In a 1970 article in the Rheinischer Merkur, the essayist Hans-Jürgen Baden offered one of the opening salvos of a mushrooming debate over left-wing engagement with Heimat. The concept, he wrote, had fallen into disrepute and was viewed as ideologically burdened. He meandered through associations of Heimat with the stench of provincial literature, nationalism, dullness, nefarious bourgeois values, and the sticking of one’s head into “Heimat sands.” For the detractors of the concept, he argued, it was about an uncompromising worldview, hatred of outsiders, and a “subliminal thirst for murder” cleverly masked behind a romantic facade. Yet, such polemics, he insisted, were caricatures that distorted the truth. The concept, he argued, had fallen victim to a fashionable “antithetical thinking” that construed any term ever misused as “fascist.” Those who engaged with Heimat, he continued, were obliged to constantly apologize to obviate suspicions that they lacked intellectual seriousness. Arguing against such stereotypes, Baden insisted the concept could not simply be abandoned to be defined by yodellers and right-wing radicals. One could hardly bid adieu to formative local experiences, and one could have neither Heinrich Böll without Cologne nor Günther Grass without Danzig. His article finally pointed to the traumatic loss of Heimat that many victims of National Socialism felt – stories rendered illegible by narratives that desires for Heimat were inherently fascist.Footnote ¹

The 1970s and 1980s have long been described as witnessing a “Heimat Renaissance” – a period when a Heimat taboo was seemingly overcome – which some later believed to have existed since 1945. The strands of development that the term “Heimat Renaissance” covers are diverse. It saw not only intellectual and left-wing re-engagement but also the emergence of localist environmentalist groups, village renewal projects, protests over city planning, thematizing of Heimat in literature, and intensified popular interest in regionalism. The groups involved, as observers noted, were also diverse, though younger generations and those on the left had a notable presence.Footnote ² The prevailing narratives about the Heimat Renaissance derive largely from the period itself, and more specifically from the “Heimat discussion” amongst intellectuals and activists – many of whom previously rejected the concept.Footnote ³ According to these narratives, the period saw the birth of a new concept which differed from an “old” one that had supposedly always been nationalist, reactionary, ruralist, exclusionary, anti-democratic, and hostile to European unity. This broke a tradition, some later believed, going back generations in which those on the left had allegedly always rejected the word.

Many of these assumptions have continued into the present. As one work on literature during the period argues, the Heimat Renaissance saw the turn away from what the author insists had theretofore been an old, backward, static, and ruralist Heimat concept to a new “forward-looking” one that broke a Heimat taboo going back to 1945.Footnote ⁴ Admittedly, few historical works have taken the Heimat Renaissance as their primary subject of analysis. Numerous thematic studies of the 1970s and 1980s, however, have recognized its relevance to their respective areas. Environmental historians have appreciated its importance to environmental protests, while the Heimat-infused protests in Wyhl against building a nuclear power plant in the mid 1970s are sometimes assumed to be its starting point.Footnote ⁵ Urban historians have noted the role of local identity in protests against city planning, sometimes noting further appeal to Heimat.Footnote ⁶ Works on rural activism have also occasionally recognized its relevance.Footnote ⁷ Scholars of literature and film have been amongst the few explicitly interested in Heimat in these decades and its role in the work of writers and thinkers.Footnote ⁸ For scholarship focused on the Heimat Renaissance as a whole, however, we must look back to works from the period itself, which sought not only to describe but also to shape the movement.Footnote ⁹

This chapter argues for a re-reading of the Heimat Renaissance in the context of the concept’s broader history to re-evaluate its contours, causes, and misconceptions. The chapter begins by reconstructing the sprawling Heimat discussion and re-evaluates the question of what triggered left-wing and intellectual re-engagement. Speculations about the causes of the Heimat Renaissance have proven diverse, particularly given how the 1970s represented a period of dynamic structural change. The decade saw a “loss of confidence” amidst the economic downturn after the 1973 oil crisis, growing scepticism towards technocratic planning, fragmentation of the 68er movement, and the emergence of local environmentalist movements.Footnote ¹⁰ Many of these have been referenced as potential causes and all have some validity.Footnote ¹¹ A factor that should also be added to the list is the success of Ostpolitik, which quickly made fighting expellee Heimat rhetoric yesterday’s news.

In explaining left-wing and intellectual re-engagement, however, this chapter emphasizes the degree to which it grew out of perceived problems regarding what new rhetoric of doing away with Heimat meant in practice. Here, it mattered that a Heimat taboo on the left had not existed since 1945 or since time immemorial, with many only just beginning to take on questions about what getting rid of Heimat meant beyond the realm of rhetoric. In the 1960s, few broached the question, though the chapter begins by looking at a lone figure who did – the Holocaust survivor Jean Améry who believed such rhetoric had little grounding in practice at all. His work also reflected one of the problems of attempts to tabooize Heimat: its incidental erasure of Jews’ traumatic loss of Heimat at the hands of the Nazis. The chapter then turns to the Heimat discussion after 1970 and shows how tensions between rhetoric and practice represented its central theme. Eliminating the word, many argued, did not do away with the phenomena it described and only ceded their definition to the far right. Others argued that singular preoccupation with global revolutionary change had led them to neglect places of Heimat as concrete sites of reform. Forgetting the local, they insisted, had only ceded the shaping of towns and cities to the technocratic class. Yet others insisted that disengaging with Heimat left no space to make sense of personal life or relate it to politics. Heimat, some further insisted, was needed to counteract the “loneliness” and “emotional coldness” of capitalist society.

Despite the turn to greater engagement, the chapter shows how the Heimat discussion saw the consolidation of earlier misconceptions about the concept’s history. Those arguing for engagement often contrasted their own ideas against an imagined history in which Heimat had allegedly always been an anti-democratic concept of an immobile society that only passively celebrated places as they had always been. A new “active Heimat concept” they argued, was about shaping a future local world. Some even argued that a new Heimat idea should be completely divorced from the earlier movement’s allegedly reactionary interest in history.

Rather than taking intellectual discourses as representative of the Heimat Renaissance at large, the second part of the chapter looks at grassroots groups who evoked Heimat from below in protesting technocratic planning. The planning euphoria had itself been part of the turn against Heimat during the previous decade. While technocratic planners and the extra-parliamentary left conceived of “progress” in radically different modes, both tended to view Heimat as a hurdle to it. Protestors against technocratic planning in the subsequent decade frequently drew on the Heimat concept, though a closer analysis problematizes arguments that they reflected the birth of a radically “new” concept.

This chapter revisits three fields of Heimat-infused opposition to technocracy which historians have typically considered in isolation: protests against elimination of municipal districts, opposition to top-down city planning, and environmental destruction from infrastructure projects. While willingness to take to the streets in protest was new, pre-existing notions of Heimat as a site of democratic participation and narratives about regional democratic identities forged in earlier years proved central themes. The latter half of the chapter hones in on the iconic protests against a nuclear power plant in the Baden town of Wyhl. Far from representing a radically new Heimat idea, the chapter shows how Wyhler drew on extant ideas of Baden democracy and Europeanness forged two decades earlier. Rather than rejecting a Heimat concept connected to history, Heimat enthusiasts relied on a longer-standing approach of drawing on useable regional historical memories. Interest in history, in short, was not as reactionary as some engagist intellectuals believed. Wyhl, moreover, offers only one example of how locals repurposed older narratives about local identity. Turning to the example of Cologne, the chapter shows how more inclusively minded groups marshalled local historical memory and ideas of local tolerance to advocate for greater embrace of immigrants.

Despite assumptions that the Heimat Renaissance saw a full break with earlier attempts to eliminate the concept, this chapter concludes by demonstrating how re-engagement on the political left remained fiercely contested. Turning to the examples of public education, film, and party politics, this chapter shows how increased engagement went hand in hand with ongoing efforts to stamp out use of the concept. This division on the political left would continue beyond the Heimat Renaissance and into the present.

A Dubious Exchange?: From Lone Voices to Sprawling Discourse

In a popular volume on Heimat written at the height of the Heimat Renaissance, the left-wing journalist Elizabeth Moosmann remarked on how earlier thoughts about doing away with Heimat had often not gone far beyond language. Many, she argued, simply believed that eliminating the term was tantamount to the disappearance of the phenomenon itself.Footnote ¹² It was true that few in the 1960s discussed how such rhetoric related to practice. There was, however, a notable exception: the Austrian-Jewish author Jean Améry who wrote about the topic in his autobiographical work Beyond Guilt and Atonement released in West Germany and Austria in 1966. His work’s discussion of Heimat would attract much greater attention in the subsequent decade. Améry’s biography strongly informed his views on Heimat. Born as Hanns Mayer to a Catholic mother and Jewish father, he came of age in Vienna and changed his name after the war as a symbol of shattered identity. His work recounted his flight from Austria during the Anschluss, followed by exile and hiding in France and Belgium and his survival of Auschwitz. In a chapter entitled “How much Heimat does a person need?,” Améry related the trauma of losing Heimat and how it entailed a loss of former communities, security, identity, sites of familiarity, a personal past, and a cohesive sense of self.Footnote ¹³

After recounting his experiences, Améry pivoted to the contemporary turn against Heimat. The “spirit of the times,” he wrote, was unfavourable to the concept, with many equating it with expellee territorial claims, excessive emotionality, and a pre-modern world.Footnote ¹⁴ As one who had legitimately lost Heimat, Améry wrote, he “dared” to stand up for its value.Footnote ¹⁵ He particularly focused on whether the rhetoric of transcending Heimat corresponded to practice. A new generation increasingly believed they had traded in “Heimat for the world.” This “splendid transaction,” he insisted, ultimately proved to be dubious. One could drive from Fürth to the French Riviera and order “deux Martinis” and imagine themselves to have cashed in on the Heimat-world exchange and to have become a “world citizen of the late twentieth century.” For Améry, however, this was not about transcending Heimat or true cosmopolitanism. Shallow knowledge of the world derived from holiday trips, he wrote, was not a real replacement for Heimat.Footnote ¹⁶ Améry believed that the turn against Heimat came not from transcending it but rather from having it in spades: “one must first have Heimat,” he argued, “in order not to need it.”Footnote ¹⁷ While he refused to answer the question of “how much Heimat a person needs,” Améry concluded with an acerbic critique, arguing that the answer was: “far more, in any case, than a world of homed people, whose entire pride was in their cosmopolitan holiday fun, could ever dream.”Footnote ¹⁸

Though Améry was making a broader critique, his story highlighted how attempts to tabooize Heimat made it impossible to recognize Jewish trauma of losing Heimat at the hands of the Nazis. While early post-war citizens often ignored their loss, the narrative that desire for a place of Heimat was inherently fascist rendered them virtually illegible. This informed not only Améry’s critique but also that of others, like the German–Jewish author Hilde Domin. Domin did not directly challenge attempts to tabooize Heimat during the 1960s, but she noted in later years that she had simply ignored them. Like Améry, Domin saw the turn against Heimat as more rhetoric than practice. Her biography also shaped her views. Domin had fled her native Cologne in her early twenties during the rise of the Nazis, going first to Italy and then England and, fearing German invasion, to the Dominican Republic. Domin returned to West Germany in the mid 1950s and recounted in the mid 1970s how the word “Heimat” had until recently been “almost taboo” in intellectual circles. The idea of “exile,” she further noted, had become fashionable. People often casually “played ball” with concepts, she wrote, but those who actually experienced exile and had been traumatized by loss of Heimat, she argued, proved more defiant. Its loss, she wrote, was like a “wound whose scar never heals.”Footnote ¹⁹ Throughout the 1960s, she continued to publish pieces on her ruptured sense of Heimat, including poems about the “sunken city” of Cologne, whose streets others could casually traverse but through which she could only swim.Footnote ²⁰ Writing in 1975 about the earlier taboo, Domin expressed support for new attempts to rescue the concept from the “odium of militancy” of the expellee societies. She described the revival as emerging out of a crisis of belonging and believed that Heimat was a place where one had a right to local participation.Footnote ²¹

Lone voices like those of Améry gave way to a growing chorus after 1970, in which many similarly posed sceptical questions about what earlier rhetoric meant in practice. A number of political and social developments unfolded between the time of Améry’s writing and the early 1970s, which created a more favourable environment for questioning an earlier intellectual taboo. Only one of these was the victory of Ostpolitik. In 1969, Willy Brandt was elected chancellor, and any lingering doubts about rapprochement would be swept away with the signing of the Eastern treaties in 1970 and 1972. The expellee societies continued to protest the treaties, though they talked little about dashed hopes of return and more about how the treaties recognized injustice.Footnote ²² The marriage of territorial claims and recognition politics would go through a painful divorce, even if it occasionally resurfaced in declamatory Heimat meeting mottos like “Silesia remains ours.”Footnote ²³ Either way, the urgent need to discredit expellee Heimat rhetoric had been cleared off the political table.

A sense of living at a moment of “crisis,” as Domin suggested, also played a role. Feelings of crisis in the 1970s suffused discourses on technocratic planning, centralization, the perceived “ungovernability” of society, and economic downturn.Footnote ²⁴ All of these factors transcended West German borders – but then so too did intellectual rethinking about politics and space. Numerous western European countries in the 1970s saw regional rebellions against technocratic planning, attacks against centralized governance, and demands for greater local participation.Footnote ²⁵ If anything, they proved more pronounced in more centralist countries like Britain and France, where regionalists referred to the “internal colonialism” of the centre.Footnote ²⁶ Shifting thoughts about place and politics could also be seen in works like that of the British–German economist E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, which called for greater focus on “human scales.”Footnote ²⁷ Other intellectuals sang the praises of the “small state.”Footnote ²⁸ The Anglo-American world also saw the proliferating writings of humanist geographers, who critiqued a technocratic way of seeing, bureaucratized and anonymous forms of living, and valorization of mobility over home.Footnote ²⁹ A Heimat boom could even be seen in the GDR, which saw renewed interest in local festivals and history, Heimat-themed novels, and environmentalism.Footnote ³⁰

A closer analysis of the Heimat discussion demonstrates the particular importance of the perceived failure of global revolutionary visions of the previous decade to quickly materialize. Scholars have long noted the sense of disappointment amongst left-wing activists after 1968 and how it resulted in readjusted expectations.Footnote ³¹ Jürgen Habermas argued that such disappointment resulted in a sense of “disorientation” and crisis on the left, which increasingly abandoned utopian visions.Footnote ³² In the process, the 68er movement underwent a process of fragmentation. Different splinter groups, as Sven Reichardt well demonstrates, diverged between those who expressed greater desires for community, “emotional warmth,” and valuation of personal experience, and others who held fast to earlier orthodoxies.Footnote ³³ These divisions mapped closely onto diverging attitudes towards engagement with Heimat. Many who expressed disappointment over failures to achieve rapid revolutionary change argued for Heimat as a site of community, emotional warmth, and concrete reform. In sussing out the role of left-wing disappointment in the growing intellectual Heimat discussion, the timing of the Heimat discussion’s emergence is noteworthy. It began not in 1973 after the economic downturn nor after the protests in Wyhl, but rather only two years after 1968.

The “Heimat Discussion”

When the 1973 oil crisis brought decades of seemingly limitless growth to an end, a sprawling discussion on the need for left-wing re-engagement with Heimat was already well underway. Baden’s article in Die Zeit in 1970 was only an overture to a proliferating discussion. His declaration that there could be no Böll without Cologne nor Grass without Danzig offered inspiration for a radio discussion involving both authors two months later organized by the Hessischer Rundfunk. Grass used the programme to argue against left-wing abandonment of the concept. It could be abused, and still was being abused by the expellee societies to derail the Eastern treaties, he noted, but it would be a fatal error to leave the concept to be shaped by demagogues.Footnote ³⁴ Böll equally defended it and argued that Heimat had not only been threatened by expulsions, evacuation, and bombings, but also by technocratic destruction of the natural and built environments and by economic inequalities.Footnote ³⁵

Böll and Grass were not the only ones to advocate for re-engagement. The Hessischer Rundfunk followed the programme with a regular series entitled “Wie heimatlos ist die Linke heute?” (How homeless is the left today?). The dozen or so contributors discussed the sense of crisis on the political left. The intellectuals and politicians invited to speak included Martin Walser, who argued in more defiant tones for engagement compared to his 1968 Heimatkunde. The concept, he argued, fit most strongly with democracy and socialism, since creating a real place of Heimat meant doing away with capitalist alienation and including all citizens in decision-making. Capitalist states, he argued, only offer Heimat to those who control the means of production. Walser evoked the concept to attack moderate intellectuals who refused to challenge Brandt from his left flank. A Heimat concept that was about resigning oneself to present conditions, he argued, demonstrated that one’s conception of it was too limited.Footnote ³⁶

The SPD politician, author, and peace activist Dieter Lattmann, in his contribution, seconded Walser’s sentiments. The extra-parliamentary left’s clinging to the idea of “Heimatlosigkeit” (homelessness), he insisted, had led them to get lost in abstract theory, intellectual elitism, and “self-satisfaction,” which inhibited their ability to engage with less intellectual people and undertake concrete political reform.Footnote ³⁷ The radio programme, however, also demonstrated divisions on the left. Some contributors had nothing at all to say about Heimat, simply using their slot to talk about other issues. The publisher and journalist Gerhard Szczensy, meanwhile, offered a starkly contrasting view. The political left, he argued, could only maintain democratic freedoms by protecting society from Heimat and those who felt they needed more of it. The title of his contribution, “How much Heimat does the left need?,” was a clear rebuke of Améry’s work. Not having a place of Heimat, Szczensy argued, was fundamental to the human condition.Footnote ³⁸

Growing critique of disengagement with Heimat could also be seen amongst activists of the 68er generation. A doctoral student of cultural studies at the University of Tübingen, Gottfried Korff, offers a prime example. Writing in a student periodical in 1973, Korff argued that the strategy of disengagement had failed and only strengthened the ability of the expellee societies, reactionary groups, and capitalist interests to abuse it. Korff rejected arguments that one should not engage with Heimat because it was too emotional. Doing away with the concept did not eliminate such emotions in practice, and it was precisely their power that made engagement with them necessary.Footnote ³⁹ Even after the oil crisis and the Wyhl protests, intellectuals and activists continued to argue for re-engagement by highlighting tensions between anti-Heimat rhetoric and practice. One young Konstanz author argued in 1978 that the rediscovery of Heimat on the left had been triggered by a reaction against the “debacle of a political, cultural, and geographic departure.” Return to Heimat was the desire for “comprehensibility” that had been missing from the 68er movement. Heimat, he continued, should be about emancipation and solidarity with one’s fellow human being, which should extend not merely over the “garden gate” but across different skin colours, ethnicities, and histories.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1975, the journalist Francois Bondy contrasted Heimat with the heroic internationalism of the past decade. Bondy, who supported re-engagement, argued that the earlier reaction against Heimat had been partly needed and partly excessive and not entirely thought through.Footnote ⁴¹

Academics also increasingly queried what eliminating Heimat meant in practice. Continuing her earlier research on Heimat, Greverus, the Frankfurt anthropologist, argued that one could not simply transcend the “territorial imperative” and that its indispensability made engagement with it equally so.Footnote ⁴² While the previous decade gave birth to ideas like the “global village,” scholars like Greverus were sceptical that an individual could possess enough knowledge about all parts of the globe to render all places into sites of home.Footnote ⁴³ The cognitive limits of individuals in practice had to be taken into account as did the significant time required to gain the knowledge of places and social connections needed to make them into places of home.

