Maiken Umbach

Hijacked Heimats: national appropriations of local and regional identities in Germany and Spain, 1930–1945

This article analyses instances in which ultra-nationalism and local and regional identity politics proved compatible, and even mutually constitutive. Focusing on Germany and Spain under Hitler and Franco, the authors suggest that both regimes imagined the nation as a space composed of distinctive regional parts. They uncover a particular ideological affinity between fascist or quasi-fascist views of the state and the notion of regional diversity, which was invoked to combat the perceived dangers of state-building in the Napoleonic mode: liberalism, progressivism and bureaucratisation. While political separatism was repressed, regionalism was often cultivated to introduce an element of populism, grass-roots activism, social rootedness and ideological dynamism into the political process that seemed desirable to both regimes. In the German case, it also served as a pragmatic and hence manageable alternative to volkish ideologues, whose spiritualist and egalitarian inclinations brought them increasingly into conflict with the party line.

German federalism : past, present, future

Foreword: H.Schulze Notes on the Contributors Introduction: German Federalism in Historical Perspective M.Umbach Federal Habits: The Holy Roman Empire and the Continuity of German Federalism J.Whaley History and Federalism in the Age of Nation-State Formation M.Umbach Federalism and the Heimat Idea in Imperial Germany A.Confino Political Unity and Linguistic Diversity in Nineteenth-Century Germany M.Durrell Federalism and the Nazi State J.Noakes Democratic Centralism and Regionalism in the GDR M.Fulbrook Federalism from Cooperation to Competition C.Jeffery Challenges and Perspectives of German Federalism W.Renzsch German Federalism in History: Some Afterthoughts A.J.Nicholls Index

Selfhood, place, and ideology in German photo albums, 1933–1945

This article explores the significance of photography and photo-album making as practices that many Germans used to record their lives during the Third Reich. Millions of photos not only offer insights into everyday life under National Socialism: mass photography itself had a transformative effect, turning seemingly mundane actions into performances for the camera and into conscious acts of self-representation. The article also considers the relationship between amateur snapshots, on the one hand, and propagandistic and commercial photographs, on the other. Identifying connections between the genres, it argues that these are best understood as two-way processes of borrowing and (re-)appropriation, in which private subjectivity and public ideology constantly commingled. Particularly important in linking the two were photos of emotional or affective states, such as relaxation, exploration, introspection, and even melancholy, which were often defined or underscored by the ways in which both civilians and soldiers positioned themselves in relation to particular landscapes. The photographic archival record is highly varied, but such variation notwithstanding, photos helped cement immersive “experience” as the basis for individual and collective identity; this was central to the ideology of the National Socialist regime, even if it never wholly controlled its meanings.

Classicism, Enlightenment and the ‘Other’: thoughts on decoding eighteenth–century visual culture

Cultural historians have been slow to respond to the pictorial turn. They often find images too ambiguous to use as sources in their own right. This problem is aggravated by two characteristics shared by early modern and postmodern visual culture: both transgress boundaries of genre (such as the text/image divide), and both tend to be notoriously fluid and plural in terms of their ‘message’. The nineteenth–century Idealist notion of ‘art’, by contrast, celebrates unity of style and content, and tolerates multiple meanings only where they can be resolved in dialectical synthesis. This legacy continues to prevent us from understanding visual evidence which conforms to neither requirement. Drawing on readings of the contemporary landscape art of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Cy Twombly, this article proposes a new approach to visual culture of pre–Idealist periods, for which ambiguous allusive fields and transgressions of genre were constitutive. The eighteenth century’s use of classical culture is a case in point, here exemplified by a close reading of the multi-layered trope of Arcadia. The conclusions that emerge from this reading call into question negative assumptions about the Enlightenment’s dogmatic rationalism which have dominated historiography from Romanticism to postmodernism. The ‘image–texts‘ of the eighteenth century destabilized hegemonic rationality without promoting its opposite, instead integrating the ‘other’ into a self–reflexive and self–critical Enlightenment ideology.

Introduction: photography and twentieth-century German history

In the introduction to this special issue on photography and German history, we outline current research on using both professional and amateur or snapshot photography to elucidate problems in 20th-century German history. We argue that an approach is required that focuses on the transformative impact of the mass production and circulation of images in this period, and the way in which this altered peoples consciousness of their own role vis-a-vis larger social and political process, and in changing the boundaries between public and private life. We also explore the role this practice played in enabling new forms of politics, including, but not confined to, so-called totalitarian regimes.

A Joint Preface

All nation-states are creations of physical topography, historical circumstance, political claims, and cultural imagination. A countrys identity may be the result of its material place, legal self-understanding, and (invented) national traditions, but it is also defined by certain founding myths and historical associations born of dreams and distance. The histories of the United States, Liberia, and Israel are obvious examples, in that their territories have become mythic “landscapes of memory” in their own right for many around the world, even among those who have never been there.