Between Heritage and Countermemory: Varieties of Historical Representation in a West

German Community
Author(s): John R. Eidson
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Nov., 2005), pp. 556-575
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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 JOHN R. EIDSON
University of New Hampshire

Between hentage and countennemoxy:

Varieties of historical representation in a
West German community

* * _ ince the sixties," anthropologists concerned with contem-

A B S T R A C T
porary meanings of the past have drawn less on Emile
Contrasting views of the past are often understood
_ Durkheim (1965) and Maurice Halbwachs (1992) than on
in terms of dichotomies (e.g., hegemonic-
b Antonio Gramsci (1998) or Michel Foucault (1984), em-
counterhegemonic and regressive-progressive),
_ phasizing power, difference, and contestation over con-
but ethnographic data gathered in a German
sensus.l But, having freed ourselves of the illusion that societies cultivate
community suggest the need for a more
unitary conceptions of their development and defining moments, we have
differentiated approach. The public presentation of
often settled for a simple form of dualism. Distinguishing between official
history in that community corresponds to one of
and unofficial views of the past has become common, often with the as-
three conventions: (1) the commemoration of the
sumption that this distinction corresponds to a whole series of equivalent
founding of local institutions by their members,
ones: hegemony and counterhegemony, heritage and countermemory, or
(2) "hometown history," an avocation of the local
even manipulation and authenticity. These associations are captured in
bourgeoisie, and (3) citizens' initiatives for coming
the evocative summary by Uli Linke, who contrasts "representations of the
to terms with the Nazi past. German-area
past . . . through which states, elites, or dominant descent groups confiscate
specialists have tended to dismiss the first two
linear time and proclaim official chronologies" with "the vast complex of
types and to valorize the third, but different
unofficial, noninstitutionalized knowledge . . . furnishing the 'raw material'
representations of the past in the present are best
for representing the past" and "forming a counterweight to the knowl-
viewed as varieties of symbolic capital, which
edge that is . . . monopolized by . .. elites for the defense of established in-
members of different social groups employ in the
terests" (2001:2219).
institutional settings to which they have access
With such distinctions in mind, the historian Alon Confino has criti-
and in which they are authorized to play active
cized Henry Rousso (1991) for basing his analysis of the collective memory
roles. [historicat memory, heritage, countermemory,
of the Vichy era in France on official representations only, thus grasping
distinction, politics of recognition, symbolic
variation only as a series of successive phases. According to Confino, Rousso
capital, Germany]
has failed to see that each phase of the postwar era was complexly layered,
containing both official representations and "very different representations
of Vichy . . . in the private spheres of family, friends, workplace, and neigh-
borhood" (1997a:1394).
Confino and Linke are right to alert scholars to the significance of
variation in views of the past at any one time and place, but their tendency
to conceive of this variation in terms of a dichotomy between official and
unofficial versions requires qualification on at least three counts.2 First-
and regardless of the faults or merits of Rousso's analysis to assume that

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 Varieties of historical representation * American Ethnologist
official history is necessarily unitary is invalid. With the
notable exception of one-party systems (Watson 1994),
official history often comes in multiple varieties, corre-
sponding to the plurality of offices in complexly organized
territorial states or to differences among the forces vying
for political power (e.g., Gildea 1994; Herzfeld 1992). Fur-
thermore, the differences among official varieties of his-
tory may provide clues for at least some of the variation
in unofficial spheres, assumi-ng for the moment that the
distinction between the official and the unofficial can al-
ways be neatly drawn. Finally, and perhaps most funda-
mentally, as researchers, once we widen our perspective
to include unofficial understandings of history, we must
be prepared for the eventuality that the subject matter
broadens, as well, spilling over into areas unrelated or only
tangentially related to our own favored topics. In the
example cited by Confino, the memories derived from
"the private spheres of family, friends, workplace, and
neighborhood" may not be about the Vichy regime at
all which is, after all, an official topic, that is, one touch-
ing on public offices and the exercise of political power-
but about something else entirely. Rather than contributing
to Confino's agenda of developing a better understanding of
Vichy France and its place in the collective memory of the
French, people may follow their own agendas, which direct
attention to other frames of reference.
Shifting from France to Germany, the site of the case
study featured in this article, much evidence suggests that
many people are quite concerned with aspects of the past
that are only tangentially related to national political is-
sues. But, clearly, scholars are often uncertain or perhaps
too certain what to make of such evidence. In the sec-
ondary literature on contemporary German culture and
society, popular forms of historical memory that do not
correspond to scholars' interests in national politics are
quickly dismissed as expressions of either unschooled
minds (Hauptmeyer 1987) or regressive ideologies (Jeggle
1987). The latter judgment is based on yet another dichot-
omy, which may be understood as a simple transformation
of the one mentioned at the outset: Regressive ideologies
are those that used to be hegemonic, before counterhege-
monic alternatives gained in strength and established them-
selves as progressive forces competing for dominance in the
national public sphere.
Once the distinction between progressive and regres-
sive forces becomes established in the language of public
discussion at the national level, it is often used to catego-
rize diverse phenomena and sort them accordingly, some-
times with a disregard for the degree to which the meaning
of these phenomena is dependent on their embeddedness
in local and regional contexts. The alternative is, first, to re-
ject the assumption that all phenomena can be subsumed
automatically under the categories current in the national
public realm and, second, to attempt to reconstruct the
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local and regional contexts that are most appropriate for
understanding them. This is, admittedly, a difficult assign-
ment because the appropriate contexts for the analysis
of local attitudes toward history are not neatly bounded
"little communities" (Redfield 1960) but multiple, irregularly
shaped, and only partially overlapping social configurations.
Nevertheless, conceiving of various ways of representing
the past in the present without reducing them to an artifi-
cial standard should be possible. I suggest that diverse re-
presentations of the past be understood with reference to the
following set of variables: the social groups that advocate
them; the frarnes to which members of these groups refer in
articulating their visions and in conceiving of the public to
which they are presented; and the bases of group members'
authority to represent the past in public and, thus, to trans-
form it into a kind of symbolic capital.
In the following discussion, I apply this approach to
materials collected in a small town where I conducted
fieldwork from 1979 to 1981 and that I have visited for brief
follow-up studies in 1990, 1993, and 2003. With a popula-
tion of 7,800, Boppard on the Rhine is the largest settle-
ment in a thinly populated county encompassing a portion
of the left bank of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, the ad-
joining foothills, and part of the plateau to the west. The
most important branches of the local economy are tour-
ism, services, small industry, and wine production. Many
residents commute to workplaces in the city of Koblenz,
a provincial center with just over 100,000 inhabitants, lo-
cated 20 kilometers (about 12.5 miles) to the north.
In this setting, I focus on what Hermann Bausinger
(1990:82-87) has called "the presentation of the histori-
cal," that is, the ways in which people represent what
they call "Geschichte," or history, in local public life. Ini-
tially, at least, this concentration on representations of
the past in public might seem to impose undue restrictions
on the range of phenomena under consideration by ne-
glecting private, inarticulate, or silenced memories of the
type referred to by Confino (1997a) and Linke (2001); but
several factors mitigate this apparent narrowing of the
scope of my investigation. First, although memories may
be inchoate or silenced, this state of affairs is not neces-
sarily permanent; rather, it may be a phase in a larger
process, which culminates in articulation and expression.3
Second, the number of different social groups that are
involved in shaping public representations of the past in
the local community increases the probability that a broad
range of variation will find expression. Finally, hetero-
geneity is also fostered by the diverse modalities through
which the past can be presented, including resource man-
agement (architecture, landscaping, plaques, and monu-
ments), performances (customary observances, festivals,
and parades), and text production (newspaper articles,
books, and brochures), which, in their variability and inter-
connectedness, lie afoul of neat distinctions between
557
American Ethnologist * Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
"inscribing" and "incorporating" practices (Connerton
1989:72-73) .
In the field site, the presentation of the historical is
neither homogenous nor particularly hegemonic; rather, it
is characterized by diversity and contestation. The ques-
tion is, however, who is contesting what with whom? To
understand contests of this sort, it is by no means suffi-
cient to be well informed about issues currently under
discussion in the national public realm of representative
bodies, the news media, or arts and letters. Of greater im-
portance for understanding local attitudes toward history
are local tensions and conflicts, particularly past strug-
gles for recognition and inclusion and contemporary rela-
tions among confessions, social classes, political parties,
and local factions. At least since the early 20th century,
such conflicts have found expression in a locally or region-
ally situated public sphere in which, because of cultural
historical developments touched on below, the cultivation
of historical consciousness is held to be a value in and of
itself. This creates conditions under which the past may
be viewed as a resource (Appadurai 1981) or as a form of
symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1990) that can be drawn on
in more or less successful bids for social distinction
(Bourdieu 1984) and recognition (Taylor 1994).
On the basis of my most recent visit to the field site,
during which I able to document the developments of
the last decade, I distinguish three typical approaches to
local history, which I shall characterize briefly before
examining each in more detail: (1) commemoration, (2)
hometown history, and (3) coming to terms with the past.
