The Nation as a Local Metaphor. Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871-1918.

By Alon Confino (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xiii plus 280pp.).

Since the middle of the 1980s the history of bourgeois society (burgerliche Gesellschaft) has motivated some of the most innovative research on Imperial Germany. Following the completion of numerous research projects and monographs in both German and English the material outlines of bourgeois life have been well drawn. We are well informed about how they lived - their politics, local organizations and family structure - but less so about how they thought, about issues of bourgeois subjectivity and identity. Alon Confino's new book investigates bourgeois subjectivity by focusing on one of its most salient aspects, the formation of a national cultural identity. In his study of the "Heimat idea" in Imperial Germany, we revisit the topic of nationalism through the lens of local history and via the concept of collective memory. Confino's contribution to Burgertumsforschung analyzes how the bourgeoisie shaped German national identity in their own image, the vehicle of which was the "Heimat idea", a way of imagining the nation in terms of the local.

Drawing on the work of Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Pierre Nora and Amos Funkenstein, Confino explores "the ways people turn national"(xii), focusing on how Germans "internalized the nation-state by transforming it into a local experience"(50). This was accomplished by the creation of a "common denominator 

between their intimate local place and the abstract national world"(xii). This "common denominator" was the "Heimat idea", the imagining of the nation via local idioms which "transform[ed] the nation into an everyday life experience"(xii). The "Heimat idea" was "a visual image of the nation that represented interchangeably the locality, the region and the nation"(9). According to Confino, this "invented" tradition which arose in the context of the rise of popular politics and the beginnings of the tourist industry between 1890 and 1914 was the dominant form through which Germans imagined their national community.

Confino's study addresses two forms of "local-national memory"(11); the analysis of these two forms gives the book its structure and chronology. The first section covers the invention of Sedan Day, a yearly celebration of military victory over France during the Franco-Prussian War, as a national holiday. Created by local bourgeois notables, this holiday "represented the nation in a setting of localism"(39). Confino defines Sedan Day as a form of national imagining connected to the social formation of German liberalism between 1870 and 1890. In their blatant rescripting of local history, liberal notables fashioned conceptions of nationhood and profiled themselves as national educators, as spokesmen for the emerging nation state. As Confino claims, these celebrations were exclusive, elitist and ultimately unable to gamer a truly popular following. Sedan Day, a celebration of the national conducted in a local idiom, addressed political and social issues that "became obsolete" with the rise of popular politics after 1890. As the Sedan Day celebrations declined, what Confino calls the "Heimat idea" rose to prominence, a new way of imagining the intersections, or mutual embeddedness, of the national and the local.

The second half of the book presents a rich analysis of the "Heimat idea", as Confino traces its formation through the production of local histories (Heimatbucher), local cultural museums (Heimatmuseen) and the groups and associations of the Heimat movement. He analyzes the concept of Heimat as a new way of seeing and thinking about history and historical change that was anti-scientific, anti-professional, popular and based on emotion and the authenticity of personal experience. "By making the Heimat memory into a social mode of action through books, museums, organizations, and associations, and, not least, through changing the meaning of the word Heimat" from a representation of the local to an image of the national, he writes, "Heimatlers formed a bourgeois social milieu of memory"(157). This second section contains the book's greatest strengths, its most compelling arguments and its claim to originality. However, several questions remain.

Unlike Celia Applegate's study of Heimat in the Pfalz, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat,(1) the work which motivated interest in the idea of Heimat in Imperial Germany, Confino's book is not concerned with the lived dimension of the "Heimat idea". Despite claims to the contrary, it is studied here primarily as an idea and not as a form of local social praxis. The "status of the Heimat idea in the nation as a whole"(98) motivates this work, how the Heimat became a representation of the nation. Confino sketches out a context for local action and points to local initiatives and origins, but consistently moves his narrative to the national level, seeing in the "Heimat idea" a "national stage for local diversity"(159). As a result, the local context remains abstract. Social differences are elided; regional differences vanish.

Added to this is the fact that Heimat was not everywhere imagined in the same way; strong conflicts existed between the different branches of the movement and among the different regions of Germany. Confino's argument for the central importance of the "Heimat idea" in Imperial German society is an important contribution, and his analysis provides a compelling framework for future studies. Interest in the "Heimat idea" was commonly shared among the different regions of Germany, but the content of these imaginings differed. The "invented traditions" and fabricated historical narratives of local culture were regionally specific, and these differences matter. The "Heimat idea" in the north German port city of Hamburg, for example, was depicted mainly through the idiom of Impressionism and was displayed on the walls of the Hamburg municipal art museum and not in a local Heimatmuseum. Heimat was not just an idea or a composite image of the nation, as this book argues, but was also an arena of discursive conflict with competing claims to national representativeness. It would be interesting to know how a composite Heimat image, which existed by the 1930s, did come about. On this point Confino's work on the rise of the tourist industry and its effects on the way that the local and the national were imagined is right on the mark.

Washington University in St. Louis 

ENDNOTE 

1. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials. The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).