Myth, Magic Formula, Plastic Word—A Conceptual Approach

Heimat is a term that is not only difficult to translate literally but also oscillates between wide-ranging interpretations in German. It can open a wide field or sink into a narrow hole. Heimat can be the whole world or your room, an open conglomerate of ideas or a membership card for your party, your football club, or senior citizens’ club, a bloated nation or an ethnic minority marginalized by it, such as the great Italy, which bathes in the splendor of antiquity of Rome, or a caravan settlement of Roma or Sinti that is burned down by nationalist fanatics. Heimat can be Austria, which shrank after the First World War and still basks in the memory of the Habsburg monarchy in which the sun never set, or a Slovenian village in bilingual Carinthia, which had and has to defend its Slovenian lessons and local plaques against the assimilation pressure of the nation-state. In the election campaign for the office of Austrian President, both the green (and later elected) candidate Alexander van der Bellen (Standard 2016) and the right-wing populist candidate Norbert Hofer claimed the proper understanding of Heimat for themselves—Van der Bellen with an open perspective, a Heimat that can accommodate refugees, Hofer with the closing kind of a Heimat that needs to be protected from intruders (cf. Freiheitsliebe 2016; Kurier 2016).

As such, there is no Heimat. Structuralist approaches offer meanings of Heimat (cf. Barthes 1972; Deleuze 2003), which can consequently also be interpreted: Substance or truth for the essence of what Heimat is, will not be found in these, even with the most thorough psychoanalytic or scientific inspections. However, this does not mean that the different meanings of Heimat may not base und on authentic-life situations, facts, circumstances, just as much as on a psychological level the ideas, wishes, fears, constraints, attempts at healing, and hopes connected with Heimat.

There is an interplay between myth and truth, which is itself a myth. One creates the other: The myth creates realities—subjectively and inter-subjectively—just as facts, living conditions, living environments, historical and biographical events create myths. According to Jacques Derrida (1973, p. 17), every meaning also plays the role of the significant, the meaning-giving factor.Footnote 1 To extrapolate, Heimat is not only what we see in it, but it also creates these meanings. The attempt to deconstruct Heimat can base on the reciprocity between meaning and the creation of meaning, between meaning and the given circumstances, myth and reality: It is not a search for the real Heimat, but an attempt to understand how and why Heimat is understood in a certain way.

Stretching a term by Uwe Pörksen (1995), we could see the term Heimat as a plastic word. It is omnipresent, used indiscriminately and thoughtlessly, and has become a hermetically encapsulated shell, comparable to the drug capsules that people swallow with the confidence that they will help, but whose content remains entirely unexplored for the user. I got this impression when I conducted a series of interviews with young South Tyrolean riflemen (Schützen) in 1997/1998 to understand what fascinated them about this traditional association, the sole aim of which was to protect the Heimat.

What is Heimat? In response to this question, cheeks flushed slightly, mostly there came a “Uhm” and “Whoa,” an embarrassed smile, or answers such as “Heimat, that’s hard to say, that’s a lot…” Then attempts to locate it followed: “The place where I live,” “The family,” “the mountains,” “South Tyrol,” “Tyrol” (Peterlini H.K. 1998, pp. 76 f.). The deconstruction of Heimat is ultimately an attempt to explore the content of this plastic word, in this healing and poisonous pill capsule, not in an essentialist sense, but with the focus on possible meanings.

“Heimat – an artificial product for which there was no reality,” Walter Jens (1985, p. 15) describes the transformation of a sober word into a romantic attempt to compensate: “Heimat as a transfigured yesterday, intact world and relic of the order of the state in the age of urbanization, industrialization, mass collection.” (Ibid) In its exaggeration, Heimat becomes a counter-world to reality to transfigure it and make it more bearable, according to Freud’s understanding of myths as “poetic fancies” (Freud 1922/2011, p. 113) and “the manifestation of distorted cures” (ibid, p. 123), which comfort, but also result in the consolidation of unhealthy and unhappy attitudes. As substitute worlds, myths can prevent problem-solving, as would be possible through communication and negotiation in the real world (cf. Habermas 1984, 1987). According to Mario Erdheim (1984), myths strengthen the rule systems in reality because everything that is conflict-ridden does not give rise to changes in rule relationships but is projected onto external enemies (cf. ibid, p. 38).

The counter-world, the substitute world, or the world of memories as a consolation for the lost: “One must have a home in order not to need it” is the much-quoted formula by Jean Améry (1980, p. 46). Anyone who has lost it, is missing it and looking for it, is exposed to insecurities and disturbances (ibid, p. 47). As the most influential literary Heimat factory, German romanticism drew its inspiration from the idealized memory of the time before man’s alienation through industrialization and technology.

