The paper discusses how regional history can react to the omnipresent globalisation-discourses of our times and the new rhetoric of ‚Heimat‘quite common in all political camps In an age of globalisation ‚Heimat‘seems to be a place which is constructed to reassure a society of its identity, sometimes by including and sometimes by exluding strangers Regional history analyses the history of small and middle-sized regions that were affected and shaped by different forms of globalisation throughout the centuries The current process of globalisation and the new rhetoric of Heimat should therefore be accompanied by regional historians in a critical manner.