Thomas Schaarschmidt. Regionalkultur und Diktatur: SÖ¤chsische Heimatbewegung und Heimat-Propaganda im Dritten Reich und in der SBZ/DDR. Cologne: BÖ¶hlau, 2004. xv + 574 pp. EUR 37.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-412-18002-7.

Reviewed by Scott Moranda (Department of History, SUNY-Cortland)
Published on H-German (April, 2006)

From Normal to Abnormal: Heimat Enthusiasm Under Two Dictatorial Regimes

Thomas Schaarschmidt's history of Saxon Heimat associations offers something that remains rare--a study that places 1945 in the middle of a timeline, rather than at the end or the beginning. The author tightly focuses his gaze on associational politics and considers the limits the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic encountered in their efforts to assert total control of cultural activities. Schaarschmidt's story thus illuminates a world of negotiation, tactical retreats and self-interested maneuvering on the part of amateur historians, folklorists and preservationists. The author argues that neither regime completely eradicated the apolitical and inward-looking world of Heimat enthusiasts, though he asserts that the communist dictatorship proved more thorough in its efforts.

Given his goal of testing theories of totalitarianism and the limits of dictatorship, Schaarschmidt would seem to avoid the trap of assuming a direct link between National Socialism and a particular German anti-modernism embodied in Heimat movements. Whether or not he ultimately succeeds in this respect is less than clear (and will be discussed below). To a great degree, however, the assumptions built into the structure of Schaarschmidt's narrative seem to go to the other extreme--that is, the author suggests that the National Socialist period and the East German dictatorship represented a period of abnormality divorced from the German mainstream. Schaarschmidt thus presents readers with a story of decline. Such a narrative structure situates Heimat clubs in a struggle to secure normalcy in the face of abnormal totalitarian maneuvers. A "normal" world of private, voluntary associations disintegrated--only partly under National Socialism and more radically under the Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic. Under the first dictatorship, this collapse was largely self-inflicted. Under the second, the wounds inflicted were more thorough and fatal--largely because the new regime was fundamentally opposed to the liberal, bourgeois model of civil society.

The author thus begins with the story of the Nazi coordination of existing cultural organizations--a project greatly bolstered by the enthusiasm and "self-coordination" of many Heimat preservationists. For Schaarschmidt, the anti-modernism and romanticism of preservation groups helped them to see the political movement as a potential ally in their fight against materialism and communism. The author primarily focuses on three different organizations--the Landesverein Sächsischer Heimatschutz, territorial associations of folklorists and antiquarians (Landsmannschaften) and hiking clubs like the Erzgebirgsverein. While adapting to the new regime, however, all three remained wary of centralization and a loss of autonomy after 1933. Schaarschmidt's important contribution here is his insight into how Heimat enthusiasts took advantage of the overlapping and competing jurisdictions within the National Socialist state to create relatively autonomous niches within the new system.

In the second half of the monograph, the author explains how the emerging communist dictatorship whittled away at any remaining club autonomy in an attempt to exclude so-called "bourgeois" and "fascist" elements. Even as traditional associations faced dissolution, however, they worked the system to find breathing room--whether through alliances with local communal leaders or in affiliation with the Natur und Heimatfreunde inside the Kulturbund. Attempts by functionaries to centralize the planning of Natur und Heimatfreunde activities, moreover, never fully succeeded. New local affiliates often preferred to organize slide shows and hikes that appealed to traditional tastes instead of creating opportunities for political agitation. The Kulturbund apparently even considered jettisoning the problematic Natur und Heimatfreunde in 1959. On the one hand, such crass political gambits revealed the power of central authorities; on the other hand, the ultimately unsuccessful dissolution of the Natur und Heimatfreunde suggested to Schaarschmidt that political functionaries, to a certain degree, "gave up" on total control, allowing Heimat enthusiasts to carve out a niche for apolitical activities. Here, Schaarschmidt follows Thomas Lindenberger in asserting that such niches actually helped stabilize SED rule by silencing popular criticism.[1]