Similarly, current feelings of disengagement from globalization are trailing the desire for smaller, manageable, protected, and defensive units—that is, Heimaten. The plural, which is not yet very common, shows a potential usually reduced to Heimat in the singular and thus narrowed to a Heimat hermetically delimited by others. The dissolution of borders fosters fear of exposure and loss and creates a longing for safe demarcations and belongings. Thus, Heimat becomes a magic that can be invoked against primal fears as well as against current insecurities. These can be worries about the elements, about the cruelty of the Other, about competition and overreaching in an elbow society, about shocks to one’s own existence through life events, about the disintegration of one’s own ego through psychological stress and threat, about one’s own transience and mortality, about political and social processes of change, the effects of which are not yet foreseeable. According to Horst Bienek, such holy words are “used and misused, used and distorted, displaced and exalted, even denounced” (Bienek 1985, p. 7).

The definitions of Heimat across the social sciences produce a “confusing series of comparisons and exceptions” (Baur et al. 1998, p. 37). The term receives continued coverage both in the scientific literature and as a cover story in German-language magazines, such as Der Spiegel (1984, 2012Footnote 2), Geo (2005), and Du (2009), in special supplements from renowned daily newspapers such as Die Presse (2005), or in high-quality films, for example, the Hunsrück trilogy “Heimat” by Edgar Reitz (2010).

Only a German Issue—or a Universal Need?

Etymologically, Heimat is an abstraction from Heim (cf. Duden 2007, p. 330). The suffix -uoti, which converted Heim into Heimuoti (Old High German) and Heimuot (Middle High German), is the same one that bent the adjective arm (poor) into the noun Armut (poverty) (ibid). The very concrete word Heim for house and place of residence through this suffix became a higher-level, generalizable term. At the linguistic level, just this charging of meaning created the split between everyday practice and overarching meaning, which is also evident in the overlap of Heimat in everyday life with political symbols. The word is related to the English home, the Swedish hem, the Greek kṓmē for village, the Slavic sem’ja for family. The noun likely derives from the Indo-European root ḱei- for lying. Possible meanings are the “place where you settle, camp” (ibid), which also includes phrases of Heirat (marriage) and geheuer (originally part of the household, familiar). A negative dimension of heim and geheuer reveals a more profound extent that reveals overlaid meanings of security and demarcation: uncanny and ungeheuer for what is not your own home, your place, your camp, your own family.

One of the myths surrounding Heimat is that Heimat is “not really translatable” (Bienek 1985, p. 7) or even untranslatable. It is true: the word is difficult to translate; in its condensed fusion of meanings created by poetry, it is probably actually a fairly German affair. This is how Rolf Petri walks through the difficulties of the translation: the English homeland is as emotionally positive as Heimat and close to the substantial exchange value of the word in the nineteenth century; the French terms le petit patrie (small fatherland) and matrie (motherland) come close to some of what is meant by Heimat, while “le pays” (the land) expresses the appreciation of the regional; in Italian, paese, nazione, paese natio, terra natia, or patria could be aids—but just aids. Some of the translations contain less, some more, and some other meanings than Heimat. From this, Petri concludes that “the serious translation problems are based on a historically relevant differentiation of the terms” (Petri 2001, pp. 80 f.). He is referring to Hermann Bausinger and his attempt to demythologize the untranslatability of Heimat: It was a matter of ordinary translation difficulties, as with many other words.

The dilemma resolves by taking apart meaning and significance. Petri admits, “It would be nonsensical to view the need for manageability and participation in the spatial articulation of social relationships as a ‘German’ need” (ibid). Bausinger had meant nothing else: “The thesis of the untranslatability of Heimat comes down to the assumption that people elsewhere did not develop a particularly intimate relationship with the place where they grew up or where they live. This is certainly not the case, even if the bond is not equally strong and durable everywhere. What is difficult to translate from the term Heimat is the general feelings of personal appropriation of a place or a landscape. Rather, it is the specific coloring of these feelings; it is the romantic mortgages of the Heimat term that play a special role in Germany.” (Bausinger 2000, p. 72).

