GERT HEIDENREICH
Stranger In Your Homeland
I
T WOULD BE EASIER
to talk about the country I live in if I were able
to say that the eastern part of Germany had been my view of
Heimat
(home) long before the Wall came down-opening up the prospect
of an end to ideology and intolerance, the end of a parochial idyll.
But it is true that, like most of the citizens of the Federal Republic, I
had grave doubts about unification and no particular yearning for it.
It
is also true that the West, where I grew up, was never really my
Heimat
either. For most of my life, being German has been a weird state of
affairs.
So what do we mean today when we talk about closeness with the
land and culture? Has not the concept of
Heimat
been perverted by our
demagogic century, invalidated by global networking, to the point that
it is devoid of meaning anyway? Nevertheless, we all carry within our–
selves a memory of places where we were happy, places we were or are
as familiar with as they seemed familiar with us-a certainty, a curious
amalgamation of landscape, language, smells, and light, that alloy of
childhood we call home. Where we lack such memory, we know at least
how to describe the longing for it.
But what if the country never had the chance to offer the reliability
people wanted-if
Heimat
itself is as uncertain as thin ice over dark
depths and its very concept only useful as a definition of kitsch?
In
my memory, our living space unfolds like a mute country. The fool–
ish hope that the children wouldn't understand: we learned from frag–
ments of sentences that
the Jews-the
adults used to utter the words
strangely, casually, in a low voice, as if they tasted putrid-that
the Jews
had disappeared in dark times, apparently without anybody being
responsible.
Then, hesitantly, our fathers returned. Wordless. Heroes looked
brighter than they did, that much I knew, villains looked grimmer. But
Editor's Note: "Stranger in Your Homeland" was originally presented as a
lecture on March
21, 1999
in the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar as
part of the "Reden liber Deutschland und Europa" series.