Although most if not all representations of the past in
public are commemorative in some way or to some degree,
I reserve the term commemoration for what Germans call
"Gedenkjahre," "Gedenktage," or"Jubilaen" (Bergmann
1997) public celebrations of special events in the history
of institutions, which are held on the anniversaries of
those events by the members of the institutions them-
selves. Understood in this way, commemoration is the
most popular approach to the past, both in its accessibility
(practically any institution can provide the occasion for
celebrating an anniversary) and in its tone, which is gener-
ally affirmative. In this context, the adjective affirmative
(which corresponds to the categories of the epideictic, the
demonstrative, or the panegyric in classical rhetoric) refers
to varieties of historical representation that encourage
auditors to embrace a particular institution, social group,
locality, region, or nation and to work actively to secure it
in a particular form. Affirmative history-which may or
may not be primordialist, if one takes this term to mean
the postulation of unchanging essences that determine social
character (Foster 1991) is perhaps the most direct way in
which members of particular groups or institutions achieve
a sense of belonging, distinguish themselves from others,
and stake a claim for some form of public recognition.
558
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The second kind of local history is known in Germany
as Heimatgeschichte, Heimatforschung, or Heimatkunde.
Although intended at least in part for popular consump-
tion, this "hometown history" is restricted in production to
members of the educated bourgeoisie, for whom quasi-
scholarly pursuits represent the avocation of choice. Once
again, the tone is generally affirmative, but the reader or
hearer is usually invited to identify with a more broadly
inclusive although sometimes distinctly primordialist-
category than in the case of commemoration, because
hometown history is oriented, most generally, not toward
a single institution but toward the town, the region, or
the nation as a whole. Under the influence of professional
historians in provincial archives, however, hometown his-
torians may adopt critical approaches, depending on cur-
rent trends in national or international historiography.
The third kind of history has various designations
in Germany, including Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit
(working through or critically reappraising the past) and
Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coping with, dealing with,
managing, or overcoming the past), both of which I shall
translate as "coming to terms with the past."4 In a West
German setting, these terms refer almost exclusively to the
National Socialist era, especially to Nazi crimes and the
Nazis' victims, most notably people of Jewish descent.5 For
reasons given below, coming to terms with the past is often
most evident as a form of public behavior that was devel-
oped in national institutions then introduced into local
communities by members of the educated or political
classes. Not surprisingly, then, the focus in local commu-
nities is on local counterparts of nationwide developments
between 1933 and 1945. Despite some similarities of class
affiliation, local advocates of coming to terms with the past
often differ from hometown historians in their political
attitudes, just as the critical tone of coming to terms with
the past often contrasts strongly with the affirmative tone
of hometown history. This is not to say that those promot-
ing critical engagement with Nazism lack other means for
attaining affirmation and other bases for gaining distinc-
tion and recognition in the present with reference to the
past (Huyssen 1995:82-84; Young 1993:53).
Commemoration
Thinking of commemoration as the opposite of genealogy,
as Foucault (1984) defines it in his widely cited essay on
Friedrich Nietzsche, is tempting. Like "heritage" (1984:82),
"the historian's history" (p. 87), or "history in the tradi-
tional sense" (p. 86) the foils against which Foucault
develops his alternative vision commemoration is char-
acterized by the "search for 'origins' " (p. 77) and by
assumptions of "uninterrupted continuity" (p. 83). It is
based on a "comprehensive view of history," one posit-
ing "continuous development" (Foucault 1984:88) and
 Varieties of historical representation * American Ethnologist
supposedly resulting in "an acquisition, a possession that
grows and solidifies" (p. 82) and, therefore, is "sufficiently
stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for under-
standing other men" (pp. 87-88). In contrast, advocates
of the genealogical method which Foucault also refers
to as " 'effective' history" (1984:88) or "countermemory"
(p. 93) understand any supposed origin as "a place of
confrontation" (p. 84), "interaction," and "struggle" (p. 83)
and any subsequent temporal process as "an unstable as-
semblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that
threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from under-
neath" (p. 82).
Foucault's distinction is useful up to a point, and it
has informed my understanding of approaches to local
history in the field site; but, if it is overgeneralized, it
involves a confusion of form and function, that is, of the
intrinsic qualities of historical representations and the
political purposes they are supposed to serve. Although
commemoration often takes on the outward trappings
of heritage, indulging in "the chimeras of the origin"
(Foucault 1984:80) and "the consoling play of recogni-
tions" (p. 88), this does not prevent it from serving pur-
poses that might be ascribed to countermemory.6 Because
identification and affirmation necessarily take place in a
broader social context, in which interactions among indi-
viduals or groups are characterized by indifference, coop-
eration, rivalry, or open conflict, the "faults" and "fissures"
that are often absent from commemorative observances
themselves may, in fact, inhere in the interstices among
various commemorative projects.
Scholars trace European commemorative practices
back to precedents in Judaism and medieval Christianity
(Bergmann 1997; Mitterauer 1982) that were secularized
in courts and municipalities during the early modern era
and popularized by civic organizations, political move-
ments, business enterprises, and even families in recent
centuries (Kleinschmidt 1977; Muller 2004). Given this
broad institutional range, which seems to expand as one
approaches the present, remarkably, most commentators
on modern Germany have restricted themselves to com-
memorative observances with national significance. Dif-
ferent authors have shown how participants in popular
movements of the l9th century celebrated glorious or
tragic moments in the nation's past (Duding et al. 1988);
how National Socialists remembered crucial events in the
rise of their movement (Connerton 1989:41-43); how the
state, various social groups, and artists commemorate
the Holocaust (Young 1993, 2000); and how leaders of
the German Federal Republic fulfill the difficult task of
observing various dates in the violent history of the 20th
century (Olick 1999). Recently, anthropologists working
in East Germany have examined commemorative obser-
vances in rural communities or among private citizens in
urban settings, but the focus is still on people's views of
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events with a larger political significance (Berdahl 1999;
Ten Dyke 2001).
In this article, I focus, instead, on the kinds of com-
memorative observances in which members of local
communities participate most often and most actively,
including, especially, the celebration of the anniversaries
of the founding of local institutions. For contemporary
administrators, clerics, businesspersons, and club mem-
bers, observing special anniversaries for example, the
25th, 50th, or 100th has come to represent both an
obligation and an opportunity to reflect on the constitu-
tion of their respective institutions and to present them,
or idealized images of them, to the broader public. This
helps to explain why, in the field site, public life is replete
with various kinds of celebrations, ranging from 150 Jahre
Kreis Sankt Goar (150th Anniversary of St. Goar County) to
50 Jahre Bopparder Sesselbahn (50th Anniversary of the
Chairlift in Boppard), to cite only two examples from the
last half century.
From many possible examples of commemoration in
the field site, I have chosen institutions that are situated
along social fault lines that have characterized the local
community for over a century. Nachbarschaften (neigh-
borhood associations) of which there are a dozen in
Boppard are typical citizens' organizations of the Middle
Rhine region, with symbolic paraphernalia and recurring
ceremonies, such as annual festivals, flag dedications, and
jubilees (Pauly 1990; Zender 1960). Although, today, local
residents are most likely to emphasize the "traditional"
character of the neighborhood associations, this is best
understood as a veiled reference to the previous exclusion
of their members, namely, indigenous Roman Catholics of
both the business and working classes, from full partici-
pation in social and political life.
Most neighborhood associations claim to be ancient
or medieval in origin, but in their current form they were
shaped by the typical conflicts of the l9th century (Eidson
1990). Following the defeat of Napoleon, the Rhenish ter-
ritories, with their largely Roman Catholic populations,
were awarded to the Protestant state of Prussia. As a result,
Roman Catholic communities were often dominated by a
powerful minority made up of Protestants and some lib-
eral Catholics. In the 1870s, the hostility of the Prussian
state and its liberal citizens to Roman Catholicism culmi-
nated in the so-called Kulturkampf, or "struggle for [liberal]
culture," which consisted in a series of legal measures
designed to reduce the role of the clergy in public life.
The Kulturkampf had the unintended consequence, how-
ever, of sparking a Roman Catholic revival throughout
Germany (Cary 1996; Sperber 1984). In Boppard, neigh-
borhood associations were along with the parish church,
the local organ of the Zentrum (Center Party), and other
church-based voluntary associations the organizational
forms of the suppressed Roman Catholic factions. Most
559
American Ethnologist * Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
of the traits that today's neighborhood activists regard
as traditional emblems, flags, monuments, sayings, and
ceremonies were developed during this period, as neigh-
borhood representatives invoked their organizations'
premodern origins while emulating modern bourgeois
associations (Eidson 1990; see also Hobsbawm and Ranger
1983; Pauly 1990).
One of the high points of the Roman Catholic revival
in Boppard was the celebration of the 500th anniversary of
the annual festival of the Town Square Neighborhood,
which was held soon after World War I, once universal
suffrage was introduced and the local Roman Catholic
majority had gained a political position matching its
numbers. Long before the war, a Catholic priest had
concluded, after examining certain medieval documents,
that the Town Square festival was first held in 1420 and
would be 500 years old in 1920. Therefore, in 1921, after
years of planning and with a slight delay caused by the
occupying French forces, the Town Square neighbors
celebrated this special anniversary with an elaborate fes-
tival featuring a Festschrift, a parade with groups in
historical costumes, and reenactments of the historical
events that supposedly led to the founding of the festival
(Kreuzberg 1920; M. 1921).
