History in Modern Germany (GSA 2002)
Date: Wednesday, December 04, 2002

Report: German Studies Association 2002 Session Nr. 91, The Periphery as
Center: Region, Nation, and Cultural History in Modern Germany

Moderator: David Crew, University of Texas at Austin

"Alsatians into Germans? The Politics of Germanization in Alsace-Lorraine
1870-1918"
Anthony J. Steinhoff, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

"Modernism Outside the Metropolis: Cultural Practice in Interwar Goettingen"

David Imhoof, Susquehanna University

"Pudding Pow(d)er and Stasi Vans: Interrogating Historical Memory in the
former GDR"
Daphne Berdahl, University of Minnesota

Commentator: Dieter K. Buse, Laurentian University


This Saturday afternoon session began with the assumption that local
experience has constituted one of the most salient and constructive
dimensions of "German culture" since the nineteenth century.  Recently Celia
Applegate and Alon Confino have encouraged historians to treat expressions
of Heimat as important media through which Germans have understood their
connection to national culture and politics. [1]  Studying a variety of
cultural activities from the early 1870s to the early 2000s, these papers
went further and underscored the fact that local conditions shaped not only
how Germans in those places experienced cultural and political change but
also the very direction of "German" culture and politics writ large.  As
examples of what Jack Hexter once called "splitters," the panelists
nonetheless began the process of delineating common criteria for "lumping"
avowedly local experiences together in a way that sheds light on modern
German cultural and political life. [2]

Anthony Steinhoff opened by maintaining that in post-1871 Alsace
Germanization took place, but not along the lines of what had been fostered
by state officials, primarily because no unitary German national culture
existed.  Offering an alternate metaphor to Confino's description of
nation-building as putting "national wine" into "local bottles," he
described the process as being closer to the blending of a fine scotch.
Steinhoff insisted that regional variants might contain elements of a
single, nationally-blended malt, but not all.  First Steinhoff looked at the
official politics of Germanization in Alsace and suggested such a policy did
not really exist, aside from efforts to limit the French language and the
creation of a new university with German faculty.  Nevertheless, the
majority of the Alsatian population was potentially "winnable for Germany,"
though state practices helped little.  However, if one examines Alsace as
part of a "nation of provincials," expressed in education, religion and
voluntary associations, then one sees "the Alsatians slowly bought into
larger German trends, adapting them to fit local situations and needs."
Thus a local culture developed, and by offering a local patrie without
questioning the larger fatherland, "Alsatians integrated themselves into the
German nation by adapting elements of the national product."

David Imhoof employed the concept of fusion to explain the utilization of
modernist rhetoric coming from other areas of Germany in the mid-sized,
conservative university town of Goettingen.  He began by examining the
building of a movie theater in 1929 in the modern "New Objectivity" style.
While this should have shocked conservative contemporaries, they instead
defended and extolled this building because it brought a "big-city movie
theatre" to the town.  In his second example, Imhoof showed how local
sharpshooting (Schuetzenwesen) leaders and advocates likewise valued their
1927 Bauhaus rifle range as a site for merging modernity with traditional
festivity.  In this instance he noted that "national discourses about
military readiness, masculine duty, and German identity" promoted "the
fusion of established local traditions and new, even alien aesthetics" well
into the Nazi era.  Imhoof's third case study was Goettingen's Haendel Opera
Festival, where Expressionist aesthetics combined modernism and baroque.  By
the 1930s "historically accurate" (Werktreue) performance had won out over
Expressionism at the Festival.  But Nazi leaders and sympathetic cultural
critics did not champion this shift as anti-modernism, instead they
emphasized the "seamless story of cultural progress and distinction."  The
desire to appear modern or to employ modern forms combined with local
institutions and ideas, so that the Third Reich leaders "did not have to
write the script: they simply added ideological and financial endorsement"
to existing institutions and ideas.  Imhoof closed by claiming that,
overall, the impact of modernism may be dramatic at an aggregate level, but
"it mean[t] the most at the local."

Daphne Berdahl moved to the present and the creation of the Leipzig Forum of
Contemporary History (ZGF), an eastern counterpart of the Bonn Haus der
Geschichte der Bundesrepublik.  She revealed a house of bizarre mirrors
where the museum's mission is to portray "the history of resistance and
opposition in the GDR" under the agenda of "comparative dictatorship
studies."  Berdahl's paper studied "local and national politics of memory"
through two cases of "museumification" of GDR history.  The ZGF, Berdahl
showed, sees itself as "a place of living remembrance" and insists that its
guides and institute staff see it that way as well, namely, as a "sequential
horror of socialist abuses," and as a "nationalizing project" offering a
"historical conception common to all Germans."  Berdahl then presented some
of the visitors' responses and why they thought that these museum
presentations were not their experiences.  Many visitors emphasized the
challenge of everyday living in the GDR rather than political resistance or
Stasi surveillance.  Berdahl next turned to the counter-narrative to the
hegemonic memory-making of the ZGF: the various "Ostalgie" projects that
seek to collect and present the material culture of everyday GDR life.
Often (and ironically) supported by state subsidy via work projects, these
private initiatives have collected the artifacts of the GDR and let them
bear witness.  But of what?  Berdahl offered interview answers that ranged
from memories to nostalgia to fragments of identity.  She concluded that the
comments of visitors and creators show "a highly complicated relationship
between personal histories, disadvantage, dispossession, the betrayal of
promises, and the social worlds of production and consumption."

