Learning German: die Heimat

In a conversation with an Austrian girl at a party recently, she described Minnesota, where she had spent an exchange year during high school, as her "zweite (second) Heimat." And that struck me as strange, because a lot of times I don't feel like I have any Heimat at all.

Your dictionary will tell you that Heimat means "home," but that makes it sound like Heimat is about your house and your family, when that's not the case at all. "Homeland" is a little better, but "die Heimat" existed long before nineteenth-century nationalism and its conceptualization of the nation as a political community came about. As far as I can tell, Heimat is a sense of rootedness, the security of knowing that you belong to a place, and not because you happen to live there now, but because you and your family have always been there, since as long as anyone can remember. 

It reminds me of the lyrics to "If I Should Fall from Grace with God," written about Ireland by London-based The Pogues:

          This land was always ours

          It was the proud land of our fathers

          It belongs to us and them

          Not to any of the others

And that's something that I, as an American, will always feel like I'm missing. I do feel connected to Pittsburgh, and to Pittsburgh's industrial history, to a greater extent than a lot of my American friends do to their birthplaces, because I know that my family was part of it, but that history begins in 1830. Before that, Pittsburgh was something else, something foreign that I feel no connection to, and my ancestors were farming on the steppes of Italy and the flat plains of Poland. 

It reminds of a conversation I had with some work colleagues about genealogy. They asked me about my German last name; I said that my ancestors were most likely from Rheinland-Pfalz, because that's where most Pennsylvania Dutch people come from, but that I really don't know, because my German ancestors came to America in the 1730s. And they were astounded that I knew so much about my family history. Genealogy isn't a big thing in Austria and Germany, because if your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents grew up on farms in Bayern, chances are that your family has always consisted of farmers in Bayern, all the way back to feudal times. That's rootedness.

And it's only recently, as I've come to learn more about and appreciate the Austrian concept of Heimat, that I can begin to understand why the conservatives say that Austria is "kein Einwanderungsland" (not a country of immigration). Because immigrants don't have a Heimat here in the same way that other people do. And of course this concept of Heimat is a myth, just as imagined as any other community, but that doesn't make it any less real. It's something I noticed way back in December, but the more I learn about Austria, the more convinced I am becoming of this disconcerting idea: Ausländerfeindlichkeit (xenophobia) is the flip side, the necessary underbelly, of everything that I love about this country. And becoming an Einwanderungsland -- something necessary economically, from a human rights perspective, and out of practicality (the second- and third-generation "foreigners," after all, aren't going anywhere) --might indeed require Austria to abolish a part of itself.

I know I sound like an FPÖ supporter now, like one of the right-wingers I'm supposed to be studying for my thesis, but trying to understand a mentality rather than judge it can lead to some uncomfortable positions.