Eight
Heimat and the Recovery of Identity
War, the last and most desperate assertion of national existence, had twice brought the Germans to the point of losing theirs, the second time more decisively than the first. The immediate postwar arrangements among the Allied leaders made official what bombing raids, Nazi excesses, and sheer weariness had already accomplished: the narrowing of political and social life to small regions unconnected to any whole, not even that of a single victorious power. The Pfalz came first under American occupation, then under French, was linked first to the Saar, then to Hesse and parts of the Rhineland. In 1947 it finally ended up a district of the state Rhineland-Pfalz.[1] For the first several years after the war, the French insisted that political parties and economic activities be restricted to the borders of their zone of occupation. The immediate postwar years also brought a modest revival of separatist activities in the region, as well as other movements of opinion for and against a variety of regional alliances—with Baden, with Bavaria, with Hesse, and so on.[2] A national state to which the Pfalz could belong was
[1] On the occupation and the reestablishment of government in the Rhenish area, see Rainer Hudemann, "Zur Politik der französischen Besatzungsmacht," in Rheinland-Pfalz entsteht. Beiträge zu den Anfängen des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz in Koblenz 1945–1951 , ed. Franz-Josef Heyen (Boppard am Rhein, 1984); Faber, "Die südliche Rheinlande," pp. 457–64; Gustav Wolff, "Die Pfalz in den Schicksalsjahren 1945/6," Pfälzische Heimatblätter 2 (1954): 49–53, 57–61, 81–84; Hans-Jürgen Wünschel, ed., Schicksalsjahre der Pfalz. Dokumente zur Geschichte von Rheinland-Pfalz (Neustadt/Pfalz, 1979); F. Roy Willis, The French in Germany 1945–1949 (Stanford, 1962).
[2] Peter Jakob Kock, Bayerns Weg in die Bundesrepublik (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 98–99, 121, 126–28; Kurt Thomas Schmitz, Opposition in Landtag. Merkmale oppositionellen Verhaltens in Länder-
(footnote continued on next page)
achieved only in 1949 after four years of political limbo. It claimed only some of those people accustomed to calling themselves Germans and boasted a constitution explicitly federalist, based on those regional governments that, at least in the case of Rhineland-Pfalz, had preceded it by several years.
Germany, in short, was rebuilt from the regions outward and upward. Within the western zones of occupation, the particular shape of the rebuilding derived as much from the Germans' own diagnosis of the national "sickness" as from the various schemes for German "pastoralization" or deindustrialization that were current in French and American governmental circles at the time.[3] Many of those Germans who were gradually reviving public life had come to understand Nazism (what Ludwig Reichert, the mayor of Ludwigshafen and the president of the constituent assembly for the Rhineland-Pfalz, called "our insanity beyond all conceiving and our consciencelessness beyond all measuring") as the disease of uprooted "mass man."[4] Thus democracy and "healthy" attitudes would have to begin in the family, the home, the locality, and grow from those "roots" into a new nation and a new national identity.[5]
Not surprisingly, one of the essential terms of this discussion was Heimat . Pulled out of the rubble of the Nazi Reich as a victim, not a perpetrator, Heimat once again expressed the particular claims of a traditional provincialism on the identity of Germans. "Out of our spiritual and material distress," observed a Bavarian historian in 1949, "has been born a new animation of Heimat thoughts."[6] These "Heimat thoughts" in turn informed the efforts of Germans in scholarly, cultural, and civic organizations to "unburden" themselves of the Nazi heritage, while at the same time strengthening the ties of German people to their locality. Heimat was not, however, as simple a cure as many claimed it to be, and in the interplay of reform and
(footnote continued from previous page)
[*] parlamenten am Beispiel der SPD in Rheinland-Pfalz (Hannover, 1971), pp. 18-20; Horst-W. Jung, Rheinland-Pfalz zwischen Antifaschismus und Antikommunismus. Zur Geschichte des Landesparlaments 1946–1948 (Meisenheim am Glan, 1976), p. 11; Hans-Jürgen Wünschel, "Der Separatismus in der Pfalz nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg" (diss., Universität Heidelberg, 1975).
[3] In 1949, for instance, in his Goethejahr address at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, Thomas Mann spoke of standing "four years after the culmination of our sickness." On the language of sickness and convalescence, see the suggestive remarks in Kock, Bayerns Weg , p. 22; on the Allies, see Willis, The French in Germany ; and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Germany Is Our Problem: A Plan for Germany (New York, 1945).
[4] Quoted in his obituary, PH 9 (1958): 34–35.
[5] Kock, Bayerns Weg , pp. 22–23. He points in particular to J. J. Kindt-Kiefer, Europas Wiedergeburt durch genossenschaftlichen Aufbau; Wilhelm Hoegner and C. Silens, Irrweg und Umkehr ; Otto Feger, Schwäbisch-alemannische Demokratie. Aufruf und Programm ; and Wilhelm Röpke, Die Deutsche Frage .
[6] Max Spindler, "Zur Lage der bayerischen Geschichtsvereine," Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 15 (1949): 263.
forgetfulness it mirrored both the accomplishments and the shortcomings of the German effort to move beyond their Nazi past.
That the locality should be the appropriate context for understanding the recasting of German national identity is not self-evident. National discussions in national publications among nationally prominent intellectuals and politicians have largely shaped our understanding of the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung , or overcoming the past. Yet the structure of opinion at the national level was so attenuated in the immediate postwar years—and what there was, so preoccupied with the unfolding drama of cold war—that to understand the internal implications of recovery we must look to local papers, local organizations, and local public occasions. Regional public life had already begun to revive several years before anything approaching national public life reemerged in western Germany, and in the early postwar years localness itself became a subject of discussion, particularly discussion about the assimilable past. Germany, wherever and whatever it might be, still mattered; but the Pfalz was Heimat and the ruins of the Westmark were yet to be cleared away.
