Abstract
The essay presents a reading of three war-related texts: Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, Heinrich von Kleist’s The Battle of Hermann, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Written against the background of the Revolutionary Wars and the Prussian Wars of Liberation, respectively, the plays by Schiller and Kleist engage in the discursive construction of an emphatic sense of heimat (home), either by way of creating the new sentiment of homesickness (originally called nostalgia) or by advocating the complete destruction of the very home territory you are trying to defend. Gravity’s Rainbow, in turn, decodes the Second World War as a massive exercise in technology transfer. It effectively presents a deconstruction of heimat in an age in which the imperative to merge technologies supersedes all national agendas.
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