Six
A Republic of Hometownsmen

The cultural defenders of the Rhineland elevated local identity to the level of national destiny, recruiting the homespun virtues of Heimat to the patriotic cause of German survival. Nevertheless, within the political culture of the Weimar Republic the encouragement of localism—local loyalties, identities, and cultures—was more than a clever tactic of anti-French propagandists. For a variety of Germans, some of them outspoken republicans, some self-conscious guardians of high culture, and others simply anxious defenders of the community, the common good had to be pursued locally, in the more intimate circles of one's collective life. Heimat was the term that called forth a vision of this common good; it was the moral dimension of mere geographical closeness, the common obligations, duties, and values implied by a "feeling of belonging together." In the words of Lorenz Wappes, a public official in the Pfalz, Heimat was the "common good, . . . the foundation on which man strives upward, and the goal for which man struggles," the basis for a "coming together of hearts and minds."^[1] The unification of German hearts, in this idiom, depended not on politics, or on "science, art, the economy, the public bureaucracy," but on the Heimat "as the living part of the great whole, of the people and fatherland": in order to "bring our people to a state of unity, that is to say, to the agreement of popular feelings and the integrity of state affairs," he concluded, "we must turn our minds to the idea of Heimat."

[1] Lorenz Wappes, "Zum Geleit," in Die Pfalz: Ihre Entwicklung und Ihre Zukunft. Ein Sammelwerk unter Mitwirkung führender Persönlichkeiten der Pfalz und mit besonderer Beförderung der Staatsbehörden , ed. Erich Köhrer and Franz Hartmann (Berlin, 1926), p. 5.

Despite the quasi-mystical tone of this kind of language, neither Heimat nor the hopeful localism to which it belonged necessarily reflected a tendency to apolitical retreat in the troubled years of German democracy. The term apolitical , as it has been used in recent efforts to define the public disposition of localist Germans, refers to the "desire to make party political concerns, practices, and structures inapplicable to public life."^[2] The apolitical German was, then, not so much the immature German of Weberian analysis as the determinedly consensualist German, who tried to exclude party conflict from public affairs by refusing to speak in public about the economic and political issues that would inevitably provoke disagreement. That consensualism, in turn, helped to maintain a bourgeois hegemony in the hometown: those who would challenge the cultural and political preeminence of the bourgeoisie simply could not make themselves heard. Wappes's call to "turn our minds to the idea of Heimat" would seem on the face of it an eloquent testimony to such apoliticism; indeed, the whole edifice of Heimat cultivation before and after the war included no room for the expression of grievances against the political and economic order.

Nevertheless, one must pause for a moment to ask why, in fact, it should have. Wappes's "Heimat thoughts" could and did exist, in the same person, alongside partisan political opinion; the advocates of Heimat patriotism included people who joined national parties and people who did not, as well as people who felt no solidarity with the bourgeoisie as such. More important, if we would label "Heimat thoughts" as apolitical, we would learn only what something is not—a perilously incomplete understanding to be sure. Precisely because the term apolitical is essentially negative, describing an "is not" rather than an "is," it leaves an interpretive vacuum into which rush all variety of inappropriate and unintended assumptions: the observation that Heimat was not political in the partisan or power-wielding sense can carry the strong implication that it ought to have been. As a conceptual category, then, apoliticism runs the danger of implying failure where there is just absence, deviation where there is just difference.

One can reduce this danger by employing a vocabulary capable of expressing and interpreting the actual content of what passes as apoliticism. The public realm need not be understood, implicitly or explicitly, as properly constituted by competing economic interests and identities; political theory allows for a publicness defined by the effort to achieve commonality, mutual dependence, and responsibility. The localists of Weimar certainly saw the public realm in such a way and consequently devoted themselves to community rather than (and as well as) to party. "Heimat ideas" in their positive form were the expression of communal integrity, the conscious imagining of a

[2] Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), p. 6.

whole. During the years of the Weimar Republic, Heimat was at the center of deliberate efforts to nourish a public morality appropriate to the new form of government and yet mindful of German traditions. Heimat rhetoric and Heimat activities encouraged a public-mindedness, a desire for moral elevation, and, not least of all, a search for security in a society ridden by crisis. Heimat defined a certain kind of identity, neither private nor partisan but "political" in its dependence on a common public space: to be conscious of one's Heimat and solicitous of its welfare was continually to seek the implications for action that followed from the sharing of a land and a historical tradition.

The encouragement of Heimat thus reveals a public activism very different from the bitter party struggles that dominate our image of Weimar public life. The failure of Weimar governments to win widespread agreement on such symbols of the common life as a national flag or a national anthem is of course notorious, the most telling case being the painful absence of unquestioning support for the "Law for the Protection of the Republic."^[3] But efforts to achieve a republican consensus also took a localist turn, where they met with modest successes before being undermined by sustained economic crisis and resultant political extremism. Heimat ideas and organizations played a crucial role in sustaining public loyalty to the Republic, both as the legitimate form of government in Germany and, less cautiously, as the government most consistent with German traditions.

Heimat also served the ideological purposes of local men and women who were hardly enthusiastic about Germany's republican experiment but were nevertheless hostile to the radical alternative of Nazism. To take the full measure of Heimat's significance in Weimar culture, then, one must also consider its role in expressing established values, in representing a vision of political and social stasis. The turmoil of the Weimar years brought cultural conservatives and troubled republicans into a strange alliance that did not survive the onslaught of the National Socialist movement. How the ideas and institutions of Heimat cultivation served the consensual needs of the Weimar Republic and in turn fell victim to the Republic's inherent instability is the subject of what follows.

Writing in the fall of 1918, a representative of the Pfälzerwald Verein declared that "a new Heimat" awaited the soldiers returning defeated from the field, a Heimat "totally changed" from that which they had left in 1914.^[4] The revolutionary aftermath of the German defeat had loosened the bonds be-

[3] The best book-length treatment of the problem of legitimacy is Gotthard Jasper, Der Schutz der Republik: Studien zur staatlichen Sicherung der Demokratie in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen, 1963).

[4] "Wilkommen," WH , no. 24 (8 December 1918): 1.

tween local loyalty and the national state that fifty years of Heimat activities had tried to secure. For the Heimat associations, the uncertainty of late 1918 over whether a German state existed—and if so, where—posed a severe challenge to their capacity to articulate feelings of patriotic loyalty. What did it mean in November 1918 to be a patriotic German, loyal to Heimat and Fatherland, concerned about the common good of both? The author of the Pfälzerwald Verein's welcome to homecoming soldiers hoped for an "order of rights . . . better than we have heretofore had, which will guarantee freedom to everyone, without distinction of rank, an order of rights that the hard-pressed citizen of this severely tested land may claim as his own."^[5] To take part in this rebuilding, reestablishing the communal harmony on which citizenship was based, was at least part of the mission of the Verein in the subsequent months. In March 1919, the Verein paper proudly announced that four club members had been elected to the National Assembly in Weimar.^[6] Regardless of how it eventually came to regard the Republic in its last years, in 1918 the Pfälzerwald Verein, then the premier Heimat organization in the region with some fifteen thousand members in the Pfalz and outside of it, was prepared to accept the Republic as the legitimate expression of German sovereignty and the heir to Heimat loyalties.

This tentative convergence of Heimat sensibilities with republicanism owed something, to be sure, to the threat of French annexation of the Pfalz, but patriotic expedience alone accounts for neither the extent nor the nature of the phenomenon. Certain groups in the Pfalz, especially though not exclusively those on the left, believed that the notion of Heimat, properly understood and propagated, could strengthen the civic consciousness and the democratic capabilities of Germans, producing good Germans and good citizens too. Responsible public behavior would follow from the study of the Heimat, and an enhanced public consciousness from its celebration. The Pfälzische Verband für freie Volksbildung (Pfälzer League for Popular Education), a new adult educational association founded initially to nourish anti-French patriotism, argued that the "most significant holes in the spiritual armor of the German people" were to be found in the area of popular knowledge of civic and state affairs; its leaders proposed the remedy of popular education first in matters of the Heimat, then of the nation altogether.^[7] Encouraging a local newspaper's Heimat celebration, Maximilian Pfeiffer, the German ambassador to Vienna and a native Pfälzer, wrote that "Heimat love and Heimat pride alone enable the state citizen to become a citizen of

[5] Ibid.

[6] WH , no. 26 (8 March 1919): 4.

[7] Hermann Fitz, "Die Volksbildungsbestrebungen in der Pfalz," Pfälzische Post , no. 225 (26 September 1919).

the world, for the path to the understanding of peoples is open only to those who in their deepest soul understand and exalt their own identity."^[8] Consciousness of one's local identity, one's Pfalztum , thus seemed to hold implications for political and social behavior beyond the mere sentimentality of hometown patriotism.

The Pfälzers who tried to articulate the civic implications of "the idea of Heimat" shared this set of assumptions about local life and politics with the founders of the Weimar Republic itself. Hugo Preuss, first author of the Republic's constitution, brought to his practical effort at state building a preoccupation with the contemporary implications of German traditions of local self-government. A student of Otto von Gierke, Preuss had pursued the democratic implications of Gierke's work in his prewar scholarship on German cities and in his early political career as a municipal politician in Berlin.^[9] His initial constitutional draft (which did not survive even the first round of constitutional consultations with the German states) had contained his solution to the twin German problems of territoriality and citizenship. He proposed to devolve many administrative and self-governing powers from the central state, past the intermediary states, to the municipalities, communes, and districts, from whose local embrace the new citizen would step forth. And although this balance of local autonomy within a unified state fell afoul of small-state particularism, Preuss's vision of the citizen as an updated hometownsman, responsible to the ever-widening spheres of communal life from the town to the Republic, survived implicitly in the Weimar constitution's statement of the rights and duties of citizens. For Preuss, as for the Pfälzer Heimatlers, the ethical and political locality could be the location of "a universal national-pedagogical system of education, bringing the participating citizens out of the narrow circle of their communal experience step by step into the great matter of national politics."^[10]

Indeed the "idea of Heimat," with various emphases and flavors, permeated the educational reforms and experiments of the Weimar period. Article 146 of the Weimar constitution had set the agenda for a major recasting of the German public school system, calling for a reformed curriculum, expanded educational opportunities, and careers open to talent. Although many specific reforms, particularly those intended for high schools and universities, were quickly lost amid confessional, ideological, and sectional conflicts, early Weimar governments agreed on the need for the inclusion of

[8] Dr. Maximilian Pfeiffer to the Pfälzische Rundschau , printed in 25 Jahre "Pfälzische Rundschau."

[9] See, e.g., Heinrich Heffter, Die deutsche Selbstverwaltung im 19. Jahrhundert. Geschichte der Ideen und Institutionen (Stuttgart, 1950), pp. 731–67; and Gerhard Schulz, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur. Verfassungspolitik und Reichsreform in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1963), pp. 9–17.

[10] Preuss, cited in Schulz, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur , p. 128.

Staatsbürgerkunde , or civics, in schools at all levels, and they managed to create a national elementary school system.^[11] In addition, a startling variety of programs in adult education, open education, and vocational education began to take hold alongside the old structure of confessional and elite education.^[12] The general tendency of both reform and experiment was to dismantle the system that had created a nation of "subjects" (Untertanen ) and replace it with one that would cultivate the German citizen, capable of independent thought but conscious of his or her role in society, educated in practical matters but committed to ideals, particularly republican ones. Social Democratic reformer Konrad Haenisch called this paragon "the new German character [Menschentyp ]": not with Hamlet's "unworldliness" (Welt-fremdheit ), nor yet materialistic, but rather a union of the "most solemn fulfillment of duty, the most sober sense of facts, and the most elevated idealism," a synthesis of "Old-Potsdam, Old-Weimar, and New-Berlin," a person of "political-economic and civic thought and of social and democratic feelings."^[13]

For reformers and experimenters alike, the field of Heimatkunde seemed to offer the means and the subject materials with which to begin this education in public-mindedness. Heimat studies as such had been invented by the Heimat movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and involved the teaching of geography, science, and history through the firsthand experience of one's surroundings—methods already advocated by the likes of Rousseau and Pestalozzi but little adopted in the pedagogically unimaginative Wilhelmine schools.^[14] Apart from a few Heimat textbooks that appeared at the turn of the century, Heimatkunde made scant appearance in school curricula until the Weimar period.^[15] Its first adoption came in the experimental Gemeinschaftschulen (community schools), the Dewey-influenced Arbeitsschulen (work or activity schools), and new Deutsche Oberschulen (German upper schools), like the Lichtwarkschule in Hamburg that one observer called "perhaps the most radical state secondary school in all of Germany."^[16] Reflecting an emphasis on not only geography and natural sci-

[11] Thomas Alexander and Beryl Parker, The New Education in the German Republic (New York, 1929), pp. vii–x; Manfred Abelein, Die Kulturpolitik des Deutschen Reiches und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Cologne, 1968), pp. 69–74; R. H. Samuel and R. Hinton Thomas, Education and Society in Modern Germany (London, 1949): Kurt Düwell, "Staat und Wissenschaft in der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kulturpolitik des Ministers C. H. Becker," Historische Zeitschrift , Beiheft 1 (1971): 32, 46–47; Cecilia Hatrick Bason, Study of the Homeland and Civilization in the Elementary Schools of Germany (New York, 1937), p. 26.

[12] Alexander and Parker, New Education , pp. 3–11, 67–83, 119–242.

[13] Konrad Haenisch, Sozialdemokratische Kulturpolitik (Berlin, 1918), pp. 23–24.

[14] See Chapter 3 above; and Bason, Study of the Homeland , pp. 8–10.

[15] Bason, Study of the Homeland , p. 8.

[16] Anderson and Parker, New Education , pp. 5–7, 121–128, 156–160; Bason, Study of the Homeland , p. 15.

ence but social relations as well, Heimatkunde suited the nonregimented plans of study in the new schools, which directed the student's attention "in ever-widening circles" from schoolroom to city to province to nation, with frequent stops to observe the out-of-doors.^[17]

In the course of the 1920s, Heimatkunde achieved even wider dissemination, particularly in the education of young children. The Reich Grundschulgesetz (Basic School Law) of 1921, which abolished state and private preparatory schools and established national standards for the first four years of a child's education, suggested that the early school should encourage "moral advancement, the spirit of citizenship, and individual and vocational qualification in the spirit of German culture and international conciliation"; the principles of nationality, Heimat, and childhood should integrate the curriculum.^[18] The principle of Heimat required that all human activities be introduced and understood in relation to the local and the familiar. As an educator in the national Zeitschrift für die Bildung wrote in 1925, "Our goal today in education is to form not only a civilized person [Gemeinschaftsmensch ] but a conscious citizen of the German state. Along the path of educating a German citizen lies an education in the German national consciousness, which in turn is accomplished by an education in the German Heimat-consciousness."^[19] The details of such an education were left to the individual regions to legislate; by 1928, Baden, Prussia, Württemberg, Thuringia, Saxony, and Bavaria had developed guidelines that included Heimatkunde as a special subject for older children and a method of learning for the younger ones.^[20]

Bavaria issued its guidelines on the teaching of Heimatkunde in secondary schools in 1921.^[21] ministerial announcement called for the replacement of Bürger- und Lebenskunde (civic and life studies) with Heimat- und Lebenskunde (Heimat and life studies), a shift that one textbook writer called the "official recognition of the Heimat principle."^[22] Heimatkunde was to form the "core of the entire secular instruction," instilling "knowledge and understanding" of the world through the local perspective and evoking "respect and love . . . for the culture and the history of our people . . . which will be the surest foundation for a new building of our fatherland."^[23] The initiative was wel-

[17] Bason, Study of the Homeland , p. 15.

[18] Quoted in ibid., p. 27.

[19] Cited in Wolfgang Emmerich, Germanische Volkstumsideologie (Tübingen, 1968), pp. 135–36.

[20] Bason, Study of the Homeland , pp. 27–28.