The issues of local identity and the Nazi past took shape in a number of different contexts, but most explicitly in the revival of scholarship on the Pfalz and in the revival of a specifically Pfälzer literature, art, and folk culture. In default of a regional university, the traditional representatives of scholarship in the Pfalz had been the historical and scientific associations and, since 1925, the Pfälzer Society for the Promotion of Learning. All had been subsumed within the Nazi vision of a centrally controlled "völkisch learning," and all had more or less shut down after 1940, barely managing to preserve anything in the final years of the war. By 1950, however, all had been restored to the form they had taken in the Weimar period. In 1949, six of the ten surviving members of the original, pre-Nazi Pfälzer Society met to revive the organization; the state government of Rhineland-Pfalz quietly took over the functions of a now-absent Bavarian government, and Friedrich von Bassermann-Jordan again became president.[7] The Historical Association reformed in 1950, officially voting out the statutes of 1937 and electing a new central committee.[8] In 1948, the Pfälzer Association for Natural History and Preservation also regrouped. In 1950, a new "Working Group for Pfälzer Heimat History" was founded for "all friends of Pfälzer history," a new "Working Group for Pfälzer Family Research" started up, and a local branch of the regional office of monuments opened in Speyer.[9]
A range of new publications was the most visible sign of this flurry of
[7] PH 1 (1950): 64; Veröffentlichungen der PGFW 69:7; Ernst Christmann, "Wissenschaftlicher Mittelpunkt der Pfalz," Pfälzische Heimatblätter 1 (1952): 35.
[8] PH 1 (1950): 31.
[9] PH 1 (1950): 48; Rudolf Schreiber, "Bilanz der Pfälzer Wissenschaft," Pfälzische Heimatblätter 2 (1953): 4–5; Kurt Oberdorffer, "Bilanz der Pfälzer Wissenschaft," Pfälzische Heimatblätter 3 (1955): 11–12.
reorganization. In 1949, Friedrich Sprater, longtime director of the Historical Museum, founded a quarterly journal called Pfälzer Heimat that he conceived of as the heir to the magazine Pfälzisches Museum-Pfälzische Heimatkunde . In 1952, the Pfälzische Heimatblätter began to appear, a joint venture of the scholarly associations and the local press, aimed at a popular audience. In 1953, the Historical Association restarted its own yearly journal.[10]
Although no single purpose informed this writing and the subjects addressed were as varied as the inherent limitations of the Pfalz would permit, the new periodicals did reflect their editors' determination to restore to scholarship, particularly regional scholarship, the attachment to factual detail of which the Nazis had been so contemptuous. But publishing reassuringly antiquarian articles was not all they did. Such leading local scholars as Kurt Baumann and Rudolf Schreiber brought a critical realism, for the most part unprecedented, to their understanding of the entity "Pfalz" itself. No longer were the nineteenth-century origins of the region ignored or its troubled relations with Bavaria made to seem better than they had been.[11] These men's attitude reflected a profound distaste for the blatantly political function that regional scholarship had served in the Third Reich. Baumann consistently criticized local histories that in any way smacked of apologies for the new, old, or wished-for borders of the region.[12] In 1953, he lashed out at a book by Eugen Ewig on "the historical foundations of the state Rhineland-Pfalz" that argued—rather mildly—for the existence of historical precedents for the current political arrangements: "That the historical profession, after all the bleak experiences of the last decades, would still allow itself to serve as the underpinnings for whatever political opinion should happen to be current must strike all of us as alarming. Does our existence as a state really depend upon the construction of artificial and problematic prehistories to justify it?"[13] Similarly, the scholarly associations gave no comfort to the various postwar movements to reunite the Pfalz with Bavaria (the mission of a new Bund Bayern-Pfalz) or to establish a "new Kurpfalz" through the union of the Pfalz with Baden.[14] In many ways, Pfälzer scholarship after the war looked much like Pfälzer scholarship of the twenties. It did not, to the disgust
[10] PH 1 (1950): 1; Rudolf Schreiber, "Zum Geleit," MHVP 51 (1953): 5–6.
[11] See, e.g., Schreiber's "Grundlagen," pp. 35–40; and Kurt Baumann, bayerische Oberrheinpolitik," Pfälzische Heimatblätter 2 (1954): 89–91.
[12] See his criticism of the treatment of Pfälzer themes in Karl Bosl and Hermann Schreibmüller's Geschichte Bayerns (review in PH 5 [1954]: 140–41) and his harsh criticism of Rolk Gustav Haebler's Badische Geschichte: Die alemannischen und pfälzisch-fränkischen Landschaften am Oberrhein (review in PH 4 [1953]: 32).
[13] Review of Ewig, Die geschichtlichen Grundlagen des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz , in PH 4 (1953): 125. On Baumann, see Hans Keller in a Festgabe für Kurt Baumann zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Anton Doll, MHVP 77 (1979); and his collected essays, Von Geschichte und Menschen der Pfalz. Ausgewählte Aufsätze , ed. Kurt Andermann (Speyer, 1984).
[14] See the journals Bayern und Pfalz and Stimme der Pfalz on the one hand and Kurpfalz , organ of the Verein "Kurpfalz ," on the other.
of some, address broad or burning historical issues, but retreated instead to the security of the small in scale and the local in range.[15] In that—divided Berlin and cold war notwithstanding—it differed little from the rest of German life.[16]
The dispassionate scholar of postwar local history nevertheless lived in tension with the locally patriotic preserver of the regional past. Often united in the same person, these two attitudes jostled each other in the publications themselves, where the objectivity of the articles was belied by the sentimentality of titles like Pfälzer Heimat . Individuals continued to describe their scholarly activities in terms of concern for the fate of the region. Walther Plümacher wrote in 1951, for instance, that "now, more than ever before, localities must cultivate their past in order that the historical consciousness of people, from which rises the capacity continually to renew our lives, may intensify and grow"; similarly, Otto Sartorius described work in Pfälzer natural history in terms of "the great need of the people of our time to cultivate and promote everything that expresses our German, Western culture."[17] The groups themselves continued to seek out connections to local public authority, as expressions of their representation of the region as a whole. The Historical Association again asked the district president to serve as honorary chairman: "[His participation] is the richly symbolic expression," wrote a chronicler in Pfälzer Heimat , "of the close attachment, over the past 125 years, of the Pfälzer government to the representatives of Pfälzer historical efforts."[18] It was an attachment, moreover, that, despite the obvious abuses of the Nazi period, the group saw no fundamental reason to distrust.
Of course, preservationism had a practical side to it, and the urgency of the need to restore wrecked and plundered Heimat museums, disintegrating archives, and bombed-out historical buildings obscured the equally urgent need to question what one preserved and why one preserved it.[19] In Siegfried Lenz's novel Heimatmuseum , the hero, a displaced person (Heimatvertriebener ) from the eastern provinces, tells how he came ultimately to destroy the museum of Masurian culture that he had constructed in Schleswig-Holstein
[15] Buchheit, "Nur engere Heimatforschung wie bisher? Zur Diskussion um die Arbeit im Historischen Verein der Pfalz," Ludwigshafener General Anzeiger , 10 March 1955, p. 6.
[16] On the retreat from politics, "abstract ideas, programs, and organizations" in the postwar years, see Helmut Schelsky, Wandlungen der deutschen Familie in der Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1953).