A Seducative Concept for Etnic Minorities

The idea of Heimat is particularly dense in South Tyrol/Italy. It is considered God-given in a novel and film title by the alpine-hero Luis Trenker (“Heimat from God’s Hand,” dedicated to his mother, cf. Trenker 1979, p. 448). In its political meanings, Heimat invokes the (supposedly) good old days (“South Tyrol – German for 2000 years” as a car sticker), becoming a kind of political sacrificial altar in front of which new generations are kneeling. “No victim too difficult for Heimat …” is the title of a documentary about the imprisoned and partly tortured bombers against Italian politics in the 1960s (Golowitsch 2009). “Friend, you who still sees the sun, greet me the Heimat that I loved more than my life,” the combatant Luis Amplatz chose as the theme for his grave (Peterlini H.K. 2021a, p. 356). For the South Tyrolean riflemen, who see themselves as the bearers of the Tyrolean tradition of fighting for freedom against Napoleon in 1809, Heimat is a political creed that culminates in the militant circles of the riflemen movement in the separatist demand for self-determination for South Tyrol regarding its future state affiliation. The riflemen see themselves based on tradition and keeping their self-image alive as carriers of a cross-generational mission and legacy to protect their Heimat.

From the statute of the South Tyrolean Riflemen AssociationFootnote 3:

“The purpose of the federal government and the riflemen companies and riflemen chapels connected to it is:

  • Faithfulness to God, adherence to the Christian faith – traditional beliefs – and the spiritual and cultural heritage of the ancestors; Protection of the Heimat and the Tyrolean way of life and natureFootnote 4;

  • The unity of the state of Tyrol, the exemplary exercise of the rights and obligations of the South Tyroleans to preserve the Tyrolean character and to secure the livelihood of the German and Ladin ethnic groups in their ancestral Heimat;

  • Human freedom and dignity;

  • The care of the Tyrolean shooting rituals, the traditional costumes, and the native landscape and nature.Footnote 5

Maintaining these principles is the highest obligation of Tyrolean riflemen.” (Schützenbund 2020)

In an introductory preamble on the website of the South Tyrolean Riflemen Association, it says:

“The task of the riflemen today is to defend Tyrolean identity whenever it is threatened. Identity is defined as the language, culture, custom, legal sense, belief, value system, and generally practiced norms of people’s behavior in a certain area. Identity is the sum of the characteristics passed down through generations that have shaped people in a certain area (Heimat) and give them an unmistakable face. The geographical area of these people ‒ their Heimat ‒ is shaped on the one hand by these people; on the other hand, Heimat shapes the people. From this perspective, riflemen are active Heimat guards!”Footnote 6

Sketches of a Longing: Psychoanalysis as a Model of Understanding

Psychoanalysis offers a wide range of instruments for understanding the creation of national identities, such as that associated with Heimat, especially in its cultural-theoretical and ethno-psychoanalytical branches (cf. Peterlini H.K. 2010b). Sigmund Freud has already created the basis for researching cultural, political, and social phenomena through psychoanalytic empathy, interpretation, and understanding; the personal psychological, and collective formation of myths was a matter of concern and source of knowledge in many of his works.

A prerequisite for the formation of enemy images and phantasms are psychic processes of repression, splitting off, and projection of burdensome parts of the ego (Freud 1911/1958). Ultimately, it is the ability and disposition of human beings to displace, detach from, and project to the outside what is incriminating, ineffable, inexplicable, frightening, and guilty. Freud already gradually relativized his original trauma theory whereby only severe, sexual traumatization of the infant triggers this mechanism. After him, generations of psychoanalysts (Ferenczi 1949; Klein 1946; Klein and Riviere 1953; Fairbairn 1952; Winnicott 1965; Richter 1972; Kernberg 1975; Stern 1977) developed the model in different directions. Not only the violent assault (this especially, of course) but also general existential experiences would be difficult to cope with for individuals and groups if they. National and ethnic conflicts are—as Josef Berghold (2005, pp. 110 f.) shows in nine theses—an ideal projection surface for psychological stresses that are difficult to manage privately.

One of the central psychoanalytic explanatory models for the projection process goes back to Freud’s student Melanie Klein. In its intensive interaction with the mother’s breast, the infant experiences the mother’s breast as present and caring (and therefore as a good breast), absent and failing (and thus as a bad breast). According to Melanie Klein, the ability of “projective identification” develops based on this experience of care and refusal by one and the same object, which the child still experiences as part of himself (Klein 1946, p. 102). For the infant who has no or minimal rational explanatory patterns, the experience of the absent breast goes along with the deepest fears of exposure, hunger, and death, which the baby cannot process rationally in this phase of development. Klein observed two successive phases in the infant’s reactions, the depressive and the paranoid-schizoid position. In the depressed position, the absent or failing breast is encountered in the hope of reconciliation; aggression and accusations of guilt are not directed outwards but swallowed (introjected). In the paranoid-schizoid position, on the other hand, with help from the projection, “all painful and unpleasant sensations or feelings in the mind are by this device automatically relegated outside oneself; one assumes that they belong elsewhere, not in oneself. We disown and repudiate them as emanating from ourselves; in the ungrammatical but psychologically accurate phrase, we blame them on to someone else.” (Klein and Riviere 1953, p. 11). Since the child would not be able to cope with the ambivalent (ambiguous) sensation compared to a once good, sometimes bad mother’s breast, a “bad object” (ibid, p. 22) is selected onto which the aggression can be projected. For Klein, the healthy development went from a paranoid-schizoid position to a depressive one, in practical terms, from acting out anger towards others toward taking responsibility for oneself.

