A. heimaten (German)
Part of speech: Verb
Definition
1) The practice of making oneself at home in a spiritual or physical place, in an area or country where someone grew up, where someone migrated, where someone feels comfortable
2) The practice of making oneself at home in a spiritual or physical place, in a region or country where something/someone comes from, where something/someone has/sees its origin

B. Heimaten (German)
Part of speech: noun, plural word
IPA: [ˈhaɪ̯maːtn̩]
Grammatical features
Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative plural of the noun Heimat (obsolete)[1

 

Ich hab ein neues Schiff bestiegen,
Mit neuen Genossen; es wogen und wiegen
Die fremden Fluten mich hin und her —
Wie fern die Heimat! mein Herz wie schwer!
—Heinrich Heine[2]

Anecdote I

WIR (ALLE) SIND DAS VOLK was the title of the artwork by German artist Hans Haacke for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017. This now seminal long-duration work had its genesis in 2003 and continues to claim space in the form of billboards, posters, and flags carrying the sentence in thirteen international languages in public spaces around the world, as could be seen around the Neue Nationalgalerie from 2021 to 2023 and a few years ago around SAVVY Contemporary and other institutions in Berlin.

The magnitude of this work lies in the fact that it radically questions the common understanding of the German term Volk (people) and therefore the concept of Heimat (home) that are so central in the understanding of what Germany was, is, or wants to be. Haacke, like the magician he is, dismantles the foundation on which Germanness and its singular, unilateral, monochromatic, monoethnic projections are built, only to place the building blocks again in all our hands and ask us to reconfigure that foundation. One could say that Haacke is inviting everyone to rethink what Volk and Heimat signify, and not only who is part of them but also who is or should be able to participate in the crafting of and making of that Volk and Heimat.

But to be able to understand this work WIR (ALLE) SIND DAS VOLK [WE (ALL) ARE THE PEOPLE], one must go back at least to 1998 when Haacke was commissioned by the German Bundestag to produce a Kunst am Bau (percent for art project) sculpture for the atrium of this political institution that hosts parliamentarians and thus political representatives of the German people. Haacke’s proposal was the installation DER BEVÖLKERUNG, which sparked a heated debate in and outside of the Bundestag and only ‘cooled down’ when the majority of the parliament voted for the realization of Haacke’s concept on 5 April 2000.

The far-reaching controversy around Haacke’s work wasn’t because it invited parliamentarians to bring soil from their constituencies to Berlin and contribute to the 21 x 7 m piece of turf with the white-lettered title DER BEVÖLKERUNG in its centre. The controversy rather came about because, in conceiving DER BEVÖLKERUNG, Haacke was referencing the inscription on the Reichstag building DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE (to the German people) designed by Peter Behrens. In 1916, Paul Wallot had the inscription installed on the building he had completed in 1894. It bears mentioning that at the time, this inscription too led to a scandal.

Haacke had dared to dedicate the parliament not to the German people, but to the population.[3] At the end of the twentieth century, Haacke was rightfully asking the questions who is meant by Das Volk and what it actually stands for in the aftermath of the atrocities of the twentieth century that emanated from Germany. In several interviews at the time, Haacke pointed out that it was important to shift from the people to the population, as the parliamentarians voted to the Bundestag had the task to represent not just those who carry a German passport—not only ‘historical’ Germans—but all the people who live in this country.[4] In an interview titled ‘Wem gehört das Volk?’ conducted by Matthias Flügge and Michael Freitag, Haacke states the following motivation:

In German history, we certainly find the concept of the people in the emancipatory tradition of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Hence words such as ‘Volksvertreter’, ‘Volksbühne’, ‘Volksschule’, etc.. In addition, however, the concept of the people—especially in the word combination ‘German people’, which implies a mythical, marginalising tribal unit—is associated with a radically undemocratic understanding of the res publica. It is this dubious ancestral passport thinking, at least since the Roman invasion, that paved the way for the crimes of the ‘Volksgenossen’. And it is this concept of the people, which suggests a community of blood, that continues to cause mischief, as evidenced by election results and racially motivated acts of violence.[5]

This argument applies to the conceptual history of the German term Heimat as well. It thus comes as a surprise that after leaving behind the concept of Das Volk to work with Die Bevölkerung, some years later Haacke decided to make another radical shift. A shift that embraces Das Volk, but makes it more elastic and more permeable, more accommodating and more hospitable by using the title WIR (ALLE) SIND DAS VOLK. The emphasis here is obviously on the ALL, as if Haacke is saying we can’t leave notions like Volk or Heimat in the hands of those who want to instrumentalize such terminology for their xenophobic, exclusivist, and racist purposes.

