Their capacity nevertheless to shape and to maintain a coherent national identity that incorporated the peculiarities of their local experience is the precise subject of this study.

The people in question lived in one small corner of the nation, in the midst of almost continuous disputes over the location and the significance of the border. The border in question is one Germany shares with France. In the study that follows, I explore the implications of one aspect of that disjunction: the capacity of borders themselves to take on cultural meaning that transcends their political or economic purposes. Yet a disjunction persists between national claims and national realities, between the enormity of the influence of the national idea in the world today and the arbitrariness of national identities themselves. Our continuing fascination with national character-our own and that of others-further attests not so much to the reality of the nation as to our seemingly unbreakable attachment to the national category. The modern nation asserts its legitimacy in many ways, but most strikingly in the willingness of its members to believe in it, to identify with it, and even to die for it. Ĭonsciousness of national belonging is one of the most striking and least understood of modern phenomena. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990 1990.

Origin the saboteur doesn&#39;t run

Origin the saboteur doesn't run