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CHAPTER 6 German Landscape Local Promotion of the Heimat Abroad Thomas Lekan In 1869 a German factory worker described his experience at a picnic on Chicago’s North Side. “Nothing thrills a German more than a festival in the woods under the green leaves of oak trees!” he exclaimed. “This [feeling] has clung to our people since the forest life of our ancestors . I forgot that I was so far, so distant from my homeland celebrating a festival under foreign oaks, [and] I had lively conversations with those around me and was full of happiness.”1 This worker’s belief that oak trees could stimulate convivial feelings of homeland invokes one of the most pervasive tropes among Germans abroad: a belief that all Germans, regardless of time and location, had a special af‹nity for their landscape of origin. Indeed, the concept of Heimat, which scholars have usually identi‹ed as a local sense of place grounded in emotional attachments to familiar surroundings,2 was actually a highly mobile rhetorical device, one that provided a touchstone of identity for emigrants from German-speaking lands throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American observers often referred to German Americans as a people who had gone “from forest—to forest .” Their yearning for a familiar environment made them seize upon woodland areas even in comparatively treeless regions, and they supposedly clung to Old World provincialism despite America’s rapid industrialization and urbanization.3 Germany’s status as a “nation of provincials,” in which most citizens envisioned their country as a decentralized mosaic of regional landscapes, also shaped the experience of Germans abroad and enabled them to imagine themselves as part of a Kulturnation that spanned the seas. In this chapter, I use German American communities’ relationship to the German homeland between roughly 1880 and 1939 as a case study in the transplantation and transformation of Heimat identities 141 on both sides of the Atlantic during a period of unprecedented contestation over the character and boundaries of Germanness. The migration and reinforcement of provincialism were not unique to German Americans; Irish, Italian, and Russian immigrants also identi‹ed strongly with speci‹c districts or counties in their home countries. What I believe was unique to German diasporic communities, however , was their belief that they had physically inscribed a particular cultural landscape into their new Heimat. Writings on German Americans claimed that they maintained (or could be stimulated to embrace) emotional ties to the natural features of their homeland; that these attachments resulted in a superior stewardship over the land; and that the distinctive cultural landscapes that had emerged in their home country through centuries of occupation would be recapitulated in a foreign setting. Their concept of landscape resembled that of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, whose romantic concept of Land und Leute had proposed a belief that each landscape, be it national, regional, or local, represented an aesthetic totality that synthesized natural features and cultural customs into an organic whole, a Kulturlandschaft.4 The Kulturlandschaft did not serve merely material needs, but instead was an ideal form that dispensed moral lessons and legitimated historical claims to a particular territory. Germanness, in this sense, was not merely linguistic or cultural; it could be envisioned, even touched, in particular landscapes and natural experiences. And just as the Heimat movement in Germany was largely an urban phenomenon of middleclass associations (Vereine) dedicated to researching the rural Heimat and exploring it through hiking and weekend excursions, so too were the regional clubs of America founded in cities like Chicago similarly composed largely of middle-class or skilled working-class members. The nineteenth-century impetus for promoting such Heimat identities emerged on the German American side. For ‹rst-generation immigrants , visions of homeland, whether Rhenish, Swabian, or Saxon, were linked to personal and collectives memories of place. For secondand third-generation German Americans, the Heimat clubs provided a form of urban sociability and a sense of cultural uniqueness in an era in which “Anglo-Saxon” elites looked disapprovingly upon all immigrant groups as a threat to their religious mores and economic status. World War I, however, shifted the locus of Heimat promotion from America to Germany. The decline of German American organizations amid the hysteria of World War I occurred just as the territorial losses of the Versailles settlement and the ensuing con›icts of the Weimar era sharpened the tone of Heimat rhetoric within Germany and made the 142 The Heimat Abroad “loss” of millions of Germans along the...

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