TY - BOOK ID - 77886513 TI - The nation as a local metaphor PY - 1997 SN - 0807860840 9780807860847 0807823597 0807846651 9780807823590 9780807846650 0807846600 9780807846605 9798890868817 PB - Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press DB - UniCat KW - Nationalism KW - National characteristics, German. KW - Collective memory KW - National characteristics, German KW - Germany KW - Regions & Countries - Europe KW - History & Archaeology KW - Collective remembrance KW - Common memory KW - Cultural memory KW - Emblematic memory KW - Historical memory KW - National memory KW - Public memory KW - Social memory KW - Memory KW - Social psychology KW - Group identity KW - National characteristics KW - German national characteristics KW - Consciousness, National KW - Identity, National KW - National consciousness KW - National identity KW - International relations KW - Patriotism KW - Political science KW - Autonomy and independence movements KW - Internationalism KW - Political messianism KW - Württemberg (Germany) KW - Würtemberg (Germany) KW - Wirtemberg (Germany) KW - Wuerttemberg (Germany) KW - Württemberg-Hohenzollern (Germany) KW - Württemberg-Baden (Germany) KW - Württemberg (Germany : Landesbezirk) KW - Württemberg (Kingdom) KW - Politics and government. KW - Politics and government KW - Collective memory. KW - Württemberg (Germany) UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77886513 AB - All nations make themselves up as they go along, but not all make themselves up in the same way. In this study, Alon Confino explores how Germans turned national and argues that they imagined the nation as an extension of their local place. In 1871, the work of political unification had been completed, but Germany remained a patchwork of regions with different histories and traditions. Germans had to construct a national memory to reconcile the peculiarities of the region and the totality of the nation. This identity project, examined by Confino as it evolved in the southwestern state of Wurttemberg, oscillated between failure and success. The national holiday of Sedan Day failed in the 1870s and 1880s to symbolically commingle localness and nationhood. Later, the idea of the Heimat, or homeland, did prove capable of representing interchangeably the locality, the region, and the nation in a distinct national narrative and in visual images. The German nationhood project was successful, argues Confino, because Germans made the nation into an everyday, local experience through a variety of cultural forms, including museums, school textbooks, popular poems, travel guides, posters, and postcards. But it was not unique. Confino situates German nationhood within the larger context of modernity, and in doing so he raises broader questions about how people in the modern world use the past in the construction of identity. ER -