Heimat nostalgia was not inherently antimodern but could center on industrial-urban culture

Evidence

Although regional considerations certainly did loom large in expellees’ imagining of Heimat , modern and even industrial features were often dear in their memories. To be sure, Marion Gr ä i n von D ö nhoff, an expellee and later editor of Die Zeit , imagined Heimat as pastoral and antimodern in her 1984 memoirs, but this was because her Heimat in East Prussia had been exceptionally rural, whereas her exile in Hamburg was urban. She claimed that the Heimat all expellees yearned for was “a great, secluded landscape of endless forests, blue lakes, and broad river lowlands,” which meant “much more than it does for those who grew up in an industrial area or in a major city.” 40 Upper Silesians would have strongly contested this. They tied Heimat to the smokestacks and Catholic steeples of an industrial-urban borderland culture. Expellees also commonly tied Heimat to their notion of German innovation and progress, said to be the fruit of German efi ciency and order. Emblems of “German modernity” thus became icons of a lost Heimat just as easily as natural landscapes and “ancient traditions.” — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the common trope that homeland nostalgia must be pastoral; parallels how manufactured identities can overlay diverse actual lived experiences. — connects to: Nostalgia mode is formal reiteration, not psychological longing — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2423; Positive invocations of the past are not always mere nostalgia — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 1070; Nostalgia for imagined pasts provides community glue for detached suburbanites — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 906 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Does the antimodern-pastoral version of Heimat gain rhetorical dominance because it served the revisionist political project better than an industrial one?

Broader Connections

• Positive invocations of the past are not always mere nostalgia #corroborates (0.80) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1070
• What looks like nostalgia for the past can actually be a longing for modernism. #corroborates (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 317
• Nostalgia mode is formal reiteration, not psychological longing #complicates (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2423
• Early modernists saw industrial city life as demanding a fundamentally new art #corroborates (0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 143
• Nostalgia for imagined pasts provides community glue for detached suburbanites #expands (0.72) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 906
• Deindustrial ruin produces nostalgia for places not yet fallen #expands (0.72) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 396