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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2014
The idea of publicly recognizing an important milestone in the life of Mack Walker's book German Home Towns, which appeared in 1971, goes back to January 2011 when David Luebke and Yair Mintzker put out a call for papers to discuss “German Home Towns—Forty Years Later” at the upcoming meeting of the German Studies Association (GSA) in Louisville, Kentucky. The robust response to their call confirmed the wide-ranging impact of Walker's book and validated their hunch that the fortieth anniversary was the right time for a critical celebration of this influential text.
1 Walker, Mack, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate 1648–1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.
2 Many thanks to everyone who participated or attended. Full listings for sessions 128, 157, and 178 are available through the GSA website at https://www.thegsa.org/conference/documents/GSA_program_11.pdf.
3 Walker's book had received two commendatory, although not uncritical, treatments shortly after its twenty-fifth anniversary: Friedrichs, Christopher, “But Are We Any Closer to Home? Early Modern German Urban History Since German Home Towns,” Central European History 30 (1997): 163–185Google Scholar, and Sheehan's, JamesForeword to the paperback edition of Mack Walker, German Home Towns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), xiii–xviiGoogle Scholar.
4 Friedrichs has pointed out that because of Walker's unconventional goals, his book initially found relatively less resonance in its home field of early modern German urban history. Friedrichs, “Are We Any Closer?” 164.
5 Walker, German Home Towns, 427.
6 Recently, for example, in Merkl, Peter H., Small Town and Village in Bavaria: The Passing of a Way of Life (New York: Berghahn, 2012)Google Scholar, which references on p. 207 the “hometowns that Mack Walker has described so well.” Walker was sensitive to the extended death rattle of the home towns, noting that their “final demise” came only in the 1950s. Walker, German Home Towns, 429–30.
7 Walker, German Home Towns, 426.
8 To cite just one example, German Home Towns is referenced in three different essays in Evans, R. J. W., Schaich, Michael, and Wilson, Peter H., eds., The Holy Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6Google Scholar, 75, 249. According to one assessment, the book provides “a wellspring of inspiration” and “could fruitfully lend itself to re-examination in light of nearly two generations of innovative research.” See Susan Karant-Nunn, “Is there a Social History of the Holy Roman Empire?” 249.
9 Walker, German Home Towns, 6.
10 This literature has grown tremendously in the past decade. For an introduction, see Kümin's, Beat review article, “Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire,” German History 27 (2009): 131–44Google Scholar and the literature cited there.
11 Walker, German Home Towns, 4 and 431.
12 In discussing the legacy of the home towns, Walker distinguished between an “ideal of community” with characteristics “attributed” to it and the “actual communities as social entities.” Ibid., 418 and 427. In this distinction he may have been moving toward the idea of “invented tradition” that emerged just one year later in Hobsbawm's, Eric “The Social Function of the Past: Some Questions,” Past and Present 55 (May 1972): 3–17Google Scholar.