Haacke’s work for documenta 14 in 2017 came at a critical point in twenty-first century European history. It came in the wake of increased racism in Germany, with a rise in violent attacks against foreigners, especially refugees—while most of Europe was experiencing a rebirth or reconceptualization of nationalistic tendencies in countries like Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. Haacke’s work came at a time when refugee centres in Germany were burning again, while citizens hindered the work of the firefighters, as they chanted ‘refugees go home’, and ‘Wir Sind das Volk’ [we are the people].[6] It seemed as if Haacke was reckoning that despite the historical baggage that words like Volk or Heimat bring along, it was time to reappropriate these concepts and give them new meaning, instead of discarding them. It seemed as if Haacke was engaging in a practice of unlearning.

According to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, 22.6 million people in Germany[7] have a migration fore- and background and recent studies have shown that Germany needs half a million skilled immigrant workers every year,[8] which means that, as Haacke’s work already made clear, both the notions of Volk and Heimat need to be radically reconsidered. The term Volk should not and never could afford to exclude all these people. Especially, as there has never been a singular, uniform, coherent, or homogenous deutsches Volk (German people), as the construct called ‘deutsch’ is made up of the Bavarians, Preussians, Saxons, Bohemians, Danes, as well as Syrians, Iranians, Ghanians, Nigerians, Moroccans. The idea of a homogenous, monochromatic, and linear Volk or Heimat needs to be unlearned.

Anecdote II

In 2014, when Germany’s men’s national football team won the FIFA World Cup in Brazil, Mesut Özil rapidly became a figurehead of German football culture—and furthermore, he represented a new generation of national players that found themselves in a double bind of cultural identity, but didn’t mince their words when pointing out the double standards against which they were measured. Whenever Özil scored, he scored for Germany, and all that mattered was that this emerging star was crucial in positioning Germany in the football cosmos. However, when he didn’t play as well or the team lost, he was considered by sports commentators, fans, and football functionaires to be a Turkish-German footballer.

Sometimes it is just a hyphen that decides if you are part of the German Heimat or not. Sometimes a hyphen suffices as a reality check to remind you that you are not fully part of or make up just a fraction of that Heimat.

Özil’s political affinities and life since he retired from the German team in 2018 have repeatedly been the subject of public debate. His chummy handshakes with Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as well as a selfie revealing his tattoo of a howling wolf and three crescent moons—a typical symbol of the Turkish fascist group Bozkurtçular, also known as the Grey Wolves—paint a controversial, if not devastating picture of his political beliefs. Özil himself was targeted in a racist campaign, with people debating if Özil was German enough or not, if and when he could be part of this construct of a German Heimat or not. This experience was one of many reasons why Özil made the weighty decision of resigning from the German team, stating that: ‘Ich wurde in Deutschland geboren und ausgebildet, also warum akzeptieren die Leute nicht, dass ich Deutscher bin?’ [‘I was born and educated in Germany, so why don’t people accept that I’m German’?], and ‘Gibt es Kriterien, ein vollwertiger Deutscher zu sein, die ich nicht erfülle?’ [‘Are there any criteria for being a fully-fledged German that I don’t meet?’].[9]

It wasn’t the first time that a footballer had cried foul at racism in sport in Germany, but this exclusion, this questioning of his identity and nationality, proved to be the last straw for Özil. He spoke of racism and xenophobia in Germany directed against a German citizen, reigniting debates on German citizenship and migration, German citizenship and religion, German citizenship and whiteness. And though Özil received harsh criticism for his reckoning from the German Football Association (Deutscher Fußball-Bund, DFB) officials and the press, there was significant support from the different migrant communities in Germany that have to go through the same struggles of whether they belong or not, and to what degree, on a daily basis. Support also came from from some politicians like the Federal Minister of Justice at the time, Katarina Barley (SPD) who outspokenly said that it is an ‘alarm signal when a great German footballer like Mesut Özil no longer feels wanted in his country because of racism and does not feel represented by the DFB’ or the then SPD Deputy Leader Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, who appealed ‘to all citizens with different roots: We belong together and we will never accept racism’.[10]

As mentioned earlier, this denigrating experience of having one’s identity and belonging constantly questioned in the quotidian is too common to migrants of first, second, third, or otherwise generations, so long as one’s name or phenotypes fall outside of the singular frame of what Germanness has come to mean, or the linearity or monochromatism of what Heimat has come to represent.

