The Concept of "Heimat"

[breakingthrunow]

When I try to explain the concept of "Heimat" to people, it doesn't translate well. In German, it can sound cheesy but I think it's still valid and everyone can relate to a degree. I have come across it so many times now that I decided to goggle and see how others describe this typical German word in English. One thing I found that I believe sums

Comments

[fietsvrouw]

I taught an entire course at the university last year entitled "Heimat und Diaspora." It was fascinating to see where the students went with the concept. Something that I found most interesting was how often the geographic location associated with Heimat was determined by factors other than where the person lived or was born. For many students, Heimat was more a location that represented some abstract concept. One student's parents were from Kentucky, and although she had never lived there, she considered it her home because she associated it with "southern hospitality" and "being real."

Even more interesting was the number of students who had spend months or up to a year as exchange students in Germany and who considered Germany to be home. Those students almost universally felt that they had more than one home (and as a result, no true home). Most felt that they had lost some connection to their home of origin because their friends and family could not understand their emotional bond to Germany. (One student had just returned from a year in Germany and was suffering from severe depression and what she called homesickness, and simultaneously had to deal with familial hostility towards her for expressing homesickness for Germany. (I had a similar experience when I returned to the US after 7 years in Germany.)

Most of my students expressed a sense that language played a huge role in their sense of Heimat. (We watched Nirgendwo in Afrika as a part of the course - it is worth looking at for its treatment of Heimat). Ultimately they started calling the class their "Heimat" because it was a community of people with one foot in the US as home and one foot in Germany. In their final essays quite a few of them wrote about this and about the fact that feeling at home had more to do with being with people who shared a similar experience of home than being in the geographic location itself.