In interpreting and further developing Klein’s model, Wilfried R. Bion understood the continuing oscillation between depressive and paranoid-schizoid positions as a lifelong cycle of development, which occurs as a dynamic process between disintegration and integration, fragmentation and coherence, chaos and formation. Mental illness, therefore, entails “to make a dynamic situation static,” while recovery entails “to restore dynamic to a static situation and so make development possible” (Bion 1963, p. 60). Accordingly, the flexible, agile change from a depressive to a paranoid-schizoid state and vice versa is not dangerous; it ultimately represents psychological agility and enables handling of the environment, fellow human beings, and life situations (cf. Lahme-Gronostaj 2003, p. 66). The life-aggravating problem arises only from an increase in one or the other position in the extreme and a fixation on this state. From an individual-psychological point of view, this would be the suffering of depression or psychosis, i.e., in self-paralysis through guilt and shame or in the delusional accusation of external objects that supposedly (or in part also in reality) are endangering oneself.

From Inner Soul Questions to Social and Political Patterns

What is significant about the psychoanalytic models is that the toddlers internalize their misery and their reactions so profoundly due to the not yet possible reflexive processing. Consequently, these experiences inscribe themselves as patterns in body and soul (considered as unity in phenomenology). With similarly triggering moments and missing favorable resolutions through life and learning experiences, these can reactivate themselves at any time and reproduce for life.

For social processes, we could deduce an exciting hypothesis. An open discourse, which enables and encourages open and democratic reflections on the crisis, prevents the emotional depressive congestion that would otherwise result in angry, psychotic reactions. If discomfort can be articulated and communicated, if different positions can be negotiated, and angry feelings have their place, it may be possible that the valuable parts of the depressive phase—acceptance of guilt, responsibility, willingness to compromise—come into play. One could object that the currently free discourse in digital media makes this participation possible. Therefore, these new possibilities for almost all people should lead to an acceptance of foreignness. Why then are straightforward xenophobia and populist agitation raging in social media, as discussed in the chapter “Dialogue with Adorno” in this volume? At this point, it should only be noted that the discourses in digital media rarely result in an interpersonal and reflective, nor self-reflective exchange, but mostly get caught up in irreconcilable pro and counter positions, so communication lacks a responsive character and an empathetic understanding. The hate messages on social media are not a reflexive treatment of fears and their examination from the perspective of life questions and life situations, but rather the angry crying of the baby, who cannot explain his misery, impotence, and helplessness. It is difficult to predict if we learn to use the new media in a more constructive way for personal exchange and social reflexivity instead of aggression.

A historical example could give hope: In its first application, the radio was also a medium for the propaganda stimulation of the masses by fascism and Nazism until it was used by all population groups and used for its potential to promote democracy. The stimulating, more shouted than spoken, speeches by Hitler and Goebbels on the radio have given way, albeit dramatically late, to interviews with people from different backgrounds and positions, reports on life stories, living environments, and specific problems and possible solutions.

Therefore, the decisive factor would be whether people with their actual questions, concerns, and issues are heard and recognized in social exchange (cf. Honneth 1995), avoiding the shift to irrational fears and enemy-images of the Other, while actual problems remain unspoken and unresolved. For social work in the migration-shaped society, racism has become a new challenge (cf. Geisen 2018). Justified fears about the future (i.e., due to the no longer undoubtedly secure prosperity in Europe, the limits and consequences of a capitalist economy built on growth and the planet’s future) are often projected onto migrants and refugees. According to the psychoanalytical theory about such dynamics, the so constructed enemies of Heimat are not triggers, but at most, symptom carriers of deeper and repressed problems.

The female connoted Heimat as male matter

In a small, manageable land like South Tyrol, these dynamics can be studied almost in a test tube, including their historical dimension, which affects the present day. The remembered history of Tyrol, which is very present as a myth and which reinforces defensive attitudes by reactivating old patterns, is a narrative of suffered oppressions, followed by liberating outbreaks. At the same time, the inner discourse in Tyrolean/South Tyrolean society was—and is—affected by an identity model that depicts identity primarily as a unity, first in a religious, later in a political and linguistic, and finally in an ethnic sense. Thus the political myth of Tyrol is a myth with high unity pressure, paralyzing the communication within the group, with the danger of long-lasting resentment and eruptive discharges.

A key topic for Heimat psychoanalysis is birth trauma (Rank 1924/1993) as a formative experience of loss of security, which constantly reactivates itself in the course of life. Leaving a familiar environment is, on the one hand, a prerequisite for developing and living; on the other hand, people experience it as a loss of care, support, and security (however deceptive these may have been). The birth is highly distressing for the fetus and an existential threat that simultaneously brings him to life. The parturition does not necessarily have to be extraordinarily traumatic. Even under reasonably normal conditions, for the fetus, it represents the leaving of comforting care and places the fetus in a completely new situation. Heimat is a metaphor for both: as a womb symbol, it is the great mother, who protects from exposure to life and yet has to be left again and again for an independent life; as the last or eternal Heimat, it promises a return to the lost paradise at the price of life.

Especially in the riflemen tradition (which is ultimately the most direct expression of the Tyrolean defense culture), Heimat—in German a feminine—mostly appears as a maternal myth. Still, it is a purely male affair in its political design and military defense. Ultimately, Heimat was “owned by the powerful men” (Unterrichter 2007, p. 13). In 2006, for example, there was still an intense debate in the South Tyrolean Riflemen Association about whether women should be more than just marketers among riflemen. Women in the company once had to assist the soldiers in the war with consolation, bandages, and gifts of love. More recently, they have been marching along as adornments and pourers of grog (cf. Dolomiten 2006a, p. 15, b, p. 15). The equal opportunities councilor, Julia Unterberger, urged the riflemen to abandon a gender role tradition according to which their marketers have historically been “for the most part prostitutes who went with men to war.” (NTZ 2006a) The Minister of Culture, Sabina Kasslatter Mur, asked the riflemen association to “rethink its role assignments, which may have been justified centuries ago, in the spirit of current developments” (NTZ 2006b).

The dispute initially flattened to no avail; women’s equality in the riflemen organization continued to fail. However, the marketers organized themselves at a first country meeting on August 1, 2015. The resolution passed at the time states: “We marketers no longer see it as our sole task to be an eye-catcher in the front row next to the captain. We need to contribute to the community’s success by actively participating, contributing our ideas, and taking responsibility. […] We marketers know that male comrades expect a lot from us: correct, clean appearance, punctuality and reliability, a sense of duty, and comradeship. We also want to make a difference for Heimat and culture. We take on various tasks such as maintaining the traditional costumes, shrubs, and crosses. We marketers march in the front row next to the captain; we are very well aware of this and proud of it. We are proud of our beautiful costumes.” (Schützenbund 2019).

As a result, the marketers were given their own statutes (ibid) and their own regulations. It says, among other things: “The costume should be freshly ironed if possible. The tips of the blouse should be strengthened. The costume itself is jewelry, so pay attention to your jewelry; it should be subtle and match the costume. Particularly striking and prominent colors and shapes, oversized wristwatches, and many rings are unsuitable and should be avoided. The costume needs matching shoes (costume shoes). Fashion shoes with high heels should be avoided. The hair should always be neatly styled and, if it reaches over your shoulder, tied up, braided or tied together (also under your hat) so that you can see the beautiful costume, but above all, your face. The make-up should be applied discreetly. Particularly noticeable red fingernails or red lips are not part of the costume and are inappropriate.” (Ibid) No dress and outfit code could be found on the same website for male shooters.

Narcissistic theory as model of understanding for the shift from social fears to national unity

Heimat can also be understood psychoanalytically as a narcissistic draft of a dream world in which the individual and the group know that they are safe and loved. Negative and narcissistic projection (cf. Volkan and Ast 1994) complement each other: everything that is good for the self promotes the idea of an intact identity. What has to be pushed out of the actual experience is projected onto the fear and enemy images, the phantasms. As uncertain as the emergence of the term Heimat may ultimately be (cf. Bausinger 1980, p. 16), its fascination is undoubtedly unfolded by overlapping breaks and losses. The vision of deep security and solidarity emerged from a set of regulations, the Heimat law, which granted the right of establishment and purchase to one, and denied it to the other. The questioning of the established world view of a vault between heaven and hell through the Enlightenment, the alienation of people and living space through industrialization and technology was contrasted with the Heimat idea as a “processing form of the experiences of loss” (cf. Heinz et al. 1980, p. 45).

