Heimat and Migration: Reimagining the Regional and the Global in the Twenty-First Century 9783110733150, 9783110738155

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1 Heimat – History and Present
Heimat Contested? Promises and Threats of a German Discourse Between Battlefield and Sacred Canopy
Politics, Society, Literature: Heimat Discourses and Rural Novels by Bastian Asdonk and Mariana Leky
Part 2 Rural Spaces
Beyond Brooks, Hills, and Dales: Dörte Hansen’s Reconceptualization of Heimat in Mittagsstunde (2018)
Herkunft and Heimat: Memory and Place in Uncanny Rural Spaces
Part 3 Heimat and Migration
Saša Stanišić’s Novels: Making Sense of Heimat and Migration?
Von Beet zu Beet, von Baum zu Baum: Exile, Diaspora, and Transnationality in Ronya Othmann’s Die Sommer
Migration and an Intersubjective Home in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen
Part 4 Heimat and the Other
Black German Orientational Heimat Architextures in Noah Sow’s Die Schwarze Madonna: Afrodeutscher Heimatkrimi (2019)
Heimat for One? Spaces of Community and Disability in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur and Tschick
Searching for Home in Fatih Akin’s Urban Heimatfilme
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Heimat and Migration

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

Edited by Irene Kacandes

Volume 34

Heimat and Migration Reimagining the Regional and the Global in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Len Cagle, Thomas Herold, and Gabriele Maier

ISBN 978-3-11-073815-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-073315-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-073328-0 ISSN 1861-8030 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022949823 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: AndreyPopov / iStock / Getty Images Plus Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Len Cagle, Thomas Herold, Gabriele Maier Introduction 1

Part 1 Heimat – History and Present Werner Nell Heimat Contested? Promises and Threats of a German Discourse Between 21 Battlefield and Sacred Canopy Thomas Herold Politics, Society, Literature: Heimat Discourses and Rural Novels by Bastian Asdonk and Mariana Leky 43

Part 2 Rural Spaces Gabriele Maier Beyond Brooks, Hills, and Dales: Dörte Hansen’s Reconceptualization of 71 Heimat in Mittagsstunde (2018) Maria Stehle Herkunft and Heimat: Memory and Place in Uncanny Rural Spaces

87

Part 3 Heimat and Migration Joscha Klüppel Saša Stanišić’s Novels: Making Sense of Heimat and Migration?

109

Nursan Celik Von Beet zu Beet, von Baum zu Baum: Exile, Diaspora, and Transnationality in Ronya Othmann’s Die Sommer 141

VI

Table of Contents

John Slattery Migration and an Intersubjective Home in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, 163 gegangen

Part 4 Heimat and the Other Vanessa D. Plumly Black German Orientational Heimat Architextures in Noah Sow’s Die Schwarze Madonna: Afrodeutscher Heimatkrimi (2019) 185 Seth Peabody Heimat for One? Spaces of Community and Disability in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s 203 Arbeit und Struktur and Tschick Len Cagle Searching for Home in Fatih Akin’s Urban Heimatfilme Contributors Index

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Len Cagle, Thomas Herold, Gabriele Maier

Introduction

This project originates from a panel at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) conference in Washington, D.C. in 2019 on the German Dorfroman (village novel) that Thomas Herold organized and at which Gabriele Maier and Seth Peabody presented. The discussion of texts that deal with village or rural communities at this panel inevitably circled back to the notion of Heimat, a culturally specific and politically fraught term that is sometimes rendered in English, inadequately, as “homeland.” It soon became clear that using the term Heimat to discuss German-language “village literature” is particularly problematic in light of the increasing diversification of contemporary German society and the internationalization of the German literary field in recent decades. The political climate in the aftermath of what has come to be known as the “refugee crisis” of 2015 seemed to beg for a different approach to questions of home, the nation, and belonging. In post-convention conversations, Herold and Maier decided that the notion of Heimat warranted its own panel on another occasion; together they organized a follow-up seminar at NeMLA 2020 in Boston. The seminar explicitly invited discussions of narratives of migration as a counterpart to narratives of rootedness and belonging in order to test the notion of German Heimat in the twenty-first century in a way that considered the changing realities within which Heimat discourses take place. The resulting volume addresses the parallel proliferation of discourses of Heimat and discourses of migration in contemporary German-language culture. Though some argue that the term Heimat never disappeared from public discourse (Zudeick 51), the ubiquity of the term in the last two decades is striking. Political campaigns make heavy use of it; in Germany, the ministry of the interior added Heimat to its list of responsibilities and to its name in 2018; commercial interest in anything that induces the Heimatgefühle (feelings of home) usually associated with rural life has soared. In the literary field, too, village novels frequent the bestseller lists, and critics even coined the term “neue Heimatliteratur” (new Heimat literature, März, n.p.) to describe the recent popularity of the genre. At the same time, as the “refugee crisis” reverberated throughout Germany and Europe and Germany’s reformed Zuwanderungsgesetz (immigration law) extended citizenship beyond mere blood lineage, discussions about migration became entangled with discussions about Germanness, the nation, and belonging – in short, with debates about the meaning of Heimat. Migration and Heimat are not opposites, but each gets co-opted in discussions about the Other, and each puts the Other into stark relief. The polarization of German discourses of belonging reflects the polarization of German society: many Germans do voluntary Flüchtlingsarbeit (work with refuhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-001

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gees) at the local level, while debates about Germanness and German identity continue to preoccupy the national media. On the one hand, Thilo Sarrazin’s polemical warning about the impending self-abolition of Germany vis-à-vis increasing immigration (2010) paved the way for the PEGIDA movement. Echoing the East German Monday demonstrations that preceded the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, if in a very different spirit, these “patriotic Europeans,” as they called themselves, set out to fight against the perceived “Islamization of the Occident” (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes). On the other hand, the discussions surrounding Mezut Özil’s role in the German national soccer team, his personal relationship with the Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Özil’s correct observation that the label Turkish-German is in general applied to him but there is no equivalent “Polish-German” for his friends and colleagues Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski (Özil n.p.) only confirm the fact that the twenty-first-century German national soccer team is finally as ethnically and culturally diverse as German society itself. German culture, too, has diversified considerably over the last decades: what began in the wake of the first groups of guest workers in the 1950s and 1960s as Gastarbeiterliteratur, literary texts written in German by guest workers, has long since become its own genre, which, for better or for worse, is sometimes referred to as Migrationsliteratur, or “migration literature.” This transformation took place with the active support of publishers who consider authors with Migrationshintergrund (migration background), as people in Germany with nonGerman parents or grandparents are called, to be an economic necessity for their programs. Literary prizes and competitions often recognize such authors or are specifically geared toward them, and literary migration studies have become a well-established academic field both inside and outside Germany (Vlasta 7–28). Our premise in this volume is that discourses about migration and discourses about Heimat are inextricably intertwined. Although stereotypical images of Heimat as popularized in the Heimatfilme (Heimat films) of the 1950s often include allusions to the postwar migration of ethnic German refugees happening on a large scale at around the same time, these films cannot on the whole be considered representations of a diverse society: Heimat is presented as something that must be preserved and protected against real or perceived external threats. Yet we would like to maintain that the opposite is also true: the function of these films was at least in part to define the German Heimat as a welcoming space for millions of expellees who had lost their own Heimat behind the Iron Curtain, thus putting even this extraordinarily “German”¹ notion of homeland that historically is more often

 In his chapter in this book, Werner Nell discusses the widely shared view that Heimat is an ex-

Introduction

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than not associated with exclusion in a context of societal integration. Despite the reemergence of right-wing, racist, and exclusionary uses of the term Heimat, this volume shows that there are in fact more recent German-language cultural texts that problematize and challenge a view of Heimat as a community that excludes the Other than there are promulgating it. Moreover, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the entanglement of discourses of migration and Heimat is not a symptom of polarization alone, but can also be productive: it can help us to reframe what it means to have a home, to lose one, find one, and belong to one. Both discourses of Heimat and discourses of migration negotiate questions of identity, belonging, and integration. Whether we are dealing with narratives in which the self-understanding of village inhabitants is challenged by “newcomers,” representations of migrants caught in a limbo between no longer belonging to the old and not yet belonging to the new, or the general question of integration that always challenges both long-time residents and new arrivals, both discourses deal with similar issues and with people struggling with similar challenges when it comes to defining where they belong. Questions of belonging, of course, are not only crucial to narratives that center around specific places and spaces, nor are they relevant to just two groups of people, “migrants” and “locals,” conceived as opposites. While many of the following chapters deal with rural settings and thus the space that traditionally and historically has been identified with Heimat, Heimat can and must be negotiated in urban settings as well (see John Slattery’s and Len Cagle’s chapters) or “on the road” (see Seth Peabody’s chapter). Similarly, concerns with identity, belonging, and integration are not uniquely relevant to migrant groups, but extend to majority and minority groups in general, and are thus very much in the remit of dominant cultures. Disability discourses (Peabody’s chapter) and discourses challenging heteronormativity and whiteness in Germany (Vanessa Plumly’s chapter) are therefore not to be seen as exceptions or additions to discourses about belonging, but as being at the center of the present inquiry. Our starting point, however, is the village, the space in which a long literary tradition and the public imagination have located Heimat (Nusser 86). This historical cultural construct of the village as Heimat is amplified by contemporary projections of bucolic fantasies, and of a nostalgia for a “simpler,” pre-modern lifestyle.

clusively German phenomenon. Nell argues that on the one hand, fundamental aspects of the desire to belong to a specific place are in fact universal, and that notions equivalent to Heimat can be found in multiple languages, making the perceived “Germanness” of the idea questionable. On the other hand, there are uniquely German aspects of the idea of Heimat as a keyword in creating and promoting the German nation and Volk (people).

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From popular nineteenth-century narratives² featuring tight-knit rural communities speaking their own dialects, to the 1950s Heimatfilme (and the 1970s anti-Heimat reaction to the genre in film and literature), to Edgar Reitz’s expansive smallscreen epic entitled Heimat (1984) – the village has been and remains the focal point of Heimat imaginations in German-speaking culture. The ever-increasing urbanization and the decline of German villages on the one hand, and the ever-increasing importance of rurality in the German imagination on the other (Nell and Weiland 11), are reflected in the mere presence of a large number of recent village novels that, implicitly or explicitly, place themselves in the tradition of Heimat literature. These works thus allude to a term and tradition within a spectrum of what is often considered to be 1950s kitsch at best, or “blood and soil” nationalism at worst. While we agree that this is an uncritical and reductive approach to the genre (Eigler 2012, 29), we find that all discussions about Heimat do tend to run up against these two poles and position themselves in relation to them. Current political and societal discourses present Heimat either as an exclusionary space that must be preserved or as a pre-modern utopia and wellness refuge³ – but how does contemporary Heimat literature position itself in relation to such discourses? By extension: how does it position itself in relation to discourses of inclusion, integration, and migration? Many of the texts and films examined in this volume negotiate questions of identity and integration, of self and Other. Some of the texts examined, such as Mariana Leky’s Was man von hier aus sehen kann (What You Can See from Here, 2017; Herold’s chapter) are not obviously about migration, nor or they overtly political. Yet they, too, indirectly deal with fundamental questions about what Heimat is, and how it can be conceived of as a space that can be inhabited sustainably. As it turns out, this Heimat must be something that is open to the integration of the Other. For these reasons, the contemporary village novel, which has enjoyed some attention in recent scholarship especially with regard to the notion of Heimat and in cultural geography (Eigler, Gansel, Nell and Weiland), looms large in this volume. At the same time, the village in the twenty-first century no longer resembles the village of the “original” Heimat literature of the outgoing nineteenth century. The literal disappearance of villages, the accelerating urbanization of Germany,

 These narratives include Berthold Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Black Forest Village Stories, written between 1842 and 1880), Peter Rosegger’s village stories from Styria (between 1870 and 1900), and Ludwig Thoma’s Lausbubengeschichten (Rascal Stories, 1905), to name a few popular examples.  See Herold’s chapter. Examples for the former include the Heimat-rhetoric of the political right, for instance in the 2017 campaign for German national elections. The latter can be found, for instance, in the Heimat representations of popular country and garden magazines.

Introduction

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and the increasing interconnectedness of the twenty-first-century world leads to the virtual disappearance of the very idea of remoteness. Even without considering the migration and refugee crises: the crossing of borders, internationality, and the intersectionality of characters who are at home in this global village have become the norm in literature of the twenty-first century.⁴ The “loss” of Heimat in this globalized world, then, has therefore taken on an entirely new meaning from the loss of Heimat many experienced in the 1940s and 1950s, when more than ten million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe were forced to leave their homes. Whereas the expellees’ “loss” back then was permanent, the “loss” in the twenty-first century is often temporary: guest workers return, second generation immigrants are used to living in or visiting multiple places of origin and balancing different cultures, refugees, for better or worse, sometimes return to their country of origin once it has been deemed “safe.” Furthermore, as transnational identities become more and more common, the concept of Heimat, the question of belonging, and our received understanding of how identities form must all be reconsidered – and reconsidered in the same breath, as it were, in the same context. It goes without saying that the notion of Heimat is multi-faceted, and its mere usage as a valid concept controversial, as it clearly is proximate to nationalism, racism, exclusion, and xenophobia. Born in the eighteenth century and enhanced as a far-reaching idea during the first attempts to conceive of a German nation state in the nineteenth century, the term arguably reached an infamous peak with its absorption into National Socialist “blood and soil” ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. The Nazis, as is well known, identified Heimat with “German” soil and thus incorporated the term into their mythical cycle of death and rebirth, in which “German” blood fertilizes the “German” soil that in turn produces nourishment for more “Germans.”⁵ After a wave of popularity during the 1950s and 1960s and hundreds of seemingly benign and apolitical Heimat films and the ensuing critical turn that brought out the dark side of the rural idyll, the usage of Heimat appears to have been consolidated, as Herold’s chapter points out, to denote something between a peaceful oasis of wellness and an enclave of white supremacy. It comes as no surprise, then, that a collection such as Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Your Homeland is our Nightmare, Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah, 2019), one of the most important contributions to the topic in recent years, criticizes the contemporary German Heimat not only with its title but also with regard to the visuals of its cover. The words “eure” (your) and “unser” (our) dissolve into the background  For an overview of how “transnationalism” shapes society, see for instance Steven Vertovec’s comprehensive study on the topic.  This ideology, to name but one example, drives much of the plot of the 1941 Nazi propaganda film Heimkehr (Homecoming).

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and the book title at first glance reads “Heimat ist Albtraum.” The book jacket thus paints a picture of a nightmarish Heimat that is only accessible in its idyllic configuration to those who have been here for generations and look the part. Much of the recent political discourse on Heimat consists of attempts by the political left and center to reclaim the concept of Heimat notwithstanding its problematic baggage, confirming the sentiments expressed by the contributors to Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (see Herold’s chapter). And yet: if Heimat were exclusively exclusionary, it would have lost its usefulness as an everyday concept in an ever-diversifying society, the reality of which has long since passed the point where perpetual homogeneity was even a remote option. While there are voices that wholeheartedly proclaim that the concept has indeed lost its usefulness (if it ever had any) and that it should be happily and hastily discarded in the landfill of obsolete ideas (Ebermann), the other “truth” is that Heimat continues to be widely used in everyday language and, more importantly for our project, in contemporary literature and film – where it occurs particularly frequently in connection with migration. Thinking about Heimat, then, means not just discussing and criticizing its nationalistic history and its more or less veiled presence in (white) nationalistic discourse. It also means examining where individual iterations of the concept stand vis-à-vis this discourse, and what it means to those who are new to the broader Heimat discourse. Further still, considering Heimat in the twenty-first century requires looking beyond what Heimat is and what it means to individuals: it means considering what Heimat can be and maybe even what Heimat should be or must be in order to make not just the concept itself but contemporary society as a whole sustainable. The latter point is one Werner Nell makes in the opening chapter of this volume on the history and sociology of Heimat. Nell describes Heimat as being on the spectrum between canopy and battlefield and points to four central losses that drive the notion of Heimat throughout its roughly 200-year history. While he does not provide an ultimate definition of Heimat, he does articulate what Heimat needs to be in order to adapt to contemporary society and its ever-increasing diversity: if Heimat is to be or to remain a useful concept, it must be understood as an inclusive idea that embraces newcomers. Along similar lines, Thomas Herold in Chapter Two analyzes the specifically political Heimat discourse that emphasizes an us-against-them rhetoric on the right and attempts by the left to reclaim the term. At the same time, these political discussions co-exist with a general societal discourse in which Heimat appears to be apolitical and benign and, for instance, allows for the in-house organic brand of the supermarket chain Lidl to be called “Ein gutes Stück Heimat” (A good piece of Heimat). In this and other contexts, Heimat often appears in connection with back-to-nature sentiments and wellness. The many ways in which the term Heimat is used, appropriated, and instrumentalized

Introduction

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is the reason this volume begins with two introductory chapters that set out to evaluate the various iterations of Heimat in history and society: Heimat is complicated, and its meaning depends on its context. A sovereign conception of Heimat that could be applied in all situations and circumstances does not exist – a fact underlined by the plurality of Heimats mentioned in the literature (Confino). Each of the chapters in this volume, then, appropriately approaches and understands and discusses Heimat in its own way, rather than referring to a common definition or universal notion. This introduction consequently refrains from attempting to provide any such definition. The following chapters, however, do have two things in common: First, as mentioned above, they share the premise that most German speakers use the term Heimat unironically, without hesitation, and without second-guessing its exact meaning. Despite its loaded history, the term Heimat has a place in everyday language. Second, each chapter is driven by a curiosity about the meaning of Heimat in the context of migration, as well as by questions that address the extent to which Heimat is a useful concept; whether Heimat needs to be reimagined; and whether there is more to Heimat than the aforementioned associations of pre-modern space and exclusionary nationalism. Or to put it differently, authors in this volume not only examine what Heimat means in specific contexts, but also the circumstances under which Heimat “works,” i. e., the conditions under which the notion of Heimat is able to provide the refuge and self-identity that it promises. Scholarship on the notion of Heimat has proliferated in parallel with (and in response to) broader public debates on the topic over the past thirty years. Celia Applegate’s book A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat set the tone in 1990. Her study emphasizes the coexistence of the local and the national in the Heimat idea in Germany during the period of nation-building in the late nineteenth century. Alon Confino (1993) similarly examines a young nation that must integrate diverse and at times hostile groups and in this context uses Halbwachs’s notion of “collective memory” to understand Heimat. Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman (1993) choose the same starting point but consider Heimat spanning a whole century, including the question as to what Heimat means for German-Turkish writers. Peter Blickle in his all-encompassing study Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland focuses on stable aspects of Heimat through the centuries (2002). Johannes von Moltke (2005), in contrast, emphasizes dynamic models and reevaluates the often-ridiculed Heimatfilm genre. Friederike Eigler (2012; 2014) considers Heimat in the wake of the “Spatial Turn” and suggests a productive collaboration between Heimat studies and cultural geography. The aforementioned essay collection Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum underscores the essentially conservative, reactionary, and exclusive nature of Heimat, calling the normalization of the word in the public and political sphere into question and il-

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lustrating in its individual contributions the consequences of such normalization for Germans perceived as “Other.” Other recent books that deal with the politics and conflicts surrounding Heimat in present discourse(s) include Peter Zudeick’s Heimat. Volk. Vaterland (Heimat. People. Fatherland, 2018) and Thomas Ebermann’s Linke Heimatliebe (Leftist Love of Heimat, 2019). Most recently to assemblage of this volume, Susanne Scharnowski examines the history of the term Heimat since the 1700s and unpacks various debates and ideological appropriations in different periods in her comprehensive study Heimat. Geschichte eines Missverständnisses (Heimat. History of a Misunderstanding, 2019). While the present volume does not attempt to provide a definitive account of what Heimat means, it creates space for a number of recent German-language texts on the subject to be brought into dialogue with one another. Our ultimate goal is to look at a cross section of what scholars and writers think Heimat is and can be as the first quarter of the twenty-first century draws to a close, and as the ongoing (and newly exacerbated) refugee crisis in Germany adds new urgency to the topics of Heimat and migration. As it repeatedly arises in several of the present essay collection’s contributions, the most pressing question in the study of “migration literature” is that of definition and identification. On the one hand, the corpus of “migration literature” consists almost exclusively of works by authors who have first-hand experience of migration. On the other hand, if the Gastarbeiterliteratur of the 1980s was clearly defined by reference to authors’ countries of origin and their shared experience, such clarity is lacking in the twenty-first century with the growing awareness of potential misclassifications when a group of diverse authors with different experiences are lumped together under a label that many explicitly reject (Maffli 98). Scholarship that considers literature by authors with a Migrationshintergrund, or migration background, has long struggled – and sometimes failed – to avoid the twin pitfalls of generalization and reduction. The academic study and recognition of the literary achievements of non-native German authors began in the 1980s with the work of Harald Weinrich and Irmgard Ackermann.⁶ The emphasis was on multilingualism and the terms Ausländerliteratur (literature of foreigners) and Gastarbeiterliteratur (guest worker literature) became known to a wider public (Vlasta 8). In 1985, Harald Weinrich established the Adalbert von Chamisso Prize funded by the Robert Bosch foundation. Until it was discontinued in 2017, the prize – a total of 15,000 euros – was awarded an-

 Irmgard Ackermann, editor. In zwei Sprachen Leben. Berichte, Erzählungen, Gedichte. Piper, 1983; Irmgard Ackermann and Harald Weinrich. Eine nicht nur deutsche Literatur. Zur Bestimmung der Ausländerliteratur. Piper, 1986.

Introduction

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nually to an author whose mother tongue was not German.⁷ Other publications by Horst Hamm, Carmine Chiellino, and Sigrid Weigel as well as a special issue of New German Critique and a conference on “MigrantInnenliteratur” in Sheffield in 1994 underscored the fact that this genre is defined by reference to authors’ identity.⁸ A shift took place around the turn of the century. Anthologies of works by “migrant” writers no longer presented literature written by “talented guest workers” but were now “presented as containing modern and trendy contemporary German literature” (Vlasta 13–14). This shift in the perception of authors with a migration background, formerly perceived as exotic, extraordinary Others but now seen as trendsetters of the German literary scene, led to the establishment of Migrationsliteratur as a legitimate literary category. This recategorization did not, however, overcome labeling by language or country of origin, which, as we shall discuss shortly, is perhaps indicative of the continued relevance of such shared characteristics in the present context. Over the last 20 years, the scholarly discourse began to reconsider labels, and terms such as Gastarbeiterliteratur, Migrantenliteratur (migrant literature), or Ausländerliteratur were increasingly replaced by designations such as “transcultural” or “cosmopolitan Germanophony.”⁹ A number of publications since 2000 avoid reference to identity categories altogether and choose to use “migration literature” (Vlasta) or “literature of migration” (Adelson). They define the “genre” merely by the topic of the texts without regard to the author’s experience or country of origin (see also Maffli 104), which allows for comparative approaches and “can comprise authors with diverse backgrounds and from different generations” (Vlasta 48). That said, while scholarship is increasingly circumspect in its recourse

 For more background on the Chamisso Prize and its problematic history of what has been criticized as “pigeonholing authors of a non-German background” (Matthes/Osborne/Krylova 10), as well as criticism that “Chamisso authors” merely added “exotic flavor” to an otherwise “homogenous German culture” (ibid.), see the introduction (p. 10) in the 2021 volume Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today, edited by Frauke Matthes and others. Myrto Aspioti’s and Lizzie Stewart’s essays in the same volume offer additional critical insight into the (cultural) politics of literature, film, and theater surrounding artists with a “background of migration.”  See Horst Hamm. Fremdgegangen – freigeschrieben. Einführung in die deutschsprachige Gastarbeiterliteratur. Königshausen & Neumann, 1988; Carmine Chiellino. Am Ufer der Fremde. Literatur und Arbeitsmigration (1870–1991). Metzler, 1995; Sigrid Weigel. “Literatur der Fremde – Literatur in der Fremde.” Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart: Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968, edited by Rolf Grimminger, Carl Hanser, 1992, 182–229.  See Helmut Schmitz, editor. Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration. Rodopi, 2009 and Christine Meyer, editor. Kosmopolitische ‘Germanophonie’. Postnationale Perspektiven in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Königshausen & Neumann, 2012.

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to identity categories, the author’s identity still plays an important role in the journalistic realm, especially in Feuilleton sections and in book reviews (Maffli 98). Moreover, the fact that a work and its author are still (or again) often regarded as being one and the same is clearly demonstrated by the 2019 Bachmann Prize, when the Jury refused to consider Ronya Othmann’s “Vierundsiebzig” (Seventyfour) as a literary text because of the alleged identity of the text’s first-person narrator as the author herself (see Celik’s chapter in this volume). In an effort to underline the point of “normalization” of “migration literature” as an integral part of the German literary landscape, Matthias Aumüller and Weertje Willms state in the introduction to their recent collection of essays Migration und Gegenwartsliteratur (Migration and Contemporary Literature) that it has become a “literary and sociological fact that a certain part of the population, one which in itself is very diverse but which is defined on the basis of a shared migration background, has gained a foothold in literary life” (Aumüller and Willms viii).¹⁰ Interestingly, even when speaking or writing about normalization, the term “migration background” still serves as determinant, as there is another trend that goes hand in hand with the aforementioned increasing disregard of the author’s biography: the regional sub-categorization of “migration literature,” in which authorial identity, experience, and ethnic and cultural background very much play a role. The “Turkish Turn” (Adelson) was followed by an emphasis on Eastern Europe (Haines), as authors with a Slavic-language background recently outnumber authors with Turkish-language background in Germany (Aumüller and Willms xi). The proliferation of essay collections that concentrate on regional sub-groups (see Adelson; Aumüller and Willms) perpetuates the foregrounding of authors’ individual backgrounds and experiences. In sum, there exist at present three somewhat contradictory developments: the push to move beyond “migrant” as an identity; the continued interest in non-native authors’ biographies; and the focus on the specificity of non-native authors’ experiences of migration that leads to subcategorizations. We do not attempt to resolve these contradictions, but in order to acknowledge the uncertainty that surrounds all labeling in the realm of the literature of migration, we will, if the term is necessary at all, add quotation marks to “migration literature.” The question as to the particular experience of a given author arises in specific contexts and will be discussed accordingly in individual chapters, as this is an ongoing discussion that can be justifiably revisited.¹¹ We argue that acknowledging the specificity

 Our translation. All following translations are our translations if not indicated otherwise.  For a detailed discussion of the history and the stakes of the notion of Migrationsliteratur see Matthias Aumüller. “Migration und Literatur. Überlegungen zum motiv- und gattungsbildenden Po-

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of authors’ identities and experiences, as the contributions to this volume do, is not incompatible with a rigorous approach to literary works, but rather essential to it. In this we agree with Hans Giessen and Christian Link, who in doing so place themselves within a wider trend in German Studies, a field which in their view has caught up with the “transnational reality of their subject areas” (Giessen and Link 7). Focusing on a given author’s history of migration can be a means of acknowledging difference and investing it with value, rather than a means of othering. A migration background, after all, has long ceased to be regarded as “Other”; as Giessen and Link show, authors with a migration background have been regular participants in German literary life for decades if not centuries (Giessen and Link 8).¹² The choice of texts discussed in this volume represents a cross-section of twenty-first-century texts on Heimat and migration written in German. Our thematic arc begins with an examination of Heimat in history and at present and continues with an increasing emphasis on the relationship between Heimat and migration, in order to arrive at a point where the discussion can be expanded to the related discourses of disability and queerness. The fact that some contributors engage with the same texts and authors speaks to their relevance to German literary and public discourses. Dörte Hansen’s novels reexamine rural spaces and Heimat ideas throughout the twentieth century. Her multi-generational narratives enrich the tropes of traditional Heimat literature with historical depth and thus stake out the possibilities of the village novel in the twenty-first century. By imbuing the rural spaces in her fiction with twentieth-century histories of displacement, Hansen suggests that tensions related to belonging and identity have been present even in the most idyllic rural settings for a very long time. Of similar significance for this volume is Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft (2019; Where You Come From, 2021). Stanišić’s reception has exemplified many of the discussions surrounding “migration literature,” although the author clearly positions himself against the labeling of texts

tenzial des Migrationsbegriffs als Bestandteil des Kompositums ‘Migrationsliteratur’.” Migration und Gegenwartsliteratur. Der Beitrag von Autorinnen und Autoren osteuropäischer Herkunft zur literarischen Kultur im deutschsprachigen Raum, edited by Matthias Aumüller and Weertje Willms, Wilhelm Fink, 2020, pp. 2–23.  In the introduction to their recently published volume Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today, Frauke Matthes and her fellow editors even argue that the emergence and increasing volume of “artists and writers from diverse backgrounds” question the “relevance and legitimacy of a certain type of public figure (historically white, male) in today’s Germany” (Matthes/Osborne/ Krylova 4). The essays in their book focus on the politics of culture with specific attention to current society in the wake of the “refugee crisis” of 2015. This focus differs from the one presented in the current volume, but there is a thematic overlap especially with regard to “migration literature” that renders Matthes et al. informative complementary reading to our own contributions.

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and authors with reference to migration. Moreover, his text brings home the political dimension of Heimat discussions, in which “Herkunft” (origin, provenance, or background) is often used to label and exclude newcomers. That said, Stanišić’s project is a terminological one; he sets out to disentangle the notions of Heimat and Herkunft, while adroitly alluding to the genre of Heimat literature. A third major contemporary artist whose work dovetails considerations of Heimat and migration is Fatih Akin, who in his films examines characters who move between different worlds, both culturally and geographically, while searching for a meaningful understanding of their origins and belonging within local communities – communities that are no longer located in a rural setting, but in the metropolis, within which the Kiez (neighborhood) becomes the protagonists’ Heimat. We understand that such discourses are neither distinct nor limited to migration and Heimat. Minorities, in conjunction with the question of belonging, are labeled not just according to their migration status, but also by their skin color, the abilities of their bodies, or their sexual preferences and identities. When some of the chapters in this book discuss disability, race, or queerness, we do not necessarily consider these discourses on various kinds of intersectionality as complementary to questions of migration and Heimat, but rather as essential to them. It is for this reason that we solicited, for instance, an essay on Noah Sow’s Die schwarze Madonna: Ein afrodeutscher Heimatkrimi (Black Madonna: An Afro-German Heimat Detective Story, 2019). The books we could not incorporate are many, and we explicitly do not claim to present an exhaustive survey. We understand our contribution to the discourse as being just that: a contribution that, while offering some answers, understands itself primarily as an invitation to more work on more texts. We do hope, however, to offer insights that will add nuance to existing perceptions of Heimat and point the way towards possible new configurations of the notion. The individual chapters are organized into four sections, each with its own distinct emphasis. The first part, Heimat – History and Present, is dedicated to a historical evaluation of the notion of Heimat and to an examination of its potential in contemporary discourse. The two essays in this section stake out the field within which Heimat discussions occur and against which texts that deal with Heimat must be considered. As the chapters examine what Heimat is, what Heimat can be, and suggest what it should be, they set the stage for a number of case studies. Werner Nell’s aforementioned analysis of Heimat between “sacred canopy and battlefield” provides a historical overview of competing notions of Heimat up to the present. His chapter arrives at what could be called a twenty-first century status quo where two Heimat perceptions coexist: on one hand, a diverse society has come to terms with a plurality of Heimats as a new “normal,” while on the other hand, voices of exasperation vis-à-vis still existing nationalistic and exclu-

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sionary tendencies remain prominent. The latter lead to calls for “disintegration” and an emphasis on persistent cultural divisions as exemplified by essay collections such as Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum. Citing Hermann Bausinger, Nell ultimately arrives at what he calls a “starting point” for contemporary Heimat discussions, while leaving historical and sociological analyses behind. Instead, he switches to the expression of societal necessity or desire, by proposing an idea of Heimat that includes migrants and offers a Heimat for all rather than insisting on tradition and exclusion. Thomas Herold’s essay concentrates on current Heimat discourses in politics but also society at large. Heimat discourses overlap with the discourse of personal well-being, the desire for natural retreats in response to burn-out and anxiety, and with considerations of sustainability. This chapter contrasts the wellness industry’s “repackaging” of Heimat with the conception of Heimat articulated in recent village novels, such as Bastian Asdonk’s Mitten im Land (In the Middle of the Country, 2016), which mirrors the dichotomy of idyllic and exclusionary discourses, and Mariana Leky’s Was man von hier aus sehen kann. Herold argues that the concept of Heimat in this novel circumvents the fallacy of current political discourses and offers a new and positive Heimat model that is able to adapt and integrate rather than exclude the Other. The second part of the volume is dedicated to the analyses of Rural Spaces in contemporary novels. The contributions to this part interrogate the space of Heimat, a space which, after all, is occupied by members of a diverse society. This part is most explicitly dedicated to the question of the development of Heimat literature in the contemporary village novel. Gabriele Maier discusses Dörte Hansen’s novel Mittagsstunde (Midday Hour, 2018), a village novel that successfully avoids clichéd Heimat images. Maier draws on Eigler’s ideas about Heimat to argue that Hansen presents a dynamic Heimat model that manages to transform a reactionary notion into a meaningful twenty-first-century concept and thereby also transforms the traditional village novel into a model of contemporary Heimat literature. Maria Stehle examines three texts of different genres that deal with rural spaces, Heimat, and the concept of Herkunft (origins): Saša Stanišić’s memoir Herkunft, Dörte Hansen’s novel Altes Land (2015; This House is Mine, 2016), and Ilja Trojanow’s essay collection Nach der Flucht (After the Escape, 2017). Stehle argues that these texts render rural spaces, the notion of origins, and the memory thereof equally uncanny, even haunted, and thus defy appropriation as “inclusive” or “multicultural” models of Heimat. They do, however, offer new ways of understanding place and conceiving of a community that is not built on exclusion. This anthology’s third part, Heimat and Migration, continues the examination of rural spaces, but also expands the focus to include the city and spaces beyond the borders of Germany. The authors in this section examine texts that explicitly thematize migration. Joscha Klüppel takes another look at Saša Stanišić, not to con-

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trast Herkunft with his other texts, but instead to consider Stanišić’s work as a whole and find an intersection between Heimat and migration. A critical examination of Stanišić’s biography and texts, however, leads Klüppel to question the notion of “migration literature” altogether. While in Herkunft Stanišić writes about his flight from Bosnia and his experience as a refugee in Germany, he also wrote what constitutes a village novel with Vor dem Fest (2014; Before the Feast, 2016). Klüppel proposes that an author’s biography be dropped completely in considerations of genre and suggests speaking about “narratives of migration.” Furthermore, in exploring topoi that span all of Stanišić’s work, Klüppel engages with the author’s individualized, plural conception of Heimat via a discussion of the role of death and trauma in the novels. Nursan Celik analyzes Ronya Othmann’s Die Sommer (The Summers, 2020), a novel that bridges the distance between the outskirts of Munich and a small village in northern Syria close to the Turkish border, where the protagonist used to spend summers at her grandmother’s before war and the Yazidi genocide committed by the Islamic State tear her world apart. Celik argues that the term “migration” does not fit with the storyline and uses “exile,” “diaspora,” and “transnationality” instead, as different generations in the novel employ different coping mechanisms in their quests for home and belonging in the context of war and loss. John Slattery examines Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015; Go, Went, Gone, 2017), arguably the best-known recent German novel written in response to the “refugee crisis.” The text delves into the relationships a retired Berlin professor builds with refugees as well as the German immigration and asylum bureaucracy. The novel, Slattery argues, challenges traditional Heimat images and Eurocentrism, and instead promotes a new model of belonging “rooted in care for human beings.” The fourth part, Heimat and the Other, consists of essays that consider the notion of Heimat from the perspective of the Other that has traditionally been excluded from the community implied by Heimat. The three chapters challenge traditional perceptions of Heimat (white, hetero-normative, able-bodied, rural) and thus further expand the playing field within which contemporary Heimat discussions take place while also, as has been argued in this introduction and some of the other chapters, freeing Heimat from its exclusionary implications. Vanessa D. Plumly discusses Noah Sow’s novel Die Schwarze Madonna: Afrodeutscher Heimatkrimi, a text that in its subtitle positions itself within two particular traditions, but simultaneously claims exceptional status and thus points to the one-sidedness of this tradition. The novel challenges not just the predominant whiteness of Heimat as it has been traditionally perceived, but also its Eurocentric, Christian, and heteronormative foundations. Plumly argues that the novel goes beyond binary oppositions and instead presents Heimat as evolving in “intersecting and shifting relations,” “queering” a Heimat that has implicitly been intent on keeping Black, Muslim, and queer

Introduction

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people “out.” Seth Peabody’s essay on Wolfgang Herrndorf ’s texts Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure, 2013) and Tschick (2010; Why We Took the Car, 2014) examines the Heimat notion from the perspective of disability studies. Heimat, Peabody argues, “assumes an intact and able-bodied subject.” Even recent studies that present Heimat as a notion that goes beyond a static exclusionary model and emphasize dynamism and complexity often only refer to a Heimat that is “inhabited by essentialized and static individuals.” Herrndorf ’s texts, on the other hand, by adding disability, age, and illness to the mix – Arbeit und Struktur is Herrndorf ’s blog on his travels during the last two years of his life while he fought and ultimately succumbed to a brain tumor – negotiate Heimat “within the bounds of a physically broken, beaten, or excluded self.” In the anthology’s last chapter, Len Cagle examines Fatih Akin’s “Urban Heimatfilme,” arguing that these films harken back to the Heimatfilm genre of the 1950s, giving it an urban overhaul and a Migrationshintergrund. In this overhaul, the films’ settings – “Bavaria” and the “Hamburger Kiez,” respectively – are equally “exotic.” More importantly, the concept of Heimat for the characters of Akin’s films has to do with “homecoming,” and this homecoming can take place in a cluttered Hamburg apartment or a cozy German bookstore in Istanbul where a cup of tea is offered to customers. Heimat here is not something one is born into, nor is it determined by any particular national or cultural identity. Rather, Heimat is “what one chooses and is welcomed into, indeed, what one chooses to welcome others into.” This idea can serve as a fitting ending, if not conclusion, to our joint investigation of Heimat and migration.

Works Cited Ackermann, Irmgard, editor. In zwei Sprachen Leben. Berichte, Erzählungen, Gedichte. dtv, 1983. Ackermann, Irmgard, and Harald Weinrich, editors. Eine nicht nur deutsche Literatur. Zur Bestimmung der Ausländerliteratur. Piper, 1986. Adelson, Leslie A. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. Palgrave McMillan, 2005. Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. U of California P, 1990. Aspioti, Myrto. “Geography, Identity, and Politics in Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest (2014).” Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today, edited by Frauke Matthes, Dora Osborne, Katya Krylova, and Myrto Aspioti, Edinburgh German Yearbook, vol. 14. Camden House, 2021, pp. 97–121. Aumüller, Matthias. “Migration und Literatur. Überlegungen zum motiv- und gattungsbildenden Potenzial des Migrationsbegriffs als Bestandteil des Kompositums ‘Migrationsliteratur’.” Migration und Gegenwartsliteratur. Der Beitrag von Autorinnen und Autoren osteuropäischer Herkunft zur literarischen Kultur im deutschsprachigen Raum, edited by Matthias Aumüller and Weertje Willms, Wilhelm Fink, 2020, pp. 2–23.

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Aumüller, Matthias, and Weertje Willms. “Einführung.” Migration und Gegenwartsliteratur. Der Beitrag von Autorinnen und Autoren osteuropäischer Herkunft zur literarischen Kultur im deutschsprachigen Raum, edited by Matthias Aumüller and Weertje Willms, Wilhelm Fink, 2020, pp. vii–xx. Aydemir, Fatma, and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, editors. Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum. Ullstein, 2019. Blickle, Peter. Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland. Camden House, 2002. Boa, Elizabeth, and Rachel Palfreyman. Heimat – A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990. Oxford UP, 2000. Chiellino, Carmine. Am Ufer der Fremde. Literatur und Arbeitsmigration (1870–1991). Metzler, 1995. Confino, Alon. “The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory and the German Empire, 1871–1918.” History and Memory, vol. 5, no. 1, 1993, pp. 42–86. Ebermann, Thomas. Linke Heimatliebe. Eine Entwurzelung. Konkret, 2019. Eigler, Friederike. “Critical Approaches to ‘Heimat’ and the ‘Spatial Turn’.” New German Critique, no. 115, 2012, pp. 27–48. Eigler, Friederike. Heimat, Space, Narrative: Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion. Camden House, 2014. Gansel, Carsten. “Von romantischen Landschaften, sozialistischen Dörfern und neuen Dorfromanen: Die Inszenierung des Dörflichen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur zwischen Vormoderne und Spätmoderne.” Imaginäre Dörfer. Zur Wiederkehr des Dörflichen in Literatur, Film und Lebenswelt, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, Transcript, 2014, pp. 197–223. Giessen, Hans W., and Christian Link. “Zur Relevanz von Kulturkonzepten.” Migration in Deutschland und Europa im Spiegel der Literatur. Interkulturalität – Multikulturalität – Transkulturalität, edited by Hans W. Giessen and Christian Link, Frank & Timme, 2017, pp. 7–10. Haines, Brigid. “German-language writing from eastern and central Europe.” Contemporary German Fiction. Writing in the Berlin Republic, edited by Stuart Taberner, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 215– 229. Hamm, Horst. Fremdgegangen – freigeschrieben. Einführung in die deutschsprachige Gastarbeiterliteratur. Königshausen & Neumann, 1988. Maffli, Stéphane. “Bemerkungen zum Begriff der Migrationsliteratur am Beispiel von Melinda Nadj Abonjis Roman Tauben fliegen auf.” Migration in Deutschland und Europa im Spiegel der Literatur. Interkulturalität – Multikulturalität – Transkulturalität, edited by Hans W. Giessen and Christian Link, Frank & Timme, 2017, pp. 97–110. März, Ursula. “Auf einmal Heimat. Alle loben immerzu die weltläufige, deutsche Migrantenliteratur. Dabei gibt es gerade einen unübersehbaren Boom des Dorfromans.” Die Zeit, 25 October 2017, www.zeit.de/2017/44/heimatromane-dorf-renaissance-literatur. Accessed 28 July 2021. Matthes, Frauke, Dora Osborne, and Katya Krylova. “Introduction: Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today.” Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today, edited by Frauke Matthes, Dora Osborne, Katya Krylova, and Myrto Aspioti, Edinburgh German Yearbook, vol. 14. Camden House, 2021, pp. 1–14. Meyer, Christine, editor. Kosmopolitische ‘Germanophonie’. Postnationale Perspektiven in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. Nell, Werner, and Marc Weiland. “Vorwort.” Imaginäre Dörfer. Zur Wiederkehr des Dörflichen in Literatur, Film und Lebenswelt, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, Transcript, 2014, p. 11. Nusser, Peter. Trivialliteratur. Metzler, 1991. Özil, Mesut. “Meeting President Erdogan.” Twitter, 22 July 2018, twitter.com/mesutozil1088/status/1020984884431638528?lang=en. Accessed 7 July 2021.

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Sarrazin, Thilo. Deutschland schafft sich ab. Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010. Schmitz, Helmut, editor. Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration. Rodopi, 2009. Stewart, Lizzie. “The Akın Effect: Fatih Akın’s Cultural-Symbolic Capital and the Postmigrant Theater.” Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today, edited by Frauke Matthes, Dora Osborne, Katya Krylova, and Myrto Aspioti, Edinburgh German Yearbook, vol. 14. Camden House, 2021, pp. 161–182. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. Routledge, 2009. Vlasta, Sandra. Contemporary Migration Literature in German and English: A Comparative Study. Brill, 2016. Von Moltke, Johannes. No Place like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema. U of California P, 2005. Weigel, Sigrid. “Literatur der Fremde – Literatur in der Fremde.” Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968, edited by Klaus Briegleb and Sigrid Weigel (= Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Vol. 12. Edited by Rolf Grimminger), Carl Hanser, 1992, pp. 182–229. Zudeick, Peter. Heimat. Volk. Vaterland. Eine Kampfansage an Rechts. Westend, 2018.

Part 1 Heimat – History and Present

Werner Nell

Heimat Contested? Promises and Threats of a German Discourse Between Battlefield and Sacred Canopy Looking back on more than seventy-five years of German history since 1945, I observe that Heimat has never been far from German discourse, literature, everyday discussions, or experience.¹ On the contrary, it has been all the more present as its opposite: Heimatlosigkeit (the loss of Heimat)² was one of the most prominent topics in West Germany (at least) throughout the 1950s and even into the 1960s, while, for just as long and just as intensely, the question of the loss of Germany’s Eastern provinces and the fate of the expelled German populations from those territories dominated public discussions and private experiences alike (Kossert 139–192).³ But naturally, there have been cycles and changes in public discourse, too – in relation to and resulting from the developments and changes that took place in the milieus and attitudes of German society after World War II (Krockow 1990, 265–354; Schildt). These changes also reflected the “Westernization” (Doering-Manteuffel) of the Federal Republic after 1945⁴ and were part of Germany’s ongoing integration into the European community. In this essay, I would like to begin by providing an overview of the history of Heimat discourses within the context of Germans’ sociocultural experiences of facing industrialization and modernity. I will then review four basic assumptions that  It appears to be impossible to sum up this discussion and its development over the years, which underlines the appeal and suggestiveness of the topic and its uses; for some first steps and further reading, see Weigand; Blickle; Gebhard et al.; Scharnowski; Schmid 2021; Oesterhelt. For older but still useful bibliographies, see Klein; Steiner and Brecht.  On the mirroring of Heimat in present-day experiences of precarity/Heimatlosigkeit (homelessness) discourse and media, see Kathöfer and Weber.  Between 1949 and 1969, the German Federal Republic had its own Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte (Federal Ministry of Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims), which not only worked on remembering the suffering of “German” victims, but also provided extensive support to preserve the memory of “lost Heimats.” These people were generally addressed as Heimatvertriebene (those expelled from their Heimat). For references to the Eastern European “lost Heimats” in film and contemporary television, see Köppen. When the Federal Ministry of the Interior extended its agenda in 2017 by assuming responsibility for Heimat, conservative and reactionary voices tried to catch up.  This development was based on, enforced, and carried out by generational change too; see Gilcher-Holtey; Frei. For parallels and differences with regard to East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), see Israel; Wolle. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-002

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appear to be relevant to German discourses on Heimat, past and present. They concern the question of whether Heimat is a universal experience or a typically German one, and the place of Heimat between Gesellschaft (society) and Gemeinschaft (community). Next, I will propose the concept and its discourse as a field in which to negotiate and reflect upon the experiences and challenges of an unsettled modernity. In doing so, I will identify and explain four gaps or experiences of loss that are characteristic of ongoing but also arduous processes of modernization and claims about the treatment and discussion of, and the longing for, places and legitimacy, including those that go by the name of Heimat. Finally, I will consider the possibilities, opportunities, and limitations of literature, other media, and cultural discourses when it comes to addressing a desire for belonging within a changing society. I will also mention some of the voices of “new” German authors with regard to the latter.

I I start with the German experience of industrialization and modernization processes after 1800 when discourse on and imaginings of Heimat became a platform for dealing with the challenges of uncertainty and the presumed shattering of stable conditions and orientations, and for the desire to find a shelter from “cold modernity.” The development of the current notion of the term is marked by two contrary but simultaneous movements: the “shattering of the horizon” and the increasing significance of local traditions and folklore, of Heimat and Heimatlichkeit (a sense of belonging to the home or feeling like home) (Bausinger 1961, 86– 87).⁵ There have been many challenges and shocks in German history since the nineteenth century, and unsettledness has been one of the major experiences and impulses in Germany (see Bade). And it clearly still is – in the period since 1945, more as something imagined and feared than as a real experience. Nevertheless, this unsettledness is still there, at least as a background murmur or a kind of shadow in the German mentality (see Biess) that still survives today.⁶ In this context, the longing for belonging has also become a major force in Germany’s popular range of emotions, on the one hand, as a means of organizing everyday life and creating its self-image. On the other hand, the longing for belonging marks out a

 Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own.  For the importance of seeing the discourse more as a reaction to modernization processes than in the context of Romantic philosophical or cultural assumptions, see Scharnowski 34–55.

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battlefield in the struggle against the shattering of real or imagined certainties. But references to Heimat may also be used as a reservoir to address and mobilize people for political and ideological purposes. The first discourses on Heimat appeared around 1800, influenced by German Romanticism and in response to events such as the defeat of the “Old Empire” in 1806 by the Napoleonic forces and the French revolutionary armies, the restoration period (“The Holy Alliance”), the failure of liberalism during the unsuccessful revolution of 1848/1849, and the forced founding of the “Second Reich,” which provided a sense of not only military pride but also of a foundation “built on sand” (Krockow 1989, 34–87). These reinforced the instability of German self-confidence on the one hand and Germans’ increasing need for belonging (Heimat) on the other (Oesterhelt 84–110). As people like Alexander Kluge have observed (243– 244), German Heimat discourses have historically been shaped by uncertainty and the impact of defending, if not fighting for, the establishment of a relationship between desire and fear, between the intense need for belonging and a tendency toward violence (see Nell 2019) in the interest of restoring a supposed sense of certainty. This process had already begun and was sustained throughout the nineteenth century, before being dramatically reinforced in the twentieth century by the experiences of the wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945. These developments provided a powerful and undeniable need that – in reaction to the severe economic crisis of 1928/1929 as well – was not only exploited by Nazi terrorism but also nurtured the appeal of a Nazi-defined Volksgemeinschaft (national community) as the genuine keeper and upholder of a pure and clean society. Imagined as Heimat, references to Gemeinschaft (and Volksgemeinschaft) are still found in contemporary German discourse and cultural attitudes – at least when it comes to the German national soccer team. Belonging, the need for Heimat, and grief for its loss appeared more necessary, popular, and seductive in the aftermath of 1945 (see Schmid 206–212), revealing the extent to which the nation and society of the time had been destroyed or at least destabilized; this is reflected in the popular imagination, in family narratives, and television series even today (see Bundeszentrale).

II After 1945 Heimat continued to be accompanied by two aspects of modernization: the experience of increasing liberty on the one hand and of being confronted with mobility and the partial loss of connections and places on the other. While Heimat, beginning with the Heimatbewegung (Heimat movement) in the final decades of the nineteenth century (see Hüppauf ), had become and was also used as a

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major ideological instrument to mobilize nationalist, then National Socialist attitudes and engagement, it almost appeared to have been totally delegitimized by 1945. The more that newer challenges, that is, those presented by mobility and historical experiences of the loss of place and orientation, had to be considered in this context, the more Heimat appeared ambivalent, thus reflecting history as well as ongoing and widely spreading processes of increasing modernization. Those who missed the places they had lost but also their – widely imagined – sense of orientation in the past believed Heimat was still valuable and contested, while a smaller group (of mostly intellectuals) pointed out how Nazi propaganda had abused the term ideologically and chose to neglect or redefine it. Therefore, as mentioned above, Heimat – in the sense of referring to loss and generally bypassing critical reflection – became one of the most popular concepts of the 1950s and early 1960s, although the concept and its connotations appeared to have been thoroughly corrupted by their use in Nazi propaganda and terminology.⁷ At that point, a sort of rupture took place as West Germany integrated into Western Europe, and transatlantic connections opened it up to aspects of internationality and a more positive evaluation of modernity (see Maase).⁸ But these were by no means one-way developments. Initially, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the concept of Heimat was generally replaced by “region” and a more sociological approach to peoples’ everyday lives and surroundings, including popular culture (see Warneken). But when regionalism reappeared all over Europe in the 1970s, empowering local actors and communities,⁹ not least in reaction to the generalization and formalization of lifeworlds in the context of increasing modernity, there was a slight return of focus to the surrounding world (Nahwelt) of living conditions, influenced and encouraged by environmental activities and calls for participation at the local level (see Lipp 1986; 1997). Changes in the media also took place when the traditional Heimatfilm, a highlight of the 1950s, was replaced by new cinematic approaches. Within these contexts, Edgar Reitz’s film tetralogy Heimat (1984–2012) became a kind of potter’s wheel in the 1980s, introducing and filling the concept with imaginings and narratives

 Cf. Heinrich Böll: “Für mich ist meine Heimat, die politische Heimat Deutschland, 1933 bis 1945 zerstört worden” (20) (For me personally, my home, my political home of Germany, was destroyed between 1933 and 1945).  For East Germany / the German Democratic Republic, the older Heimat context was strongly neglected as it was seen as a part of fascist ideology. On a more down-to-earth level, it was treated as popular or people’s culture in the Marxist understanding of appreciating the lifestyles and traditions of the lower (working men and peasant) classes; see “Heimat” 1989.  On the concept’s oscillation between conservative and liberal, even progressive orientations, see Elkar and Ruge, respectively.

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based on the experiences of people from below and from the peripheries (farmers, handymen, women, members of different generations). Thus, with a more realistic description of rural, peripheral surroundings in New German Cinema (see Liptay et al.), the processes of modernization and Westernization also came into view (Reitz 2004a) that had already been taking place throughout the 1950s and 1960s, even in those agricultural spheres that had generally been associated with Heimat and premodern lifeworlds. By reflecting on ongoing social change, images of supposedly “pure” rurality were produced and promoted by the media and thus added to the already mixed appearances of modernized agriculture and villages, most of them urbanizing rather slowly, but sometimes also rapidly. Heimat appeared as lost, and yet also as a concept to label the experiences of social change and new forms of cooperation and community. The success of Reitz’s television series (and later the movies) sparked a broad discussion that went even beyond Germany and helped to liberate the concept of Heimat and its references from the Romantic, nationalist German traditions that had prevailed at least until the middle of the 1960s.¹⁰ In the third installment of his tetralogy, Heimat 3: Chronik einer Zeitenwende (Chronicle of a Changing Time, 2004), Reitz dealt with the experience and the consequences of the German unification of 1989/1990 by showing workers from East Germany helping to reconstruct a house above the Rhine river valley, thus posing the question as to what – at the turn of the millennium – Heimat might be for a “new” German society in both the present and the future.

III So far, I have presented the state of the Heimat discussion within the frame of German sociocultural debates and experiences. I would now like to address some transnational aspects, which, on the one hand, place contemporary German discourse in relation to global developments, thus bringing globality (in the form of migrant workers, refugees, migration experts, etc.) to the debates and conceptual propositions about addressing Heimat in contemporary Germany’s diverse society. We must keep in mind the many long paths that discussions of belonging have taken in both older and more recent cultural debates when we now try to outline today’s actors and concepts in relation to each other and with regard to present challenges and claims. Here, we are confronted with issues such as how to deal with (acknowledge and integrate) “strangers” or refugees, how current aspects and challenges are taking up older concepts that have been ideologically abused

 See, e. g., “Geh über die Dörfer!” (Go Across the Villages).

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(as we see in new right-wing parties and movements), and how traditional assumptions are developing in relation to the need to stabilize and develop rural sites and provide equal living conditions throughout society. In response to accelerating globalization and new challenges resulting from the neoliberal economy and its processes that serve to disconnect people from their landscapes and social surroundings (see Giddens), Heimat has once again become a frequent and much-debated topic since 2000. While this discussion and the use and misuse of Heimat have recently been taken up as a weapon against foreigners, refugees, and people with migration histories in their own lives or family experience, especially in the context of right-wing populism, and are thus spreading in German society once again (see Butterwegge et al.; Zick et al.), liberal society has also adopted the topic of Heimat as a weapon against right-wing populism by developing infrastructure and supporting the attractiveness of rural landscapes, both for the sake of tourism and also in the interests of improving conditions for rural residents. We are currently seeing debates about the challenges facing and improvements being made to rural sites, villages, and small towns (see Steinführer) as well as experiments with examples and guidelines to enable and stabilize living conditions in rural areas (see Kersten et al.), not least with regard to quality of life (see Nell and Weiland 2021), which still might and can also be addressed as Heimat (see Nell 2018). Still, all of these different approaches refer to and make use of the concept, the tradition, and the attractiveness of Heimat, as it still responds to popular interest and public concerns, as well as to a broad range of individual self-ascriptions and self-descriptions (see Schmidt; Hecht; Türcke). In this age and in relation to these developments, the indices of Heimat have shifted between critical and affirmative approaches, which are neglected and then become dominant again (see Krockow 1989; Scharnowski). Frames of discourse and references to basic attitudes have changed places and functions in political and cultural arenas, as changes in epistemic and scientific research have also taken place:¹¹ from historical and anthropological (if not biological) approaches, to social and philosophical, critical, and even everyday usage (see “Heimat”). Political and ideological claims have been defining, shattering, spoiling, and transforming the field and concept in terms of its inherited meanings and references (see Bausinger 1980; Gebhard et al.; Hüppauf ). Questions like, “Is Heimat still a contem In academia, this process started with Bausinger (1961), who turned the spotlight from antimodern complaints about the loss of Heimat and Volkskultur (which in this connotation cannot be translated as “folk culture”) to empirically based research on daily life, traditions, customs, and practices regarding housing, furniture, fashion etc. (for Heimat in this context, see Bausinger 1961, 85–93; in retrospect, Thiemeyer).

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porary topic?”; “What does Heimat mean today?”; or “Is there such thing as Heimat at all?” and “For whom?” have been taken up again and again since 1945 (see Gebhard et al.; Schüle; Scharnowski; Schmid). In the final decades of the twentieth century, a more constructivist approach came into being, and current questions lead back to ontological, anthropological, or even existentialist approaches regarding the concept and its everyday necessity (see Schmid). Throughout the ups and downs of these discursive references, these questions have found broad resonance in public debates, in the media, in literature, and in film. Obviously, they still seem to address something that is lacking or that can be seen as in the process of becoming lost (from Bausinger 1961 to Hecht, and ever after; cf. Schüle). Many communities, companies, associations, and other civil actors, even entrepreneurs and business people, have grappled with Heimat and taken up the task of organizing, using, reconstructing, re-enacting, and developing concepts and experiences of Heimat, be it for tourist events, historical memory, landscape sustainability, business purposes, entertainment, or political administration and mobilization.¹² Since 1990, Germany’s slow and reluctant process of acknowledging itself as a migration society (cf. Alexopoulou) has posed new challenges and raised new issues with regard to this discussion as well: is Heimat a place where migrants are required to assimilate to the conditions, norms, and habits of the existing majority, or can it be shaped and used as a field in which new concepts of immersive understanding for both sides – immigrants and long-term residents – can be developed, accepted and practiced (Kück)? Many voices that were formerly not permitted or acknowledged by the traditional “German” majority have added to this discussion, revealing the arena of Heimat debates not only as another field in which questions of acceptance and belonging have been deliberated but also as a space where integration takes place via dissent, thus aiming to achieve or organize consensus, and Heimat appears as a realm where questions of visibility and claims for respect, the legitimacy of “being there” as a part of this society, are processed and negotiated (Terkessidis; El-Mafaalani).

 Within this context, there were broad discussions about the way this topic was highlighted through the inclusion of the concept of Heimat within the scope and agenda of the Federal Ministry of the Interior in 2017, not least from the critical perspective of representatives of Germany’s migrant community (Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah); this renaming connected the concept and its demands with the agenda of developing infrastructure and other social spheres in urban and rural spaces, thus contributing to the equality of living conditions, and could therefore be seen as a useful and rational decision.

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IV Keeping these historical and sociocultural developments in mind, I will now try to draw out the appeal and diversity of Germany’s Heimat discourses in a more systematic way, addressing the four aforementioned aspects. This will provide us with access to the topic as well as a means for understanding conflicts and valuations of the concept in contemporary debates. If we consider the conjunctures, main streets, side paths, and even dead ends of Heimat debates in the decades since 1945, it is clear that some basic elements must be readdressed. This reevaluation might also function as a frame and reference point for further discussions regarding the Heimat of immigrants (see Türcke; Schmid 212–220) and for the question of belonging in a multicultural, diverse society that, at a minimum, addresses and puts into focus both sides, that is, settlers and nomads alike (see Flusser). What is more, these aspects must be considered, as the process of German unification since 1990 is still unfinished; moreover, it seems like the results and recognition of these processes are currently being contested and called into question again (see Berlin Institut). Within this frame and with special regard to the supposed or even fabricated obligations migrants must face if they want to belong or at least be heard within contemporary German Heimat discourses, there are four aspects to address. These appear to be necessary and helpful for restoring (and reflecting upon) the impact, appeal, and disturbing consequences of dealing with Heimat in contemporary discourse, which might also be taken up to focus the debate or to destabilize or even destroy the success story of the Federal Republic (see Schildt). First, we must address the assumption that Heimat refers to something specifically German, and to what extent: 1. Even today, many people in Germany are aware, if not proud, that there does not appear to be any proper equivalent to the notion of Heimat in other languages. This might seem like a special case of idiosyncratic self-praise. But on a more ideological level, Germans have been claiming since the nineteenth century – as some continue to do today – that in its “true” meaning, Heimat belongs exclusively to the “German” realm. Indeed, as a self-referential topic and an arena for addressing or even dramatizing one’s own situation and/or experience, it is still a term commonly used by Germans. The objection could be made here that people all over the world share, value, and are familiar with the positive connotations of and references to the place where they were born, grow up, and lead their life (Schmid 17–78). Words and conceptual metaphors like home, homeland, terra natale, ojczyzna/kraj rodzinny, and pays d’origine, to name but a few related terms, show the various spheres in which the experience or feeling of “belonging” to a local settlement, to a family, to a

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well-known group, to a natural environment, or to a landscape is perceived and cherished just as much as in German-speaking countries (Blickle 2–3). In any case, the desire to belong can be seen universally as a challenging and sometimes motivating factor. In the United Nation’s “Declaration of Human Rights,” one general value of Heimat is reflected in Article 13: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” Accordingly, the issue or impact of Heimat can be seen as a universal need and experience on the one hand, while, on the other, every individual has the right to decide how far or near, how important or not, how often and how much Heimat, or how many Heimats, might be acceptable or desirable for them. To my mind Heimat is therefore a universal rather than a specifically German obsession. Heimat as a form of negotiating the needs and experiences of “belonging” and “not-belonging” to a place, time, situation, or the people in one’s own life is not, in this specific iteration, an essentially German concept in the traditional sense and might thus be universal. It may refer to general human experiences and needs, at least since people became settlers and thus became capable of relating personal/biographical experience to the idea or perception of space and time in continuity.¹³ But it is precisely from this point of view that the historical and cultural emphasis on specific German aspects and their accentuation in German political and cultural discourses appear as an abbreviation, if not a distortion, of the human need to belong in social and local settings (by disregarding their limitations as well). This can only be explained by specific historical circumstances and ideological leanings (and obsessions) in the long-term experiences and variety of social developments in the German provinces (die deutschen Lande), which did not become the Deutsches Reich until 1871. In general, there is no specifically German dimension or meaning of Heimat when it comes to assessing the needs and experiences of men and women in reference to their locations or surroundings. But, looking back on the “short history” of Germany (see Hawes), Heimat still appears to be one of the keywords for establishing and promoting the idea of German unity and a German Volk in the sense of a nation (see Renan), all of which did not exist before 1800 and which had to be developed quickly, within a few decades, during the nineteenth century, in competition with other ideas/ ideologies in the race to modernity. So, while we find a kind of general dimension of Heimat even in the German context, it also appears noteworthy that there have been some singular aspects to it as well.

 Vilem Flusser also draws our attention to the fluidity of settling and being restricted to one place, home, people, surroundings, and so on (55–64).

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Therefore, from another point of view that reflects the history of ideas in Germany (Geistesgeschichte), Heimat truly appears to be a specifically “German” topic, especially in its traditional form. It is this sense of Heimat that Christian Graf von Krockow evokes in the subtitle of his book Heimat: Erfahrungen mit einem deutschen Thema (Heimat: Experiences with a German Topic; 1989). Understood as a “German” topic, Heimat does not encompass the idea of a common ground where people may take their chances by “coming together” or at least trying their best to come to terms with each other in concrete circumstances. Instead, as in other cases (for instance, the ambiguous German “success story” of Gemeinschaft ¹⁴), its appeal has derived from an understanding of Heimat as a means of constituting a group’s uniqueness primarily against all challenges from the outside. This uniqueness is assumed to have its basis in the specificity of local surroundings and long-term historical experiences – or even perceived as “naturally” rooted in racial or folkish (völkisch) assumptions. From this perspective, the main function of the concept and discourse in the German tradition has been to draw a line between “us” and “them,” between Heimat and die Fremden (the strangers). Taking up and referring to the origins of German Romanticism around 1800 and including the spirit of the so-called Befreiungskriege (anti-French Wars of Liberation), the roots and the glamor of Heimat can be found in the formative period in which Germany began to consider itself a nation and in the special way that it conceived of itself culturally as a people born with and against the challenges of industrialized modern society (see Johnston 1990). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the specifically German concept (and feeling) of Heimat formed and spread widely through literature, songs and Gesangsvereine (choral societies), Heimatkunde (local studies), textbooks, the press, the Heimatbewegung (Heimat movement), and Heimatschutz/Heimatkampf (Heimat protection/defense) as a form and model of inclusion on the one hand and of exclusion on the other (Lipp 1987). In its popular sense, German Heimat genuinely appeared to be a common ground accessible only to those who (already) belonged to a place (by birth, family, genealogy, language, or culture – whatever that means). Thus, Heimat in its German understanding remained restricted to local communities in a mostly remote, rural setting. But in this tradition and context, it reveals that it can be connected with transnational/global experiences, debates, and human needs everywhere. Heimat can thus be modeled as a “small world” (see Luckmann 1970) with reference to the everyday life of common people, prominently visualized in pictures of villages or “small towns”

 See Delitz.

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(see Glaser), in peasant life, countryside narratives, and rural landscapes. Heimat was designed and popularized and appeared as a heile Welt (safe/intact world), which became more attractive and deeply felt the more it had to be developed and defended against (supposed) challenges and contestations from the outside (the city, modernity, “others”). In this sense, Alexander Kluge brought together the dense feelings and absurd constellation of Weihnachten, Heimat, and Krieg (Christmas, home, and war; cf. Nell 2019) in his short stories about World War II, showing the interrelation of those force fields of emotion as a significant layer in Germany’s cultural (and political) imagination. Within this historical and culturally shaped framework, the specific “German” impact of Heimat was generally intended to denote a demarcation and was used to establish a wall to separate those who were inside from those who were outside. Even today, sixty years after the immigration of foreign workers began, while the third and fourth generations of those families now living in Germany are still being labeled as having a “migration background,” the issue of living with “well-known strangers” (see Simmel) is still under debate with respect to the topic of Heimat. The dimensions of Heimat (as we will see in the next section) primarily refer to vacant and lost positions and spaces; its all-consuming functions and multilayered appeal come out best when images and references are produced that allow Germany to describe itself in its relationship to and demarcation from “others.” While Heimat, from this perspective, appears as a means or weapon for exclusion and self-defense, it is therefore an instrument and impulse for debating and coming together on societal levels as well. Sociologically, it may be defined as a construction and as a discursive arena (Schiffauer 148) constituting, covering, and hiding an absence with reference to an all-inclusive common ground. The German Heimat discourse thus appears to be as much a narrative of desire and need as it is the construction of a phantasma built over a gap. Its function is to cover (and signify at the same time) an abyss of meaning, stability, belonging, and perhaps self-consciousness, marking a hole in the ground that modern society and individuals of the modern age experience and have to face in the form of both deprivation and liberty (Wagner 20–24), with one of the two factors obviously dominating in a given situation, while sometimes both are present.¹⁵ Whereas

 In order to come to terms with German Heimat as a literary topic, as an everyday imaginary, and as an arena of cultural discourse, analysis may take up the instruments and tools of deconstruction. What is hidden or can be detected as experience and/or expectation, when locality and sociality are shaped by the concept (and imagery) of Heimat? What kind of loss, vacancy, or emptiness is covered, or transformed, by the use, the invocation, and presentation of Heimat? What messages and functions are provided by simulating Heimat in the assumption of an existing

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I earlier presented perspectives on the debate from both outside and inside, we will now come to discuss the ground on which Heimat can be constructed or built – and we will find, as a core argument of this paper, that the ground is not stable or solid. Instead, Heimat appears to be built over a hole. I will mention four gaps that create a need for Heimat, thereby reinforcing the concept’s impact and fueling the forces contesting it while also defending the concept and reconstructing it in perpetuity. Within this frame, Heimat can be described with respect to four losses/absences or deficiencies that constitute the abyss mentioned above. As the dimensions of these losses are indeterminable, it is understandable that the promises and claims of Heimat are as attractive and unlimited as they are uncanny and dangerous. They cannot be satisfied, thus constituting a field of constant grappling, negotiating, and criticism – which includes declarations, manifestos, and performances and artworks. Claiming or evoking the experience and/or the agenda of Heimat aims and promises to close the abyss between the anachronistic expectations and experiences created by the challenges of modernity. And this is precisely what institutions and organizations do, whether they are working for tourists, for political purposes, or entertainment, let alone economic interests or private needs. At least three of the losses that constitute the status of Heimat under the conditions of modernity are already reflected in the etymology of the German Heimat as we find it in the Grimm Brothers’ description in the Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary; cf. Grimm; Blickle 3–15). The first gap I will call the “transcendental gap.” Here, the oldest reference (I) goes back to religious and metaphysical conceptions: in Paul Gerhardt’s hymn “Himmlische Heimat” (Heavenly Home, 1649), Heimat is located not “here,” but “there,” in an “other world.” In this dimension, the concept is already both loaded with special value and connected to a sphere that is neither real nor available.¹⁶ The constitutive elements of its attractiveness derive from the infinity of desires and needs and from the radiant forces of a never-ending imagination. At this point, Heimat already appears as a space for dreaming, filled with hopes for and imaginings of redemption and salvation. Luckmann views it as a field where the transition from traditional to modern religious themes can be observed and negotiated (Luckmann 1967, 107–111). The “shining” of the concept to which Ernst Bloch refers in his well-known description of Heimat is

place in reality, as the outline of a stable framework for feelings and behavior, and as a valid promise, if not demand, for a stabilized future?  Schmid also deals with these aspects of religion and metaphysical desires (438–478).

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already constituted by these metaphysical and religious promises and/or expectations (Bloch 1995, 1376). In this sense, the promise and attractiveness of the concept derives from its possible function as a sacred canopy for a society “without a canopy” (see Berger; Soeffner).¹⁷ The territorial (societal) gap: instead of attaching itself to a concrete place, the second reference (II) also leads to an interspace between security and instability, but with regard to territory and community/society. Appearing as a term in common and civic law since the late eighteenth century, Heimat describes a place where one has the right to live and is entitled to adequate living conditions (Bausinger 1961, 86–88). The term and its discourse developed facing increasing social and territorial mobility during the process of industrialization and the spread of emancipation and equality after 1789. As the idea and promise of a place of undisputed belonging and safety became more important and attractive, and the more instability and mobility spread, the more Heimat developed into an impetus and also a sign, cipher, or keyword for the unfilled promises and the desire to belong to and be in possession of a place (both physical and in society) in a changing world. Viewed positively, belonging became an object of negotiation and for negotiating the social and legal positions of individuals and groups, while, in its negative implications, the assumed loss of belonging became a rationale for exclusion and disrespect, one of the main topics of cultural criticism, and for the mobilization of anti-modern aversions (Klinger 207–220). In addition to unsatisfied metaphysical desires, with regard to this second point, the abyss was also deepened by impossible expectations of stability and continuity in a world on the move. Temporal gap: in the context of modernity, it was not only space that began to diffuse and that was called into question but – as a third factor – time, which had already been viewed as a mystery since St. Augustine, now also appeared to be a vanishing stream without any chance of being fixed or returning (III). While philosophers of history (like Hegel and Marx) and their critics (like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) debated the progress and loss of time in general, the

 With the concept of a “sacred canopy,” Peter L. Berger describes the clearly undisputed frameworks and basic assumptions that have traditionally allowed human beings to live with others in a “shared universe.” In Berger’s model, while this sacred canopy could be constructed and was provided by religious systems of belief in traditional societies, modernity offers a plurality of concepts and orientations, Heimat being one of them, demanding, even forcing people to make their own choices or work on the construction of shareable concepts with others (Berger, Ch. 5). In this perspective, it appears that ongoing Heimat discourses can be explained by the persisting attractiveness and appreciation of the concept, which reflects people’s needs and experiences in fragile conditions.

