Article
The Elusive Borders of Regional
Feeling: Re-Imagining the
Federalist Map in Early
West Germany
European History Quarterly
1–31
© The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/02656914241279774
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Jeremy DeWaal
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Abstract
While a rich body of work on nations and national borderlands has demonstrated how
the ideal of the nation state resulted in ever greater (and often violent) demands for geographic fixity, this article shows how territorial visions of regional communities permitted a tremendous level of flexibility and were able to hold highly divergent geographic
imaginings in suspension. The article seeks to demonstrate this by looking at a unique
moment in post-war West German history when spatial planers, parliamentary committees, regionalists and an army of experts sought to determine the boundaries of regional
belonging in preparation for a planned redrawing of the West German federal map. Many
believed that a viable federalist democracy required stronger federal states rooted in a
sense of regional community. The states created by the Allies were initially seen as temporary, and Article 29 of the new constitution required that states be redrawn by considering boundaries of regional belonging. The intense efforts of experts, politicians, and
regionalists, however, ultimately failed and revealed widely diverging ideas about which
territories corresponded to a common sense of regional community. Conflicting historic
state borders, the historic force of physical geographies, confession, orientation to urban
centres, a profusion of dialect borders, and regional cultural practices all shaped geographic visions of region, but simultaneously underpinned widely-variant cognitive
maps. While the failure to redraw the West German map resulted in this episode of history largely being forgotten, I argue that it speaks volumes about how forms of community beyond and beneath the nation state have been imagined in territorial space.
Corresponding author:
Jeremy DeWaal, History, University of Exeter, Room 114, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, UK.
Email: j.dewaal@exeter.ac.uk
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Keywords
cognitive mapping, federalism, Heimat, Luther Committee, regional identities, regional
state building, regionalism, Stamm, territoriality, West German history
The question of ‘where’ a particular nation could be found in geographic space has long
played a central role in a range of national historiographies. This is perhaps nowhere truer
than for German history. Few scholars will be unfamiliar with the iconic question of
Goethe and Schiller posed in 1797: ‘Germany? But where is it? I know not how to
find such a country’.1 As Helmut Walser Smith has recently shown, efforts to map
‘Germany’ began already in the early modern period, though such maps were filled
with shaded areas, dotted lines, and representations of ambiguity. Demands for absolute
fixity, he concludes, were the product of a modern age when the idea of nation was
wedded to that of the modern state.2 Over the past several decades, historians have
devoted much attention to modern conflicts over the geographic contours of national
communities – and for good reason. Such contestations underpinned histories of
violent struggle throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the historian
Charles Maier, the pursuit of an overlap between national ‘identity space’ and ‘decision
space’ was one of the foundational trends of modern history and the hallmark of what he
refers to as a ‘territorial age’.3
The nation state, however, was not the only form of territorially imagined community.
Much evidence, moreover, suggests that the modern ideal of the national community as
the primary source of political sovereignty made the dynamics of imagining it in territorial space rather unique. Instead of focusing on territorial imaginings of national community, this article looks to modern regional communities, which help shed light on what
cognitive mapping of modern communities looked like with absolute claims to political
sovereignty taken out of the picture. More specifically, this article looks at a revealing
moment in modern German history when experts and regionalists sought to ‘discover’
the borders which separated regional communities and cultures.
The history of regions and regionalism in modern Europe has long been a rich field of
research. While many works have shed light on the relationship of regional and national
identities, less attention has been devoted to how modern regional communities were cognitively mapped.4 One of the few possible exceptions can be found in studies of
1
2
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, ‘Xenien’, in Musen-Almanach (Tübingen 1797), 222.
Helmut Walser Smith, Germany: A Nation in its Time (New York 2020).
Charles Maier, ‘Transformations of Territoriality, 1600–2000’, in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and
Oliver Janz, eds, Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen 2006), 32–55;
Charles Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth-Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’,
American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 3 (2000), 807–31.
4
For excellent surveys on modern regionalism, see Xosé Núñez Seixas and Eric Storm, eds, Regionalism and
Modern Europe: Identity Construction and Movements from 1890 to the Present Day (London 2019); Joost
Augusteijn and Eric Storm, eds, Region and State in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building, Regional
Identities and Separatism (Basingstoke 2012). See also, Laurence Cole, ed., Different Paths to the Nation:
Regional and National Identities in Central Europe and Italy, 1830–1870 (Basingstoke 2007). For only a
few classic works on regionalism in Germany, see Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German
3
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nationally contested border regions, which have provided some examples of how national
contestation reshaped ideas about which territories belonged to a common region.5
Unlike modern nation states, however, regions laid claim at most to partial forms of sovereignty and sometimes were only cultural ideas without any correspondence to national
territorial subdivisions. The idea that regional ‘decision spaces’ should overlap with
regional ‘identity spaces’, moreover, was far weaker and often inconsistent. But how
did modern denizens forge cognitive maps of regional communities? Can we see the
same impulses towards ‘fixity’? What role did geography, dialect, religion, or political
borders past and present play in shaping cognitive maps? Did the interplay of these
factors yield stable and commonly shared cognitive maps? If any nation in modern
European history had clearly defined regions, Germany would seem a prime suspect
given its strong federalist histories.
Regional political borders in German history, however, were never formed by first
looking descriptively at which peoples saw themselves as belonging to a common
region. The re-drawing of the map under Napoleon is a classic example, with random
states drawn according to raw power politics followed by subsequent efforts to instil denizens with regional identities.6 This article, however, examines a telling moment in the
early post-war years when experts and regionalists in West Germany sought to work
the other way around: asking first what territories corresponded to regional feeling in
preparation for an anticipated redrawing of the federal map. While the history of these
efforts has largely been forgotten, appearing chiefly on the margins of political histories
of West German federalism, they offer rich insight into how modern regions were imagined in geographic space.7
The federal states which eventually became permanent fixtures of the new Federal
Republic traced back, for the most part, to the interim states created by the allies based
on temporary administrative considerations. Both the Allies and the West German
state saw them as temporary. Many federalist enthusiasts, meanwhile, maintained that
decentralizing the new republic required not only a sub-national division of power, but
Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, CA 1990); Siegfried Weichlein, Nation und Region: Integrationsprozesse im
Bismarckreich (Düsseldorf 2004); Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in
Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge 2008); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor:
Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, NC 1997); Jasper
Heinzen, Making Prussians, Raising Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building after Civil
War, 1866–1935 (Cambridge 2017); Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal
Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca, NY 2003).
5
Caitlin Murdock, Changing Places: Society, Culture, and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands,
1870–1946 (Ann Arbor, MI 2010); Alison Carrol, The Return of Alsace to France, 1918–1939 (Oxford
2018); Christopher Fischer, Alsace to the Alsatians: Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism
(New York 2010); Brendan Karch, Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland: Upper Silesia,
1848–1960 (Cambridge 2018); James Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National
Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, MI 2008).
6
7
Green, Fatherlands and Weichlein, Nation.
For legal and political histories, see Werner Rutz, Die Gliederung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Länder
(Baden-Baden 1995); Peter Burg, Die Neugliederung deutscher Länder (Münster 1996); Bettina Blank, Die
westdeutschen Länder und die Entstehung der Bundesrepublik (Munich 1995); Almuth Hennings, Der
unerfüllte Verfassungsauftrag (Hamburg 1983).
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also federal states rooted in regional community. In 1948, the Allies issued guidelines for
the formation of a West German state, which included directives that a new federal government must redraw its regional state borders.8 The Parliamentary Council which drafted
the ‘Foundational Law’, in turn, included Article 29 which declared that the new republic
must redraw the federal states according to regional feeling, historical connections, and
social and economic viability.9
The constitutional requirement triggered the mobilization of a vast scholarly and bureaucratic apparatus to determine the boundaries of regional belonging. It included politicians, geographers, historians, political scientists, linguists, folklorists, and dialect
experts, among others. It saw the drafting of hundreds of reports on different aspects
of regional belonging submitted to a new parliamentary committee tasked with redrawing
the entire map. The issuance of the committee report was followed by a brief legal
window in which regionalists in a portion of the country were allowed to gather signatures to hold referenda on creating new states.
This article probes these attempts to find the borders of regional belonging. It begins
with a reflection on cognitive mapping, earlier territorial patterns in German history
which would shape the debates, and an assessment of the historical context in which
the post-war re-bordering efforts unfolded. It continues by examining the diverse
approaches which post-war experts took, from examination of dialect borders to
physical geography, ancient ‘tribal’ borders, confession, shifting political borders,
memory of past state forms or the radiating influence of cities. The final part of the
chapter looks at how regionalists themselves advocated for their own conflicting maps
of regional belonging.
As such efforts illustrated, the potential factors which could influence territorial imaginings of region was staggering. It is not the intention of this article, however, to integrate these myriad forces into a universal model which claims to explain how every
potential imagining of region worked. Needless to say that simplistic explanations
would hardly do, and the study of individual regions reveals the complex and inevitably
contingent nature of such processes. This article is instead interested in the degree to
which regional communities required uniformity in their imagined geographic contours.
The history of efforts to redraw the West German map, this article concludes, ultimately demonstrated how modern regional communities permitted far greater diversity in
understandings about their contours, defining characteristics, and geographies compared
to modern nation states. Neither experts nor regionalists were able to find commonly
agreed upon borders because such borders did not exist. Cognitive maps of region
often proved even more variant than the earliest territorial imaginings of nation in previous centuries, with conflicting geographic imaginings crisscrossing the core point of other
cognitive maps of region. While the West German state would quickly abandon efforts to
redraw its interior borders according to regional feeling, the fleeting history reflected how
8
‘Frankfurter Dokumente, July 1, 1948’, reprinted in Reinhard Schiffers, ed., Weniger Länder – mehr
Föderalismus? (Düsseldorf 1996), 119.
