Heimat's environmental turn

This paper asks what the German concept of Heimat (“home/ homeland”) has to offer to ecocritical debates on the role of place-belonging in environmental consciousness. More explicitly, it examines how changes which the understanding of Heimat has undergone since the 1970s, in which its environmental dimension has come increasingly to the fore, have been formulated by the cultural anthropologist Ina-Maria Greverus. It shows how they parallel developments over the last thirty years in space and place theory on the one hand, and hpw they relate on the other to recent calls in ecocritical theory for a shift from local to global, and for attention to ways of promoting environmental consciousness by training us to move between the two. Finally, Jenny Erpenbeck's 'Visitation' (2008) is discussed as a literary representation of contemporary German thinking about home, the homeland, place-belonging and caring for the environment.