The Merits of Reciprocity: Small-town Twinning in the Wake of the Second World War

This paper argues that the sociality of town twinning in Europe since the Second World War has been organized around relationships of reciprocal exchange, for instance, the exchange of visits, hospitality, and gifts. While the paper empirically refers to a qualitative study of forms of twinning sociality in small towns in Germany, it conceptually frames the findings in terms of anthropological theories of exchange. The latter are relevant for the paper because they articulate doubts regarding the capacity of reciprocal exchange to effect sustainable social cohesion. However, in the case of town twinning after the Second World War, this theoretical argument must be differentiated in order to account for a historical constellation in which twinning attempted to forge links between members of former enemy nations. Under such conditions, strictly reciprocal twinning exchange, although receding to the background today, proved to be functional because it required only minimal investments and expectations regarding mutual understanding, affectivity, or even communication. Thus, reciprocity was ideally suited to accomplish an, in historical terms, utterly unlikely result, namely, to forge and re-establish connections among people who were not only perfect strangers but also former enemies.