Originally This Chapter Was Called “Pigs, Potatoes, and Collective Memory,” and was based on several assumptions about the ways that food operates as a lieu de mémoire, or a site of collective memory and identity, in post-1989 Germany. After sifting through books, newspaper articles, websites, and cookbooks, however, it quickly became apparent that the word “apples” most certainly belonged in the title as well. That is, apples turned out to be even more resonant than pigs and potatoes, as they were the object of all kinds of memory work in eastern and western Germany alike. From Dresden to Stuttgart, Magdeburg to Hamburg, there are apple identification fairs where people can bring five ripe apples (preferably from the sunny side of the tree) to be identified by volunteer fruit experts. There are municipal orchards harvested by crews of young men doing their civil service, living archives, kept under lock and key, of old-fashioned apple trees, and people busily brewing cider at home, or distilling varietal spirits from specific old-fashioned apples and pears. School groups, college students, retirees, avid members of pomologists’ clubs or fruit-meadow clubs devote their weekends and their backyards to the preservation of old apple and other fruit varieties. These apples both shape and are shaped by memory and identity as people seek to preserve the traditional varieties of particular regions as well as the landscapes they create.

Following the approach of scholars such as Applegate, Boa and Palfreyman, Confino, and Lekan, I posit that regional identity, which is focused on the Heimat (loosely, homeplace), is distinct from, but also constituent of, national identity in Germany. For Confino, “antagonism and friction reconciled in the end through a process of remembrance and forgetfulness in the Heimat idea as an image of the German locality, region, and nation” (8). Furthermore, “the local peculiarities expressed in, for instance, Heimat museums and images made up through a process of stereotypization a representation of the German nation as a whole” (98). Confino emphasizes that “Germany became a nation of Heimats” because “the idea of Heimat harmonized the heritage of local identities and the single national identity” (158). Applegate was a forerunner in seeing Heimat not only as not inherently proto-fascist (a point emphasized by Lekan, Confino, and Boa as well) but also as a kind of union of the local and the national.