Carmel Heeley received her BA in Philosophy and Holocaust Studies at the University of Manchester before completing an MA in European Jewish History at the Leo Baeck Institute, Queen Mary. Her MA thesis, entitled Volksgemeinschaft, Gender and the Nazi Concentration Camps, explored the relationship between moral sentiments, moral values and Nazism’s racialized conceptions of gender that underpinned the concentration camp system between 1933-1939.
Her research interests include: Third Reich history, German-Jewish history, anti-Semitism and Nazism’s persecutory policies, the history of emotions, as well as the moral framework of Nazi Germany.
Working Title: ‘German Jews, German Gentiles and the Alps: How Conceptions of Heimat, Bavarian Traditions and Moral Values defined ‘German’ Belongings and German-Jewish experience, 1920-1940.’
At its heart, my project engages with recent historiographical efforts to work with the category of emotion by examining the links between moral sentiments, moral values and social imaginaries that underpinned conceptions of ‘belonging’ in Germany between 1920-1940. In particular, I explore how sentiments, values and imaginaries informed the self-understanding of German Jews and gentiles, and more broadly were crucially central to legitimising the inclusion and exclusion of Jewish minorities in German society at large.
Specifically, my PhD focuses on how German Jews were important in forming and propagating the ways in which ‘belonging’ was imagined in Germany, and how their ideas were later overturned by the Nazis, between 1920 and 1940. I am particularly concerned with the German idea of ‘Heimat’ – a primary concept of belonging tied to regionalism – as central to how German society imagined itself and ultimately, to perceptions of inclusion and exclusion. Building on current historiography, I demonstrate the key integratory function of these regional interpretations of ‘authenticity’, and the moral sentiments (emotions) and values that fuelled them. I do this by analysing the multiple levels on which Jews negotiated inclusive regional interpretations of Heimat that were employed locally and nationally – as inventors of ideas, entrepreneurs and holidaymakers – taking Bavaria as a case study. Bavaria, considered an embodiment of quintessential ‘German’ (alpine) landscapes and traditions that promoted distinctive practices, is poignant here as a site where German Jews could visualise and articulate various identities linked to ‘German’ belonging. That these interpretations were consequential to German perceptions of ‘authentic belonging’ is evident in how they were subsequently overturned by the Nazis to legitimise anti-Semitic measures, excluding Jews from Heimat-associated sites, practices and organisations – no more visible than in the German Alps.
(Completed: 2020)
