functionaries would attempt both to infiltrate separatist movements and to bring back with them as much documentary evidence of French "atrocities" as they could assemble. The National Center for Heimat Services would then publish this evidence with great fanfare or give it to the German commissioner for the occupied areas to lay before the Allied high commissioners.^[37] The National Center also published a periodical called Heimataufbau (literally, Heimat Building-up), an "information bulletin" distributed on both sides of the Rhine that carried articles on the true German nature of various Rhenish peoples and regions.^[38] Its "Rhenish cultural conferences,"

[34] The castle project, in the words of Oberforstrat Keiper, would "strengthen our Pfälzer population in their patriotism for Bavaria and for the German Reich." See the confidential summary of his letter of 15 February 1920 to the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, PLAS, T1, no. 11. On the importance the Historical Association ascribed to the project, see also "Bericht über die Vereinstätigkeit von Spätherbst 1918 bis zum Frühjahr 1922," MHVP 39/42 (1922): 6.

[35] Reichsinnenministerium to Landesregierung Bayern (6 February 1920), BHStAM, MK 15557.

[36] Reimer, Rheinlandfrage , p. 174.

[37] A selection of such pamphlets, bound into one volume by the Hoover War Library, is titled Pamphlets on the Rhineland Question and includes, for instance, a pamphlet ostensibly assembled by the Rhenish Women's League that enumerated cases of aggravated assault and rape upon Rhenish women, especially by black troops from the French colonies (Hoover Library, Stanford, Calif.); on the functions of the Reichskommissar für die besetzten Gebiete, see Ernst Fraenkel, Military Occupation and the Rule of Law: Occupation Government in the Rhineland, 1918–1924 (London, 1944), p. 117.

[38] The edition on the Pfalz, "Die Deutsche Pfalz," came out in early 1921: Heimataufbau: Mitteilungsblatt der Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst 1 (14 February 1921).

the first held in May 1920 in Fulda, conveyed further assertions of German devotion to the region, and its subsidiary organizations, like the Rheinische Heimatbund, founded in Düsseldorf in August 1920, engaged in covert activities on the left bank of the Rhine.^[39]

The National Center itself did not effectively promote German interests and German consciousness in the Rhineland, mainly because it did not fool the French. Heimat Service agents were regularly exposed, and by the autumn of 1920 the Reich had reached the point where it would have to end all Heimat Service operations in the occupied areas or face disciplining by the High Commission.^[40] In addition, the strongly anti-Catholic—and in particular anti–Center party—attitudes of many of its organizers aroused opposition even within the German government.^[41] In the Rhineland itself, such attitudes merely played into the hands of French propagandists, who already contrasted Prussian hatred for Rhenish Catholics to the purported sympathy of their French coreligionists.^[42]

But by the time it had become clear that the National Center for Heimat Services was a failure, each of the state governments with an interest in the Rhineland (most importantly, Prussia and Bavaria) had already established operations of their own, to which the Reich government could simply add its support. At a series of meetings in 1920 and 1921, representatives from the states and the Reich (in particular from the Commission for the Occupied Areas) agreed with great difficulty on a common set of goals and guidelines for a "national cultural defense."^[43] Bavaria sent representatives both from its regular ministries and from its special state commissioner for the Pfalz. The assembled officials gave the direction of cultural defense to the states, not the

[39] Reimer, Rheinlandfrage , p. 177.

[40] Ibid.

[41] The Volksvereinigung für Katholische Deutschland mounted a particularly effective attack on the Heimatdienst (ibid., p. 177).

[42] On French propaganda, see the contemporary account by Peter Hartmann, Französische Kulturarbeit am Rhein (Leipzig, 1921); see also, e.g., J. Aulneau, Le Rhin et la France: Histoire politique et économique (Paris, 1922), a book identified by the Germans as a piece of propaganda financed by the Quai d'Orsay (Rheinische Volkspflege representative to Bayerisches Staatsministerium des Unterricht und Kultus [hereafter cited as BavMinUK] [30 May 1922], BHStAM, MK 15557); and the Prussian government's own report on anti-Prussian sentiment in French propaganda, Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung (hereafter cited as PrusMinWKB), "Kulturpflege im besetzten Rheinlande" (18 November 1920), BHStAM, MK 15557 (hereafter cited as "Kulturpflege" [18 November 1920]), esp. pp. 2–4.

[43] Notes from Knoch, Bavarian representative to the Reichskommissar für die besetzten Gebiete to BavMinUK (15 June 1920), BHStAM, MK 15557; "Kulturpflege" (18 November 1920); "Niederschrift über die Besprechung im preus. Ministerium des Innern" (18 November 1920), BHStAM, MA 108372; and Minutes from meeting in the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst and Volksbildung, Berlin (15 February 1921); Kaestner to BavMinUK (14 April 1921); Kaestner to BavMinUK (18 April 1921); BavMinUK to sämtliche Referate, "Betr. Kulturpflege in der besetzten Pfalz" (20 February 1921)—all in BHStAM, MK 15557.

Reich—an arrangement that satisfied Bavaria's insistence on the treasured prerogatives of the states.^[44] The Reich would simply allocate a certain amount of money each year to "cultural purposes in the occupied areas"—10 million marks in 1922—which would be divided among the states and matched, in turn, by equal funds from their governments.^[45] This general plan was ratified by representatives from the Center party, the German People's party, the German Democratic party, the German National People's party, and the Socialist party.^[46]

The common guidelines so achieved had two major tenets, the first called "local initiative," or Eigeninitiative , the second "mutual relations," or Wechselbeziehungen .^[47] Cultural propaganda that ignored local cultural particularity, thought the Prussian officials who articulated these principles, would be a disaster; the National Center for Heimat Services had proven this. Moreover, the French (or so believed the Germans) were unfortunately the masters of cultural propaganda. They had already succeeded in the Orient, Latin America, Belgium, and, above all, Alsace-Lorraine in spreading their superficially attractive "civilization."^[48] Indeed, Alsace-Lorraine stood as a constant reminder to these German officials of their failure as a nation to be persuasive. According to one representative, speaking of his experience as a German official in Colmar before the war, "we lost the struggle in Alsace: we never won over their souls." The teaching of everything, from mathematics to history, was "overwhelmingly Prussian," filled with "the usual Hohenzollern adoration and unreflective war enthusiasm." Not only was no account taken of local Alsatian culture, but no attempt was made to bridge the enormous cleft that developed between it and the rest of Germany.^[49] In Holland, too, during the war, the German newspaper failed utterly because it was immediately recognized as propaganda and derided by the local population,

[44] For the political dimensions of Bavaria's aggressive particularism, see Wolfgang Benz, Süddeutschland in der Weimarer Republik. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Innenpolitik 1923–1925 (Berlin, 1970), pp. 325–30; Reimer, Rheinlandfrage , p. 223. On the Bayerische Volkspartei in opposition to the Weimar Republic, see Klaus Schönhoven, Die Bayerische Volkspartei, 1924–1932 (Düsseldorf, 1972); Werner Gabriel Zimmerman, Bayern und das Reich 1918–1923. Der bayerische Föderalismus zwischen Revolution und Reaktion (Munich, 1953), pp. 81–82; Falk Wiesemann, Die Vorgeschichte der nationalsozialistischen Machtübernahme in Bayern, 1932–1933 (Berlin, 1975), pp. 34–39.

