Federalism, Regionalism, and the Construction of Spaces

The Weimar Republic was a democratic and a federal state. The Reich had significantly more powers than it had had in Prussian-dominated Imperial Germany. Not only the Reich, but also the Länder (states) were structured democratically. Neither the plans for a reorganization of the Reich nor those for ending the dualism between the Reich and Prussia came to fruition. The unitarian leanings of the democrats ran against the will of the democratic state governments to assert themselves. The 1920 Reich Finance Reform reversed the course of fiscal federalism by creating a nationwide centralized system of taxation replacing the older Länder tax codes. The Reich and the Länder shared revenues which put the Länder at risk in the crisis after 1930. A range of economic, social, and cultural dynamics changed Germany’s spatial order. No longer were the Reich’s financial administration and unemployment-insurance system oriented toward state borders. The same applied to transport areas and tariff zones, which were oriented towards rationalization and optimization. The Heimat movement found the essence of the nation in an ethnically and culturally defined peoplehood, which brought it close to the völkisch movement. A sharp nationalism prevailed in the Heimat movement putting border regions more and more at the center of national imagination.