Anecdote III

In 2018, the year of Özil’s resignation, SAVVY Contemporary staged an invocation with the title CARESSING THE PHANTOM LIMB. HEIMAT – PROGRESSION, REGRESSION, STAGNATION? for that year’s edition of the Long Night of Ideas organized by the Auswärtiges Amt, Germany’s Federal Foreign Office. The point of departure for reflecting on Heimat was a statement made by the acclaimed German novelist and Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Herta Müller, during a reading at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin on 11 November 2009: ‘Heimat ist, was man nicht ertragen kann, wenn man dort ist, und nicht loslassen kann, wenn man weg ist. [‘Heimat is that which you can’t bear while you’re there and can’t let go of when you’re away.’]'[11]

In an essay titled ‘“Phantomschmerz im Erinnern” bei Herta Müller. Heimat als konstruierter und dekonstruierter Raum’, Garbiñe Iztueta writes of the Romanian-born German author’s problematic relationship to the term Heimat. Iztueta cites several statements by Müller from her anthology Heimat oder der Betrug der Dinge (1997), including: ‘Wenn ich mich zu Hause fühle, brauche ich keine “Heimat”. Und wenn ich mich nicht zu Hause fühle, auch nicht’ [‘If I feel at home, I don’t need “Heimat”. And if I don’t feel at home, neither then’], and another statement from a 2009 interview with journalist Renata Schmidtkunz where Müller says: ‘Ich glaube, Heimat ist das, was man nicht aushält und nicht loswird’ [‘I think Heimat is what you can’t stand and can’t get rid of’]. Iztueta goes on to point out that in Immer derselbe Schnee und immer derselbe Onkel (2011), Müller describes her affective relationship to Heimat as ‘Phantomschmerz im Erinnern’ and ‘irrationale Sehnsucht’ [‘phantom pain in memory’ and ‘irrational longing’].

Iztueta then analyses the notion of Heimat in Herta Müller’s work as follows:

Herta Müller’s work has been categorised as anti-homeland literature in close connection with her ‘foreign gaze’, which functions as a deconstructive device. … Müller’s foreign literary gaze functions as such a deconstructive procedure as far as the discourse of the traditional and instrumentalised Banat-Swabian homeland is concerned. In the context of the Banater-Swabian reality, Herta Müller portrays homeland as mendacity and its identity-forming function as deception (‘Heimat oder der Betrug der Dinge’). In this way, she attempts to expose the concept as an instrumentalized construct. The traditional concept of ‘home’ is based on a number of apparently self-evident characteristics, which Herta Müller breaks down in her narratives: a stable and harmonious close relationship between self and home; comprehensibility and transparency for the self (e.g. spatial orientation); the possibility of meaningful action, which functions as a counterweight to foreignness and alienation.[12]

These reflections on Müller’s notion of Heimat were foundational to the project CARESSING THE PHANTOM LIMB. HEIMAT – PROGRESSION, REGRESSION, STAGNATION? and serving as a vantage point from which to deliberate on what the term Heimat has come to mean; who is afforded the possibility of being part of and crafting Heimat? Who is excluded? Who is tolerated? What is the relation between Heimat and nativity, religion, class, and race? Here, Müller’s thoughts on Heimat intersect with those expressed by Olu Oguibe in his essay ‘Imaginary Homes, Imagined Loyalties: A Brief Reflection on the Uncertainty of Geographies’, where he writes that:

our bond with the site of our nativity is a one-way affair. It is an ambivalent bond borne out of a one-sided loyalty and a proclivity to possess, a desperate striving to belong, to lay claim to something that lays no claim in return. Severed from the womb and the body that bore us and hauled into the void of life and existence, we crave to attach ourselves to something, a moment, a location, an event; we crave an anchor which we readily find in the contours of the house of our upbringing, in the streets of our childhood, in the city of our birth. But the city has a different desire and a different response, for we need the city more than the city needs us.[13]

Oguibe’s observations resonate with Müller’s comment that ‘Heimat is what one can’t stand when one is there and cannot let go of when one is away.’ The provocation being what if the reverse to this seems to be true? What if the overcompensation that comes with over-identifying with a certain Heimat and hyper-excluding others from that Heimat has to do with the craving that which has been lost or was never there? Which is to say: if people are in their ‘Heimat’ but still feel the loss of that Heimat, then maybe that thing called ‘Heimat’ is already long gone or never really existed.  