9
‘Artikel 29, Grundgesetz’, April 23, 1949, reprinted in Schiffers, ed., Weniger, 122–3.
DeWaal
5
regional communities lacked the same impulse towards fixity which could be found on
the level of the nation state.
Cognitive Maps and ‘Partial Sovereignties’
In using the term ‘cognitive maps of region’ this article refers quite simply to those
regional geographic spaces with which individuals consciously identified. The term
‘cognitive map’ was itself first coined in the late 1940s, and the earliest thinkers
who used it thought not of nation or region but rather about individual engagement
with everyday spaces. First used in psychology, the term was increasingly taken up
by geographers by the 1970s. In a joint work on the concept from the decade, the
geographer Roger Downs and the psychologist David Stea asked how similar individual maps of the same places were. Cognitive maps, they argued, were tools used to
deal with the ‘staggering volume of potential spatial information’ and were necessarily selective, involving a mixture of fact and fiction.10 While earlier scholars had
asked how ‘accurate’ cognitive maps were, Downs and Stea pointed out that the question problematically posited an accessible ‘objective’ map of place against which cognitive maps could be measured. While similar cognitive abilities and behaviour
patterns would result in some similarities, they concluded that cognitive mapping
was deeply subjective given the personal nature of experiences and the meanings
attributed to them.11
Historians, though seldom engaging with the earlier work of psychologists or geographers, increasingly took up the term in research into the larger-scale ‘imagined community’ of the nation.12 The forces pushing for collective agreement in ‘cognitive maps’ of
the nation were hardly restricted to similar ‘cognitive abilities’ or patterns of behaviour.
Such processes were embedded within powerful political movements, the emergence of
ideas of the nation as the fundamental source of political legitimacy, and the ‘totalizing
classification’ of nation-building processes.13
In terms of scale, regions lay somewhere between the kind of everyday spaces which
the first theorists of the concept considered and the nation states which so preoccupied
historians. Unlike nationalists, political regionalists laid claim at most to what in the
German context has been referred to as ‘partial sovereignty’ (Teilsouverenität).14 By
its very nature, ‘partial sovereignty’ cannot be precisely delineated for the simple
reason that it was defined by ambiguity and historical contestations about what it
should entail. It can perhaps best be defined ex negativo: it did not involve claiming to
10
Roger Downs and David Stea, Maps in Minds (London 1977), 99–103.
11
Ibid., 104.
12
Frithjof Schenk, ‘Mental Maps: Die Konstruktion von geographischen Räumen in Europa seit der
Aufklärung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2002), 493–514; Norbert Götz and Janne
Holmén, ‘Mental Maps: Geographical and Historical Perspectives’, Journal of Cultural Geography, Vol. 35,
No. 2 (2018), 157–61.
13
Christoph Conrad, ‘Vorbemerkung: Mental Maps’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2002), 339–
42, here 341.
14
Peter Kock, Bayerns Weg in die Bundesrepublik (Stuttgart 1983), 137.
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be a nation state but was also not fulfilled by a purely cultural form of regionalism in
which the region relinquished claims to accommodation within state structures.
There is little reason to think that determining the borders of regional feeling would be
any more difficult in the German lands than in other national contexts. But the longer
tradition of thinking about Germany as a ‘federative nation’ meant that Germans
tended to face the ‘where is the region’ question more often.15 Revolutions and the aftermath of wars particularly represented moments when Germans confronted changes or
proposed revisions to its interior state borders.16 To fully understand the post-1945
debates, a brief glimpse at these longer histories is needed. The territorial history of
the German lands offered post-war regionalists a dizzying array of contradicting
borders and reference points. Going back to the early Middle Ages, the Germanic
tribes and medieval tribal duchies had left an imprint on regional cultures and dialects
but had broken down in the late Middle Ages. The fragmented borders of early
modern states, meanwhile, fluctuated at a bewildering pace and had witnessed
dynamic processes of confessionalization and state-building. In the early nineteenth
century, Napoleon’s sweeping territorial revisions of the German lands particularly
reduced fragmentation and substantially consolidated states. Given how these states
were drawn purely based on politics, dynasts and provincial elites made great efforts
to subsequently promote regional identities for their new territories. They continued to
advance them after national unification, during which Bismarck adroitly used federalist
structures to keep a lid on potential regionalist conflicts.17
Regionalism, however, was not simply a top-down phenomenon, and scores of different groups promoted regional consciousness after the birth of the ‘Heimat movement’ in
the late nineteenth century. The term ‘Heimat’ which gained tremendous popularity in
regionalist movements, referred to a sense of home and belonging in local and regional
places, and represented a key word in the articulation of ideas about Germany as a nation
of diverse regions. Prominent actors in regionalist movements included the educated
bourgeoisie, hobby historians, local teachers, clerics, local notables, folklorists, and a
range of others, while regionalists often framed themselves as bridging narrow partisan
camps.18
If any period pre-figured the post-1945 confrontation with the ‘where is the region’
question, it was the Weimar years, during which many proposed redrawing the federal
states. The turbulence of the period threw up regionalist questions in a major way,
with a decade-long debate over proposed ‘Imperial Reforms’. As Jasper Heinzen has
demonstrated, many of the regional conflicts which the Second Empire had effectively
15
Dieter Langewiesche, ed., Föderative Nation. Deutschlandkonzepte von der Reformation bis zum Ersten
Weltkrieg (Munich 2000); Maiken Umbach, ed., German Federalism: Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke
2002).
16
See Anton Schindling, ‘Einleitung’, in Anton Schindling and Eike Wolgast, eds, Zusammenschlüsse und
Neubildungen deutscher Länder im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart 2013), 9–14.
17
Siegfried Weichlein, ‘Nation State, Conflict Resolution, and Culture War, 1850–1878’, in Helmut Walser
Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford 2011), 281–306.
18
On the diversity of actors shaping regional consciousness see Heinzen, Making Prussians; Applegate, A
Nation of Provincials and Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor; Jenkins, Provincial Modernity.
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7
contained erupted.19 Interwar proposals to redraw the federal states were complex and
were embedded in proposals to fundamentally overhaul national constitutional structures.20 The dominant position of Prussia was a particularly contentious issue. As
Heinzen demonstrates, federalists who argued for Prussia’s dissolution often pursued
ideas of redrawing German states according to ‘tribe’ – an imprecise concept whose
borders regionalists were unable to agree upon, all the while insisting on them as the
basis of regional self-determination.21 Given the breadth and complexity of the proposed
Imperial Reforms, however, it can be easy to miss the extent to which it revealed conflicting territorial imaginings of region.22
After the seizure of power, Hitler sought to shut down these territorial debates after
overhauling the administrative structures of the state.23 The network of regional
Gauleiter and Reichstatthalter, however, evoked and sometimes invented regional concepts to solidify their own positions or increase the territories under their jurisdiction.24
As several scholars have demonstrated, the regime often sought to use regionalism in
propaganda and made great efforts to channel its energies outward.25 Still, it did not hesitate to push against strains of thinking about regionalism which it saw as too inward or
detached from the war effort.26
19
Heinzen, Making Prussians.
For works emphasizing the tremendously diverse issues taken up in the Imperial Reforms, see Werner
Frotscher, ‘Verwaltungsorganisation und Reichsreform’ in Kurt Jesserich et al., eds, Deutsche
Verwaltungsgeschichte: Band 4 (Stuttgart 1985), 112–36; Yoshiro Iida, ‘Demokratischer Einheitsstaat: Pläne
zur Reichsreform in der Weimarer Republik’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, Vol. 67, No. 1 (2019),
5–26.
20
21
In addition to his monograph, see also Jasper Heinzen, ‘Making Democracy Safe for Tribal Homelands? Self
Determination and Political Regionalism in Weimar Germany’, European Review of History, Vol. 26, No. 5
(2019), 807–33. Eric Kurlander, ‘The Landscapes of Liberalism: Particularism and Progressive Politics in
Two Borderland Regions’ in David Blackbourn and James Retallack, eds, Localism, Landscape and
Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860–1930 (Toronto 2007), 124–45. On
Weimar-era efforts to unify Thuringia which demonstrated divergent imaginings, see Hans-Werner Hahn,
‘Vom Thüringer Kleinstaatenjammer zum Land Thüringen’ in Schindling and Wolgast, eds,
Zusammenschlüsse, 125–53.
22
Gerhard Schulz’s 600-page tome on the topic, for example, has little to say about diverging imaginings of
regional belonging. Gerhard Schulz, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur. Die Periode der Konsolidierung
und der Revision des Bismarckschen Reichsaufbaus 1919–1930 (Berlin 1987).
23
Dieter Rebentisch, ‘Die “Neuaufbau” des Reiches und die innere Verwaltung in den Ländern’ in Jesserich
et al., eds, Deutsche Verwaltungsgeschichte, 747–8.
24
Maiken Umbach and Claus Szenjmann, eds, Heimat, Region, and Empire: Spatial Identities under National
Socialism (Basingstoke 2012). See also Bernd Kasten, ‘Gauleiter konsolidieren ihre Machtbereiche’ in
Schindling and Wolgast, eds, Zusammenschlüsse, 153–80; Heinzen, Making Prussians, 283–5.
25
Xosé Núñez Seixas and Maiken Umbach, ‘“Hijacked Heimats”: National Appropriation of Local and
Regional Identities in Germany and Spain, 1930–1945’, European Review of History, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2008),
295–316
26
Jeremy DeWaal, ‘Regionalism and its Diverse Framings in German-speaking Europe across the Long
Twentieth Century’, in Seixas and Storm, eds, Regionalism, 169–92, here 177–80. For examples from the
Rhineland, see Jeremy DeWaal, ‘Heimat as a Geography of Postwar Renewal: Life after Death and Local
Democratic Identities in Cologne’, German History, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2018), 232–6.
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A Nation of Regional ‘Heimat States?’
