Trans-local Friendships: The Microstructures of Twinning Sociability

While chapters 3 and 4 have looked at the ways in which trans-local encounters are locally organized, the present chapter will turn to the social situatedness that makes them possible in the first place. Twinning practices depend crucially on strategies of tending social relations across national and language borders as well as on recruitment and networking in the local settings. It is an oft-heard claim that town twinning is, at its core, about trans-local sociability, friendship, and togetherness. For instance, Johannes Sticker who wrote one of the first empirically based monographs on town twinning, asserts that friendship helps one to find oneself through the other and that ‘Whoever looks closely at town twinnings in this light quickly comes to realize that they equal the sum total of friendships which produced them. Towns in themselves cannot create friendship though. Only people individually can be the carriers of friendship’ (Sticker, 1982 [1975], p. 21, author’s translation).¹ Likewise, Frau Korte from Breitental underlines the importance of friendships, which she sees based on discovering how other people have the same problems (as does Fieber, 1995, p. 30) when seeking to overcome hostility and secure peace in Europe:

Because I believe that if you know other people and see that they are not really that different at all but are nice, ordinary people with the same problems as ourselves, then we cannot be driven so easily to go off to war, yes, like our grandfathers lay in the trenches in Belgium.