In 1946, the Baden author and recipient of the regionalist Hebel prize, Max Picard, argued in his book Hitler in Ourselves that “it is … possible that the individual in Germany can find themselves when they take themselves out of the vague grandiose state and bring themselves into the concreteness of the small state.”Footnote 1 Picard was not alone in viewing preoccupation with “Großstaaterei” (grand statism) or “Nibelungen-like large spatial thinking” as hallmarks of National Socialism.Footnote 2 From 1945 to 1956, many of his co-regionalists in the Southwest – from Lake Constance to the Odenwald – who debated their federalist future made similar arguments. Democratically minded groups of regionalists argued that Heimat and regional identity should play a role in developing post-nationalist ideas of nation, promoting European unity, and establishing a federalist spatial culture. Denizens in the Southwest also noted how desires for Heimat had reached new heights in the aftermath.
While the previous chapters focused on local Heimat, this chapter moves to the regional level, with the area in question including a demographic mix of urban and rural places. Thinking about region focused less on physical reconstruction and therapeutic community but proved equally prominent in thinking about political renewal. This chapter hones in specifically on prolific discussions about Heimat, federalism, and regional identity in intense debates over what federal state or states should be established in the Southwest. These debates began immediately after 1945, with the latency of the immediate post-war years fostering free-wheeling imaginings of different federalist possibilities. This included popular discussion of a proposed autonomous “Swabian-Alemannic democracy,” which proponents claimed would be founded upon regional democratic traditions. By 1949, these more fanciful discussions gave way to the Southwest state debates in which citizens argued about whether to create a unified Southwest state or restore the states of Baden and Württemberg, voting on the issue in referendums in 1950 and 1951, with legal challenges thereafter. Many supporting competing state forms expressed similar views about the importance of region to democracy, while having conflicting cognitive maps of where the “region” could be found in geographic space.
Elections in West Germany, as historians have noted, represented major forums of debate over democratization.Footnote 3 The referenda in the Southwest fit this pattern but focused specifically on the role of region in forging a democratic spatial culture. They generated thematically sprawling discussions on the role of the region in rethinking the national category, facilitating political participation, and advancing international reconciliation. They also reflected the degree to which many saw a singular focus on large spatial scales as a danger to democracy. This chapter traces these debates through a range of sources, including citizens’ letters, newspaper articles, regional state proposals, regionalist monographs, polls, parliamentary debates, radio broadcasts, and referendum pamphlets, posters, and speeches. By looking at the referenda debates as being about the spatial foundations of democracy, this chapter moves beyond previous considerations of them as simply a political pre-history of the state of Baden-Württemberg.Footnote 4 Understanding how they were about the geographic scales of democracy helps explain their unusual intensity.
This chapter begins with a brief examination of the region’s complex territorial histories, which informed the divergent cognitive maps of region which came into view after 1945. It further considers the diverse political histories of the region, many of which regionalists selectively appropriated after 1945 to argue for “democracy” and “Europeanness” as regional values. A subsequent glimpse at National Socialist engagement with Heimat in the region reveals similar types of ambiguity as in the Rhineland and the Hanseatic cities. Moving to the moment of defeat, the chapter examines how many southwesterners described the region as a site of political renewal. Lay regionalists offered their own visions of a new federalist democracy, which, though sometimes whimsical, provide insights into attitudes towards space and democracy. Here, the chapter looks at Otto Feger’s bestseller work, Schwäbisch-Alemannische Demokratie, published in 1946, which argued for an autonomous Swabian-Alemannic state. Feger and other Swabian-Alemannic Heimat enthusiasts argued that regional Heimat was crucial to democratic federalism, anti-militarism, rejecting nationalism, European unification, and abandoning “Prussian” and Nazi visions of space. Though most southwesterners rejected his “autonomism,” similar ideas about region, space, and identity continued into the Southwest state debates.
While many anticipated that the entire federal map of West Germany would eventually be redrawn, the three interim states of the Southwest created by the Allies were seen as uniquely untenable, and political elites presented citizens with the options of recreating Baden and Württemberg or unifying them. Swabian-Alemannic regionalists and Badenese regionalists had conflicting cognitive maps of what territories represented a common region, with the former arguing for unification. Though pro-Badener and Swabian-Alemannic regionalists were visceral opponents, both advanced similar arguments about Heimat as a forum of political participation, international reconciliation, and federalism. Several regionalists on both sides emphasized rejecting “Prussian” visions of nation and appealed to Swiss models of communal democracy. In the referenda, however, Swabian-Alemannic regionalists were joined by strange bedfellows who desired fusion for very different reasons. These smaller groups of technocrats, expellees, nationalists, and industrialists, who were disinterested in or hostile towards federalism, argued for union based on desires for a “larger” state that would be more efficient or a force against “petty statism.” Yet other fusion supporters argued that Heimat in democracy must be strictly private and should not be politicized, even for federalist purposes.
Regionalists’ claims to values like “Badenese democracy,” “Badenese openness to the world,” or “Swabian-Alemannic democracy” had clear parallels in other West German regions. It is also telling that they emerged as popular selling points in the referenda. Still, trends in regional identity were not identical to those in Cologne or the Hanseatic cities, with regionalism in the Southwest having a more rural and conservative inflection. The referenda, meanwhile, reflected the same gaps between democratic identification and practice that could be seen elsewhere. While they revealed popular identification with vague ideas of “democracy” and European unification, they simultaneously laid bare weaknesses of early West German democratic culture.
The Diverse Strands of Regional History
The regional debates in the Southwest are difficult to follow without a brief glimpse at the complex and long regional histories that citizens often evoked. In the Early Middle Ages, the Southwest had been settled by the Swabian-Alemannic tribal grouping, with Swabia representing a tribal duchy in the region throughout the Middle Ages (Figure 4.1). Its settlement patterns influenced the topography of modern Swabian-Alemannic dialects and encompassed the bulk of present-day Baden-Württemberg, Bavarian Swabia, German-speaking Switzerland, and Alsace. In the Middle Ages, “Alemannen” and “Schwaben” were Latin and German terms for the same tribal grouping, though such “tribes” were often internally diverse. From the Late Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, the former tribal duchy was fragmented among a host of different states with fluctuating boundaries. By the seventeenth century, we see evidence of how identification with a larger Swabian idea began to fragment. In Matthäus Merian’s 1663 map of Swabia, he amended a list of Swabian cities which, “because of their hearts” felt they belonged to other lands.Footnote 5 It goes without saying that early-modern inhabitants had neither a modern sense of regional identity nor notions of “democracy” as a regional value. Describing their regional “natures,” the sixteenth-century humanist, Johannes Cochlaeus, described the “Swabians” as an industrious people who excelled at trade and donned the clothes of war and peace equally well.Footnote 6
Figure 4.1 Draft of important historical states and dialect borders of the Southwest.
This territorial division was eliminated by Napoleon, who greatly expanded two client states, Baden and Württemberg, whose new borders were drawn entirely according to political expediency (Figure 4.2). Baden increased five to six times in population, while Württemberg more than doubled.Footnote 7 Baden was shaped by Napoleon as a snake-like state along the border to make it susceptible to French influence. Their random borders led the nineteenth-century folklorist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl and others to denounce them as “accidental states.”Footnote 8 Dynasts in both states made extensive efforts to forge a new sense of region. This was reinforced by the introduction of liberal constitutions in both states.
Figure 4.2 Baden, Württemberg, and Hohenzollern after Napoleon.
In the modern Southwest, inhabitants continued to speak Swabian-Alemannic dialects which did not correspond to state borders. A range of internal dialect boundaries existed, with the Black Forest, for example, representing a moderate boundary that separated Upper-Rhenish Alemannic dialects in South Baden from Swabian dialects prominent in much of Württemberg (Figure 4.3). Though this boundary did not run perfectly along the state border, the terms “Alemannic” and “Swabian” increasingly coalesced in popular imagination around the separate state ideas of Baden and Württemberg. Misconceptions that they had represented different historic tribal groupings grew throughout the nineteenth century. The dialect differences between the southern two-thirds of Baden and Württemberg, however, paled in comparison to the differences that both had with the northern inhabitants of their own states who spoke West Franconian dialects. In aggregate, this array of criss-crossing historical state, dialect, and cultural borders would inform diverging modern mental maps of region which the post-war referendums brought to the fore.
Figure 4.3 Important borders with the Swabian-Alemannic dialect space.