While “personalization” had been a derogatory term in activist circles in the previous decade, many in the flourishing Heimat discussion argued that earlier rejection of Heimat left little room for thinking about personal life histories and connecting them to politics.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such arguments could be seen throughout political tracts, dialogue forums, and even in film. Herrenknecht was among those who questioned ideas about having “overcome personal biographies” amongst the activists whom he otherwise supported.Footnote ⁴⁵ Participants in a panel entitled “Heimat – Desire for Identity” at a 1980 City-Countryside Dialogue in Berlin saw re-engagement with personal life histories on the left as the motor behind the rediscovery of Heimat. This rediscovery, the panel insisted, was not a retreat from visions of revolutionary change, as some had charged.Footnote ⁴⁶

The filmmaker Edgar Reitz, who produced the famous Heimat series, was perhaps the strongest critic of what he described as an earlier disengagement with personal experience in favour of ideological abstraction. Far from a traditionalist, Reitz belonged to the avant-garde of the New German Cinema. A strong supporter of left-wing re-engagement, Reitz both critiqued earlier spatial orthodoxies, while arguing that the 68ers had indirectly infused thinking about Heimat with new vigour.Footnote ⁴⁷ While relaying these ideas in interviews, Reitz conveyed them most vividly in his second instalment of the Heimat series, which included scenes of the university student Hermann pounding out traces of dialect in his speech to be taken seriously in intellectual circles in the 1960s. The message was conveyed even more succinctly in a scene of 68er protestors, in which a young woman, recently arrived from the rural Hunsrück, is caught up in the enthusiasm of the 68er rebellion in Munich. Arriving at a protest calling for more freedom of discussion, she took to the microphone in support of the movement, recounting how it related to her personal experiences and the exploitation of her working-class family in her hometown. Far from supporting the speech, the crowd forced her to step down, denouncing her for using unscientific terminology, leaving out theoretical analysis, and presenting them with “privatist shit.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Other activists on the political left felt that earlier spatial orthodoxies left them exposed to the “emotional coldness” of capitalist society. They described Heimat as about combating “loneliness” and anonymity.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such juxtaposition of Heimat and loneliness in these decades is perhaps unsurprising. The 1970s and 1980s are often described as decades of “individualization” which saw the dissolution of thick communities and the emergence of a “risk society.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Writing in the 1970s, the sociologists Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner couched many of these processes explicitly in terms of “home.” Modern society, so they argued in their work The Homeless Mind, had been gripped by an unprecedented emotional feeling of homelessness.Footnote ⁵¹ The desire for home as an antidote to loneliness could also be seen in other quarters, including amongst left-wing students who sought to forge a sense of “home” in the “lonely cities” by forming urban communes.Footnote ⁵²

The writings of the left-wing activist and theologian Hans-Eckehard Bahr particularly touched on the themes of Heimat and combating loneliness. Technocracy and capitalism, he argued, had torn apart meaningful social relationships and replaced them with a “throw-away mentality” in which individuals were seen as replaceable and disposable. For Bahr, Heimat was about seeking belonging, empowerment in decision-making, and emotional warmth. The concept, he further argued, should be understood as about solidarity between workers, students, and peoples of different nationalities.Footnote ⁵³ A West Berlin psychiatrist expressed similar sentiments a few years later as she recounted why she changed her mind about the concept. Many of her patients in the big city had been dealt with “like packages that can be pushed around” – a phenomenon she connected to capitalist forms of living and not having a feeling of Heimat.Footnote ⁵⁴ Across the border in neighbouring Austria, the left-wing dialect poet Hans Haid described Heimat as a means of “melting” the “emotional ice age” that surrounded them and combating feelings of “isolation” and “loneliness.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Those who saw Heimat as a panacea for loneliness offered different explanations for why they believed loneliness had become so prolific. One international law scholar insisted in a piece on Heimat that demands for flexibility and mobility resulted in many people being unwilling to form attachments to anything that could generate “homesickness.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Others, like the scholar Klaus Weigelt, believed they resulted from spatial thinking that rejected the local as a site of meaning. Singular valuation of the abstract, he wrote, had resulted in a resignation, anonymity, and a sense of individual insignificance. Heimat, he concluded, was needed to give individuals a feeling of protection and acceptance.Footnote ⁵⁷

In his call for left-wing engagement with Heimat in the countryside, Herrenknecht specifically referred to the need to take on “provincial loneliness.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Herrenknecht felt that left-wing abandonment of the countryside as inevitably reactionary rendered it a lonely place for those on the left who did not flee to the city. They must, he insisted, re-engage with the countryside to make it Heimat for everyone. Herrenknecht put his ideas into action, leaving West Berlin to return to his native Hohenlohe in the mid 1970s, where he founded the left-wing society “Traum-a-land.” The name played on the theme of the countryside as a site of “trauma” and future dream (“Traum”). The society was to promote left-wing “provincial work” and forge rural left-wing networks that would combat loneliness. Provincial work, Herrenknecht believed, also meant taking on technocratic efforts to remake the countryside from the top down.Footnote ⁵⁹

Many shared Herrenknecht’s belief that Heimat was crucial to taking on technocracy – a move which meant abandoning notions that political revolution would simply unfold on an abstract global stage. The student activist Gottfried Korff argued that technocracy and capitalism treated individuals as objects of profit and efficiency and saw Heimat as a “dysfunctional element” in processes of rationalization and automation that required greater mobility and liquidity.Footnote ⁶⁰ Two years later, the editors of a left-wing literary journal in a special edition on “Heimat and Revolution” declared that they must take up the Heimat concept to fight exploitation of the landscape, therein reclaiming a word that had been “occupied” and “stolen” by the right.Footnote ⁶¹ In explaining why so many of the youth and middling generations rediscovered the concept, other authors likewise pointed to reaction against technocratic and commercial dismantling of Heimat.Footnote ⁶²

Re-Enforced Misconceptions and Contested Temporalities

Engagist intellectuals all agreed that Heimat did not have to be reactionary or anti-democratic. Fewer, however, questioned assumptions that it had been anything but these things in the past. In turn, they tended to present their own ideas as a radical break. Given ongoing resistance to their efforts in some quarters of the left, arguing for engagement with a new concept made a certain sense. In framing their ideas as completely new, some insisted that those on the left had never used the word in German history.Footnote ⁶³ In reality, the Heimat movement historically had appeal across the political spectrum. It had generally emphasized being above partisanship, with attempts to articulate more overtly partisan ideas of Heimat representing a somewhat newer trend. Engagist intellectuals, however, argued that ideas of Heimat as potentially pro-European, democratic, or urban were all “new,” despite earlier post-war antecedents and a longer history of urban Heimat sentiment.Footnote ⁶⁴ Others contrasted a new “rational” concept with an old “emotional” concept. This included the Hessian dialect singer Bodo Kolbe born in 1949, who drew on the Heimat idea to protest expansion of the Frankfurt airport. His assumption that there was a strict division between rationality and emotions paralleled that of earlier critics who argued that Heimat was excessively emotional.Footnote ⁶⁵ Perhaps few narratives proved more problematic than the contrast of an “old” Heimat concept of an immobile society with a new Heimat concept of a mobile one.Footnote ⁶⁶ Such narratives flew in the face of the fact that the late nineteenth-century Heimat movement emerged in a period of unprecedented mobility which far outstripped that of the late twentieth century.

The misconception of Heimat as having been taboo immediately after 1945 also gained steam towards the latter half of the Heimat Renaissance. The claim was made invariably without reference to sources and by interlocutors who had not lived through the early post-war years as adults. One pedagogue noted in passing in 1984 that there was a “widespread silent consensus” that the Heimat concept had gone through a necessary period of abstinence following the Nazi period.Footnote ⁶⁷ The generational dynamic at play in forging the 1945 legend can be seen in one of its very first and most quickly debunked iterations in a 1966 radio programme. Organized by an art history student Günter Kampfhammer, then in his early twenties, he used the programme to sketch the concept’s history from its beginnings to the present. Arriving at the post-war period, he briefly noted that no one “dared” utter the word in the rubble. An older citizen, who had lived through the rubble years as an adult, wrote a letter in response to the programme insisting that this was simply untrue and that Heimat sentiment had reached great heights in the rubble cities.Footnote ⁶⁸ Two decades later, in a discourse dominated by younger and middling generations, fewer voices were there to counter the proliferating misconception.

Others presented narratives of Heimat’s early post-war history as having vacillated between disinterest and reactionary ideology. In the introduction to an edited volume on Heimat from 1980, the journalist Jochen Klicker, then in his mid forties, argued that few after two lost world wars had interest in Heimat and only cared about economic recovery. Ideas of Heimat during that period, he further argued, had been about regressive bigoted local narrowness and rejecting the broader world. Klicker proved ambivalent towards the concept’s possibilities and believed it first needed to be stripped of its “irrational” elements.Footnote ⁶⁹

In arguing for an “active Heimat concept,” engagist intellectuals drew contrasts with what they described as an “older” concept which had allegedly always been about an immobile society’s celebration of things as they had always been. The term “active Heimat concept” became a keyword in intellectual discourses and focused on future visions of home as a source of political mobilization. Some even argued that an active Heimat concept should be utopian in nature.Footnote ⁷⁰ Many of them drew on the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who had written about Heimat in his work The Principle of Hope, penned in American exile during the Second World War. Bloch posited Heimat as utopia in which “no one has ever been” and which must be fought for through revolutionary action.Footnote ⁷¹ Though the work first appeared in the mid 1950s in the GDR, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that he received much attention in West Germany. Advocates of his approach argued that an active Heimat concept must be completely divorced from any connection to one’s personal past or to cultural memory. Connection to the past, they believed, was about stasis and hostility to progress. As one doctoral student wrote in a socialist youth journal in 1981, in taking up the Heimat concept, the left was breaking with an old concept about history and tradition, which had given it a “stench of hostility to progress, provincialism, narrowness” and “nostalgic regression.”Footnote ⁷²

Such characterization of the past Heimat movement as about passive celebration of stasis is difficult to reconcile with the intense activity of the earlier movement and the extensive changes amidst which it unfolded. Earlier thinking about Heimat had also included thoughts about more ideal places of home, even if ideas about completely divorcing Heimat from history and memory were relatively new.Footnote ⁷³ The theme of balancing and negotiating between tradition and change, however, had been a central theme of early post-war Heimat discourses. There were, however, some new trends in the Heimat discussion. Criticism of the negative aspects of one’s local world found a new intensity, particularly in the new realism of a critical Heimat literature, which departed from depiction of Heimat as either idyll or regressive caricature.Footnote ⁷⁴ As Martin Walser argued, authors should approach Heimat as an “armoury of realism.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The critique that such Heimat authors directed at their hometowns led some conservatives to label them “nest spoilers.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The intensity of discourse around the temporalities of Heimat was also somewhat new, though a similar debate was taking place in the GDR.Footnote ⁷⁷

For some, the idea of eliminating any connections between Heimat, memory, and the past evoked new questions about what rhetoric meant in practice. As the Regensburg author Ernst Hauschka argued, the idea of Heimat as a purely future place presented the same problems as arguments that Heimat should encompass the entire globe. “Every human,” he argued, had their own spatially and temporally bound history from which one could not simply “disembark” at will. The key was to maintain a temporal balance between the past and visions of a future place of Heimat.Footnote ⁷⁸ It was perhaps too much to ask that millions should suddenly cease to experience their local worlds as sites of personal and collective memory or cohesive personal biographies – or that local places should cease to function as sites of orientation, security, and identity – all of which relied on memory. As the scholar and activist Jürgen Pelzer argued in a literary journal in 1987, the left appeared to have been unable to eliminate a “traditional” Heimat concept associated with one’s personal memories, identity, and security. Pelzer suspected that this was an indication that the left should just give up engaging with Heimat as it may just end in a cul-de-sac of conservativism.Footnote ⁷⁹ Attempts to disengage from history also went against the grain of growing popular interests. The 1970s and 1980s saw a massive expansion of historic preservation groups, founding of Heimat museums, and museum attendance more broadly.Footnote ⁸⁰ The philosopher Hermann Lübbe argued that this resulted from an accelerated pace of change and the “shrinking of the present” in which trusted places disappeared with increasing speed and the future seemed ever more uncertain.Footnote ⁸¹ Disengaging from interest in history, in any case, seemed a problematic venture.

The positing of Heimat as a future utopia also raised other questions, including how it could account for diversity and individuals’ diverging ideas about their ideal places of home. What one imagined to be a utopia represented a site of dread for another. An answer to this question was proffered by the political scientist Winfried Steffani whose reflections on Heimat in the early 1980s have since been forgotten. Heimat and politics, he believed, should not be about fighting for utopia. Instead, it should be an evolving democratic search process involving compromise, ongoing discussion, and maximizing pluralism. Given subjective interpretations of what Heimat should look like, Steffani argued, it could not simply be planned from above or be about achieving singular objective conditions. The Heimat concept, he thus argued, had – or ideally should have – a strong relationship with pluralist democracy. The right to Heimat, he further argued, ended where others sought to impose their vision of Heimat on others by force. Facilitating the experience of Heimat, Steffani believed, required maximizing personal freedoms, enabling political participation, and having open public discourse.Footnote ⁸²

Steffanni’s attack of “planning” Heimat was a clear gesture to the popular rebellion against technocracy. The Heimat Renaissance was not simply an intellectual discourse, and more citizens than ever began demanding a voice in shaping their local worlds. Such lay groups, however, did not see Heimat as divorced from the past. Deep interest in history could be found throughout the citizens’ initiatives, which protested the tearing down of historic city landscapes or the elimination of historic municipalities in the name of efficiency. Their interest in history was hardly about passive celebration of stasis.

Disputing Geographies of Progress

Centralized planning grew slowly in the early 1960s and reached “euphoric” heights by the beginning of the 1970s. Its growth represented a departure from earlier post-war associations of top-down technocratic planning with “totalitarianism.”Footnote ⁸³ Though technocrats demonstrated little interest in semantic debates, they also tended to view local place attachments as barriers to modernization. As the writer, peace activist, and SPD supporter Peter Härtling insisted in a radio broadcast on Heimat in 1972, technocrats often privileged abstract principles over lived concrete places.Footnote ⁸⁴ Herrenknecht similarly felt that technocrats, capitalists, and industrialists approached Heimat as a barrier to progress.Footnote ⁸⁵ By the 1970s, technocratic projects had left an indelible mark on the lived environment. City planners, seeking little local input, overhauled urban landscapes with an eye towards function and destroyed countless historical sites and city quarters which served as sites of community. Sprawling infrastructure projects, nuclear power plants, and industrial complexes threatened both local landscapes and the natural environment. Most importantly, the culture of top-down planning prevented locals from participating in decisions about how their local worlds would be shaped.

Historians have devoted considerable attention to the history of the planning euphoria and the citizens’ initiatives that emerged in response to them.Footnote ⁸⁶ While studies of different parts of the planning euphoria have recognized the appearance of the Heimat concept in counterprotests, it has seldom been the primary subject of analysis. Insight can be gained by revisiting different types of protest which have been studied in isolation, while paying more explicit attention to Heimat. A survey of such protests demonstrates how it was often those aspects of planning which most influenced Heimat which evoked the greatest push-back. Three areas of planning and protest stand out: West German communal reforms, the remaking of city landscapes, and the transformation of rural spaces through industrial and infrastructure projects. At the centre of each was the question of locals’ democratic rights to have a say in shaping their local worlds. Ideas about Heimat as a site of democratic participation were not new, though willingness to take up confrontational action to demand a say was.

The controversial communal reforms which swept across West Germany from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s were part of the broader expansion of planning and centralization which began at the end of the 1950s. Though many after 1945 hailed federalism as a force for democratization, by 1962 the legal scholar Konrad Hesse described the republic as a “unitary federal state” in which the states had become provinces of administration.Footnote ⁸⁷ Centralizing projects of the 1960s transcended partisan divides, while a technocratic class increasingly viewed federalism as a barrier to the centralized coordination needed to administer a complex modern society.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the early 1970s, the Bundestag considered further steps towards centralism, with proposals to redraw the federal states to reduce their numbers to increase efficiency.Footnote ⁸⁹

Centralizing reforms of local communes proved most controversial. These initiatives came from the federal states themselves, which initiated a wave of county and municipal reforms from the mid 1960s and the 1970s. The reforms emphasized administrative efficiency, while ignoring questions of participation and local identification with municipal institutions. State governments reduced the number of independent municipalities in West Germany by two-thirds and cut the number of administrative districts from 25,000 to 8,000.Footnote ⁹⁰ Cleavages over the reform ran not from left to right but rather from above and below. The politicians and planners who supported them argued that overcoming historical municipal borders was an act of modernization.Footnote ⁹¹ Virulent though localized protests emerged in waves throughout towns and counties slated for elimination. Protestors emphasized their right to local self-determination and their identification with local institutions. Many who reported never having protested suddenly took to the streets, burned their voting cards or, in the case of the town of Ermershausen, occupied the town hall and erected barricades. Protestors framed the issues as explicitly about Heimat and democratic participation and arranged political festivals, wrote letters to the editor, or resigned party membership.Footnote ⁹² Protests throughout the decade ultimately failed to halt the rolling centralization of local governance, though scholars in the subsequent decades denounced them as having presented barriers to participation and undervaluing identification with municipal institutions.Footnote ⁹³

