Volume 5 (2020): Issue 1 (October 2020)

‘Heimat’ is booming to a degree that can rightly be called a renaissance. Noticeable is not only the variety of claims to “readjust” and “reframe” the concept, but its role within a conservative attempt to recalibrate societal conditions as well as the circumstances of the humanities and cultural studies. The ‘not-newness’ of the expression, thus, forms the core of an attitude of enlightenment and rehabilitation which attempts to rearticulate ‘Heimat’ in order to affirm a sense of ‘natural’ belonging, whether on a local, regional or global scale. In view of a global debate about experiences of precarity and insecurity towards the future, the return to strate-gies of naturalization and embeddedness may not be all too surprising, but from a cultural studies perspective it is no less unsettling. It is by no means a harmless reactivation of tradi-tion(s), but unveils a will to naturalization whose normative force must not be underestimated. The current political climate calls for the cultural studies to observe and describe ‘Heimat’ using methods and media to analyze and account for its normative implications. However, this examination can only show the desired effects if it makes transparent its own conditions and strategies. This special issue on “precarious Heimat” assembles disruptions of ‘natural’ belonging and inquires after the techniques, the places, the discourses and actors of this particular way of producing human-nature-relationships and reality. In their opening essay, Solvejg Nitzke and Lars Koch discuss the objectives and failures of ‘Heimat’ as a device of renormali-zation and disruption management, thus opening the floor for a collection of ‘Heimat’-analyses, which spans dinosaurs, primordial humans and extraterrestrial beings; covers Germany, Austria, France, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Senegal and the United States of America and even a view of the whole Earth.

The article analyzes how the concept of ‘Heimat’ was established and shaped in the second half of the 19th century in the contemporary mass medium of the journal. In the context of the universal claim and the miscellaneous structure of periodical publications, the locally focused discourse on the home-land serves as a centralizing element. Based on this centripetal function, the article discusses the role of literary publications in these periodicals. A comparison of Adalbert Stifter's canonized Nachkommenschaften (Descentants) with the today unknown Der Schütz’ von der Pertisau by Herman Schmid, editor of the the journal Heimgarten, shows that “Heimat” refers not only to geographical and cultural, but also to genealogical complexes. Furthermore, Stifter's satirical revision of Schmid's demonstrates that irony can also be part of he discourse on the homeland – a tendency which only becomes apparent when we analyze literary texts within the context they were first published in.

In the German Reich, the landscape became the central medium to experience Heimat. The exotic landscapes the colonies provided led to an unprecedented spatial expansion: from a distance, the nation itself could become Heimat. While this spatial ‘extensibility’ as well as its capability to establish identity has long been the subject of research, so far the temporal dimension of Heimat has received little attention. The new and unimaginably long periods of time the discovery and exposition of the geological time scale in the 19th century provided seemed not to affect the Heimat. Examining popular scientific writings from the years 1898–1931 by Alfred Götze and Wilhelm Bölsche, this article shows that in the German Reich along with the spatial expansion of Heimat a temporal expansion took place. Including prehistory and earth history, this temporal expansion reached far beyond locating the Heimat in the ‘good old days’. In the medium of prehistoric landscapes, the contemporaries could experience two versions of a deep time Heimat. A nationalist deep time Heimat localized national unity in the depths of time, thus promoting a more comprehensive and at the same time more abstract ‘national’ Heimat. An imperialist deep time Heimat helped to expose the ‘struggle for existence’ and promoted the expansion of the Heimat as the only possible way to preserve it.

Taking its cue from Walter Benjamin's methodological critique of Rudolf Borchardt's anthology Der Deutsche in der Landschaft, the article demonstrates how these different approaches connect ‘intellectual history’ and a specific idea of nature. While Borchardt proposes a unifying vision of nature (modelled after Goethe's) that leads to a concept of history as continuity and a tradition that ist to be regained; with Benjamin the idea of a conceptual continuum and organic culturality collapses in the wake of fascism: ‘Heimat’ becomes precarious intellectually and naturally. Being-in-landscape as a saturated experience is furthermore only possible in a mode of remembrance, that is, as a testament to its own demise.

Cycles are a topic, a motive and a poetic principle of Josef Winkler's novel Laß dich heimgeigen, Vater, oder Den Tod ins Herz mir schreibe (2017/18). It deals with the skeleton of the SS soldier Odilo Globocnik, who was buried in the community fields of the village Kamering after the end of the Second World War. Underlining his disapproval of the collective concealment of Globocnik's end, the first-person narrator demonstrates in a letter-like text to his father various cycles (including food, people, narrations, etc.), that connect the skeleton with its surroundings. Starting with the earth of the community field, a toxic food chain is traced in Winkler's work, which focusses on the area of the village. At the same time, a global guilt context pointing beyond this area is indicated. The concept of the ecosystem forms the background of the text, which connects ecology, memory and the origin discourse and in this way addresses ideas of home and the homeland.