Beyond territorial history, the cultural and political “traditions” of the Southwest proved equally diverse. Throughout the early modern period, there was a real threat of the towns of the Southwest “turning Swiss” and away from the autocratic territorial states of the Empire.Footnote 9 For the modern period, the historians Dieter Langewiesche and Hans Fenske have emphasized the strong democratic traditions of the Southwest which had been a major centre of the 1848 revolutions.Footnote 10 Both states fought against Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War, which regionalists sought to forget after 1870 to paper over conflict between region and nation.Footnote 11 The states continued in their same borders in the Empire and the Weimar Republic, though losing their dynasts in 1918, while some Weimar reformers proposed unifying them.Footnote 12 Nationalists in the inter-war years defined the region as a bulwark against the French and exploited the historic connection of Alsace to Alemannic regional culture to assert national territorial claims.Footnote 13
By 1933, the “democratic” traditions of the Southwest did not result in considerable differences in votes for National Socialism. Trends in Baden were comparable with the national average, while votes in Württemberg were seven points below the average in the 1932 elections.Footnote 14 After the seizure of power, the regime maintained the states as Gaue and integrated more receptive Heimat societies. Even receptive regionalists, however, like those in the Swabian Heimat League, complained about being marginalized.Footnote 15 Unreceptive regionalists, like Otto Feger and Otto Färber, the latter of whom was banned from publishing, engaged privately in regionalist activities. As in the Rhineland and the Hanseatic cities, the Nazis sought to channel local energies towards national expansion, while discouraging views of Heimat seen as too inward or out of tune with state goals. As the Reich Labour Ministry argued in a book on Baden as a “borderland,” it was unacceptable for them to continue thinking only about their “narrow Heimat Baden” without immediately turning their focus to the broader empire.Footnote 16 The book framed region as primarily a question of national economic output.Footnote 17 Nazi propaganda also used Swabian-Alemannic regionalism to argue for “recouping” neighbouring territories.Footnote 18 The regime particularly promoted the writings of the pro-Nazi Swiss author Jakob Schaffner who argued that Germany must force the Swiss to their knees and back into “Alemannendom.”Footnote 19
During the war, southwestern cities witnessed significant bombing, with levels of destruction of the inner cities of Mannheim, Stuttgart, Pforzheim, Heilbronn, and Karlsruhe ranging from 40 to above 80 percent. Smaller towns like Bruchsal, Kehl, Freudenstadt, and Crailsheim also saw major destruction, while other rural areas not affected by the bombing saw a large influx of expellees and urban evacuees.Footnote 20 With the defeat of the Nazis, the occupiers would split the Southwest between the French and American zones. Their boundary ran along the Karlsruhe-Ulm freeway, cutting Baden and Württemberg in half.Footnote 21 The Americans unified the north into the state Württemberg-Baden, while the French zone consisted of Württemberg-Hohenzollern and South Baden, which simply took on the name “Baden” (Figure 4.4). The Allies saw these states as temporary.
Figure 4.4 Interim states established by the Allies in the Southwest.
Renewal within the “Small Circle” of the Region
Citizens in the Southwest reported the same kind of turn to thinking about Heimat after 1945 which could be found elsewhere. As Otto Feger recounted in a 1947 Heimat book on Konstanz: “The imagined forces that engagement with the Heimat gives us are today, amidst the collapse of so many other basic principles, all the more valuable than they ever were in peaceful times.” In earlier years, Feger noted, one could hear “flowery” statements about Heimat as a source of protection and energy but after the disaster of the Third Reich, he continued, such speech gained concrete reality. Heimat, he believed, offered a crucial resource for “spiritual rebuilding” and breaking with a Nazi worldview.Footnote 22 The Baden state president, Leo Wohleb, made a similar argument in 1946. They could begin anew, he argued, by “holding together on the small bit of earth that is left to us” from “Heimat” and “in a small circle of the Badenese land and people.” Though they also thought about all of Germany, he argued, they must harness their federalist convictions.Footnote 23
Southwesterners hardly saw Heimat as tainted. Passing references to Nazi abuse of the idea, when they appeared, typically insisted that the Nazis misunderstood the concept. Wohleb, for example, emphasized giving children a genuine sense of Heimat that was not the engineered Heimat feeling of Nazism.Footnote 24 The reference to giving children a Heimat appeared quite frequently, including in the Baden constitution.Footnote 25 A woman from the town of Meßkirch in a letter to Wohleb similarly expressed her concern that children be given a sense of Heimat since the Nazis, she remarked in passing, had ignored it and emphasized instead “battle, singing marching songs and similar slogans.” She continued by expressing her feeling for her own Badenese Heimat, which she described as a place where she felt like “a child in its mother’s lap.”Footnote 26
The woman’s letter again reflects gendered understandings of the concept in which women were framed as providing Heimat for both children and husbands. As another woman from Karlsruhe wrote to Wohleb, giving children Heimat was imperative. She continued by conveying her own Heimat feeling and elation at seeing the reconstructed Stefan church reascending over her hometown.Footnote 27 Another woman in Konstanz, who created her own Baden Heimat society, included in the society charta a statement about women as facilitators of Heimat. Baden, she argued, had a progressive spirit, and they must convey this Heimat feeling to their children. “Badenese women,” it held, must use their “dignity” and “femininity” to tend to the home and bring to their people a spirit of “reconciliation” and “joy.”Footnote 28
The Catholic theologian Josef Beeking, who fled to Switzerland during the war and later taught at the University of Freiburg, particularly argued for the centrality of mothers to Heimat. The family, he maintained, was its most important element – offering a place where one loved and felt loved and was protected in a “cosmic totality.” The mother, he argued, was the symbol of this cosmic totality, and her heart lay at the centre of Heimat.Footnote 29 If the mother was the centre point for Beeking, it was the virginal woman who represented the region of Baden. The personified representation of the region had long been the figure of a woman in a Bollenhut costume, with red-coloured balls on her hat indicating her single status (Figure 4.5).
Figure 4.5 Regional Bollenhut costumes at the Freiburg Trachtenfest. (1955).
Conservative strains of thinking about Heimat did prove stronger in the less urban areas of the German South. This was well reflected in the ruralist sentiments in a pastoral letter from the Archbishop of Freiburg in 1946. “Heimat!” he wrote, “it sounds like a song to our ears.” Their “Badenese Heimat” even if it was “chopped up, in disarray, and destroyed” would “bloom” after they cleared the rubble. The conservative archbishop, originally from the small village of Meßkirch, and in his mid seventies, proceeded to argue that Germans and rural people have stronger Heimat feeling. He closed his letter by urging congregants to sympathize with the expellee plight.Footnote 30
Federalists in the Southwest and beyond particularly appealed to region as a site of political renewal. This can be seen in a peculiar source genre which proliferated throughout post-war Germany: popular drafts for a new German democracy created by denizens distant from major positions of power. As one American occupation official jokingly wrote in 1948, seemingly every German he encountered had some sort of constitutional draft in their pocket.Footnote 31 Wolfgang Benz, in an edited collection of constitutional drafts, similarly noted their large volume and the futile nature of examining those not from elite decision-makers.Footnote 32 Those from non-elites, however, help shed light on popular thinking about how region should relate to democracy. Southwestern federalists created their own share of proposals, many of which seem whimsical in retrospect. Federalist visions, as the political scientist Michael Greven points out, flourished in this moment of open possibilities in the late 1940s.Footnote 33 As an occupied nation that did not need to make immediate practical decisions, Germans could imagine varied and often fanciful political futures.Footnote 34
Visions of a federalism rooted in regional culture were politically diverse and included both liberal democratic and anti-liberal visions. Those who argued for a “Heimat conscious federalism” included anti-liberals like the arch-conservative Lower Saxon politician Otto Schmidt.Footnote 35 In the Southwest, Catholic democrats played a prominent role in advocating for a federalism rooted in regional sentiment. They often evoked histories of national fragmentation and contrasted a federative national idea with a “Prussian” one.Footnote 36 Revaluation of historic fragmentation reversed Nazi descriptions of it as having sapped national strength.Footnote 37 Other major federalist thinkers in the Southwest included the Catholic liberal Otto Färber who proposed a national democracy based on states drawn according to regional feeling. In the Southwest, he believed this meant unifying a common Swabian-Alemannic region.Footnote 38
Protestants could also be found amongst those advocating a federalism rooted in regional identities. This included Robert Scholl, the mayor of Ulm, and father of the Nazi resistors Hans and Sophie Scholl. Scholl proposed his own draft for a federalist democracy in which regions proved central. Scholl argued that Germany could turn to democracy by abandoning “Prussian” traditions and embracing the democratic histories of the western regions.Footnote 39 While Scholl drafted his plans in the bombed-out landscape of Ulm on the Danube, a hundred kilometres away on the other side of the Upper-Swabian plain, the Konstanz archivist Otto Feger was busily preparing his own programmatic work on regional Heimat and political renewal. His book would be a bestseller.
Visions of a “Swabian-Alemannic Democracy”
“Swabian-Alemannic democracy,” the archivist of Konstanz proclaimed in 1946, was a value rooted in centuries of regional history. If citizens were to build a new democracy, they must draw on this value and the region’s historic “striving toward freedom.”Footnote 40 The archivist Otto Feger, like many others, did not see Heimat as tainted by Nazi propaganda and maintained that the regime had viewed Heimat enthusiasts as unthreatening “book worms.”Footnote 41 Feverishly composing a book advocating the creation of a regional democratic state, Feger published Schwäbisch-Alemannische Demokratie in a left-leaning press in Konstanz, selling over 50,000 copies.Footnote 42 Feger sought more than a decentralized Germany; he wanted autonomy within a new democratic Swabian-Alemannic state. Those of the Southwest, he argued, must turn towards a smaller world and away from the large machinery of the German state. An autonomous Swabian-Alemannic state, he argued, would not be a “formidable palace,” but a “weather-proofed, home-like abode for a family that has become smaller.” They could not wait for the Allies to bring democracy, he argued, and must seize the moment by turning to their regional democratic traditions.Footnote 43 While few shared his separatism, his ideas about space and democracy had clear parallels in later federalist debates.
Feger was hardly a member of the political elite. He was born to a middle-class family in Mülhausen, Alsace in 1905. He studied in Switzerland, Germany, and the United States and earned a doctorate in law in 1928. Active in the Centre party in the Weimar years, the Nazis banned him from practising law after 1935 and removed him from a city job, after which he ran a cinema to finance his studies of regional history. In 1939, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and spent most of the war as a translator in Italy.Footnote 44 As a POW in Italy in the summer of 1945, he recalled how inactivity led his mind to “the democratic traditions” of his “Alemannic Heimat.”Footnote 45 Quickly released from prison, Feger hastily composed his book.