While the territorial reforms disproportionately affected smaller towns, the planning euphoria could be seen in more material ways in urban landscapes. City planning in the 1960s and 1970s had become synonymous with large-scale structures in exposed concrete, emphasis on formal function over community, preference for large functional centres over mixed neighbourhoods, and what detractors described as anonymous “living silos.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Tensions over city planning were not new, and the reconstruction of bombed cities after the war had also evoked conflict between planners and lay citizens.Footnote ⁹⁵ Far more resentment, however, came in following decades with the wilful elimination of historical landscapes and city quarters that served as hubs of community interaction. The planners’ ideal of a “car-friendly city” particularly left an enduring mark.Footnote ⁹⁶ Ordinances like the 1971 Law for the Promotion of City Construction slated the demolition of massive areas without considering historical significance.Footnote ⁹⁷ According to government estimates, by the mid 1970s, more historic buildings had been destroyed through planning measures than had been bombed during the war.Footnote ⁹⁸

These developments were not limited to West Germany. While the publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler referred to the “murdered city” of West German planners, across the Atlantic, those like the journalist Jane Jacobs criticized the “death” of American cities built according to function but without a sense of community.Footnote ⁹⁹ In the West German context, the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich framed the issue as explicitly about Heimat in his 1965 work entitled The Inhospitality of Our Cities. Mitscherlich was aware of attempts to end use of the word Heimat in the decade and would take it on more directly in 1970, though he dealt with it in his 1965 work by simply ignoring it.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In advocating for cities that could be experienced as “Heimat,” Mitscherlich was more of a lone voice in 1960s West Germany. He decried how planners built uninspired cities that only valued formal function, while ignoring emotional needs for community and a distinctive built environment.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Mitscherlich and his later supporters did not believe Heimat could simply be built. It was about creating spaces that facilitated engagement of citizens with each other and with the local landscape. Denizens themselves must shape them into Heimat.Footnote ¹⁰² Mitscherlich’s critiques found more fertile ground after 1970, when an avalanche of similar manifestos by architects, journalists, and lay people appeared throughout West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Such works called for cities that could be experienced as “Heimat,” which contrasted with the “inhuman” cement cities of the planners which fostered “anonymity” and “loneliness.”Footnote ¹⁰³

For the editors of the architectural journal Bauwelt, Cologne represented a prime example of a city where planners buried its community feeling and historical importance “under cement.” In a special edition on Cologne, the editors argued that it had been torn up with large intersections, high-speed roads, and shopping centres, eliminating more intimate streets and heritage sites. Planners and city officials, they argued, focused on rational function over local sentiment and did not consult locals. The city’s fate, the editors noted, was hardly unique.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Cologne certainly corresponded to planner’s ideal of a car-friendly city, with its six-lane north–south highway cutting the historic medieval centre of the city in half. Böll noted how this new “automobile-Cologne” created yet another alienating local landscape and reduced the social life of the streets, with the car acting as an “instrument of isolation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

If Cologne reflected failed planning, it also saw the same type of appeal to Heimat in counterprotests which could be found throughout West Germany.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Cologners particularly appealed to Heimat in protests over plans to overhaul the traditional working-class neighbourhood of the South City. Protestors drew on local culture and used dialect as their protest language. Speculators, they argued, had little conscience in eliminating spaces of social interaction. Conflicts came to a head with the month-long occupation of the Stollwerck factory, a nineteenth-century industrial heritage site that protestors sought to preserve and transform into affordable housing.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The dialect rock band Bläck Fööss championed the movement through protest songs which mocked planners’ megalomania and emphasized the city quarter as a site of community. Locals sang the songs at Carnival for decades, while dialect songs emerged as a medium of local political activism across West Germany.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Some also expressed concern that planners and industry sought to reshape cities to discourage settlement and promote a more mobile labour force willing to leave behind local attachments as the needs of the economy dictated. The young student of architecture Felizitas Lenz-Romeis expressed this concern in her since forgotten book in 1970, which asked whether cities should be built to be “Heimat” or as “through-way stations.” Industrial interests, she argued, promoted planning cities that would facilitate frequent relocation and discourage settlement. Taking on ideas of Heimat as anti-modern, she asked: “Can cities today still be Heimat, or is this idea outmoded, anachronistic – does it belong to the compost pile of the blue flowers of romanticism?”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ She did not reject mobility and argued it could be about finding Heimat but insisted that a check should be placed on economic pressures to build cities that promoted endless uprootedness.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Similar sentiments could be found beyond West Germany. The geographer Anne Buttimer, whose career had taken her from Cork to Dublin, Seattle, Louvain, Glasgow, and finally to Worcester, Massachusetts, described the new landscapes of cities as symbols of a society which “deified reach” and “derided home.” As someone who knew how “traumatic a change of home can be,” Buttimer stood up for cities as sites of home.Footnote ¹¹¹

While rates of mobility were lower in the 1970s and 1980s than in the early post-war years, this was little consolation for those compelled to leave home for economic or other reasons.Footnote ¹¹² Many reported feelings that employers expected workers to be uprootable. As the pedagogue Eduard Darga wrote in a 1965 piece on Heimat, corporations and the state often simply assumed that employees and public workers should be transferable.Footnote ¹¹³ At the end of the decade, Günther Reichert, the press representative of the Federal Agency for Political Education, then in his late thirties, argued that both industry and well-intentioned “opinion makers” sought a workforce that was entirely relocatable and admonished attachment to Heimat and “rooted structures.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Those who expressed such concerns often had personal experiences of uprootedness. Reichert, expelled from Bohemia as a young boy, had relocated three times during his academic pursuits. This pattern applied even more to the protestant pastor Claus von Aderkas, who argued in 1968 for greater attention to the suffering of those compelled to be mobile.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Aderkas, a Baltic German, had been forced by the Hitler–Stalin pact to leave Latvia at age twenty and experienced a second expulsion in 1945, followed by stations of study and professional postings in Berlin, Marburg, Erlangen, Munich, Eselkamp, and Bremen.

Beyond the cities, planners sought to remake the countryside through new industrial complexes, freeways, and other projects. In rural planning, considerations of community, history, cultural particularity, and local participation played little role. Planners particularly focused on the function of small towns vis-à-vis urban centres.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Few rural projects, however, proved more iconic than the planned construction of a nuclear power plant near the Baden town of Wyhl. Protests over the plant could be seen on televisions throughout West Germany, and their history has subsequently garnered significant scholarly interest. The plans to build the plant were announced in 1973 and evoked intense localist protests which lasted for a decade and included extended occupations of the construction site. Regionalism, dialect, and appeal to Heimat filled the protests. They made for captivating displays and included the parading of a coffin labelled “democracy” in discussion meetings, shouting at politicians in Stuttgart in dialect, and singing dialect protest songs. Wyhl protestors famously forged alliances with locals in Alemannic-speaking communities across national borders in Alsace and Switzerland who were resisting the construction of a lead factory and another nuclear plant. They framed themselves as part of an international regionalist community which transcended national borders and fought against centralist powers.

These medialized protests quickly became a symbol of the Heimat Renaissance itself. As one research assistant at the University of Bochum argued, Wyhl for many had freed the Heimat concept from ideas about its inherent backwardness.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The former 68er activist and sociologist Wolfgang Sternstein, who studied the protests on site, noted how they clashed with his own assumptions about the concept. The word had a bad sound, he argued, but Wyhler’s use of it seemed to be anything but reactionary.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The protests have particularly garnered attention in studies of environmentalism and social movements given their grassroots origins and cooperation across international borders.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As Stephan Milder has recently demonstrated, protests like those in Wyhl were first and foremost about demands for local participation.Footnote ¹²⁰

Intellectuals and activists who declared that a “new” pro-European and democratic idea of Heimat had emerged often pointed to Wyhl. Regionalists’ engagement in protests was certainly new – as was the culture of technocratic planning that they confronted. Federalist Heimat enthusiasts of the early post-war years seldom imagined protests when they thought about local participation.Footnote ¹²¹ A closer analysis, however, shows how Wyhl was hardly a radical departure from earlier thinking about Heimat. Wyhler, as we shall see, drew directly on ideas advanced in the early post-war years and retooled earlier narratives about democracy and Europeanness as regional values.

Repurposing Regional Identities

The Heimat movement hardly closed down in the 1960s, despite the growth of a Heimat taboo in some intellectual and activist circles. Heimat societies also continued, even if some saw a brief dip in numbers or struggled to attract young members.Footnote ¹²² Publication of Heimat journals remained vibrant. Federalist ideas about Heimat also persisted as did earlier narratives about “Badenese democracy,” “Cologne tolerance,” or “Hanseatic openness to the world,” explored in earlier chapters. Such terms represented sliding signifiers which different groups appropriated and refashioned in the context of new debates. A closer look at lay Heimat groups during the 1970s and 1980s problematizes narratives about the period witnessing the birth of a radically new Heimat concept divorced from a “reactionary” interest in history. Lay Heimat enthusiasts continued to harness useable historical memories in dynamic ways which were hardly reactionary. Though many examples can be found, two will be examined here: engagement with historical narratives about Badenese democracy and Europeanness in Wyhl and appeals to “Cologne tolerance” and useable local pasts to combat hostilities towards immigrants.

