Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in Divided Germany

Abstract

In Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in Modern Germany, Marcel Thomas aims to get past divided histories of postwar Germany that set up one (usually the West) as the “ideal” against which we should measure and understand the other's relative success. He finds many similarities between the perceptions and experiences of villagers east and west of the Berlin Wall.Thomas employs the German historical framework of Alltagsgeschichte (“the history of everyday life”) to better understand how two villages, in different regions of divided postwar Germany, negotiated changes in their communities in the years after World War II.He focuses on Ebersbach, in the Federal Republic of Germany, an erstwhile “market town” in Baden-Württemberg, and Neukirch, in the German Democratic Republic, a modernizing village in Saxony. Ebersbach and Neukirch are not mirror images of one another, divided only by their divergent experiences of national government between 1945 and 1989; they are, rather, similar but unique, embedded in the distinct local histories of their regions.Thomas draws on a variety of sources, including local historians and museums, in constructing his argument about the fundamentally similar nature of village life and politics in the two Germanys. One of his most interesting sources comes in the form of the oral history interviews he conducted with residents of Ebersbach and Neukirch over a three-year period.The text is composed of six thematic chapters, each of which deals with some aspect of the postwar development of the German village. Their common goal is to complicate the narrative of centrally directed change enacted at the local level and passively accepted by local communities. Instead, Thomas argues for a “give-and-take” (as he titles chapter 5) between national leadership in Bonn and Berlin, local government and bureaucracies, community activists, and ordinary citizens.In the first and sixth chapters, Thomas evaluates the twin processes of village modernization (chapter 1) and community engagement with the local, regional, and national past (chapter 6). Villagers in both Ebersbach and Neukirch looked to a modern future and understood that rural modernization represented a key component of national progress in Cold War Germany. Neither group posed an obstacle to modernization so much as they hoped to shape it to their benefit. Accordingly, while forging “Modern Villagers” entailed the development of a vision of the future by those within and outside the community, the final chapter shows how villagers marshaled their past to bolster that vision through the production of local histories.Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the shifting boundaries of the village community as it was reconceived in the postwar world and reconstituted from within by longtime residents and by newcomers. Thomas points to common contradictions in both Ebersbach and Neukirch, noting a tension between a growing desire for privacy, associated with modernity, and a nostalgia for the close-knit rural communities of the past. Both communities, too, struggled to fully integrate outsiders, including groups of ethnic German refugees, foreign workers, and urban commuters (chapter 3).Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the communities’ engagement with and perceptions of political developments in the village, region, Germany, and the world. Thomas challenges the idea that only border communities and Berlin were cognizant of their role in the broader dynamics of the Cold War and shows that Ebersbachers and Neukirchers engaged with the other Germany, often using it as a metric for the relative progress achieved by their own community. As might be imagined in a book that focuses on the village, Thomas emphasizes the effects of local, “bottom-up” efforts to negotiate political change, both as a response to “top-down” politics and as a catalyst for them.Thomas's Ebersbachers and Neukirchers are emphatically villagers, not peasants, and seldom farmers. Those who are interested in the modernization of farming techniques, the status of agriculture in postwar Germany, or the role of agribusiness in shifting the economic landscape of rural Germany might look elsewhere. Rural Germans, however, have long been linked to both food production and to an idealized past, and Thomas is attuned to how this symbolic baggage might affect the self-perceptions of rural communities in a postwar world in which nostalgia and autarky are no longer central concerns of the state.Thomas's monograph is especially useful as a model for linking local histories to national and transnational narratives. He resists simply projecting changes at the national level onto the local one, even as the national and the international are ever-present in the minds of the villagers.