In the exaggeration of the nation towards the end of the nineteenth century, Heimat became an emotional and political shelter against the other. According to Mario Erdheim, the national idea cannot be viewed separately from suppressing social fractures and conflicts. In its psychological need for protection, the individual avoids everything that could bring conflicts with the group and its ruling authority—also in the interest of the applicable rule and economic system (Erdheim 1984, p. 25). Breaking out of the unity (identity) of the group harbors the risk of social death, which, depending on time and political system, could also cost life in real terms. The perception of social disparities within the group threatens their unity, while the shift of discontent to national issues and external enemies strengthens internal cohesion.

The need for groups to cover up internal breaks in favor of an illusionary homogeneity also explains, as Alexander Mitscherlich argues, that the fears and hostility that are repressed as a result are projected onto scapegoats and strangers outside the community (Mitscherlich 1969, p. 31). For example, national conflicts are also staged unconsciously to act out individual psychological conflicts that are reflexively inaccessible to the individual. The national agitation in the collective relieves the individual of a reflexive examination of their own problems, life situations, and worries.

The feeling of national solidarity compensates the individual for accepted social disadvantage, incapacitation, and exploitation. Considering that the Latin term for birth (natio) is included in nation, it becomes plausible that the nation is a fitting mother projection, an idea of collective security, of being collectively cared for, and cared for by a big, good mother (cf. Aigner 2002, pp. 253 f.). Everything that threatens this idea, which life inevitably brings with it, such as failures, insults, and social fears, is split off by the good mother—and projected onto an external enemy (ibid, p. 303). In the social dimension, the actual Other is only perceived in his—oversized—menace for the nation as a symbolic mother.

For the Tyroleans, who always wanted to be their own nation, the equivalent concept for the nation is Heimat—with all its translational difficulties. What specifically means the home courtyard as neuter in the dialect (the Hoamat), as a feminine (the Heimat) is a territorially, culturally, politically, and nationally expanded idea of security. Heimat is the condensation of all positive national feelings, a good mother who creates security, is lovable and pure, and must be protected from foreign intruders/rapists. The national struggle for this Heimat makes it possible to channel all feelings that do not fit in, such as suppressed fears, frustrations, feelings of guilt, into aggression against foreign enemy images, to remain in tune with one’s system of rule and to remain united as a population group. The identity of the individual, which is itself a psychic construct, is partly founded, partly strengthened, partially armored, and hardened by the collective identity.

From my family history, two episodes of talks with my mother come to my mind, demonstrating how offenses can be shifted in perception and memory. I had always suspected that my mother’s regret for missing educational opportunities (“I would have loved to study”) was due to fascist oppression. The ban on the German school forced her to go to the Italian school. This may have played a part without a doubt, but on the other hand, my mother made good progress in the Italian school. The main reason for not having gone to secondary school was that an aunt of my mother persuaded her parents that she had a suitable apprenticeship with a German-speaking merchant family at the time, who “then took serious advantage of me.”Footnote 7 The parents, who at the time could have afforded secondary school because of their thrift, had made another good-faith decision that deprived my mother of all of her educational aspirations as an apprentice; it was not Italian fascism, which was undoubtedly an oppressive system, but that the country’s own people were significantly involved in this through an exploitative attitude towards female apprentices. This exploitation was more challenging to admit than the (justified) denunciation of fascism, an externalized enemy. The second example: In the interwar period, my grandfather did well professionally due to his manual skills. His specialty as a carpenter was building stairs. However, he lost a good job at a carpentry workshop because he could not cope with a foreperson. When he wrote a somewhat undiplomatic letter to company management, he was released. My mother only told me both episodes in old age, and even though she may have described me earlier, I had not fully assessed it but rather related both injustices exclusively to fascism. The image of a fascist foreign power that suppressed my family was too strong to recognize the proportions of disadvantage and injustice that should be assigned to our system. It may also be easier to bear insults and the shame associated with them if they are pushed towards the foreign power and shared collectively and in solidarity with your own group. This, in turn, can explain why political debates, in particular, are a projection screen for the disposal of psychological burdens—individuals see their suffering socially divided in the struggle with their group against another. If the injustice of one’s own group was recognized, the individual would have to deal with it and risk social exclusion.

