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Epilogue

Paul Hammond

in The Strangeness of Tragedy

In the tragedies discussed in this book, the characters eventually move into the singularity of their own death, which has been prepared long before. From Agamemnon to Clytemnestra to Oedipus and ... More

In the tragedies discussed in this book, the characters eventually move into the singularity of their own death, which has been prepared long before. From Agamemnon to Clytemnestra to Oedipus and Macbeth, death occupies a pre-existing off-stage space into which they are summoned: a form of Heimat. These are all instances of der eigne Tod: completed tragedy. The journey which the tragic protagonist makes is one which takes him out of the shared Heimat, the common home with its agreed structures of thought, into a form of the unheimlich where the usual relations of time and space, signifier and signified, are deformed into strange shapes. In this dimension the individual may appear strong, may seem to have a Hegelian stature and solidity, but the work of tragedy is to estrange such a selfhood from the world around it and from itself. The foreign through which the tragic figure moves is a foreign which relates to the return home.Less

The Sense of Place: Representing the Local in the Modern City

Maiken Umbach

in German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924

This chapter argues that Heimat, the cultivation of a local sense of belonging, was integral not only to German nationalism, but also to German bourgeois modernism. It traces how markers of ... More

This chapter argues that Heimat, the cultivation of a local sense of belonging, was integral not only to German nationalism, but also to German bourgeois modernism. It traces how markers of place‐based sentiment were re‐moulded to suit distinctly modernist sensibilities, and then employed in a variety of urban settings. In Hamburg, reformers such as Fritz Schumacher transformed the iconography of the patrician city‐republic into a more sentimental rhetoric of place, capable of reaching out to new political constituencies. Although they had fewer distinctive local precedents to draw on, in Berlin, architects such as Hermann Muthesius, using English inspirations, created a modernist vernacular iconography, which came to dominate the new suburbs. The third case study explored here is the (partial) failure of attempts by reformers such as Karl Ernst Osthaus to transform the new industrial city of Hagen into the regional heart of the Ruhrgebiet.Less

Conclusion and Epilogue: Bourgeois Modernism and National Socialism

Maiken Umbach

in German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924

This epilogue compares German bourgeois modernism with Nazi cultural politics. It argues that continuities should not be studied in terms of isolated ideas, but through the constellations in which ... More

This epilogue compares German bourgeois modernism with Nazi cultural politics. It argues that continuities should not be studied in terms of isolated ideas, but through the constellations in which such ideas were operationalized politically. This approach is explored through a comparison of different uses of red brick, the archetypal Heimat material. For Schumacher, red brick invoked local traditions that invited an identification with place and civitas. For Fritz Höger, however, red brick embodied the archaic roots of civilization, and a spiritualist vision of collective salvation. Höger looked to material culture to forge a sense of social unity and political totality. He saw this as compatible with Nazi ideology, although after 1933, his work was rejected as excessively irrational. By contrast, bourgeois modernism, however repressive, also remained pluralist, thriving on the visible juxtaposition of history and memory, order and nature, nation and region, the progressive and the archaic.Less

Sailing to Bohemia: Utopia, Memory, and the Holocaust in Postwar Austrian and German Writing

Alfred Thomas

in Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City

Turning from interwar French responses to Prague, this chapter examines the elegiac treatment of the city as a site of nostalgia in postwar German and Austrian literature. Writers who represented ... More

Turning from interwar French responses to Prague, this chapter examines the elegiac treatment of the city as a site of nostalgia in postwar German and Austrian literature. Writers who represented this treatment include the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan; the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who left her native Austria and finally settled in Italy; and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, who spent most of his career in England. Enforced or self-imposed exiles from their origins, all these writers envision Prague as a second Heimat. Their experience of Prague is therefore nostalgic, an act of identification with a lost Heimat. In highlighting Prague's function as a space of the imagination, they tacitly acknowledge that the city is above all else a site of writing in which the fulfillment of desire is constantly postponed and therefore a permanent source of utopian hope. In part this was a response to the fact that Prague was one of the few central European cities to survive the destruction of World War II. But insofar as its Jewish population did not and its German inhabitants were expelled soon afterward, the city also becomes a site of memory and mourning, in particular for Celan, whose mother had fled to Bohemia from a Russian pogrom in 1915 and who was murdered by the Nazis.Less

Creating a Tradition: German Environmentalism, 1900 to 1945

Frank Uekötter

in The Greenest Nation?: A New History of German Environmentalism

The chapter follows the development of environmentalism avant la lettre from the late nineteenth century to the end of Nazi rule. It shows that German environmentalism showed a number of ... More

The chapter follows the development of environmentalism avant la lettre from the late nineteenth century to the end of Nazi rule. It shows that German environmentalism showed a number of peculiarities from its inception such as a large and diverse network of individuals and civic leagues on the national, regional and local level, a powerful and proactive state administration, and a pivotal role of scientific expertise. If we include the burgeoning Life Reform movement, we find a broad and diverse environmental scene that, though highly fragmented, was obviously booming before 1914. However, World War One was the start of three decades of crises that severely curtailed the prospects of environmental reform. The chapter also includes a discussion of the Nazi era. Generally speaking, Nazi rule did not mark a turning point in terms of environmental commitments and should be seen primarily in terms of power relations: while the ideological rapprochement of environmentalism and Nazi ideology remained incomplete and often smacked of opportunism, some environmentalists forged a number of alliances with Nazis. Most of them were short-lived and rather ineffectual. The Nazi history of environmentalism was first and foremost a history of opportunism and self-deception.Less

The “Living Community” in the Classroom

in Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany

This chapter investigates the transfer of the community concept into the setting of school reform via the curriculum proposed by Friedrich Junge and its reception within the communities of primary ... More

This chapter investigates the transfer of the community concept into the setting of school reform via the curriculum proposed by Friedrich Junge and its reception within the communities of primary and middle school teachers. It tries to demonstrate how the biological community concept shaded over easily into lessons about human community, Heimat, and expectations for good citizenship in the new German nation. Junge published Natural History in the Primary School: The Village Pond as a Living Community. His curriculum became a major vehicle by which the biological perspective spread out into the German population. His program also circulated with lightning speed through the ranks of schoolteachers in the 1880s. The Lebensgemeinschaft concept presented a naturalized parallel and reinforcement of the idea of “Heimat.” It reinforced the naturalness of the Heimat concept because it was taught as embodying a set of relationships rooted in nature.Less

Heidegger and the Political

Janae Sholtz

in The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political

Chapter Five develops the Heideggerian relationship between earth, art, and a people in both political and ontological terms. The first section delineates the multiple significances of earth, ... More

Chapter Five develops the Heideggerian relationship between earth, art, and a people in both political and ontological terms. The first section delineates the multiple significances of earth, revealing that the exercise of gathering multiple significances together emerges as the hallmark of thinking, essential for the emergence of a historical, philosophic people-to-come. The chapter explores what it means to become thoroughly unheimlich, as wanderers through what is strange so as to return to what is “ownmost,” examining Heidegger’s claim that becoming a “people” requires true historicity. The penultimate section links art and earth from Origin of the Work of Art to his later emphasis on Ereignis in anticipation of Deleuze’s crucial emphasis on thinking as event. The final section turns to Heidegger’s emphasis on Hölderlin and poeticizing as the place of the Ereignis of a people-to-come.Less

“O Afrika, Meine Seele ist in dir geblieben”: Heimat and Citizenship for German Settlers in the 1920s

Sean Andrew Wempe

in Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations

Chapter 2 looks at memory and imperial identity among former German settlers, those repatriated to Germany from East Africa after the First World War. Many former settlers, both those who had been ... More

