The Project

German History Intersections is a source-based digital project that examines three broad topics – migration, knowledge and education, and Germanness – from 1500 to the present. By charting these topics across centuries, the project offers an alternative to traditional histories that focus on discrete historical periods.

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The Topics

Migration

Knowledge and Education

Germanness

Mi­gra­tion
Draw­ing on the per­sonal sto­ries of in­di­vid­u­als and the col­lec­tive ex­pe­ri­ences of mi­grant groups, this mod­ule ex­am­ines the move­ment of peo­ple across and within the shift­ing bor­ders of Cen­tral Eu­rope from the Early Mod­ern pe­riod to the present.
Knowl­edge and Ed­u­ca­tion
Ed­u­ca­tion, ideas, and the his­tory of knowl­edge are the focus of this mod­ule, which ex­plores the con­struc­tion, ne­go­ti­a­tion, cir­cu­la­tion, and or­ga­ni­za­tion of var­i­ous types of “ex­pert” and pop­u­lar knowl­edge in Ger­many over five cen­turies, from the Ref­or­ma­tion to the Dig­i­tal Age.
Ger­man­ness
This mod­ule de­scribes the com­plex and ever-​changing mean­ing of Ger­man­ness from the Holy Roman Em­pire to present-​day Eu­rope. One cen­tral theme is the in­ter­sec­tion of Ger­man­ness with other mark­ers of iden­tity, such as gen­der, eth­nic­ity, re­li­gion, and so­cial class.

Focus

Grün ist die Heide (1951)

I chose the 1951 film Grün ist die Heide because it uncannily shows how non-Jewish West Germans after 1945 continued to promote essentializing and exclusionary notions of Germanness. The film reinscribed National Socialism into a past in which only non-Jewish Germans were victimized and the Shoah was completely ignored. With its vivid colors and its sentimental music representing a “homeland” untouched by violence, Grün ist die Heide became the blueprint for the immensely successful Heimatfilme of the 1950s and early 1960s. The film’s influential soundtrack featured the “Riesengebirgslied,” which declared the mountains in the Polish-Czech borderlands as “German mountains.” The characters and the story celebrated authoritarian notions of social control and patriarchal gender relations as the path to postwar stability.

Martina Kessel, University of Bielefeld, member of the “Germanness” working group

Image credit: © picture alliance