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Chapter 7 - Between Rhetoric and Practice

Re-Reading the Heimat Renaissance, 1970–1989

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2024

Jeremy DeWaal
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

This chapter revises our understanding about the causes, contours, and myths of the Heimat Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s. It begins by reconstructing left-wing intellectual debates about Heimat and shows how efforts to re-engage with Heimat emerged as a result of the fragmentation of the 68er movement and a sense of crisis on the political left. Re-engagement was driven by beliefs that new rhetoric about overcoming Heimat could not be translated into practice and that disengagement had resulted in a weakened “homeless left.” The chapter then turns to grassroots groups who evoked Heimat to combat a culture of technocratic planning. The chapter challenges arguments that these movements reflected the birth of a radically new Heimat idea and shows how they developed longer-standing federalist ideas about Heimat and democracy. More inclusively minded Heimat enthusiasts in larger cities like Cologne and Hamburg, meanwhile, retooled earlier ideas of local tolerance to combat persistent discrimination of immigrant populations. Left-wing re-engagement with Heimat, however, remained fiercely contested.

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Chapter
Information
Geographies of Renewal
Heimat and Democracy in West Germany, 1945–1990
, pp. 278 - 319
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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