Germany made homeland a dirty word. Thirty years on, it returnedReturn Of The Repressed In Germany

A country that treats belonging as contraband does not abolish it — decades later it gets the ugliest version of it.

The war ended, history ended, Germany thought it had closed the book. Thirty years later, neo-Nazi parties take over forty percent of the vote in the east.

A word you were not allowed to love

Around 1990 the journal New Perspectives Quarterly ran an issue on German nationalism. The filmmaker Syberberg said something sharp: after the war, Heimat — homeland — became forbidden territory.

Germans were told to live in the head, he argued: excellent at maths, physics, business. The heart had nowhere to go. And the heart wants a place — the light on the trees, the sky at night, a garden plot of one's own.

When East Germany vanished, fifteen million people woke up without a country. They wanted a homeland more than anyone, precisely because they had just lost one.

The playwright Heiner Müller put it plainly: with socialism gone, capital had no rival, and therefore no alibi when people failed to thrive.

The right simply took over the job of capital's harshest critic. They are not interested in dialogue. They are filling a void.

Cohn-Bendit, then deputy mayor of Frankfurt, counted it out: easterners expected unification to bring western living standards overnight. In reality life got worse before it got better. Fear, uncertainty — and then four hundred thousand refugees dropped into that cauldron. Someone has to give that fear a face.

What needs admitting is not guilt but need

The author's argument: treating every defence of belonging as Hitler's ghost come back is aiming at the wrong thing. People need to belong; that is what being human means.

The job of a state is to secure its borders and set sensible immigration criteria, not to clean up violently after the fact in the Mediterranean. Canada integrates immigrants better than most because roughly sixty percent arrive through the economic class.

Asylum needs redefining too: it was meant as temporary refuge for the persecuted, not a route to permanent residency for whole populations of weak states.

An open society needs defined borders to survive. Lose either and you lose both.