[17] Walther Plümacher, "Die Ebernburg, Geschichte und Bedeutung," PH 2 (1951): 114; Otto Sartorius, "Unsere Heimatmuseen und Vereine," PH 1 (1950): 11. Sartorius's identification of German culture with a broader western tradition is itself new and remarkable.
[18] PH 1 (1950): 32.
[19] On the destruction of archives, museums, and buildings, both during and immediately after the war, see Friedrich Sprater, "Kriegsverluste," MHVP 51 (1953): 41–47; and miscellaneous accounts, e.g. PP 2 (November 1951): 8; and PH 1 (1950): 30–31 and 2 (1951): 28.
after the war.[20] In the Pfalz, such despair and disgust were never publicly acknowledged; with vigor, hope, and persistent self-regard, Pfälzers set about recovering what had been lost and restoring what had been damaged. In 1950, the Historical Museum in Speyer, whose collections had survived the war only to disappear in the chaos of 1945, reopened with an exhibition entitled "Pfälzer Land—Pfälzer Work."[21] The Cultural Ministry of Rhineland-Pfalz at the same time began a systematic effort to preserve historic buildings.[22] By 1951, the first town festival had been held, in celebration of an occasion deep in the past and in restorative disregard for the more recent and painful anniversaries that each passing year brought.[23]
Not just buildings, archives, and museums had to be preserved, but people also, a scarcely articulated truth of post-Nazi existence that the notion of denazification could not accommodate. Some of the more egregious sinners of the Nazi period disappeared—no trace of Hermann Emrich, for instance, can be found after 1945, for whatever reason. Others sought or were granted obscurity. Still others, the bulk of the population, considered themselves as much victims as participants in the Nazi era of German and Pfälzer history. Few disqualified themselves from participation in the postwar society just because they had failed to put up active resistance to the prewar one. The scholarly societies were filled with and even led by men who had published, researched, excavated, and lectured under the Nazi regime. Evidence of devotion to the Pfalz went a long way toward securing forgiveness even for those whose sins had been more than ones of omission. Hermann Moos, who had headed the folklore museum in Kaiserslautern in the Nazi period and had organized it around distinctly racialist principles, died in early 1950 in obscurity. The author of a long obituary in Pfälzer Heimat questioned whether "this true son of our Pfälzer Heimat, one of its experts and artists of a truly notable rank, whose life and work were deeply rooted in it and completely dedicated to it," ought really to be ignored and forgotten.[24] Such words should be read not as an apology for Nazism but rather as a plea for Pfalztum that stemmed from a sense—tinged with self-pity—of its vulnerability, its corruptibility, and, for all that, its essential worthiness. In a similar spirit, a regular section of the magazine Pfälzer Heimat celebrated the accomplishments of Pfälzers, living and dead, with scant regard to the Nazi
[20] Lenz's work fits into a postwar literary genre of what one might call the anti-Heimat; Günter Grass's Tin Drum is another example. In them a sense of place and locality no longer provides consolation or identity but undermines one's ability to be at peace in the world.
[21] Account in PP 1 (June 1950): 18.
[22] See esp. Wolfgang Medding in PH 1 (1950):113; 2 (1951):90; 3 (1952): 119; 5 (1954): 35; 6 (1955): 158; and on into the present.
[23] PH 2 (1951): 64; and frequent accounts of such festivities in the following years, especially in 1958, when Kaiserslautern celebrated its eight hundredth anniversary.
[24] Rudolf Ludwig, "Unsere Landsleute und Mitarbeiter," PH 1 (1950): 63.
period. In those first years after the war, it seemed to Germans that their suffering had been punishment enough for their misjudgments, conceits, and ambitions. Healing, not hair rending, was the order of the day as far as the local societies were concerned, and part of that process, for all its disturbing overtones, was recapturing and preserving the past.
Those who were responsible for the revival of local art, literature, and music showed as much or more reluctance to stir up memories of the recent past, seeking instead in culture both consolation for their sorrows and vindication for their forgetfulness. "The German person takes the word of the poet with him on his way through life," wrote the Pfälzer Oskar Bischoff in 1950, "in order that he find new strength in his life and work when he is worn out."[25] Like Friedrich Meinecke with his vision of small circles of Goethe lovers in every German town and city, some Pfälzers believed that culture, specifically heimatlich culture, could turn people back to the best and truest of Germanness.[26] "A people is more than a mere political expression," declared the founder of the new Pfälzische Kulturgemeinde (Pfälzer Cultural Community), and life amounted to more than the struggle for existence.[27] Indeed, these promoters of culture thought that a preoccupation with mere existence in the postwar years had thrown Germans into a profound cultural crisis, the manifestations of which were the fragmentation of cultural endeavors, an indifference to cultural excellence, and a proliferation of bad literature, bad music, bad art. Few agreed on where the roots of this crisis were to be found—in Nazism generally, in Nazi materialism, in war and defeat, in postwar want and plenty, in the atom bomb—but few disputed that a crisis was upon them, and few doubted that salvation from it lay close to home.[28]
In the Pfalz, cultural renewal centered on the periodical Pfalz und Pfälzer , founded in 1950 and edited by Oskar Bischoff.[29] Its focus, as the title indicates, was explicitly Pfälzer; it was oriented toward the Heimat, in order, as Bischoff later explained it, to prove that "the landscape was still both artistically and spiritually valid."[30] Other projects and associations aimed at the renewal of local culture soon followed: the Pfälzer Cultural Community in late 1950, a refounded Pfälzer Literary Association in 1951. The promoters of Pfälzer culture worried that insufficient attention had been paid to the
[25] PP 1 (June 1950): 15.
[26] Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections , trans. Sidney B. Fay (Cambridge, Mass., 1950).
[27] Joachim Körner, "Wie überwinden wir unsere 'Kulturkrise'?" PP 1 (November 1950): 10.
[28] Ibid., pp. 10–13.
[29] Later it was called the Rheinisch-pfälzische Monatshefte .
[30] Bischoff, "Die Aufgaben und Ziele unsere Zeitschrift," Rheinische-pfälzische Monatshefte (coninuation of Pfalz und Pfälzer under a new title; hereafter cited as RPM ) 4 (1953): 1.
importance of ineffable goods in the rebuilding of Germany after the war. For instance, Bischoff called the closure of a radio station specializing in cultural broadcasting "spiritual démontage ," in reference to the widely resented French relocation of whole factories from the Pfalz to Lorraine.[31] In contrast to his countrymen in the 1920s, Bischoff did not blame the French for the threat to "Pfälzer culture and its traditions," but rather the Germans themselves, who had neglected to take the same care in recouping their spiritual losses as they had their material ones.
