This chapter examines popular appeal to local Heimat as a site of political renewal in Cologne. It shows how democratically engaged localists advanced narratives of “Cologne democracy” and “openness to the world,” while replacing nationalist narrative of their region as a “Watch on the Rhine” with that of the Rhineland as a “bridge” to the West. Democratically engaged localists further argued that Heimat should be about promoting European unity and post-nationalist ideas of nation. Such groups constructed these narratives by pulling on useable local histories and reinventing local traditions. Such early democratic identifications, however, existed alongside major failures in democratic practice and frequent depictions of the Eastern bloc as an “anti-Heimat.” Emphasis on democratic local histories also aggravated failures to confront guilt for the Nazi past. Exclusion of newcomers also represented a significant challenge. More inclusively minded Cologners attempted to combat persistent exclusionary practices by arguing for “Cologne tolerance” as a local value and by insisting that a correctly understood Heimat concept should generate sympathy for the displaced.

The chapter examines conflicts between German expellee organizations and their critics about how the Heimat concept should be understood. It traces these conflicts through a study of annual expellee Heimat meetings – dynamic and often explosive events which involved personal reunion, cultural displays, political spectacles, children’s events, and medialized debates. Expellee leaders and their critics conflicted over whether Heimat should moderate or strengthen national sentiment. Loss of Heimat based on national ethnicity and redrawing of national borders underpinned more nationalist interpretations of Heimat in the expellee organizations. National politicization of expellee Heimat feeling, however, did not rely on personal intention to return to the East as some have argued. Nationally strident demands for a right to the Heimat in the East were also deeply bound up in recognition politics. Claims that expellee children had a right to Heimat in the East triggered further conflicts over the concept. Opponents of the expellee societies denounced their efforts to depict Heimat in the East as an ethnic inheritance and argued that personal experience of place was essential to the concept.

Moving from Cologne to the Hanseatic cities, this chapter demonstrates remarkably similar Heimat revivals and trends in local identity narratives in early post-war Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen. All three cities saw a major renaissance of local culture and emphasis on the value of Heimat in repairing community bonds and mobilizing for reconstruction. Democratically engaged locals argued for “democracy” and “openness to the world” as Hanseatic values and redefined the long-standing metaphor of their cities as “gates to the world.” Abandoning nationalist narratives of them as exit points of German power, such groups argued for their maritime cities as sites of international reconciliation. Locals wove such narratives by drawing on useful local historical memories. Hanseatic locals, however, reflected the same shortcomings in democratic practice, including persistent attempts to evade guilt for the Nazi past, gendered understandings of Heimat, and exclusion of newcomers. As in Cologne, more inclusively minded locals, however, sought to combat hostilities towards newcomers by engaging with the Heimat idea and arguing for “tolerance” as a local value.

This chapter examines major revivals of Heimat culture in the ruins of post-war Cologne and appeals to “Heimat” as a site of new beginnings. To put this case study in context, it begins with a brief pre-history of the Nazi years and shows how the regime selectively appealed to Heimat when in the regime’s interest, while suppressing ideas about Heimat which were out of step with the regime’s goals. The chapter then examines post-war appeal to local Heimat as a vital tool for repairing local community, healing biographical rupture, mobilizing for reconstruction, and providing a sense of therapeutic community. The chapter outlines how the script of finding new life through Heimat differed significantly from that of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft, and it explains how these differences redounded to the benefit of cultural demobilization in the aftermath. This and Chapter 2, however, also highlight Heimat enthusiasts’ considerable failures. This chapter concludes by exploring one failure in particular: persistent gendered ideas about home and Heimat in which male visions of home were privileged over those of women, re-enforcing the conservative gender norms of the period.

This introduction outlines the main questions and debates which the book addresses, followed by an overview of the history of the Heimat idea and the study’s methodological approach. While scholars have looked at post-war cinematic and literary Heimat tropes, the book argues for more attention to Heimat as specific sites of home. On the question of the concept’s Germanness, it steers a middle path that recognizes how the history of German-speaking Europe has shaped the concept, while acknowledging its connection to broader questions about place attachment. Rather than positing a single “German” understanding across time and space, the work approaches discussions about Heimat as an evolving and contested discourse about place attachments and their relationship to diverse political and social issues. The introduction continues by outlining the book’s contribution to debates about West German democratization, reconstruction, post-war confrontation with dissonant lives, and expellee history. It concludes by outlining the book’s findings on the history of efforts to eliminate the concept in the 1960s and left-wing attempts to re-engage with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Epilogue traces the afterlives of West German debates about Heimat in post-reunification Germany. It shows how public debates about the concept over the past three decades have primarily revolved around three issues: popular desires for home in the face of economic demands for mobility and flexibility, questions around immigration and integration, and the ongoing question of left-wing engagement with or disavowal of Heimat. All three issues have clear connections to the earlier West German debates, even if memories of these connections have often been lost. While the Epilogue shows how attempts to define the Heimat concept from the political left have remained contested, it demonstrates a growing trend towards engagement in the most recent Heimat debates over the past decade. Disengagement with desires for home, many have argued, has proven self-defeating, while many immigrant groups themselves have expressed deep desires for home in new places and have often argued for engagement with Heimat.

The conclusion outlines a collective civic national German identity, a “New We” that includes all citizens (departing from the exclusion e.g. of visible minority citizens in the lingering ethnobiological concept). As for its second meaning, the symbolic-emotional celebration of this New We, it argues that competing proposals (Leitkultur, Heimat, patriotism) are all essentialist and lost to the far Right, despite attempts by left-wingers to redeem them through redefinition. After deliberating once more whether Germany needs a national identity at all (it does), or whether it is postnational (it isn’t), the conclusion proposes that the contents of the New We be defined democratically and within the boundaries of the constitution. The conclusion closes with a utopian vision of open borders in which mobility has become a human right and a reminder that citizenship and passports are contingent – and that those least fortunate in “the birthright lottery” (Ayelet Shachar), the paperless, periodically be amnestied and naturalized as Germans.

This chapter analyses the move of historians away from text and towards the interpretation of visuals. Starting with art history’s turn to the social and the cultural, it traces the interest of historians for an ever wider group of images, including popular images. It also highlights the emergence of perspectivalism and transdisciplinarity in the field of visual history. The main bulk of the chapter is taken up with presenting a range of examples showing how the visual turn in historical writing has contributed to deconstructing national identites, class identities and racial/ethnic identities. Ranging widely across different parts of the globe it also discusses the deconstruction of religious and gender identities through visual histories that have in total contributed much towards a much higher self-reflexivity among historians when it comes to the construction of collective identities through historical writing.

After 1945, Romanian Germans explored multiple possibilities in their search to define a Heimat, taking us beyond the known narrative of the ‘other homeland’ in Germany. Their most hotly contested issue – where did they belong? – turned particularly acute during the Cold War, as the Romanian German community became more fractured and physically separated. Romanian German identity in this period, this chapter argues, was flexible and far more transnationally defined than often assumed. At its heart were opposing views of ‘regionalism’, nationalism, and belonging. Romanian German identity debates during this period operated on different scales in the community, which made identity contestation particularly messy. If the Landsmannschaften (homeland societies) in Germany encouraged greater emigration from Romania, other Romanian Germans, especially those close to the Lutheran Church, pushed back. Meanwhile, as this chapter demonstrates, the realities ‘on the ground’ reveal a rich cultural history of transnational Romanian Germans communicating across numerous borders, constantly rethinking their own roles in an uncertain Cold War.