Heimat: A German Family Album

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Although I’ve long considered writing about Heimat, I intended to do it differently: From the rolling hills of Bavaria, home to the country’s first Heimat ministry under Seehofer; from Hesse, where the Greens sought to reclaim and redefine the word; or perhaps from North Rhine-Westphalia, which holds a “Heimat Congress” every two years to explore the concept. The prospect of writing about the topic in the midst of a global pandemic, from my apartment and in cafes in my neighborhood as Berlin tentatively reopens, never crossed my mind. A theme that runs through the book is the unreliability of memory. This is probably especially true in Germany, where people want to distance themselves from the crimes of the Nazi regime, and any participation they might have had in them. For instance, hundreds gathered to watch the burning of the town synagogue, but later few would admit having been there, and even those were old people decades after the war who no longer had to fear any repercussions; the others all claimed that they had been “out in their fields” or doing something else when it happened. One thing most people can agree on is that the way the majority of Germans have reacted to the atrocities of the Second World War should serve as a model for the rest of us. But where is the line between "making sure it can't happen again" and feeling nothing but shame for your country, your heritage, your family, for things that happened before you were even born? The word “Heimat” has been used for centuries, although its meaning has shifted and expanded significantly along the way. Hardly the wide-ranging, philosophical concept it’s become today, it was originally associated with a legal term, Heimatrecht, which meant the right to live in and enjoy the protection of a particular town or community—either where one was born or had lived a certain amount of time. In many parts of the German-speaking world, people carried a Heimatschein, or document identifying and proving their Heimat. (Even today, the Swiss identification card is called a Heimatschein.) I'm glad I read this, but was deeply disappointed by where the author's focus lay. I don't know how to recommend this to others, unless they were interested in reading a societally-powerful person's insufficient grappling with shame, or a meditation on collective shame that has little to do with meaningful reparation/accountability. I think this narrative meant to tease apart the crucial nuance between guilt and shame, but these aren’t thoughtfully explored — instead, Krug’s need to know just what her ancestors did or did not do overwhelms the stories, and is resolved only after barreling past a tremendous amount of trauma (those of Jewish folks, and also her dad’s obviously traumatic relationship with his sister).

Rather than inspire vain hopes for physical resettlement, there were cases in which imaginary journeys inspired expellees to one day undertake an actual journey to visit the Heimat transformed and satisfy curiosity about what was left of the spaces they remembered. Night after night, an Upper Silesian expellee narrated to his children (some born in Gleiwitz, others in the West) about the dear spaces of the lost Heimat. “With each day as the kids got older, I settled down more in these foreign spaces,” until the West became his family’s Heimat. For all this, he prayed “with all my heart that it will be possible for me to be able to show my children the lost Heimat,” for, much as he tried to tell them of his love for the church of All Saint’s in Gleiwitz, he knew that only “when they see it later” could they know “why I loved this church more than any other.” Expellee children, often with only the faintest early memories of Silesia, also undertook imaginary journeys across the Iron Curtain, at times writing school papers that inspired them with the prospect of undertaking a trip later on. As shown in Chapter 6, many of them departed the controlled realm of the imagination, ventured to the real Silesia, and were immersed in a world of disjuncture between the two images of Heimat . Touring the Lost German East, they had to cope with the fact that Rübezahl’s Reich had become home to people with a very different history than the one they still cherished in their hearts. Rübezahl’s children were now Polish.

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Rather than one definitive Heimat, immigrants to Germany might have Heimaten, the word’s less-used plural. When I met Görlitz Mayor Octavian Ursu last summer, I asked what the word means to him. He was born in Bucharest, Romania, and moved to Görlitz at 22. After spending more than half his life in Germany, he was elected mayor for the center-right CDU last June. Ursu ran a close race against the AfD’s Sebastian Wippel, who grew up in Görlitz. In campaign materials, Wippel’s slogan was “A Görlitzer,” inherently implying Ursu wasn’t. And last fall in the Austrian Alps, watching lederhosen-clad young men herd elaborately decorated cows down from mountain pastures during the annual Almabtrieb ceremony, I better understood the sorts of images politicians from Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) evoke when they speak about preserving Austrian Heimat and traditions. I remember once working with a German of a similar age, who refused to talk about the topic at all. She wouldn't even my answer questions about what they taught in school about WW2. She felt that it was all in the past and that's where it deserved to stay. For those who don’t fit into the AfD’s idyllic, German (and implicitly white) concept of Heimat, the word, and its presence so ubiquitous it appears in the name of a government ministry, can feel less like a nostalgic longing for hometown beer halls and grandma’s schnitzel and more like an implied threat of exclusion. Mentioning the word to a progressive-minded German might prompt cringing (by even those who may use the word casually when they describe visiting family for the weekend). The Nazis “politicized, paganized and nationalized” Heimat, Celia Applegate writes in her book A Nation of Provincials, arguing that they perpetrated the “ultimate perversion of the idea of Heimat.”

