Heimat as a Geography of Postwar Renewal: Life after Death and Local Democratic Identities in Cologne, 1945–1965

Abstract

Through a case study on Cologne, this article examines an early postwar turn to local Heimat as a geography of renewal that offered visions of new postwar lives and new identities. A series of factors informed the local turn, including the decimation of home towns, loss of former local lives, elimination of the nation as a sovereign political actor and a need for local community in the face of social divisions and reconstruction. Heimat also came to the fore as a modifying force in ideas of nationhood. Rather than shedding national loyalties, the turn to Heimat involved a turn away from national struggle and towards local reconstruction to secure new civilian lives. By reformulating local historical memory and traditions, many Heimat enthusiasts argued for values of ‘Cologne democracy’, ‘openness to the world’ and ‘tolerance’ as important to democratization, European unification and outsider integration. These identifications remained proscriptive, existing alongside ongoing undemocratic and exclusionary practices, while aggravating failures to come to grips with the Nazi past. At the same time, they helped disband the notion that democracy and European unification were foreign entities. In showing how Heimat was crucial to early postwar culture, this study challenges notions of the concept as either taboo after 1945 or primarily about anti-Westernism, ruralism, repression of the past, regressive forms of environmental protection or self-victimization. It also contributes to research on West German democratization by pointing to often-overlooked popular attempts to forge identification with democracy in the early postwar years.