Public festivals with historical pageantry were common
in late l9th- and early 20th-century Germany (Bausinger
1990:82-87), but the Town Square celebration of 1921 was
the first such festival in Boppard. Seizing the day, the Town
Square neighbors used historical pageantry to underwrite
a version of local history that emphasized the age-old
privileges of indigenous Roman Catholics and their sub-
sequent violation by a series of territorial administrations,
most recently, the Prussian state (Eidson 2000). This refer-
ence to past injustices lent historical justification to the
democratic victory of local Roman Catholics, organized in
the Center Party.
The Town Square Neighborhood, led by the local
Roman Catholic business class, was widely held to be the
most prestigious neighborhood association in Boppard. In
the years following the big event of 1921, however, this
claim, evidently, was not universally recognized, as anni-
versary celebrations became an outlet for the expression of
rivalry among various neighborhood associations, repre-
senting different social groups. Of special interest is the
High Street Neighborhood, which attempted to outdo its
illustrious rival with its own 600th anniversary celebration
in 1928. In contrast to the conservative, bourgeois offi-
cers of the Town Square Neighborhood, the artisans and
workers who led the High Street Neighborhood included a
disproportionate number of the town's few Social Demo-
crats. Despite the High Street challenge of 1928, the Town
Square Neighborhood maintained its position of domi-
nance well into the postwar era, when participation de-
clined as the sons and daughters of local business families
seo
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began leaving the small town to attend universities and
pursue careers in urban centers.
When I first arrived in Boppard in the fall of 1979, I
had unknowingly missed the 650th anniversary of the
founding of the High Street Neighborhood by a year and
a half. In retrospect, however, the ambitious festival of
1978 clearly represented a kind of "coming out" for the
High Street neighbors, who were able to establish them-
selves as a force to be reckoned with in local public affairs.
Since that time, the High Street neighbors have consoli-
dated their position in the local community, as I was able
to confirm while attending their 675th anniversary, which
was celebrated in June 2003 with historical costumes,
pageantry, and parades. The main venue of this four-day
festival was a rented tent with tables and benches for
several hundred people, which had been set up tempo-
rarily on a parking lot near the center of town. The festival
began on Friday evening with music and an official greet-
ing from the neighborhood president. Next came a series
of speeches by prominent guests, including the chairman
of the regional historical society, a representative of the
state governor, the county executive, and the mayor.
The speeches given by honored guests on the first
evening of the High Street anniversary celebration of June
2003 may be seen as a characteristic expression of the local
politics of recognition as they developed over the course of
the 20th century (Eidson 1990). One of the purposes of
anniversary celebrations is to enhance the reputation of an
organization and its representatives by making claims in
public and arranging for the public ratification of those
claims. In the case of the 675th anniversary of the High
Street Neighborhood, the more or less explicit claims made
by neighborhood spokespersons can be summarized as
follows: Our neighborhood association is the custodian of
old traditions; these traditions correspond to public virtues
such as neighborliness, mutual aid, and historical con-
sciousness; we, as caretakers of these traditions and as
purveyors of the corresponding virtues, deserve public
acknowledgment for our contribution; and because of our
indigenous status and the age and continuity of our tradi-
tions, we enjoy "first rights" over those who came later,
even if latecomers are in positions of public authority.
The speeches made by the guests of honor ratified
these claims in very conventional ways with one excep-
tion. The county executive assured the assembled neigh-
bors of their importance by telling them, "You are the
humus, the root, the origin."7 The mayor praised their
voluntary contributions to the restoration of public build-
ings, saying, "If there were no High Street Neighborhood,
then ... we would have to double the number of em-
ployees in the municipal department for public works.^'
The deputy governor praised their "orientation toward
the life-situation of [neighborhood] members" and their
"impressive demonstration" of their humanity. Everything
 Varieties of historicaL representation * American Ethnologist
went according to plan, until one of the invited speakers,
the chairman of the historical society, made a remarkable
break with convention by referring explicitly to the offi-
cial support of the neighborhood association for the new
German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, in 1933. This near scandal
was, however, defused through expert crisis management,
so that, for the next three days, the festival could return
to the "traditional" pattern that I knew from fieldwork
in the early 1980s and from local newspaper reports since
the late l9th century (Eidson 1990, 1994).
Hometown history
The second variety of local historical representation,
Heimatgeschichte, or hometown history, may be among
the most thoroughly misunderstood phenomena in con-
temporary German scholarship. Following Pierre Bourdieu
(1984), one might call it an object of "misrecognition,"
insofar as the critique of hometown history is a central
component of the self-understanding of disciplines that
shared a common origin with it, at least to some degree, but
that were subsequently defined in contradistinction to it.
Today, scholars tend to view amateur historical activ-
ities in local communities as inferior or corrupt versions of
their own enterprises, criticizing practitioners for their
ignorance of historical methods or adherence to regressive
ideologies (e.g., Hauptmeyer 1987; Jeggle 1987). Yet, as is
well-known, the historical societies of the early l9th cen-
tury provided important institutional bases for the devel-
opment of modern historical scholarship (Chickering 1993;
Heimpel 1972). In Germany, history was established as a
separate academic discipline in the decades between the
dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the
founding of the German Reich in 1871.8 During this period,
the emerging class of academic historians, especially those
specializing in classical, national, or European history,
either took charge of the historical societies, transforming
them into professional associations, or abandoned them to
"the 'retired pastors and physicians' whom Theodore
Mommsen and his colleagues at the universities ridiculed
for their parochial interest in archaeological artefacts,
genealogy, the restoration of monuments, and the history
of local dynasties" (Chickering 1993:75).
In recent scholarship, the emergence of academic
historiography is described in language that is less self-
congratulatory than that of the late l9th century, but the
emphasis is still on the professionalization of the discipline
and the establishment of scientific procedures (Diesener
and Middell 1996). Scholars have shown less interest in the
historical societies that were still under the control of
dilettantes and continued to lead a parallel existence, often
in active exchange not with leading history professors but
with those graduates of historical seminars who found
employment in the expanding network of higher schools
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or in new initiatives for public history "below the academic
heights" (Chickering 1993:75). Such exchanges were espe-
cially evident in the late l9th and early 20th centuries,
when, after the nation-state had been founded, new histor-
icizing projects emerged that were more concerned with the
distinctive characteristics of the various territories and
locales making up the nation. In provincial governments,
this involved establishing modern archives, public commis-
sions for territorial history, and new ofElces for cultural
preservation (Chickering 1993:75-77; Koshar 1998).
Among the residents of both urban centers and the
provinces, these official developments had their popular
pendant in a series of initiatives that have often been
referred to as the "Heimatbewegung," or the movement
for the homeland, home region, or hometown (Applegate
1990). In local communities, activities oriented toward the
Heimat took the form of resource management, cultural
performances, or text production (cf. Bausinger 1984;
Confino 1997b; Ditt 1990). All three types of activities
could be used to express ideas about history and its
relevance for the present; but, whereas cultural perform-
ances were broadly accessible to members of various
social strata, resource management and text production
were typically the preserves of the local bourgeoisie.
Taken together, the establishment of academic histo-
riography, the new public initiatives for territorial history,
and new developments among amateurs in local commu-
nities may be understood as various aspects of an emerg-
ing Geschichtsktur, or culture of historical consciousness
(Rusen 1997). Despite much recent interest in this topic,
however, the complexity of the relationships among these
groups and their historical visions has not yet been ex-
plored adequately. Local communities, which have re-
ceived the least amount of attention, saw the advent of a
new kind of specialist, who was recruited from the ranks
of the local notables. The new hometown historians
were petty officials, lawyers, doctors, apothecaries, pas-
tors, priests, teachers, and school officials, who enjoyed a
special status in their communities and whose "honorific
preferences" consisted in "the right to pursue certain non-
professional dilettante . . . practices" (Weber 1958: 191),
which, in this case, included "quasi-scholarly ... accom-
plishments" (Veblen 1979:45), in the words of two ob-
servers of the bourgeoisie at the Turn of the Century.
Members of the new class of amateur local historians
had a double role: On the one hand, they were contact
persons for the historians in the provincial archives, and,
on the other hand, they were local authorities, who pur-
sued their own programs and who presided over local
events requiring historical sanction. Most frequently, their
texts corresponded to one of two types: first, didactic
literature for the local public, for example, the so-called
Heimat book, a publication with chapters on the geogra-
phy, cultural monuments, folklore, and ancient, medieval,
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American Ethnologist * Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
and usually to a much lesser extent modern history of
the hometown or home region;9 and, second, a kind of
contract work for clients in the local community, namely,
the members of local institutions who invited the histo-
rians to give speeches on anniversary occasions and, simul-
taneously, to contribute to the Festschriften that typically
accompanied the celebrations.