Enemy images between reality and imagination

The hypothesis that ethnic groups (cf. Volkan 2003) can go through similar psychological phases like individuals is a premise for psycho-historical and psychoanalytic interpretations of social developments. This assumption does not deny the actual historical events but perceives them as more complex emotional and psychological charges. Freud used the concept of over-determination in the sense of multiple determinations and ambiguity for the coexistence and overlapping of equal causes to create the unconscious dynamics (dream structures, symptoms, repressions, separations, distortions, displacements, projections) (Freud 1900/1913, 1915/75). Accordingly, historical facts cannot be analyzed independently but are always contingent on their interpretation. According to Derrida, the thing itself is always to be understood with meanings: “There is no absolute origin of sense in general” (Derrida 1997, p. 66). Only traces can be questioned—as Derrida alludes to the phenomenology of Husserl—for their possible meanings, namely in the sense that “[t]he trace is the différance which opens appearance (l’apparaître) and signification” (ibid).

Fact and interpretation, event and meaning, appearance, and signification cannot be separated from one another even by the most careful historical research. From a psychoanalytic point of view, creating enemy images is easier the more they combine with actual events. Immigrants from Italian provinces in the 1950s were, in the popular perception of South Tyrol, representatives of the ruling, patronizing state. It was easier to recognize and act out against strangers, who were also state-skilled and privileged, what had to be suppressed in one’s own: the social competition in one’s group, the loss of importance of the rural economic structure with existential insecurities and insults in the middle of the last century, the patronizing and exploiting by South Tyrolean employers and/or by an oppressive father, for whom the foreign state was a grateful replacement object. In some biographies of those assassins who fought for South Tyrol’s freedom with bombs in the 1960s, there are depictions of conflicts with their own fathers or the shame about their failures (cf. Peterlini H.K. 2010b, pp. 60 ff.). The fact that the state acted in a truly oppressive and authoritarian manner facilitated the shifting of aggression and made it a grateful projection screen for what had to be swallowed about one’s own father and—due to the child’s love for the father—was not accessible reflexively.

Similar observations can be made in the current migration debate. Concerning migrants, fears of economic overreaching are particularly prominent in the factual argumentation. These may be partially and occasionally justified due to the higher willingness of foreigners to undertake work that requires lower wages or the higher demands on social benefits due to greater need (Berghold 2005, p. 153). However, the psychotic distortion of real people to the phantasm “foreigners” makes it almost impossible to see them not only as competitors or intruders but also as service providers, taxpayers, fellow citizens, and people. The foreigner serves as a lightning rod for what is scary and troublesome.

Cultural memory and its interacting with collective traumata

An essential link between the individual’s psychological processes and the large group is memory culture. Whether and how something is remembered and what, on the other hand, falls into oblivion, is fundamental to collective identities. Thereby, the memory and repression performance of the individual interacts with that of the group. According to Volkan, the bond between the individual and the group is woven primarily through inner images of the history of large groups such as myths, songs, eating habits, dances, heroes, and martyrs (cf. Volkan 2003). This is where the psychoanalytic theory of forgetting (through splitting off and replacement) meets Jan Assmann’s theory of memory. In continuing the idea of collective memory by Maurice Halbwachs (1980), Assmann distinguishes four external dimensions of memory:

  • Mimetic memory—this refers to action and intends different forms of behavior through imitation; we found it saved in instructions relating to machinery, cooking, construction;

  • The memory of things: from private everyday objects such as beds, chairs, crockery, clothes, and tools to houses, streets, villages, towns, cars, and ships;

  • Communicative memory: Language and the ability to communicate with others;

  • Cultural memory—the handing down of meaning. (Assmann J. 2011, pp. 5–6)

Like every subdivision, it is prone to gradual or abrupt transitions. In this way, areas of the “mimetic memory” can become routine, become a rite, thereby exceeding the pure memory of activity and gaining a special meaning. As an example, it occurs to me that when my father cooked the polenta, typical cornmeal from Trentino and the South Tyrolean lowlands, my father always ended up drawing a cross on the simmering polenta with the salt and often explained to me that this was what Nonna did, his mother. The salting of the polenta had become, through the adoption of a sign, a ritual which—from Nonna to my father, from my father to me, from me to my children—was adopted into cultural memory and assumed an emotionally charged meaning that exceeded the pure function of salting.