The German people, so an early post-war Heimat society in the town of Oldenburg
argued, needed to create a federalism based on ‘Heimat states’. Thrusting citizens into
random states, they argued, would leave them only with national feeling but deprive
them of the crucial mediating feeling of Heimat.27 Oldenburgers were not the only
ones after 1945 who advocated for states based on Heimat feeling. Many regionalist federalists throughout the early Federal Republic argued that it was crucial for building a
new democracy. As one Baden town mayor argued, federalism was not simply a technocratic project, it must also be the subject of ‘feeling’ (emphasis in original). They had had
enough of ‘choking unitarism’ during the Nazi regime, he argued, and needed regionalist
states to resist the threat of a centralist Bonn.28 Many federalist politicians similarly
argued that avoiding a backslide into dictatorship required a robust federalism rooted
in regional community.29
Post-war West Germany, as Yoshiro Iida has argued in his study of interwar Imperial
Reforms, enjoyed a much a stronger consensus in favour of federalism than Weimar
Germany.30 Both the allies and many West Germans described federalism as a counterpoint to centralism as a ‘Prussian’ tradition which needed to be abandoned in the wake of
National Socialism. As Siegfried Weichlein has noted, West German sentiments and
allied interests very much dovetailed in the construction of new federalist structures.31
The geometry of discussions about redrawing the federal map in West Germany, moreover, was not as entangled in many of the intractable issues which dogged the Weimar
Republic. The Prussian state, whose dominance had been such a thorny issue, disappeared. The question of redrawing state boundaries was also not as enmeshed in proposals to totally revamp constitutional structures as it had been in the Weimar years. The
post-1945 period was also more defined by centrism and consensus politics. Questions
of what territories constituted the ‘region’, though still quite contentious, could thus be
confronted in a somewhat more disentangled way and with a bit more sobriety than in
the Weimar years. Disaggregating regional border questions from many of these contested issues also made it all the easier to see how territorial imaginings of belonging
diverged.
Anticipations that the entire federal map would be redrawn were also higher in early
post-war West Germany. The Allies ordered a future West German government to redraw
its borders, though they left it to the Parliamentary Council, which drafted the new state’s
‘Foundational Law’, to hammer out the details. The council included vocal advocates of
creating states based on regional feeling, including the Rhenish politician and avid
27
Bundesarchiv (hereafter Barch), B144/254, Oldenburgischen Landesbund, ‘Oldenburg und Niedersachsen’,
40.
28
Staatsarchiv Freiburg, T1 Wohleb/45, Letter, Bürgermeister a.D. to Gegenwart, September 3, 1951.
29
Jochem Huhn, Lernen aus der Geschichte? Historische
Föderalismusdiskussion 1945–1949 (Melsungen 1990), 45–6.
Argumente
in
der
westdeutschen
30
Yoshiro Iida, ‘Demokratischer Einheitsstaat: Pläne zur Reichsreform in der Weimarer Republik’, Zeitschrift
für Geschichtswissenschaft, Vol. 67, No. 1 (2019), 5–26, here 6. See also Kock, Bayerns Weg, 336–7.
31
Siegfried Weichlein, Föderalismus und Demokratie in der Bundesrepublik (Stuttgart 2019), 1–31.
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federalist, Adolf Süsterhenn.32 Süsterhenn played a key role in drafting Article 29, which
mandated that new states must be delineated based on ‘cultural and historical connections’ and what drafters referred to as ‘landsmannschaftliche Verbundenheit’ – a peculiar
and virtually untranslatable phrase which suggested a sense of connection and togetherness with people in a particular landscape. Economic factors, social structures, and
administrative aspects of geographic scale were also to be considered.33 Nearly all
noted the peculiarity of the term landsmannschaftliche Verbundenheit.34 Constitutional
drafters, legal experts, and academics, however, all confirmed that the term was legalese
for a common sense of regional Heimat.35
Academics, constitutional commentators, and spatial planners all therefore
approached the term as referring to a sense of regional belonging.36 The Academy for
Spatial Research and State Planning (Akademie für Raumforschung und
Landesplanung), for example, argued that the outlined requirement referred to regional
spaces shaped by feelings of Heimat, tradition, and belonging.37 Werner
Münchheimer, a scholar deeply involved in plans for border redrawing, concurred,
arguing that landsmannschaftliche Verbundenheit was an emotional principle informed
by subjective factors and lived experience, including childhood memories, domestic
warmth, and consciousness of the past. It was a ‘superordinate term’ for all ‘feeling of
belonging in Heimat’. Such entities, he argued, had the right to be states.38
The Parliamentary Council made one exception to Article 29, which applied to the
three awkwardly-shaped and unsustainable states of the German Southwest, whose
borders the French and American occupiers drew according to a motorway (Figure 1).
Article 118 held that their three state minister presidents could determine new state configurations through common agreement. Since they failed to agree, the second clause
mandated a vote. The subsequent Southwest State debates of the early 1950s demonstrated how regionalists in the area had scores of conflicting cognitive maps of region.
Debates over restoring or unifying Baden and Württemberg in the Southwest also
involved heated debates about the importance of region to democracy.39
32
This could particularly be seen during his work on the committee from 1952 to 1955. For many letters and
reports from Süsterhenn, see Barch 106/2660-2661.
33
‘Artikel 29, Grundgesetz’, April 23, 1949, reprinted in Schiffers, ed., Weniger, 122–3.
34
Peter Schöller, ‘Die Problematik des Richtbegriffes “Landsmannschaftliche Verbundenheit”’, Westfälische
Forschungen Vol. 28 (1974), 27.
35
Hermann von Mangoldt, Das Bonner Grundgesetz, Vol. 2 (Berlin 1966), 728; Institut für Raumforschung,
Beiträge zur innergebietlichen Neuordnung (Bonn 1952), 12.
36
Heinz Beckmann, Innerdeutsche Gebietsänderungen nach dem Bonner Grundgesetz (PhD thesis,
Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, 1954), 7; Hennings, Verfassungsauftrag, 170.
37
Kurt Brüning and Heinz Sting, Probleme der Innergebietlichen Neuordnung Gemäss Art.29 Abs.1 GG:
Gutachten im Auftrage des Bundestagsausschusses für innergebietliche Neuordnung (Bremen 1951), 13–14.
38
Werner Münchheimer, Materialien zur Auslegung der Neugliederungs-Prinzipien in Art 29 Abs.(1) des
Grundgesetzes (Frankfurt 1954), 31, 35.
39
Jeremy DeWaal, Geographies of Renewal: Heimat and Democracy in Postwar West Germany, (Cambridge
Forthcoming), Chapter IV.
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Figure 1. The federal states of West and East Germany in 1949
Source: Institut zur Förderung öffentlicher Angelegenheiten, Die Bundesländer: Beiträge zur
Neugliederung der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt 1950), Plan 8.
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11
Efforts to redraw the federal map began with a series of state minister conferences.
Preparing for the conference, Münchheimer looked back to proposals to redraw the
map of the Weimar Republic. Laying diverse Weimar-era proposals onto one another,
he sought to discover ‘core landscapes’ that could act as starting points.40 The minister
conferences, however, failed to reach any consensus. Two subsequent parliamentary
committees were then called to address the issue. The first, the Euler Committee
existed from 1949 to 1950, but also failed to present a map proposal. The committee
merely outsourced its work, contracting reports from two competing geographic institutes, the newly-minted Institute of Spatial Research in Bonn and the Academy for
Spatial Research and State Planning. The former reported that no single ‘useable map’
existed which reflected borders of regional belonging. It produced a massive list of
226 historical and cultural regional maps and atlases, drawn according to different principles. A new map, they insisted, had to be created.41 After a year, no closer to a solution,
the committee dissolved, presenting a list of the 14 most intractable problem areas.42
The Euler Committee was replaced by the Luther Committee, which was given three
years to draft a new map for an up or down vote in the Bundestag by January 1955. The
committee consisted of an army of 40 members and associated experts and was headed by
the former Weimar-era chancellor, Hans Luther. While his direct ancestor, Martin Luther,
had notoriously traversed Germany on foot, Hans Luther and his fellow committee
members did so by train, often noting how they saw regionalists waving flags along
the train route as they passed.43
The Luther Committee assembled a massive list of scholarly literature on regional histories, politics, dialects, and traditions, and contracted hundreds of expert reports, none of
which brought clear answers.44 In contracting reports, the committee drew on academic
geographers throughout West German universities and did not exclude unsavoury figures
who successfully re-established their careers after working for the Nazi regime. This
included Hermann Aubin and Erwin Scheu. Aubin, who preferred the idea of ‘tribe’ to
regional Heimat, sought to pre-empt notions that he would produce ‘blood and earth’
propaganda, while his colleague Scheu held that regional Heimat feeling should only
be spared when preponderant practical considerations did not indicate otherwise.45 The
committee and its army of experts, however, did not control the conversation. In the academic realm, federal states contracted their own reports, while other academics took up
the study of particular regions of their own volition. In the popular realm, discussion
about regional belonging took place across newspapers, regional journals, Heimat societies, and referendum debates.
40
Werner Münchheimer, Worum geht es bei der Neugliederung Deutschlands? (Frankfurt 1951).
41
Institut für Raumforschung, Beiträge, 19.
‘Eulers Vorschläge zur Länderneuordnung’, July 7, 1951, reprinted in Schiffers, ed., Weniger, 141–2.
42
43
Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz (hereafter LHK) 860/8366, ‘RHEINLAND-PFALZ Bericht über Eindrücke bei
der Bereisung des Landes in der Zeit vom 19. bis 26.5.1954’, 6–7.
44
Barch, B106/2660, Lutherausschuss, Literaturliste.
Erwin Scheu, ‘Zweites Referat’, in Hermann Brill, ed., Die Bundesländer: Beiträge zur Neugliederung der
Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt 1950), 21.