Within the narrative that Schaarschmidt has established, however, the creation of such niches also indicated a survival of "normality" in the face of abnormal totalitarian dreams. Here, though, the author makes a potentially problematic assumption. He suggests that, in their defense of regional autonomy, Heimat enthusiasts consistently resisted centralization and rarely considered the advantages of greater centralization or, for that matter, the growth of the modern state. In a related manner, the author's focus on organizational details and political negotiation divorces Heimat culture from broader cultural and political narratives in German history. In his one nod to the mentalities and cultural attitudes of Heimat organizers, he stresses that an agrarian romanticism made Nazism attractive to preservationists. Two key problems, as a result, weaken his thesis.

First, Schaarschmidt ignores (or is unaware of) recent key contributions to the study of Heimat organizations on the part of Thomas Rohkrämer, Thomas Lekan or even Matthew Jefferies.[2] All of these historians have raised doubts about the anti-modernism of Heimat culture; instead, they describe preservationists who sought to construct an alternative modernity that balanced industrial growth and landscape preservation. Lekan, in particular, has revealed an attraction to technocratic landscape planning that gave the state a key role in organizing economic development in a more rational manner. In other words, Heimat groups found something other than agrarian romanticism appealing in Nazism; they also recognized the possibilities of using modern state resources to manage capitalism rationally and thus preserve German landscapes (natural and historical).

This oversight leads to the second problem--one that becomes most evident in Schaarschmidt's discussion of the German Democratic Republic. For the author, the GDR was the more ruthless in its destruction of traditional associational life in Germany, and as a result, his narrative depicts power emanating "from the top" to crush local pockets of nonconformity while groups "at the bottom" scurried for protection. Here, he is not necessarily wrong, but he fails to acknowledge possibilities for cooperation between Heimat enthusiasts and the new regime. Certainly, the ideological gap between Marxism-Leninism and preservationists was fairly insurmountable. At the same time, a faith in technocratic landscape planning had not completely disappeared after 1945. Here, Schaarschmidt misses an opportunity to investigate continuity between the two regimes. Insofar as socialism initially promised scientific planning and balance between development and preservation, Heimat enthusiasts could imagine a role in East German society beyond their safe and silent apolitical niches. Could have it been that regional Heimat enthusiasts, as much as the leadership in Berlin, imagined a role for central state planning even as they remained skeptical of the tone-deaf political functionaries in the Kulturbund? The construction of Schaarschmidt's narrative as a story of decline and "lost causes" thus ignores the potential for complexity and complicity in the history of the German Democratic Republic. At its worst, moreover, the author's discussion of social niches in the GDR implies that participants in those niches somehow managed to tune out the promises of socialism or politics for forty years and merely hoped to endure a period of abnormality imposed from outside. These dictatorships were not entirely alien inventions imposed from the outside on unsuspecting Germans; through much of the early twentieth century, Europeans in a variety of cultural settings pondered the advantages of authoritarian regimes over weak parliamentary systems.

Nonetheless, Schaarschmidt has made an important contribution by writing a case study for testing theories of dictatorship and totalitarianism. Particularly noteworthy is how his comparative history highlights the ruthlessness of the SED regime. Most of all, the author's detailed narration of negotiation, compromise and self-interested enthusiasm teaches us a great deal about the powers and limits of dictatorships with totalitarian ambitions.

Notes

[1]. Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur. Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Cologne: Bohlau, 1999).

[2]. Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880-1933 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999); Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871-1918 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); see the H-Net review at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=26173851619801 .

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Citation: Scott Moranda. Review of Schaarschmidt, Thomas, Regionalkultur und Diktatur: SÖ¤chsische Heimatbewegung und Heimat-Propaganda im Dritten Reich und in der SBZ/DDR. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11694

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