Narratives about Wyhl as having witnessed the birth of a radically new Heimat concept have focused on protestors’ emphasis on local democracy and ideas of regionalism as bridging across national borders. But neither of these ideas was new and had clear antecedents in the early post-war years. Discourses on regional traditions of democracy, Europeanness, and hostility to centralism remained strong in the Southwest after the 1951 referendum. Reflecting the partisan eclecticism of such ideas, one regionalist pamphlet in 1969, borrowing on a Willy Brandt slogan, insisted that their regionalism was about “daring more democracy.”Footnote ¹²³ Memory of the Baden revolutionaries of 1848 as a reflection of regional democratic identities also remained prominent. As one SPD voter and teacher from Überlingen argued in 1970, they must preserve Badenese “democratic consciousness” of the nineteenth century for the twenty-first.Footnote ¹²⁴ Other Badenese regionalists continued to boast about how the Baden 1848 radicals Hecker and Struve were the first to propose the separation of church and state and a progressive tax structure, while rejecting militarism.Footnote ¹²⁵ Narratives about Baden as a “world-open” bridge to France and Switzerland also persisted throughout the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ¹²⁶ This was on full display at a “Heimat Day” held in 1966 in the border town of Kehl under the theme “Heimat and Europe,” where Badener celebrated with French citizens across the Rhine in Strasbourg. The event was filled with symbolism and speeches that depicted Badenese regionalism as about fostering European unification.Footnote ¹²⁷

Wyhler, in short, had a well-established arsenal from which to draw in the mid 1970s. Protestors prolifically evoked memories of Baden’s 1848 revolution and ideas of an Alemannic tradition of resisting authority.Footnote ¹²⁸ They did, however, add to the historical narrative by revering a history that earlier regionalists ignored: the Peasants’ Rebellion of 1525, in which the Southwest had been a hotbed. The more revolutionary nature of the rebellion and the image of the lowest rungs revolting against elites uniquely fit their protest. It also reflected the growing embrace of protest as a form of participation. In 1975, protestors in Alsace and Baden observed the 450th anniversary of the rebellion to link it with their cause.Footnote ¹²⁹ In the years after the protests, subsequent regionalist protest groups, including the Bundschuch collective, evoked narratives of a Badenese democratic tradition stretching from the Peasants’ Rebellion to the Wyhl protests themselves.Footnote ¹³⁰ Badener also continued to celebrate ideas of Badenese democracy after Wyhl, including in the re-enactment in the late 1980s of Hecker’s march from Konstanz to Karlsruhe in 1848 to topple the Archduke.Footnote ¹³¹ Protestors in Alsatian Marckolsheim and Wyhl also easily appropriated well-established regional narratives of Baden and Alsace as bridges across national borders. Some protest leaders, like the Alsatian dialect author André Weckmann, put their own spin on these ideas by labelling them an “Alemannic international,” while drawing on longer-standing narratives of a regional tradition of being “local democrats.”Footnote ¹³²

A cleft did exist between Wyhl protestors who evoked regionalist ideas and many youth activists who flocked to their cause.Footnote ¹³³ Still, many former 68ers who joined protestors ultimately embraced ideas of democratic regionalism. The young activist and songwriter Walter Mossmann offers a prime example. A native of South Baden, Mossmann was involved in the extra-parliamentary opposition in the 1960s and later became a leader of the Wyhl protests. Mossmann was the son of a Baden regionalist and recounted hanging up pro-Baden posters during his childhood in the 1950s referenda. Mossmann’s ideas about a regional tradition of democracy were clearly shaped by those forged in the early post-war years. In promoting the Wyhl protests, Mossmann advocated a more robust federalism and argued it was better to have governance “within one’s close reach.” He further drew on ideas of regional democracy. Badener’s democratic tradition, he argued, was instilled with the spirit of 1848 which contrasted with “Prussian megalomania.” He also drew on tropes of Baden’s Europeanness and its role as a bridge to Switzerland and France.Footnote ¹³⁴

Much of this rhetoric could just have easily appeared in the referendum debates of the early 1950s. Mossmann, however, added his own twist to them. While earlier groups of pro-European regionalists abandoned the nationalist Watch on the Rhine metaphor, Mossmann resurrected it in an inverted form in a famous protest song entitled “the New Watch on the Rhine.” The song depicted Alemannic protestors in Alsace and Baden as watches guarding the region against Bonn and Paris.Footnote ¹³⁵ Reflecting the tone of his 68er activism, Mossmann further equated “Prussian” destruction of democracy in Baden with American acts in Vietnam and with industrial managers’ and political elites’ actions in the present-day region.Footnote ¹³⁶ He also reflected the greater ambivalence of some former 68ers to the word “Heimat” itself. While some embraced it and others rejected it, Mossmann’s approach proved more schizophrenic. He acknowledged that Heimat had become a keyword among protestors. As one Wyhl metal worker argued, protestors had previously been instilled with the importance of Heimat after having experienced forced evacuation and the ravaging of the Heimat during the war.Footnote ¹³⁷ Mossmann, however, vacillated between arguing that Heimat was an exclusively local rather than national space and arguing in other contexts that he did not use the word at all as it was full of “sweet lies.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Another former 68er, Wyhl protestor, and dialect songwriter Roland Burkart (Buki), then in his late twenties, similarly noted how he remained “rather ambivalent” about the word given his earlier association of it with Nazi plans for world domination.Footnote ¹³⁹

While discourses on local democratic participation in Wyhl bore a clear resemblance to earlier federalist Heimat discourses, Wyhler were far more willing to take up confrontational action. The political landscape of the 1970s and 1980s was favourable to calls for greater local democracy amidst growing concerns about the “ungovernability” of society, the importance of “personal impactedness” in politics, and the failures of planning.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ By the mid 1970s, West Germans were overwhelmingly supportive of federalism. Support for centralism hovered in the low teens, while identification with federalism remained in the high sixties; this support differed little across political parties.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The decades, in turn, saw a dialling back of technocratic planning and greater consultation of citizens impacted by different projects.Footnote ¹⁴²

One could trace the continued evolution of similar narratives about “democracy” as a local value elsewhere, including in Cologne and the Hanseatic cities. Narratives about local “tolerance,” however, had particularly dynamic histories given the growing need to confront discrimination against immigrant groups whose numbers grew throughout the 1960s and 1970s. By the mid 1960s, the number of “guest workers” reached 1.3 million and doubled to 2.6 million by the early 1970s.Footnote ¹⁴³ Many came from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Turkey, with Turkish immigration growing strongly in the 1970s. Only 30 percent of guest workers returned to their countries of origin during the 1960s, and it increasingly became clear that many would remain in West Germany.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Discrimination against immigrants was rife, and places like Cologne or Hamburg were no exception.

Advocates of greater acceptance of immigrants in Hamburg particularly leveraged narratives about Hamburg tolerance and useable local pasts. To depict immigration as part of a local tradition, supporters of immigrant rights evoked the city’s seafaring traditions, international connections, and the long history of immigration to Hamburg.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In the 1980s, the Hamburg philosopher Rolf Italiaander represented a particular advocate of such ideas.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The city archivist Hans-Dieter Loose, who similarly promoted them, also recognized how local historical legends, while providing inspiration, did not offer any concrete models.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Similar trends can also be found in Cologne, which faced increasing hostilities towards growing numbers of foreign workers. Throughout the 1960s, the percentage of foreign inhabitants of the city reached over 10 percent of the population. Reflecting the depth of antipathies, the Cologne city administration in the mid 1970s joined Munich, Frankfurt, and Hannover in evoking a national law which permitted cities with large immigrant populations to temporarily ban settlement of foreigners from non-common market countries.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ More inclusively minded Cologners sought to combat such impulses by appealing to more inclusive ideas of Heimat and ideas of tolerance as a local tradition.