[21] In 1922, it issued similar guidelines for the elementary schools. Ibid., p. 27; Jakob Böshenz, Heimat-Lebenskunde und Stoffverteilung für die Volksfortbildungsschulen Bayerns , 3 vols. (Grünstadt/Pfalz, 1921–22), introduction; Friedrich Pfister, "Volkskunde und Volksschule," in Manz, Mitterweiser, and Zeiss, Heimatarbeit und Heimatforschung , p. 137.

[22] Böshenz, Heimat-Lebenskunde , introduction.

[23] Pfister, "Volkskunde und Volksschule," pp. 137–38.

comed in the Bavarian Pfalz. Since 1920 teachers' organizations had been encouraging Bavarian authorities to "throw out history, geology, and biology and bring in simple Heimatkunde, so that our schoolchildren will develop love for their Heimat" yet still learn about the rest of the world.^[24] Rejecting previous Bavarian textbooks as "boring," a teacher in the Pfalz argued for the importance of leaving the classroom occasionally and taking to the roads of the region, in order to instruct "each individual Pfälzer in the German quality of his own nature and his own land."^[25] The idea of community and commonality would thus take on an actual physical dimension. Journeys, we know from anthropologists, create meaning; this particular journey through the Pfalz was to establish the interconnectedness of many personal histories to that of the imagined whole, the Pfalz—with roads and long vistas as an appropriate embodiment of the unity across space and time.^[26]

The Heimat associations of the Pfalz—the Historical Association and the smaller literary and antiquarian societies—also maintained in the pages of their magazines a lively discussion about educational reform and Heimatkunde. One writer suggested that an experimental residential school, a Landeserziehungsheim , be founded in one of the old Pfälzer castles. The method of teaching would be "living observation, not book learning"; "the study of nature, of the Heimat, its social relationships and its history" would "give to humanistic education a new meaning" and would establish "the golden middle way," "the proper balance between freedom and law."^[27] Albert Becker of Zweibrücken, the most prolific of local Heimat scholars, emphasized the importance of teaching a "psychological understanding" of the German character (Volkstum ); the "highest purpose" of such instruction would be to make students understand that "out of the many-sidedness of the individual folk groups a unified community of people reveals itself, existing behind all changes in family and life forms and all differences in estate and education."^[28] Support for Heimatkunde in the regular schools stretched from the Catholic head of the teachers' association to the Social Democratic party (SPD) of the Pfalz.^[29] In 1924, for instance, the Educational Committee of the regional SPD had added a "children's Heimat edition" to their local news-

[24] "Wir brauchen ein Pfälzisches Heimatbuch," Pfälzische Lehrerzeitung , no. 45 (1920): 264.

[25] Ibid. The notion of such education immediately brings to mind W. H. Riehl and his method of "knowing" the Pfalz, i.e., walking its roads. See Chapter 2 above.

[26] See Benedict Anderson's thoughts on the establishment of new group identities in Imagined Communities , esp. p. 55 on journeying.

[27] E. Schramm, "Burg Berwartstein als Erziehungsheim," PM-PH 38/17 (1921): 123–24.

[28] Becker also discouraged too great a fixation on peasant life in the teaching of Heimatkunde; see his "Volkskunde und Unterricht," PM-PH 44/23 (1927): 65.

[29] See Ludwig Eid, Heimatliches Volkstum und der Lehrer in der Pfalz (Ludwigshafen, 1925); and Ludwig Eid, Pfälzer Volk. Vortrag im Ferienkurs der bayerischen Lehrerbildner zu Speyer (Bayreuth, 1926).

paper; the same Albert Becker, writing in the leading Heimat magazine of the Pfalz, approved of its "warm heart for the youth, its open spirit, and its true Heimat love."^[30]

One of the first and most complete of the Heimat textbooks written in the 1920s was the work of Jakob Böshenz, a poet, author of one of several "Pfälzer songs" ("Es liegt ein Land am grünen Rhein"), and an active participant in the "discovery of the Heimat" at the turn of the century.^[31] By profession Böshenz was a teacher, and his textbook Bürger- und Lebenskunde had been widely used in Pfälzer continuation schools (for those not bound for university) before the war. In 1921, in line with Bavarian policy, Böshenz retitled the work Heimat- und Lebenskunde , adding sections on democracy, citizenship, and social organization.^[32] The purpose of the book and the three-year course of study it prescribed was to teach students about the practical and ethical aspects of "occupational" and "communal" life.

Böshenz's essential message was one of communal responsibility and moral obligation, which was at the same time a message of social reconciliation and reformism. The principal lesson that Böshenz drew from occupational life was the need for cooperative effort: "Bound together so also will the weak be powerful." What he called Vereinsgedanken , or associational attitudes, ought, he thought, to pervade the economic sphere, leading men to join together in trade, agricultural, recreational, and philanthropic organizations to advance their own cause as well as that of the whole.^[33] Association was for Böshenz both the secret to progress and the principle that explained the whole complex interweaving of state, industry, agriculture, trade, and commerce in modern society. Men did not pursue their own interests in disregard or ignorance of countless other discrete economic individuals; rather, they formed various kinds of groups, which together made up the whole.

The principle of association—a prescription disguised as a description—received its fullest treatment in Böshenz's three sections on "communal life" in family, Heimat, and Fatherland. All good feelings and all cooperative impulses emanated, by his account, from the family house outward into hometown and nation. Both family and community membership exacted duties as well as bestowed privileges: respect, gratitude, care for elders, punctuality, cleanliness, and consideration were featured on the list of "foundations of a lasting Heimat peace," along with "community feeling, peaceableness, helpfulness, dependability, and integrity." The hometown ought to satisfy one's private and public needs; its streetlights and sewage system, its town hall, marketplace, and churches, "Catholic, Protestant, and Israelite," together

[30] Die Welt der Kleinen (ed. Bildungsausschuß der SPD Bezirk Pfalz) 1 (1924), intro.; review of same by Albert Becker, PM-PH 41/20 (1924): 187.

[31] Biographical sketches in PP 2 (1951): 16; and PH 7 (1956): 71.

[32] Böshenz, Heimat-Lebenskunde .

[33] Ibid., 1:40–44.

defined the "Heimat place" and in the process saved man from "that most horrifying of all human feelings," homesickness (Heimweh ).^[34]

Democracy first entered onto this conventionally harmonious scene protectively clothed in "old German ways."^[35] According to Böshenz, the new German state had reestablished the hometown on the basis of a communal and egalitarian self-government with ancient though unspecified roots. Democracy itself he nevertheless saw as something new, the "great turning point" for Bavaria and Germany.^[36] Germany had become "the freest democracy in the world": "The old state has fallen, the authoritarian state has disappeared; there are no more rulers and no more subjects."^[37] Democracy had brought civic and legal rights to the people, but Böshenz insisted that these rights also entailed duties, the fulfillment of which would secure the common good—notions that, again, harked back to much older German conceptions of communal peace and brotherhood.^[38] Working for the good of the whole, whether "community, state, nation, or humanity," required "a readiness to serve and to sacrifice, which are the true civic virtues": "The protection of the rights of the individual require first and foremost respect for the fundamental rights of the whole."^[39] The civic freedom of Böshenz's account, then, lay not in the absence of restraints on the citizen, but in the possibility of self-determination and ultimately in the citizen's ability to rule himself for the sake of his community.

Applied to actual social relations, Böshenz's insistence on duty as the essence of citizenship required that conflict among classes be resolved in the interest of the whole. The modern state, according to Böshenz, "more and more seeks to ward off such shocks [as class conflicts]" and to achieve "social justice" through "better living conditions" and other measures.^[40] "Social thinking" in the life of the nation, like "associational thinking" in the life of the economy, was the key to public health. Not coincidentally, the articles of the Weimar constitution for which Böshenz reserved special praise were those assuring the freedom of assembly and association (Article 59) and the right of codetermination and worker's councils in the workplace (Article

[34] Ibid., 1:48, 75–76; 2:158–60, 163, 182–84.

[35] Ibid., 2:160–62. Böshenz's whole discussion of hometown autonomy bore more than coincidental resemblance to Otto von Gierke's fundamental distinction between community (Genossenschaft ) and domination (Herrschaft ) in the first volume of Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht (Berlin, 1868).

[36] Böshenz, Heimat-Lebenskunde 3:110.

[37] Ibid., p. 119.

[38] See Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984).

[39] Böshenz, Heimat-Lebenskunde 3:113–14.

[40] Ibid., p. 124.

165). "With these," he optimistically instructed young Pfälzers, "the freest constitution in the world overcomes the hostile conflict between capital and work, between industrialist and employee."^[41]

Heimatkunde, then, involved not just instruction through the example of local conditions but, more important, the projection onto the nation at large of a traditional, guild-inspired notion of communal harmony. Understanding the Heimat—"the foundation of the national state"—involved understanding one's own self and responsibilities in relation to the locality, the nation, and the world. "All the communal life of man," taught Böshenz, "is carried out in either the circle of the family or the community or the state—and each of these communities brings men face to face with their human fate, which is to be bound together for better and for worse by the bonds of love and loyalty, ready to protect and to help one another in the defense against unfriendly forces and in the fulfillment of common goals."^[42] "State" or "civic" thinking, he concluded, was "eminently ethical."

The union of Heimatkunde with civics, and of ethical communalism with political education, was not confined to the education of young people in the Weimar Republic but extended into the new territory of adult education, or freie Volksbildung . The Volksbildung movement had begun before the war in efforts—first of the socialist adult education movement and later of a middle-class, reformist imitation of that movement—to bring advanced education and high culture to the working classes.^[43] In the Weimar Republic, the adult education movement spread rapidly into all regions of Germany, reaching out to the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie as well as to its traditional constituency of urban workers.^[44] One of the more important consequences of the new democratic constitution, the Volksbildung movement expressed for one observer the "right of all to a liberal education" and "assure[d] to all the citizens the opportunity of sharing in our cultural resources."^[45] The "young Republic and the new trend in adult education were mutually necessary," wrote an activist in the movement, because "the urgent need for free and responsible citizens had to be met immediately" and could not wait for "a new generation . . . educated for the right combination of liberty and discipline."^[46] "According to their right of self-determination, the people have taken their fate into their own hands and in the future want no more to abandon their political power to a highly privileged few," wrote a Pfäzer teacher and head of the new adult college in Kaiserslautern. The mission of

[41] Ibid., pp. 125–26.

[42] Ibid., p. 128.

[43] Samuel and Thomas, Education and Society , pp. 135–37.

[44] Ibid., pp. 140–47.

[45] Alexander and Parker, New Education , pp. 215–19.

[46] Fritz Borinski, cited in Samuel and Thomas, Education and Society , p. 140.

Volksbildung was to teach people about the "common cultural heritage," which would give a solid foundation to their new political rights and renewed "communal feeling."^[47] The Weimar constitution itself specified in Article 148 that all levels of government should support adult education. Indeed, for a Pfälzer lawyer in Berlin, the Volksbildung movement had "finally made real the idea of the 'Great Coalition.'"^[48]

The state did not, however, directly govern adult education; instead it provided financial and moral support to a variety of organizations, some affiliated with parties or religious groups, but many unaffiliated, or "frei," and gathered in regional coalitions like the Landesverband für freie Volksbildung (Regional League for Popular Education) in Bavaria and the Zentralstelle zur Förderung der Volksbildung und Jugendpflege (Central Office for the Promotion of Popular Education and Youth Activities) in Hesse. In the Pfalz, the Pfäzer League for Popular Education was founded in 1919 with Bavarian funds and democratic aspirations.^[49] In the early 1920s it participated in local efforts to defend German culture against the invasion of French civilization, but the league also adopted a position critical of the German heritage of elite culture.^[50] Its leaders saw the league as the organization of the future, suited to the "new democratic times" and ready to meet the challenge of the French occupation by appealing directly to the desire for Bildung in the people, the Volksgenossen .^[51]

Adult education in the Pfalz, associated primarily with trade unionism, had had its beginnings in the industrial towns of Ludwigshafen and Kaiserslautern before the war, but the leaders of the new adult education movement, although mostly Social Democrats and Democrats, were determined to remain absolutely neutral in religious and political terms, as befitted the dignity of their task in a people's state.^[52] Freie Volksbildung contrasted with state education, forced education, and any education that tried to impose particular opinions on other people. The league's members believed instead in rationality, open discourse, and above all Sachlichkeit , objectivity.^[53] They believed also in the importance of shifting the ground of cultural education—

[47] Ludwig Wagner, "Der Pfälzische Landesverband für Volksbildung," Pfälzer Lehrerzeitung , no. 26 (23 December 1919): 134.

[48] Emil Dosenheimer, "Die Volksbildungsbestrebungen in der Pfalz," PB 8 (25 May 1928): 68.

[49] See pp. 129 and 133 above.

[50] Fitz, "Was will der Pfälzische Verband für Freie Volksbildung?" p. 71.

[51] Ibid.; and Fitz, "Volksbildungsbestrebungen."

[52] Volksbildung in der Pfalz. 30 Jahra Kulturarbeit im Dienste unserer Heimat , ed. Pfälzischer Verband für Freie Volksbildung (hereafter cited as PVFV) (Neustadt/Pfalz, 1952), pp. 12, 42; Fitz, "Pfälzischer Verband für freie Volksbildung," PM–PH 38/17 (1921): 89.

[53] Fitz, "Was will der Pfälzische Verband für Freie Volksbildung?" p. 71.

and cultural defense—away from the artifacts of the privileged few to the artistry of the people, in both city and countryside. Consequently they advocated a decentralized organization—indeed, less an organization (even that sounded too regimented) than a spontaneous coming together of many efforts to promote "Pfälzer-German folk culture."^[54]

Neither the league's decentralized structure nor its independence was achieved without a struggle. The Bavarian state commissioner for the Pfalz, Theodor von Winterstein, wanted adult education to be based in Speyer, from which cultural stronghold would go forth roving bands of professors delivering scholarly lectures across the region. In the Social Democratic newspaper of Ludwigshafen, league cofounder Dr. Hermann Fitz published a widely reprinted criticism of the plan, in which he argued for cultural promotion from "unten nach oben" (bottom to top) instead of "oben nach unten" (top to bottom). The Speyer plan, thought Fitz, would produce an organization "with the character of an Honoratioren club," consisting of "civil servants, professors, and moneybags [Geldgeber ]." What Germany and the Pfalz needed was the active participation of "simple people" in their own further education, particularly in civics and history: "because in the realm of popular education in citizenship lies the most alarming hole in the spiritual armor of the German people."^[55] The issue was finally decided at a public gathering, where the democratic model of adult education triumphed, albeit with some concessions to the advocates of scholarly lectures, and in July the league received 500,000 marks from Bavarian funds to "promote the lasting unity of the Pfalz, Bavaria, and the German Reich."^[56]

Membership in the league consisted only of groups, one per locality, which supervised adult education courses and supported other activities deemed compatible with the league's goals.^[57] Already in February 1920, the league and the city council of Kaiserslautern had founded a community college as a focal point for adult education in the Pfalz.^[58] The league made pioneering efforts to establish public libraries all over the region, as well as

[54] Ibid.; Fitz "Pfälzischer Verband," p. 89.

[55] Fitz, "Volksbildungsbestrebungen"; the same article was reprinted in many newspapers in the Pfalz (see the newspaper clippings in the papers of the Staatskommissar für die Pfalz, BHStAM, MA 106019).

[56] Winterstein to Bayerisches Staatsministerium des Innern (hereafter cited as Bav-MinInn) (14 January 1920), BHStAM, MA 107709; Fitz, "Zur Frage der Volksbildung in der Pfalz" (ca. December 1919), BHStAM, MA 106019; "Gründung einer freien Volksbildung Verein betreffend" (28 November 1919), BHStAM, MA 106019; "Bericht über die Besprechung der sachgemäßen Verwendung der 500.000 Mark: Volksbildungszwecke" (Mannheim, 13 June 1920), BHStAM, MA 106019; "Satzungen des Pfälz. Verbandes für Freie Volksbildung, e.V." (Neustadt, 1920).

[57] "Satzungen," p. 3.

