Editorial
From the Editors
(published in GQ 83.1)
The theme of the Quarter is Heimat—and my colleague, Dr. Kata Gellen, has succinct and penetrating comments, appended immediately after my own.
Looking in the opposite direction [forward], we need to alert our readership to the discussion groups on the issues confronting the profession at the next MLA Convention. These will be co-sponsored by the AATG, and a selection of the texts will be published in GQ at this time next year. Dr. Katherine Arens is managing the project and has invited contributions with this text: “Responding to the 2007 MLA Report, considering the place of German language/ Studies within the university context: Policies, best practices, outsiders’ views.” If you have productive thoughts along these lines, Dr. Arens would be glad to hear from you [k.arens@mail.utexas.edu]. And of course we would welcome more responses to our forum on Close Reading [82.4].
James Rolleston
Wieviel Heimat braucht der Mensch?
On June 15, 1947, Hermann Broch wrote to his friend Else Spitzer from his Princeton exile:
merkwürdig, daß Dich und wahrscheinlich auch Fritz [Else’s husband] noch immer die sogenannte Heimatlosigkeit stört. Da bin ich viel israelitischer, denn ich habe mich tatsächlich, bei aller Liebe zu manchen Landschaften, mein ganzes Leben lang ausschließlich diasporesk gefühlt, wovon ich allerdings die Wiener Küche ausnehmen muß, die immerhin eine Heimatsbindung darstellt […]. Aber ansonsten fühle ich mich auch ohne Heimatsgefühl durchaus glücklich, und manchmal mache ich hierzu ein Kitschgedicht. (143)
Three of the five essays in the current issue of German Quarterly engage critically with the question of Heimat. Here it is no longer a feeling, as it was for Broch, but rather an analytical category. How can we understand this development?
Many writers of Broch’s generation, who experienced the Second World War and subsequent exile, grappled with the question of Heimat: What does a “Heimatgefühl” consist in? Which affects and experiences are tied to it? And how important is it anyway? In 1966 Jean Améry famously asked, “Wieviel Heimat braucht der Mensch?” The answer for him was quite a bit more than one might think.
Over the course of 50 years, Heimat has become desubjectivized: one might speak of a move from Heimatgefühl to Heimatbegriff. As the essays by Rebecca Braun, Sonja Fritzsche, and Michele Ricci Bell demonstrate, contemporary German Studies seeks to infuse the notion of Heimat with theoretical rigor. They explore how Heimat is constructed and deconstructed in literature and film, and the political and social implications of these cultural acts. For these authors, Heimat is quite a serious matter—not the subject of kitschy poems, but of cultural analysis.
Kata Gellen
Work Cited
Broch, Hermann. Briefe 3 (1945-1951). Dokumente und Kommentare zu Leben und Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981.