[45] "Ergebnis der Besprechung in Reichsministerium des Innern" (12 May 1922), BHStAM, MK 15557. Bavaria received 22 percent of the money, or 2.2 million marks, to Prussia's 40 percent, half of which was committed to the Saarland. Thus, among the regions within the occupied area as a whole (Rheinhessen, the Prussian Rheinland, Saarland, and the Pfalz), the Pfalz actually received 2 percent, or 2 million marks more than the others.

[46] Reimer, Rheinlandfrage , p. 179.

[47] See the first extensive development of these terms in "Kulturpflege" (18 November 1920), passim.

[48] Ibid., p. 3.

[49] Minutes of the meeting in Darmstadt (22–23 April 1921), BHStAM, MK 15557, p. 3.

in contrast to the enormously successful papers sponsored by the French and British.^[50]

The policies of "local initiative" and "mutual relations" promised a way out of the pattern of past failure and present inferiority; they also take us straight to the provincial heart of German national patriotism. According to the Prussian report, cultural propaganda of the entente variety should have been abandoned altogether as "pointless and destructive"—insulting to the Rhinelanders and productive only of further divisiveness.^[51] The Rhinelander was "well aware of the national danger and the necessity of self-assertion," but he was also "conscious of standing in his own land on the soil of an ancient, constantly lively culture that must be maintained to be preserved." Similarly, the Pfälzers, according to one Bavarian official, were characterized by "a strongly developed attachment to the Heimat," which he attributed to the Pfalz's characteristic structure of settlement in small towns, its "companionable natural setting" manifested in extensive "Verein activity" (specifically, the Pfälzerwald Verein), and, most of all, its "strongly developed sense of self . . . that regards things familiar and local as the best."^[52] The national and the state governments should engage in "cultural promotion" through the encouragement of local cultural associations ("local initiative") and in the "protection of the many ties between the Rhenish and the general German culture" ("mutual relations"). They should not inadvertently assist the French in turning the Rhineland into a "cultural borderland"; nor could they allow the "narrow Heimat" of Rhinelanders to become "encapsulated," isolated from "the broader Heimat" of Germany.^[53] In short, "resistance had to come from the people themselves."^[54]

Here the civil servants of the new republic found themselves in the same dilemma as the founding politicians of the old Second Empire: how to reconcile diversity with unity, how to bind the national and the particular in mutually satisfactory relations. Their efforts in the 1920s, under unusually tense political circumstances, drew on the cultural vocabulary of the 1860s and 1870s, in fact constituted part of a continuous process of national integration of a peculiarly German variety. Its defining characteristic was the cultivation of cultural diversity without the encouragement of political autonomy. "The thoughts, indeed the warm-hearted feelings, that we must care for and strengthen in the Rhineland, are consciousness of the distinctive character [Eigenleben ] of this much pressured and threatened land and its

[50] Ibid.

[51] "Kulturpflege" (18 November 1920), p. 6.

[52] BavMinUK, "Betreff: Kulturpflege in der besetzten Pfalz," no. 7495 (13 April 1921), BHStAM, MK 1557 (hereafter cited as "Kulturpflege in der Pfalz").

[53] "Kulturpflege" (18 November 1920), pp. 6–7.

[54] "Niederschrift über die Besprechung im preus. Ministerium des Innern" (18 November 1920), BHStAM, MA 108372.

interconnectedness with the entire organism of the German people," the Prussian report emphasized. The initiatives of the local population, as well as exchange between them and the population of unoccupied Germany, were predicated first on the "principle of cultural distinctiveness" and second—"at least as important"—on the principle of Heimatpflege. "This latter is of the highest ethical value," continued the report. "For in Heimat thoughts the people's character [Volkstum ] is rooted, out of which develops the greater interconnectedness."^[55]

From the outset of their involvement in the "cultural defense" of the Rhenish Pfalz, the Bavarians had given such Heimatpflege—with its attention both to the locality and to the rest of Germany—more attention and funding than did even their Prussian and German counterparts. With the addition in 1921 of Reich funding, they could simply do more than they had done previously. Teachers in lower schools, now encouraged by special seminars and attractive vacation plans, were to make their goal "the awakening of understanding and love for the Heimat," as well as the "awakening of lively ties to German culture on the foundation of Heimat-thinking."^[56] The new association for adult education, which was funded partly by the Bavarian government, devoted itself to German civic education through the "Bodenständige und Heimatliche," the things rooted in the earth, the things of the Heimat.^[57] According to one Bavarian report, castles and architectural monuments, "well known to be intimately tied to the Heimat feelings of the local population," should be given particular attention, especially since the French had "tried to exploit" such local feelings, even embarking on a highly symbolic restoration of the great cathedral in Speyer.^[58] And all the local voluntary associations engaged in Heimat protection, whether of nature, folklore, literature, festivals, or history, received further encouragement in the form of more extensive grants and the adoption of their periodicals for use in the Pfälzer schools.^[59]

Bavaria also encouraged such traditional cultural undertakings as a regional orchestra and a new regional library, but even these paid homage to Heimat sentiment. The library's collection was shaped almost entirely

[55] "Kulturpflege" (18 November 1920), pp. 9–10.

[56] "Kulturpflege in der Pfalz"; "Deutsche Kulturpflege im besetzten rheinischen Gebiet" (14 April 1921), BHStAM, MK 1557, p. 6.

[57] An extended discussion of adult education in the Pfalz may be found in Chapter 6 below. The quotation is from Hermann Fitz, "Was will der Pfälzische Verband für Freie Volksbildung?" Der Pfälzische Heimatkalender 1922 (Neustadt/Pfalz, 1921), p. 72.

[58] Korn (BavMinUK) to Regierungsrat Trendelenburg (PrusMinWKB) (13 April 1921), BHStAM, MK 15557.

[59] The intention was expressed in "Kulturpflege in der Pfalz"; the results can be judged in the "Vereinsmitteilungen," reported in Pfälzisches Museum ; in the records of the Historical Association, PLAS, T1; and in miscellaneous correspondence between the BavMinUK and the Staatskommissar für die Pfalz, BHStAM, esp. MA 107709–12, MA 108078.

around the Pfalz itself, its history, its neighboring lands, its literature, landscape, and natural resources.^[60] The books, in the militant imagination of the library's new director, Hermann Reismüller, were soldiers, standing in orderly line along the bookshelves, ready to resist the French. As he saw it, the library was "a further important link in the chain of cultural measures" that would "extend the cultural potential of the Pfälzer borderland, give scholarly efforts there a stronger foundation, and, most important, strengthen the national defense against energetic and determined attacks from our western neighbor."^[61]

Although French annexationism remained the most important reason behind the state sponsorship of Heimatpflege in the Rhineland throughout the 1920s, Bavarian and Prussian officials would not have worried about the French influence on the Rhenish population were it not for the troubled state of their own relations with their Rhenish districts. To put the case otherwise, the cultural policies of the 1920s reveal more about the difficulties of German integration after the First World War than merely the consequences of French interference. The Weimar constitution had by no means solved the perennial German problem of balancing state and national power, and the tensions of intra-German affairs tended to make themselves felt in even the most unlikely contexts. Mention has already been made of Bavaria's resistance to a centralized policy of Heimatpflege, a resistance rooted in a desire for state autonomy within the German nation. The general concept at issue in that debate was how German nationalism should be understood and encouraged. The answer the national and state representatives came up with was largely decentralist, emphatic in its insistence on the importance of local particularity in the construction of a general German identity.

But even while they may have approved of such a vision of German nationalism in its cultural aspect, Pfälzers found themselves more and more dismayed at its political aspect, which is to say, the refusal of the conservative Bavarian state to grant the Weimar government the full recognition that most Pfälzers felt it deserved. Here was the revival of a century-old suspicion between the two regions, rooted in the Pfalz's far greater enthusiasm for a strong national state. As in the 1860s, Pfälzer political opinion in the 1920s, with some exceptions, supported the unified, indivisible state that Bavaria

[60] "Die Schaffung einer Pfälzischen Kreisbibliothek, Denkschrift des Bibliothek-Ausschußes," PM 36 (1919): 42; "Niederschrift über die Sitzung des Ausschuß zur Schaffung einer pfälzischen Kreisbibliothek" (16 February 1920), BHStAM, MA 107924; Reismüller, "Bericht über die Bibliotheksverhältnisse der Pfalz und Denkschrift über die Schaffung einer pfälzischen Kreisbibliothek" (June 1920), BHStAM, MA 107924. One owner of a large private collection, Jakob Baumann, publicist, historian, and cathedral cleric, refused to sell his collection to the French, who wanted their own Pfalz collection. Baumann, according to Reismüller, the teller of this story, was "kerndeutsch." See Georg Reismüller, "Die Pfälzische Landesbibliothek in der Separatistenzeit: Ein Erinnerungsblatt" (1930), PLBS, unpublished MSS. ("Rara"), pp. 2–3.

[61] Reismüller, "Die Pfälzische Landesbibliothek," p. 1.

rejected. This time the Socialists, not the National Liberals, were the strongest representatives of unitarian opinion in both regions, and as their influence waned in Bavaria in the course of 1919, the hostility between the Pfalz and Bavaria grew. Chronic Pfälzer complaints against the government—that Bavaria neglected their economy, discriminated against their Protestants, harbored generally hostile attitudes toward their culture—again came to the surface, but this time accompained by the threat of Pfälzer defection to other states or to an autonomous position in the German nation itself: in October 1919, for instance, an editorial in the Speyerer Zeitung declared that "the economic abandonment of the Pfalz by Bavaria as well as the pressure of Center party domination that has hung heavy on this land for so many years has turned a large portion of the population against Bavaria and awakened the wish for secession."^[62]

In Bavaria, meanwhile, the growing influence of the Bavarian People's party (BVP), which had become openly hostile to the republic, even to the point of breaking with the German Center party, confirmed Pfälzer alarm.^[63] Such programs as the Pfälzer Aid Fund, established at just this juncture, could do little to combat the deepening suspicions. In May 1920, at the first meeting of the Pfälzer local council, Social Democrat Profit condemned Bavarian efforts to undermine the unity of the Reich and affirmed the Pfalz's devotion to the Reich and to Bavaria if the latter chose the right course.^[64] In language that echoed the liberals of 1848, Pfälzer Social Democrats declared themselves to be "with Bavaria for the Reich, yes; with Bavaria against the Reich, never!"^[65] The worst crisis in this tense situation came in late 1920, when rumors of BVP leader Georg Heim's negotiations with the French to establish a "Rhine-Danube block" against Prussia reached the Pfalz.^[66] An advisor to the district presidium reported that the Heim episode had seriously damaged "pro-Bavarian thinking": "One hears everywhere in the educated and hence in the loyal German circles of the citizenry the fear that the Pfalz will be 'negotiated' away by Bavaria; the circles of Heimat-loving, Pfalz-born civil servants, especially of the higher ranks, are particularly fearful; they have the bitter feeling that their heads are in a noose and after all their loyalty and conscientiousness they will in the end be betrayed."^[67]

Thus Bavaria's plans for the "cultural defense" of the Pfalz, like Prussia's

[62] Cited by Georg Steigner, Presse zwischen Rhein und Saar. Angriff und Abwehr der Sonderbündler im Spiegel der Publizistik (Zweibrücken, 1962), p. 7.

[63] Kritzer, Bayerische Sozialdemokratie , p. 148ff.; Zimmermann, Bayern und das Reich , p. 81.

[64] "Niederschrift über die Verhandlungen des Kreistages der Pfalz am 10. Mai 1920, in Speyer" (10 May 1920), BHStAM, MA 107710.

[65] Cited by Steigner, Presse zwischen Rhein und Saar , p. 6.

[66] Wiesemann, Vorgeschichte , p. 28; Reimer, Rheinlandfrage , p. 223.

[67] Memorandum from "Dr. K" (i.e., Knoch, the Bavarian representative to the Reichskommissar für die besetzten Gebiete) (20 December 1920), BHStAM, MA 107737. At the same time, the reactionary Gustav von Kahr was rumored to be trying to trade away the Pfalz for the Tyrol (Memorandum from Knoch [11 November 1920], BHStAM, MA 108363).

for the defense of its Rhineland, proceeded within a context of disintegrating loyalty and even outright hostility to the rule of right-Rhenish state. The confessional issues may have differed widely, the political alignments taken divergent patterns, and the attitudes in the two Rhenish districts over the desirability of a unified state not been in accord, but both situations highlighted the dilemmas of Germany's inconsistently federal structure. Under the pressures of French occupation, the weak points in the interlocking levels of local, regional, state, and national government became weaker, and the many oddities of an uneven political development even odder. With the French pushing them one way and the Bavarians another, the Pfälzers had hardly space or strength enough simply to affirm that their loyalties were all for Germany. As one Pfälzer civil servant warned the Bavarian state commissioner, "The Reich matters to us Pfälzers more than anything, in the unity of the Reich our Germanness is incorporated, our love for the Heimat seeks in it a foundation, our economic life is built upon it; the Reich matters to us more than party, religion, and, in the final analysis, the borders of this state."^[68]

Bavarian officials, for their part, tended to lose sight of the question of German survival in pursuit of the nearer goal of holding on to the Pfalz for Bavaria. Many, for instance, were reluctant to admit to Pfälzer organizations that money for cultural promotion came from the Reich as well as from themselves. In March 1921, a Bavarian cultural official wrote to his Prussian counterpart that the point of cultural propaganda was "to create a close dependence" of the occupied districts on the governments of the individual states, not on Germany as a whole.^[69] This indeed was the true inner logic of the principle of Wechselbeziehungen, or mutual relations: to strengthen the Prussian-Rhenish and the Bavarian-Pfälzer bonds. And from the start, the struggle for Bavarian officials had two fronts: against anti-Pfälzerism in Bavaria and anti-Bavarianism in the Pfalz. Ridden as it was with economic and political crises, not to mention Social Democrats, the Pfalz seemed no great prize to many conservative Bavarians. Already in 1919, Winterstein's office, with the Bavarian Regional Association for Heimat Protection, was producing propaganda for consumption in both regions—for instance, the Pfalz-Bayerische Heimgarten , an almanac for the home the basic message of which was that "the peoples of the Pfalz and Bavaria are essentially the same and share a two-thousand-year history."^[70]

[68] Oberregierungsrat Dr. Künkele (Pfälz. Reg. Kammer des Forsten) to Wappes (18 July 1922), BHStAM, MA 107806.

