The Nation as a Local Metaphor

Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918

Alon Confino

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807860847
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

All nations make themselves up as they go along, but not all make themselves up in the same way. In this study, Alon Confino explores how Germans turned national and argues that they imagined the nation as an extension of their local place. In 1871, the work of political unification had been completed, but Germany remained a patchwork of regions with different histories and traditions. Germans had to construct a national memory to reconcile the peculiarities of the region and the totality of the nation. This identity project, examined by Confino as it evolved in the southwestern state of WArttemberg, oscillated between failure and success. The national holiday of Sedan Day failed in the 1870s and 1880s to symbolically commingle localness and nationhood. Later, the idea of the Heimat, or homeland, did prove capable of representing interchangeably the locality, the region, and the nation in a distinct national narrative and in visual images. The German nationhood project was successful, argues Confino, because Germans made the nation into an everyday, local experience through a variety of cultural forms, including museums, school textbooks, popular poems, travel guides, posters, and postcards. But it was not unique. Confino situates German nationhood within the larger context of modernity, and in doing so he raises broader questions about how people in the modern world use the past in the construction of identity.

Chapter One: Thinking about German Nationhood, 1871–1918

THINKING THE NATION

In the past decade the most influential way of making sense of the sense of national belonging has been to regard the nation as a cultural artifact, as a product of invention and social engineering.¹ This “cultural turn” in the study of nationalism displaced the modernization theory, prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s, that argued that nationhood was a necessary concomitant of modernity, a form of belief produced by the cultural, economic, and technological transformation into and of modernity.² But in spite of the now flourishing interest in nationalism, the sense of national belonging remains a puzzling problem. This is due, in part, to the paucity of studies exploring the ways in which theories of nationalism have worked in practice in distinct countries. Perhaps more important is the failure of theory to encompass the malleability of nationhood. Scholars have usually emphasized one aspect of nationalism, such as economy and industrialization (Karl Deutsch, Ernest Gellner), ethnicity (Anthony Smith), or invention of the past (Eric Hobsbawm).³ But nationhood defies these definitions. Although they are part of it, none fully embraces its ambiguous and often contradictory meanings. The multifariousness of nationhood is indeed striking: while it represents attachment to a defined territory, the international spread of nationalism appears to be its essence; while it is a new historical phenomenon, it is believed to be ancient; while it is part of modernity, it obsessively looks back to the past; while it yearns for the past, it simultaneously rejects the past by seeking to construct an improved version of it; while it represents the uniform nation, it tolerates a host of identities within the nation.

In order to understand the multifaceted character of nationhood and how it works, we should take note, I believe, of two features. The first is the process by which people internalize the nation. The modernization theory has been unsuccessful in providing an answer because by viewing nationhood as an inevitable product of modernization it has made national identity an inescapable progression from traditional to modern identity, whereas in reality nationhood is an irregular and uneven process in which people simultaneously embrace and repudiate the past. Scholars of the new cultural approaches to nationalism have not been more helpful. Although Eugen Weber, employing Deutsch’s approach, has shown us in his study Peasants into Frenchmen how people pull themselves from local affairs into national affairs, we still lack a similar study that incorporates the new cultural and anthropological approaches to nationalism, delineating how people internalize the abstract world of the nation to create an imagined community.⁴

Indeed, the state of the research can be illuminated by the following example. Since 1983 Anderson’s fascinating notion of the nation as an imagined community has become a household term in the way we conceive nationalism; but we still await a study that explores the process—social, political, and cultural—by which people come to imagine a distinct nation. Nationhood is a metaphor for social relations among millions of people:⁵ we need a method that can tell us about the way people devise a common denominator between their intimate, immediate, and real local place and the distant, abstract, and not-less-real national world. Such a method must also be a remedy to the artificial dichotomy between nationalism from above and from below by exploring nationhood as a process by which people from all walks of life redefine concepts of space, time, and kin.

The second feature of national identity is its ability to represent the nation without excluding a host of other identities. Because it rejects other nations, national identity has often been regarded by scholars and laypersons as exclusive. The striking potential of nationhood to integrate diverse and frequently hostile groups within the nation is forgotten too easily. The full force of this fact becomes clear when we consider nationalism not as an ideology, like liberalism, fascism, or communism, but as a religion.⁶ Nationalism, like religion, is a common denominator that defies gender, regional, social, and political divisions, relegating these categories to secondary position. Both are capable of representing the oneness of something, God or the nation, and simultaneously the particularity of other identities; their representation is more than the sum of the identities that coexist in them. We need a method of analyzing national society and culture that embraces both nationhood and other identities that exist in the nation.⁷

How, then, are we to look at nationhood?

THINKING GERMANY

I should like to consider this question by looking first at interpretations of the construction of national belonging in Germany. My aim here is neither to review the historiography of German nationalism nor to discuss the origins and disastrous consequences of the German national idea. Rather, I should like to discuss the implicit and explicit assumptions about the making of German national belonging advanced by three leading interpretations of modern German history: the modernization approach; its particular German offshoot, the Sonderweg interpretation; and post-Sonderweg historiography.

The modernization approach suggested that German nationhood was a creation of the social and economic transformation from a traditional to a modern, industrial state.⁸ Challenging an earlier view, presented in the works of Hans Kohn and others, that saw nationalism as the history of an idea, this approach viewed German unification in the 1860s as the outcome of the growing economic unification since the Zollverein, the customs union among German states founded in 1834, and of Prussia’s superior economic development and social organization.⁹ The modernization approach substantially broadened our knowledge about the forces that produce national belonging: how social and economic changes pulled Germans from local to national institutions and worldviews, and how roads, schools, and military conscription developed in them a sense of community. But this approach explored the diffusion of national belonging, not its meaning. By giving a social and economic explanation, it ignored the fact that national belonging is essentially a problem of culture. And by viewing nationalism as an inevitable product of modernization, it also viewed national belonging as an immutable fixed process from traditional into modern identity, while in fact the process was full of fluctuation where people simultaneously repudiated and reclaimed past ways of life and thought.

The Sonderweg view centered on the notion of the peculiarity of German history, interpreted as diverging from the history of other Western countries in its inability to produce a liberal democracy. It determined a particular reading of national belonging. Setting out to explain why Nazism developed in Germany, the Sonderweg thesis applied modernization models of nation building to German history and suggested that aberrant German nationhood was the creation of a discrepancy in German society between modern economic development and the persistence of traditional and antidemocratic social, political, and cultural structures.¹⁰ “Normal” nationhood, by extension, was the reflection of a simultaneous process of nation building: industrialization in the economic field, democracy in the political system, liberalism as an ideology, and the hegemony of the bourgeoisie in state and society. Compared with this yardstick of historical development, Germans’ national sense of belonging was “wrong,” as was the German historical development that failed to accomplish a bourgeois revolution and a democratic regime. In German society, viewed by the Sonderweg proponents as a closely knit entity, national feeling largely originated from the ruling elites, predominantly the Junkers, and their dominant culture. The elites manipulated national sentiments and imposed them on other segments of society through imperialism abroad and hatred of “enemies of the empire” (Reichsfeinde) at home, in particular Catholics and socialists.¹¹ The meaning of German nationalism thus became a means to divert attention from a repressive regime.

The Sonderweg thesis appears to be an exemplary case of the dangers of imposing an explanatory ideal-type model on the vicissitudes and contingencies of historical and human affairs; it has been less successful in exploring the changing development of German national feeling than in measuring its alleged deficiencies against “normal” development. As a consequence, the Sonderweg approach focused on what German nationhood was not, instead of on what it was. Perhaps more important, this perspective has treated national belonging not as a way of construing national life, but as a coercive instrument to hold power. We need to resort to a great deal of guesswork from the practice of manipulative nationalism to the reality of national identity. By interpreting national feeling as the mere product of manipulation, the Sonderweg thesis obscured the fundamental difference between nationhood and aggressive nationalism, for aggressive nationalism may or may not be part of nationhood, but is not equivalent to it. Moreover, the Sonderweg thesis has not emphasized enough the interaction between social groups that is essential to every concept of society and culture. It interpreted German national belonging as having been produced by the ruling elites in an orderly fashion and then imposed on society, while in reality it was an unpredictable process where many social groups interacted. As a result, in spite of its contribution to German historiography in various fields of research, the Sonderweg thesis has not bequeathed to us models for understanding the diversity of German culture and society.

The Sonderweg generated a historiographical reaction in the early 1980s from historians who have questioned the peculiarity of German history.¹² Unlike the Sonderweg historians, who were committed to social science history, the critics of the Sonderweg have constituted, in terms of methodology, a heterogeneous group influenced by social history, historical anthropology, and literary criticism. Post-Sonderweg historiography has not articulated a comprehensive interpretation of modern German history, but it has provided some illuminating new directions for understanding the German Empire. Critics have reversed the Sonderweg thesis’s depiction of German society by emphasizing history from the bottom up, conceiving German society as a multitude of social, political, confessional, and gender groups. This approach has substantially broadened our knowledge of groups that were traditionally neglected in the historiography, such as the family, peasants, and women.¹³ The comprehensive study of single social groups has received a methodological support by Alltagsgeschichte that traces the social and cultural everyday life experience of a defined group.¹⁴ One result of post-Sonderweg historiography, therefore, has been a view of a German society fragmented into separate enclaves because critics of the Sonderweg have been less interested in looking at German society as a whole than in exploring the subjective experience of its component parts. As a result, no comprehensive view has emerged of the social and cultural factors that created among diverse and opposed groups a feeling of belonging together as Germans; topics about cultural common denominators in German society have been left unresearched.

The three approaches have bequeathed a number of problems to the study of national belonging in the German Empire. The modernization and the Sonderweg approaches shifted the meaning of Germans’ national belonging away from what actually happened in the empire. The first focused on the origins of national belonging, the second on its outcome, Nazism, thus making the actual experience of its construction insignificant. In consequence, we know very little about how Germans actually internalized the nation. The Sonderweg and the post-Sonderweg historiographies have not provided an analysis of German society and culture that embraces both nationhood and other identities that existed in the nation. The Sonderweg approach regarded German society as a whole, as a global entity, and German identity as dominated by Prussia and the Junkers, thus largely failing to look at the various modes and types of relationships between the component parts of German society and culture, between the multitude of social, regional, and confessional identities in German nationhood. Post-Sonderweg historiography looked at the component parts, but did not provide a view of German society and identity as a whole. Both interpretations failed to convey the exceptional characteristic of national identity, that is, its successful attempt to represent both the nation and the peculiarity of other identities.

How, then, are we to look at German nationhood in particular and at nationhood in general? I suggest viewing it from the perspective of collective memory, as a product of collective negotiation and exchange between the many memories that existed in the nation. It is a developmental approach to the history of German nationhood, emphasizing the contingencies in its construction. By stressing the interaction between national memory and other memories, this approach explores nationhood through the metaphor of whole and parts, taking cognizance of German identity and German society as a global entity where peculiar component parts interacted.

COLLECTIVE MEMORY

The notion of collective memory has been used in the past decade, with uneven degrees of success and sophistication, to explore how a social group, be it a family, a class, or a nation, constructs a past through a process of invention and appropriation and what it means to the relationship of power within society. The notion of memory has been a latecomer in historical studies.¹⁵ Historians were preceded by psychoanalysts (Sigmund Freud), philosophers (Henri Bergson), and writers (such as Marcel Proust), who, unlike historians, regarded memory as a faculty of the individual mind; by anthropologists, who found memory a more suitable concept than history to understanding illiterate societies (Jack Goody); and by sociologists (Maurice Halbwachs and Roger Bastide).¹⁶ The first to have used the concept systematically was Halbwachs, whose fundamental contribution was to establish the connection between a social group and collective memory. In a series of studies Halbwachs argued that every memory is carried by a specific social group limited in space and time.¹⁷

Of course, social groups cannot remember, for this is only a faculty of the individual.¹⁸ And certainly, people cannot remember events in which they did not take part. Yet you do not need to have stormed the Bastille in order to celebrate 14 July as a symbol of national identity. One’s memory, like one’s most intimate dreams, originates from the symbols, landscape, and past that are shared by a given society. Since the making and the reception of memories, personal and collective, are embedded in a specific cultural, social, and political context, we can explore how people construct a past in which they did not take part individually, but which they share with other members of their group as a formative sense of cultural knowledge, tradition, and singularity.

Building on the new and increasing body of literature, I find collective memory useful for elucidating the two features of nationhood I mentioned earlier.¹⁹ It allows us, first, to explore the relationships between national belonging and the host of identities that exist in the nation. The nation is a conglomeration of opposing and at times contradictory memories (such as national and regional, Catholic and Protestant, bourgeois and w...