Lyrical Redefinitions of Heimat in Mariella Mehr's Nachrichten aus dem Exil and Widerwelten

During the fall of 2005, 1 found Mariella Mehr, Oberlin College's Max Kade Writer-in-Residence, sitting at one of her local haunts, sipping a drink and bathing in October light.1 Recognizing me nach dem Schritt, as she came to know us all, since her eyesight was failing, she gestured that I should join her. "Sehnsucht - ich sehne mich nach Italien. Ich mochte nach Hause, zu meinen Huhnern, zu meinem Garten." Waving her cigarette in the air, Dr. Mehr smiled as if to apologize. "Es ist zwar schon hier, die Leute nett ..." she trailed off. Eager to return to the subject of her journey home, she shared her route: "Wir fliegen naturlich nicht direkt nach Florenz. Wir mussen erstmal in Atlantis umsteigen ..." After a moment's hesitation, her face broke into a grin. We laughed. "Ich hab' mich aber schon versprochen!" It is fitting that the Swiss writer Mariella Mehr, even if unaware, fails to chart the road home to a clear destination, but grasps it as a path leading through Atlantis - a place celebrated in myth as much for its disappearance as for its existence. For, as reflected by this short encounter, Mehr not only values home and treasures its associations through her longing for a return, but she also is preoccupied with home's absence and loss. These concerns form the basis of her poetry volumes, Nachrichten aus dem Exil (1998) and Widerweiten (200 1 ) , in which Mehr offers a seemingly impulsive dismantling and revaluing of the categories of place, passage and personhood.2 Yet, as this essay will argue, there is a logic to Mehr 's lyrical transposing of aspects of Heimat, which is best understood in light of three main sources: Mehr's own biography, through which tropes of displacement and persecution reverberate; received definitions of Heimat emerging from German literary and cultural contexts; and historical and contemporary attitudes about home and the closely linked notion of travel traced to "Gypsy"3 tradition - and in particular, to her own Yenish4 heritage. The vocabulary and concepts supplied by these sources, presented in the first section of this article, form a basis for understanding Mehr 's lyrical characterization of Heimat. As the subsequent analysis reveals, Mehr's poetry self-consciously invokes the distinctly Germanic term Heimat and its attendant aspects such as language and location, expanding its suitability for capturing complex intercultural experiences by positing an altered notion of Heimat without a singular homeland; of travel that wavers between joy and despair; and of longing that orients itself not to a single place, but to community and destiny. While considering Mehr's 2003 "Heimat" essay, which asserts a privileged relationship between Heimat and language, the close readings of her poems culminate in a critical assessment of the ways that Mehr's poetry illustrates the word's ability to participate in the preservation, creation and discovery of Heimat. Mehr finds in poetry a most fitting form, enabling her to free herself from lexical confines, as well as allowing her discrete units in which to experiment with varied renderings of Heimat's terms. Yet, while employing the poetic form as a site for redefining aspects of Heimat and language's role in its pursuit, Mehr challenges the reader to reconcile the poetic subject's generally unfulfilled search with Mehr's own assertion of language's positive role vis-a-vis Heimat. Terms and Concepts: Foundations for Mehr's Notions of Heimat5 and Home "Als Kind war sie in 16 Erziehungsanstalten und wurde von 5 psychiatrischen Beratungsstellen 'betreut'" (Djuric 123). Born in 1947 in Zurich to Yenish parents from whom she was forcibly taken at birth, Mehr suffered for some 25 years of her life at the hands of malevolent caretakers as a victim of the infamous Hilfswerk fur die Kinder der Landstrase6 project, beholden to a system that exacted suffering in the name of charity. Beyond the intense physical and psychological pain experienced at the hands of the Swiss children's aid organization Projuventute, Mehr 's lack of freedom and enduring fear, conditions fostered by this system, provided no basis for a positive view of home. …