Pfalz und Pfälzer pursued spiritual regeneration for the most part through literature, publishing the writings of former and contemporary Heimat authors. Literary and art criticism and music history also appeared in its pages, along with frequent discussions of the essential value of looking to folk culture for inspiration and Pfalztum. "One thing is certain," began one such discussion in 1951: "if we would heal our wounded soul, if we, the straying ones, would again find ourselves, if we would again feel within ourselves the Volksgemeinschaft . . . then we cannot take seriously enough the problem of folk culture."[32] The notion of heimatlich culture encompassed all these diverse fields, from the folk song to the sculpture, positing a continuum of cultural experience in the landscape itself. More than anything else, the editors and writers of Pfalz und Pfälzer relied on the notion of Heimat to give coherence and unity to their work. Hence, when they spoke of cultural fragmentation in the Pfalz, as they frequently did, they referred only to institutions, and their prescriptions for improvement were likewise limited to practical matters like train schedules.[33] No one seemed ever to doubt that, given the opportunity, the essential Pfälzerness embedded in the land could not fail to find expression in a distinctive and worthy renaissance of local culture.[34]
Pfälzer culture may have been regenerative; it certainly was rehabilitative. In the new and renewed cultural organizations, many artists and poets who had put their work at the disposal of the Nazi regime reconstructed themselves through the forgiving genre of Heimat lyricism. "My dear friends," began an early essay in Pfalz und Pfälzer , "one cannot speak enough of the Heimat": "it is something like heaven, a nonrational, deep soulfulness," not a place, "neither mountain nor valley, neither tree nor hill," rather "rootedness in the earth"; "it is the strengthening of life and the original comfort from which all else flows that in this earthly corner affirms your existence; so let the world do as it will—the Heimat loves and confirms you
[31] Oskar Bischoff, Hans Reetz, et al., "Wir protestieren gegen die Auflösung des Studio Kaiserslautern," PP 2 (March 1951), p. 16.
[32] Prof. Arthur Berg, "Volksliedforschung—Volksliedpflege," PP 2 (April 1951): 16.
[33] Hanz Reetz, "Pfälzische Kulturpropaganda auf Seitenwegen?" PP 1 (June 1950): 19; "Die Kulturaufgabe der Pfälzischen Presse," PP 2 (May 1951): p. 18.
[34] Other regions, after all, claimed such a culture; indeed, most German literary histories were once organized by region.
without question, as its child."[35] The most prominent erring child to return to this Heimat, professing, probably in all sincerity, his love and his never-extinguished attachment to the Pfalz, was Kurt Kölsch, the former Gaukulturwart on the long road back from Nazi prominence. His arrival was marked by the publication in 1952, on the front page of Pfalz und Pfälzer , of a poem he had written in 1945. It was called "Abendländische Elegie " (An Elegy to the West), and it depicted a crisis of soul in all western culture, affirming in the end the essential goodness of the earth and the Fatherland: "Hier ist der Acker und hier ist die heilende Erde. / Langsam füllt sich Wort und reift in den Ähren das Korn. / Über dem Heimweg wölbt sich der Reichtum der Sterne. / Kühle der sanftesten Nacht umfängt uns abendlich schön. / Singe, du Künstler, das Lied von dem Heimweg der Seele!"[36]
In June 1952, again in Pfalz und Pfälzer , Kölsch made explicit the message of the poem. In a short piece, part autobiography, part apologia, he described times in prison camp right after the war when he had helped his companions assuage their homesickness by telling stories in Pfälzer dialect; later, after his return to the Pfalz in 1948, he had been able to find employment only in odd jobs, as a forester, gardener, stonecutter, delivery boy, and agricultural day laborer; nevertheless, although cut off from his real profession, he "rediscovered" in the vineyards of his beloved Pfalz and in the daily contact with Pfälzers "truly a deep and inner union with my Heimat, a mystical communion, a rediscovery of the powers and essences" of the land to which his poetry had always spoken.[37] Throughout the narrative—indeed, throughout his poems after 1945—the Heimat was a constant point of reference; his love for it, ever on display, legitimated him as an artist in postwar society. "I ask no more," he concluded, disingenuously, "than what I myself have always and under all circumstances been ready to grant to others: that one's work be justly received and recognized for the creativeness that is expressed not politically but artistically and—a little love, so that one feels that one is not entirely alone."[38]
[35] Wilhelm Michel, "Lob der Heimat," PP 1 (August 1950): 13–14.
[36] "Abendländische Elegie," PP 3 (January 1952): 1:
Here are the fertile fields and here is the healing earth.
Slowly the word fills up and the corn ripens in the ears.
Above the way home arches the richness of the stars.
Coolly the gentlest night wraps us around of an evening.
Sing, you artist, the song of the soul's way home!
[37] Kurt Kölsch, "Von mir—über mich," PP 3 (June 1952): 2–3. "He has always remained closely bound to his Pfälzer Heimat," affirmed Oskar Bischoff a few years later (PP 3 [June 1952]: 10).
[38] Kölsch, "Von mir—über mich," p. 3. Kölsch could hardly have forgotten that such toleration was precisely what he rejected in his "inspirational" writings in Die Westmark , where he associated it with a destructively "liberal" outlook. See Chapter 7 above.
Nevertheless, the restorers of Pfälzer culture in the postwar Pfalz, affirming and forgiving though they certainly were, did not lack a critical distance from the task at hand, or a sense of ambivalence about the Heimat genre to which they were dedicated. An essential feature of Heimat endeavors had always been their solipsistic regionalism: written, painted, or composed by local artists on the subject of the locality, Heimat works of art had not found, nor were they intended for, an outside audience (except, possibly, the outside audience of tourists who came to visit and admire). True, these works consistently turned on the paradox of the representatively German within the particularly Pfälzer—a paradox that was the key to their dual patriotism—but recognition from Germans had not been essential to the maintenance of Pfälzer art. The French occupation and then, of course, Nazism had strained the Heimat genre to the point of breaking by demanding that it turn outward and promote the Pfalz, propagandistically, for an audience of non-Pfälzers. Bischoff, though he shared little else with his immediate predecessors, nevertheless believed that Pfälzer culture would thrive only if it gained the recognition of German society as a whole. "The acknowledgment of our narrow Heimat is not enough," he wrote in 1953; "we seek to gather together on one platform . . . all those engaged in the culture and Heimatpflege of the Pfälzer and Rhenish areas, in order to gain recognition of their worth beyond the local borders."[39]
Lying behind Bischoff's concern, one that he shared with many others in the Pfalz, was not mere Pfälzer boosterism but a recognition of the problem of cultural excellence and authenticity in postwar Germany. Too much literary and artistic production since 1945 had opted for triviality and frivolity in the face of destruction and atrocity. Against all that, Bischoff insisted that the Heimat and the landscape could be the basis of profound artistic expression, not just of popular movies about Alpine maidens and doggerel (Reimerei ) about mischievous boys. Similarly, the truly Pfälzer existed not in the vulgar sense in which one found it depicted in much popular literature, but deeply embedded in a particular feel to the land and in a particular cast to the people. Landscape artists had also to learn to seek profundity, not prettiness.[40] The renewed interest in folklore took shape, at least in part, in an effort to locate authentic and profound cultural experiences that were also local and particular. When the radio studio in Kaiserslautern threatened to shut down in 1951, Bischoff and others claimed that their opposition to its closure sprang "not from provincial prejudice, but from an understanding of
[39] Bischoff, "Die Aufgaben und Ziele unserer Zeitschrift," RPM 4 (January 1953): 1.