45
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The work of the Luther Committee would ultimately fail. While its reports demonstrated extreme variances and inconsistencies in cognitive maps of regional community,
it would rubber-stamp the legality of the random states created during occupation as fulfilling the obligations of Article 29. In making sense of the flurry of studies and contracted
reports that its work generated, insight can be most easily gained by looking thematically
at the different factors which experts focused on to discover the boundaries of regional
belonging. What influence, for example, did dialect borders, confession, or the settlement
patterns of the Germanic tribes have on regional culture? What was the influence of
nineteenth-century states which had pushed their own regional propaganda? What of
physical geography? While experts had their own opinions on the subject, so too did
regionalists at the ground level.
The Slippery Concept of ‘Stamm’
If the drafters had anything to look back on, it was proposals to redraw Weimar-era states
according to ‘tribe’ (Stamm). The term ‘tribe’, however, does not accurately capture the
fluid meaning of the German term ‘Stamm’. On the one hand, the word was used to refer
to the ancient Germanic tribes and the influence of their settlement patterns on regional
culture. The tribal duchies shaped medieval German history and strongly influenced
modern German dialect borders. (Figure 2) But Stamm also implied a general sense of
common origins. In the popular realm, the term became a synonym for a sense of regional
belonging projected into a vague past which sometimes had nothing at all to do with the
Germanic tribes.
While ‘Stamm’ found appeal amongst diverse political groups in the Weimar era, few
had clear answers about which ‘tribes’ constituted the nation. As the Hamburg scholar,
Kurt Stavenhagen, noted, almost no one in the Weimar era seemed able to list them.
Are the Prussians a Stamm? he asked, reflecting on the fact that there had been no
Germanic tribe by that name. What about so-called ‘sub-Stämme’? Tribal settlement patterns, he pointed out, no longer reflected notions of regional community in many areas,
such as that of the Franconian Stamm which included the Rhineland and the Palatinate,
where denizens no longer identified with the idea. Nor could one easily find exact borders
between the settlement areas of the Germanic tribes, which had intermingled and
overlapped.46
In the Weimar Republic, Hugo Preuß and other democratic thinkers supported creating
new states based on Stamm but did not delineate them beyond noting that they were not
the nineteenth-century dynastic accidents of birth.47 Coming from a more reactionary and
nationalist perspective, the literary scholar, Joseph Nadler, did list them. He delineated a
‘German-Roman’ group including Thuringians, Bavarians, Alemanni, and Franconians,
46
47
Kurt Stavenhagen, Heimat als Lebenssinn (Göttingen 1948), 49–50.
Hugo Preuß, Reich und Länder (Berlin 1928), 21, 157. See also, Celia Applegate, ‘Democracy or Reaction?:
The Political Implications of Localist Ideas in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany’, in James Retallack and Larry
Jones, eds, Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern Germany (Cambridge 1992), 251–60. Rudolf
Henle, Reichsreform und Länderstaat (Rostock 1931), 13–14.
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Figure 2. Early Medieval tribal duchy borders as mapped in the final Luther Committee report
(Friesland, Saxony, Upper and Lower Lorraine, Thuringia, Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria). Colours
represent tribes, while light dotted lines represent diocesan borders
Source: Bundesminister des Innern, Die Neugliederung des Bundesgebietes: Gutachten des von der
Bundesregierung eingesetzten Sachverständigenausschusses (Cologne 1955), Annex 6, Nr.2.
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and a German-Slavic group made up of Saxons, East-Middle Germans, and East-Lower
Germans. Some historic factors, he noted, appeared to tear these groups apart, like the
Rhine carving ‘Rhinelanders’ out of the Franconian Stamm or the Swiss abandoning
ideas of themselves as Alemanni. But consciousness of belonging was, for Nadler, irrelevant.48 Other Weimar-era scholars denounced such racial interpretations.49 The geographer Hans Schrepfer noted the same inconsistencies in identification with Stamm and
argued it should only be considered where they remained in popular consciousness.50
The interwar Austrian-Jewish scholar Friedrich Hertz, meanwhile, argued that the
concept was extremely flexible and immensely difficult to delineate.51
Experts in early West Germany found the same inconsistencies, uneven identifications, and clefts in usage of the term.52 In his report on Lübeck, for example, the
Hanseatic historian, Ahasver von Brant, reported that the town culturally belonged to
the same Stamm as the rest of Schleswig-Holstein, but did not identify with it.53 Yet
another report held that Schleswig-Holsteiner did not even belong to a common
Stamm and were shaped by different Stämme whose vague borders could be seen in
fuzzy zones of transition of regional culture, dialects, place names, and building
styles.54 Curiously, one report noted that Lippe, in the Teutoburger forest, was part of
the Westphalian Stamm (an ancient ‘Westphalian’ tribe never existed). The report concluded, however, that Lippe did not identify with it, having developed a separate
‘Heimat feeling’.55 The German Southwest reflected the same indeterminacy. While
the committee determined it was unified by a Swabian-Alemannic Stamm, they noted
how consciousness of this had blurred. Many in the nineteenth-century ‘accidental
state’ of Baden, moreover, began to identify their state with what they described as a separate ‘Alemannic’ Stamm.56 Other vagaries came from the fact that early medieval tribes
had themselves not had clear dividing lines. Reports, in turn, referred to ‘partial Stämme’,
‘young Stämme’, ‘new Stämme’, and ‘intermediate Stämme’.57
48
Joseph Nadler, Die Deutschen Stämme (Stuttgart 1925), 7–8, 13–48.
49
For debates, see Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, Verhandlungen des Siebenten Deutschen
Soziologentages (Tübingen 1931), 233–68.
50
Urban centres and eastern regions, Schrepfer insisted, had weak identification with Stamm. Hans Schrepfer,
Deutschlands Neugliederung in 12 Reichsländer (Frankfurt 1931), 2.
51
Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, Verhandlungen, 268.
Alfred Karasek-Langer, ‘Volkskundliche Erkenntnisse aus der Vertreibung und Eingliederung der
Ostdeutschen’, Jahrbuch für Volkskunde der Heimatvertriebenen Vol. 1 (1955), 58.
52
53
Barch B106/2660, Ahasver von Brant, ‘Die Vorschriften des Art.29, Ziffer 1 GG in ihrer Anwendung auf
Lübeck’, 2.
54
Barch B106/2660, Deyn, ‘Schleswig-Holstein, eine historische und kulturelle Einheit?: Eine gutachtliche
Äusserung zu Art.29 Abs.I des Grundgesetzes’, 1–2.
55
Bundesminister des Innern, Die Neugliederung des Bundesgebietes: Gutachten des von der Bundesregierung
eingesetzten Sachverständigenausschusses (Cologne 1955), 111.
56
Barch B106/2661, D VIII, Anlg.2, Protok.10-12.2.55, ‘Bericht über Baden-Württemberg’, 1–4;
Bundesminister des Innern, Neugliederung, 96.
57
Münchheimer, Materialien, 33; Akademie für Raumforschung und Landesplanung, Probleme der
Innergebietlichen Neuordnung Gemäss Art. 29 Abs.1 GG. Gutachten im Auftrage des
Bundestagsausschusses für innergebietliche Neuordnung (Hanover 1951), 13–14.
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Given the conflicts and disparities around Stamm, the Luther Committee’s final report
referred to the term inconsistently when describing the boundaries of regional belonging.
In rubber-stamping the legality of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate – a state that a host of
regionalists were eager to tear apart – the committee signed off that the state technically
fulfilled the constitutional requirement given that all its territories were within the boundaries of the old Franconian Stamm. West Franconian areas, however, spread much
beyond the state borders and committee members confessed privately that little joined
the state together culturally.58
If identification with ‘tribe’ proved inconsistent, their settlement areas had influenced
modern dialects. Dialect boundaries, however, proved even more unwieldy. As Luther
Committee reports held, dialects often did not have clear borders and were separated
by broad segue areas. Linguistic analysis merely bundled together diverse but related variations to establish simplified categories.59 For linguists, literally thousands of dialect
borders could be found. Many, but not all, were recognizable by everyday denizens.
The appropriation of dialect borders as a marker of regional identities, moreover,
proved inconsistent.
Drawing on the work of the nineteenth-century folklorist, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl,
the committee divided Germany into three broad cultural and dialect groups: Lower,
Middle, and Upper German. At the same time, they noted tensions of such a model in
public conception. The nineteenth-century Prussian influence in the north and memories of southern resistance had, in some areas, shaped a binary notion of southern and
northern German cultures.60 The relationship between Stamm and dialect families
also proved controversial. A study commissioned by the state of Hessen, for
example, claimed that Hessian dialect borders corresponded with Stamm and came
close to its current state borders. A committee expert, Heinrich Landahl, however,
rejected the assessment, pointing out that the northern and southern halves of the
state spoke different dialects. The southern half, meanwhile, spoke a west
Franconian dialect which spilled over its eastern border into the town of
Aschaffenburg, which had been part of Bavaria for over a century. This evoked the
question of whether Aschaffenburger identified with Hessians based on dialect or
with Bavarians based on a century of dynastic statehood. The Spessart mountain
chain directly east of the city formed a major dialect border within the entire
Franconian dialect family, separating Rhine and Mosel Franconian to the West
from the East Franconian dialects spoken in the rest of the northern Bavarian state.
A common dialect, however, was not enough to forge full regional identification
with Hessen, since Bavarian identity had made inroads over the last century.61
58
Barch B106/2661 Anlage 5, Protok.10-12.2.1955, Thesen über das Land Rheinland-Pfalz, 1.
Barch 136/4343 Hermann Aubin, ‘Die geschichtlichen Kulturräume Deutschlands: Versuch einer ersten
Übersicht in Hinblick auf Art.29 GG’, 6.
59
60
Bundesminister des Innern, Neugliederung, 56.