[69] Korn (BavMinUK) to Regierungsrat Trendelenberg (PrusMinWKB) (31 March 1921), BHStAM, MK 15557.

[70] Georg Berthold, "Bayern und Pfalz," in Pfalz-Bayerischer Heimgarten , p. 3. The Staatskommissar arranged for its distribution in schools and elsewhere (Jolas [Staatskommissar für die Saarpfalz] to BavMinUK [20 August 1920], and Matt [BavMinUK] to Staatskommissar für die Pfalz [16 September 1920], BHStAM, MA 107710). Another example of such propaganda was the book Der Wert der Pfalz für Bayern und das Reich , by BVP politician Michael Horlacher (Diessen vor München, 1920).

But ultimately the goal of "mutual relations" depended on the Landsmannschaften, organizations of "compatriots" or "fellow countrymen" that formed an essential part of the associational landscape of German cities. A Landsmannschaft usually had its beginnings in gatherings of displaced provincials at a favorite restaurant or pub—at the so-called Stammtisch . The Stammtisch could of course also be a venue for the cultivating of advantageous business relationships and the forwarding of political ambitions. In many ways the prototypical expression of the German preoccupation with Heimat and a communalism that was both nostalgic and strategic, the Landsmannschaft rested on the conceit that its members were all strangers in a foreign city, whether it be Stuttgart, Berlin, or San Francisco (where the notion at least made some sense), and distinct from the rest of the population in their locally formed traits of personality as well as their shared memories of home.

The Pfälzer Landsmannschaften had been founded in the first decade of the century as chapters of the Pfälzerwald Verein, and thus had unusually well developed ties to the Heimat itself. The war and the subsequent occupation of the Pfalz gave them a renewed sense of mission, while the steady movement of Pfälzers out of the economically beleaguered region into the cities of unoccupied Germany increased their membership far beyond its prewar level. Already in 1919, the Association of Pfälzers in Berlin held a demonstration in front of the Reichstag to protest the conditions of occupation in the Pfalz, with the Pfälzer Maximilian Pfeiffer, then general secretary of the Center party and member of the Reichstag, presiding.^[71]

To turn such expressions of mutual loyalty into support for Bavaria was only a matter of emphasis. The majority of the Pfälzer Landsmannschaften were in Bavaria anyway, their chairmen and activists often Pfälzers who had left the region to pursue careers in the Bavarian civil service.^[72] The same was also true of the so-called Pfälzer Hilfsvereine (Pfälzer Aid Associations), new organizations founded specifically to relieve distress in the occupied regions. From 1920 on, Winterstein and Wappes (who succeeded Winterstein as the Pfälzer state commissioner in November 1921) had extensive contact with all these organizations, providing them with the occasional contribution or speaker for their meetings.^[73] At one point, Winterstein even had ambitions to

[71] "Such gatherings," wrote a Pfälzerwald member in Wald-Heil! "can fill us left-Rhenish Pfälzers with thanks and joy" ("Die Pfälzer im Reiche," WH , no. 9 [1920]: 4).

[72] Of the ten groups in Bavaria, six were led by men in the higher ranks of the civil service (PM-PH 38/17 (1921): 126).

[73] See, e.g., the extensive contact between the Bavarian government and the Verein der Pfälzer in Berlin, BHStAM, MA 108048.

bring them all together into a Westmarkenbund (roughly, a League of the Western Marches), but their main tie remained the associative rituals of the Pfälzerwald Verein.^[74]

The limitations of relying on essentially nonpolitical associations to shore up Bavaria's reputation in the Pfalz were made clear in the summer of 1922, when the logic of "mutual relations" across the Rhine threatened to encourage the Pfalz right into the arms of Baden. The episode, which was set off by Bavaria's failure to show any enthusiasm for the Law for the Protection of the Republic, a tremendously popular law in the Pfalz, demonstrates the malleability of regional traditions in Germany as well as the arbitrary nature of many inner-German relations.^[75] In May 1922, the city of Mannheim had hosted a "Badenese-Pfälzer May Day," in which artistic exhibitions and folkloric festivities were combined, according to the mayor of Ludwigshafen, with political efforts "in the direction of the reestablishment of the old Kurpfalz."^[76] In July, civic and Heimat organizations in cities of the southern Pfalz began making similar plans for a "Pfälzer Sunday" in Karlsruhe that would be the culmination of an autumn festival. Plans were also in the air for a new "Rhineland committee" at the University of Heidelberg, which would give academic expression to the long historical ties between Heidelberg and the left-Rhenish Pfalz. Even the Pfälzerwald Verein had stated not long before at a "Pfälzer evening" in Mannheim that "we left-Rhenish Pfälzers are delighted that 'Pfälzer thoughts' live on with such vigor in Mannheim, proving after all that blood is always thicker than water."^[77]

Perfectly ready to exploit the invented traditions of a common Pfälzer-Bavarian past for their own political ends, Bavarian officials now found themselves in the uncomfortable position of standing by while the Badenese and their supporters in the Pfalz played the same game. The planners of the Karlsruhe "Alemannic-Pfälzer Sunday" spoke, ostensibly in reference to the French, of producing "an eloquent expression of the will to inde-

[74] Winterstein to Reichsinnenministerium (21 February 1920), BHStAM, MK 15557. Not until the Nazi era did such centralization occur, and then not voluntarily.

[75] On anti-Bavarian feeling attendant upon Rathenau's murder, see Knoch to Lerchenfeld (18 July 1922), BHStAM, MA 107806; see also Bruno Körner in the Pfälzische Post (13 July 1922); on similar anti-Bavarian feeling flaring up at the time of Erzberger's murder in 1921, see Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 433; and Albert Pfeiffer, "Die Pfalz unter französischer Besatzung," p. 94. Pfälzer civil servants, for instance, were adamantly in favor of the law; see Minutes of meeting of Pfälzer chapter of the Bayerische Beamten Bund (23 July 1922), BHStAM, MA 107806.

[76] Mathéus to the Bayerische Staatsministerium für Handel, Industrie und Gewerbe (Commerce, Industry, and Occupations) (30 June 1922), BHStAM, MK 15557; on the Staatskommissar's suspicions of Badenese businessmen, see Knoch to Wappes (29 April 1922), and Mathéus (Präsidium der Pfalz) to BavMin für Handel etc. (30 June 1922), both in BHStAM, MK 15557.