Commentator Buse complimented the three authors for the strength of their
papers and the style of presentation (including illustrations which
highlighted the texts).  He pointed to two evident consequences of the
rethinking of identities and of making nation-states in the last twenty
years: 1) the impact of the theoretical construct of Benedict Anderson's
"imagined communities" and 2) the shift away from Berlin to the regions, to
ask how "national" played itself out elsewhere. [3]  Though the three papers
went all over the German map and to various locations, each probed the
degree of integration of a specific locale with the respective "national
state" realms, trends or memories.  Steinhoff suggested that Alsace in the
Imperial era became partly integrated into some national whole and thus
partly, though uniquely, "Germanized."  Imhoof used a small town to
demonstrate the fusion of old and new styles involved in modernism relating
to cinema, shooting clubs and Haendle festivals.  Berdahl was a world away
as she attacked the museum and memory manipulation in Leipzig.

The papers developed these concepts with novel evidence.  Buse asked, who
previously knew the degree to which Alsace followed German patterns of
associational life?  Who previously knew the work of the Vogesen club or the
varied responses to schooling laws?  But he also asked Steinhoff for more
information about the numbers of those who left Alsace and who refused
Germanization, the specifics of clubs' symbols and rituals, and individual
expressions of identity.  Further, does Steinhoff's perspective not
postulate a national whole and thus contradict his earlier model of regional
variants as he looks for degrees of integration?   Similarly on Imhoof's
paper: who knew that little Goettingen had an 820-seat cinema in the 1920s
where variety also loomed large?  Here local boosterism was presented as an
acceptance of modernity or as a fusion of outside forces with Goettingen's
unique setting.  Who knew that sharp shooters built a modern sophisticated
rifle range, fusing modernity with a traditional sport?  Imhoof showed
continuity into the National Socialist period and the effort to "integrate
Goettingen into national discourses. "  But, Buse questioned, what of the
perspective offered in Kinser and Kleinman's classic study _The Dream That
Was No More a Dream_, namely that monumentalism could serve many purposes?
[4]  Who knew that the Haendel festival tried to speak to the "modern soul"?
Buse agreed with Imhoof's conclusion about the variety of roles assigned to
culture and that "without studying the local we cannot understand the
development of German culture."  Yet, he asked, can we understand it without
wider comparisons?  Can we let modernism mean so many things?  Regarding
Berdahl's presentation Buse asked, who knew the degree of orchestration
attempted in the ZGF?  Berdahl showed the "nationalizating project" of
trying to create a common historical mythology and the responses to it.  Who
knew the intentions of the Ostalgie counter history and the poking of fun at
it?  Berdahl showed memory production and consumption, yet her context could
be drawn more widely.  If the museum production of the west--all those
institutes honouring male politicians from Adenauer to Ebert, from Brandt to
Bismarck--were considered, then the west again dominates modern German
history and that version that is propagated.  Berdahl did point out the
social element in various national memory works, but implicit in her account
is that place made little difference within the GDR, namely that that
society may have been well-integrated before re-unification.

In conclusion, Buse asserted that the three papers both confirmed and
challenged Anderson's notion of "imagined communities."  They pointed to the
failure of national homogeneity at a local level yet confirmed it in the
actions of groups and individuals active in constructing and reconstructing
communities, even when not creating a uniform national one.  These studies,
he continued, also underscored the need for comparative work.  Finally, the
panelists elucidated the process of integration into some national whole by
showing, in turn, the very limits to such integration.  All authors
confirmed the utility of getting away from the center and looking at the
periphery.

Dieter K. Buse, Laurentian University

NOTES

[1] Celia Applegate, _A Nation of Provincials: The German idea of Heimat
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) and Alon Confino, _The
Nation as Local Metaphor: Wuertemburg, Imperial Germany, and Memory,
1871-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

[2] J. H. Hexter, _On historians: reappraisals of some of the makers of
modern history_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 241-243.

[3] Benedict Anderson, _Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and
spread of nationalism (London: Verson, 1983).

[4] Bill Kinser and Neil Kleinman. _The Dream That Was No More A Dream: A
Seaerch for Aesthetic Reality in Germany, 1890-1945_ (New York: Harper &
Row, 1969).

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS