Double Vision: Territorial Strategies in the Construction of National Identities in Germany, 1949–1979 Guntram H. Herb Department of Geography, Middlebury College The establishment of two separate German states in 1949 had far-reaching effects on German national identity. Initially, both governments claimed to represent the German nation as a whole, and each professed an identity that went beyond its state borders. When the two German states started to recognize each other in the early 1970s, the GDR (East Germany) embarked on a separate path and posited that a separate Socialist nation had developed in the territorial confines of the GDR. Now the GDR needed to explain how its construction of identity could be unique when it had the same German cultural roots as the FRG (West Germany). In the FRG on the other hand, the narration of national identity had to square the recognition of the eastern border of the GDR in international treaties and with demands to former German territories beyond it. The paper addresses these challenges over territory and identity in the two German states, using a conceptual framework inspired by works from critical geopolitics and recent studies on nations as local metaphors. I identify and discuss three key elements that are central to territorial strategies in the construction of national identities: territorial differentiation, territorial bonding, and territorial script. Next, I apply these elements to an empirical analysis of identity construction in the FRG and GDR. Sources in- clude geography textbooks and atlases, which have a decisive influence on shaping conceptions of the nation. Dominant constructions of national identity in the two states did not respond to each other’s initiatives and failed to produce effective strategies by the end of the 1970s. Key Words: Germany, nation, territory, construction of national identity, geographic education. T he establishment of two separate German states in 1949 had far-reaching effects on German nation- al identity. Throughout the Cold War, the two Germanys clashed not only over the political ideologies of their respective blocks but also over the territorial extent of the German nation. The position of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), was to keep issues of national territory open and to maintain claims to large areas in Poland and other East European countries. 1 Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), opposed these claims and denounced them as a continua- tion of the imperialist policies of the Hitler regime. The GDR regime did not refrain, however, from arguing for the unification of the German nation under its leadership until the late 1960s. When the Cold War began to thaw and the FRG officially recognized the GDR as a result of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the GDR changed its rhetoric. Starting in the early 1970s, the government denied the existence of significant commonalties between East and West Germany and posited that a separate socialist nation had developed in the territorial confines of the GDR. The FRG leaders vehemently rejected this claim and maintained their stance on the continuity of a greater German nation. Each German state faced a dilemma in trying to construct a convincing vision of its version of national identity. The construction of national identity in the GDR needed to show the development of a separate nation despite common roots in the German national movement of the 19th century, a movement that was centered on the cultural unity of all Germans in Central Europe. The construction of national identity in the FRG was pressed to explain how the recognition of the eastern border of the GDR, the so-called Oder-Neisse line, in inter- national treaties could be squared with demands for German unification beyond the confines of the two German states. The two challenges were explicitly territorial in character. In the GDR, the difficulty was to reduce the spatial extent of its national identity concep- tion to the confines of the GDR state territory, while in the FRG, the struggle was to keep the full spatial extent of its national identity conception in light of the restrictive conditions of realpolitik. What was the response to these territorial challenges in each German state? In particular, what strategies were employed in each state to construct a clear and convincing image of the territorial foundation of ‘‘its’’ national identity? To answer these questions, this investigation Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(1), 2004, pp. 140–164 r 2004 by Association of American Geographers Initial submission, June 2000; revised submissions, September 2001 and August 2002; final acceptance, May 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.