Heimat

I had occasion today to look for background on the word Heimat, the German word for ‘home, one’s native place’, with untranslatable connotations of the countryside, village life, childhood and community. I suspect that for younger people the main association to the word is the well-known film - which is also very prominent in Google results. For me, being older, the echoes of German romanticism have to be double-checked. And indeed I found that political ideologies polarise around the concept of Heimat. At Eric Zuelow's excellent Nationalism Project, I found a review by Tom Donahue of Bernhard Schlink, Heimat als Utopie (Frankfurt am Maine, 2002), from which I learnt that Heimat is embraced by romanticism and nationalism, but also over-shadowed by its exploitation by Nazism. Marxism and existentialism, which reject the idea of the individual’s identity being tied to a place, see national, regional and ethnic sentiment as reactionary.

So we still find, in the modern politics of the left, that people are able to embrace multiculturalism, and accept the integrity of ethnic sensibilities in non-western cultures, but display an instinctive distrust of the same phenomena lingering in western society.

So much the worse for local, and even national, cultures within the UK, which never seem to find any support on the left. For so many years, we've struggled to get any money or support for the Scots language from government. The hopes raised by the creation of the Scottish Parliament have come to nothing. As I recall, even before the first election the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum, as it then was, self-censored a report advocating a place for Scottish culture in the school curriculum, in anticipation of the expected Labour majority.

In Northern Ireland, on the other hand, the linkage of Ulster Scots to right-wing populism (the Protestant interest) has produced the Ulster-Scots Agency. Unfortunately, the state of political culture over there is such that little money has been spent on projects and much on junketing and bureaucrat's salaries.