We have loved this book for more than forty years.Footnote ¹ Age cannot wither its intellectual charms, nor custom stale its endless teachability, especially in graduate seminars. As in any long relationship, there have been moments of vexation and irritation, but we return to this book over and over to be nourished anew by its originality, its insights, and its capacity not just to evoke a certain kind of German community but also to convince us that the values of such communities shaped much of German history right into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The analytical structure and argument of German Home Towns should lie at the heart of any attempt to appreciate and evaluate its impact, but we must also take into consideration the language of the book. For the language of German Home Towns has come to pervade discussions of German urban and political history, sometimes in completely unconscious ways. Start with the term “home town” itself—a deeply evocative American phrase, utterly un-German, which in Mack Walker's hands turned into a natural way to refer to certain types of German communities. Consider this passage from Peter Clark's authoritative new survey of European urban history:

Actually, of course, they were so called only by Mack Walker, to whom Clark makes no reference. But the term itself has by now become assimilated. And there are other memorable terms as well: the Holy Roman Empire as an “incubator,” the “regime of uncles,” and of course the “movers and doers” who were so antithetical to hometown values.

Of Mack Walker's many books, only one, The Salzburg Transaction, has been translated into German.Footnote ³German Home Towns, though arguably a much more important work and surely one that is more often discussed by German historians, remains untranslated. Perhaps one reason is that in some fundamental way the book is untranslatable. What would you call the “movers and doers”—Beweger und Täter? And, even more important, how would you translate “home town”? Heimatstadt? It doesn't work.

But what exactly was this German home town? According to Mack Walker, the German home town was defined in part by size: it was a community small enough to constitute a face-to-face society with “regular reciprocal relations between leadership and community”—a community in which, to use Rudolf Schlögl's more recent formulation, political interaction could take the form of “Kommunikation unter Anwesenden.”Footnote ⁴ For this to be possible, Walker posited a total population of not more than ten to fifteen thousand inhabitants, or about two thousand adult male householders.Footnote ⁵ But a lower limit was important as well. The home town was always a Stadt and not a village, for urban status, embodied by recognized privileges and a city wall, was fundamental to one of the defining characteristics of the home town: its relative impenetrability by outside political and economic forces. Within this relatively isolated and largely self-sufficient community, citizens experienced a “steady pressure on all members towards the median,” with guilds playing a central role as “conscious and recognized institutions for maintaining a satisfactory degree of equality.”Footnote ⁶ Ambition and conflict were not unknown in the German home town, but they were discouraged: ambition was “suppressed,” conflict was “smothered” whenever possible.Footnote ⁷

Another feature of the hometown mentality, in Walker's view, was the naïve conviction by inhabitants of a typical home town that their particular town was distinctive in its constitutional forms and communal customs. In fact any town's treasured uniqueness was only superficial. Underlying uniformities insured that every arriving traveler or journeyman instinctively understood and readily accepted the communal norms. But civic pride demanded a perception of local uniqueness that reinforced the home town's determination to defend itself from outside forces.

This defensive impulse, of course, becomes a central theme of the book's later chapters, as small-town guild masters and journeymen are seen to resist the neocameralist liberalism of nineteenth-century officialdom. When the wigmakers of Mannheim petitioned against women making wigs or the potters of Rastatt demanded that masons be forbidden to make stoves, they were not just protecting their economic self-interest; they were also defending an entire integrated culture of social, economic, and political values.Footnote ⁸ Resistance was futile, of course. But this is what gives the conclusion of the book its remarkable tone of poignancy tinged with menace. By the 1860s, “political incubator, communal citizenry, and guilds were gone”—but “the ubiquitous yearning for organic wholeness” was not, and eventually became the “most important legacy of hometown history to twentieth-century Germany.”Footnote ⁹

Of course, though he himself might not accept this characterization, the German home town as described by Mack Walker was an ideal type. No one community ever fit all of Walker's criteria. Much as I admired the book from the first time I read it, I nevertheless spilled much ink early in my career trying to show that one particular home town had more social diversity and greater economic linkages to the outside world than was accounted for by Walker's model.Footnote ¹⁰ But in fact this largely missed the point, for this is not a book about economic or social structures; it is a book about how communities understand themselves.

