Retooling Heimat
By Berkley Wilson
“Heimat is a crucial aspect in German self-perceptions; it represents the fusional anti-Enlightenment thinking in German Romanticism; it is the idealization of the pre-modern within the modern; it unites geographic and imaginary conceptions of space; it is a provincializing, but disalienating, part of German bourgeois culture; it reflects modern German culture’s spatialized interiority; it combines territorial claims with a fundamental ethical reassurance of innocence; and, to achieve this combination, it uses a patriarchal, gendered way of seeing the world.”
-Peter Blickle, Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, 2004
What does it mean to be German (or American or Russian) today? In a recent article, the New York Times asked many Germans, particularly immigrants and those of mixed race to answer this question, and concluded that for many the “struggle to belong” is ongoing and the prospects of being considered German dismal. The far right has come up with a distinction between “bio-Germans” and “passport Germans,” insiders and outsiders, the latter fair game for racial attacks and ostracism.1 The nationalist wave that has swept through parts of Europe, USA, and beyond makes it timely to turn back briefly to the concept of heimat, in which ideas of home, homeland, and belonging are inextricably fused. The problem is in how each is interpreted. Prior to the 19th century, the word Heimat took on a meaning of patriotism and regional pride, morphing over time to express an identity based on sentimental attachment to rural values: religious adherence, agriculture, and reverence for cultural traditions. The rise of cities in the late 18th and early 19th centuries led to an embrace of Heimat against the gusts of modernity. According to Hannah Arendt, the breakdown of the feudal system across western Europe made room for the concept of social and individual equality, “according to which, a nation within a nation could no longer be tolerated.” Heimat became a feeling, a state of being. Heimat is home, Heimat is at rest. Heimat is a secure space, isolated from global crisis and outside influence. Heimat is the comfort of a family recipe. Heimat is a newborn baby that looks just like great grandpa.
In a state of Heimat, an individual appreciates the past, seizes on the opportunities of today and builds a future for his offspring that mirrors the traditions and values of the past.
German historian Peter Blickle captures the various German definitions of Heimat:
“No doubt, the regressive aspects of the idea — variously translated as “home,” “homeland,” “hometown,” “homestead,” “native region” (Lower Bavaria, Frankonia, Upper Swabia, Black /Forest, Appenzell, etc., or “native country” (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, or Lichtenstein) — are troubling to us now.”
In the 20th century, the Nazis deployed Heimat in rural propaganda campaigns to boost morale and instill German unity amidst economic and political chaos. The Nazi-defined version of Heimat focused on the ethnic homogeneity and ancestral customs of rural volk, and rejected all outsiders as manipulative urbane foreign agents set to impose systems of oppression that would force them to give up their ancestral customs. Those in power could do what they wanted as long as they had the volk.
Resurrecting the idea of the volk that plays on ancient tribal passions is becoming the contemporary demagogue’s path to popularity. While ideas of racial or cultural purity have long been debunked, they are easily mobilized to channel resentment for political gain. For instance, as part of his administration of exclusion, U.S. President Donald Trump, for the first time, boasted to Minnesotans about turning back refugees:
“Since coming into office, I have reduced refugee resettlement by 85%, and as you know, maybe especially in Minnesota, I kept another promise. I issued an executive action, making clear that no refugees will be resettled in any city or any state without the express written consent of that city or that state. So speak to your mayor. You should be able to decide what is best for your own cities and for your own neighborhoods, and that’s what you have the right to do right now. And believe me, no other president would be doing that.”
-President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Minnesota, October 10, 2019
This type of messaging is a delicately targeted verbal dalliance aimed at evoking suspicion of refugees (most of them Muslim), and targeting urban officials as enemies of “homeland security.” The people, mostly caucasians wearing red hats emblazoned with “Make America Great Again” in white lettering, are eager to see their president pick a fight with the millennial liberal mayor of Minneapolis; part of which is represented in Congress by Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American congresswoman currently getting a lot of attention in the political media and someone who the president has encouraged to ‘go back to her country.’
With the demise of active war zones and proxy fights (Syria being the exception), US public tolerance for inflicting violence on other humans living in arid lands is low. The President, aiming to retain his power in the upcoming election, has reformulated his rote schtick (“lock her up,” “go home to mommy”) and is currently beta testing 2020 messaging at his rallies. He’s starting to show emotion, and share wisdom he received from his father, Fred Trump, the American born son of Bavarian immigrants. He shows a hint of vulnerability when talking about writing letters to families of fallen soldiers; it is evident he dislikes the task. He appreciates the sacrifice, but would rather not have to visit with mothers and fathers burying their adult kids. Trump combines his appreciation for sacrifice with a declaration that he is ending the foreign wars:
“We were supposed to be in Syria for 30 days. We’ve now been there for 10 years. We were supposed to be in Afghanistan for a short period of time, we’re now going to be there for close to 19 years, it’s time to bring them home.”
