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98 4 A Moral Community THE NEIGHBORHOODS OF interwar Hildesheim were spaces of transgression . Conviviality felt very personal and integrating. Friendship was by definition private and intimate; neighborliness shared in these qualities, to a lesser degree. Yet conviviality could also feel very alienating and political . Through friends and neighbors, Hildesheimers laid claim to power and status in the local public sphere. They also publicized their private affairs, challenged others with their political beliefs, and even tried to compel their neighbors to comply. In all its aspects then, conviviality bore the evidence that Hildesheimers shaped their lived reality. For good reason, then, interwar Hildesheimers associated the politics of neighborliness with dirt. This chapter will explore the more overtly political uses of neighborliness as well as the mechanism through which ordinary Hildesheimers restored moral order thereafter. Hildesheimers did not balk at using neighborly relations to actively promote their agendas for power and politics. Instead, they relied on cleansing rituals to purge the neighborhood of all memory of politicization and restore normalcy. Street Politics My interview partners suggested that politics was a matter for those up there while they were just ordinary Hildesheimers. They used the term politizieren to refer to the act of seriously discussing political issues. Some did so with very good friends or close relatives with whom they shared common convictions (e.g., G/12b R/110, G/148b R/140), but like the tables at local pubs where groups of men regularly met to play cards (a Stammtisch), these friends could discuss politics because friends tended to find friends who were like them. Self-selecting by definition, friendship actually insulated Hildesheimers from serious political disagreements. Most of my interview partners denied having discussed politics with neighbors. In the atmosphere of civil war that permeated the Weimar Republic, direct forms of discourse about party politics could too easily have led to open conflict. In the atmosphere of economic uncertainty and status A Moral Community 99 competition, even direct claims to power and status were too readily dismissed as false arrogance. For these same reasons, however, Hildesheimers felt the need to imagine a better status for themselves and make their political views known to their neighbors. The informal customs of conviviality were perfectly suited to accomplish these contradictory ends: to express the political self behind the veil of the everyday. In recent decades, historians have expanded the definition of the political to encompass power relations, identity constructions, and cultural processes of everyday life. While most histories of Weimar street politics have tended to focus on the extensive, formal mobilization of the masses for politics or violence (Diehl 1977; Fritzsche 1988, 1990, 1998), in this study I consider instead the more subtle, informal style of symbolic discourse about politics and identity that permeated neighborly relations. My interview partners were very forthcoming about politics in this everyday sense. Categorically normal, it has been easy and convenient to dismiss semiotic politics as eigensinn rather than recognizing it as a means to herrschaft. Although the evidence is anecdotal and still somewhat limited, it suggests that Hildesheimers engaged proactively in a none-too-subtle form of street politics. Hildesheimers knew a lot about their neighbors. Heinrich Weber explained that he knew to which Christian confession they belonged because each church held services at different times. Catholics left around 1:45. His father used to joke around lunchtime: “Right when I try to close my eyes for a minute, then [those church bells] start to jingle again!” Heinrich then remembered one family in particular. They left for church individually: first the children and then the parents. It was this “extended” departure, he explained, that drew attention to them and therefore to their Catholic confession . “Otherwise no one noticed who was Catholic or who was Protestant . That was of no significance to the children” of his corner neighborhood (G/144b R/30). He also knew their class: their father was a master artisan like his father. Later he added that Hildesheimers announced their class during neighborly intercourse through clothes, non-monetary exchanges, and the titles used while greeting. You could guess where men worked, Heinrich explained, because you saw their wives bringing them lunch every day (G/145a R/130). You could also draw conclusions about confession (G/135a R/55) and class from the school that one attended. Given these institutional differences, physical proximity was thus sufficient to ensure that Hildesheimers knew roughly to which milieu their neighbors belonged: working class, Catholic, or Protestant middle class. From...

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