[77] WH , no. 28 (1919): 3; "Ein Rheinlandausschuß an der Universität Heidelberg," PM-PH 37/18 (1921): 143; Pfälzer in Berlin (November 1922): 2.

pendence . . . in which the main emphases will be the qualities of rootedness and fellow-feeling [Landsmannschaftlichkeit ] in Pfälzer-Badenese cooperation."^[78] The Pfälzerwald Verein, too, involved itself in the preparations for the celebration of "the Alemannic component of the Pfälzer people [Volksstamm ]." Displays of traditional costume, parades of dressed-up historical figures, singing of folksongs and patriotic songs—all part of the standard repertoire of the Verein's Heimat activities—suggested in the Badenese context the marginality of Bavaria to the Pfalz and indeed to Germany.^[79] State Commissioner Wappes, after an initial panic, decided that the best course of action would be to participate in the celebrations, making them as blandly patriotic as possible. But he never approved of them, for although a "Greater Baden" never emerged in Germany, the celebratory argument for its historical truth did in fact undermine Bavaria's attempt to claim the Pfalz for its own. "Their costume parade has no artistic or historical value whatsoever," wrote an outraged Bavarian official in response to the Karlsruhe celebration.^[80] Momentarily preempted, the Bavarians still maintained their claim to the rituals and traditions of the Pfälzer Heimat.

But the campaign to save the Pfälzer Heimat specifically for Bavaria was bound for failure, even if that failure did not become clear until 1933. It depended on a delicate balance—difficult to maintain in the best of times, let alone the worst—between Pfälzer self-consciousness and Pfälzer submission to Bavaria, between pro-German loyalties and pro-Bavarian ones, between cultural exchange and political stability, between national unity and regional autonomy. The relations between Bavaria and the Pfalz never again achieved the relative peace enjoyed before the war, even if by the end of 1922 the efforts of the state commissioner for the Pfalz to overcome at least the French challenge had obviously succeeded. When the Reich secretary for the occupied areas discreetly toured the Pfalz to see the programs he was financing, he encountered everywhere "a splendid feeling for the Fatherland . . . the true reflection of the German soul of the Pfalz." In expecting to arouse affinities between themselves and the Pfälzers, the French, he thought, had mistaken "appearance for essence and form for content." The Rhinelander was, "to paraphrase the Nuremberger poet on the working class, 'Germany's poorest but also truest son.'"^[81]

After January 1923, he could not have been so sanguine. The near collapse of the economy and the political structure of the occupied regions under the strain of passive resistance greatly complicated the maintenance of a

[78] Knoch to Ministerpräsident von Lerchenfeld (3 August 1922), BHStAM, MK 15557.

[79] Adding insult to injury, the Reich was all set to support Badenese-Pfälzer friendship days, evidently in ignorance of Bavaria's extreme pique (ibid.); see also Wappes to BavMinUK (19 September 1922), BHStAM, MK 15557.

[80] Korn (BavMinUK) to Staatssekretär Brugger (3 September 1922), BHStAM, MK 15557.

[81] Report of Knoch (14 November 1922), BHStAM, MA 107812.

united German front in the face of French aggression. Indeed, German unity survived only at a high cost, not just to Rhinelanders but to all Germans. The events of 1923 and 1924 sharpened the distinction between traitor and patriot, threatening to dissociate patriotism and love for Heimat from the tenuously established institutions of the German republic. Starting with a mass lynching in the Pfälzer town of Pirmasens that put a terrifying end to the second wave of separatism in the region, right-wing violence became ever more a feature of the Pfälzer scene, eventually proving the final, most compelling argument against a purely "cultural defense."

The national crisis of 1923 thus represented both climax and defeat for the essentially domestic and pacifistic nationalism of Heimat. Its events are familiar, and only the particular form they took in the occupied Pfalz need be considered here. In January 1923, the French, not content with the Ruhr, also impounded the customs duties, export and import revenues, and returns on public forests in the Pfalz.^[82] By the end of January, most of the leading Bavarian administrators had been expelled, and civil servants in railroad, finance, and forest administration were subordinated to the direct orders of the Interallied Rhineland Commission. In response, Pfälzer workers adopted the strategy of passive resistance along with the rest of the occupied areas, refusing to carry on their duties under French supervision. In March 1923, the French simply took complete control of the railways, revenues, and forests, firing, then expelling from the Pfalz, some 8,400 civil employees. The expulsion of most town mayors and of many Bavarian administrators and civil servants immediately followed. By November, over 21,000 people (or approximately 2.5 percent of the population) had been forcibly removed to the other side of the Rhine.^[83] The great inflation, which had begun in the Pfalz by the end of 1922 (and proceeded with especial severity, with currency devaluations sometimes 25 percent greater than in unoccupied Germany), accelerated an already powerful trend toward the complete displacement of German currency by French.^[84] In the six months after the onset of passive resistance, unemployment, though hardly uniform, was generally severe. In the shoe-manufacturing town of Pirmasens, where the sole industry was brought to a standstill by the combination of trade barriers, passive resistance, and shortages of crucial raw and ready-made materials, unemployment was almost 100 percent between April and December 1923.^[85]

The practice of passive resistance and the expulsion of so many civil servants came close to destroying the administrative structure of Bavarian-Pfälzer relations. The Rhineland Commission had forced the office of the

[82] Wysocki, "Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen," p. 261.

[83] Ibid.; Albert Pfeiffer, "Die Pfalz unter französischer Besatzung," pp. 94–95; Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 434.

[84] Rudolf Fendler, "Die Pfalz in der Weimarer Zeit," in Pfälzische Landeskunde , vol. 3 (Landau/Pfalz, 1983), p. 328.

[85] A. Seibel, "Die Cunozeit," Pfälzische Heimathlätter 7 (1959): 28.

state commissioner for the Pfalz to disband in the fall of 1922 because of alleged activities in violation of the treaty. The office secretly relocated to Heidelberg, where it continued to operate behind the cover of ostensibly private organizations like the Oberrheinische Nachrichtenbüro (Upper-Rhenish Information Service).^[86] With the flood of Bavarian civil servants to the right bank of the Rhine, the Heidelberg operation took on the character of a shadow government, staffed by the old administrators and in clandestine contact with influential circles in the Pfalz. Without any increase in funds, State Commissioner Wappes ministered to Pfälzer morale and loyalty as well as to the welfare of the expelled Bavarian employees and their families; he also coordinated political parties, unions, and professional organizations within the Pfalz, and maintained regular contact with the other German states that had authority in the occupied areas.