[40] There was notably more interest in artistic modernism after the war: see esp. Hans Reetz, "Auch Hans Purrman hat die Bitternis erfahren müssen," PP 1 (August 1950): 12; and K. F. Ertel, "Die Pfälzische Sezession," PP 1 (June 1950): 9.
authentic Kulturpflege, which must be nourished directly from the Volkstum in order that its intellectual heights not be suspended, unsupported, in empty space."[41]
The existence of an outside audience would supposedly provide a check on too much local silliness, forcing Pfälzer artists simultaneously to think deeply about their local selves and strive toward universal standards of cultural excellence (whatever they might be). In a piece playfully entitled "Pfälzer, Over-Pfälzer, All-Too-Pfälzer," Hans Reetz addressed such an audience by making fun of stories in which the word Pfälzer became meaningless through its repetition: "the Pfälzer village, the Pfälzer heaven, the Pfälzer air, the Pfälzer bread (perhaps made out of American grain, ground in Mannheimer, thus Badenese, mills), the Pfälzer summer, the Pfälzer evenings, Pfälzer table gossip, a velvet-blue Pfälzer night, and so on." Reetz nevertheless affirmed the existence of Pfälzerness, reachable not through repetition of the adjective but through penetration of the spirit. He suggested a contest for the best piece of Heimat writing in which the word Pfälzer would never appear: "Essence is the thing," he concluded, "not stereotype."[42]
The ambivalence and yet the desire to believe were both reflected in postwar discussions about the place of local dialect, in particular dialect literature, in German culture. On the one hand were the countless products of the wine-soaked imagination, banal and inauthentic; on the other hand was the vision of what dialect could be, as well as a few outstanding poets who had realized it. In 1948, Oskar Bischoff lamented the fact that "outside our province, the common image of the Pfälzer, his essence and his distinctiveness, his interior and his exterior, is often one-sided, if not completely distorted." Bad dialect poetry had contributed substantially to this distortion, he thought, and unfortunately good dialect poetry was increasingly rare because "few of our dialect poets have recognized that inherent in Pfälzer dialect is an authentic power of speech suited to image making . . . indeed to genuinely poetic pictures and lyrical expressions."[43] In the opening issue of Pfalz und Pfälzer , Ernst Christmann, a distinguished scholar of Pfälzer dialect, took up the argument with "an earnest word" on the failures of contemporary dialect writing. Most dialect poets, he thought, had failed to exercise the proper "self-criticism," creating hopelessly bad doggerel out of inauthentic bits of dialect with inappropriate pieces of high German thrown in to make the piece scan or rhyme. Contemporary writing, "exactly like the good or kitschy buildings that are being built on our public streets," either "honored or dis-
[41] Bischoff, Reetz, et al., "Wir protestieren," p. 16.
[42] The Nietzschean reference in the title clues us in to the audience (educated Germans) and to the subject (cultural standards) that he is addressing: "Pfälzisch—überpfälzisch—allzu pfälzisch," PP 2 (October 1951): 21.
[43] Bischoff, "Pfälzer Mundartdichtung, Ein Wort zuvor!" Pfälzer Bote: Volks- und Heimatkalender (Neustadt/Pfalz, 1948): 93.
figured and disgraced the Heimat itself"; restraint and taste were the order of the day, but neither was much in evidence.[44]
Predictably, Christmann provoked several strong defenses of dialect. As one writer asserted, it was the only means to express what was "felt as a Pfälzer"; similarly for Albert Becker, "each province must preserve its dialect, for it is indeed the element in which the soul can breathe."[45] And some miscellaneous efforts were subsequently made to elevate the medium—through competitions, through scholarly recordings of dialect, and through the reprinting of the so-called classic works of Pfälzer dialect, mostly products of the nineteenth century.[46] Nevertheless, the battle against literary, visual, and musical kitsch that Oskar Bischoff had declared in 1950 was probably doomed to failure. In 1955, Pfalz und Pfälzer had to close (for financial reasons, significantly, unable to compete in a market of mass production), and no journal took up its task of promoting the poetry inherent in the Pfälzer soul. But that the battle had taken place at all attested to the importance of regional particularity to German identity. Heimat was not peripheral to the cultural heritage in which Meinecke placed his hopes for Germany's regeneration, but instead was part of it. For Bischoff and others, there could be no revival of German culture as a whole without first recovering the local self.
The capacity of the community of the Pfalz to survive may have been the real issue in the fate of Bischoff's literary journal, as reactions to its closing in 1955 made clear. For Willi Gutting, a writer and teacher in the Pfälzer village of Sondernheim, the journal had been "more than the organ of a literary circle, more than the mouthpiece of creative people in our region"; rather, it had been "the manifestation of a community, whose capital lay outside the material sphere in the timeless landscape above the clouds." In Berlin, Theodor Bohner, honorary president of the Vereinigung Deutscher Schriftstellerverbände (Union of German Writers' Leagues), declared himself "shocked" at the inability of the Pfalz to sustain the journal: "The Rheinpfalz has always been a decapitated land, . . . and precisely because the Pfälzer, despite all the hymns to wine, is nowhere at home, I, a Pfälzer who lives out his life in partial infidelity to his land, felt the existence of the journal as a kind of protection over my own life. It affects me deeply to witness such a display of Pfälzer impotence." According to the Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller Rheinland-Pfalz (League for the Protection of German Writers in Rhineland-Pfalz), "the consciousness of a landscape is de-
[44] Ernst Christmann, "Von pfälzischer Auch-Mundartdichtung," PP 1 (April 1950): 3–4.
