Preservation for the Masses: The Idea of Heimat and the Gesellschaft für Denkmalpflege

(GDR), the terms Heimat and historical preservation are not two that immediately spring to mind. The enduring vision of the GDR has not been one of preserved medi-eval city centers, nor one of intense searches for the in-timacy of local identity. Rather it has been one of anon-ymous rows of prefabricated apartment buildings punctuated by the occasional utopian attempt to create a new Socialist architecture, an architecture designed to flatten regional differences and erase local loyalties. This paper will briefly explore how Heimat and preser-vation interacted with each other in the GDR, in partic-ular through the activities of the Gesellschaft für Denk-malpflege, or the Society for Historic Preservation.1 These preservation activists resisted, with some de-gree of success, attempts by the Socialist Unity Part