Based on an analysis of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), this contribution deals with the fragile relationship of humans to their supposedly “natural” home planet in a war scenario that points to the World Wars of the 20th century. Already at the end of the 19th century, Wells’ novel makes us aware of the complex framework within which mankind regards the earth as a “natural” habitat. At the same time, the novel demonstrates the consequences of a war of annihilation and the resulting collapse of all social, political and institutional security systems. The article shows that Wells’ text remains still highly relevant in an age of global refugee flows and elementary ecological changes.

The short poem “Tacchini” by German poet Durs Grünbein, born 1962 in Dresden, from his cycle Cyrano, oder: Die Rückkehr vom Mond (2014), takes on an almost forgotten lyrical topos: Being a classic symbol in 18th and 19th century poems, the moon apparently became less present in recent poetry. The reason for this proper ‘demystification’ may have been the first actual landing in 1969, making the moon a ‘mere’ place within reach. But the ‘conquest’ of space also had a surprising side effect, namely, the ‘rediscovery’ of the Earth, when the view on the ‘home planet’ led for the first time to a deliberate reflection on the relation between humans and nature.

Grünbein refers to this shift of meaning when his cycle seems to deconstruct the history of moon poems by introducing the new perspective from the moon to the Earth. Thereby, “Tacchini” adopts the ‘view from above’ and thus reverses the classical observing position when the lyrical narrator describes traces of human civilization and environmental pollution visible from outer space. Set in dialogue with philosophical approaches by Richard Buckminster-Fuller and Günther Anders as well as the Anthropocene theory, Grünbein's poem will be the starting point for a discussion of the concept of the ‘home planet’ and the boundaries of the ‘natural home’.

Traditionally, the Amazon rainforest appears to be the natural habitat of illusions and hallucinations. As the fundamental “other” it provides the rare experience for modern human beings to feel outnumbered when faced with the abundance of “nature”, or “Umwelt”. This paper examines two paradigms of amazonian perception, their theorization and literary reflection. While serving as refuge for the last remains of “integral naturalness” (Pierre Restany) or as the vanishing home for the “chronically homeless” European (Lévi-Strauss, Frans Krajcberg) in 20th century, it gives lessons on the necessary modes of perception for the 21th century and its entanglements of humans, animals, plants and technologies in the Anthropocene (Eduardo Kohn, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro). A novel by Argentinian contemporary writer Pola Oloixarac, Constelaciones oscuras (2015; engl. Dark constellations, 2019), draws attention to the different functionalizations and imaginations of Amazon forests. Moreover, the novel seizes on indigenous ontologies, reverses positive and negative forms and completes approaches of modern Amazonian anthropology and their notions of multinaturalism, shamanism and perspectivism. The text ultimately does not recoil from the idea of an “anthropology beyond the human” and its consequences: the human as an externally controlled host in a symbiotic existence. On the basis of Oloixarac's novel this paper sketches a theory of perception for the entanglements of the Anthropocene.

In literatures of the African diaspora, identity politics remain a central topic. However, the process of locating individual identity becomes ever more difficult as personal or family histories of migration become more complex. The article discusses concepts of “identity liquidification”, experiences of bodilessness and strategies of name changing using examples from the work of Léonora Miano, NoViolet Bulawayo and Fatou Diome. It shows that, ultimately, spatial concepts of home have no chance of persisting and appear necessarily precarious. It follows that different concepts of identity need to take their place.

Home is an auratic term that is often connected to positive feelings and experiences like comfort, warmth, or safety. In such associations, home is set up as a pre-existing space, an organic community, and an inborn feeling, i.e. an allegedly natural experience that can become threatened by hostile outside forces. Such a sedentarist metaphysics sees mobility as a pathology or threat and rejects both homelessness and alternative notions of home. However, ideas of home have been ‘mobilised’ in nomadological approaches to home and mobility. Here, home is reassessed as a dangerous fantasy, and a radical homelessness and nomadic subjectivity turns into a progressive source of resistance to essentialist sedentarism and state control.

This binary opposition has led to certain impasses in the discussion of home that the article traces, to then propose a third way of conceptualising home in a close reading of Yaa Gyasi's novel Homegoing (2016) along the lines of Brah's notion of a ‘homing desire’ (1996). Using the initial two protagonists, the two sisters Effia and Esi, and their respective chapters as representative examples for the novel as a whole, the close readings show that Effia's story critically comments on organic, sedentarist notions of home, while Esi's story underlines that celebrations of nomadism and homelessness are equally problematic. For both characters and their descendants, home is elusive, fluid, and far from unproblematic, but at the same time, home is something longed for and desired.