These are big applause lines at his rallies. He is proudly standing up to interventionist Republicans and Democrats in Congress and at the elite think tanks. When senior Republican senators criticize the president’s pullout of Syria and direct peace talks with the Taliban, Trump ignores them or makes minimal, meaningless adjustments to the mission so as to appease traditional Republicans and their neo-conservative opinion makers in the intellectually minded media, (Commentary, National Review, The American Interest, The Atlantic, Economist). If indeed this is the beginning of the end of US involvement in sectarian middle eastern wars, it’s costly for people living in those lands. The scale of human devastation (physical, psychological, cultural, economic) across the region is far from the slickly designed, highly produced ‘shock and awe’ that kicked off America’s 21st century misadventure. Defense research expenditures have pivoted away from fighting wars in foreign lands towards monitoring and segmenting the southern border with Mexico. The drawdown of American forces overseas means fewer opportunities to refine technological advancements in surveillance and biometric tracking. The cameras, sensors, satellites, drones, and tracking softwares have been redeployed from zooming in on dark-skinned people in Arab and Muslim lands, to zooming in on dark-skinned people traversing the economic and trade zone straddling the U.S. and Mexico border. Trump’s refusal to continue troop deployments and draw down global military commitments means more high-tech surveillance experiments within the homeland and its immediate borders.
The policy shift – facing criticism from within the president’s own party – represents a vision of a country untethered from global crises and their accompanying images of street clashes, mass protests, poverty porn, and stateless refugees. Trump’s combining of security at the border with a drawdown in the number of troops serving in war zones is akin to the German concept of Heimat, love and affection for the homeland.
The interwoven history of American Heimat – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio – share a genealogical and ancestral archaeology that cannot be ignored in the context of racial and religious resentment. The internet has made American Heimat mobile and networked on social platforms. Perhaps the euro-nationalists of the 1930’s needed the invisible barriers of connected network technology and its psychic control over human brains to cordon off segments of racial pure zones. They didn’t need tanks, they needed routers. They didn’t need warships, they needed trans-oceanic fibre optic cables. They didn’t need V1 drones, they needed WiFi enabled hot air balloons, and miniaturized satellites to bypass oceans, mountains, and government restrictions. They didn’t need a propaganda ministry, they needed social media and cable news, with their content prediction algorithms and AI-generated content blocks to maximize audience and streamline revenue. The information feedback loop optimizes groupthink, fear, anxiety, and shock value to reinforce ‘us vs. them’ narratives of existential struggle. Presidential Twitter posts become urgent headlines. Urgent headlines evoke more urgent posts, leading to more denunciations of political enemies and acclimation for allies. The Twitter obsessed political press gets caught in the vicissitudes of the political parties and loses its grasp of the electorate, either out of laziness (who wants to go to Iowa in January?), or out of exhaustion.
Notes
1‘I Will Never Be German’: Immigrants and Mixed-Race Families in Germany on the Struggle to Belong, by Lara Takenaga. Published Nov. 8, 2019 Updated Nov. 11, 2019
Thirty years after Germany’s unification, nearly 500 readers shared with us what it means to be German.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/reader-center/german-identity.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Reader%20Center
2A complicated word, Heimat has been summarized as follows:
Ever since the word emerged in the Middle Ages, Heimat has come to describe the epitome of Germanness, encompassing, among many other things, a place of comfort, unspoilt nature, one’s mother tongue, blood relations and familiar traditions and customs. Thus, Heimat has served as the justification for dividing and uniting the German people; has been worshipped and despised, misused and abused; has caused unbelievable sorrow as well as feelings of utter comfort, security and belonging; but has never, not even after the shameless Blut-und-Boden propaganda during the Nazi era, stopped to influence and infiltrate the minds of countless Germans.
Gabriele Eichmanns, and Yvonne Franke, editors. Heimat Goes Mobile : Hybrid Forms of Home in Literature and Film. Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2013.
STATELESSNESS AND ITS VICISSITUDES
By Sofia Silveira-Florek
Most people have never heard of statelessness. The idea of a person with no nation is not even considered.
Nationality seems to be inherent to being a person. Yes, sure, most countries were created for,and because of European elites playing havoc in lands whose political landscapes were already more complex than fourth dimension chess, leading to conflict-filled independence projects. Concurrently with the history of colonization, it is almost impossible to think of a life without nationality.
In a world that values individuality, the concept of nation-estate seems to be one of the few collective endeavors embraced by “modern” life, along with the practice of religion (it really depends on the religion) and the institution of family (it really depends on the family). Now, to that list, one could add being part of a corporation, but that is a theme for a whole other article.
The point is: once you meet a stateless person you realize that having no nationality can make it impossible for one to participate in a corporation, can shake and scare one’s sense of family and maybe even interfere with religion – because it is really hard to have faith when one’s crime is to be born without I.D.
Statelessness is a tale directly related to migration. Displacement, a mixed background, and a lack of opportunity are not accounted for within a system that marginalizes the stateless and causes statelessness. Every time a baby is born their nationality on paper is theoretically defined by one or the other: blood or soil.
