Heimat globally

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jens Jäger
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 414317568

In recent studies local forms of collective identification are explored in a global perspective. They are scrutinized in their relation to regional and national (and imperial) forms of identification. Scholarship of the last fifteen years suggests that national, regional and local identities continued to exist simultaneously, overlapping and contrasting with one another in complex ways but it remains difficult to set up an analytical framework to research these processes.The aim of the project to discuss such a framework. On the basis of the extensive research on the German concept of "Heimat", which identified its forms, contents, institutions, protagonists and visualisations, a model can be described to recognize similar processes in non-German societies. However, the concept of “Heimat” needs to be reconsidered as one form of spatial identity in relation to nationalism and globalization as a condition to reconcile the differing identities creating the multiple identities which seem to be the norm in societies and political entities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A growing body of local and regional studies has already shown that such processes were by no means a German Sonderweg (similar discourses unfolded in the United Kingdom/British Empire referring to "home"/"Homeland" in Spain to "tierruca" or "terruño", or in France to "petite patrie", just to name but a few examples). In sociological and cultural anthropological research even the German concept of “Heimat” is described as a universal concept. In this view, the project suggests to develop a descriptive tool which allows analysing similar movements in modernising societies.The development of the amateur photography movement around 1900 serves as an example. This movement unfolded in local contexts but understood itself as a national and even transnational movement. Photography contributed massively to the visualisations of the local as of the national (and imperial) and popularized them. It contributed also to the iconography of the local which manifested itself not only in the contemporary media but in postcards.Thus the project develops a new perspective on local, national and global forms of collective identification in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The example reviews the capacities of this perspective.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants