Author: Elizabeth Boa
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191583545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
The discourse of Heimat, meaning homeland or roots, has been a medium of debate on German identity between region and nation for at least a century. Four phases parallel Germany's discontinuous history: Heimat literature as a response to modernization and to regional tensions before the First World War; the inter-war period when Heimat divided into racist ideology, left-wing opposition, and inner resistance to the Third Reich; a post-war dialectic between escapist 1950s Heimat films and right-wing claims to the lost lands in the East to which anti-Heimat theatre and films in the 1960s and 1970s were a response, with the urban Heimat in GDR films adding a socialist twist; regionalism and green politics in the 1980s and German identity beyond Cold War divisions. A key point of reference in current debates on German history, Heimat looks likely to continue in postmodern and multicultural mode.
Author: Friederike Eigler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110292068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
The concept of Heimat with its seemingly pre- or anti-modern connotations of rootedness in a place of origin is central to a critical understanding of German history and culture. Over the course of the past fifteen years, scholars across a range of disciplines have found new ways to examine the changing notions of Heimat – its multifaceted cultural, literary, and visual history, its gendered connotations, and its national and ideological appropriations. This anthology is the first to examine cultural manifestations of Heimat by giving special consideration to issues of memory and space. The contributions to this volume challenge static notions of place often associated with Heimat. Instead, they explore the social and cultural production of places of belonging as they emerge in literary and visual narratives ranging from 1800 to 2000 and beyond. Although the anthology includes historical perspectives on Heimat, its overall objective is not to trace its cultural or literary history, but to place this complex term into new conceptual contexts. Drawing attention to manifestations of Heimat within German literary and cultural studies provides a rich ground for exploring the transformation of locality in trans/national contexts.
Author: Jessica Andel
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3658389850
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 116
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Book Description
The German notion of ‘Heimat’ is highly subjective, ambiguous and historically charged. Senses of belonging and identity associated with Heimat render the concept vulnerable to appropriation and instrumentalization by different political forces. Thereby, a static and exclusive understanding of Heimat is often depicted. This book drafts a counternarrative to demystify the contested concept. On the one hand, Heimat is conceptualized as spatial through emotional-geographical approaches to human-place relations. And on the other hand, the concept is placed in a global context through the perspective of international migration. The author contributes to the understanding of Heimat as an emotional map of self-location. This subjective map is neither purely static nor dynamic - it is characterized by simultaneities of opposing processes.
Author: Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230391117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
This collection brings together international scholars pursuing cutting-edge research on spatial identities under National Socialism. They demonstrate that the spatial identities of the Third Reich can be approached as a history of interrelated dimensions; Heimat, region and Empire were constantly reconstructed through this interrelationship.
Author: K. Molly O'Donnell
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472025120
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Germans have been one of the most mobile and dispersed populations on earth. Communities of German speakers, scattered around the globe, have long believed they could recreate their Heimat (homeland) wherever they moved, and that their enclaves could remain truly German. Furthermore, the history of Germany is inextricably tied to Germans outside the homeland who formed new communities that often retained their Germanness. Emigrants, including political, economic, and religious exiles such as Jewish Germans, fostered a nostalgia for home, which, along with longstanding mutual ties of family, trade, and culture, bound them to Germany. The Heimat Abroad is the first book to examine the problem of Germany's long and complex relationship to ethnic Germans outside its national borders. Beyond defining who is German and what makes them so, the book reconceives German identity and history in global terms and challenges the nation state and its borders as the sole basis of German nationalism. Krista O'Donnell is Associate Professor of History, William Paterson University. Nancy Reagin is Professor of History, Pace University. Renete Bridenthal is Emerita Professor of History, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Author: Josef Stuart Len Cagle
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110733153
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Discourses of Heimat and of migration both negotiate questions of identity, belonging, and integration; moreover, despite the reemergence of right-wing, racist, and exclusionary uses of the term Heimat, there are in fact more recent German-language cultural texts that problematize and challenge a view of Heimat as a community that excludes the Other than there are promulgating it. This volume addresses the parallel proliferation of discourses of Heimat and of migration in contemporary German-language culture and demonstrates that the entanglement of migration and Heimat can be productive: it can help us to reframe what it means to have a home, to lose one, find one, or belong to one.
Author: Elizabeth Boa
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780198159223
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
The discourse of Heimat, meaning homeland or roots, has been a medium of debate on German identity between region and nation for at least a century. Four phases parallel Germany's discontinuous history: Heimat literature as a response to modernization and to regional tensions before the FirstWorld War; the inter-war period when Heimat divided into racist ideology, left-wing opposition, and inner resistance to the Third Reich; a post-war dialectic between escapist 1950s Heimat films and right-wing claims to the lost lands in the East to which anti-Heimat theatre and films in the 1960sand 1970s were a response, with the urban Heimat in GDR films adding a socialist twist; regionalism and green politics in the 1980s and German identity beyond Cold War divisions. A key point of reference in current debates on German history, Heimat looks likely to continue in postmodern andmulticultural mode.
Author: Elizabeth Boa
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780198159230
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
'What this study achieves, above all else, is to underscore the constant yearning of the German psyche for a potent and cohesive identity, compelling us to ponder not only the cultural accomplishments this has inspired, but also the afflictions it has, in no small part, brought upon the nation' -Forum for Modern Language StudiesGerman identity has been a controversial theme throughout the modern age, especially in the wake of unification. This study explores the theme of identity between locality and nation in literature and film from the late nineteenth-century through to the present, locating key novels and films in a wider cultural context of great significance for an understanding of German history.
Author: Gabriele Eichmanns
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144385087X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Heimat has been a crucial concept for the construction of identity in the German-speaking world. Seemingly impossible to translate, Heimat has served to describe feelings of comfort and belonging that are traditionally tied to a specific location, be it one’s place of birth or childhood home. Yet, in a world characterized by ever increasing global influences and a fast-paced lifestyle, the notion of Heimat as a static, inflexible and rather exclusionary idea is becoming more and more obsolete and is giving way to new hybrid Heimat forms that encompass traditional as well as foreign elements. Thus, Heimat can no longer be perceived as a solely German concept but is rapidly merging binary opposites, shaping Germans’ understandings of home in new and unexpected ways. The nine essays in this anthology explore these hybrid forms of Heimat in our globalized world from multiple angles. Some take a look at traditional genres of Heimat like the Heimatfilm or Heimatroman and examine how contemporary filmmakers (Tom Tykwer, Fatih Akın) and authors (Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Hugo Loetscher) have appropriated those genres to arrive at an updated version of Heimat in the 21st century. Other articles focus on gendered readings of Heimat and show how Mo Asumang’s Roots Germania and Ula Stöckl’s Das alte Lied emancipate the term from its nurturing, motherly qualities and instead provide women—including women of color—with powerful agency. Finally, contributors explore Heimat in the regional and historical contexts of East and West Germany, Switzerland and Romania. In the process, this anthology inscribes itself into the ongoing discourse on Heimat and enriches it by showing how the current notion of Heimat transcends traditional boundaries of nation, culture and race.
Author: Philipp Nielsen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190930675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
In the decades between German unification and the demise of the Weimar Republic, German Jewry negotiated their collective and individual identity under the impression of legal emancipation, continued antisemitism, the emergence of Zionism and Socialism, the First World War, and revolution and the republic. For many German Jews liberalism and also increasingly Socialism became attractive propositions. Yet conservative parties and political positions right-of-center also held appeal for some German Jews. Between Heimat and Hatred studies German Jews involved in ventures that were from the beginning, or became increasingly, of the Right. Jewish agricultural settlement, Jews' participation in the so-called "Defense of Germandom in the East", their place in military and veteran circles and finally right-of-center politics form the core of this book. These topics created a web of social activities and political persuasions neither entirely conservative nor entirely liberal. For those German Jews engaging with these issues, their motivation came from sincere love of their German Heimat-a term for home imbued with a deep sense of belonging-and from their middle-class environment, as well as to repudiate antisemitic stereotypes of rootlessness, intellectualism or cosmopolitanism. This tension stands at the heart of the book. The book also asks when did the need for self-defense start to outweigh motivations of patriotism and class? Until when could German Jews espouse views to the right of the political spectrum without appearing extreme to either Jews or non-Jews? In an exploration of identity and exclusion, Philipp Nielsen locates the moments when active Jewish members of conservative projects became the radical other. He notes that the decisive stage of the transformation of the German Right occurred precisely during a period of republican stabilization, when even mainstream right-of-center politics abandoned the state-centric, Volk-based ethnic concepts of the Weimar republic. The book builds on recent studies of Jews' relation to German nationalism, the experience of German Jews away from the large cities, and the increasing interest in Germans' obsession with regional roots and the East. The study follows these lines of inquiry to investigate the participation of some German Jews in projects dedicated to originally, or increasingly, illiberal projects. As such it shines light on an area in which Jewish participation has thus far only been treated as an afterthought and illuminates both Jewish and German history afresh.