Barch 106/2661, Heinrich Landahl, ‘Zum Gutachten der Regierung des Landes Hessen am 14.10.1954’, 1;
Regierung des Landes Hessen, Das Land Hessen im Rahmen der Neugliederung des Bundesgebietes
(Wiesbaden 1954), 35.
61
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Neither Stamm nor dialect, in short, offered conclusive answers in Hessen, Bavaria, or
elsewhere.
The Power of Physical Geography or the Influence of Cities?
A toolbox of other factors remained to be considered. Several experts looked to physical
geography, given how it shaped historical, cultural, and linguistic developments across
the longue durée. The early post-war scholar, Wolfgang Bolten, in a work on redrawing
regional borders, particularly promoted attention to physical geography. Rivers and
drainage divides, he argued, did not constitute borders but rather ‘axles of collection
basins’. In plain areas, he argued, forests and lowly-populated spaces acted as natural
borders.62 The report of the Institute for Spatial Studies similarly emphasized natural
borders in finding ‘core landscapes’.63 Others, however, were more critical.
Münchheimer argued that drawing regional boundaries according to physical geography
was a ‘Sisyphean task’. Nevertheless, when geography was considered, he advised long
mountain chains as useful borders. The flow of water, Münchheimer argued, never determined ‘organic political borders’ in Central Europe, though tributary systems could be
collective points of common regional cultures.64 The final Luther Committee report
also eschewed focus on physical geography, concluding that the idea of ‘natural
borders’ was a cultural construct. The influence of a sea, mountain chain, moor, or
forest landscape, the report maintained, was always situational. They agreed, however,
that rivers were not proper borders, as they disrupt organic state foundations and regional
orientation toward urban centres. Instead, borders should be placed in lowly populated
areas.65
Individual reports on geographic features’ impact on regional culture, moreover,
often contradicted empirical observations of regional sentiment. In the Luther
Committee report on Baden-Württemberg, for example, it was argued that the
Black Forest did not represent a boundary between a Swabian and Alemannic
regional culture, categorizing both sides as belonging to a single regional cultural
space.66 The Southwest state debates of the early 1950s, however, revealed that a
number of regionalists saw it as a border. For Badenese regionalists, the nineteenthcentury dynastic state border that ran through the forest fused with a weak dialect
border, becoming the basis for imagining a new ‘Stamm’. (Figure 3) Other geographic features brought the same ambiguity. Peter Schöller, a geographer who conducted research on the Westerwald, a low forested mountain chain, found similar
problems. It was, he argued, a fluid geographic area which was in tension
62
Wolfgang Bolten, Verfassungsrechtliche Probleme einer künftigen Neugliederung der Bundesrepublik
(Dissertation, Rechtswissenschaften, Universität zu Köln, 1954), 118.
63
Institut für Raumforschung, Beiträge, 17.
64
Werner Münchheimer, Die Neugliederung Deutschlands: Grundlagen–Kritik–Ziele und die Pläne zur
‘Reichsreform’ von 1918–1945 (Frankfurt 1949), 40.
65
Bundesminister des Innern, Neugliederung, 30.
66
Barch, B106/2661, ‘Bericht über Baden-Württemberg’, Anlg.2, z.Protok.v.10-12.2.1955., 2–3.
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Figure 3. Topographical Map of Baden-Württemberg. The Black Forest (Schwarzwald) separated
Baden and Württemberg at the southern end. Compare with dotted-line boundary between
Baden and Württemberg in Figure 6
Source: Wikimedia Commons, 2008.
between Rhine Franconian and Mosel Franconian dialects and the pull of competing
cities. For his part, Schöller believed regional building styles and art offered a better
means of determining boundaries.67 The Luther Committee, meanwhile, concluded
67
Peter Schöller, ‘Grenzland Westerwald’, Raumforschung und Raumordnung, Vol. 3 (1955), 133–46; Peter
Schöller, Neugliederung: Prinzipien und Probleme der politisch-geographischen Neuordnung Deutschlands
und das Beispiel des Mittelrheingebietes (Bad Godesberg 1965), 30–1, 64–95.
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that the nature of regional belonging in the Westerwald would permit unification
with territories in any direction.68
The committee report looked more favourably on what it referred to as the ‘City
Principle’ – the idea that regional belonging was shaped by orientation to cities. The
committee’s final report held that regional cultural spaces were not ‘isolated, full
spaces’ but rather ‘radiating areas’ that emerged from urban nodes.69 Such descriptions,
however, also reflected a sense of fluidity and imprecision. The committee’s use of the
principle also left much unsaid. The region of Hessen, for example, represented,
according to a committee report, the radiating influence of Frankfurt, Kassel,
Wiesbaden, and Darmstadt.70 No explanation was offered on why the radiating influence of these cities belonged in a common regional basket. The committee report did
concede that some regions were difficult to conceive of in terms of urban influences,
such as the German Southwest. Here the committee, determined that the Southwest
was not oriented to cities but rather to three geographic radiating zones: Lake
Constance, the Upper Rhenish lowlands, and a ‘Swabian core area’ (where this core
lay they left undefined).71
The City Principle, however, proved even more problematic than the committee was
willing to publicly concede. Orientations to urban centres were overlapping, imprecise,
reduced gradually in strength, and varied across different demographic groups. The
City Principle proved particularly ineffective in rural areas. The Westerwald again
offered a good example, being pulled in every which direction by the overlapping pull
of urban centres. (Figure 4). The City Principle also could not explain cognitive maps
of region which stretched across large spans of territory, nor could it account for identification with regions whose perceived borders ran through the centre of urban conglomerations. The population conglomeration of the Ruhr and Northern Rhine, including
Essen, Dortmund, Duisburg, Bochum, Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Bonn provided a
prime example. Denizens of the latter three cities traditionally identified themselves as
Rhenish, while the former identified themselves as either Westphalian or more narrowly
as Ruhrpottler. Ideas about what territories belonged to the Rhineland or Westphalia,
however, remained tremendously unstable. The need to define a border through the
middle of the conglomeration, however, was obviated by a consensus that they could
share a common state for economic and administrative reasons while maintaining separate regional identities.
Some looked to yet other factors. Confession, for example, had shaped the German
map for much of its history. Regional enthusiasts of Bavaria, the Rhineland, Upper
Swabia, and Baden often affiliated regional natures with Catholicism, while many
northern German territories identified regional culture with Protestantism.
Nevertheless, confession proved of limited usefulness, given how nineteenth-century
regional states mixed confessional populations and later population movements
68
Bundesminister des Innern, Neugliederung, 23–4.
69
Ibid., 23, 31, 132.
Barch B136/4344, ‘DVI. Hessen’, 4.
70
71
Bundesminister des Innern, Neugliederung, 95.
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19
Figure 4. Map of cities in the Westerwald and urban zones of influence. Thick lines represent the
pull of five medium-sized cities at its edges. The shaded zone in the middle represents the
boundary between the zones of influence of Cologne and Frankfurt
Source: Peter Schöller, ‘Grenzland Westerwald’, Raumforschung und Raumordnung, Nr. 3 (1955),
144a.
variegated confessional geographies. Yet other cultural factors could be considered,
including regional food and drink, regional dress, flora and fauna, or regional art
styles.72 The geographic borders of private societies, institutions, and publications
could also influence cognitive maps of region. The Luther Committee recognized
this, drawing up a 40-page list of private organizations and their institutional
borders.73
The Force of Regional Decision Spaces
One of the most contentious factors with which experts grappled was the role of modern
dynastic states and other regional decision spaces. The dynastic states of the nineteenth
century had been shaped purely according to political consideration, while eager dynasts
had subsequently pushed new regional identities. Even Prussian provinces managed to
shape cognitive maps of region. Still, such states had failed to eliminate competing identifications, and they brought together random territories with no correspondence in terms
of dialect, confession, or regional cultural practices. As Münchheimer noted in his advice
72
LHK 860/1246, Friedrich Illert, ‘Der rheinisch-pfälzische Raum als kunstgeschichtliche Einheit’.
73
Bundesminister des Innern, Neugliederung, 81.
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to politicians tackling the state issue, regional states from 1789 to 1949 had brought
together peoples into ‘historically coincidental relationships’.74
At Luther Committee meetings, experts bickered about the influence of nineteenthcentury ‘accidental states’. This included debates about whether region was a subject of
observed practices or ‘psychological facts’. Some even suggested that regional identity
was partially hidden within different ‘layers of consciousness’ which could emerge
spontaneously.75 The committee posited six periods of territorial history which influenced regional belonging: the medieval period of tribal states, a period of splintering
from 1250 to 1648, a period of early-modern confessional statehood, an era of territorial
consolidation under Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, a period of dynastic state
building (1815–1918/1945), and finally, the post-war period. But what periods were
most influential? Given that territorial histories conflicted, some argued that the constitution should have stipulated that states be drawn according to ‘living’ historical connections.76 To simplify Germany’s ‘monstrous’ territorial history, the committee
created a three-page fold-out chart giving a rough convoluted sketch of which territories
went where in respective periods. They ultimately privileged two periods as the most
influential on regional community: the period of tribal duchies and the nineteenthcentury history of regional dynastic states. (Figures 2 and 5) They also noted that conflicting identifications with different historical states could exist simultaneously in the
same places.77
Disagreements about dynastic states particularly came out at committee meetings.
When the subject of the dynastic state of Bavaria arose, for example, Jakob Kratzer, a
Bavarian jurist, presented the state as a place that developed a common ‘feeling of
belonging’ that crossed different lines of Stamm, bringing together Franconians,
Swabians, and Old-Bavarians. These individual groups, he opined, did not have
their own sense of regional feeling. Hans Luther rejected this view, arguing that
there could be ‘double feelings of belonging’. This could also be seen, he argued,
in places like Osnabrück which identified with both Westphalia and Lower Saxony.
