Heimat
Subtitle: a critical theory of the German idea of homeland
By: Peter Blickle.
Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture; Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered)
Publisher: Camden House
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Rochester, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 186
Subjects: Human territoriality -- Germany.; Ethnicity -- Germany.; Group identity -- Germany.; German literature -- History and criticism.; Homeland in literature.; Nationalism in literature.; Nationalism and literature -- Germany.
Description: "The idea of Heimat (home, homeland, native region) has been as important to German self-perceptions over the last two hundred years as the shifting notion of the German nation. While the idea of Heimat has been long neglected in English studies of German culture - among other reasons because the word Heimat has no exact equivalent in English - this book offers us the first cross-disciplinary and comprehensive analysis, in English or German, of this all-pervasive German idea.

Blickle shows how the idea of Heimat interpenetrates German notions of modernity, identity, gender, nature, and innocence, and reminds us of such commonplace expressions of Heimat sentimentality as Biedermeier landscapes of Alpine meadows and castles on the Rhine, but also finds the Heimat preoccupation in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. Always aware of the many literary representations of Heimat (for instance in Schiller, Holderlin, Heine, Rilke, and Thomas Mann), Blickle does not argue for the fundamental innocence of Heimat.

Instead he shows again and again how the idealization of a home ground leads to borders of exclusion."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [161]-174) and index.