On January 26, 2023, the Institute of European Studies hosted an event discussing Germany’s cultural developments after WWII. Professor Sadhana Naithani from Jawaharlal Nehru University presented on the new cultural meanings of villages in Germany. She approached the topic by analyzing four different narratives from people who decided to live in a village.
Naithani opened her presentation by explaining the developments of the field of cultural anthropology and why it is important to speak about narratives of time and space. She explained that the anthropological discipline failed to include studies of post-colonial nations. To this day, it is evident that colonialism has had a lasting impact on discrimination within academia.
Before WWII, the German village stood as a symbol of community and tradition. However, the war destroyed villages around the country and along with it, they lost cultural values such as shared dialects and conceptions of a shared communal identity. Nevertheless, the village survives: modern German villages now represent a more modern definition of community. Naithani exemplified these modern notions of community through four stories: (1) The Last Farmer of Reinhausen, (2) The Ex-Soldier at 92, (3) The Brothers Grimm in the Bremke Village, and (4) The Woman Who Made a Commune.
The individuals from these four narratives represent a generation of German people who, in search of community after the war, ended up constructing a new cultural significance in villages. Some of them moved there for work, others have established families there, and some have even created community theaters in honor of German fairytales. They all have in common that they are creating an institution of cultural memory by reinventing the meaning of the village. This pre-industrial space serves as a platform for change based on voluntary membership, individual commitment to community, and freedom to choose – things that were not very accessible in pre-WWII Germany.