[45] Heinz Lorenz, "Offener Brief an Dr. E. Christmann," PP 1 (June 1950): 16; Albert Becker, "Von Pfälzer Mundart, Mundartdichtung und Mundartforschung," PP 2 (January 1950): 6.
[46] PP 5 (November 1954); PH 8 (1957): 72; Peter Luginsland, "In Memoriam Paul Münch," PP 2 (February 1951): 1.
pendent on the intensity with which the poets, writers, and artistically active people of all kinds experience its incorporeal existence."[47] From these perspectives, the inability of the Pfalz to sustain the journal seemed damaging testimony to the tenuousness of its existence as a real community, something more than a mere political arrangement. The journal's own concern for authenticity in a world filled with kitsch had expressed a deeper insecurity of Pfälzers themselves about the truth of their identity. As long as the journal existed—an experiment (as Bischoff characterized it, after Albert Schweitzer) in "sober idealism"—the vitality of the Pfälzer as such seemed amply demonstrated; when it failed, it took a piece of that illusion with it.
The hopes invested in Pfalz und Pfälzer were, however, only one manifestation of many that revealed the insecurities of postwar Germans about the survival—and truth—of the community, as it was traditionally constituted and understood. The Nazis' representation of Volksgemeinschaft could be easily abandoned, for it had found its only realization in a war that made all Germans vulnerable to hardship, displacement, and death. Whether pre-Nazi images of the community offered comfort was certainly not clear to the clear-sighted, though to the traumatized and the weary the temptation of "normality" was enormous. The immediate resurgence of Heimat in the first decade after the war attested to the weariness rather than the wisdom of Germans; certainly for some, Heimat endeavors represented a high calling, a challenge, but for most they were simply the easiest path to recovery, as well as the least objectionable expression of togetherness. Even the standard of authenticity could be too strenuous. Heimat was attractive for representing not something truer than the Nazis' "community of blood," but something essentially peaceful, noneventful. The notion of Heimat also expressed the immortality of the community to which one belonged, and that illusion, above all, had been destroyed in Hitler's final mad attempt to take the German nation down with him.[48]
The humble almanac was one of the first forms of Heimat consciousness to revive after the war, preceding the more sophisticated historical and literary ones and providing at least as revealing a glimpse into the mood of the period. Describing his product as a "tender sprout," the editor of the Pfälzerland wrote in 1946 that "after the apocalyptic catastrophe of the so-called Third Reich, we must start again from the beginning. . . . Let us not fail . . . to take up the task of directing thoughts of the Heimat again into healthy
[47] Gutting, Bohner, and the Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller were all quoted in Bischoff, "Wir heißen Euch hoffen," RPM 6 (September 1955): 1.
[48] See the chapter entitled "Betrayal" in Sebastian Haffner, The Meaning of Hitler , trans. Ewald Osers (New York, 1979), pp. 149–65. Note also the enthusiasm of the so-called Heimatvertriebene (Heimat exiles) for association building and Heimat activities in their new homes. To recreate a "Heimat" for oneself was to begin to heal from the traumas of postwar displacement.
channels. The Pfälzer must again learn to feel himself as a Pfälzer."[49] To this end, the almanac dispensed advice on survival and regeneration disguised as jokes, folk sayings, and paeans to the Pfälzer character—its stoicism, its aversion to war from long historical experience, its openness to change and diversity, its friendliness, and its capacity for humor even in the grimmest of times.[50] An article in the newspaper Rheinpfalz attempted to be similarly inspiring when it lamented, "What remains now of our justly famous Rheinpfälzer temperament, where are our light hearts and our busy hands, working together to rebuild the Heimat?"[51] The existence of the Pfälzer character affirmed—or perhaps assumed—the existence of a community based on collectively held traits and values.
That community was the implicit concern of a Heimat-celebratory tendency among postwar educators also. In an article recommending the use of Heimatgeschichte for teaching children about the past, Gustav Knapp concluded that "Heimat knowledge can translate into the feeling of belonging together and of closeness, as well as into the inclination toward community. Herein lie the strongest intellectual and emotional roots for everything that would grow and prosper."[52] To some extent, Heimat was a community understood without reference to political or moral obligations, and Heimat instruction in the schools made a similar retreat from the Weimar agendas of civic instruction, settling into a relentlessly factual attention to geography, geology, and local history. The new Heimatkunde texts approved for use in the schools often consisted simply of slightly rewritten versions of discredited Nazi schoolbooks, stripped of references not just to Adolf Hitler and Horst Wessel, but to political citizenship and political entities of any kind, bad or good.[53]
Yet the community of Pfälzers, specifically its embodiment of common needs and common rights, was at the same time the implicit subject of a postwar political rhetoric concerned with the reanimation of public life.
[49] "Zum Geleit," Pfälzerland: Illustrierter Familien-Kalender 1947 , p. 9.
[50] See, e.g., "Ihr lieben Pfälzer!" Pfälzer Bote (Neustadt/Pfalz, 1947), p. 1; E. Johann, "Pfälzer Land und Leute" and "Stimmen der Meister gegen den Krieg," in Pfälzerland 1947 , pp. 12–13. For the same interpretations of character in more serious form, see Karl Lollnig, Wandlungen im Bevölkerungsbild des pfälzischen Oberrheingebietes , p. 35; and Albert Pfeiffer, "Die Pfalz" (8 June 1947), fragment of manuscript in PLAS, C1382.
[51] "Fröhliche Pfalz—Gott erhälts!" Rheinpfalz (18 May 1946): 2.
[52] "Die Heimat im Geschichtsunterricht," Westdeutsche Schulzeitung (formerly Pfälzische Lehrerzeitung ) 62 (28 July 1953): 175.
[53] See, e.g., the series "Von Heimatkreis zur weiten Welt" by Hans Mann and Alfred Stoffel, esp. the Pfalz volume Pfälzer Land. Eine kleine Heimat- und Landeskunde der Rheinpfalz und des benachbarten Saarlandes (Bonn, 1956), which relied to some extent on writings published in Die Westmark ; or Albert Zink, Die Pfalz mein Heimatland. Eine Heimatkunde für die Pfälzer Jugend (Neustadt/Pfalz, 1950), a revision of his Die Pfalz: Heimatkunde des Gaues Westmark .