A good example of this could be found in the Cologne Almanach, edited by the local enthusiast Joseph Hennecke. During the height of the Economic Miracle, Hennecke promoted not only narratives of Cologne democracy but also ideas of embracing immigrants as a practice of local tradition. Cologne, he argued, historically attracted foreign peoples from the outside and offered them “Heimat.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Throughout the 1960s, more inclusively minded localists sought to use Carnival and ideas of the tradition as a site of Cologne tolerance to promote greater inclusion of immigrants.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Regional historical memories also offered a means to normalize immigration. The regionalist Adolf Flecken, at the 1965 Rhenish Heimat Day, argued for acceptance of immigrants by evoking memories of nineteenth-century immigration to the Rhineland from France, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, and Belgium. Flecken continued that his Heimat society sought to help immigrants find a second Heimat in the Rhineland. Given the origin of most immigrants from the Mediterranean, Flecken drew prolifically on the Rhineland’s Roman histories and how past influx from the Mediterranean enriched their regional culture. It was typical for their “Heimat,” he insisted, to simultaneously embrace immigration and maintain regional distinctiveness.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Such ideas about tolerance were clearly aspirational. Discrimination remained widespread, and it was its presence which made appeal to local tolerance important. Claiming “tolerance” as a local value also left denizens open to challenge when engaging in exclusionary practices. Wolfgang Schulze-Olden, a University of Cologne student and student association president, used such identifications as leverage in a 1964 article on Cologne’s “openness to the world.” Despite the prevalence of the term, he wrote, foreign students in Cologne were still often excluded and subject to offensive stereotypes and housing discrimination. Truly being open to the world, he argued, meant eliminating these practices and promoting greater embrace of foreign students.Footnote ¹⁵² One foreign exchange student similarly used a letter to the Kölnische Rundschau to insist that claimed local values be performed, noting how terms for newcomers like “Pimock” and “Imi” though often used in jest, inhibited embrace of newcomers.Footnote ¹⁵³ The 1976 Carnival offered one of the most visible conflicts between local identity claims and the realities of exclusion. A controversial float appeared in that year’s parade depicting Turkish immigrants rhapsodizing about the beauty of the Rhine while pushing a pram full of children holding child money vouchers. Groups of more inclusively minded locals attacked the floats with eggs and paint, while Heinrich Böll fumed with indignation, arguing that it violated Cologne values.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The subsequent year, the Society of Friends of Cologne Folk Culture admonished Cologners that they must be vigilant against turning their Heimat tradition into an exclusionary event.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Other advocates of inclusion insisted that Heimat itself should be understood as a human metaphor about place attachment. This approach involved urging locals to reflect on their own relationship to Heimat to feel more empathy for the displaced. This could be seen in the youth Heimat publication Jung-Köln, published by Cologne schools. The journal included regular columns on immigrant experiences in Cologne and accounts of locals’ world travels to promote cosmopolitan ideas of localism. The journal often recounted stories of immigrant children in Cologne from areas including Greece, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Indonesia, demonstrating their struggles leaving behind human relationships, adjusting to a new culture, and confronting treatment as second-class citizens. The articles urged greater embrace of them. Recounting the story of a Greek girl who arrived in their Rhenish metropolis, for example, the journal invited young readers to speculate whether, having left friends and familiar places behind, she would find a sense of “Heimat” in her new place of residence.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The journal, however, ceased publication in 1969 after the removal of Heimatkunde as a school subject in North-Rhine Westphalia. Only a few years later the subject reappeared, with a growing number of advocates arguing for engagement with Heimat in education. Their efforts, however, remained controversial.

Contested Re-Engagement

In 1979, an article in the FAZ proclaimed triumphantly that “one can speak about Heimat again” and that engagement with the word no longer led to one’s political loyalties being subject to “false suspicions.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The assertion, on the one hand, accurately captured the turn against a Heimat taboo in intellectual and activist circles. Still, attempts to eliminate Heimat from the public lexicon continued. The contestedness of re-engagement could be traced through several venues. This chapter closes by looking at three: the partial reintroduction of Heimatkunde, the creation of Reitz’s television series Heimat, and attempts of left-wing political parties to shape the concept. The divisions over engagement which they revealed persisted throughout the Heimat Renaissance and into post-reunification Germany.

The reintroduction of Heimatkunde in the mid 1970s reflected a gradual shift of opinions on the pedagogical value of local knowledge. The contested nature of its reintroduction, however, was nowhere better demonstrated than in how the titles “Heimatkunde” and “Sachkunde” popped in and out of different states’ official school curricula at a dizzying pace after 1975.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Many scholars increasingly described reflection on Heimat in education as “indispensable,” while others like Bredow and Foltin advocated for an “enlightened Heimatkunde” which balanced themes of preservation and change.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Shifting opinions about pedagogical engagement with the “subjective emotions” of local experience played a role in the revival. While detractors previously cited the emotionality of local attachments as a reason for eliminating Heimatkunde, as two scholars of historical pedagogy argued in 1984, focus on personally experienced spaces allowed educators to engage with the emotions of “personal historicity.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ For others, Heimatkunde had a role to play in confronting the Nazi past. The Jewish studies scholar Utz Jeggle advocated for a Heimatkunde of National Socialism which underscored how Nazi crimes took place within specific local spaces.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Several political activists also supported re-engagement with Heimatkunde. Herrenknecht decried devaluation of local knowledge, which he believed stemmed from a spirit of political centralism and called for a “revolutionary Heimatkunde.”Footnote ¹⁶² Around the same time, Korff, the Tübingen student of cultural studies, argued that there was nothing progressive about getting rid of Heimatkunde, and that its elimination reflected a capitalist spirit of dispensing with forms of learning that did not have clear economic utility. Korff argued for what he termed an “emancipatory Heimatkunde.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Martin Walser advocated a “detectivist Heimatkunde” which should be used to discover neglected local histories which brushed against the grain of prevailing ideological and commercialist historical narratives.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Opposition to engaging with Heimat in schools, however, remained visible. As one Frankfurt pedagogue argued in 1977, Heimatkunde should not be revived, as it was too emotional and short-sighted, did not adequately train cognitive processes, isolated local groups from outsiders, resulted in intolerance, and was outdated in a new era of mobility.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ As a scholar of federalism and supporter of Heimatkunde noted six years later, many remained sceptical of the subject’s reappearance and he sympathized with concerns that it could be misused.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Notions of local knowledge as trivial also remained present in popular culture. Few works illustrated this better than the satirical 1982 pop hit “Wissenswertes über Erlangen” (Things worth knowing about Erlangen), by the West Berlin songwriter Max Goldt. Following the screeching tones of a tour group exploring the local landscape, the song conveyed a clear message: interest in knowledge about smaller places was the domain of the regressive Philistine.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Though interest in Heimat within universities had grown, it too remained contested. By the 1980s, academics increasingly participated in the flowering Heimat discussion which activists and intellectuals had dominated in the previous decade. Interest in local experience was also a hallmark of the emerging field of Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life). Some, however, still noted pejorative attitudes in the academy towards interest in the local. As the historian Rainer Jooß argued, many still identified Heimat history with the provincial schoolteacher rather than the serious scholar.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In neighbouring Austria, the scholar and journalist Franz Köb noted how gaining entry into academic circles required keeping up appearances of being without roots, with those whose place attachments became exposed – for example by speaking dialect – being cast to the bottom of the “pyramid of authority.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹

The contestedness of re-engagement was equally apparent in media – most notably in the production of Reitz’s sixteen-hour first instalment of Heimat which aired on WDR in 1984. Watched by 26 percent of West Germans, the series followed the family Simon in the rural Hunsrück from the end of the First World War to the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Describing the work as an “anti-Heimat film” is misleading, though the term has been used in unfortunate ways to describe both films that reject Heimat and those that remain invested in it but break with a more traditional Heimat film genre. Reitz’s work is better described as a “critical Heimat film” in which Heimat could be a site of both oppression and warmth, belonging and exclusion, and protection and violence. The critical Heimat film genre was not entirely unprecedented. As one recent study has demonstrated, Jewish filmmakers in the Weimar Republic created their own critical Heimat films, many of which challenged the anti-Semitic undertones of conservative Heimat ideas and laid claim to a Jewish place of Heimat in Germany.Footnote ¹⁷¹

Reitz’s biography played a key role in his decision to take up the topic. He came of age in the Hunsrück but felt a deep desire to leave home and break with his former biography, starting a new life in Munich where he studied and began his film career. Reitz later recalled how his conception of the series grew out of his inner conflict between “flying the nest” and finding himself still connected to home.Footnote ¹⁷² In preparing for the film, Reitz drew on oral histories from the Hunsrück, which also became the subject of a documentary. The theme of lost Heimat proved prominent in his interviews, and Reitz expressed how they conveyed to him how Heimat should not be simply portrayed as an idyll.Footnote ¹⁷³

Rather than depicting Heimat as a space cordoned off from modernity, Reitz’s film traced how technological transformations, ideological movements, and global events transformed rural life in ways that were often highly ambivalent. Not unlike critical Heimat authors of the period who departed from ideas of Heimat as “green islands” in a modernizing world, Reitz’s film traced how village life was penetrated and transformed by the telephone, radio, the automobile, the building of roads, the growth of local industry during the Economic Miracle, political movements, and the embeddedness of the local world within those beyond it.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ For different characters, Heimat, moreover, could be a place of attachment but also a place from which they were cast out or sought to escape.

The opening credits of the series have often attracted attention – depicting the superimposed title “Heimat” above the figure of a stone etched with the words “Made in Germany.” Often read as a claim about the Germanness of Heimat, Reitz later insisted it was an incidental remnant of something else: the adamant refusal of the WDR producer Joachim Mengershausen to allow the series to be called “Heimat.” The word, Mengershausen believed, was a term of Nazi ideology which was bourgeois, sentimental, and about the kitsch of tourism and the lies of past Heimat films. Coaxed into producing the series under the title “Made in Germany,” it was only through a last-minute struggle, the forceful intervention of the producer Bernd Eichinger, and an agreement to take on part of the premier costs that resulted in agreement to the “Heimat” title. With the film essentially complete, the only feasible option, however, was to superimpose “Heimat” above the extant opening credits.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Divided sentiments could equally be seen in the series’ reception. It was remarkably popular with the public, and Reitz’s office was flooded with mail of people telling their own life stories for similar kinds of Heimat sagas.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Intellectuals and film critics, however, proved more divided. Many critics focused on legitimate issues with aspects of memory in the episodes covering the Nazi years.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ For others, however, it was the series’ broader investment in Heimat which seemed problematic. Rather than depicting Heimat as a site of inherent oppression and backwardness as in earlier anti-Heimat films, the characters seemed for critics too sympathetic and the overall tune too nostalgic.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Reitz, for his part, openly defended the concept and argued that they needed to take places of personal life seriously.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Over the next several decades, Reitz continued with his second and third instalments of Heimat, which stretched across forty hours of film.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Beyond the silver screen, the mixture of re-engagement and resistance could be seen in party politics. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a clear shift towards engagement could be seen in the SPD and the newly formed Green Party. As the Spiegel noted in the federal elections of 1984, seemingly every party was using the word “Heimat,” including the Greens, the SPD, the CDU, and even the Communists.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Admittedly, elected SPD politicians, who had to engage in the business of winning majorities, had never formally rejected the concept. Willy Brandt himself had spoken of the frequent need of individuals to find a “social and spiritual Heimat.”Footnote ¹⁸² Still, left-wing politicians of the 1960s did not explicitly argue for shaping the concept. In the 1970s and 1980s, a range of SPD politicians made more explicit calls for engagement, including Holger Börner, Herbert Wehner, Günther Markscheffel, and Dietrich Sperling. Börner, Wehner, and Markscheffel all explicitly rejected what they saw as the simplistic equation of Heimat with National Socialism, arguing that this overlooked how the Nazis had deprived millions of Heimat.Footnote ¹⁸³ Markscheffel, who had spent the Nazi years in exile, argued that the regime for him represented an “Unheimat” and that Heimat required creating a place of tolerance, democratic freedoms, and the rejection of nationalism.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ The goal of the workers’ movement, many of them argued, was about fighting for a place of Heimat and that achieving Heimat required “openness to the world,” European unity, international cooperation, willingness to help one’s fellow man, embracing immigrants, and avoiding warfare.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

