This introduction outlines the main questions and debates which the book addresses, followed by an overview of the history of the Heimat idea and the study’s methodological approach. While scholars have looked at post-war cinematic and literary Heimat tropes, the book argues for more attention to Heimat as specific sites of home. On the question of the concept’s Germanness, it steers a middle path that recognizes how the history of German-speaking Europe has shaped the concept, while acknowledging its connection to broader questions about place attachment. Rather than positing a single “German” understanding across time and space, the work approaches discussions about Heimat as an evolving and contested discourse about place attachments and their relationship to diverse political and social issues. The introduction continues by outlining the book’s contribution to debates about West German democratization, reconstruction, post-war confrontation with dissonant lives, and expellee history. It concludes by outlining the book’s findings on the history of efforts to eliminate the concept in the 1960s and left-wing attempts to re-engage with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s.

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.

The chapter examines heated debates about Heimat, federalism, and regional identity in the German Southwest during referendum campaigns over the construction of new federal states in the region. While this history has often been glossed over as the pre-history of Baden-Württemberg, the chapter shows how it was saturated with debates about the spatial foundations of democracy. Opposing groups of regionalists who had different cognitive maps of region advanced similar ideas about “democracy” and “openness to the world” as regional values. Abandoning narratives of their region as a bulwark of the nation, many on both sides competed over whose regional vision would offer a better “bridge” to France and Switzerland. Many federalist regionalists in the Southwest further argued that Heimat feeling should bolster decentred ideas of nation. As in the case of Cologne and the Hanseatic cities, the case of the Southwest again demonstrates how early post-war denizens used regional identities to forge early identifications with democracy and European unification. At the same time, the referenda simultaneously demonstrated the same serious shortcomings in democratic mentalities and practice.

The Epilogue traces the afterlives of West German debates about Heimat in post-reunification Germany. It shows how public debates about the concept over the past three decades have primarily revolved around three issues: popular desires for home in the face of economic demands for mobility and flexibility, questions around immigration and integration, and the ongoing question of left-wing engagement with or disavowal of Heimat. All three issues have clear connections to the earlier West German debates, even if memories of these connections have often been lost. While the Epilogue shows how attempts to define the Heimat concept from the political left have remained contested, it demonstrates a growing trend towards engagement in the most recent Heimat debates over the past decade. Disengagement with desires for home, many have argued, has proven self-defeating, while many immigrant groups themselves have expressed deep desires for home in new places and have often argued for engagement with Heimat.

This chapter examines the first systematic efforts to eliminate the Heimat concept. The chapter shows how they emerged in the early 1960s amidst a period of Cold War crisis. Expellee claims to a right to Heimat in the East lurched to the centre of the greatest foreign policy debate of the period and represented a major barrier to rapprochement with the Eastern bloc. Supporters of rapprochement took up two conflicting strategies in confronting expellee Heimat rhetoric. The first challenged how the expellee societies understood the concept, while the second involved arguing that desire for Heimat was inherently fascist. The chapter shows how other generational, demographic, and economic developments also shaped the anti-Heimat movement. While earlier focus on Heimat had been tied to its loss, long-term economic growth, completed reconstruction, and decline in mobility rates led earlier preoccupation with Heimat to ebb. A number of activists on the extra-parliamentary left, many of whom sought re-engagement in the 1970s, also described attachment to local Heimat as inherently exclusionary, reactionary, overly emotional, militarist, or a blockage to international revolutionary change.

Is there an alternative to EU dual decision-making regimes? The chapter advances the alternative model of federal union as distinct from the federal state.

The chapter identifies the types of crisis exploded in the 20210s and 2020s and the theories on EU decision-making.

How does the EU decide? The chapter introduces to the main decision-making regimes of the EU in order to prepare the reader for the following empirical chapter on the governance of the crises.

The growth of national sovereignty in the EU political process, due also to new enlargements, requires a multi-tier Europe with a federalist core.

The Russian aggression of Ukraine had dramatic effects on the energy and security policy of the EU. Those effects were mainly managed at the national level. The security and military challenge was left to NATO.