Because it is usually sponsored by the town or county
government, the Heimat book may be viewed as an official
version of local history that occupies a privileged posi-
tion in local public life (Kreis von Heimatfreunden 1953;
Kreuzberg 1925; cf. Jeggle 1987:502). But its effects have
typically been tempered by the more numerous contri-
butions to Festschriften, in which local historians often
make at least some concessions to their clientst self-
understanding. The resulting relationship between home-
town historians and commemorators might be described
as a kind of complementarity based on mutual recogni-
tion or misrecognition. On the one hand, hometown histo-
rians have, since the early 20th century, been accorded a
superior public authority in all matters of historical inter-
pretation by virtue of their social standing and their ties
to professional historians in provincial archives and re-
gional associations. On the other hand, local commemo-
rators have gained sanction from "on high" at the price
of deferring to the interpretations of hometown histo-
rians or refraining from contradicting them openly at
least, for the duration of the speech on the appropriate
. .
ceremonla occaslon.
To illustrate this relationship, I return briefly to the
500th anniversary of the Town Square festival in 1921,
during which the neighborhood association put on a
historical parade and a historical pageant while also com-
missloning a local historian to write a history of the
neighborhood's annual festival. The result was two differ-
ent versions of the festival's history. In the parade and
pageant, which were conceived and carried out by neigh-
borhood activists, the festival was depicted as an expres-
sion of privileges that medieval authorities had granted
to the members of the Town Square Neighborhood. But
the text in the Festschrift, which was written by the county
school inspector- the editor of the county Heimat book
of 1925 and the chief advocate of the Heimat movement
in Boppard proposed an alternative theory in which the
origin of the festival was traced back to ancient Germanic
beliefs and customs, which were not the exclusive pro-
perty of the neighborhood but common to a whole people
(Kreuzberg 1920). Not coincidentally, the first interpre-
tation promoted the elevation of the neighborhood as-
sociation above actual or potential rivals, whereas the
second emphasized its integration in the larger local and
national community.
As the example of the Town Square festival of 1921
shows, the historical visions of commemorators and
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hometown historians may be quite disparate and even
contradictory, even when both emerge within a largely
primordialist framework. Despite the frequency of such
contradictions, however, I know of no single instance in
which they have become an object of reflection. Rather,
each party in the arrangement seems to be content with
the benefits of mutual recognition, without paying much
attention to the discrepancies. For much of the 20th
century, this has been a workable accommodation because
the differences in interpretation have been smoothed over
through a common commitment to an affirmative, even
self-congratulatory, form of history. But this reciprocal
recognition or misrecognition became more difficult in
the late 20th century, when national standards of critical
history, particularly with regard to the Nazi past, began to
reach the provinces.
Following World War II, commemoration and home-
town history reemerged in their familiar prewar forms
while making very few allusions to the way in which Nazi
rule had affected the local community (Eidson 2004).
Commemorators continued to emphasize the antiquity
and continuity of their institutions, and hometown histor-
ians, soon organized in the new regional historical society
(founded in 1958), continued to concentrate on antiquity,
the Middle Ages, and the early modern period. Because
these patterns were not unique to Boppard but were com-
mon throughout Germany, a new generation of critical
scholars in Volkskunde (national ethnography or folklore,
renamed in the 1970s European ethnology or empirical
cultural science) began arguing that Heimat enthusiasts
throughout Germany were repressing trauma and guilt
stemming from the Nazi era and even that the Heimat
had always been and continued to be implicated in radi-
cal nationalism and fascism (Bausinger 198a; Jeggle 1987;
Kramer 1973; see also Dow and Lixfeld 1986).
Clearly, however, the involvement of hometown his-
torians in Nazism and Nazi ideology is, first and foremost,
an empirical question. In Boppard, the leading hometown
historians of the early 1930s were nationalists but not
National Socialists. Rather, they were Roman Catholics
and Center Party members, who were dismissed from their
offices in schools by the Nazis and whose organizational
basis a committee within the beautification society, a
typical association of the small-town bourgeoisie was
subject to Gleichschaltung (coordination).l° The only pub-
lishing hometown historian in Boppard during the Nazi
era was still the county school inspector, who lost his post
in 1933 but remained active as a private scholar.ll The
Heimat books for Boppard or for the corresponding county
were published not during the Nazi era (1933-45) but
in 1925, 1953, and 1966. Therefore, although both Nazi
ideology and hometown history were implicated in a larger
primordialist discourse and although Heimat enthusi-
asts in Boppard and elsewhere were sometimes or often
 Varieties of historical representation * American Ethnologist
Nazis, or "fellow travelers," the evidence suggests that the
two phenomena were not identical (see Ditt 1990; Hanke
2004). Possibly, perhaps often, the Nazis' insistence on
Volksgemeinschaft (national community) came into con-
flict with the hometown historians' enthusiasm for local
and regional peculiarities.
In the postwar era, National Socialism presented no
difficulties for affirmative varieties of local history, as long
as it could be ignored or depicted as something other than,
and external to, the local community (Eidson 2004). In
accordance with changing standards of historical writing
and collective memory at national and regional levels,
however, the current chairman of the historical society
had, by the early l990s, adopted a strategy of engagement
with the topic of National Socialism and the fate of the
local Jewish population. Then, at the High Street anniver-
sary celebration of 2003, this "new" approach was applied
to the history of the neighborhood association, as well.
The chairman of the historical society displays all of
the characteristics that have long been typical of home-
town historians in the field site. Although he is a Rhine-
lander and a Roman Catholic, he is a newcomer to the
local community; he holds an advanced degree and re-
cently retired from a high position in the provincial school
system; and he has long been active in important civic
organizations, including the regional historical society
and the Christian Democratic Union, both of which have
brought him into contact with leading figures in the
intellectual and political life of the province. In June
2003, his speech on the history of the High Street Neigh-
borhood departed from the usual, largely speculative for-
mulas with which I was already familiar (see Eidson 1993),
insofar as it was based on primary sources, namely, on
entries in the neighborhood protocol book, which is kept
by the neighborhood secretary and which includes
minutes of meetings, financial reports, and occasional
comments on current events.l2 Because he reviewed the
contents of the protocol book from 1928 until the present,
the chairman inevitably covered the years of Nazi rule,
during which time the neighborhood secretary made de-
monstrative statements indicating the support of neigh-
borhood members for Hitler. In my reading, the chairman
was not making a statement about the special culpability
of the High Street neighbors. Rather, he was trying to break
with the established convention of generalizing about the
medieval origins and unchanging character of the neigh-
borhood, using the protocol book to evoke, instead, the
changing attitudes and activities that were typical of many
Germans during the 20th century. Nevertheless, by quot-
ing passages indicating the neighbors' support for the
Nazis, the chairman violated local conventions of affirma-
tive history.
How did listeners respond to this new precedent in
local commemorative observances? Most of the estimated
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400 people in the tent did not show any visible response at
all. But at the table where I was sitting together with a
group of older neighborhood activists, at least one pro-
tested, if only unofficially. When the speaker referred to
neighborhood support for the Nazis, the elderly man
sitting next to me, the son of a Social Democrat and
treasurer of the neighborhood association in the 1970s
and the early 1980s, interjected loudly, saying, "That's
not true!" and "What does that have to do with us?" At
the conclusion of the speech, however, this man's brother,
the former neighborhood president, who still plays a
central role in neighborhood affairs, maintained his com-
posure and thanked the chairman warmly.
The problem lay not in the accuracy of the chairman's
quotation, which can be confirmed by examining the
protocol book of the High Street Neighborhood, but in
the changing standards among hometown historians and
the difficulties that the new standards may create for local
commemorators. Since the advent of hometown history in
the early 20th century, its practitioners have recontextual-
ized the favored narratives of individual organizations,
such as the neighborhoods, but they have done so with
reference to affirmative versions of national or territorial
history, which have not seemed to challenge favored
narratives fundamentally. Now, however, the chairman
had recontextualized neighborhood history in a new crit-
ical framework, which as I shall argue in conclusion-
may itself be affirmative at another level but which rejects
absolutely avoidance of references to the Nazi past.
Coming to terms with the past
On one point, at least, the academic criticism of home-
town history is justified: From 1945 to the late 1980s,
hometown historians throughout Germany often left the
most dramatic events of recent history out of the Heimat
book a situation that I shall now rectify with reference to
recent local historical literature from the field site.
When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the
National Socialists moved quickly to eliminate the political
opposition, dissolve democratic institutions, and promote
anti-Semitism. In Boppard, this meant ousting Center
Party members from local government and discrimi-
nating against socialists and communists, some Roman
Catholics, and Jews (MiRling 1994:197-231). At that time,
the 100 members of the 800-year-old Jewish community
constituted 1.5 percent of Boppard's circa 6,500 residents
(Schuller 1925:40). Most heads of Jewish households
were involved in the trading of textiles, cattle, or agricul-
tural products in Boppard and its hinterland. Some were
quite prosperous, although merchants of all denomina-
tions had suffered losses in the economic crises following
World War I. Local residents of Jewish faith or descent
were citizens of the German Reich and often belonged to
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American Ethnologist * Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
neighborhood associations and other civic organizations
with predominantly Christian memberships. Their chil-
dren were disproportionately represented in the higher
schools, including the Catholic high school for girls. Never-
theless} in the decade before the Nazi seizure of power,
Jews had been subject to discrimination in Boppard, as is
indicated by articles in a Jewish newspaper in Hamburg,
which warned potential visitors to the scenic Rhenish town
that they might be unwelcome in some popular locales
(Burkard 1994; Burkard and Thill 1996:51-73, 80).
