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 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.