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memory and idea of Heimat became attractive for everyday purposes as a concrete source of and expected goal for one’s own living conditions, as it imagined a place of belonging and rest in time. It offered a chance to bring together childhood memory and the nostalgia for early experiences of stability and acceptance – although these probably never existed in the first place – to create an imaginary place like Heimat (see Türcke), or, in Bloch’s words, “there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland [Heimat]” (Bloch 1995, 1376). Due to the absence of stability in space and time in reality, the only “real” place for Heimat could thus be found in the imagination or in literature and other artificially created contexts or ideologies, combining the expectation of ultra-stability (not capable of being injured by real conflict and diverse opinions) with the radiance and impression of being completely at home until or even at the end of time. An imagined gap – a gap for imagination: Heimat, and this must be mentioned as the fourth dimension in the constitution of the abyss mentioned above – going beyond the dimensions mentioned in the Grimm dictionary – thus became a poetic (that is, a fictional but also fictitious) construct (IV). It has therefore been shaped, developed, and illuminated by literature and other artefacts. As a cultural imaginary, Heimat needed literature and cultural construction and affirmation as much as literature and other cultural productions became spaces and places for reflecting on the three aforementioned losses, their importance increasing as they took up the absence of sheltering ideas and institutions as a starting point, which is one of the primary bases of fiction and narration in modernity (Eco 395–416). Without referring to fiction and forgery, both of which Ernest Renan in particular supposed were necessary for “becoming a nation” (294–298), there would not be any cultural or political discourse on – and no evidence of – Heimat at all. As an imaginary homeland, Heimat can be constructed, claimed, contested, established (and dealt with) as a means and a kind of human reaction to the experience of three of these gaps as losses: the transcendental gap (1), the loss of territory and legitimacy (2), and not least the unappeasable “maelstrom” of time (3), while the fourth gap – imagination as a way of developing, having, and reflecting on Heimat (4) – also reveals itself to be an opportunity and an instrument for fulfilling or at least dealing with the three gaps mentioned above – in a thoroughly ambivalent sense and with contestable consequences. Thus, none of the aspects mentioned appear to be typical of German experiences, discourses, or contestations; rather, they can all be seen as consequences of modernity itself (see Giddens), which will be noted in the following section, which aims to evaluate these findings about Heimat in relation to a broader concept of modernity as a whole.

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Summing up these four dimensions of the abyss called Heimat, each of which and all of which together are not “here,” in fact, but “there,” in imagination, thus becoming “real” in social conditions: these dimensions obtain their shine and attractiveness from their ability and function to design, cover, mark, and “hide” the absence (or the loss) of an eagerly desired stability in space and time in “this” world, and not least in human imagination and culture. They reveal and mark the hole in the ground of the modern condition over which the key modern concept of Heimat has been established, its impact emanating into the present in that it intersects between past and future. If Heimat is utopia, as Bernhard Schlink (2000) has claimed following Ernst Bloch, it seems necessary to describe it in two ways: on the one hand it offers the promise of a sphere and experience that is not real but that is deeply desired and ideologically useful, so that it becomes a force and a fact in reality (see Thomas and Thomas). On the other hand, it shows and covers the emptiness and vacancy of a non-existent place, to quote Marc Augé: a kind of “non-place” (63) or a “heterotopia” (Foucault 11), boundlessly attractive when it comes to producing images and issues, but also helpful and frightening in some cases when it comes to establishing a borderline between “them” and “us.” Inasmuch as Heimat is not confined to the possession of a real space or place, but rather echoes the desire for a “should be” with reference to real experiences,¹⁸ the promises and challenges of Heimat appear to be imaginable and unlimited as such, but also unsatisfactory in principle. Here, we have the source and origin of its attractiveness and of its appropriateness and suitability for ideological purposes and poetic construction and reflection all at once; it is a motor and weapon in a never-ending debate about “being here.” It will therefore be worthwhile and necessary to amplify this scene with more contemporary voices and experiences to connect the concept’s historical and cultural outlines (sections I–III) with my analytical sketch of basic assumptions (IV), focusing on Heimat on the basis of four losses/gaps (IV.3), and additional, more recent contributions from diverse backgrounds in contemporary Germany.

 In Lacan’s model: the artificially built symbolic order conquers the imagination to heal or at least mend or to cover the holes, the abyss, that the real is essentially afflicted with (Lacan).

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V Until 1945, the staging of Heimat had essentially developed within anthropological and historical framings of a supposedly social albeit territorial need, to say nothing of its völkisch and even racist underpinnings, due to the use and misuse of Heimat concepts by the Nazis. However, after 1945, the concept came under suspicion, although it never lost its attractiveness in everyday life and individual observation. Whereas Heinrich Böll’s essays from the 1950s, for example, contributed to the formation and discussion of Heimat from a more individualistic, pluralistic, and local perspective, from 1945 into the 1960s, Heimat was predominantly being discussed as “Heimat lost” in the so-called Vertriebenenliteratur (literature of the expelled). This was followed by the critical Heimatliteratur of the late 1960s and 1970s, which concentrated on local aspects as well as on the social conflicts and individual problems that could be found in those rural settings that had previously been used to establish idealized notions of Heimat. Moreover, the horizon of the debates carried out during this period had widened to include contemporary European regionalism and was filled with promises and expectations of “grassroots democracy.” Nevertheless, during all those decades, discussions of Heimat – including educational conceptions of Heimatkunde (local studies) and its transformation into regional studies, then area studies and microhistory – accompanied the social and cultural development of both German societies. Finally, starting with Edgar Reitz’s television series Heimat in 1984, which focused on the everyday lives of village dwellers in the twentieth century and their historical experiences of loss and belonging during the major ruptures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new impulses appeared: individuals and their own changing perspectives in ambivalent experiences, and their oscillation between desires of belonging and not-belonging; the relevance of social affairs and history; the opportunities and challenges of a changing modern society and of a variety of lifestyles. Therefore, in the early 1980s, Hermann Bausinger introduced a criterion for the contemporary evaluation of Heimat by placing it within the contexts and, for Germany at the time, “new” experiences of migration and mobility, namely by asking if, how, and to what extent Heimat could be developed as a key concept and framework for opening up society in its local communities to migrant workers and other people from somewhere else.¹⁹ Finally, we have found a starting point and yardstick for dealing with

 “In our cities and villages of today, it seems to me that we have a quite appropriate criterion, if Heimat is still understood as a reservoir of appealing traditions, which can be used freely or as a concept for creating humane conditions. The criterion is that we deal with foreign migrant work-

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current contestations and challenges, as well as promises of a contemporary and at least human understanding and provision of Heimat for everyone. But of course, discussion means conducting ongoing debates and including more voices. Recently, journalist Ferda Ataman, born in Stuttgart to Turkish parents in 1979 and a representative of the third generation of immigrants, declared: “Ich bin von hier. Hört auf zu fragen” (“I come from here. Stop asking”). In her book, she highlights the normality of Heimat as a shared space between migrants and other people in today’s German society, where Heimat can be used to denominate a realm in which one can make a living in one’s own sphere and partake in activities with others who belong to the same diverse and mixed society as everyone else (see Manesse). On the other hand, in 2019, Berlin-born Max Czollek, a member of a new generation of German-born Jews, claimed that the incitation “Desintegriert Euch!” (“Disintegrate yourselves!”) is a mode of resisting mainstream and rightwing concepts that define integration as a kind of submission to the traditional German concepts of Heimat—seen as a form of coherence, homogeneity, and unity (summing up various connotations of Gemeinschaft). In most cases, migrants have to face and adapt to the leading discourses of the immigration society (Kapitelman; Terkessidis). As long as the topics of “culture” (whatever that might mean) and Heimat are part of Germany’s ongoing, top-priority discussions, it seems inevitable that immigrants will also be forced (invited?) to share and participate in these debates. While Y. Michal Bodemann has coined the term “Gedächtnistheater” (theater of memory; 2001) to describe the function of Jews in the self-appraisal of an autochthonous German society, Czollek tries to open the floor to migrants developing a new, unconventional understanding of Heimat on the basis of their own multilayered, diverse experiences and assumptions in his contribution to the recently published Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum by Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah. In summary, I would like to quote Mithu Sanyal: “If the nation takes the function of an outside border, Heimat does so with regard to the inside” (104). Heimat in this sense demarcates the line between those who have the power to define belonging and those who must submit. Back in 2015, German journalist and activist Patrick Gensing proposed skipping the discussion of Heimat entirely, because aside from promising a sacred canopy, it has always appeared and is still mostly useful as a weapon on a battlefield where the exclusion of “others” is at the top of the agenda (Gensing), while in his bestselling book Heimat finden (2021), philosopher Wilhelm Schmid works on dedramatizing the German discourse by insisting

ers. A concept of Heimat which does not create a place for them is insufficient, however richly it might be draped with historical props” (Bausinger 1983, 216).

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that the desire and experience of belonging to someone, somewhere, in some place or situation is neither essentially “German” nor restricted solely to the experiences of loss and conflict. It seems that, at least for human beings generally, the need and desire to feel at home and belong to someone, and even the promise and the possibility of doing so – sometimes, somewhere and with others – can be found and imagined in a variety of forms, conditions and experiences, the diversity of which may be seen as a characteristic of the human condition as such.

Works Cited Alexopoulou, Maria. Deutschland und die Migration. Geschichte einer Einwanderungsgesellschaft wider Willen. Reclam, 2020. Ataman, Ferda. Ich bin von hier! Hört auf zu fragen. Fischer, 2019. Augé, Marc. Non-Places. Verso, 1995. Aydemir, Fatma, and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, editors. Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum. Ullstein, 2019. Bade, Klaus J. Homo Migrans: Wanderungen aus und nach Deutschland. Erfahrungen und Fragen. Klartext, 2004. Bausinger, Hermann. Volkskultur in der technischen Welt. Kohlhammer, 1961. Bausinger, Hermann. “Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen, aktiven Heimatverständnis: Begriffsgeschichte als Problemgeschichte.” Der Bürger im Staat, vol. 33, no. 4, 1983, pp. 211–216. Bausinger, Hermann. “Heimat in einer offenen Gesellschaft: Begriffsgeschichte als Problemgeschichte.” Heimat Analysen, Themen, Perspektiven, edited by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1990, pp. 76–90. Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Doubleday,1967. Berlin Institut für Bevölkerung und Entwicklung: Vielfalt der Einheit. Wo Deutschland nach 30 Jahren zusammengewachsen ist. Berlin Institut, 2020. Biess, Frank. Republik der Angst: Eine andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik. Rowohlt, 2019. Blickle, Peter. Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland. Camden House, 2004. Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vol. 3. Suhrkamp, 1972. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, vol. 3. Translated by Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, MIT Press, 1995. Bodemann, Y. Michal. Gedächtnistheater: Die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung. Rotbuch, 1996. Böll, Heinrich. “Was ist Heimat?” Hauptworte – Hauptsachen: Zwei Gespräche: Heimat. Nation, edited by Alexander Mitscherlich and Gert Kalow, Piper, 1971, pp. 11–56. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: Dossier Geschichte und Erinnerung. Bonn, 2021, bpb.de/geschichte/zeitgeschichte/geschichte-und-erinnerung/. Accessed 6 June 2021. Butterwegge, Christoph, Janine Cremer, Alexander Häusler, et al., editors. Themen der Rechten – Themen der Mitte: Zuwanderung, demographischer Wandel und Nationalbewusstsein. Leske + Budrich, 2002. Czollek, Max. “Gegenwartsbewältigung.” Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Ullstein, 2019, pp. 167–181.

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Delitz, Heike. “Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.” Dorf: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, J.B. Metzler, 2019, pp. 326–337. Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm. “Transatlantic Exchange and Interaction – The Concept of Westernization.” The American Impact on Western Europe: Americanization and Westernization in Transatlantic Perspective, Conference at the German Historical Institute Washington, 25–27 March 1999, http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/ebook/p/2005/ghi_12/www.ghi-dc.org/conpotweb/west ernpapers/doering.pdf. Accessed 3 August 2021. Eco, Umberto. Einführung in die Semiotik. Wilhelm Fink, 1972. Elkar, Rainer S., editor. Europas unruhige Regionen: Geschichtsbewusstsein und europäischer Regionalismus. Klett, 1981. El-Mafaalani, Aladin. Das Integrationsparadox: Warum gelungene Integration zu mehr Konflikten führt. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2018. Flusser, Vilém. Von der Freiheit des Migranten: Einsprüche gegen den Nationalismus. Bollmann, 1994. Foucault, Michel. Die Heterotopien: Les heterotopies; Der utopische Körper: Le corps utopique; Zwei Radiovorträge. Suhrkamp, 2013, pp. 9–22. Frei, Norbert. 1968. Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. dtv, 2008. Gebhard, Gunter, Oliver Geisler, and Steffen Schröter, editors. Heimat: Konturen und Konjunkturen eines umstrittenen Konzepts. Transcript, 2007. “Geh über die Dörfer!” Der Spiegel 30 September 1984, www.spiegel.de/politik/geh-ueber-die-doer fer-a-3cc31fb8-0002-0001-0000-000013510755?context=issue. Accessed 4 August 2021. Gensing, Patrick. “Das Fremde als Bedrohung. Der sehr deutsche Begriff ‘Heimat’ klingt harmlos. Doch progressiv besetzt werden kann er nicht. Seine Funktionsweise ist die der Ausgrenzung.” taz, 5 November 2015, taz.de/Die-Deutschen-und-der-Heimat-Begriff/!5246134/. Accessed 21 June 2021. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press, 1990. Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid, editor. 1968. Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft. Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1998. Glaser, Hermann. Kleinstadt-Ideologie: Zwischen Furchenglück und Sphärenflug. Rombach, 1969. Grimm, Jakob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Heimat.” Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 10, edited by Moritz Heyne, Hirzel, 1877, pp. 864–866. woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB#3. Accessed 15 June 2021. Hawes, James. The Shortest History of Germany. Old Street Publishing, 2017. Hecht, Martin. Das Verschwinden der Heimat: Zur Gefühlslage der Nation. Reclam, 2000. “Heimat.” Brockhaus Enzyklopädie in 24 Bänden, vol. 9, F.A. Brockhaus, 1989, pp. 617–619. Hüppauf, Bernd. “Heimat – die Wiederkehr eines verpönten Wortes: Ein Populärmythos im Zeitalter der Globalisierung.” Heimat: Konturen und Konjunkturen eines umstrittenen Konzepts, edited by Gebhard, Gunter, Oliver Geisler, and Steffen Schröter, Transcript, 2007, pp. 109–140. Israel, Jürgen. “‘Wir schützen sie, weil sie dem Volk gehörtʼ. Zum Heimatbegriff in der DDR-Literatur.” Heimat: Suchbild und Suchbewegung, edited by Fabienne Liptay, Susanne Marschall, and Andreas Solbach, Gardez!, 2005, pp. 131–143. Johnston, Otto W. Der deutsche Nationalmythos: Ursprung eines politischen Programms. Metzler, 1990. Kapitelman, Dimitrij. “Was ist Heimat? Im Camp der bestmöglich Angekommenen.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, vol. 67, no. 11–12, 2017, pp. 4–8. Kathöfer, Gabi, and Beverly Weber. “Introduction: Precarity/Heimatlosigkeit.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2018, pp. 411–417. Kersten, Jens, Claudia Neu, and Berthold Vogel. Das Soziale-Orte-Konzept: Zusammenhalt in einer vulnerablen Gesellschaft. Transcript, 2021.

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Klein, Ludger. “Heimat: Eine Auswahlbibliographie.” Heimat: Lehrpläne, Literatur, Filme, edited by Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1990, pp. 293–356. Klinger, Cornelia. Flucht. Trost. Revolte: Die Moderne und ihre ästhetischen Gegenwelten. C. Hanser, 1995. Kluge, Alexander. “Unheimlichkeit der Zeit.” Neue Geschichten Hefte 1–8. Zweitausendeins, 1978. Köppen, Manuel. “Die wiedergefundene Vergangenheit: Der neue deutsche Bewältigungsfilm.” Kriegsdiskurse in Literatur und Medien nach 1989, edited by Carsten Gansel and Heinrich Kaulen, Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, pp. 13–29. Kossert, Andreas. Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945. Siedler, 2008. Krockow, Christian Graf von. Heimat: Erfahrungen mit einem deutschen Thema. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1989. Krockow, Christian Graf von. Die Deutschen in ihrem Jahrhundert 1890–1990. Rowohlt, 1990. Kück, Svenja. Heimat und Migration: Ein transdisziplinärer Ansatz anhand biographischer Interviews mit geflüchteten Menschen in Deutschland. Transcript, 2021. Lacan, Jacques. Die vier Grundbegriffe der Psychoanalyse. Walter, 1980. Lipp, Wolfgang. “Heimatbewegung, Regionalismus: Pfade aus der Moderne?” Kultur und Gesellschaft: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 27, Opladen 1986, pp. 331–355. Lipp, Wolfgang. “Heimat in der Moderne: Quelle, Kampfplatz und Bühne von Identität.” Heimat: Konstanten und Wandel im 19./20. Jahrhundert; Vorstellungen und Wirklichkeiten, edited by Katharina Wiegand, Deutscher Alpenverein, 1997, pp. 51–72. Liptay, Fabienne, Susanne Marschall, and Andreas Solbach, editors. Heimat: Suchbild und Suchbewegung. Gardez!, 2005. Luckmann, Benita. “The Small Life-Worlds of Modern Man.” Social Research, vol. 37, no. 4, 1970, pp. 580–596. Luckmann, Thomas. The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. MacMillan Colliers, 1967. Maase, Kaspar. Bravo Amerika: Erkundungen zur Jugendkultur in der Bundesrepublik in den fünfziger Jahren. Junius, 1992. Manesse, Robert. Heimat ist die schönste Utopie: Reden (wir) über Europa. Suhrkamp, 2014. Mitscherlich, Alexander, and Gerd Kalow, editors. Hauptworte – Hauptsachen: Zwei Gespräche: Heimat, Nation. Piper, 1971. Nell, Werner. “Heimat ohne Baldachin.” Über Land: Aktuelle literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf Dorf und Ländlichkeit, edited by Magdalena Marszalek, Werner Nell, and Marc Weiland, Transcript, 2018, pp. 357–390. Nell, Werner. “Heimatdiskurse und Gewalt.” Heimat Global: Modelle, Praxen und Medien der Heimatkonstruktion, edited by Eduardo Costadura, Klaus Ries, and Christiane Wiesenfeldt, Transcript, 2019, pp. 105–132. Nell, Werner. “Differenz und Exklusion: Heimat als Kampfbegriff – mit einer Erinnerung an Heinrich Böll.” Heimat Revisited: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf einen umstrittenen Begriff, edited by Dana Bönisch, Jil Runia, and Hanna Zehschnetzler, De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 145–165. Nell, Werner, and Marc Weiland, editors. Gutes Leben auf dem Land? Imaginationen und Projektionen vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Transcript, 2021. Oesterhelt, Anja. Geschichte der Heimat. Zur Genese ihrer Semantik in Literatur, Religion, Recht und Wissenschaft. De Gruyter, 2021. Reitz, Edgar. Die Heimat-Trilogie. Heyne, 2004a. Reitz, Edgar. Heimat 3. Chronik einer Zeitenwende. Knaus, 2004b.

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Renan, Ernest. “Was ist eine Nation?” [1882]. Grenzfälle: Über neuen und alten Nationalismus, edited by Michael Jeismann and Henning Ritter. Reclam, 1993, pp. 290–311. Ruge, Undine. Die Erfindung des “Europa der Regionen”: Kritische Ideengeschichte eines konservativen Konzepts. Campus, 2003. Sanyal, Mithu. “Zuhause.” Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Ullstein, 2019, pp. 101–121. Scharnowski, Susanne. Heimat: Geschichte eines Missverständnisses. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2019. Schiffauer, Werner. Fremde in der Stadt: Zehn Essays über Kultur und Differenz. Suhrkamp, 1996. Schildt, Axel. Ankunft im Westen: Ein Essay zur Erfolgsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik. Fischer, 1999. Schlink, Bernhard. Heimat als Utopie. Suhrkamp, 2000. Schmid, Wilhelm. Heimat finden: Vom Leben in einer ungewissen Welt. Suhrkamp, 2021. Schmidt, Thomas E. Heimat: Leichtigkeit und Last des Herkommens. Aufbau, 1999. Schüle, Christian. Heimat: Ein Phantomschmerz. Droemer, 2017. Simmel, Georg. Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Grundformen der Vergesellschaftung 1908. Duncker & Humblot, 1968. Soeffner, Hans-Georg. Gesellschaft ohne Baldachin: Über die Labilität von Ordnungskonstruktionen. Velbrück, 2000. Steiner, Ines, and Christoph Brecht. “Der deutsche Heimatfilm – Eine kommentierte Auswahl.” Heimat: Lehrpläne, Literatur, Filme, edited by Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1990, pp. 359–524. Steinführer, Annett, Lutz Laschewski, and Tanja Mölders, editors. Das Dorf: Soziale Prozesse und räumliche Arrangements. LIT, 2019. Terkessidis, Mark. Migranten. Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2000. Terkessidis, Mark. Nach der Flucht: Neue Ideen für die Einwanderungsgesellschaft. Reclam, 2017. Thiemeyer, Thomas. “Fach, wie Schublade.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 September 2020, p. N3. Thomas, William Isaac, and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs. Alfred A. Knopf, 1928. Türcke, Christoph. Heimat: Eine Rehabilitierung. Zu Klampen, 2006. Von Hodenberg, Christina. Das andere Achtundsechzig: Gesellschaftsgeschichte einer Revolte. Beck, 2018. Wagner, Peter. Modernity: Understanding the Present. Polity, 2012. Warneken, Bernd Jürgen. Die Ethnographie populärer Kulturen: Eine Einführung. Böhlau, 2006. Weigand, Katharina, editor. Heimat: Konstanten und Wandel im 19./20. Jahrhundert. Vorstellungen und Wirklichkeiten. Deutscher Alpenverein, 1997. Wolle, Stefan. Der Traum von der Revolte: Die DDR 1968. Christoph Links, 2008. Zick, Andreas, Beate Küpper, and Wilhelm Berghan. Verlorene Mitte – feindselige Zustände: Rechtsextreme Einstellungen in Deutschland 2018/19. Dietz, 2019.

Thomas Herold

Politics, Society, Literature: Heimat Discourses and Rural Novels by Bastian Asdonk and Mariana Leky “We cannot cede to the nationalists the longing for Heimat, for security (Sicherheit), slowing down (Entschleunigung), solidarity (Zusammenhalt) and recognition (Anerkennung)” (cf. Zudeick 18).¹ President Frank-Walter Steinmeier argued as much in the middle of the 2017 German federal election campaign that would result in another iteration of the grand coalition, as the strength of the extreme right-wing and left-wing parties made a center-left and center-right governing coalition impossible. As is well known, this election resulted in the first federal parliamentary representation of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), whose 12.6 % of the popular vote earned the nationalist party 94 seats in the Bundestag. This success came in the wake of the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees came to Western Europe. The initial euphoria and demonstration of Willkommenskultur (welcoming culture), propelled by chancellor Angela Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das!” (We can do this!) rhetoric was soon displaced by a popular backlash, regular demonstrations of the “patriotic Europeans” who were concerned about the “islamization of the occident” (PEGIDA – Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), and the rise of the AfD, poaching votes from the right flank of the conservative CDU/CSU. The election campaign of the political right was dominated by nationalism, xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-Islam rhetoric – all in the name of Heimat which, according to campaign slogans, was under serious attack. Clearly, this Heimat was defined as all that is not the Other – and it did not even need to be spelled out, as everybody intuitively understood what was meant by benign-sounding campaign mantras like “Our country, our Heimat. You, my Germany.” The fact that Heimat is difficult to define and easy to misuse makes it a predictable tool for the AfD and their ilk. And that is why Steinmeier’s quotation is notable, as Steinmeier tries to redefine the term and thus turn it into an acceptable notion for those who do not subscribe to exclusionary political mantras. Steinmeier acknowledges that there is a void, a longing for Heimat, which he subsequently defines as four things: security, slowing down, solidarity, and recognition. The terms Entschleunigung and Zusammenhalt evoke the traditional rural Heimat set-

 If not otherwise noted, all translations are mine. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-003

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ting. Anerkennung nods to those who feel left out by contemporary societal discourses and is reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” (2016) – though Steinmeier puts it in a much less politically clumsy manner. Sicherheit, then, seems to allude to the xenophobic discourse on criminal migrants, i. e., young African and Middle Eastern men assaulting German women. Notably, Steinmeier avoids mentioning the feeling of safety out on the street at night. Rather, the general term Sicherheit goes beyond street crimes. It includes social security and the safety net (things governments can do for helpless individuals) and a feeling of security (Geborgenheit) that is created in a safe and familiar environment. When we speak about Heimat, Steinmeier tells us, let us not discuss crime statistics but instead let us fix income inequality and other societal divisions, and thus create an inclusive home that is strong enough to adapt to change. Steinmeier’s subtle attempt at a re-definition of a term whose history makes it appear like an empty container that can be filled at will and as circumstances require can act as a starting point for my current inquiry: the notion of Heimat in the contemporary Dorfroman (village novel). In the following first part of my paper, I will briefly discuss the larger political context and the consequences of what the Washington Post called the “inglorious return” of “Germany’s homeland propaganda” (Attiah n.p.). The wide acceptance and popularity of the notion of Heimat surely plays a role in the successful incorporation of Heimat into the political discourse. More precisely, some of the things traditionally associated with Heimat seem to be lacking, such as a rural lifestyle, nature, self-reliance, and self-identity. In short, the idea that something is rotten in modern urbanized society and requires adjustment, or, as Steinmeier puts it: the longing for Entschleunigung, appears to be on peoples’ minds and thus provides fertile ground for Heimat “propaganda.” I will discuss some of these trends in order to set the stage for the examination of the village novel genre, a genre that in the last ten years has enjoyed a “boom” (März n.p.) that runs parallel with the newfound popularity of Heimat in the general discourse. One might assume that the popularity of the genre is linked to the prevalence of the aforementioned Heimat ideas. The second part consists of general remarks about the Dorfroman and Heimat as a subject of academic inquiry. I will build on Friederike Eigler’s examination of Heimat in the context of the spatial turn in order to develop a theoretical framework for the discussion of specific representations of rural spaces in the Dorfroman. In the third and fourth part, I will analyze two novels, Bastian Asdonk’s Mitten im Land (In the Middle of the Country, 2016) and Mariana Leky’s Was man von hier aus sehen kann (What You Can See from Here, 2017). I will argue that both novels in their own way react and contribute to the current Heimat discourse in the sense that they attempt to make Heimat inclusive, in contrast to the political discourse that, at least as far as the political right is concerned, puts the notion of

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not-belonging front and center. In my conclusion, I will circle back and discuss the specific contributions the Dorfroman makes to contemporary discussions about Heimat and questions of belonging.

1 Contemporary Heimat Discourse(s) in Germany In recent years, Heimat has become a popular weapon in German politics. Steinmeier is not the only politician to employ the term. The AfD has been mentioned, but their even more radical alter ego, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), an ultra-nationalist party that has survived several unsuccessful banning attempts, has been even more brazen in its Heimat rhetoric and imagery, leaving little space between those neo-Nazis and the “blood and soil” ideology of the “original” National Socialists. Their campaign imagery puts the Heimat stamp on all kinds of idyllic spaces in nature and rural settings, including wheat fields blowing in the wind (a Nazi classic) – and their slogans leave no doubt as to which groups represent a threat to this Heimat: “Heimat needs children. No same-sex marriage” and, rather inelegantly, “Rapefugees,” to name but a few. Heeding Steinmeier’s advice, Cem Özdemir, at the time chair of Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (the German Green party) and, as a Turkish-German, part of the “other” the right-wing Heimat excludes, tried to re-appropriate the term Heimat during a Bundestag speech that was directed at and against the AfD: “This coming Saturday, I am going to be in my Heimat. I will take an airplane to Stuttgart. There, I will take the commuter rail and get off at that final stop Bad Urach. That’s my Swabian Heimat, and I am not going to let you take it away from me” (Özdemir n.p.). A small village in the Swabian province perfectly fits the idea of Heimat, but the Turkish name does not, as the bearers of such names belong in their own place – at least in the eyes of the right: the NPD had rhymed catchily “Ist der Ali kriminell, in die Heimat, aber schnell!” (If Ali is a criminal, he has to be sent back to his Heimat immediately!) Özdemir thus embraces the term and adds to the traditional image in an attempt to re-define the notion of Heimat by opening it beyond the group that has “always” been there – “always” meaning for the last couple hundred years, because Özdemir was of course born in Bad Urach. It is difficult to tell what is more remarkable: the fact that someone is denied the right to call their place of birth Heimat in twenty-first-century Germany, or the fact that a politician from the political left publicly embraced the term in a political speech in the German parliament. While the young Greens disagreed with this approach and complained that “Heimat is an exclusionary term and therefore not suitable for fighting rightwing ideology” (cf. Zudeick 18), it is undeniable that Heimat has reached discourses

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beyond the far right. It has become mainstream among the Volksparteien CDU/CSU and SPD (Steinmeier’s political home). In 2014, Bavaria’s CSU founded the so-called Heimatministerium (Ministry of Heimat), the first minister of which, Markus Söder, defined its raison d’être as the following: “Heimat means: to be at home, to stay at home and to feel at home. For this purpose, we have developed the strategy of Heimat” (“Heimat Bayern” n.p.). And in accordance with the often-observed notion of Heimat as simultaneously local and national (see, for instance, Applegate 6; Confino 50), this Bavarian idea went national after the 2017 election, when Horst Seehofer, formerly Bavarian Ministerpräsident, went to Berlin as head of the newly coined Ministerium für das Innere, Bau und Heimat (Ministry for the Interior, Building and Heimat). “We’ve got this!” is the obvious message to voters: there’s no need to go to the fringe if you are concerned about your Heimat. The journalist Peter Zudeick offers theoretical support for such messaging in his 2018 book Heimat. Volk. Vaterland: Eine Kampfansage an Rechts. His dictum: The far right has occupied these words and turned them into “discursive weapons against the idea of a liberal and humane society” (14). These terms, however, are not irretrievably lost and should therefore be reclaimed: “We cannot cede the arsenal of terms, that is being used to take the people for a fool, to the right” (15). This trend of Heimat-mainstreaming doesn’t go unnoticed and unanswered. In the foreword to Thomas Ebermann’s polemical Linke Heimatliebe (2019), Thorsten Mense criticizes the newfound Heimat-adoration in general and the fact that the political left in particular has embraced it, too. Nowadays, there is competition between the far right and the Green party and even Die Linke as to “whose love of Germany is bigger and truer,” says Mense, and quotes by way of example Katrin Göring-Eckart, vice president of the Bundestag: “We love this country! It is our Heimat! We are going to fight for this Heimat!” and Thuringia’s Linke (left-wing) Ministerpräsident Bodo Ramelow, who promises not to let Nazis take away his Heimat (all Mense 9). Mense maintains that ultimately, “linke Heimatliebe” (left-wing love of Heimat) entails the same reactionary currents that the right employs with their exclusionary Heimat propaganda: “For love for Heimat, that comes along so innocent and peaceful, already carries with it hatred for all that disturbs the perceived idyll – the foreign, troublemakers, ‘nest polluters,’ the Other, but also even change and with this any kind of emancipation” (15). Mense sees a whole society drifting rightwards and bemoans the fact that an entire nation is yearning for an antiquated ideal of Germanness rather than trying to figure out what “a future German society of the many” (10) might entail. The open question in this difference of opinion, if you will, is the question of whether or not the term Heimat can be separated from the nationalist and segregationist hue it unquestionably has in the context of the NPD, the AfD, and their ideological predecessors. As for the term itself, it plays a role in a much larger con-

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text than the political discourse – and it has played a role for a long time, of course, and never disappeared, even though some of its manifestations like Heimatliteratur, Blut und Boden (blood and soil), Heimatfilm, and Anti-Heimatfilm have come and gone. Heimat museums have not closed, and the school subject Heimatkunde (local studies), though replaced by Sachkunde (social studies) for the most part, is still on the books in Switzerland. In this sense, Zudeick is right when he states that current observations about a “comeback” of Heimat are overblown: “In science, literature, art, journalism […] the term ‘Heimat’ has been prevalent for decades” (51). This is not to say, however, that there has not been a recent emphasis on certain aspects of Heimat in the discourse that go beyond the political – the aspects that Steinmeier alludes to with his use of the word Entschleunigung and that can be described as an idealization of the rural. “‘The village’ booms and the villages are dying” (11), write Werner Nell and Marc Weiland in their preface to the essay collection Imaginäre Dörfer (Imaginary Villages, 2014). And indeed, two seemingly contradictory trends are happening simultaneously. On the one hand, more and more people live in cities (Amann 81), villages are dying, and as a society, Germany is “without any doubt urbanized into the last corner” (Dirksmeier 42). On the other hand, the concept of the rural (das Ländliche) is still very much alive and researched in Urban Studies, Rural Studies, and Cultural Geography (Baumann 89–92), following a long tradition of creating images of idealized rural spaces for a predominantly urban audience to satisfy its craving for “images of a nonalienated work and life environment that is in unison with nature” (Schütte 41).² Recently, however, excitement about the countryside has become a “mega trend” (Amann 80) and there are a number of expressions for “countryside euphoria” (91) such as the popularity of “wwoofing” (world-wide voluntary work on organic farms), successful TV shows like Bauer sucht Frau (now up to season 15 – the US equivalent Farmer Wants a Wife was cancelled after one season in 2008), and the sheer number of countryside magazines like Landlust (country passion), Landliebe (country love), or Mein schönes Land (my beautiful country). The latter’s “immense success” (Baumann 91) defies the general downward trend in print magazine distribution numbers (101). Another trend one might add is organic food labeling and marketing and the supposedly idyllic, peaceful, natural, and, paradoxically, pristine landscapes where products from companies like Landliebe or Müller originate (Amann 81). And then of course there is the supermarket chain Lidl’s organic house brand that does not even pretend to be subtle: “Ein gutes Stück Heimat” (A good piece of Heimat).

 See also Nell, “Imaginationsraum” 28.

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It goes without saying that the country magazines, to say nothing of organic food marketing campaigns, create an idealized, idyllic space that has little to do with real spaces, elide any and all problematic aspects of rural life such as lack of infrastructure, animal disease, or conflicts regarding the placement of wind turbines, to name but a few (Baumann 102). These publications rarely deal with real places and instead emphasize gardening, cooking, and home improvement. Farming in this context is always the farming of the reader. These magazines are therefore less about rural landscapes, “but rather magazines about lifestyle, most of all” (103). If country magazines are an answer to the longing for Entschleunigung and thus a part of the contemporary Heimat discourse, the village novel similarly provides an imaginary space. What, then, is contemporary literature’s contribution to the issue? What answers can these novels give? How do they represent this space that politicians either want to protect from the Other or make even better in the name of humanity? What, in a nutshell, is the Heimat of the Dorfroman? And how does the Dorfroman position itself in the political Heimat discourse?

2 Heimat and the Dorfroman Ursula März noted in Die Zeit in 2017 that Heimat literature has had a remarkable run in the last ten years: A large number of village novels³ have recently been published, and they can consistently be found on bestseller lists and are showered with literary prizes. And, she adds, echoing the aforementioned assumption that a certain “longing” must be answered: “it cannot be ignored that this new Heimat literature – how else to name it? – accommodates growing public interest” (n.p.). Indeed, there are many such novels and they contain all the tropes one would expect: the rural community, where everyone knows everything about everyone; the edges of the woods, deer included; the farming world; the rural-urban dichotomy of city dwellers longing for a quieter life in the countryside and the village community’s resentment toward these outsiders. While the contemporary Dorfroman is not formulaic like the Heimatfilm of the 1950s, a recurring topic is a complete brokenness of the idyllic space. Sometimes, what looks idyllic at first glance turns out to be broken on closer inspection. The utopia turns out to be a dystopia. Examples would be Bastian Asdonk’s Mitten im Land (2016) or Katrin Seddig’s Das Dorf (The Village, 2017). And sometimes, the village is broken to begin with and presented as an absolutely brutal, violent, undesirable place from which the main

 For more about the history of the genre of the village novel and its connection with Heimat literature, see the introduction in this volume.

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character(s) cannot escape, although escape is all they dream about. Examples for this category are, among others, the following texts, in order of increasing violence: Andreas Maier’s Das Zimmer (The Room, 2011), Bernd Schroeder’s Auf Amerika (To America, 2014), Norbert Scheuer’s Am Grunde des Universums (At the Bottom of the Universe, 2017), Alina Herbig’s Niemand ist bei den Kälbern (Nobody is with the Calves, 2017), and Andreas Moster’s Wir leben hier seit wir geboren sind (We Have Lived Here Since We Were Born, 2017). The other recurring theme is the search for one’s own place in the world, in society, in the community. This could be represented by a city expat looking for fulfillment in the countryside or a village dweller searching for a Heimat that can be more specifically defined as a “network of social relationships” (Gansel 205). Among the many different attempts to define Heimat, Carsten Gansel argues, this “subjective component” (205) is one constant, in addition to space and time dimensions. Heimat then, writes another critic, is not a specific place but the “product of the feeling of agreement with one’s own little world” – or the other way around: “Heimat gets destroyed in places where people are no longer secure regarding their environment, where they are constantly exposed to irritation” (Bausinger 109). Interestingly, the village novels overall do not appear to offer the same kind of refuge that country magazines promise. On the contrary, the protagonists of these novels, more often than not, fail in their search. They either discover that village life is not as idyllic as they had anticipated (Mitten im Land), or their village life is a living hell from which they cannot escape. Niemand ist bei den Kälbern exemplifies this kind of entrapment. Alina Herbig’s novel describes a rural nightmare of domestic violence, sexual abuse, poverty, and desolation – milk prices are too low, wind turbines take over and threaten the status quo – from which escape turns out to be impossible for the narrator Christin, who gets beaten up not only by her husband but also by her city lover during intercourse (afterwards, he likes to leave cigarette burn marks on her body). Christin, without any education to speak of and a bank account withdrawal limit of 10 Euros, is unable to adjust to a better life in the village and unable to leave. The novel ends with what amounts to a metaphor for this rural life: Christin drives her car at high speed on the grain field, because at a lower speed, one gets stuck in the mud. A preliminary conclusion about the genre, then, might be that it provides the antipode to the self-fulfillment-promising country magazines. A case in point is Christoph Peters’s Dorfroman (Village Novel, 2020), a novel whose title promises nothing less than an exemplary text for the genre as a whole. Here, the protagonist, an unhappy city dweller, visits the village of his childhood and during the visit remembers his youth in the 1970s when the proposed construction of a nuclear power plant divided the community and family. The clash of tradition and mod-

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ernity tears apart something that was supposedly whole at some point – and neither the community nor the protagonist recover from it. Accordingly, the Heimat is destroyed, the protagonist loses his home, and the book, literally, ends with a declaration of error: “I will still get into my car and drive back to Berlin, where I am not at home, either. It is wrong” (Peters 412). Beyond this kind of dystopian nihilism, the question that will concern the remainder of this essay regards the specific contributions of the new Dorfroman to the Heimat discourse.⁴ Before I get into the discussion of two examples of such villages, I will first and finally briefly consider what Heimat means in this context and how it can be approached in these novels. Obviously, the current discussion has shown that the concept of Heimat in question here is not a purely spatial phenomenon, i. e., not a mere place. It is an idea as much as a physical location, and maybe more so. In the political discourse, the images that accompany the term go far beyond a village, a region, or even the nation, as they imply lifestyle, inclusion and exclusion, and so on. The long history of Heimat has been thoroughly researched, and this is not the place to reiterate the tension between the regional and the national (for instance, see Applegate 10 ff.) or the fact that there have always been multiple Heimats (Confino 62). Rather, my guiding question here is about spatial representation of the village in connection with the idea of Heimat that defies mere spatiality. For this purpose, a quick look at the discussions concerning spatial representation in

 I am particularly interested in novels of the recent past in which the village itself is at the center. To sharpen the focus, it is helpful to consider Carsten Gansel’s 2014 classification of “tendencies in the staging of the village/the rural” (218): First, memoirs by the authors of “pop” literature that describe youth in the countryside in the 1980s in an idealized, idyllic fashion – Gansel references Astrid Lindgren’s The Six Bullerby Children. Sven Regner’s Neue Vahr Süd (2004) is another example. The second tendency can be found in texts by younger authors in which contact with the rural sphere triggers “thinking about/re-thinking (Nach-Denken) or remembrance of the past” (Gansel 218), as in Jan Brandt’s Gegen die Welt (Against the World, 2011). Third and finally, Gansel mentions German rural TV crime shows. These categories are slightly different from what is at interest here: The first type of novel is rather subjective and unique in its approach and thus not really interesting with regard to a larger discourse. The second type represents continuity from twentieth-century memory literature and would be worth discussing in that context. The third type is interesting because here, in the Regionalkrimi (regional detective story), as it is sometimes called, the village itself becomes a protagonist: spatial representation here is neither overshadowed by unrealistic nostalgia nor by any critical memory discourses. This tendency is therefore closest to what shall be examined in the following: the Dorfroman in which the village itself is at the center, in which we get an immediate view of the organization of village life and work. I would like to suggest making these novels, many of which were published after Gansel’s classification (2014), the third category and propose a way of analyzing and discussing spatial representations of these “new” villages.

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cultural geography and the extent to which such approaches can be utilized in the current context will be helpful. Ernst Langthaler notes that more often than not, the view of the “old village” that is a closed system, consists of farming culture, and will inevitably be destroyed by modernity, predominates in the realm of “village research” (Dorfforschung, 64). The reason for this, Langthaler argues, is on the one hand the urge to keep the research manageable. On the other hand, there are “extra-scientific desires in a hectic, confusing und problematic world for quiet, straightforwardness and routine – wishes to which even scholars are prone, at times also with regard to the taste of the audience” (64). If “even scholars,” as Langthaler dryly diagnoses, are susceptible to the promises of a slowed-down, natural, self-fulfilling lifestyle, how can the village be “constructed according to social- and cultural studies” (64) without lapsing into such fantasies? Here, Langthaler points to two results of the spatial turn for village studies: First, the village space is no longer simply considered a given, but rather one that is also “erzeugt” (created) through “material, social and symbolic practices” (64). Secondly, the village space not only consists of a “container space within absolute borders” (64) but develops from the “relations of its […] elements” (64). The container model that considers space as an absolute vessel that can be filled with content has been critiqued for some time, although it is still around (Baumann 92), not least because it makes intuitive sense in everyday conversations (Dennerlein 71). With regard to Rural Studies, however, Baumann points out that critique of the container model is already inspired by the cultural turn of the 1970s. As a result, new approaches in cultural geography consider the rural “less as an objective characteristic of space but rather a symbolically communicated and negotiated social representation” (92). Such thoughts even influence urban and rural planning, as the city/countryside dichotomy is increasingly replaced with center/periphery and categories such as reachability and mobility lead to new conceptualizations of space, thus weakening the container model (99). The implications for the concept of Heimat are clear: Heimat is open to spatial approaches that emphasize this newer understanding of space and its creation. Eigler argues that German (Heimat) studies, “responding to problematic or reactionary manifestations of Heimat in literature and film, have largely focused their attention on issues other than representations of place and space” (2014, 26). They have thus contributed to the impression that they adhere to an outdated spatial model – the container model; at least that must be the impression from the perspective of cultural geography, which in turn considers Heimat predominantly as a “static” “container” for traditions and thus as something that exemplifies “traditional notions of place” (2014, 22). Eigler suggests that Heimat studies utilize approaches from spatial studies and specifically points to the work of Henri Lefevbre (The Production of Space), Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, and

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Mikhail Bakhtin’s dynamic model of space, particularly the “idyllic chronotope,” whose characteristics “correlate with nostalgic, idealized, or utopian renderings of Heimat” (2014, 40). De Certeau differentiates between lieu (“place”) and espace (“space”). The two notions are not identical to place and space as defined by Anglo-American cultural geographers, but in de Certeau’s system mean proper place (lieu) and lived or practiced place (espace) and the role of narratives is to transform one into the other. This approach, Eigler argues, is “highly relevant for cultural and literary studies,” as it points “to the role of stories in creating ‘lived space’ and, conversely, to the role of movements across and within places in creating stories,” and thus establishes the “relevance of dynamic notions of space for narratives of belonging” (2014, 47). Particularly, Eigler continues, the “fundamental role de Certeau attributes to stories, namely their ability to turn space into place and place into space” pertains to Heimat studies as it “can be productively related to exclusionary versus open notions of Heimat” and “spatial stories have the potential of discursively challenging traditional notions of Heimat, which in some extreme manifestations tie belonging and (ethnic or national) identity to control over a particular territory, that is, to a ‘proper place’” (2014, 47–48). When discussing Heimat ideas, then, lived space (espace) is as important as proper place (lieu), as are the stories that connect/create the two. To the extent that these stories concern and contain those who move in and out of Heimat spaces, dynamism becomes a more obviously central Heimat attribute. On the other hand, the “in and out” specifically defines a specific place and raises the question as to what constitutes this place. It therefore comes as no surprise that, like de Certeau, Eigler is interested in boundaries: since “Heimat has often been used to exclude ethnic, racial, and cultural others, one of the most salient questions about literary representations of Heimat concerns the narrative rendering of spatial boundaries,” specifically the question as to how “the limits of Heimat” are “textually” defined (Eigler 2012, 42). As village or rural spaces are by definition understood in opposition to urban spaces, the narrative rendering of boundaries is highly relevant for the discussion of the Dorfroman. In the following, I would like to take up both the dynamic notion of space that is socially and symbolically communicated rather than simply a given and Eigler’s notion of storytelling in conjunction with the negotiations between the idea of Heimat and place. As Heimat can be situated between space and idea, between a specific place (the village) and an idealized notion of that place (the longing), the following case studies shall examine the way in which the village space and its boundaries are created in the narrative. My preliminary thesis is that they contribute to the discourse in a way that is able to overcome the dichotomy between reductive Heimat notions in the wake of national socialist “blood and soil” ideology

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and the simplistic understanding of Heimat as a premodern space. Specifically, the two novels discussed below set out to conceptualize Heimat images that their protagonists perceive as positive, sustainable, and desirable. As readers, we are invited to judge whether or not these novels fulfill their own Heimat ideals. As it turns out, such fulfillment “fails” as long as the dichotomy remains stable. It “succeeds” when the idea of Heimat gets an overhaul.

3 Bastian Asdonk: Mitten im Land When the journalist Marc Bielefeld decided for a radical change of scenery and to live on a boat, he described his decision on Spiegel Online: “I wanted to get away from the craziness of the offices, the shrieking of the city. Away from the cars, traffic lights, signs and spheres of noisy and never-ending messages” (see Gansel 198). The protagonist in Bastian Asdonk’s novel, as if he had read Bielefeld’s essay, names the exact same reasons for leaving his high-profile position in Berlin and moving to the “middle of the country,” the former East German countryside, in order to live a life that is pure and undisturbed and free of the stresses of the city and his old job that had burnt him out – in a place that is so beautiful a landscape painter couldn’t “dream up” (Asdonk 16) this idyllic spot in a more perfect way. He, the nameless first-person narrator, arrives at his newly purchased lake house in the woods close to a little village with a clear agenda: producing his own food, finding his inner balance, living a sustainable life. He is not, however, prepared for the tight-knit rural community, whose xenophobia, violence, nationalism, and anti-establishment feelings slowly become visible. It begins with a few quotations here and there that one would hear at a PEGIDA demonstration: “Problems with thieves? That’s the Romanians and Poles who come over and steal everything they can carry. This we owe to Europe. We should never have let that happen” (133). He also learns about an attack on a wedding party during which the Korean groom and his family were beaten up by a mob with baseball bats and brass knuckles without receiving any help, assistance, or sympathy from the local authorities. He slowly learns that the village’s “middle class” and the village representatives such as the mayor and the bar owner live in a sort of truce with the local gang of young and violent neo-Nazis. The residents later even plead with the narrator after his own violent run-in with the local Nazis “not to make a big deal out of the whole thing” (122), so as not to encourage the media to drag the village into the mud. In another sign of what is going on in the middle of the community, the narrator happens to walk into a gathering of a local women’s group in the backroom of the village pub and overhears a speech

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about the necessity of resistance and politicians who ruin “our Heimat” with their irresponsible behavior: “Every day, they spread their lies in the government-controlled media. Our job is to continue to aggressively give birth in order to create more children” (90). “We,” the speaker continues in perfect “blood and soil” manner, “are the soil on which our country will thrive again” (90). The locals become even more violent and threatening when the narrator begins a relationship with Maja, a cashier in the village’s supermarket. What begins with anonymous threats and a message that suggests he leave the “liberated area” (141),⁵ escalates with the narrator’s hunkering down behind barbed wire, his hospitalization after what he perceives to be an attack on his property and life, and his hiding in the woods because he is too scared to return to his house. The novel’s plot is driven by the clash of Heimat notions: on the one hand, the narrator sees his new home as a refuge from modern society and its “typical civilization illnesses” (62). The locals, on the other hand, defend their Heimat, which they define ideologically in a National Socialist “us” vs. “them” manner, against the stranger who to them represents the inferior and threatening Other. The reconciliation between these two seemingly irreconcilable concepts comes unexpectedly from a group of anthroposophists whom the narrator encounters when he is on the run from the Nazis. They seem to represent the missing link to the narrator’s fulfillment. Running an organic family farm and a sort of life-coaching center – offering adult seminars in “Weltanschauung” (worldview, 200), though they concede that that is not the term people use anymore – they live off their own land, in unison with nature and themselves. They offer community and protection to the narrator, in addition to what to him sounds like a “sound” philosophical foundation of this lifestyle, as explained by Jakob, the community’s mastermind. The narrator is immediately drawn to this place and its ideology. “Since my childhood, I haven’t had this feeling of natural order” (203). He decides to stay and, after a trial period, is accepted into their community, only to then discover that this “community” includes not only the village’s “middle class” but also, to the narrator’s horror, the neo-Nazis who suddenly show up to his initiation ritual. As the narrator learns, this whole rural community in its idyllic state only works because the Nazi mob keeps strangers away and thus makes possible that “everything here stays the way it is” (211). Paradise, the narrator learns, cannot be created individually in a lake house surrounded by barbed wire. It must be created in a community, and

 This is an allusion to the idea of the “National befreite Zone” (national liberated area) that Neonazis in Germany use in order to define and mark areas in which their ideology prevails and national or local governments lose their influence.

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with a similar defense mechanism: it requires a violent mob to keep strangers away so that everyone on the inside can live in peace. The reader, who sympathizes with the narrator’s longing for Entschleunigung, ultimately sees their initial expectations unfulfilled. What had promised to become an idyllic Heimat utopia instead reveals itself as a dark satire. In the end, the novel offers the shocking revelation that the narrator is all too ready to fall for the seduction of a fulfilled, though violent, exclusionary, and National Socialist life in paradise. When the narrator, an educated liberal, initially learns about the childproducing Nazi matrons, he thinks everyone in this place has lost their minds (90), and half-heartedly argues towards the end that this “racial dullness is disgusting” (211). When he realizes, however, that the attacks on him were not personal, but in the name of defending an ideal that he himself aspires to, he quickly makes his peace with the arrangement and joins the community. The final image appears to be inspired by the Voltairian “We must cultivate our garden” (Candide) resolution: The novel ends with the “men” – and we can assume that this includes the Nazis who had beaten him into the hospital, as there aren’t enough working “men” on the farm (Jakob, for instance, only talks and thinks, but doesn’t do any farm or garden work) – helping the narrator restore his garden. As readers, we are of course outraged by this arrangement and, on closer inspection, notice that the narrator was “different” from the start: now it makes sense that, when he discovers a huge cornflower Swastika planted in the middle of a wheat field, he cannot help but notice the beauty of the “lustrous blue” (Asdonk 76) in the golden field; that he values physical labor over the intellectual work of the ‘elites,’ as did the Nazis (33); that he feels disconnected from his gay and brown friend Navid when he notices “something foreign about him, something that I will never be able to completely understand” (67). With this, we do not identify. Or do we? – the novel seems to ask. The general intention of Asdonk’s Mitten im Land is to point to the reactionary tendencies that are not only housed in antediluvian rural communities, but also in the center of society, in the urban intellectual class, among the elites who think their ideas of sustainability and obsession with nature make them immune to extreme ideology. In other words, Mitten im Land is not only a regional marker, but also an arrow pointed at the middle of our society, whose center, as the blurb on the novel’s book jacket helpfully points out, has moved more and more to the right. I would like to look beyond this larger political message and dissect the specific constructions of the two competing notions of Heimat in the novel, the narrator’s idyllic vs. the rural community’s exclusionary ones, and examine how their ultimate reconciliation fails on closer inspection. Interestingly, these competing notions are based on two competing spatial models. While Jakob explains that the village and the peaceful space it represents is created through the interrelationship

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between the different social groups and thus adheres to a dynamic spatial model, the narrator is stuck in container thinking, as he is under the impression that all he needs is the space (his lake house) that can then be filled with a garden, which together with the beauty of the view of the water would create his self-fulfillment. As if to underline this idea, he first fortifies his piece of land with barbed wire, but then, ironically, leaves it as he “moves” to the woods, so that what he ends up with is but an empty container. His idea of Heimat is lacking community, as Jakob informs him: “People need other people. Family, friends, neighbors” (181). Instead of an adjustment that would replace the erroneous Heimat notion with a better one, however, we only get the final image of the novel in which everyone helps to restore the garden. But the integration of the narrator remains superficial, as he literally never joins the “we” of the community: While Jakob explains the community philosophy in terms of “we,” and that “we” includes the “middle” of the village as well as the neo-Nazis, the nameless first-person narrator remains just that: someone who says “I” to the very end and who remains nameless, i. e., nobody ever addresses him by his name. It is thus the novel’s narrative strategy to keep the narrator anonymous within a community in which everyone is on a first-name basis. The alternative model, on the other hand, while built on community, is fraught with inner contradictions that ultimately deconstruct the very idea that the communal truce between different societal groups would be able to create a space like the one the narrator had initially envisioned. This village “mitten im Land” that the inhabitants call their “Heimat” is mainly defined through the community’s understanding that there is an “us” on the inside against a “them” on the outside. The outside consists of the racially other, democracy in general – “Democracy makes you ugly” (89) – and politicians in particular, especially the US-led Western alliance, and modernity/consumerism. The inside, however, remains murky, and this is where the spatial construct of this village and its borders becomes significant. The village is not defined via strict spatial borders. On the contrary, from the beginning, the question as to what is inside and what is outside the place is raised via the lake house, which is clearly outside the bounds of the village (in the woods), yet is a house that everyone seems to know, as the narrator can refer to it as “the lake house” when he speaks with the mayor. Similarly, the other places of the novel add to the ill-defined space rather than contributing to the narrative creation of the scenery: it is, for instance, unclear if the hospital is part of the village or a regional clinic. Similarly, when the narrator calls the police in the middle of the night, the emergency operator immediately seems to know who is on the line and what the issue is (neo-Nazis attacking his lake house), suggesting that the police station is part of the village – which would then seem to be larger (it houses the emergency call operator) than the fact that everyone knows “the lake house”

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suggests. Even the anthroposophists’ farm on the other side of the woods turns out to be part of the community, as is the building supply store and the agricultural wholesaler. The novel’s rural space appears to spread out in concentric circles that ultimately enclose a substantial area; this would seem to starkly contradict the fact that within this space, everyone not only knows everyone else but is well-informed about everything that happens: not only the narrator’s arrival is a known fact, but also the details of his love affair with Maja. The police know, Jakob knows, the Nazis know, even the person who lives next to Maja in the (only at first glance) anonymous apartment building seems to know everything. This raises the question: who is in and who is out? And if everyone is on the inside, what keeps them there, and where does it end? This question is especially trenchant as the whole construct of this community is one that is defined against the Other, the outside. As Jakob explains, he and his family and their farm are part of a larger rural community, and while the mob doesn’t exactly work for Jakob, it is clear that he is the person in charge, the person who talks to the mob, gives them advice, suggests that it was a mistake to “scare” (212) the narrator too much. When the narrator applies, so to speak, to be part of the community, he passes his three-day trial period on the farm, and the anthroposophists elect to keep him. The reader, and it must be assumed the narrator as well, is at this point under the impression that the latter will become a member of this farming community, as it is there where he feels spiritually fulfilled, and as the self-sufficient lifestyle celebrated there is exactly what he has been looking for. In the end, however, the circle that welcomes him is much larger than it at first appears, as the whole village community, or at least every person the narrator has encountered so far, appears for his initiation ritual – and in the end the narrator finds himself back in his lake house, not on the farm, and the “men” help him with his garden. The clear suggestion here is that, first, the anthroposophists are in charge not only of their farm but of the whole community, and second, the trial period was not for a place in this community farm, but for a place in the community as a whole. The narrator has thus, by living and working on the family farm for three days, proven his suitability to settle in his (!) lake house. This specific disconnect between trial period and reward, the asymmetric construct in which one family welcomes the narrator into a community of hundreds (or thousands?) of people, is symptomatic for the larger disconnect within the community: the disconnect between the sustainable lifestyle of the anthroposophists that, in Jakob’s explanation, is the whole reason why they are where they are and why they do what they do, and the larger community that doesn’t share these ideals. The mayor refers to the anthroposophists as “denen” (them) and nods “in an undefined direction outside the village” (45), clearly marking an ideo-

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logical and spatial divide. And Maja asks the narrator incredulously why he wouldn’t just buy vegetables in the supermarket? (80) The relationship the community has with the “outside” world is similarly contradictory. Exemplary is the organic farm itself: while the owners take pride in the fact that everything they eat “we grew ourselves” (188), the narrator quickly learns that the farm, going beyond mere self-sufficiency, is economically based on the farm bakery and cheese dairy. Who are the customers, however, in a community that does not seem to value sustainability too much – if not “outsiders”? But how would “outsiders” even get here if the community does everything possible to keep them away? This remains an open question – or simply slightly unbelievable. Case in point: the seminars. Are they only geared toward the town folk, as the fact that we see one of the local Nazi women as a customer/“patient” (200), may suggest? The question, again, is this: how small can a community be for this kind of business to be successful? One last example is the obvious contradiction that, on the one hand, the village community wants to stay out of the media, as they ask the narrator not to make a big fuss about his encounter with the Nazi mob. On the other hand, Jakob explains that the Nazi mob is necessary to keep strangers away, so that the idyllic space remains idyllic. The novel seems to suggest that the very idea of a community that is closed off is contradictory at best and illogical and unlivable at worst. This contradiction is mirrored in the spatial configuration of a clearly defined group of “us” that is not supported by a clearly defined space and borders. On the contrary, the notion of this tight-knit community holding together against a hostile outside is constantly undermined, at times comically, when for instance the Nazi women preach the necessity of bearing more and more children but lack the corresponding imperial ideas or drive. As ridiculous as the idea of babies for the “Führer” sounds, babies for a local Nazi group so they can do some sustainable farming becomes even more ridiculous. As has often been discussed (Applegate, Confino), one of the main functions of the idea of Heimat that developed around the 1871 nation building was the introduction of a connection between the beloved “regional” that required protection and Pflege (care) and the newly introduced “national.” The volatility of the latter, which was caused by its artificial character, could be somewhat overcome with the emotional attachment to the “regional.” Asdonk’s novel points to the absurdity of a Heimat that is only regional. This is not to say, however, that we come away with the notion that Heimat only works in combination with nationalist ideas. On the contrary, nationalism and exclusion are presented as just as logically problematic. Namely, Jakob’s main inner contradiction is his assertion that, in order to keep everything as it is, the community needed to accept the violent tendencies of the neo-Nazis in order to deter outsiders and thus, in effect, modernity. The suggestion that the

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rural idyllic and peaceful life of the farming anthroposophists is only doable in collaboration with the Nazis, as if they were “other” to the anthroposophists, is undermined by Jakob’s own telling of the farm’s history, which was owned by his grandfather and during the Third Reich protected by a family friend who, as he euphemistically puts it, “was politically very influential back then” (178) – and was also used as a Nazi training center. And though Jakob agrees with the narrator that this “racial dullness” (211) is disgusting, the anthroposophists in their antiAmericanism emphasize Germanness just as much as the neo-Nazis, all but banning the English language from their community (196). Finally, the same woman who gives the “völkisch” speech about the duty of childbearing is among the clientele of the life coaching business. In the end, everyone in this rural community is a Nazi, including the members of its ideological center, the farm. Real integration does not take place, and to that extent, the narrator’s quest fails. The Heimat-ideals remain irreconcilable – a fact that plays out in one more significant way. The novel is written in the present tense, which fits the first-person narrator who lives in the moment and seeks personal fulfillment, and whose whole enterprise is devoid of any historical depth. We learn next to nothing about his past, he comes without a partner, there is no mention of any family ties, and the only friend he seems to have is the one with whom he mentally breaks up because of his otherness. Clearly, his idea of a Heimat that can be created here and now fails. The message, then, would be that Heimat in the present tense remains unachievable. Heimat requires historical depth and tradition – but the tradition that becomes available in this community is one of National Socialism, as the only remaining knot that ties the community together is, on closer inspection, Nazi ideology. The novel therefore not only ridicules the narrator’s naïve ideas of sustainability and inner peace. As it demonstrates the inner contradictions of the supposed reconciliation between two competing Heimat ideals, it negates the mere possibility of Heimat itself in that it offers no way out of the dichotomy of simplistic pre-modern space and exclusionary ideology.

4 Mariana Leky: Was man von hier aus sehen kann Mariana Leky’s bestseller Was man von hier aus sehen kann offers a glimpse from within the village and tells a story that attempts to maintain and rehabilitate the village as a place of refuge, security, self-identity, and unity with nature. The village here is defended as a Heimat space in the Blochian sense where Heimat is a “philosophical term against alienation. That one can be self-identical in Heimat, that nothing foreign is attached to the objects, as Hegel says, but that the object instead is so close to us as the subject, so that we are at home in it” (Bloch 206). The novel

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suggests that the protagonist Luise can be self-identical only in her village home – but this village first needs to be re-created in order to allow for her to become truly self-identical. Luise, the first-person narrator, tries to come to terms with her village identity, and she does so in three long episodes that span 20 years: the first takes place when she is ten, the second when she is 22, and the third when she is 30. As is the case in Mitten im Land, much is off-kilter in this village as well: from a depressed neighbor who, over the course of 20 years, doesn’t seem to leave her room or change out of her pajamas; to Luise’s friend Martin who gets beaten by his alcoholic father; to her own father who, separated from Luise’s cheating mother, travels the world and is mostly present in phone calls; to Luise’s grandmother Selma’s life-long mourning for her husband who died young in the war; to Selma’s gentleman friend, the village optometrist who is referred to simply as der Optiker throughout the novel, who cannot escape the voices in his head, and who suppresses his love for Selma until she is on her death-bed; to, most importantly, the fact that Martin falls out of a defective train door at full speed in front of Luise’s eyes when they are children – a death right on the foil of the village, as the two friends always blindly recited the passing landscape on their train rides: “woods, meadow, meadow, woods, field …” and the door failed at one of those markers. As opposed to most village novels, the traumatizing death of the childhood friend as well as the many little dysfunctionalities in this village are balanced with the warm relationship between Luise and her grandmother Selma. Together, they represent the nucleus of the village community and provide a glance of what the notion of solidarity, security, and self-identity that pervades many Heimat-definitions might entail. For Luise, whatever the shortcomings of the rural community may be (be it her mother and father who both completely fail in their parental roles, or the tragic loss of Martin), the relationship with Selma and Luise’s idea of the village as her ersatz family are the cornerstones of her decades-long search for an identity she finds towards the end of the novel: an identity that makes functionality within a dysfunctional environment possible and that ultimately appears to present the village as a perfect Heimat space. Frederik, a Buddhist monk who lives in Japan and who becomes the love of Luise’s life in the novel’s second part, plays a major role in Luise’s eventual adjustment when at the end of the third part he finally appears to give up his celibate life and become part of the village community. On closer inspection, however, the novel goes beyond a love story with a happy ending. Luise’s coming to terms requires more than getting together with Frederik. On the contrary, making Frederik a part of her life and identity does not perfect the Heimat space, but rather is possible only after an adjustment of Luise’s understanding of Heimat itself. In the following, I will discuss the novel’s construction of

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the Heimat space, its necessary eventual adjustment, and the implications for the notion of Heimat. The novel’s nameless and regionally (Westerwald) only vaguely defined village is constructed as an idyllic space in remarkably non-idyllic and non-spatial terms. Natural beauty or remoteness are always already there, but they are not thematized. Only once in the novel do any of the characters comment on the village’s aesthetic charm, when the Optiker points out the surrounding countryside’s “magnificent symphony of green, blue, and gold” (Leky 82), but no one else in the village seems to care much about the beauty of their surroundings. Luise acknowledges in this context that they “lived in a picturesque region, gorgeous, paradisiacal,” and adds: “that’s also what was written in cursive font on the postcards that lay on the counter of the mom-and-pop store” (82). Acknowledging natural beauty here means either ironizing it in clichéd “symphonies” or a reduction to a postcard image, underscoring the constructed character of “traditional” Heimat imagery that is literally only a picture on a postcard, i. e., an artificial image that is created for the world but removed from the actual place it represents. Beyond this, the novel’s village consists of the houses of the main protagonists, the store, the ice cream place, and the Uhlheck (which roughly translates as owl pasture) – the only word in the novel that points to a northern German dialect and refers to an uphill meadow just outside the village where Selma goes for a walk every night. The rural space is nevertheless central for the novel and for Luise’s self-identity, as the village landscape defines key (tragic and traumatizing) moments of the novel with the repeated mantra of naming the different rural elements: “Meadow. Field. Forest” (61) is what Luise sees in front of her inner eye when she stares at Martin’s house inside of which, she knows, Martin in this moment gets beaten by his father; “Woods, meadow […] pasture, pasture” (100) says Martin when the train door suddenly opens; “Meadow, woods. woods. Perch one. Field. Woods. Meadow. Pasture, pasture” (230) Luise thinks when she reads Frederik’s letter informing her that he has decided not to mix things up (“durcheinanderbringen”) and to stay on his path in Japan without Luise. In the logic of the novel, the memorized order of the rural landscape must be mixed up in order to overcome the narrator’s trauma. Helping Luise with her trauma is the one thing Selma, the center of everything and the person whom everyone, including Luise, would consult with any problem (109), cannot do, as she regretfully says shortly before her death: “But I would have liked to help put your life in order, Luise” (267). Luise’s father cannot help, either, although he presumes to have the answer to all the village’s questions, as he repeatedly offers his solution to anyone willing to listen: “You all need to let in more world” (14). Luise’s father is himself unable to find inner equilibrium and throughout the novel remains a mere lost soul between the here and the far away, a traveler without a destination who is yet unable to let go of the village (he con-

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stantly seems to take part in the village life via telephone, even helping, on the phone, with the search for a runaway dog). In a way his mantra ultimately contributes to Luise’s happy ending in that the novel ends with Luise’s first solo trip far away (to Australia), a journey that marks the end of Luise’s thirty-year sedentariness in the village and the next small town. But the “durcheinanderbringen” requires more than leaving the physical space. Instead of descriptions of an idyllic space (see above), the novel’s village is presented mainly as a function of Luise’s narrative. The novel thus echoes the recognition following the spatial turn that villages are created through “social and symbolic practices” (Langthaler 64), or, to say it with Eigler and de Certeau: the narrative turns place into “lived space.” And this is what is literally happening in Was man von hier aus sehen kann: The village consists of a network of social interactions which feed the story to the narrator. Ultimately, village and Heimat representation become a narrative issue. Luise, though speaking in the first person, acts like an omniscient narrator. She speaks about the voices that torture the Optiker as if she could hear them; she knows about intimate conversations between village inhabitants; when she sleeps for three days straight after Martin dies, she describes in great detail how Selma carries her around; she even explicitly describes, among many other things, how Selma and the Optiker look at each other while she, Luise, lies on her bed, eyes closed (Leky 122). To be sure, this is not yet narratologically extraordinary, as Luise could just be relating her memories as an omniscient narrator who happens to have picked the first person as a mere narrative strategy. However, there are several instances when we become privy to how Luise learns what she knows, which put a focus on the question as to where the information we get comes from and to what extent Luise’s knowledge itself is part of the narrative. For example: Before he began traveling all over the world, Luise’s father regularly visited a psychoanalyst, Dr. Maschke. Throughout the novel, Luise tells the reader as a matter of fact that her father’s absence was Dr. Maschke’s idea. To her own and the reader’s surprise, however, Dr. Maschke tells her late in the novel that the opposite is the case: he had tried to talk Luise’s father out of his travel plans. Then it begins to dawn on Luise “that there wasn’t the slightest proof that Dr. Maschke had sent my father on a world trip, that Selma and I had simply assumed that that had been the case” (216). What had been presented as a fact by a quasi-omniscient narrator turns out to be mere conjecture on the part of Selma and Luise. Another instance concerns the Optiker and the voices he hears. Already in the novel’s first part, Luise talks about the voices matter-of-factly and even quotes them verbatim. At the end of the novel, however, when Frederik first meets the Optiker, the Optiker opens up to Frederik, telling him everything about the voices in his head. Luise reveals that this is how she first learned about the voices (200).