The Heidelberg "Watch," as it patriotically called itself, received support from private voluntary associations in its struggles to maintain "Heimat loyalty."^[87] Outside the Pfalz, the Landsmannschaften took over many welfare functions for expelled Pfälzers, raised money for people in the Pfalz, and kept up a steady stream of propaganda on the region's sufferings.^[88] In June 1923, a number of civil servants and businessmen living in Munich formed a new organization they called the Pfälzer Treubund (Pfälzer Loyalty League), the aims of which were to maintain ties to the Pfalz and to coordinate the many Pfälzer voluntary associations already in Bavaria. Their appropriation of the Pfälzer cause constituted a significant departure from previous efforts, which had been shaped by a primarily convivial tradition. They modeled the Loyalty League on organizations more aggressively nationalistic and outward-turning than most local Heimat clubs—chiefly the Deutsche Schutzbund für das Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtum (German Protective League for Germans in Borderlands and Foreign Countries), whose Munich chief, Major Gilardone, helped to found the new Pfälzer group. Gilardone introduced the word völkisch into the discussion, a term with racial and exclusionary implications absent in the preferred words of Heimat organizations, volkstümlich or heimatlich .^[89] Calling for a "völkisch resistance in the west," Gilardone wanted to create a "single mass" out of the sixty thousand or so Pfälzers in unoccupied Bavaria.^[90] His choice for leader of the new organization was Munich police president Eduard Nortz, a Pfälzer who had risen through the ranks of the Bavarian civil service. Nortz was

[86] Wappes to Ministerpräsident Knilling (5 September 1923), BHStAM, MA 107711.

[87] Jakob Mathéus, "Auf Wache in Heidelberg," in Dokumente aus dem Befreiungskampf der Pfalz , p. 89.

[88] PB (1923): passim.

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

[90] "Niederschrift über eine Besprechung zur Bildung eines pfälzischen Treubundes" (18 June 1923), BHStAM, MA 108046.

by reputation a conscientious civil servant, a traditional conservative rather than a right-wing radical, but in the aftermath of his handling of the May Day demonstrations in Munich he had been criticized for leniency toward Hitler's National Socialists.^[91] Outside the Loyalty League, certain people within the Heidelberg Watch began to have contacts with even more explicitly right-wing, antitreaty, antirepublican groups in Bavaria. This trend, epitomized by the Pfälzer Loyalty League, betrayed the growing influence of prescriptive rather than descriptive notions of Pfälzer identity: no longer seeking the commonalities of an admittedly diverse population, the Loyalty League set rigid and ultimately exclusionary conditions for membership. In 1923, the shift in emphasis was subtle, and it was aimed, moreover, against the French. Its implications, however, turned ultimately against other Germans.

Meanwhile, in the Pfalz itself, the organized assertion of Pfälzer character was subordinated to the struggle of daily life under the conditions of passive resistance. The boycott of French-operated rail, mail, and bus services made most associational activities impossible—or at least impolitic, given the ironic necessity to ride a French train to attend a patriotic meeting. In addition, the rapid devaluation of the currency put a nearly unmanageable burden on local Heimat publications.^[92] Most people actively engaged in associational activities—particularly those concerned with the character and traditions of the Pfalz—had to accustom themselves to the constant scrutiny of the French. As the prominent Pfälzer Maximilian Pfeiffer expressed it in his letter to the German foreign minister, these men and women lived "standing on a powder keg, . . . daily placing their entire legal existence on the line."^[93]

But the full impact of 1923 on the local population, particularly that part of it engaged in Heimat associational activities, cannot be understood without some consideration of the psychological effects of the runaway inflation. As Gordon Craig has written, the wildly declining currency created "a lunatic world in which all the familiar landmarks assumed crazy new forms and all the old signposts became meaningless."^[94] To be sure, the presence of foreign troops in old familiar places had already altered the world of the local population, a fact that required its own psychological adjustments, but the state of occupation and siege was a historically precedented one that evoked easily understandable emotions and well-rehearsed responses. Inflation, in

[91] Harold J. Gordon, Jr., Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch (Princeton, 1972), pp. 125, 195–97, 204–6.

[92] In 1923, for instance, the paper Pfälzisches Museum nearly went bankrupt and was saved only through special Reich funds (Miscellaneous correspondence [1923], PLBS, Papers of Albert Pfeiffer and Maximilian Pfeiffer).

[93] Max Pfeiffer to Reichsminister des Auswärtigen Amt (8 March 1923), PLBS, Maximilian Pfeiffer Papers.

[94] Gordon Craig, Germany: 1866–1945 (New York, 1978), pp. 450–51.

contrast, undermined the world of local self-understanding, suggesting an arbitrary and rootless quality to social position, communal organization, and personality itself. As one Pfälzer writer exclaimed, "In the value of the American dollar and the English pound, see your own worth, O people of Germany, O German nation!"^[95] The victims of the rapidly devaluing currency filled the ranks of the Heimat associations: middle-class people of limited horizons and unadventurous fiscal behavior, living on fixed incomes or small salaries or self-employment; people who had already lost considerable savings through their conscientious investment in war bonds, people who now lived trapped between French economic exploitation and their own ruined national economy. Certainly a frenetic disregard for social prescriptions could have been one reaction to the situation, but a far more accessible response for hometown people was a kind of grim resignation—and in public, a clinging to old certainties about the Heimat. The deliberately folksy almanac published yearly by the adult educational league always began with a letter, sprinkled with folk wisdom, from the "Kalendermann." In 1923, he indulged in a fantasy about the return of the Huntsman of the Kurpfalz from the misty past, not to save the maiden from the dragon or even the Pfälzer from the Frenchman, but to intervene in a food purchase between a villager and a shopkeeper charging millions of marks. "In this hour of need, falling hard on our ears like the sound of funeral bells, comes the word Heimat ," the Kalendermann wrote. Like the elm tree (a recurrent metaphor in Heimat writings of this year), the Heimat endured storm, war, and hunger by pressing its roots ever deeper and growing ever upward. "With the Heimat, one doesn't gamble, winning then losing, losing then winning. The Heimat was bequeathed to us by our fathers, and we pass it on to our children. . . . The Heimat survives, as long as you have breath left in you, it survives."^[96]

In September, the new German chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, called an end to the economically crippling practice of passive resistance, a decision that made financial reform possible in the rest of Germany but deliberately abandoned the Rhenish economy to follow its own declining course. In the Pfalz, unemployment, already a more severe economic problem than in the Reich, rose from 15,000 in March 1923 to nearly 70,000 by October, then by December to more than 119,000, a figure never again reached even in the severe crisis of the early 1930s.^[97] Meanwhile, the continuing crisis had revived the interest of the French—Tirard in Coblenz and de Metz in the Pfalz—in establishing a neutral Rhenish state. In the late summer, the

[95] Franz Hartmann, "Das Prüfungsjahr 1923," in Der Jäger aus Kurpfalz: Pfälzischer Heimatkalender 1924 , (Neustadt/Pfalz, 1923), pp. 78–79.

[96] "Lieber Heiner," Der Jäger aus Kurpfalz 1924 , p. 1.

