Doing Heimat - The Role of Imaginations, Practices and Emotions in Saxony, 1969-2000.

• Applicant: Dr. Johannes Schütz
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432598161

"Heimat" is often the subject of current political debates and popular cultural discourses. This is where my research project comes in. It aims to historicise the everyday constructions of Heimat. To do this, it combines a history of practice with a history of emotions. For in contrast to the diachronic differences in ideas and concepts of Heimat, the significance of practices and how they were structured by ideas and emotions has not been researched so far. On the basis of selected practices, I examine how in Saxony between 1969 and 2000 a wide variety of actors transfomed and translated discourses of Heimat and emotions into everyday actions. In a three-step approach, it looks at the connections between ideas, practices and feelings: It asks about the translation of ideas into discourses and the influence of these discourses on practices, it examines how practices routinised everyday actions and thus manifested discourses, and the project explores how emotions that were addressed and retrieved by imaginations of Heimat were expressed and acted out by people in practices. The project does not only focus on the second half of the GDR, but looks at the constructions of Heimat beyond the end of the GDR in a transforming society until 2000. On a broad source basis - file material from mass organisations, diaries, letters, local chronicles, migration reports, Stasi documents and judicial files - the project examines the connections between very different discourses, practices and feelings of Heimat. The aim of the project is to show that very different ideas of space, future and community were negotiated and acted out in the GDR as well as in the postsocialist society. To what extent, however, the numerous discourses and ideas of Heimat actually guided people's actions in Saxony between 1969 and 2000, what practices were used to create and stabilise community and what part feelings played in this, is the subject of the project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants