Oliver Zimmer

Boundary mechanisms and symbolic resources: towards a process-oriented approach to national identity*

This article argues that the classical distinction between civic and ethnic forms of national identity has proved too schematic to come to terms with the dynamic nature of social and political processes. This has caused difficulties particularly for those historians and social scientists studying particular national movements rather than concentrating on a handful of thinkers and intellectuals or taking a broadly comparative approach. As an alternative to the classical model, I propose to distinguish between, on the one hand, the mechanisms which social actors use as they reconstruct the boundaries of national identity at a particular point in time; and, on the other, the symbolic resources upon which they draw when they reconstruct these boundaries.

In Search of Natural Identity: Alpine Landscape and the Reconstruction of the Swiss Nation

Elias Canetti, in a brief passage of his Crowds and Power (first published in German in 1960), argued that neither language, nor territory or history are at the heart of what today we would call national identity. What nations can not do without, however, and what has contributed most to turning different individuals into conscious members of a particular nation, is a national “crowd symbol.” Canetti then went on to show that most European nations possessed one such symbol around which a popular feeling of national belonging could be generated and sustained. In the case of England, he maintained, it was the sea that took this function; while for the Germans it was the forest. In France, on the other hand, it was the Revolution that came to play this very role. And in Switzerland—the case Canetti probably knew best from his own experience—it was the mountains (see Canetti 1960:191–203).

‘A Unique Fusion of the Natural and the Man-Made’: The Trajectory of Swiss Nationalism, 1933-39

In 1996, a special commission of Swiss and foreign historians was set up to investigate Switzerland’s economic and business links with nazi Germany during the second world war. Among the few themes of a predominantly non-economic nature investigated by the commission was Switzerland’s refugee policy both before and during the war. While this has undoubtedly resulted in a number of new insights, the ideological climate in which this policy could take shape has received little attention. Above all, no reassessment of Swiss interwar nationalism has been undertaken. This article assumes this task, tracing the formation of the national revival in the period 1933-39 through an exploration of the links between public discourse and state-induced cultural policy. The essence of the cultural nationalism of the era is located in a complex fusion of voluntaristic and organic conceptions of national identity.

Remaking the Rhythms of Life: German Communities in the Age of the Nation-State

Across Europe the late nineteenth century marked a period of rapid economic change, increased migration, religious conflict, and inter-state competition. In Germany, these developments were further accentuated by the creation of the imperial state in 1870-71 and the conflicting hopes and expectations it provoked. Attempting to make sense of this turbulent period of German history, historians have frequently reverted to terms such as industrialization, urbanization, nation-formation, modernity or modernization. Using the prism of comparative urban history, Oliver Zimmer highlights the limitations of these conceptual abstractions and challenges the separation of local and national approaches to the past. He shows how men and women drew on their creative energies to instigate change at various levels. Focusing on conflicts over the local economy, elementary schools, as well as on nationalist and religious processions, Remaking the Rhythms of Life examines how urban residents sought to regain a sense of place in a changing world: less by resisting the novel than by reconfiguring their environments in ways that reflected their sensibilities and aspirations; less by lamenting the decline of civic virtues than by creating surroundings that proved sufficiently meaningful to sustain lives. In their capacity as consumers or citizens, members of religious or economic associations, people embarked on a multitude of journeys. As they did, larger phenomena such as religion, nationalism and the state became intertwined with their everyday affairs and concerns.

Beneath the “Culture War”: Corpus Christi Processions and Mutual Accommodation in the Second German Empire*

On a sunny day in June 1897, the Augsburg councillors Kusterer, Doll, and Martin joined the town’s main Corpus Christi procession. Given that the three men represented the Center Party, a Catholic political party in Augsburg’s liberal-dominated city council, their taking part in this most important of Catholic religious feasts was by no means exceptional, as each year thousands of inhabitants either joined the Corpus Christi procession or lined the streets as bystanders. In the local press, both liberal and ultramontane newspapers covered the event in the usual way, noting, among other things, that the town’s garrisoned military had lined the route of the procession, or that “many houses” had been decorated “with birch branches, wreaths, and images.” They also mentioned, without further ado (and without naming names), that “three councillors” had joined the procession. None of the newspapers covering the event reported that anything extraordinary, let alone improper, had happened before, during, or immediately after the procession.2

Urban Economies and the National Imagination: The German South, 1860–1914

If we still know rather little about how ordinary men and women experienced nationalism and the modern nation-state, this is in part because the communal embeddedness of people’s national imagination has received scant attention in a field in which many works are pitched at a highly abstract level. In the terminology of Benedict Anderson, the most influential theorist of recent decades, nations are imagined communities; what had enabled people to imagine a large and abstract community like the nation was print capitalism: a language- based revolution in the means of communication that started with the Reformation and reached its apogee in the mass-produced newspapers and novels of the nineteenth century.1