With the Nazi seizure of power, Jews were expelled
from local organizations and subject to repressive ordi-
nances, boycotts, harassment, brutality, and the expropri-
ation or forced sale of their real estate. Therefore, many
Jewish residents emigrated, often sacrificing their property
in the process. Those who remained in town until the
nationwide pogrom of November 1938 found it difficult if
not impossible to escape with their lives. The desecration
and destruction of the synagogue under the direction of
SS members on November 10 and 12 was preceded by
the arrest of all Jewish men and the public beating of
some Jews and alleged philo-Semites. Finally, the remain-
ing members of the Jewish community were taken to
regional gathering points and transported to Dachau,
Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, or Bergen-Belsen in the early
1940s. Very few returned to Boppard after the war, and the
local Jewish community was not reestablished (Burkard
and Thill 1996:85-123).
The avoidance of references to the Nazis and to the
local Jewish population by Boppard's hometown histor-
ians and other public figures in the years following the war
provides further evidence in support of the thesis that
Germans have actively repressed memories of the crimes
of the Nazi era (Adorno 2003; Giordano 1987; Mitscherlich
and Mitscherlich 1967). Recently, however, scholars have
emphasized countervailing trends, which were immedi-
ately evident in the drafting of the new constitution and
which were subsequently pursued in governmental policy,
public programs for political education, parliamentary
debates, war-crime trials, the critical media, the arts, and
the schools (see, e.g., Frei 1996; Herf 1997; Krause 2002;
Lepsius 1989; and Reichel 2001). Despite being accompa-
nied by apologetic tendencies (Moeller 2001) and despite
many inadequacies in conception or execution, critical
engagement with the Nazi past had already begun to have
a wider effect on public opinion by the late 1950s (Berghoff
1998) and subsequently became a central component of
the official self-understanding of the Federal Republic of
Germany (Schwartz 2001:2270; Young 1993:53). Although
much disagreement persists about the form that this
critical engagement should take and what it should tell
Germans (Kramer 1996; Maier 1997; Olick 1999), it is
clearly well established and has even been held up as an
example for other states in which the violation of minority
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populations has become the subject of protest, reflection,
and deliberation (Torpey 2003).
The ongoing encounter of the German people with the
Nazi past has continually taken new turns and crossed new
thresholds, but some spheres of collective life have proven
to be particularly resistant. One could say that coming to
terms with the past has been more evident in the national
spotlight (e.g., in federal legislation, the courts, national-
level politics, the national capital, and the national media)
and more problematic outside of it (e.g., in local commu-
nities or in relations between generations within fami-
lies).l3 Observations made by Anglophone ethnographers
working in German-speaking countries seem to confirm
this generalization. With reference to his experiences with
a host family during a school exchange program in Austria
in the 1960s, Michael Agar uses attitudes toward the Nazi
era as an example of "how it is that a society turns part of
itself into an unacceptable topic, a topic to avoid" (1994:
210). Similarly, Daphne Berdahl, during fieldwork in a
village in the east near the former border of East and West
Germany, assumed that "probing questions about the
village's Nazi past" might "impede my ability to become
integrated into the community" (1999:18).
After being accused of wanting to "dig up" the Nazi
past shortly after my arrival in Boppard in late 1979, I
resolved not to initiate conversations about this topic but
to remain alert for volunteered information, which was only
occasionally forthcoming once I became better acquainted
with members of the older generation. The testimony of
those who grew up in Boppard (Rehn 2003:21) seems to
indicate, however, that verbal patterns of avoidance and
apology have not differed greatly from the written forms
that I have explored elsewhere (Eidson 2004). Be that as it
may, the onset of my fieldwork was coincident with the
emergence of new initiatives for public engagement with
the Nazi past, which were introduced into local communi-
ties "from above," especially via the national media and the
school system or through the agency of representatives of
the mobile elite of the larger society.
Historical studies of the role of print and electronic
media in the Federal Republic of Germany demonstrate
their importance in fostering the development of a "crit-
ical public sphere," which contributed to the gradual
liberalization of political attitudes (Hodenberg 2002). Such
trends were, moreover, prerequisites for the local recep-
tion of media events, including, especially, the broadcast
of the U.S. television series Holocaust (Chomsky 1978) in
January 1979. This film, which focuses on the fate of a
fictional Jewish family during the Nazi era, drew an un-
precedented number of German viewers, stimulated re-
markable responses throughout the country (Wilke 1999),
and was a popular topic of conversation during my first
months in Boppard. Although some of the people I spoke
with criticized the film's melodramatic anel commercial
 Varieties of historicaL representation * American Ethnologist
character, few questioned the historical facts on which the
film was based or the moral stance that the filmmaker took
with regard to those facts.
Commentators on school instruction during the early
decades of the West German Republic have charged that
textbooks did not treat the National Socialist era ade-
quately and that teachers often neglected the most re-
cent years in their overviews of national or European
history (Berghoff 1998:107; Borries 1988:37-58). Still,
strong evidence indicates that the effects of changing
school curricula, together with the coming of age of a
new generation of teachers, have had a cumulative effect,
which has resulted in a qualitative change in instruction
and in pupils' attitudes (Buruma 1994; Soysal 2000). These
changes are especially evident in special initiatives such
as the Schulerwettbewerb Deutsche Geschichte (German
History Competition for Pupils), which was initiated by
the West German federal president in 1973 and which,
in the early 1980s, called for papers on "Everyday Life un-
der National Socialism" (Schneider 1997). This prompted
pupils to visit local archives and to interview members of
their grandparents' generation in an effort to illuminate
neglected aspects of a past still fraught with taboos. I ob-
served the first results of this competition, or of a similar
initiative, during fieldwork in 1980 and 1981, when I met,
by chance, with pupils who were using back issues of
the local newspaper in the town archive to learn about
the behavior of Boppard's electorate during the 1930s.
The results of these efforts were modest when compared
with the most famous case of a young German Nazi hun-
ter, Anja Rosmus of Passau, whose story inspired the film
The Nasty Girl (Verhoeven 1989). Nevertheless, they rep-
resented a turning point in approaches to the topic of
National Socialism in local public life.
For practitioners of hometown history, the reception
of critical approaches to the Nazi past was often facilitated
by a new generation of professional historians in archives
and public commissions. The historians who began enter-
ing into vacant posts in provincial archives in the decades
after the war were usually still trained in university depart-
ments for territorial history, but these had, in the mean-
time, been modernized under the influence of new trends
in social history. The results were evident both in scholar-
ship and in contributions to public history, which might be
regarded as the professional correlates to hometown stud-
ies. For example, the Heimat book for St. Goar County,
which was published in the mid-1960s under the editor-
ship of an archivist, covers the whole history of the region,
beginning in pre-Roman times, but also includes chapters
that address the Nazi era directly (Heyen 1966). The
archivist who edited the county Heimat book also pro-
duced an edited volume featuring documents pertaining to
the rise of the Nazi party and the years of Nazi rule in
Mainz, Koblenz, Trier, and vicinity (Heyen 1967).
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Generational change among archivists corresponded
to generational change among hometown historians in
Boppard and other small towns, but this process takes
longer among amateurs or semiprofessionals because they
often enter into their period of greatest productivity only
after retiring from careers in schools, churches, govern-
ment offices, or businesses.l4 The delay in generational
succession among hometown historians helps to explain, if
only in part, why, in communities throughout Germany,
engagement with National Socialism often did not begin
until the late 1980s (Berghoff 1998:102; Burkard and Thill
1996:137; Jeggle 1997). In Boppard, a new three-volume
work on the history of the town provides evidence both of
the delayed arrival of critical history in the local commu-
nity and of the continuing significance of regional net-
works for the production of local historical interpretations:
It was published by the historical society, but the most
substantive sections were written by professionally trained
historians employed in universities, state archives, state
offices for cultural preservation, and higher public schools
(MiSling 1994, 1997). The contributions by amateur and
semiprofessional local historians living in Boppard are
restricted to aspects of the postwar era (MiSling 2001).
Professional historians belong to a class of educated
persons, who often leave their communities of origin,
study in urban centers, and then settle in other areas,
where they occupy positions of authority in leading insti-
tutions and serve as agents of change. This applies not only
to historians in provincial archives but also to members of
other professions, who, taken together, may be understood
to constitute a mobile national elite. My prime example is
the young optician who now occupies the site of the Old
Synagogue in Boppard. Following his studies at a technical
college in Cologne, this scion of a local Roman Catholic
family returned to the Middle Rhine Valley, where in 1990
he bought the piece of real estate in the High Street district
where Boppard's synagogue used to stand, before it was
destroyed in 1938. By 1994, he had transformed the
remains of the Old Synagogue into a multifunctional
structure, combining his residence, an optician's shop,
an art gallery, a cultural center, and a site of remembrance
for the local Jewish community. To convey the intentions
and personal style of this historically minded optician, I
quote from his Internet website:
In 1990, the master optician, [R. H.], bought the
building . . . that served as the Jewish place of worship
from 1867 until its destruction. Using only his own
financial means, he renovated and restored it with
reference to old documents . .. and with insight, skill,
and a feeling for the history of the house.... In
restoring the synagogue building, it was important to
Lthe new owner] ... that its original function be
recognizable. While it was not possible to re-create the
565
American Ethnologist * Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
original appearance in its entirety, visual allusions to
the past were, nevertheless, skillfully incorporated.
