Strangers in the Village

The third chapter turns towards newcomers in Neukirch and Ebersbach and explores how the villagers responded to the growing inflow of non-locals into the locality in the postwar era. Unlike previous scholarship, which has often focused on one particular group of newcomers, it examines the continuities between different waves of migration in East and West. The chapter reveals that ethnic German refugees, foreign workers, and urban newcomers were in similar ways marginalized by long-standing locals who tried to claim ownership over the spaces of ‘their’ locality. While migration is remembered through very different narratives in Neukirch and Ebersbach, Easterners and Westerners failed to fully come to terms with diversity in their village. In the booming Ebersbach, locals remembered a continuous inflow of strangers that diversified the community. In the shrinking Neukirch, on the other hand, stop-and-go migration was silenced in a narrative of continued homogeneity of the community. The chapter thus demonstrates how migration and integration in the divided Germany played out in local contexts. Diversity in postwar society, it will be shown, was contested in debates over local identity and belonging.

Modern Villagers

The first chapter provides an introduction to the postwar remodelling of Neukirch and Ebersbach and examines how this process was informed by shifting notions of what it meant to be rural in postwar society. Rather than understanding ‘rurality’ as an inherent characteristic of localities at the periphery of society, the chapter shows that the remaking of the village in East and West was shaped by a similar chronology of a departure from, and subsequent return to, the rural. In the first two decades after the war, the state as well as local residents in both Germanies primarily envisioned the rural as backwards and in need of modernization. The modernization attempts of planning elites and the belief of villagers in a modern future culminated in the ‘planning euphoria’ of the 1970s. From the end of the decade onwards, however, experiences of crisis and a fading belief in progress led to a rediscovery of the rural in which traditional characteristics of rurality became reconciled with modernity. The chapter thus demonstrates that what it meant to be ‘rural’ became a key question in debates over the direction and outcomes of social and political renewal in both German states. It adds to our understanding of how the establishment of two very different societies in the divided Germany was debated and contested through peculiarly local meanings.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to the two case study villages Neukirch and Ebersbach, explains the methodology of the study, and outlines the structure of the book. It also sets out the central argument that there were parallel histories of responses to social change among villagers in the divided Germany. The chapter then outlines the three major ways in which the book contributes to scholarship on postwar Germany: Firstly, by highlighting similarities between East and West, it complicates persisting Cold War divisions in the historical literature. Secondly, it emphasizes the complex ways in which East and West Germans engaged with large-scale changes through peculiarly local meanings. Thirdly, by focusing on two case study localities which question conventional divides between the urban and the rural, it challenges understandings of the rural as the traditional ‘other’ in modern society.

The Cold War in the Village

This chapter examines in more detail how the inhabitants of the two villages engaged with the other Germany and the division of their nation. The Neukirchers and Ebersbachers lived far away from the inner-German border, but in their everyday lives they nonetheless were forced to confront the impact of division. By analysing everyday practices through which the villagers positioned themselves in the political landscape of the Cold War, the chapter sheds new light on the asymmetry of (be)longing and othering in the divided nation. It demonstrates how the Neukirchers and Ebersbachers constructed their own respective imaginary East and imaginary West shaped by local concerns and searches for identity. In Neukirch, the villagers increasingly built up the West as an object of longing in their attempts to deal with the daily struggles of life in a shortage economy. The Ebersbachers, on the other hand, used the East as a Cold War ‘other’ to express pride in their economic recovery and gain a stronger sense of their own identity in a divided nation. These distorted images of the other Germany led to widespread alienation and misunderstandings in the first German–German encounters in the reunified nation. It was difference, rather than a shared sense of national identity, that dominated the experiences of the Neukirchers and Ebersbachers when the inner-German border disappeared in 1990.

Conclusion

The conclusion revisits the key arguments of the book and highlights the broader implications of its findings for our understanding of Germany’s postwar history. In particular, it emphasizes the need to reconcile what might be described as the opposing bottom-up and top-down histories of the divided Germany. As much as the history of the divided Germany was a history of antagonistic conceptions of society, it was also a history of local attempts to get by in an era of rapid social change. The chapter thus emphasizes the need to include more local perspectives in studies of Cold War societies. It argues that explorations of how larger processes of change played out in the specific local settings of everyday life allow us to complicate traditional narratives of life on both sides of the Iron Curtain and overcome persisting divisions in the historical literature.

Beyond Nostalgia

The final chapter explores local histories produced by the residents of Neukirch and Ebersbach from the 1960s onwards, including local chronicles, picture collections, and exhibitions. The analysis of this rich engagement with the postwar past of the locality challenges the understanding of villagers as passive bystanders to change. Local histories, it will be shown, were more than nostalgic laments of modernization. In both Germanies, a wider personal and public engagement with the development of the village became a prominent means for locals to understand, control, and respond to change in their locality. Nostalgia was only one element in this, as reflections on the most recent past in the village were always shaped by both pride in achievements and pain over losses. Local histories, therefore, became an important medium for Easterners and Westerners to situate themselves in the shifting social and political context of the divided and reunified Germany. By revealing parallels between East and West as well as continuities between the time before and after reunification, the chapter demonstrates that an active engagement with the locality’s past has been an important aspect of the parallel histories of responses to social change in the divided Germany.

Give-and-Take Politics

Chapter five focuses on instances of activism in the two villages to challenge the dominant understanding of rural politics in East and West as mirror images. It demonstrates that the remodelling of localities in postwar Germany provided the framework for a new kind of give-and-take politics which relied on a mutually beneficial partnership between citizens and the state. In the liberal democracy of the West as well as the socialist dictatorship of the East, dynamic local politicians created spaces for participation which were readily seized upon by local residents. Locals became more willing to volunteer their time and energy towards the remodelling of their locality, often partnering with, or at least expecting support from, state authorities. In return, they increasingly defended their own interests and held the welfare state to its promises. The localities of the divided Germany thus became the site of a new kind of give-and-take between citizens and state. Within the confines of the very different social and political systems, a parallel transformation of local politics in East and West occurred in the 1960s and 1970s.

(Un)Making Community

Chapter two challenges the traditional narrative that the close-knit rural ‘community’ was swept away by inevitable modernization processes in postwar society. Instead, it demonstrates that the villagers had a much more ambivalent stance towards ‘community’ than often assumed. Analysing the interviewees’ multilayered narratives of the disappearance of the village community, the chapter shows that local residents in both villages increasingly abandoned traditional social networks but instantly lamented their demise when they disappeared from their lives. In the booming and affluent Ebersbach, locals gradually retreated into privacy and withdrew from traditional social spaces in the village, but at the same time began to mourn their loss. In the East, villagers shared this desire for privacy, but the numerous problems of life in a shortage economy made it necessary for them to maintain a range of support networks. Once this pragmatic community unravelled after reunification, the Neukirchers too began to long for the village community of the past which they had just left behind. The chapter thus shows that despite very different circumstances on both sides of the Wall, Germans in East and West shared an ambivalent attitude towards community and redefined communal relationships in the village in similar ways.