Fifteen Eighty Four

Scholars have often looked at cultures through the lens of their “keywords”– terms allegedly so unique as to be untranslatable. In German-speaking countries, one six-letter word has particularly generated controversy: “Heimat.” According to one professional poll, over 90% of Germans view “Heimat” positively. Activists on the political left, however, have been deeply divided between those who advocate for shaping ideas about Heimat and others who argue for doing away with it. Over a half-century of efforts to eliminate the word, however, have proven remarkably unsuccessful. Just over the past few years “Heimat” has been the topic of numerous popular magazine editions, radio programs, TV series, theatre pieces, museum exhibitions, and popular non-fiction works, among others.

While “Heimat” is sometimes translated into English as “home,” it is more accurately described by the idea of “feeling at home” in a local or regional place. Words for home in different languages often differ in scales and connotations, but the phenomena which “Heimat” has described are not uniquely German. A glimpse at studies of “place attachment” reveals clear parallels elsewhere. “Heimat” and places of attachment represent locations where an individual has a sense of familiarity, belonging, community, personal memory, and human relationships. Political debates about how to engage with popular desires for home also transcend borders–and they’ve gained new importance amidst attempts of far-right wing groups to define them on their own terms.

In the German case, these debates have coalesced around conflicts over the word “Heimat” itself.  Should supporters of democracy and inclusive communities shape ideas about Heimat or should they leave it to the far right? Myths about the concept’s history have played a decisive role in these debates. Desires for “Heimat,” some have argued, are inherently regressive and exclusionary and have historically only ever been a subject of right-wing politics. Attempts to understand it in more democratic, pro-European, or inclusive terms, they opine, would be a radical departure. Perhaps one of the most prolific myths is that the concept was taboo immediately after 1945, and that its recent “revival” is but a passing fad which will soon disappear again.

In conducting several years of research for my book on Heimat and the politics of place after 1945, I was continually surprised by how much thinking about Heimat in the period deviated from these popular stereotypes. In pouring over thousands of sources from different genres, authors, and places, I found virtually no reference in the first decade and a half after the war to Heimat as tainted or taboo. On the contrary, there was an obsession with finding a sense of Heimat in the wake of a war which had so thoroughly shattered home towns, caused mass dislocation, and left many pining for home.

Even more surprising was how much these discussions in the early Federal Republic were filled with ideas about how hometown sentiments could be used to give an infant democracy roots. Many democratic advocates insisted that “Heimat” offered an “elementary school” of democracy. If large state structures shut out citizens from decision making, so they argued, localities would offer them a site to participate and feel the effects of their actions. Other supporters of democracy insisted that Heimat should be about valuing local civilian life and rejecting militarism and national aspirations to power. Federalist enthusiasts, meanwhile, insisted that Heimat sentiment would re-enforce a federalist culture which would help impede the centralist impulses of aspiring dictators.

Such ideas stood in stark contrast to nationalist conceptions that Heimat feeling should strengthen national convictions. In contemporary debates, many have propagated the myth that Heimat was only ever a nationalist term. In reality, understandings about its relationship to nation were historically flexible, ranging from nationalist conceptions on one end of the spectrum to separatist ones on the other and anywhere in between. Nationalist conceptions could still be found after the war and the new republic saw little separatism. But many advocates of European unification took up the concept and argued that local Heimat sentiments and European convictions should go hand-in-hand – moderating earlier emphasis on the national category. In this way, Heimat feeling could be – as one Rhenish regionalist insisted – the “anti-thesis of modern nationalism.”

 Many also looked to localities and regions to foster identification with democracy and European unification. My book particularly explores a surprising explosion of discussions about “democracy” and “European-mindedness” as claimed local or regional values throughout the Federal Republic. Pro-European regionalists in western border areas further tossed aside nationalist narratives about the fundamental Germanness of their regions and instead emphasized their historical connections to their western neighbours.

We should not, of course, forget the many shortcomings of early West German democracy, nor the persistence of other nationalist or undemocratic ways of thinking about the concept. Extant studies have well demonstrated the problems of early democratic culture and unwillingness to honestly confront guilt for the Nazi past. Democratization was nothing if not a long and ongoing process. At the same time, there was a rich body of thought on how Heimat sentiment could be used to advance democracy and western reconciliation.

If Heimat was not taboo immediately after 1945 as the current myth maintains, it begs the question of when and why certain groups began to argue that Heimat (and presumably the phenomena it described) were inherently regressive and needed to be extinguished. My book takes up this question and demonstrates how such efforts emerged in a surprisingly narrow time window. In 1958, they were largely absent from public discourses, but by 1962 were very much present. This timing was not coincidental. These years saw the advent of a major Cold War crisis and an intense foreign policy debate over rapprochement with the Eastern bloc. Many feared an outbreak of war in a new era of nuclear weapons and one thing particularly stood in the way of rapprochement with the eastern bloc: expellee claims to a right to “Heimat” in the lost regions of the former German East.     

The societies of the expellees claimed to speak for millions of Germans forced from their homes in the former German East. They had long articulated nationalist conceptions of Heimat and insisted on a national territorial right to the Eastern regions. But it was not until the Cold War crisis of the early 1960s that their rhetoric about a right to the Heimat became embroiled in the biggest foreign policy conflict of the era. The eastern bloc depicted expellee claims as the foremost threat to peace in Europe, and it was clear that rapprochement would require giving up territorial claims.

Diverging groups on the political left in the early 1960s took up two contradictory strategies in countering expellee Heimat rhetoric. The first sought to argue against how the societies understood Heimat. The second took up the opposite strategy: arguing that nationalist and Nazi ideas about Heimat were the most accurate understandings, a phenomenon that needed to be eliminated. For some, Heimat also seemed to be a blockage to rapid global revolutionary change. Efforts to tabooize Heimat, however, never reached beyond small circles of intellectuals and activists on the political left and ultimately backfired. It represented, I argue, less a transcendence of Heimat and more disengagement with powerful forces whose definition were being ceded to the political right. The 1970s, meanwhile, saw a major revival of the concept amongst many on the left in a range of arenas.

Rather than simply being a passing fad, I argue that the turn to re-engagement with Heimat in the 1970s emerged out of failed efforts to determine what relatively new ideas about getting rid of home meant in practice. One could try to police use of the word “Heimat,” but this did not eliminate the phenomena it described. What was one to do with the local situatedness of personal lives? How could places of personal biography be related to politics? Some further argued that visions of rapid global revolutionary change led them to neglect the local as a site of reform. Disengaging with Heimat not only meant ceding definitions about home to the far right, it also meant giving up the shaping of local places to technocratic elites. Yet others insisted that Heimat was needed to counteract the “loneliness” and “emotional coldness” of capitalist society.

The growth of immigration added new facets to these debates. While nationalist groups depicted immigrants as a threat to Heimat, my book shows how others insisted that a properly-understood Heimat concept should promote greater acceptance. Reflection on one’s own relationship to home, they insisted, should generate sympathy for the displaced who were seeking a place of home. Discrimination against immigrants, according to this line of thinking, was not protection of Heimat but rather the denial of Heimat to millions.

Divisions towards Heimat persisted on the political left into and beyond the 1970s. The past few years, however, have seen a clear uptick in calls for greater engagement. This begs the question of why over a half century of efforts to snuff out Heimat have proven so unsuccessful. The answer perhaps lies in the persistence of local place attachments themselves and the diverse functions they continue to serve. Contrary to frequent assumptions, banning the word never equated to transcending place. Refusal to speak about Heimat did not mean that millions suddenly ceased to experience local landscapes as important sites of meaning and personal memory. The ability to continually live in the same place and keep webs of personal relationships intact continues to have meaning for many. Predictions that technologies of communication, movement, or economic globalization would render Heimat outdated, moreover, have proven misguided. On the contrary, political, social, or economic forces which disrupt local place attachments seem to have continually animated popular desires for a place of home. If past is prologue, dis-engagement is not without risk.