Heimat

Heimat derives from the Old High German heimōti, meaning 'home estate' or 'homestead' — the inherited property that constituted a family's place in the world. The root heim is Proto-Germanic *haimaz, cognate with Old English hām (home, village), which survives in English place names ending in -ham (Birmingham, Nottingham) and in the word 'home' itself. The Old High German heimōti had a legal and material sense: it was the land one belonged to by birth and inheritance, the place from which one's family rights derived. Over centuries of use, the material meaning accumulated emotional, cultural, and spiritual associations until Heimat became something no legal document could adequately describe.

By the 19th century, Heimat had become the central concept of German Romanticism's relationship to place. Against the universalism of the Enlightenment and the displacement of industrialization, Romantic writers and painters invested Heimat with everything that modernity was erasing: the specific landscape, the local dialect, the folk customs, the particular quality of light on a particular hill. Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, with their solitary figures contemplating German forests and mountains, are visual arguments for Heimat. The Heimat literature of the late 19th century — stories set in the Rhine valley, the Black Forest, the Bavarian mountains — celebrated regional particularity against the uniformity of urban industrial life.

The word's appropriation by German nationalism was almost inevitable, given its emotional charge. By the time of the First World War, Heimat had been enlisted into the language of nationalist mobilization: soldiers fought for Heimat, sacrificed for Heimat, died for Heimat. Under National Socialism, Heimat was woven into the ideology of blood and soil (Blut und Boden), which linked racial identity to specific German landscape in a way designed to exclude those deemed not to belong — most catastrophically the Jews, many of whom were German by language, culture, and ancestry but were declared alien to the German Heimat. The concept became an instrument of expulsion and genocide.

After 1945, German intellectuals faced the question of what to do with Heimat. The word was contaminated but the need it named was not. Generations of Germans expelled from the eastern territories (Sudetenland, Silesia, East Prussia) during the postwar resettlement used Heimat as the organizing concept of their grief. The filmmaker Edgar Reitz made a monumental multi-part film series titled Heimat (1984–2013), chronicling a fictional village in the Hunsrück region through a century of German history — an attempt to reclaim the word for human particularity rather than political violence. The Heimat debate continues in German culture today, most recently as the concept has been deployed by right-wing populists to define who belongs in a rapidly diversifying German society.