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Luise’s narrative ich, then, is the village. The ich resembles a wir in many instances, in that Luise often speaks for the other characters who are close by, as Luise is virtually never alone. Though Luise tells the story, she does so with the help of her friends and family, of the village community that provides the information for the story. All the late-night phone calls, all the conversations in the general store, all the anecdotes whereby one person tells the next person something and soon everyone knows – all these tidbits of village life turn out to be both diegetic, as they are part of the plot, and meta-diegetic as they create the novel’s narrative voice. Luise’s father is a case in point: though he is physically absent, his phoning in keeps him in the villages’ narrative loop – he is, for better or worse, still part of the community no matter how far away he is. On the other hand, it is this wir of the village community that for Luise represents the place she does not wish to and cannot leave behind. She stays connected when she moves to the Kreisstadt (district town), where she works in a bookstore, by phone or via bookstore visits by the Optiker, for instance. Even when she sleeps with Frederik for the first time, the village community takes part, as Luise explains in great detail what every single member of the community did that night (211–212). Her relationship with Selma is so close that they can be considered quasi co-narrators – even some of their dialogues take place in thought, as Selma appears to be able to read Luise’s mind (170). A number of events at the end of the novel help Luise put her life in order. Selma dies, and with her the center of the village community and the go-to emergency contact. “I dialed the number that almost everyone I knew would dial in emergencies” (109), Luise had said earlier, pointing to the central role Selma played in the village community. It is at this point that two things happen to Luise. First, she fills the vacuum Selma leaves behind: she keeps the aggrieved Marlies, who doesn’t take Selma’s passing easily, from killing herself, makes decisions as to what happens next, keeps in mind that the Einzelhändler (mom and pop store owner) and Palm, Martin’s father, need to be taken care of, and makes arrangements for the accommodations of her estranged parents. In short, Luise takes over for Selma and becomes the chief organizer of village affairs (296). Secondly and more importantly, and similar to Oskar Matzerath in Günter Grass’ Tin Drum, Luise (literally) finds (the power of ) her own voice. In the most grotesque scene of the novel, Luise tries to convince Marlies not to kill herself when all of a sudden Frederik walks towards her and they see each other for the first time in eight years. It is in this moment that Luise realizes what she can do with her voice, though Selma had already, if cryptically, pointed it out to her before she died: Luise has the ability to make objects such as picture frames fall off the wall when she knowingly tells a lie. In this scene, then, she promptly uses her powers to cause a little earthquake in Marlies’s house, thus making the astonished Marlies change her suicidal plans. At the same time, as she screams lies such as:

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“I have never ever loved anyone as little as you” (294) at the falling shelves and lamps in Marlies’s kitchen, she convinces Frederik, now standing next to her, how much she loves him. The ultimate rearrangement of the Heimat order in the book’s final chapters takes place on and around the Uhlheck – the place that is central to the village’s and the novel’s narrative fabric. The Uhlheck, situated outside the village but visible from its edge, is a liminal space. Selma goes for a walk there every night, more often than not in the company of someone else, and towards the end, Luise pushes Selma (now confined to a wheelchair) through this space; it is here that Frederik first appears, as he gets lost and Luise shows him the way back to the “Haus der Einkehr” (house of contemplation), a guest house in the next village that is rented out to various organizations such as screaming therapy groups or, as in this case, meditation groups from Japan; and here, on the Uhlheck, an okapi appears in Selma’s dreams, meaning that within 24 hours, as village lore has it, someone will die. A place of love and death, the Uhlheck represents the emotional center of the novel. But it is also Selma’s and Luise’s place and thus the center of the novel’s narrative perspective. From here, one can see the village, which, then, is the titular “was man von hier aus sehen kann” (that which can be seen from here). In the end, the village order is “durcheinandergebracht” and the perspective gets turned around. Selma is no more, and thus the ich/wir that had narrated most of the story is lost. At the same time, Luise finds her own and individual voice, which is certainly stronger than before, but no longer represents the village community in the way that it had. In the final scene, Luise, the Optiker and Marlies go for a walk to the Uhlheck, Luise for the first time without Selma. Here, Marlies begins to gain agency. She leads the way and observes the village – an observation that is introduced with a sentence that alludes to the novel’s title: “In the middle of the Uhlheck, from where one could see into the village, she stopped” (303). Marlies seems to take over the Uhlheck and thus fill part of the void Selma has left behind. At the same time, Frederik, who had stayed in Selma’s house, symbolically marks a changing of the guard with a thorough cleaning job of Selma’s place. And from this new perspective, Frederik sees and observes Luise and the others return (311). This change of perspective is cemented in with the last paragraph of the epilogue: Luise leaves for her trip to Australia and Frederik, who will wait for her in Selma’s house, looks after her, closes his eyes, and keeps “a motionless afterimage” (315) as Selma had done on the novel’s first page. The novel thus ends with the dissolution of the former narrative center and the establishment of a new narrative perspective. As shown above, the narrative center had been identical with Luise’s village Heimat and all that this Heimat had encompassed, all she would never leave, all the reasons why this place was her place. Yet in order for there to be a happy ending, everything must go, includ-

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ing Luise. However, the suggestion is not that the place of Heimat is imperfect and must be left behind. Luise finds herself not elsewhere, but in this very village – Frederik waits for her and the happy ending is clearly one that is destined to remain in this rural space. It is this space that gets an overhaul – and paradoxically, Heimat for Luise only works, in the end, when she gives up what Heimat means for her: when she lets go of Selma, or her narrative voice. But letting go does not mean that Heimat disappears. Rather, it entails a renewal of the community and its narrative function. The novel offers a reimagination of Heimat that explicitly goes beyond the idyllic premodern space on the one hand, as it rejects the postcard image of the colorful “symphony.” On the other hand, and this is probably the most interesting aspect of Leky’s Heimat, it avoids the us-versus-them-rhetoric of exclusionary notions of Heimat. The “wir” of the novel is positively defined – the “other” remains non-existent. The novel’s repeated attempt to “let in the world” seems to painstakingly avoid political terms – it is something that concerns people inside the Heimat bubble, not its borders. Openness is not at stake, as the Haus der Einkehr, for instance, already symbolizes: here, groups of all different kinds come for their seminars, including monks from Japan – as opposed to the seminar rooms in Mitten im Land that seem to be used only by local Nazi groups. One could argue that the integration of Frederik, originally from Duisburg, does not necessarily make this novel more welcoming than Mitten im Land – if this integration is ever questioned, but it is not, as nobody ever even asks whether joining the rural community is a good idea for either side. The fact that Frederik fits in promptly is not discussed as a question of belonging or integration, but rather represents an example of how this positive idea of Heimat works: as one that renews itself. It is not the fact that the villagers “let in the world” that allows for Luise’s happiness, but the fact that the Heimat itself is open to change from the inside. In Mitten im Land, people try to make sure that “everything here stays the way it is” (Asdonk 211). In Was man von hier aus sehen kann, Heimat only works if everything does not stay the way it used to be.

5 Conclusion In order to make a connection between the larger Heimat discourse in German politics and society in the last decade and a number of recent village novels, I have tried to show two things: (1) an approach to analyzing the creation of rural spaces, which allows indication of (2) the novels’ particular renderings of Heimat that respond to the larger discourse and, in Leky’s case, offer an alternative vision. Building on Eigler’s approach and borrowing from the insights of cultural geography, I

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have analyzed the spatial settings of two village novels and thus, by looking at the narrative creation of the rural (lived) spaces, the interrelations of different groups and spaces, and the borders thereof, I have outlined the specific Heimat ideas that define and forge the novels’ larger points. In Asdonk’s Mitten im Land, the two Heimat ideals that define the political discourse as outlined in the introduction come to emerge: the idyllic premodern space the narrator craves, and the exclusive and racist one of the political far right. The protagonist’s ideal breaks down not only because he is alone, but also because of his obsolete spatial model that sees space as an empty container. Moreover, close examination of the spatial creation of the local Nazis’ Heimat model shows it to be inherently flawed and contradictory. The novel thus ridicules both sides of the Heimat discourse and, in a sense, seems to concede the point to the young Greens (see above) that Heimat is always an “exclusionary” term, even if approached from the supposedly apolitical idyllic angle. It unveils as illusory the idea that the political left might be able to appropriate Heimat in order to fight right-wing nationalism. Leky’s Was man von hier aus sehen kann avoids the Heimat dichotomy and politics altogether in an attempt to offer an alternative model. Lived space here is created via social interactions, and Heimat representation is identical with the narrative perspective. And while the novel’s village appears to be similar to the idyllic notion of Heimat – though not so much in its spatial creation, but rather its promise of kindness, togetherness, and security – Luise’s personal happiness and thus the novel’s Heimat ideal can only function via the overhaul of this very Heimat. This idea of Heimat is something that goes beyond tradition and idyllic space and proposes a model of Heimat that only works if it keeps evolving. In order to relate this Heimat to the current discourse, it is helpful to look at one more contemporary attempt to define Heimat positively: Robert Habeck, the current vice chancellor and former leader of the Green party in Germany, defines his alternative idea of Heimat in this manner: “Heimat can mean that people in society treat each other in solidarity: that people identify with their work, that there is social togetherness and spaces where people communicate with each other, without stress and pressure to perform” (Habeck n.p.). What sounds like a nice attempt to find an inclusive way to claim Heimat and rid it of its dark undertones turns out, vis-à-vis the current discussion, to be futile. Both novels would agree that Habeck’s togetherness is something of a basic function of any positive Heimat notion. But at the end of the day, it is not “what it can mean” that matters, but how it can succeed. The strength of the model Leky’s novel suggests is that it is not taking away anyone’s Heimat. It accepts Steinmeier’s notion of some basic longing that must be satisfied. And it allows for a fulfillment in the given space – Luise does not have to leave her home, on the contrary, everything points toward a fulfilled continuation of her village life, together with Frederik, who waits for her to

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return from Australia. The suggested model does, however, require an openness toward change and reinvention, and an acceptance that not everything will stay the way it has always been. This is the real expansion of the Heimat idea – an idea which then indeed makes possible what Thorsten Mense demands of the political discussion, i. e., imagining what a “future German society of the many” (10) might entail.

Works Cited Amann, Susanne, Markus Brauck, and Alexander Kühn. “Flucht in die Idylle.” Der Spiegel, 29 October 2012, pp. 80–88. Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. U of California P, 1990. Asdonk, Bastian. Mitten im Land. Kein & Aber, 2016. Attiah, Karen. “Germany’s ‘homeland’ propaganda is making an inglorious return.” Washington Post, 10 February 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/02/10/ger manys-homeland-propaganda-is-making-an-inglorious-return/. Accessed 15 August 2021. Baumann, Christoph. “Facetten des Ländlichen aus einer kulturgeographischen Perspektive. Die Beispiele Raumplanung und Landmagazine.” Imaginäre Dörfer. Zur Wiederkehr des Dörflichen in Literatur, Film und Lebenswelt, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, Transcript, 2014, pp. 89–110. Bausinger, Hermann. “Heimat in einer offenen Gesellschaft. Begriffsgeschichte als Problemgeschichte.” Die Ohnmacht der Gefühle. Heimat zwischen Wunsch und Wirklichkeit, edited by Jochen Kelter, Drumlin, pp. 89–115. Bielefeld, Marc. “Leben auf See.” Spiegel Online, 29 August 2013 https://www.spiegel.de/reise/aktuell/ rueckzug-auf-ein-segelboot-marc-bielefeld-ueber-seinen-ausstieg-a-917793.html. Accessed 15 August 2021. Ernst Bloch: “Über Ungleichzeitigkeit, Provinz und Propaganda: Ein Gespräch mit Rainer Traub und Harald Wieser.” Gespräche mit Ernst Bloch, edited by Rainer Traub and Harald Wieser, Suhrkamp, 1975, pp. 196–207. Confino, Alon. “The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory and the German Empire, 1871–1918.” History and Memory, vol. 5, no. 1, 1993, pp. 42–86. Dennerlein, Katrin. Narratologie des Raumes. De Gruyter, 2009. Dirksmeier, Peter. Urbanität als Habitus. Zur Sozialgeopraphie städtischen Lebens auf dem Land. Transcript, 2009. Eigler, Friederike. “Critical Approaches to ‘Heimat’ and the ‘Spatial Turn’.” New German Critique, no. 115, 2012, pp. 27–48. Eigler, Friederike. Heimat, Space, Narrative: Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion. Camden House, 2014. Gansel, Carsten. “Von romantischen Landschaften, sozialistischen Dörfern und neuen Dorfromanen: Die Inszenierung des Dörflichen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur zwischen Vormoderne und Spätmoderne.” Imaginäre Dörfer. Zur Wiederkehr des Dörflichen in Literatur, Film und Lebenswelt, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, Transcript, 2014, pp. 197–223.

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Habeck, Robert. “Der Kluge sucht die Offensive.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 7 March 2018. https://www.su eddeutsche.de/politik/robert-habeck-der-kluge-sucht-die-offensive-1.3894369/. Accessed 15 August 2021. “Heimat Bayern.” Bayerisches Staatsministerium der Finanzen und für Heimat. https://www.stmfh. bayern.de/heimat/. Accessed 3 March 2021. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991. Leky, Mariana. Was man von hier aus sehen kann. DuMont, 2017. März, Ursula. “Auf einmal Heimat. Alle loben immerzu die weltläufige, deutsche Migrantenliteratur. Dabei gibt es gerade einen unübersehbaren Boom des Dorfromans.” Die Zeit, 25 October 2017, www.zeit.de/2017/44/heimatromane-dorf-renaissance-literatur. Accessed 28 July 2021. Mense, Thorsten. “Vorwort.” Thomas Ebermann. Linke Heimatliebe. Eine Entwurzelung. Konkret, 2019 pp. 7–15. Nell, Werner, and Marc Weiland. “Imaginationsraum Dorf.” Imaginäre Dörfer. Zur Wiederkehr des Dörflichen in Literatur, Film und Lebenswelt, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, Transcript. 2014, pp. 13–50. Nell, Werner, and Marc Weiland. “Vorwort.” Imaginäre Dörfer. Zur Wiederkehr des Dörflichen in Literatur, Film und Lebenswelt, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, Transcript, 2014, p. 11. Özdemir, Cem. “Deutschland ist stärker, als es Ihr Hass jemals sein wird.” Der Tagesspiegel, 26 February 2018. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/oezdemirs-bundestagsrede-zur-afd-deutsch land-ist-staerker-als-es-ihr-hass-jemals-sein-wird/21003244.html. Accessed 15 August 2021. Peters, Christoph. Dorfroman. Luchterhand, 2020. Zudeick, Peter. Heimat. Volk. Vaterland. Eine Kampfansage an Rechts. Westend, 2018.

Part 2 Rural Spaces

Gabriele Maier

Beyond Brooks, Hills, and Dales: Dörte Hansen’s Reconceptualization of Heimat in Mittagsstunde (2018) Recent years have seen a striking trend on the German book market. A plethora of authors such as Juli Zeh, Mariana Leky, Andreas Moster, or Katrin Seddig have produced contemporary versions of the German Dorfroman (village novel), a subcategory of Heimatliteratur that depicts life in rural areas. This trend goes hand in hand with the resurfacing of the term Heimat – in particular in connection with the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015 and its discussion in the German media and beyond¹ – as well as with an earlier proliferation of travelogues whose authors do not devote their time to the discovery of far-away places and cultures but instead chronicle their journeys through the German-speaking world, be it Wolfgang Büscher’s Deutschland – eine Reise (Germany – a Voyage, 2005), Roger Willemsen’s Deutschlandreise (Travels through Germany, 2002), Jan Weiler’s In meinem kleinen Land (In My Small Country, 2006), Burkhard Müller’s B – eine deutsche Reise (B – a German Voyage, 2010) or Franka Frederik’s Fucking Fulda. Eine erotische Deutschlandreise (Fucking Fulda. Erotic Travels through Germany, 2013), just to name a few. These writers, for the most part, explicitly investigate the extent and potential to which Germany lends itself as a genuine Heimat in the twentyfirst century and what such a Heimat would actually entail. The genre of the village novel seems to be a continuation of this examination on a smaller scale by shifting the focus from movement to stasis, from an exploration of new spaces to an investigation of familiar places, from the nation to the local village as the archetypical symbol of belonging. Among recent authors of the village novel, Dörte Hansen is one of the most prominent representatives of the genre with her two novels Altes Land (2015; This House is Mine, 2016) and Mittagsstunde (Midday Hour, 2018). In both novels, the action takes place in small towns somewhere in the North German lowlands and features a diverse group of protagonists and their perceptions and stereotypes of village life. Unlike in the nineteenth century, where Heimatliteratur meant an idealized image of nature that stood in contrast to modernization and industrialization in urban areas (see Boa and Palfreyman 1), Hansen’s novels carefully avoid

 See, among others, Daniel Schreiber’s article “Deutschland soll werden, wie es nie war,” Reinhard Müller’s “Mission Heimat,” and “Er ist wieder da: der Begriff ‘Heimat’.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-004

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the unreflective use of all-too-common clichés but instead subject those clichés to critical scrutiny. Even though Hansen, like many of her fellow authors, clearly writes in the tradition of the village novel, she manages to skillfully subvert its reactionary features in order to arrive at a contemporary version of Heimatliteratur that is open to outside spaces and communities. In this chapter, I investigate how Hansen’s play with spatial configurations both creates and disrupts a sense of Heimat in her second novel Mittagsstunde, setting her work apart from more traditional concepts of Heimat that, as Alon Confino postulates in his book Germany as a Culture of Remembrance, demand “[t]rees, fruits, gardens, brooks, hills, and the earth” and “a community within nature and in harmony with nature” (46). Does Hansen portray Heimat as a place of peaceful co-existence of man and nature – or does she suggest that Heimat is nothing more than a mere figment of the imagination without any relevance for life in the twenty-first century? Ideas from Doreen Massey, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Friederike Eigler, among others, support my investigation of Hansen’s literary renderings of Heimat and specifically her use of space as a defining component of the concept of home. Over the last few years, the notion of Heimat has undergone major conceptual changes that include engaging Heimat with discourses on the spatial turn to arrive at new insights. Prominent representatives in the field of German literary and cultural studies include Friederike Eigler, Jens Kugele, and Peter Blickle, to name just a few. In particular Friederike Eigler’s groundbreaking essay “Critical Approaches to Heimat and the ‘Spatial Turn’” takes the Heimat discourse in a new direction when Eigler explores place as an entity that is not necessarily insular, self-sufficient, and “regressive” (28) – a “container of traditions” (34) the way that Heimat is often viewed – but rather always connected to the world and influenced by it. For Eigler, local and national, local and global engage in a dialogue that brings them closer together and softens the boundaries of formerly binary opposites. In the same vein, Eigler positions Heimat, previously considered a static entity, as a dynamic, mobile, and progressive phenomenon, as well as something that needs to be “actively acquired” (31). Thus, through the notion of Heimat, a place yields new spatial configurations that might include “alternative manifestations of place-bound belonging” (Eigler 2014, 178). Eigler’s insight has important implications for the village novel, because it suggests a new source of dramatic tension and conflict within the narrative. In other words, Heimat is not a placid sense of home but a discursive site with deep political consequences. The deeply discursive and political nature of home is also emphasized by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan as well as by social scientist Doreen Massey, other key figures associated with the spatial turn. In Space and Place (1977), Tuan differentiates between space and place, with space referring to “freedom” (52) or “that which al-

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lows for movement,” in contrast to place, which happens when such movement stops (6). Yet, in Tuan’s view, both entities are not fixed but rather subject to constant change over time. Much like Eigler, Tuan sees place and space as overlapping with and transforming into one another. This is especially true regarding the notion of home. For Tuan, home is inextricably tied to social relations and objects that have the potential to turn home into “an intimate place” (144), characterized by permanence and stability. Yet, when social relations change, home is subject to change as well and might be transformed into a different entity. Similarly, even though space signifies possibilities, opening the familiar to new experiences and new people is also unsettling. Consequently, people use social rules and conventions to protect themselves from the discomfort and uncertainty that change brings. Tuan provides the example of a small town where people “‘watch out’ for one another,” a practice that “has both the desirable sense of caring and the undesirable one of idle – and perhaps malicious – curiosity” (61). As people “watch out” for each other, day-in and day-out, they are caring for each other while simultaneously policing the boundaries that make their home a particular “place.” While this practice ensures that life remains stable and perhaps comfortable for some, the townspeople remove the spaciousness that allows for change. In caring for place at the expense of space, the townspeople can make their home a prison. In Space, Place, and Gender (1994), Doreen Massey also foregrounds the importance of social relations for spatial configurations. For Massey, space and place have similar qualities, among them “stasis and reaction” (151) and, as Tuan had pointed out in his earlier study, the ability to transform since their identity isn’t fixed. According to Massey, place is “always and continuously being produced” (171). In terms of home, Massey charges that “the identity of any place, including that place called home, is in one sense for ever open to contestation […] their identity of place is in part constructed out of positive interrelations with elsewhere” (169). Massey argues against the fixed nature of home with clear boundaries and binary opposites of us versus them. For her, it is “interactions with the ‘outside’” (169) that make for a genuine home. Thus, we find clear parallels to Tuan’s ideas when Massey stresses the “unfixed” nature of places precisely because of the importance of “social relations” which make places “by their very nature dynamic and changing” (169) as well as “open and porous” (5). In Massey’s telling, the desire to repress or ignore change in favor of maintaining a particular sense of place is a political act that favors one group at the expense of others. But the efforts of insiders to maintain the status quo is not only doomed but also pyrrhic. Even if insiders were to “win” in the short term, their victory comes at the cost of dynamism and energy. A village that resists change may look like a picture postcard on the outside while dying from within.

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It is, thus, the changeability of place as well as its link to social relations that is the common theme of the above scholars. Place is thus particularly relevant to the discussion of home or Heimat, where mobility is traditionally limited and clear boundaries are drawn between us and them. Tuan and Massey speak to the importance of social relations that define a place called home and that tie belonging to a specific community. As the subsequent analysis of Hansen’s Mittagsstunde suggests, Hansen similarly shows how the village as a place can become open and porous and, to use Massey’s words, let the outside world in without feeling threatened or fearful. In Hansen’s Mittagsstunde, spatial configurations play a major role to the point where space can and must be regarded as the protagonist of the narrative. As mentioned before, it is not the Alpine regions of Bavaria with its “appearance of an agricultural state with a pre-industrial idyll”² (Willemsen 161), the stereotypical backdrop for Heimat as seen in countless Heimat films of the 1950s such as Der Förster vom Silberwald (The Forester of the Silver Wood, 1954) or Weißer Holunder – Das Echo vom Königssee (White Elder – The Königssee Echo, 1957). Rather, it is Northern Germany with its “naked land […] ravaged and maltreated” (M 18), its “clouds like millstones” (M16), and a landscape that oppresses animals and human beings that is the focus of Mittagsstunde. Northern Germany is dear to the heart of Ingwer Feddersen, born and raised in Brinkebüll but now professor of Pre- and Early History at Kiel University. Similar to Theodor Storm’s iconic poem “Die Stadt” (The Town), which depicts Storm’s hometown Husum as a desolate and gray but ultimately endearing place full of wonderful memories, Ingwer is inextricably tied to the small town Brinkebüll “the way one is attached to a dearly loved stuffed animal, that is already missing an eye and doesn’t have fur on its tummy” (M 18). Even though Brinkebüll’s climate is rough and its inhabitants established farmers with narrow-minded views, Ingwer feels a strong sense of belonging to his former hometown, despite his academic accomplishments and departure from Brinkebüll decades ago: “He still orbited around his former spheres, a loyal moon face, potato child almost fifty years old. He seemed to be made of this land […] His element was the soil. Drifting sand” (M 287). Brinkebüll remains an essential part of Ingwer, who was formed and shaped by the village that made him into the person he is today. It is the Brinkebüller Heimaterde (Heimat soil) that has cast a spell on Ingwer, whom we encounter during his sabbatical year at the age of 49. He is in the place where he grew up, Brinkebüll, in the house of his ailing grandparents, Sönke and Ella, whom he is taking care of. Even though Sönke and Ella are Ingwer’s grandpar-

 If not otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

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ents, they have been like parents to him ever since his mother, Marret, disappeared without a trace when Ingwer was quite young. Now back in Brinkebüll, a place that continues to be of great importance to him, Ingwer is confronted with an onslaught of memories that take him back in time and make him reflect on the impact the past still has on his current way of life. Thus, over the course of the entire novel, the past is a constant companion of the present to the extent that it is not always easy to tell them apart. Different time periods emerge and form a rich picture of Ingwer’s Heimat that is not always easy to construct. Jumping back and forth in time results in a palimpsest where former layers shine through, overlap, and make it challenging to tell one from another. And just like Ingwer goes back in time in his memory, he regularly goes back in time by accessing Brinkebüll’s soil – something that he has been doing ever since he was a child. The novel describes Brinkebüll’s soil as a genuine Heimatlied (M 27, Heimat song) to Ingwer. It is composed of numerous different layers Ingwer all knows by heart – “outwash sand, gravel sand, boulder clay […] ground moraine, end moraine, sandar, glacial valley” (M 27). Aided by an old Shell-Atlas – the only book in Sönke and Ella’s house – and spurred on by his teacher, Lehrer Steensen,³ and his obsession with fossils, the Neolithic era and “the mysteries of Northern Germany’s pre-historic times” (M 28), Ingwer has become a passionate digger who “turned stones upside down at the roadside. Rummaged through every wash margin when he was at the North Sea and searched for ambers and prehistoric tools, fossils of sea urchins. He felt compelled to do so” (M 27). The urge to rummage through the soil in search of artefacts is a force greater than Ingwer and binds him intimately to the land – a land that, in turn, divulges its treasures in the form of tangible objects that tell of ancient times. Studying the land to learn about one’s ancestors is of immense significance to both Ingwer and Lehrer Steensen – but in particular to Lehrer Steensen who, like Ingwer, is obsessed with the past and its significance for present times and is thus a staunch proponent of the rather outdated subject Heimatkunde (local studies). For him, Heimatkunde entails the exploration of one’s soil that will reveal the secrets of one’s ancestors to the eager investigator: Six-thousand years ago, a brand-new era started on Brinkebüll’s soil. […] People stopped migrating and they stayed put, nomads turned into sedentary people! The first farmers! Everything started from here. […] And every shard, every axe made of stone that they found here was a testimony of those changing times. (M 229–230)

 Interestingly enough, the two archaeological chroniclers of Brinkebüll sport names that relate to soil – Steensen is a reference in Plattdeutsch (in the lower German dialect) to stone, and ginger, Ingwer’s name, grows best in loamy soil, which has a lot of sand – like Brinkebüll’s soil. I am indebted to Len Cagle for those excellent observations.

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A clear emphasis on continuity can be detected in Steensen’s quote, a stress on the intricate connection of time and space and the need to honor and revere that connection. Being privy to the history of a place provides us with greater appreciation for it and makes us see our own existence in a different light. As Tuan states, the question of “‘What is a place? What gives a place its identity, its aura?’” (4) can only be answered with history in mind, which will cause an immediate change in our perception. Tuan refers to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg’s visit to Kronberg Castle which conjures up memories of Hamlet: “‘Hamlet lived here? […] Suddenly the walls and the ramparts speak a quite different language’” (4). As Kronberg Castle is changed by our knowledge of its past, the same holds true for Brinkebüll, whose status is elevated from one of a mere village to a historic place with a long, significant tradition and groundbreaking implications for the future of humanity. The importance of soil in Mittagsstunde that serves as an essential indicator of Heimat is not a neutral marker but conjures up alarming memories of the National Socialists’ “blood and soil” propaganda, the “ethnic (völkisch) exaggeration of the farmer” (Marszalek 350) and their politics of expansion. While the “Third Reich” is not explicitly mentioned in the novel and references to World War II are only made in passing, we do encounter Lehrer Steensen and his several character traits that are reminiscent of “Third Reich” ideology, such as his authoritative pedagogical approach: “The students needed to know where their place in this herd and who their leader was” (M 227). Also notable in this regard are Steensen’s proclivity to use physical force to rein in his students, his elitism, and his favoritism among his students (“He did not believe in equality but in differences,” M 228), as well as his willingness to subject his own body to all kinds of hardship: “Steensen didn’t seem to need anything or anyone, no wife and no friend, no hot food, no warm house” (M 71). In addition, Steensen is a steadfast believer in the subject of Heimatkunde, a subject deemed “ideologically overloaded” (Faehndrich 227) and criticized for its narrow focus on the rural idyll which led to its replacement with Sachunterricht (social studies and science) in the 1970s to expand the scope of its subject matter. Yet, despite criticism and an official directive from the government, Lehrer Steensen refuses to either give up his textbook, Schleswig-Holstein-Heimatbuch from 1949, or modify his authoritative pedagogical approach. Instead, his classes are shaped by his belief in “the old school: morning song, prayer and inspection of the hands before class, nine grades in one classroom, seatwork and calligraphy. And his students studied Heimatkunde” (M 228). Steensen’s belief in staying connected to tradition is played out in his adherence to the old ways of life and traditional hierarchical structures that cannot be tampered with. Steensen’s unwillingness to let go of the past is a problematic undertaking in and of itself, since the past is not a fixed entity. According to Doreen Massey in her

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book Space, Place, and Gender, “[t]he identity of a place […] is always and continuously being produced. Instead of looking back with nostalgia to some identity of place which it is assumed already exists, the past has to be constructed” (171). Whereas Steensen sees Brinkebüll’s soil and landscape as unchangeable constants over the course of thousands of years (M 230), the reader understands that his Heimat was irrevocably altered by the land consolidation reform in the 1960s. Suddenly the formerly peaceful fields are populated by invasive machinery that forcefully attack the land, violate it, and tear “deep ruts into the soil” (M 66). Trees are uprooted, trails disappear, animals flee in terror while human beings wreak havoc on nature in the name of progress (M 66). In a warlike fashion, Steensen’s Heimat is mercilessly re-shaped, broken open to emerge as a modern entity that lacks any signs of backwardness: “The entire narrowness, skewness and limitedness, the contortedness and the overgrown, the intricateness had to go. These villages could not remain the way they were” (M 38) – a quote that seems to echo Tuan’s statement that “[t]ools and machines enlarge man’s sense of space and spaciousness” (53). Heimat is reconstructed and invented anew with a brutal force willing to wound and injure to eradicate the old once and for all. The change of physical appearance not only erases an age-old landscape with a direct connection to Brinkebüll’s ancestry but also a sanctuary for flora, fauna, and for Marret Feddersen, who gave birth to Ingwer while she was still a child. Marret takes the role of secret chronicler of wildlife in Brinkebüll, whose landscape serves as a safe haven for Marret in which she can disappear during the day and reemerge with her special finds, such as “rocks, feathers, cow horns, and pieces of bark of long-felled trees” (M 305). Her collection resembles “a sort of museum. A village archive of Brinkebüll in old jam jars and Nivea containers, shoeboxes and match boxes, Jägermeister bottles” (M 313), supplemented by Feddersen’s old Shell-Atlas, where dried and pressed flowers and plants abound. In addition, numerous drawings and detailed descriptions of animal and plant life complete Marret’s assembly – “Marret didn’t preserve anything that belonged to humans” (M 314) – done with great care and a passion for preservation. Thus, we find a third chronicler who, alongside Ingwer and Lehrer Steensen, records the surrounding area of the village in all its richness and thereby establishes a strong connection to the land. Marret’s status as chronicler of Brinkebüll is augmented by her role as a Cassandra who prophesizes the demise – or “Ünnergang” (end of the world) – of the old ways of life in the village in connection with the land consolidation reform and modernization efforts. As signs abound in the form of the sudden death of centuryold elm trees, a lack of roaming animals in the fields, the bloody killing of a fawn by Paule Bahnsen’s ultramodern harvester, as well as the death of Hamke’s youngest son Mattsen on Brinkebüll’s new road, Marret is indefatigably on a mission to

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alert her fellow villagers to the changing times and to imminent doom. Severely impacted herself by the new, open landscape, the disappearance of her former hiding places, and, eventually, the demolition of the old barn where she keeps her Brinkebüll collection, Marret, like the storks and animals in the fields, vanishes without a trace. She leaves behind her entire collection of Brinkebüll’s flora and fauna, which exudes a “melancholia that Ingwer himself was quite familiar with” (M 314), and an emptiness in the village that is hard to fill. Brinkebüll’s land consolidation reform not only fundamentally alters Brinkebüll’s scenery, but also changes its community and the relationships among the farmers themselves. Heimat, up until the middle of the nineteenth century closely tied to property (see Führ 12) which, with regard to the farming world, meant the possession of land, is now subject to profound redistribution efforts, no matter the memories or generations attached to a certain piece of land. Land, turned into a soulless entity by the land surveyors, is remeasured, restructured, and re-allocated, which brings discord and dispute among the farmers who are forced to give up old inheritances, beloved plots, and bucolic nooks for the sake of the greater good. New borders are drawn, fields consolidated, and possessions streamlined to the point where even the farmers themselves lose their bearings and suddenly end up in fields they no longer own. Hills, dales, mounds, and ponds are eliminated and the character of the landscape now appears “strange” and “like smoothed over” (M 75). What remains is entirely man-made, artificially created with the sole purpose of maximizing profits but now unsuitable for “swallows and the storks and the sticklebacks […] Not even a hare was able to hide in those fields” (M 273). The charming beauty of nature’s idiosyncrasies has been made to yield to uniformity and consistency. In the end there is silence – both in the fields and in the homes of the farmers who grudgingly accept the new reality they once so eagerly voted for. And over time, the injuries inflicted by the land reform slowly start to heal under a blanket of snow which covers up the wounds “like a gauze bandage” (M 106) and promises relief for nature and villagers alike. Brinkebüll’s modernization efforts are not only apparent in the changing landscape surrounding the village but also with regard to spaces in the actual village itself. Before Brinkebüll’s land consolidation reform, the village is a rather secluded place, tucked away in the countryside with little connection to the outside world. Brinkebüll’s spatial configurations are such that all common spaces are open to and used by the entire community: all children in Brinkebüll, for example, attend the village school with Lehrer Steensen, no matter their intellectual abilities or individual aspirations. In addition, Dora Koopmann’s mom-and-pop store, along with Erich Boysen’s bakery, serve as the only sources of groceries in town. And last but not least, Sönke Feddersen’s tavern provides a banquet hall where all festivities in the village are celebrated, be they weddings, anniversaries, or funerals.

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Brinkebüll is imagined as the “epitome of communal solidarity” (Marszalek 349) where alternative spaces do not exist since all life happens in the village and is meant to happen there. With the lack of alternative spaces, there is no opportunity to escape certain power dynamics that are inherent in the aforementioned communal spaces. As spaces can and do reflect “existing power relations” (Hallet 11) and may even strengthen them, it comes as no surprise that power is wielded by Dora Koopmann, who is entirely unwilling to cater to her customers’ wishes even if they are quite reasonable. As a matter of principle, she only offers three types of cheese in her store (M 298), a limited selection of ice-cream – “‘Himmi Jimmi? Not available!’” (M 265), “no pasta […] as long as knitting needles – or yoghurt with cherry flavor. What type of idiot would come up with something like that?” (M 298). On the other hand, the Brinkebüller consumer is in charge as well, particularly when it comes to Erich Boysen’s elaborate cakes that Boysen is quite proud of but unable to sell since “to put store-bought cake on the table, baker cake! when neighbors, sisters-in-law, aunts were invited over, was equal to declaring bankruptcy of one’s household” (M 108–109). This rather narrow-minded attitude in the village is reflected in Lehrer Steensen’s educational philosophy, a philosophy that is essential in shaping the destiny of his students. His village school constitutes a space where students are mercilessly assigned to three professional categories: 1) “farmers, bakers, carpenters, mothers and shop assistants,” 2) “officials […] or employees at an insurance company or bank” and then in truly exceptional cases 3) “high school students” (M 228–229), who are sent off to the Gymnasium in the district capital. As Doreen Massey suggests, spaces have the authority to form and shape, wield power, and create hierarchies, which translates here into each Brinkebüller occupying their fixed social status for a lifetime. Whereas spaces in the village are shared with the entire Brinkebüller community, the same does not hold true for outsiders, as Hansen highlights on the first few pages of her novel. A clear divide between the villagers who naturally belong and those from outside who fall into the category of the Other exists, and the divide seems impossible to bridge. Marret Feddersen, even though deemed “twisted” (verdreiht, M 35) but born and raised in Brinkebüll, is allowed to randomly enter private spaces such as living rooms and kitchens to eat people’s food and to draw on notepads and magazines while waiting for company to proselytize. Marret exclusively uses the backdoor, another sign of communal belonging, “since only strangers and peddlers came to the front door” (M 8). Thus, it does not come as a surprise that the bald cutler in a blue skirt and white nylons who arrives in Brinkebüll every spring to sharpen knives and sell his brushes has to remain at the front door and is not asked inside to sit on the kitchen bench: “It was not because of his nylons and the sky-blue skirt, it was because he was a stranger” (M 11). The

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classical divide between “us” and “them” can furthermore be detected between the three land surveyors and the locals in Sönke’s tavern. As Eigler delineates in Heimat, Space, Narrative, “Heimat is traditionally closely tied to ethnic notions of Germanness,” but ostracizing can certainly happen to “other Germans” as well (147). This directly applies to Mittagsstunde. Not only are the three land surveyors described as “mystical creatures” (M 45), which underlines their exotic status in the village, but they are also served a watered-down version of grog, a so-called Damenmischung (M 39, mix for the ladies), and are viewed as inappropriate suitors for the young ladies in the village. Villagers and outsiders remain divided, and this divide is, as the novel seems to suggest, impossible to bridge. The survival of the community is of paramount importance in a place where public and private spaces easily overlap and reveal details that should have remained secret. Being secretive, keeping secrets, remaining silent becomes the modus operandi in Brinkebüll. “A lot went unstated in Brinkebüll, things that had been floating through the village for years, from house to house, from farm to farm […] insinuations and assumptions and the unspeakable and things that were almost forgotten” (M 166). Ingwer mentions a certain “buzzing” (M 165) that is all around him during his childhood until he, one day, realizes that Marret and not Ella is his real mother. For Brinkebüllers, to remain silent is a form of survival, so that silence becomes a second mother tongue to them: “The silence was like a second mother tongue, people acquired it the way they learnt to talk. The children already knew what they were allowed to say and what not” (M 166). Keeping secrets is an essential part of the community that makes the smooth co-existence of the people possible. If stealth and secrets are essential parts of life in Brinkebüll, then the Freudian notion of the uncanny – das Unheimliche – comes to mind. The uncanny is inextricably tied to Heimat and is especially emphasized in 1960s and 70s Anti-Heimat novels and plays, e. g., in Martin Sperr’s Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern (Hunting Scenes in Lower Bavaria, 1966) or Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Stallerhof (Stallerhof, 1972), where the village becomes a place of dread, and the celebrated Heimat idyll turns into fear and terror. While Mittagsstunde does not focus primarily on the alleged depravity of the village, we do encounter domestic violence (Heiko Ketelsen), alcoholism (Hanni Thomsen), poverty (Hanni Thomsen), accidents (Mattsen Hansen) and extramarital affairs that are openly discussed in the novel and criticized for their lack of consequences. Being from Brinkebüll – “a villager who was born here, baptized here, confirmed here, and married here” (M 184) – provides a person with immunity and makes them an inextricable part of the community, no matter the crime they commit. Regardless of the affairs they have, the illegitimate children they father, the domestic violence in one’s house or the abuse of animals, Brinkebüllers are not willing to ostracize someone who

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is from the village. This attitude becomes particularly apparent with regard to Folkert Ketelsen, whose daily spanking of his children and wife is widely known but who is not held responsible for his deeds. Even serious injuries do not cause any intervention since [n]obody in the village ever thought of helping him against his father […] People did not interfere because Folker Ketelsen was from Brinkebüll, a villager with an old farm, he had always been around, father, grandfather, great-grandfather. Ingwer wondered what a person had to do in order to be ostracized. […] He couldn’t think of anything. (M 96–97)

Community gives a sense of belonging but fails to differentiate between what is acceptable and what should be punishable. Communal integrity trumps individual wellbeing and leaves little room for personal needs and desires. The necessity to share all communal spaces changes with the land consolidation reform which brings in its wake a new road to the village. The insular space of Brinkebüll is broken open and extended to the outside world. Whereas choices were limited before due to spatial constraints – going to school, going shopping, finding a suitable partner – the new times make it possible to get out into the world and lead individualistic lives. The rather static place of Brinkebüll, characterized by its stability, is turned into a spatial entity that expands beyond the village limits. Women are getting their driver’s licenses so that they can go to the hairdresser or shop in supermarkets, Dora Koopmann finds a new job and a husband, going to “de hoge School” becomes a common occurrence and Gönke Boysen, baker Boysen’s fourth child and avid reader, moves to Berlin and rarely returns to Brinkebüll, a place she always thoroughly despised. Life changes dramatically for the Brinkebüllers, who, for the first time, are confronted with the possibilities of life outside of their village. The possibility to leave and connect to the outside world which enriches many Brinkebüllers also generates a loss, an emptiness that ensues when spaces that were intimately tied to community lose their significance. Whereas Brinkebüll used to be a self-sufficient entity that harbored all essential institutions for daily life, it is now entirely dependent on the outside world since those former institutions do not exist anymore. With the permanent disappearance of Dora Koopmann’s mom-and-pop store, the only source of groceries in the village vanishes and leaves people who do not own a car, like Hanni Thomsen, stranded. In the same vein, Lehrer Steensen’s retirement brings about the closure of Brinkebüll’s school and requires all children to commute to nearby towns. And the shift from walking through the village to driving in one’s car makes random encounters and friendly chats on the streets impossible and life thus less gregarious. Gradually, Brinkebüll’s public life ceases and is relegated to the private realm. It only lives

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on in the memories of older villagers, who still remember their former Heimat and its significant places before the land consolidation reform. Nostalgic notions of a lost Heimat reemerge in the tales of those who witnessed the radical changes in the village and are inextricably tied to certain places, be it the names of small trails and ponds like Sniederwisch, Achter’t Heck and Kattenkuhl (M 187), the old mill pond, gatherings under the village chestnut tree – an iconic symbol of village life – and songs like “There is no country more beautiful” (M 187). Even though modernization is met with general approval, Hansen emphasizes the melancholy feelings that develop when the village chestnut tree is being cut down: “one hundred-and-fifty years gone. Silence fell over the people for a moment” (M 205) and the roots of the other chestnut trees are all dug out (M 207). To keep up with the changing times, the old must make room for the new: the “green roof of foliage” (M 214) of the chestnut trees that lined the road, animals that used to graze in the paddocks, or “milk churns, puddles on the farms, elm trees with twisted branches” (M 317) – all of these are eliminated. Feeling rootless due to the shift and loss of village spaces is a prevalent theme in the novel and goes hand in hand with the decline of an entire era, which, according to Ingwer, must be regarded as the era of the farmer: “The fire was blown out, tents were folded up and the sedentary ones were left behind […] homo ruralis. Almost extinct” (M 318). Even though nostalgia is a recurring theme in the novel, mainly personified by Ingwer Feddersen, it is counteracted by numerous attempts to revive the dying village. Not only Ingwer, “stagnate nostalgic in the middle of a mid-life crisis” (M 282), wistfully remembers the good old days, but even Bambi Bahnsen, successful farmer and at the forefront of modernization, “felt something of a loss when he looked at the Brinkebüll of today” (M 282). Decades after the land consolidation reform, a concerted effort is underway to mitigate some of the damage done to the village. The mission of the newly established Dorfkulturverein (association to promote village culture) is to bring storks back to Brinkebüll, the Arbeitskreis Renaturierung (task force renaturation) is working on reviving and preserving the old moor and heath landscape, and the Mühlenbauverein (association for mill building) is in charge of an annual Mühlenfest (M 280, mill celebrations). The old megalithic tomb, so dear to Lehrer Steensen, is now clearly marked with signs after its restoration by Brinkebüll’s youth and the volunteer fire department, and five alpacas with brown curls populate Sievers’ old paddock (M 280), counteracting the lack of farm animals and ringing in a new era. In Brinkebüll, Heimat is both disappearing and re-emerging simultaneously. Hansen’s description corresponds to Werner Nell’s broader assessment of German village life. In these places, he writes, “disappearance and emergence of the village coexist […] in a dialectical relationship with each other” (qtd. in Marszalek 349). In place of its traditional promise of bucolic

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stability, the new Heimat becomes the site of a tension that is both destructive and productive. “Disappearance and emergence” are closely tied to the outside world since it is often the newcomers to the village who are instrumental in its revival. What many are looking for is an idealized version of rural life which turns Brinkebüll into “a sensitive projection surface for nostalgic, utopian, or even fantastic ideas” (Marszalek 348) that include “thatched-roof houses, plank floors, brick, transom windows, cobblestone” (M 268), features that Brinkebüllers couldn’t do away with fast enough a few decades ago. Everything that was considered an obstacle to modernization and thus a surefire sign of backwardness by the villagers is now coveted by the new Brinkebüllers. Dilapidated communal spaces such as the old mill, the abandoned dairy farm, or the village school are renovated and turned into private residences, livestock re-appears in the fields, and traditional crafts such as spinning, dyeing, weaving, and knitting are revived. Even Plattdeutsch (Low German), the dialect Lehrer Steensen was eager to eradicate from each and every household for decades, has become so popular that it is being taught at the Volkshochschule (adult education center). Although not all old traditions are revived, e. g., the formerly so sacred midday hour remains a relic of the past and so does the notorious Frühschoppen (morning pint) in Sönke’s tavern on Sunday mornings after church, the trend to beautify and restore certain features of the village is undeniable. It is particularly apparent in Sönke’s tavern, which is located at the crossroads of the old and new, simultaneously characterized by decline and re-emergence. Sönke’s tavern marks the point where stability and freedom, the new and the old, demise and revival come together and create a hybrid entity in the form of the Brinkebüll Buffalos, a line-dancing group founded and directed by Heiko Ketelsen, or Sheriff Ketelsen as he is called in Brinkebüll now. Heiko is deeply committed to his group that performs all over the county and has aspirations to participate in the festival Line Dance Star Awards in Kalkar with international instructors. The Brinkebüll Buffalos consist of locals and newcomers alike who form a hybrid community in Sönke’s tavern, in a place that used to constitute the heart of the old village where Brinkebüllers would gather to celebrate, local organizations such as the hunting association held their meetings, and the local youth danced to Schlagermusik (hit songs). Now, with a decreased interest in that type of entertainment, the rather shabby tavern is repurposed and redecorated by Sheriff Ketelsen, whose love of the United States is clearly visible in the US flag and posters on the wall, the cowboy boots, fringe leather jackets or plaid shirts everyone sports, and the chicken wings, hamburgers, and donuts his group likes to consume. Sönke’s tavern turns into a saloon (M 93) with the help of a fake buffalo skull, and Sönke himself is made an honorary member of the Brinkebüll Buffalos. The reader encounters a

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microcosm, characterized by what Massey calls “multiple identities” that can be “either a source of richness or a source of conflict, or both” (153). It is this hybrid space that enriches a dying community and brings new life to it with the help of Heiko’s American fantasies. Sönke’s tavern, Brinkebüll, and the surrounding area constitute the backdrop for Heiko’s own imaginary spaces, his fantasies of the American Wild West. Despite his abysmal upbringing, Sheriff Ketelsen remains deeply attached to Brinkebüll and never physically leaves the village – but his mind does. Where everyone else sees “nothing but a dilapidated dairy farm and a bunch of trash in front of a derelict farmhouse” (M 288), Heiko’s own imagination transforms his ramshackle farm into Heiko’s Ranch with a paddock “for Western riders” and a tepee for kids where children can have their birthday parties. There are also “horseback riding, archery, horseshoe throwing, and, at the end, roasting stick bread at the campfire, business was all right during the summer months” (M 288). The Brinkebüller Geest turns into prairie and desert sand (M 93) when Heiko cruises through his Heimatland – and in his fantasy Sönke’s tavern transforms into a Countrykneipe (country pub) called Farm House Saloon: “exposed beams along the ceiling, old cartwheels at the bar, beer kegs as tables” (M 312). Sönke’s tavern becomes a hybrid space where the village meets the world, the local meets the global, and each entity is enriched by the Other. In the hybrid space of Sönke’s tavern, Hansen represents the profound ambiguity of the contemporary German experience of Heimat. On the one hand, a void has opened that the old concept of Heimat can no longer fill, described by Blickle as follows: “Heimat has become lonely: Heimat is no longer a place of shared identity and shelteredness. It is a place, where a person finds himself in all his strangeness and self-alienation” (61). Brinkebüll has become what Marszalek calls the “village as a realm of memory,” caused by “estrangement through mobility” and “rootlessness” (350), and the new status quo makes a return to former times impossible. For those mourning the uprooting of a place that meant home to them, Heimat remains a source of yearning and loss. As Eigler states, “The yearning for Heimat as a manifestation of the loss of metaphysical rootedness constitutes a significant part of the concept’s rich connotation” (2014, 2). The question remains as to what the residents of Brinkebüll do with that yearning and loss. Sönke’s tavern represents a way out of this predicament. Heimat’s displacement brings a sense of freedom and possibility, especially for those who would have been excluded in the old hierarchies. “Spaciousness is closely associated with the sense of being free,” Tuan states. “Freedom implies space, it means having the power and enough room in which to act” (52). Although the décor of Sönke’s tavern reflects a certain kind of Wild West kitsch, and thus hints at a different nostalgia for lost times, the new establishment represents a fresh set of economic and

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social possibilities inviting both new and old residents – “insiders” and “outsiders” alike – to create new forms of community, new forms of Heimat. It is undeniable that some irrevocable changes have happened and that there is no way to turn back time. Nostalgia will not bring back the old farms, the old landscape, the old communal spaces. The age of sedentarism has concluded and mobility is now what defines life in the village. Yet, despite its radical changes, the new Brinkebüll will remain a source of comfort and strength to many, and in particular to Ingwer, who derives true happiness from being on Brinkebüll’s soil, as was discussed at the beginning of this chapter: “[The village] played him like an instrument, it played children’s songs and Heimat songs […] In summer, it played fortissimo, when the air was filled with the scent of dog roses and elderflower, of hay and clover […] There was a buzzing in him and it sang” (M 287–288). Brinkebüll is still a place that Ingwer calls Heimat in spite of – or maybe because of – all the changes it has been undergoing. The village is a place where old and new can come together and form a new, hybrid entity that consists of the past and present, demise and emergence, the familiar and the foreign. Thus, a new concept of Heimat emerges, a concept that, as Blickle discusses in his article “Gender, Space, and Heimat,” “is linked equally much, if not more so, to the future and the present than to a remembered past. We now frequently find activism and hope where there was melancholia and mourning” (54). With all the changes that have been happening in Brinkebüll, activism and hope have counteracted some of the emptiness and tristesse in the village – both due to its opening up to the outside world. Yet, as Doreen Massey urges, we need to connect a “place to places beyond. A progressive sense of place would recognize that, without being threatened by it. What we need, it seems to me, is a global sense of the local, a global sense of place” (156) – and Brinkebüll seems to be on its way to becoming such a place.

Works Cited Blickle, Peter. “Gender, Space, and Heimat.” Heimat: At the Intersection of Memory and Space, edited by Friederike Eigler and Jens Kugele, De Gruyter, 2012, pp. 53–68. Boa, Elizabeth, and Rachel Palfreyman. Heimat – A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identities in German Culture 1890–1990. Oxford UP, 2000. Büscher, Wolfgang. Deutschland, eine Reise. Rowohlt, 2005. Confino, Alon. Germany as a Culture of Remembrance. U of North Carolina P, 2006. Der Förster vom Silberwald (Echo der Berge). Directed by Alfons Stummer, Rondo FilM 1954 Eigler, Friederike. Heimat, Space, Narrative: Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion. Camden House, 2014. Eigler, Friederike. “Critical Approaches to Heimat and the ‘Spatial Turn.’” New German Critique, vol. 39, no. 1, 2012, pp. 27–48.

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“Er ist wieder da: der Begriff ‘Heimat’.” Handelsblatt, 8 February 2018, www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/in land/kommentar-warum-es-gut-ist-dass-wieder-von-heimat-die-rede-ist-15446995. Accessed 21 April 2021. Faehndrich, Jutta. Eine endliche Geschichte. Die Heimatbücher der deutschen Vertriebenen. Böhlau, 2011. Frederik, Franka. Fucking Fulda. Eine erotische Deutschlandreise. Ullstein, 2013. Führ, Eduard. “Wieviel Engel passen auf die Spitze einer Nadel?” Heimat. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit einem strapazierten Begriff. Historisch – philosophisch – architektonisch, edited by Eduard Führ, Bauverlag GmbH, 1985, pp. 10–32. Hallet, Wolfgang, and Birgit Neumann. “Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur: Zur Einführung.” Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn, edited by Wolfgang Hallet and Birgit Neumann, Transcript, 2009, pp. 11–32. Hansen, Dörte. Altes Land. Albrecht Knaus, 2015. Hansen, Dörte. Mittagsstunde. Penguin, 2018. Kroetz, Franz Xaver. Stallerhof – Geisterbahn – Lieber Fritz – Wunschkonzert. Vier Stücke. Suhrkamp, 1973. Marszalek, Magdalena. “Das Dorf als Erinnerungsraum.” Dorf. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, J.B. Metzler, 2019, pp. 348–356. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. U of Minnesota P, 1994. Müller, Burkhard. B – eine deutsche Reise. Rowohlt, 2010. Müller, Reinhard. “Mission Heimat.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 February 2018, www.faz.net/ak tuell/politik/inland/kommentar-warum-es-gut-ist-dass-wieder-von-heimat-die-rede-ist-15446995. html. Accessed 21 April 2021. Müller-Richter, Klaus. “Einleitung – Imaginäre Topografien. Migration und Verortung.” Imaginäre Topografien. Migration und Verortung, edited by Klaus Müller-Richter and Ramona Uritescu-Lombard, Transcript, 2007, pp. 11–32. Nünning, Ansgar. “Formen und Funktionen literarischer Raumdarstellung: Grundlagen, Ansätze, narratologische Kategorien und neue Perspektiven.” Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn, edited by Wolfgang Hallet and Birgit Neumann, Transcript, 2009, pp. 33–52. Schreiber, Daniel. “Deutschland soll werden, wie es nie war.” Zeit Online, 10 February 2018, https:// www.zeit.de/kultur/2018-02/heimatministerium-heimat-rechtspopulismus-begriff-kulturge schichte/komplettansicht. Accessed 21 April 2021. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, 1989. Sperr, Martin. Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern. Zweitausendeins, 1980. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977. Weiler, Jan. In meinem kleinen Land. Rowohlt, 2006. Weißer Holunder (Das Echo vom Königssee). Directed by Paul May. KG Divina GmbH & Co, 1957. Willemsen, Roger. Deutschlandreise. Eichborn, 2002.

Maria Stehle

Herkunft and Heimat: Memory and Place in Uncanny Rural Spaces In his most recent literary text, Saša Stanišić contends with Herkunft (2019; Where you Come From, 2021) – also the name of the novel (2019) – a deeply problematic term in its history and in its present use in far-right, alt-right, and nationalist contexts: I started to think about my origins […] then questioning the whole thing. It seemed old-fashioned, regressive, even destructive, to talk about my origins or our origins in an age when where you were born and where you came from were once again being misused as distinguishing features, when borders were hardening and so-called national interests rising up from the drained swamp of small-country particularism. In times when exclusion and refusal of entry were on the ballot again. (59–60)¹

Herkunft (origin) is a term that is often used to exclude (and other) People of Color in Germany, yet Stanišić insists on trying to claim and redefine its meaning. “Where are you from” is a question that marks people as having a separate Herkunft rather than a Heimat, as racially, ethnically, culturally Other. In the twenty-first century, the question should clearly be a “no-go,” but many white people in Germany continue to insist on asking it (Sanyal 101). In his philosophical reflections Nach der Flucht (After the Escape, 2017), author and essayist Ilja Trojanow demands that people ask the question “where are you going?” just as often as they ask “where are you from?” (19). Similarly, Dörte Hansen’s popular novel Altes Land (2015; This House is Mine, 2016) offers reflections on how some people are always considered “foreign” and not allowed to ever claim roots long after they consider themselves “attached” (45). When Heimat is considered together with migration it evokes the term Herkunft: some people can claim a (German) Heimat while others have a Herkunft. In this dichotomy, the racialized and essentialist meanings of both terms become apparent. The three texts I discuss in this chapter, Altes Land, Herkunft, and Nach der Flucht, offer critical interventions in discourses about Heimat and Herkunft, origin and roots, that are loaded with racialized violence in the German context. Formal-

 All translations from Stanišić’s novel are based on the 2021 translation by Damion Searls, Where You Come From. For a discussion of the nationalistic and violent connotations of the term Heimat see Aydemir, Fatma and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah in “Einleitung,” Eure Heimat ist unser Alptraum (9–10). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-005

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ly, the texts have very little in common: a novel, a memoir, and a collection of philosophical vignettes; yet each text exposes different facets of racialized conceptualizations of Heimat and Herkunft and develops new approaches to places, stories, and memories that are oriented towards different, more just futures. Altes Land uncovers the continued hauntings of the German Nazi past; Herkunft compares and contrasts the genocidal violence during the Balkan Wars with new racisms emerging in 1990s Germany; and Nach der Flucht offers metaphorical language to think about the uneven politics of place and displacement in the twenty-first century. After exploring theoretical underpinnings of my discussions of Heimat and Herkunft and the process of making Heimat un-heimlich, uncanny or un-homely,² this chapter offers close readings of the three works that unmask the problematic political baggage of the concepts of Heimat and Herkunft and make, in some cases defiant, claims to more mobile notions of history, narrative agency, and place (see Kathöfer and Weber 2018a, 412; Eigler 27–28).

1 Heimat, Herkunft, and the Uncanny Scholars, artists, and activists have attempted to redefine and reclaim Heimat as a term by arguing for more open, inclusive ways of conceptualizing belonging and home in a contemporary, multiethnic Germany and Europe.³ Kathöfer and Weber summarize the history of the concept in their introduction to a special issue on Heimatlosigkeit and precarity: Traditional conceptualizations of Heimat have been closely linked with cultural essentialism and a sense of loss, whether in the romantic idea of a premodern bourgeois idyll; ideological appropriations of Heimat in Nazi Germany; cultural and nationalist imaginaries of the Heimatfilm; discourses on the “lost Heimat in the East,” disseminated in particular by expellees [referring to the work of Eigler]; or the decades-long discussions of the role of German Leitkultur in German-speaking multicultural societies. (2018a, 411)

Black German scholar and activist Peggy Piesche, in an interview with Kathöfer and Weber, argues that “to find a political understanding – a political collective identity – means to reject the notion of Heimat in a simple understanding of Germanness. But also to name and claim Heimat as a right of belonging” (Kathöfer and Weber 2018b, 420). Piesche refers to the “toxic archive of Heimat” (424) as Piesche

 For an interesting discussion of un-heimlich spaces of Heimat see Eigler’s analysis of Sabrina Janesch’s novel Katzenberge, where an uncanny house marks the discomfort of belonging (166).  See, for example, the work of Friederike Eigler, 2014 or Alon Confino, 1997.

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and Karina Griffith, filmmaker, artist, and scholar, discuss ways in which People of Color in Germany can “claim and redefine” Heimat “rather than allowing oneself to be limited by a concept of pure negation or emptiness” (425). They argue for community building and gatherings, mimicking German Stammtische (regulars’ tables), which are generally associated with white men gathering in traditional German pubs to lament the state of the world. Piesche and Griffith reclaim the word Stammtisch, which contains the word “stem” (trunk) that is also part of the word Stammbaum (family tree), as a term to describe chosen family, a chosen family tree that describes forms of community building (427). The three texts I analyze in this chapter draw on the association of trees, stems, and roots with family histories and stories to critically examine notions of Herkunft and Heimat, yet also claim belonging, place, and community. In their reflection on family stories and quests for belonging, they foreground concepts of place and memory. Heimat, according to Friederike Eigler and Jens Kugele, is part of the “constellations of memory and space” (1). Rather than being steeped in loss and nostalgia, Eigler and Kugele propose a complex approach to the layers of history and memory that make and shape shifting notions of belonging (3). Heimat and Herkunft become mobile concepts that are formed and reformed by memories and stories told. This means that both, Heimat or Herkunft, are not static; they are spatial and narrative constellations that evolve and are continually produced. This conceptualization is echoed in Doreen Massey’s definition of space. Space, according to Massey, does not necessarily have a clear boundary and it does not produce only one form of identification (155–156). Spaces create identifications and a sense of place as multiple and layered. With these definitions in mind, the texts I discuss in this chapter reveal the racialized implications of the mutually constitutive concepts of Heimat and Herkunft and offer new ways of conceiving mobile concepts of place and belonging. Mining the multiple layers of place and memory uncovers Heimat and Herkunft as multiple,⁴ multi-facetted and constantly produced yet also always un-heimlich. Based on Sigmund Freud’s work on Das Unheimliche, Maria Tatar defines uncanny events as having “the power to provoke a sense of dread precisely because they are at once strange and familiar” (169). Tatar focuses on houses and, in the broader sense, homes to elaborate on the effects of this double meaning. By adding a prefix, the German term heim (home) becomes un-homely, pointing to that which is hidden, remains hidden inside the house, a mystery or a “Geheimnis” (169, emphasis added). Tatar’s reading of houses as uncanny emphasizes the connection be-

 For a detailed discussion of Heimat as plural in the works of Stanišić, see Klüppel’s chapter in this volume.

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tween the uncanny and place, between what we know and what cannot ever be fully known and what remains strange or unsettling. In the texts I analyze in this chapter, uncanny places are marked not only by old houses that hide things past and present but also by unreliable memory and by uncanny landscapes, plants, trees, and wildlife. Belonging, the familiar and familial, filled with traces of people’s pasts and lives, is tied to these uncanny stories and places. Something remains that can never be fully known, that is secret, hidden, and obscure. The uncanny in these familiar places speaks of exclusion, violence, and loss. To uncover the uncanny layers of Heimat and Herkunft is a necessary deconstructive move in any attempt to create paths towards imagining different notions of origin, belonging, and home that resist appropriations for racialized or nationalist causes. Visual artist Shané Gooding describes her relationship to home as narrative, memory, and place when she discusses a series of her work entitled Home – Wherever that May Be. She defines home as “the amalgamation of the many places and spaces I claim and what they embody”; home is “what speaks to my identity, acknowledges my roots, reflects my culture, champions the communities I’ve belonged to, and symbolizes my comfort. So I hold tight to what remains – to who remains” (Gooding n.p.). Altes Land, Herkunft, and Nach der Flucht uncover the “toxic archive of Heimat” (Piesche in Kathöfer and Weber 2018b, 424). Place and memory are un-heimlich but they are also what remains. The protagonists of these texts claim places as defined by complex layers of stories, transient roots, and chosen communities.

2 Altes Land: Landscapes, Soldiers, and Old Houses Altes Land is Dörte Hansen’s debut novel; it tells the story of four generations of a family of refugees from Prussia. Hildegard von Kamcke, formerly part of a family of well-off landowners in Eastern Prussia, flees to Germany with her two children at the end of the war. Her younger child tragically dies on the journey. She and her daughter Vera reach Northern Germany and are housed on Ida Eckhoff ’s farm. Ida does not welcome the “Polacks,” (AL 2)⁵ as she calls the refugees; she has an openly hostile relationship with Hildegard and only slowly warms up to the child, Vera. Ida’s son, Karl, returns from the war with what today would be identified as

 All citations from Altes Land are based on the translation by Anne Stokes, This House is Mine (2016). For frequently cited works, AL refers to Hansen’s novel Altes Land, H refers to Stanišić’s Herkunft and NdF refers to Trojanows’s Nach der Flucht.

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PTSD. He screams at night and appears unable to work or take over the farm but becomes enchanted with Hildegard. Karl and Hildegard get married, against Ida’s will. Hildegard becomes the new master of the house; in despair, Ida hangs herself in the attic of the huge house, dressed in full traditional costume (AL 30). Soon after Ida’s suicide, Hildegard leaves Karl, marries an architect, and has another child, Marlene. Marlene marries a professor and has a son, a musical prodigy, and a daughter, Anne. Anne lives in a hipster area of Hamburg with her partner and their son Leon until her partner cheats on her and Anne flees to the countryside and her aunt Vera, who still lives in the big, old, decaying farmhouse. In parts, the novel is a parody of hipsters in cities who move back to the countryside in search of a more authentic life. The tone of the writing shifts when it turns to Anne and Vera, and the narrative perspective oscillates between an omniscient narrator and Vera’s or Anne’s perspective. The novel shows how Vera, Anne, and Leon slowly become family, in spite of the ghosts that haunt the family, the house, and the village. With Anne and Leon, life and a new kind of chosen family have returned to the old, haunted house. Altes Land borrows tropes from the genre of the Heimatroman (Heimat novel) only to break them. Heimatroman is a loosely defined genre. Usually, Heimatromane are categorized as light entertainment, addressing popular themes and set in often clichéd, romanticized, rural spaces rather than cities.⁶ Altes Land seems to allow for readings that border on Heimat-kitsch and, due to its focus on Prussian postwar migrants and a German soldier who returns traumatized from the war and the at times melodramatic family story, it touches on the revisionist discourse of victimizing Germans in postwar Germany. Yet, Altes Land ultimately resists such a reading. Hansen creates a text more akin to an Anti-Heimatroman (see Weiland 326). Anti-Heimatromane deconstruct the myth of idyllic village life and formulate contemporary social critiques (see Weiland 331). These texts, according to Weiland, often use irony, exaggeration, and the grotesque, and experiment with form and narrative perspective (333). Using many of these strategies, Altes Land offers a critical reflection on what place means, how memory haunts and defines place, and how community and family can be re-formed against all odds. In this novel, place remains multiple, uncanny, and haunted. By creating the complex yet enigmatic character of Vera, Altes Land critically intervenes in the discourse on Heimatvertriebene (expellees) – a term that was (and still is) used to describe German-identified refugees from Eastern Prussia

 For a definition of Heimatroman and a discussion of recent Anti-Heimatromane see Marc Weiland; for critical approaches to Heimat films see, for example, Johannes von Moltke or Ofer Ashkenazi.

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and implies a lost Heimat in the East.⁷ Vera experienced racism and discrimination as a child refugee; she understands herself and her family members as refugees, not as expellees. Yet, Vera does not see herself or her mother as victims and she does not mourn her Herkunft or a distant Heimat; National Socialism, German guilt, and the war are the ghosts that haunt the house, the characters, and the landscape, and Vera decides to stay with these ghosts and her step-father Karl. She embraces country life, hunts and butchers her own meat, and mainly keeps to herself. The house and the garden remain just as Vera inherited them (see AL 35), the scarred façade and the disheveled thatched roof (see AL 47) and the garden with its gnarly cherry tree, its mossy, unkempt lawn, the lopsided flower beds and the tattered hedge (64–65). In describing Vera’s close relationship with Karl and her affinity with the house and the garden, with the place of memory, trauma, and death, the novel rejects any notion of “lost Heimat” in the East and insists on taking responsibility for the crimes and horrors of Nazi Germany. Through the perspective of Vera’s niece Anne, the novel further complicates the ways in which the house and the landscape connect to notions of (family) history and belonging. When Anne first arrives at the house, Vera recognizes her and her son as “refugees” (AL 101). This impression associates Anne and Leon with Vera and her mother, decades earlier. The circumstances of their flight are different, though, something the novel does not explicitly address. Vera seems too keen to see herself and “her people” in Anne and Leon. She describes the blond hair of the boy and his nose, which looks to her like any child’s nose, but then she sees his brown eyes and full eye lashes and recognizes what she calls a “wink from the East” (AL 102). Vera’s “recognition” is strangely racialized and uncannily connects her to her “Prussian” identified mother. By inserting Anne’s perspective, however, the novel continuously questions Vera’s perceptions. Vera’s understanding of her family’s history, the landscape, the garden, and the house is but one perspective within the multiple layers that define place and belonging in the novel. Her longing for recognition and home is ambivalent and contradictory. It is in this ambivalence that the novel offers the most astute reflections on place and belonging: the stubborn insistence on staying in spite of discomfort, fear, and of feeling haunted and/or excluded. As Anne arrives in the area, fleeing her cheating partner in Hamburg, she observes the rural winter landscape: For the first time she was seeing the Altland in its cold starkness, the fruit trees standing like soldiers in the heavy earth, bare regiments in endless rows and between them the marsh soil

 For a general discussion of the history and literary discourse on expellees, see Eigler 51–69. For a discussion about depictions of expellees in literary texts, see Eigler 146–47 as part of her discussion of Christoph Hein’s novel Landnahme.

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hard with frost. In the deep rut left behind by the tractors, rainwater had turned into ice. Large birds of prey, whose names she didn’t know, perched on the branches as if they were too heavy to fly. (AL 89–90)

Anne sees the ghosts of the soldiers in the bare trees, and the farmland in the winter reminds her of battlefields; she closely observes yet she does not fully understand. These images and the many detailed landscape descriptions create an astute sense of place that is decidedly uncanny and stands in contrast to the convention of the Heimatroman that tends to romanticize landscapes as the backdrop of clichéd and often kitschy stories of petty crime and love. In his 2020 book Anti-Heimat Cinema, Ofer Ashkenazi shows that through its constant repetition of images, themes, and narrative structures, modern German Heimat culture expounded an iconography of the German landscape and its inhabitants that was intimately bound up with concepts of authenticity, community, and heritage, as well as with nostalgic emotions associated with rootedness, with a sense of being at home. (3)

In contrast to these tropes of German Heimat culture that dominate Heimatromane and Heimatfilme, Anne associates the landscape and the house with violence, war, and soldiers (e. g., AL 197), even though she does not have any personal memories of flight and war. Hansen creates an iconography of a German landscape that trades notions of Herkunft with historical hauntings and replaces nostalgic visions of Heimat with uncanny memories. Similar to the landscapes, the house is uncanny and haunted but, nonetheless, it is home. For Vera, the house is her refuge, but it is also an adversary, something she has to guard herself against. She describes the house as hostile, uncomfortable, and just like with the animals she hunts and butchers, she claims that one cannot show weakness vis-à-vis this house, which has been standing broad-legged on this marshy ground for almost three hundred years (AL 47). The house as alive with ghosts: Ida Eckhoff ’s ghost, sleeping, dancing above her, the ghosts Karl left behind, the soldiers who marched with him, and all the others whom she did not know, who breathed here and who died here. In Chapter 20, entitled “No Sound,” Vera is reminded of this as she is alone in the house, listening to the many noises, the cracking of the old beams that remind her of breaking bones and whispers in the walls (AL 246). She knows that these houses were not built for people living alone but she insists that she cannot and will not leave (AL 246). She describes herself as a refugee again and compares herself to moss that cannot grow or bloom but stays (AL 247). It is precisely her identity as a refugee that leads to her stubborn, defiant insistence that she will stay in spite of hostile people and the haunted house with its cold walls (AL 251), since it is written on the face of the house in the local dialect, “dit Huus is mien” (AL 251; This house is mine).

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Altes Land rejects uncritical or romanticized notions of both Heimat and Herkunft. At the end of the novel, a new chosen family unit has formed and the renovation of the house begins. The haunting, however, is not gone. Heimat remains ambivalent; it will and has to remain un-heimlich. Herkunft is but a distant memory that mixes with newly-made memories and the traumas people carry. The gnarly old cherry tree that their orderly neighbor Heinrich thinks must go (AL 64) is still there; it remains, deeply rooted. It carries memories and marks the place but it does not offer fruit or nourishment to the newly formed family unit; nobody picks or eats the few cherries it still produces. The house is filled with people again but because of its haunted past, it always also remains an uncanny place, filled with memories and stories that cannot ever fully be known. Vera, Anne, and Leon stay with the overgrown garden, the stories, the hauntings, and exclusions, but they fill the house with new life. The uncanny landscapes and overgrown gardens, and the decrepit, strangely alive, decaying house connects the family and their histories. The family’s defiant place-making is a claim to belonging and to local voice and agency, however scattered and transient it might be.