Stateless people are born as a result of displacement and dissonances between home and host country. If blood is what defines citizenship, being born in a country is not enough to be a citizen. One needs a parent born in that land, and if there isn’t one, the home country of the parents should grant status. Often, the home country will not do that if the child needs to be born there to be granted citizenship. Under lack of blood or soil, statelessness comes and the ones molded by it get to live with no nationality.
The more one learns about statelessness the more one realizes that there is a lot more to the apparent dichotomy of soil or blood: it depends on which kind. Ethnicity or race discrimination based on formal or informal policies and practices that affect certain groups disproportionately is a common form of screening that leads to statelessness, like the Rohingya in Myanmar1 are stateless due to the restrictive provisions and application of citizenship, which primarily confers citizenship based on race. Additionally, 25 states,2 including Nepal and Swaziland, do not allow women to transfer nationality to their children, making statelessness a reality if the father is unknown, missing or deceased.
In practice, living without identification can result in a myriad conflicts for an individual, and they can easily be isolating. From fear of living without identification to simply not being able to take part in activities that have as their main result mobility and connection: How does one enroll in school? How does one get a driver’s license? In global North countries especially, there is not a week that goes by where a person is not asked to show their identification.
February 2017 Photo; Shujenchang
The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) is the international organization that represents and defends stateless people; after all, no country will. In their sixty-five years of existence resolutions were formed, reports delivered, and pressure was made to fight against the use and mis-use of deprivations of nationality. Scattered victories,3 like the 300,000 Urdu-speakers that were finally considered citizens of Bangladesh in 2008, or, the 2007 case of the stateless children born to Brazilian parents abroad who were unable to acquire Brazilian nationality unless they went back to live in Brazil, set a slow but steady pace for the agency.
The #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness by 20244 was launched along with the United Nations global goals and the only country that met the goal so far was Kyrgyzstan.5 Otherwise, the movement for stateless people resides in the advocacy of members of civil society, who, little by little, help the ingression of stateless people into institutions, like unions and schools.6
Discrimination against stateless people manifests itself most clearly in their attempts to access documentation needed to prove their nationality or their entitlement to nationality, such as a national identity document (I.D.) or a birth certificate. Lack of such documentary proof can result in a vicious circle. If you don’t have those documents, you cannot get citizenship. Without citizenship, it is impossible to get these documents. So one lives, but is denied access to healthcare and education, the right to vote and to relocate, to leave the host country and to explore it.
According to the UNHCR, there are ten million stateless people in the world. One of them (the only one I have met so far) is among the most gracious people I have ever encountered. In a project that unites ethnography and archeology, Isadora Dias Vieira and I had the chance to collaborate with Abraham Paolos – father, M.A in international Relations, friend, advocate for the rights of imprisoned immigrants, and community organizer – in building a mosaic of his story and his statelessness, linking it to the history of nation-states, especially his host country, the United States of America.
Right at the beginning of our interviews, Abraham told us not to pity him and not to build a narrative that incites pity. According to the Cambridge dictionary, pity is “a feeling of sadness or sympathy for someone else’s unhappiness or difficult situation.” When I met Abraham, it always surprised me how he communicated happiness, but I could not help but feel for the many hardships he faced because he did not have an identification. The mental image I got was the anxiety of trying to go through a turnstile and being hit in the stomach by the will to go and the machine’s unacceptance of whatever the person hit in the stomach had to offer. It is the sensation of being trapped by an identification error and the time and effort it takes to get a stamp that, in our society, theoretically should be given a long time before Abraham could utter his first words.
Sympathy is not the only feeling present in hearing his story. The guilt of the things lived, and the things not accomplished went through my head. How could I, who have all the Identification cards, not feel shame for the possibilities and rights not exercised? And how can he, amidst so many tests, be able to stand and go and write and live so much? His embrace of life and pain, his refusal to be a shadow even though in the eyes of at least three nation-states he is one, is a constant reminder of the brilliance of minds tossed to the margins and how much societies around the globe lose for their hiding of statelessness and the people who are so much more than bodies deprived of nationality.
Notes
1https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/rohingya/
3https://www.refworld.org/docid/545b47d64.html
4https://www.refworld.org/docid/545b47d64.html
6The University Council of Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Consu/Unifesp) in Brazil, approved in November 13th, the creation of affirmative actions for and the insertion of refugees, stateless and humanitarian visa applicants in their selection: https://www.unifesp.br/noticias-anteriores/item/4143-unifesp-aprova-vagas-na-graduacao-para-refugiados-apatridas-e-portadores-de-visto-humanitariofbclid=IwAR0JCO3KATQUVqwjTkPFCjla08LN1sVcvoY00GkxU3hcYQhUm8UGOV6QRM
References
“How UNHCR helps the stateless.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“Nationality and Statelessness: Handbook for Parliamentarians N° 22.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. July 2014:30.
“UNHCR Action to Address Statelessness: A Strategy Note.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. March 2010.
Unravelling Anomaly. Detention, Discrimination and the Protection Needs of the Stateless Persons. London: Equal Rights Trust, 2010.
UNHCR (15 June 2006) “UNHCR worldwide population overview.” UNHCR. Retrieved 13April 2018.