Heimatweh

The longing for home in the modern world is preceded by the loss of home. Flight and expulsion are therefore often the beginning of a heightened longing for home. The impossibility of returning and the prevention of finding a new home therefore mean a lasting injury for those who have been displaced. But even those who did not have to leave the places and landscapes of their childhood have lost their homes in the course of industrialisation, urban sprawl and the destruction of the natural environment.
The urgency of home arises from its deprivation. We must therefore think of home in terms of the foreign and the passage through it. Such an understanding of homeland therefore has nothing in common with the regressive celebration of ethnic homogeneity.