[58] PVFV, Volksbildung in der Pfalz , pp. 14–15.

sending out a Wandertheater to bring German drama to the people.^[59] It also published popular almanacs, sponsored concerts and poetry readings, organized folk costume and custom celebrations, led people to museums and historical sites—in short, engaged in all the activities falling under the rubric of Heimatpflege. "Under the unifying banner of love for Heimat," read the league statutes, the manifestations of a democratically shaped culture would gather.^[60]

In its efforts to make local culture explicitly democratic and even republican, the Pfälzer League for Popular Education faced the opposition of those who read in the word frei an intemperate liberalism, godlessness, ethical neutrality, and anticommunitarianism. The Katholische Presseverein für Bayern (Catholic Press Association for Bavaria), a leading Volksbildung organization in Bavaria that claimed eight hundred chapters and over one hundred thousand members, objected in 1921 to the exclusive support that the frei Volksbildung movement of the Pfalz was receiving from the Bavarian government.^[61] But against such criticism, the league always insisted that the word frei indicated neither liberalism nor anticlericalism but the pluralism of opinions and ideas in a democratic culture. "We represent a totally different kind of neutrality from that of the old liberal tendency," wrote its leader, Dr. Fitz, to the Catholics in 1921.^[62] According to Fitz, "free" education involved an attempt to do more than either propagate one view of the world (as the Catholics did) or simply present opposing points of view (as, supposedly, liberals did); "freie Volksbildung" aimed rather at reaching some collective notion of "a true national-popular culture" through the consideration of all "worldviews and religions."^[63]

Fitz called himself "a convinced follower" of the adult educational reformer and bureaucrat Robert von Erdberg, then administrator of Volksbildung in Prussia.^[64] Erdberg's distinction between a "dispersed" Volksbildung and a "shaped" Volksbildung (formulated in the late nineteenth cen-

[59] Eduard Feth, "Büchereiarbeit in der Pfalz" (lecture at the Volksbüchereikonferenz in Kaiserslautern, 20 October 1921), PM–PH 38/17 (1921): 155–58. The Wandertheater was eventually enormously successful, the first of its kind in Germany and the model for a number of later efforts like the Bavarian Landesbühne ; see Spindler, Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte , vol. 4, part 2, p. 1239.

[60] "Satzungen," p. 3; Fitz, "Was will der Pfälzische Verband für Freie Volksbildung?" p. 72; Verein news, PM–PH 38/17 (1921): 89.

[61] Müller of the Katholische Presseverein für Bayern e.V. to Kreisregierung der Pfalz (26 March 1921), BHStAM, MA 107924; same to BavMinUK (21 July 1921), BHStAM, MA 107924; same to Fitz of PVFV (22 July 1921, BHStAM, MA 107924. For its part the government was mostly concerned that educational efforts be centralized: Korn of BavMinUK to Kreisregierung der Pfalz, Kammer des Innern (8 September 1921) BHStAM, MA 107924.

[62] Fitz to Müller (26 July 1921), BHStAM, MA 107924.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Ibid.; Samuel and Thomas, Education and Society , p. 140.

tury to clarify his own program of ethical, intuitive, and national values) was similar to that struck by Fitz between an empty neutrality and a productive toleration. And Fitz did at first succeed in gathering together Democrats, Social Democrats, and Communists, as well as Christian trade unionists and non-Bavarian Catholics, under the banner of a "shaped" Volksbildung.^[65] Another founder of the Pfälzer league, the jurist Emil Dosenheimer, described the scene at the community college in Kaiserslautern, where "representatives of the most divergent religious confessions and worldviews—Jesuits and freethinkers—discussed religious problems from their own personal standpoint, without concealing their differences. . . . It is indeed a sign that true education is taking place," he continued, "when one sees this capacity and desire to understand and to respect the convictions of another." Volksbildung, he concluded, had brought together "people of different religious and political outlooks—making no distinction between bourgeois and worker—into one unanimous voice."^[66]

Given the familiarly communal ring to these words, reminiscent of Böshenz's call for a harmonious citizenry, one is not surprised to find that the "leading and integrating" concept that would accomplish this transformation, indeed this transcendence, of conflict was Heimat: "We are all citizens, Pfälzers—and the Pfälzer loves his Heimat," intoned Dosenheimer. More, "we are all Germans, no matter to which estate we belong, to which party, religion, or worldview we confess."^[67] And even though Dosenheimer's sketch of the community college may read more like a fantasy than a factual report, the aspiration to a unified diversity was there: in Heimat, Pfälzers found a commonality sufficiently open-ended to accommodate as many different opinions as would admit to loving their homeland. Like the national unifiers of the 1860s and 1870s, these adult educators sought to create a single entity out of fragmentation. But in the intervening half-century, the diagnosis for what caused fragmentation had changed from regional diversity as such to religious and political differences. To overcome them without "repressing" them was the challenge facing the new democracy, and that challenge could be met not only through the open discourse and Sachlichkeit of adult educational methods, but through a concentration on the "Bodenständige und Heimatliche" as well.^[68]

The league's insistence on the achievement of freedom only within a community of people belongs, then, in the context of this German preoccupation with unity and fragmentation. Fitz believed that without "communal life"

[65] Fitz to Kreisregierung der Pfalz, Kammer des Innern (22 July 1920), BHStAM, MA 106019; Fitz to Müller (16, 22 July 1921), BHStAM, MA 107924.

[66] Dosenheimer, "Volksbildungsbestrebungen," p. 68.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Fitz to Müller (22 July 1921), BHStAM, MA 107924: Fitz, "Was will der Pfälzische Verband für Freie Volksbildung?" p. 71.

individual education and self-fulfillment were impossible: the chief goal of freie Volksbildung should be "to develop individuals into full personalities and into worthy members of the community of people." The whole man was one who not only had the inner resources to understand his own potential and survive disappointment but had also "found in his inner self a relation to the commonality of his fellow creatures."^[69] A common love for one's Heimat was one such relation; in the Weimar Republic, one's citizenship or role in the state—though poorly understood and less cultivated than Heimat loyalties—joined with love for the Heimat as another "relation to the commonality of fellow creatures."

The league, as a consequence, set about the task of educating the German people in public responsibility.^[70] In 1923 the folksy almanac Jäger aus Kurpfalz , one of the chief means by which the league cultivated "Heimat thinking," included alongside its Heimat poetry and weather reports a "civic chat" from Fitz.^[71] In it he discussed the newly acquired rights and—just as important for Fitz as for Böshenz—the newly expanded duties of the citizen.^[72] The failure to recognize these duties was in Fitz's opinion the greatest threat to the Republic's survival, for it lent credence to the authoritarian assertion that the masses were not fit for self-rule. Obedience to the laws of the nation was the essential duty of the citizen, even more crucial in a democracy than in an "authoritarian state" because "one controls oneself." Such self-control flowed not from enlightened self-interest but from a carefully cultivated altruism; a citizen, then, was to be contrasted to an individualist and a particularist.^[73] Fitz's civic education was, like Böshenz's, essentially ethical, an instruction in democratic morality. "Morals," he argued, "are a cultural good, a commonly held and pursued good, that makes possible the flourishing of human life." They derived from the restraint of a natural, but destructive, egoism. Without that restraint—voluntary in a Volksstaat —there would be no community, no culture, no human existence. In any community, from the family to the workplace, the town, and the state, the will of the people must be directed "to the preserva-

[69] Fitz, "Was will der Pfälzische Verband für Freie Volksbildung?" pp. 71–72.

[70] Fitz, "Volksbildungsbestrebungen."

[71] Bezirksamtmann Dr. Hermann Fitz, "Eine staatsbürgerliche Plauderei," Der Jäger aus Kurpfalz (1923), pp. 80–84.

[72] He divided these rights, conventionally, into "positive" and "negative" ones: the latter were freedoms of religion, assembly, speech, thought, person, economic conduct, and press; the former, representing the state as "union of free citizens," were equality before the law, equal participation in the suffrage, and equal claim to protection from attack. He perceived the most change from before 1918 in the realm of positive rights (ibid., pp. 80–81).

[73] In the words of Prussian minister of education C. H. Becker, who in 1922, shortly after the murder of Walter Rathenau, had pushed through a program of civic education in the schools and universities, "this kind of learning will be our way from individualism and particularism to a true citizenly character" (cited by Düwell, "Staat und Wissenschaft," p. 47).

tion and the promotion of the whole in which each lives." In conclusion, Fitz directed the attention of his readers to Article 163 of the Weimar constitution: "Each German has the moral duty so to direct his intellectual and physical powers that without damage to his personal freedom the good of the whole will be promoted." "Can you, reader, call yourself a citizen in this sense? Have you deserved the rights of our Volksstaat ?" he asked Pfälzers.^[74] The answer was not self-evident in 1922; eleven more years of democracy would make it hardly more so.

Thus, a Heimat education brought the singularity of one's immediate experience of the world together with the diversity and generality of greater horizons and grander purposes. The point of such self-understanding was to emphasize the concepts of belonging and commonality, through them teaching responsibility. For the Weimar educators, one's Heimat was the most basic component of identity: "Ours is the education of Germans to be Germans, the rooting of the German individual characters in the German folk character," declared an author in the Zeitschrift für die Bildung in 1925; "from the narrow Heimat to the German people and from the German people to the German state, that is the way our youth should go."^[75]

Although incompatible with classic liberalism, such attitudes did not necessarily preclude either equality, toleration, or self-government, as Böshenz's textbook and Fitz's chat sought to demonstrate. The civic teachings of Heimat-minded educators in the Weimar Republic made up for any philosophical inconsistencies by their sincerity in searching for some source of common identity; they should not be faulted for their consequent failure to encourage individual dissent—an intellectual commodity that in any case seemed plentiful enough to contemporaries. The Weimar Republic had its vigorous opponents as well as its reasoned advocates, the Vernunftsrepublikaner ; what it lacked, what Fitz was trying to produce, was passionate supporters, people committed intellectually and emotionally to a "people's state." Fitz's and Böshenz's constant talk of the whole man, of community and communal feeling, coupled as it was with their enthusiasm for the Weimar constitution, makes sense only in light of such a mission.

The compatibility of Heimat and democracy also revealed itself in the activities of Pfälzer Heimat associations. For the duration of the Weimar period they, too, bestowed a degree of legitimacy on the government, if only by proving that Heimat loyalties and Heimat patriotism could flourish in the Republic. The field of Heimat history was a case in point. Recounting the misdeeds of the French took up much Heimat-historical energy during the 1920s, but local historians also discovered the Pfalz's own democratic tradition. The black-gold-and-red flag of the new Republic had, after all, once

[74] Fitz, "Staatsbürgerliche Plauderei," p. 84.

[75] Cited in Emmerich, Germanische Volkstumsideologie , pp. 135–6.

been raised over a Pfälzer castle (Hambach in 1832), and Pfälzers were inclined to interpret contemporary German republicanism as the outgrowth of some locally cultivated variety.^[76] At a well-attended lecture in Speyer in 1923, for instance, Professor Hermann Schreibmüller argued that nationalism and republicanism had long been allied in the Pfalz in such figures as the Hambachers Johann Wirth and Philipp Siebenpfeiffer (this lecture, incidentally, contributed to the French decision to expel him from the Pfalz later that year).^[77] The Heimat novelist August Becker, locally celebrated since the late nineteenth century for his romantic stories of Pfälzer customs and people, was suddenly discovered to have been a "forty-eighter" who remembered as a young boy hearing the townspeople cry, "Up with freedom! Freedom in our land!"^[78] There was also an upsurge in public ceremonies commemorating municipal charters granted some six or seven hundred years earlier; the precedent may not have been as apt as planners wished, but as in Böshenz's textbook, democracy and self-government were celebrated as old German traditions, to be welcomed and respected as such.^[79]

Consolidating this alliance between Heimat and democracy, the Social Democratic party of the Pfalz founded its own Heimat newspaper in 1925, comfortably named Bei uns daheim (At Home with Us), which published histories of Pfälzer socialists and popular uprisings.^[80] What was notable about the party's effort in the field of Heimat history was its participation in a recognizable mainstream. The same authors—Daniel Häberle, Ernst Christmann, Kurt Baumann, Albert Zink, Lina Staab, and the redoubtable Albert Becker, to name but a few—that appeared in Bei uns daheim appeared in Pfälzisches Museum-Pfälzische Heimatkunde as well. The same unmistakable Heimat mixture of sentimental poetry, folklore, and popular science accompanied the local histories. In 1929, the grandfather of Heimat history in the Pfalz, Theodor Zink, formally bestowed his approval on the "Heimat newspaper" Bei uns daheim for having brought "the ideals that we all try to serve into circles that heretofore were torn out of the Heimat earth, uprooted, but nevertheless possessed of an unfulfilled longing for the unattainable values of the things of the Heimat." The benefits of the undertaking were not confined

[76] Albert Becker, "Das tolle Jahr der weinseligen Anarchie," PB , no. 5 (1929): 64ff.

[77] PM–PH 40/19 (1923): 52.

[78] The anti-French resonance of this phrase should not drown out its democratic overtones. See his story "Der Freiheitsbaum," and accompanying biographical sketch, in Der Jäger aus Kurpfalz 1928 , pp. 28ff.; PB , nos. 20 (25 December 1927): 244–45 and 5 (25 May 1928): 71.

[79] See, e.g., the accounts of the Stadtsjubiläum of Kaiserslautern in PM–PH 43/22 (1926): 245, and of Neustadt in PM–PH 42/21 (1925): 323.

[80] These were contained in a regular section, "Kulturgeschichtliches aus alter und neuer Zeit," Bei uns daheim , Heimat beilage of the Pfälzische Post 1–8 (1925–32). In 1929, for instance, the articles addressed the subjects "Ferdinand Lassalle and the Pfalz" (Kurt Baumann, Bei uns daheim 5 [21 August 1929]: 22) and "Proletarian Currents in the Pfälzer Movement of 1848/49" (Bei uns daheim 5 [6 February 1929]: 3).

to workers but were mutual, indeed, Pfalz-wide. Reading the paper, Zink asserted, "I have been able for the first time to look into a world that most of us know only by hearsay. In their sections of stories, sketches, and tales they have brought together, so far as I can see, the best of our Heimat talents; in no other paper have so many been combined so fruitfully."^[81]

Heimat history had always tended toward social history, certainly more so than its academic counterpart in the German universities; in the Weimar period this tendency mirrored the aspirations of the new political order to egalitarian representation. A historical subject need claim neither power, wealth, nor genius (with which the Pfalz was ill-supplied) to attract the attention of Heimat historians, but only Pfalztum, the quality of "typical Pfälzerness." In 1925, for instance, teacher and Heimatler Ludwig Eid celebrated the lives and personalities of two "men of the people," Aloys Weisenburger and Johannes Schiller, for embodying "the high excellence of the folk character."^[82]

Indeed, the more Heimat history turned away from a celebration of Bavarian dukes and their dynastic concerns, the more indistinguishable it became from its close cousin Volkskunde, which reached a peak of popularity and intellectual legitimacy in the Weimar Republic.^[83] Closely tied to the teaching of Heimatkunde in the schools, Volkskunde took as its subject the manners and mores of the "people." And like Heimatkunde, it represented for many of its practitioners "a breath of fresh air" in the desiccated academic halls of "intellectualism" and "rational culture."^[84] It promised to unite the modern call for "a youthfully fresh culture" with the equally strong impulse to seek out the past for its revelations of the "German spirit": "Like a tree that sends its roots deep beneath it to acquire strength and life," wrote one Weimar practitioner of Volkskunde, "so do we seek life forces out of the past, while our gaze is nevertheless on the future. . . . [Our] goal is a culture that is rooted in our people and has as its centerpoint the Heimat."^[85] For Albert Becker, Volkskunde was the academic fulfillment of Heimatkunde: "it leads from the geographically bound to the general-human."^[86] Inextricable from other contemporary intellectual strivings for categorization and synthesis,

[81] Pfälzische Lehrerzeitung , no. 45 (7 November 1929).

[82] "Männer des Volkes," PM–PH 42/21 (1925): 155. The enduring popularity of Liselotte von der Pfalz can be attributed to this same tendency in Heimat historical consciousness to celebrate people for their Pfalztum (see also Chapter 3 above).