ˈhaɪ̯maːtn̩

But what if Heimat was not understood in the guise of singularity, monochromatism, monoethnicity, or anything linear? What if Heimat was an embracing concept? What if this concept embraced the different beings and cultures that make up a certain conceptual or physical space or geography, and make that space a better, respectful, humanitarian, earth-friendly, and conducive space? What if Heimat wasn’t a constant but a process, a project, a praxis? Not a given, but a process crafted by all who make up that conceptual or physical space to make it more accommodating for all?

heimaten is a multi-year project and network including institutions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in which:

  1. the shift from a singular Heimat to plural Heimaten is enacted. A project in which the multiplicity of Heimaten that make up German conceptual and physical spaces are not a contradiction, but the inherent facets, hues, and strata of society—and which need to be celebrated. These Heimaten are Anatolian, Bavarian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, Saxon, Swabian, Vietnamese, and much more. These Heimaten are atheist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, pagan, none of the aforementioned, and more. The festival embodies the idea and praxis of heimaten as being more than the sum of its singular parts and has as a common denominator respect of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
  2. heimaten as a praxis, as a verb, as an exercise is enacted. Which is to say that a Heimat is not a given, but a malleable structure that can only become if everyone in the society plays an active role in the shaping of it. One can imagine Heimat as a muscle that needs exercising through the process called heimaten to keep it fit. For this, peoples of different creeds, cultures, and colours inhabiting these spaces are called upon to participate in this practice.
  3. a research, discussion, and exchange group is established that on a yearly basis comes together to deliberate on and make recommendations on questions of heimaten. This includes post-Heimat[14] theories and practices, which propose an Umleitkultur (detour culture) rather than a Leitkultur (leading culture), in which Christianity, whiteness, masculinity are not unspoken principles for social norms but instead accompanied by a distracting, queer, non-normative culture. In short, detours are favoured over straight roads.[15] Post-migrant[16] theories and practices that are currently being negotiated within political, cultural, and social spheres within Germany, Europe, and beyond are also crucial for these discussions. Cultural theorists, philosophers, and academics of different backgrounds, artists, activists, and others are invited to conceptualize in theory and practice heimaten as a container that could entail the concerns of the Post-Heimat, the post-migrant, and post-cosmopolitanism. One of the many tasks ahead is to imagine a society that does not function on the basis of ‘integration’ or ‘tolerance’ but on mutual and reciprocal respect of each other irrespective of where one’s last name comes from, where one was born, or gender, age, and class, irrespective of religious or cultural beliefs so long as they respect human and earth values.
  4. heimaten considers the possibility of be-heimaten. As anthropologist Jonas Tinius points out,[17] beheimaten encompasses the notion of hospitality and signifies giving a home. Since the German prefix ‘be-’ in beheimaten doesn’t completely address the fundamental question of who is part of that psychological and physical space called Heimat—or for that matter when, how, and for how long, just as Haacke’s twist with Bevölkerung didn’t fundamentally tackle the issue of Volk—it is worth working with heimaten literally and metaphorically as a substrate. The question of agency comes up here. Who has the agency to ‘give’ someone else a home? Heimaten is a practice of actively creating a home, of wielding the intrinsic agency of creating that possibility of belonging. Since beheimaten is not limited to the human species but includes the beheimaten of plants, animals, and other species, it also offers the possibility of shifting from human agency towards other, non-human agencies.

From 2024 to 2027, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with the support of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, invites scientific and cultural associations to practise heimaten in the premises of the HKW and in cooperation with numerous institutional partners throughout Germany as well as in Austria and Switzerland. Musicians, storytellers, artists, activists, cooks, scientists, and contributors from all walks of life are invited to participate in the conjugation of the verb heimaten.

This project is a possibility of unlearning[18] Heimat and learning heimaten.

 

[1]These definitions are based on the meaning and definition of the word Heimat according to German language wiktionary.org (August 2024), de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Heimat:
1) place, area, or country where someone grew up, where one feels comfortable
2) place, region, or country where something comes from, where something has its origin

[2] Another ship I now ascended,/ My journey by new companions attended;/ By strange waves toss’d and rock’d, I depart—/ How far my home! how heavy my heart! Heinrich Heine, ‘Life’s Journey’, in The Poems of Heine: Complete, translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring, (London: George Bell and Sons, 1908), 170.

[3] In German, the terms Volk (people) and Bevölkerung (population) have distinct and particular histories. The former has come to have more nationalist connotations while the latter is more commonly used in demographical contexts.

[4] Vera Stahl, ‘Hans Haacke: “Der Reichstag ist ein imperialer Palast” [‘The Reichstag is an imperial palace’]’, Spiegel Online (12 September 2000), www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/-a-92860.html.

[5] Matthias Flügge, Michael Freitag, Hans Haacke, ‘Der Bevölkerung: Wem gehört das Volk [‘The population: who owns the people’]’, derbevoelkerung.de/wem-gehoert-das-volk/. Originally published in neue bildende kunst, 9/7 (1999), 22–24. (Translation by the author.)

[6] Philip Oltermann, ‘Crowd cheer fire at hotel being converted into refugee shelter in Saxony’ The Guardian (21 February 2016), www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/21/crowd-cheers-fire-hotel-refugee-shelter-saxony-germany.

[7] ‘Sharp rise in labour migration in 2022’ The Federal Statistical Office (27 April 2023), www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Population/Migration-Integration/_node.html.

[8] Dirk Kaufmann, ‘What skilled workers does Germany really need’, DW (4 April 2023), www.dw.com/en/what-skilled-workers-does-germany-really-need/a-65223664.

[9] ‘Deutscher, wenn wir gewinnen, aber Immigrant, wenn wir verlieren’ ['German when we win, but immigrant when we lose'], nd (23 July 2018), www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1095096.mesut-oezil-deutscher-wenn-wir-gewinnen-aber-immigrant-wenn-wir-verlieren.html.

[10] ‘Deutscher, wenn wir gewinnen, aber Immigrant, wenn wir verlieren', nd (23 July 2018).

[11] Garbiñe Iztueta, ‘„Phantomschmerz im Erinnern“ bei Herta Müller. Heimat als konstruierter und dekonstruierter Raum’ ['"Phantom pain in remembering" in Herta Müller. Home as a constructed and deconstructed space’], literaturkritik.de (9 October 2015), literaturkritik.de/id/21207.

[12] Garbiñe Iztueta, ‘”Phantomschmerz im Erinnern” bei Herta Müller. Heimat als konstruierter und dekonstruierter Raum’, literaturkritik.de (9 October 2015). (Translation by the author.)

[13] Olu Oguibe, ‘Imaginary Homes, Imagined Loyalties: A Brief Reflection on the Uncertainty of Geographies’ in Interzones: A Work in Progress, eds. Octavio Zaya and Anders Michelsen, (Copenhagen: Tabapress, 1996).

[14] PostHeimat Network project,, postheimat.com.

[15] Nora Haakh, Jonas Tinius, Ruba Totah, ‘Problematising PostHeimat', PostHeimat Network (April 2020).

[16] Naika Foroutan, 'Post-Migrant Society', Kurzdossiers, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, (21 April 2015), www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/kurzdossiers/205295/post-migrant-society/.

[17] In a private conversation with the author.

[18] ‘Unlearning is not forgetting, it is not deletion, cancellation nor burning off. It is writing bolder and writing anew. It is commenting and questioning. It is giving new footnotes to old and other narratives. It is the wiping off of the dust, clearing of the grass, and cracking off the plaster that lays above the erased. Unlearning is flipping the coin and awakening the ghosts. Unlearning is looking in the mirror and seeing the world, rather than a concept of universalism that indeed purports a hegemony of knowledge.’ Savvy Contemporary, ‘Unlearning the Given: Exercises in Demodernity and Decoloniality of Ideas and Knowledge’ (2016), https://savvy-contemporary.com/en/events/2016/unlearning-the-given/.