Feger’s work drew on a range of histories to push ideas of “Swabian-Alemannic democracy.” This included the Southwest’s historic fragmentation. The 240 states which once bespotted the Southwest, he argued, were anti-centralist and “supranational,” and gave the Southwest a European outlook. He traced a history of democratic liberalism from medieval decentralization and old city constitutions to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He pointed to the Southwest as a hotbed of the 1848 revolutions and to strong southwestern representation amongst the democratic leaders of the Weimar Republic.Footnote 46 Negative historical memories proved equally useful. His foil for a democratic Alemannic identity was a “Prussian-Nazi” tradition. Feger drew a direct line from Friedrich the Great to Bismarck and Hitler, arguing that Prussian tradition contained the seed of territorial expansion – from Great Brandenburg to Great Prussia, to Small Germany, to Great Germany, to a “greater German Lebensraum.” Prussia, he insisted, was a bastion of militarism that glorified the state over the people. Feger clearly believed the Southwest bore less guilt for National Socialism and expressed fears that the East and North would again destroy democracy and plunge Europe back into a world war. No more of their blood should be spilt, Feger wrote, simply because East Germans want to “conquer Poland.”Footnote 47 Feger rhetorically asked: “Should we [in a Swabian-Alemannic state] somehow conquer a part of Bavaria or a canton of Switzerland as Lebensraum?” In a small state, war would be eliminated as an instrument of politics.Footnote 48
Feger outlined detailed structures of a new state. They must, he argued, move past the vast state machinery of the Weimar Republic that blocked popular participation. Their regional democracy would be radically decentralized and facilitate grassroots participation, with everyday citizens integrated into the administration of the state and the legislative process. The state would have a two-chamber parliament elected directly, with direct democracy like Switzerland. The capital was to be in a small city like Rottweil to avoid the centralist tendencies of a larger one like Stuttgart. State law would be simple and comprehensible to everyday citizens. There would be no ministry of war, and the economy would be oriented toward peace-time goods. In schools, regional history would be a part of democratic education.Footnote 49 Feger left open what territories would join the state. The Swabians and Alemannen, he noted, were the same group and Baden and Württemberg had to be done away with. He would have preferred his native Alsace be included, though he depicted it as a cultural “transition area” to avoid antagonizing the French. The border in the northern Franconian areas would need to be considered carefully as regional belonging there was vague. Bavarian Swabia and the Swabian-speaking Austrian Vorarlberg would be welcome to join but needed to make this decision themselves.Footnote 50
Feger’s “autonomism” meant tossing out Germany as a political but not as a cultural idea. Swabians would remain German, he wrote, and might feel more so once they are not “terrorized in the name of Germandom.”Footnote 51 The Swabian example could pave the way for other German regions, though they would have to harness their own traditions. Feger further ascribed their region the task of building a cultural bridge to Germany’s neighbours. Heimat, he held, was not about retreating from the world, but rather engaging with it in an internationalist way. A Swabian-Alemannic state guided by its tradition would be internationally oriented and welcome cultural influence from across its borders, including from France.Footnote 52 Feger further articulated their fraternal relationship with Switzerland, which he saw as a model for their democratic communal form of government.Footnote 53
Reactions to Feger’s fanciful work – both positive and negative – illustrated the resonance of some of his ideas. He inspired others to write in a similar spirit, including one Münsingen lecturer who completed a 1947 work on Alemannic history and culture that argued for regionalism as a bridge across national borders.Footnote 54 Feger’s former law teacher Franz Beyerle supported many of his goals, while suggesting instead a loosely bound federalist Germany with a capital in Frankfurt.Footnote 55 Full-throated opponents, like the Baden regionalist Karl Bader, at least noted in his diary that the “slightly eccentric” book had interesting ideas; he particularly shared Feger’s hostility to “Prussian” tradition.Footnote 56 More than any other figure, Feger found resonance with the mayor of Singen, Bernhard Dietrich. Dietrich proved even more fanciful and promoted a decentralized confederation of southern German Alpine states, rooted in Catholicism, with a capital in Salzburg, and within a Customs Union with France and Switzerland.Footnote 57
Dietrich had been an opponent of the regime, seeking refuge in France during the mid 1930s and was appointed mayor of Singen in 1945. Dietrich enthusiastically received Feger’s work and issued his own manifesto for a group of “autonomist federalists” addressed to the “Heimat-conscious people of the countries of Europe.” They must, he argued, protect their Heimat from “Prussian-German” militarism, nationalism, and centralism. The group held that individual freedom in Heimat could only be achieved in an autonomous, democratic, deprussianized state. The state would be based on regional culture and work towards a European confederation.Footnote 58 Dietrich founded a Swabian-Alemannic Heimat society, of which Otto Feger became a member, with branches emerging throughout the Southwest. Forcing the German regions together, the society held, led to the disaster of 1918 and 1945, and the “South and West” had their hands forced by the “reactionary mass voices of the North and the East.”Footnote 59 Maintaining a national political union, they argued, threatened renewed catastrophe. Their platform emphasized southwestern democratic traditions that could no longer be subjected to “Prussian” desires for conquest and Lebensraum. National unity had been the “nightmare of the Heimat,” and they sought a “small, but free state” where Germany was only a cultural space. Their Heimat society was to be led by uncompromising Nazis resistors but would not exclude former lower-level party members, as all were allegedly needed for rebuilding.Footnote 60
Identifying with democracy, as Feger himself noted, did not make one a proficient democrat. Writing of the rapid willingness of many after the war to take up the mantra of “democracy,” Feger wrote: “lovely … so we are all democrats, with or without intellectual reservations. But what is democracy?”Footnote 61 For critics of Feger and Dietrich, their visions themselves demonstrated insufficient understandings of what democracy entailed. Critics pointed not only to the anachronistic nature of their musings but also to their ethnic hostility to the expellees. Expellees, Feger and Dietrich believed, had hierarchical “Prussian” ways of thinking. They should be allowed to settle in the Southwest but not receive citizenship until they culturally conformed, even if citizenship, they argued, must not be made about race or birthplace. Opponents, including Wohleb, argued that their proposal amounted to a “blood and soil” citizenship policy.Footnote 62 A clear moral failure could also be seen in their evasion of regional guilt for the Nazi past, even if neither of them had burdened personal histories. The Southwest had been “raped” by the North and East, Feger argued, while Dietrich believed they would achieve a new beginning by breaking free from “collective guilt.”Footnote 63 Admittedly, such evasion was not the focal point of their writings, which centred on fears of fascist relapse. Forgetting Nazi violence, Feger argued, would endanger democracy. “Today” everyone was against war and for democracy, but he feared they would forget “Dachau” and “Bergen-Belsen,” and only remember Nazi parades and victory marches.Footnote 64
By 1948, fanciful autonomist dreams already began to dissipate. Baden investigated the Swabian-Alemannic Heimat Society for separatism but deemed them incapable of threatening the state.Footnote 65 The French forbade them to establish newspapers or a political party, while Feger and Dietrich conflicted over proposed federalist structures, with the Heimat society soon disbanding. Feger subsequently supported a Southwest state as approximately unifying a common region.Footnote 66 The greatest factor inhibiting the group was its separatism – a word whose negative connotations persisted. Few wanted to toss German unification overboard and most saw Heimat as simply the basis of a more decentred idea of nation. With the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949, the sense of open possibilities of the immediate post-war years had narrowed considerably. Despite the failure of the earlier “autonomist” movement, several of their ideas would resurface in the subsequent federalist state debates. This included emphasis on abandoning a “Prussian” model of nation and heralding Swiss democracy.
Understanding the subsequent Southwest state debates necessitates a brief look at the political framework in which they unfolded. In the first years of the republic, it was widely believed that the entire federal map would be redrawn, with the Allies directing a new West German state to revise interim state boundaries.Footnote 67 The Parliamentary Council, in turn, approved article 29 of the Foundational Law, which held that the states must be redrawn according to factors including economic and social viability and regional belonging.Footnote 68 The borders of the three southwestern states, however, were seen as uniquely untenable, with the council further approving article 118, which permitted the three minister presidents of the Southwest to redraw their regional map based on common agreement.Footnote 69 Attempts to find agreement, however, were doomed from the outset. The minister president of Württemberg-Baden, Reinhold Maier, a gruff liberal and Württemberg Protestant, was adamantly for a single Southwest state. Gebhard Müller (CDU), the minister president of Württemberg-Hohenzollern and Upper-Swabian Catholic, also supported union. Wohleb, the CDU minister president of South Baden, however, was an avid Badenese regionalist and Catholic who argued for re-establishing Baden.Footnote 70
The minister presidents agreed to hold an informational referendum to break the deadlock, asking citizens in 1950 to vote for a unified state or for Baden and Württemberg. The results revealed massive majorities for the Southwest state in Württemberg, with 93 percent support. Württemberger proved highly receptive to a common Swabian-Alemannic regional idea and could rest assured they would represent the numerical majority. Baden as a whole rejected union by 50.9 percent. North Badener, however, supported it by 57 percent, while only 40.5 percent did in South Baden.Footnote 71 The results did not break the impasse, meaning a final binding referendum had to be held the next year and the Bundestag would determine voting procedures. Wohleb proposed voting in Württemberg and Baden as independent districts, while the others proposed a gerrymandered four-district model, consisting of South and North Baden and South and North Württemberg, with approval of three of four resulting in unification – a method which the preceding informational referendum indicated would result in their victory.