The SPD parliamentarian, Hermann Heimerich, who grew up in Bavarian
Franconia and had been Lord Mayor of Mannheim until 1933, supported his view,
pointing out that many Mannheimer did not identify with the state of Baden to
which they had belonged since the Napoleonic era; many identified with
Palatinaters across the Rhine.78 Kratzer’s argument that all in the Free State identified
with Bavaria was demonstrably false. While some regionalists in Bavarian Swabia
were declaring ‘never again Munich’, Franconians regionalists in the northern half
of the state created their own ‘Franconian Working group’ which demanded cultural
74
75
76
77
Münchheimer, Materialien, 34–5.
Barch B106/2661, Luther-Ausschuß, ‘Protokoll der 4. Vollversammlung’, 13.
Burg, Neugliederung, 88–9.
Bundesminister des Innern, Neugliederung, 31, 51–61.
Barch B106/2661, ‘Protokoll der 4 Vollversammlung’, 14–7; ‘Protokoll über die Sitzung der
5. Vollversammlung des Sachverständigen Ausschusses, 10. bis 12. February 1955’, 5–6.
78
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Figure 5. Luther Committee Map of territories and provinces of the nineteenth century which it
believed influenced contemporary regional identities
Source: Bundesminister des Innern, Die Neugliederung des Bundesgebietes: Gutachten des von der
Bundesregierung eingesetzten Sachverständigenausschusses (Cologne 1955), Annex 6, Nr.9.
autonomy and denounced Old-Bavarians in the south who conflated the state with
their own Stamm.79
Still, the Bavarian state did have significant appeal and both the conservative Christian
Socialist Union and the Bavaria Party avidly fought to restore its pre-1933 form, which
would include the Palatinate with which the rest of the state did not share a border. The
79
LHK 860/5167, Letter, Meinhart of the ‘Fränkische Arbeitsgemeinschaft’ to Peter Altmeier, December 19,
1949.
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Bavaria Party notably flirted with separatism from West Germany, though more as a
‘thought experiment’ than as an explicit plan.80 Had they followed through, they certainly
would have further inflamed those Franconians and Bavarian Swabian groups who
wanted to leave the Bavarian state. National separatism, however, did not represent a
real threat in West Germany. Separatists, moreover, would have had to confront the
same territorial ambiguities faced by early nationalists. This could perhaps best be
seen in the work of the Swabian-Alemannic separatist, Otto Feger, who waffled on
whether his proposed Swabian-Alemannic state would include Bavarian Swabia,
where its border vis-à-vis northern Franconian areas lay, and whether it should include
Alsace. One thing was clear: for Feger it was not based on the ‘accidental states’ of
Baden and Württemberg.81
Ambiguities about nineteenth-century ‘accidental states’ also emerged elsewhere,
including in the former Prussian provinces of the Rhineland and Westphalia. The committee noted how the provinces had influenced mental maps of region.82 Süsterhenn, a
committee member from Cologne, asserted that many of the North and South Rhine identified with the territories of the old Rhine province, even though a significant dialect
border ran through its centre.83 Regionalist groups certainly reflected this, including
the Rhenish Heimat Society, which rallied against ideas that the Rhineland referred
only to the northern Rhenish cities. Still, its society boundaries did not perfectly
overlap with the old Rhine Province, leaving out the Saarland while adding Mainz and
Worms.84 In a study of the Westphalian province, the legal scholar, Karl Hall, found
equal variance. The idea of ‘Westphalia’ had, throughout its history, corresponded to
five different regional maps whose borders fluctuated tremendously. Those redrawing
regional borders, he insisted, needed to ‘redefine’ where Westphalia was.85
Complicating matters further, some cities had not historically belonged to territorial
states at all. The Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen represented a case
in point, though the Nazis had eliminated seven-hundred years of Lübecker independence, making it a part of Schleswig-Holstein. The cities’ influence certainly radiated
beyond their federal state borders, and they shared common dialect and cultural practices
with adjacent areas. Reports on the identification of Lübeck and Hamburg with
Schleswig-Holstein, however, conflicted.86 The Hanseatic historian, Ahasver von Brandt,
argued that the three cities had a ‘baffling’ level of identification with each other and less
80
Ernst Vollert, Nie Wieder München (Augsburg 1949), 22–5. On separatism in the party as a ‘thought experiment’, see Kock, Bayerns Weg.
81
Otto Feger, Schwäbisch-Alemannische Demokratie. Aufruf und Programm (Konstanz 1946), 15, 31–5, 145,
156–7.
82
83
84
85
Bundesminister des Innern, Neugliederung, 81.
Barch B106/266, ‘Protokoll; 4 Vollversammlung’, 34.
Adolf Flecken, Gestaltung der Heimat nach rheinischer Eigenart (Neuss 1966), 13–14.
Karl Hall, Die Niedersächsisch-Westfälische Grenze und die Neugliederung Niedersachsens (Marburg 1954).
Barch B106/2660, Deyn, ‘Schleswig-Holstein’; Olaf Klose, ‘Schleswig-Holstein: eine historische und kulturelle Einheit? Eine gutachtliche Äußerung zu Art.29 Abs.I des Grundgesetzes’.
86
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with their hinterlands.87 The Hamburg Senate, for its part, insisted that all three of the ‘emotional principles’ of Article 29 meant that their city should retain its statehood.88
Regional Referenda and Divergent Mental Maps
The committee rushed to complete their report by the January 1955 deadline, though they
abdicated their charge to present a new map for an up or down vote. Instead, they simply
added to the previous committee’s laundry list of problem areas, concluding that there
were numerous ‘over-cuttings and combination possibilities of the most different
types’.89 To give the current states a veneer of legality, they rubber stamped them as fulfilling Article 29.90 The content of their report, however, presented a different picture.
The descriptive language used itself revealed the indeterminate nature of cognitive
maps of region. Cities and ‘core spaces’ were described as ‘radiating’ a common
feeling of regional belonging into zones of influence. Certain localities ‘tended’ or
‘were turned’ to certain regional constructions, while other localities or sub-regions
were described as ‘transitional spaces’, ‘overlayered’, ‘overlapping’, or as ‘in tension’
between different regional constructs. Some reports to the committee openly stated
that their task was not possible. As von Brandt reported, feelings of regional belonging
were too complicated to enshrine in a single map.91
By 1955, the path of least resistance meant leaving the temporary states of the Allies in
place. Regional state minister presidents resisted the dissolution of their power bases, and
the committee’s work made it clear that redrawing the map would open up intractable
disputes throughout the Federal Republic. Vituperative regionalist debates had already
erupted in the Southwest in the 1951 referenda, which resulted in the unification of
Baden-Württemberg. While regionalists had a brief legal window in 1956 to collect signatures to hold re-bordering referenda, the federal government sought to make requirements prohibitively steep. Signature collection could only occur in areas whose
boundaries changed after May 1945, regionalists would have to gather signatures from
10 per cent of the voting population within a two-week period, and signatures were
only collectable at city halls. Successful signature collection would require the federal
government to schedule a referendum, but the results would not be legally binding.92
The rules ultimately restricted signature collection to groups seeking to leave the states
of Rhineland-Palatinate and Lower Saxony. Other petitions stretching from Lübeck to the
Southwest were rejected based on technicalities. Two signature collections were
approved from the small northern territories of Oldenburg and Schaumburg-Lippe
87
Barch B106/2660, Ahasver von Brandt, ‘Die Vorschriften des Art.29, Ziffer 1 GG’.
88
Barch B106/4343/F4, Hamburger Senatskanzlei, ‘Memorandum zur Frage der staatlichen Selbständigkeit der
Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg’, 1953.
89
Barch B136/4344/F2u3, ‘Probleme der Neugliederung’, Anlage-2; Bundesminister des Innern,
Neugliederung, 20–1.
90
91
92
Bundesminister des Innern, Neugliederung.
Barch B106/2660, Ahasver von Brandt, ‘Die Vorschriften des Art.29, Ziffer 1 GG’.
Hans Geeb, ‘Sieben Volksbegehren zugelassen’, Bulletin des BPA, 18 February 1956.
24
European History Quarterly 0(0)
which sought to restore their local independence. Five, however, were approved in
Rhineland-Palatinate, where the competing efforts of regionalist societies offered a
vivid perspective from below on how denizens had divergent maps of region
(Figure 6). Proposals included one from the Middle Rhine to reunite with northern
Rhenish cities by joining the state of North Rhine Westphalia. Two others sought to
unify the territories of Rheinhessen and Montabaur with Hessen. The Palatinate saw
three competing visions of regional belonging: one to reunify it with the Electoral
Palatinate by joining Baden-Württemberg; one to maintain the status quo; and another
to re-unify with Bavaria which shared no border with the Palatinate. In arguing for different cognitive maps of region, denizens drew on conflicting memories of historical
states, dialect spaces, ideas of Stamm, and arguments about geography.
Even before the committee began its work, competing regionalists groups had formed
in the Palatinate to advocate for different states. The committee subsequently travelled to
the region in 1954, arriving at Neustadt, a town on the ‘Wine Street’ (Weinstraße), where
they offered an audience to two competing regionalist societies. The first to present their
case was the ‘Electoral Palatinate Society’ formed in 1949 to promote unification with a
larger German Southwest state to eliminate a border that separated the Palatinate from the
territories of the Electoral Palatinate in Heidelberg and Mannheim.93 A society representative offered a cogent presentation on why a reunified Palatinate represented a common
region. He began by noting how redrawing ‘inner-German’ borders democratically was
unprecedented.94 He continued by arguing that the two parts of the greater Palatinate had
been in a common state from 1329 to 1797, after which its ‘middle point’ in Mannheim
and Heidelberg had been ripped away, while the Congress of Vienna gave the parts of the
Palatinate west of the Rhine to Bavaria. Palatinaters, he insisted, had hated their distant
Bavarian overlords. He further argued that it was equally absurd to imagine that
Rhinelanders and Palatinaters belonged in a common state. Inventing a new Stamm
concept, he insisted that the Palatinaters were ‘Upper Rhine Franconians’.95
Even within the Electoral Palatinate Society, however, divergences in regional cognitive maps could be found. While signature collection posters only depicted a re-unified
Palatinate, several articles in their publications argued that they further shared regional
cultural connections with the rest of the Southwest which they would be joining in a
common state.96 Others argued that they were simply part of an Upper-Rhine region
which stretched down through Baden. This region, one article argued, was a land of
wine and confessional tolerance and not the Bavarian land of beer, centralism,
Catholicism, and conservativism.97
The regionalist society ‘Bavaria and the Palatinate’, the second to present their case,
had over 9000 members and supported reunification with Bavaria.98 The society’s case
93
94
LHK 860/4, ‘Satzung des Vereins “Kurpfalz”’.
