Heimat, Nation, Fatherland. The German Sense of Belonging

Abstract

Hermand, Jost, and Steakley, James, eds. Nation, Fatherland. The German Sense of Belonging. New York: Lang, 1996. ix + 230 pp. $46.95. hardcover. Nation, Fatherland. The German Sense of Belonging is a collection of the papers presented at the 2 7th Wisconsin Workshop, October 1995. Six of the eight contributions investigate the German idea of Heimat; the first and last paper provide a chronological frame for this investigation. The first inquires into the Heimat-related notion of in the eighteenth century, the last into that shift in German historiography since the 1980s that has placed Germany once again in a geopolitical Mittellage, or middle position, in Europe. All eight papers are a delight to read. Heimat scholarship is, to be sure, already saturated with case studies. But the Wisconsin Workshop is an annual forum of uniformly high quality. In the resulting volume, scholars from the U.S., Germany, and Great Britain show with unusual authority and elegance how complex and multivalent nation, and fatherland (key terms in the field of German Studies) are. The opening paper, Hans Peter Herrmann's Fatherland': Patriotism and Nationalism in the Eighteenth Century, eloquently demonstrates the epigraph to his 1996 book on the same subject: It is nationalism which engenders nations, not the other way round (Ernest Gellner). Herrmann shows the interplay between cultural and political patriotism from 1740 to 1770, that period during which the notion of becomes suffused with feeling and love of fatherland becomes a substitute for religion. The next six papers investigate the idea of Heimat. Cora Lee Nollendorf's well-researched Fernweh-Heimweh? Attitudes of GermanAmericans before describes the contrasting attitudes of various German-American emigrant groups towards the Heimat idea, from pre-1848 to post Civil War. Written in the manner and spirit of Walter Benjamin, Erhard SchUtz's Berlin: A Jewish Heimat at the Turn of the Century? gracefully circumnavigates the four foci (Berlin, childhood, 1900, Jewishness) of Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit urn 1900 (1987), at first without naming the text itself. In the end, Schiltz argues convincingly that Benjamin's book-written in exile, according to Schlitz, as a vaccination against homesickness (76)-talks about Heimat without saying its name. In this sense the text itself becomes a Heimat. William Rollins's Heimat, Modernity, and Nation in the Early Heimatschutz Movement shows that in the Heimatschutz movement from 1904 to 1914Heimat represents a complex concept with romantic, socially emancipatory, bourgeois, and integrative elements. Heimat here represented a bourgeois-progressive alternative to the Wilhelminian order (88). Exclusivity in the Heimatschutz movement, Rollins argues somewhat controversially, was minimal since Heimat in this context was more about anti-capitalist reforms than conservative political objectives. …