These include the use of glass in the re-creation of the
characteristic arches of the three main windows, the
chiseled keystones with the Star of David, the year of
the dedication and of the destruction of the synagogue
[carved in stone], and the menorah over the contem-
porary windows of the gallery. More crudely renovated
fragments allude adroitly to the earlier destruction [of
the synagogue]. [Optiker-Holz n.d.: Galerie in der Alte
[sic] Synagoge, my translation]
During a conversation with the optician on the day
after the neighborhood festival of June 2003, I discovered
that he sees himself as a beleaguered fighter with support
from allies in an expansive regional network but facing
resistance from the town administration, the churches, his
bank, and even a local postman who refused to deliver
mail to the "Old Synagogue," which is the address that the
optician prefers for his domicile and place of business. In
addition, the optician has been frustrated in his attempt to
have the synagogue recognized as a cultural monument by
state officials (who argue that not enough of the building's
original substance has been retained).
Some signs indicate, however, that the optician's
project is gaining a degree of local acceptance, as he
himself admits. In the photographs on his website docu-
menting various events concerning Boppard's Jewish com-
munity, the mayor and the chairman of the historical
society are clearly visible, and in the text accompanying
another website photograph, the mayor is quoted as say-
ing that "the Old Synagogue is inseparably linked with
the history of Boppard" (Optiker-Holz n.d.: Kultureller
Ruckblick; quoted from Rund um Boppard, the local
weekly newspaper). Although, in 2003, the Old Synagogue
was not incorporated into the High Street festival, despite
its location within the High Street district, the neigh-
borhood president is a member of the Social Democratic
Party bloc in the town council, which supports the opti-
cian's efforts. Finally, after watching the video that the
High Street Neighborhood produced to document its
675th anniversary, I discovered that the optician and his
wife had participated in the High Street anniversary cele-
bration as members of the group in "historical" costumes.
Contextualizing varieties of historical
representation
"We are all Germans now." With this statement, the
sociologist John Torpey makes a case for the paradigmatic
status of the Germans, not only as perpetrators of crimes
against humanity but also as a people that has engaged
critically with those crimes and, thus, helped to promote
"the worldwide spread of reparations politics at the dawn-
ing of the new millennium" (2003:3). Although not in-
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tending to question the singularity of the destruction of
European Jewry during the Third Reich, Torpey suggests
that the Holocaust has become "a standard and a model"
(2003:2) in the global trend toward identifying, acknowl-
edging, and rectifying the atrocities and acts of genocide
that have characterized the modern era. At the same time,
the progress that Germans have made in recognizing their
special culpability for the Holocaust has set "a standard of
reckoning with the past that others have been forced to
confront" (Torpey 2003:2).
Many responses are possible to Torpey's train of
thought, but it is perhaps most interesting as an indication
of the degree to which the Holocaust has shaped interna-
tional public opinion about the Germans and how they
should view their past, if they are to be rehabilitated in the
eyes of the world (or, at least, a part of it). Having
committed crimes of historic dimensions, or having had
those crimes committed in their names, the Germans must
come to terms with their past in a way that permits others
to recognize them once more as worthy participants in the
international community. Given the magnitude of Nazi-era
crimes, Germans can reasonably be expected to accept
these terms; and most have done so, as public opinion
surveys and social historical investigations have shown
(Conradt 1989; Herbert 2002). Often, however, the com-
mitment to engage with the Nazi past has been accompa-
nied by the tendency to judge practically all historical
developments and all reflections on them in these terms.
Those are the conditions under which many specialists in
the study of local culture and society have been tempted
to categorize the phenomena coming under their purview
in terms of binary opposites: Right and Left, regressive
and progressive, heritage and countermemory, national
and postnational, and so on (Bausinger-1984; Bergmann
1997; Hauptmeyer 1987; Jeggle 1987, 1997; Kramer 1973;
Schock 1977).
Examining local forms of historical representation in
terms of the typical political tendencies of their advocates
is certainly valid, although only rarely would the results
of such examinations justify reducing the phenomena un-
der consideration to the political extremes of early 20th-
century Germany. In the field site, one could fairly say that,
until recently, advocates of affirmative versions of home-
town history were political conservatives (of the Roman
Catholic variety), whereas advocates of coming to terms
with the past were left-liberal in orientation. But even
these modest conclusions are now being overturned
through processes of societal liberalization, which are well
documented for postwar West Germany (Herbert 2002)
and have resulted in gradual yet dramatic changes in many
aspects of life and thought, including public standards for
representing the Nazi past (e.g., Olick 1999; Young 2000).
Against this backdrop, the chairman of the historical so-
ciety, who is a leading member of Boppard's conservative
 Varieties of historicaL representation * American Ethnologist
bourgeoisie and a known Christian Democrat, has engi-
neered the transition from affirmative to critical local
history and, in this way, closed ranks with the optician in
conformity with the ruling consensus in the politically
conscious national citizenry. Moreover, the trend toward
accommodating critical approaches can be observed
among amateur and semiprofessional local historians in
towns and villages throughout Germany, if to a variable
degree (e.g., Meynert 1990).
If the changing character of hometown history can be
explained with reference to the shifting boundary between
the Right and the Left, the stance of commemorators such
as the High Street neighbors is more refractory to inter-
pretation in these terms. Although they include a dispro-
portionate number of Social Democrats, that is, members
of a left-of-center party, neighborhood spokespersons
continue to advocate a form of local history that indulges
in the "chimeras of the origin" and in "the consoling play
of recognitions" (Foucault 1984:80, 88) while avoiding
reference to the Nazi past or exhibiting apologetic tenden-
cies. Why?
One of my purposes in this article is to show how re-
ducing different ways of representing the past to a scale of
measure based on the opposition between regressive and
progressive approaches or heritage and countermemory-
may lead to two errors simultaneously. The first possible
error is, knowingly or unknowingly, to transform critical
history based on human-rights discourse into a kind of
"self-congratulatory liberal understanding," which may
be used not only to legitimate powerful Western states, as
Nandini Sundar (2004:148) has argued, but also to lend
distinction to some social classes within those states at
the expense of others. The second error is to fail to re-
cognize that the members of other social classes have
fewer occasions for participating in human-rights dis-
course and, therefore, tend to take recourse in more con-
ventional discourses.
Like participants in discussions about the status of
Germany in the international community, many members
of local communities are driven by the need or desire for
recognition but in a different context. They are less
concerned with what the world thinks about the Germans
than with what their neighbors think about them; or they
have fewer reasons to enter into discussions about their
nation's reputation and are more concerned about their
own. In the field site, proponents of all three approaches
to history look to the past for definition and validation
in the present, but they do so in very different situations,
with different materials, and sometimes-for different
reasons. For the purpose of demonstrating this point, I
suggest replacing the dichotomy between heritage and
countermemory, or between regressive and progressive
views of history, with attention to the variables that have
informed my description and analysis of the three kinds of
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local history, namely, social groups, frames of reference,
and bases of authority, along with corresponding forms of
symbolic capital.
The reference to "social groups" is meant to evoke the
German concept of "Tragergruppen" (lit. carrier groups),
which figures prominently in the sociology of Max Weber
and implies that ideas or programs are often advocated
not by individuals alone or by society as a whole, but by
particular groups that can be identified and understood in
terms of their social position, their attitudes, and their
interests (Alexander 2004:11). "Frames of reference" is an
admittedly very general term, which I use to refer, simulta-
neously, to the social fields (Glick Schiller and Fouron 1999)
in which people representing the past are active, the relative
publics (Wiber in press) to which they appeal, and the
ideological resources on which they draw. By referring to
various frames of reference, I mean to emphasize the
embeddedness of representations of the past in social
situations in which particular actors, audiences, precedents,
intentions, conventions, and strategies which are never
the only possible ones come into play. With the term bases
of authority, I mean especially the positions of actors within
institutions and the way in which these positions obligate
them or give them the right to comment publicly on aspects
of the past in the present. Bases of authority also provide
access to symbolic capital, which in this context includes
the contents of historical representation, the meanings
attached to them, and the way in which these meanings
reflect on those who promote them. With these variables in
mind, I now review the three approaches to local history
one last time, this time in reverse order.
