Heimat, History, and Identity

Abstract From its very beginning, the German Democratic Republic ( gdr ) tried to establish legitimacy through historical narratives. The state party required thousands of amateur historians, who conducted their studies as leisure activities, to participate in this ideological project. Every chronicler had to prove the necessary and inevitable victory of socialism when researching local history. The article focuses on the practices of those hobby historians, looking at the ways in which they went along with the official demands and how they tried to find their own ways to deal with historical issues. Furthermore, it points out how these practices lasted beyond German reunification and are still used today to construct local identity.