The Nation As a Local Metaphor

by Confino, Alon

• ISBN13: 9780807846650
• ISBN10: 0807846651
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

All nations make themselves up as they go along, but not all make themselves up in the same way. In this study, Alon Confino explores how Germans turned national and argues that they imagined the nation as an extension of their local place. In 1871, the work of political unification had been completed, but Germany remained a patchwork of regions with different histories and traditions. Germans had to construct a national memory to reconcile the peculiarities of the region and the totality of the nation. This identity project, examined by Confino as it evolved in the southwestern state of Wurttemberg, oscillated between failure and success. The national holiday of Sedan Day failed in the 1870s and 1880s to symbolically commingle localness and nationhood. Later, the idea of the Heimat, or homeland, did prove capable of representing interchangeably the locality, the region, and the nation in a distinct national narrative and in visual images. The German nationhood project was successful, argues Confino, because Germans made the nation into an everyday, local experience through a variety of cultural forms, including museums, school textbooks, popular poems, travel guides, posters, and postcards. But it was not unique. Confino situates German nationhood within the larger context of modernity, and in doing so he raises broader questions about how people in the modern world use the past in the construction of identity.

Table of Contents

Preface

Thinking about German Nationhood, 1871-1918

Thinking the Nation Thinking Germany Collective Memory German National Memory, 1871 Württemberg, 1871

Germany and Württemberg: An Uncomfortable Coexistence in Sedan Day

The Nation in the Locality The Abdication of the State Württemberg

Who Celebrated the Holiday, Where, and What Did It Mean?

The Celebration: Bequeathing Local and National Memories

The Pedagogical Holiday: National Wine in Local Bottles

Sedan Day: A Memory for All the Germans?

Society, Politics, and the Holiday Exclusion and the Appropriation of the Nation Rethinking German History before and after 1871

Birth of a Nation Feeling Swabian or Feeling German?

Local Land, National Land: A Nation of Two Germanies?

An Unfulfilled National Community Opposition

A National Holiday without a Nation The 1890s and the End of Sedan Day

Germany and Württemberg: A Nation of Heimats

A System of Knowledge and Sensibilities Heimat History

"Vivid, Conceivable, Popular" Heimat Nature

Poeticalness and Practicality Heimat Ethnography

Commemorating the Good Old Days Heimat and Modernity: Progress and Loss

A National Lexicon One, Two, Three…

A Thousand German Heimats The Word and the Organization Heimat

The Bourgeois Homeland Heimat Museums

A National History of Local and Everyday Life History and Memory

The Nation in the Mind Cityscape, Regionscape, Nationscape Homo Germanicus

The German Heimat: Illo Tempora Old Wine in New Bottles--Again?

Nature and Landscape

The Heimat Hometown

The Nation as a Mental Property Afterword: Heimat, Germany, and Europe

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.