The carrier group for coming to terms with the past
includes, especially, those who, because of their social
origins, their education, their career, or their style of life,
feel called on to represent "Germany" to themselves, their
compatriots, and the outside world. The appropriate
frames of reference for coming to terms with the past
include social networks among like-minded persons, the
precedents that have been established since the end of
World War II, and, more generally, "human rights ideas"
(Torpey 2003:4), as they are cultivated in various national
and international forums. In the field site, the optician in
the Old Synagogue may serve as an example. Although
born in Boppard, he studied in Cologne, one of Germany's
more cosmopolitan cities; and, now that he has returned
to his hometown on the Middle Rhine, he continues to
cultivate a business clientele that is national and interna-
tional in scope, especially through Internet advertising. In
his political and cultural endeavors, the optician interacts
with participants in a regional network of historians,
creative writers, and artists, who lecture, give readings, or
exhibit their works in the Old Synagogue and who con-
tribute to Sachor (Remember), a periodical published
near Mainz, the state capital, that is devoted to Jewish
567
American Ethnologist * Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
history and sites of remembrance in the federal state of
Rheinland-Pfalz. Although some of the contributors to
this periodical may also be members of historical societies
in Mainz, Koblenz, or Trier, their philosophical orientation
and ambitions often differ from those of the leaders of the
provincial bourgeoisie who double as hometown histo-
rians. The public to which they address themselves is not
that of the local community, the county seat, or the district
capital but that of like-minded cosmopolites in the Federal
Republic, the European Union, and beyond. In this sense,
one might say that the optician is in the local community
but not of the local community, insofar as he has adopted
a universal standard and is now attempting to impose it on
the local community.
The social group that carries hometown history is also
an educated elite, but one with a distinctly provincial bent,
insofar as its members are holders of prestigious positions
in the central institutions of provincial society, whether in
public administration, the church, the school system, or
local business. Their frames of reference extend beyond
the bounds of the community, although often no further
than the provincial center of Koblenz, where they interact
with archivists and other members of regional associations
and committees for public history. When compared with
those who commemorate their own institutions, home-
town historians usually seem to adopt a more judicious
stance vis-a-vis the diverse factions that make up the local
community. Nevertheless, their status as pillars of local
and regional society has made them purveyors of integra-
tive forms of history and has allowed them to assert their
authority in matters of historical interpretation while ac-
commodating the self-understanding of a host of small-
town commemorators. When, however, their partners in
public history espouse new standards, hometown histo-
rians must adapt, if they are to retain their credentials. As
yet unclear is how the adoption of new critical initiatives
will affect the relationship of hometown historians to their
local clients, who, in their desire to gain recognition by
commemorating their institutions, are dependent on affir-
mative versions of history.
Socially, commemorators are as diverse as the mem-
bership or, rather, the leadership of the institutions that
are being commemorated. In the case of powerful national
or international organizations such as the church, leading
figures in local organs may be highly qualiEled and well-
connected persons, just as the frames of reference for
commemorative observances may be expansive. Clearly,
however, this is not so in the case of strictly local institu-
tions such as the High Street Neighborhood. In this in-
stance, even leading members occupy relatively humble
positions in society, in terms of education, occupation,
and income. If, however, neighborhood spokespersons
continue to advocate affirmative approaches to the his-
tory of their own organization, this is caused less by an
568
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educational deficit than by their exclusion from other,
more prestigious institutional frameworks. In contrast to
hometown historians, the High Street neighbors lack high-
level connections in the provincial center. Their neigh-
borhood association is the only institution through which
they can gain distinction and public recognition and
within which they are authorized to make pronounce-
ments about the past and its significance for a wider
audience which, in this case, is largely restricted to those
who attend their festival or read the local newspaper. The
neighborhood association becomes an object of public
attention beyond the locale only on special occasions, as
in June 2003, when a journalist from the regional radio
program interviewed the High Street president. But on
such occasions, journalists and their audiences are inter-
ested in neighborhood associations only as embodiments
of "tradition." If they do not play this role, they are no
longer of interest.
One might say, then, that, with respect to history,
neighborhood members are in a position analogous to
that of the industrial proletariat, in that they have nothing
to bargain with on the market of historical representations
other than their own rather circumscribed past. Their
neighborhood association represents their own limited
fund of symbolic capital. This would explain why the
attitude of many neighbors toward their association is
celebratory, whereas their position regarding past links to
the Nazis is defensive or apologetic.15
Because both the optician and the chairman have ties
to the High Street Neighborhood, both are at least poten-
tially implicated in the pro-Nazi statements made by its
spokespersons in 1933. This implication is not threatening
to them, however, because their bases of authority are
spread more widely and their symbolic capital is invested
in more diversified portfolios. For the optician, living in the
neighborhood where the pogrom of November 1938 took
place is less a liability than an opportunity to commemo-
rate the local Jewish community (to which he himself does
not belong). The chairman is a resident and passive
member of the High Street Neighborhood, but his view
of it is that of an authoritative local historian, whose first
obligation is to the standards cultivated in the historical
society and the provincial archive. Both the optician and
the chairman view the neighborhood critically, not be-
cause of its intrinsic properties but because they take it to
represent the larger society on which they feel authorized
to comment.
The reference to symbolic capital is useful, insofar as it
allows one to see that, rather than renouncing affirmative
history completely, the optician and chairman have the
luxury of seeking it elsewhere. In the case of the optician, I
refer to the website from which I have already quoted, in
which his shop and gallery, including the history of their
founding and the highlights of the cultural program over
 Varieties of historicaL representation * American Ethnologist
the last ten years, are presented in an attractive format and
in favorable terms. For the chairman, it is instructive to
consult an interview published in the pupils' newspaper of
the high school that he directed, in which the development
of the school during its years under his stewardship is
described quite positively (Neuer Popel 2001). Of course,
there is nothing wrong with the chairman and the optician
representing the history of the institutions in which they
have a personal stake in a positive light. Nevertheless,
these examples show that even critical historians represent
aspects of the past, especially those that reflect on them
personally, in an affirmative fashion.l6
In his analysis of Holocaust memorials, James Young
(1993:22, 53) suggests that Germans have succeeded in
breaching the "conventional 'memorial code' " (which I
have called "affirmative" history) and establishing a "neg-
ative memorial legacy" (critical history), without, however,
sacrificing their ability to derive some kind of positive self-
identification from the past:
Over time Germany has shown that a negative memo-
rial legacy can be sustained as well, even cultivated as
a basis for national identity. Such memory serves as a
negative infrastructure against which the state judges
its present actions: memory of past crimes committed
in its name now determines what Germany may no
longer be or do. In this light, antimemory of the Holo-
caust in Germany may be as much a part of the new
Germany's self-idealization as all the memory of its
heroes and victims put together. [Young 1993:53]
Although not questioning the sincerity of those advocat-
ing "antimemory," Young notes that "the motives of
memory are never pure" (1993:2) by which he means
that German citizens may achieve reorientation and derive
satisfaction by constructing new identities in contradis-
tinction to discredited ones, regardless of whether new
identities are national or postnational in character (Torpey
1988). My point is that, if participation in the new anti- or
countermemory can serve as a means of "self-idealization,"
that is, as something resembling heritage, then it can
also serve as a means of distinction (Bourdieu 1984), be-
cause not everyone in German society has the same op-
portunity to benefit from it. Clearly, some Germans (and
others) still reject the "negative memorial legacy" and cling
to the "conventional memorial code" for reasons that I
and most readers of this journal regard as wrong. But
the example of the High Street neighbors suggests that,
in many cases, other issues are probably at stake. If the
"conventional 'memorial' code," or affirmative history,
is generally condemned, this undermines not only the
small minority of radical nationalists but also all those
who lay claim to a unique essence (Geertz 1973), a special
authenticity (Taylor 1994), or a right to respeto (Rosaldo
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2003) to avoid coming up short when they are measured
against a universal scale that is controlled by others, who
are generally recognized as being more highly qualified.
Am I predicting, in conclusion, the "eternal return" of
affirmative history, in conjunction with primordial or
essentialist constructions of group identities? Not neces-
sarily. Given the social organization of historical remem-
brance in Germany, particularly its distribution among
public institutions and various groups within civil society,
representations of the past will continue to be motivated
by diverse interests, which make recourse to heteroge-
neous forms and contents. Invocations of a special heri-
tage will continue to supplement demands for recognition,
often in ways that professional historians regard as inac-
curate if not far-fetched. But this is not to say that the
bases of claims to this special heritage are not subject to
change. In Boppard, the rhetoric surrounding neighbor-
hood associations, which are thought to epitomize "tradi-
tion," has changed considerably over the last century,
reflecting larger processes of liberalization (Herbert
2002). In the 1920s, the county school inspector saw them
as survivals of ancient Germanic cults, and in the 1950s
his son, also a leading local historian, derived them his-
torically from medieval corporations (Kreuzberg 1953;
Kreuzberg 1920). But on the first evening of the anni-
versary celebration of 2003, the county executive called
neighborhood associations "the first Burgerinitiativen"
(citizens' initiatives), a decidedly modern concept. It re-
mains to be seen whether and how this initiative will be
taken up by new leaders in the neighborhood, although
the signs are positive. Given the unofficial link between
the High Street Neighborhood and leading Social Demo-
crats, the Old Synagogue conceivably will be integrated
into future neighborhood events. Local forms of commem-
oration could become more consistent with what Jurgen
Habermas has called "post-conventional identity," "con-
stitutional patriotism," and "world citizenship" (Torpey
1988:13, 15, 17). To make this transition, small-town com-
memorators must find a way of making critical approaches
to history consistent with their own needs for affirmation,
as others have done before them.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This article is based on research that has
been supported, over the years, by the German Academic Ex-
change Service (DAAD), the Department of Anthropology of
Cornell University, the Department of Anthropology of the Uni-
versity of Maryland in College Park, the Institut fur Kulturwissen-
schaften of the Universitat Leipzig, the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology in Halle an der Saale, and the people of
Boppard am Rhein. Thanks to the AE editors, the anonymous
reviewers, and to the members of the Ethnological Workshop in
Halle particularly Deema Kaneff, Andreas Dafinger, Tsypylma
Darieva, Rozita Dimova, Brian Donahoe, Tilo Gratz, Chris Hann,
Monica Heintz, Thomas Kirsch, Gordon Milligan, Boris Nieswand,
569
American Ethnologist * Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
Ursula Rao, Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Lale
Yalcm-Heckmann for comments on various drafts.