[97] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 435. The total population of the Pfalz was somewhat less than 950,000; the December figure thus represented unemployment of about 12 percent.

northern Rhenish separatists Josef Smeets, Josef Matthes, and Hans Adam Dorten regrouped, also approaching representatives of disaffected economic groups in the Pfalz, especially the unemployed and the struggling farmers.^[98]

Ironically and unfortunately, the first bid for a political reordering of the Pfalz in 1923 came not from separatists but from the Social Democratic deputy and former Bavarian prime minister Johannes Hoffmann and two of his party colleagues. Hoffmann had long felt that "the Pfalz question" had been raised by "the open constitutional crimes of the Bavarian government" and hence that Pfälzers should not "fear the French" but rather "the Bavarian government with its Reich-damning, Reich-destroying politics."^[99] When in the fall of 1923 Hoffmann's old nemesis Gustav von Kahr took on the semidictatorial powers of general state commissioner in Bavaria, Hoffmann began to fear that Bavaria would secede from the Reich, leaving the Pfalz stranded.^[100] He decided to forestall such a disaster by leading the Pfalz out of the Bavarian polity, and the logic of the situation led him to seek French support. In October 1923, Hoffmann and his allies proposed the formation of an independent Pfälzer state within the German republic, but the Pfälzer council, unwilling to take such a radical measure, unanimously rejected the motion, an action that made Hoffmann into a political pariah.^[101]

The defeat of Hoffmann's initiative again forced the French to shift their attention to elements on the fringes of Pfälzer political life. The second separatist episode in the Pfalz, which began less than two weeks after Hoffmann's failure, was much more unsettling and violent than had been the Free Pfalz movement of 1919, in part because of the increasing polarization of local politics, in part because of the disastrous economic situation. The Social Democrats, once the crucial force in the united German front in the Pfalz, were demoralized by recent events, and trade unions could no longer be depended on to mobilize in the face of a French-supported coup. The Bavarian People's party and the Center party were in the midst of a bitter fraternal feud. The party that had succeeded to National Liberal support in the region, the German People's party, was turning further to the right, gathering support from elements normally associated with the reactionary National German People's party (unrepresented in the Pfalz).^[102] Other former

[98] Ibid., p. 434; see also the general study McDougall, France's Rhineland Diplomacy , esp. chap. 8.

[99] Speech of Reichstag Deputy Hoffmann, reprinted in the Pfälzische Post , no. 184 (9 August 1922).

[100] Kritzer, Bayerische Sozialdemokratie , pp. 153–54, 183.

[101] Hoffmann even lost the support of his own party. Later he lost his job as a schoolteacher in Ludwigshafen, and after his death in 1930 his widow received no state pension. See Hans Fenske, "Der Konflikt zwischen Bayern und dem Reich im Herbst 1923 und die pfälzische Sozialdemokratie," MHVP 71 (1973): 203–16; and Kritzer, Bayerische Sozialdemokratie , p. 154.

[102] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 434.

National Liberal voters split off into farmers' organizations, especially the Freie Bauernschaft (Free Peasantry), a group tending simultaneously to the right and to the French.^[103] In short, if a consensus could be said to have existed in 1919 in support of the new German government, it was attenuated to the point of vanishing by late 1923, leaving only a variety of groups fixated as much on their internal enemies as on the national threat.

The national threat came in the form of a vagabond, disorderly army under a landless farmer named Franz-Josef Heinz from the village of Orbis. In early November, shortly after the Dorten-Matthes coup in the Rhineland, it entered the Pfalz from the already "liberated" north, taking over town halls with French rifles, extracting oaths of loyalty from cowed or indifferent town mayors, and finally arriving at the government building in Speyer on 10 November. Seizing the building and expelling its inhabitants, the separatists proclaimed the foundation of the "Pfälzer Republic in Federation with the Rhenish Republic," under the "autonomous government" of President Heinz-Orbis. The new government adopted a currency based on the French franc and promised to make good what the inflation had destroyed. At the same time it consolidated its essentially military control over the towns and countryside.^[104] By early December, under the sponsorship of the French, it had requested recognition from the Rhineland Commission as the legitimate government of the Pfalz.

In early January, a few days before the commission's decision on formal recognition of the Pfälzer Republic was due to be made public, Heinz-Orbis and his chief advisors were shot down while enjoying after-dinner drinks at a hotel dining room in Speyer. The assassination was carried out by a handful of radical nationalists probably recruited from various extremist organizations—among them the Nazis, who after 1933 took full credit for the affair.^[105] It had been carefully planned by officials in the Heidelberg Watch, even to the point of assuring the presence in the hotel that night of a London Times correspondent sympathetic to the Germans.^[106] It effectively meant the end of the separatist regime. The Agreement of Speyer, ratified on 14 February

[103] Jonathan Osmond, "Geman Peasant Farmers in War and Inflation, 1914–1924: Stability or Stagnation?" in Die deutsche Inflation—Ein Zwischenbilanz/The German Inflation Reconsidered—A Preliminary Balance , ed. G. Feldman et al. (Berlin, 1982).

[104] Pamphlet (30 November 1923), PLBS, collection of 1920s Flugblätter . The appeal was largely to the petty bourgeoisie and the worker, as well as to war widows and veterans. It denounced Bavarian neglect and indifference, quoting an unnamed Bavarian official's response to appeals from the depressed region, "The Pfälzers are used to going hungry."

[105] For a profile of one of the people involved in the vigilante action, see Friedrich Graß, "Edgar J. Jung," in Pfälzer Lebensbilder , ed. Kurt Baumann, vol. 1 (Speyer, 1964), pp. 302–49. See also Reimer, Rheinlandfrage , p. 372; McDougall, France's Rhineland Diplomacy , p. 322.

[106] The reporter, G. E. R. Gedye, published his account of the bloodbath, carried out by courteous young men who asked the other restaurant guests to get under their tables, in The Revolver Republic: France's Bid for the Rhine (London, 1930).

1924 by the Allied High Commission, brought an official end to the autonomous government and gave the Pfälzer local council the authority to restore order, which it did by restoring Bavarian government in the region and bringing back the officials and civil servants expelled since January 1923.^[107]

Regardless of whether the Heidelberg officials maintained regular ties to extreme nationalist organizations—an alliance that Wappes, a reliable and moderate participant, vigorously denied—the vigilante tactics to which these government officials in Heidelberg resorted eloquently bespoke the general level of anarchy and demoralization that obtained throughout the occupied area.^[108] In 1919, coordinated resistance from all the major groups of the population had immobilized a similarly hodgepodge group of autonomists, who had also been armed by the French. In 1923, resistance was sporadic, isolated, and ineffectual. The separatists of 1923 did not hold on to power through the French, though they could not have held on without them, and certainly not through popular support. A week after the assassinations, the British consul in Munich toured the Pfalz and reported that no significant part of the population—neither the unions nor the newspapers—had ever supported the separatists, more than three-quarters of whom had come from outside the region.^[109] The French aside, then, the separatists seem to have prevailed at least partly because no popular consensus existed on which to build a concerted resistance. Indeed, almost immediately after the separatists had seized power, the Pfälzer population was treated to the spectacle of its own government in Bavaria seeming to condone the similarly lawless activities of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist movement. Nor was the comparison overlooked either by the left or the bourgeois middle in the Pfalz, who saw little difference between that group of fanatics and their own.^[110]

Two months later, in the violent, anarchic dénouement to the whole crisis-ridden year, a mob in the town of Pirmasens, possibly incited to action by Nazi agitators, trapped the remaining separatists in the town hall and set it on fire, lynching those men who tried to escape the burning building. It was a

[107] Albert Pfeiffer, "Die Pfalz unter französischer Besatzung," p. 97.