3 Herkunft: Snakes, Graveyards, and Grandmothers Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft is a deconstructed memoir that touches on the impossibility of remembering and the loss of stories and memories past.⁸ The text is both a first-person narrative and a personal memoir; however, to distinguish the author and his narrator, I refer to the author as Stanišić and the narrator in the text as Saša.⁹ Saša sets out to tell the story of his childhood in Yugoslavia where he lived with his Bosnian mother and Serbian father until they fled the Balkan War to Germany. After escaping the war, Saša and his parents are in a refugee camp and then move to Heidelberg, until his parents have to leave again as their temporary permit expires. His parents move to the US and spend time in Cro-

 For another discussion of Stanišić’s novels and their treatment of Heimat, see Klueppel’s chapter in this volume.  The author is the one responsible for the text while the narrator is the one telling the story. This distinction seems clear, however, narratological theory has long debated the meaning of responsibility, voice, and agency in texts (see, for example, Dorothee Birke and Tilmann Köppe’s edited volume Author and Narrator (2015)). This is not the place to elaborate on these debates, but it is important to make this distinction especially since in Stanišić’s text, the relationship between the two is even closer since this is a work of biographical fiction. It is nonetheless important to not erase the distinction since the author has created a literary voice – a narrator.

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atia when they can, while Saša stays in Germany on a student visa. Herkunft narrates Saša’s search for his own and his grandmother’s memories in Oskoruša, the village of his ancestors, and in new places he calls home. He collects memories from his childhood, his youth, and his time as a student, but he also traces his attempt to learn more about his grandparents, mainly his Serbian paternal grandmother, Kristina, who, he claims, was part of the Mafia and now suffers from dementia. He visits her, but most of the time she does not recognize him or mistakes him for other, often long deceased, family members. Rather than claiming places that connect the present to the haunted past, in Herkunft, the search for place is an attempt to trigger lost memories. The theme of memories lost in the novel offers critical perspectives on both Heimat and Herkunft. Similar to what Didem Uca has shown in her analysis of Stanišić’s debut novel Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006; How the Soldier Repairs the Grammophone, 2008), formative experiences happen in Germany and in “uncanny returns” to places that are “both […] Heimat but also […] vastly different place[s]” (186). When the narrator visits the almost deserted village of Oskoruša, his Herkunft, guides show him cherry trees (H 33) and he remembers a party for his parents held under cherry trees (H 35). The reader will wonder, however, if the final dance of the party the narrator remembers before the start of the war ever took place, since the text makes memory and place uncanny by questioning the reliability and accuracy of our memories, the stories we tell, and the connections we make. In the text, memory and the places of memory are constantly shifting, unstable, and deeply unreliable. The text constantly undermines the narrator’s authority, which creates complex and unstable layers of space, memory, and place in the villages and towns in the former Yugoslavia and in Germany. Both his “old” Heimat – deemed his Herkunft – and his new Heimat, the hills surrounding Heidelberg and the places he spent time in during his youth, become unreliable, uncanny, un-heimlich in the way in which the past, the present, and the memories of different people clash and intersect. What starts out as a search for his Herkunft quickly turns into a much more complicated, political web of unreliable, intersecting forms of violence and pain but also of belonging, love, and care. Moments that appear to have been key incidents in Saša’s childhood illustrate the unreliability of memory. Memories conjure something familiar yet strange (see Tatar 169). When the adult Saša visits Oskoruša, walking with a distant relative, Garvilo, to visit the graves of their ancestors, a snake crosses their path. At this moment, Saša remembers his father trying to kill a snake in a chicken coop by throwing a stone at the snake: “Poskok contained everything a child needs for a good scare. Poison and father wanting to kill…. I was scared of the world and of the animal and the father at once.… A premonition whispers to me: Father’ll miss” (H 23). The narrative then returns to the graveyard and the adult Saša. He continues to

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imagine a snake in the tree, evoking images of the Garden of Eden. The landscape, though, is not paradise; it is dry, hot, and dusty. Contrary to his suspicion that his father does not manage to kill the snake, Saša recounts a different memory, where his father hands him the dead snake: “Father shows me the dead snake. I ask if I can hold it. I hold the snake and think: that isn’t a snake anymore. Father is Father, covered in dust.… ‘Were you scared?’ father asks” (H 39). Shortly afterwards, he remembers his parents’ dance, quoted above: “That was my parents’ last dance before the war. Or the last I witnessed. I never saw them dance in Germany either.… I dug a grave for the snake” (H 39). Memories of the snake connect multiple stories, places, and times. The snake evokes the story of Adam and Eve as the story of the “original sin” and loss of innocence. For Saša, the snake stories also signify the end of his childhood, of his sense of belonging, and of his parents dancing together in the garden. The dead snake becomes a symbol of loss and war. The fear he feels when he remembers the snake is tied to the fear he experienced because of the war and their forced migration. The snake and the tree are uncanny memories connected to multiple places and stories; however, as this narrative strand weaves itself through the text, these very memories are called into question. In a later chapter, Saša not only wonders if any of this ever took place, probing the accuracy of his memories, but he also questions the idea of the book itself, its genre, and its narrator: “What kind of book is this? Who is narrating?… A snake in the Oskoruša cemetery? The horned viper on the fruit tree? The Natural History Museum in Vienna says that horned vipers are absolutely terrible climbers” (H 225). As he reflects on his father’s encounter with the snake again from his apartment in Hamburg, he is convinced the snake-encounter only exists in the lines of his book: “(Father raises the stone high above his head: strength, decisive action, seriousness; but then the war came and was stronger than him etc.) I am sick of the betrayals of memory and I am gradually getting sick of the betrayals of fiction too” (H 226). In this way, Herkunft is not only a reflection on memory but also on the process of writing itself as the author undermines the authority of its narrator and its characters’ memory. Just like place and memory, narrative voice becomes shifting and contested. In Saša’s search for Herkunft, memory and place are unstable and complexly interwoven, which exemplifies a concept of place that is not static and not universal; memory is unreliable and place does not have clearly defined borders (see Massey 155–156). Places, says Massey, “can be defined in terms of social interactions,” they are “processes” (155). In that sense, the snake, the tree, and Saša’s emotional reactions to both the memory itself and his process of remembering define place in precisely this way: as process, as interaction, as unreliable, shifting, and uncanny. Stanišić’s reflections on memory and the writing process create mobile concepts of history, belonging, and place. In his search for Herkunft, the places of

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his childhood and his memory of war and flight link with the places of his youth in Germany, his new Heimat. The text tenuously connects these different temporal and spatial levels. Saša looks for Heimat in Oskoruša but does not recognize anything in this wild, beautiful landscape (H 269, 273), instead what he can imagine are Yoga workshops and German yuppie-tourists rediscovering the beauty of the rugged terrain (H 80). When he writes about Heidelberg, he remembers the gas station (H 123) where he hung out or the vineyards he roamed in his youth (H 127); but Heidelberg and Germany are also places of loss, confusion, and fear. Memories of his youth intersect with his reactions to reports about right-wing, racist mob violence in Hoyerswerda and the attacks on Turkish Germans in Solingen and Mölln. The 1990s mark a time when mob violence against refugees and murderous attacks against people considered “foreign” in Germany were on the rise. Saša and his parents first arrived in Germany as refugees in the 1990s and tried to find a safe space in a country that appeared not to be safe for anyone considered Other. In this political climate, his Herkunft, at least as a young refugee in Heidelberg, was something he wanted to keep hidden. Aware of the racist clichés attached to Serbs and Croatians in 1990s Germany, Saša tries to protect himself by claiming he came from Slovenia and states that he misses the Alps; as he remarks sarcastically, missing the Alps seems to be a popular concept in Germany (H 149). He learns to tell stories, to be culturally savvy: he knows what images to evoke to please Germans. His relationship to Germany remains as ambivalent as his relationship to the reliability of narrative voice and memory. The playful approach to national belonging and stereotypes is interwoven with the complexity of memory and marks a rebellion against the fetishization of Herkunft and the fantasy of national identity (H 218–219). The nationalistic genocides of the Balkan Wars intersect with memories of childhood in Yugoslavia and the experience of being a refugee in Germany in the 1990s. These stories, too, haunt Stanišić’s text and complicate his relationship to place. The title of Stanišić’s book, Herkunft, becomes an amorphous term and Heimat, as a concept, dissolves into the uncanny landscapes of familiar yet unreliable, at times violent, memories. The leitmotiv in the text is Saša’s attempt to connect with his grandmother Kristina, who increasingly lives in her own, imagined world where timelines and places collapse and intersect in new ways. Herkunft, Saša states, is writing about grandmothers (H 60), but it is exactly this part of the story, his demented and then dying grandmother, that appears most impossible to grasp for the narrator; his narrative agency slips. Her dementia and his realization that what he remembers from his past also appears to be unreliable lead to a complex reflection on the ethics of storytelling, the validity of memory, and claims to belonging. The wish for a different ending and the agency to write our own ending are emphasized in the playful way in which Stanišić ends the text. Readers are

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guided towards different endings, depending on which phrases or reactions they choose. The way in which Herkunft plays with narrative levels and voices creates a text that is at the same time deeply sad, playful, and relatable. Stanišić deconstructs Herkunft and Heimat by recreating the confusing, even sinister, worlds of memory and storytelling, but these worlds are also infused with an ongoing search for stories of love, care, and connection.

4 Nach der Flucht: Trees, Roots, and Log-Boats Ilija Trojanow’s philosophical reflections in Nach der Flucht are melancholic vignettes on loss but also biting critiques of racialized concepts of belonging; similar to Stanišić and Hansen, however, Trojanow provides metaphors and stories that open paths for different ways to think about memory and place. Narrative agency and place remain amorphous in this text; both memory and space are complexly interwoven in short political, poetic, and social reflections. Formally, Nach der Flucht works with associations and complex metaphors. Trojanow’s main character is the third person “the one who fled.” The vignettes in part one, entitled “about the ruptures,” have Roman numerals and part two, “about the rescues,” switches the count to Arabic numbers. The transition from rupture to rescue is gradual and not complete but the structure of the text indicates development, motion, and progression. This different formal-aesthetic approach, compared to Stanišić’s or Hansen’s texts, also becomes clear in the way in which Trojanow introduces the figure of the grandmother. Rather than a central character, however enigmatic or unreliable, in Trojanow’s text the grandmother is but a crumbling memory: “When the one who fled thinks about his grandmother, he hears her voice, how it breaks. How it falls apart, how it becomes incomprehensible except for her pain” (NdF 29).¹⁰ The grandmother’s stories are inaudible; her broken voice only signifies pain and loss. It is that search for stories and places lost and new forms of belonging that drive the narrative, but the search is set up to fail from the start. Experiences of pain and loss are “ruptures,” yet the text is also a call for “rescues” that open possibilities towards new approaches to place and belonging. Of the three works I discuss here, Nach der Flucht is the most radical intervention in the racialized, loaded connotations of the Heimat-Herkunft discourse I describe in this chapter. While Hansen critically contends with Heimat and Stanišić attempts to search for his Herkunft, Nach der Flucht rejects and retires both concepts in favor of a more layered, process-based understanding of why stories, mem-

 All translations from Trojanow’s text are my own.

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ories, and places matter. The text explores the process of retrieving memories, of who has the agency to decide which stories matter, and who can claim place and belonging. Nach der Flucht further deconstructs essentialist ideas of belonging, Herkunft, and Heimat by returning, at various spots, to the metaphors of trees and roots, symbols that also play a role in the two texts I discussed above. Trojanow’s text explicitly proposes different ways of thinking about “rootedness” as place and process-based (see Massey 155) and connected to stories told. In German cultural history, according to Johannes Zechner, the forest is a space for political and ideological projections, specifically for patriotic and national ideologies that then increasingly became nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic (12).¹¹ Nationalist romantics in the nineteenth century glorified German Wälder and, again, that idea was appropriated by the Nazis. The symbolic connection between trees, forest, and nationalism does not end with the Nazi era. In post-1945 West Germany, Ernst Jünger, for example, continued to instrumentalize forests for nationalistic causes in his essay Der Waldgang (The Forest Walk, 1951). In the 1980s, emotionally laden discourses about the Waldsterben (the death of the forests) emerged across the political spectrum. While these discourses focused on environmentalism, the nationalist connotation of a special bond between Germans and “their” forests was evoked as well (see Zechner 203–208). As this brief summary illustrates, forests evoke a long history of cultural practices that centers fears, the hidden, and the uncanny. It is against this backdrop and in response to the previous discussions that I read Trojanow’s intervention into the use of tree, root, and stem metaphors. Early in the text, Trojanow evokes the metaphor of the trunk, the “stem” of a tree. He claims that this metaphor of the stem – that also features in the aforementioned Stammbaum – is doubly-wrong in its metaphorical use: Trunk, (tree)stem: a metaphor, usually doubly wrong. 1. Trees do not move; their migration is called pollination. People who constantly talk about roots identify too strongly with oak and ash trees. When a person stems from elsewhere, does that mean that only their leaves are not of the country (Germany)? 2. The trunk /(tree)stem/family tree as a dynasty. A unit bigger than a family, an extended family, a clan. A past that he managed to leave behind (and be it as an innocent child). Carved into him a tattoo that he pursues in a new language. (NdF 6)

Growing roots, according to Trojanow, is not always an adequate measure against loneliness (NdF 22). In the first part of the book, trees are haunted; metaphorically, they remain connected to violence and fear: “Head first he hangs from the last

 For a detailed study of the ideological history of the German forest see Johannes Zechner, Der deutsche Wald: Eine Ideengeschichte zwischen Poesie und Ideologie 1800–1945.

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tree. Soon he will drown. It rains nonstop, the water rises. […] Everything is rain. Everything is water. Soon he will go under. Head-down” (NdF 21). Hanging upside down from a tree branch over the water conjures a range of images. What starts with an image that might evoke playful tree climbing merges into images of suicide, hangings, torture, even waterboarding and drowning. The text then associates the body hanging upside down with bloody fruit; the violence of the moment requires endless mourning, as Trojanow writes, but also evokes sadness and fear (NdF 22). Heimat, in this text, is the place people had to leave behind due to war and violence. Thus, leaving Heimat is not associated with loss but with a sense of relief. However, as Trojanow states, it is not as simple as a German saying might suggest: “Once your homeland is lost, it is lost forever. If only it were so. The homeland is carried after the one who fled like an old shirt that he left behind” (NdF 35). It is that “shirt one left,” the “homeland,” that then becomes Herkunft. The narrator never refers to the country the “Geflüchtete” fled as Heimat or Herkunft: Only other people claim that the country from which he fled is his homeland. The one who fled tries to explain: he has gotten comfortable here, but the country of his origins does not disappear. […] Two sentences later someone asks about his true homeland. The one who fled is tired of giving complex explanations. (NdF 36)

Similar to Saša’s tactic of inventing a more acceptable story or origin to avoid questions about Heimat (H 175), the suggestion here is to evade the question about Heimat and Herkunft by reverting to generic memories of youth when someone insists on asking about his origin (NdF 38). To go back home, Heimkehr, as Trojanow states, is only possible to a homeland we construct ourselves (NdF 42–43). This echoes what Stanišić describes when he realizes he will necessarily fail in his attempt to invent or reinvent his grandmother’s life in Oskoruša. Trojanow concludes part one by drawing a haunting, uncanny image of Heimat as an illusion, something one cannot get rid of, even when one stops believing in it (NdF 67). In Nach der Flucht, this is both a comforting and a disturbing thought. Heimat stays with us; however, it is precisely what continues to haunt refugees after the flight, which creates what Eigler refers to as “postmemorial spaces” (67).¹² Similar to Stanišić, Trojanow calls his own reflections on Heimat into question by stating that Heimat is the most contradictory landscape for literature (NdF 113), never just “safe and secure” but always also “hostile and treacherous,” “sinister and oppressive” (Tatar 182) – uncanny.  Eigler refers to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” and builds her argument based on Kopp and Niżińska in Germany, Poland, and Postmemorial Relations.

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Part one, “of the ruptures,” not only narrates ruptures, it also ruptures concepts, such as Heimat and Herkunft, makes them uncanny, and offers new “constellations of memory and space” (Eigler and Kugele 1). Part two, “of the rescues,” shifts the tone from lost places and stories to creating and claiming places for the future. The tree with its roots and its bloody fruit and branches one hangs off upside down is cut and floats down a river, as an Einbaum, a log-boat. The log-boat describes “a de-stemming.” The refugee floats in/on this log-boat; it can capsize but it can never grow roots (NdF 78). The refugee on the boat evokes images of overcrowded boats trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, of people drowning and dying as they seek safety. Rooting, according to the text, takes place in utopia, an imagined better future in which the refugee is finally able to find a home (NdF 96). The metaphor of roots, a key metaphor also in Hansen’s text and in the Heimat discourse at large, appears in the second part of Auf der Flucht in a new light; growing roots requires courage. For the refugee, to grow roots is an act of defiance against eradication efforts, to insist on staying where one was “weeded” (NdF 81). The metaphor of the weeds overgrowing the fields or gardens connects to Hansen’s overgrown garden as a metaphor for a claim to space that remains unruly and maintains its own sense of agency. In Trojanow’s text, it is this, however courageous and defiant, rooting that turns towards the topic of rescues. Rescue then means to defiantly grow roots again after being deemed a “weed,” the possibility of resort or rescue, and of different futures. This insistence on defiant rooting is also a rejection of a romanticized discourse of “uprootedness.” The claim that everybody today shares the experience of being uprooted is a myth Trojanow vehemently discounts: It is presumptuous to claim that all people nowadays are exiles and that homelessness is the basic condition of this vastly changing, globalizing world. […] No, let’s keep the church in the village, where every Sunday donation money will be collected for the local refugee camp. We are not that similar that some won’t have to give and others won’t have to receive donations. (NdF 89)¹³

This rebuttal is important as it counters appropriations of the discourse of “uprootedness,” as a worldly and hip notion that anyone can claim. Trojanow’s text makes Heimat un-heimlich, similar to Stanišić, in that Heimat is amorphous and haunted and refers not only to the place refugees leave but also to the new places they encounter. Neither place can ever fully be known, understood, or claimed. Similar to what Hansen describes for her character Vera, the

 For another, earlier intervention into this discourse, see Steyerl (166).

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process of rooting in hostile grounds is an act of defiance. The log-boat might be the preferred place as the focus is on the journey; places of origin and any new Heimat remain places of fear, violence, and pain. The text rejects a search for Herkunft and Heimat-nostalgia and subverts both terms by re-signifying metaphors and meanings: floating in the log-boat, capsizing, becoming a stubborn weed, are the dominant metaphors that create the possibility of rescues.

5 Conclusion: Claiming Memory, Claiming Place In all three texts, the past does not define a place as Heimat; the past supplies the ghosts and the hauntings that make Heimat un-heimlich. Similar to what Massey describes, place acquires its specificity by the way in which stories uncover “a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus” (154). Memory is unreliable but defines the places of the past and the paths we took and take, the stories we tell. Paths toward better futures lead through these haunted spaces and memory-scapes; none of the texts discussed here depict a world in which memories can be left behind; memories influence the present and the future, but they cannot completely define them. Hansen’s monster-house, a metaphor for the horrors of the Nazi past, racism, and war, is still there, and the overgrown garden continues to surround the house; yet, different people live in the house, they fix it, and they bring new life to it. As a space, the house remains ambivalent. Similarly, the snake in Herkunft signifies danger and war but it is also a creature that marks the place that was once “home” and a caring father trying to protect his son from danger. The uncanny (and false) memory of holding the dead snake’s body then shifts the tone again towards compassion and sadness mixed with repulsion. Readers never find out whether Saša’s father killed the snake; rather, they get to choose an ending to the story of Kristina and her grandson and create and imagine various possible futures. Trojanow metaphorically cuts the haunted, uncanny trees with their bloody fruit and turns the stem, the doubly-wrong metaphor, into a log-boat that moves down a river, possibly gets stranded and stays put for a while, but never grows roots. The water that once threatened to drown the figure hanging from the tree, upside down, becomes a metaphor for time and its flow a symbol of possibilities. In Auf der Flucht and Herkunft, to claim agency and a story means to imagine different futures in which the protagonists carve out a place, however temporary, for their stories. In Altes Land, the defiant claim to place, the way in which Vera stays and Anne settles, does not mark the end of the hauntings, of pain and loneliness but points to a possibility for different futures. In all three texts, not Heimat or Herkunft but often uncanny memory defines these new places as unreliable but

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ever-present reminders of the hauntings of the past. When the concepts of Heimat and Herkunft are deconstructed, new ways of conceptualizing place and narrative emerge: renovations, creating new things, playing with stories and endings, and floating down the river on a log-boat. The three texts use metaphors of trees, roots, and uncanny rural spaces to tell stories of haunted pasts and presents and the possibilities for different futures. The texts also show how literature offers ways to reflect on agency and insert complexity into these discourses. Formal experimentation with voice and agency is important in all three texts. Altes Land contains many sections that are inner monologues, switching between the thoughts and perspectives of different characters. Truths, the reader begins to note, are found somewhere in the gaps between these perspectives. The most reliable, steady character in the novel is the uncanny, haunted old house. Stanišić deliberately undermines his narrator and his characters by creating conflicting, unreliable memory-scapes. Playful approaches to voice and storytelling culminate in endings that the readers themselves can choose: agency over the unreliable story is thrust onto the reader. Explicitly philosophical reflections in Nach der Flucht allow for deconstructions of concepts of Heimat and belonging that relate to contemporary political discourses without sacrificing complexities. Trojanow sketches the journey of flight as a form of drifting; the spaces he conjures are also German spaces, they are un-heimlich, but the drifters move through them and make claim to these spaces. Against the racialized, exclusive “toxic archive of Heimat” (Piesche 424), the three texts end with – sometimes vague or allegorical yet defiant – visions of chosen family and community building. Because spaces inside and outside of Germany remain uncanny, un-heimlich, the texts I discuss here resist appropriations for the promotion of a marketable multicultural Germany. None of the communities and attachments depicted at the end of these texts appear “sustainable” (Kathöfer and Weber 2018a, 416). The bonds between the chosen family in Altes Land remain precarious and haunted; Stanišić does not offer one resolution to his story and is not keen on claiming any notion of belonging as violent experiences of the present and the past intersect in all the places the text explores; Trojanow specifically addresses appropriations by rejecting the discourse where “we all become migrants” as ignorant and offensive. Not everyone is invited into the log-boat. Hito Steyerl describes a German public’s desire for a “renovated and globalized concept of Heimat” (165). None of the works discussed in this essay lends itself to be appropriated or claimed for a mainstream German discourse of Heimatlosigkeit (having no home) as hip or marketable (Steyerl 164), nor for creating new concepts of Heimat as inclusive and multicultural. Memory and place in these texts conceptually dissolve the dichotomy between Heimat and foreignness and allow for differentiated approaches to intersecting forms of trauma, racialized exclusion, and pain, as well as care, communi-

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ty, and belonging. They thus create possibilities for building new understandings of and relationships to place that are not built on categories of exclusion, or, to return to Gooding’s words at the beginning of this essay, they call for us to try to champion community, find comfort, and hold on to what and who remains; questions of memory and place evoke concepts of where we want to head next, together (see Sanyal 1210).

Works Cited Ashkenazi, Ofer. Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape. U of Michigan P, 2020. Aydemir, Fatma, and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, editors. Eure Heimat ist unser Alptraum. Ullstein, 2019. Birke, Dorothee, and Tilmann Köppe, editors. Author and Narrator: Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological Debate. De Gruyter, 2015. Confino, Alon. Nation as Local Metaphor: Wü rttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918. U of North Carolina P, 1997. Eigler, Friederike. Heimat, Space, Narrative: Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion. Camden House, 2014. Eigler, Friederike, and Jens Kugele, editors. Heimat: At the Intersection of Memory and Space. De Gruyter, 2012. Gooding, Shané. Artist Website, www.shanekgooding.com/2618765-home-wherever-that-may-be#22. Accessed 22 November 2020. Hansen, Dörte. Altes Land. Albrecht Knaus, 2015. Hansen, Dörte. This House is Mine. Translated by Anne Stokes, St. Martin’s Press, 2016. Kathöfer, Gabi, and Beverly Weber. “Introduction: Precarity/Heimatlosigkeit.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2018a, pp. 411–417. Kathöfer, Gabi, and Beverly Weber. “Heimat, Sustainability, Community: A Conversation with Karina Griffith and Peggy Piesche.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2018b, pp. 418–427. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. U of Minnesota P, 1994. Sanyal, Mithu. “Zuhause.” Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Ullstein, 2019, pp. 101–121. Stanišić, Saša. Herkunft. Luchterhand, 2019. Stanišić, Saša. Where you Come From. Translated by Damion Seales, Tin House, 2021. Steyerl, Hito. “Gaps and Potentials: The Exhibition ‘Heimat Kunst’: Migrant Culture as an Allegory of the Global Market.” New German Critique, vol. 92, Special Issue on Multicultural Germany: Art, Performance, and Media (Spring – Summer 2004), pp. 159–168. Tatar, Maria. “The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature, vol. 33, no. 2, 1981, pp. 167–182 Trojanow, Ilija. Nach der Flucht. Fischer, 2017. Uca, Didem. “‘Grissgott’ meets ‘Kung Fu’: Multilingualism, Humor, and Trauma in Saša Stanišić’s Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006).” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 73, no. 3, 2019, pp. 185–201.

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Von Moltke, Johannes. No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema. U of California P, 2005. Weiland, Marc. “Böse Bücher aus der Provinz: Der Anti-Heimatroman und das aktuelle Erzählen über Land.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik, vol. 30, no. 2, 2020, pp. 326–344. Zechner, Johannes. Der deutsche Wald: Eine Ideengeschichte zwischen Poesie und Ideologie 1800– 1945. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2016.

Part 3 Heimat and Migration

Joscha Klüppel

Saša Stanišić’s Novels: Making Sense of Heimat and Migration?

“I want to understand the concepts of place, that’s why I write. Of placelessness, that’s why I write […]. I want to understand it better. Of the concept of the nation of ownness [des Eigenen] and foreignness [des Fremden]” (Stanišić 2017a).¹ What Bosnian-born author Saša Stanišić says in the first of his three “Zürcher Poetikvorlesungen,” held in November 2017, is reflected in his novels: they are pervaded by a challenge to parochial categorizations of human beings and by reflections on modes of understanding that can potentially overcome binaries like “the nation of ownness and foreignness.” At the forefront of his literary endeavors are two categories that play an important role in Stanišić’s novels but that are also often imposed upon them: Heimat and migration. In this chapter, I will investigate the way that Stanišić’s novels examine how to make sense of the ideas of Heimat and migration. More specifically, my analysis of Stanišić’s novels will show two things: (1) that each form of Heimat in his novels always refers back to something that must be represented critically and, more importantly, as a pluralistic concept: Heimats. This is because (2) the experience of (forced) migration and its repercussions are not only mediated in his novels through the experiences of trauma and death; they also continually impede access to shared ideas of Heimat, thus necessitating the concept’s plurality. This plurality allows for the inscription of heterogeneity, (post)migrancy, and individuality into the Heimat discourse and acknowledges the existing participation of silenced and minoritized voices in Heimat discourses. His novels frame this concept by engaging with trauma (Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert, 2006; How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, 2008), cultural memory (Vor dem Fest, 2014; Before the Feast, 2016a), and familial origins (Herkunft [Origin], 2019; Where You Come From, 2021), though they also overlap. With this argument in mind, my analysis will show how Stanišić approaches trauma and death in his texts. Both trauma and death highlight the struggles that inhabit the questions and experiences associated with surviving forced migration. The same struggles, however, also help to formulate, negotiate, and conceptualize Heimat(s). Similarly, Stanišić uses aspects of magical realism to comprehend Heimat(s) and migration. The use of these themes enables the narrative voices of his novels to

 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. The German original reads: “Ich möchte die Konzepte des Ortes verstehen, deswegen schreib ich. Der Ortslosigkeit, deswegen schreib ich. […] Ich möchte das besser verstehen. Der Nation des Eigenen und des Fremden.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-006

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scrutinize the two concepts. Following a brief introduction to the author and his novels, I will problematize the notion of Heimat before analyzing the literary works. Saša Stanišić was born in the Bosnian city of Višegrad. He has lived in Germany since he was fourteen years old, growing up and subsequently studying in Heidelberg. His debut novel, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert, tells the story of Aleksandar, who, for much of the novel, is its narrator. He tells the story of his family in Višegrad, of the death of his grandfather, the start of the Bosnian War, and his subsequent escape to Germany. After his arrival in Germany, the novel uses a variety of fragmented, multilayered, and creative strategies to show how Aleksandar copes with trauma, tries to learn German, and – toward the end – visits Višegrad. The novel was an immediate success and even made the shortlist for the German Book Prize that year.² Stanišić followed up his debut with two more successful novels, Vor dem Fest and Herkunft, as well as a collection of short stories, Fallensteller (Trappers, 2016). Vor dem Fest won the Leipzig Book Fair Book Prize in 2014 and made the long list for the German Book Prize. Herkunft won several prizes, most notably the German Book Prize in 2019, cementing Stanišić’s status as one of Germany’s most acclaimed contemporary authors. His autofictional novel Herkunft shares thematical similarities with his debut novel, discussing and scrutinizing questions of origin and belonging. Vor dem Fest, however, is set in Fürstenfelde, a small fictional village located in rural Brandenburg.³ The novel narrates the days before the village’s annual St. Anne’s Feast Day celebrations (Annenfest) and provides glimpses into the minds of some of its inhabitants as well as the village’s overall anxiety about the future. Vor dem Fest is a critical discussion of collective memory, as Dora Osborne correctly asserts (470). Although Stanišić’s writing has received increasing critical attention, that attention has generally remained focused on his debut novel. Little notice has been given to the overarching, recurring themes and narrative strategies that the author employs in all three of his novels. This chapter is a first step in that direction.

 His debut novel has been translated into twenty-eight languages (cf. Haines 105). For some statements of praise on the novel, see Haines 106.  Though it must be noted that the fictionalized village is, in part, based on the real village of Fürstenwerder (Osborne 471).

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1 Problematizing Heimat Saša Stanišić makes visible a multitude of Heimats in his novels and in a three-part lecture series, the “Zürcher Poetikvorlesung,” which he held in November 2017.⁴ The second of his lectures, for example, is titled “The Biographical, the Improbable, the Cruel, and the Joke: My Heimats.” In this list, the biographical is the only common aspect of usual notions of Heimat. As is evident in the title of the second lecture, Stanišić’s vision of Heimat(s) is very idiosyncratic. For the purposes of this chapter, then, we will have to problematize notions of Heimat if we are to arrive at the plurality of Heimats that Stanišić inhabits.⁵ I adhere to the argument posed by a multitude of scholars that a singular notion of Heimat is unable to account for the heterogeneous, diverse German society of the twenty-first century. In fact, it is precisely the singular idea of Heimat that performatively perpetuates the outdated notion of a German homogeneous cultural monolith. The relationship between Heimat and migration is an ambiguous one: it is not necessarily the experience of migration itself that complicates access to Heimat; more often, it is how migrating individuals are received by others that makes it difficult to inhabit a shared idea of Heimat. However, the movement that is essential to migration allows and even necessitates an understanding of Heimat as something plural that can be independent of geographical locations and is instead constituted by aspects of individual importance. This is where the relationship between migration and Heimat can be productive, as individualized aspects have the potential to inscribe themselves into a parochial, ossified, and stagnant Heimat discourse that is dominated by a group that perceives itself to be homogeneous. Though egregiously burdened by its use to justify colonial exploitation and fascist genocide, Heimat remains an influential idea to this day – as underscored, for example, by the necessity of this edited volume. What are the various understandings of Heimat? Anja Barr, for one, emphasizes its fluidity: “Heimat is understood not as a static attribution, but rather as a flexible and configurable world of expe-

 The “Zürcher Poetikvorlesungen” are an annual lecture series that has been organized by the German department at the University of Zurich since 1997. Prominent speakers over the years have included W.G. Sebald (1997/1998), Volker Braun (1998/1999), Durs Grünbein (2006/2007), Herta Müller (2007), Marcel Beyer (2009), Melinda Nadj Abonji (2018), and, of course, Saša Stanišić in 2017.  At times, I echo notions of the concept discussed in the introduction to this volume as well as Maria Stehle’s chapter. While Stehle and I share an emphasis on the exclusion inherent in most concepts of Heimat, her discussion focuses on the intrinsic uncanniness of Heimat, specifically as it inhabits physical places. The attention of my discussion, however, remains on the pluralization of the concept.

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rience/world of lived experience” (139). While Barr characterizes Heimat specifically within the context of the German movie Gegen die Wand (Against the Wall, 2004; in English as Head-On), her understanding of Heimat implies a negotiation that takes place on both individual and societal levels that is more generally applicable, allowing for the emphasis on what one person or (a large part of ) society sees as Heimat to shift continuously. This, then, makes the concept somewhat volatile in nature. More importantly, it stresses the fact that Heimat is always something constructed. In his influential volume Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, Peter Blickle writes that Heimat is “the imaginary space where a reconciliation with an alienated, moving world occurs” (40–41), describing it as an “imaginary real world.” Building on the constructed and volatile nature of Heimat, Blickle presents it as a return to something imagined, a protective mental hideaway, a contrast to reality, and, as such, a means to recoup or compensate for a feeling or for one’s idea of self slipping away. The concept of Heimat, Blickle argues, works “through an imagistic and, thus, regressive representation of an ideal life, or at least of a lost ideal stage in life” (139). In a similar vein, Halina Hackert locates Heimat in the awareness of a spatial loss (135). We may add to the loss of place the loss of a particular, romanticized “stage in life.” German philosopher Ernst Bloch expresses the latter feeling when he writes: “there will arise in the world something that shines into everyone’s childhood, but where no one has yet been: homeland” (1376). This leaves us with a volatile, constructed concept that reacts to both spatial loss (of place) and temporal loss (of a particular phase of life), thus implying the loss of an emotional sense of protection as well. It is for this reason that Heimat is often evoked in a dichotomy with something that disturbs either that place or stage in life: foreignness. Jürgen Hasse describes Heimat as “a relationship between ownness [Eigenem] and foreignness [Fremdem] that continuously sheds its skin” (17). While we can see this relationship in individuals moving to a new place or even a new country, we encounter it more strongly when “foreignness” supposedly unsettles the status quo. It is no coincidence that the notion of Heimat, neatly packaged into repurposed slogans like “We are the people,” is undergoing a resurgence at a time when large numbers of refugees are coming to Germany looking for safety and a future. Instead of tackling the intricate and complex societal issues that are at the bottom of growing feelings of unrest and a loss of control – economic discrepancies between the federal states of the former GDR and the former FRG, the political disillusionment of broad swaths of the German public, the denial of the existence of structural racism in Germany, the long-term and lasting failure of both political and societal institutions to take into account the inevitable and necessary shifts in the make-up of so-

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ciety⁶ – a return to an imagined space of control and nostalgia is subsumed within the concept of Heimat. Often, this return presents itself as the emotional recuperation of a lost status quo that operates via exclusion. Unsurprisingly, then, the concept has received its fair and merited share of criticism, most recently in a collection of essays titled Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Your Homeland is Our Nightmare, 2019), edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah.⁷ Published in part as a reaction to the addition of Heimat to the title of the Federal Ministry of the Interior in March 2018, often colloquially referred to as the Heimatministerium,⁸ the collection critically addresses the term Heimat. In charge of renaming the ministry was its new head, conservative politician Horst Seehofer, one of the leaders of the CSU (Christian Social Union). The addition of the two words Bau (building) and Heimat (officially translated as community) was thus a conservative reframing of the importance of specific discourses. Political sociologist Bilgin Ayata describes this change as the institutional reintroduction of Heimat, an attempt to revise history that is emblematic of a shift in contemporary political discourses (43). Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah harshly criticize the notion of Heimat in the foreword to Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum on the basis that “the concept of Heimat has never described a real place in Germany, but always the yearning for a particular ideal instead: a homogeneous, white, Christian society in which men have the final say and women worry about childbirth – where other realities of life simply do not find a place” (9). They emphasize their rejection of the term by placing it in single quotation marks – the written equivalent of touching something with gloves, in this case because of the inapplicability of the word to their lived experience, their reality, the reality of many. In her essay in the same volume, Mithu M. Sanyal states succinctly: “Simply put: if ‘the nation’ functions as an outer border, then ‘Heimat’ creates an inner border” (104).⁹ Aydemir, Yaghoobifarah, and Sanyal are only a few of the voices giving ex-

 Mark Terkessidis highlights this last point excellently in the first chapter of his 2010 book Interkultur, referring to this phenomenon in bigger cities as “Parapolis.”  Translations of the essays of Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum have recently been published by UC Berkeley’s Transit journal in a 2021 issue titled “Homeland.”  The “Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat,” officially translated as the Federal Ministry of the Interior, of Building, and Community, although Heimat and community are certainly two different things with perhaps some overlap. After the elections in 2021, new chancellor Olaf Scholz ordered the ministry be renamed again in early December of 2021, this time dropping the word “Bau.” The word Heimat, however, remained. This speaks to the normalization of the concept, introduced by conservatives, and retained by Social Democrat Scholz.  Similarly, Nazli Nikjamal writes in her dissertation on Die Konzeption von Heimat im Werk deutscher Schrifsteller iranischer Herkunft that “Heimat provides a feeling of ontological security at the expense of those who are not allowed access” (121).

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pression to the exclusion inherent in the concept of Heimat that has been rearing its ugly head again with particular force since the 1990s. It is already problematic when the notion of Heimat is used to exclude refugees and migrants, but it becomes unbearable when it is used to exclude German citizens simply because they are not perceived as “German” due to their name, skin color, or religion. What too many consider “German” is not representative of today’s society. It is, however, representative of the exclusion and racism many face, and this is linked to the idea of Heimat. ¹⁰ Luckily, many of those excluded provide their own epistemological concepts, claiming their stake in the discourse. Mark Terkessidis, for one, argues for a political and societal program of “interculture” (“Interkultur”) in which everyone is granted accessibility (“Barrierefreiheit”) and given the same opportunities in a manner that accounts for multiplicity within society: interculture as a rule of action (“Handlungsregel”; 10) for everyone. Terkessidis understands this rule of action as an organizing principle – but one that emphasizes communication and the creation of new connections. There is no such thing as harmony, Terkessidis argues, and it does not always have to be the goal. Instead, German society should strive for a flexible form of communication and interaction that can account for “life in an ambiguous state and the creation of a future that is still vague” (10). “Interculture” means that we should not stop at respecting each other’s differences. Respect is necessary but living together successfully and productively requires more than that. Terkessidis proposes that the goal needs to be a diverse public space “in which accessibility prevails and everyone can maximize their potential” (126). While not specifically formulated as an alternative to Heimat, this could lessen its necessity in political and societal discourses, and deconstruct the idea of a default, a norm set in stone of what is considered “German.” Mithu Sanyal also argues for a productive and reformative approach that formulates Heimat “in the plural, thus accounting for the lived realities of an increasing number of Germans by acknowledging how (im)migration enriches the Heimat” (120). However, Sanyal emphasizes the importance of creating such a notion in the “process of consensus building” (121). This process thus requires a diverse and complex assortment of experiences and voices, including those currently excluded (such as disabled people, LGBTQIA+, migrants, Germans who do not conform to the ideal of Heimat criticized by Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah), resulting in an understanding and acceptance of plurality that is reflected in a concept of Heimats.

 In this context, Maria Stehle discusses Peggy Piesche’s notion of the toxicity of this understanding of Heimat in chapter four of this volume.

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The idea of pluralizing Heimat is, in and of itself, nothing new. Celia Applegate and especially Alon Confino think of Heimat as something that does not merely exist in the singular. Confino understands Heimat as a combination of collective memory and imagined community (47), connecting “the local, the regional and the national community” (50). It is in this sense of the local, regional, and national that he argues for the existence of a plural Heimat – what he calls “Heimats” (62). If one’s Heimats are simultaneously a city or village, a federal state, and a nation, then an individual should be able to inhabit a multitude of Heimats. There are, however, two problems with Confino’s understanding of Heimat (and Heimats) in the context of twenty-first century postmigrant Germany. The first is the essential role that Heimat plays in collective memory. Confino traces this collective memory from the nineteenth century and the German empire into the twentieth century. He focuses on a notion of collective memory that inevitably excludes refugees and the descendants of guest workers, for example, from the collective memory of what is supposedly German, thus making Heimat inaccessible on a temporal level to millions of people living in Germany. Secondly, Confino’s idea of Heimat in the plural is not the same as, for example, Sanyal’s (or Stanišić’s, for that matter). For Confino, each instantiation of Heimat (e. g., a local Heimat, a regional Heimat, a national Heimat, etc.) is still based on the singular and exclusive idea of Heimat that Aydemir, Yaghoobifarah, Sanyal, Terkessidis, and many others criticize for not being representative or timely. Confino himself says as much when he writes, “A thousand Heimats dotted Germany, each claiming uniqueness and particularity. And yet, together, these Heimats have informed the ideal of a single, transcendent nationality,” which he calls the “generic Heimat” (62). Confino’s pluralities are simply branches that sprout from the tree that is this “generic Heimat.” The idea of Heimats that this chis chapter proposes, however, is fundamentally plural; there is no hierarchy in which a categorical Heimat trumps and subordinates all other notions of Heimat. Instead of reviving an exclusionary dichotomy between Heimat and not Heimat, Sanyal’s “process of consensus building” steps outside of this dichotomy, thus entering into a new discursive playing field. Heimats is a multitude of open public spaces that invite every single person in a society to participate in creating a panoply of characteristics that constitute a representative and fair society. But Heimats is also a multitude of private spaces that do not prescribe a certain set of religious, behavioral, or societal norms, instead allowing Heimats to be understood individually, not merely geographically, but kaleidoscopically, in every shape and form: the biographical, the improbable, the cruel, and the joke for Stanišić, for example, if we think back to the title of his second “Zürcher Poetikvorlesung” (Zurich Lectures on Poetics). According to Stanišić, each Heimat needs ambivalence (Stanišić 2017a, 75:56–75:58). This is unattainable when Heimat refers to a specific point in time and a specific group of people.

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Coming back to Stanišić, we encounter an author whose conceptualization of Heimats is creative, playful, and ambivalent. It emphasizes language, writing, and storytelling. For him, there is, first of all, his childhood in Višegrad and all his associations with the river Drina, his grandparents, and his parents. While this is no longer attainable in reality, it still is in his narratives, making it “the most palpable Heimat that I will ever be able to ever describe” (Stanišić 2017a, 75:40–75:44). The emphasis is on the creative act of describing and storytelling, allowing Stanišić to maintain agency while inscribing this particular Heimat into discourses of (post)migrancy and lived experience instead of it being subject to external determination. Similarly, Stanišić describes inhabiting a second Heimat, one that is imagined, a “Heimat of literary imagination” (Stanišić 2017a, 75:48–75:50). The emphasis on self-creation is even more evident here. His third Heimat reiterates creation and agency, now clearly connected to writing and storytelling. He calls it a “‘there’ while I am telling a story” (Stanišić 2017a, 76:24–76:27). In the lecture, it is important for Stanišić to immediately clarify that he is talking about a very specific, “creative” Heimat, anchored in the process of storytelling (Stanišić 2017a, 76:29–76:46). Interestingly, Stanišić connects a local adverb with a temporal component. More precisely, he connects a place of absence (there vs. here) with a lingering in the moment (while). This makes Heimat difficult to understand: Heimat is created in the moment and keeps recreating itself at each moment, resulting in a conglomeration of moments (while). In this multitude of Heimats – a list that is not exhaustive – the creative act of writing, storytelling, and thus generating agency stands out. In describing his Heimats, Stanišić avoids, even undercuts any prescriptive attribution to (or exclusion from) a dominant notion of Heimat. But even more than that, with the emphasis on the creative act, the idea of Heimat moves from being predominantly geographical to being a medium. More precisely, it acts as a medium in which to make sense of the world and Stanišić’s position in it. It critically mediates his creative output. Vor dem Fest is set in the fictional town of Fürstenfelde in Brandenburg’s Uckermark. The story confronts the reader with the past, present, and future of this small village. Most of the narrative takes place on the eve of St. Anne’s Feast Day, an annual celebration, the reason for which the villagers can no longer remember. Nonetheless, preparations for the feast are made while the heterodiegetic narrator follows several villagers (and a vixen) to explore how they engage with the village’s past, its present, and its fear of dying out. In the novel, the narrator gives voice to a community, a “we” that has lived through the end of the GDR and reunification, and is struggling with the rural flight of its young people and trying to find its purpose. For this exploration, Stanišić uses the template of the village novel (Dorfroman), a genre that has seen a recent rise in popularity. Unsurprisingly, this rise has coincided with the reemergence of public Heimat discourses. As

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Werner Nell and Marc Weiland write in the introduction to Imaginäre Dörfer: Zur Wiederkehr des Dörflichen in Literatur, Film und Lebenswelt (Imaginary Villages: On the Return of the Rural in Literature, Film, and Environment), “Images of the ‘village’ are currently again at the center of societal discourses, namely as place where life is affirmed and reformed, and the future designed, as well as ambivalent, confusing places to explore the past” (21). In all its ambiguity, the village has traditionally been and still is the place that is best encapsulated by Heimat more than any other term. Certainly, both Vor dem Fest and the concept of Heimat are indebted to this idea of the “village” – the representation of a quaint, traditional, and secure Germanness that is close to nature. The village novel thus holds an eminent position for literary negotiations of Heimat. Nell and Weiland argue that we should understand literary and cinematic constructions of “the rural” in particular as “laboratories in and with which processes of social negotiation are performed by taking epistemological and hands-on perspectives” (20). This applies to Stanišić’s novel(s) and allows us to see the double function that the village inhabits, both in Vor dem Fest and more generally: on the one hand, it is a place of retreat, (seeming) tranquility, and romanticized tradition and, as such, a strong proponent of a politicized, conservative notion of Heimat. On the other hand, it provides a strong base from which to scrutinize this notion and examine how it can materialize – as a metonymy for Heimat, so to speak. Such a dissection may offer the building blocks necessary to create an inclusive (or “intercultural,” according to Terkessidis) notion of Heimats.

2 Critical Representations of Heimat: Vor dem Fest When composing Vor dem Fest, Stanišić, did not at first have a rural area in Eastern Germany in mind, but rather the Yugoslavian landscape of the Banat, “something with two lakes, and forests”(Bartels). Because of this image of “two lakes, and forests,” a friend took him to the Uckermark, where Staniśić dove into village histories, and spoke and, most importantly, listened to their inhabitants. In Vor dem Fest, these conversations and experiences culminate in the small fictional village of Fürstenfelde.¹¹ At its core, this novel is an exploration of Stanišić’s concept of lit-

 I would argue that Stanišić layers the Eastern European on top of the German landscape, thus creating a hybridization that transcends borders and inscribes Eastern Europe into Germany and vice versa. More could be said about this (and will be in my dissertation project), but this chapter is not the place to do so.

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erature. As he explains in the first “Zürcher Poetikvorlesung,” “For me, literature is a creative reproduction of reality” (Stanišić 2017a, 51:06–51:10). Similarly, as he argues in Herkunft, “Fiction, in my view, I said, is an open system of invention, perception, and memory that rubs up against real events” (Stanišić 2021, 16; 2019, 20). The lived reality that the author encountered when visiting the Uckermark is enriched with fictional characters and turned into a narrative that quickly exhibits how reality is creatively reproduced in an open system of invention, perception, and memory: several chapters follow a vixen on the hunt for food, and the second half of the novel is interrupted by chapters that not only take place in the village’s past but also adopt the language of the time. Furthermore, the historical reports become more and more fantastical and, in turn, less believable. One chapter even changes the layout of the novel by showing crossed out print sentences next to handwritten text (see Stanišić 2016a, 210–213; 2014, 187–190). Stanišić’s fictional writing, then, is a product that relies heavily on imagination. The two quotes also make it clear that, ultimately, the novel’s narrative voices are unreliable, which will play an important role in my analysis of his latest novel Herkunft in the second half of this chapter. Keeping in mind the notion of the creative reproduction of reality, Stanišić’s depiction of life in the small village right before its important St. Anne’s Feast Day celebration is characterized by what I would call the irony of reality.¹² In his third “Zürcher Poetikvorlesung,” Stanišić refers to a two-sentence chapter that he says describes the overall sentiment of the novel: “How’s things? Can’t complain” (Stanišić 2016a, 257; 2014, 230).¹³ The optimistic drabness of rural life presented in the novel signals an unwillingness to concede, a perseverance: although the narrative describes only the day before and the day of the feast, habit and repetition are evident and palpable in each of the character’s actions. The narrative voice, often characterized by dialect and sociolect, is found in a “we” that both represents the village as a whole and ironically caricatures it: “The village immediately felt sure he meant Dietzsche. But we think he could have meant other people” (Stanišić 2016a, 257; 2014, 233, emphases mine). Suddenly, “the village” is juxtaposed with “we.” Even though the villagers do not know the actual reason why they are celebrating St. Anne’s Feast Day, it is part of a larger attempt to narrate their own past and present and, in doing so, to secure the village’s survival into the future. In

 The fact that the villagers do not know why the important St. Anne’s Feast Day is celebrated highlights this.  The translation “Can’t complain,” while technically accurate, does not do justice to the indifferent and yet steadfast affirmation of life in “Muss ja” justice. “Muss ja” literally means “it has to.” No matter how bleak the situation is, things just have to be okay.

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other words, Stanišić and the village participate in the artistic creation of their own Heimats. No character depicts this creative endeavor more clearly than Frau Schwermuth, the city archivist working at the Homeland House (Haus der Heimat), a cultural center that is town meeting point, tourist information, and archive of local history.¹⁴ Throughout the story, it is strongly implied that Frau Schwermuth is, in fact, not only curating the items in the archive but also creating them: “Frau Schwermuth holds many threads in her hand” (Stanišić 2016a 26; 2014, 32). She is composing the history of the village. After all, without a past, there can be no present or future. Frau Schwermuth embodies what Alon Confino argues about Heimat folklore: that it “linked generations by emphasizing the longevity of traditions, real or invented, thus connecting the past and present” (59). Thus, by composing the village’s past, she is attempting to legitimize the village’s present, which, in particular, takes place in the part of the story right before the St. Anne’s Feast Day, when past and present overlap: Anna, a girl from the village, suddenly becomes a participant in some of the parenthetical, semi-historical reports. Two thieves from one of the historical accounts appear in the village and try to steal the church bells. This suspension of the normal temporal chronology and the intrusion of the past into the present, “constitutes storytelling through which the village secures its future existence” (Böttcher 311). Past and present thus overlap, creating a direct link to memory and history: “On this day the night wears three liveries: What Was, What Is, What Is Yet To Be” (Stanišić 2016a, 65; 2014, 64). That the novel has introduced its readers to both the characters and their history beforehand underscores the close link between narration and how the village sees itself. The village defines itself through its inhabitants and their traditions: the ferryman is deceased, the bellringer is about to retire, both the carpenter and the electrician have died without any replacement. In Vor dem Fest, we read, “That’s the real meaning of Nothing […]: When something exists and works, but is no use to anyone. Objects, implements, a whole village. The bells. They are still there, that’s all” (Stanišić 2016a, 78; 2014, 74). Re-narrating the village’s past creates purpose. Heimat can be filled with that purpose and does not merely fade. By creating a past, the village is realized in the present which, in turn, solidifies Heimat. The novel implies this by highlighting the renewed interest in the Homeland House during the St. Anne’s Feast Day celebration. We can also see this in Frau Schwermuth’s own lineage: her son, Johann, is taking over the outdated and unpaid occu The use of the Homeland House and its importance in the plot is emblematic of Heimat production and Heimat memory, as Alon Confino shows: “A direct outcome of the production of Heimat memory, Heimat museums embodied, first of all, the uniqueness of the locality. The past of even the smallest community was worthy of collection and exhibition” (59).

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pation of the bellringer, thus injecting it with youth and ensuring its continuity. Most importantly, purpose is created through writing, particularly in Frau Schwermuth’s re-writing of the past. Philipp Böttcher correctly points out that the village’s identity is not fixed, but created in the narrative process (316). It is almost as if Frau Schwermuth takes on Stanišić’s premise of Heimat as a “‘there’ while I am narrating”: the importance of storytelling is highlighted repeatedly in the novel. This is where Heimat can be found. Along these lines, Böttcher states that the centrality of storytelling that Stanišić inscribes into his novel and characters reflects Stanišić own understanding of origin and Heimat as something “open, fluid, and bound to memories and narratives” (316). This does, indeed, apply to Stanišić’s understanding of how Heimats are created: through self-narration, and without fetishization or external interpretation (Fremddeutung).

3 Reframing Migration Critically discussing migration has its pitfalls, particularly when the author of the work being analyzed has him- or herself experienced migration. Too often, the author’s biography dominates the reading of a literary text. But as migration is central to Grammofon, it is necessary to clearly separate narrative analysis from the author’s biography. For this reason, I will begin this section with a discussion of the problematic literary genre referred to as the “literature of migration.” The term “migrant” often carries negative connotations, mainly of the “Other.” In Writing Outside the Nation, Azade Seyhan writes: “Like the term Gastarbeiter, [migrant] diminishes the impact and distorts the parameters of this body of writing” (105–106). In the first “Zürcher Poetikvorlesung,” Stanišić says, “And still people comprehensively speak of migration literature. It is like calling the books by Michael Lenz, Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, and Thomas Glavinic baldheaded literature” (Stanišić 2017a, 66:45–66:58). The author’s biography is redundant for the purposes of classifying what we read. But how does this align with repeated references to Stanišić’s lecture series? At the heart of Stanišić’s lectures is his engagement with and reflection on his own writing process. I am not arguing for the absolute exclusion of the author from the novel – something that would be close to impossible when analyzing an autofictional text like Herkunft, for example. Autofiction can be understood as a fiction that consists for the most part of real events and facts, but it differs from an autobiography due to the “homonymy among its author, narrator, and character” (Vilain 5). The crux of the suggestion that I am making is that we do not conflate the author’s biography with content, an interpretative guide, or – and this is most important – authorial reflection. I am advocating not the disavowal of the author, the Barthesian death of the author, but merely the

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disavowal of the author’s biography. Stanišić’s ruminations on his writing process provide us with a layer for understanding his narratives, but one that is not dependent on his lived migration experiences. Perhaps these experiences influenced how he understood his writing process. Perhaps they did not. It is irrelevant. What is relevant is the contribution they make to the discourses on narrative techniques with which Stanišić engages. In this regard, he is primarily someone who has written, not someone who was forced to flee. But let me return to the discussion of the “literature of migration” because the genre ascription can be more harmful than Stanišić’s humorous simile about baldheaded literature might let on. The term (especially the German terms Migrationsliteratur and Migrantenliteratur) can be exclusionary and racist. As Olga Grjasnowa writes in “Privileges,” one of the essays in Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum: In Germany, that means literature that is always different, that does not belong, that is not “organically” German [biodeutsch]. Incidentally, the alleged commonality between “(im)migrant authors” is not aesthetic or thematic, but hereditary: they may come from anywhere in the world, except for Germany. Everyone – really, without exception – everyone who has a strange-sounding name or whose parents were not born in Germany is lumped together under this ineffable term. A term that remains highly questionable, racist, and paternalistic. (Grjasnowa 135)

For Grjasnowa, Migrantenliteratur (and the “literature of migration,” I would argue) is a perpetual othering based solely on the name or the origin of the author. As she points out, this is not only racist but, as our analysis of Stanišić’s novels will show, too parochial and narrow. After all, there is currently a “ubiquity of exophoric and intercultural writers among the highest ranks of German-language authors” (Uca 188). Similarly, Hamid Tafazoli strongly criticizes the idea for several reasons. He argues that the concept reduces the literary discourse to the “foreignness of the migrant-figure” (82), thus dichotomizing cultural foreignness (83); it furthermore implies an immutable, homogeneous, and authentic condition of culture that excludes those deemed migrants and, in so doing, constitutes the “privilege of being German” (87). To frame the analysis of Grammofon and Stanišić’s writing in general, I would like to follow Brent O. Peterson and argue for something simpler: instead of the literature of migration, let us talk about narratives of migration (Peterson calls it “migration narratives”). Though it is only a small change, I believe it to be effective. The emphasis on narrative puts the focus exclusively on the content of the writing, thus deemphasizing the author’s biography even more and providing a “text-based alternative” (Peterson 85) instead. After all, anyone can write a narrative of migration in fiction, so there is no need to refer back to the author for authenticity or validation. It would be impossible to classify an author’s oeuvre

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broadly and simplistically as the “literature of migration”; shifting the emphasis to narrative instead allows for more flexibility and precision. Stanišić’s debut novel, then, is a narrative of migration, while Vor dem Fest is not. Stanišić himself says that “migrant literature can only be effectively discussed by [topic] and in relation to the literary premise of genre, style, tradition, etc.” (2007, 2). I believe that the term “narrative of migration” provides more specificity with a stronger focus on content than on the author.¹⁵ The concept of narratives of migration accounts for the complexities that (almost) all novels have – which brings us back to Saša Stanišić and his debut novel Grammofon. It is a narrative of migration, but much more as well: it is “part family novel, part migration story, part war memoir, with shades of magic realism” (Haines 105). Understanding Grammofon as such, the next section analyzes how trauma and death pervade the novel’s multiplicity.

4 Trauma and Death: Essential Conditions of Forced Migration Stories that have experiences of forced migration at their core (Grammofon), the anxiety of a village fading from relevance and memory (Vor dem Fest), or an engagement with origins and coming to terms with the loss of a loved one (Herkunft) grapple with varying degrees and dimensions of trauma. Grammofon links trauma to the loss of language and memory, and continuously wrestles with the question of whether writing through and about trauma is productive or beneficial. The novel is set a few weeks before the start of the Bosnian War in 1992. The focal point of the novel and, at times, its narrator is Aleksandar Krsmanović, a boy living in the Bosnian city of Višegrad. The novel does not always follow a chronological narrative and jumps between experiences and memories from Aleksandar’s boyhood, with a particular focus on his grandfather Slavko. Soon, however, the plot homes in on a central event: Slavko’s death. Alert readers will pick up on small clues throughout the first chapters that hint at the war looming in the background of the story. In the aftermath of Slavko’s death, brutal reality intrudes into the narrative. Aleksandar’s escape to Germany is followed by a narrative break. The previous, breezy style of narration reaches its limits and the second half of the novel

 In the same vein, we could describe aspects of the popular novel Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015; Go, Went, Gone, 2017) by Jenny Erpenbeck as a narrative of migration when the reader learns of the experiences of characters like Osarobo, Tristan, or Ithemba without forgetting that our point of focalization is that of an educated white retiree and that the novel is constructed as a Bildungsroman.

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is mostly told in seven letters as well as in a collection of short stories that are attributed to Aleksandar.¹⁶ While the short stories try to recapture the tone of the novel’s beginning, the letters engage with the struggles of living in a new country, the acquisition and loss of language, and of Aleksandar’s parents, and the (im)possibility of arrival. Brigid Haines summarizes the novel’s narrative fluidity as the evolution of a narrative voice, which goes from being “a naïve storyteller confident of his own powers” to becoming “a postmodern writer who accepts the limitations of fiction, the incompleteness and instability of memory, the possibilities of fluid identities, and the strategic necessity of silence” (110). Looking closely at the novel, Haines’s description not only accurately represents the changes in the narrative voice but also mirrors the different ways in which the narrator tries to approach the trauma of war, escape, and arrival. In these differing approaches to coping with traumatic events, the narrated attempts follow what Cathy Caruth describes as two characteristics at the forefront of experiencing trauma. The first, she writes, is the inaccessibility of trauma (Caruth 1995, 11). For Caruth, this means that the actual traumatic event can only be experienced at a later point, “as a temporal delay that carries the individual beyond the shock of the first moment” (Caruth 1995, 10). In this vein, the reader is presented with seven letters in the second half of the novel that Aleksandar writes to Asija, a Muslim girl he met while hiding in a basement in Viśegrad. The first letter is sent shortly after his arrival in April 1992 (the month the Bosnian war started), and the next three follow in intervals of roughly six months. However, the time between the subsequent letters grows drastically, with the last three letters spanning more than six years (December 16, 1995–February 11, 2002). In these letters, the reader learns of Aleksandar’s process of learning the German language. After a year, Aleksandar starts to lose his native language.¹⁷ This directly coincides with the loss of both his identity and memory, as Aleksandar writes: Asija, I don’t remember the birch trees. I feel as if one Aleksandar stayed behind Viśegrad and in Veletovo and by the Drina, and there’s another Aleksandar living in Essen and thinking of going fishing in the Ruhr sometime. In Višegrad, back there with his unfinished pictures, there’s an Aleksandar who began and never finished. (Stanišić 2008, 150; 2006, 142)

As Didem Uca argues, the German language throughout the novel and in his letters “serves as a means for Aleksandar to reframe his engagement with a traumatic

 While the narrative voice is mostly Aleksandar’s, there are changes of perspective within the narrative (see, for example, Arnaudova 2019, 42).  “Yesterday for the first time I couldn’t remember a Bosnian word, the word for birch tree, I had to look it up: ‘breza’” (Stanišić 2008, 149–150; 2006, 142).

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past” (191). It is made clear that during all this time, Aleksandar never receives an answer. He is not even sure if Asija and all that she stands for (his youth, his memories, Višegrad) even exist: “Do you ever get my letters? Are you even there?” (Stanišić 2008, 164; 2006, 153). Three years later, he begins his final letter by wondering whether he had imagined Asija. This letter is the shortest one that he writes, and he ends it asking whether Asija ever really existed at all (see Stanišić 2008, 232; 2006, 213). Aleksandar’s loss of language and his uncertainty about his memories is also shown through the break in the narrative, and, to use Haines’s words, in the impossibility of keeping up the “naïve” narrative of the “Aleksandar who began and never finished” in Višegrad. It shows that writing against his trauma, searching for a lost identity must fail – or so it seems. Stanišić ends his novel with a glimmer of hope. Around one hundred pages earlier, Aleksandar tries to call every person in Bosnia with the name Asija that he can find – to no avail. In the last two pages, however, he gets a call and a woman’s voice says his name. Aleksandar says, “I’m here now” (Stanišić 2008, 345; 2006, 315). The final words of the novel are thus an affirmation – an affirmation of the individual in the present, surviving, living. And yet, two things remain: the novel leaves it open whether Aleksandar (a) has actually found his Asija, and (b) whether that is going to help him work through his traumatic experiences. And we must not forget that it took him more than a decade to get to this ambiguous point. According to Caruth, the inaccessibility of trauma is closely linked to a second characteristic: the impossibility of immediate understanding. “The trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge” (Caruth 1995, 153). We see this play out in the first half of the novel, which portrays an attempt to hold on to life and normalcy.¹⁸ Its figurative, light, sweet, and, on the surface, naïve language tries to hide the brutality of the war. It does so by focusing on Aleksandar’s grandfather Slavko. As the war swells up below the surface of the narrative, it seems as if Slavko is the last dam preventing it from breaking loose – a protective shield for the young protagonist. But the grandfather’s death, which coincides with the start of the war, makes any palliation, any hiding behind memories of family parties underneath plum trees unsustainable. But more than that: the cruelty and mercilessness of a genocidal war is, for a young boy, too atrocious to understand. The death of a grandfather, however, is both simpler and finite. Thus, the trauma he experiences

 The same can be said for the parenthetical short story collection within the novel, titled “When Everything Was All Right” (Stanišić 2008 173; 2006, 159). This collection of fifteen short stories mirrors the narrative voice from the beginning of the novel. It is also dedicated to his grandfather Slavko and includes a foreword by his grandmother Katarina.

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is mediated through the death of the grandfather in order to put it into terms of which he can make sense. Similarly, the narration continuously flees into moments of the imaginary and fantastical. There is the parenthetical collection of short stories that is presented as part of the novel (see footnote 18), where the storytelling cloaks the distinction between Aleksandar’s actual experiences and his imagination. However, it is the peculiar setting of the parenthetical collection attributed to Aleksandar himself as well as the fragmentary nature of the second half of the novel that raises this question in the first place. This imaginary escapism is a mechanism that allows him to deal with the horrors he encounters, which Caruth describes as the impossibility of immediate understanding, “the transformation of trauma into a narrative memory that allows the story to be verbalized and communicated, to be integrated into one’s own” (1995, 153). Perhaps the clearest example comes in the form of one of the later chapters in which the narrator describes in detail a soccer match between Serbian and Bosnian soldiers during a truce. Stanišić himself commented on this narratological strategy in his first “Zürcher Poetikvorlesung,” saying, “The cloak of the fantastic lies over the body of violence, thin and penetrable. Every idyll is merely temporary […]. Narrating is always a diversion as well – a diversion from the horror. But in moments of existential crisis, it can also be a survival strategy, the self-ascertainment of a world that you mistrust” (Stanišić 2017a, 47:20– 47:52). The narrators in Stanišić’s novels repeatedly use this strategy to cope with setbacks, exclusion, and especially death. We see this at the start of Stanišić’s debut novel in relation to the grandfather’s death, in the soccer match, and when the grandmother dies in the novel Herkunft. Before paying closer attention to the role that death plays in Stanišić’s novels, however, I must briefly comment on the relationship between trauma and the core issue of migration and Heimat(s). As illustrated, trauma plays a significant role in Stanišić’s novels. Trauma can have a multitude of origins, one of which is the experience of forced migration as seen in my reading of Grammofon. Both the migration experience itself and the reason for migrating (e. g., civil war, natural catastrophes, etc.) can cause trauma, as many studies have shown (e. g., Silove et al. 351–357; Watters and Ingleby; Neuner et al.; Hamburger et al.; Hynie 297–303; Sangalang et al. 909–919). Struggling with trauma, in turn, can complicate and impede arrival and thus access to a Heimat. At the same time, being excluded from a community that defines itself by its sense of Heimat (e. g., through racism, structural barriers, ostracism) can reinforce trauma. In short: trauma induced either by the experience and causes of forced migration, or by exclusion or refusal can be yet another barrier to accessing a Heimat or even Heimats. And though trauma can render Heimat(s) inaccessible, arriving in and securing a Heimat does not necessarily cure the trauma.

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5 Anxiety and Death: Essential Conditions of Forced Migration As important as trauma is in Stanišić’s novels, the event and impact of death are particularly essential throughout his writing. In Grammofon, trauma is closely linked to the death of the grandfather. But death as a narrative tool is more versatile. Stanišić himself describes it as “a symbol but also very concretely a loss” (Stanišić 2017c, 21:11–21:15). It is death that works as a trigger for both narrative and the (potential) trauma in Vor dem Fest. The novel opens with the death of the ferryman. As the reader learns throughout the book, the ferryman was not simply a ferryman but also a respected townsperson, having lived there for many decades. Most importantly, however, he was a storyteller – an occupation that is always of the greatest importance in Stanišić’s novels. the reader never meets the ferryman, the death of such an important figure not only begins the narrative but also reveals a different form of trauma, a structural trauma – one that Dominick LaCapra calls “an anxiety-producing condition of possibility” (82). The narrative voice implies exactly this: “Now the ferryman is dead, and we don’t know who’s going to tell us what the banks of the lake are getting up to” (Stanišić 2016a, 1; 2014, 11). No one cares what the shores are up to, obviously. However, the ferryman was not only a storyteller but also someone who brought people into the village. Though there are other ways to access the village, the ferryman’s death reinforces a feeling of being disconnected from the world. In short, the ferryman’s death leaves the villagers feeling anxious about how to fill the gap and about how to prevent themselves from being left behind; their anxiety is therefore about the future of the village. As we learn throughout the novel, Fürstenfelde is one of the many smaller villages (especially in the East of Germany) that have been heavily impacted by urban migration, a rural exodus. Many young people leave the village for the cities (in the novel, for example, Anna Geher).¹⁹ The ferryman’s death is, after all, just one more symbol of the inevitable death of the village: more people are dying than are being born (Stanišić 2016a, 3; 2014, 12) and, “of course, in spite of the pictures, many of their subjects will soon be forgotten” (Stanišić 2016a, 90; 2014, 85). Though the narrative voice tries to remain optimistic,²⁰ this is illusory: “Only now the ferryman is dead” (Sta-

 Even her last name has the German word “to go” as its root, literally “goer,” someone who goes somewhere. In German, “to go” can also be understood as “to leave.”  “Somehow or other they always have. […]. Somehow or other things will go on” (Stanišić 2016a, 3; 2014, 12–13).

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nišić 2016a, 3; 2014, 13, emphasis mine). In the ferryman’s death, the novel presents both anxiety about the present and anxiety about the future. By engaging with this anxiety, Vor dem Fest gets creative in that it suspends the temporal and narrative boundaries between past and present. Throughout the novel, the reader encounters the insertion of (semi‐)historical narratives. Here, we read of female figures from the past. At first, they do not have names. But then the narrator says, “Let’s call her Anna” (Stanišić 2016a, 248; 2014, 222). Anna Geher, one of the protagonists, is, unsurprisingly, central to the novel. Anna is a young woman who is about to move to the city of Rostock to attend university. Throughout the novel, Anna’s experiences are narratively interwoven with the experiences of figures from the past. At the start of the third part of the novel, this becomes obvious as past and present blur. Anna finds herself in a stand-off with Frau Schwermuth and Herr Schramm, a retiree she has run into and whom she is trying to prevent from committing suicide. Frau Schwermuth points a gun at Anna and Herr Schramm. Anna, in turn, draws the weapon that Herr Schramm had intended to use for his suicide, and points it at Frau Schwermuth. Mirroring this event, several chapters tell the story of an old man named Lutz and a young woman (Anna), holding out at the edge of the village to fight off an invading horde. They are standing in the same spot as Anna, Frau Schwermuth, and Herr Schramm, only it is the seventeenth century. The historical Anna is carrying a crossbow. In the present, Frau Schwermuth seems to be experiencing a psychotic break in which the history she had written and rewritten overlaps with the present. She tells Anna to put down the crossbow (Stanišić 2016a, 244; 2014, 218) and keeps calling Herr Schramm Lutz, insisting that Anna is a traitor.²¹ A few pages later, the narrative voice interferes in the storytelling and the rewriting of history, then and there: David versus Goliath. Hmm, no, we don’t like that. […] It would be more exciting if they were really in danger. And this is all going too smoothly. Suppose someone else comes along? For instance, someone from the village who thinks Anna is a traitor. […] Let’s say the mayor. Yes, him. He tells Anna to put her crossbow away and come down. […] We need another twist in the story now. Right. It’s a fact that Lutz trusts her. He stands between her and the mayor, who aims his pistol at Lutz. Right, we already know about that. (Stanišić 2016a 249– 250; 2014, 223–224)

The first interjection from the narrative voice highlights that an interesting story is more important than a factual one, even referencing GEO Epoche magazine in the midst of a story that is supposedly set in the seventeenth century (Stanišić 2016a,

 Herr Schramm’s actual first name is Wilfried.

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250; 2014, 223).²² The use of the first-person plural pronouns “us” and “we” shows that the narrative voice sees itself as the voice of Fürstenfelde. In the next sentences of the quoted passage, the concurrence of past and present becomes fully evident. The narrative voice retells the story of the stand-off between Anna, Frau Schmermuth, and Herr Schramm. The fluid transition from this chapter into the next one, picking up where the last two chapters (one in the present, one in the past) have ended, makes it clear: past and present have collapsed into one another. Thus, the Anna of the present and the historical figures overlap. In her recent article “Trauma, Survival, and Creativity in Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest,” Osborne correctly focuses on Anna in her analysis of the novel. She argues in favor of reading “these different Annas” as a form of cultural memory, “figures of trauma and its recurrence throughout history” (2019, 4). Anna embodies not only anxiety about the future (her rural flight) but also a recurring trauma that the village seems to have buried in its Homeland House. The villagers in Fürstenfelde cannot remember the reason for their traditional celebration. But through the intrusion of the past into the present in the form of “these different Annas” and the underlying trauma connected to their stories, the village comes to terms with it during the St. Anne’s Feast Day celebration. The feast is an instance of order, of community, and, as Osborne argues, “a means of reinstating order following loss or violence” (4). This is why the novel starts with the death of the ferryman and ends with the celebration of St. Anne’s Feast Day. For Osborne, the end of the novel thus portrays the overcoming of trauma. In an auction that spans the last two chapters of Vor dem Fest, Anna Geher starts the bidding on a painting of the village made by Frau Kranz, the village artist. But in the very last sentence of the novel, she is outbid by the village, by the “we”: “Standing by the bonfire, she raises a burning brand in the air and bids ten euros, but we outbid her, we bid twelve” (Stanišić 2016a, 353; 2014, 315). The village thus triumphs over the representation and recurrence of the trauma. Osborne equates this with the survival of the village (see 2019, 16). Interestingly, Osborne and Böttcher interpret the figure of Anna differently but come to the same conclusion: that Fürstenfelde is saved and continues to exist (Böttcher 321). Instead of seeing Anna as a representation of trauma that needs to be overcome, however, Böttcher argues that the novel’s ending is the “constructed narrative reintegration of Anna into the village com-

 Implicitly, these parallel stories and the overarching engagement with past and present pose critical questions about the relationship between story and history. The novel also answers the question it poses – history is always a story. Several times, the narrative voice asks: “Who writes the old stories?” (e. g., Stanišić 2016a, 248, 250; 2014, 223, 224). Shortly afterward, it answers: “Someone. Someone writes the stories. Someone has always written them” (Stanišić 2016a 253; 2014, 227). These eight words are so important that they constitute their own chapter.

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munity” (322) and that the final auction of the painting on St. Anne’s Feast Day shows that this reintegration is successful. Either way, Fürstenfelde does live on and survives the ferryman’s death. The return to the village in some of the short stories in Fallensteller (2016) is evidence of this.

6 Challenging the “basis of representation from within” As in Vor dem Fest, we see death and trauma play an essential role in Stanišić’s latest novel, Herkunft. For my analysis of this award-winning novel, however, I would like to add one more spice to our theoretical spice rack – namely magical realism, as it provides Stanišić with a creative and, at times, quirky toolkit for undercutting hegemonic and dominating aspects of discourse. This, in turn, allows him to accentuate voices and experiences that are often unable to speak up and are subsumed and silenced by said aspects. Take Heimat, for example: people in Germany who do not fit into the hegemonial, predominant idea of a white, Christian Heimat are ostracized and made to understand that they do not belong. This can happen on an implicit level through seemingly innocuous questions or statements about one’s “real” origin, language skills, or, in a less innocuous example provided by Herkunft, a woman coming up to the protagonist and his family while they are having a barbecue at a playground in the woods and asking if the pig on the spit is a dog (see Stanišić 2021, 348; 2019, 345). But it can also happen explicitly. As Herkunft’s narrator Saša writes, “We were also often reminded that in Germany people have to obey ‘the rules.’ […] And along with every rule people reminded us of, they were also reminding us: You don’t belong here” (Stanišić 2021, 152–153; 2019, 151). Magical Realism narratively processes these experiences of exclusion and racism and the broader social discourses connected with them, allowing Stanišić to subversively challenge them from within. Magical realist texts, loosely defined, contain an “irreducible element” (Faris 2002, 102) of magic without relying on the suspension of disbelief, instead remaining grounded in a narrative world that conforms to the conventions of literary realism.²³ Nonetheless, magical realism disrupts accepted beliefs about time, space, and identity by presenting different conceptualizations in the disguise of realism.

 Wendy Faris suggests a total of five characteristics of magical realism, including the three mentioned in the text; see also her 2004 volume Ordinary Enchantments (8).

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Turning to Stanišić’s latest novel Herkunft, we can see that the use of magical realism in a book that continually thematizes topics such as origin, Heimat, ostracism, and exclusion also helps to scrutinize these topics. Stanišić pushes the reader towards reflection, almost imperceptibly at first. Investigating this strategy also reveals the connection to trauma and death as well as the core issues of Heimat and migration, which we will see at the end of the novel. But first, a brief introduction to the book that won Stanišić the German Book Prize is in order. After all, it is an autofictional novel, and the analysis of its ending needs to be contextualized. In Herkunft, Stanišić questions the ideas of origin (one German word for which is Herkunft) and Heimat by retelling the story of his arrival and first years in Germany, as well as the story of his grandmother in Višegrad who suffered from dementia. The homodiegetic narrator Saša himself – different, but not always easily distinguishable from the author Saša Stanišić – in the novel describes the novel as “a portrait of my not being able to meet the demands of a self-portrait” (Stanišić 2021, 46; 2019, 49). Throughout the narrative, we jump from Stanišić’s adolescence in Heidelberg to a narrative strand in Višegrad during his childhood, to another narrative strand in Oskaruša, the little village in which Stanišić’s grandfather grew up and that Stanišić visits with his grandmother. Interspersed throughout the narrative are little paragraphs that pull the reader back into the author’s present at the time of writing.²⁴ Discussing the concept of Heimat(s) by reading a book named Herkunft begs the question as to the relationship between these two terms, Heimat (home) and Herkunft (origin). Stanišić, in fact, often highlights the overlap between the two concepts, e. g., when “grandmother” is his answer to both the question of Heimat and that of Herkunft (see Stanišić 2021, 60, 62; 2019, 63, 65). Generally, the term Herkunft refers directly to the place one was born as well as the community and history of family, culture, and community. While the word Herkunft can be layered and varied, it is usually more static than Heimat, especially geographically, but also temporally: it refers to one’s place of birth, one’s family history, community, and culture, denoting a specific past. Stanišić’s novel provides an excellent example: on his first visit to the little mountain village of Oskoruša, where his grandfather grew up, the narrator Saša visits the graveyard. On each headstone, he reads his last name, Stanišić. As he learns throughout his visit, Oskoruša, too, is part of his origin. When the narrator first ruminates on his Herkunft after arriving in the small village, he sounds almost presumptuous: “There it was – where do you come

 For example: “Today is August 29, 2018. In the past few days, thousands in Chemnitz, Germany, have demonstrated against open borders. Immigrants are being demonized and the Hitler salute hangs over the present” (Stanišić 2021, 96; 2019, 97).

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from – same as always, I thought, and I let rip: Not a simple question! First it depends on what your where is aiming at. The geographical location of the hill where the hospital was? The national borders of the state at the time of the final contractions? Parents’ provenance? Genes, ancestors, dialect? However you look at it, your place of origin is just a construct!” (Stanišić 2021, 28–29; 2019, 32) For him, it is clear that Herkunft is always a construct. Gavrilo, the family friend his grandmother and he are meeting, simply responds: “From here. You are from here” (Stanišić 2021, 29; 2019, 32). For Gavrilo, there is no doubt. Furthermore, Saša’s brief monologue emphasizes a few characteristics. Most importantly, the word Herkunft is something constructed by the multitude of ingredients the narrator mentions in his speech and thus highly individual. Throughout the novel, the narrator presents his reader with assorted notions of what Herkunft is: his grandmother, something disparate due to the distance from most of his family, Gavrilo gifting him a pig to take home to Germany, his son in Hamburg, his mother (Stanišić 2021, 62; 2019, 65), bitter-sweet accidents, war (see Stanišić 2021, 63; 2019, 66), to mention just a few examples. But what the narrator says in Oskoruša’s graveyard highlights more than this: it situates the temporality of Herkunft in the past. Each of the items named in his speech refer to a specific and prior point in time – his birth, his parent’s birth, his ancestors, the evolution of language. And Gavrilo’s answer reveals an important aspect of “Herkunft” that Heimat can hardly account for. By locating the narrator’s origin in Oskoruša (“You are from here”), the individual does not need to have lived or have been born in a place for it to be Herkunft. ²⁵ As Paul Gilroy argues in Black Atlantic, British African-Caribbean people who were born in the UK often feel that they belong to a shared African culture and history.²⁶ Similarly, the connection that many Germans born to guestworkers

 Consider in this context also works by Afro-German writers, e. g., Olumide Popoola’s Also By Mail (2013) or the poems of May Ayim (e. g., “borderless and brazen”).  Both in the examples from the novel Herkunft and the reference to The Black Atlantic, we encounter the implied notion of diaspora as something that intersects with migration and Heimat. While “diaspora” as a concept is not part of the analysis of this chapter, the relationship between diaspora and migration as well as between diaspora and Heimat needs to be addressed – at least briefly. Unsurprisingly, migration and diaspora are closely related. Both are spatial and temporal. Looking at the examples provided in Stanišić’s novels, Aleksandar’s migration occurs from Bosnia to Germany (spatial) and, until Aleksandar arrives in an apartment in Germany, takes a certain amount of time (temporal). Similarly, diaspora is characterized by the rift between being in one place and not being able to return to another. But one significant difference is a diasporic spatiality and temporality that is characterized less by geographical movement and more by a shared past. After all, diaspora is usually a communal experience, e. g., the Yugoslavian diaspora in a certain city or federal state. Herkunft provides a poignant example of this in the chapter “Honest, Loyal, Tireless” (Stanišić 2021, 86–90; 2019, 87–91), where the narrator recounts the annual Yugoslavian Repub-

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have to their parents’ native countries speaks to this. Many of the characteristics named here are, indeed, attributes of the conceptualization of Heimats for many people, mainly family, community, and specific locations. Furthermore, Heimats are something that, like the term Herkunft, are innately individual. But this brief look into Herkunft also clearly distinguishes of its essential features from those of Heimats, in particular Herkunft’s location in the past as well as its static nature. Heimats, on the contrary, are often fluid and in flux. Migration, of course, adds another variable to both concepts. Herkunft, however, is weaponized too often in the context of migration and used as a signifier of exclusion from a Heimat. The novel’s narrator acknowledges as much when he admits that he avoided admitting that he was engaging with his Herkunft for a long time, writing that it seemed backward and destructive to write “about my origins or our origins in an age when where you were born and where you came from were once again being misused as distinguishing features, when borders were hardening and so-called national interests rising up from the drained swamp of small-country particularism” (Stanišić 2021, 59–60; 2019, 62, emphasis in original). But he then reiterates that, to avoid this pitfall, he explicitly focuses on people and what it means for those people to be born in a specific place. We see this clearly in the novel Herkunft – which is where magical realism comes in. For most of the novel, Stanišić provides us with a prelude to magical realism. He understands fiction as “an open system of invention, perception, and memory that rubs up against real events” (Stanišić 2021, 16; 2019, 20) and makes ample use of deviations from the story, short bouts of word play and chains of association: “My stories just wouldn’t be mine without digressions. Digression is my mode of writing” (Stanišić 2021, 33; 2019, 36). After all, Stanišić describes his biographical writing – which Herkunft certainly is – as “an uncanny, absurd attempt to preserve and creatively preserve what was once important to someone, to me” (Stanišić 2017a, 67:57–68:07, emphasis mine). Stanišić continually enriches his story with ornamentation, on the levels of both language and content, but does not yet cross the line to magical realism. In fact, the reader is simply presented with a homodiegetic narrator (Saša) freely admitting the role that imagination plays in his writing: “The story begins with the world being set alight by the addition of stories” (Stanišić 2021, 33; 2019, 36). This layering of stories within the narrative is, in fact, continuous throughout all three novels, as much a defining characteristic as the digression that Stanišić acknowledges.

lic Day celebrations on November 29 after the fall of the Yugoslavian Republic. He describes men and women nostalgically singing songs and sharing stories about the “good old days,” coming from all over the world to cities that once were Yugoslavian.

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Importantly, the narrative voice is not alone in admitting that the story begins with the “world being set alight by the addition of stories” (Stanišić 2021, 33; 2019, 36)²⁷; other characters make this clear as well. In the chapter “Schwarzheide, 1993,” for example, Saša recalls how hard his father worked after joining him and his mother in Germany. He comments on his recollection by quoting his father who calls his story “nonsense” and tells him to ask next time, “so you don’t have to make things up” (Stanišić 2021, 141; 2019, 139, emphasis mine). We encounter several such situations throughout the novel – and potentially there are more that we as readers do not recognize as such, because we do not know what actually happened and what is poetic license. Thus, the reader encounters Saša as an unreliable narrator – something he does not try to hide. In a short chapter toward the end (“Every Day”), he repeats the sentence, “I am not upset” (Stanišić 2021, 283–284; 2019, 277–278) a few times, yet every other sentence in the chapter screams exactly that.²⁸ This style of writing adds several layers to even simple sentences. When we read, “Fictions occupy my home, I think” (Stanišić 2021, 172; 2918, 170), we may question whether he indeed had this exact thought in this exact moment or whether we are encountering even more fictionalized ornamentation of actual experience. Interestingly, this openness, almost transparency, on the part of the narrative voice prevents said narrative voice from alienating its readers. After all, when we expect creative and imaginative stories, we are not surprised by them. Indeed, this transparency allows for the simple suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader while maintaining a sense of realism. But that is not all. Most importantly, Stanišić playfully prepares the reader for the narrative to cross into the fantastical at the end of the novel. The last roughly fifty pages of the novel are titled “Dragon’s Hoard.” Here, Stanišić sends the reader on a literary scavenger hunt, a choose-your-own adventure. After reading a warning message,²⁹ we learn that we as the reader are now taking over the persona of the narrator Saša. Each page of narration is followed by two potential continuations. Depending on the reader’s decision, they are sent to a different page and

 The German original uses the word “befeuern” (literally “to fuel”), which emphasizes the catalytic nature of the stories being added. Like the shoveling of coal to fuel the engine of an old-fashioned train, each of Stanišić’s stories and narrative strands is fueled by the addition of more and more stories. After all, “[d]igression is my mode of writing” (Stanišić 2021, 33; 2019, 36).  “I don’t like how little she drinks”; “Her movements are impetuous and slowed down like those of a child who’s learning how to do things”; “That the neighbor locks Grandmother in the apartment when she goes out bothers me”; “That we as a family still can’t find another solution annoys me” (Stanišić 2021, 283; 2019, 283).  “Don’t read this book in order! You decide how the story should continue – you create your own adventure” (Stanišić 2021, 305; 2019, 291).

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can reach different endings. The story starts realistically: Saša is visiting his grandmother late at night at her retirement home in Rogatica. But the fantastical soon intrudes into the story. He, his grandmother, and two of her friends climb Vijarac mountain. They meet a three-headed dragon, the guardian of Saša’s grandfather Pero, who has returned to life (see Stanišić 2021, 349–350; 2019, 346–347). At the same time, there are passages in which Saša helps his grandmother get dressed or talks with her about her late husband. In short, we are clearly experiencing an “irreducible element” of magic, a combination of realism, and the fantastic. The reader is part of a struggle between two oppositional, incompatible systems that each create a different kind of fictional world and thus blur the primacy of the world that the reader was expecting from the form, plot, and cultural history of which the novel is a part. Like his first two novels, however, this escape into the fantastic is primarily that: escape, distraction. At the end of one of the brief chapters, shortly before our next choice, the text is interrupted by italics: “Today is October 29, 2019. I just wrote: ‘Well it’s not butterflies, you donkey.’ My phone rang. My grandmother has died at the age of seventy-eight in Rogatica” (Stanišić 2021, 316; 2019, 312, emphasis in original). Suddenly, death intrudes into the narrative. His grandmother’s death had been looming over most of the text, as the reader progressively read of her physical and mental decline. The novel setting off into magical realism, then, is an exaggeration of the previous fictionalization that is Stanišić’s writing style. It is the impossibility of accepting death, an attempt to keep his grandmother alive in the narrative. Throughout the narrative, Stanišič seems to find an answer to his search for home and origin, at least in part: “Home, I say, is what I am writing about right now. […] Grandmothers are home” (Stanišić 2021, 60; 2019, 63) – or in general: family. But family is almost inextricably connected with loss – the loss experienced by his parents, who had to give up their lives in Višegrad and start over again in Germany (and later the US and Croatia) without ever coming close to the same level of normalcy and comfort; and the loss of his grandparents who are either already dead or remnants of the past: “All the short visits to see her after the war. Every time we were a bit more foreign to each other – the familiarity was the past. I was always rushing around, she was always there” (Stanišić 2021, 327; 2019, 323). He and so many others are “Yugoslavia-fragments” (Stanišić 2021, 214; 2019, 212), and that kind of fragmentation is traumatic. But more importantly, the realization that origin and Heimat are closely connected to family reveals itself distinctly in those final pages where the fantastical component of magical realism is trying to keep them alive. But even magical realism can only attempt to cover up the tragic power of death: “It’s hard for me to keep my grandmother here, alive” (Stanišić 2021, 321; 2019, 317, emphasis in original). Every word in the sentence is in italics, except

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for “here.” “Here” in the narrative? “Here” in the present? In Hamburg where the narrator lives? After all, “it is difficult for me to remember her as a healthy woman” (Stanišić 2021, 321; 2019, 317). Even the fantastical narration itself is selfreferential, which is underscored when the, at this point in time, dead and fantasized grandmother says, “Telling stories won’t keep me alive, Saša! You’re getting sparks mixed up with embers. You’re exaggerating! Where you come from is a giant cavern full of dragons?” (Stanišić 2021, 348; 2019, 345) To compensate and cope with this death, Stanišić overcorrects by allowing the fantastical to fully take over the story arc: “I open my eyes. Grandmother and Grandfather are sitting there, looking at each other” (Stanišić 2021, 352; 2019, 349). However, this overcompensation only lasts for or a moment. He follows it up with what really happened, how the funeral liturgy took too long, and how the coffin was too big for the grave, thus demystifying what he had just built up. The novel does not assign more value to one event than the other, thereby allowing both scenarios to exist simultaneously, allowing the reader to decide – mirroring the segment’s form of the scavenger hunt in this section of the novel. While the novel provides many more examples of how Staniśić works through the implosion of a country, displacement, and growing up, at times, in a strange country, I want to return to the question of Heimat. More specifically, I would like to briefly discuss the relationship between magical realism and Heimat, which is not as apparent as the connection between magical realism and migration that I have highlighted in my analysis of Herkunft. In relation to Heimat(s), magical realism provides two opportunities. First, it is an opportunity for creation, specifically to create Stanišić’s Heimats “of the literary imagination” and of “a ‘there’ while I am narrating.” Secondly, the narration in his novels uses characteristics of magical realism to undercut the expected progress of the novel’s form. In so doing, magical realism allows storytelling to formulate fragmented experiences and, most importantly, it “radically modifies and replenishes the dominant mode of realism in the West,” thus challenging “its basis of representation from within” (Faris 2004, 1). Magical realism allows narratives to create individual access to Heimat(s) by scrutinizing hegemonial, exclusionary discourses and inscribing individual perspectives into the concept.

7 Conclusion: A Continuous Process Early on in Herkunft, the narrator states, “Where I Come From is Grandmother” (Stanišić 2021, 52; 2019, 65). Though he is referring to origin (Herkunft) and not Heimat, we have already seen how closely they are connected. For Stanišić’s narrator, then, the experience of Heimat is time spent with the grandmother, keeping her

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alive narratively. Throughout his writings, Stanišić provides his reader (and listener) with many potential Heimats. But we must not forget the importance of Heimats that are continuously fluid and changing. In his first “Zürcher Poetikvorlesung,” Stanišić talks about how his memories of being a young boy in Višegrad with his parents, grandparents, friends, and the Drina are a somewhat shaky Heimat to him – one that, as we have seen, Stanišić embroiders poetically.³⁰ Another Heimat for him is Oskoruša, the village we get to know in Herkunft. He calls it an “inaccessible and perishing Heimat” (Stanišić 2017a, 75:20–75:24). Interestingly, this is a Heimat that is echoed, for example, in Fürstenfelde in Vor dem Fest: a dying village that will continue to survive as long as someone tells stories about it.³¹ There is also the aforementioned Heimat of “a ‘there’ while I am narrating.” On the one hand, this emphasizes the fluidity of Stanišić’s notions of Heimats. On the other hand, it brings us back to Oskoruša: while he is writing about it, he is “there.” While he is writing about it, his grandmother and his grandfather are “there.” After all, “in the proximity of death, all stories in Oskaruša exclusively concern themselves with life” (Stanišić 2017c, 30:54–31:01). The narration allows for the mobility that an exclusionary notion of Heimat does not. And it also allows death to be overcome and, closely linked to this, provides a means of coping with trauma. This fluidity, the narrative overcoming of death, and the engagement with trauma characterize all of Stanišić’s novels and their exploration of the relationship between migration and Heimats. Each novel arrives at a slightly different notion of Heimat and Heimats but does so by similar narrative means and with similar goals of getting the reader to reflect upon and scrutinize the dominant concept of Heimat, presenting him or her with options that are not singular, predetermined notions. Instead, they undermine and repurpose Heimat, supplementing it with multiplicity, fluidity, and flexibility. At the same time, they close themselves off to easy platitudes and do not offer generalities or even definite answers. Similar to the notion of “a ‘there’ while I narrate,” Stanišić’s approximation of multilayered and complex Heimats is a continuous process and is, as such, a clear negation of “the fetishization of where a person came from” (Stanišić 2021, 218; 2019, 216). Fur-

 One brief note on trauma: Stanišić writes, “I feel like I owe some kind of debt, because of the history of this city, Višegrad, and the happiness of my childhood there, and like I’m trying to repay it with stories. I feel like my stories are about this city even when I’m not trying to write about it” (Staniśić 2021, 195; 2019, 193). In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth asks an open-ended question that could be put into dialog with Staniśić’s quote: “Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?” (1996, 7)  “Equally certain is that these thirteen will never leave. They will be the last,” writes Stanišić about Oskaruša (2019, 14; 2021, 18). Even the “we” voice of the village is mirrored with regard to Oskaruša (Stanišić 2021, 54; 2019, 57).

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thermore, rethinking the notion of narratives of migration allows us to see the multiplicity of Heimats mirrored in the multiplicity of narrative levels in Grammofon and Herkunft. The biographical aspect matters – but only because Stanišić allows it to matter. Migration and its effects are at the heart of these novels and the creation of Heimats because it is relevant to his process of working through it: “It just doesn’t let go of me, and that is good” (Stanišić 2017a, 65:35–65:40), he says about his memories and his past. And yet, he transcends the topic of migration by letting his storytelling blossom into flowers of the fantastical, of digressions, by embellishing it – to see where it will take him, where it will take the reader. Trauma and death are present at all times, but never as something to be fetishized for the reader or as a hiding place for the protagonist or author, but rather as something to unpack and approach on their own terms. The same is true of the notion of Heimat. Finally, Stanišić’s escapes into the fantastical, detectable in all three novels, allow him to delay the inevitable, allow for Heimat and migration to be understood in relation to each other. But more than that, the notion of Heimats is a means of mediating the world and experiences of migration, making Heimats tangible, pliable, and, ultimately, something that we can approach and inhabit – so that we can keep trying to make sense of it all.

Works Cited Adelson, Leslie A. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature. Toward a New Critical Grammar. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials. The German Idea of Heimat. U of California P, 1990. Arnaudova, Svetlana. “Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Identitätskonstruktion im Roman von Saša Stanišić Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert,” in Auswanderung und Identität. Erfahrungen von Exil, Flucht und Migration in der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Eds. Christel Baltes-Löhr, Beate Petra Kory, Gabriela Şandor. Transcript, 2019, pp. 39–54. Ayata, Bilgin. “‘Deheimatize It!’” Jahrbuch für Kulturpolitik 2019/20. Thema: Kultur. Macht. Heimaten. Heimat als kulturpolitische Herausforderung, edited by Norbert Sievers, Ulrike Blumenreich, Sabine Dengel, et al., Transcript, 2020, pp. 39–44. Aydemir, Fatma, and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah. “Foreword.” Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Ullstein, 2019, pp. 9–12. Barr, Anja. “Die Heimat der Heimatlosen. Transkulturelle Identitäten in Özdamars Der Hof im Spiegel und Fatih Akins Gegen die Wand.” Pluralität als Existenzmuster: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf die Deutschsprachige Migrationsliteratur, edited by Raluca Rădulescu and Christel Baltes-Löhr, Transcript, 2016, pp. 139–152. Bartels, Gerrit. “Die wertvollste Gabe ist die Erfindung.” www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/sasa-stanisics-roman-vor-dem-fest-die-wertvollste-gabe-ist-die-erfindung/9617570.html, Der Tagesspiegel, 14 March 2014. Accessed 11 August 2021. Blickle, Peter. Heimat. A Critical Theory of the German Idea of the Homeland. Camden House, 2002.

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Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, vol. 3. Translated by Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, MIT Press, 1986. Böttcher, Philipp. “Fürstenfelde erzählt. Dörflichkeit und narrative Verfahren in Saša Stanišićs ‘Vor dem Fest’.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik, vol. 30, no. 2, 2020, pp. 306–325. Caruth, Cathy, editor. Trauma. Explorations in Memory. The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3, 1994, pp. 302–338. Confino, Alon. “The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory and the German Empire, 1871–1918.” History and Memory, vol. 5, no. 1, 1993, pp. 42–86. Faris, Wendy B. “The Question of the Other: Cultural Critiques of Magical Realism.” Janus Head, vol. 5, no. 2, 2002, pp. 101–119. Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Vanderbilt UP, 2004. Grjasnowa, Olga. “Privilegien.” Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Ullstein, 2019, pp. 130–139. Hackert, Halina. Sich Heimat erschreiben. Zur Konstruktion von Heimat und Fremde in Einar Schleefs ‘Gertrud’. Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2012. Haines, Brigid. “Saša Stanišić, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert: Reinscribing Bosnia, or: Sad Things, Positively.” Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner, Camden House, 2011, pp. 105–118. Hamburger, Andreas, Camelia Hancheva, Saime Özcürümez, et al., editors. Forced Migration and Social Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Sociology and Politics. Routledge, 2018. Hasse, Jürgen. “Introduction.” Das Eigene und das Fremde: Heimat in Zeiten der Mobilität, edited by Jürgen Hasse and Karl Alber, 2018, pp. 9–24. Hynie, Michaela. “The Social Determinants of Refugee Mental Health in the Post-Migration Context: A Critical Review.” The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 63, no. 5, 2018, pp. 297–303. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Nell, Werner, and Marc Weiland. “Imaginationsraum Dorf.” Imaginäre Dörfer. Zur Wiederkehr des Dörflichen in Literatur, Film und Lebenswelt, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, Transcript, 2014, pp. 13–50. Neuner, Frank, Margarete Schauer, Christine Klaschik, et al. “A Comparison of Narrative Exposure Therapy, Supportive Counseling, and Psychoeducation for Treating Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in an African Refugee Settlement.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, vol. 72, 2004, pp. 579–587. Nikjamal, Nazli. Die Konzeption von Heimat im Werk deutscher Schriftsteller iranischer Herkunft. Queen Mary University of London, 2018. PhD dissertation. Osborne, Dora, “’Irgendwie wird es gehen’: Trauma, Survival, and Creativity in Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest.” German Life and Letters, vol. 72, no. 4, 2019, pp. 469–483. Peterson, Brent O. “Peter Schlemihl, the Chamisso Prize, and the Much Longer History of German Migrant Narratives.” German Studies Review, vol. 41, no. 1, 2018, pp. 81–98. Sangalang, Cindy C., David Becerra, Melicia M. Mitchell, et al. “Trauma, Post-Migration Stress, and Mental Health: A Comparative Analysis of Refugees and Immigrants in the United States.” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, vol. 21, 2019, pp. 909–919. Sanyal, Mithu. “Zuhause.” Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Ullstein, 2019, pp. 101–121.

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Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton UP, 2001. Silove, Derrick, Ingrid Sinnerbrink, Annette Field, et al. “Anxiety, depression and PTSD in asylum-seekers: Associations with pre-migration trauma and post-migration stressors.” The British Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 170, 1997, pp. 351–357. Slemon, Stephen. “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse.” Canadian Literature, vol. 116 1988, pp. 9–24. Stanišić, Saša. “Doppelpunktnomade.” Kulturstiftung des Bundes, vol. 6, 2005. Stanišić, Saša. Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert. Luchterhand, 2006. Stanišić, Saša. “How You See Us: On Three Myths about Migrant Writing.” International Writing Program Archive of Residents’ Work 728, 2007. Stanišić, Saša. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Translated by Anthea Bell, Grove Press, 2008. Stanišić, Saša. Vor dem Fest. Luchterhand, 2014. Stanišić, Saša. Before the Feast. Translated by Anthea Bell, Tin House Books, 2016a. Stanišić, Saša. Fallensteller. Luchterhand, 2016b. Stanišić, Saša. “Zürcher Poetikvorlesungen I: Saša Stanišić.” Literaturhaus Zürich, 2017a, https://www.voicerepublic.com/talks/zurcher-poetikvorlesungen-i-sasa-stanisic. Accessed 25 August 2021. Stanišić, Saša. “Zürcher Poetikvorlesungen II: Saša Stanišić,” Literaturhaus Zürich, 2017b, https://www.voicerepublic.com/talks/zurcher-poetikvorlesungen-ii-sasa-stanisic. Accessed 25 August 2021. Stanišić, Saša. “Zürcher Poetikvorlesungen III: Saša Stanišić,” Literaturhaus Zürich, 2017c, https://www.voicerepublic.com/talks/zurcher-poetikvorlesungen-iii-sasa-stanisic. Accessed 25 August 2021. Stanišić, Saša. Herkunft. Luchterhand, 2019. Stanišić, Saša. Where You Come From. Translated by Damion Searls, Tin House Books, 2021. Tafazoli, Hamid. Narrative kultureller Transformationen. Zu interkulturellen Schreibweisen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur der Gegenwart. Transcript, 2019. Terkessidis, Mark. Interkultur. Suhrkamp, 2010. Uca, Didem. “‘Grissgott’ meets ‘Kung Fu’: Multilingualism, Humor, and Trauma in Saša Stanišić’s Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006).” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 73, no. 3, 2019, pp. 185–201. Vilain, Philippe. “Autofiction.” The Novelist’s Lexicon, edited by Villa Gillet, Columbia UP, 2011, pp. 5– 6. Warnes, Christopher. “Introduction.” Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 1–17. Watters, Charles, and David Ingleby. “Locations of care: Meeting the mental health and social care needs of refugees in Europe.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, vol. 27, 2004, pp. 549–570.

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Von Beet zu Beet, von Baum zu Baum: Exile, Diaspora, and Transnationality in Ronya Othmann’s Die Sommer 1 Preliminary Note: The Debate about Othmann’s Vierundsiebzig The literary studies debates carried out during the 43rd Festival of German-Language Literature – known as the Bachmann Prize – held in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2019, were most notably accompanied by heated discussions regarding a text entry from the German-Kurdish author Ronya Othmann, which managed to leave some of the members speechless.¹ Othmann’s contribution was a short text called Vierundsiebzig (Seventy-Four,² 2019), which deals with the genocide of the Yazidi Kurds perpetrated by ISIS. Vierundsiebzig made a strong impact on the jury by raising an ethical question concerning the appropriateness of judging a primarily factual text written about the atrocities of genocide. As the almost unanimous jury stated in their opinion, it seemed indefensible to return to a logic of criticism to judge the events depicted. This was all the more challenging due to the author’s biography, for she is the daughter of a Kurdish-Yazidi father herself. The jury considered it ethically inappropriate to treat her entry as a mere work of literature and fiction when, in fact, the topic adressed was not of a fictional nature. As jury member Hildegard Keller argued, the lack of distinction in the text between Othmann and the first-person narrator made it ethically reprehensible to judge Vierundsiebzig as literature. However, to relegate a literary text like Othmann’s Vierundsiebzig to the realm of facticity does considerable injustice to its literary value. In this context, Johannes Franzen states that the jury has treated the text poorly, with the potentially far-reaching consequence that it loses its status as a work of art. Indeed, it is easy to see that excluding the short text Vierundsiebzig from the literary inventory because of what Franzen describes as the dignity of what one has experienced firsthand (n.p.) is an inappropriate approach to take and conclusion to reach regarding

 I would like to thank the editors of this anthology as well as Dorit Neumann, Jessica SanfilippoSchulz, and Lydia J. White for their constructive help with this chapter.  Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-007

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its status as literature. As a matter of fact, submitting a short text as an entry in a literary competition allows it to be treated as such. Consequently, the following investigation of Ronya Othmann’s debut novel Die Sommer (The Summers, 2020) will focus on its status as a literary text. For this reason, the question of factuality and fictionality, or even the degree of factuality and fictionality, is of minimal interest. Instead, my goal is to examine Die Sommer in terms of three specific modes and configurations of experience that are noteworthy in the story: exile, diaspora, and transnationality. In doing so, I will draw out the differences between these three concepts that can be conflated and subsumed under the umbrella term of “forced migration.”³ Following the lead of scholars like Nina Glick Schiller and Anna Amelina, I will examine the reductionist implications of the very term migration and show it to be an unsuitable and imprecise concept with regard to the storyline of Die Sommer. Instead, this chapter will focus on exile, diaspora, and transnationality as something closely connected to the formations and shapes of forced migration. One side effect of drawing a distinction between migration and forced migration is that another aspect will become visible: the concept of Heimat as something enormously difficult to apply in the context of forced migration. As I will argue, three concepts of forced migration come to the surface due to the use of diverse literary-aesthetic techniques, such as repetitive metaphors and highly symbolic objects. Finally, focussing primarily on Die Sommer, I will map the failure of a protracted Kurdish-Yazidi attempt to establish roots and settle down. By investigating the various characters in the novel, each belonging to a different generation, I will show how the text represents a panorama of multiple experiences of forced migration.

2 A Threefold Perspective: Exile, Diaspora, and Transnationality The literary texts by German-Kurdish author Ronya Othmann usually revolve around Kurdish-Yazidi⁴ characters.⁵ The explicit use of the term “Kurdish-Yazidi”

 Cf. Oltmer 9–25; although transnationality does not necessarily count as a manifestation of forced migration, it emerges and results from some of the character′s former experiences of forced migration in Die Sommer.  The Yazidis (alternate spelling: Êzîdîs) are an exclusively Kurdish monotheistic religious community and minority, which, as is also true for the Kurds as a whole, have their original settlement areas in present-day Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Due to various factors, such as internal political

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does not simply refer to Othmann’s focus on the experiences of primarily Kurdish characters; rather, it refers specifically to Yazidi Kurds. Yazidi Kurds form an ethnoreligious subgroup within the Kurdish community and population and are a persecuted, highly marginalized minority that Othmann has been increasingly addressing in her literary and journalistic texts since the genocide committed by ISIS in 2014. The fact that the author has a biographical connection to the themes explored in Die Sommer should not obscure the independence and autonomy of her novel, as its textual strategies and conflicts are able to generate coherence without any biographical input or points of reference. Rather, framing is necessary elsewhere: the concepts of exile, diaspora, and transnationality require specification and distinction. By referring primarily to works by Nina Glick Schiller (2012), Anna Amelina and Helma Lutz (2020), and Thomas Faist (2010), who distinguish between and define these concepts and terms precisely, I will demonstrate that Die Sommer negotiates several forms and manifestations of forced migration processes. Talk of mere migration, as I will argue, is too vague and broadly formulated to be useful here. Although exile and diaspora seem to be semantically identical at first glance, the two terms designate different concepts. Let us begin with the notion of “exile”: this term refers to displaced people who seek refuge in a place that is not their home (Meerzon 17). Although this definition is not insufficient per se, two further clarifications are required for the course of this investigation: instead of speaking of home or even Heimat,⁶ I shall use the term “country of origin.” As experiences of diaspora are discussed here as well, “home” seems to be too narrow a notion to be generally applicable.

conflicts with the predominantly Muslim population of the Kurds in Iraq, the attribution “Yazidi” in some parts of this religious community refers not only to religious but also to cultural-ethnic affiliation. In the most radical variant, some Yazidis even refuse to be considered Kurds and see Yazidishness as a national-ethnic classification. The novel Die Sommer does not make this distinction. Therefore, the usage “Kurdish-Yazidi” is applicable here. Regarding genealogy and the history of Yazidism, see Kizilhan.  Cf. Birgit Ammann’s investigation of and studies on the transnational Kurdish diaspora in the western part of Europe, especially Germany.  I will avoid the term Heimat here for three reasons: firstly, it is not used in Die Sommer and hence, using it in my analysis of the novel might bring in false semantic dimensions. Secondly, since the concept of Heimat is narrower than its English counterpart home, it might not always be applicable to the Kurdish-Yazidi diaspora community, which has no particular point and place of reference and settlement. Thirdly, the concept of Heimat is controversial in the context of German literature because it has national(ist) and ideological connotations. Instead, I will either speak of a country/place of origin or – though less often – home to signal the longing and belonging of individual characters in Die Sommer.

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As for the concept of exile, it is usually but not exclusively applied to the forced, violent banishment from one’s country of origin and involuntary resettlement somewhere else, and thus proves to be a term that, unlike the term “migration,” necessarily includes some form of violent resettlement.⁷ An exile always starts by being forced to expatriate, whereas migration can often be voluntary. Nonetheless, commonalities between migration and exile still appear when we specifically consider forced migration: the metaphor of in-betweenness,⁸ for instance, is a common feature of both experiences. In the case of both exile and forced migration, a feeling of disruption in the new country of settlement dominates, which exiles and refugees thus often describe as a mere temporary solution without any desire to put down roots (Kuhlmann 10). At the same time, the position of being in between, which contains an element of border-crossing (Sievers 10), is also only conditionally tenable since it is preceded by the outdated idea of cultures and nations as closed, mutually exclusive systems. Ever since the publication of Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), cultures have increasingly been understood as hybrid, dynamic systems. As Wiebke Sievers states (10), in-betweenness is no longer considered a fixed position in which immigrants find themselves but a space in which cultural changes are negotiated without creating new hegemonies. Consequently, by rejecting the concept of a static, rigid culture or even nation, the notion of in-betweenness is closely linked to cross-border and transnational studies (Glick Schiller 2012, 25, 29). This is concisely formulated by Russel West-Pavlov, who underscores that a crossed border is no longer a border in the original sense, but rather one that contains “the very possibility of its own transgression” (14). In contemporary research, the tendency to build social and emotional alliances in the new country of settlement, which is usually accompanied by a political commitment to the country or area of origin, is considered another characteristic of exiles besides forced migration (cf. Kuhlmann 9–15). Regarding the experience of exile, it is apparent that subjects very often also find connections to the cultural heritage of the country of origin (Zierau 14). The same often applies to the members of diaspora. The term “diaspora” was originally used to exclusively describe the historic experience and suffering of the Jewish people. Since the semantics of the term were broadened in the late twentieth century, diaspora can now be applied to religious,  Both exile and migration can be equally forced processes, as Alan Galmen points out (309). However, being forced to move and (e)migrate is an essential criterion for the use of the concept of exile, whereas this does not necessarily apply to migration.  Dazwischen; in 1992, Sigrid Weigel still viewed the state of Dazwischen as a metaphor for migration (cf. 182–230).

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ethnic, and cultural minorities and persecuted groups that have either forcefully or voluntarily experienced the dispersion and dissolution of their respective communities, especially over a longer period of time. While the use of the concept of exile resonates with the passage of individual fate, diasporas are collective fates of entire groups and communities. Whereas exile mostly denotes a private dimension, diaspora strongly denotes and contains a collective dimension as well as a collectively shared experience of dispersal. In diaspora studies, however, there is no agreement regarding the nature and cause of dispersal (Faist 2010, 12). While some scholars refer to forced dispersal as characteristic of diasporic communities, others use the concept of diaspora in a much broader sense. In this chapter, diaspora is used in a comparatively narrow sense as solely referring to forced dispersal and is therefore associated with forced migration. In relation to the Kurdish and Kurdish-Yazidi diasporas in particular, this narrow usage of the term diaspora is indispensable. The Kurdish as well as the Kurdish-Yazidi diasporas have always been forced diasporas, as portrayed in Die Sommer. Other crucial aspects that are widely shared in diaspora studies are the notions of the cross-border experiences of diaspora communities as well as the maintenance of boundaries (Faist 2010, 13), although the latter is controversial: some strongly maintain that assimilation would be the end of a diaspora community as a distinctive community, while others, following Bhabha, take approaches to cultures, nations, and communities that are generally characterized by hybridity. Whatever approach one might opt for, diaspora communities do have “some sort of cultural distinctiveness” (Faist 2010, 13), as I will argue in relation to Die Sommer. Furthermore, and with regard to the term “diaspora literature” in particular, it is often suggested that conveying the memory of the reasons for displacement and thus helping the community to survive as a minority group is a frequent motivation and self-proclaimed task for diaspora writers (Zierau 23). In this sense, diaspora literature might aim at what Aby Warburg and others have described as the memorialization of culture. While this is not inaccurate overall, it certainly neglects the fact that diaspora literature can come with an established, autonomous literary status. Finally, the third important term and impulse alongside exile and diaspora in Othmann’s Die Sommer, transnationality, also denotes cross-border formations (Faist 2010, 9). Transnationality can be identified as one consequence of and for diaspora communities, or the “diasporization” of cultures and nations in particular. However, in its most basic dimension, transnationality refers to individuals who hold multiple ties and links to two separate nation-states (Faist 2010, 9; see also Faist 2009; and Vertovec). As a process that is often seen as resulting from globalization, transnationality or transnationalism has become particularly popular in

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migration research since the 1990s. Although transnational communities are sometimes part of a diaspora, not all of them are diaspora communities. For this reason, transnationality tends to be a much broader concept than diaspora since the latter usually relates to religious or ethnic groups while the former might be used for any kind of “social formation” (Faist 2010, 21). Another fundamental difference can be identified when we consider the aspect of mobility. Transnationality is usually accompanied by cross-border mobility, which is not always the case for diaspora communities. For the Kurdish-Yazidi diaspora, cross-border mobility is only partially (or rather, temporally) established, considering for instance the genocide perpetrated by ISIS. Let us return briefly to the notion of migration: as several scholars such as Glick Schiller already emphasized in the early 1990s, it has become increasingly unsuitable to speak of migration processes because, as they noted at the time, many first-, second-, and even third-generation migrants still maintain close ties with their homelands or sending countries. Thus, the concept of migration understood as a static phenomenon (Nail 3) or a one-time process of limited duration no longer seems convincing (Amelina and Lutz 2020, 33). The notion of migration as a process of “mobile social positions” has thus been used to supplement the concept (Nail 3, 235), as has the conceptual framework of transnationalism or transnationality in migration research. Linking together one’s society or “societies of origin and settlement” (Glick Schiller at al. 1992, 5), transnational processes are followed by both the formation and sustaining of multiple social and national relations. Conceptualizing and theorizing transnationality, Glick Schiller highlights “the synergies and tensions of the mutual construction of the local, national and global” (2012, 23). The simultaneity between both the synergies and tensions that are employed in experiences of transnationality reveal the dialectic of border-crossing (“trans”) and border-containing (“nationality”) that are inherently expressed and implemented in “transnationality.” Other scholars such as Amelina and Lutz have added the notion of social and spatial mobility, and the multiple social and cultural networks that accompany transnational experiences (2020, 18). By taking a transnational approach, they emphasize an “unfinished bi- and multidirectional process” (Amelina and Lutz 2020, 33) as one of many possibilities and directions of migration. Transnationality is also frequently linked with diaspora communities: by referring to what he calls transnational social spaces of migration as something based on “sustained ties of geographically mobile persons, networks and organizations across the borders across [sic!] multiple nation states” (Faist 2006, 3), Faist,

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for instance, explicitly reveals the connection between transnationality and diaspora communities.⁹ Multiple social spaces and geo-spaces as cross-border-phenomena (Pries and Seeliger 231) are often included in the theory of transnationality as well, which is closely associated with several dimensions of mobility. For this reason, scholars of contemporary cross-border research who emphasize social, national, and spatial mobility in transnational studies have criticized the continued use of the “nation” as a point of reference (Amelina et al., 2012, 2). Moreover, transnationality contains an equivocation: on the one hand, there is the notion of transnationality as something that contains and includes several nationalities and that is characterized by social and spatial mobility; on the other hand, the meaning of the prefix trans- refers to the overcoming and dissolution of the nation and nationality. Which semantic aspect prevails in Die Sommer based on the transnational character¹⁰ Leyla remains to be answered later in this chapter. Focussing on the three main characters of Die Sommer, the following sections will look at examples of exile (Leyla’s father Silo), diaspora (Leyla’s grandmother), and transnationality (Leyla) as different forms of forced migration.

3 “Ask the walls of the prison” – The Father’s Exile Die Sommer revolves around the protagonist Leyla, daughter of a Kurdish-Yazidi father and a German mother living near Munich, who spends summer vacations in a Northern Syrian village called Tel Khatoun, where her grandmother and relatives reside. Leyla’s story is told in relation to the private and familial consequences of the ISIS invasion of Syria in 2014, which are contrasted with a life in Germany that contiues while news of the Yazidi genocide is constantly being broadcast on television. On a more general level, the novel focuses on the Yazidis as one of ISIS’s main targets. The novel’s complex themes, such as exile, migration, and diaspora, work in the wake of the genocidal catastrophe, which is implemented in the story in an almost laconic, distant manner. Consequently, it would seem rather reductive to de-

 For further discussion, see Faist 2010, 9–34.  A transnational character, as stated here, is not to be confused with a “third culture” character, a term and category coined by the sociologist Ruth Useem. Following Useem, many scholars use the term “third culture” to “describe children who spent a significant part of their formative years outside their parents’ culture” (Sanfillipo Schulz 2). Since this does not apply to Leyla, I will instead describe her as a transnational character.

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scribe the novel as a coming-of-age story, even though the central character is depicted at different stages between childhood and adolescence. In the novel, the early life of Silo, Leyla’s father, in Northern Syria is characterized by permanent harassment due to repeated experiences of torture at the hands of groups like the Syrian secret service and finally the burdensome status of being a stateless person who, although he was born in Syria, only receives the passport of an adschnabi (foreigner; Othmann 2020, 100). This denies him the opportunity to pursue higher education, despite having been a model student. Adschnabi, prison, constant harassment – all these experiences and words are bound tightly to the field and meaning of exile. There is usually a strong connection between the words that Silo uses, or that the narrator uses when speaking about him, and the experience of exile as forced migration. A succinct passage that portrays Silo’s exile includes his statement, “The prison was my university” (Othmann 2020, 194).¹¹ This dialectic sentence functions as a crucial maxim for Silo’s life. While the semantic field “university” represents his unfulfilled ambitions in life, the semantic field “prison” represents his reality. In general, the segments of the novel that are narrated by Silo – or that refer to him – notably include two versions of his life and biography: first, they contain the actual version of his life, which is the cruel reality of exile; second, they contain an if-only version in which he could have been living a free life with access to culture, education, and capital – if only the circumstances had been different. From a narrative and aesthetic point of view, this dual structure generally arises when Silo takes over the function of narrator and dwells in or recalls past events. Indeed, his language and his style of narration are best characterized as primarily using the past tense and the subjunctive. On several occasions, it becomes apparent that he is only able to endure his exile by holding on to illusions and by behaving “as if,” pretending that he is only a guest in Germany and will soon return to a free Syria (Othmann 2020, 206). Let us recall the concept of exile: not becoming closely linked to the new country and location of residence is a typical trait of exiled individuals. The illusion of guest status feeds the illusion that one’s exile may soon come to an end; such illusions generally seem to have the character of a psychological self-defense mechanism, which is usually deployed when the probability of there being an end to exile is zero. In Die Sommer, self-defense mechanisms become most apparent in scenes in which Leyla’s German mother is also present. In striking contrast to her father, Leyla’s mother, who has never experienced her life being in danger, is depicted as a

 As Othmann’s novel has not been translated into English (yet), I will use my own translations of its passages.

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pragmatist with no false hopes. Taking this into consideration, the following scene most concisely sums up what I have argued so far: It’s only a matter of time, the father said. One or two more months, then the three of us will travel to a free Syria […]. The Kurds will no longer be second-class citizens, but citizens […]. Let’s wait and see how everything plays out, said the mother. But her father wasn’t really listening to her. (Othmann 2020, 206)

If we take a closer look at Leyla’s father and mother, two diametrically opposed approaches toward life are expressed in this passage. Whereas Silo in his exile cannot endure reality without dwelling on utopian dreams, the mother is portrayed as a pragmatic character without any delusional dreams. Being almost entirely cut off from reality and from making a distinction between what seems likely and what does not, the father barely responds to his actual surroundings due to his self-defense mechanisms. While the year 2014 marks the zenith of the genocidal catastrophe, Silo’s persecution has continued for decades, and his forced escape from the village is his only option for self-preservation. Instead of speaking of the village as the father’s hometown or Heimat, it is more precise to speak of his place or country of origin. As I discussed before, the term Heimat suggests a sense of belonging, a sense of home, but this does not apply to the father’s experiences in the village. At the same time, the father demonstrates a desire to belong and for a home-like place, which Karen Joisten grasps as a very fundamental anthropological constant of enormous importance (1). The father deserves further attention because his story manifests the experience of exile as one very fundamental source for the novel’s events. Representing someone to whom the very notion of home does not apply, and even less so that of Heimat, the novel portrays his exile as something that is not merely a temporary phenomenon or an experience with a potential end. In the father’s consciousness, it is clearly acknowledged that the homeland or rather country or place of origin can only be admitted as something that has passed and that has been irrevocably lost. The country of origin, however, has specific significance in the context of the novel because it has an elementary function. In one of its many forms, it is a link to the past and hence has a nostalgic function (Fischer 1). As a result, it seems all the more consistent that the parts of the novel narrated from the father’s perspective generally focus on events that happened in the distant past and that took place to some extent in the Yazidi village once considered a home-like place. However, for the father, exile was already predestined, and this belief has also spread into his pre-exile memories. The following childhood scene shows that Silo’s memories already foreshadow his exile: as he tells it, whenever he and other members of his

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community would leave school, they would switch from Arabic to Kurmanji (a Kurdish dialect) in the manner of an internalized automatism (Othmann 2020, 97). But since this mechanism of hiding one’s cultural belonging and affiliation cannot possibly work out for long, it seemed like being forced to flee was already just a matter of time, even back then. It is quickly proven that the prohibition of his own language did in fact signify that staying permanently in one place was never an option for the father, which furthermore points to the systematic prohibition of the Kurdish language in the Kurds’ primary countries of origin. Moreover, the oppression – the attempt to eradicate the Kurmanji language spoken by the majority of Kurds, which goes hand in hand with the goal of eradicating the Kurdish population as well as their cultural identity and heritage – prompts Amin Hassanpour to even speak of a linguicide (Hassanpour 5) in this context. The fact that a subject’s thoughts, perceptions, and actions always take place in a language, and indeed cannot take place outside of a linguistic system, makes clear what a language ban means for individuals and, in turn, for the entire community. The father’s exile is not of a merely temporary nature, and even the summers spent in Northern Syria with the family during Leyla’s school vacations do not reveal any hope that his exile will end. Too many factors, such as the increasing deterioration of the village’s landscape, poverty (when they visit the village, the family always provides relatives with essentials such as medicines from Germany), and the constant threats from Turkish border guards, do not allow them to contemplate a permanent return. As is both explicitly stated and metaphorically demonstrated by the descriptions of the increasingly deteriorating landscape of Northern Syria (Othmann 2020, 85), there is not a single sign that indicates a possible return from exile. Even life in Germany cannot end the father’s exile due to its foreign cultural reference system. Rallies and demonstrations that draw attention to the genocide and the systematic oppression of Kurds and the associated pleas for political change in the Middle East, as well as time spent absent-mindedly watching Kurdish channels on television (Othmann 2020, 170, 228), show exile to be a permanent state of suffering. As mentioned earlier, it is characteristic of exiles that the new place of residence continues to be perceived as foreign and cannot function as a substitute. Differences in how Leyla’s father and mother communicate with locals demonstrate this: “The mother spoke a lot with the people in the village, the father as little as possible […]. The way he said please and thank you and: Only if it’s really no inconvenience to you” (Othmann 2020, 144–145). Silo’s politeness and caution toward locals, lamented here by Leyla and bordering on obsequiousness, epitomizes his internalized guest status, which does not allow for a sense of belonging. In this sense, Leyla describes her father’s formula for life in German exile as trying not to

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attract attention, always being polite, and always being modest – precisely the behavior of a guest. As mentioned earlier, it becomes equally clear that the father’s exile takes place in the German language: while his German is described as broken even after decades of living in Germany, and while he is depicted as taciturn and almost incapable of speech in German, his disposition changes abruptly as soon as he switches to Kurdish: “In Kurdish, however, he talked for hours, […] joked, made fun, provoked, laughed tears, cursed passionately […]. He also spoke up in Kurdish, like someone who is someone, Leyla thought” (Othmann 2020, 164). This ambivalence between his character and behavior demonstrates very precisely the two versions of his life as discussed before. While switching to German and hardly being able to communicate properly in this foreign language marks his actual life as that of an exile, a different version of Silo surfaces when he speaks Kurdish: he becomes somebody, not the nobody he feels himself to be in exile. But this latter character, as repeatedly becomes obvious, is only his ideal, subjunctive character and the life he would have led if only he had not had to endure the sufferings of forced migration. From the beginning of the novel until the very end, he thus remains an exiled individual who does not undergo much of a development and therefore leaves the impression of being rather rigid.

4 Sufferings of Collective Diaspora: Leyla’s Grandmother Und jeden Tag fahre ich zweitausend Kilometer in einem imaginären Zug hin und her, unentschlossen zwischen dem Kleiderschrank und dem Koffer, und dazwischen ist meine Welt. (Tekinay) And every day I travel two thousand kilometers on an imaginary train back and forth, undecided between the wardrobe and the suitcase, and between them is my world.

Another key role within the novel is played by Leyla’s grandmother, who most visibly represents the collective diaspora of the Kurdish-Yazidi community. She is also

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the person Leyla holds on to and talks about the most, which underscores her importance as a representative of the Kurdish-Yazidi diaspora. Although the grandmother rarely speaks directly, she is the main point of reference for Leyla. In contrast to her son Silo speaking Kurmanji, the grandmother is mostly described as a taciturn but very capable person who takes charge of everything and on whom many villagers depend on (Othmann 2020, 58–60). The aspect of diaspora thus becomes particularly clear when she has to leave her village due to ISIS attacks. Although all three main characters in Die Sommer are members of the Kurdish-Yazidi diaspora community, Leyla’s grandmother represents the diaspora of this minority group most explicitly, as stated before. Kurdish-Yazidis are a religious minority first and a cultural minority second. But while both Leyla and her father are portrayed as having only minor religious attachments (Othmann 2020, 115) and demonstrate a mostly cultural affiliation with Yazidism, the grandmother proves to be a thoroughly religious character. As an elderly person, she is in charge of continuing Yazidi traditions and is the first person to provide Leyla with answers about religious and cultural matters (Othmann 2020, 35–36). Her death therefore signifies a great loss not only for Leyla, who is particularly attached to her, but for the whole Kurdish-Yazidi diaspora community. The diaspora situation that Leyla’s grandmother represents can be briefly but concisely mapped by means of a specific symbol that appears repeatedly: the suitcase. While from Leyla’s perspective, the suitcase has genuinely positive associations, the grandmother, as a representative of the Kurdish-Yazidi diaspora community, perceives it in a completely different manner: “They had told her to pack her things. Uncle Memo had packed her a suitcase. The grandmother herself had not known how to do that, how to pack a suitcase” (Othmann 2020, 265). This passage illustrates the grandmother’s premonition already foreshadowing the impossibility of a return once the suitcase is packed. Accordingly, it is then Uncle Memo who must perform the act of packing. The grandmother cannot separate herself from the village where she has lived all her life. The suitcase thus functions as an unfamiliar item since it is not even able to convey the illusion of a possible safe haven somewhere else. In this sense, within the context of diaspora, it does not have the dominant, overtly European connotation of being free and mobile, i. e., the ability to follow one’s wanderlust.¹² For the Kurdish-Yazidi community, it is Wanderzwang – the compulsion to wander – not wanderlust; as Zygmunt Bauman notes, “not all wanderers are on the move because they prefer being on the move to staying put” (Bauman 12). When suitcases therefore enter the lives of the Kurdish-Yazidis in the

 Regarding the symbolic dimensions of the suitcase, see Bauman.

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village of Tel Khatoun, the villagers are reminded that they have once again been “uprooted” (Bauman 11) and are forced to flee. As a group of stateless people, the Kurdish-Yazidi population in the grandmother’s village has no access to passports, so the very option of traveling does not even exist. This, in turn, eliminates any positive associations with the suitcase per se: “Everyone in the village, the father said on the phone, has bought a suitcase now. Before, there were hardly any. Suitcases. What for? said the father. No one had holidays, nor a passport” (Othmann 2020, 231). The people in the village being forced to buy suitcases demonstrates that diaspora is always bound to a collective dimension on both a literal and a figurative level. The suitcase is thus a symbol of the threat to the Kurdish diaspora community, a vivid and concrete visualization of fear and flight that can become real at any moment. On that note, the following quote is also particularly insightful: “Children had died like flies in the village” (Othmann 2020, 53). The diaspora situation presented in the novel is marked by the permanent threat, the regularity, and the everyday occurrence of even the youngest dying, and the pressure to leave and flee at any time, followed by the simultaneous absence of a place of safety and refuge. Diaspora is expressed as a burdensome state of limbo without solid ground, a position of in-betweenness and of permanent uncertainty, although unlike in the case of transnational experiences, the notion of in-betweenness does not have positive connotations This becomes especially apparent in the grandmother’s experiences in Germany as she cannot relate to her foreign surroundings and environment at all and – in another highly symbolic moment – dies shortly after her arrival. The grandmother’s death is already anticipated when she places her shroud into her suitcase before leaving Syria. It becomes immediately clear that being forced to escape leads to the further dispersal of the Kurdish-Yazidi diaspora community. Consequently, by fleeing from Northern Syria, they lose a crucial cultural reference point. Revisiting the debate that Faist sums up about why a diaspora community might depend on characteristic features that distinguish it from other communities (2010, 13), another aspect is brought to mind: losing specific places of cultural reference can lead to further dispersal and therefore to the assimilation of the diaspora community, and hence to the loss of its understanding of itself as a community and a collective identity. As Bauman concisely formulates it, “the real problem is not how to build identity, but how to preserve it” (Bauman 9). Therefore, the grandmother’s escape marks an important watershed. Returning to significant motifs and symbols in the novel, I propose that books are as equivocal as suitcases. Just like suitcases, they have positive connotations in Leyla’s perception, whereas they mean quite the opposite for Leyla’s father and grandmother as representatives of the diaspora. The mere possession of books, especially in the forbidden Kurdish language Kurmanji, leads to imprisonment and

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torture for Leyla’s father in Syria and Turkey. For instance, the local government places books under general suspicion and, regardless of their content, considers them to be highly political and treasonous toward the government. This leads the grandmother to perceive them as dangerous goods and to bury them deep in the garden: even though she is illiterate, she considers anything printed to be enormously dangerous. Keeping this in mind helps us to understand why Leyla’s father makes sure that Leyla is always surrounded by books, which also become an integral aspect of her suitcase. Therefore, in Die Sommer, both books and suitcases prove to be motifs that convey different meanings in the context of the Kurdish-Yazidi diaspora when compared to the context of transnational experiences, as demonstrated by Leyla as the central character. Due to the linguicide and ban on Kurdish dialect, books that are written in Kurmanji in particular might have a different meaning to the one that Leyla perceives. While the grandmother buries them to avoid endangering the family or risking imprisonment, for Leyla they are essential.

5 The Novel’s Credo: Leyla’s Transnationality Die Sommer does not primarily address questions of identity, a topic often reductively considered to be one of the main themes of literature by migrant authors. It therefore avoids running the risk of being pigeonholed as so-called “migrant literature” (Migrantenliteratur) or “migration literature” (Migrationsliteratur), which, upon closer examination, turns out to be a misleading category. A recent essay by the Kurdish-German author Karosh Taha, for instance, addresses the often-experienced expectation that she negotiate conflicts of (cultural) identity in her literary works. As Taha outlines, being a migrant author, she even has to prove that she is capable of writing about anything but young migrants who are seeking their identity in a pool of different cultures. What she writes about is thus barely appreciated, as migrant characters are perceived as non-existent if the cultural conflict is not addressed (Taha). Taha’s criticism of the perception or interpretation of migrant characters as bound to conflicts regarding culture and identity is very apt when it comes to Leyla. Indeed, Leyla experiences precisely what Taha addresses in her essay: the reduction of her character to one that experiences conflicts of cultural belonging and identity, which are very often expected and expressed by her environment. On the contrary, she is presented as a transnational character who does not experience the conflicts of a torn identity. Instead, her conflicts and struggles are caused by ISIS and the genocide they have perpetrated on the Kurdish-Yazidi community. For Leyla, the genocide results in the loss of many family members and of a place that had been a fundamental part of her life.

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Before I move on, I would like to state that I consider the term “migrant literature”¹³ to be highly problematic¹⁴ for three reasons: first, it suggests a homogeneity of experiences for migrant authors; second, it tends to focus on the biography of authors instead of their works of literature; and, third, this term evokes a niche existence, which consequently entails a demarcation between German literature by non-migrant writers as the rule and German-language literature by migrant writers as the exception.¹⁵ A brief glance at the most successful books released by major German publishing houses in recent years proves that, in the current German literary landscape, the term migrant literature is becoming more and more obsolete: Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s novel Außer Sich (Outside Oneself, 2017; Beside Myself 2019), Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft (Origin, 2019; You Come From 2021), which won the 2018 German Book Prize, and, more recently, Deniz Ohde’s debut novel Streulicht (Scattered Light, 2020), which was honored with the 2020 aspekte Literature Prize, provide sufficient evidence that so-called migrant literature has long ceased to be located on the margins of the public literary landscape. Furthermore, it is clear that the term migrant can only be used insofar as all the authors mentioned above are of migrant origin, which is ultimately far too thin a foundation, as it says too little to qualify as a useful term. As stated earlier, until the beginning of the twenty-first century, migration research was dominated by the dualism of being settled and belonging for non-migrants and the experience of foreignness and exclusion for migrants (Baltes-Löhr 15) – a view that no longer seems adequate. Instead, some scholars in the field of German Studies now tend to speak of a transnational paradigm in contemporary literature (Seyhan 281). Die Sommer also helps to further highlight the obsolescence of the label of migrant literature in contemporary German literature. This is primarily shown by Leyla as the key protagonist of the novel, for her conflicts do not revolve around questions of identity or cultural affiliation. Instead, she can be identified as a transnational character, for whom the term “migrant character” would be too reductive. In the novel, the term “transnational” applies exclusively to Leyla as the leading protagonist among the three characters presented here. As a transnational character moving and crossing the borders between Germany and Syria, she is linked and tied to nation, culture, and mobility in many ways. This allows us to draw the conclusion that, with Leyla, as a representative of the youngest genera-

 The category of Migrantenliteratur replaced the previously frequently used category of Gastarbeiterliteratur (Heinze 31).  For an early critique of this term, see Keiner 3–14.  Other than “migration literature,” the category of “migrant literature” at least emphasizes processual intercultural movements and structures (cf. Zierau 22).

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tion, questions of national and cultural identificatory belonging can at most be relegated to the background, as is the case for other transnational characters. As the daughter of a Kurdish-Yazidi and a German, Leyla repeatedly becomes recognizable as a person who has mastered the balancing act between two cultures, two languages, and two nations. In Leyla’s case, the question of “Who am I?” is not posed at all. When the mother of her classmate asks her whether she is more German or more Kurdish, Leyla replies “German” (Othmann 2020, 158) – an answer that leaves her classmate’s mother satisfied. When Leyla is asked the very same question by her Kurdish aunt Felek, she gives quite the opposite answer, making her aunt “[clap] her hands in delight” (2020, 158). As she is depicted as a child for some parts of the novel and only in the latter parts as an adolescent and finally as a young adult, she often behaves, at least when she is very young, based on what is expected from her. She then frequently acts like someone with a fluid identity, giving the impression that “identities can be adopted and discarded like a change of costume” (Bauman 11). Since she only provides such responses when she is very young and insecure, this allows us to assume that it is exclusively the external world and society that find it difficult to deal with Leyla’s transnationality and cultural plurality, continuing an outdated mode of thinking about cultural structures. Characteristically, this is demonstrated when she is asked, “Isn’t it difficult to grow up between cultures like that? Surely your father is strict? Does your mother wear a headscarf?” (Othmann 2020, 158). These questions raised by her best friend’s German mother are familiar to Leyla. They are connected to a cultural and social environment that is portrayed as not yet familiar with transnationality. Hence, the notion of cultures as more or less mutually exclusive, as expressed in both the German environment and the Kurdish environment in her grandparents’ village, dominates Die Sommer. For this reason, Leyla regularly stands out as a transnational character and is asked a lot of questions regarding her identity. But since questions of identity are not a serious matter for Leyla, she usually provides others with a quick, simple answer that satisfies them but does not confront them with their prejudices. While Leyla’s conflicts only marginally revolve around questions of identity, instead resulting from having to stand idly by and watch the genocide of her own community and kin in North Syria unfolding on television, there is evidently an externally imposed question of “Who are you?”: “Everything about Leyla always confused everyone” (Othmann 2020, 158), the narrative voice states. In her German hometown and at school, she is perceived as different due to her multicultural background, appearance, and even name. The same applies when she spends summers at her grandmother’s village in Syria: she is the only one among her Kurdish relatives who has a parent of non-Kurdish origin. Questions concerning Leyla’s identity are always raised by others. Hence, as she undergoes the general

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process of coming of age, she is sometimes almost forced to become uncertain in this regard. Still, and as I have argued already, it is not the question of belonging and identity that is decisive but rather the threat of losing meaningful cultural memories that are part of her own self-awareness as an individual. Living in Germany, her only possible reaction to the genocide can be found in her attempts to forcefully reanimate memories of the Syrian village in which her grandparents lived. However, Leyla’s attempts to remember are not meant to reproduce the misunderstanding that memories are objective images of past perceptions, let alone a past reality, but are instead a highly selective process of both reconstructing and constructing past events (Erll 7). In Leyla’s case, however, they function as the collective cultural memory of the religious minority of Yazidis threatened by expulsion and genocide. Attempts to reanimate and continue memories become crucial for Leyla at the very same time as the genocide takes place. Her response – trying to preserve memories of the summers spent in her grandparents’ village – is a defense mechanism against the partial extinction of the Kurdish-Yazidi community that is happening simultaneously. Hence, in Die Sommer, memories express much about the needs and concerns of individual characters such as Leyla. But the characters’ individual, private dimensions are always expressed as political and public dimensions at the same time; Leyla’s occasional lamentations about not being able to remember various details of the many summer vacations spent in her grandmother’s village thus have the same value as the cultural memory work being carried out in relation to the Kurdish-Yazidi culture and traditions that ISIS is increasingly trying to completely erase. Even at school, Leyla experiences the threat of a whole community being erased and extinguished when her Turkish schoolmate states that there is no such thing as the Kurds (Othmann 2020, 159), which further encourages her need for memories. The following passage is characteristic of this context, which turns the private, individual memory into a collective one: She became restless when she thought about forgetting and when she really forgot. […] What the name of the citadel was that they had once visited, where she had collected the little stones that lay in some box at her parents’ house. Each time something like that felt to her as if by forgetting she had lost everything a second time, and this time for good. (Othmann 2020, 73–74)

The name of the citadel she once visited, the place where she had collected stones – these memories might seem to lack significance and be, if at all, of genuinely private, but still minor importance. However, losing these memories would not simply mark a private loss, but a collective and indeed greater loss for the Kurdish-Yazidi diaspora community. For this reason, Leyla blames and reproaches herself for not

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capturing her memories on camera. If only she had known what was to come, she would have used a camera, would have catalogued everything and “created a huge database” (Othmann 2020, 74), so that nothing could ever be lost. For Anna Poletti, the (symbolic) function of the camera lies in “gathering and reflecting on lived experience” (2020, 8). In this account, the camera apparatus helps to materialize a non-material “discourse of truth” that “empowers those who hold the camera to become truth seekers” (Poletti 2020, 64). Associated with truth and certainty, Leyla feels that the camera could have worked against oblivion and the major extinction of the Kurdish-Yazidi community caused by the genocide. Another symbol in the novel that, according to Poletti, has a similar function to that of the camera is the cardboard box. Just like cameras, cardboard boxes are tools used to gather, document, and reflect upon memories and experiences. As a “ubiquitous technology of self-documentation” (Poletti 28), the cardboard box helps to preserve and sometimes even catalogue and structure memories. But whereas Poletti emphasizes that the contents of cardboard boxes are usually discarded objects (2020, 11) whose connection “to a place and time has dissolved in our memories” (2020, 28), boxes have an additional dynamic for the transnational character Leyla. They emphasize the automatic approach she takes toward her multiple cultural affiliations, which becomes particularly revealing in the following excerpt: “She put all the plastic jewelry she received as gifts in her summers […] into shoe boxes in Germany. Sometimes […] she would take out the boxes, pull the bracelets over her wrists and put the butterflies in her hair, then do her homework or read” (Othmann 2020, 52). As becomes obvious here, it is not discarded objects that make up the content of Leyla’s boxes or drawers; rather, the cardboard boxes help her to manage and organize her transnational existence. Whenever she returns to Germany from her summer vacation in Syria, she puts the gifts and things she either received or bought into boxes. This shows that, from an early age, she is already capable of adapting to her respective cultural and national surroundings and hence of differentiating between what she can use or wear in Syria and what she can use or wear in Germany. As stated before in Bauman’s words, Leyla demonstrates the particularly transnational attitude that (cultural) “identities can be adopted and discarded like a change of costume” (Bauman 11); her character thus emphasizes the fluidity and constructionist value of depicting cultures and nations. To further understand Leyla’s transnational experiences, let us once more make recourse to the motifs of the suitcase and books: unlike in the context of her grandmother and father’s diaspora, these have mostly positive connotations for Leyla. The airport, for example, which belongs to the suitcase’s semantic field and represents a significant transit space and place of memory for Leyla, is an integral part of her life. Rather than having the connotation of forced migra-

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tion, she perceives the packing of her suitcase and the journey to the airport as emblematic of freedom. That said, Leyla should not be mistaken for a tourist. The tourist – who Bauman describes as someone who packs lightly “with just a few belongings necessary to insure against the inclemency of alien places” and who can “set out on the road again at a moment’s notice, as soon as things threaten to get out of control” (11) – functions as a contrast to Leyla. As described in the novel, Leyla’s suitcase(s) being full and heavily packed with gifts for her relatives marks her personal attachment to the place she has visited, which is her grandmother’s Northern Syrian village, each summer vacation. Her return to the airport is a bridge and permanent transitional stage between different places that are equally fundamental to Leyla as a transnational character: “Leyla sometimes wondered which she preferred, the long, lonely afternoons in Germany or the hot summers in the village, continuouslysurrounded by family” (Othmann 2020, 49). She is equally connected with both contrasting sides – that is, the cold, lonely Germany, and the warm, sociable Syria. What is more, this very contrast is itself indispensable to Leyla’s experience as a character in-between, which underlines the central aspect of transnationality in her personality. At the same time, parallels with Bhabha’s “third space” become visible. This concept conceives of the aspect of transition as the shared, normal state that opens up the possibility of renegotiation and border-crossing (Zierau 11). In this sense, it is noteworthy that the term Heimat is never used in the novel. For a transnational character like Leyla, Heimat might not be a proper concept as it implicates the idea of one point and place of reference. As transnationality is bound to both local and national cultural mobility, the concept of Heimat can perhaps be viewed as too rigid to be applied to Leyla’s character. To repeat an important point: Heimat in the context of a diaspora community as depicted in Die Sommer is not always an adequate term.

6 Conclusion I would like to end this chapter by making reference to one of Othmann’s journalistic essays, published in 2018, in which she states, “Wir sind von Beet zu Beet gegangen, von Baum zu Baum” (“We went from flower bed to flower bed, from tree to tree”; 2018). This quote contains experiences of exile and diaspora as well as transnationality in equal parts. Functioning as a strong, precise metaphor for the themes negotiated in Die Sommer, it represents a lack of settledness, which is expressed in the context of exile and diaspora as a permanent experience of misery. At the same time, it is positively reframed when applied to Leyla’s transnationality as the novel’s credo. The quote can then be interpreted as affirmatively containing

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cultural renegotiations and moments of border crossings. Moreover, Die Sommer is a good candidate for what Arianna Dagnino terms “literatures of mobility,” that is, “those literatures that are affected by or deal with travels/exploratory drives, migratory flows, exile/diasporic experiences, expatriate/transnational narratives, and, more recently, neo-nomadic trajectories” (131). To return to what I argued at the very beginning with respect to Othmann’s text not receiving the proper literary-critical judgement for the Bachmann Prize: I have demonstrated that her texts contain negotiations of multifaceted concepts and forms of forced migration that emerge in particular through her use of literary techniques and the repetition of motifs. Hence, judging Othmann’s Vierundsiebzig or Die Sommer through the lens of factuality and regarding them as texts that simply report on events neglects their literary and fictional value, as has been shown in the multiple concepts and categories discussed in this chapter.

Works Cited Amelina, Anna, and Helma Lutz. Gender and Migration. Transnational and Intersectional Prospects. Routledge, 2020. Amelina, Anna, Thomas Faist, Nina Glick Schiller, et al. “Methodological Predicaments of Cross-Border-Studies.” Beyond Methodological Nationalism. Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies, edited by Anna Amelina, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist, et al., Routledge, 2012, pp. 1–19. Ammann, Birgit. Kurden in Europa. Ethnizität und Diaspora. LIT, 2001. Baltes-Löhr, Christel. “Geschlecht, Wanderungen, Erinnerungen, Identitätskonstruktionen – Ausgeleuchtet mit der Figur des Kontinuums.” Auswanderung und Identität. Erfahrungen von Exil, Flucht und Migration in der deutschsprachigen Literatur, edited by Christel Baltes-Löhr, Beate Petra Kory, and Gabriela Sandor, Transcript, 2019, pp. 11–38. Bauman, Zygmunt. Tourists and Vagabond: Heroes and Victims of Postmodernity. IHS, 1996. Borsdorf, Ulrich, and Heinrich Theodor Grütter. “Einleitung.” Orte der Erinnerung. Denkmal, Gedenkstätte, Museum, edited by Ulrich Borsdorf and Heinrich Theodor Grütter, Campus, 1999, pp. 1–12. Dagnino, Arianna. “Global Mobility, Transcultural Literature, and Multiple Modes of Modernity.” The Journal of Transcultural Study, vol. 4, no. 2, 2013, pp. 130–160. Erll, Astrid. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung. Metzler, 2005. Faist, Thomas. “The Transnational Social Spaces of Migration.” Working Papers – Center on Migration, Citizenship and Development, vol. 10, 2006, pp. 3–8. Faist, Thomas. “The Transnational Social Question. Social Rights and Citizenship in a Global Context.” International Sociology, vol. 24, no. 1, 2009, pp. 7–35. Faist, Thomas. “Diaspora and Transnationalism: What Kind of Dance Partners?” Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods, edited by Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist, Amsterdam UP, 2010, pp. 9–34. Fischer, Sylvia. Dass Hä mmer und Herzen synchron erschallen: Erkundungen zu Heimat in Literatur und Film der DDR der 50er und 60er Jahre. Peter Lang, 2015.

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Franzen, Johannes. “Literaturkritik: Hemmung vor der Wirklichkeit.” Die Zeit, 15 October 2019, www. zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2019-10/literaturkritik-fiktion-fakten-schreiben-qualitaet/komplettansicht. Accessed 19 June 2021. Galmen, Alan. “Migration and Exile in a turbulent World.” Migration Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 2015, pp. 307–314. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration.” Annals New York Academy of Sciences 645.1, 1992, pp. 1–24. Glick Schiller, Nina. “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 1, 1995, pp. 48–63. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Thomas Faist. Migration, Development and Transnationalism: A Critical Stance. Berghahn, 2010. Glick Schiller, Nina. “Transnationality, Migrants and Cities. A Comparative Approach.” Beyond Methodological Nationalism. Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies, edited by Anna Amelina, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist, et al., Routledge, 2012, pp. 23–40. Hassanpour, Amir. “Preface to the Reader.” Kurdisch Reader. Modern Literature and Oral Texts in Kurmanji, edited by Khanna Omarkhali, Harrassowitz, 2011, pp. 1–20. Heinze, Hartmut. Migrantenliteratur in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland – Bestandsaufnahme und Entwicklungstendenzen zu einer multikulturellen Literatursynthese. Express, 1986. Joisten, Karen. Philosophie der Heimat – Heimat der Philosophie. Akademie, 2003. Keiner, Sabine. “Von der Gastarbeiterliteratur zur Migranten- und Migrationsliteratur – literaturwissenschaftliche Kategorien in der Krise?” Sprache und Literatur, vol. 30, no. 1, 1999, pp. 3–14. Kizilhan, Ilhan. Die Yeziden. Eine Anthropologische und Sozialpsychologische Studie über die kurdische Gemeinschaft. Medico, 1997. Kuhlmann, Jenny. “Exil, Diaspora und Transmigration.” Politik und Zeitgeschichte, vol. 64, no. 42, 2014, pp. 9–15. Levitt, Peggy, and Nina Glick Schiller. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society.” International Migration Review, vol. 38, no. 3, 2004, pp. 1002–1039. Meerzon, Yana. “On the Paradigms of Banishment, Displacement, and Free Choice.” Performing Exile: Foreign Bodies, edited by Judith Rudakoff, Intellect, 2017, pp. 17–36. Nail, Thomas. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford UP, 2015. Oltmer, Jochen. Globale Migration. Geschichte und Gegenwart. Beck, 2016. Othmann, Ronya. “Hundert Flüche, Hundert Segenswünsche.” Der Spiegel, 28 April 2018, www.spiegel.de/spiegel/literaturspiegel/d-157029983.html. Accessed 19 June 2021. Othmann, Ronya. Die Sommer, Hanser, 2020. Poletti, Anna. Stories of the Self. Life Writing after the Book. New York UP, 2020. Pries, Ludger, and Martin Seeliger. “Transnational Social-Spaces.” Beyond Methodological Nationalism. Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies, edited by Anna Amelina, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist, et al., Routledge, 2012, pp. 219–238. Sanfillipo Schulz, Jessica. “Marketing Transnational Childhoods: The Bio Blurbs of Third Culture Novelists.” Transnational Literature, vol. 8, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–18. Seyhan, Azade. “The Transnational/Translational Paradigm in Contemporary German Literature.” Colloquia Germanica, vol. 41, no. 4, 2008, pp. 281–293. Sievers, Wiebke. Grenzüberschreitungen: Ein Literatursoziologischer Blick auf die lange Geschichte von Literatur und Migration. Böhlau, 2016.

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Taha, Karosh. “Was mache ich eigentlich hier? Eine Rechtfertigung.” Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft E.V., 27 January 2021. kupoge.de/blog/2021/01/27/was-mache-ich-eigentlich-hier-eine-rechtfertigung/. Accessed 19. June 2021. Tekinay, Alev. “Dazwischen.” Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968, edited by Sigrid Weigel, Hanser, 1992, pp. 217–218. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. Routledge, 2009. Weigel, Sigrid. “Literatur der Fremde – Literatur in der Fremde.” Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968, edited by Klaus Briegleb and Sigrid Weigel (= Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Vol. 12. Edited by Rolf Grimminger), Carl Hanser, 1992, pp. 182–229. West-Pavlov, Russell. “Border-Crossings: By Way of an Introduction.” Border-Crossings. Narrative and Demarcation in Postcolonial Literature and Media, edited by Russell West-Pavlov, Justus Makokha, and Jennifer Wawrzinek, Winter, 2012, pp. 9–16. Zierau, Cornelia. Wenn Wörter auf Wanderschaft gehen… Aspekte kultureller, nationaler und Geschlechtsspezifischer Differenzen in deutschsprachiger Migrationsliteratur. Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 2019.

John Slattery

Migration and an Intersubjective Home in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen Migration sharpens the critical eye on one’s own values and asks which of them still make sense. – Mithu Sanyal¹

1 Introduction Although the word Heimat is not often explicitly stated in Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015; Go, Went, Gone, 2017), Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel about forced migration implicitly explores and deconstructs the term’s myriad connotations. The story is about the establishment of a community of displaced African refugees in Berlin with various backgrounds and homelands, including Libya, Nigeria, Ghana, Niger, Chad, and Burkina Faso. Illustrating the ways in which bureaucratic barriers prevent the migrants from gaining work and residence permits for Germany, the text shows how some traditional notions of Heimat – embedded, at least in part, in the idea of being rooted to one’s place of birth and ensuing socialization – are often used as a “weapon” to exclude perceived Others.² However, the novel also provides an example of what an open concept of Heimat that is rooted not in a common place of origin but in mutual, cross-cultural support might look like. In the story, Richard – the book’s protagonist and a retired Humboldt University classics professor – befriends several African refugees stemming from different areas and cultures, who come together at Berlin’s Oranienplatz. This assembly of refugees in the novel is a fictionalization of the Refugee Tent Action, which took place in Berlin-Kreuzberg from 2012 to 2014, when migrants converged to protest asylum politics in Germany and Europe at Oranienplatz.³ By taking a closer look at the intersubjective bonds of affective solidarity between displaced subjects in

 The original quote in German is the following: “Migration schärft den Blick auf die eigenen Werte und stellt die Frage danach, welche davon noch immer sinnvoll sind” (Sanyal 121). Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own.  See Werner Nell’s chapter in this volume. While the Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm provides manifold notions of Heimat, it foregrounds one’s place of birth in its first two definitions: “1) heimat, das Land oder auch nur der Landstrich in dem man geboren ist; 2) heimat, der Geburtsort.” For more on how these particular, traditional notions of Heimat since modernity that focus on place of birth also include one’s socialization, see Boa 34–35.  For more on the Refugee Tent Action in Berlin-Kreuzberg, see Landry 398. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-008

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the novel’s diegesis, I will show how Erpenbeck unsettles exclusionary notions of Heimat entrenched in an idea of belonging based on a shared place of birth.⁴ Gehen, ging, gegangen engages with these traditional notions and illustrates their complicity in the creation of unwelcoming immigration laws. Yet the novel does more than just scrutinize exclusionary concepts of Heimat. Erpenbeck provides an intercultural model of home established among characters in the book based on inclusive social interactions that accept and attempt to cope with vulnerability while valuing difference. While many analyses of the novel employ a semantic lexicon closely related to the term Heimat, scholars have generally eschewed directly engaging with the fraught signifier in relation to Erpenbeck’s text (Verešová; Leskovec; Kory; Ludewig; Roth; Salvo; Steckenbiller). Even scholars who have explicitly mentioned Heimat have done so sparsely. For example, in her article on Gehen, ging, gegangen, Johanna Vollmeyer mentions Heimat in the abstract but rarely in the actual article (Vollmeyer). Furthermore, Gary Baker writes about the violence of precarity and the loss of worker identity in the novel, but his avoidance of the term Heimat leaves a deficit in secondary literature about the text (Baker). Anna Horakova’s article examines how Erpenbeck’s novel reimagines the GDR legacy of international solidarity but does not directly address Heimat at length (Horakova). By performing an analysis of Gehen, ging, gegangen that refuses to shy away from Heimat, I will draw on the insightful work conducted by these scholars to highlight how the novel provides a model of intercultural community that is not defined by its distance from an Other. These more inclusive notions of Heimat stand in contrast to the novel’s depiction of an anti-immigrant bureaucracy that constructs barriers preventing the refugees from receiving work and residence permits for Germany. The story illustrates how a future international sense of Heimat could be linked to an idea of open belonging and a common goal of sharing responsibility for everyone’s basic well-being. The refugees in Gehen, ging, gegangen establish an intersubjective home by providing mutual support to each other, resulting in strong affective solidarities. I am borrowing the term affective solidarities from Christina Schwenkel, who uses this term to discuss social relationships formed between residents of Vietnam and GDR citizens who went to Vietnam to help rebuild after the devastation of the Vietnam War. As Schwenkel notes, “A focus on affectivity does not reduce the concept of solidarity to an essentialist belief in a global humanity with shared interests and sympathies that unconditionally unite all of humankind. It does, however,

 For a critical theory of Heimat that explores these particular notions along with various other concepts of Heimat, see Blickle.

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maintain that solidarity can be more than a mere ‘politics machine’ productive of political subjectivities and state ideologies alone” (269). By pointing to specific instances of cross-cultural bonds forged between humans, Schwenkel moves beyond a rhetoric of idealism and supposed unity when addressing the idea of solidarity. By applying Schwenkel’s realistic concept of solidarity, social relationships, and emotion to my analysis of Erpenbeck’s novel – a novel that offers an abundance of nuance with regard to the challenges and benefits of forming new social relationships – I would like to conceptualize an intersubjective notion of home as something socially complex and dynamic. With the term intersubjective home, I am referring to a notion of Heimat that draws its affective power from social relationships. This intersubjective home does not base belonging on having the same cultural roots but rather on the human commonalities of vulnerability and grief on the one hand and the acceptance of nuanced, multifaceted difference on the other. Some of the differences between subjects that are often acknowledged in the novel are, in fact, the varying degrees of vulnerability and grief associated with each migrant’s unique set of life experiences. Because the novel shows how community develops between individuals at the grassroots level, it is an example of what an inclusive global Heimat might look like locally. By reconsidering Heimat from this intersubjective perspective, Erpenbeck’s novel demonstrates how Heimat’s affective power can be rechanneled away from concepts of exclusion toward a more open notion of community. This inclusive sense of community is rooted in mutual understanding of each other’s respective, unique set of losses. Characters in the novel do not find Heimat within a national or regional community (Gemeinschaft), nor within an idealized, ostensibly idyllic rural sense of Gemeinschaft, but rather find shelter in one another. Gehen, ging, gegangen’s sense of home rooted in social relationships, instead of a singular place, considers Heimat – with its fraught aura and associated historical lessons – while responsibly developing a refined vision of a cross-cultural, transnational concept of home. This concept of home offered by Erpenbeck’s literature of migration provides manifold instances of intersubjective insight as it depicts the establishment of a new community. I call this phenomenon of forming community in the novel an intercultural utopia. The word intercultural denotes the fact that bonds in the novel are forged across ethnic and national lines of belonging, while the word utopia, with its Ancient Greek roots, literally means no place, showing how a sense of home in Gehen, ging, gegangen develops through social relationships that do not necessarily require a particular geographic location to persist.

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2 Intercultural Utopia Although the novel is narrated from the questionable perspective of its European protagonist Richard, Homi Bhabha has praised Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen as a “migration masterwork” (Bhabha). Literary journalists have also lauded the novel for the most part, while some scholars have scrutinized Erpenbeck’s choice of a European protagonist in a piece about African refugees.⁵ However, some secondary literature has defended Erpenbeck’s choice of narrator/protagonist, at least in part, due to Richard’s self-criticism and the ambivalent didacticism of the story that challenges the reader to be critical of perspectives – on Africans – that are rooted in European traditions (Roth; Salvo). While effectively highlighting the problematic nature of narrating this book from a European perspective, this debate has inadvertently functioned to foreground Richard even further in public discourse and continues to distract from Erpenbeck’s depiction of an intercultural migrant community that is dynamic and thought-provoking. As the novel is part of the literature of migration, an analysis of Erpenbeck’s piece about forced migration that emphasizes the open sense of home established in the story among displaced subjects is still missing in the existing scholarship. Moreover, Erpenbeck’s model of a recoded Heimat recognizes that different subjects experience vulnerability to varying degrees and in myriad ways depending on their unique, dynamic positionality. To refer to this phenomenon of acknowledging each subject’s unique set of multiple positions on intersecting continuums of dynamic vulnerability in Erpenbeck’s novel, I borrow Michael Rothberg’s term “differential vulnerability” (9). Rothberg describes differential vulnerability as something that results from one’s unique implication in a complex entanglement of diachronic and synchronic cultural forces that emerge from the “ongoing, uneven, and destabilizing intrusion of irrevocable pasts into an unredeemed present” (9). The way the novel’s characters recognize and acknowledge this complex temporal and sociocultural phenomenon and its differing effects on the vulnerability of each individual, I argue, is the crucial element that makes a realistic attempt at intercultural utopia possible. In Gehen, ging, gegangen, the mutual acknowledgement of differential vulnerability leaves an indelible mark of solidarity on the community of displaced subjects. This becomes most evident toward the end of the novel, when Erpenbeck starts a paragraph in her usual third-person narration, re-

 Here, I echo Anna Horakova’s acknowledgement of how Bhabha praises Erpenbeck’s novel (73). For more see Bhabha and Horakova. For an example of how a literary journalist lauded the novel, see Lühmann. For an example of how a scholar criticized Erpenbeck’s choice of a European protagonist in a piece about African refugees, see Hermes.

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porting what four different people at a gathering of refugees at Richard’s house say to one another (Erpenbeck 2017, 279). Unlike in the rest of the novel before it, this narrative technique does not mention any names, and it is also unclear who the four speakers are. However, this text passage does not ignore the differences in need between the speakers. The first person to speak comments on how it is getting cold at night, and the second person to speak states that they will lend the first person their jacket. This shows how Erpenbeck, even in a text passage that does not reveal who is speaking, consistently illustrates how the acknowledgement of differential vulnerability within the group creates a sense of solidarity. In this way, the novel recognizes vulnerability without fetishizing it. The focus remains on meeting everyone’s unique needs. Differences in not only vulnerability but also in thought are valued in the novel. For example, in the last few pages, the members of the refugee group ask each other about their shared inability to find a spouse for differing reasons that are mostly tied to their refugee status. This conversation develops when Awad – one of the main characters of the story and one of the most traumatized refugees after being violently chased out of Libya – tells a story about meeting a woman three times in the subway. During the third meeting, the woman asks Awad if he will sleep with her. Awad tells her that he is not yet ready, but that he would perhaps like to later on. However, the woman stops communicating or meeting with him after that (Erpenbeck 2017, 280). Many of the refugees affirm that they have encountered similar reluctance from potential romantic partners to enter into a serious relationship during their time in Germany. But Apollo, a Tuareg from the deserts of Niger who has formed some ties in Berlin, says that he has a committed girlfriend but that he has not asked her to marry him for the sole reason that he does not want her to think he is only marrying her to increase his chances of obtaining a German work and residence permit (Erpenbeck 2017, 280). Many refugees initially disagree with this rationale and do not understand why he would refuse to marry her solely on such grounds. However, Awad eventually shows some understanding after he is questioned about it again (Erpenbeck 2017, 281). After some reflection, others in the group also demonstrate understanding. Rashid, a Yoruba from Nigeria, however, still cannot understand this missed opportunity, but his dissenting opinion is respectfully acknowledged by the group even though many do not agree (Erpenbeck 2017, 281). In this sense, Erpenbeck recognizes that the tension between conflicting ideas can actually be productive if those conflicting ideas are not perceived as obstacles to supposed harmony. The sense of community formed in the novel by individuals displaced from various locations illustrates how new connections established across cultures can provide an example of a more open, inclusive concept of Heimat.

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The very plurality of what many of the novel’s refugees consider to be their homeland(s) debunks certain narrowly conceived notions of Heimat about subjects ostensibly having only one true homeland: their place of birth. Many of the refugees in the story had already migrated from one African country to another before being forced toward Europe by political conflicts and the violence of war. As a result, numerous migrants in the novel do not identify with having only one true homeland that is their place of birth. For instance, Awad was born in Ghana, but he was raised in Libya. Awad states on occasion that Libya was his homeland (Heimatland), illustrating that he does not necessarily equate his Heimatland with his place of birth (Erpenbeck 2017, 62). Later, Awad also expresses sentiments of Heimat for Oranienplatz in Berlin, showing that his concept of Heimat is plural (Erpenbeck 2017, 181). Lamya Kaddor, the Heimat Ambassador for North RhineWestphalia, has noted that this is true for many migrants and that the term Heimat could be conceptualized beyond the singular: “I could also think of Heimat in the plural” (Kaddor). As Kaddor explains, we must finally begin to see Heimat as Heimats. Erpenbeck’s novel illustrates that these Heimats do not necessarily have to be rooted in locations. One example of this involves Richard’s observation that many of the refugees find their sense of community more in the social connections they are able to establish and maintain through cyberspace than in any sense of home in a geographical space or loyalty to a nation-state. “On every one of his visits, Richard notes that the men feel more at home in these wireless networks than in any of the countries in which they await their future” (Erpenbeck 2017, 177). In this text passage, Richard’s thoughts are narrated not directly in the first person but in the third person, by a narrator who is not omniscient and who shares Richard’s limited perspective. Erpenbeck’s narrative technique here shows both the limited perspective and vulnerability of the individual human who cannot be omniscient or be everywhere at once. However, while humans, with their dependent, fragile bodies, must exist in one space at a time, the affective power of home does not have to be entirely connected to spatial conceptions. In fact, the story demonstrates that Heimats do not have to be based on the geographical, hierarchical idea of place at all. Erpenbeck’s literature of migration shows how a sense of community develops between subjects and how the affective strength of these bonds is rooted primarily in social interaction. While Heimat contains immense affective potential for forging bonds, the fraught signifier’s sordid National Socialist past is a constant reminder of how identifying with a national/ethnic community against an Other can lead to horrific violence and atrocities. However, it is precisely because this signifier functions as a reminder and warning of the violence that national/ethnic communities engaging in Othering can commit that it is well-suited to preempt naiveté. At the same time, its affective potential to inspire the building of communities makes a carefully re-

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coded Heimat a realistic and responsible signifier of international justice and peace. By making implicit references to both the Nazi past and German colonialism while at the same time envisioning affective cross-cultural solidarities among migrants who are not from Germany, Erpenbeck’s novel seems to suggest that Heimat may be resignified to establish a global community while remaining cognizant of how dangerous Othering can be.⁶ The term Heimat could be recoded to signify visions of a potential international, utopian community based on intersubjectivity and the idea of open belonging in each locality. Kathrin Göring-Eckhard speaks of such a potential concept of Heimat as open but with a common cause.⁷ The common cause of uniting, not against an Other, but to meet everyone’s basic needs while still respecting an individual’s freedom to live a self-determined life, is at the core of Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen. Although much imagination and theorization on a broader level has gone into the project of intercultural utopia, Erpenbeck’s novel provides an example of practical interactive community-building that moves beyond the theoretical by illustrating a model for intersubjective practice. In doing so, the novel acknowledges the importance of social relationships on the level of the individual and smaller communities without naively positing that these communities are somehow entirely separately imagined by larger national communities and their narratives of national history. The use of a literary representation to provide such a model is quite fitting. As Azade Seyhan observes, “Literary expressions of contemporary sociopolitical formations offer critical insights into the manifold meanings of history and take us to galaxies of experience where no theory has gone before” (5). Erpenbeck’s novel does exactly that by showing how this contemporary community of refugees is affected by German bureaucracy. For instance, the third-person narrator of Gehen, ging, gegangen reflects on how, with Dublin II, European countries without a coast on the Mediterranean Sea bought themselves the right to avoid having to listen to the stories of refugees who have migrated across the Mediterranean (Erpenbeck 2017, 67). The narrator’s general reflections are then tied to the specific observation that Awad “can’t get the images of the dead lying on the streets of Tripoli out of his mind” (Erpenbeck 2017, 67). However, German immigration authorities are not obligated to hear Awad’s account of his past and do not have to recognize that he is a traumatized refugee in need of asylum. Nevertheless, despite the fact that Awad and many of the other refugees in the story are often not heard by German immigration authorities, the migrants form a transnational community  For an example of a reference to Germany’s Nazi past in Erpenbeck’s novel, see Erpenbeck 2017, 18. For examples of references to German colonialism, see Erpenbeck 2017, 36–37, 49.  Göring-Eckhard’s original German words were “dieses Offene, dieses Gemeinsame.” For more, see Göring-Eckhard.

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within this national context that proves to be difficult to disperse due to the strength of its affective solidarities.

3 Establishing Community through Social Interaction A closer look at the role played by grief in the text reveals how undertones of loss within the concept of Heimat can lead to an unrealistic desire for one’s environment to remain unchanged. However, as the novel shows, changes and disruptions to the status quo can induce productive insights and glimpses into others’ perspectives that can increase empathy and understanding. For instance, at the beginning of the novel, Richard experiences melancholy about his academic career coming to an end (Erpenbeck 2017, 6). Then, toward the end of the novel, when Richard learns that Osarobo’s restlessness is a result of continually having to change his temporary place of residence, both Osarobo and Richard show a mutual understanding for one another’s differential feelings of restlessness. In this case, it is Richard in his current position of privilege who must recognize and acknowledge that it is Osarobo who, after being forced to leave behind his friends and family in both Niger and Libya, has been constantly displaced from refugee shelter to refugee shelter in Berlin, while Richard’s idleness during his retirement has been a matter of choice (Erpenbeck 2017, 237). In this sense, the novel offers productive social connections that acknowledge differential loss to alleviate grief. Grief, in turn, takes on the role of allowing subjects – who have been displaced for varying reasons and who are embedded within differential histories – to forge bonds. The common ground of grief and even displacement – albeit due to different circumstances – shared by the refugees and Richard help them to form social connections with each other. Given Richard’s past as a displaced person from Silesia, the story shows that even a person ostensibly rooted in a community may have at some point been forced to move. With its rhetoric of a lost Heimat in the east, the Federation of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen) drew attention to the displacement of those violently forced to leave areas such as Silesia (as Richard was) and the Sudetenland after World War II (Eigler 3). Nineteenth-century discourses related to Heimat, of which remnants still linger in the term’s connotations, often imply that one does not appreciate one’s Heimat until one has lost it or is separated from it. As Alexander von Villers noted in the late nineteenth century, “Distance leads to Heimat, loss leads to ownership” (Villers 11). Loss in the form of homesickness is prevalent among many of the novel’s characters, but the homesickness that the characters in the book express is not for a place: it is for loved ones.

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The refugees and Richard overcome their instincts to suppress their own expressions of bereavement for lost loved ones, allowing them to form connections with one another that mutually acknowledge a universal (yet differential) human vulnerability to loss. Awad mourns his father’s death and shares the pain he feels about this along with his struggles to locate his own identity (Erpenbeck 2017, 63, 65). Awad tells Richard, “My father is dead, he says. And me – I don’t know who I am anymore” (Erpenbeck 2017, 63). Richard often thinks about his deceased wife (Erpenbeck 2017, 16), and he finally shares this with his friends on the last page of the novel (Erpenbeck 2017, 283). In this scene, Richard describes how his wife bled after having an illegal abortion that Richard had pressured her into. She did not die then, but she was so emotionally affected by the aftermath that the resulting depression may have contributed to her death many years later. Ali asks Richard in the last conversation of the book about the fear Richard felt in response to seeing his wife’s blood after the abortion: “What were you afraid of? That she might die, says Richard. Yes, he says, at that moment I hated her because she might die” (Erpenbeck 2017, 283). Here, Richard shares how he feared future loss. However, unlike Richard in his youth, some of the refugees in the novel have no one left to lose. Instead of fearing pessimistic thoughts about possible future losses, as Richard did when he saw his wife bleed, the refugee Rashid is afraid to think about his past. Because Rashid’s memories are so closely connected to grief, he fears reminiscing about good times at home with family: “Rashid said to Richard in one of their conversations that not even memories of his wonderful life with his family could console him, since these memories were bound up with the pain of loss” (Erpenbeck 2017, 277). Instead of repressing grief, Rashid shares his emotions with Richard. When Rashid tells Richard about the night his father was murdered and the family house burned down earlier in the novel, he recognizes and acknowledges this memory despite his fears of the pain of loss (Erpenbeck 2017, 86–90). Not only mutually acknowledging grief but also admitting shame helps to establish connections in the novel. According to sociologist Graham Scambler, shame implies an “ontological deficit” (2). This ontological deficit applies not only to the bereavement of loved ones but also to material impoverishment and social detachment. In the social and material world, if one has less, one often begins to believe one is less. Undeserved shame regarding material lack develops in many refugees, and the fact that they remain largely invisible in Western society exacerbates this self-perception of being less than others. Many of the refugees are ashamed that they are arbitrarily unable to support themselves or their families due to being displaced by the violence of war, stemming from conflicts beyond their control. For example, Abdusalam, a refugee from coastal Nigeria, and a few other refugees sing, “A mission without success brings disgrace. Then it is better to die than to

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feel this shame forever” (Erpenbeck 2017, 275). While Abdusalam unjustly feels shame about not receiving permission to work in Germany, Richard justly feels shame about his false conceptions that reveal he has had dehumanizing views about people living on the African continent (Erpenbeck 2017, 169). “For much of his life, he’s hoped in a tiny back corner of his soul that people from Africa mourn their dead less. Death there has been a mass phenomenon for so long now. Now, this back corner of his soul is occupied instead by shame: shame that for most of his lifetime he’s taken the easy way out” (Erpenbeck 2017, 169). In this way, shame can be caused by the realization of one’s internal choice to ignore global inequity and the perpetuation of implicit bias as Richard’s experience illustrates, or it can be caused by external forces beyond one’s control as Abdusalam’s experience shows. In spite of – and partially because of – these tribulations resulting from shame, the characters, despite their losses and sentiments of inadequacy, feel gratitude for what they do have: life. This gratitude develops in social spaces of community. Urban, public sites such as Oranienplatz and Alexanderplatz are repeatedly visited by many characters in the novel and provide a space for social interaction to take place with fluid lines of belonging. Although government bureaucracy tacitly coerced the refugees to leave the protest camp at Oranienplatz, they return there often (Erpenbeck 2017, 181). As Awad puts it: But mostly we go to Oranienplatz, that tent is still there. The men mean the information tent that has remained on the square as part of the agreement with the Berlin Senate, it’s been set on fire three times by xenophobic Berliners and has been put up again three times. What do you do there? We stand around and talk. I will always revere the memory of Oranienplatz. (Erpenbeck 2017, 181)

Oranienplatz is one of the few places Awad can call home, but despite efforts to drive him and other refugees away from it, it remains associated with shared experience and invokes a sense of relief, if not gratitude. Living with others who were able to empathize with a traumatic past while facing a precarious future created a sense of community. According to Andrea Leskovec, new emotions of a more dynamic sense of belonging than that offered by many notions of Heimat can indeed be achieved by crossing borders. These can be new social spaces or shared experiences through which the feeling of belonging emerges (Leskovec 137). As Leskovec asserts, socializing strengthens this sense of shared community. In the novel, social connections help to ease the detachment caused by “loss of worker identity” leading to “confusion and depression” for both the refugees and Richard.⁸

 For more on the loss of worker identity among those who, like Richard, were socialized in the

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The refugees’ disorientation brings much more pressure than the protagonist’s because they still have the responsibility of supporting families as well as themselves (and do not have legal permission to stay and are not protected by citizenship). Richard thinks in response to his retirement, “Everything would still function without him” (Erpenbeck 2017, 6). Relevant here is Richard’s GDR background, a nation in which worker identity carried a high amount of both cultural and social capital. As a result, the former East German experiences grief about losing his self-image as an esteemed and respectable worker, but this loss does not involve the sort of stress that the refugees must live with about a current and possible future lack of economic capital as long as they have no permission to work in Germany. The question of how to value this difference between challenges faced by different people while building social relationships as a way of constructing more inclusive concepts of home is at the center of the novel. While the valuation of difference is important to the story, the common ground between many of the refugees and Richard undeniably strengthens their relationships. The text emphasizes that Richard shares a common love of domestic routines with many of the migrants. For example, Rashid and Ithemba, two skilled tradesmen who both hope to someday receive permission to work in Germany, pass the time by cooking, while Awad works as a dishwasher.⁹ Richard constantly likes to keep tidy and complete grocery shopping lists for his trips to the store, or Kaufhalle, as he refers to it using the East German word (Erpenbeck 2017, 22). Furthermore, many refugees in Erpenbeck’s novel share the common ground of struggling with the aftermath of trauma. For instance, toward the beginning of the novel, Awad and Rashid both share thorough recollections about some of the atrocities they witnessed while other refugees provide brief but also graphic oral accounts.¹⁰ This common ground of mutually understanding the effects of the trauma suffered by witnessing violence helps to create solidarity among the refugees. However, although commonalities play an important role in the story’s social relationships, the novel also shows the fallacies of trusting assumptions about harmony in an imperfect world. The absolute fusion of ideas does not allow for any productive tensions to result in/from critical thinking. In fact, the total merging of philosophies is suspect due to its inevitable inequality in a competitive world of wills. As Azade Seyhan

GDR and worked there as adults but later became unemployed in reunified Germany, see Berdahl 193.  For more on this newly formed community’s common love of domestic routines in Erpenbeck’s novel, see Baker 518.  For Awad’s narration of his traumatic past, see Erpenbeck 2017, 59–64; for Rashid’s story, see Erpenbeck 2015, 84–90.

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observes, the fusion between familiarity and foreignness almost consumes the foreign (6). This shows the danger of expecting that migrants become well integrated. Whenever we assume that we must integrate someone into our society, then we also mean there is a norm that is better and above others (Grjasnowa 131). By providing examples of social relationships that do not require complete compatibility to persist, the novel demonstrates that differences lead to critical thought made possible by friction. An example of this can be seen between Rashid and Richard when each of them asks a different question in response to the fact that Rashid’s father was murdered. Richard asks if the perpetrator has been identified, while Rashid asks – after an awkward silence – why people kill other people, leading Richard to the insight that Rashid’s line of inquiry is much more important (Erpenbeck 2017, 88–89). As this example illustrates, differences of opinion (when seen as opportunities to expand insight as opposed to obstacles) can do just the opposite of hindering peaceful co-existence: their friction can inspire lines of inquiry that address underlying causes of violence. While complete fusion on the host’s terms absurdly promises to somehow erase suffering entirely, compassion promises more realistically to mitigate it. According to Baker, Erpenbeck depicts the mitigation of differences between Richard and some of the refugees “via compassionate one-on-one contact and sincere care for each other” (505). Compassion allows the characters in the novel to build community (Gemeinschaft), and as Erpenbeck’s novel shows, Gemeinschaft can at times be even more important than what the greater society (Gesellschaft) can provide. For instance, although the German government forces the refugees to disperse (Erpenbeck 2017, 180), many decide to stay together in Berlin: “A friend, a good friend, is the best thing in the world. Indeed, the men say that they would rather stay in Berlin without any money, even illegally if need be, as a group” (Erpenbeck 2017, 183). German concepts of Heimat along with Eurocentric notions of education (Bildung; Steckenbiller 71) may be behind the forces threatening to disperse the community of refugees, but a sense of community persists in the novel despite these dispersive forces.

4 Critique of National Narratives Along with its emphasis on community, Gehen, ging, gegangen also undermines – by providing productively haunting reminders of Eurocentric didacticism – notions that threaten to disperse the community of refugees. The verb “to go” expresses movement. Constant movement without rest or any lasting sense of home for humans – all of whom have dependent, fragile bodies – causes anxiety, frustration, and depression. Ceaseless displacement significantly hinders the interactions that

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help to form meaningful social relationships, which are key to sentiments of home. The community of refugees in Erpenbeck’s novel experience such repeated displacement. For example, after the German government basically expels the refugees from Oranienplatz by forcing them into a supposed agreement, they are dispersed into separate groups (Erpenbeck 2017, 180). Although the refugees are continually displaced, even within Berlin, the characters repeatedly arrive at the same places: Alexanderplatz, Oranienplatz, and Richard’s house (Erpenbeck 2017, 188, 276). This phenomenon in the text works to create the familiarity of home in these spaces but at times has a haunting undercurrent, reminding both Richard and the refugees of loved ones who have died (Erpenbeck 2017, 277, 281). In addition, uncanny undercurrents prompt them to remember their feelings of uselessness as people without work: “If you could see me doing my work, you would see a completely other Rashid. For me working is as natural as breathing” (Erpenbeck 2017, 194). As the previous quote shows, Erpenbeck’s novel illustrates how the opportunity to productively contribute to a community by providing work skills is an essential part of feeling at home in a place. Furthermore, this cyclical spatiality throughout the novel symbolizes the refugees’ Sisyphean efforts to finally arrive in a lasting home with regular work and routine as well as Richard’s undertaking to deconstruct his own ingrained partiality towards Eurocentric thinking. Richard’s Eurocentrism in the novel consists not of explicitly white supremacist views but rather of implicit cultural biases within a world view that emphasizes European cultural history. The novel is cyclical not only due to its spatiality but also because it features a continually reemerging awareness of biased didacticism. In a classroom where migrants are the students, the teacher utters an inadvertent double entendre during a language acquisition lesson: “Ich bin super, Apollo says suddenly.¹¹ Yes, she [the German teacher] says, you are super, but now let’s practice forming the past” (Erpenbeck 2017, 74).¹² The English version of the text uses the formulation “past tense,” but I have omitted the word “tense” to show the double entendre in the German version of the text. The teacher’s comment about forming the past is key to understanding the novel’s subversion of traditional notions of Heimat rooted in constructed narratives of national history. The title of the novel involves past-tense verb forms, which is a clue that this scene is crucial to the didactic tone of the entire text. This comment, literally worded in German as forming the past (“die Vergangenheit bilden”; Erpenbeck 2015, 81), helps readers to recognize the influence

 Apollo is Richard’s Eurocentric nickname for one of the refugees.  “Ich bin super, sagt plötzlich Apoll.” “Jaja, sagt sie” [die Deutschlehrerin] “aber wir wollen jetzt die Vergangenheit bilden” (Erpenbeck 2015, 81).

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narratives have on cultural memory. Narratives are not the whole past. Instead, they are biased reconstructions. According to Miodrag M. Vukčević, “Referring to the way refugee subjectivity is perceived, it becomes very clear that the cultural pattern of the host community is determined by its historical experience” (78). Because the historical experience of a nation related through narratives is based on constructed collective memory, Erpenbeck’s novel examines the tension between the individual and the collective memory of a larger community or nation. National narratives, including those containing myths of Heimat, can be absorbed and perpetuated by myriad individuals. The young nation of Germany, which has only been a state since 1871, has already been associated with numerous mythical national narratives involving ostensibly ancient traditions. One such narrative from which some constructs of German identity draw is Germania by Tacitus. Tacitus is quoted by Ithemba’s lawyer near the end of Gehen, ging, gegangen. On the surface, the quote is not used to reinforce xenophobia; rather, Tacitus is ostensibly used to show what excellent hosts the Germanic people purportedly were around 90 C.E.: Surely you are acquainted with the lovely section in Tacitus’s Germania devoted to our ancestors’ hospitality? and now the lawyer begins his recital: It is accounted a sin to turn any man away from your door. The lawyer claps the book shut and asks Richard: And nowadays? And nowadays? asks Richard in return, feeling a faint sense of hope. Now, two thousand years later, we’re left with section 23, paragraph I of the Residence Act (Erpenbeck 2017, 250–251).

The lawyer refers here to his own extensive explanation that precedes this passage about modern bureaucracy not being in line with supposed basic German values and their ostensibly long-standing tradition (Erpenbeck 2017, 250). The text passage above, while claiming hospitality, is pervaded by a national pride that essentializes the Germans as inherently excellent hosts who, purportedly, have unwaveringly always been so. This lawyer is the eerie personification of lingering ideas that resurface. Not only the lawyer’s mannerisms and language use suggest that he time-travelled from the nineteenth century, but also his German national pride. German national pride, such as that expressed by the lawyer, drives the continued reconstruction and perpetuation of a singular, mythically unifying identity and past. These themes are accompanied by a nineteenth-century nostalgia for some vague time period before modernity that purportedly privileged villages and nature over cities. During the Industrial Revolution, Heimat was strongly associated with nature, especially with mountains and forests that, with their clear air, were the antithesis to crammed, polluted cities (Sanyal 105–106). This temporal longing for a distant, imagined past mixed with national patriotism perpetuates these nineteenth-century sentiments, which pervade the following scene

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where Richard and Ithemba leave the lawyer’s office without Ithemba having received any real help: The lawyer places one hand over his heart and bows. Then he opens the double doors and says: If you’ll be so kind, thus indicating that their appointment is over. As [Richard] passes the coat rack on his way out with Ithemba – there really is a top hat on the shelf above – he finds himself almost entirely convinced that this lawyer must have [come] from [the nineteenth] century. (Erpenbeck 2017, 251)

While this is the first explicit reference to the afterlife of such nineteenth-century sentiments in the novel, it is not the first implicit reference. Eerily recurring modern notions of Heimat are critiqued throughout the novel. In this text passage, the fact that the lawyer bows and says, “if you’ll be so kind,” opening the door for the men and letting them out as a tacit signal that they need to leave, reveals contradictions in the concept of old-fashioned German politeness.¹³ The so-called pleasantries in the lawyer’s mannerisms actually function as a means of convoluting the exclusion of perceived Others and perpetuating the status quo. In other words, this immigration lawyer personifies a Heimat-as-fortress stance disguised in formalities – like immigration law and bureaucracy – to protect a status quo of global inequality. As a result, Erpenbeck exposes the fallacy of projecting this unequal-status-quo-preserving Heimat-as-fortress ideology entirely onto only those who are informal and uneducated. Longing for an impossibly unchanging Heimat can lead to a not only monolithic but also ahistorical understanding of the concept. Björn Höcke, the speaker of the political party Alternative for Germany (AfD: Alternative für Deutschland) in Thuringia, uses the definition that was common in the 1800s almost verbatim, echoing the notion of Heimat based on birthplace mentioned earlier in this chapter. “There are three dimensions of Heimat, first the geographic dimension, that is the landscape of nature which I am born into [emphasis mine]. Then we have the cultural dimension. Those are the traditions, the myths, and the fairy-tale books, and then finally there is the social dimension. Those are the commonly held values, customs, and norms” (Höcke). Unlike Erpenbeck’s novel, which illustrates how valuing differences between people can strengthen a sense of home, Höcke’s notion of Heimat as described in the quote above focuses entirely on common ground. According to Höcke, people with the same Heimat must come from the same geographic area while also sharing the same cultural traditions and social values. In addition, Höcke insinuates that Heimat is something static that cannot react

 Erpenbeck’s German version of this text passage contains many especially old-fashioned, polite forms of nineteenth-century speech, for example, “Sie erlauben” (Erpenbeck 2015, 264).

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to difference or dynamic changes in a community. Höcke implies that the soul of the German people has remained unchanged through two world wars, different political systems, and massive technical and social revolutions (Sanyal 109). Nineteenth-century nostalgia for a premodern nationalist future paired with illusions of a harmonious Heimat are uncannily recurring themes in the text. These desired afterlives, the novel shows, can hinder progress toward more inclusionary, differentiated notions of home. The lawyer insists that Germans are inherently open hosts by nature (Erpenbeck 2017, 251). According to the lawyer, corruptive modern bureaucracy, with its laws that go against the simple nature of the German, is to blame for the lawyer’s inability to help Ithemba obtain a residence permit. However, the desire for a mythically constructed German identity can lead to an exclusionary ideology that motivates the writing of laws that keep people from receiving permission to immigrate. Bureaucracy provides a generic they to blame, while the national narrative of hospitality ensures that many German people can still view themselves as moral hosts with open doors. However, this motif of German morality rooted in culturally constructed narratives that ostensibly unify the German people is countered in the novel by the solidarity based on real human need shown among the community of refugees. It serves in the text as a disruption to idealizations of an essentialized moral Germanness that is hospitable to others while supposedly being in tune with (an aestheticized) nature. In this way, the novel Gehen, ging, gegangen exposes the absurdity of some of the abstract essentialisms that still influence individuals and discourses not only in Germany but also throughout Western society.

5 Conclusion Taking a closer look at Erpenbeck’s novel reveals not only a nuanced critique of Heimat tropes but also a rerooting of Heimat, taking it away from a notion of exclusionary belonging based on place of origin and shifting it toward an inclusive, intersubjective notion of home. The migrants’ interactions create a sense of home that is individualized and contingent upon mobile and open – not stagnant and closed – modes of belonging. While illusions in more traditional notions of Heimat reinforce the values of redemption, resolution, and repression that fuel the exclusionary matrix, Erpenbeck’s novel provides insights into how these contested notions are subverted. As a result, interruptions to purported harmony reveal that the traditional construct of Heimat is an inadequate antidote to alienation. In fact, the novel shows there are ultimately no remedies for estrangement. However, more realistic approaches demonstrated by the characters in the novel – like communicative personal contact as a way of building meaningful relationships – can

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be more effective in mitigating detachment. While the traditional conception of belonging rooted in place of origin is incapable of ameliorating the pain of severance, refugees in the novel form bonds that create positive sentiments of home in a precarious geopolitical world order of mass migration and war violence. These sentiments produce emotional valences similar to the feeling of Heimat, but the community of migrants in the novel does not use the term as a weapon to exclude perceived Others. Erpenbeck’s novel shows through its sparse yet explicit use of the word Heimat that the term itself is not indispensable. However, as the novel also demonstrates, the term could be effectively recoded to signify an intercultural, international concept of community that acknowledges universal but differential vulnerability. Although German immigration authorities – both those depicted in the novel and those in reality in 2014 – were able to clear the refugees from Oranienplatz, the intersubjective home established by the community of migrants in the novel proved difficult to expunge. The refugees were not allowed to stay at Oranienplatz, but many did not disperse and remained together as a group in Berlin, with Richard among others. Rethinking home through intersubjectivity, as opposed to the concept of place, gives new empowerment to the community of refugees in the novel who understand that the group itself – with its shared interactions – constitutes home for the novel’s main characters. While Oranienplatz was the space in which this sense of home developed, it later proves unessential to the migrants’ ability to maintain their affective solidarities. Outside of the novel’s diegesis, although Oranienplatz was cleared of refugees in 2014, future national laws that continue to define the nation-state as a walled fortress of exclusion might find less support from legislators and their constituents who have read Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen. In its pages, a new model of Heimat rooted in care for human beings – instead of national or regional imaginaries – remains, with its ideas ready to be absorbed and disseminated.

Works Cited Baker, Gary L. “The Violence of Precarity and the Appeal of Routine in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2018, pp. 504–521. Berdahl, Daphne. Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland. U of California P, 1999. Bhabha, Homi. “Statelessness and Death: Reflections on the Burdened Life.” Cornell School of Criticism and Theory 18 June, 2018. Blickle, Peter. Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland. Camden House, 2002.

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Boa, Elizabeth. “Some Versions of Heimat: Goethe and Hölderlin around 1800. Frenssen and Mann around 1900.” Heimat: At the Intersection of Memory and Space, edited by Friederike Eigler and Jens Kugele, De Gruyter, 2012, pp. 34–52. Eigler, Friederike. Heimat, Space, Narrative: Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion. Camden House, 2014. Erpenbeck, Jenny. Gehen, ging, gegangen. Ernst Klett, 2015. Erpenbeck, Jenny. Go, Went, Gone. Translated by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions Books, 2017. Göring-Eckhard, Kathrin. “Heimat Deutschland – nur für Deutsche oder offen für alle.” Hart aber fair. ARD, 25 February 2019. Grimm, Jakob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Heimat.” Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 10, edited by Moritz Heyne, Hirzel, 1877, pp. 864–866. woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB#1. Accessed 2 September 2022. Grjasnowa, Olga. “Privilegien.” Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Ullstein, 2020, pp. 130–139. Hermes, Stefan. “Grenzen der Repräsentation. Zur Inszenierung afrikanisch-europäischer Begegnungen in Jenny Erpenbecks Roman Gehen, ging, gegangen.” Acta Germanica/German Studies in Africa, vol. 44, no. 1, 2016, pp. 179–191. Höcke, Björn. “Was bedeutet Heimat?” Fakt ist! aus Erfurt. MDR, 16 April 2018. Horakova, Anna. “Paradigms of Refuge: Reimagining GDR Legacy and International Solidarity in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen.” Transit, vol. 12, no. 2, 2020, pp. 70–89. Kaddor, Lamya. “Was bedeutet Heimat?” North-Rhine Westphalia Dialog with Lamya Kaddor and Lars Werner. Forschungsinstitute für gesellschaftliche Weiterentwicklung, 12 July 2018. Kory, Beate Petra. “Im Dickicht der deutschen Asylbürokratie: Jenny Erpenbecks Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015) und Abbas Khiders Ohrfeige (2016) im Vergleich.” Auswanderung und Identität: Erfahrungen von Exil, Flucht und Migration in der deutschsprachigen Literatur, edited by Christel Baltes-Löhr, Beate Petra Kory, and Gabriela Sandor, Transcript, 2019, pp. 107–130. Landry, Olivia. “‘Wir sind alle Oranienplatz’! Space for Refugees and Social Justice in Berlin.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 51, no. 4, November 2015, pp. 398–413. Leskovec, Andrea. “Grenzziehung und Grenzüberschreitung: Zugehörigkeit als Thema literarischer Texte.” Acta Germanica/German Studies in Africa, vol. 46, no. 1, 2018. pp. 136–150. Ludewig, Alexandra. “Jenny Erpenbeck’s Roman Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015). Eine zeitlose Odyssee und eine zeitspezifische unerhörte Begebenheit.” Niemandsbuchten und Schutzbefohlene: Flucht-Räume und Flüchtlingsfiguren in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur, edited by Carsten Gansel and Hermann Korte, Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2017, pp. 269–286. Lühmann, Hannah. “Ein Roman als Crashkurs in Flüchtlingskunde.” Welt, 31 August 2015. https:// www.welt.de/kultur/literarischewelt/article145830887/Ein-Roman-als-Crashkurs-in-Fluechtling skunde.html. Accessed 21 July 2021. Roth, Daniela. “The Functionalization of the Figure of the Refugee and the Role of the Bildungsbürgertum in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen (2015) and Bodo Kirchhoff’s Widerfahrnis (2016).” Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik, vol. 11, no. 1, 2020, pp. 101–124. Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford UP, 2019. Salvo, Sophie. “The Ambivalent Didacticism of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, vol. 94, no. 4, 2019, pp. 345–362. Sanyal, Mithu. “Zuhause.” Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Ullstein, 2019, pp. 101–121. Scambler, Graham. A Sociology of Shame and Blame: Insiders Versus Outsiders. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

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Schwenkel, Christina. “Affective Solidarities and East German Reconstruction of Postwar Vietnam.” Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. Berghahn Books, 2015, pp. 267–292. Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton UP, 2001. Shafi, Monika. “’Nobody loves a refugee’: The Lessons of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Novel Gehen, ging, gegangen.” Gegenwartsliteratur, vol. 16, no. 1, 2017, pp. 185–208. Steckenbiller, Christiane. “Futurity, Aging, and Personal Crises: Writing about Refugees in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015) and Bodo Kirchhoff’s Widerfahrnis (2016).” The German Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 1, 2019, pp. 68–86. Tacitus, Cornelius. Tacitus Germania. B.G. Teubner, 1930. Verešová, Erika. “Subjektivation und Identitätsformung im Prozess des Gehens: Gedankliche Wege von Thomas Bernhard und Jenny Erpenbeck.” Auswanderung und Identität: Erfahrungen von Exil, Flucht und Migration in der deutschsprachigen Literatur, edited by Christel Baltes-Löhr, Beate Petra Kory, and Gabriela Sandor, Transcript, 2019, pp. 131–148. Vollmeyer, Johanna. “‘Der Mensch wird erst am Du zum Ich.’ Die Konstruktion von Identität und Alterität in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Roman Gehen, ging, gegangen.” Revista de Filologia Alemana, vol. 25, no. 1, 2017, pp. 181–200. Von Villers, Alexander. “Briefe eines Unbekannten.” Druck und Verlag von Carl Gerholds Sohn, vol. 1, no. 2, 1887, p. 11. Vukčević, Miodrag M. “The Perception of a State of Insecurity in Literature on Global Occurances. Gehen, ging, gegangen vs. Die Flucht.” Alman Dili ve Edebiyati Dergisi – Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur, vol. 2, no. 40, 2018, pp. 77–102.

Part 4 Heimat and the Other

Vanessa D. Plumly

Black German Orientational Heimat Architextures in Noah Sow’s Die Schwarze Madonna: Afrodeutscher Heimatkrimi (2019) Black Madonna statues and images can be found and are revered worldwide. They are an art historical object of curiosity and embody religion, politics, and the quest for social justice. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, these icons have experienced a cultural rebirth in the Western world. The previous one occurred during the European Renaissance in the twelfth century (Fox). In 2018, African American Chicago-born and based artist Theaster Gates opened his exhibition “Black Madonna” at the Kunstmuseum Basel, noting “‘I was super-interested in how powerful women […] seem to be a solution that the world is never looking for’” (Sooke n.p.). One of his goals with this exhibition was “to celebrate black female images” considering them to be “everyday women who do miraculous things.” Summing up the exhibition, he explains that it “weaves back and forth from religious adoration to political manifesto to self-empowerment to historical reflection.” The centering of powerful Black women and/as Black Madonnas in Gates’s exhibition with its multiple and winding orientations rather than linear approach resonates with diasporic Black German artist, activist, and author, Noah Sow’s 2019 detective novel Die Schwarze Madonna: Afrodeutscher Heimatkrimi (The Black Madonna: Afro-German Heimat Detective Story).¹ A first in this genre,² Sow’s detective novel introduces the protagonist Fatou Fall, a recently unemployed Black German department store detective from Hamburg. Fall undertakes an unofficial investigation after she and her daughter Yesim bear witness to a crime committed in the world-renowned chapel that houses the Black Madonna in Altötting, Bavaria. This initial crime structuring the novel’s plot is racially motivated and erroneously frames Blackness and Muslim identity as suspect. As a result, Fall’s daughter compels Fall to uncover the motivations behind the act. She succeeds with the help of her new friend Grace. All three represent powerful women performing marvelous deeds and offering solutions to the crime that white inhabitants of the town are not looking for, willfully ignore, or desire to sweep under the rug.  All translations are my own except where otherwise noted.  At the time of writing, the novel is still sui generis. See also Plumly’s “Auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte” on the evolution of Black German detective fiction (407–409). Mel Currie self-published his crime novel Just Before Too Late in 2019, in which the murderer has an Afro-German mother. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-009

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Similar to the function of the Black Madonna in the world of art, detective novels thematize societal problems and seek justice.³ Sow lives in Hamburg – like her protagonist Fall – and is an anti-racist activist. She is one of the founding members of the Black media watch group Der Braune Mob e.V. (The Brown Mob). Sow’s activist work and life experiences informed her first book, Deutschland SchwarzWeiss (Germany BlackWhite, 2008), in which she took on the challenging task of educating white Germans about everyday and institutional racism. In both of her books, Sow emphasizes how the past continues to animate present-day Germany and inform Black German identity and (non‐)belonging. In choosing to write her first work of fiction in the detective novel genre, Sow further informs readers about historical and contemporary injustices in Germany including, but not limited to, colonialism and racism. Die Schwarze Madonna also attests to the heterogeneity and intersectionality of Black Germans. The building of Black German identity, per Tina Campt, is process oriented. Campt stresses that “‘[t]exture’ connotes multiplicity and plurality without fragmentation. It is not a static construction but shifts and changes contingently” because of relationality (117). This is likewise applicable to Black Germans’ conceptualization of Heimat in that its relationality in space, time, and in connection with others contours its meaning. There need not be a hierarchizing of elements of identity since texture makes several alignments possible (117). These “spacetime” dimensions of Blackness, as Michelle Wright refers to them, are fundamentally orientational (4). They also resonate with Sara Ahmed’s queer reading of “bodies and spaces as orientated” through “homing devices” (12, 9). In this chapter, I argue – following Fatima El-Tayeb’s theoretical reading of the verb – that Noah Sow “queers” Heimat’s national and hegemonic architecture by “building a community based on the shared experience of multiple, contradictory positionalities” (xxxvi).⁴ This queering produces what I refer to as Heimat architextures that disrupt dominant and exclusionary Heimat constructions. They are not firmly in place but rather continuously being built in what Wright regards as “Epiphenomenal time” or the “now” that considers Blackness as both a construct (past, present, and future) and as phenomenological and context-dependent (Wright 4). Black German Heimat-making in Die Schwarze Madonna counters the white (European) racialized and sexualized frame of Heimat that unjustly assumes that being Black and German, queer and family-oriented, Muslim and liberated, among other combinations, are incompatible and contradictory positionalities.  See, for example, the introductions to Katharina Hall’s Crime Fiction in German and Faye Stewart’s German Feminist Queer Crime Fiction: Politics, Justice and Desire.  See also Plumly’s “Auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte” for more on this queering as it relates to Sow’s and El-Tayeb’s work (417).

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The intersecting layers of exclusion reinforced through a white German Heimat landscape and its corresponding institutional architecture or its manmade structures, such as anti-Black racism, cisheteropatriarchy, and anti-Muslim racism are therefore exposed in the novel. Thus, Black German Heimat architextures and Heimat(t)räume (Heimat spaces/dreams) operate in contrast to contracting, forcibly stagnant, or linear architectures of the imagined national German Heimat on both individual and collective levels. Heimat can be unidirectional and harden or solidify in the building of unproductive walls and borders or it can be porous, malleable, and queerly oriented. Often, it operates in both ways within the same spacetime; it depends on who employs the concept, as Die Schwarze Madonna makes clear. To understand the dominant concept of German Heimat as architectural permits a reading of it through the distinctive elements or parts that contribute to its overall form and function: whom it serves as a space/place and whom it excludes.⁵ In the Western world, architecture takes both the white, able-bodied, straight male and Christianity as its erecting and erected norms.⁶ An architectural rendering of Heimat is apt given past and present political, religious, and cultural disputes. For example, Muslim communities’ design and erection of mosques in the Germanspeaking world are met with controversy from the white Christian majority. Additionally, the historical presence and placement of synagogues operate(d) not only as safe havens but also sites of antisemitic violence and pogroms, signaling the non-belonging to and the exclusion of Jewish populations from the German landscape. The 2018 renaming of Germany’s Bundesministerium des Innern (Federal Ministry of the Interior) to the Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau (!) und Heimat (Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community) confirms such an architectural scaffolding of Heimat. This reconfiguring, in my reading of Heimat, seeks to fortify the walls of (non‐)belonging that the dominant architectural structures of a national, homogenizing, and hierarchical German Heimat erect.⁷

 See Léopold Lambert’s work on the normatized ideal body on which much of architecture is based.  Leontine Sagan’s film Girls in Uniform (1931) exhibits in the opening scene how architecture, partriarchy, and heterosexuality are dominant, intersecting norms, even in an all-female film, and white queer orientations and white female structures can bend but not completely undo these supposedly rigid structures. One should also consider Heimat’s repeated attachment to domesticity and the power men have over the space of the home.  One of the ministry’s first actions was a poster campaign mounted throughout Germany. It advertised financial support for the “voluntary return” of foreigners living in Germany to their countries of origin. For Jewish-Germans, this campaign resonated with Germany’s historical past, and for Muslims in Germany, the sign had clear implications that their presence in Germany was not desired, as it was posted in English, German, French, Arabic, Russian, Paschtu, and Farsi.

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1 The Architecture of an Exclusionary German Heimat Whiteness is the dominant or “chief ” structure in the legacy of Heimat. As sociologist Wulf D. Hund sees it, “‘Heimat’ represents a historical place in which racism has been at home longer than the Germans” (10). Less a Black German preoccupation with Heimat than a white German one, this fixation on Heimat necessitates Black Germans to lay claim to the cultural concept on their own terms.⁸ Still, Black Germans do not simply construct and imagine their Heimat in response to its hegemonic iteration. They do so as an act of creation and preservation in the present that is oriented toward imagining and producing radical futures (Piesche 420–421, 424). Though race is a fundamental exclusionary mechanism that operates in the consolidation of a majoritarian white German Heimat construction, it does not operate alone. Exploring the intersectionality of Heimat at the state/institutional level and at the local/individual level, the editors of Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Your Heimat is our Nightmare, 2019) elaborate on the organizing principles of the national model in Germany.⁹ They explain how Heimat has always been the longing for an ideal, rather than something that exists (Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah 9). This ideal consists of “a homogenous, white Christian society, in which men have the say, women, above all, are occupied with having children and other realities simply do not occur” (9). While this volume is one of the first polemical texts to pinpoint the political dimensions of Heimat that preclude minority communities’ acceptance into German Heimat, it is not the first to call into question the hegemonic conditioning of racialized belonging, gender and sexual identity, and Germanness/Europeanness that manufactures supposed others/Others (El-Tayeb xx).¹⁰ At the individual level, the editors push readers to question how they are implicated in the buttressing of an exclusionary, institutionalized Heimat: “Do I want  See also Plumly’s chapter “Heimat Transgressions, Transgressing Heimat.”  The coded title on the cover in which the words Eure and unser blend into the background (and are raised from the cover), form two versions of the title with contrasting meanings. Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah explain this decision: “Denn nicht die Herausgeber_innen und Autor_innen dieses Buches entscheiden, wo das ‘Wir’ endet und das ‘Ihr’ beginnt” (10, Because the editors and authors of this book don’t decide where the ‘we’ ends and the ‘you’ begins). The title also highlights the invisibility of whiteness that structures this “we” and “you.”  For an in-depth analysis of the many Black German cultural productions that thematize Heimat and belonging and for a critique of Heimat theories and their attention to gender, space, and place, but lack of analysis of race, see Plumly’s BLACK-Red-Gold in “der bunten Republik”: Constructions and Performances of Heimat/en in Post-Wende Afro-/Black German Cultural Productions.

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to live in a society that orients itself toward national and racial ideals as well as racist, antisemitic, heteronormative and transphobic structures?” (10) If not, then how can this be disrupted and changed? As the quote conveys, Heimat is not only anchored in its whiteness. Christianity and cisgender heteronormativity or Western heteropatriarchy undergird it. The critical assessments that Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah deliver and the questions they pose drive home the underlying structures of Heimat that lay the foundation for its normative national architecture, while signaling that they are not the only option available. Indeed, Heimat can be queerly reimagined and otherwise assembled. Exposure to both creative and real possibilities in works that Black Germans pen is one way to materialize this. I now turn to architecture, Blackness, queerness, and Islam as they are presented in Sow’s novel. More significantly, I interrogate how they correlate to and coalesce in the featured Black Madonna statue that is architecturally secured in Altötting’s chapel walls. In doing so, I demonstrate how Sow situates Heimat differently while still acknowledging the barriers of exclusionary Heimat norms firmly in place and in need of dismantling. Because my analysis is intersectional and involves queer orientations, it is impossible to avoid some overlap when unpacking the specific structuring elements of Heimat. This interweaving is illustrative of Black German orientational Heimat architextures.

2 Heimat Architecture and Heimat Architextures in Die Schwarze Madonna Architecture, whiteness, politics, and re(li)gion are entangled in both the Heimat architecture and Heimat architextures of Sow’s novel. Heimat is both old (Altötting ‒ the site of the Black Madonna) and new (Neuötting ‒ where Fall spent her childhood with Aunt Hortensia) as well as both rural (Altötting/Neuötting, Bavaria) and urban (Hamburg – Fall and Yesim’s place of residence). This contrasts with German Heimat’s often nostalgic and idyllic representation. Despite the multiply oriented Heimats of Sow’s novel, the narrative only transpires in Bavaria and briefly in the car ride there and back. Still, this frames Heimat as mobile and in transit. Additionally, the incorporation of both the old and new parts of this Bavarian town in reference to its architectural and infrastructural history highlights the juxtaposition of differing spaces, times, and orientations as extant on a micro scale in addition to the macro scale of country vs. city in the larger German national landscape.¹¹  Using “old” and “new” to refer to parts of a town/city is a common practice in Germany.

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Architecture is also connected to racial and religious politics in the region. When an Islamic community center in Altötting is approved to be built (SM 124)¹², powerful and influential citizens desire instead to erect a Christian sports and youth center and sabotage the existing plans (SM 352). This conveys how Christians in the novel perceive Christianity and Islam as in competition. The priest Simone from Argentina, the policeman and SPD mayoral candidate Kilian Niederwieser, and the architect and fraternity member Christian Brandl are all implicated in the crime that transpired in the chapel (SM 352). White German youths (males) donned blackface and graffitied the words “ALLAH WAKBAH” (sic) on the Black Madonna’s chapel walls. Sow’s intentional misspelling alerts those with even a minimal knowledge of Islam that the perpetrators are clearly not Muslim. This defacement displays the failure of the white people in the town to read the writing on the wall. The perpetrated crime increases white German anxieties and anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-Muslim sentiment in the town with the intent of having the Islamic cultural center project aborted. Another example of politics and their connection to architecture documents Neuötting’s postwar and post-Wall status. Upon Fall and Yesim’s initial arrival: “The entrance to the village […] greeted her with typical upper-Bavarian postwar architecture. […] There were fewer farms than Fatou had remembered” (SM 15). Shortly thereafter, Yesim proclaims “Look! There are also refugees here” (SM 15). She points out a racist political campaign placard that stigmatizes current refugees as coming to Europe to reap the German welfare state’s benefits. The placard reads: “Pilgrimage not welfare: Stop the flood of refugees!” (SM 15) This frames the region as the religious pilgrimage site that it is in real life and juxtaposes the two different, yet similar journeys of these groups to the region. But rather than expose their intersections in Western European (and Christian) colonization, the political framing establishes an already presumably rooted Christianity and, by proxy, whiteness. Fall responds to Yesim’s remark noting that white, anti-immigrant racists are everywhere (“[i]n Bavaria and in Hamburg,” SM 15), debunking the myth that larger, multicultural cities are less hostile. Yesim retorts that Hamburg is more racially diverse, but Fall contends they must first assess the existing demographics of Neuötting (SM 15, 16). It is not merely a coincidence that architecture features prominently in the first images the narrator describes of the town; it is connected to postwar Germany and contemporary post-Wall Germany (and its current associations with the most recent influx of refugees); and its impressions contest Fall’s memories of the past as well as Yesim’s current expectations. These

 In this chapter, SM refers to Noah Sow’s novel Die Schwarze Madonna.

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infrastructural signs orient the two characters in multiple directions in the space and time of the now vis-à-vis the past, present, and future. Fall was right to wait and see whom the two would encounter in Neuötting and Altötting. The heterogeneity of the locals that she and Yesim meet indicates the visibly shifting face of postwar and post-Wall Germany, and of Bavaria more specifically. Early on, Isabel befriends Yesim. She is the adopted Bangladeshi daughter of Anita Stefan, a white German widow who is Aunt Hortensia’s neighbor and Fall’s childhood acquaintance (SM 30–31). When Anita, Fall, Yesim, and Isabel attend the Kulturfest (culture festival) in Altötting, Fall is introduced to Grace Bâ. Grace works for the Refugee-Initiative and has lived in the town for over ten years. Significantly, she tells Fall that the town now has both an Afro shop and even a mosque (SM 120), commenting on the changing community and its built environment. Moreover, Grace is either an immigrant or refugee to Germany: “her ‘s’ sounded like West Africa and her ‘r’ like Upper Bavaria” (SM 119), who initially found it difficult “to orient herself ” (SM 119). These examples indicate Neuötting’s and Altötting’s increasing racial, religious, and ethnic diversity and convey the “roots and routes” of diasporic Black Germanness (Clifford 308, 316, 320), broadly defined. Black German identity is oriented in multiple directions and is cohesive, despite supposed contradictions. A few additional characters nod to the novel’s textured landscape. Grace introduces Fall to Orhan Daimagüler, who was Vorstand des Verbandes der Muslime (Head of the Association of Muslims) and is leading the Muslim cultural center project (SM 124). Fall also meets Grace’s extended circle of friends in a beer garden in Altötting – a predominantly white German space typically found in the south¹³: Mamadou Enchanté who is French and presumably Black; Ismael from Algeria; and Abadin from Bosnia (SM 184). While there, Fall also re-meets Kenny, who is non-binary and Grace’s partner (SM 184). It remains ambiguous where they are from or whether they are Black. The various orientations of these characters present the complexity of multiple and intersectional modes of identification and belonging. Through their presence, Sow unsettles the supposed permanence of German Heimat’s architecture and who it quite literally serves. Blackness, queerness, and Islam, which these and other characters represent, are united in the Black Madonna’s historical context. Her contemporary deploy-

 Sow thematizes the dominance of whiteness and the potential/likelihood of white violence in these spaces (184–185; 328–329). For example, the group intentionally makes a Stammtisch reservation at the Wirtshaus Straubinger under the guise of an “International Tourism Board” (328–329). Here, Stammtisch also takes on connotations of whiteness in reference to the root/Stamm of this cultural concept, while “international” highlights the non-acceptance of the group into the white German Heimat.

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ment in various intersectional social justice causes around the world further resonates with these categories of non-belonging in Germany. I now tackle each in turn to reveal Sow’s orientational Heimat architextures. They are captured in the icon’s historical abuse and contemporary use.

