Book Reviews
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Book Reviews TOWARDS A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF HEIMAT Gisela Ecker (ed.) Kein Land in Sicht. Heimat ± weiblich? (No Land in Sight: Feminist Critiques of Heimat) Munich: Fink, 1997. 224 pp., ISBN 3-7705-3104-3 Since 1989 there has been a renewal of debates on nation and nationalism in Germany, and these debates are of continuing consequence in the face of all the problems of a process which has been welcomed as `a growing together of what belongs together', namely a German nation, as well as problems which arise in the wake of globalization (a catchword for a complex of social problems arising from the neoliberal turn in politics) and the founding of a uni®ed Europe and the wars we have witnessed in the Balkans and in countries formerly belonging to the Soviet Union. Kein Land in Sicht. Heimat ± weiblich? is an interdisciplinary collection of essays which illuminate aspects of Heimat and add considerably to an under- standing of its importance for the discourse of the nation. Heimat is of central importance in the German discourse of the nation. It is a uniquely German word, although, as Gertrud Koch explains in her essay (`Vom Heimat®lm zu Heimat'), we can ®nd the complex of feelings described by Heimat in discourses of regional movements trying to construct differences and regional identities. To give an idea of the complex of feelings, Koch quotes a passage on Scottishness from David Miller's On Nationality (1995): He also wanted to keep the past alive; though his intelligence suspected that much of the tradition owed itself to nineteenth-century invention and a wish in the Scots to be other than the Irish, his heart swelled in a way he could not stop at the old songs and stories. This access to something he could not describe but that ®lled his heart when he heard, for instance, the word `Locheil' or the talking crackle of heather burning, he wanted to pass to his child. He supposed he wanted her to have those things he could not describe but knew he did possess, loyalty and a sense of place, as a father with a faith might show the way to his child. The difference between a Scottish feeling of Scottishness, for instance, and the German feeling for Heimat would then concern different functions, Heimat being a discourse of nation. Heimat has its roots in the 19th century. It emerged long before the German nation, originally constructed along cultural lines (Kulturnation), established a nation-state. Heimat signi®es a vague sense of belonging, and does not require clear legal de®nitions or citizenship regulations. Its vagueness lends it the character of an empty space to be ®lled by projections of various kinds expressing people's desire for homogeneity and a natural order. Thus, Heimat The European Journal of Women's Studies Copyright # SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 6, 1999: 369±381 [1350-5068(199908)6:3;369±381;009530] 370 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3) belongs to those uni®catory discourses on which discourses of the nation feed and which gives them their affective appeal. Gisela Ecker, in her introduction to this collection of essays, characterizes the bundle of emotions expressed by Heimat: homesickness, nostalgia, a desire for harmonious and satisfying circumstances, a desire to return to a space without con¯icts, signifying either a return to an early phase in one's life or a return to a former cultural and social phase in history. These emotions may be activated and instrumentalized by and for a variety of political and national discourses, by patriots and supporters of Vaterland, in the dif®cult processes started by the reuni®cation of Germany (Wiedervereinigung), as well as for a critique of capitalism and for ecological programmatics. Heimat is very often a substitute and a dehistoricized version of nation, used to avoid acknowledging troubling facts in German history. From analyses focusing on the construction of nation, for instance in early- modern England, we know that the discourse of femininity is fundamental for the discourse of the nation. Femininity and nationality were constructed in a recipro- cal process as has been described by scholars analysing the representations of nation in Elizabethan works of art and literature. Kein Land in Sicht. Heimat ± weiblich? makes it very clear that what applies to nation and femininity applies to Heimat as well. Heimat is a place typically peopled by women, mainly mothers, whereas men typically are soldiers who defend Heimat somewhere else and suffer from Heimweh, homesickness or nostalgia. Since the turn of the century Heimat signi®es the place where the self enjoys a stable identity, and which functions as a help to cover up losses, traumatic experiences and psychic cracks. A recent government publication, for instance, celebrates Heimat as saving us from the coldness of functional