And not just any communities: German communities. For German Home Towns is preeminently a work of German history. The book begins, after all, not with the towns themselves but with the Holy Roman Empire. Communities are identified as being home towns not only by their demographic scale and economic structures, but also and, just as important, by their location within the unique political geography of central Europe: true home towns, according to Walker, could be found only in the “individualized country” of “middle Germany,” not in the major centralizing states such as Bavaria and Brandenburg-Prussia.Footnote ¹¹ And the significance of the home town lay above all in the way in which its values penetrated German society as a whole. Walker did not openly espouse the concept of a German Sonderweg—a term which, in any case, was only coming into its own among historians as he was writing this book—but the concept of a distinctly German political culture lies at the heart of his analysis. Indeed this is the very phenomenon for which Walker's model of the home-town mentality attempts to account.

While this book was preeminently conceived as a contribution to the study of German history, it is something else as well. A book with a title like German Home Towns must also be assumed to want to make some contribution to the study of urban history. But the urban history of what? Germany alone, or something broader?

After all, there is much about the German home town that would seem deeply familiar to students of small-town life in any part of Europe between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹² The laborious attempts to preserve a distinct sense of community, the hostility toward innovation, the fear of outside influences, the long epochs of smothered conflict giving way on rare occasions to open divisions that required intervention from some higher authority—all of this can be found in small towns in places far beyond Germany.

And above all, of course, there were the guilds. Here is Mack Walker on the central role of the guilds in the German home town:

That certainly sounds like Hildesheim or Weissenburg. But it also sounds like many non-German towns as well. For many of the customs and practices of German town guilds were routinely to be found in communities outside the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire. Consider, for example, this classic description of early modern guilds in a town far from Germany:

Every word of this passage could be applied to the role of guilds in almost any European town of the late early modern era. Yet this passage does not, in fact, pertain to Europe. It is a description of the guilds in Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat in India during the Mughal era. To be sure, the structures of urban life in Gujarat were far from identical to those of Europe. Above all, the notion of citizenship—the very bedrock of European urban political culture—simply did not exist in Asia.Footnote ¹⁵ But it is a reminder that there were, in fact, fundamental aspects of the German home town that transcended German particularity.

Or take this passage that so fundamentally encapsulates Walker's view of the political processes of the German home town:

How familiar, again, this would be to the historian of any small town in Europe. No town of only two or three thousand households could develop an isolated elite of civic magistrates indifferent to the interests and concerns of their fellow citizens. For one thing, all urban governments depended on a large body of householders to carry out administrative functions on the neighborhood or parish level. And many towns had regular annual elections that gave hundreds of citizens considerable influence over the composition of the municipal government.Footnote ¹⁷ There was nothing uniquely German about a pattern of regular reciprocal relations between urban leadership and citizenry.

So just how German was the German home town? Certainly in many ways German home towns fitted right into the norms of European urban civilization as they had evolved by the end of the early modern era. But at the same time, there were distinctly German elements.

To see this more clearly, let us consider briefly some aspects of the collective political culture of small towns in another European country—specifically, England between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, the period corresponding to the epoch covered in Part I of Walker's book. England, after all, was preeminently a country of home towns. There was London, of course, with its population of more than half a million in 1700. Two other towns—Bristol and Norwich—exceeded Walker's upper limit of 15,000 inhabitants by 1700. But every other town in England was small enough to correspond in scale to Walker's home towns with their guild-based economies and face-to-face political relations.Footnote ¹⁸

And what exactly was political life like in these dozens of provincial home towns? We may take as our guide Paul Halliday's admirable study of the political culture of English provincial towns between 1650 and 1730—a book that, like Walker's, draws upon evidence from dozens of different towns to assemble a collective portrait of the character of small-town politics.Footnote ¹⁹ What we find in the towns that Halliday analyzed is this: bitter, sustained factional divisions. These factions arose in the aftermath of the English Civil War. Puritans turned into dissidents and Low Churchmen, Anglicans into High Churchmen, and these divisions in turn found political expression in the emergence of the Whig and Tory parties. To be sure, civic “unity” continued to be prized as a political value, but in fact, as Halliday showed, “a new politics emerged based on competition between organized, continuous opposing groups.”Footnote ²⁰ Throughout the 1660s and 1670s party leaders in town after town would not merely accuse their opponents of undermining civic harmony but would also appeal to the king's privy council or, more often, to the Court of King's Bench for a writ or ruling to deprive their foes of office and thereby secure all political power for themselves. In the fever-pitch politics of the 1680s, the crown itself took the initiative in revoking municipal charters and reshaping town councils. But subsequently the initiative in civic disputes reverted to leaders of the opposing factions within the towns themselves. By the eighteenth century, party conflict had become a permanent, normalized feature of political life in the English towns; indeed, Halliday argued, “partisan politics emerged as a stable means for communities within a dynamic society to make decisions.”Footnote ²¹