Left-wing efforts to occupy the concept often involved arguments that right-wing movements, nationalists, and National Socialists destroyed a sense of Heimat for many. As the author Manfred Bosch insisted, promises of Heimat in right-wing politics often resulted in the opposite – failing to provide warmth, protection, nearness, and the concrete. Imperialism, he further argued, relied on the false notion that one can only have Heimat if one takes away Heimat from someone else. Achieving Heimat, he argued, required individual participation, equality, and democratization.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The journalist and intellectual Francois Bondy made similar arguments. While the Nazis used the word in propaganda, he argued, they had taken away millions from their homes and planned for mass uprootings, which could be condoned through the national idea but not through Heimat.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

The concept proved even more suited to the emerging Green Party, which absorbed many of the energies of the citizens’ initiatives. The Greens emphasized local participation and transcending traditional partisan divides. Both dovetailed with longer-standing trends in the Heimat movement. Intersections between localism and environmentalism could also be found beyond West Germany, including in France and even in the GDR.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ The founding groups of the Greens, as Silke Mende has demonstrated, consisted of different factions who felt old political categories had broken down and sought to unify around new key terms. Such attempts to unify around new terms generated conflicts between what she refers to as the Greens’ undogmatic, community-focused, orthodox communist, and conservative wings.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ While she does not consider “Heimat,” their debates over the term reflected similar patterns.

Many in the press described the West German Greens as having taken up the left-wing banner of Heimat. The Spiegel noted this with much fanfare in 1979 and argued that their ideas about Heimat were radically “new,” departing from an allegedly unbroken tradition of Heimat having been a nationalist and anti-democratic concept.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Several party members in the 1980s explicitly described Green Party politics as about Heimat. The party activist Hajo Kracht argued that fighting for a place of Heimat was the Greens’ central goal. He defined the concept as about environmental protection, pacificism, democratic participation, international solidarity, and embrace of foreign workers and refugees. At the same time, he noted, some amongst the Greens were too shy to use the word, while a “seminar Marxist” wing of the party adamantly rejected its use. Kracht himself argued that tabooizing the concept inhibited their ability to reach the hearts and minds of everyday people and only strengthened the right wing’s ability to abuse Heimat feeling.Footnote ¹⁹¹ The Green party politician and 68er activist Thomas Schmid similarly supported engagement. Eliminating the concept, he argued, would not solve anything and no one could wish away their personal past. It was better to take up the concept and deal with its mortgages.Footnote ¹⁹²

Kracht’s report of a division on the left was undoubtedly accurate, and several critics assailed Green Party members who used the word. This included the Bayreuth biologist Ludwig Trepl, who took to the journal Links to criticize fellow Greens. Creating a place of Heimat, Trepl argued, was about creating “sites of horrific hatefulness and devious stupidity.” The “Heimat-rejectors” among the Greens, he argued, had a difficult plight given that Heimat had become a central political idea of the movement. Many on the left, the author noted, disingenuously drew on Bloch and an allegedly progressive Heimat concept but were simply drawing from the “arsenal of reaction” and giving up on changing social orders. Heimat, he concluded, was always about hostility to change.Footnote ¹⁹³

Appropriating the Greens’ slogan “Nuclear Power? No thanks!” the journalist Henryk Broder launched a similar attack in an essay entitled “Heimat? No thanks!” Heimat, he argued, was “suspect,” “small-minded,” “musty,” “always restrictive,” and “exclusionary.” Only a rural place, he continued, could be Heimat, as cities were pluralist. Broder recounted actively resisting feeling a sense of Heimat for Cologne, where he spent his youth and which he particularly disliked during Carnival. During their Heimat festival, he wrote, he felt like Captain Cook encountering “wild tribal peoples” who swayed for hours like “autistic children.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ While Broder attacked the Greens, others targeted use of the word in the peace movement. The publicist Wolfgang Pohrt took aim at the “Heimat whispers” in peace movement protests against the American stationing of Pershing rockets in West Germany. Their use of the word, he argued, ultimately revealed their veiled nationalism, anti-Americanism, and neo-fascism.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

Some opponents of left-wing engagement continued to argue that Heimat was only a word and did not correspond to any real phenomena at all, concluding that getting rid of the term would be the end of the matter. As the editor of the journal Spontan argued in 1980, Heimat was an “empty concept,” an “extortionate postulation,” and a demand for reverence, love of parents, and obedience. Supporting its elimination, he rhetorically asked how much they were supposed to forget or overlook given the current “psychotic fixation” on Heimat.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Other opponents simply thought it bad strategy. As the author Richard Hey argued, expressing his distaste for left-wing engagement, the left needed to act on the same spatial scales as international corporations.Footnote ¹⁹⁷

A fraction on the left, so the political scientist Hans-Georg Wehling reported in the early 1980s, was unsettled by others on the left who engaged with Heimat.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Yet, enough people had shifted their views to make maintaining even a segmented taboo unsustainable by the 1980s. This could be seen in frequent failed efforts to block engagement. As an edited volume on Heimat in literature noted in the mid 1980s, their preceding conference on the subject had taken place over the objections of fellow scholars.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ In the city of Erlangen, objections to discussion of Heimat resulted in a conflagration over the city’s annual Culture Days in 1982. Organizers adopted the question of Jean Améry, “How much Heimat does a person need?” as the event theme. The left-liberal “Cultural-Political Society,” which planned to hold a conference in conjunction with the Culture Days, sought to block the theme’s adoption, arguing that the Heimat concept was inherently reactionary and thus should not be a topic of discussion. Not all members of the Cultural-Political Society, however, agreed. The society member, journalist, and cultural historian Hermann Glaser intervened to defend engagement. Glaser focused on laypeople’s need for comprehensible spaces where they were not the objects of top-down administration. He contrasted this with right-wing manipulation of Heimat which he argued disenfranchised citizens. While some described Heimat as an irrational force, Glaser argued that it went hand in hand with critical rationality and having a voice in shaping of one’s place of home.Footnote ²⁰⁰

Conclusion

Left-wing and intellectual re-engagement with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s emerged in the context of a sense of crisis on the political left after 1968. The Heimat discussion amongst intellectuals and activists in these years revolved around questions about what relatively new rhetoric of rejecting Heimat meant in practice. Re-engagists argued that one could hardly disembark from personal biographies and local experiences or wish away the emotions attached to places of home. Banning the word, re-engagists argued, had not eliminated the phenomena it described and only empowered nationalists and capitalist interests to abuse them. Some felt it disempowered the left from taking on technocracy and exposed them to the emotional coldness of capitalist society. Other collateral damage included erasure of Jewish accounts of their traumatic loss of Heimat after 1933.

Claims that the period saw the emergence of a radically new Heimat concept, however, were exaggerated and illustrated persistent preconceptions about the earlier Heimat movement. Still, some trends were new. Unlike the early post-war Heimat movement, the Heimat Renaissance involved highly medialized national discourses amongst elite intellectuals. Intellectual ideas about divorcing Heimat from the past was also a newer trend, as were the efforts to create more partisan understandings of the concept. From below, willingness to protest to demand rights to have a say in the shaping of their local worlds also represented a new trend.

Narratives of an “old” Heimat concept having always been anti-democratic and about an immobile society’s passive celebration of stasis offered useful foils for advocates of re-engagement, but they had few roots in the historical matter. Examples of pro-European, democratic, and post-nationalist ideas of Heimat had a clear presence in earlier decades.

Locals from below continued to harness and further develop such ideas in the context of new struggles. Rather than rejecting engagement with history and local traditions as inherently regressive, such groups continued to evoke them in ways that could facilitate change.

No studies have assigned a formal end date to the Heimat Renaissance, though the term has never been used to describe the years beyond national reunification in 1990. The dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and national reunification all added new layers to the question of Heimat, while pealing other ones away. Still, the Heimat Renaissance left a clear imprint on attitudes towards the concept in post-reunification Germany.