Here, Heimat and Pfalztum were invoked at least as often as in the speeches of the antioccupation politicians of the early 1920s, but this time to secure forgiveness and to emphasize commonalities across party divisions, not to inflame nationalist emotions. In early 1946, for instance, district president Eichenlaub, speaking at a civic gathering in Neustadt, blamed the Prussians (implicitly interpreting Nazism as a form of Prussianism) for the hatred that had theretofore existed between France and Germany. The new Landrat , Hanns Haberer, who followed Eichenlaub at the podium, pledged himself "to restor[ing] the well-being and future of the Heimat" in a spirit of forgiveness, repeating the word Heimat twelve times in a speech of five minutes. He concluded with a plea for "all of us to put our work at the service of the higher ideals of the people and the Heimat." The final speech of the evening was an emotional affirmation of Heimat as the basis of German collective life:
Out of destruction and want and disgrace and guilt we have saved one thing: our glowing heart for our Heimat! . . . It lies here before us: wineland and tilled land, mountain and valley and stream, cities and villages, all bleeding from many wounds, torn apart by thousands of scars. . . . Hatred, injustice, revenge, force, terror, sycophancy, and knavery have all passed over us, but of one thing we can be sure, we did not betray our Heimat—in our hearts we resisted. And our Heimat will expiate our sins. . . . Heart, soul, Heimat, your best sons stand before you, caught up in your distress, laboring and creating with you, suffering and sacrificing with you, rising with you out of destruction to the rights of humanity. People of my Heimat, I call to you, hand to hand, heart to heart, victim to victim, hope to hope, love to love, with belief in the highest good: democracy and freedom for our Pfälzer Heimat.[54]
The idiom of Heimat allowed Germans to speak indirectly of the unspeakable, extinguishing their guilt in the process. Thus Heimat came to embody the political and social community that could be salvaged from the Nazi ruins.
Moreover, in seeking that "democracy and freedom" to which the speaker in Neustadt had referred, the heimatlich past could still inspire and instruct—as a new community association in Landstuhl, dedicated to the restoration of Franz von Sickingen's castle of Ebernburg, proved. At least from 1520 to 1523, the Ebernburg had been "a shelter to justice, a place of humanistic and religious renewal." One of the leaders of the Verein expressed the hope that "we in our work on the Ebernburg also encounter the freedom and justice and living faith that the young reformer [Franz von Sickingen] also sought and understood." The so-called Ebernburg tradition should be regarded "by people of our times as particularly necessary and healing to their distresses, dangers, and fears."[55] Needless to say, the postwar years in
[54] Speeches reprinted in Rheinpfalz (9 January 1946): 3.
[55] Plümacher, "Die Ebernburg, Geschichte und Bedeutung," pp. 111–14.
the Pfalz and in all of western Germany saw an enthusiastic revival of interest in the Hambach Festival, with its potentially powerful symbolism for a renewed republic.[56] More generally, the democratic and popular movement in nineteenth-century Pfalz, "so long ridiculed or ignored," enjoyed a popularity unparalleled even in the Weimar period, as representative of "our good democratic tradition": "The past of our own small Heimat," declared one local official, Günter Söfsky, "is rich in examples of the history-building powers of this landscape. And the German southwest, the old land of kings, . . . is also the land of origin of German dmocracy."[57] If democracy could not be rooted in Germany as a whole, it could still be rooted in the German locality, the Heimat; from such small beginnings would grow national traditions.
Looking at activities and speeches like these, H. W. Jung has rightly pointed out that politicians and public figures of the immediate postwar years, specifically in the Rhineland, did not address the difficult questions about their political culture that the local success of fascism had raised, but relied instead on the specter of Prussianism on the one hand and communism on the other to escape real responsibility. What he characterizes as "southwest German ressentiment " manifested itself in a renewed nostalgia for the old Reich, the first and only true Reich, of Karl der Große—Charlemagne to the French, and thus a symbol too of Franco-Rhenish friendship.[58] Yet political particularism was perhaps not the most striking feature of this tendency. Certainly, small communities and larger regions alike sought to define a past and a present "unburdened" by the heavy weights of Machtstaat and Militarismus , with one practical consequence being a marked resistance to any form of "denazification" of individuals. But though the process had Rhenish peculiarities, it was not peculiar to the Rhineland, nor was it simply the expression of a renewed small-statism.[59]
Rather, the rhetoric of Heimat, predicated as it was on the integrity of the
[56] On the local level, see the account of restorations undertaken by the Rheinland-Pfalz Kultusministerium and a summary of the symbolic importance of Hambach in PH 8 (1957): 69, 150–57; on popular enthusiasm for Hambach at the time, see Lorenz Wingerter, "'Klingt noch ein höher Lied als Vaterland?': Fritz Eckerle zum Gedächtnis," PP 3 (May 1952): 3 (the answer in Eckerle's words was "Ja, Freiheit!"). More recently, Chancellor Helmut Kohl (a Pfälzer) tried to make Hambach the rhetorical centerpiece of Ronald Reagan's German tour of 1985. Reagan's speech there to a carefully selected group of German high school students was, of course, overshadowed by Bitburg—appropriately, to be sure, and, from the perspective of those beleaguered German democrats of the Pfalz, typically.
[57] Söfsky, introduction to Veröffentlichungen der PGFW 69, p. 9; Trautz, Die Pfalz am Rhein , p. 30. See also Kurt Baumann, "Pfälzer kämpfen um die Freiheit Amerikas," PP 1 (August 1950): 9–10; Hans Fessmeyer, "Der Grünstadter Revolutionär August Mosbach," PH 4 (1953): 43–46; District President Keller, introduction to Karl Heinz, 150 Jahre Bezirksverband Pfalz (Neustadt/Pfalz, 1966), pp. 5–7.
[58] Jung, Rheinland-Pfalz zwischen Antifaschismus und Autikommunismus , pp. 1, 9, 14–17.
[59] On the failure of Entnazifizierung , see ibid., p. 33.
locality within a national state, represented the recovery of that distinctively German, locally rooted patriotism that Nazism had discouraged. Whether in schoolbooks, almanacs, poetry collections, films, or political speeches, Heimat promised healing and health through the peculiar virtues of authentically local experience. The solution to the German problem, thought a writer in Saxony, was to follow the rule "Outwardly as unified as necessary, inwardly as diversified as possible."[60] The cultivation of Heimat embodied this rule in the purest form, for it gave the state its due without ceding all local claims to autonomy and distinctiveness. Best of all, Heimat gave the Germans as a whole something all their own: "How happy we are compared to totally uniform states, for the colorful diversity that the German Volkstum inherited from the old Stämme and the individualized landscape finds its expression in the diversity of our federal states. . . . All these particularities in the colorful picture of the German state are rooted in the Heimat."[61]
In 1951, the author of a tribute to Paul Münch, one of the great Pfälzer dialect poets, described the genre as "the last refuge of Heimat bliss and Heimat ties in our cultureless and godless world." Münch's masterwork in the local dialect was a comic celebration of Pfälzer self-regard called Die pälzisch Weltgeschicht , or World History According to the Pfälzer. Writing in 1909 at the height of the prewar Heimat movement, Münch found the sense as well as the place of world events firmly in the Pfalz itself. His death in the first days of 1951, his memorialist thought, may well have marked the end of Mundart and with it the end of the Heimat feeling it had engendered: "perhaps in the atomic age and in the age of the ubiquitous 'pidgin English' they will soon disappear forever."[62]
Certainly, as the shape of a postwar German nation began to emerge, much seemed to militate against the survival of local identities and locally referential views of the nation. At the level of popular culture, the once-flourishing Heimat organizations and activities have been almost entirely displaced by the postwar rage for American film, food and drink, television, and music. Although a European-wide phenomenon that has only become more marked over time, the process of "Americanization" was accelerated in the Pfalz by the terms of the NATO alliance. Since 1955 large numbers of American military and civilian personnel, air bases, training grounds, and PXs have covered the infertile landscape of the western Pfalz, and since the 1960s the U.S. government has been the largest employer in the region. American culture and American troops together have symbolized the eclipse
[60] Georg Schnath, Heimat und Staat. Betrachtungen eines Niedersachsen (Hannover, 1958), p. 20.
[61] Ibid., p. 21.
[62] Peter Luginsland, "In Memoriam Paul Münch," PP 2 (1951): 1.
of European power and influence. Since 1945, the national character of popular cultures in Europe has been increasingly attenuated.
Yet, the charge of cultural imperialism notwithstanding, the choice to consume American popular culture is no more a matter of coercion than is any other choice involving consumable goods. Indeed, is there anything more intrinsically "real" about the invented Pfälzer folk dress than about a pair of Levi jeans? Maybe at the turn of the century there was, but even then the cultural force of the folk dress had as much to do with the contemporary desire for it as with any qualities all its own. As a critic of artificial attempts to promote "German folk customs" through Heimatkunde in the schools has written, "What cannot be lived and experienced outside the school cannot be conserved inside it."[63] That lesson was there to be learned in the experience of the Nazi years; and despite entirely sincere efforts since the war to restore integrity and vitality to local customs, the lesson has remained valid in the cities of a reconstructed Germany.
What is at stake here is a more ineffable product of culture: the way we identify ourselves and the terms by which we do so. From such a perspective, the historically grounded inclination of Germans to seek the key to their national identity in the multiplicity of their provincial origins has not proven completely susceptible to the scourge of "Americanization." Much evidence suggests that Germans, including German youth, are not ashamed of their dialects and are capable of switching back and forth between them and high German at will.[64] Dialect writing enjoyed a revival in the new genre of antinuclear poetry and prose, where its essential localness expresses a protest against the alien forces responsible for the nuclear power plant, the bomb emplacements, and the like.[65] That Germans as a whole continue to regard Heimat, however defined, as an essential part of their social identity is attested to not just by political scientists and contemporary anthropologists but by the phenomenal success on West German television in 1984 of a long treatment of life in the locality called, simply, Heimat[66] Perhaps most telling
[63] Kopp in 1961, cited by Greverus, Auf der Suche nach Heimat , p. 11.
[64] See, e.g., Jürgen Macha and Thomas Weger, "Mundart im Bewußtsein ihrer Sprecher: Eine explorative Studie am Beispiel des Bonner Raumes," Rheinische Vierteljahresblätter 47 (1983): 265–301.
[65] For perspectives on Heimat and contemporary German literature, see H. W. Seliger, ed., Der Begriff "Heimat" in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur (Munich, 1987).
[66] See Chapter 1, p. 18, above. The film, by Edgar Reitz, is the subject of a special issue of New German Critique (no. 36 [Fall 1985]); see also Timothy Garten Ash, "The Life of Death," New York Review of Books 32 (19 December 1985), pp. 26–29. In Germany, see esp. "Sehnsucht nach Heimat," Spiegel (1 October 1984) (cover story); Christian Graf von Krockow, "Heimat," Die Zeit (5 October 1984); Anna Mikula, "Edgar Reitz, ein Deutscher," Die Zeit Magazine (26 October 1984). On Heimat in general, see the representative pieces in Weigelt, Heimat und Nation ; and Bausinger and Köstlin, Heimat und Identität .
of all, German provincial identities and "Heimat consciousness" have been unobtrusively but steadily reasserting themselves in East Germany since the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
The concept of Heimat has also come to speak to the persistent concern of industrial societies for something more than mere physical survival—as well as the fear that this something has not been achieved. Ever since Karl Marx first characterized the state of alienation in the worker as the inability to regard his surroundings "as his Heimat," the term has expressed a concern for a community that transcends a political world divided along the parliamentary concepts of left and right.[67] Ernst Bloch regarded Heimat as the very essence of his "principle of hope." It has the last word in his enormously long philosophical attempt to bring together Marxism and world religions in a synthetic vision of man's capacity to overcome alienation (Entfremdung ) and voicelessness (Entäußerung ): "At such a time there will arise in the world something that appears to all in their childhood and yet in which none have dwelt: Heimat."[68] Bloch's current popularity in Germany, moreover, reflects the same sense of cultural angst that finds expression in the Green movement and in the peace movement, both of which, significantly, have found political support and ideological inspiration on the local level of German experience and have spread from there into the political mainstream.
For Heimat, despite all its misadventures over the years, has become essential to the German conception of community. Since its first tentative revival in the period of an emergent, German-wide public culture, it has come today to have more legitimacy and more power of evocation than such terms as Fatherland or even nation . The provincialness of Germans, a state responsible for their sense of inferiority and for their pride, has similarly survived many rises and falls in the political fortunes of their late-achieved nation. And as Germans, more than any other people in Europe, continue to question the sources of their national identity, in newspapers and public speeches, in films and literature, and now in renewed discussions of the future of East and West, the problem of local diversity and the promise of Heimat will continue to shape their answers.
[67] In the 1844 manuscripts, he spoke of the "Kellerwohnung des Armen, die eine fremde Macht spiegelt, die er nicht als seine Heimat . . . betrachten darf, wo er sich vielmehr in dem Hause eines andern, in einem fremden Hause, befindet" (cited in Greverus, Auf der Suche nach Heimat , p. 14).
[68] "So entsteht in der Welt etwas, das allen in die Kindheit scheint und worin noch niemand war: Heimat" (Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung [Frankfurt, 1959], 3:1628).