While a rich body of work on nations and national borderlands has demonstrated how the ideal of the nation state resulted in ever greater (and often violent) demands for geographic fixity, this article shows how territorial visions of regional communities permitted a tremendous level of flexibility and were able to hold highly divergent geographic imaginings in suspension. The article seeks to demonstrate this by looking at a unique moment in post-war West German history when spatial planers, parliamentary committees, regionalists and an army of experts sought to determine the boundaries of regional belonging in preparation for a planned redrawing of the West German federal map. Many believed that a viable federalist democracy required stronger federal states rooted in a sense of regional community. The states created by the Allies were initially seen as temporary, and Article 29 of the new constitution required that states be redrawn by considering boundaries of regional belonging. The intense efforts of experts, politicians, and regionalists, however, ultimately failed and revealed widely diverging ideas about which territories corresponded to a common sense of regional community. Conflicting historic state borders, the historic force of physical geographies, confession, orientation to urban centres, a profusion of dialect borders, and regional cultural practices all shaped geographic visions of region, but simultaneously underpinned widely-variant cognitive maps. While the failure to redraw the West German map resulted in this episode of history largely being forgotten, I argue that it speaks volumes about how forms of community beyond and beneath the nation state have been imagined in territorial space.

中文翻译：

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地区情感难以捉摸的边界：重新想象早期西德的联邦制地图


虽然关于民族和国家边界的大量研究表明，民族国家的理想如何导致对地理固定性的更大（而且常常是暴力）的需求，但本文展示了区域社区的领土愿景如何允许极大的灵活性和灵活性。能够保持高度不同的地理想象。本文试图通过观察战后西德历史上的一个独特时刻来证明这一点，当时空间规划者、议会委员会、地区主义者和一群专家试图确定地区归属的边界，为有计划的西德重新划分做准备。联邦地图。许多人认为，可行的联邦制民主需要植根于区域共同体意识的更强大的联邦国家。同盟国创建的国家最初被视为临时性的，新宪法第29条要求在重新划定国家时考虑地区归属的边界。然而，专家、政治家和地区主义者的巨大努力最终失败了，并暴露出关于哪些领土符合地区共同体共识的广泛分歧。相互冲突的历史国家边界、自然地理的历史力量、信仰、城市中心的定位、大量的方言边界和区域文化习俗，所有这些都塑造了该地区的地理视野，但同时也支撑了千差万别的认知地图。虽然重绘西德地图的失败导致这段历史在很大程度上被遗忘，但我认为它充分说明了在领土空间中如何想象民族国家之上和之下的社区形式。