[83] Albert Becker, "Um die Seele des Volkes und der Heimat: Neues vom Arbeitsfeld der Volkskunde in Deutschland," PM–PH 47/26 (1930): 263.

[84] E. Fehrle, "Zur Stellung der Volkskunde in der Gegenwart," in Manz, Mitterweiser, and Zeiss, Heimatarbeit und Heimatforschung , p. 74.

[85] Ibid., pp. 75–76.

[86] "Um die Seele des Volkes und der Heimat: Gedanken zur Geschichte der Pfälzer volkskundlichen Bestrebungen," PM–PH 42/21 (1925): 285.

from Karl Jaspers to Werner Sombart, Volkskunde was for Becker the climax of the collective intellectual history of the last two centuries. Through its examination of the intersections between high and low culture, one would arrive at a definition of the Volk that could encompass individual creativity, high cultural development, and the ineffable, associative spirit of the collectivity—a goal shared, for instance, by Ludwig Eid in his admiring account of talented "men of the people."

For the average member of a Heimat association, however, Volkskunde provided an excuse to dwell on everyday phenomena and was thus eminently suited to the cheerful self-absorption of the Heimat turn-of-mind. The subject of the Pfälzer personality became a virtual obsession of popular Heimat writings. Albert Pfeiffer, a severe critic of the excesses of popularized folklore, considered it a "fad" riddled with spurious claims to authenticity.^[87] Pfeiffer was surely right in seeing that the subject gave even the lowliest representative of Pfälzer culture license to expressive indulgence. In a rare congruence of subject and object, these Pfälzer self-analysts irreverently described their irreverence—or directness, playfulness, feistiness, open-mindedness, whatever seemed appropriate.^[88] More than that, the methods of Heimatkunde that were pushed in popular courses and textbooks of the 1920s represented a do-it-yourself attitude toward local history.^[89] In 1923, the Pfälzer League for Popular Education came out with a book entitled How I Research the History of My Heimat . A Badenese Heimatler, Michael Walter, promised in his Brief Guide for the Heimat Researcher to help the beginner avoid "detours and dead ends" and to "incorporate him into the whole Heimat movement."^[90] Heimat activists encouraged women and peasants to become conscious of their irreplaceable knowledge of Heimat traditions and folklore.^[91] The family itself became an object of research, as well as a method for understanding one's own personal ties to the Heimat, that is, to the commonality of all families.^[92]

[87] Albert Pfeiffer, "Der Pfälzer Character," PM–PH 39/18 (1922): 64–65.

[88] For a good selection, see 25 Jahre "Pfälzische Rundschau."

[89] See, e.g., the "heimatkundliche Kurs" given by the Verein Historisches Museum der Pfalz in 1924 ("Vereinsnachrichten," PM–PH 41/20 [1924]: 88), or the "Volksbildungskurs-Ferienkurs für Heimatkunde" given by the Pfälzische Verband für Freie Volksbildung every year starting in 1921 ("Auszug aus dem Reisetagebuch des Regierungspräsidenten" [1921], BHStAM, MA 108372).

[90] PM–PH 40/19 (1923): 103–4; M. Walter, Kleiner Führer für Heimatforscher. Winke, Stoffe und Hilfsmittel (Karlsruhe, 1924), p. 2.

[91] See, e.g., Hedwig Buller-Hoefler, "Frau und Heimat," in Manz, Mitterweiser, and Zeiss, Heimatarbeit und Heimatforschung , pp. 30–34; and F. J. Ehleuter, "Wie ein Bauer Heimatarbeit treiben kann und soll, und wie ich dazu kam," in ibid., pp. 66–73.

[92] In 1921, the Heimat magazine Pfälzisches Museum-Pfälzische Heimatkunde established a regular section on Familienforschung (PM–PH 38/17 [1921]: 148); see also the March/April issue of 1925 devoted to family research, esp. Dr. August Sperl, "Die Sinn der Familienforschung," PM–PH 42/21 (1925): 43–44; and E. L. Antz, "Familienkunde," ibid., p. 45.

The lively interest in Mundart or dialect, the speech of the people, epitomized the folkloric egalitarianism of this period. Dialect literature and poetry, long a haven for sentimentality as well as a measure of vulgarity, flourished as a truly popular art form, appropriate to the "now-current democratic sensibilities."^[93] "No part of our German Fatherland has so much dialect poetry as the Pfalz," boasted an editor of Pfälzisches Museum —Pfälzische Heimatkunde . To preserve it, to encourage new production of it, and to make it available to the rest of Germany became a major task of the Heimat associations.^[94]

Of course, the affinities between the Heimat turn-of-mind and democracy did not necessarily translate into enthusiasm for the particular government of the Weimar Republic. The folkloric activities of the 1920s had no such explicitly partisan content. Pursued largely irrespective of political implications, their political reputation has subsequently derived from an antiliberalism and antiparliamentarianism attributed to them by the genealogy-building propagandists of Nazism.^[95] But the Nazi interpretation says little about the actual role of Heimatkunde and folkloric enthusiasms in provincial societies. Moreover, if anti-Weimarism was all there was to this folkoric activity, what then is one to make of a group of costume and dance enthusiasts of the 1920s who dubbed themselves "the Hambachers" and traveled around the Pfalz performing "revived" versions of folk celebration?^[96] Their deliberate identification with a local landmark most prominently known for a nineteenth-century democratic demonstration betrayed an almost naive readiness to fuse onto the serious questions of government in the Weimar Republic an all-embracing sentimentality, sinister only in retrospect—and perhaps not even then. Similarly, the Social Democrats' enthusiastic adoption of folklore into their festive occasions reflected both their effort to participate in a mainstream of German popular culture and, it follows, the preoccupation of that mainstream with Volkskunde, the cultivation of popular traditions.^[97] Folkloric activities would strengthen "feelings of togetherness" and "consciousness of a common German fate," according to the Reich Committee for Socialist Cultural Work, thereby creating a true Volksgemeinschaft —a true national community.^[98]

The Pfälzer preoccupation with the United States of America in the 1920s

[93] Otto Mausser, "Die Mundarten der Pfalz," Pfalz-Bayerischer Heimgarten , p. 67.

[94] PM-PH 38/17 (1921): 126.

[95] See Chapter 7 below.

[96] "Die Hambacher," PM-PH 41/20 (1924): 69.

[97] See, e.g., the Pfälzer preparations for a Kulturwoche in Leipzig in 1924, sponsored by the Reichsausschuß für sozialistische Bildungsarbeit and devoted in part to the "echt volkskündlich" (BavMinUK [July 1924], BHStAM, MK 15558).

[98] Ibid. It is worth noting that the vocabulary of a Volksgemeinschaft was not the exclusive property of the radical right.

reflected better than anything the tentative steps of the Heimat community toward democratic consciousness and republican sensibilities. Early in the decade, local interest in America had tended to take the form of an appeal (encouraged by the Bavarian and German governments) for help against the French.^[99] Heimat clubs in Germany sent publications and information to German societies in America, like the American and German Federation for Culture and Commerce, which in turn raised money and lobbied for political support for the occupied region.^[100] In 1920, for instance, a German-American society in New York sponsored a money-raising "Volksfest in the manner of the Dürkheimer Wurstmarkt [a celebrated Pfälzer fall festival]" in Astoria Park. Back in Germany, the Pfälzers claimed to be heartened: "In our times," wrote a Wald-Heil! editorialist, "when the hard-pressed German people stand alone in the world, we find consolation and good cheer only in our inner connection to the Fatherland and the Heimat. . . . We must never forget that we are Germans and in the Pfalz also Pfälzers, and this we cannot forget as long as there are still Pfälzers in the rest of the world, standing strong and true to their identity [Volkstum ]."^[101]

But from the outset, the act of cultivating ties to America—a kind of journey of the collective Pfälzer imagination—created new meaning, new significance for the quality of Pfälzerness itself.^[102] The simple fact that there were "Pfälzer-Americans" reinforced the primary conceit of Heimat cultivation, that Pfalztum preceded and indeed transcended the mere political boundaries of the region: many Pfälzer-Americans were, after all, descendants of people who had left the Rhineland long before the Pfalz as such existed.^[103] But the most important extension of meaning that the American connection realized was toward an essentially democratic definition of Pfalztum. America became, in the frequent accounts of emigration to America,

[99] The Oberrheinische Nachrichtenbüro—an arm of the Staatskommissariat für die Pfalz—provided "objective" (i.e., not French-sponsored) information on the events in Germany to German-American newspapers; the Bavarian government also collected and sometimes published letters from Americans incensed about French occupational practices, especially the use of black troops (Bayerisches Staatsministerium des Äussern [hereafter cited as BavMinAus], misc. papers, BHStAM, MA 108326).

[100] "Vereinsnachrichten," PM-PH 38/17 (1921): 145; Robert Paul Sachs, Präsident des Amerikanischen und Deutschen Bundes für Kultur und Wirtschaft, misc. papers, BHStAM, MA 108326.

[101] "Pfälzer in Amerika," WH , no. 9 (8 September 1920): 4.

[102] On the role of "journeys" in creating meaning, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), esp. chaps. 5 and 6.

[103] As Albert Becker put it, "Political borders cannot define the limits of culture"—though in the case of the "Pfälzer character" that is precisely what they did do ("Von Pfälzerlands Natur und Geschichte," PM-PH 44/23 [1927]: 58). The extension of the term Pfälzer indefinitely and imprecisely into the Rhenish past led to such meaningless statistics as that two to three times as many Pfälzers lived in Pennsylvania as in the Pfalz (cited by Ludwig Eid in Pfälzer Volk )—meaningless, that is, only out of the context of the cultivation of local identity.

the nation most expressive of the German soul.^[104] And America was a democracy. Early Pfälzers in America, of whom much was made in the 1920s, had also been democrats: from Nikolaus Herchheimer, a Revolutionary War general, to the dukes Christian and Philipp Wilhelm von Forbach, who also participated in the "North American war for Freedom," even to Oskar Straus, a Jewish-American businessman and public servant whose Pfälzer forefathers had been active in the 1848–49 revolution and who left considerable money to a Pfälzer charity when he died in 1926.^[105] The identification of the Pfalz with the United States through its favorite sons reached a kind of apotheosis in 1930, when the Heimat researcher Daniel Häberle laboriously uncovered the Pfälzer ancestry of then-President Herbert Hoover, revealing him to be the first American president of German descent.^[106]

America was also prosperous and hard-working, qualities that Pfälzers liked to claim and, in the 1920s, wished desperately to recover. When in 1929 the industrial city of Ludwigshafen celebrated its seventy-fifth birthday, a Heimat newspaper compared its rapid growth to that of the United States: both had a "healthy moral center"—which accounted for their success—a soberness of purpose, and a productive cooperation between industry and learning, technology and art.^[107] Indeed, the incorporation of the United States into the world of the Pfälzer Heimat can serve as an analogue for the whole ambiguous role of democracy and the Weimar Republic in the Heimat imagination. A middle ground, where the United States could appear as something other than a behemoth of unrestrained modernism and the Weimar Republic something more than an unsatisfactory and un-German compromise, sometimes, for a few moments, came into view behind the fogs of social resentment and political extremism.

Had democracy, equality, citizenship, and civic responsibility been the only or even the most prominent of "Heimat thoughts" (Heimatgedanken ) during the Weimar period, Fitz's vision of a regionally rooted republican consensus in Germany might have been realized. But posed sometimes in conjunction

[104] An incomplete list of emigration articles in the Heimat press would have to begin with the November/December issue of PM-PH 39/18 (1922), devoted to Pfälzer emigration to America; see also PM-PH 41/20 (1924): 137; PB , nos. 3 (1 February 1925): 36; 5 (March 1929): 64; 5 (March 1931): 52; 1 (January 1932): 3; PM-PH 45/24 (1929): 162-64.

[105] Daniel Häberle, "Die Heimat der Familie Herchheimer und des Bauerngenerals Niklaus Herchheimer festgestellt," PM-PH 43/22 (1926): 90; PM-PH 39/18 (1922): 169; "Oskar S. Straus," PM-PH 43/22 (1926): 244.

[106] Hoover apparently did acknowledge the kinship; "Dank des Präsidenten Hoover an Professor Dr. Häberle," PM-PH 47/26 (1930): 43. He also received an invitation to participate in a Berlin celebration of the "liberation" of the Rhineland; needless to say, he declined it. See PB , nos. 2 (January 1930): 22 and 4 (February 1930): 45.

[107] "75-Jahre Ludwigshafen-am-Rhein," Die Pfalz am Rhein: Touristen-Zeitung 12 (May 1929): 202.

with and sometimes at odds with a Heimat egalitarianism was the problem of cultural excellence and spiritual renewal. Heimatpolitik , like Kulturpolitik on the national level, had addressed itself after the war to the dual problem of consolidating republicanism and preventing the decline of the "cultural nation," the commonality of aspiration to that most German of qualities, Bildung.^[108] Unlike Kulturpolitik, however, no explicit Heimatpolitik really existed, only an ill-defined effort by Bavarian cultural bureaucrats and their allies to encourage Heimat activism. "We must reawaken pride in our cultural community," said a Prussian official at a meeting of the representatives of the occupied territories in 1921: "pride not just in our technical superiority, but deeply within, where the holiest and most valuable goods of humanity dwell. . . . Let us infuse the German republic with the German spirit and the German soul, and only then can they continue to exist!"^[109]

The French were not the only enemies of German culture in the 1920s. French civilization did often play the role of whipping boy, standing in for all the absent or abstract modernisms that threatened to undermine the foundations of the cultural nation. Materialism was the chief problem, though to a much greater extent than they themselves acknowledged Heimat activists participated in material culture, carrying advertisements in their newspapers, praising industry and commerce, savoring the Pfälzer wines and Saumagen (a local delicacy, similar to the Scottish haggis) along with the rest of the masses—in short, selling Heimat on the market of modern material society. Nevertheless, in the "fiery struggle of materialism with humanism," most Heimat clubs and their members would have placed themselves firmly on the side of humanism, idealism, and the cultivation of the inner man.^[110] And along with materialism came a host of lesser vices to be resisted, from emotional depression and spiritual demoralization to trashy and porno-

[108] Bildung, of course, means more than mere education; it means cultivation of the intellect, the sensibilities and emotions, and the soul or spirit; it refers to a consensus on how that could be achieved, through extensive formal education, through the absorption of a body of literature and history. Unlike cultivation in the English sense, which involves some notion of good breeding, "gentle birth," and an internalized set of manners and mores, Bildung was available to anyone who could obtain the education and so, under a democratically minded regime, to all the people—potentially. On the German concept of Bildung, see Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community 1890–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), esp. pp. 6–13, 86–89. On national Kulturpolitik, see Düwell, "Staat und Wissenschaft," pp. 31–32.

[109] Minutes from meeting in the (Prussian) Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Volksbildung, Berlin (15 February 1921), BHStAM, MK 15557.

