COLUMBIA FORUM
The Place of Heimat

Bernhard Schlink is professor of law at Berlin's Humbolt University and a judge at the Constitutional Court in Northrhine Westphalia. An authority on German constitutional law, he has written the leading textbook on fundamental rights under the German constitution, taught European law at New York's Cardozo School of Law, and lectured widely. He is also a best-selling author, notably of Der Vorleser (The Reader), a novel about a postwar German youth coming to terms with the Holocaust, which has been translated into 29 languages. Schlink spent 2000-01 as a Director's Fellow at the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers. In this excerpt from "The Place of Heimat," delivered at Deutsches Haus on April 17, 2001, Schlink discussed the experience of exile and Heimat (home or homeland) in the modern world.

Bernhard Schlink delivered "The Place of Hemiat" in English based on a translation by Andrew Piper, a graduate student in Germanic languages. PHOTO: LYNN SAVILLE

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Again and again I meet Germans from the former East Germany who tell me they feel as if they are in exile, although they are where they always were, live where they always lived, and work, quite possibly, in the same factory, office, school or newspaper where they worked before 1989. Everything, they say, has changed and become foreign to them. It is not just that things have changed, but that things have been changed by others, without their help and against their will. Things have been made foreign by others. That is why they say they live in exile — in this foreign place where they live according to laws that they did not make, laws whose interpretation and enforcement they themselves do not determine.

Members of minority groups in the U.S. as well speak the same way. They feel as if they are in exile among the majority with which they live. There are women who feel exiled because they experience their society as created and dominated by men. There are older people who feel this way, too, in a society that worships youth and its beauty, its culture and its consumption.

In each case, from the Germans in the new federal states to the senior citizens in our youth society, I can understand this feeling and why it is associated with the concept of exile. And yet the association is peculiar. The concept of exile is actually and originally the antithesis to a Heimat, a home or homeland, which one had to leave behind. One is expelled from this Heimat, either by force or necessity; it lies somewhere beyond some border; one longs for it, and one returns there when circumstances permit, when the political repression, or the famine, or the fury of the plague ends. The foreign law under which one lives in exile is foremost the law of a foreign language. Writers have repeatedly described and lamented the severity of this law. Czeslaw Milosz says of the writer in exile, "[In the country he comes from] he was aware of his task and people were waiting for his words, but he was forbidden to speak. Now where he lives he is free to speak, but nobody listens and, moreover, he forgot what he had to say." Joseph Brodsky says similarly, "To be an exiled writer is like being a dog... hurtled into outer space in a capsule.... Your capsule is your language [and] before long [you] discover that the capsule gravitates not earthward but outward in space."

Of course, there are positive descriptions of exile, including many about what exile means for the writer. Milosz asks whether this condition of legitimized alienation is not in fact a privileged kind in comparison with the alienation that every writer suffers in his or her own society. Brodsky describes not only the terror, but also the possibility of freedom in exile. And Marina Zwetajewa suggests that writers, "far-sighted by the very nature of their craft," are able to see their homeland more clearly from the distance of exile. The crucial element, then, for the original and actual concept of exile is not a negative or a positive connotation — there are both. Rather, the crucial element of exile is its correspondence to a notion of Heimat, a homeland in which one was once at home and in which one would be at home again, if one could be, and to which one would return if circumstances permitted.

Where is this Heimat for the Germans who originally come from the new eastern states and yet who feel exiled in these new states? Beyond what border is their Heimat? Beyond what border is Heimat for the minority that lives among a majority, a majority among whom it has always lived and yet among whom it feels exiled? Out of which society have women been expelled to live among this patriarchal society, or senior citizens among the society of youth? In which society does one speak the language of women or the language of age, languages which are not understood in these patriarchal or youthful societies?

What foolish questions, you might be thinking. Exile is a metaphor, and the question — where is the Heimat that corresponds to exile? — is as equally mistaken as when one would ask who the father is with whom philosophy, the mother of all sciences, bears her children. Exile is life in a foreign place, a life not determined by oneself, but by others. It is an estranged life. Exile is a metaphor for this experience of estrangement or alienation; it is so existential and universal that it needs no place, and certainly no Heimat as its opposite place.

In fact, in discussions today about exile and the suffering of exile, one finds expressions that were always used to describe Marxist or Existentialist experiences of alienation. From the early Karl Marx of the economic-philosophic manuscripts to the late Jean-Paul Sartre, it has been axiomatic that the relation of the oppressed class, or the oppressed gender or oppressed peoples to their own activity is "a relation to one's own activity as if to a foreign activity," just as their relation to the external world is "a relation to the external world as if to a foreign world." In Marx's words, relations have "mercilessly ruptured human bonds, even those between workers and their colleagues, and have left no remaining bond between two human beings except naked self-interest, except pure, unfeeling payment." A German from the new states could well describe the changes in his professional life today with these words.

Yes, exile is a metaphor for the experience of alienation. But that doesn't answer the question about a Heimat that corresponds to exile. Why has the experience of alienation at the end of the last century rediscovered a metaphor that refers to places — explicitly to the place of exile where the experience is won and implicitly to the place where one would not be in exile, but at home? The Marxist and Existentialist experience of alienation lacked precisely this reference to place; it was the experience of placelessness. The proletariat does not have a place in bourgeois society, and does not need one in communist society. According to Marx and Engels, the proletariat is the class in whose particularity as a class the universality of humanity is imbedded, beyond nations, borders and places. And from Søren Kierkegaard to Sartre, Existentialist experience is one of "ex-sistere," the stepping out from all given contexts, orders and locations of Being, the experience of a placeless singularity and solitude before God or nothingness. Marxist and Existentialist experiences converge in the recognition that the place promised by Heimat, bourgeois society, nation, family, marriage, church or other cultural institutions is simply an illusion. Shaped by these experiences, in the last century, but especially after the Second World War, placelessness has been the defining intellectual experience.

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