3 The Black Madonna: Blackness and Heimat The context of Blackness as always from somewhere else or as resulting from displacement is called into question in Die Schwarze Madonna. Sow achieves this not only through the rootedness of Fall and Yesim, but also by demonstrating the uprootedness of whiteness. This reversal is evidenced in a news reporter’s response to statements one of the presumably white German mayoral candidates from the CSU, Dr. Hans Piekow, makes. After commenting on how “Altötting will remain Catholic” and how they need to control the influx of refugees, the reporter retorts, “Mr. Dr. Piekow, with all due respect, you yourself are a refugee […] your parents came from Silesia to Bavaria after the war – fled” (SM 180). This clarification situates Herr Dr. Piekow’s family as part of the over twelve million Heimatvertriebene (expellees) in the post-World War II context (Oltmer n.p.). And though he confirms this, he also asserts “my grandmother originates from Bavaria. This here is my Heimat” (SM 181). Herr Dr. Piekow’s use of the German word stammen seeks to re-root his whiteness firmly in German soil. In this way, Sow exposes the hypocrisy and performativity of whiteness as always already from here (as stagnant or fixed) in relation to historical and contemporary migration contexts in Germany. Simultaneously, Sow signals Germanness as historically Black via long-standing sites and sights of Blackness in Germany – the Black Madonna statue and an image of St. Maurice. Located in the heart of Europe, the Black Madonna of Altötting (ca. 1330) “is actually at the root of the most important Marian pilgrimage site in German-speaking countries” to which around a million people trek annually (Stadt Altötting, n.p.). Not only does the Black Madonna disperse her message out into the world, but she also brings the world to Altötting. Pilgrims call upon her for guidance, assistance, and miracles, and numerous likenesses to the icon exist across parts of Western Europe and around the globe. Ean Begg notes that 450 Black Madonnas exist worldwide “not counting those in Africa south of the Mediterranean littoral” (3). They are believed to be remnants of pagan times (Begg 49, 74, 130; Birnbaum 3), as well as connected to Cybele, Isis, Ceres, Demeter, Kali, Allat, the Queen of Sheba, and Lilith, among many other ancient goddesses. Black Earth mother goddesses in Central European cultures that correspond to the womb are

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also associated with her (Moss 322; Oleszkiewicz-Peralba 34; Birnbaum 85).¹⁴ As such, the Black Madonna is a Jungian archetype that unites many cultures and various religions, past and present. Christians repurposed the preexisting Black Madonnas to disseminate the ideology of the Catholic church and make Christianity palatable to the antecedent cultures of the region to convert the populations. Today, throughout the world, the Black Madonna signifies the synthesis of multiple cultures through cultural contact or what is referred to as syncretism (Oleszkiewicz-Peralba 18). As Antonio Benítez-Rojo explains, “a syncretic artifact is not a synthesis, but rather a signifier made of differences” (21). In this way, the Black Madonna is not an equalizer, but a recognizer and acknowledger of difference across identities. She is thus not assimilatory but embodies a multitude of contradictory orientations. The potential of the Black Madonna also lies in the fact that she can be repurposed, as she has been countless times before. In Sow’s detective novel, she attests to the creativity and ingenuity of Women of Color in Germany, as well as their resilience in fighting multiple mechanisms of exclusion. As Małgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba explains, the Black Madonna in her various manifestations “has been a symbol of identity and resistance against oppression and the subject of curious iconographic transformations” (9). Ever-changing in the now, her historical status also remains contested. The Black Madonna’s Blackness and authenticity is questioned in Sow’s novel, as originals and copies come to the fore in the scenes in which she features. They emphasize the performativity of race as a construct and its ability to be recast over time. However, Sow does not elide the violent impact of race and its anti-Black foundation documented in the omniscient narrator’s observations: “‘Look’, said Fatou, ‘that’s the Black Madonna. This one here is a copy. Inside the chapel is the original. She’s very valuable. […] She’s akin to a patron saint’” (SM 40–41). Already, questions of authenticity arise, given that there are multiple versions of the statue. In addition to this, the origins of Altötting’s own Black Madonna are as unclear as are those of her Blackness. The Black Madonna’s Blackness may be a façade; the Catholic church touts this narrative, claiming that her Blackness resulted from candle smoke that blackened her over time (Stadt Altötting, n.p.). This erasure relays the expulsion of Blackness from Christianity and the attempts in Western Europe to rid itself of any connections to Blackness (and by proxy paganism and Islam), whether pre- or post-Christianization. It also ignores Christianity’s colonial context of conquest. Many researchers do not agree with this assessment of the Black Madonna’s Blackness (Früh and Derungs 243; Begg 6–8). As such, they

 Notably, Peter Blickle’s existing theorization of Heimat articulates it as tied to the mother’s womb (92).

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make visible the assimilatory power that purifies, in this case, white Judeo-Christian Germanness. The Black Madonna herself simply dons blackface, an acceptable form of Blackness originating in whiteness. Markedly, Fall questions the authenticity of the statue’s Blackness, too. When she visits the chapel with Yesim, the narrator notes: “Fatou didn’t succeed in noticing anything exceptional about the statue that made her so famous. They also did not look like an African mother and child, but rather she looked like a European Madonna with long, straight hair that was simply dyed black” (SM 42). Observing that the statue may not be rooted in Blackness but rather produced as Black through whiteness, either in its initial casting or sometime thereafter, Fall exposes the hypocrisy of incorporating and revering a whitewashed Blackness in the myth of Western Christianity, when Black people remain excluded, indeed erased, from the category of Europeanness (read white) more broadly, regardless of religious affiliation because they are racialized (El-Tayeb xiv). As such, the Black Madonna serves as an exception to the rule of belonging to Germanness and German Heimat architectures. She represents a palatable or assimilated Blackness, framed by and through a supposed origin in whiteness and Christianity, a Blackness that is not authentically Black. Fall also explains to Yesim that as a child her own presence as a Black girl was taken as a sign by many of the pilgrims to Altötting, marking her as otherworldly. “Yesim giggled. ‘They worshiped you because you were Black?’ ‘Something like that’, said Fatou. ‘I think they saw some kind of religious sign in the fact that I was standing there. In my time there were no Black people here. I didn’t see any at least’” (SM 42). This account presents a critique of the “positive” racism that befalls Fall (Sow 2008, 80–82); she is Black in a space where white Germans celebrate and revere Blackness, without the actual recognition of Black Germans. In this way, Black Germans remain relegated to an outsider status, understood as coming from beyond the artificially constructed borders of Germanness. Moreover, this scene in the novel adds another layer to the idea of originals and copies in the text: Fall is authentically Black in experience and lived reality and not in blackface like the statue and the perpetrators of the crime that occurs in the chapel are. A reading of Fall as authentically Black, but performatively a Madonna, is provided at the beginning of the novel. As it opens in medias res, Fall sings a Madonna song in the car as she and Yesim sojourn southward. In establishing the novel in this way and having Fall later recount how she was read as a sign, Sow may be suggesting that Fall and Yesim are the contemporary real-world Black “Madonna” and child. The Black Madonna is “the protector, the consoler, the defender, the fighter for freedom and justice, and the great equalizer” and “[b]efore her, gender, race, class, and ethnic origin are not debilitating distinctions but a foundation of strength” (Oleszkiewicz-Peralba 11). Fall and Yesim represent this strength in the

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face of intersecting forms of violence and racial discrimination as well as in their multiply oriented identities. Additionally, the two are in pursuit of justice. Fall even suggests at one point that Yesim might later become a lawyer or judge (SM 10), and it is Yesim who convinces her mother to investigate the case, since both know the truth about the perpetrators (SM 72). According to Fall, “I’m investigating because I don’t want myself and my daughter to have a hometown in which justice doesn’t play a role” (SM 293– 294). Fall actively works to dismantle Heimat’s erected architectures that unjustly banish and convict some (Black Germans and Black refugees, among many others) in the name of protecting the power of white Germanness and Christianity and judging them as innocent. Here, we witness a subversion of the Black Madonna’s role in the white German imaginary through a return to her socio-cultural and politico-historical roots and routes. What is more, the Black Madonna statue is not the only Black patron saint that figures in the novel. In the last section of the text and in the resolving of the case, Fall and her Black German friends are at a local tavern (SM 342). While there, Grace puts the final pieces of the crime puzzle together, when the group overhears a conversation coming from a Stammtisch of white Bavarian Germans who make racist comments and speak to and at others about them. Directly prior to this culminating scene, Mamadou points out the image of St. Maurice in the space: ‘Look!’ said Mamadou. He pointed to a painting on the front wall. It showed Saint Maurice in his complete melanin grandeur” (SM 342). To this, Fall proclaims that he hopefully fought for “the right ones” (SM 342) and Abadin responds that he fought against the Romans and for the Christians. Kenny’s response reveals sarcastic disappointment, and given the context of the narrative, his/her/their disappointment makes sense. Those in the right in this contemporary spacetime are not the Christians who are framing Muslims. No one definitively knows if St. Maurice was real, but sources contend that he was “commander of the Theban Legion in the late third century CE” (Bowersox n.p.). The legion consisted of Christians who were martyred while in Agaunum because they defied orders to murder local Christians. Bowersox notes that “the idea of using a black figure to evoke cosmopolitanism and Christian universalism was not particular to Maurice” (n.p.) Indeed, he is presented in conjunction with the Black Madonna, as both serve the function of a performatively superficial celebration of Blackness through a white racialized and colonial frame without an actual recognition of Black Germans. Still, these religious icons add texture to German Heimat’s supposedly immutable architecture. The multiple uses of the exclamation “Look!” from Yesim’s acknowledgement of the racist campaign poster in Neuötting at the beginning of the book to Fall’s gesturing to the Black Madonna in Altötting and Mamadou’s identification of St.

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Maurice establish the (in)visibility of textured Blackness in the German landscape.¹⁵ These interjections are orientational signposts that signal how Blackness is celebrated or rejected under specific conditions – in this case, assimilated (or not) into dominant Christian and white Western identity, but still expelled from fully belonging.

4 White Patriarchy, White Matriarchy, and Queer Multiracial Alternatives In the first third of Die Schwarze Madonna, readers learn that Fall returns to Neuötting to visit her over 80-year-old white German Aunt Hortensia. Hortensia is not her biological aunt but did raise her (SM 20, 29). Aunt Rosa, who had lived with Hortensia and was presumably her life partner, became ill (SM 74), so after the third grade, Fall lived in Frankfurt with an aunt on her mother’s side. In these ways, Heimat operates from the outset of the novel as queerly oriented and matriarchal rather than heteronormative and patriarchal. It also brings us to the more general queer atmosphere of Die Schwarze Madonna engendered through multiple references to the weather as schwül (humid) – a term from which the word schwul (gay) is presumed to have evolved (Beachy xi).¹⁶ The queer, non-linear structures that permeate the novel allude to the older roots of the Black Madonna in societies where women were understood as wielding power over life, death, and regeneration (Birnbaum 4). This is linked to the Earth Mother. She conveys the cyclical power of fertile soil in the planting of seeds, their growth, death, and regermination. Christianity’s patriarchal version – Father, Son, Holy Spirit – evolved out of this established context of maiden, mother, old woman (Oleszkiewicz-Peralba 103). Thus, life/mother is embodied in Fatou, impending death/old woman in Aunt Hortensia, and regeneration/maiden in Yesim. This female dominated framework illustrates Fall’s queer and multiracial family structures. Sow queers the Christian, white, heteronormative family and reorients it through multiple directions and possibilities. She opens the space of Heimat and

 The use of the word “Schau!” or “Look!” evokes Frantz Fanon’s interpellation as a Black man through the phrase a white child utters to him in the colonial context of France: “Look, a negro!” (109–112). This utterance signals the interpellation of Blackness throughout Die Schwarze Madonna as its exclamatory power is repeated in moments where mediated Blackness circulates in colonizing contexts and is rendered legible – here by critical Black subjects, rather than whites.  See, for example, pages 25, 73, 101, 112, 134, 287, 358.

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its rigid structures to possibilities considered outside of the normative reproductive sphere of the white German nation that have nevertheless always been and remain an integral and even fluid part of it. As Oleszkiewicz-Peralba elucidates, the Black Madonna in Latin American contexts, “La Lupita [Guadalupe], La Llorona, and La Malinche are now configured as powerful icons of Chicana resistance to cultural hegemony and patriarchal domination. […] and among Chicana lesbians she symbolizes defiance to compulsory heterosexuality” (156).¹⁷ In this way, Sow orchestrates a return to the Black Madonna’s roots in non-patriarchal, queer, and multiracial structures of the matriarchal past and reorients them in conjunction with global cultures of resistance today.¹⁸ The queer associations with the Black Madonna statue are linked to Aunt Hortensia and Aunt Rosa’s relationship; the color “Rosa” is a symbolic postwar indication of queerness in reference to the pink triangle that homosexuals were forced to don in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps and that LGBTQ Germans have since reappropriated. Moreover, Hortensia was a child during World War II. The narrator relays that Hortensia already contrasted postwar standards and norms for women, when Fall was younger: “Her views were conservative. […] She [was] nevertheless different than many others of her generation. At a time in which it was still unheard of that women wore pants, she had dressed herself as a man. She even went to work in pants and a hat” (SM 29). The reader perceives Hortensia in the quote in stark contrast to the traditional gender roles that women of the 1950s and 1960s world of good housekeeping and female domesticity adopted. The passage alludes to historic cultural and mediated contexts of the era. Heimatfilme in the postwar period arranged the national narrative through heteronormative, cisgender, women’s roles, but they were also juxtaposed with the more subversive Hosenrolle (breeches role) films of the 1950s that offered a “critical antiheteronormative counterpoint to postwar constructions of gender, sexuality, and the family” (Guenther-Pal 366–367). These films presented an alternative to the cultural and social norms that Heimatfilme structure and frame, much like Aunt Hortensia does in Sow’s novel.

 A Haitian version also exists: Erzulie Dantor, a voodoo goddess and protector of lesbians that is modeled on the Black Madonna of Czestochowa (Cherry). More recently, an activist was jailed in Poland for appropriating the Lady of Czestochowa for an LGBTQ protest (Sieradzka).  “Matriarchy” today usually connotes the realm of white female power that subordinates itself to white male power and wields that power over further subordinates (i. e., People of Color). For a discussion of how this played out in the historical context of enslavement, see Davis (pp. 7–8). This is of course not the same as the past context from which “matriarchal” mythological Black goddesses are routed to the Black Madonna.

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Reflecting on the role of religion in condemning queerness, Fall recalls how Hortensia once remarked that in Neuötting: “It was safer for the two [she and Rosa] to be in the church than not be” (SM 28). The church offered the women an opportunity to belong and not be rejected from the community. Despite their performative and transgressive membership, the exclusionary mechanisms at play and the hypocrisy of inclusion are definite. If they simply act/perform the role of Christians as white closeted lesbians, they can be admitted into the German Heimat architecture. This demonstrates the two aunts’ ability to pass into belonging. However, this performance still requires masking part of themselves to gain entrance into Heimat’s fortress. It unmasks the heteronormative, patriarchal power of the Catholic church that configures Heimat’s barricaded façades. The differences between Hortensia’s (closeted) queerness and that of Aytaç, Fall’s partner and Yesim’s father who recently came out, are also palpable. Hortensia can be incorporated into the hegemonic German Heimat, whereas this is an impossibility for Aytaç who is not only queer, but also Turkish German and Muslim. In this way, Sow demonstrates how white queer, matriarchal positionalities can still reinforce cisheteropatriarchal and Christian structures that support whiteness. Queer multiracial orientations and positionalities provide constructive alternatives because they are the most inclusive and non-hierarchical.

5 Anti-Muslim Racism, Religious Syncretism, and the Black Madonna’s Architexture of Belonging Sow’s integration of more than one form of institutional racism and anti-Muslim racism (for example, in politics, the Catholic church, and the media) exposes its infrastructural reach. In Die Schwarze Madonnna, the circulation of mediated racialized images creates the haunting specter of the dangerous Muslim (man) (SM 69–71). Covering the chapel crime, a news reporter states that the culprits “left behind Arabic graffiti and Muslim threats” (SM 69) and a young man representing the SPD (the Social Democratic Party) on the news declares: “Of course we don’t tolerate terrorism and radical Islam” (SM 71). The colonial project(ion) of white Christian innocence protects against targeting white perpetrators as the potential vandals (SM 70), while the media disseminates a homogenized, essentialized, and hardened image of Muslim (male) identity as a perilous threat. This infrastructure contributes to the shoring up of German Heimat’s architecture. Cisgender patriarchal structures also intersect with circulating anti-Muslim racism. As El-Tayeb explains, “the hijab in particular serves as the key symbol of Muslim difference, representing silenced, oppressed women living in parallel soci-

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eties that are shaped by ancient and primitive rather than modern Western structures” (83). In conversation with Fall, Anita articulates this supposed threat of Islam, reinforcing the white European assumption that Islam oppresses Muslim women: “There are few foreign families who live here. […] In Isa’s class there are two Turkish girls, but that’s also something different. I definitely want to be careful with that. They are already wearing headscarves although they are only eleven” (SM 79). Turkish Germans, though not deemed foreign in Anita’s words, are reduced to threatening and oppressive Muslims. Here they specifically target young girls, who in turn supposedly target other girls. This cisgendered racialization and resultant hierarchy leaves no room for self-determination, even as it still exists. The reader accesses Fall’s sarcastic and critical thoughts directly after Anita’s racist remark. “Unheard of […] how could the brats dare to wear a headscarf. And that in a city in which nuns were walking around everywhere. Where will we arrive at from there” (SM 79–80). Though Fall does not utter this response to Anita, she does assert that Yesim and her father are Turkish (SM 79–80). Anita’s religious hypocrisy is unveiled through Fall’s internal juxtaposition of Christianity and Islam. It is further witnessed in the imperceptible status of Yesim as Turkish/Muslim to Anita because Yesim does not wear a hijab. Doubling back, Anita remarks how modern and self-aware Yesim is (SM 80). She still does not comprehend that complexity, beyond her binary and fixed way of thinking, exists. Anita does not register how her own contradictions and assumptions are incompatible with Yesim’s textured reality. Instead, she paints Yesim as exceptional. As a Black and Turkish German, she is accepted on assimilatory terms that accommodate an imaginary German (read Christian and white) culture. This instance is not the only interpersonal communication in which white Germans condemn Islam through a white racialized frame, a lack of knowledge, and the refusal to recognize complex orientations in Heimat architextures. It is not just that religion shapes family structures, as witnessed with Fall’s aunts, family structures also shape religion. Aunt Hortensia leerily asks Fall if Yesim is Muslim. Fall responds that she may choose her religion (SM 28), and Hortensia follows with “‘And your Ali-’ ‘Aytaç’, Fatou corrected. ‘Eitschasch…, he was also one [Muslim]. And now you are a single parent’” (SM 28). On the contrary, Fall is not raising Yesim alone, and Yesim comes to Aytaç’s defense (SM 31), but Hortensia remains unaware that he is queer and did not just leave Fall. Fall withholds this information from her, not knowing how Hortensia will react because neither of her aunts ever actually came out to her. She simply drew her own conclusions (SM 29). Hortensia’s cisgendered and sexist assessment that Aytaç absconded is the product of patriarchal structures and anti-Muslim racism that labels all fathers and, particularly, Muslim fathers at this intersection as absent. In these ways,

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Sow explores the complexity of cisgender, sexuality, race, and religion to reveal how Germany expels racialized Muslims from belonging to the architecture of a white, Christian, heteronormative, binary German Heimat. As one of the Abrahamic religions, Islam is patriarchal, but it has not always been this way. As Sigrid Früh and Kurt Derungs explain, a black meteorite in Mecca is still worshipped today and represents the “pre-Islamic and ancient oriental” Goddess Allat (244). One can also find a representation of a female’s womb at the site. This, the editors note, is merely another example of how “a patriarchal world religion takes up a matriarchal symbol and circulates it as a center for believers” (244). The Black Madonna, akin to Allat, is therefore a “homing device” (Ahmed 9) that has the potential to orient queer and multiply oriented Muslim subjects in Germany, offering them a path of resistance and belonging. She unites across religion, culture, race, gender, sexuality, and class, the latter of which I did not touch upon in this chapter, but for which she equally stands.

6 Conclusion In Sow’s Die Schwarze Madonna, complex realities, spaces, and affective sites collectively and individually cast a mold for textured identities and Black German belonging. In pursuit of social justice in Germany through the case(s) that Fatou Fall investigates, Sow centers the titular Black Madonna: “for the dark feminine is the symbol of wisdom, love, nurture, protection, and transformation and the messenger of peace and justice all over the world” (Oleszkiewicz-Peralba 167). The use of the iconic Black Madonna and the location of Neuötting/Altötting, Bavaria presents readers with multiple associations that take on new meanings with each contextual and relational turn of the page. In the process, Sow builds queer Heimat architextures, capable of shifting in design, with both roots and routes. They offer an alternative to Heimat’s existing architectures that are consciously made with the intent to keep Black, queer, and Muslim people and anyone who orients themselves at the junctions of these identities out.

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Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006. Aydemir, Fatma, and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, editors. Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum. Ullstein, 2019. Beachy, Robert. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. Vintage Books, 2014. Begg, Ean. The Cult of the Black Virgin. 1985. Penguin Books, 1996. Birnbaum, Lucia Chiabola. Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy. U of Northwestern P, 1993. Blickle, Peter. Heimat. A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland. Camden House, 2002. Bowersox, Jeff. “St. Maurice in Magdeburg (ca. 1240).” Black Central Europe. blackcentraleurope.com/sources/1000–1500/st-maurice-in-magdeburg-ca-1240/. Accessed 28 February 2021. Campt, Tina. “Afro German Cultural Identity and the Politics of Positionality: Contests and Contexts in the Formation of German Ethnic Identity.” New German Critique, vol. 58, 1993, pp. 109–126. Cherry, Kittredge. “Black Madonna of Czestochowa Becomes Lesbian Defender Erzuli Dantor.” QSpirit, 26 August 2020, qspirit.net/black-madonna-lesbian-erzuli-dantor-czestochowa/. Accessed 14 March 2021. Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3, 1994, pp. 302–338. Currie, Mel. Just Before Too Late. Mel Currie, 2019. Davis, Angela. “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” The Black Scholar, vol. 3, no. 4, 1971, pp. 2–15. El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World. Grove P, 1967. Fox, Matthew. “The Return of the Black Madonna: A Sign of Our Times or How the Black Madonna Is Shaking Us Up for the Twenty-First Century.” Creation Spirituality: Reawakening Mysticism, Protecting Mother Earth. 21 Feb 2011, www.matthewfox.org/blog/the-return-of-the-black-ma donna-a-sign-of-our-times-or-how-the-black-madonna-is-shaking-us-up-for-the-twenty-first-cen tury. Accessed 24 June 2021. Früh, Sigrid, and Kurt Derungs, editors. Die Schwarze Frau: Kraft und Mythos der schwarzen Madonna. Unionsverlag, 2003. Guenther-Pal, Alison. “‘Should Women Be Amazons?’: Reallocating Masculinity in German Postwar History and Hosenrolle.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, 2018, pp. 365– 394. Hund, Wulf D. Wie die Deutschen weiß wurden. Kleine (Heimat)Geschichte des Rassismus. J.B. Metzler, 2017. Lambert, Léopold. “Architectural Theories: A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normatized Body.” The Funambulist, thefunambulistdotnet.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/architectural-theories-a-subversive-approach-to-the-ideal-normatized-body/. Accessed 14 Mar 2021. Hall, Katharina, editor. Crime Fiction in German. Der Krimi. U of Wales P, 2016. Mädchen in Uniform. Directed by Leontine Sagan, Deutsche Film Gemeinschaft, 1931. Moss, Leonard, and Stephen C. Cappannari. “The Black Madonna: An Example of Culture Borrowing.” American Association for the Advancement of Science, vol. 76, no. 6, 1953, pp. 319–324.

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Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Małgorzata. The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation. U of New Mexico P, 2007. Oltmer, Jochen. “Zuwanderungen nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg.” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. 15 March 2005, www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/migration/dossier-migrationALT/56359/nach-dem-2-weltkrieg. Accessed 14 March 2021. Plumly, Vanessa. BLACK-Red-Gold in “der bunten Republik”: Constructions and Performances of Heimat/en in Post-Wende Afro-/Black German Cultural Productions. 2015. U of Cincinnati, PhD dissertation. Plumly, Vanessa. “Auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte: Black German Detectives and the Cases of Anä is Schmitz and Fatou Fall.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 57, no. 4, 2021, pp. 402–423. Plumly, Vanessa. “Heimat Transgressions, Transgressing Heimat: Black/Afro-German Diasporic (Per) Formative Acts in the Decolonization of the German Heimat Landscape as a White National Spacetime.” The Berlin Republic: 25 Years on/of German Reunification. Eds. Todd Herzog, Tanja Nusser, and Richard Schade. Wilhelm Fink, 2019, pp. 125–143. Rojo, Antonio Benitez. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Duke UP, 1997. Sieradzka, Monika. “Poland: Furor over ‘Rainbow Madonna’ LGBTQ Activist Arrest.” DW, 10 May 2019, www.dw.com/en/poland-furor-over-rainbow-madonna-lgbt-activist-arrest/a-48694526. Accessed 14 March 2021. Sooke, Alastair. “The intriguing history of the ‘Black Madonna.’” BBC: Culture, 19 July 2018, www.bbc. com/culture/article/20180719-the-intriguing-history-of-the-black-madonna. Accessed 13 July 2021. Sow, Noah. Deutschland SchwarzWeiss. Der alltä gliche Rassismus. C. Bertelsmann, 2008 Sow, Noah. Die Schwarze Madonna: Afrodeutscher Heimatkrimi. Fatou Falls erster Fall. BoD-Books on Demand, 2019. Stadt Altötting. “Altötting: Herz Bayerns.” 2021. https://www.altoetting.de/en/tourism-altoetting/pil grimage/the-madonna-of-altoetting/. Accessed December 19, 2020. Stewart, Faye. German Feminist Queer Crime Fiction: Politics, Justice and Desire. McFarland & Company Inc., 2014. Wright, Michelle. Physics of Blackness. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

Seth Peabody

Heimat for One? Spaces of Community and Disability in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur and Tschick Preface I draft this essay at the end of a year of restricted mobility due to a global pandemic, which might be seen to resonate with the topic at hand. However, this paper feels deeply personal to me for reasons far removed from the current crisis. When I first studied the two works by Wolfgang Herrndorf discussed below, I had just moved back to the state where I grew up, and where both of my parents still lived, for the first time in more than 15 years. Just as I was arriving, my father began treatment for lymphoma. During just over two years between his diagnosis and his death, he lost strength and mobility, and he also suffered a complete loss of hearing due to a rare side effect from a chemotherapy drug. I had just returned “home,” together with my family – which included a one-year-old child, my parents’ first grandchild. It would seem to be a moment for a joyful resurgence of Heimat sentiments. Of course, I view that notion with critical skepticism, but even so, the idealized possibility of Heimat was a striking foil to the painful loss of familiar points of contact, and the difficult – but sometimes surprising, humorous, and joyful – process of finding new modes of navigation and connection in the context of disability, always overshadowed by the looming prospect of death. It is within this frame, marked from the outset by loss, exhaustion, fear, disorientation, and a search for new modes of human connection, that I made the choice to look again at the tired but tenacious idea of Heimat, from yet another viewpoint in which its primary trait is its inaccessibility.

1 Introduction The water was lukewarm. I felt my mother reaching for my hand as I sank. Together. . . we sank to the bottom and then looked up from there at the iridescent, glittering surface of the water… And I was insanely happy. Because you can’t hold your breath forever, but you can hold it for a pretty long time. (Wolfgang Herrndorf, WWTC 244–245)¹

 Quotations from Tschick are drawn from Tim Mohr’s translation, published under the title Why https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-010

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I am two years old and have just woken up. The green blinds are lowered, and looking out between the bars of my crib, I can see the dawn in my room that consists of numerous small red, green, and blue particles, as on a television seen from too close, a silent fog, into which the early morning has just begun to flood through a penny-sized hole in the blinds. My body has exactly the same temperature and consistency as its surroundings… and I wish that it will remain like this forever. (Wolfgang Herrndorf, Arbeit und Struktur, 7)

Wolfgang Herrndorf ’s memoir Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure, 2013) begins with a remarkably similar image to the one that concludes his young adult novel Tschick (2010; Why We Took the Car, 2014). In both cases, the narrator describes a womb-like feeling, surrounded by soft material or liquid and with indistinct patterns of light (cf. Baßler 78). Both scenes portray a moment of refuge, a longed-for state of comfort and protection, along with a fantasy of that status drawing out in time. In both cases, it is a doomed fantasy, albeit for very different reasons. In Arbeit und Struktur as well as Tschick, these scenes reminiscent of prenatal comfort stand in contrast to the books as a whole. The memoir describes the two years between the author’s cancer diagnosis and his death; his travels documented during the book are marked not by comfort and shelter but by confusion, disorientation, and dissonance between his perception of the world around him and the view provided by the wider lens available to the reader. In Tschick, the young adult novel’s light and humorous tone is paired with a plot marked by repeated bouts of disorientation culminating in a climactic traffic accident. Both books’ fragmented imaginative geographies stand in opposition to conventional understandings of Heimat as a heile Welt or intact, wholesome world. And yet, Heimat remains in the background of both works. A review of Tschick in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung describes the book as a “Heimat novel” (von Lovenberg n.p.), and in Arbeit und Struktur, a similar emphasis on space, community, and language – albeit a problematic emphasis with regards to all three terms – shows that this work might equally be considered in relation to the discourse of Heimat. The womb-like scenes that conclude Tschick and initiate Arbeit und Struktur provide a fantasy of the originary sheltering space of home; they foreground a longing for beginnings, for stasis, for homeostasis and equilibrium in a regressive space of earliest childhood. In both the novel and the memoir, despite so many fragmented spaces and travels marked by disorientation, the regressive space of Heimat is given a privileged position.

We Took the Car. Translations from the film script for Tschick are taken from the film’s English subtitles. Translations from all other works are my own. For frequently cited works, T refers to Tschick, WWTC refers to Why We Took the Car, and AS refers to Arbeit und Struktur.

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To understand the geographies of Heimat described in Berlin and Brandenburg in these texts, it is worth a brief detour to California. Both Frederick Jameson and Edward Soja describe the Hotel Bonaventure in Los Angeles as an ideal model for postmodern space, an act of deliberate spatial violence inflicted on the individuals trying to orient themselves. In a related discussion, Marc Augé’s analysis of “non-places” focuses on transience and spaces-between: for him, sites of impermanence such as hotel lobbies and airport cafés are the emblems of postmodern geography. Both the disorientation and fragmentation emphasized by Soja and Jameson, and the transience noted by Augé, seem to create an opposite pole to the security and permanence supposedly offered by the Heimat concept. But I suggest that Arbeit und Struktur and Tschick reveal an area of overlap between both of these spatial configurations – the utopian and possibly regressive or reactionary model of Heimat, and the often dystopian models of postmodern theorists. They all assume an intact and able-bodied subject, upon whom spatial violence can be practiced or for whom shelter can be created. For broken or immature bodies, these individual acts of spatial violence are irrelevant. Travelling rural Brandenburg, Maik and Tschick fail to orient themselves as a deliberate product of their own adolescent rebellion. In Berlin, Herrndorf ’s failure to find his way home reveals that the comfort of Heimat requires sound mind and body. In immaturity, sickness, or death, the difference between the sheltering village Heimat and the fractured surfaces of the Hotel Bonaventure breaks down. Arbeit und Struktur describes the author’s work, life in Berlin, and travels as he is dying of brain cancer. It is in this state that Herrndorf completed Tschick, which features a plot centered around a travel narrative. Together, the two works explore what Caroline Frank has described as “imaginative geographies” (174). Within this framework, I wish to emphasize that the protagonists of both works exist in an isolated and impaired mental space. They remain cut off from any stable community and unable to navigate the terrain required for their travels. Instead of a communal and sheltering Heimatgefühl (feeling of home), Herrndorf ’s texts present a spatially and socially fragmented sense of home. In what follows, I build on recent discussions of Heimat as well as relevant texts within disability studies to argue that these two bestselling texts by Herrndorf engage productively with the challenges of the Heimat idea within the context of disability and limited mobility. When read together, they exhibit physical limits to theoretical understandings of Heimat and space. After discussing the two texts by Herrndorf, I turn to Fatih Akin’s adaptation of Tschick and argue that the film draws into focus the simultaneously hybrid and heterotopic qualities of Heimat. Michel Foucault defines heterotopias as “counter-sites” in which traditional geographic locations “are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). Foucault’s concept provides a model for how fictional geographies such as those created in

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Herrndorf ’s texts can offer social critique and explore new configurations of environment and society. Herrndorf ’s focus on peripheral protagonists combines with Akin’s style as an auteur of identity to yield a sense of multilayered space and hybrid identity, ultimately providing an imagined space of belonging within the context of physical disability and emotional precarity.

2 Heimat, Space, and Disability Heimat is, of course, a key term for thinking about space, community, and identity in German, and the analyses that follow explore how the term’s spatial and social complexities are compounded by the different ways in which the same landscape is experienced by individual human bodies. As discussed in the present volume’s introduction, Heimat has been variously assessed as an untranslatable term related to the English notion of “home” (Boa and Palfreyman), a vital space for shelter and social support that can serve marginalized as well as dominant groups (Greverus), a political tool for building national identity in the abstract nation-state (Applegate, Confino), a regressive space that lends itself to reactionary tendencies (Blickle), and a key term in ongoing cultural discourses of place, identity, history, and memory (Eigler, Eigler and Kugele, von Moltke).² Recent discussions of Heimat have emphasized its significance for peripheral or marginalized groups and those experiencing precarity (Kathöfer and Weber). Through the prominent scenes that long for a womb-like Heimat scenario within a context of emotional and physical trauma, the texts discussed here participate in broader discourses regarding the Heimat concept’s value for marginalized groups, yet repeatedly emphasize challenges that arise due to age, disability, and illness. The exclusion of disability and illness from Heimat has been implied through many of the aspects that past scholars have ascribed to the Heimat concept. Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman argue that “time and change are built into the spatial metaphor of Heimat: time is the ever-present enemy of Heimat . . . The inexorable passage of time brings distance from the imagined Heimat of childhood, hence the yearning nostalgia and sense of loss which the idea of Heimat so often evokes” (Boa and Palfreyman 24). The presence of disability or the change within a body due to illness would contradict the notion of Heimat as an unchanging and intact state of being. Past scholars have explicitly discussed health and ill See the present volume’s introduction for a broader discussion of theoretical and methodological approaches to Heimat. For a detailed review of the scholarly literature on Heimat, see Eigler. For a more recent analysis that extends the Heimat concept to include critical approaches by German-Jewish filmmakers, see Ashkenazi.

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ness in relation to Heimat, but in symbolic rather than physical terms: Boa and Palfreyman build on the patriarchal connotations of Heimat to describe maternal illness as a signifier for a troubled home. Because “men inherit a family home” whereas “women […] do not own the Heimat but embody it, […] maternal health or sickness may symbolize the health and sickness of the Heimat, decadence or poverty often being signified in the figure of a sickly mother” (Boa and Palfreyman 26). The texts analyzed below reveal that these aspects are not only symbolic: physical illness or disability can serve as an obstacle for participation in a Heimat space or community. Loss and exclusion comprise important themes in scholarly discussions of Heimat. Kathöfer and Weber observe that “the sense of Heimat is always already rooted in a sense of Heimatlosigkeit” (412) and consider how the Heimat idea has been used to contribute to, but also to resist, “the ongoing production of otherness through racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and so on that remain part of discourses of national cultural traditions and understandings of home” (413). Disability and illness offer an important extension, but also reversal, of these discussions of exclusion. It is an extension of past discussions in that, according to the social model of disability, an individual is excluded because of community norms that establish able-bodiedness as the required default in order to participate in a space; physical structures are set up in a way that excludes disability.³ At the same time, disability can erode an individual’s ability to take part in the spaces that they have hitherto enjoyed, and social efforts at inclusion cannot undo the individual’s awareness of what is lost. The texts discussed below respond to this sense of loss at the individual level; they are marked by frustration at the physical bounds within which the conscious self is contained more than by resentment against the community or space to which one no longer has access. Anti-Heimat texts and films have long pointed out the violent exclusions committed by the supposedly sheltering Heimat community; in contrast, these texts show the emotional response of the individual self whose changing mental and physical abilities impede participation in the communities and spaces of home.

 For a detailed discussion of the origins and complexities of the social model of disability, see Bickenbach et al., 1173–1174.

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3 Heimat, Disability, Disorientation: Arbeit und Struktur Herrndorf ’s memoir Arbeit und Struktur describes the author’s experience with an aggressive form of brain cancer known as glioblastoma, with which he was diagnosed in February 2010. The work first existed as a blog and was published as a book after Herrndorf ’s death in 2013. As Lilla Balint describes it, the blog was initially designed “to inform his friends about his condition, the results of medical tests, surgeries, and the minutiae of everyday life with cancer. Not yet available to the public, the journal occupied a liminal space between private diary and online blog” (4). After about six months, Herrndorf made the blog publicly accessible. Still, aspects of the work in both its online and printed forms show elements that resist the traditional blog format: rather than showing the newest entries first, the reader is led first to a page with background information about the blog and is told to start with the first entry, called “Twilight” – a lyrically written, undated entry that stands as a prologue. Thereafter, starting on March 8, 2010, the entries proceed chronologically, with the exception of a ten-part flashback midway through the book that tells the events of late February and early March 2010 leading up to, and immediately following, the cancer diagnosis.⁴ Other than this flashback, the entries proceed chronologically until the final entry, shortly before the author’s death in August 2013. To provide a genre label for this strange combination of literary writing and personal blog, Elke Siegel suggests the concepts of “autopathography” and “autothanatography” (351). Whereas “autobiography” would suggest an author writing his or her own life, Siegel’s terms attempt to convey the fact that Herrndorf, in a constructed and artistic way albeit in real time like a blog, writes his own sickness and death. While Arbeit und Struktur frequently describes Herrndorf in a state in which he feels completely healthy, despite his knowledge of his own illness, several prominent passages feature episodes marked by physical or mental disability. Over the course of the book,⁵ his experience of his home city becomes increasingly impacted by illness and disability, and for this reason I contend that insights from disability studies add a useful lens for Herrndorf ’s work, and also for the idea of Heimat. But

 The ten-part flashback begins almost 100 pages into the book. The abrupt shift from chronological entries to the earlier events in order to provide personal and medical context is emphasized through the chapter headings, beginning with “Flashback, Part 1: The Hospital” (97).  The blog remains available online at wolfgang-herrndorf.de. In the remainder of this study, unless the medium of the blog is relevant, discussion and citations from Arbeit und Struktur will refer to the book.

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it is worth noting that my description of Herrndorf ’s condition as being disabled is contentious. As Susan Wendell observes, “the relationship between disability and illness is a problematic one” (17). Disability studies scholars and disability advocates have often focused on the healthy disabled, and have carefully distinguished between chronic illness and disability, in order to resist the “medicalization of disability” and focus more clearly on the oppressive effects of ableism (Wendell 17). This desire to distinguish between illness and disability might be especially pronounced in the case of cancer, given that “having cancer has been experienced by many as shameful, therefore something to conceal, and also unjust, a betrayal by one’s body” (Sontag 193). If cancer survivors themselves refuse to accept their disabled and/or unhealthy body, then they would likely prove unhelpful for disability activists who want their bodies to be accepted by public opinion and included in the geography of public spaces and institutions. At the same time, Wendell notes: social constructionist analyses of disability, in which oppressive institutions and policies, prejudiced attitudes, discrimination, cultural misrepresentation, and other social injustices are seen as the primary causes of disability, can reduce attention to those disabled people whose bodies are highly medicalized because of their suffering, their deteriorating health, or the threat of death. Moreover, some unhealthy disabled people, as well as some healthy people with disabilities, experience physical or psychological burdens that no amount of social justice can eliminate. Therefore, some very much want to have their bodies cured, not as a substitute for curing ableism, but in addition to it. (18)

Further, “‘healthy disabled’ is a category with fluctuating and sometimes uncertain membership” (Wendell 19). As Herrndorf narrates his condition throughout the pages of Arbeit und Struktur, his self-categorization moves between healthy and able-bodied, terminally ill but currently healthy, disabled and unhealthy but with hope of recovery (from illness, disability, or both), and disabled and ill with little hope of any kind of a future. As Herrndorf works through his own response to his ill and sometimes disabled body, he uses his blog initially just to share updates with his friends and family, but eventually to communicate and create out of his changed situation. He participates in what has been described (within North American literature, but with relevance for other literatures as well) as “one of the most significant developments – if not the most significant development – in life writing” over the past several decades: “the proliferation of book-length accounts (from both first- and thirdperson points of view) of living with illness and disability” (Couser 530). Herrndorf ’s text crosses several narrative and generic boundaries within this phenomenon. It begins as a private blog, becomes public, and then becomes a book. Further, while it retains its journalistic form, at times it takes on a more continuous

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narrative style, most notably in the opening “Twilight” chapter and the flashback sections. And as Herrndorf connects with others suffering from cancer, a number of third-person threads emerge throughout the text. Indeed, the final word, “Alma” is explained in a footnote to refer to Almut Klotz, a musician and author who had died of cancer five days earlier. As such, the book ends with Herrndorf using his platform to provide third-person commentary on others suffering a similar fate. By situating his own story within a web of interconnected lives, the blog becomes Herrndorf ’s virtual home and community. Over the course of Arbeit und Struktur, not only the blog, but also the multiple novels Herrndorf is writing become a sort of virtual Heimat in response to his difficulties in physical spaces. The book’s heading points to this strategy for combating the seemingly inevitable physical decline. The title Arbeit und Struktur derives from an entry in the flashback. Herrndorf describes a phone conversation with another glioblastoma patient who immediately went back to work as if nothing had changed, and who was still successfully working 13 years after his diagnosis. The focus on work seems to offer a liberating path of action; it gives a productive and open-ended project that lends meaning to a painfully finite life. Given the uncertainty regarding how much longer he would live and how quickly and severely the tumor would begin impacting his mental capabilities, “[b]logging represented a deliberate effort on Herrndorf ’s part to administer the self ” (Balint 6). After his diagnosis, the work of writing in general, not only the blog, takes center stage: Herrndorf completes Tschick in the first months after the diagnosis and the novel Sand the following year. Arbeit und Struktur and the fragmentary novel Bilder deiner großen Liebe (Pictures of Your True Love, 2014) were both published posthumously. In the midst of all this focus on virtual communication and writing, physical spaces and travel also play a role in Herrndorf ’s experience of communities and belonging. As in travel literature generally, descriptions of Herrndorf ’s trips away from Berlin help to construct or understand identities back home (Brückner et al. 1). Specifically, the travel narratives within Arbeit und Struktur call into question the effectiveness of a virtual Heimat constructed through writing. In February of 2011, the author travels to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, and two months later, he makes a trip to southern Italy. A number of entries describe working, swimming, and relaxing by the sea. During the trip to Fuerteventura, the sea seems to offer solace and rejuvenation: at the end of the vacation, he describes his “difficult parting from the sea” (AS 194). But the beauty and power of the sea are in fact a secondary concern: when he first arrives, he writes, “most important question after arrival: where is the WiFi?” (AS 189). He complains midway through the trip of strong dizziness, and his specific complaint does not have to do with lost vacation time (or the threat of mortality), but rather: “[I] can’t

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work” (AS 190). The next week life is better: “[I’m] working like a machine again” (AS 192). We might take this as an expression of Herrndorf ’s independence and the meaning he gains through work, but for the fact that there are others present as well. His friend Kathrin Passig tells him in November of the same year, seven months later, that she hated these trips because of Herrndorf ’s “asocial behavior in compulsive fixation on work” (AS 283). From Passig’s comments, it becomes clear that Herrndorf ’s positive connotation of his time by the sea – a classic heterotopia, thirdspace, or wilderness landscape that might allow new modes of engagement with everyday life – functions very differently in his illness-induced writing frenzy. While occasional trips abroad are described in the text, most travels narrated in the memoir take place in Herrndorf ’s chosen home city of Berlin. But even here, his experience with space is strongly altered. As his illness progresses, orientation becomes increasingly difficult. One night he struggles to find his way home as darkness falls. Writing about the experience afterward, he reflects on the desire to feel that he has not lost the mental and physical capabilities that he once had, “among them the ability to say and be ‘I.’ And to orient this ‘I’ in space, dammit. Herrndorf, the logician, the mathematician, the born navigator. I was those things once, after all. And therefore, I am still those things today” (AS 331). In this quotation, the narrator’s thoughts circle around an “I” that wants to assert itself not only in space but in time. The passage rages against the idea of a gap between who the author was and how he is; it pleads for sameness between the post-diagnosis subject undergoing cancer treatment and the pre-cancer self. To support this chronological continuity, Herrndorf seeks spatial orientation on the streets of his urban Heimat, circling the streets around his apartment for two hours before finally finding his way home. While writing for his online community provides some replacement for lost physical communities, passages like this still display a longing for comfort and competence within physical space. In critiquing the Heimat concept for its tendency toward exclusion, critics have emphasized how the praise of community and search for harmonious integration of humans into an environment can easily blend into exclusionary thinking and racism (for example, Boa and Palfreyman 21–22). The critique emphasizes cultural identities and geographic origins that can be prerequisites for experiencing shelter within the notion of Heimat, but Herrndorf ’s inability to find his way home shows that there is also an implied intellectual state required. The Heimat does not offer shelter to one who cannot navigate its streets. And while the digital community that develops around the blog could provide a surrogate sense of belonging, the blog simultaneously narrates Herrndorf ’s encounters with friends such as Passig whose relationship with Herrndorf, grounded in the offline world, comes into conflict with the community of readers that becomes favored due to Herrndorf ’s ob-

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session with his work. This process offers a curious reversal to the trope of “narrative prosthesis” that has been discussed by scholars in disabilities studies (Mitchell and Snyder 274). Whereas literature often makes deliberate display of disabled characters in order to connote difference against the anonymous background of supposedly normal able-bodied characters, Herrndorf ’s narrative emerges from the position of disability. Disruption arises, and Herrndorf ’s illness and gradually developing disabilities are only put on display when mirrored back by another person who makes their way into the narrative. Faced with the deterioration of the author’s body and mind, the blog itself comes to function as what we might call prosthetic time for the author who knows that the years of his own life are being cut off. The blog preserves individual moments of time in an attempt to compensate for the inaccessibility of a timeless Heimat, despite Herrndorf ’s stated awareness of the “Sinnlosigkeit” (AS 214) – meaning “futility,” but also “meaninglessness” – of the attempt. In such a state, can Heimat be an experience that is valued? While the online community seems to offer some replacement for lost physical contacts and abilities, Herrndorf ’s repeated struggles to occupy his physical spaces – combined with his recurring descriptions of sites in Berlin such as favorite bars and swimming lakes – suggest that the sense of belonging can only be perceived as something lost. In the entry on April 4, 2010, Herrndorf writes: “Prassnik. Normalcy. Good” (AS 38). Normal life, experienced at the bar Prassnik, might be as close as the text offers to a feeling of home, belonging, and comfort. Shortly before this entry – less than a week earlier, in the entry on March 29, 2010 – Herrndorf reports that he has the “Scheißmethylgruppe” or “shit-methyl-group” (AS 35), a genetic variation that significantly reduces his chances of survival.⁶ He describes this discovery as “a winner in the genetic lottery” (AS 35). But regardless of the genetic variation, survival rates become flat, and very low, after two years. In its visual form as well as its content, this revelation dominates the entries that follow. The text features a large descending line graph showing survival rates; the graph is inserted within two paragraphs of prose. The subsequent entries are short and feature text only, so that the one-line entry, “Prassnik. Normalcy. Good.” offers an arrival in its formal qualities as well as its content. After the medicalized understanding of his body, according to which his very existence is presented as a genetic lottery and set of percentages, the simplicity of a normal outing to his favorite locale offers brief comfort within knowledge of dissolution.

 Since the combining of words in German cannot be replicated in English, I include the German original to give a sense of the tone that is simultaneously angry, darkly humorous, and highly medicalized.

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Heimat is a celebration of humans and environments deemed normal, whether defined geographically, politically, or through radical openness that aims at inclusion. Likewise, able-bodiedness comes to be seen as the default through the “construction of normalcy” (Davis 23). The brevity of Herrndorf ’s three-word entry on “Normalcy” points to both the strong psychological desire for, as well as the inevitable transience of, a sense of belonging and home, understood without definition or explanation to be “normal,” that becomes increasingly inaccessible over the ensuing 400 pages of Arbeit und Struktur. The memoir documents a homelessness dictated not by an unwelcoming community or inaccessible space, but by a body that increasingly renders impossible the types of access that the conscious subject, housed with increasing unease within this deteriorating body, still desires.

4 Heimat in Herrndorf’s Tschick: Spectacle, Euphoria, Indifference The experience of place, belonging, and community in Tschick, the bestselling young adult novel that Herrndorf completed during the months after his cancer diagnosis, and that he discusses frequently in the first third of Arbeit und Struktur, offers insights that complement and extend the geographic and social disorientation of the memoir. In Tschick, the narrator Maik Klingenberg is a 14-year-old outsider in school who befriends a new student, Andrej Tschichatschow, nicknamed Tschick, who is of German heritage but lived with his family in Russia until emigrating to Berlin with his brother several years earlier. On the last day of school, Tschick and Maik are among the only students who are not invited to the birthday party of Tatjana, a popular girl in class on whom Maik has an enormous crush. Initially brought together by their shared outsider status, Maik and Tschick gradually become friends and embark on a road trip in an old car Tschick has hotwired.⁷ On the road they meet a wide array of eccentric, bizarre, and almost always supportive or nurturing characters who enable their continued journey, right up until the trip ends with a highway crash into a dilapidated semi-truck pulling a cargo of live pigs. The support that Maik and Tschick receive on their journey is lacking in their home lives. Their parents are absent, abusive, or (in the one positively portrayed parent-child relationship) alcoholic, and none of the spatial shelter of Heimat is present. At the end of the novel, Tschick is living in an ironically labelled “Heim” that is actually a forced detention center rather than a chosen,  Specifically, the car is a Lada, an old Russian car “that just barely fulfills the minimum definition of a personal motor vehicle: it runs” (Ritzen 89).

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sheltering home (T 253);⁸ and Maik’s family lives in the one luxury villa built at the edge of an empty field, the first of a community that Maik’s father had intended to build as a real estate developer before the project was halted due to environmental concerns. In both cases, there is only the shadow of a family, geographically isolated from any larger community. If there is a happy ending in the novel, it arises not through a successful journey and return to a joyful home, but rather through an increased ability to navigate the complexities of illness and disability within a precarious domestic sphere. One specific form of illness that is frequently connected to disability – alcoholism – affects both protagonists. While alcoholism in itself does not necessarily constitute a disability, it is often connected to physical and mental disabilities as a cause, effect, or complicating factor (Samokhvalov et al. 2). Further, and of primary interest for the present analysis, alcohol addiction, like other chronic illnesses, can function similarly to disability in terms of the resulting social stigmas and exclusions (Corrigan 4–5; Schomerus 59).⁹ Alcoholism is an ongoing struggle for Maik’s mother. Meanwhile, Tschick engages in repeated binges from the moment he first appears in the novel. Within a very different context, Siobhan Senier has examined literary portrayals of communities that explicitly overcome the exclusive and spectacular approach toward alcoholism that, as with disability in general, commonly appears in ableist communities and literatures (Senier n.p.). In Tschick, the narrative gradually makes a similar shift away from a view of alcoholism as spectacle toward a view that accepts alcoholism as one trait among many, rather than a defining feature. Both Maik’s mother and Tschick, with their alcoholism and familial or social exclusion, are initially introduced as spectacles to be gawked at, following the well-established patterns for disability in literature as something that elicits “a stare, a gesture of disgust” (Mitchell and Snyder 280, cf. Garland-Thomson 199). Tschick’s alcoholism, along with his relative poverty and lack of a supportive family, leads to him being labeled “Asi” (asocial). These elements are put on display from his first appearance in the novel: “Tschick was [asocial] trash, and that’s ex-

 The simplest literal translation for Heim is “home” and the word also calls to mind the broader concept of Heimat, but the English-language publication of the novel translates the word only as “juvenile detention center” or simply “detention center” (WWTC, 223, 244).  Of course, the stigmas related to both disease and disability are complex and variable; the specific contours and historical progressions of these stigmas vary based on the specific disease or disability, other aspects of individual identity, and makeup of the community within which they are experienced (Corrigan 4–5).

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actly what he looked like” (WWTC 35).¹⁰ On the next page, we learn what this means: He was average height, had on a dirty white shirt that was missing a button, bargain basement jeans, and misshapen brown shoes that looked like dead rats. He also had extremely high cheekbones and slits instead of eyes. His eyes – these narrow slits – were the first thing you noticed about him. They made him look Mongolian and you could never tell where he was looking. (WWTC 36)

What does it mean to look like “asocial trash?” From this passage, it begins with messy and tattered clothes, suggesting that “asocial” is a schoolyard signifier connoting poverty and lack of a stable home. The word is a projection: those who are comfortably supported by social structures assign the label of “asocial” to the person who lacks those structures, rather than noting the failure of the social fabric to support a child who emigrated to Germany years earlier. Derision toward Tschick’s unkempt wardrobe is soon mixed with racist depictions of his appearance, e. g., extremely high cheekbones and “slits” instead of eyes. These traits are racialized not only as foreign, but as barbaric. The description of his appearance as “Mongolian” connects him with the novel’s use of “Attila the Hun,” a moniker that appears repeatedly in the narration as a shorthand for a violent, angry, or chaotic person. Two pages into Tschick’s introduction, it is revealed that he is extremely drunk; his “asocial trash” label thus arises through the class’s response to his unkempt wardrobe, racialized appearance, and alcoholism. Even as the classroom community attempts to exclude Tschick based on class, race, and health, elements of Tschick’s appearance frustrate the class’s efforts to define an exclusive community, both socially and spatially. Regarding the social community, Maik reports that Tschick’s narrow eyes make it impossible to tell where he is looking; he is thereby described in a way that prevents his participation in a classroom society defined by spectacle. Rather than being integrated into classroom society, he is simply present, without the class even knowing if he is mentally alert: “The way he slumped in his chair with his eyes barely open, you never knew whether he was asleep, wasted, or just really laid-back” (WWTC 41). No longer being looked at, but also not looking with the class, he gains a liminal status that remains at the borders of the culture that does not accept but can no longer fully reject him. He also disrupts the spatial boundaries of Heimat within the class. Ina-Maria Greverus describes the Heimat concept as referring to a spe-

 The German word “Asi” contains implications that are not included in the word “trash” used in the English translation, so I have added the literal translation of the German slang to the published English translation.

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cifically defined space; her analysis develops through engagement with zoological discussions of territoriality such as Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of a subjectively determined Umwelt or environment (Greverus 18, 28). Because the class is unable to determine what Tschick is looking at, they cannot know how he perceives the space that the class inhabits; he thereby disrupts the territorial no less than the social component of the would-be exclusive classroom community. Whereas his alcoholism is initially presented as a spectacle that would unify the class, his acceptance (without integration) chips away at the exclusivity of the community that he precariously inhabits. Maik’s mother offers another example of alcoholism being initially otherized as a spectacle but ultimately accepted; compared with the change in how Tschick’s alcohol consumption is viewed, the reversal of the portrayal of his mother’s condition is both more gradual and more complete. The prominence of this episode within the novel, as well as the rapid transition between different approaches to alcoholism, are highlighted by the fact that they comprise the one portion of the novel when the protagonist gains a different name, seemingly a coveted mark of respect from his peers. Maik gains the nickname “Psycho” because he writes an entertaining essay about his mother’s alcoholism and reads the paper aloud to the class. He presents his mother’s illness as something to be gawked at, and the class’s response – rapt attention and the bestowing of a nickname – rewards him for this approach. The status of alcoholism as spectacle is quickly overturned. After Maik reads the essay, the teacher, Mr. Schürmann, shouts at Maik: “That’s your mother. Did you ever stop to think about that?” (WWTC 25). Mr. Schürmann’s extreme discomfort with Maik’s candid disclosure of his mother’s condition gestures toward the symbolic reading of a sick mother as an unhealthy or damaged Heimat (Boa and Palfreyman 26). Maik does not repeat the initial narration of his mother as ridiculous spectacle, but he also does not accept Mr. Schürmann’s implied message that his mother’s alcoholism is something shameful that should be hidden from others. Instead, Maik returns to his initial thesis (“I like my mother,” WWTC 21), suggesting that he accepts her illness. This impression is strengthened when, shortly after Maik reads the essay, he loses his nickname. The nickname is removed because a new boy in school, “handsome André” (WWTC 27), declares him to be boring. Maik refuses to continue the presentation of disability as spectacle, and the book emphasizes this point by introducing a character who is himself a spectacle, his identity defined by his pleasing appearance, to strip Maik of his nickname. In the remainder of the book, the rest of the class is largely absent and the narration is therefore focalized more emphatically through Maik’s perspective; as a result, his accepting view of his mother’s illness begins to permeate the narrative.

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Through the gradual acceptance of alcoholism, the text shifts away from the display of disability as narrative device; it thus seems to model acceptance of illness and disability as part of an inclusive Heimat. At the end of the novel, the protagonists and supporting characters of Maik, Tschick, Maik’s mother, and Isa seem to have coalesced into a happy community of outsiders that offers a hopeful alternative to the traditional Heimat idea. As described at the beginning of this study, the novel ends with a womb-like scene in which Maik swims underwater with his mother. While in the pool, he thinks about the things that are most important to him and feels happy. It is a seeming return to a womb-like Heimat, surrounded by warm water and holding hands with his mother. Yet the language employed in these final moments of this supposed Heimat novel calls the possibility of a happy ending into doubt. While Maik is underwater with is mother, he (as first-person narrator) describes himself as being “happy” – but only in the English translation of the novel. In the German original, the meaning is notably different. Maik declares: “ich freute mich wahnsinnig” (T 255, rendered in English as “I was insanely happy,” WWTC 245). The verb “sich freuen” is not associated with longterm happiness; it describes something more akin to fleeting euphoria. The book’s final sentence emphasizes just how fleeting this joy is: “Weil, man kann zwar nicht ewig die Luft anhalten. Aber doch ziemlich lange” (T 254; in English: Because you can’t hold your breath forever, but you can hold it for a pretty long time,” WWTC 244–245). In the German quotation, a tension arises through two words that are omitted or incompletely rendered in the English translation: “zwar” (indeed, in fact) implies awareness of reality, while “doch” (but, still, nevertheless) connotes defiance or contradiction. The adolescent narrator begins his final statement with “doch,” emphasizing the resilient capacity for joy he has developed over the course of the novel. But the reader cannot ignore that taken literally, Maik’s joy exists on the time frame of holding one’s breath underwater – a matter of seconds or, in exceptional cases, minutes. Soon enough, the euphoria of this Heimat image will fade. The seemingly happy ending of Tschick invites skepticism not only because of the brevity of its joyful final scene, but also because of the precarity of all the characters upon whom Maik’s happiness depends. The most obvious example is his mother: while underwater, he muses that there are worse things than an alcoholic mother. In response, the reader might remember that Maik also has an abusive father, and while Maik’s father is not in the picture in the final scene, Maik and his mother are still financially dependent on him. Another source of Maik’s underwater delight is his memory that it would not be long until Maik could visit Tschick in his “Heim” (home or detention center). There is no suggestion of Tschick moving from a Heim to a true Heimat, whatever that might mean, let alone a supportive family or home environment; the only realistic hope is a visit in his detention cen-

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ter (the term used in Tim Mohr’s translation, unfortunately without the doublemeaning from the original German). Finally, regarding Isa, the memory that brings him joy is of their brief time together, a letter she sent to him at school, and the hope of a meeting in Berlin the following week.¹¹ What will happen during and after this meeting? Will Isa be there at all, and if so, will she remain in Berlin? Given that she was living alone in a garbage dump when Tschick and Maik first met her, the reader might wonder what factors brought her to that point and whether they might continue to impact her life and her ability to have a stable friendship with Maik. For each of the characters who are crucial to Maik’s sense of being “insanely happy,” the accumulated information that has been presented throughout the novel makes it difficult for the reader to share in Maik’s optimism. As a result of the brevity and instability of Maik’s joyful moment at the end of the novel, the final passages of Tschick suggest a sense of home that cannot be insulated from the threat of homelessness (whether physical or emotional); the novel carries out Kathöfer and Weber’s assertion that “the sense of Heimat is always already rooted in a sense of Heimatlosigkeit [homelessness]” (412). Maik, Tschick, and Isa are all marginalized and isolated, so they try to connect with each other and find a sense of belonging that is lacking in each of their family backgrounds (cf. Evans 155). It is a small community defined negatively, by means of a shared lack. The resulting sense of community is similar to conceptions of Heimat that Kathöfer and Weber have explored in “cultural production by minoritized and racialized groups”; in these works, “Heimat thought is not rooted in nostalgic loss. Instead, a home denied becomes a home that is claimed” (Kathöfer and Weber 412, cf. Blickle 147). As the novel builds toward the negatively defined Heimat of its concluding scene, a keyword is “egal” (indifferent, immaterial), suggesting that indifference provides a crucial tool for an individual in an unwelcoming world.¹² Maik’s mother triumphs over her failed marriage by throwing the material signs of her marriage (and resulting wealth) into the pool and declaring: “Das ist alles egal” (T 251; in English: “none of this matters,” WWTC 242). As Maik swims underwater at the end of the novel, it occurs to him that the class will likely call him Psycho again; he responds with indifference: “Ich dachte nämlich, dass sie mich jetzt wahrscheinlich wieder Psycho nennen würden. Und dass es mir egal war” (T 253; in English: “I  In her letter, Isa tells Maik that she is coming to Berlin and suggests that they meet the following Sunday at 5pm in front of the Weltzeituhr (world clock), a major landmark in the center of the city.  The various English translations reduce the impression created by the repetition of the single word “egal” in German; I have therefore included the German text for the quotations below.

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thought that everybody at school was probably going to start calling me Psycho again. And that I didn’t care if they did,” WWTC 244). And as we know from Arbeit und Struktur, Herrndorf himself achieved material success thanks to this novel after years of near-poverty. His response: “es gibt nichts, was mir egaler wäre” – when success finally arrived, he could not have cared less (182). Indifference to material success and popularity comprises a precondition to belonging, but the presence of illness, disability, and marginality remain. While Maik has grown up, the social fabric around him – comprised of the people who interest him, not the school class and authority figures who were his concern at the beginning – remains in tatters. Perhaps, then, the lesson that Tschick offers as a young-adult Heimat novel is how to successfully clothe oneself in a Heimat stitched together from a shredded social fabric. Past texts have discussed the construction of hybrid or hyphenated Heimat within a multicultural society.¹³ Tschick highlights a different level of complication, based on age and health rather than cultural background. After the initial transition from gawking at alcoholism to accepting it, Tschick suggests the possibilities and challenges of a small but supportive Heimat community, albeit negatively defined, for its outsider adolescent protagonists.

5 From Heimat to Heterotopia: Fatih Akin’s Adaptation of Tschick When Tschick became a film under the direction of Fatih Akin, the issues regarding a negatively defined Heimat became only more emphasized. After an initial plan to have the film adaptation of Tschick be directed by David Wnendt, production timelines and aesthetic differences between Wnendt and producer Marco

 See, for example, the volume Heimat Goes Mobile: Hybrid Forms of Home in Literature and Film, edited by Gabriele Eichmanns and Yvonne Franke, especially the introduction and the essays in Part III, and Alexandra Ludewig’s book Screening Nostalgia: 100 Years of German Heimat Film (15, 389–432). The films of Fatih Akin, whose adaptation of Tschick is discussed below, are often described as displaying hybrid or hyphenated approaches to Heimat and identity (Ludewig 405–06, Berghahn 142, Mennel 585). Akin himself “rejects the label of a hyphenated identity filmmaker,” even though his films frequently engage with themes of migration and hybrid identity (Berghahn 142). In the present volume, Len Cagle’s essay works through these tensions by examining the personal and local, rather than (inter)national or (multi)ethnic, notions of Heimat in Akin’s films. In a related analysis, Kathöfer and Weber discuss complexities involving exile, trauma, and precarity in recent Heimat discourse; at the same time, they criticize the depoliticized use of postcolonial theory in recent discussions of mobility and hybridity (411–412).

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Mehlitz led to Fatih Akin taking over as director.¹⁴ Critics, scholars, and the director himself have referred to Heimat sentiments in various earlier films by Akin (e. g., Berghahn 143, Ludewig 13, Borcholte and Akin n.p.). But these discussions have not extended to Akin’s adaptation of Tschick. Whereas Akin’s “hyphenated Heimat” (Ludewig) films focus on characters negotiating multiple cultural identities in order to forge a more diverse and inclusive sense of community, Tschick focuses on outsiders whose age (as minors) and unstable homes create a sense of Heimat that is strained or broken, albeit no less emphasized. Reviews of the film frequently noted that the plot remains quite faithful to Herrndorf ’s novel (e. g., Husmann n.p., Kaever n.p.); yet several key events are reordered and landscapes are altered, yielding important additions to the film’s presentation of Heimat. The changes emphasize failures and boundaries of movement: shocks, crashes, transgressions, and networks. Heimat becomes not a cohesive and sheltering core – indeed, this centralized notion of Heimat is questioned even more radically in the film than in the book, due to its emphasis on car crashes at both the beginning and end.¹⁵ Instead of a stable and centralized Heimat, the film presents a dynamic and dispersed set of distinct but interconnected places: Heimat is replaced by heterotopia. In the concluding scene from the film’s main plot, the lack of a functional community in the present is again emphasized, but while the novel provides a happy ending that can last only a moment, the film concludes with a suggestion of social belonging that is postponed into the distant future. In the novel, the final word “lange” (long) might be taken as a self-referential nod to the form of the novel itself, as Baßler suggests (78), but we cannot ignore that its literal denotation is a length of time that is little more than a minute. The film ends with the other extreme. In an overt manipulation of the story’s chronological progression, the film ends not with Maik’s return to school, but rather with a flashback to the earlier scene at an overlook in the Harz mountains. Just before the flashback, Maik is shown in a close-up side view; in the background and out of focus, Tatjana gazes at him from across the room. Maik’s voice is heard in a voice-over relating that Tatjana’s affections, which were of utmost interest at the beginning of the film, are

 Mehlitz and Wnendt differ somewhat in their characterization of why the directorship was changed; for details, see Wolfgang Höbel’s report “Mein ‘Tschick’, dein ‘Tschick’” in Spiegel Kultur.  As discussed below, the film begins by showing the scene of the car crash that marks the end of the boys’ road trip. In the novel, this scene is not described until much later. At the end of the film, while the final credits roll, an original animated sequence shows a series of events that are creatively adapted from aspects of the novel that were omitted from the film. The sequence concludes with Tschick running away from a hospital, hotwiring another Lada, and deliberately crashing it into a wall next to the hospital parking lot.

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now “egal” (they do not matter) to him, and all he can think about is when he will see Tschick again. Cut to the earlier scene: a slowly panning extreme long shot sweeps across a landscape of forested hills, and Maik’s voiceover is juxtaposed with the voices of Maik, Tschick, and Isa as they look out over the view. A final reverse shot shows Maik, Isa, and Tschik sitting at the overlook; Maik proposes that they all meet there again in 50 years, and Isa agrees. Immediately afterward, the image freezes, and the closing credits and music begin. Unlike in the book, Maik at this point has not received a letter from Isa. Instead, sound bridges and flashbacks allow the film to end with a scene of the three friends together, but within the film’s diegesis there is no hint that reunification will occur before the 50 years have elapsed. In contrast to the negligibly short moment of euphoria that concludes the novel, the film ends with a scene of friendship and belonging projected 50 years into the future, with no promise of functional community in the meantime. This conclusion exposes the ephemerality of even the negatively defined Heimat community of the three outsiders. Like the conclusion, the film’s opening sequence also adjusts the chronology and location from the novel in ways that are of interest for the film’s portrayal of Heimat. In Herrndorf ’s novel, the narration begins in a highway police station where Maik is talking to police officers after the accident: “The first thing is the smell of blood and coffee” (WWTC 1). But the film starts earlier, on the highway, in the shadow of an overturned truck and surrounded by escaped and mutilated livestock, with a long line of stopped cars leading up to the crash site. The roaming animals and highway setting of these opening shots display immediate affinities with the Heimat and road movie genres, but both are inverted. Pigs, part of the agricultural landscapes of traditional Heimat imagery, are shown as an object out of place, a commodity upended while being transported from an unknown home to an unknown destination. And the road itself, symbol of freedom, travel, and escape, is introduced by means of a traffic jam. Both Heimat and the road appear, from the outset, as a wreck. In the beginning, agricultural products are disrupted in transit across space; at the end of the film, the three adolescents’ friendship is imagined forward in time. In both cases, elements of Heimat discourse are dispersed. In one of the events leading up to the crash at the end of the film, another significant change suggests possible implications for this dispersal. In the novel, one of the final events in the road trip involves Tschick and Maik crossing a massive open-pit lignite mine on a rickety bridge. In place of this scene, Akin’s film shows the two friends crossing a swamp on a floating bridge made of logs lashed together. As the car sits on the wooden bridge precisely at the level of the water, it takes on the appearance of a floating barge. The scene nods toward Herrndorf ’s description of how he conceived of the idea for Tschick: in Arbeit und Struktur, he describes the stolen car

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as a modern-day substitute for Huckleberry Finn’s raft (113). Akin’s new climactic scene in the movie – not a part of the novel – gestures toward Herrndorf ’s reflections on his own novel by transforming the car into a boat. In this sequence, two of the key coming-of-age moments in the film occur. First, after Tschick injures his foot while wading in the swamp beside the bridge and is therefore unable to operate the car, Maik initially refuses to drive, with the explanation: “I’m a coward. I’m a coward and I’m boring” (1:10:05–1:10:10).¹⁶ Tschick replies that Maik is in fact far more impressive than he realizes, since he has gained the affections of Isa, and “compared to Isa, Tatjana is brain dead.” Then, Tschick reveals, “I can tell. Because … I don’t like girls” (1:10:20–1:10:35). Tschick’s injury is combined with the declaration of Maik’s coming-of-age and Tschick’s coming out. These events span multiple chapters in the novel; in the movie, they are condensed into the scene on the wooden bridge, in which the car seems to float on the water like a boat. With all of these key events gathered together, it is fitting that the boat calls to mind Michel Foucault’s description of a ship as the “heterotopia par excellence” (27). A heterotopia, according to Foucault, is a sort of “counter-space,” and one of its traditional roles has been to provide a space for “individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis” (24). Adolescents are the first example he gives for such individuals. By transforming the car into a boat, Akin simultaneously gestures toward Foucault’s idea of heterotopias and Herrndorf ’s own description of journeys over water as a key element of successful adolescent narratives. Philipp Ritzen has discussed Herrndorf ’s novel in relation to Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, focusing especially on the distinction between heterotopias and utopias and their role in Maik’s development and maturation (87–88). While Ritzen describes numerous sites within the novel as heterotopias, his analysis specifically skips over the concluding scenes of the mine and the hospital (Ritzen 93, FN31). It is therefore of interest that Akin adapts precisely these scenes to take place on a sort of boat (Foucault’s “heterotopia par excellence”) and to be the location for significant moments of character growth. Further, these allusions and theoretical connections align with Akin’s approach to the film’s protagonists; their teenage status complements their migration and dysfunctional family backgrounds to create characters who are constantly on the margins and in transition, and who therefore are excellent vessels for narratives about growth and transformation. Akin “sees teenagers as ‘mystical creatures’” in that “they are not children, they are not adults, they are somewhere in between. This state of in-betweenness fits with Akin’s fluid idea of

 As mentioned above, quotations from the film are drawn from the English subtitles. The German screenplay by Lars Hubrich was also consulted in preparing this analysis.

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identity and genre hybridity” (Schultz 204). The in-between status of the protagonists sets them outside of rigid social norms and community structures; like their heterotopic vehicle, they stand outside of conventional structures and can therefore provide insight, critique, and connection despite – or due to – their outsider status. Herrndorf ’s writings signify a heterotopic journey in search of identity and in defiance of limits related to cultural origin, family, age, health, and physical ability. Akin’s film adaptation enhances these impacts. As a hybrid road-movie, coming-ofage film, and Heimatfilm, Tschick portrays Heimat with a sympathetic complexity fully in line with the exploration of hybrid space and identity in Akin’s earlier films. While the film cannot undo the physical limitations to Heimat presented by disability and illness, it responds by foregrounding the physical shocks, obstacles, and fleeting connections that mark the adolescent protagonists’ sense of identity and belonging.