[110] Albert Becker, "Das Ende einer altpfälzischen Lateinschule," PM-PH 43/22 (1926): 141. According to Becker, the struggle had begun already in the mid-nineteenth century, when an attempt had been made to turn the Lateinschule into a Gewerbeschule , or trade school. In 1926, finally, the school "that had survived even during the terrible times of the Thirty Years' War" succumbed to the spirit of the age.

graphic literature. In April 1922, the Literary Association of the Pfalz warned that despite the relative success of its most recent Heimat evening, "many who should participate still keep their distance: the souls of even the best in our midst are depressed, and rightly so. . . . But let us not allow total pessimism to rule," the editorialist continued; "no one who wishes to take part in the spiritual rebuilding of Germany ought to neglect the task of combating the greedy drive of the masses toward cheap entertainment."^[111]

Religion provided the most obvious avenue to German souls, and Heimat enthusiasts did not ignore its importance in maintaining German culture—indeed, a priest or minister was the mainstay of many a Heimat association. In his celebrated Rembrandt als Erzieher (1891), Julius Langbehn had stated that "the wine of religion is best savored in the chalice of the Heimat"; attempting to extend this metaphor further some twenty-five years later, a Bavarian cleric added: "the taps through which knowledge of the Heimat flows are the church, the cemetery, the chapel, and the sacred year of festivals and customs."^[112] A local priest should consider Heimatpflege part of his sacred duty, this writer continued, lest drinking halls replace houses of God in shaping the people's spiritual lives.^[113] From the start, the Bavarian officials concerned with supporting German culture in the Pfalz included in their package of subsidy a generous grant to religious institutions—Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, according to population distribution.^[114] In 1928, a memorandum on "economic and cultural emergency in the threatened western border regions and in the occupied region" declared that "spiritual distress" had turned people ever more toward the churches, which as "monuments" to Heimat culture and spirit were eligible for state aid.^[115]

But the advocates of spiritual renewal through Heimat cultivation found in the nurturing of local identity reason enough for their activities. Though its boundaries may have been fully physical, Pfälzerness, like the Heimat feelings that went with it, was a state of mind or, as the Germans more often put it, of heart and of soul. "Heimat work is educating work," wrote a Bavarian Heimatler, "and the Heimatler is a missionary, whose Bible are his Heimat notebooks, out of which he creates the spirit and draws his

[111] "Vereinsnachrichten des Literarischen Vereins der Pfalz," WH 7 (April 1922): 8.

[112] Dr. Peter Dörfler, "Der Pfarrer und der Heimatgedanke," in Manz, Mitterweiser, and Zeiss, Heimatarbeit und Heimatforschung , pp. 50–52.

[113] Ibid.

[114] BavMinUK, "Übersichten: Reichs und Landesmittel für kulturelle Fürsorge im besetzten Gebiet," BHStAM, MK 15533.

[115] BavMinAus, "Denkschriften der Länder Preussen, Bayern, Hessen, Baden und Oldenburg über die wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Notlage in den bedrängten westlichen Grenzgebiete und im besetzten Gebiet" (1928), BHStAM, MA 107971; in addition, Domkapitular [and Landtag member] Hildenbrand to Ministerpräsident Held (17 December 1924), BHStAM, MA 106032.

strength."^[116] The Pfälzer Heimat was not just a place but an Erbe , an inheritance, on the preservation of which the Heimat activists staked the moral health of their nation. Reflecting on the widespread feeling of cultural, as well as political and economic, crisis, one contemporary observer wrote of a "general longing for inwardness and profundity" in the people, who naturally turn to the "creative treasures of the Heimat" to recover their "cultural pride."^[117] For the Pfälzer bureaucrat and naturalist Theodor Künkele, the contemplation of localness, especially local nature, would assure the Germans of spiritual victory over hostile forces: "Joy in nature and in its immutable truth and noble purity, investigation of its being in its most general and most particular . . . manifestations can elevate us above all the wretchedness of our humiliation in Germany and our misfortunes in the Pfalz and make us strong in love for the Heimat, in belief in our people, and in the hope of a peace not of the sword and of force but rather of the spirit and of all humanity."^[118]

For others, the inheritance of the Heimat was chiefly historical and traditional. To rediscover the many-sidedness of German history and folklore was to keep alive a consciousness of German worth. In 1927, a Pfälzer historian wrote that "within the unity of the nation" the "cultural progress" of a people depended on the quality of its understanding of its past; historical study had to address itself to the "individual character [Eigenart ] of lands and peoples, the particularities of the Heimat."^[119] Similarly for a school official in Passau, "the forces for awakening the spirit of healthy progress" lay in "Heimat history": "it is the task of the Heimatler to reach into economic life with an educational purpose, directing men's minds toward the spiritual necessities of life." Against the increasingly uprooted character of men's lives, the Heimatler "must create a tradition"; he must ensure "that the Heimat is felt as the center of the cares, the sorrows, and the struggles of past generations. . . . For then, out of the history of the Heimat will grow pride in the Heimat and loyalty to the land."^[120]

The first group to try to establish a new context for the preservation of Pfälzer culture was, not surprisingly, the local adult education league. At its founding in 1919, the league's leaders declared its main objective to be the

[116] Wilhelm Leidel, "Von der bayerischen Ostmark," in Manz, Mitterweiser, and Zeiss, Heimatarbeit und Heimatforschung , p. 99.

[117] Dr. Anton Weiher, Vorsitzender der Pfälzischen Verband für Freie Volksbildung, "Besatzung und Volksbildung," Dokumente aus dem Befreiungskampf der Pfalz , p. 152; the same sentiments are echoed by Josef Oswald, "Bayerische Heimatbewegung und -forschung zwischen den zwei Weltkriegen," Historisches Jahrbuch 72 (1953): 604.

[118] Theodor Künkele, "Der innere Wert naturkundlicher Arbeit in der Pfalz," PM-PH 38/17 (1921): 1.

[119] Fr. Jung, "Die historische Wissenschaft und die Heimatpflege," Hundertjahr Feier der Gründung des Historischen Vereins der Pfalz (Speyer, 1927), pp. 6–7.

[120] Leidel, "Von der bayerischen Ostmark," pp. 96–99.

"improvement and deepening of the intellectual, artistic, and moral cultivation of the Pfälzer people"; to this end it would become "an intellectual and creative center" for the Pfalz, helping to save "the rich treasures of the Pfälzer spirit from their disastrous fragmentation."^[121] It pledged to "bring the good book to as broad a cross-section of people as possible." The league's own "Advisory Board for the Discouragement of Trashy Writing" would seek to elevate the moral and artistic taste of the population, providing classic and Heimat literature as sounder alternatives.^[122]

But the league received little support from the traditional guardians of Pfälzer culture in Speyer. Hermann Fitz had from the start defended his project against the charge of purveying "inflated half-cultivation" for mass consumption. He asserted that Bildung ought not to be the exclusive domain of an "Honoratioren-Club" of "civil servants, professors, and moneybags." Government officials, eager for a truly popular offensive against the French, seem to have agreed with him; in any case, they gave the organization broad support.^[123] But governmental fiat could not so easily overcome the tension between equality and excellence that remained central to local discussions of culture, nor did it intend to undermine the prestige of Speyer as the capital of the Pfalz.^[124] Consequently, government policy never tried to shift the balance of cultural power that had obtained since the 1870s. A select group of the educated middle class continued to dominate local cultural institutions. The sociological character of the region's scholarly associations, for instance, did not change significantly after the war. In 1918, the membership of the Historical Association consisted of a reasonably broad range of middle-class professionals, businessmen, and white-collar workers, but moving up the hierarchy of the association the atmosphere became increasingly rarefied, until at the very top, in the ruling committee, one encountered only the highest Bavarian officials, the wealthiest businessmen, the most distinguished academics of the region.^[125] The pattern repeated itself in the association supporting the Historical Museum.

But then, neither by design nor by purpose were these meant to be popu-

[121] Dosenheimer, "Volksbildungsbestrebungen," p. 66; Fitz, "Pfälzischer Verband," p. 89.

[122] Dosenheimer, "Volksbildungsbestrebungen," p. 67; "Vereinsnachrichten," PM–PH 39/18 (1922): 303.

[123] Ludwig Wagner, "Pfälzischer Landesverband"; Fitz, "Volksbildungsbestrebungen."

[124] Out of practical necessity, the Verband itself soon sought out the support of the "civil servants, professors, and moneybags," gradually winning over to the cause of popular education the head of the new Pfälzische Landesbibliothek and the editor of the leading Heimat publication, Pfälzisches Museum–Pfälzische Heimatkunde; see Reismüller, "Die Pfälzische Landesbibliothek," p. 11; BavMinUK to Staatskomissar der Pfalz, BHStAM, MA 107924.

[125] "Verzeichnis der Mitglieder des Historischen Vereins der Pfalz nach dem Stande vom 1 October 1918" (Speyer, 1918). The organization membership stood at 1,130. Of the 38 Sachwaltern in the localities, most were higher-level civil servants, mayors, and school directors ("Vereinsnachrichten," PM–PH 38/17 [1921]: 125).

lar organizations. More the patrons of culture than its creators or consumers, the historical and artistic associations of the Pfalz combined small numbers with large influence. All Pfälzer museums and most Pfälzer writing and research went on under their auspices and those of the churches and schools from which they drew their support.^[126] In 1924, moreover, the Bavarian government renewed its support of high culture in the region, in effect tightening the grip of Speyer and its educated elite over cultural life in the Pfalz.

The Bavarian government reentered Pfälzer cultural affairs after the crisis year of 1923 both to continue the rhetorical battle against the French and to combat a pervasive sense of cultural depression in the Pfalz, which threatened—or so the Bavarians thought—the political stability of the region.^[127] The state of the local economy was alarming enough. District President Mathéus reported that it "was totally beaten down": large industries he thought could eventually recover on their own, but the middle ranks of agriculture and trade would need considerable help.^[128] At his and the government's urging, the Landtag in February 1925 approved the appropriation of 10 million marks to combat both cultural and economic decline.^[129] These Pfalzhilfe funds were to be divided among individuals, communities, cooperatives, and firms in the form of readily available, variable-term loans, the interest on which would be given outright to cultural organizations in the region. The district president of the Pfalz, together with representatives of the local assembly, trade unions, and farmers' and independent businessmen's organizations, would extend the loans; the Bavarian Ministry of Culture, together with the State Commission for the Pfalz, would distribute the interest.^[130]

Within only four years, the conflicts inherent in the scheme had manifested themselves, but in the meantime this balance between indebtedness and outright subsidy seemed a brilliant solution for the Bavarian govern-

[126] The cultural preeminence of Speyer and its elite comes through clearly, for instance, in the account of Prof. Ludwig Fränkel, "Pfälzische Kleinstadt-Kultur," Das Bayerland: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Bayerns Volk und Land (1921): 145–46.

[127] On the reorganization of the Pfalzkommissariat and Wappes's warnings for the future, see the exchanges of 1924 in the BavMinAus, BHStAM, MA 107712, esp. Wappes to BavMinAus, (8 August 1924), "Betr. Die Neugestaltung der nationalen Abwehr in der Pfalz und für die Pfalz," BHStAM, MA 107712; also "Ministerialratssitzung" (23 January 1925), BHStAM, MK 15530, in which the prime minister held forth on the "special importance to be laid upon the cultivation of cultural and intellectual ties between Bavaria and the Pfalz for its great political significance in the strengthening of the feeling of belonging together."

[128] "Niederschrift über die Sitzung im Staatsministerium des Aüssern" (16 January 1925), BHStAM, MA 106032.

[129] Bayerischer Landtag, 46. Sitzung (20 February 1925), BHStAM, MK 15530.

[130] Statutes of the "Pfalzhilfe" (20 January 1925), BHStAM, MK 15530; see also "Niederschrift über die Sitzung im Staatsministerium des Aüssern" (16 January 1925), BHStAM, MA 106032.

ment, generating more goodwill than was paid for by, in effect, making Pfälzers support their own culture while Bavaria took the credit. The Pfalzhilfe subsidized only those cultural undertakings that were both locally prominent and "patriotic." The Pfälzer orchestra and opera, the recently established regional library, the scholarly associations, the Historical Museum, the most prominent Heimat journal, and the league for adult education had all proven their usefulness to Bavaria and their antipathy to anything French. Their funding was never in question.^[131]

But the centerpiece of Bavaria's renewed Kulturpolitik—the establishment of a "Pfälzer Academy," eventually named the Pfälzische Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften (Pfälzer Society for the Promotion of Learning)—generated considerably more controversy. The proposed academy's promoters claimed that it would provide a "necessary union of scholarly and artistic work in the Pfalz" and "answer the long-felt need to consolidate the fragmented scholarly works in the field of Pfalzkunde."^[132] But skeptics heard in this echo of the Volksbildung movement's statement of mission an implicit rejection of the egalitarian premises of open adult education. There seems, at the very least, to have been a clear intent on the part of Bavarian officials to appeal to the elitist cultural sensibilities of the "educated and art-loving middle class," whose loyalty the Bavarian state was eager to secure.^[133] And by 1924 the political support for a democratic Kulturpolitik had dissipated, leaving the way open for such conservative cultural projects as the proposed academy.^[134]

A renewed call for cultural excellence and scholarly distinction, then, was the public expression of a resurgent Honoratioren Kulturpolitik in the 1920s. The new society's founders liked, somewhat speciously, to trace its ancestry back to the Kurpfälzische Akademie der Wissenschaften of the eighteenth

[131] Bavaria also supported churches, sporting activities, singing groups, and a variety of special events and projects; see Misc. financial reports of BavMinUK (1925–26), BHStAM, MK 15530; financial report of the Pfalzhilfe (1925–26), BHStAM, MK 15534; financial report of the Pfalzhilfe (1926–35), BHStAM, MK 15535. Bavarian officials were quick to point out that these monies represented not even half of what their actual support for culture in the Pfalz came to, if one counted regular appropriations to cultural and educational institutions; see "Aufzeichnungen über die Berücksichtigung der Pfalz im Bereiche des Staatsministeriums für Unterricht und Kultus 1924–26," BHStAM, MK 15530.

[132] BavMinUK to BavMinAus (23 December 1924 and 1 August 1925), BHStAM, MK 15530.

[133] BavMinUK to Jolas (Staatskommissar für die Pfalz) (22 December 1924), BHStAM, MK 15530.

[134] The adult education movement had so successfully proven its "patriotic importance" that no outright attack on its democratic principles materialized. Likewise, the popular Pfälzerwald Verein continued to be funded, despite its irrelevance to high culture. See Reg. Pfalz to BavMinUK (3 April 1925), BHStAM, MK 15530; BavMinUK to BavMinAus (9 June 1925), BHStAM, MK 15530.

century; they invoked also a late-nineteenth-century call for the establishment of a prestigious and scholarly "Historical Commission" for the Pfalz.^[135] A "national Heimat problem" (as one contemporary account put it), the lack of a "scholarly center" in the region contrasted miserably to the "love for the Heimat" that informed the region's distinguished literary and historical work.^[136] Cultural leaders claimed to be "dismayed" by the diminishing number of Pfälzers active in Heimat scholarship and the generally low level of much that appeared in the daily newspapers and journals.^[137] However well intentioned, the overwhelming majority of what passed as Heimatkunde and Heimatpflege, the head of the regional library declared, "has no significance and no value in the field of true learning."^[138]

Jealousy of Baden's cultural and academic brilliance presented Bavaria with further reason to move quickly before the educated Pfälzer elite discovered there was more than a fine university to admire in Heidelberg.^[139] Whether or not such anxieties were grounded in political reality, Bavaria maintained its suspicions even to the point of excluding the rector of the University of Heidelberg from the opening ceremonies of the new Pfälzer Society for the promotion of Learning in October 1925—whose presence, so they reasoned, would give the impression that Bavaria could not pursue a Pfälzer Kulturpolitik without Baden's aid.^[140] The impression they sought instead was that of Pfälzers and Bavarians united in cultural aspiration and

[135] Emil Heuser, "Eine historische Kommission für die Pfalz," PM 16 (1899): 1–3, and misc. letters in response, pp. 25–27, 43; HVP committee minutes (22 February 1905), PLAS, T1, no. 14. See the account of the new society's historical origins in Meeting of the Gesellschaft on its 50th anniversary, published in the series Veröffentlichungen der Pfälzischen Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften , vol. 69 (Speyer, 1975), p. 7.

[136] "Ein nationales Heimatproblem," Neue Pfälzische Landeszeitung (29 September 1924); Matt (BavMinUK) to Mathéus (Reg. Pfalz) (20 April 1925), BHStAM, MA 107932.

[137] Wappes Memorandum, "Betr. Pfälzisches Institut zu Speyer" (30 December 1924), BHStAM, MA 107932; Reismüller (Direktor des Landesbibliothek) to Decker (BavMinUK) (3 January 1925), BHStAM, MK 15549; also Ludwig Eid, "Über eine geistige Aufgabe in der Pfalz" (17 December 1924), BHStAM, MK 15549.

[138] Reismüller, "Der Pfälzische Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften zum Geleit! Der Stand der wissenschaftlichen Pfalzkunde," Pfälzer Zeitung 76 (24 October 1925): 3.

[139] In 1924 Bavarian suspicions of Baden seemed to be confirmed. A wealthy patron of scholarship and Democratic party politics in Heidelberg, Dr. Goldschmidt, opened negotiations with Daniel Häberle, Pfälzer geologist and Heimatkundler, to found a Pfälzer institute in Heidelberg. Häberle was thought to be harboring feelings of resentment toward Bavaria for failure to honor him sufficiently for his Heimat scholarship. The plan eventually came to nothing. See the tempest it nevertheless occasioned in the cultural bureaucracy in BHStAM, MA 107932 and MK 15549.

[140] Decker (BavMinUK) to Jakob (Präs. Pfalz) (2 October 1925), BHStAM, MK 15549. On the founding itself, see Reismüller to Wappes, "Organisationsplan für die Wissenschaftliche Kommission für Pfalzkunde" (3 January 1925), BHStAM, MA 107932; Mathéus (Pres. Pfalz) to BavMinUK, "Zusammenfassung der wiss. Arbeit in der Pfalz" (15 May 1925), BHStAM, MK 15549; Schmitt (BavMinJust) to BavMinUK (22 July 1925), BHStAM, MA 107932; Matt (BavMinUK) to BavMinAus (21 August 1925), BHStAM, MA 107932; Matt to Mathéus (20 October 1925), BHStAM, MA 107932.

achievement. Most of the twenty-two founding members, who were not self-selected but appointed, were the beneficiaries of Bavarian education and the promoters of Bavarian-Pfälzer cultural ties. The new chairman was Friedrich von Bassermann-Jordan, wine magnate, gentleman scholar, and heir to the only real political dynasty in the region; the secretary was Albert Pfeiffer, head of the state archives in Speyer, brother to a leader of the Bavarian People's party (Anton Pfeiffer) and to a leader of the Center party (Maximilian Pfeiffer), and editor of the Pfalz's best journal of Heimat studies. Leading industrialists and cultural patrons, heads of cultural and educational institutions, and eminent local scholars made up the balance of the membership in this exclusive group.^[141]

The opening ceremonies, and the week of scholarly lectures in Pfälzer cities that followed, presented a vision of the Pfalz as a community of culture and imagination, of tradition and creation, but also as a community with recognized leaders and elite standards.^[142] The opening-day audience included the entire spectrum of Pfälzer notables, political and economic, sacred and secular, academic and practical—a quite literal gathering of those on whose political loyalty the Bavarian government depended. What these men heard was an affirmation of the unity and antiquity of the geographical region, defined as a heritage of Bildung and Kultur common to all Pfälzers; what they participated in themselves was an affirmation of the power of a select few to protect and preserve the Pfalz so defined. "The love of Heimat, Volk, and Fatherland has brought us all together here," said District President Mathéus. New chairman Friedrich von Bassermann-Jordan thought that "no one [could] outdo us in attachment to our earth and Fatherland" and, more, that "for us the society [would] itself be a Pfalz—a Palatium not only of united scholarly activity but a Palatium of German thought." "It is a joy for my German and especially my old Pfälzer heart," said Franz Matt, the Bavarian minister of culture, to witness this revival of interest in the history of our "ofrebears and Volkstum ," which springs from "a longing for the spiritual" and "a love for the Heimat." For Matt, the task of

[141] "Die Gründung der Pfälzischen Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften [PGFW]," PM–PH 42/21 (1925): 279–81 (this full account of opening festivities, statutes, and members was also reprinted in pamphlet form in 1926). Regular members were to be nominated by the Ministry of Culture and ratified by two-thirds of the PGFW membership; the Ministry of Culture would also name the chairman and secretary of the society (Draft of the PGFW organizational structure, BHStAM, MK 15549).

[142] The latter part, the Hochschulwoche as it was known, was a revival of the ministry's original conception for adult education in the region, a notion that Fitz had managed several years earlier to quash.

saving the past and with it the future was not for every man but for "a small and united group of men, . . . not seeking honor but fulfilling duty and service to their compatriots."^[143] The Pfälzer people should acknowledge the superior claims of such excellent and dedicated men to guard its cultural identity. "In their hands," reported the Pfälzische Rundschau , a paper chronically affirmative of the government's position, "lies the spiritual reawakening of our life in the Pfalz."^[144]

Similarly, a laudatory editorial in the Pfälzer Zeitung assured its readers that this had not been a scholarly event for the benefit of "a narrow circle of academically trained and academically active men": "What happened yesterday in this historical setting must be considered a general Pfälzer event, can indeed with full justification be seen as a Bavarian event, and, like all cultural occurrences on the Rhine, it is also a German event."^[145] The shapers of the new society saw themselves transcending the particularities of class and region not through democracy but through the universality of their high cultural aspirations. Invoking the cultural authority of Goethe, Schiller, Melanchthon, and, surprisingly, the Koran, Friedrich von Bassermann-Jordan argued that "'learning and art belong to the world and before them disperse the boundaries of nations.'"^[146] Yet such a transcendence of particularity for the most part ended at the borders of Germany, the cultural significance of which the society continually reaffirmed. The nationally circumscribed knowledge it promoted held the key to national regeneration. The new society, proclaimed Mathéus, will not just serve "our narrow Heimat, but will participate in the revival and prospering of our Bavarian and greater German Fatherland. . . . The weapons of the spirit are left to us," he continued; "German learning and German culture will lead us out of the expanses of rubble that the world war left behind."^[147]

Between 1925 and 1933, the society sponsored publications, a handful of historic festivals and commemorations, and a few major projects like the compilation of a dictionary of Pfälzer dialect. It also probably contributed to a general reinvigoration of the scholarly associations of the region. "It is a high service and a cultural necessity," wrote the cultural minister of Bavaria to the Pfälzer Society for the Promotion of Learning,

that in these times, in which all traditions find fundamental opposition and are put aside in preference for the present, there are still nationally minded men willing to devote themselves to the cultivation of Heimat history, never tiring in

[143] "Die Gründung der PGFW," PM–PH 42/21 (1925): 272–73.

[144] Ibid., p. 283.

[145] Ibid.

[146] That particular line—"Wissenschaft und Kunst gehören der Welt an und vor ihnen verschwinden die Schranken der Nationen"—he attributed to Goethe (ibid., p. 280).

[147] Ibid.

their maintenance of the ties between our generation and the past. From these ties come not only the courage, the self-consciousness, and the Heimat joy of our people, but also the proper public sense, in short, every fundamental power that is identical with culture and with prosperity.^[148]

But the efforts of the adult education league and the academy to realize a Heimat community in the Pfalz inevitably came up short when confronted by the incapacity of the whole society, deeply divided on the pragmatics of politics and economics, to sustain any common understanding of its collective life. Political disagreements in and of themselves do not necessarily preclude a society's achieving some consensus on its civic responsibilities and its cultural values. But the citizens of the Weimar Republic notably failed to agree on a common language with which to discuss the larger aspirations and responsibilities of their society, despite much talk about the importance of traditions and "belonging-togetherness" (Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl ). Those who shared a language of Heimat shared it only in a limited sense: they had inherited a mixed legacy of Heimat cultivation from the Wilhelmine period, the ambiguity of which continued to manifest itself in considerable disagreement over whether Heimat implied democracy, cultural pluralism, spiritual regeneration, or simply escape. A pervasive, multifaceted discontent undermined even tentative efforts toward consensus. The enemy of any and all Heimat exhortations to collective contentment, such discontent ultimately proved the greatest strength of the otherwise incoherent and self-contradictory National Socialist movement.

The intractability of specifically political divisiveness in the Pfalz had become obvious to Bavarian officials by November 1924, less than a year after the separatist incidents. The state commissioner for the Pfalz, entrusted with overseeing Bavarian interests in the region, wrote to his superiors that his office would have to disband the special political action committees, with whose cooperation many of the cultural and economic programs for the Pfalz had been implemented: "The party splinterings in the Pfalz are so strong, the conflicts between individual parties so deep, that it is becoming too difficult to direct them toward a profitable cooperative effort."^[149] Even though flawed, the collective effort to combat the French from 1919 to 1923 proved to be the last occasion on which political factions in the Pfalz came together in the Weimar Republic. After 1924, the political life of the region was marked by continual party feuding and periodic political crises: from 1924 on, an acrimonious fraternal battle between the Center party and the Bavarian People's party; in 1925, Social Democratic uproar over rumors of a monarchist putsch; in 1925, 1926, and 1927, the proliferation of new right-wing splinter

[148] BavMinUK to PGFW (28 October 1931), BHStAM, MK 15551.

[149] Jolas to Staatsrat Schmelzle (24 November 1924), BHStAM, MA 107712.

parties; periodic witch-hunts of alleged separatists, incidents between right-wing groups and the French authorities, clashes between the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA), the Reichsbanner (the Socialists' answer to the SA), and the Pfalzwacht , a Catholic semimilitary group; and finally, persistent rumors of an imminent Nazi coup.^[150] Both the Catholic parties and the socialist parties held on to their constituencies until the final years of the Republic, losing voters to one another (Center to the Bavarian People's party, the Social Democrats to the Communists) but not significantly to splinter groups. The Protestant bourgeois parties of the Pfalz, the dominant political force of the nineteenth century, enjoyed no such stability. Sooner and more rapidly than in Germany as a whole, liberalism lost its strength, the few democratic liberals tending toward social democracy and the once powerful National Liberal constituency drawn ever more to the right and into a variety of racialist-nationalist (völkisch ) groups, including the German National People's party, the Economic party, the Bavarian League of Peasants and Proprietors, and, of course, the National Socialists.^[151]

The development of National Socialism in the Pfalz largely confirms the current scholarly opinion that the movement represented, as Thomas Childers recently expressed it, "less . . . a distinctly lower-middle-class phenomenon than . . . a remarkably successful catchall party of protest."^[152] Certainly strong support from the largely Protestant Mittelstand in the Pfalz brought an important block of otherwise fluctuating voters to the National Socialists, but well-to-do, well-educated Pfälzers as well as dirt-poor farmers and unemployed shoemakers also voted for the Nazis.^[153] The founding members of the party in Kaiserslautern, the Pfalz's second industrial city, in-

[150] Schönhoven, Die Bayerische Volkspartei , p. 182; BHStAM, MA 108076, MA 107816; Faber, "Die südlicher Rheinlande," pp. 437–42; NSDAP Hauptarchiv, Hoover Institution Microfilm Collection, reel 32A, folder no. 1786 (1926–32); reel 48, folder no. 1105 (1931); and reel 86, folder no. 1776 (1932).

[151] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," pp. 439–40.

[152] Foreword to 1986 reissue of Theodore Abel's Why Hitler Came into Power , reprint ed. Thomas Childers (1938; Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. xvii; Abel's own observations in 1939 on the diversity of National Socialism's social composition have, starting in the mid-1970s, been reaffirmed. Also relevant are Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983); Thomas Childers, ed., The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1919–1933 (Totowa, N.J., 1986); Richard Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton, 1982); and Peter Merkl, Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (Princeton, 1975). See also the review article of books on the social composition of Nazism, by James J. Sheehan in Theory and Society 13 (1985): 851–67.

[153] Hamilton has suggested that the strong National Socialist showings in the wine region reflect the presence of well-to-do travelers in resort towns like Neustadt, Landau, and Bad Bergzabern, thus down-playing the significance of the lower-middle-class vote in those regions (Who Voted for Hitler? pp. 227–28). The Nazis' greatest successes nevertheless came in the economically most depressed parts of the Pfalz—the north and the town of Pirmasens in the south, neither of which was by any stretch of the imagination a resort area.

cluded along with the small businessman and midlevel bureaucrats several academically trained professionals.^[154] Electoral success for the National Socialists came early and fast in the Pfalz. The party won its first victory in 1924, taking a mayoralty in the northern community of Dannenfels (and thereby giving the Pfalz the dubious distinction of having elected the first Nazi town mayor in all of Germany).^[155] Largely independent of its Bavarian counterpart, the Pfälzer party avoided the period of stagnation that set in after 1925 among Bavarian Nazis; Pfälzer Nazis regrouped in 1925 under schoolteacher Josef Bürckel and his cronies Ernst Leyser and Richard a trio that dominated Nazi affairs in the region until 1944.^[156] Between 1928 and 1930 the party had made enough inroads into the multiple parties of the Protestant electorate to run a close second behind the Catholic parties in the 1930 elections, overtaking the Social Democrats by a narrow margin. By 1932 they were far and away the strongest single party in the region and had begun to win away some of the Catholic-Bavarian vote itself.^[157] In March 1933, the Nazis almost achieved an absolute majority against the combined votes of Catholic, socialist, and bourgeois parties:^[158] this was an electoral victory unparalleled in any region of such mixed confessional and occupational structure and exceeded only in the entirely Protestant regions of Schleswig-Holstein, East Hannover, Chemnitz-Zwickau, and Pomerania.^[159]

The success of the Nazi party in the Pfalz had particular causes as well as general implications, but certainly the character of the local leader, Josef Bürckel, who maintained extraordinary personal control over the shape of the local movement, was of fundamental importance.^[160] A populist, social revolutionary, and virulent anti-Catholic, Bürckel was closely allied to the Strasser brothers' wing of the Nazi movement, with its emphasis on the "Arbeiter" component of NSDAP and its radical critique of capitalism. In

[154] Heinz Friedel, Die Machtergreifung 1933 in Kaiserslautern Ein Beitrag zum Werden des Nationalsozialismus in der Westpfalz (Otterbach/Kaiserslautern, 1983), p. 11.

[155] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 442.

[156] Wiesemann, Vorgeschichte , pp. 88–90.

[157] On the potential susceptibility of Catholic voters to the Nazi appeal, see Günther Plum, Gesellschaftsstruktur und politisches Bewußtsein in einer katholischen Region, 1928–1933 (Stuttgart, 1972). His study concerns the Prussian-Rhenish district of Aachen, but certain social characteristics of his Catholic sample obtained also in the southeast corner of the Pfalz. Plum argues that the church, perhaps inadvertently, made it easier for voters to switch to the Nazi party by excluding loyalty to parliamentary democracy from the program and outlook of the Center party. On the antiparliamentarianism of the Bayerische Volkspartei, see also Wiesemann, Vorgeschichte , pp. 284–85.

[158] Wiesemann, Vorgeschichte , pp. 270–71.

[159] Faber, "Die südlichen Rheinlande," p. 440.

[160] Peter Hüttenberger has identified two styles among the Nazi Gauleiter, the first toward bureaucratization and the second—the pattern Bürckel embodied—of clique formation, where a few people held power in their hands and distributed it among their friends. See his Die Gauleiter. Studie zum Wandel des Machtgefüges in der NSDAP (Stuttgart, 1969), p. 39.

1926, Gregor Strasser spoke at a rally in the industrial town of Kaiserslautern and to the catcalls of Social Democrats and Communists accused them of being the pillars of capital in Germany.^[161] Indeed, Pfälzer Nazism under Bürckel in some ways represented a striking revival of an old local political tendency toward volatility, radical populism, and grass-roots mobilization—qualities that had surfaced at various points in the nineteenth century in protest against Bavarian monarchism.^[162] A travestied Jacobinism, stripped of concern for liberty or civic virtue, Nazism in the Pfalz fed on the chronic economic depression in the region and on the continuing presence of the French occupation, against which local Nazis managed by sheer repetition and audacious prevarication to establish themselves as the most German of national patriots.

