As far as visuality and materiality are concerned, Mack Walker's German Home Towns is a paradoxical work. In more than 400 pages of dense text about society, politics, and law in and around German towns from 1648 to 1871, the author devoted almost no space to the home towns' visual and material aspects. One would look in vain in this book for detailed descriptions of burghers' private and communal buildings; the layout of fortifications, streets, and public spaces; the location of civic and religious institutions; or the outward appearance of the townspeople, their fairs, rituals, and processions. Early in the book, Walker set the tone for his approach by dismissing as intellectually lazy the most common definition for a town in early modern central Europe—a settlement surrounded by physical walls—and in the entire book he included only one image of a German home town (and even that only on page 222).Footnote ¹

But here is the paradox. Despite the absence of any direct treatment of the visual and physical aspects of German towns in the book, the central metaphors in German Home Towns are physical and visual through and through. Consider the case of urban fortifications, which Walker is so quick to dismiss as part of the home town's formal definition. Walker never discusses these great monuments of civic culture: their shape and layout; their military, police, and symbolic functions; their expensive maintenance in the early modern period; and their physical undermining in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though their physical aspects are neglected in the book, the same monuments nonetheless played crucial roles as metaphors in Walker's analysis. His civic community is famously defined through “walls and webs” (the title of chapter IV); the invasion of the home town's sphere in the early nineteenth century is equated with “undermining its walls” (the title of chapter IX); and the author's favorite proverb—“keine Misthenne fliegt über die Stadtmauer”—relates to the walls as well.Footnote ²

What is one to make of the coterminous absence and presence of such highly visible, physical monuments in Walker's book? Why did Walker overlook the visual and material aspects of the home town but also use them extensively as metaphors in his story? Is this the result of the physical nature of most metaphors, an unconscious negligence on Walker's part, or a simple contradiction in his analysis? Is there more to be said about this?

Paradoxes and contradictions are often very telling, and this one is no exception. The following pages aim neither to criticize Walker for criticism's sake nor only to suggest, together with James Sheehan, that we can use additional lenses with which to explore Walker's urban communities alongside gender, religion, or discursive analysis.Footnote ³ Rather, they constitute an attempt to delve deeply (albeit briefly) into German Home Town's theoretical foundations in order to show that what seems at first glance an innocuous paradox is in fact a crucial axis not only of Walker's book but also of much larger trends in the evolution of social history both in Germany and in the United States. Doing so helps us understand Walker's book better, place it more accurately within the literature that came before it, and appreciate our own position vis-à-vis German Home Towns forty years after its publication.

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In his introduction to the second edition of German Home Towns in 1998, James Sheehan highlighted Walker's achievement within its German historiographical context.Footnote ⁴ For a very good set of reasons: Walker drew historians' attention away from Prussia and Austria to the so-called Third Germany; he discussed, just when the notion of a German Sonderweg was raising its head, “not the liberal bourgeoisie that Germany did not get, but . . . the hometown Bürgerschaft that Germany preeminently did get”; and he emphasized the role of the Holy Roman Empire in the lives of countless Germans at a time (the early 1970s) when the Empire was still historiographically marginal.Footnote ⁵ In his essay in this issue of Central European History, Christopher Friedrichs follows this tradition and exposes the particularly German aspect of Walker's book.

The importance of the German context of Walker's book notwithstanding, what is much less appreciated is the distinctly American background of German Home Towns. On one level, this background might seem obvious. The term home town is, of course, a particularly American expression and, as one German reviewer of Walker's book was quick to point out (not without some exasperation), there is no German equivalent to this term.Footnote ⁶ But the notion of the home town can lead us only so far here, because American (let alone European) social theory never made much analytical use of it either before or after the publication of Walker's book. Much more important for an understanding of the theoretical background for Walker's book is a different term that appears in the book's full title, a term that was becoming widespread in American sociology and social history right when Walker was writing his book. This term is community.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, community studies were becoming ever more influential in social history and urban studies in the United States.Footnote ⁷ In the wake of the urban riots of the 1960s and the general political and social upheavals of the period, American historians and sociologists were on the search for a different time when things had supposedly been better. In the past (so the argument went) people lived in small communities and knew each other face-to-face; now there were only enormous, inchoate masses of anonymous people. This narrative was not an invention of the 1960s, of course. As Thomas Bender emphasized in the late 1970s, the roots of community studies can be found in the writings of the founders of sociology both in Europe (e.g., Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel) and the United States (Robert Park, Louis Wirth). The 1960s saw a rebirth of this effort which, in the political context of the times, acquired an added meaning. The effort now was to recover something like an authentic lost community, and the locus was the small town on the one hand and the urban neighborhood on the other.Footnote ⁸ Ideas about the extraordinary persistence but also eventual decline of communities of face-to-face interaction were consequently neither Walker's own invention nor that of later German scholars influenced by Niklas Luhmann. Very far from it. The preoccupation with face-to-face communities was part of the spirit of the 1960s and early 1970s in certain circles in American academe. It was all around Walker when he was writing German Home Towns, and it would cross the Atlantic back to Europe only later, especially through Luhmann's influential work, itself a product of direct engagement with American (Parsonian) sociology.Footnote ⁹