logics, rigid rationality and instrumentality, anonymity and isolation. Heimat, as patterned on the gender system, is, then, constructed and represented along the lines of the prevalent mother image. The affective and emotive longings for Heimat are of an oedipal character, and the oedipal track can be traced, for instance, in a vast production of Heimat literature and ®lms in a Heimat setting. In Heimat literature and ®lms, women are represented as guaran- tees for wholeness, innocence, stability and homogeneity, and the narrations of the ®nal return to a non-ambivalent place of Heimat and of the struggle to regain it follow patterns of stereotypical gendering. In producing a discourse of unity and wholeness, Heimat literature and ®lms of necessity cover up gender differences and a lot of other differences as well. The illlusions of homogeneity always function by denying differences or making them disappear. Twelve essays by scholars from across the disciplines analyse various aspects of Heimat discourse in the 20th century. Silke Wenk and Irene Nierhaus are art historians. Wenk analyses the gendered national and Heimat message and mean- ing of placing KaÈthe Kollwitz's sculpture Mutter mit totem Sohn (Mother with a Dead Son) in a telling architectural context of Germany's old and new capital, Berlin. Irene Nierhaus analyses the meaning of the Vienna Wehrmann, a sculpture of special import for an exclusively male understanding of nation, and the ritual of hammering nails into this ®gure as an important link to understand how elements of the discourse of Heimat can be transformed into elements of a national discourse. Theologian Doris Brockmann makes us aware of the Christian equation of heaven and Heimat and of the implications of the dogma about the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (proclaimed in 1950) for gendering heaven according to Heimat by putting the Virgin and Mother Mary in heaven. Annegret Pelz discusses cartographic traditions and 20th-century literature in order to ®nd out about Europe as a possible projection of Heimat. Annette Brauerhoch and Gertrud Koch Book Reviews 371 analyse aspects of Heimat in ®lms. Brauerhoch discusses Helma Sanders-Brahm's ®lm Shirin's Wedding (1976). The ®lm, which narrates relevant events in the biography of a Turkish immigrant, ends up ontologizing the fate of women under patriarchy through a concomitant denial of difference and a denial of Heimat to the protagonist Shirin. Koch analyses the aesthetics of Heimat®lm and the functionality of discourses of Heimat for the discourse of the nation. Gisela Ecker, Monika Nienaber, Ina Brueckel and Kader Konuk analyse the discourses of Heimat in works of 20th-century literature and their reception. Birgit R. Erdle discusses Levinas's constructions of the myth of Ulysses and the story of Abraham in the context of a discourse of Heimat, and Herta MuÈ ller gives us a notion of what discourses of Heimat would mean to a Romanian woman of Roumeno-German descent. MuÈ ller's contribution to the collection helps to understand the depressive and constricting implications of Heimat via an autobiographical and idiosyn- cratical reconstruction of Heimat in the rituals and lifestyles of people, and she pleads strongly for a de®nitive dismissing of all discourses of Heimat. The book is a really good read. The selection of essays is convincing, and the range of disciplines covered is extensive. This collection is an inspiring and illuminating contribution towards a better understanding of the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at work in the cultural construction and circulation of Heimat. It helps to make Heimat a debatable matter and recognize its tremendous in¯uence in constructing German nationality. It is useful and liberating to read this book. REFERENCE Miller, David (1995) On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gisela Engel J. W. Goethe University, Frankfurt WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN? Billie Melman (ed.) Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870±1930 London and New York: Routledge, 1998, 459 pp. (with biographical references and index), ISBN 0-415-91114-1 (pbk), ISBN 0-415-91113-3 (hbk) Coming from the former Yugoslavia and living in the west while that country was disintegrating through a war, I often encountered one set of questions: `Haven't people from the former Yugoslavia had enough of bloodshed throughout their history? Haven't they had enough of expulsions, persecutions, massacres in World War II, World War I, the Balkan Wars, and all the other con¯icts in the past? Were they not sick and tired of the past hatreds, mutual accusations and endless quarrels? Why are they repeating it all over again?' In short: `Haven't they learned anything from their history?' Reading the collection edited by Billie Melman, one is tempted to ask these same questions again, and, having asked them, to end up in despair.