We are witnessing another wave of the socialist-green anti-national culture war in Germany.
The German word “heimat” is difficult to translate. It can mean homeland, but it can also mean home, and yet both translations fail to capture the full flavor of the German word. Heimat is closest to homeland, the area where one was born, where one has many relatives, friends and acquaintances, where one knows the local customs and expressions, perhaps speaks the local dialect and knows how things are done there. Heimat is the land where you have been to every corner, every bush, every pub, and which you will never forget, wherever you go.
The specific German meaning of the word comes from the country’s history. Germany is a country of regions, and these regions have retained their own language, their typical customs and mentality to this day, although urbanization and migration have put local customs under siege for some time.
Yet the Protestant provinces of the north still live in an almost different world than the Catholic Bavarian and Swabian towns and villages of the south.
In the more than two centuries following the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, until the founding of the state in 1871, Germany was divided into some 200 states and petty states, which is why the country ended up with so many centers and many faces, and this still defines the extremely diverse landscape of German culture and language today.
Why am I telling you all this? Last week, Social Democrat Interior Minister Nancy Faeser announced that
The word heimat needs “a positive redefinition … the concept must become open and diverse.”
This would mean, in the home secretary’s view, that “people should decide for themselves how they want to live, what faith they want to follow and how they want to love.” Not that this has not been the case so far.
So what was the home secretary really trying to say? The word heimat is one of the most positive values in Germany, despite migration and the constant internationalist woke propaganda. According to a survey in 2018, 83% of West Germans, including 89% of Bavarians, and 91% of East Germans, regardless of age or social class, considered belonging to their homeland very important.
What Interior Minister Faeser really meant by this reinterpretation was put in more precise terms by Green Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck:
„The homeland is the promise that every person can find warmth and security wherever they come from and wherever they wish to live.”
It’s quite simple: Accept that in your hometown you will hear the muezzin instead of bells, embrace polygamy and the image of women dressed from head to toe in a burqa; accept that the local grocery store flies a rainbow flag (as does your correspondent’s home); and see it all part of the local folklore, as something that „belongs to us.” Or as President Steinmeier put it: Exclusion is an abuse of tradition and local mutual trust.
But it’s not just the homeland that’s been the problem lately. From nearly the very beginning, the forest has played a special role in German mythology, literature and culture.
The beautiful German forests are the closest of all landscapes to the German soul.
German Romanticism was practically born in the forest, with countless poems and musical compositions describing the atmosphere, beauty and dangers of the forest, with the image of the forest used as a symbol of the human soul. To this day, hundreds of thousands of people, alone or with their families, regularly go hiking in the woods; hiking, like the homeland, is an important part of German tradition and culture.
But unfortunately, the forest is not such an innocent concept, and hiking is not as innocent an activity as you might think. „Hiking is a popular leisure activity among neo-Nazis,” the leading journal of mainstream media, Die Zeit, recently discovered. „Hiking has nothing to do with sports, it’s more about subverting the concept of homeland,” writes the author of the article. Hiking is culturally linked to Romanticism, the author notes, a trend that in the left-wing interpretation of history (taken over from the GDR) is regarded as the direct predecessor of national socialism and is therefore inherently suspect.
Which is why today’s hikers are heirs to the ideology of the Hitler Youth.
Allegedly, there are countless far-right hiking groups, whose members are only seemingly innocent hikers, the article goes on to claim, referring to some completely unknown and insignificant groups. Nor is the forest itself innocent nature, the author quotes an “expert,” but “a vehicle of modern prejudice, of nationalist, racist and biologist ideologies, a symbol of the Germanic roots of the German homeland.”
In other words, the Germanic origins of the Germans are the original sin of this people; there is no redemption, how could there be, only eternal atonement.
In this context, we should note that the word Nazi has acquired an incredibly “enriched” meaning in recent years.
A Nazi is today someone who considers migration to be a mistake, who does not approve of gender and LGBT propaganda, who does not support the shutting down of nuclear power plants, who does not take part in the climate movement, and more recently, who does not want to either freeze or die for Ukraine.
The extension of Nazism to citizens who love their homeland, hiking and forests is simply a logical development of this newly enriched meaning.
Today’s cultural journey must be complemented by a topical news story that puts the latest wave of anti-national hysteria in perspective. Berlin’s radical left-wing and green government wants to speed up the naturalisation of migrants, and it is not alone. A new naturalization center would help 20,000 migrants a year obtain German citizenship in Berlin. The requirements to learn German are too high, a member of the far-left faction complained, and will be lowered. Up to now, eight years’ residence in Germany and a clean criminal record, as well as language skills, were the conditions for being granted citizenship. The federal Social Democrat-Green Free Democrat government has already announced that the residence requirement will be lowered to five years, and that if you have completed a laughable “integration course,” you could be among those who decide Germany’s future after three years.
Now it is clear why the concept of homeland needs to be „positively reinterpreted” and why anyone who still clings to some German cultural traditions is a Nazi.