The economic difficulties of the Pfalz in fact derived in large part from the conditions of occupation. Occupational restrictions on trade had exacerbated postwar problems of readjustment, cutting off the industries of the Pfalz from raw materials, coal supplies, and markets and contributing to high rates of unemployment in 1922 and 1923.^[163] After the disastrous inflation of 1923, the occupied regions were slow to benefit from the advantages of the new currency because both the French and German governments resisted its introduction into the Rhineland. In the Pfalz, the Chamber of Commerce was driven in January 1924 to invent its own currency, the short-lived "Pfälzische Handelskammerdollar"; without a settled currency, overall recovery was delayed and a decline in levels of unemployment agonizingly slow.^[164] Only in 1927 did the region begin to see the possibility of a return to prosperity—the building trades revived, and French actions somewhat relieved the commercial isolation of local industries. Thanks to unrelenting propaganda, the tourist trade had begun to pick up, and Pfälzer wine was enjoying a patriotic vogue in unoccupied Germany. But even before the American stock market crash in October 1929, the tenuous prosperity of the Pfalz began to falter. In late 1928, unemployment rose again. The reports from Bavarian prime minister Held's official tour of the region in September 1929 attested to the pessimism of trade unionists, white-collar workers, and industry and trade leaders alike: Friedrich von Bassermann-Jordan himself led the prime minister around the stricken vineyards in the southeastern Pfalz.^[165] The crash, like

[161] Account in Pfälzer Tageblatt , no. 226 (8 September 1926).

[162] Many of the Pfälzer respondents to Theodore Abel's 1936 survey of early Nazis revealed a decided concern for social justice, as well as a general belief in the virtues of the German worker; see, e.g., nos. 178, 183, 331, and 410, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Abel Collection.

[163] Wysocki, "Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen," pp. 267–80.

[164] Ibid., p. 289.

[165] "Pfalzbereisung durch den Herrn Ministerpräsidenten Dr. Held" (September 1929), BHStAM, MA 107820; also, "Denkschriften der Länder Preußen, Bayern, Hessen, Baden und Oldenburg," (1928), BHStAM, MA 107971.

the postwar depression, hit the Pfalz particularly hard: chronic capital shortages in small and medium industries became more acute; industries closed or went on short time; the building industry practically shut down; wages sank, and the percentage of day laborers rose; the number of unemployed workers reached 84,280 at the end of 1930 (the figure in December 1923 had been slightly higher at 84,900).^[166] In 1930, a journalist in Munich reported that the Pfalz stood far above the national average in receipt of unemployment compensation; in Kaiserslautern, as much as a third of the population received it, in Ludwigshafen, a seventh.^[167]

In Pirmasens, the "shoe capital" of Germany, that figure would reach almost 100 percent by 1932. A case study in the growth of right-wing radicalism, Pirmasens had a Protestant, lower-middle-class population that stood out in the largely Catholic southern Pfalz. Its economy depended exclusively on the shoe industry, organized in small-scale, labor-intensive production with many family members participating. Hard economic times came after the war. The Nazi movement had gained adherents in the town already in 1924.^[168] Future Gauleiter Bürckel came from a neighboring village; he regarded the town as his political birthplace.^[169] The town's shoes were bought and distributed in the national market by middlemen, most of them Jews. By 1930, anti-Semitic incidents—including not only harassment and insults but beatings of Jewish businessmen—had become so frequent and blatant that the Jewish middlemen began to avoid Pirmasens altogether, farming out their contracts to Catholic producers in surrounding areas. This "boycott," as Nazi agitators termed it, exacerbated the town's economic decline and hatred for both Jews and Catholics.^[170]

The Nazis of Pirmasens tended to be young, hard hit by the chronic economic problems in the town, and involved in violent paramilitary groups, some of the left and some of the right.^[171] But the growth of Nazism in Pirmasens reveals more than the impact of economic crisis on political behavior. By far the most significant formative experience for Nazis of Pirmasens and

[166] Wysocki, "Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen," pp. 287, 293.

[167] "Die Pfalz, Bayerns Sorgenkind," Münchener Zeitung (1930), newspaper clipping in BHStAM, MA 107785. See also Friedel, Machtergreifung , pp. 21–25.

[168] Theodore Abel's remarkable series of Nazi vitae, solicited in 1934, included what Peter Merkl has called a "grossly disproportionate" number of responses from the Pfalz and neighboring Saarland (about 60 out of 581 life stories) attesting undoubtedly to the efforts of Bürckel himself to encourage participation in the project. Several of these respondents were from Pirmasens; one (no. 410) was the founder of that town's SA group in 1925. See Merkl, Political Violence , pp. 16, 198. The responses themselves, in their original form, can be read at the Hoover Institution Archives in Stanford, Calif.

[169] Hüttenberger, Die Gauleiter , p. 185.

[170] For a full account, see the Deutschland Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1980), vol. 4 (1937), pp. 984–85. (hereafter cited as Sopade ).

[171] Merkl, Political Violence , pp. 198–203.

the Pfalz as a whole had been the French occupation. This obvious, but often unattended, fact of 1920s German life also proved crucial to the involvement of almost every one of Theodore Abel's Pfälzer respondents in a 1934 survey of ordinary Nazis: drawing on these life histories, Peter Merkl asserts that the antioccupation struggle was a "school for political violence" as well as a "major recruiting vehicle" that brought the young Nazi movement early adherents and quick legitimacy.^[172] Whatever the civilities of relations between French and German officials in the Rhineland, the mere presence of occupation troops suggested that in the last analysis political rule was based on force. Occupational rule also subtly undermined the legitimacy of the courts, elections, and other civic apparatus of the Weimar Republic. Abel's Pfälzer respondents displayed extreme hostility not only to foreigners, political parties, the Catholic church, and to a lesser degree Jews, but also—and unlike respondents from other regions of Germany—to the German police and government proper.^[173] In light of its cooperation with the occupiers, however reluctant and pragmatically motivated it may have been, the German government's authority as the "conventional wielders of violence" seemed illegitimate; reliance on "one's own physical force" came to seem not merely a justified but a welcome alternative.^[174]

Abel's respondents for the most part confirm the general pattern of Nazi activism in the Pfalz in the 1920s. The early years of the occupation, from 1919 to 1924, had been marked by an extraordinary amount of violence, between French troops and Germans as well as between Germans of various labels and identities—Socialists, Communists, separatists, right-wing paramilitarists, and so on. National Socialists as such caught only the tail end of this half-decade of uproar, but many who eventually drifted into the Nazi party had begun in other antiestablishment groups or simply as individual agitators, passive resisters, or rowdies. The sociological character of the early Nazi party in the Pfalz thus bore curious and more-than-coincidental resemblance to the separatist gang, for both were groups of radically disaffected, often unemployed or underemployed young men. Without too much psychological second-guessing, one can regard this close resemblance as crucial to the Nazi obsession with the separatists, an obsession that did not abate but grew in the course of the 1920s and persisted well after 1933.^[175]

[172] Ibid., p. 203. Abel's survey (see note 168 above) took the form of a contest for pre-1933 party members to write an account of their life and involvement in the National Socialist movement. An American sociologist at Columbia University, Abel published his analysis of the life histories in Why Hitler Came into Power in 1938.

[173] Ibid., p. 206.

[174] Ibid., pp. 203–6.

[175] When the French left the Pfalz in 1930, the Nazis declared a kind of unofficial free-for-all against former separatists, many of whom had been granted amnesty in 1924 in a short-lived spirit of reconciliation. On 24 March 1933, the new Nazi government of the Pfalz ordered the arrest of all known or suspected separatists; many were subsequently sent to concentration camps where they died or were executed (Reimer, Rheinlandfrage , pp. 407–9).

Nor did the possibility, real or imagined, of some kinship between the fledgling National Socialist movement and the defunct separatists escape the attention of contemporaries. Various Pfälzer Nazis periodically refuted accusations that they were former members of separatist groups.^[176] Bürckel himself was dogged by this suspicion, which he took the trouble to refute in court in 1931. By his own account, his antiseparatist credentials were proven by his participation in the mob's lynching and burning of separatists in Pirmasens in early 1924.^[177]

The contribution of the occupation to the Nazi movement, Merkl argues, was "an extreme degree of leader worship, a sense of personal insecurity and self-pitying masochism, and a touch of irrational paranoia."^[178] Add to that the unsavory and brutal character of many early Nazis in the Pfalz and the picture is not one to attract the Heimat and fresh air-loving Kulturmenschen who flocked to less violent forms of associational life. Yet the Nazis's championing of the antioccupation cause, in however unheroic and unpleasant a fashion, contributed enormously to winning over the self-consciously respectable Pfälzers.^[179] At the very least, the Nazis' self-representation as the patriotic defense organization ultimately frustrated the capacity of the legitimate government and the mainstream political parties of the region to combat Nazi fanaticism. The Pfalz did, after all, have well-established Catholic and Social Democratic parties that could, with much greater justification than the Nazis, claim to have "saved" the Pfalz from the French. Compared to their systematic efforts, through legitimate political, cultural, economic, and diplomatic channels, to frustrate French ambitions and gather Pfälzer loyalty, the Nazis' occasional ambushing of a French soldier or harassment of a suspected former separatist looked paltry indeed.

But the political mainstream never got the credit it deserved—the story, of course, of the Weimar government all over Germany. The Bavarian government, moreover, increasingly sought to avoid confrontation with the Nazis rather than risk a showdown that might conceivably benefit the far left.^[180] In April 1927, for instance, Pfälzer district president Mathéus and the

[176] Sopade (1936), 3:225, e.g.

[177] Pfälzische Rundschau (20 April 1931), account of fines imposed on Editor Neubauer of the Rheinpfälzer for having printed an article in 1930 suggesting Bürckel was a separatist; see also accounts of Bürckel's successful refutation of such rumors in the courts in NSDAP Hauptarchiv, Hoover Institution Microfilm Collection, reel 81, folder no. 1610 (1930–32).

[178] Merkl, Political Violence , p. 206.

[179] Faber also argues that the anti-separatist stance of the Nazis won them instant credibility among the respectable classes (p. 442).

[180] Geoffrey Pridham, Hitler's Rise to Power: The Nazi Movement in Bavaria, 1923–1933 (London, 1973), pp. 146–84.

Bavarian minister of the interior agreed on the necessity of banning a Nazi rally in Landau for fear it would provoke the working class and the occupation authorities; but, Mathéus emphasized, "we must not use the objections of the occupation authorities as a reason , or we will invite the criticism especially of the National Socialists."^[181] In the face of the ostentatious "patriotism" of Nazi agitators and bullyboys, the very legitimacy of the Pfälzer and Bavarian governmental authorities as the guarantors of public order and justice seemed uncertain. Prosecution of Nazis for crimes against French occupation personnel became a politically hazardous undertaking, and eventually the government and the police were reluctant to pursue cases against the Nazis even for attacks on other Germans.^[182] Only at the insistence of the Interallied Rhineland Commission did the Bavarian government impose a ban on the wearing of brown shirts in 1929.^[183] In 1930, the Bavarian Catholic defense organization, Bayernwacht, expanded into the Pfalz, changing its name to Pfalzwacht in deference to the Center party and gathering extensive membership from Catholic organizations to combat the "godlessness and immorality of the revolutionary new-barbarism."^[184] Yet neither the Pfalzwacht nor the Pfälzer SPD Reichsbanner units were as strong as the Nazi SA, nor were they willing to join forces against the SA, as their fathers and elders had in the early part of the decade against the separatists and French. Few, if any, perceived the National Socialists as a force so destructive as to warrant the temporary transcendence of an older antipathy between the traditional right and the equally traditional left.

Against this foreground of growing hostility to the established authority of government and rising legitimacy of antiestablishment agitators like the Nazis, the Heimat movement stands in bizarre contrast, providing a background of steady exhortations to peaceableness, contentment, conservationism, self-knowledge, acceptance, and resignation. Certainly the gap between this symbolic depiction of Pfälzer society and its splintered, unhappy reality was enormous, but so too was the gap between most of the Heimat movement's leaders and the proponents of political extremism. Although it remains difficult to gauge the extent to which the membership of comparatively large organizations like the Pfälzerwald Verein was infiltrated by Nazi

[181] Mathéus to BavMinInn (8 April [and 4 May 1927]), BHStAM, MA 108076. The occupation authorities had closely monitored the Nazi party from its start, and had frequently put pressure on the local government to ban Nazi rallies and the like. See, e.g., a series of incidents in 1926 recounted in BHStAM, MA 108076.

[182] NSDAP Hauptarchiv, Hoover Institution Microfilm Collection, reel 32A, folder no. 1786 (1926–32).

[183] Memorandum of the Interallierte Rhein. Kommission (May 1929) and accounts of incidents in the Pfalz and the protest in the Bavarian Landtag (July–Sept. 1929), BHStAM, MA 108076.

[184] Wiesemann, Vorgeschichte , pp. 199–200.

party members, several factors speak against any significant National Socialist presence in any of the Heimat organizations in the Pfalz. In the first place, the actual number of Nazi party members before 1933 was relatively small: people may have voted for the National Socialists without joining the party, an act of distancing that allowed them, tragically, to continue to benefit from the institutions and values of the Weimar Republic while undermining them with their vote. And certainly the Heimat organizations were part and parcel of Weimar, whatever transmutations they underwent after 1933. The historical and scholarly associations were too Catholic or too pro-Bavarian, the adult education league too democratic, the hiking, singing, and folklore groups too apolitical, and all were too conservative in the literal sense of the word to attract much support from committed Nazi party members, disgusted with the status quo and increasingly busy with party rallies, street fighting, and political organizing.^[185]

Indeed, in the course of the 1920s, Heimat activities themselves came under attack, from the Nazis as well as from a variety of individuals and groups sympathetic to the Nazis and unable to find either merit or consolation in the invented traditions of an earlier generation. The most obvious source of conflict was the money for cultural undertakings that Bavaria and the Reich distributed in the Pfalz.^[186] The Cultural Ministry's policy of restricting funds to a few umbrella organizations, which had been designed at least in part to consolidate Bavaria's political supporters, necessarily left individuals and smaller, less well established organizations without state support.^[187] A number of the government's critics, including for the time being the Social Democrats, saw in the policy a deliberate neglect of avantgarde cultural efforts in favor of convention, tradition, and hopelessly narrow provincialism. The failure in 1926 of a literary magazine called Heimaterde (Heimat Earth), which had tried to encourage young and experimental writers, led the Social Democratic Pfälzische Post to denounce angrily "those upper classes, those educated people, and especially those circles who [took] every opportunity to lay claim to literary sophistication, Heimat love, and popular education" yet stood by and let Heimaterde down in their silence. The Pfälzische Merkur similarly deplored the demise of Heimaterde and the cultural exile of its editor to Baden: "A few people, always pushing themselves to the front, think themselves to be the only true representatives of Pfälzer cultural life, and they take great pains to insure that no one disturbs their exclusive

[185] Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Abel Collection.

[186] Hüttenberger points out that fully half of the Bavarian Gauleiter were, like the Pfalz's Bürckel, schoolteachers—a statistic he thinks may reveal a great deal of alienation from Bavarian cultural policy, for schoolteachers were, after all, state servants (Die Gauleiter , p. 88).

[187] The files are full of such requests and rejections. For a typical exchange, see BavMinUK to A. Roediger of E. Kaussler'schen Verlag, Landau (19 January 1926), BHStAM, MK 15530.

circles, snuffing out any work that does not bear the holy mark of their clique."^[188]

Nothing revealed the existence and the power of this "clique" more than the new Pfälzer Society for the Promotion of Learning. From the start, it drew the anger of Bavaria's cultural critics, predictably those of the Social Democratic left, and more profoundly in the end from a nascent group of cultural radicals who were drifting closer to the National Socialist camp in their call for a revolutionary reawakening of German culture. The leading representative of this attitude was a young scholar, poet, and writer named Gert Buchheit, who had studied under the literary critic Friedrich Gundolf and had become possessed of the spiritual ambitions of the George Circle, those advocates of a poetic regeneration of civilization.^[189] Buchheit had returned to the Pfalz after his education to try to ignite his stodgy Heimat with the fire of art. He settled in Pirmasens and there tried to establish his own association, the Rheinpfälzer Society for Literature and Art, for whose financial support he applied to the Bavarian Cultural Ministry.^[190]

Unsuccessful in his plans, Buchheit began publicly to denounce the Bavarian cultural establishment and the new Pfälzer academy.^[191] Published in the anti-Bavarian press, Buchheit's attacks revealed a self-consciousness of youth, change, and the greater Germany, all of which were inimical to the insiders' cultural Heimat. Buchheit denounced the new Society for the Promotion of Learning as a "purely provincial, local undertaking," whose leaders dishonestly evaded his criticism by deploying their "ingratiating Pfälzer ways."^[192] He repeated a Social Democratic accusation that the society merely represented the backstage maneuverings of the Bavarian People's party to gain popularity in the region, but his critique otherwise bore little resemblance to calls for a more democratic cultural policy.^[193] "Germany can only be thought united through common work, given that this work takes the whole nation into account," wrote Buchheit (following Paul de Lagarde); the "Pfälzer Society for Heimatkunde," as he contemptuously referred to it,

[188] "Zum Ende der Heimaterde," Bei uns daheim 6 (19 May 1926); "Aus heimatlichen Gauen," Pfälzischer Merkur , no. 13 (1926).

