RevDem Podcast · Review of Democracy

Heimat Revisited: Jeremy DeWaal on Place, Belonging and Post-war Politics in West Germany

·39 min·2 clips

“The most important aspect of Heimat is people.”

Heimat is hard to translate, and the episode starts there. Kardos and De Waal use the term to get at place attachment, political feeling, and the democratic history of post-war West Germany, where belonging was both contested and consequential. The book at the center of the discussion is Geographies of Renewal: Heimat and Democratization in West Germany from 1945 to 1990. De Waal frames it as an effort to understand how Heimat relates to democratization, federalism, European unification, and local political culture without flattening it into one fixed meaning. His method is wide on purpose. He draws on Heimat journals, Heimat societies, poetry, music, state papers, city government reports, speeches, amateur historical writing, autobiographies, non-elite sources, and letters because place attachment and emotional life show up in all kinds of evidence. That breadth matters. He argues that some of the clearest material comes from personal writing about life in the ruins, where emotion can be easier to see than in state papers. The conversation keeps circling back to politics. De Waal notes that Heimat in the post-war years could carry nationalist, exclusionary, or anti-democratic meanings, yet it was also taken up by people trying to imagine a more democratic, open, and inclusive public culture. That tension sits at the center of the episode. Rather than treating Heimat as either harmless local color or a fixed political label, the discussion follows how it could be used to think about democracy, federalism, and European unification. Kardos keeps pressing on definition. De Waal answers by showing that the term shifts across contexts and cannot be pinned down by one clean translation or one stable political meaning. The result is a careful historical argument. It asks the listener to stay with nuance, comparison, and the long afterlife of concepts that political actors often want to simplify. The episode also doubles as a demonstration of method. It shows how a historian can move across genres and archives to recover ideas that only appear once one looks beyond elite documents. The structure is interview-led. Kardos returns to the previous point before moving ahead, which gives the conversation a cumulative shape rather than a series of detached claims. De Waal answers in extended explanations. He keeps connecting the post-war moment to broader histories of German culture, memory, and emotional life. There is no rush toward slogan or verdict. Instead, the discussion stays with complexity long enough to make the term feel historically usable again. By the end, Heimat is no longer just a disputed word. It becomes a test case for how scholars study place attachment, democratic life, and the social meanings that bind people to institutions, landscapes, and memory. The episode also makes clear that local belonging can be politically productive without being politically innocent. It shows that democratic renewal often starts in arguments over ordinary words. That is what gives the conversation its weight.

As heard by us

A patient look at Heimat as a contested idea tied to democracy and place.

Aleksandra Kardos and Jeremy De Waal use Heimat to open up a careful discussion of place attachment and democracy in West Germany from 1945 to 1990.

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Why you'd press play

You want Heimat unpacked without the usual nationalist shorthand.

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