Consequences (II): Hölderlin and Homeland (“Heimat”)

Abstract

Godwi, the protagonist in Clemens Brentano’s 1801 novel of the same title, quotes the following verses: “As wide as the world,/As powerful the mind,/As much strangeness he holds,/So much homeland is his gain.” But in the novel Godwi does not quite know what to do with this quotation. Is “world” and “home” a contradiction? As it happened this question was equally relevant to Hölderlin. From an anthropological point of view, Adolf Portmann argued in 1953 that as long as man is the type of person “whom we know as human beings today”, he is Ptolemaic, i.e. primarily earth-oriented: “However far thought and fantasy wander, they always initially work with the images of an original experiential bond, to which the earth is a real home”. He also refers to Mircea Eliade, who speaks of a “mystical solidarity” with home.