[108] The groups in question were the Bund Oberland, the Jungdeutsche Orden, and the Werwolf, Wicking, or Treuhand organizations. Both the French and subsequent historians have too quickly assumed a close affinity between these groups and the Heidelberg Watch. Wappes's distancing from radical nationalism deserves consideration, not least because it was made not publicly but to a closed meeting at the Bavarian Foreign Ministry. See "Niederschrift über die Sitzung im Staatsministerium des Äussern" (1 May 1924), BHStAM, MA 107712.

[109] "Die Separatistenbewegung in der Pfalz," esp. Clive Protokolle (14 January 1924), BHStAM, MK 15575; Dietrich Schlegel, "Der Separatismus in der Pfalz nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg," MHVP 71 (1973): 228–46. See also Steigner, Presse zwischen Rhein und Saar ; and Goebbel, Pfälzische Presse , passim.

[110] For an expression of Pfälzer dissatisfaction with Bavaria's tolerance of the Nazis, see, e.g., the editorial in the Pfälzische Rundschau , "Hitler und seine Leute," on 11 November 1923.

frenzy of violence that appalled contemporary observers, even as they tried to believe the separatists had it coming to them. The murderous conflagration in Pirmasens betrayed a growing rift that had opened in the course of 1923 between the purveyors of a conventional Heimat patriotism, of mountain wanderings and local artistic exhibitions, and a small but growing number of Germans too radically disaffected from the political and economic order to find answers to their grievances in the consolations of a local world.

But by March 1924 all this was either officially forgotten or transformed into a tale of "sober, decent patriotism."^[111] In the years between 1923 and 1933, as internal strife increasingly immobilized the Weimar governments, a new literature developed in the Pfalz that recounted the events of 1918 to 1923, memorialized their participants, and shaped these events with the logic of Pfälzer historical understanding. As in 1689, when the French general Mélac had laid waste to the Pfalz, so in 1791, in 1919, and in 1923. By these accounts, what had taken place had been the "heroic struggle of the Pfälzer people for their Germanness and their freedom," the victory of "a defenseless, weaponless," but "true German" population.^[112] This moral battle "of spirit and sensibility against brute strength" was won through "their love for their Heimat": "loyalty to the Heimat triumphed over storms of lightning and thunder that broke over us time and again."^[113] One former district president reminisced in 1927 how his government's "Heimat work" (referring to the encouragement of local festivities, traditions, historical consciousness) had been the key to victory over the French.^[114] Another recounted his experience of administering the Pfalz from the Heidelberg Watch fully within the conventions of Heimat writings about local nature: like the Heimat poet, he stands at a distance, admiring the full spectacle of the Pfalz's natural beauty from his vantage point across the Rhine, feeling the "blue mountains of the Haardt" evoke in him "a deep Heimat feeling" for "the suffering spirit in a battle of Right with Power."^[115] The symbols of the Pfalz—the cathedral in Speyer, the Rhine, the vine-covered hillsides—became symbols for Germany also in this literature of nostalgia and veiled justification. And presiding over the years of struggle, "rising ever over the most delicate lines of our mountains, over the bows of our dark, melancholy forests, over the music of the winds, reviving the most downtrodden victim, delighting future generations,

[111] Gedye, Revolver Republic , p. 63.

[112] Lintz, Großkampftage aus der Separatistenzeit , p. 7; Georg Germann (pseud.), Im Gefängnis der Separatisten. Wahre Begebenheit aus den Leidensjahren der Pfalz (Nuremberg, 1927), pp. 10–11.

[113] Lintz, Großkampftage aus der Separatistenzeit , p. 7; Franz Hartmann, "Großkampftage," in Dokumente aus dem Befreiungskampf der Pfalz , p. 69.

[114] Friedrich von Chlingensperg auf Berg, "Heimatarbeit in der Pfalz," in Manz, Mitterweiser, and Zeiss, Heimatarbeit und Heimatforschung , pp. 35–42.

[115] Hartmann, "Großkampftage," p. 91.

spoken from loving lips comes one word, conveying at once wish and fulfillment, the word: Heimat! "^[116]

For the Bavarian administrators who returned to the Pfalz, eager to reassert their own government's legitimacy, that word with all its unifying, summarizing, mystifying potential continued to hold a powerful attraction. They immediately set about trying to salvage the mission of the early years of the occupation—the struggle of patriotic Germans against a repressive, insidious foreign occupier, the saving of the Heimat. In the months and years that followed, the Bavarian government continued to stage demonstrations, festivals, and cultural events that emphasized both the Germanness of the Pfalz and Bavaria's devotion to the region. In April 1924, after two months of intensive planning, Pfälzer clubs in all the cities of Bavaria celebrated a "Pfalz week," during which distinguished politicians and scholars gave public speeches on the distinctive cultural and historical heritage of the beleaguered region and popular festivities raised money for Pfälzer families.^[117] At the end of 1924 the government launched its most ambitious program of Pfälzer support yet, with the establishment of a large fund for loans to small businesses in the Pfalz, the interest from which would go to Pfälzer cultural and Heimat programs.^[118] In 1925 Pfälzer groups, albeit cautiously, joined in the Prussian Rhineland's celebration of a thousand years of participation in German culture and history.^[119] The next year saw the founding, with great fanfare, of the Pfälzische Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften (Pfälzer Society for the Promotion of Learning), dedicated to the study of the Pfalz, its history, its natural resources, its people and traditions.^[120] In 1927 the Historical Association celebrated a hundred years of Bavarian commitment to the preservation of the Pfälzer past.^[121] And so on it went, in every town in the Pfalz, for every conceivable anniversary or historically resonant occasion—this celebration of the Pfälzer heritage, defying the foreign enemy while making increasingly unconvincing assertions of domestic accord. By 1930, the actual French departure from the Rhineland came almost as an anticlimax, so perfunctory had been their presence in the last years of the occupation, so well anticipated and well rehearsed the celebrations attendant on this "liberation" of the Pfalz. The Heimat had been saved, as jubilant publicists proclaimed all over the Pfalz in 1930; but in the process, it had also been lost.

[116] Lintz, Großkampftage aus der Separatistenzeit , p. 75.

[117] "Pfalzwoche" (1923–24), BHStAM, MK 15541.

[118] "Pfalzhilfe" (1924–26), BHStAM, MK 15530–31.

[119] "Tausendjahrfeier der Rheinlande," BHStAM, MK 15584.

[120] "Gründung einer pfälzischen Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften" (1924–June 1926), BHStAM, MK 15549.

[121] "Hundertjahrfeier des Historischen Vereins der Pfalz" (1927), BHStAM, MA 107935.