Heimat: Gemischte Gefuhle - Rainer Gross

"Home" triggers memories and intense feelings - an association generator, today also a political concept of struggle: The text analyzes personal and collective images of "Heimat": The sociological view from the outside poses the question of the function of Heimat for individual and national identity formation. Their often unconscious prerequisites - according to Gross' thesis - lie primarily in the psychodynamics and genesis of "home feelings" in the area of tension between a given origin and self-chosen places of longing for arrival, between idealization of a lost paradise and utopian transfiguration of the longing places, between collective psychology and individual biography. More and more people are longing for belonging today, but in contrast to the exclusive, rigid images of home, they are trying to think of their plural in terms of home: to be safe, to be at home, with oneself, in relationships, at work ...