In 1998, David Blackbourn observed that ‘space is too often a hidden dimension’ in historians' efforts to understand the past, and called for a more pronounced ‘Sense of Place’ in German history. Almost a decade later, new perspectives and approaches incorporating senses of place have contributed to understand that not only nations, but every community constructed their own places as ‘imagined communities’. This volume presented by David Blackbourn and James Retallack which emanated from a conference in Toronto in May 2005 brings together contributions on social, cultural, political, and environment history, and offers a good example in which ways ‘the ambiguities of place’ can broaden the horizons across these sub-disciplines.
The excellent introduction by Blackbourn and Retallack ties together the rather loose ends of the articles and addresses the uses of place ‘as a prism that allows us to view German identity in new ways’ (p. 4). Mainly focusing on the homelands and borderlands from the years of unification to the interwar period, they assume that multiple or hybrid identities are the norm, and that nation, region, religion, politics, class, gender, ethnicity, and generation are just starting points for deciphering the processes by which people shaped their identities and allegiances in different spatial settings (p. 7). They address the important question of how these various possible forms of collective identification could be combined in the minds of individuals, and ask which expressions these forms of identification found in a political and social structure that left many options for the paths of institutional growth during the 1860s and 1870s. In contrast to questioning German national narratives from a global and transnational perspective, Blackbourn and Retallack focus the lens on the subnational level to trace ambiguous feelings of belonging over time. They perceive ‘the local’ as an elastic concept and are thus able to comprise in it such different subnational perspectives as southern Germany, the federal states, and differently marked regions. The volume reminds us that questions of German identities became more, and not less, complicated with the foundation of the Empire.
The volume is divided into four parts (‘Placing cultures, moving cultures’, ‘Political cultures’, ‘Landscapes’, and ‘Language borders’). The idea of cultures on the move dominates the first part. Celia Applegate argues that high culture music and compositions can only be understood by considering their performances in different places and settings as modes of national identity formation. Jennifer Jenkins shows that the Worpswede artists' colony incorporated both traditional and modern elements in their Heimatkunst, showing that the constructedness of nature was an essential characteristic. James Retallack's thought- provoking article tells the story of Julian Hawthorne and his ‘Saxon Studies’, and shows the cross-fertilizations of experiences and expectations within the processes of cultural transfer. Hawthorne's misanthropic study of Saxon localism in contrast to a more unified Germany after 1871 referred to American negative experiences with states' rights, federalism, and the Civil War. His chosen place as a travelling observer was contested by contemporary Saxons who saw him as an uninvited foreigner, thus refuting Hawthorne's argument for mental and cultural unification from a local point of view.
Although Hawthorne touched eminent political subjects, he was not interested in local politics as such. In their essays, Eric Kurlander and Thomas Kühne follow the trail of political localism with particular emphasis on centre–periphery divisions and the role of local politics in shaping alliances and concepts of parliamentary politics in everyday practice. Eric Kurlander describes the relations between regional ideas and progressive politics in Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace to show how völkisch ideas provided a unifying effect between liberals and conservatives in the former, but a dividing line between liberals, clericals, and socialists in the latter borderland. Thomas Kühne looks at the electoral strategies in Prussia, and emphasizes the lack of local candidates with the Polish party, the SPD and the Catholic Centre party. Turning to the local political culture in associations and the Stammtisch, he convincingly argues that symbolic inclusion into the local community and increasing popular participation did not necessarily preordain a ‘good’ outcome of representative democracy. With ordinary people performing the nation in local communities, this practised democracy could hold ambiguous meanings and potentials of political mobilization. These findings refer to histories of institutions and personal experiences which could answer not only what people were performing, but also what they thought they were performing, and how these ideas in practice related to the sphere of institutions.
David Blackbourn's contribution explores the images of the German east borderlands. The idea of cultivated landscape was closely linked to cultivation images of the German east until Frederick the Great, which were produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and influenced by the American frontier myth. Thomas Lekan enquires into American and German approaches to the conservation and preservation of landscape, and highlights the relationship of natural landscapes and national character. With this particularly instructive research at hand, one can hope for further exchange with recent scholarship on the interactive constructions of cultural and industrial landscapes and heritage.
Turning to language borders, the essays on multi-lingual regions show how languages could serve as normative forces to structure and divide previously less partitioned regions. Caitlin Murdock's research on landscape constructions in Saxony refers to the political incentives in tourism after 1918 to mark the region as a contested borderland. Pieter Judson skilfully describes how the nationalist publicity on landscape and beauty in the Südmark between Austria and Slovenia contributed to successful appropriations of the territory.
The stimulating essays explore many, but not all, aspects of the broad terrain mapped out in the introduction. The strength of this volume lies in a rather open concept of the ‘local’. The editors reasonably make their case for a less dogmatic use of the term whose benefit lies in the shift of perspective towards the subnational. It serves as a descriptive term for re-reading meanings of the national, and not as a method or analytically concise tool. Therefore the present collection is an excellent starting point for further research to test the concepts of place, identity, and hybridity in their diverse historical forms.