This forgotten American context of Walker's classic is important for several reasons. For one, it explains the somewhat awkward use of the term “home town” in his book's title. From a German perspective, such a term might seem odd and even lead to criticism of Walker. But within the context of American social history and theory of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the important point was not necessarily to stress the uniqueness of German home towns but rather to suggest that American home towns were not that exceptional: that the process through which Gemeinschaft dissolved into Gesellschaft was much larger than what had happened in New England villages or in Jane Jacobs's great American cities.

The second and more pertinent point for the present discussion is that the coterminous absence and presence of visuality and materiality in Walker's book is not unique to him. It is rather a characteristic of many of the more sophisticated early works within the community studies movement. These works certainly recognized the importance of visibility (much less materiality). After all, small communities were places where everybody knew everybody else; they were places of face-to-face interaction, where people, quite literally, looked each other in the eye. A certain kind of “seeing” was consequently recognized as fundamental to the operation and survival, but also decline of these communities. (Indeed, there was much work in the early years of community studies that concentrated on the territorial or physical aspects of community, equating that concept with an actual, physical place.Footnote ¹⁰) But long before Walker's book, sociologists recognized the danger of equating community with its physical aspects. Community was much more than that. A community, Durkheim wrote as early as 1912, “is not constituted simply by the mass of individuals who compose it, the ground which they occupy, the things they use, and the movement they make, but above all by the idea it has of itself.”Footnote ¹¹ “Community,” Thomas Bender would echo a similar (if nonidentical) sentiment sixty years later, is best defined as a “network of social relations marked by mutuality and emotional bonds”—and it “is not about a place but about an experience.”Footnote ¹² It is here, I believe, that we can start to appreciate Walker's carefulness in not equating communities with their physical or visible forms. The German home town was much more than an actual place. It was also a social network, and even more important, it was an idea. This is why it could exert such a tremendous influence on people's lives even decades after it ceased to exist in its traditional form.

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The first explanation for the paradox of visuality in German Home Towns is therefore theoretical: the inherent tension in social theory between community as a place and community as a network and an idea. The second explanation is much more practical, at least at first glance. The fact of the matter is that the source base for research on small and medium-sized communities in the early modern period is limited in several important ways. There are, of course, a great deal of political, legal, and financial documents that shed light on home towns: the constitutional documents of the Empire and particular Länder, legal sources, demographic and tax records, and much more. In German Home Towns Walker used many such documents and often in a brilliant way. What is usually lacking in municipal archives and what is all but completely absent from Walker's book are the voices of the townspeople themselves. Why?

One explanation for this silence has to do with the kind of history Walker was writing and its strong sociological background. The “new social history” with its emphasis on anthropological rather than sociological analysis was not as present in community studies in the late 1960s as it would be just a few years later.Footnote ¹³ Just as important, however, is the scarcity of sources early modern and sometimes even nineteenth-century townspeople left behind about their inner lives. It is notoriously difficult to penetrate into townspeople's minds, to know what they felt, thought, and said, because the source base for such an investigation is incredibly narrow. All of this explains a curious fact: Walker could write many pages about the legal basis for the existence of German home towns, about the Empire, and about specific German states and their policies toward home towns. But when he wrote some of the more memorable human scenes in his story, he had to conclude his analysis after only a couple of pages.

Take the story of the Hildesheimer tinsmith Flegel, for instance, which James Sheehan identified in 1998 as one of the book's high points.Footnote ¹⁴ We can follow the legal issues in this case fairly closely. But Walker does not tell us what Flegel thought about his attempts to marry Helmsen's daughter; what was actually said between the parties is not recorded; what Flegel felt about the whole affair is a matter for speculation. Or take another memorable scene in the book: the bullying of Weissenburg by the Prussians in 1796.Footnote ¹⁵ More than two centuries later, Walker's readers can actually see the scene in their mind's eye, including the planting of signs just outside the town's gates by the Prussians, claiming it a territoroire prussien. But here it stops. Trying to figure out what Weissenburgers thought and felt and discussed in this situation is almost a hopeless endeavor. One can speculate, one can be suggestive, but one cannot know with certainty because the written records are not available.

The fact that Walker often used terms that are foreign to his dramatis personae—the term home town first and foremost among them—is consequently the result not only of the sociological background of his book but also of the source base he could lay his hands on. It would be nice—it would be important!—to understand the townspeople through their own words, thoughts, and feelings as the world was changing around them. Especially if one wants to investigate empirically Georg Simmel and Louis Wirth's (overblown) assertion that the difference between premodern and modern urban environments has to do with the mental state of their inhabitants, one needs to explore the perspective, the worldview, and the mentality of townspeople.Footnote ¹⁶ But a few notable exceptions notwithstanding, the available sources about townspeople in the early modern period and sometimes even in the nineteenth century make it incredibly difficult to write the history of these communities from the perspective of their own inhabitants. Hence Walker's brevity when describing some of the most memorable human scenes in his book. In an important sense, then, Walker's German home towns are not only invisible (in Italo Calvino's double meaning of the term): they are also extraordinarily silent.

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Walker's neglect of the visual aspects of the home town, and the absence of the townspeople's own voices from his story, are good reasons why his book—despite its many forward-looking aspects—could not be written today in the same way. Indeed, much of the historiography of the past several decades attempted to correct exactly these voids and silences, characteristic not only of Walker's work but also of pre-cultural turn historiography more generally. But the absence of visuality and the townspeople's own voices from German Home Towns is not (only) a problem; in an important sense it validates some of Walker's basic theoretical assumptions and it also opens up venues for further research.

First, it is worth thinking about the reason why certain sources about early modern townspeople are so scarce. Why is it that even when great events take place in or around a small town—fire, plague, a great battle, the reaching of an important communal decision—we have so few written sources about them? One possible explanation has to do with the traditional nature of burghers. Early modern townspeople were not “writing their selves.” They rarely kept a journal, and as a rule they lacked the sentimentality that would characterize later, more introspective generations. Perhaps more important and more germane to a discussion of Walker's book is the fact that communication takes place differently in a small community—and this, we remember, is the underlying sociological assumption of Walker's project and of 1960s community studies in general—than it does in a major city, a region, or a whole country. In an important article in 2005 that constitutes an elaboration of Niklas Luhmann's thought on the matter, Rudolf Schlögl claimed that in a small, physical-interaction-based community (Anwesenheitsgesellschaft), written material is not as important as it is in more socially differentiated communities and organizations.Footnote ¹⁷ One can imagine here the townspeople exchanging views and information in the marketplace, in a guildhall, or at church, and engaging in political action less through the exchange of letters or official documents than through face-to-face meetings and rituals. The lack of written sources about the inner and political lives of townspeople is therefore not only a problem when we reassess Walker's achievement forty years later. In an important sense, it also supports his sociological assumptions—or at least a more fully developed (Luhman/Schlögl-esque) version of them.

How then can one still penetrate into the private spheres of the townspeople and their communal lives? How can we shed more light on the way townspeople lived and died, worked and argued, evolved or stayed the same? It is here that visual culture can be helpful and here, too, that the difference between Walker's theoretical context and that of more recent studies is thrown into sharp relief. Walker's book demonstrates how, when we look at small urban communities, we can sometimes see what we cannot hear. We see Flegel going to the guildhall or the signs placed in front of Weissenburg's gates even if we cannot hear the townspeople's actual comments about such events. Consequently, if we could find a way to decipher the visual language of these scenes—what it meant for townspeople to witness or see them—we could reasonably hope to understand much more about their inner and communal lives. It is furthermore a common assumption of recent studies of early modern face-to-face communities in Germany that their members tended to interact in a much more performative and visual way than members of other, more complex social systems.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, Rudolf Schlögl could even claim that the early modern city existed as a form of interaction and “much less as an idea.”Footnote ¹⁹ According to this model, analyzing visual and performative elements in townspeople's lives is not about social epiphenomena (this would have been Durkheim's, and to a certain extent also Walker's, position); it is in an important sense to witness and explore the thing unto itself.

What is true in terms of visuality is also true in terms of materiality. It is often easier to know what a burgher had in his house in 1806 than to know what he thought about the Napoleonic Wars. Consider all the countless inventories, trade and customs receipts, and building plans that lie in municipal archives across Germany, untouched for centuries. If one were to follow such objects—as Robert Mark Spaulding demonstrates in his essay in this issue of Central European History and as I, with a very different focus, tried to show in a recent book about city walls—one would get a new perspective on the history of the German home town, including aspects of its politics, economic activity, religious devotion, and much else that Walker did not recognize or explain.Footnote ²⁰ Perhaps more important, such an investigation will help us bridge the gap in Walker's analysis between the figurative and the literal, between the penetration of the home town's sphere as a metaphor on the one hand, and its physical penetration through outside forces on the other: the very essence of the process by which the Gemeinschaft dissolved into a Gesellschaft.