Germans, Jews, and the Alpine Heimat: How Moral Values, Bavarian Traditions, and Sport were Central to German Self-understanding and German-Jewish Claims to Belonging between 1920 and 1940.

This thesis explores how German Jews were important in innovating and propagating the ways in which belonging was imagined in Germany, and how their ideas were overturned by the Nazis. As a meaningful social imaginary tied to regionalism, ideas of authentic belonging in the form of ‘Heimat’ were central to perceptions of inclusion and exclusion within German society. The key integratory function of regional interpretations of authenticity is evident in how German Jews actively invented and promoted regional customs to articulate belonging. I concentrate on Bavaria as an embodiment of quintessentially ‘German’ Alpine landscapes and traditions that endorsed distinctive regional practices which were constructed and employed by Jews – locally and nationally – to make their German belonging tangible. Specifically, I look to how German Jews actively negotiated inclusive regional interpretations of Heimat – fuelled by certain moral values and sentiments – as entrepreneurs, locals, and holidaymakers. I explore three key levels of Jewish attachment to Bavaria as a model of distinctive ‘Germanness’: firstly, how Jewish entrepreneurs in Munich invented popular conceptions of Bavarian culture and thus authentic ‘Germanness’; secondly, how Munich Jews mirrored these interpretations of authenticity by actively expressing an affinity with Bavaria on an individual level; thirdly, how non-Bavarian German Jews sought Bavarian customs via Alpine leisure culture to project various forms of integration. That these interpretations were consequential to German perceptions of authentic belonging is evident in how they were overturned by the Nazis to legitimise antisemitic measures. The Nazis appropriated Jewish-owned businesses that had been central to inventing conceptions of ‘Germanness’, while excluding Jews from Heimat-associated sites, practices, and organisations – no more visible than in the German Alps. My thesis starts in 1920, at the height of Alpine leisure culture and ends in 1940, after the aryanisation of Jewish-owned businesses and the near-total exclusion of Jews from the Alps