1. The "sixties" allusion is to Ortner 1984; see also Moore
1999:4. For recent reviews of contributions to memory studies,
see Confino 1997a, Gillis 1994, Lambek and Antze 1996, Linke
2001, Olick and Robbins 1998, Pine et al. 2004, and White 2000.
2. Confino (1997a:1393-1397, 1401-1402) seems both to advo-
cate and to criticize what he calls the "dichotomous" conception
in studies of historical memory: Whereas Rousso (1991) is criti-
cized for neglecting unofficial memories of Vichy France, John
Bodnar (1992) is criticized because his distinction between "offi-
cial culture" and "vernacular culture" is too simplistic. Confino
presents his resolution of this apparent contradiction in The
Nation as a Local Metaphor (1997b), his analysis of the meaning
of Heimat in modern German society and culture.
3. For example, Peter Novick (2001) demonstrates convincingly
that the Holocaust first became a central factor in the collective
memory of Americans of Jewish descent in the 1970s. In a very
different setting, Michael Stewart (2004:576) shows how, among
some European Roma, the usual preference for "remembering
without commemoration" has, since the 1990s, given way to system-
atic exploration of the experiences of Roma during the Holocaust.
4. Some authors have argued that Aufarbeitung der Vergangen-
heit is preferable to Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (e.g., Hartman
1986:114; Ten Dyke 2001:267, 271), but an adequate semantic
analysis of these and related terms, one that surveys their use in
various discourses and in corresponding social and historical con-
texts, is still lacking. In employing the English expression, "coming
to terms with the past," I follow Hartman 1986 and Ludtke 1993.
5. National Socialist and Nazi refer to the Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers'
Party (NSDAP). Although the German terms for "coming to terms
with the past" were originally developed with reference to the
Nazi past (Konig et al. 1998), they have recently been extended to
the history of the Soviet Zone and the German Democratic
Republic (Ten Dyke 2001) and generalized to encompass engage-
ment with historical injustices in other lands (Konig et al. 1998;
Torpey 2003). In this article, I discuss only West German responses
to the Nazi past. See Herf 1997 on the differences between West and
East German responses to that era. I continue to use the terms West
Germany and East Germany to refer to the original Federal Republic
of Germany (founded in 1949) and the former German Democratic
Republic (1949-90) because the legacy of the Cold War is still very
much in evidence in social, economic, and political life despite
unification in 1990. In the national media, the two Germanys are
often referred to with euphemisms, such as "the old federal states"
(the original Federal Republic) and "the new federal states" (the
former German Democratic Republic), but in everyday speech they
are still called "West Germany" and "East Germany" or simply the
"West" and the "East."
6. The classic definitions of "heritage" (Lowenthal 1998) and
"countermemory" (Foucault 1984) leave several points unspeci-
fied. What is it that leads one to think of some representations of
the past as "heritage" and others as "countermemory"? Is it their
official or unofficial status? Their focus on imagined communities
or on real trauma? The position of their advocates within larger
structures of domination? The closed or open character of their
underlying narratives? Or their repressive or liberating effects
for members of subordinate groups? And must these variables
"match up" in a particular way, if one is to speak of unambiguous
cases of heritage or countermemory; or are "mixed forms" (such
as official attempts to deal with trauma or liberating references
to imagined communities) conceivable? Finally, how does the
applicability of labels such as "heritage" and "countermemory"
510
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change with the changing fortunes of various social groups and
with the corresponding changes in the popular acceptance of the
claims inherent in their favored representations of the past? For
various attempts to answer some of these questions, see Briggs
1996, Burlein 1999, Lambek and Antze 1996:xix, and Prager 2001.
7. The quotations from the county executive, the mayor, and
the deputy governor are my translations of statements that were
transcribed (by my assistant, Isabell Maue) from the videotape
that the High Street neighbors made to document their June 2003
anniversary celebration.
8. There were four chairs of history at German universities in
1810, 14 in 1830, 28 in 1850, and 37 in 1874 (Chickering 1993:27,35).
9. No good analyses are available of the Heimat book as a
cultural document viewed in ethnographic context; rather, the
secondary literature consists either of "how to" books (e.g.,
Hauptmeyer 1987; Kreuzberg 1922) or of ideological critiques that
perceive Heimat only as a symptom of maladies that affect the
German people as a whole (e.g., Jeggle 1987; Schock 1977). For my
previous attempts to analyze various aspects of Heimat literature,
see Eidson 1993, 1995, 2004; see also Klueting 1991.
10. For a social profile of the relatively few but very active
Nazi party members in the riverside towns of St. Goar County in
1932 they were mostly sales clerks, artisans, small business-
persons, and workers see Heyen 1967:55. A review of Boppard's
local newspaper in the 1930s and early 1940s has shown that local
Nazi functionaries were not prominent in local public life (as
holders of public office or honorary offices in civic organizations)
until after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. This was often the
case in largely Roman Catholic communities, as other authors
have shown (Hamilton 1982:420-423; Jeggle 1994:168). But, as I
have noted elsewhere (Eidson 2004), party membership was just
one aspect of a complex situation and, therefore, does not pro-
vide an adequate basis for assessing local culpability during the
Nazi era. On the Verschonerungsvereine (beautification societies)
as typical bourgeois voluntary associations, see Applegate 1990:
63-65 and Eidson 2000:602.
11. Comparison of the books the school inspector published
before and after the Nazi seizure of power shows that he did not
change his position on such issues as the origins and character of
the German people (Kreuzberg 1915, 1935). His orientation was
generally volkisch, or primordialist-nationalist, but he still
employed typical figures of liberal historiography (e.g., the "mix-
ture" of Celtic, Roman, and Germanic influences in Rhenish
history) and was critical of Nazi favorites, such as assumptions
about the "Nordic race" (Kreuzberg 1935:49-50, 129).
12. My description of the speech by the chairman of the
historical society is based on his written text, which was published
in the High Street Festschri* and that he read verbatim on the first
evening of the High Street festival in June 2003.
13. On coming to terms with the Nazi past in the "national
spotlight," see, for example, Dubiel 1999, Frei 1996, Kramer 1996,
Krause 2002, and Reichel 2001. Berghoff 1998:101-103, Reichel
1997, and Young 1993:60-72 provide insight into the difficulties
of engaging with the Nazi past in local communities, and Welzer
et al. 2002 addresses problems of communication between gen-
erations within families.
14. I refer to some hometown historians as "semiprofessionals"
because some have doctoral degrees in history but are not
practicing historians. During the 1970s, a new class of local
historians emerged in some urban centers, namely, the "barefoot"
historians, or historians of everyday life, who often organized
"history workshops" (Heer and Ulrich 1985). Because they were
typically recruited from student milieus, participants in the history
workshops differed from hometown historians not only in their
 Varieties of historical representation * American Ethnologist
political attitudes and habitus but also in the way in which
historical research fit into the life course of the individual. For
"barefoot" historians, history belonged to a period of transition
between youth and adulthood, whereas hometown historians are
usually active professionals or, even more frequently, retirees.
"Barefoot" historians helped to change attitudes toward history
throughout the country, but they usually did not have a direct
effect in small towns.
15. I have already described how one of the former officers of
the neighborhood association complained loudly when the his-
torical society chairman quoted a seemingly pro-Nazi statement
from the neighborhood protocol book during his speech. When,
some months later, I viewed the videotape that neighborhood
representatives had prepared to document their 675th anniver-
sary celebration, I learned that the speech by the historical
society's chairman had been edited to omit this point. In this
video, the only reference to the Nazi era comes in the speech by
the governor's representative, who alludes briefly and obscurely
to how the High Street residents helped their Jewish neighbors
in the mid-1930s. This speech of the governor's representative
was based, as I happened to overhear, on copy that neighbor-
hood activists had provided for the governor's staff.
16. The same might be said of the professional milieus with
which readers of this journal are most familiar, if the notion of
history is expanded to include representations of the past profes-
sional lives of scholars, for example, in resumes, research pro-
posals, materials submitted for promotion to unlimited tenure, the
laudatio for honored speakers, and so on.
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