‘Luther-Ausschuß bereiste die Pfalz’ and Ludwig Reichert ‘Wohin gehört die Pfalz?’, Kurpfalz, 26 July 1954.
95
Ibid.
96
LHK 712, Plakat 2719; LHK 700/145/566/3, Gustav Wolff, ‘Pfalz und Baden’.
LHK 860/7325, ‘Die Pfalz im deutschen Südwesten’, Kurpfalz, 6 April 1956.
97
98
Barch B106/2661, Referat Landahl, 14.10.1954, 6.
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25
Figure 6. Territories which sought to change their statehood. Trier and Koblenz districts (2),
Montabaur-Neuwied (3), Rheinhessen (4), Left-Rhenish Palatinate (5). Thick dotted lines are
borders of former dynastic states and thin dotted lines are borders of former Prussian provinces
Source: Stuttgarter Nachrichten, February 1956.
was bolstered by an aggressive campaign of support by the Bavarian state. Bavaria funnelled funds to the organization, founded a supporting sister institution in Bavaria,
created mass propaganda, placed pressure on Konrad Adenauer, and established a new
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European History Quarterly 0(0)
‘Palatinate Committee’ in the Bavarian Parliament which toured the region, holding
Heimat evenings.99 Bavarian propaganda pushed bogus narratives about the Palatinate
being integrally attached to Bavaria since the late Middle Ages.100 The signature campaigns also saw the creation of the ‘Federation Rhineland-Palatinate’ – a group which
argued for the extant state and the neighbouring Saarland as a common region, though
many suspected it was financed by the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Both signature collection efforts in the Palatinate, however, failed to reach the steep targets in the time allotted. The Bavarian side acquired signatures from 7.6 per cent of the voting population,
compared to 9.3 per cent for unification with the Electoral Palatinate.101
The remaining signature collection efforts succeeded, but also revealed divergences
amongst co-regionalists. The efforts of the Heimat Society Hessen-Nassau to unify the
town of Montabaur with Hessen represented a case in point. The territorial history of
the areas had fluctuated at a dizzying pace. While it had been part of the Duchy of
Nassau from 1806 to 1866, it subsequently became part of the Prussian Province of
Hessen-Nassau until 1944. The new state of Hessen which they sought to join,
however, was unprecedented and much larger than former states which bore the name.
Members of the society diverged about whether they identified with the former Nassau
Duchy, a larger Hessian regional idea, or both. The society’s official platform pushed
a narrower identification with Nassau, though some of its members also identified with
a broader Hessian region.102 As one member rhapsodized, the Hessian regional tradition
had a ‘spirit of progress and tolerance’.103 Yet, as one local postman asked at the society’s
founding meeting, was not the current state of Hessen just as unprecedented and artificial
as Rhineland-Palatinate?104
The efforts of denizens in Rheinhessen, the territories west of the Rhine around the
historic towns of Mainz and Worms, demonstrated equal divergences. Luther
Committee presentations, travel notes, and reports all noted the area’s historic and cultural connections to other areas west of the Rhine.105 The Rheinhessen Society,
99
LHK 860/4, ‘Tagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft junger Pfälzer’, Stimme der Pfalz, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1954); Letter,
Lorenz Fey to Peter Altmeier, 5 January 1954; Typed copy: ‘Gott, können die Bayern charmant sein.’,
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12 October 1951; LHK 860/5, ‘Die Einmischung eines deutschen Landes in die
Angelegenheiten eines anderen Landes’, ‘Pfälzer tranken auf das “bayerische Vaterland”’; Barch, B136/
4343, Letter, Georg Stang to Konrad Adenauer, 6 April 1951.
100
Barch, B136/4343/2, Letter, Gebhard Orth, Landesverband der Pfälzer im Rechtsrheinischen Bayern to
Konrad Adenauer, 22 March 1950. LHK 860/4, ‘“Bayern und die Pfalz am Rhein” Aus der Rede des
Bayerischen Ministerpräsidenten am 30. Juli 1948’; LHK 860/14, ‘Die Pfalz ein Herzstück Bayerns’, Bayern
und Pfalz, May 1951.
101
Statistischen Landesamt Rheinland-Pfalz, Die Volksbegehren nach Artikel 29 Absatz 2 des Grundgesetzes
vom 9. bis 22. April 1956 (Bad Ems 1956), 27.
102
LHK, 860/4979, ‘Hessen-Nassau: Das Land, seine Menschen und seine Geschichte’, Nassauer Land,
Extrablatt, 1956; LHK 860/4979, ‘Auszug aus dem “Nassauer Bote” vom 19. Januar 1956 “Die Stimmen
‘Zurück nach Hessen’ überwiegen”’.
103
LHK 860/4536, Circulatory Letter, Helmut Pohl to the Teachers of the administrative district of Montabaur,
15 April 1956.
104
LHK 860/4979, ‘Versammlung des Heimatbundes Hessen-Nassau’.
LHK 860/8366, ‘RHEINLAND-PFALZ Bericht’, 7; Bundesminister des Innern, Neugliederung, 94. Barch
B106/2661, Referat Landahl, 14.10.1954, 6.
105
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27
however, argued that their area was part of a greater Hessian region which belonged with
the territories east of the Rhine. As one of their advertisements insisted: ‘We are Rhenish
Hessians … Our name tells us to which state we belong. For us there is no question that
we must again return to our Heimatland Hessen’.106 The society denounced
Rhineland-Palatinate as an ‘accidental state’ of French creation, a statement not
without irony given that Rheinhessen had been drawn by the Congress of Vienna
based on political calculations.107 They ultimately acquired signatures from 20.3 per
cent of voters, while those near Montabaur reached 25.4 per cent.108
Regionalists from the wine-growing areas of the Middle Rhine around Trier and
Koblenz collected signatures from 14.2 per cent for unifying with North Rhine
Westphalia.109 The ‘Union Rhineland’ Society attacked ideas of the Rhineland as only
including the northern Rhine and drew on the memory of the Prussian Rhine Province,
created in the early 1800s, which stretched along the Rhine and the drainage basin of
the Saar and Mosel rivers. As the mayor of Trier argued, there could be ‘no Rhineland
without Wineland’.110 Prominent politicians had previously pushed the Rhine
Province’s restoration, including Adenauer, a Cologner who saw the region as a bridge
between Germany and France.111 Some Luther Committee members argued that regional
cultures cut across the Rhine rather than following its flow, though others noted the
strength of regional identification with the old Rhine Province.112 The Union
Rhineland also drew on physical geography, asking in one leaflet: ‘Where does all the
water of the Saar and Mosel flow? To Cologne and Düsseldorf’. The southern areas of
Koblenz and Trier, they insisted, shared a common cultural tradition and similar dialects
with the North Rhine.113
In the end, the Federal Government refused to schedule the legally-required referenda,
though the state of Hessen brought a court case against Bonn for inaction. By 1961, the
Constitutional Court declared that the Federal Government had flouted its constitutional
obligation to redraw the federal map, but also dismissed the standing of federal states or
regionalist societies to appeal.114 Bonn would continue to resist until the new government
106
LHK 860/4980, Advertisement: ‘Volksbegehren in Rheinhessen’, March 16, 1956.
107
LHK 860/5161, Leaflet, ‘Rheinhessen-Bund: Zur Wiedervereinigung von Rheinhessen mit Hessen’, 9 April
1956.
108
LHK 465/363-364, Mitteilungen des Landeseintragungsleiters von Rheinland-Pfalz, ‘Volksbegehren’, 23
April 1956.
109
Ibid.
110
Beate Dorfey, Die Teilung der Rheinprovinz und die Versuche zu ihrer Wiedervereinigung (Cologne 1993),
453.
111
Ibid., 89, 119, 130, 204.
112
Barch B106/2661, Referat Landahl, 14.10.1954, 5; LHK 860/9, Lutz Röhrich, ‘Volkskundliche
Zusammenhänge und Grenzen in Rheinland-Pfalz’; LHK 860/9, Eugen Ewig, ‘Die landsmannschaftliche
Zusammensetzung der Bevölkerung im mittelrheinischen Raum’; LHK 860/8366, ‘RHEINLAND-PFALZ
Bericht’; LHK 860/5186, Letter, Ministerium für Unterricht und Kultus to the Staatskanzlei Mainz, 31
August 1954.
113
Dorfey, Teilung, 490.
114
Bundesverfassungsgericht, ‘Hessen-Klage’ reprinted in Schiffers, ed., Weniger Länder, 205–6.
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of Willy Brandt in 1969, which saw scheduling the referenda as a legal obligation. The
government revised Article 29 to set time limits on referenda scheduling, which meant
they would have to be held by the mid-1970s.115 By the 1960s and 1970s, however,
the culture of West German federalism had shifted. As the legal scholar Helmut
Quartisch argued in 1968, the federal states had increasingly become ‘entities of
utility’ rather than ‘entities of feeling’.116 This was well-reflected in the ‘Ernst
Kommission’, a new committee which set out its own proposals in 1973 for redrawing
state borders. The committee jettisoned consideration of culture and regional belonging
as a secondary factor, proposing simply to create larger states based on technocratic and
administrative considerations.117 While their work is certainly interesting in terms of the
broader history of West German federalism, these subsequent debates tell us relatively
little about cognitive maps of regional belonging, which had proven a central question
in earlier years.
Despite waning interest, the referenda would finally be held in 1975. In
Rhineland-Palatinate, 33.2 per cent in the Koblenz and Trier districts voted for reunification with the Rhineland, while 24.7 per cent in Rheinhessen and 30.9 per cent in
Montabaur voted for joining Hessen.118 The votes in Oldenburg and
Schaumburg-Lippe, however, became proxy votes for expressing anger against the
Lower Saxon government’s recent series of communal reforms which consolidated
local governments against the will of many residents.119 Around 80 per cent of participants in both referenda voted against Lower Saxony, though this was less than 40 per
cent of the total eligible voting population.120 Such anger at communal reforms in
states throughout the Federal Republic had become more of a source of public ire than
earlier concerns about redrawing federal states according to regional feeling.121 The
Federal Government, however, responded to the referenda by simply unbinding itself
from earlier constitutional obligations. It revised Article 29 to read that the states ‘can’
be reshaped according to the outlined criteria.122
The prospect of redrawing the map would again raise its head with national reunification in 1990. Few, however, suggested redrawing the East German states based on
regional belonging. Some West German experts in the 1950s, anticipating an earlier
reunification, had already considered how the states of East Germany could be
redrawn according to regional belonging. The results, however, revealed the same
115
Franz Herre, ‘Neugliederung’ in Walter Först, ed., Land und Bund (Stuttgart 1981), 34.
116
Helmut Quaritsch, ‘Der unerfüllte Verfassungsauftrag’, in Werner von Hadel, ed., Neugliederung der
Länder (Loccum 1968), 20–1.
117
‘Forum: Welchem Verfassungspolitischen Rang hat die Föderalistische Gewaltenteilung in der BRD?’, in
Kurt Naumann, ed., Neugliederung des Bundesgebietes (Bad Boll 1975), 37.
118
119
Statistisches Landesamt Rheinland-Pfalz, Die Volksentscheide in Rheinland-Pfalz (Bad Ems 1975), 9.
Hans-Ulrich Evers, Oldenburg und Schaumburg-Lippe nach den Volksentscheiden (Hildesheim 1975), 9–
10.
120
Ibid., 19.
121
Sabine Mecking, ‘State – Municipality – Citizen: Rational Territorial Reform against Emotion Will of the
Citizenry in West Germany?’, Historical Social Research, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2017), 295–317.
122
Deutscher Bundestag, ed., Grundgesetz (Berlin 2007), 26.
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29
points of conflict and ambiguity about where such regions could be found in geographic
space.123 In the case of Thuringia, such ambiguities could already be seen in the
Weimar-era efforts to unify the region, with divergences between identification with
Prussia and Thuringia in the north and Bavaria and Thuringia in places to the South
like Coburg.124
While regional belonging did not represent the main factor in thinking about the recreation of East German states in 1990, the moment provided ample evidence of divergent
regional imaginings. Under pressure to achieve rapid national reunification, the newly
elected Volkskammer rushed to restore the East German states abolished by the Soviets
in 1952. The importance of speed meant they could only approximately recreate them
by hobbling together the extant administrative districts (Bezirke) whose borders often
did not align with those of the former states. Informational referenda were held in counties (Kreise) who found themselves in new states, whose councils were empowered to
vote to join neighbouring states. The referenda revealed divergences in regional belonging along all the borders of the five recreated states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, and Thuringia.125 Beyond border areas, other
divergences could easily be found. Lusatians, for example, diverged between those
who identified with Saxony and those who argued for a separate Lusatian regional
idea rooted in the area’s Slavic Sorbian histories.126 The loss of parts of former
regions along the new Polish border and earlier German divisions also created new ambiguities. Areas like the Eichsfeld had been split in half by the iron curtain, while regions
like Pomerania had been cut in half along the new border with Poland. Many West
Pomeranians, however, still asserted a Pomeranian regional identity and some believed
they should have their own state. In the town of Görlitz, the last speck of the Silesian
region still in Germany, many Görlitzer held to a Silesian regional idea despite being
part of Saxony.127 More practical considerations, however, proved more decisive in
the shaping of the ‘new’ federal states.
Conclusion
Intense West German efforts to find the borders of regional belonging revealed how
regions were remarkably able to hold diverging cognitive maps of community in suspension. Post-war politicians, spatial planers, geographers, and other scholars uncovered tremendous divergences. Dialect spaces, confessional identities, conflicting maps of past
territorial states, diverse notions of ‘Stamm’, orientation to urban centres, and the historic
force of physical geography could all influence imaginings of region but failed to create
123
Werner Münchheimer, Die Neugliederung Mitteldeutschlands bei der Wiedervereinigung (Göttingen 1954).
Hans-Werner Hahn, “Vom Thüringer Kleinstaatenjammer zum Land Thüringen. Die ‘Thüringen-Frage’
1806 bis 1920” in Schindling and Wollgast, eds, Zusammenschlüsse, 125–53.
124
125
Werner Rutz et al., Die Fünf Neuen Bundesländer: Historisch begründet, politisch gewollt und künftig
vernünftig? (Darmstadt 1993), 79–105.
126
Ibid., 83–4.
127
Ibid., 82–4.
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European History Quarterly 0(0)
commonly agreed upon maps. These patterns ultimately revealed how the dynamics of
imaginings of modern regions and modern nations in territorial space were both different.
The modern idea that national communities represented the ultimate source of political
sovereignty underpinned ever growing efforts to discipline and fix the geographic contours of the nation to achieve an exact overlap between national decision-space and
identity-space. While regional states undertook their own state- and identity-building projects, their ability to force a consensus on imaginings of regional community proved more
limited.
The German lands offer us examples of such divergent imaginings in a place with deep
federalist histories. Studies of historically centralist countries would certainly offer an
interesting cross-comparison. Given the role of sub-national decision-spaces in shaping
regional identities, it would seem likely that cognitive maps of regions would be even
less defined in these cases. Some evidence confirms this suspicion. In Italy, which did
not have the same federalist traditions, early post-war efforts to introduce new federalist
structures failed in part given conflicts over what territories constituted ‘regions’.128
While orientation towards cities often overshadowed a sense of region in the Italian tradition, a ‘city principle’, it would appear, offered no more conclusive answers than it did in
the West German case. In the English case, proposals to introduce new federalist structures have also continually failed to answer intractable questions about what areas
represent coherent English ‘regions’.129 Ambiguities can also be seen in Eastern
European contexts, with one recent study of regional identity in the traditionallycentralist Czech lands demonstrating how the redrawing of provincial borders in the
late twentieth century has informed divergent generational imaginings of regional
belonging.130
Federalist states provide similar examples, and Spain, with its hybrid constitutional
structures, offers a case in point. While Spain has seen more examples of separatism,
it too has confronted a lack of consensus on where its communities lie in geographic
space. Territorial imaginings of Greater Catalonian or Basque nations, for example,
have conflicted with narrower Valencian and Navarrese regional ideas. Identifications
with the latter two have often aligned with a rejection of separatism.131 Very small
groups of separatists in West Germany, as we have seen, also confronted divergent cognitive maps. Perhaps because separatism did not represent a true threat in the West
German case, we do not find equivalent examples of support or opposition to separatism
informing the appeal of different maps.
On the whole, the efforts to redraw the federalist map in early West Germany provide
insight into the dynamics of federalist reform – whether in Germany or elsewhere – and
128
For reference to relevant Italian-language scholarship on this history, see Stefano Cavazza, ‘Regionalism in
Italy’ in Augusteijn and Storm, eds, Region and State, 85, 89.
129
David Smith and Enid Wistrich, Devolution and Localism in England (Farnham 2014), 29–44.
130
Miloslav Šerý and Marcela Daň kov, ‘When Regional Identities Differ over Generation’, Journal of Rural
Studies, Vol. 82 (2021), 430–44.
131
Sebastian Balfour and Alejandro Quiroga, The Reinvention of Spain: Nation and Identity since Democracy
(Oxford 2007), 76–7; Joan Tena, ‘Identity Conflict in the Land of València during the Post-Franco Democratic
Period’, Saitabi, Vols 62–3 (2012–2013), 187–210.
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DeWaal
the conflicting territorial imaginings of regional community which reforms will often
have to confront. Most importantly, the history of these efforts sheds light on how
forms of community beneath the nation state have been cognitively mapped. Rather
than taking modern nations as representative, more attention is needed to how cognitive
maps of modern territorial communities have been forged in contexts where such communities did not lay claims to absolute political sovereignty. Regions, which laid claim
at most to partial forms of sovereignty, offer a unique lens into these processes. If, as
Charles Maier has argued, the late twentieth century marked the beginning of a slow
decline of a ‘territorial age’, defined by absolute demands for an overlap between ‘decision space’ and ‘identity space’, it would seem all the more important to consider the
potential consequences such a divergence could have on geographic imaginings of
belonging.132
ORCID iD
Jeremy DeWaal
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3566-2122
Author Biography
Jeremy DeWaal is a Lecturer of Modern European History at the University of Exeter, and his
research has focused particularly on questions about home, region, and democracy in modern
German history. His monograph Geographies of Renewal: Heimat and Democracy in Post-war
West Germany, 1945–1990, is appearing this year with Cambridge University Press and examines
efforts to conceive of home and Heimat in more democratic and potentially inclusive modes in West
Germany after the Second World War. Through an AHRC fellowship, he has recently begun work
on a second book project on the longue durée history of the Carnival tradition, examined through
the lens of the history of emotions.
132
Maier, ‘Transformations’; Maier ‘Alternative Narratives’.