Heimat can be as benign as the mentioning by my roommate in the eastern city of Görlitz last summer that she would spend the weekend at her parents’ home in her Heimatstadt. Or the suggestion of a woman in my local market hall in Berlin, upon her hearing my boyfriend’s Austrian accent, that he might like an Austrian cheese since it’s “a piece of Heimat.” It can also be as complicated as an activist’s telling me in Cottbus, a city in eastern Brandenburg that’s seen a disproportionate rise in right-wing extremism, that people are angry and lost, turning to the AfD because they feel as if they are “losing their Heimat… rapidly before our eyes.” And it can be as dangerous as AfD politicians’ wielding it as a rhetorical club against political enemies or those deemed too foreign to fit into their idealized German society.In contrast to the official histories detailed in Chapter 2, local chronicles seldom featured a cyclical approach to historical events, in which German progress repeatedly intervened to repair devastation from regular invasions from the East (implying an inevitable pattern of death and resurrection, making another resurrection through Heimkehr inevitable). Rather, often tapping into material from earlier, interwar chronicles, amateur historians (pastors, schoolteachers, mayors, farmers) presented a linear and tragic account of ever-increasing progress, happiness, and Germanness in a cozy Heimat village that suddenly died and was buried under foreign invasion in 1945. Freikorps, Communists, Nazis – these remained conspicuously absent in most accounts, replaced by a tale of stability, culture, productivity, pastoral serenity, and urban vitality. The sudden rupture of loss at the story’s end made it clear that only the Heimat of memory survived, in part through the service of the chronicler. BelongingÂis an astoundingly honest book that conducts a devastating–and irresistible–investigation into one’s family struggle with the forces of history. I could not stop reading it and when I as done, I could not stop thinking about it. By going so deeply into her family’s history, Krug has in some ways written about us all.” And thus her graphic memoir is more of a graphic statement, a snapshot not only of her own family history, but also of the reality of possibilities for any type of storytelling about cultural heritage.”

Given the long-standing associations between Heimat and the far right , it’s understandable some would want to leave the word behind entirely. Others on the left say the term can still be saved—and have tried to redefine it in the political sphere.

Nora Krug’s book BelongingÂis a heart-wrenching, suspenseful and fascinating odyssey that straddles, and seeks to uncover, an uncharted, inaccessible, unfathomable past. It is a kaleidoscope of interrupted lives, leading inexorably to its ultimate conclusion. I couldn’t stop reading it.” When AfD politicians or supporters talk about Heimat, they mean “a homogenous, Christian, white society in which men have the final say, women above all focus on having children and other life realities are out of the question,” Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, both Germans who are descended from migrants, explain in the foreword to their 2019 collection of essays Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (“Your Heimat is Our Nightmare). “In recent decades, the word has aided right-wing populists and extremists as a concept to deprive all those people who don’t fit this ideal of their right to exist.” I had expected it to be a more scholarly approach to how the Germans dealt with their Nazi past, but this is definitely not scholarly. It is a personal, almost diary-like examination of Nora Krug’s own history and her search to understand relatives who had been part of the Nazi regime. She herself is two generations removed from World War II; her parents were born after the war and she in 1977. For me the most interesting part of the book was the description of her childhood, growing up not fully understanding why some topics could not be discussed, and some words could be used only in reference to animals, never to people. I considered for a moment before placing my pin, weighing the new word in my mind. Was my Heimat the small town in the San Francisco Bay Area where I’d grown up, where my mother still lives and to which I return regularly? Was it Philadelphia, where I attended college and learned how to think critically? Was it the University of Cambridge, where I studied abroad and which remains a sort of intellectual utopia in my mind? Or was it Washington, the city from which I had just come, where I had lived my entire postcollegiate life? Like for many in my generation, my life and communities have been spread out across multiple cities; the right choice wasn’t immediately obvious. In the event, to be contrarian, and counter the high concentration of pins across the United States, I chose Cambridge. Heimat features prominently in campaign rhetoric, including this 2018 poster from the Bavarian Christian Social Union