During debates, the Baden camp generally held to common arguments about federalism and the importance of region to democracy. Swabian-Alemannic regionalists advanced similar views, but supported union based on their differing cognitive map of region. Such unionists, however, were joined by non-regionalist groups, including technocratic elites and industrial figures, as well as expellees and nationalist voices, all of whom desired union because it would form a larger state. While Konrad Adenauer sympathized with the Baden movement, it has been suggested he remained out of the debate to avoid alienating votes needed for his defence policies.Footnote 72 Meanwhile, the Bundestag approved the four-district gerrymandered model. In preparation for the referendum, both sides formed working committees which created promotional materials, posters, leaflets, and mailers and held public forums. These media were filled with discussions about the relationship between regional Heimat and democracy.
Fighting “Grand Statism”
In 1948, a former POW and avid Badenese regionalist wrote a fiery letter to his state minister president about the importance of regionalist states in rejecting nationalism and Nazism. Smaller states, the author argued offered more human administration and blocked nationalists from gaining power. They must, he exclaimed, never again deliver their “bones” for the war of a “damned German nationalism.” They must also reject the coldness of “large state bureaucracy.” Those who knew the perfidies of the “men of nationalism,” the letter continued, could hardly wish for enough federal states. He feared a renaissance of “Nazidom” and a third plunge into world war. Moving towards a unitary state, he wrote, represented a first step in this direction: “Out of small federal states will become large federal states, and out of these the even bigger brother “unitary state.” This would bring Germany back to where the nationalists wanted them and would give birth to a “big snout” dictator that would bring back “one empire-one Führer-one war-one mass grave!” “Now a decision will be made,” he insisted, “whether a new Nazidom is to be blocked.” An expansionary national idea, he concluded, was not love of “people and Heimat,” and the rubble proved it.Footnote 73
The points made in the letter reflected a frequent strain of argumentation amongst Baden supporters. During the referenda, numerous Baden supporters similarly argued for regional Heimat as about rejecting nationalist excesses. A smaller regionalist state, they often argued, would offer accessible sites of participation and not have aggressive global ambitions. This federalism, they believed, needed to be culturally re-enforced by regional states based on Heimat feeling. As a former town mayor and Baden supporter wrote, federalism was not simply a technocratic project, it must also be the subject of “feeling” (emphasis in original). They had enough of the “chocking unitarism” during the Nazi regime and would not see it replaced by a centralist Bonn.Footnote 74 Promoting a federalism rooted in feeling, the former Weimar chancellor and native Badener Joseph Wirth argued that “we do not get goose-bumps” at the names “Swabia” and “Württemberg” and would fight attempts to eliminate their state of Baden.Footnote 75 As the Baden author, anti-militarist, and resistor of Nazism Reinhold Schneider wrote, “home” (Heim) must be surrounded by “Heimat” and “a state with a made-up name” he argued “will not become Heimat.”Footnote 76
Though Baden supporters chafed at Swabian-Alemannic regionalists who argued for union, their preferred targets were Southwest state politicians who desired a “larger” state based on economic, administrative, or national concerns. They displayed particular aversion to arguments that they simply needed a larger state. As a teacher, aged forty-nine, responded in a 1949 poll, she supported Baden because of her “animosity toward large entities.” A Freiburger bookbinder, aged thirty-three, maintained that he supported Baden because of Heimat feeling and his belief that it offered a “defence against centralism.”Footnote 77 One woman in Konstanz with “deep-seated Heimat feeling” felt so passionately about the issue that she created a local “Federation of Badener.” Southwest staters, she insisted, were taken in by “large spatial politics,” asking: “Doesn’t that evoke unconsciously the unholy legacy of an unholy time? The notion inculcated by dictatorship that you can only feel strong in the illusion of an imagined great power?” They should, she argued, look to the Swiss who were reaping the fruits of federalist division. She argued that the most beautiful feeling of freedom is consciousness of “self-supporting responsibility in a more local place of Heimat.”Footnote 78 This evocation of Swiss spatial culture proved a recurring theme. The Badener Wilhelm Hausenstein, a cultural critic sanctioned in the Third Reich for refusing to remove Jewish art from his works, similarly advocated the Swiss model as a means of rejecting a “Prussian” tradition.Footnote 79
In a referendum debate speech, the journalist Walter von Cube offered extensive explanation of why he believed Heimat was crucial to democracy. Not himself a Badener, Cube was from a Baltic-German family, spent most of his life between Munich and Stuttgart, and had been banned from journalism during the Third Reich. Speaking on the Southwest state debates, Cube denounced a “Prussian” militarist idea of Germanness and attacked those who saw focus on region as “post-coach romanticism or treason,” ascribing to such views a Nazi understanding of space. Denouncers of “petty statism,” he argued, believed “that the Southwest state is more German than Baden, that Bonn is more German than the Southwest state, an empire more German than the federation, and a Führer more German than the Empire.” Radicals on both ends of the spectrum, he argued, pushed centralism, while federalists held the democratic middle. The “germ of dictatorship,” he continued, was in the “herd that has the ambition to be ever more numerous, ever more unitary, ever more powerful.” By contrast, within the “visual range of the Heimat-like church tower” or the “reach of the Heimat-like parliament,” citizens possessed a realm of political responsibility. Those who denounced localist “church-tower politics,” he continued, were those who wanted to transform such towers into “observation stations” for a “unitary-German artillery.” Europe had been turned into a grave field by those who “loved the colossal” and labelled people who valued the “particular” as traitors. In the future, he concluded, they must not view opposition to unitarism as the un-German romanticism of regionalists who wanted their own stamps. It was a demand for federalist democracy.Footnote 80
Regional intellectuals made similar arguments, including Max Picard, the Badenese author of Hitler in Ourselves. Writing about the referendum debates, Picard argued that “small states” and “concrete” places were crucial to denazification. The ghastliest development of their time, he wrote, was “Großstaaterei” rooted purely in the “abstract.” The term Großstaaterei, or “grand statism,” was a neologism and inversion of the nineteenth-century nationalist curse word “Kleinstaaterei” (petty statism). For Picard, excessive emotional focus on “abstract space” was a cornerstone of an “abstract Hitler dictatorship” and he encouraged focus on “concrete” spaces as the foundation of a new democracy.Footnote 81
Amongst Baden’s politicians, Wohleb was the most prominent articulator of such ideas. He came to symbolize the pro-Baden movement, and Badener wrote him stacks of mail about their regional feeling. Southwest staters, meanwhile, pilloried the bespeckled Wohleb, including in cartoons depicting him as a defeated Napoleon – playing on Wohleb’s short stature and the Napoleonic origins of Baden.Footnote 82 After 1948, Wohleb regularly rallied against technocrats who, he argued, only cared about technical function and economics and “wanted ‘bigger’ spaces.” Such mentalities, he argued, derived from a “Prussian” tradition of centralism and idealization of power and warfare that fed into the rise of Nazism. A federalism rooted in regional Heimat, he believed, offered a remedy.Footnote 83 He drew on the ideas of the federalist theorist Franz Kramer who spent the Nazi years in Swiss exile and argued for a federalist model rooted in “Heimat” and the locality. Germans must look to Switzerland, Wohleb argued, and how it contained national excesses. An “abstract disembodied Swiss soul,” he argued, does not exist as each Swiss person has a canton identity stronger than an abstract notion of Swissness.Footnote 84
Citizens’ letters to Wohleb – which sometimes included attached Heimat songs and poetry – revealed the appeal of his ideas.Footnote 85 A letter from one Freiburg doctor to Wohleb insisted that Badener were forcing the nation to decide whether it was serious about federalism or using it as a facade to hide “awakening centralist and totalitarian tendencies.”Footnote 86 Another wrote of the widespread dislike of centralism and that they must make clear that Baden would not be a vassal of the centre.Footnote 87 Yet another underscored how Heimat must mediate and moderate national identity. Bavarians, Hessians, Pfälzer, Badener, and Swabians, he argued, must have their own federal states. Without them, people would have to simply call themselves “Germans” – a prospect many viewed with aversion.Footnote 88 The writer was not alone in viewing being “just German” as anathema. The relation had striking parallels to the Lübeck citizen who argued that being “just German” represented an abhorrent “Prussian” national idea.Footnote 89
Voices of support for Baden’s cause also came from federalists outside the region. A 1951 “Federalism Day” was held in Karlsruhe to coincide with the referendum. Attendees who came from throughout West Germany denounced unitarism as the essence of “totalitarian machinations” and argued for federalism as a basis of internationalism and European unification.Footnote 90 Switzerland’s function as a role model represented a major conference theme.Footnote 91 Even Swabian federalist theorists, including Waldemar Kurtz, were critical of the referendum’s undemocratic voting procedures. Kurtz, the author of a 1951 work entitled “Municipalities are More Important than States,” was himself primarily concerned with localist forms of democracy. He emphasized the need for Germans to turn away from a “Prussian” state model to a “Swiss” local democratic model as the foundation for a more humanist state.Footnote 92
Tellingly, the term “Badenese democracy” was peppered throughout the debates. In forging such narratives, Badener drew on many of the same “democratic” histories as Feger, though placing them in a different geographic container. Baden supporters highlighted their state’s early democratic constitution of 1818 and the region’s importance in the 1848 revolution and the Weimar Republic. Like Cologners who used the 100-year anniversary of 1848 to remember Rhenish revolutionaries, Badener used the anniversary to celebrate their own regional democratic figures. Works like that of the regional historian Jean Sigmann used the anniversary to argue that the Badenese revolutionaries were part of a history of “Badenese liberalism” that regionalists could draw upon.Footnote 93 Similar use of memories of 1848 could be found in other regions, with large memorial events held in Frankfurt.Footnote 94 Frankfurters emphasized the democratic symbolism of the Paulskirche, the meeting place of the 48ers.Footnote 95 In Nuremberg, the German National Museum similarly hosted a major exhibition on the revolution of 1848, while many Nuremberger sought to connect to local humanist, democratic, and socialist histories.Footnote 96
After the 1948 anniversary, Badener continued evoking the revolution of 1848 as they wove narratives about regional democracy. In the Bundestag, Hermann Kopf, a CDU politician whose family had been killed in the bombings of Freiburg, rhapsodized about how Baden was a “sanctuary” of democratic tradition and a “place of Heimat for our democratic freedom.” He gestured to the state’s early democratic constitution and democratic heroes, including the 48ers Struve and Welcker and the Weimar politicians Fehrenbach and Ebert.Footnote 97 In other speeches, Kopf emphasized a tradition of Upper-Rhenish humanism.Footnote 98 Baden democrats from the Weimar era also chimed in. This included Wirth, the Weimar Chancellor, who insisted that desire for freedom was a “Badenese” value. He further reminisced about the importance of Badenese democrats to the Weimar Republic.Footnote 99
Wohleb advanced narratives of Badenese democracy with particular alacrity. As one journalist later recalled, Wohleb believed they must keep their state and its liberalness as a voice in the “acoustic colour” of the nation.Footnote 100 Beyond praising their role in the 1848 revolutions, Wohleb recounted how Max von Baden led Germany towards a parliamentary democracy after 1918, informed by “moderate Badenese thinking.” He further recited the role of prominent Badener in the Weimar Republic, including Ebert, Wirth, and Fehrenbach. Wohleb could not help but mention in passing that Badenese presence in Nazi leadership had been small, reflecting a clear regional evasion of guilt. Wohleb further argued that Baden balanced tradition with an “open-minded progressiveness” and revolutionary change.Footnote 101 Wohleb received letters from citizens articulating similar sentiments. As one Freiburg priest wrote to Wohleb in 1952, he supported Baden as his ancestors fought in 1848 for their “true democracy of Baden.”Footnote 102 A North Baden regionalist group argued that Baden’s revolutionary spirit contrasted with the “spirit of subservience” of other Germans and that Badener should be proud of their regional resistance to tyranny.Footnote 103
Narratives of Badenese democracy also drew on a two-dimensional Prussian foil in a similar way to Rhenish regionalists. In a radio programme on Christmas 1948, for example, Wohleb denounced how “Prussiandom” led to the misfortune of Germany through “glorification of the principle of power,” “idealization of war,” and “deification of the state.”Footnote 104 Baden supporters expressed consonant sentiments in letters to Wohleb. Johann and Elisabeth Kottmaier, both doctors in Baden-Baden, wrote to him denouncing a Prussian-Nazi tradition of centralism and submission to authority, the spirit which they believed could be seen in the undemocratic framework of the referendum.Footnote 105 In rejecting “Prussian tradition,” Badener also found moral support from the French occupiers, with De Gaulle delivering a speech in Baden-Baden arguing that, if the regions along the Rhine wanted to belong to the West, they must abandon the idea of a “Prussian-oriented Germany.”Footnote 106
Neighbouring Württemberger, who largely supported union, articulated their own narratives about democracy as a local or regional value. As the Southwest state supporter and lord mayor of Ulm insisted, Ulmer were proud of their democratic history that went back to their city’s constitution of 1397 which made every citizen part of the political system.Footnote 107 Swabian-Alemannic regionalists who supported fusion also brandished their federalist credentials. As Müller, the minister president of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, argued, they shared Badener’s federalist convictions but they believed that Baden and Württemberg were part of a single region. Müller attempted to debunk notions that Alemannen in Baden and Swabians in Württemberg were different peoples, quoting a ninth-century Abbot who wrote that the terms “Alemannic” and “Swabian” were simply Latin and Germanic terms for the same group.Footnote 108 Pulling on the idea of Baden as a Napoleonic “accidental state,” one Southwest state political cartoon depicted voters taking control by blasting Napoleon out of the picture, while union referendum mailers maintained that their regional cultures stretched from east to west and not north to south.Footnote 109 As a Catholic cleric in his mid thirties from a small Baden town near the French border argued, union eliminated an artificial border.Footnote 110
Baden supporters held the line against Swabian-Alemannic regionalists, adamantly insisting that Badener were not “Swabians.”Footnote 111 They also rejected being labelled a Napoleonic state by arguing that the geography of the Rhine had shaped the state’s culture.Footnote 112 Non-regionalists who supported union based on technocratic, nationalist, or economic reasons, meanwhile, had little patience for arguments about regionalism. Nationally strident politicians like Maier believed that the question of whether Alemannen and Swabians were part of the same regional group had reached “tragi-comic” proportions.Footnote 113 Other more sympathetic figures, including Carlo Schmid, simply concluded that regional culture could not be used in fashioning statecraft.Footnote 114 Yet another group of fusion supporters had a different point to make: Heimat in a democracy, they argued, must be local and private and must be kept out of politics altogether.
Democratic Heimat Feeling as Private and Local
In the summer before the referendum, Badener in a range of towns from the Black Forest to the River Main took to public squares and green spaces to celebrate the Baden “Day of the Heimat.” This was not the expellee tradition of the same name, but rather a celebration of Baden regionalism conceived of and funded by the state of South Baden. The state urged localities to arrange festivities and slated performances of groups in regional costumes, further inviting performers from Switzerland, France, and Austria to join to highlight how the state of Baden was an international bridge.Footnote 115 Event posters included one nearly identical to a Baden referendum poster, displaying a woman in regional costume, scrolled with the words “your heart to the Heimat.”Footnote 116 The seemingly light-hearted affair, however, quickly elicited consternation.
A number of Baden mayors refused to organize events, while a group of Southwest state FDP parliamentarians expressed outrage on the floor of the state parliament. Friedrich Vortisch, an FDP representative from Lörrach, praised his hometown for refusing to participate. This was not because they did not love their Heimat, he argued, but because they were against the “abuse of the Heimat idea for political purposes.” That had been done for twelve years under the Nazis he argued, insisting that he worked against Nazi appropriation of the Heimat movement in his own Lörrach Heimat society.Footnote 117
Vortisch’s FDP colleague Willy Stahl, a native Badener and Heimat enthusiast, also spoke to denounce excessive politicization of Heimat as undemocratic. States cannot force people to celebrate festivals and sell state emblems, he argued, with Vortisch interjecting that it evoked “fatal memories” of a totalitarian state. They did not need top-down Heimat festivals, Stahl continued: from the Hans-Thoma-Fest in Bernau or the Bühler Zwetschgenfest, localities already had their own grassroots Heimat festivals. A better type of Heimat event, he argued, could be found in the Heimat evenings in Titisee, where newcomers were invited to learn about local traditions.Footnote 118 The episode illustrated a tension between notions of democratic Heimat feeling as private and local and the idea that it should re-enforce regional federalist structures. These dual notions circulated throughout West German Heimat discourses and, in moderation, were not necessarily incompatible. In Cologne and the Hanseatic cities, federalist Heimat enthusiasts had often argued that federalist decentralization itself represented a means of protecting a realm of private life from excessive ideological appropriation. Taken to their extremes, however, the two positions became more difficult to reconcile.
Those Southwest state supporters who argued that Heimat feeling should be strictly private developed the campaign slogan “Heimat will remain Heimat” to insist that federal state borders were irrelevant. In the Unification Working Group’s booklet of alphabetized debate terms, the group articulated the same position under the entry for “Heimat.” It described it as an inviolable private landscape: “Heimat is the valley, the place where the crib stood, it is the village and the city.” It downplayed the region and emphasized the locality, and outlined what Heimat was not: “Heimat is not the state, the county, the district of some secular or religious agency.” Political districts could be changed, but Heimat endured as it came from “God’s grace” and not from “Napoleon’s grace.” It could be, however, a “Heimat of choice,” the booklet argued, gesturing to the expellees.Footnote 119 Baden supporters retorted that Heimat was both local and regional, while the Baden State Parliament declared that a reunified Baden was to be a state of “inner-decentralization,” that contrasted with the “centralist phantom” of a Southwest state.Footnote 120 A pro-Baden referendum pamphlet, in turn, depicted a Southwest state as a sea monster based in Stuttgart whose tentacles clasped onto Baden’s cities (Figure 4.6). In response to Badenese rhetoric, Gebhard Müller, himself a convinced federalist, rejected charges that a Southwest state would be internally centralist.Footnote 121
Figure 4.6 The Southwest state as a centralist sea monster. (1951)
Advocates for Heimat as strictly private argued that administrative and economic concerns should determine state borders. The economic benefit of a larger state, they argued, would assist reconstruction, making it both a “demand of reason and love of Heimat.”Footnote 122 Economic arguments had an outsized presence in materials from the Unification Working Committee, which was financed by industry. As one of their leaflets argued, a larger state would benefit economic growth and have a more efficient system of administration.Footnote 123 An analysis of voting patterns, as we shall see, suggests that promises of minor economic benefits had little influence, with variations in voting returns coinciding with identification with a particular regional idea. Baden supporters, for their part, described privileging industrial and technocratic concerns as a danger to democracy. The Baden Working Group particularly harnessed an anti-technocratic spirit in posters depicting a suited hand grabbing their state – stopped by the hand of the common manFootnote 124 (Figure 4.7). In a similar tone, one Badener argued in a radio address that the common people would be left at the mercy of clauses and bureaucracy in a large state. Though they had entered a technological age, he argued, it did not mean they should be “bedazzled” by ridiculous visions of “size” which he believed had recently led the German people to misfortune.Footnote 125 For the small fraction who embraced fusion based on unitarist or nationalist sentiments, however, size was paramount.
