This summer I met Silvio. He lives in northern Italy. Tourists like me are always welcome in his “Residenza”. He tells them about his homeland. Then his eyes light up and his hands fly in all directions. Over there is the loveliest osteria, there’s the best wine, there the tastiest “Dolci”. Silvio loves his homeland. I can feel that immediately.
I secretly envy people like that. I’ve always struggled with love of home. I grew up sheltered. But that was the thing with home. I used to think of shooting clubs, kitsch and bourgeois attitudes. A feeling of narrowness and limitation. Modern went differently. “After graduation,” they always said, “the world is your oyster.” My friends and I outbid each other with escape plans. Anything seemed better than staying put.
After all, who wanted to get up close and personal with die-hards? We left our homeland without hesitation for stays at renowned business schools in London or New York, a semester at the Sorbonne in Paris or at least in the direction of Berlin. Everything felt daring and exciting. I was all the more surprised when I finally realized: I miss my homeland. Something had changed in me. Apparently many others felt the same way. They wore these T-shirts that just said “Würzburg” or “Hannover”. Showing where you were born, and doing it with loving pride, might give you more security in a world that seems to be spinning faster and faster.
“The process that we call globalization is twofold,” writes the social scientist Ralf Dahrendorf. “While economic activities need more and more space to develop and lose their grip on reality, people are looking for ever smaller spaces in which they can feel at home and develop a sense of belonging.” Precisely because of our life in a globalized world, the desire is growing after the binding. Saying “My home” is no longer embarrassing. As young adults, we all distance ourselves from our roots. “That’s also important,” says the Berlin psychologist Uwe Langendorf. “Like a chick breaks its shell, we break the boundaries of our origins because we need new stimuli for our development. It is possible to find a second home somewhere else.
But most of the time, as Langendorf observed, sooner or later people think back. “We then feel an emotional bond with our original homeland that we weren’t so aware of before.” How do people feel then who – also a consequence of globalization – turn their backs on their homeland because they are only in a foreign land hope for a better life? “When you leave everything that belongs to you, you almost leave yourself,” said the Hungarian writer György Konrad, who had to flee from the National Socialists in 1944.
Psychologist Langendorf can only confirm this: “People who feel homeless are constantly on the lookout.” It doesn’t help them that, thanks to the internet, we can take or order a piece of home with us almost anywhere in the world. The industry plays along and we are only too happy to be seduced. “Home is a longing landscape of feelings,” says the Frankfurt cultural scientist Prof. Heinz Schilling. “The triumph of social networks like Facebook also stands for this search for certainty, for orientation.” Nevertheless, most of them don’t want to do without their mobile life. But at the end of a trip, we all look forward to being “home”. How great does the first night in your own bed feel!
I now know that this is not a contradiction in terms. I recently got into conversation with a frequent flyer at the airport. Waving his Blackberry in his hand, he told me he missed not jetting around the world anymore. “I feel like I’m in prison,” he said. “But you already have a home, don’t you? Family , kids?” I asked. Then he smiled, “Of course. If they didn’t wait for me, I wouldn’t enjoy the wanderlust any more.”