How very different from all this were the home towns of Germany. There, in Walker's view, sustained political divisions were almost unknown. Instead, the impulse to conceal and smother conflict was the dominant mode of civic politics during precisely the same era. Of course there were exceptions: Walker himself emphasized that occasionally after decades of suppressed tensions, some open conflict would finally break out and higher authorities would have to intervene. But the object of this intervention was always to restore civic harmony, not to foster a model of political life that validated permanent organized factional difference within the community.

All of this illustrates the fundamental wisdom of Walker's approach in situating his home towns within the context of German particularity. Yes, the German home towns were deeply European. But they were also specifically and distinctly German.

What about the role of the guilds? In some ways, as already noted, guild values and guild cultures were among the most transcendent and transnational features of European urban life in the early modern era, and in most of Europe guild values continued to shape urban life until deep into the nineteenth century. Yet in one respect German guild values differed sharply from European norms. The nature of that difference takes us right to the heart of the distinctiveness of the German home towns.

This has to do with the role of Ehrbarkeit—honor—as an element in the system of “guild moralism” that Walker situated at the very center of the German hometownsmen's self-understanding. At first glance, of course, this statement may seem puzzling, for honor was a familiar element in guild values far beyond Germany. As James Farr has noted, all over Europe “the key badge of artisanal status could be summed up in the word ‘honor.’”Footnote ²² But elsewhere in Europe the concept of “honor” was essentially personal: it had to do with how the artisan or guild member conducted himself with respect to his work, his sexual behavior, and his personal interactions in the street or the shop. But in the German-speaking lands of central Europe, the concept of artisanal honor went vastly deeper. As a requirement for admission to mastership—and thus to membership in the hometown community—a code of sexual purity was imposed not only on the applicant himself but also, retroactively, on his parents and grandparents. Every reader of German Home Towns will recall the drawn-out tribulations of the tinsmith Flegel, whose standing as a guild master in Hildesheim was subjected to legal challenges for almost a decade because his bride's father had been born out of wedlock.Footnote ²³ Masters and journeymen alike were subject to loss of their honorable status—and thus of their livelihoods—if they ever consorted in any way with people whose personal background or occupational activities were subject to question. Indeed, Walker does not even mention the full extremes to which this principle extended. We know, after all, that simply to bury an animal that had died of disease rather than leaving this dishonorable job to the honorless Abdecker was an action that could threaten a guildsman's honorable status.Footnote ²⁴ The imperial legislation of 1731 that attempted to circumvent the system of bans and boycotts that were used to enforce the code of guild moralism long remained, as Walker showed, a dead letter in the “individualized country” that formed the heartland of the German home towns.

Probably no outburst of artisanal rage in eighteenth-century Europe is quite so well known today as the Great Cat Massacre in the rue Saint-Séverin, an event immortalized by Robert Darnton in his best-known collection of essays.Footnote ²⁵ This was an occasion, we are told, when the journeymen and apprentices of a print shop in Paris vented their rage against their master and his wife by murdering not only dozens of cats in the street but also the mistress's own beloved feline. It was an event that could never have taken place in the German home town. For German journeymen would have had good reason to fear the very loss of their Ehrbarkeit if they had ever done the Abdecker's work of disposing of unwanted domestic animals.

Killing cats does not figure anywhere in German Home Towns—though there is a memorable passage about the honor risks of sex with sheep.Footnote ²⁶ But what Walker's book does communicate is the all-encompassing character of guild moralism in German small towns, places where Ehre and Eigentum were embedded in a pervasive mesh of community values that persisted stubbornly into the nineteenth century. There was likely no place in Europe where these values were so vigorously defended and their antagonists so stoutly resisted as in the small towns of middle Germany—and this, Walker argued, had profound implications for the future course of German history. That, ultimately, is the fundamental argument of Mack Walker's great book. And that is what made the German home towns so very German.