Figure 4.7 Pro-Baden poster, “Keep your hands off of Baden.” (1951).
Fighting “Petty Statism” and Spectres of Gleichschaltung
Speaking on the radio in 1951, the Sudeten German Karl Butenek presented what he argued was the expellee position on the Southwest state. It was well known that expellees overwhelmingly supported union.Footnote 126 Butenek elaborated on how eastern German “Heimat-political” factors partly determined their advocacy for union. Expellees, he argued, rejected “petty statism” and saw the Southwest state issue as a “complete German” question. By creating larger units, he argued, they would be promoting “stronger state formations.”Footnote 127 The expellee population of the Southwest would vote overwhelmingly for the Southwest state. It represented a considerable voting bloc, with a population of one million that was disproportionately located in North Baden.Footnote 128
Those in the debates who denounced Badenese “petty statism” consisted primarily of nationalist groups, political elites, and industrial interests. Their support for union, however, put them on the same side of the referendum as federalists like Feger, whose understanding of region and democracy was quite different. The former groups described “particularism” as a “lethal” phenomenon furthered by those who sought excessive independence under the guise of federalism.Footnote 129 In a 1949 survey in Baden, a minority described opposition to petty statism as informing their support for union, though the poll did not differentiate between Badener and expellees. One apothecary, aged twenty-eight, held that “petty-statism is Germany’s misfortune,” while a doctor, aged forty-two, argued that they needed to overcome local patriotism. Similarly, a sixty-two-year-old employee argued, “We must think German, and not Badense.”Footnote 130 Baden supporters fumed at Southwest staters who denounced “petty statism” or described Badener as anti-national, insisting that their efforts were reminiscent of Nazi Gleichschaltung (co-ordination). They would fight, so the former Weimar Chancellor Wirth argued in a referendum leaflet, against all forms of “Gleichschaltung.”Footnote 131 Another Baden supporter evoked the memory of Gleichschaltung in a 1951 radio address in which he argued that large states and bureaucratic apparatuses threaten democracy. He supported Baden, he argued, based on the principles of democratic thinking.Footnote 132
In arguing that denouncers of “petty statism” had a Naziesque view of space, the Baden Working Group pointed to the work of the Karlsruhe geographer, union supporter, and former Nazi party member Friedrich Metz. Metz was hardly a fan of federalism and believed that “Badenese particularists” hid their national disloyalties behind the name of “federalism.”Footnote 133 A Badenese people, Metz argued, did not exist, and he advocated for unifying Baden and Württemberg and later annexing the Palatinate.Footnote 134 The Baden Working Group dug up a 1934 address that Metz delivered on the “Alps in German Space,” in which Metz argued that excessive regional orientations damaged the nation. There was not an Austrian or a Prussian Stamm, Metz argued in 1934, but only “a German people and a German nation.” Metz’s 1934 speech warned Alpine Germans against their tendency towards excessive inwardness and remaining crouched in the “narrowness of their valleys.” The Baden Working Group, reflecting on the 1934 speech, argued that Metz was a criminal and denounced his “Nibelungen-like large spatial thinking” which they believed informed his support for the Southwest state.Footnote 135
These divergent views on Heimat, democracy, and federalism, both between and within the two referendum camps came into full view in an explosive display in the Bundestag in January 1951, as parliamentarians gathered to decide the referendum voting districts. The Baden CDU representative Anton Hilbert took to the floor to address the role of the region in a new federalist democracy. Hilbert had been active in the Centre Party during the Weimar years, was briefly arrested in 1933, and worked in industry until 1945. Returning to politics after the war, he had been on the Parliamentary Council that drafted the Foundational Law. Addressing the Bundestag, he argued that Württemberg and Baden state consciousness proved an essential basis for a federalist democracy.Footnote 136 He immediately came under attack from the FDP representative August Euler, a former member of the Waffen-SS turned Hessian politician. Euler insisted that a Badenese people did not exist: only a German people existed. Euler’s unitary nationalism received support from another party colleague who denounced “petty statism” and argued that national interests must come first.Footnote 137 Responding to these arguments, Hilbert denounced Euler as an “unteachable unequivocal centralist,” warned against unitarism, and insisted that loyalty to Baden and the nation were compatible. A range of other parliamentarians supported Hilbert, including the Rhenish politician and member of the Centre party, Wilhelm Hamacher. Their new democracy, Hamacher argued, must avoid centralism at all costs and encourage a culturally rooted federalism.Footnote 138 Other representatives who supported a Southwest state, however, were also adamantly against Euler’s unitarism. Kurt Kiesinger, the CDU parliamentarian, native Württemberger, and future chancellor, vented frustration at both sides. He was, he argued, both a supporter of union and a “convinced federalist” and wished Badener could see that a unified state had a historical and cultural foundation. The SPD representative Erwin Schoettle seconded his views on their shared cultural heritage.Footnote 139 This federalist group of Southwest staters shared more in common with pro-Badener than the latter liked to believe. This included, among others, notions of regionalism as a potential ally in furthering European unification.
Bridges to the West, Barricades to the East
From the quadratic streets of Mannheim to Black Forest villages, locals during the referendum campaigns could see scores of election posters along their streets. Two telling posters in support of the Southwest state sought to elucidate the proper relationship of region to the national and European ideas. One read “Unified Europe? The first step is a Southwest state!”Footnote 140 The second depicted the black and red Württemberg flag and the yellow-red-yellow Baden flag as combining into a German flag.Footnote 141 The Southwest state, according to these posters, would serve European unification, while maintaining national loyalty. Both posters left much unsaid about how a Southwest state would do this – a strategic silence given the divergent reasons supporters had for advocating union. Baden supporters, however, equally pulled on the dual themes of regionalist support for European unity and loyalty to the nation, with many Badener defining their region as a bridge to France and Switzerland. This could be seen in one Baden pamphlet which depicted the state rejecting Nazi understandings of border regions as national bulwarks, which Badener replaced with a bridged landscape bustling with activities (Figure 4.8). The pamphlet also emphasized Baden’s simultaneous national loyalties and the “national act” of Baden recouping Kehl from the French – a town on the German side of the Rhine across from Strasbourg which the French had briefly annexed.Footnote 142
Figure 4.8 Baden’s transformation from national fortress to international bridge. (1951)
Though regionalists in other border areas argued for their regions as bridges across the national border, the Southwest confronted a unique challenge which gave affirmation of national loyalties added importance: many feared that the French would seek to peel away Baden from Germany as they were openly attempting to do with the Saarland. In 1951, fears of Baden “going the way of the Saar” remained a concern. The very formation of the snake-like state along the French border had, after all, been designed by Napoleon to make it uniquely susceptible to French influence. Uncoincidentally, the French also endorsed recreating Baden after 1945, citing its democratic and federalist histories, while the American occupiers endorsed the Southwest state.Footnote 143 West Germans proved more sceptical of the French occupiers than the Americans and the British. In 1952, for example, only 12 percent believed that the Americans had bad intentions toward West Germans. By contrast, 41 percent believed this of the French.Footnote 144 As a business owner from Mülheim argued, she supported union because she feared Baden going the way of the Saarland.Footnote 145
Given these circumstances, it is surprising that Baden supporters in the referenda appealed more to Baden’s Europeanness and bridge-building to France and the West than to national loyalties. As Reinhold Schneider, the Freiburg author and Baden supporter argued in 1950, their state was one of “transitions” and “bridges.” The “heritage of the Heimat,” he held, sat at the “foundation of the occidental world.”Footnote 146 The Heimat society Badenerland later reprinted one of Schneider’s quotations on its pamphlet cover, which described Baden as a “hall on the Rhine” whose windows were open to towers of Strasbourg and the Vosges mountains. Inside the pamphlet, the Heimat society defined their region as a “natural gate to the West.”Footnote 147 Similar ideas could be heard on the floor of the Bundestag. Reacting to the Southwest state argument that they needed a unified “block” against Bavaria in the federal parliament, the CDU parliamentarian Hermann Kopf responded that they did not need a “block” but rather a “bridge” to France and Switzerland.Footnote 148
Baden supporters often posited a connection between their federalist convictions and building a federalist Europe. As Cube argued, close-knit states would form a harmonic counterpoint to distant European decision-making structures – bringing the fruits of European unity into a comprehensible space. Baden, he argued, with its ties to Alsace and Switzerland, was the “German standard bearer of a European federation.” Nowhere else was the “wind of democracy” and “Latinity” (Latinität) stronger. Further rallying against the technocratic fraction of Southwest staters, Cube insisted that Baden must not be sacrificed to the intolerant “fanatics of utility.”Footnote 149 Wohleb was also an ardent advocate of Baden’s Europeanness. He had been involved in the pan-European movement since the Weimar Republic, and the French occupiers later praised him for his simultaneous local patriotism and European orientation.Footnote 150 As Wohleb wrote in 1948, European unity was a source of redemption in their final hour. A federalist democratic Germany, he insisted, could serve as a model for European unification.Footnote 151 Wohleb advanced ideas of Baden’s Europeanness, among other places, at his speech at the “Hebel Days” – an award event of Alemannic authors from Switzerland, Alsace, and Germany – where he argued that Badenese regionalism built bridges to their neighbours across the Rhine.Footnote 152
Nationalist politicians pounced on such narratives, again calling into question Badener’s national loyalties. Maier insisted that overcoming nationalism was not the problem; their problem was overcoming the worst historical tendencies of Germans to run to foreign powers to pursue their own interests against their fellow Germans.Footnote 153 Wirth assailed Maier’s charges, arguing that the enemies of Baden sought to misportray their efforts towards reconciliation with France. By being Badenese regionalists, he argued, they were not renouncing the nation.Footnote 154 Maier and more nationalist figures aside, the Southwest state camp, for the most part, went head-to-head with pro-Badener in arguing that a Southwest state would be a better agent of European unification. Müller, who believed Baden and Württemberg shared a common regional culture, described their region as both a pioneer in bringing “democratic foundational principles” to Germany and as having a “mediating and reconciling” function in international politics.Footnote 155 Others challenged Baden’s function as a viable international bridge. As one referendum pamphlet in Freiburg argued, those in the Baden movement could not even reconcile themselves with Württemberger, much less the French and the Swiss.Footnote 156 One Southwest state booklet insisted that the Southwest state would form a better “bridge” to France as they would be securely part of the Federal Republic and not French puppets; true reconciliation, it argued, could only occur when France and Germany were mutual partners.Footnote 157
