Eternal Return? Revisiting Heimat in Contemporary German Literature

Abstract

Heimat, the German concept of home and belonging, has long been associated with an idealized picture of traditional village life. The concept has a complicated history in which it has been used as a religious term to denote the homeplace in heaven, and as a legal category of inclusion and exclusion in local communities. Over the course of the tumultuous nineteenth century, amid sweeping processes of transformation brought on by the effects of industrialization and urbanization, Heimat became an imaginary foil against industrial modernity, a longing to return to a simpler rural world. Anti-urban sentiments built on reactionary ideas of racial exclusion and ethnic national identity of the mid- to late 1800s that were later integrated into the Nazis’ blood-and-soil ideology. While retaining some of its earlier components like a palimpsest, the concept is a semantic amalgamation that has repeatedly been instrumentalized for political purposes, a history that I retrace in chapter one. Since literature set in villages in the 1800s played a crucial part in developing and disseminating the modern understanding of Heimat, this study examines the refurbishing of Heimat through contemporary literature in chapters two, three, and four, namely Dörte Hansen’s Mittagsstunde (2018), Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest (2014), and Juli Zeh’s Unterleuten (2016). Published around the peak of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, these books form part of a revival of best-selling “village novels” that coincided with a renewed political and public attention to the concept of Heimat and debates around collective identity. Through close readings of these primary texts, my analysis traces parallels and references to nineteenth-century Heimat discourse in their negotiation of societal issues such as the role of local belonging, the yearning for community in an increasingly individualistic society, and regional imbalances regarding infrastructural development and public representation. The novels evoke a feeling of nostalgia as they contain characters who experience alienation from their respective worlds in processes of change that are either brought on by state initiatives and national projects or through the systemic underdevelopment of rural regions in general. All three novels reflect the multifarious quality of Heimat and they claim to represent a diverse set of views—through the multiplicity of voices in Vor dem Fest and the multiperspectivity in Unterleuten, and through the ambiguous evaluation of village life in Mittagsstunde. That they, however, largely omit pressing contemporary issues such as the integration of war refugees and right-wing-extremist violence, leaves a noticeable gap that my study comments on. Drawing from a diverse set of historical, anthropological, sociological, and literary sources, the study contributes to the scholarly discourse around Heimat and collective identity by providing a critical, broad yet historically informed look at the reconceptualization of Heimat in contemporary German literature.