Chapter 2 looks at memory and imperial identity among former German settlers, those repatriated to Germany from East Africa after the First World War. Many former settlers, both those who had been repatriated and those who remained in Africa in the new mandates controlled by Britain and South Africa, sought naturalization in other European empires or petitioned the new international system in hopes of autonomous rule for a German-African state that would answer only to the League of Nations itself. Like Pieter Judson’s ethnic communities in the Habsburg borderlands and Tara Zahra’s “nationally indifferent” Germans in the Bohemian lands, German settlers in and from Africa mercurially adapted their understandings of nationality in pursuit of their own self-interests. This chapter analyzes the ways in which the colony became the preferred locus of German identity for civilians who had lived in Germany’s largest settler colonies, German East Africa. The author focuses on memoirs of repatriated settlers who spent seven years or more in East Africa in order to demonstrate how the colony became a site of memory that served as a foil to what they viewed as the decaying German nation in Europe. Narratives of individuals from the German settlements of Morogoro, Tanga, Iringa, and Dar Es Salaam feature in this section, offering a balance of interior and coastal settings. The sample includes male and female settlers, taking into account a number of occupations and varying durations of settlement in the colonies.Less

Belonging, 1871–1914

Philipp Nielsen

in Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935

This chapter covers the period of the Second German Empire from 1871 until 1914. It describes the evolution of efforts to advance agricultural settlement and Germandom in the East and Jewish ... More

This chapter covers the period of the Second German Empire from 1871 until 1914. It describes the evolution of efforts to advance agricultural settlement and Germandom in the East and Jewish participation in these endeavors. It also investigates the reasons for German Jews’ attraction to state service. It traces how issues that were not initially linked to the causes of particular political parties or strong ideological leanings tended to move right over time, with or without Jewish participation. Hence, not all of the characters introduced here, who will feature throughout the book, could be fully situated or would have thought of themselves as on the Right before 1914. Considering the complexities of liberal and conservative political positions during the Empire, this is not necessarily something specific to them as Jews. This chapter elucidates these ambiguities.Less

Descent, 1929–1935

Philipp Nielsen

in Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935

In the last years of the Weimar Republic, beginning with the onset of recession in 1929, right-leaning German Jews faced an existential question: where would they fit into this reconfigured political ... More

In the last years of the Weimar Republic, beginning with the onset of recession in 1929, right-leaning German Jews faced an existential question: where would they fit into this reconfigured political space? For those Jews whose political identity placed them on the Right, the decline of the DVP and DNVP was of critical importance. They perceived class—or, more precisely, the working class model of Marxism—to be a threat on the order of antisemitism. The question for them was whether there would be room for German Jews in a Right that hailed a Volk based on racial descent. The chapter describes the attempts of German Jews on the Right to define and defend their place in the German Volk, or in other instances their turning away from their previous right-wing allegiances and toward alternative categories of belonging.Less

Conclusion

Philipp Nielsen

in Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935

The conclusion retraces the major developments within the German Right since the 1871 and the space of German Jews within it. In particular, it describes the fate of the three projects of the Right ... More

The conclusion retraces the major developments within the German Right since the 1871 and the space of German Jews within it. In particular, it describes the fate of the three projects of the Right in which German Jewish conservatives were involved: Germandom in the East, agricultural settlement, and the commemoration of the community of the trenches as a possible basis for a future German state. Though the Great War and the revolution also gave a basis, not least, for the community of the trenches, all of these projects came under strain following the establishment of the republic. The people rather than the state, race rather than soil or language, came markers of German identity on the Right and increasingly excluded Jews. The conclusion also traces developments after 1935, the analytical endpoint of the book.Less

“Greetings from the Zonal Border”: Tourism to the Iron Curtain

Astrid M. Eckert

in West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands

This chapter considers tourism to the Iron Curtain as a means by which West Germans and their visitors sought to make sense of the global Cold War through local activity. As early as the 1950s, the ... More

This chapter considers tourism to the Iron Curtain as a means by which West Germans and their visitors sought to make sense of the global Cold War through local activity. As early as the 1950s, the Iron Curtain attracted curiosity seekers and eventually turned into a well-developed tourist attraction. An elaborate tourist infrastructure emerged on the western side that allowed visitors to peek into socialist East Germany. The Iron Curtain was put on display in a way that prompted East German authorities to make efforts to render such visits less attractive for western tourists. Especially during the 1950s and 1960s, border tourism offered an outlet for West German anti-Communism and was frequently framed as a demand for German unity. The chapter reads border tourism as a skewed form of communication between West and East that stabilized the political and territorial status quo and helped West Germans become accustomed to partition.Less