6 Conclusion The secondary literature on Heimat is vast and complex. The introduction to this volume and the sampling of texts briefly discussed in this essay provide a survey of some of the key studies from recent decades, and there is much more that has not been mentioned here. But despite the complexity of the topic and the sophistication of the scholarly discussion, the Heimat concept retains a connotation as a simplistic, nostalgic, and often-reactionary term involving identity, space, and belonging within a community. Friederike Eigler argues that critical studies of Heimat often focus their attention on “history and politics” at the expense of “specific representations of place and space,” thus creating the impression of a “rather static, fixed notion of place” (38). Recent studies have focused much more on the internal hybridity, porous boundaries, and change over time within spaces and ideas of Heimat, adding some complexity to the persistent sense of conservative nostalgia that is ascribed to Heimat ideas and spaces. And yet, these studies have generally continued to assume an intact and able-bodied individual subject who perceives these ideas and travels across these spaces. Scholars have revealed the space of Heimat to be dynamic and complex, but it seems to be inhabited by essentialized and static individuals. Disability, age, and illness function as physical vectors of exclusion that go unseen unless one recognizes that exclusion from Heimat occurs for individual bodies in changing ways. The film and novel of Tschick, as well as the memoir Arbeit und Struktur, reveal instances in which people remain in a state of marginality or disorientation with regards to the spaces and communities of Heimat not due to their group af-

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filiation, but due to individual traits of age, health, and physical disability. Tschick and Maik lack both stability at home and the age of majority within society: they are “strafmündig” (T 10, “criminally accountable,” WWTC 4) but, paradoxically, not yet “mündig” (of age, mature). They function within traditional notions of Heimat only as victims and objects of control, not as participatory subjects. In Arbeit und Struktur, Herrndorf narrates from the other end of the spectrum: he has moved beyond a position of control and authority, even with regards to the control over his own body and movements. He views himself “no longer as a person, but rather only a shadow, as something that no longer matters” (AS 60). His temporal position of no longer, like Maik and Tschick’s position of not yet, offers a chronological corollary to their physical and emotional states of exclusion. Heimat is frequently regarded as an idea or feeling rather than place, and it is certainly an example of Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities. But abstract or imagined though it may be, it is susceptible to physical limits. Herrndorf ’s texts negotiate ideas of Heimat within the bounds of a physically broken, beaten, or excluded self as it tries to find points of support and orientation in a disorienting or debilitating home.

Works Cited Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. U of California P, 1990. Ashkenazi, Ofer. Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape. U of Michigan P, 2020. Balint, Lilla. “Sickness unto Death in the Age of 24/7: Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, vol. 40, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1–19. Baßler, Moritz. “Nach den Medien: Wolfgang Herrndorfs Tschick zwischen Populärem Realismus und Pop.” Wolfgang Herrndorf, edited by Annina Klappert, Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2015, pp. 67–85. Berghahn, Daniela. “No Place Like Home? Or Impossible Homecomings in the Films of Fatih Akin.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, vol. 4, no. 3, 2006, pp. 141–157. Bickenbach, Jerome E, Somnath Chatterji, E.M. Badley, et al. “Models of Disablement, Universalism, and the International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps.” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 48, no. 9, 1999, pp. 1173–1187. Blickle, Peter. Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland. Camden House, 2002. Boa, Elizabeth, and Rachel Palfreyman. Heimat – A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990. Oxford UP, 2000. Borcholte, Andreas, and Fatih Akin. “Soul Kitchen–Regisseur Fatih Akin: ‘Ich hatte Bock zu lachen.’” Spiegel Kultur, 23 December 2009, www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/soul-kitchen-regisseur-fatih-akinich-hatte-bock-zu-lachen-a-668682.html. Accessed 19 June 2021. Brückner, Leslie, Christopher Meid, and Christine Rühling. “Einleitung der Herausgeber: Literarische Deutschlandreisen nach 1989.” Literarische Deutschlandreisen nach 1989, edited by Leslie Brückner, Christopher Meid, and Christine Rühling, De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 1–11.

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Confino, Alon. The Nation as Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918. U of North Carolina P, 1997. Corrigan, Patrick W. “Introduction.” The Stigma of Disease and Disability: Understanding Causes and Overcoming Injustices, edited by Patrick W. Corrigan, APA, 2014, pp. 3–6. Couser, G. Thomas. “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 3rd edition, Routledge, 2010, pp. 531–534. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Verso, 1995. Eichmanns, Gabriele, and Yvonne Franke. Heimat Goes Mobile: Hybrid Forms of Home in Literature and Film. Cambridge Scholars, 2013. Eigler, Friederike. “Critical Approaches to Heimat and the ‘Spatial Turn.’” New German Critique, vol. 39, no. 1, 2012, pp. 27–48. Eigler, Friederike, and Jens Kugele, editors. Heimat: At the Intersection of Space and Memory. De Gruyter, 2012. Evans, Owen. “Building Bridges: Fatih Akin and the Cinema of Intercultural Dialogue.” Nationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema, edited by James Harvey, Palgrave, 2018, pp. 145–167. Frank, Caroline. “In Walachei, Weltall und Wüste: Wolfgang Herrndorfs imaginative Geographien.” Wolfgang Herrndorf, edited by Annina Klappert, Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2015, pp. 165–180. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Beholding.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard Davis, 3rd edition, Routledge, 2010, pp. 199–208. Greverus, Ina-Maria. Auf der Suche nach Heimat: Ein literaturanthropologischer Versuch zum Heimatphänomen. Athenäum, 1972. Herrndorf, Wolfgang. Arbeit und Struktur. Rowohlt, 2013. Herrndorf, Wolfgang. Tschick. Rowohlt, 2010. Herrndorf, Wolfgang. Why We Took the Car. Translated by Tim Mohr, Andersen, 2014. Höbel, Wolfgang. “Streit um Herrndorf-Verfilmung: Mein Tschick, dein Tschick.” Spiegel Kultur, 14 October 2015, www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/fatih-akin-uebernimmt-tschick-verfilmung-was-stecktdahinter-a-1057762.html. Accessed 19 June 2021. Hubrich, Lars. Tschick. Das Drehbuch: Nach dem Roman von Wolfgang Herrndorf. Rowohlt Rotation (E-Book), 2016. Husmann, Wenke. “Dieser Sommer ist ein ganzes Leben.” Zeit Online, 14 September 2016, www.zeit. de/kultur/film/2016-09/fatih-akin-tschick-film. Accessed 19 June 2021. Kaever, Oliver. “Heldenreise im Lada.” Spiegel Kultur, 14 September 2016, www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/ tschick-verfilmung-fatih-akins-perfekter-roadmovie-a-1110512.html. Accessed 19 June 2021. Kathöfer, Gabi, and Beverly Weber. “Introduction: Precarity/Heimatlosigkeit.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2018, pp. 411–417. Ludewig, Alexandra. Screening Nostalgia: 100 Years of German Heimat Film. Transcript, 2011. Mennel, Barbara. “14 February 2004: Golden Bear for Gegen die Wand Affirms Fatih Akin as Germany’s Preeminent Transnational Director.” A New History of German Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson, Camden House, 2012, pp. 583–588. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. “Narrative Prosthesis.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 3rd edition, Routledge, 2010, pp. 274–287.

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Ritzen, Philipp. “Mit dem Lada ins Nirgendwo: Elemente des Utopischen in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Tschick.” Alman Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi – Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur, vol. 34, 2015, pp. 85–96. Samokhvalov, Andriy, Svetlana Popova, Robin Room, et al. “Disability Associated with Alcohol Abuse and Dependence.” Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, vol. 34, no. 11, 2010, pp. 1871– 78, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01275.x. Schomerus, Georg. “The Stigma of Alcohol and Other Substance Abuse.” The Stigma of Disease and Disability: Understanding Causes and Overcoming Injustices, edited by Patrick W. Corrigan, APA, 2014, pp. 57–72. Schultz, Christina Rose. Taking Back the Stereotype: Critical Engagements with Ethnicity in German Comedy. University of Illinois at Chicago, PhD dissertation, 16 March 2018, hdl.handle.net/10027/22669. Accessed 19 June 2021. Senier, Siobhan. “Rehabilitation Reservations: Native Narrations of Disability and Community.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, 2012, n. pag., dsq-sds.org/article/view/1641. Accessed 19 June 2021. Siegel, Elke. “‘Die mühsame Verschriftlichung meiner peinlichen Existenz’: Wolfgang Herrndorfs Arbeit und Struktur zwischen Tagebuch, Blog und Buch.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik, vol. 26, no. 2, 2016, pp. 348–372. Sontag, Susan. “Aids and Its Metaphors.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 3rd edition, Routledge, 2010, pp. 193–198. Tschick. Directed by Fatih Akin, Lago Film, 2016. Von Lovenberg, Felicitas. “Wenn man all die Mühe sieht, kann man sich die Liebe denken.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 October 2010, www.faz.net/-gr4-ykm9. Accessed 19 June 2021. Von Moltke, Johannes. No Place like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema. U of California P, 2005. Wendell, Susan. “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities.” Hypatia, vol. 16, no. 4, 2001, pp. 17–33.

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Searching for Home in Fatih Akin’s Urban Heimatfilme Well the clock says it’s time to close now I know I have to go now I really want to stay here All night, all night, all night (The Doors, “Soul Kitchen”)

In an interview published shortly after the release of Soul Kitchen (2009), Fatih Akin was asked to explain his designation of the project as a Heimatfilm: Well, first of all, it’s a marketing gag. It sounds better than simply ‘comedy.’ I got the idea of the film from Grave Decisions. This film really fascinated me. I thought, man, Bavaria is exotic! I’ve traveled a lot over the last few years and no longer saw the exotic side of Hamburg. For me, Hamburg was the place that I live, where I sleep, where my doctors are, where I pay taxes, and where my kid goes to kindergarten—but it was no longer a place to make films. And yet, I had the feeling that I owed the city a film.¹

The first part of this response suggests that we shouldn’t take the director’s identification of Soul Kitchen as a Heimatfilm too seriously; the second part, however, connects Soul Kitchen, set in a dreary and decaying corner of the Hamburg Kiez (neighborhood) Wilhelmsburg, to a rural Bavarian comedy and Dialektfilm (dialect movie)² that clearly owes a debt to the classical Heimatfilm, Marcus Rosenmüller’s Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot (Grave Decisions, 2006), and suggests that one aspect of the appeal of the Heimatfilm generally is the strangeness of its setting. Hamburg can serve as the setting of a Heimatfilm not only because it is Akin’s Heimat, but also because, like Bavaria, it is “exotic.” It is certainly true that the Heimatfilm has always had an exotic quality. The panoramic landscape shots and plentiful nature scenes (mountain vistas, forests, wildlife), narratives privileging rural tranquility and quaint village life, and the ubiquity of Trachten (traditional costumes), folk songs, and colorful festivals in the classic Heimatfilme of the 1950s in particular explain in large measure the genre’s enduring appeal to urban audiences, who participate vicariously in the films’ celebrations of traditional rural culture and the harmonious coexistence with (and

 Schaghaghi; all translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.  Defined in the University of Kiel’s Lexikon der Filmbegriffe as a “dramatic or documentary film, the dialogue or commentary of which is not presented in a national standard idiom but rather in regionally spoken language” (Amann). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-011

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proper management of ) nature, and take pleasure in the small victories of the films’ Dirndl- and Lederhosen-clad characters.³ The protagonists of the classical Heimatfilm succeed in life because they accept, incorporate, and represent rural values, values which are clearly coded in the films as stable, well-defined, and superior to urban values, and are indeed often contrasted with the values (or lack thereof ) of urban characters who generally spend their time in the Heimat causing trouble for the locals. In many of these films, the failure of characters marked as urban outsiders to fully appreciate or adapt to the culture of the quaint and rural (yet to them, and to urban audiences, exotic) Heimat contributes to the idealization of the setting and its inhabitants. Akin’s response to the question regarding Soul Kitchen as Heimatfilm therefore reveals a telling feature of the appeal of the genre to an urban viewer, but fails to answer the implied question, which is: how can a film narrative situated in an urban setting like Hamburg be considered a Heimatfilm? ⁴ The answer suggested by Soul Kitchen is this: by redefining Heimat as something that is chosen and defined by its urban inhabitants on their own terms, rather than a closed system based on a set of stable (rural) values. Christina Tilmann’s review of Soul Kitchen, responding to Akin’s own designation of the film as a “new type of Heimatfilm,” declares Soul Kitchen a “Kiezfilm (neighborhood film) […] Akin, who even with his first films had to struggle with questions as to whether he was Turkish or German, has finally arrived in a Heimat that is defined by friends and locations, not by questions of nationality” (n.p.). Although I believe a case could be made for all of Akin’s films, including Soul Kitchen, as meditations on persistent and recurring issues of nationality and identity, I certainly agree that his films are generally obsessed to one degree or another with the warm embrace of Heimat, defined as home, family, and friendship, justifying Donald Weber’s designation of Akin’s work as a “cinema of hospitality” (421). My focus is on a recurring trope in Akin’s films: the establishment of Heimat in personal terms and on a small scale, often accompanied by the welcoming in of a  Marc Silberman emphasizes that the classic Heimatfilme of the 1950s “were aimed at the nostalgia of urban cinemagoers” (268) for whom “nature became a consumable product, domesticated and fake as in a poorly rendered still life rather than a hypostatized site of freedom” (117). See also Thomas Herold’s remarks in this volume regarding recent use of the word Heimat in political and cultural discourse to describe (among other things) “idealized rural spaces for a predominantly urban audience.”  As Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey points out, urban settings are fundamentally inimical to traditional notions of Heimat: “the city is the place where, as Joseph Goebbels’s racialist slur infers, ‘volksfremde Asphaltkultur’ (rootless and alienated asphalt culture) flourishes […] Heimatfilm is a compounded term whose pressure point lies precisely in the threat that the outside (citified film) poses to the inside (Heimat)” (205).

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lost or wandering stranger by figures who may themselves be outsiders in some sense. This gesture is also common to postwar Heimatfilme, which were often quite intensely – albeit obliquely – occupied with “questions of nationality.” Akin’s films therefore not only expand and challenge the Heimatfilm genre, they also reaffirm its values – albeit in an urban setting that is more fluid and less defined than the rural settings of the traditional Heimatfilm. In this chapter I focus primarily on the three films that I would argue most clearly express a theory of Heimat in Akin’s oeuvre: Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004), Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, 2007), and Soul Kitchen (2009). These films articulate a notion of Heimat that is more personal and self-determined in character than national or ethnic – a Heimat that, although spatial and thus to some extent immutable, is nevertheless inherently fluid. To state it otherwise, Akin’s Heimat is something akin to the Heimat described by Eric Rentschler in his reading of Luis Trenker’s Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son, 1934): “Heimat is a site of emotional fixity as well as a source of conceptual slippage. An imaginary property, it possesses a fluid exchange value” (94). The characters of Akin’s Heimatfilme are, in the interest of “emotional fixity” – expressed in personal and familial terms – frequently obliged to readjust their conceptions of Heimat or to reestablish a lost Heimat elsewhere. These gestures are not always successful, but they consistently align with an understanding of Heimat that is intrinsically flexible and self-determined. As in the postwar films, Akin’s Heimatfilme return frequently to the issue of Heimatlosigkeit (lack or loss of one’s homeland), including with respect to precarity (a relationship explored recently by Gabi Kathöfer and Beverly Weber and their contributors in the special issue of Seminar ⁵ that has been referenced by many contributors to this volume) and to the individual need for a sense of home, identity, and belonging. Petra Landfester has argued that Akin’s films point out “the absurdity of concepts of nation, race, and particularly ethnicity” and “deterritorialize the environment in which they are produced and invite viewers to identify the film with a local, as well as transnational film tradition. At the same token, such films illuminate the obsolescence of such concepts as nation, race, or gender” (94–95). I would further argue that, when viewed in the context of the Heimatfilm tradition, Akin’s films suggest that Heimat is neither a national nor a regional category, but rather one that is less bound to a given location or culture than it is to personal

 “It is especially the association with loss that defines Heimat […] the sense of Heimat is always already rooted in a sense of Heimatlosigkeit […] we […] take as our focus the ways in which the diversity of relationships to home must be understood as marked by precarity, designating the vulnerabilities that are embedded in every social relationship” (Kathöfer and Weber 412). Many of Akin’s characters are marked by precarity, specifically with respect to the spaces they occupy, as we will see.

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relationships located in defined interior spaces: a room, an apartment, a restaurant. This corresponds to the conception of Heimat in Akin’s films articulated by Anja Barr in the introduction to her reading of Gegen die Wand: “Heimat encompasses […] both individual sensibility as well as collective identity and the interplay of both […] Heimat […] conceived as flexible and malleable world of experience. A Heimat that one should imagine as space rather than place” (139).⁶ The search for home and Heimat in Akin’s work typically ends in a sort of fusion of precisely these dimensions, resulting in affirmations of identity, community, and belonging.

1 Heimat and the Heimatfilm Heimat has in recent years gained a certain flexibility and malleability even beyond academic discourse. Edgar Reitz, director of the 1980s television series Heimat and its sequels, recently articulated a theory of Heimat that is not determined by blood relations or the accident of birth, but rather by self-determination. In a 2018 interview (given partially in response to Horst Seehofer’s renaming of the Innenministerium to include the word Heimat), Reitz argues: That which we call the second Heimat is based on the fact that we are not only born into the family fold, but also in our own heads, wherever we feel freedom. Wherever we stand on our own feet and move about in the world we are in a position to form a second Heimat. These are more or less conscious decisions, or at least decisions that are dependent on myself. I can’t decide who my brother is. I can, however, decide who my friend is. Relationships that I form as an adult, including my choice of partner, are expressions of freedom. (Kürten)

This “second Heimat” – a sort of “Wahlverwandschaft (elective affinity),” according to Reitz – applies to outsiders as well as established insiders, for example, refugees who decide to flee violence or poverty and seek their fortunes elsewhere: “When for example the political relationships or the living conditions in a country become unbearable […] which these days happens at thousands of places in the world, people can decide to seek out a new living space” (Kürten). Clearly (according to Reitz,

 A conception of Heimat as something flexible that is located in “space rather than place” is obviously consistent with Friederike Eigler’s reading of Heimat in the context of the spatial turn as something that is “malleable” – a word that appears more than once in Eigler’s essay “Critical Approaches to Heimat and the ‘Spatial Turn’” – in that Akin’s Heimatfilme construct models of Heimat that “transcend a narrow view of Heimat/place and, instead, pertain to larger discourses on space and place” and feature “intersecting temporal and spatial – as well as personal, social, and political – dimensions” (Eigler, referring to novels by Peter Handke and Jenny Erpenbeck, 45–46).

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at least), the conception of Heimat has expanded, despite renewed conservative and extremist attempts to define Heimat in ethnically and racially exclusive terms. Reitz’s comments remind us that traditional Heimat discourses reappear in German culture during periods of stress and insecurity. The first Heimat miniseries was in part Reitz’s response to the NBC television series Holocaust (1978), which unleashed an intense national discussion when it appeared on German television in 1979.⁷ As Peter Blickle reminds us early in his study Heimat. A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, Invocations of Heimat […] always turn up where deep socioeconomic, ontological, psychological, and political shifts, fissures, and insecurities occur. Heimat buries areas of repressed anxiety. It keeps people from being reminded of that of which they do not wish to be reminded. Whenever fearful changes in modern German-speaking societies occur, Heimat is there, as well. Heimat on the surface provides a spatial, relentlessly positive, and secure collective identity, one that is free from private responsibility. Whatever lies underneath Heimat, however, remains for the most part below conscious scrutiny, outside of critical analysis, and hidden by the taboos of modern scholarship. (14)

The relevance of this observation will be apparent in the discussion of the 1950s Heimatfilm, which appears to promise an escape of sorts from complex postwar realities. It also clearly applies to the last decade, during which Germany experienced (and continues to experience) the eurozone crisis, the European migrant crisis resulting from the Syrian civil war and other conflicts, the rise of PEGIDA and the AfD, and the Covid-19 pandemic. That Heimat – in diverse forms and incarnations, including from the perspective of Germans “mit Migrationshintergrund” (with a migrant background)⁸ – has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years should surprise no one. The Heimatfilm, a category that Thomas Elsaesser refers to as “Germany’s only indigenous and historically most enduring genre” (141), also tends to surge in popularity during uncertain times. The Heimatfilm has existed since the beginning of commercial cinema and remains popular today in the form of television reruns of films from throughout the twentieth century and is represented more recently by dialect films such as the aforementioned Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot. Postwar Heimatfilme in particular have proven enduringly popular, despite the generally negative critical consensus regarding films such as Hans Deppe’s Schwarzwaldmä-

 For a recent (and brief ) account see McGuinness.  See the essay collection Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah; see also “Personen mit Migrationshintergrund” on the website of the German Federal Bureau of Statistics for the official definition of the German population “mit Migrationshintergrund.”

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del (The Black Forest Girl, 1950) and Grün ist die Heide (The Heath is Green, 1951), and the Austrian film Der Förster vom Silberwald (The Forester of the Silver Wood, 1954, directed by Alfons Stummer). Critics of these films typically find fault with their often banal narratives set against panoramic landscapes, and charming albeit saccharine scenes of village life in a divided Germany that was still in the early years of recovery from a disastrous war – a Germany that was not even close to a full reconciliation with the crimes of the previous regime. Recent history is discernable in these films, but it is seldom foregrounded. A common critique of the postwar Heimatfilm is that represented by Marc Silberman’s reading of Schwarzwaldmädel. Silberman argues that the “German bad faith about the past […] rarely surfaced overtly in the fifties cinema, as if there were public agreement not to ask any embarrassing questions, but it was always present in the background” (124).⁹ Lutz Koepnick similarly attributes the popularity of the postwar Heimatfilm to “a climate of apolitical withdrawal and public amnesia” (197) and refers to the genre’s “escapist tendencies” (229) with respect to the recent past. Recent evaluations have pushed back against this critique of the postwar Heimatfilm as being willfully ignorant of, repressing, or whitewashing Germany’s National Socialist past. For example, Sabine Hake notes that “the Heimatfilm and its spatial scenarios […] provide the kind of cross-cultural and cross-generational encounters necessary for rejuvenating genre cinema and for envisioning a postwar identity for the Federal Republic” (117). Frauke Matthes, in an essay on masculinity in Soul Kitchen that deftly connects the film to the traditional Heimatfilm, succinctly summarizes recent reevaluations of the postwar films and agrees with critics who contend that the films served as metaphors for contemporary national and sociological problems, especially regarding the issue of ethnic German refugees (134). Such re-evaluations find value in the examination of persistent and recurring motifs in the postwar films that do indeed reflect problems faced by Germany in the postwar years, albeit in a somewhat collateral manner. The historical backdrop of the postwar Heimatfilm thus includes repressed trauma, which resurfaces often in these films. Early in his comprehensive study of the genre, Johannes von Moltke highlights a monologue delivered by Lüder Lüdersen, a German ethnic refugee in Hans Deppe’s 1951 film Grün ist die Heide. In his speech, Lüdersen thanks the assembled village elders for their hospitality before leaving the village for the city – a consequence of his compulsive poaching, which is a symptom of Lüdersen’s refugee status and subsequent Heimatlosigkeit:  Silberman borrows the term “vacation from history” from Walther Schmiedling (via historian Hermann Heimpel) “to characterize the political abstinence of the fifties cinema” (268). For Silberman, “the Heimat film is a specifically German genre whose calculated apoliticalness promised escape from history through timelessness and the familiar” (128).

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While the Heimatfilm, like the genre of melodrama from which it frequently borrows, has been criticized for […] imaginary solutions to real social problems, Lüdersen’s poaching serves as a reminder of the often inconclusive nature of these solutions. At the happy end of many of the films discussed in this study, the promise of Heimat still threatens to be eclipsed by the other it sought to exorcise. Grün ist die Heide thus [features] a profoundly ambivalent figuration of home as a concept. (6)

The central question posed by the diegesis of Grün ist die Heide, however, does not specifically concern the resolution of Lüdersen’s trauma,¹⁰ but rather whether or not Lüdersen and his daughter Helga will remain in the village so that Helga can continue her developing romantic relationship with Walter Rainer, the new forester. The film’s happy end is thus determined principally by a choice of place (the village) and space (the Lüdersens live on a relative’s estate). If Lüdersen can overcome his illegal hunting compulsion, his daughter can stay in the village and establish roots. The Fatih Akin films discussed here also feature “a profoundly ambivalent figuration of home as a concept,” in that their characters, made heimatlos (lacking a Heimat) by forces largely beyond their control, struggle to reinvent – if not restore – the lost Heimat, often successfully. The updated, urban adaptation of Heimat suggested by Akin’s films is, like in the classic Heimatfilme of the 1950s, one haunted by loss and trauma, but it is also a Heimat whose inhabitants usually prove capable of replacing what has been lost.

2 Fatih Akin’s Urban Heimatfilme Akin’s tongue-in-cheek designation of Soul Kitchen as a Heimatfilm elides somewhat the fact that Heimat and adjacent concerns have always been discernable in his work.¹¹ His first film, Kurz und schmerzlos (Short Sharp Shock, 1998), is set in Altona, a Hamburg neighborhood that several of the film’s characters name-check in the interest of establishing and claiming cultural and Kiez identity.¹² The film’s protagonists, the trio of young small-time criminals Costa, Bobby,

 For a full treatment of trauma and masculine violence in the Heimatfilm (including Grün ist die Heide) see Kapczynski.  See Arslan for a reading of Akin’s films as “male-centered realist narratives” in the Turkish realist cinema tradition that feature “the drama of central male characters with respect to their identities and bonds to fathers and homes” (250).  In a 2020 interview with Akin and actor Adam Bousdouskos, included as a bonus feature on the latest DVD release of Kurz und Schmerzlos, Akin describes the genesis and long gestation of this

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and Gabriel, are differentiated by their aspirations to merely abide in, to get ahead in, or to leave the Kiez: Costa has no ambition apart from the desire to keep his girlfriend (Gabriel’s sister); Bobby wants to be a gangster; Gabriel, who has only recently been released from prison, is torn between his loyalty to home – to his friends, his family, and the neighborhood – and his yearning to move to Turkey and start a new life. Kurz und schmerzlos thus circles around problems of cultural, fraternal, and filial affiliation with home, defined in terms that are both spatial and emotional. The Italian Gastarbeiter (guest worker) family depicted in Solino (2002) settles down in Duisburg, where the children come of age and – predictably – begin to establish roots. The integrity of the family is threatened, however, by the lure of the old Heimat and by tensions from within, ultimately forcing each family member to choose between the drab new German Heimat and the sunny, idealized Solino. The Cut (2014) and Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade, 2017) dwell intensely on the loss of home, featuring narratives of violent displacement and the struggles of their survivor protagonists to restore a family dispersed by the Armenian Genocide (The Cut) or to seek retribution against extreme right-wing terrorists for the destruction of the nuclear family (Aus dem Nichts). Clearly, questions regarding home and Heimat have long been a hallmark of Akin’s films. Moreover, and as in the traditional Heimatfilm, the quest for Heimat in Fatih Akin’s work sometimes ends in success. In the case of Gegen die Wand, the quest for Heimat fails. The love story at the heart of this melodrama, which concerns two marginalized Turkish-Germans living in Hamburg, is likely doomed from the start, yet the film encourages the audience to root for the meandering pursuit of domestic stability of its protagonists: Cahit, a widowed forty-something alcoholic, and Sibel, a young woman desperate to escape the bonds of her conservative family. Cahit agrees to a sham marriage designed to get Sibel out of the family home so that she can live freely. Cahit’s tiny apartment is the principal setting of the mismatched couple’s search for Heimat. Sibel and Cahit gradually draw closer, most notably in scenes that turn Cahit’s disheveled dwelling into a cozy, distinctly Turkish-German domestic space. As Donald Weber notes: “For all his resistance to all things Turkish, Cahit begins to soften to Sibel in her role as homemaker […] Sibel brings order to his disorderly frantic existence; her domestic presence moves him from numbness to feeling. In Akin’s comic touch, her role-playing as good Turkish ‘wife’ ironically turns into the real thing” (427). Barr argues that this Scheinehe (fake marriage), predicated on Cahit’s tenuous Turkish identity and Sibel’s desire to both achieve

film as born of the desire to tell stories “aus der Nachbarschaft” (from the neighborhood) in which he grew up.

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freedom and maintain her familial bonds, is destined to fail: “Sibel takes possession of her Turkish identity in order to escape from it. This can’t succeed. Interestingly, she becomes an outsider as a consequence of her quest for belonging in both cultures, and this problem cannot be solved by either a retreat into her Turkish nor into her German identity” (148). Barr’s identification of this paradox underscores the deeply precarious nature of Sibel’s existence, her Heimatlosigkeit as a consequence of “social insecurity” (Kathöfer and Weber 413) that Sibel seeks to resolve by marrying Cahit and turning his apartment into a home, even if for her the “marriage” is initially only one of convenience and appearances. That said, the film is unambiguous in its portrayal of the emotional bonds that develop between the two. In a scene that showcases Akin’s ability to shift with agility from pathos to comedy and back, Cahit falls in love with Sibel while watching her dance in a club – an emotional shift jarringly marked by a shot in which the camera circles a transfixed Cahit, cutting to a static medium shot of Sibel in motion – but is left alone and despondent when Sibel leaves with another man. After a closeup of Cahit watching Sibel leave the club, we cut to a medium shot of Cahit at home, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking beer, and proceeding to slowly deconstruct the apartment that Sibel had transformed into a shared domestic space. This childish behavior culminates in Cahit shooting his wedding portrait with a pellet gun; notably, however, Cahit cleans up the mess before Sibel returns home.¹³ The sequence thus reinforces the growing bond between Cahit and Sibel by underscoring not only Cahit’s intensifying affection for his wife, but also his basic commitment to the domestic arrangement. Everything falls apart when Cahit accidentally kills a rival for Sibel’s affections, just as Sibel has decided to fully declare her love for Cahit. In the aftermath, the truth of the marriage is revealed; Sibel is disowned by her family¹⁴ and is forced to flee to Istanbul, while Cahit is sent to prison. Sibel soon falls back on old self-destructive habits; when Cahit travels to Istanbul to find her, he encounters resistance from Selma, Sibel’s cousin. In English (because Selma doesn’t speak German and Cahit’s Turkish isn’t adequate to the task), Cahit says of his wife: “I was dead. I was dead a long time before I met her. [In Turkish]: I had lost myself. [In

 A closeup of the wedding photo reveals that Cahit shot himself, not Sibel, further underscoring the ever-present trope of self-destruction.  Mine Eren’s reading of the film as a cosmopolitan melodrama that “creates a cinematic counter-discourse to express the emotional dimension of alienation in migration” (185) focuses on the montage in which Sibel attempts suicide in the apartment while at the family home her father burns photographs of her in the kitchen sink. This sequence too underscores the role Cahit’s apartment plays as the principal space in which the arc of the relationship plays out, from Sibel’s first visit to Cahit’s carrying of Sibel across the threshold to this final scene in their shared home.

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English] Then she comes. She gave me love. She gives me power. Do you understand that?” Weber says of this scene that Sibel “looms […] as (Cahit’s) longedfor site of refuge, the source that sustains him, the dream of a new life in the old world” (430). The reunion results in the long-delayed consummation of the marriage, and in a postcoital shot of the two sitting on the hotel balcony, Sibel suggests that the couple return to Hamburg: “Let’s go home” (“Lass uns wieder heim gehen,” my emphasis) in response to Cahit’s invitation to accompany him to his ancestral city of Mersin. Or does she mean her home in Istanbul, implying that Cahit should return alone to Hamburg? Akin chooses to shoot the couple from behind, thus injecting a measure of ambiguity by preventing the viewer from fully reading the facial expressions of either character, but I would argue that Sibel is thinking in this moment of Cahit’s apartment, the lost Heimat of their all-too-brief existence as a married couple. Ultimately, however, Sibel decides to stay with her child and partner in Istanbul, while Cahit travels on alone to Mersin.¹⁵ That the hoped-for reunion proves brief does not dilute the power of both Cahit’s and Sibel’s quests for home, even though home turns out to be something they cannot share.¹⁶ The film’s mise en scene establishes spaces that correspond to Cahit’s acquired Heimat (his domestic life with Sibel) and subsequent Heimatlosigkeit, while locating other characters in spaces that underscore (or expose) their own sense of home and belonging. Early shots of Cahit’s apartment reveal a trash-strewn hovel with a sink full of dirty dishes. Cahit sleeps and drinks a lot of beer in his apartment, but he does not dwell there in any meaningful sense. Sibel turns Cahit’s filthy, cluttered space into a cozy home. In Istanbul, Cahit stays at the Hotel London, a decaying yet homey edifice; by contrast, the upscale Istanbul hotel managed by Selma is pristine, modern, and features a beautiful view of the city, but it is not a home, although as a busy and successful professional Selma appears to practically live there. The scene in which Cahit confronts Selma further establishes Selma as heimatlos in terms of the film’s narrative, according to which Heimat equals a yearned-for return to domesticity: It begins with an exterior shot of the hotel; the camera pans up to the top floor; we cut to the cold and sterile top-floor restaurant. Selma asks Cahit how he is doing and responds to his “and you?” with “you can see for yourself … I’m still single.” When Selma tells Cahit that Sibel does not need him because she has established a new life with a new family, Cahit turns to look out the window at the city, as if scanning the skyline for his wife, before re Barr reads Cahit’s desire to bring Sibel to his birthplace as a desire to establish “eine Heimat in Mersin” that nonetheless does not entail a full embrace of his Turkish identity (148).  “At the end of the film,” concludes Barr, “they appear to have arrived where they did not want to go” (149).

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sponding with “how do you know that?” The implication is that Selma, who is objectively successful but unsatisfied with her relationship status, cannot relate to the situation in which Cahit and Sibel find themselves. In the film’s penultimate shot, we see Cahit sitting in a bus as it begins its journey toward Mersin. “The leitmotif in Head-On of returning to one’s roots leads to Cahit’s return to his Heimat,” notes Mine Eren (183); I would argue, however, that having gained and lost his home with Sibel, in transit and heading into an uncertain future, Cahit has become, at the film’s conclusion, utterly heimatlos. Auf der anderen Seite, on the other hand, is a film that seems – initially at least – less interested in domestic spaces than in the attenuated relationships between its characters, and in the ways that these relationships disrupt each other and are disrupted in turn. Members of three families form fateful connections in Hamburg, Bremen, and Istanbul; actions taken in each of these cities have consequences elsewhere; quests for meaning and connection lead to empty rooms and other dead ends; near misses and failures of communication abound. The film opens and closes with a son’s search for his father (in scenes reminiscent of the opening shots of Akin’s 2000 comedy Im Juli [In July] or the final scene of Gegen die Wand). Indeed, four of the film’s six central characters spend much of their time on screen searching for a parent, a child, or a lover, in the interest of setting things right and reestablishing something that had been lost. The film locates these reestablished relationships, however, in defined spaces that serve as locations for a sort of homecoming. The final shot, a long take over which the credits roll, depicts Nejat, who had been a German professor in Hamburg before his father Ali struck and accidentally killed the prostitute Yeter, on a beach waiting for his father to return from fishing. This closing of the narrative frame – we had previously seen Najat in the first scene driving alone toward an unnamed destination in Turkey – establishes the beach near Ali’s hometown (Trabzon) as the site for a long-delayed reunion. Nejat had left Germany for Istanbul after his father’s conviction for Yeter’s death with the intention of finding and supporting Yeter’s daughter Ayten. He soon becomes the proprietor of a German bookstore, which serves as a sort of German home for the displaced Germanist (German philologist).¹⁷ Another locus of Heimat in the film is the room in Nejat’s Istanbul apartment rented by Lotte,¹⁸ a German university student trying to free Ayten from prison. Following Lotte’s shooting death, her mother Susannah moves to Istanbul in an at Weber on the purchase of the bookstore: “Nejat begins to feel at ‘home’ and decides to stay […] Nejat internally ‘carries’ German culture within him” (433).  The announcement (via titles) in advance of both Yeter’s and Lotte’s fates somehow does not render their deaths less shocking, as Weber points out (433).

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tempt to better understand her daughter’s quest. Susanne rents Lotte’s room from Nejat and soon decides to take up her daughter’s cause. Lotte’s room thus becomes Susanne’s new home because it allows her to remain connected to her daughter, whose face she appears to see while lying on Lotte’s bed for the first time. Auf der anderen Seite thus establishes private spaces as locations of Heimat based on personal connections, but it also portrays some of its characters at various points in the narrative as heimatlos in terms of their precarity. Nejat, an academic with financial security and the easy ability to cross borders, is a privileged transnational figure able to leave Hamburg and reestablish himself in Istanbul with relative ease;¹⁹ the same does not hold for the film’s female characters, who are all defined to some extent by their precarity.²⁰ Yeter’s life as a prostitute in a foreign country (her daughter believes that she works at a shoe store) is by definition precarious, which explains her acceptance in the film’s first act of Ali’s invitation to live with him, a decision that will prove fatal (the decision to move in with Ali is in fact motivated by a very specific threat delivered by two Turkish-German men who are offended by Yeter’s occupation). Ayten’s membership in a radical political organization leads to her flight to Hamburg, where she meets and receives shelter from Lotte. Lotte leaves her family home for Istanbul and is able to settle in there, but her relationship with Ayten leads to her death. Susanne’s loss leads her to leave her home in Germany to follow in her daughter’s footsteps. The film further privileges space while undermining the importance of place by repeating a gesture from Gegen die Wand: the journey east to Istanbul and beyond in an attempt to connect with a place of origin, one’s purported source. As in the earlier film, Auf der anderen Seite declines to depict the arrival or the desired reunion, the actual moment of connection with Heimat and the family. Landfester, Weber and others have noted the debt owed in Akin’s films to Fassbinder in particular and the New German Cinema generally; the quest for meaning implied by these journeys to the point of origin recalls the final shot of Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, which depicts the protagonist Travis’s resumed journey to the titular site of his conception as a compulsion that allows him to avoid responsibility for the wreckage he leaves behind in Houston and California, but which promises at

 For a critical examination of Akin’s male characters (including Nejat) and representations of masculinity in his work, see Cormican.  Kathöfer and Weber argue that “bringing Heimat/losigkeit into dialogue with precarity” can draw out “the difference between many more traditional understandings of Heimat, predicated on a sense of nostalgic loss in the face of modernity, and the building of a relationship to place in the face of extreme vulnerability. Heimatlosigkeit in relationship to extreme vulnerability might denote a literal lack of dwelling or exclusion from a more figurative Heimat” (413).

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the least a symbolic return to the womb. Of course, the journey and the desire for some sense of home, for wholeness, for completion that it represents is of greater importance than the destination. Paris, Texas lays bare not just Travis’s origin myth, but also and more importantly the mess he has made in the lives of those supposedly dear to him. Likewise, the final moments of Auf der anderen Seite and Gegen die Wand depict journeys “home” not as ends in themselves but rather as the logical results of trauma suffered in the quest for meaning and familial connection. Unlike in Paris, Texas, however, the prognosis at the conclusion of Auf der anderen Seite is good and the outlook optimistic. We last see Nejat on the verge of a meaningful and fulfilling homecoming, while Susanne has found in Istanbul a Heimat of sorts, one represented by a new sense of purpose. For both Nejat and Susanne, home is not where one is from; home is where one finds it and what one makes of it, and ‒ more importantly ‒ with whom one can build it. Soul Kitchen (2009) depicts both a repetition and a fulfillment of this desire to create and affirm family bonds and a sense of home, but does not include a return to the original, paternal or maternal Heimat, not least because Akin declines in this case to focus on Turkish and Turkish-German characters and keeps both the action and his Greek-German protagonist in Hamburg. Readings of the film as an urban, transnational Heimatfilm tend to focus on the setting of Hamburg and more specifically Wilhelmsburg as places where a sense of multicultural belonging among characters of disparate origin can take root, while also noting that the locus of Heimat in the film is the Soul Kitchen itself, the restaurant owned and operated by Zinos Kazantzakis. The dilapidated and ramshackle Soul Kitchen, which is located in an old warehouse and serves as a home of sorts to various misfits and outsiders, has a loosely defined, somewhat fluid identity. As Zinos explains, the name is meant to evoke soul music; however, the Soul Kitchen also serves as a practice space for a rock band, houses a cranky older Greek gentleman named Sokrates and his boat, and is a popular, cheap and homey eatery for Wilhelmsburg locals. The restaurant thus presents itself early in the film as a cozy and open space that many of its side characters have claimed as their own. The Soul Kitchen appears in the first half of the film to hold somewhat less significance for Zinos, who appears to harbor at least some resentment toward the various hangers-on at his establishment. Zinos’s decision to employ imperious master chef Shayn and the uncomfortable visits of tax inspectors imperil not only the identity but also the survival of the Soul Kitchen; when the restaurant’s fortunes revive, however, Zinos finds himself increasingly dedicated to the success of his business and its role as home to those who have chosen it as a gathering spot. When Zinos’s brother Illias loses the deed to the Soul Kitchen in a poker game, luck and the help of his estranged but wealthy former girlfriend Nadine enable Zinos to recover ownership.

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As this brief summary makes clear, the focus in Soul Kitchen on the interior of the restaurant and its meaning to those who have adopted it as a kind of home results in a notion of Heimat that is bound to space.²¹ As Matthes points out: “The focus of the film is family as a Heimat that must be protected […] the restaurant symbolizes this Heimat as a physical location” (139). As in the classic Heimatfilm of the 1950s, which could be set in the Alps, the Lüneburg Heath, the Black Forest, or any other appropriately charming rural setting, in Soul Kitchen location and ethnicity are ultimately incidental: The citizens of the Heimat represented by the Soul Kitchen dwell there by choice, and it is ironic that the nominal leader of this community is the last to acknowledge its importance. In the end, however, the near loss of the restaurant causes Zinos to recognize the value of his chosen Heimat with respect to his own identity and to declare his loyalty to it. As von Moltke remarks regarding Grün ist die Heide: “Homelessness provides a superior epistemological vantage point from which to gauge the meaning of home […] the value of Heimat can only be known by those who have left it” (5). Zinos’s brush with Heimatlosigkeit, however brief, leads to a renewed appreciation and reacquisition of his Heimat.

3 Refugees in the Postwar Heimatfilm The establishment of Heimat in the form of social and domestic stability is the core motif common to both Fatih Akin’s films and the traditional Heimatfilm. Fatih Akin’s Heimatfilme repeat and reaffirm a crucial element of the traditional Heimatfilm, namely the decision of urban characters or refugees to remain and to join the Heimat, or to leave it and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Hubert Gerold, the title character of Der Förster vom Silberwald, is a Silesian refugee who, although welcomed by the village, does not quite feel at home there. To make matters worse, his refusal to betray the identity of a poacher, the city-dwelling artist boyfriend of Liesl, the daughter of the Hofrat (privy councilor) and Hubert’s potential love interest, results in his dismissal. By the end of the film, however, Hubert is restored to his position and is set to resume his courtship of Liesl and adopt the village as his new Heimat. Liesl, meanwhile, abandons her life as a sculptor in Vienna and returns to the village, swapping her city clothes for a Dirndl. Nora, the refugee and circus rider in Grün ist die Heide who has decided to emigrate to America,

 See Halle, “Großstadtfilm and Gentrification Debates: Localism and Social Imaginary in Soul Kitchen and Eine flexible Frau” for a thorough evaluation of Soul Kitchen as Heimatfilm in the context of gentrification and urban development.

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is persuaded by the local Amstrichter (circuit judge) to settle down in the village with him instead. The search for Heimat and the free adoption of a new identity and a new home depicted in Akin’s films is thus an affirmation of one of the core values of the traditional Heimatfilm, in which outsiders become insiders by marrying into or otherwise joining the established community. This results in the traditional Heimatfilm in a sort of tweaking or hybridization of Heimat, since the newcomers bring the cultures, traditions, dialects, etc. from the old Heimat with them, just as Akin’s characters retain their cultural and ethnic ties and self-identifications even as they choose affiliation with a new Heimat. To be sure, in the traditional Heimatfilm this integration is always necessarily depicted as a process of affiliation with a stable, defined ethnicity and with traditional values, and not every outsider is capable of integration into the Heimat. ²² That said, this turn in the Heimatfilm was a more progressive gesture at the time than it might now appear. It should be recalled that the postwar resettlement of ethnic German refugees was more problematic and controversial than the Heimatfilme cited here might lead one to believe. In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, historian Andreas Kossert noted that for the millions of ethnic German refugees who sought refuge in occupied Germany and, later, the GDR or the FRG, “there was quite unambiguous xenophobia toward them”: Regarding the immediate postwar period, we must absolutely acknowledge substantial racism. It is not the case that the acceptance of refugees succeeded without problems because Germans were coming to Germans. It didn’t feel that way to the people at the time. The refugees and expellees often came out of camps, many had experienced violence, were in a pitiful state when they arrived, lice-infested, ragged—and therefore corresponded to a large extent to the cliches that the native population had regarding people “from the east.” (Klußmann)

Kossert points out that most ethnic German refugees were resettled in rural areas, for an obvious reason: heavily damaged cities were simply unable to accommodate them. The disruptions to local culture caused by the forced integration of newcomers who spoke a different dialect and, in many cases, practiced a different religion

 Silberman’s reading of Schwarzwaldmädel locates this crucial aspect of the postwar Heimatfilm in his summary of the final sequence, the obligatory Volksfest (folk festival) at which all conflicts are resolved and the various romantic pairings are settled: “Contrary to the other dance sequence of the costume ball with its modern music and a snake dance, this spectacle offers an image of resolution and provides the setting in which the urban characters can experience their integration into the putative Heimat” (125–126). Some of these characters, Silberman argues, are coded as having access to both the urban and the rural, while others clearly do not belong in the rural Heimat and thus only experience it as a sort of vacation spot (122–123).

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than the locals were quite intensely felt at the time, which makes the tender concerns for the well-being of displaced persons expressed in some Heimatfilme seem perhaps a bit naïve. Consider the scene at the Schützenfest (shooting festival) in Grün ist die Heide in which Nachtigall, one of the film’s three wandering minstrels, serenades the gathered Silesian refugees – people whose Trachten clearly define them as outsiders – with a song from their lost Heimat, the “Riesengebirglers Heimatlied” (“Heimat Song of the Krkonoše Mountains,” which is at least mildly provocative since it marks the former homeland of the Silesians as German). The performance is introduced by the Amtsrichter, who had invited the refugees to the festival and cheerfully presents them with this “little surprise.” The scene follows the aforementioned monologue by Lüdersen, in which he thanks the locals for the “kindness and understanding” that have allowed him to find himself again, and thus connects the vaguely aristocratic Lüdersen in suit and tie to the Silesians in their colorful costumes as ethnic German refugees, who are welcome, at least for now, in the Heimat. As the first Heimatfilm to introduce refugees to the genre, Grün ist die Heide established a pattern that would be followed consistently for the next decade, according to which ethnic German refugees would be consoled for their losses and welcomed into the Heimat, at least in narrative filmmaking. As von Moltke states in his chapter on the film Waldwinter (Winter in the Woods, 1956), “familiarity with the topic of expulsion was soon not just a matter of historical experience – it rapidly became a generic convention […] it was inevitable that the forced mobility of millions of refugees after the war would leave its trace on the films of the genre well into the first postwar decade” (138). Interestingly, argues von Moltke, the figure of the Flüchtling (refugee) in the Heimatfilm plays against the more stereotypically conservative expectations of the genre and in fact mirrored contemporary sociological thought: Far from imagining refugee populations simply as an added burden on a suffering population, a film like Waldwinter imagines them as the vanguard of postwar modernization, clad, once again, in provincial dress […] Flüchtlinge – and by extension the question of displacement and its consequences – figured centrally in contemporary sociology, where they performed a remarkably similar function as in the Heimatfilm. (von Moltke 139)

Randall Halle notes in response to Kossert’s work that the films of the 1950s not only gave significant space to the issue of refugees and resettlement, but that critics of Kossert have been quick to point out that “already in the late 1940s politicians and academics attended to the conditions of the German expellees. Critics do not question his assertion that the expellees had a difficult time integrating into an unwelcoming Germany. It is rather a question of how much space the expulsion had in the public sphere” (18). In other words, cultural products, including

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and particularly the Heimatfilm, supported both official and non-governmental efforts to incorporate, and shaped German perceptions of, ethnic German refugees.

4 “To gain a new Heimat”: Heimat – Deine Lieder (1959) The trope of welcoming and integrating refugees in the Heimatfilm continued and even developed further throughout the decade, most strikingly perhaps in the case of Heimat – deine Lieder (Heimat – Your Songs, 1959). This Paul May feature stands in many ways as an exemplar of both the obsessions and the exhaustion of the Heimatfilm genre, even as it dramatically articulates the extent to which the depiction of ethnic German refugees had evolved over the decade. The plot, narrative, motifs, and characters of Heimat – deine Lieder are familiar: Eva, a young Kinderdorf-Mutter (caregiver) at an idyllic orphanage located in the Lüneburg Heath, meets urban playboy Paul when the convertible he is driving to Hamburg to meet his fiancé Beate nearly runs over one of Eva’s young charges. Paul falls in love with Eva, Eva resists Paul, and eventually (in true Heimatfilm fashion) everything works out; Paul’s wealthy fiancée (his marriage was supposed to save his family from financial ruin) settles for his sidekick Fritz and even plans to convince her father to financially support the orphanage. The orphans themselves earn a radio appearance and a performance at the local Heimat festival, since Eva had transformed them into an impressive choir and thanks to Paul’s connections in the city. Verena Feistauer remarks that the film “reuses countless elements that had already been seen in previous Heimat films,” starting with the title: “it’s about ‘Heimat’ and about ‘songs’ – there’s nothing more to be expected here” (356). One of these recycled motifs is the presence of a local refugee organization. The expellees in Heimat – deine Lieder are the same Silesians we met earlier in Grün ist die Heide, although here their appearance seems at first merely incidental. However, the scene in which they are consoled with a short film featuring images from their lost homeland accompanied by a performance of – again – the “Riesengebirglers Heimatlied,” performed in this instance by Eva’s singing orphans, sets up the resolution of the love triangle, in which Eva gets Paul, Beate gets Fritz, and the orphanage gets Beate’s financial support, because, as Paul remarks toward the end of the film, the children are in need of charity so that they too may gain a new Heimat. ²³ Heimat – deine Lieder thus stages a performance of orphaned chil Two of the children in the Kinderchor are black; no comment regarding the appearance of what

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dren for the benefit of war refugees, implying a kinship between two groups defined by precarity and the need for a new Heimat. A close viewing of the film implies, however, that concerns for expellees had shifted in the public consciousness by the end of the decade, and that the situation in which ethnic German refugees found themselves was no longer terribly precarious.²⁴ As Feistauer points out, some, but not all, of the Silesians in the film wear traditional regional dress; the majority wear modern clothing,²⁵ suggesting that these particular refugees at least are no longer bothering with the pro-forma representation of cultural identity that characterized the expellees of earlier Heimatfilme. Feistauer also notes the obvious nod to Grün ist die Heide implied by the performance of the “Riesengebirglers Heimatlied,” but points out that this performance, which accompanies the film Schlesien, wie es war (Silesia As It Was), is quickly followed by a rock and roll dance for the local teens: “for the film, the topic ‘Silesia’ is now by and large closed” (Feistauer 362). Alternatively, one could understand this transition to mean that the local community, while still acknowledging and honoring the presence of the refugees in its midst, nevertheless recognizes that life goes on. It is further notable that the orphanage’s gardener Kummernus, one of the film’s comic figures and the only Silesian refugee with a speaking role, seems well adjusted and pleased with his lot in life, despite his professed poverty; even his comments during the film Schlesien – wie es war, while indicative of nostalgia, do not appear to betray any sense of a tragic Heimweh (homesickness), much less a precarious Heimatlosigkeit or revanchist sentiments. Indeed, Kummernus spends the rest of the evening happily getting drunk with his new friend and sometimes rival Klemke, and in any case his position, status, and residence at the orphanage – his new home – are secure. Kummernus may well be a “caricature of an expellee” whose main role in the film is to provide an excuse for the Flüchtlingsabend (Feistauer 363; refugee evening), but given the film’s representation of these displaced

one assumes to be the abandoned children of occupying soldiers is made in the film, although their presence is made conspicuous by their prominent placement in several scenes. Feistauer contends that Heimat – deine Lieder “stages the two black children as cute but not especially obedient exotics” and considers the portrayal of these children a reflection of the racism of the time (358); I would argue that the intention of the filmmakers in casting two non-white children to play orphans in Eva’s choir may have been to underscore the theme of postwar integration of outsiders into a new Heimat, most prominently on display in the Silesian refugee scene and later expressed by Paul at the film’s conclusion.  Feistauer, on the other hand, considers the handling of the refugee motif in Heimat – deine Lieder “clumsy and not very subtle. The film says nothing substantial about fleeing and expulsion or the search for a new Heimat and integration into postwar society” (363).  Feistauer 361.

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persons as an accepted and well-integrated segment of the local population, it is certainly possible to read Kummernus and the rest of the Silesian expellees as people who, although retaining a sentimental attachment to the old Heimat, have clearly moved on – having been warmly welcomed and settled into a new Heimat. Paul’s introduction of the Kinderchor at the film’s conclusion, in which he urges the audience to contribute to the orphanage so that the children may gain “a new Heimat” thus reaffirms the film’s consistent conception of Heimat not only as a place that welcomes the refugee and the orphan and gives them a home, but as something that can be replaced.

5 Conclusion The integration of the refugees in Heimat – deine Lieder into the local population is presented as a fait accompli. Having been welcomed into a new Heimat, Kummernus and his fellow Silesians have settled in and gotten comfortable. The film thus closes the loop opened by earlier postwar films such as Grün ist die Heide by portraying its refugees as accepted members of the community, thanks to the hospitality of their neighbors – which extends to the staging of an evening in their honor over a decade after the refugees were expelled. The impulse to welcome and to integrate the displaced or merely directionless Other present in many of the Heimatfilme of the 1950s is also at the heart of Fatih Akin’s films. When Nejat in Auf der anderen Seite visits the bookstore in Istanbul and begins speaking with the owner in German, he is offered a cup of tea; this act of hospitality leads to Nejat’s purchase of the shop and is repeated later in the film when Lotte walks into the store and speaks German to Nejat, which results in her becoming his tenant. Each transaction thus ends with the discovery or establishment of a new Heimat of sorts, the end result of which will be Susanne’s move to Istanbul – where she will dwell in the same room that Lotte rented from Nejat. The loss of Sibel in Gegen die Wand is for Cahit the loss of his Heimat, not merely of his apartment or his freedom; Sibel’s situation at the film’s conclusion is less precarious, although she too has lost a Heimat – the one she had just begun to establish in the apartment back in Hamburg. At the film’s conclusion, she and Cahit are truly heimatlos. The cozy, welcoming Soul Kitchen is a Heimat for all who make it so – for those who, in the words of the film’s namesake, the song “Soul Kitchen” by the Doors, “really want to stay.” For Fatih Akin’s characters, as with many of the displaced refugees of the 1950s Heimatfilm, Heimat is in the end neither an exotic locale nor something that one is born into; it is not a place, in the sense of a locus of any particular or determined ethnic or cultural identity. Rather,

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Len Cagle

Heimat is a space that offers refuge and human connection. It is what one chooses and is welcomed into, indeed, what one chooses to welcome others into.

Works Cited Akin, Fatih. Auf der anderen Seite. Corazón International, 2007. Akin, Fatih. Aus dem Nichts. Bombero International, 2017. Akin, Fatih. The Cut. Bombero International, 2014. Akin, Fatih. Gegen die Wand. Wüste Filmproduktion, 2004. Akin, Fatih. Kurz und schmerzlos. Wüste Filmproduktion, 1998. Akin, Fatih. Solino. Wüste Filmproduktion, 2002. Akin, Fatih. Soul Kitchen. Corazón International, 2009. Amann, Caroline. “Dialektfilm.” Das Lexikon der Filmbegriffe, https://filmlexikon.uni-kiel.de/doku.php/d: dialektfilm-5332. Accessed 10 February 2022. Arslan, Savaş. “Fatih Akın’s Homecomings.” A Companion to German Cinema, edited by Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 249–259. Aydemir, Fatma, and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, editors. Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum. Ullstein, 2019. Barr, Anja. “Die Heimat der Heimatlosen. Transkulturelle Identitäten in Özdamars Der Hof im Spiegel und Fatih Akins Gegen die Wand.” Pluralität als Existenzmuster: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf die Deutschsprachige Migrationsliteratur, edited by Raluca Radulescu and Christel Baltes-Löhr, Transcript, 2016, pp. 139–152. Blickle, Peter. Heimat. A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland. Camden House, 2002. Cormican, Muriel. “Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms: The Cinema of Fatih Akin.” Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik, vol. 46, no. 1, 2013, pp. 21–46. Deppe, Hans. Grün ist die Heide. Berolina Film, 1951. Eigler, Friederike. “Critical Approaches to Heimat and the ‘Spatial Turn.’” New German Critique, vol. 39, no. 1, 2012, pp. 27–48. Elsaesser, Thomas. New German Cinema: A History. Rutgers UP, 1989. Eren, Mine. “Cosmopolitan Filmmaking. Fatih Akin’s In July and Head-On.” Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium. Sites, Sounds, and Screens, edited by Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel, Berghahn Books, 2014, pp. 175–185. Feistauer, Verena. Eine neue Heimat im Kino. Die Integration von Flüchtlingen und Vertriebenen im Heimatfilm der Nachkriegszeit. Klartext, 2017. Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. Routledge, 2008. Halle, Randall. “Großstadtfilm and Gentrification Debates: Localism and Social Imaginary in Soul Kitchen and Eine Flexible Frau.” New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, 2013, pp. 171–191. Halle, Randall. “Re-imagining the German East: Expulsion and Relocation in German Feature and Documentary Film.” German Politics and Society, Winter 2013, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 16–39. Kapczynski, Jennifer. “Postwar Ghosts: Heimatfilm and the Specter of Male Violence. Returning to the Scene of the Crime.” German Studies Review, vol. 33, no. 2, May 2010, pp. 305–330. Kathöfer, Gabi, and Beverly Weber. “Introduction: Precarity/Heimatlosigkeit.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2018, pp. 411–417. Koepnick, Lutz. The Dark Mirror. German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood. U of California P, 2002.

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Klußmann, Uwe. “Verlaust, zerlumpt – damit entsprachen sie dem Klischee.” Der Spiegel, 22 May 2018, www.spiegel.de/spiegelgeschichte/deutsche-fluechtlinge-nach-1945-ignoranz-und-fremden feindlichkeit-a-1190780.html. Accessed 21 October 2021. Kürten, Jochen. “Edgar Reitz: Heimat kann man sich nicht aussuchen.” Deutsche Welle, 20 December 2018, www.dw.com/de/edgar-reitz-heimat-kann-man-sich-nicht-aussuchen/a-46813657. Accessed 21 October 2021. Landfester, Petra. “Local and Transnational Claims in the Films of Fatih Akin: Recognition and the Gaze at the Body in Akin and Fassbinder’s Films.” Monatshefte, vol. 109, no. 1, 2017, pp. 81–99. Matthes, Frauke. “’Ein Heimatfilm der neuen Art’: Domestizierte Männlichkeit in Fatih Akins Soul Kitchen.” Zeitschrift Für Interkulturelle Germanistik, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012, pp. 131–144. May, Paul. Heimat – deine Lieder. Divina, 1959. McGuinness, Damien. “Holocaust: How a US TV Series Changed Germany.” BBC News, 30 January 2019, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47042244. Accessed 21 October 2021. Majer-O’Sickey, Ingeborg. “Framing the Unheimlich: Heimatfilm and Bambi.” Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation, edited by Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller, Berghahn Books, 1997, pp. 202–216. “Personen mit Migrationshintergrund.” Statistisches Bundesamt. https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/ Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/Methoden/Erlauterungen/migration shintergrund.html. Accessed 21 October 2021. Schaghaghi, Mariam. “Interview Fatih Akin.” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 22 December 2009. www.ksta.de/in terview-fatih-akin-ich-bedanke-mich-beim-manitu-12677250. Accessed 21 October 2021. Silberman, Marc. German Cinema: Texts in Context. Wayne State UP, 1995. Stummer, Alfons. Der Förster vom Silberwald. Rondo Film, 1954. Tilmann, Christina. “Hamburger Heimspiel.” Zeit Online, 11 September 2009. www.zeit.de/kultur/film/ 2009-09/fatih-akin-film-venedig. Accessed 21 October 2021. Von Moltke, Johannes. No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema. U of California P, 2005. Weber, Donald. “Fatih Akin’s Cinema of Hospitality.” Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs, vol. 56, no. 3, 2015, pp. 421–439. Wenders, Wim. Paris, Texas. Road Movies Filmproduktion GmbH/Argos Films S.A., 1984. Zacharek, Stephanie. “Head-On.” Salon, 29 January 2005. www.salon.com/2005/01/28/head_on/. Accessed 21 October 2021.

Contributors Len Cagle directs the German program at Lycoming College. He studied in Fayetteville, Berlin, and Providence, and completed the PhD at Brown University with a dissertation on housing and dwelling in E.T.A. Hoffmann. His teaching and research interests include German film, music, Romanticism, fairy tales, and the uncanny. He teaches a course on the Brothers Grimm every August for the Lycoming Summer Academy, an innovative and successful retention program. Nursan Celik is a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre 1385 Law and Literature as well as at the Institute of German Studies at the University of Münster. Prior to that, she studied German studies and philosophy at the University of Kassel. She was a Visiting Scholar at King’s College, London, and is co-editor of the journal Textpraxis. Digital Journal of Philology. Thomas Herold studied Germanistik, philosophy and theology in Berlin, Zurich, Providence, and Cambridge, and held a postdoctoral position at Harvard before joining the faculty of Montclair State University, where he is Associate Professor of German. He has published essays on Thomas Mann, Goethe, and Hermann Broch, among others, co-edited a volume on Uwe Johnson, and published a monograph entitled Zeit Erzählen: Zeitroman und Zeit im deutschen Roman des 20. Jahrhunderts (Rombach, 2016). Joscha Klueppel received his BA at the Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen and is now a sixthyear doctoral candidate in the Department of German and Scandinavian at the University of Oregon. He has worked on Hesse and Kierkegaard, the concepts of anxiety, cynicism, and ‘Stimmung,’ as well as translation studies. He recently began working on the contemporary poetry of Yevgeniy Breyger. His main focus and the focus of his dissertation are the works of author Saša Stanišic. Gabriele Maier is Teaching Professor of German Studies and Co-Director of the MA program in Global Communication and Applied Translation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Her research includes literature of the 20th and 21st centuries and focuses primarily on travel writing, questions of home and identity, transcultural writers, and graphic novels. She has published on Christian Kracht, Hans-Ulrich Treichel, and Christoph Ransmayr, among others; co-edited an anthology on Heimat, and written a textbook entitled Deutschland im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (2015). Prof. Dr. Werner Nell studied comparative literature, history, and social sciences in Mainz, Frankfurt a. M., and Dijon. He was Chair of Comparative Literature at Martin-Luther-University in Halle (Germany) from 1998 to 2019 and has been Adjunct Associate Professor ( John G. Diefenbaker Professor, 2019‒2022) at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario (Canada) since 2008. He is also the executive director at the Institut für Sozialpädagogische Forschung Mainz (since 1994) and has served as associate director of the Halle-based Muhlenberg Center for American Studies from 2015 to 2021. Seth Peabody has earned degrees from Harvard (PhD, AM) and Northwestern University (BA, BMus) and is Assistant Professor of German at Carleton College. His research focuses on German film, literature, and environmental humanities, but also German pedagogy and the environment. His 2019 article on critical approaches to the Heimat idea within the German curriculum, co-authored with Amanda Randall, won the award for the best article in Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-012

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Contributors

He is currently completing a monograph entitled Film History for the Anthropocene: The Ecological Archive of German Cinema, scheduled for publication in 2023. Vanessa Plumly is Assistant Professor of German at Wittenberg University. She has taught at the University of Kentucky, the University of Cincinnati, SUNY New Paltz, and Lawrence University, where she was also an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests center on marginalized and racialized communities in the German-speaking world and lie at the intersection of feminist, queer, and gender studies and film and media studies. She is co-editor of the book Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Histories & Interventions and is currently co-editing a volume titled Innovations in Black European Studies. John Slattery is completing his doctorate in transnational, post-1989 German literature and culture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The title of his dissertation is Toward an Intercultural, Intersubjective Concept of Home in Recent German Literature. While at Illinois, he has been assistant editor of the German Quarterly and Lessing Yearbook. His research aims to denaturalize the culturally hegemonic artifice of separate places and cultures by illustrating, through literary analysis, how affective solidarities can be formed across traditional lines of belonging. Maria Stehle is Professor of German and Co-Chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cinema Studies at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Her publications include three monographs entitled Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Cultures (2012), Awkward Politics: The Technologies of Popfeminist Activism (with Carrie Smith, 2016), and Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary European Cinema (with Beverly Weber, 2020). Her forthcoming book is entitled Plants, Places, and Power: Towards Social and Environmental Justice in Contemporary German Literature and Film (2023).

Index Adalbert von Chamisso Prize 8 f. AfD (Alternative for Germany) 43, 45 f., 177, 231 Akin, Fatih 12, 15, 205 f., 219–223, 227–230, 233–241, 245 Anderson, Benedict 224 Applegate, Celia 7, 46, 50, 58, 115, 206 Asdonk, Bastian 13, 43 f., 48, 53, 55, 58, 65 f. Ataman, Ferda 37 Auerbach, Berthold 4 Augé, Marc 35, 205 Ausländerliteratur 8 f. Aydemir, Fatma 5, 27, 37, 87, 113–115, 188 f., 231 Bachmann Prize 10, 141, 160 Bausinger, Hermann 13, 22, 26 f., 33, 36 f., 49 Bhabha, Homi K. 144 f., 159, 166 Blickle, Peter 7, 21, 29, 32, 72, 84 f., 112, 164, 193, 206, 218, 231 Bloch, Ernst 32–35, 59, 112 Boa, Elizabeth 7, 71, 163, 206 f., 211, 216 Böll, Heinrich 24, 36 Christian Democratic Union 43, 46 Christian Social Union 43, 46, 113, 192 Confino, Alon 7, 46, 50, 58, 72, 88, 115, 119, 206 Czollek, Max 37 de Certeau, Michel 51 f., 62 Deppe, Hans 231 f. Dorfroman See village novel

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 238 Federal Republic of Germany 21, 28, 112, 232, 241 Foucault, Michel 35, 205, 222 Freud, Sigmund 89 Gastarbeiterliteratur 2, 8 f., 155 German Democratic Republic 21, 24 f., 112, 116, 164, 173, 241 German Green Party 45 f., 66 Globalization 26, 145 Gooding, Shané 90, 104 Grass, Günter 63 Greverus, Ina-Maria 206, 215 f. Griffith, Karina 89 Habeck, Robert 66 Halle, Randall 240, 242 Hansen, Dörte 11, 13, 71 f., 74, 79, 82, 84, 87, 90 f., 93, 98, 101 f. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 33, 59 Heimatbewegung 23, 30 Heimatfilm 2, 4, 7, 15, 24, 47 f., 88, 93, 197, 223, 227–233, 239–245 Heimatkunde 30, 36, 47, 75 f. Heimatliteratur 1, 36, 47, 71 f. heimatlos See Heimatlosigkeit Heimatlosigkeit 21, 88, 103, 207, 218, 229, 232, 235 f., 238, 240, 244 f. Heimatroman 91, 93 Herrndorf, Wolfgang 15, 203–206, 208–213, 219–224 Jameson, Frederick

East Germany See German Democratic Republic Ebermann, Thomas 6, 8, 46 Eco, Umberto 34 Eigler, Friederike 4, 7, 13, 44, 51 f., 62, 65, 72 f., 80, 84, 88 f., 92, 100 f., 170, 206, 223, 230 Elsaesser, Thomas 231 Erpenbeck, Jenny 14, 122, 163–179, 230

Kathöfer, Gabi 21, 88, 90, 103, 206 f., 218 f., 229, 235, 238 Kierkegaard, Søren 33 Kluge, Alexander 23, 31 Kossert, Andreas 21, 241 f. Kugele, Jens 72, 89, 101, 206 Lacan, Jacques

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733150-013

205

35

252

Index

Left Party 46 Leky, Mariana 4, 13, 43 f., 59, 61 f., 65 f., 71 Marx, Karl 33 Massey, Doreen 72–74, 76, 79, 84 f., 89, 96, 99, 102 Mense, Thorsten 46, 67 migration literature See Migrationsliteratur Migrationsliteratur 2, 8–12, 14, 120 f., 154 f. Ministerium für das Innere, Bau und Heimat 46, 113, 187, 230 Modernity 21 f., 24, 29, 31–34, 51, 56, 58, 163, 176, 238 Moltke, Johannes von 7, 91, 206, 232, 240, 242 National Democratic Party of Germany 45 f. National Socialism 5, 23 f., 45, 52, 54 f., 58 f., 65 f., 76, 88, 92, 99, 102, 168 f., 197, 232 Nell, Werner 2–4, 6, 12 f., 21, 23, 26, 31, 47, 82, 117, 163 New German Cinema 25, 238 Nietzsche, Friedrich 33 Othmann, Ronya 10, 14, 141–143, 145, 148– 153, 156–160 Özdemir, Cem 45 Palfreyman, Rachel 7, 71, 206 f., 211, 216 PEGIDA 2, 43, 53, 231 Piesche, Peggy 88–90, 103, 114, 188 Ramelow, Bodo 46 Reitz, Edgar 4, 24 f., 36, 230 f. Renan, Ernest 29, 34 Reunification 25, 28, 116, 221 Romanticism 23, 30 Rosegger, Peter 4 Rosenmüller, Markus 227 Sanyal, Mithu 178

37, 87, 104, 113–115, 163, 176,

Sarrazin, Thilo 2 Scharnowski, Susanne 8, 21 f., 26 f. Schlink, Bernhard 35 Schmid, Wilhelm 21, 23, 27 f., 32, 37 Seehofer, Horst 46, 113, 230 Silberman, Marc 228, 232, 241 Social Democratic Party of Germany 46, 190, 198 Söder, Markus 46 Soja, Edward 205 Sontag, Susan 209 Sow, Noah 12, 14, 185 f., 189–194, 196–198, 200 Spatial Turn 7, 44, 51, 62, 72, 230 Stanišić, Saša 11–14, 87, 89 f., 94–98, 100 f., 103, 109–111, 115–137, 155 Steinmeier, Frank-Walter 43–47, 66 Stummer, Alfons 232 Tatar, Maria 89, 95, 100 Thoma, Ludwig 4 Trenker, Luis 229 Trojanow, Ilja 13, 87, 90, 98–103 Tuan, Yi-Fu 72–74, 76 f., 84 Vertriebenenliteratur 36 Village novel 1, 4, 11, 13 f., 44 f., 48–50, 52, 60, 65 f., 71 f., 116 f. Weber, Beverly 21, 88, 90, 103, 206 f., 218 f., 229, 235, 238 Weigel, Sigrid 9, 144 Wenders, Wim 238 West Germany See Federal Republic of Germany Yaghoobifarah, Hengameh 115, 188 f., 231 Zudeick, Peter

5, 27, 37, 87, 113–

1, 8, 43, 45–47