Southwest staters offered divergent explanations for how fusion would serve European unification. For some, it was simply about doing away with borders. As one Württemberg professor held, the Southwest state reduced the number of borders along a common western cultural space that stretched from Vienna to Paris.Footnote 158 Baden supporters described such notions as unitarist. As the Badener Hans Haupt argued in a radio address, a unified Europe could not be realized by forcing states into a “coordinated monstrosity”; orientation to smaller spaces, he believed, would best serve the goal of European unity.Footnote 159 For other Southwest staters, a fused state would serve European unity by drawing on their common Swabian-Alemannic cultural heritage. Feger and Dietrich advanced this argument, which could also be seen on the other side of the Rhine. As one professor from Nancy argued in a Stuttgart speech in 1950, the Swabian-Alemannic spirit represented a “connective force of middle European space.”Footnote 160
While both sides competed over who could build a better bridge to the West, both argued that their state would represent a barricade against Soviet communism. In 1947, the pro-Baden head of the state FDP insisted that Baden supporters rejected separatism on the one hand and a “Prussian centralism under the banner of the hammer and sickle” on the other.Footnote 161 Federalism, he believed, represented a rejection of Soviet glorification of the centralist state. A fraction of Southwest staters, however, argued that Cold War imperatives meant they needed a less fragmented state. Responding to charges that a Southwest state cabal was “raping” Baden, one Southwest state pamphlet insisted that: “The raping of our Heimat derives from somewhere completely different: From the East! To thwart this, we need to create a tight, solid order in a healthy, strong federal state, the Southwest state!”Footnote 162 Some lay people in a 1949 poll cited Cold War concerns as their reason for supporting union. A housewife, aged forty-two, responded that the state would facilitate a “strengthening vis-à-vis Russia,” while a locksmith, aged twenty-five, argued it would assist in fighting Bolshevism.Footnote 163 To the dismay of many Badener, the Communist Party endorsed their state’s recreation, leading Southwest staters to draw cartoons of a smiling Soviet star above Badener and Württemberger sitting at a border fence.Footnote 164 Some scrawled on Baden posters “paid for by Moscow.”Footnote 165
Nazi Shadows and Juvenile Democrats
In aggregate, the referendums revealed both the breadth of attempts to identify with democracy and European unification and clear shortcomings of democratic practice, even by the more limited standards of the early post-war years. While this could be seen in several registers, it was particularly apparent in equation of referendum opponents to Nazis. On the one hand, it was telling that associating one’s opponents with Nazism had become the superlative political critique so soon after the war. On the other hand, Nazi comparisons revealed significant demagogic practices and pitfalls in democratic culture. Overblown Nazi comparisons could be found throughout the debates. As one Baden supporter noted in a referendum tract, while they had once faced the question of “Hindenburg-Hitler,” they now faced the question of “Württemberg-Baden.” Southwest staters, he argued, used Nazi tactics, including lofty promises and propagandistic annihilation of their enemies.Footnote 166 Another pro-Badener wrote an anonymous postcard to Gebhard Müller arguing that his dreams of a “Great Swabian Empire” will not be realized. He closed the postcard with the sarcastic line “Heil Maier-Müller! Heil.”Footnote 167 Southwest staters also made Nazi comparisons. In an anonymous tract, Theodor Eschenburg described Leo Wohleb’s politics as “Leo-Fascism” and dubbed the Baden supporter Paul Zürcher an authoritarian “police-state figure.” He compared both to Hitler and Stalin and argued the referendum was a choice between a real democracy and a “pseudo-democratic authoritarian regime.”Footnote 168 Nazi comparisons also came up in reflections on the sheer volume of political propaganda unleashed during the referenda. The Baden Working Group argued that the flood of Southwest state propaganda reminded them of the “methods of the Hitler party of 1933.”Footnote 169 The undersecretary of the Baden state administration wrote to Wohleb that they were witnessing a “relapse into the darkest times of unbridled need for propaganda in the style of Goebbels.”Footnote 170 A local branch of the Working Group argued that their opponent’s inability to respect other opinions was itself Nazi-like. This made their fight for Baden, they argued, simultaneously about the broader plight of post-war Germany.Footnote 171
The Bundestag’s adoption of gerrymandered districts demonstrated obvious pitfalls of democratic practice. The informational referendum of 1950 gave parliamentarians the data to establish districts that would predetermine the outcome in 1951. The Baden movement virulently protested the move by drawing on the language of regional democratic rights. Wohleb spoke of a “Badenese sickness” that spread throughout the nation, in which regional democracy could be violated at will.Footnote 172 Taking away the independence of a million people, so a Baden supporter in the Bundestag argued, meant the end of “democratic thought and action.” The turn away from Nazism, he argued, was supposed to lead to the triumph of the rule of law.Footnote 173 Another woman from Konstanz wrote how the machinations of the Southwest staters had taken an axe to the “tender plant of democracy” and that the voting model was in the style of Adolf Hitler. The matter was not simply one about Baden, she argued – it was about all of Germany.Footnote 174 Another citizen, in a letter to Wohleb, argued that the act of gerrymandering amounted to a “rejection of the sense of democracy.”Footnote 175 By 1956, the Federal Constitutional Court agreed that the model was unconstitutional and ordered a revote with Baden as a single district – an order that Bonn flouted until 1970. Several years into this obstruction, one professor wrote in the Rheinischer Merkur on the importance of holding a revote. The referendum, he argued, had been a “plebiscite á la Hitler.”Footnote 176
Demagoguery in the debates was omnipresent and observers themselves noted how it reflected the limits of democratic discourse. Müller insisted that democratic discourse involved a more objective balancing of competing interests and that prolific demagoguery in the debates conflicted with their region’s “true democratic tradition.”Footnote 177 Both sides, however, launched a veritable campaign of annihilation against their opponents. Baden supporters, for their part, used propaganda pieces to depict Southwest staters as imperialists, Prussians, Nazis, abusive housewives, or tyrants who locked the young girl Baden in the attic.Footnote 178 A lower-level bureaucrat recalled in his memoirs that if Baden posters and brochures were to be believed, their Swabian neighbours were “mean, devious, egoists through and through, robots without hearts or spirit.”Footnote 179 The charge that Southwest state politicians were “raping” Baden fit within this demagogic rhetoric. The term stood out given the unwillingness of West German society to discuss the actual mass rape of women in the aftermath.Footnote 180 Southwest staters called on Badener to stop using the rape metaphor, as it was unsuited to democratic discourse.Footnote 181 Some in the Baden camp retorted that the term accurately described how Southwest staters threatened democracy.Footnote 182
The referenda also revealed the depth of exclusionary attitudes towards the expellees. Ideas of regional tolerance never gained the same foothold in the Southwest as they had in larger cities like Hamburg or Cologne – though they did appear. Wohleb advanced narratives of Badener as a people of “tolerance,” while the Heimatbund Badenerland argued for a regional tradition of “tolerance” and “liberalism.”Footnote 183 Yet, as one Offenburg citizen wrote to Wohleb, local hostility towards expellees made it difficult for them to find a new Heimat in the region.Footnote 184 Some in the Baden movement argued that expellees should not be allowed to vote in the referendum, given their lack of regional knowledge, short residency, and uncertain future in the region.Footnote 185 Private citizens wrote to Wohleb insisting that expellees must not water down native voices and expressing anger that such outsiders tipped the scales.Footnote 186 One of the most stunning examples could be found in a letter to Wohleb from a former low-level Baden bureaucrat Julius Glatz, who was fired given his membership in the Nazi party before 1933. His letter conveyed intense hatred of expellees, who had “infested” the region and were taking native’s jobs. Revealing his clear ongoing racial mentalities, he denounced them as “Polaken” and “disguised eastern spies.” The Baden government, he argued, risked driving people to the Southwest state camp because of their punitive actions towards natives like himself.Footnote 187
Other regionalists spoke out against exclusion of expellees, including the Freiburg Archbishop.Footnote 188 At the Baden Day of Heimat, other regionalists argued for greater acceptance, with festivities including dialect poems expressing sympathy with the expellee plight.Footnote 189 In his tract on restoring Baden, Wirth similarly emphasized the importance of embracing expellees into the “Badenese home.”Footnote 190 Other overtures, however, fell flat, including referendum posters which implied that both Badener and expellees faced loss of Heimat.Footnote 191 Expellees, unsurprisingly, reacted hostilely to such comparisons.Footnote 192
Disparate Geographies of Regional Heimat
An analysis of the geographic spread of voting returns reveals how arguments about regional belonging proved most determinative. For the sake of analysing the results, referendum arguments can be broken down into two categories: i) arguments about regional belonging and federalism and ii) arguments related to non-regionalist questions, including administrative and economic efficiency and nationalist arguments for a stronger central state. The latter category of arguments were all made in favour of union. The geographic distribution of votes, however, was clearly most influenced by cultural factors which influenced territorial imaginings of region. The final aggregated results would suggest a close referendum, with 52.2 percent of Baden as a whole voting against union. Breaking this down into districts, 37.8 percent voted for union in South Baden and 57.1 percent in North Baden.Footnote 193 Breaking this down further by county, however, reveals an expansive statistical spread (Figure 4.9). In Baden counties like Bühl, only around 10 percent voted for union, while in Pforzheim, locals voted in droves for the Southwest state at a rate of almost 90 percent. Urban versus rural contexts reveal little correlation. Votes for union were only slightly higher in urban centres, while cities of comparable size voted very differently. While 31.6 percent of Karlsruhe, for example, voted for fusion, Heidelberger did so at a level of 70.4 percent. In the far northern rural counties like Mosbach, voters supported fusion by almost 75 percent while similar rural counties around Baden-Baden never broke the 20 percent mark. Distributions of political party support also did not bear out in results, with counties with similar voting in the 1949 elections providing radically different returns in the referendum.Footnote 194
Figure 4.9 Southwest state referendum results (1951).