[189] Biographical notice in Rhein-pfälzische Monatshefte 6 (January 1955): 25.

[190] Buchheit to Geheimrat Gruber, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaft (11 October 1925), BHStAM, MK 15549; clipping from the Landauer Anzeiger [Buchheit probable author] (20 October 1925), BHStAM, MK 15549.

[191] Buchheit seems nevertheless to have continued to try to wield cultural influence in the Pfalz. See, for instance, a Buchheit petition in 1926 to obtain recognition for a young painter named Bürckel from Pirmasens (not the future Gauleiter, though likely a relation). The petition was refused. See PGFW, Niederschrift, Zweite Sitzung, BHStAM, MK 15549.

[192] Dr. Gert Buchheit, "Grundsätzliches über meine Kritik an der Pfälzische Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften," Landauer Anzeiger , no. 28 (2 February 1926).

[193] See also Studienrat Rudolf Thiel, "Pfälzische Wissenschaft! Pfälzische Wissenschaft?" reprinted in Landauer Anzeiger , no. 289 (10 December 1927).

failed to recognize the perilous times facing Germany. The younger generation, survivors of war and the "horrific national suffering" of revolution, had no patience for the "pointless historical nit-picking of the Pfälzer character" and the "hobby mentality" of the Heimat researcher. "It seems more important to us to secure all forces for the conscious rearmament and renewal of German culture and the German state," he wrote, urging Germans not to "elevate truth over its consequences, value over usefulness, or the Heimat over the whole Volk." He argued, invoking Lagarde, the "warrior [Vorkämpfer ] of German learning," that the youth did not lack idealism, but their statesmen lacked the capacity or the will to inspire idealism.^[194]

In 1933, having cast the old Pfälzer Society for the Promotion of Learning by the wayside, the Nazis would expand on Buchheit's critique, but for the time being he spoke, if not just for himself, then for a cultural radicalism as yet unclaimed by National Socialism. For its part, the society decided privately not to respond to the attacks from the Landau press; the general consensus among its members was that envy alone had inspired this aggression.^[195] In 1928, in a gesture meant to be conciliatory but appearing only patronizing, the society held its annual meeting in Landau, replete with speeches on Heimat, culture, and Fatherland. But the ceremonial did not evoke the worshipful admiration that such ritualistic celebrations of culture always had before—and that its organizers had anticipated. Instead it provoked Buchheit and his supporters to further invective. The whole episode exemplified the inability of the society's members to come to grips with the extent of the disaffection they were facing. Buchheit and his supporters did not want promises of eventual inclusion in the most exclusive of Heimat clubs; what they wanted was to have done with the whole complacent, self-perpetuating fiction of local identity and national harmony.

The affinities between the radical discontent of an intellectual like Buchheit and an unemployed shoemaker like the Pirmasenser respondent to Abel's survey of early Nazis emerged clearly after 1929. Without the severe depression that devastated the already-tenuous German economic recovery, the Buchheits and Bürckels of the Pfalz might have gone on indefinitely railing against the black plague of Bavarianism and the curse of the Weimar system. But economic distress, helped along by the peculiarities of the Pfälzer situation, promoted an alliance of the discontented. The practical basis for such an alliance was conveniently provided by the Bavarians themselves, whose Pfalzhilfe programs seemed designed to force small proprietors into economic enslavement to the cultural doyens of Speyer. The interest from the

[194] Ibid.

[195] Pfeiffer to the Amtliche Pressestelle Pfalz, "vertraulich" (1 February 1926), BHStAM, MK 15549. The old specter of Badenese scheming was also invoked; see Dr. Albert Pfeiffer, "Ziel und Arbeit der PGFW" and others, Festsitzung der PGFW (28 January 1928), BHStAM, MK 15550; "Festsitzung der PGFW in Landau," Der Rheinpfälzer , no. 25 (30 January 1928): 5.

loans to small producers and tradesmen, after all, was what actually supported organizations like the local orchestra and the learned society. As the economic situation worsened, Pfälzer debtors began to clamor for relief from interest payments, or at the very least a reduction in interest rates.^[196] The Bavarian government refused, ostensibly on the ground that the ensuing deprivation of cultural life would provoke an uproar in the Pfalz. In fact, an uproar was far more likely to come from those who would have happily seen the Pfälzer Society for the Promotion of Learning sink into the Isar (from whence it seemed to them to have come) if that would have brought some small measure of economic relief. Even in the face of an appeal from the minister of finance in late 1931 to reduce the budget of the Pfalzhilfe altogether, the prime minister insisted on retaining the cultural support in order to avoid "unpleasant political consequences."^[197]

The Bavarian government's stubborn support of the cultural and Heimatpromoting organizations of the Pfalz, despite increasing signs that an alienated lower middle class was drifting out of the Bavarian People's party and into the National Socialist camp, represented a fateful miscalculation. Never skillful in its handling of Pfälzer popular opinion, the government in Munich mistook its own clients and official retainers in the Pfalz for the Pfalz itself and, while trying to placate them, inevitably ignored large parts of the population. Moreover, its preoccupation with organized life in what had always been the cultural and political mainstream led it to misinterpret the nature of anti-Bavarian sentiment in the region, attributing it to Social Democratic and Badenese mischief or to traditional Pfälzer unitarism. Nor did the prime minister or his advisors on the Pfalz doubt that Catholic opinion, regardless of social class, was behind him. But by 1933 the party of the Bavarian government in the Pfalz, the Bavarian People's party, had lost significant electoral force even in its stronghold of Speyer.^[198] Culture alone, even when delivered in the familiar garb of Heimat promotion, could not hold the electorate of the late Weimar Republic.

Indeed, the Heimat that since the turn of the century had expressed the peculiarly provincial character of German national identity seemed by the late Weimar period to have lost its constituency and, with it, its cultural resonance. The problem was not that Heimat activities had abated in any significant way, but that Heimat sentimentality in the population at large had become increasingly separated from associational life. Abel's early Nazis in the Pfalz, for instance, commonly expressed love for Heimat and Father-

[196] Auszug aus der Niederschrift über die 136. Sitzung des Ausschuß für den Staatshaushalt (30 January 1931), BHStAM, MK 15533.

[197] BavMinFinanz to Held (23 August 1931), BavMinUK to Held (3 September 1931), and Ministerratsitzung (3 September 1931, BHStAM, MK 15533.

[198] Wiesemann, Vorgeschichte , pp. 270–71.

land but spoke simultaneously of an inability to "fit in," to find companions in everyday life, indeed even to recognize the Pfalz itself, overrun as it was by "villains," as their true Heimat.^[199] The whole edifice of Heimat promotion presupposed something that did not exist in the Weimar period: that elusive quality of consensus and, perhaps more important, a measure of goodwill toward the existing system, a capacity to seek out and celebrate commonality within it. Plenty of people longed for some kind of unity in Germany—the vocabulary of Volksgemeinschaft was by no means the exclusive rhetoric of the Nazi movement. But fewer and fewer sought that unity in the Weimar Republic.

The Heimat movement in the Pfalz for the most part did still look for solidarity in the Republic; but even when the Heimat believers gave their support to the Weimar system, it was by 1929 passive, limited, or indifferent. Heimat rhetoric, as well as Heimat activities, characteristically conveyed the innocuous injunction to set aside differences, to love one's surroundings, and to cherish one's country. Yet active support for the Weimar Republic as such may not in the end be a particularly useful criterion by which to assess the meaning of Heimat activity, much of which could just as well have been carried on under a monarchy as a democracy—or for that matter, a dictatorship. Heimat symbols attempted to embody not the state but the nation and could not, by their very nature, be the source of any critique of the state that happened at the moment to rule the nation. The essence of the Heimat movement was to legitimate what existed and what had existed, not to undermine it. Insofar as the Weimar Republic was the legal and established representative of the German nation, the Heimat movement's celebration of German nationhood was perfectly consistent with the institutions of the 1920s: a Heimat event like the gigantic Trachtenfest of 1931 in Berlin brought together thousands of Germans dressed in "traditional" regional costume, not to criticize the modernity of Weimar society, but rather to symbolize the egalitarian togetherness that was the essence of the imagined national community. Unfortunately, national symbols alone are not enough to insure the survival of the nation-state, and the Heimat movement of the 1920s could do nothing but mirror in its increasing ineffectualness the terminal crises of the political state.

In the Pfalz, the saddest demonstration of the hollowness of the public symbols of Weimar came in 1932 at the attempted celebration of the centenary of the Hambach Festival. An event and a place at once locally beloved and nationally acknowledged, Hambach had given the Weimar Republic its flag as well as demonstrated the possibility of a democratic and liberal patriotism. Although, as with everything associated with the Weimar Republic,

[199] See, e.g., nos. 181, 183, 184, 413, 416, and 417, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Abel Collection.

not everyone had accepted the legitimacy of the riotous demonstrations of 1832 as a national symbol, the impending arrival of their hundredth anniversary was not an event to be taken lightly by any concerned German, whether that citizen were anxious for the Republic's survival or eager for its demise.

Local preparations for some kind of centennial were under way already in 1929: the Pfälzer historical associations planned to organize a Hambach exhibition in the Neustadt Heimat Museum; the Pfälzerwald Verein hoped to repeat their festivities of 1914; various Heimat newspapers, especially the Social Democratic Bei uns daheim , began to carry articles on the events and participants of 1832; Albert Becker, ever prolific, added two new books on Hambach—Hambach und Pirmasens and Deutschlands Wiedergeburt (Germany's Rebirth)—to his series of "Contributions to the Heimat Studies of the Pfalz" and delivered a much-reprinted lecture entitled "The Spirit of Hambach." But in early 1931 the anticipated shape of the centennial changed drastically when the Reichs minister of the interior, Joseph Wirth, decided to try to stage a national celebration at Hambach and recruited the local press club to manage the affair. Heading this effort was Franz Hartmann, also leader of the adult education league and a convinced democrat. Hartmann envisioned a celebration not simply patriotic or narrowly historical, but imbued with the ideas of "German unity and German freedom" and concentrated on the theme of freedom of the press.^[200] Deeply conscious of the dire political situation, he hoped to attract as broad a base of participation as possible "to secure [the celebration's] transcendence of political conflict and to protect it against political exploitation by any one party."^[201]

Long before the actual celebration, planned for May 1932, any illusion that the political battles of the day could be sidestepped or overcome had dissipated. The national government's sponsorship of the event went the way of Wirth himself, who lost his office in October 1931. The Communists announced their refusal to participate in an event that would falsify the ideas of Hambach;^[202] conservative and Catholic circles held back, finding nothing to support either in the liberal and enlightened rhetoric of the original Hambach Festival or in the democratic, antimonarchical, egalitarian emphasis of the contemporary one. The National Socialists, originally inclined to appropriate Hambach for its nationalistic potential, were by 1932 denouncing the original event for the weakness of its leaders, the "foreign, liberal, and Marxist" nature of its ideology, and above all the influence on it of "the Jews Heinrich Heine (alias Chaim Bückeburg) and Ludwig Börne (Löw

[200] Minutes of meeting in BavMinAus (30 June 1931), BHStAM, MA 108074; see also Baumann, "Hambacher Erinnerungsfeiern," p. 54.

[201] Meeting of 30 June 1931, BHStAM, MA 108074.

[202] Baumann, "Hambacher Erinnerungsfeiern," p. 55.

Baruch)."^[203] Finally, the Bavarian government decided to maintain its distance from the celebration, despite the participation of groups it had long supported through the Pfalzhilfe. Accurate enough in their interpretation of the historical record, though, as always, inept in their gauging of contemporary significance, Bavarian officials expressed to Hartmann their fear that the event would become "a demonstration for the unified state" and an occasion for centralists to denounce federalism, the rights of the smaller states, and, of course, Bavaria itself.^[204]

All that was left to Hartmann, still intent on his vision of a festivity in which all could participate, was nationalism and that most durable of political opinions in the Pfalz, Francophobia. In an effort to placate a radical and a conservative right, who themselves were willing to make no concessions, the Hambach centenary of 1932 became a watered-down celebration of Bismarck's nation of 1870 (arguably without relevance to either 1832 or 1932) and Germany's freedom (defined as freedom from French occupation). The essential incoherence of the final result was aptly captured in the title-page drawing by Max Slevogt for a commemorative history of 1832: it pictured the arm of a man holding three flags, the black-white-and-red of the old Reich, the black-red-and-gold of Hambach and Weimar, and the blue-and-white lozenges of Bavaria.^[205] As the Pfälzer historian Kurt Baumann wryly observed in 1957, Slevogt might just as well have drawn in a swastika as well.^[206] On the day itself, May 6, 1932, the last gathering of democratically minded people in the republican Pfalz was disrupted by gangs of SA men who lined the narrow path to the castle, harassing the people attending the rally and shouting, "Deutschland erwache," throughout the festival speeches.^[207] The Nazi press triumphantly foresaw the day when "a fresh wind will blow away the whole revolting episode . . . and bring fluttering in the air over the castle the swastika flag." The day after the festival, the news came that Brüning's government had fallen in Berlin; within a few months, the Republic itself would follow.

Only the Heimat organizations and those democrats still willing to show themselves in public embraced the Hambach centenary wholeheartedly; only the Heimat organizations still believed—or claimed to believe—that the rec-

[203] Cited in Emil Strauss, "150 Jahre Erinnerungsfeiern zum Hambacher Fest," Die Pfalz am Rhein: Pfälzische Verkehrs- und Heimatzeitschrift 55 (May 1982): 278.

[204] Meeting of 30 June 1931, BHStAM, MA 108074.

[205] Johannes Bühler, Das Hambacher Fest. Deutsche Sehnsucht vor hundert Jahren (Ludwigshafen, 1932). Veit Valentin also wrote a commemorative history for the event, but was forbidden access to all Bavarian and Pfälzer archives by the Bavarian government; see his Das Hambacher Nationalfest .

[206] Baumann, "Hambacher Erinnerungsfeiern," p. 55.

[207] Ibid., Strauss, "150 Jahre Erinnerungsfeiern," p. 278; miscellaneous remembrances from participants, or descendants thereof. The future president of the Bundesrepublik, Theodor Heuss, was one of the speakers.

onciliation of all Germans was possible. In October of the previous year, Franz Hartmann and the members of the adult education league had questioned whether their organization's work could be continued in the poisonous political climate of the day, but they had resolved to carry on: "Precisely in the face of conflicts, we must emphasize the common goods of our culture; precisely because of the social and political fragmentation, our work has its particular importance."^[208] At the meeting's close, the Heimat poet Leopold Reitz spoke of the ideals of adult education and Heimat promotion in the Weimar Republic, in words hopeful, futile, and soon forgotten:

We do not want the battle, we want the peace. We are not a party, we are over parties and between parties. We do not have a worldview, we have a view of humanity. The party wants division, we want reconciliation. Over there, party comrades; here, only the man next to you. There, party organization; here, free will. The party wants to rule, we want to serve. The party says: who is not for me is against me. We say: who is not for me can still be for the whole. Parties say: Marx, Lenin, Hitler. We say: Pestalozzi, Goethe, Mozart. The party makes enemies of father and son. We want each to be the other's brother. The party is dissatisfied with everything and everyone; we are dissatisfied only with ourselves, that we have not yet encouraged enough forgiveness and love and still run the danger of believing ourselves to be always in the right.

We must not dispute but discuss. Not to be right but to be kind, that is everything.

[208] Record of the Hauptversammlung (18 October 1931), PM–PH 49/28 (1932): 83–84.