The Home Town as a Redemptive Postwar Geography: The Case of Cologne, 1945–65
This paper examines the emergence of local home towns as points of cathexis in the aftermath of the destructive and ideological warfare of World War II. It considers how experiences of war, including destruction of personal landscapes of Heimat, mass death, dislocation, and ideological appropriation of private spheres all resulted in localist push back after 1945. This local turn had significant cultural and political ramifications.
Scholars including Richard Bessel have asked how traumatized citizens imagined “life after death” after 1945. Home towns, I argue, represented one of the foremost geographies in which citizens imagined restored future civilian lives. Turning away from an expansive national idea as the guarantor of future life, discourses in the rubble of postwar Cologne emphasized the local as an imagined site of restored future life. Local Heimat, in turn, was described as a place of “life-affirmation.” This process proved crucial to early postwar cultural demobilization.
The turn to cities and localities as sites of meaning and rebuilding private lives also had significant political consequences. On the one hand, it dovetailed with cultural re-valuations of federalism, and often went hand-in-hand with insistence on both de-centered imaginings of nation and a system of politics that preserved private, localized spheres free from ideological appropriation. As the losers of war who faced a tainted national idea, postwar citizens also looked to cities as sites of positive identification. In this case study, I illustrate how citizens of Cologne reinvented local traditions and reconfigured local historical memories to posit “Colognian democracy,” “Colognian world-openness,” and “Colognian tolerance” as tenets of local identity. Far from being an outlier, similar trends can be found in cities and regions throughout the Federal Republic.