Where such factors offered little or no correlation, others proved decisive. A range of factors influencing cognitive maps of region were deeply inscribed into the voting map, including dialect and historical state boundaries, confession, and geographic boundaries that historically influenced regional culture. The greatest outlier in returns proved a case in point. No county in Baden came close to embracing fusion as enthusiastically as the nearly 90 percent of citizens around Pforzheim. The county was a fluke in another category: it was the only one in Baden which spoke a Swabian dialect also spoken by the majority of Württemberger. The boundaries of the Electoral Palatinate in the north could also be clearly deciphered, as could the dialect boundaries that ran through the Black Forest. As Otto Feger noted, the dialect subgroup west of the Black Forest voted significantly higher for Baden than those to the east, with some seeing the forest as a border between regional cultures.Footnote 195
The boundaries of historical regional states could also be seen. It was no coincidence that the area with the highest rate of support for restoring Baden (around 90 percent) came from areas around Baden-Baden. These areas had been the core of the original state of Baden prior to Napoleonic expansion. As the former capital, Karlsruher had a strong Badenese identity, which informed their significant rejection of fusion. Confessional geographies could also be deciphered, with Baden Catholics more likely to reject unification with Protestant-majority Württemberg.Footnote 196 Southwest state supporters were aware of this trend and targeted Catholics with leaflets that held it was not their religious obligation to support Baden.Footnote 197 What ultimately sunk the Baden movement, however, was a conglomeration of factors in North Baden that influenced imaginings of region. While the North had a greater number of expellees, they also spoke West Franconian dialects, while many in the areas of the “Electoral Palatinate” around Mannheim and Heidelberg shared a common sense of region with the Palatinate across the Rhine – an area that belonged to the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Regionalists in Mannheim and Heidelberg, in turn, pushed a movement to unify Baden and Württemberg with the understanding that the state would form the basis for later integration of their Palatinate cousins across the Rhine. Regionalists in the area thus developed their own Heimat societies and journals which advocated for a unified Southwest state.Footnote 198
The debates, in short, revealed both the central role of regional belonging in how citizens voted but also how they had very disparate cognitive maps of region. These disparate imaginings were hardly limited to the dual referendum options, with dozens of competing visions of region emerging during the debates. As a Freiburg librarian argued, his Heimat encompassed a German–Swiss area from the northern Black Forest to Zurich, Lake Constance, and the Vosges mountains, which stretched across several borders that he never felt to be natural.Footnote 199 Hermann Hesse, from Calw on the Württemberg side of the Black Forest, asserted that, for him, Heimat was on both shores of the Upper Rhine.Footnote 200 Ideas of a federalism built on regional belonging, in short, ran into an intractable problem. The question of who belonged to what region had never been clearly defined. In turn, southwesterners were never able to agree on who possessed regional sovereignty and whether it was being violated. This dynamic, moreover, was hardly limited to the Southwest. A parliamentary committee, tasked with drawing up a new West German federal map, faced the same problems throughout the early 1950s as it grappled with the constitutional requirement that states be redrawn by considering, among other things, a shared sense of regional belonging. An army of historians, linguists, folklorists, art historians, political scientists, and experts in a range of other fields who worked for the committee failed to offer any coherent answers and demonstrated prolific divergences in cognitive maps of region.Footnote 201
After the referendum, these disparate imaginings of region were again on full display as politicians, historians, and geographers struggled to find a state name and symbols for the “Southwest state.” What name could encompass everyone’s regional feeling? What histories, geographies, or cultural legacies could be evoked? Suggested names included Rheinschwaben, Altschwaben, Großschwaben, Schwaben, Alemannien, Baden-Württemberg-Hohenzollern, Zollern, Neckarland, Donau-Rhein, and “Wühoba.” Regional archives collected petitions from experts and citizens. Two congresses of historians, Heimat researchers, and geographers decided overwhelmingly in favour of the historic name Schwaben.Footnote 202
Lay citizens had other ideas. In the Black Forest, one newspaper reported that most wrote supporting Alemannien or Rheinschwaben, followed by names based on rivers.Footnote 203 Some wrote advocating for names like Donau-Rhein or Südrhein-Neckar, arguing that consciousness of a Swabian Stamm extending to the Rhine no longer existed.Footnote 204 One teacher from the Black Forest wrote that they should call the state “Zollernland” after the highest mountain at the state’s centre. It was a name with Heimat feeling, he argued, attaching a state Heimat hymn he composed.Footnote 205 Regionalists of all shades, however, reacted with horror at neologisms like “Wühoba” or “Bademberg.” One Baden-Badener, decrying such names, argued “Baden-Württemberg” would not be an improvement; Schwaben or Alemannen would be a thousand times better, as it would not be “artificial.”Footnote 206 The name Baden-Württemberg itself offended citizens from the tiny state of Hohenzollern. As one woman from Hohenzollern wrote regarding her injured Heimat sentiment, she hoped that the choice of the name did not mean the new state would follow the principle of privileging larger spaces simply because of their size.Footnote 207
The state crest proved no less contentious. Scores of drafters submitted drawings that mixed and matched colours and crests from a smattering of historical states, while others suggested regional landscape scenes. Some argued for deliberate exclusion of symbols, such as those of the nineteenth-century “accidental states.” When drafts were released, different groups expressed anger that their area was not represented. State archivists in Stuttgart, charged with collecting proposals, sketched their own caricature draft with Baden griffins, Staufer lions, and Württemberg stags devouring one another.Footnote 208 Rather than putting forth a coherent view of region, the adopted state name and crest simply aimed to avoid injuring regionalist feelings. It included a plethora of symbols, with the Staufer lions flanked by a Württemberg stag and Baden griffin, crowned with crests from Baden, Württemberg, the Electoral Palatinate, Franconia, Hohenzollern, and Anterior Austria. The name Baden-Württemberg was chosen as the one least offensive to Baden regionalists who were already mobilizing to legally challenge the referendum.
Conclusion
The referenda over the Southwest state proved to be lightning rods for debate over the spatial foundations of democracy. While small non-regionalist or anti-regionalist groups argued for a larger state based on technocratic, economic, or nationalist concerns, federalists argued for region as essential to advancing post-nationalist ideas of nation and fostering international reconciliation. Throwing overboard ideas of their regions as a fortress against the West, both Badenese and Swabian-Alemannic regionalists competed over which regional vision could best advance European unification.
Both groups of regionalists argued that having states based on regional feeling would bolster post-war federalism and that decentralization would provide comprehensible sites of participation. Regionalists, however, confronted intractable questions over where the “region” could be found in geographic space. While nineteenth-century “accidental” states like Baden became the site of regional identity for many, they had never fully supplanted alternative territorial imaginings of region. Others, however, believed Heimat in a democratic state should not be harnessed for politics at all, even within the context of federalism.
As in Cologne and the Hanseatic cities, regional identities offered a flexible resource through which many denizens in the Southwest sought to identify with a vaguely conceived idea of democracy. The Southwest did have a more rural and conservative inflection, while regionalists drew on their own particular histories. Southwesterners also looked more to a Swiss federalist model compared to their Rhenish or Hanseatic counterparts. Evocations of memories of 1848 and anti-Prussianism in fashioning regional “democratic” identities proved similar to trends in the Rhineland. The debates, however, simultaneously reflected the ongoing limits of democratic practice and culture. The gerrymandered voting districts, established in Bonn, sought to predetermine the outcome of the referendum in advance. Hostilities towards expellee voters demonstrated problems in integration, while use of regional histories to forge new “democratic” identifications demonstrated ongoing evasion of regional guilt for the Nazi past. While equating one’s opponents with Nazis represented the strongest weapon of the debate and revealed the degree of disidentification with Nazism in a formal sense, it also revealed problems with demagogic political practice and discourse.