A collective does not have a substantial memory of its own, but “it determines the memory of its members” (ibid, p. 22). The individual memory is also socially constituted, as it includes what others say, how they say it to you, and how they mirror what you have said. Assmann distinguishes communicative collective memory from collective cultural memory. Where the former includes those memories that contemporary witnesses share and are therefore no more than 80 years old, cultural memory “focuses on fixed points in the past” (ibid, p. 37), like “tales of patriarchs, the exodus, wandering in the desert, conquest” (ibid). In cultural memory, factual history is transformed into remembered history and then myths. Assmann thus outlines the importance of the culturally remembered past in myth for the present: only through (selective) remembering does history become a myth, and only as a myth does the past regain meaning for the present (ibid, pp. 37–38).

The ritualization serves the role of memory support. While the communicative memory flows in everyday life, the cultural memory is anchored in fixed forms. It has no neural basis but is carried by myths, rites, history books, teaching, films, media, monuments, the narratives of architecture, and all other fixed forms of tradition. Canonical and barely changeable texts such as the Bible and the Koran, canonized historiography, practices, and customs form the collective consciousness.

Rites and festivals are of fundamental importance in the Tyrolean memory, which is cultivated particularly intensively by the riflemen. Military readiness was provoked by prohibitions or restrictions of rites, very close to Melanie Klein’s concept. It is mostly an external attack that causes a child to change from a depressed to a paranoid-schizoid mood. The uprising of 1809 against the Napoleon-Bavarian foreign occupation was triggered mainly by attacks on rites and cultural gatherings, the ban on the midnight mass, and the transfer of the Tyrolean to the Bavarian army. The military mustering shows the state’s paternal power, which judges whether the young man’s testicles are suitable for military service—the defense of the mother’s home. In the village of Tramin, where customs have a robust patriotic note, young men painted a Tyrolean eagle on their doorstep before the mustering for the determination of military fitness (until mandatory military service in Italy was abolished in 2005). It’s easy to interpret it as the symbolization of a sense of Heimat against the compulsory service with the foreign state (Peterlini H.K. 2000). The most excruciating memories from fascism have to do with the prohibition of German songs, the translation of German epitaphs into Italian, the tearing down of the typical red and white buttons from the costume (Peterlini H.K. 2021a, pp. 17 f.). The first bomb attack in the 1950s was grounded in the fact that a traditional dance during the annual Bozen trade fair procession should no longer be performed by South Tyrolean guys but by Italian recruits (ibid, pp. 28 ff.). In this way, the familiar South Tyrolean community’s economic hardships and social breaks were redirected to a state that offered itself as an enemy due to its lack of sensitivity and toughness towards its minorities.

Motives of impotence, oppression, and defeat, as described by Wolfgang Schivelbusch (2003) in “The Cultures of Defeat,” play an essential role in this regard. Societies whose collective memory sticks to repressed frustrating situations of helplessness and defeat in the past are particularly resistant to change. They hold on to their comforting and glorifying myths to an increasing extent since the pain of defeat cannot be released for conscious processing. A strategy to alleviate defeat—closely intertwined with the myth of the hero—is creating the mythical figure of treason. The betrayal clears the defeat of one’s fault and blames a traitor’s failure. Tyrol’s social history, which has been well revised but hidden from myth, shows patterns of the mythical primary figure of the sacrificed, abandoned, betrayed hero. The rural family structure in Tyrol meant that out of the necessity for survival, only one—for a long time the youngest, later the oldest of the mainly many children—could take over the Hoamat (the farm). The others were forced to decline socially. If they were fortunate, they could learn a trade or were married well if they were daughters; in the less good and more frequent case, they became bondsmen and bondswomen on the farm of their lucky brother or in the yard of a neighbor. They had lost Hoamat, their homeworld, because of a father, who was usually authoritarian but was economically too weak to protect all of his children. In areas with real division, the courtyards were so fragmented that no one could live on them. Thus, the Upper Inn Valley, Ausserfern, Vinschgau Valley (Venosta Valley), and the Italian-speaking part of Tyrol (WelschtirolFootnote 8 or Trentino) became regions of crisis and emigration.

The myth of the Tyrolean national defense has also been heroically charged with devastating and, as a result, mostly extremely socially stressful defeats. The myth is said to at least alleviate the severity of the defeat. The loss of defeated countries, states, cultures reflects the fear of defeat in general—not only of the people but also of the individual: in the social struggle for survival, in the vulnerability of life to illness and death. The defeat would require an acceptance of guilt, shame, fate (in the sense of what happened), and mortality, but is instead suppressed, so their refinement gives strength for life. Martyrdom is one way of dealing with the sure defeat inherent in human mortality: Christ is dead for three days until the resurrection rebuilds the world. Andreas Hofer became the hero of Tyrol through execution (cf. Larcher 2005, pp. 182 ff.).

The Hofer myth, for example, shows Freud’s interpretation of the myth as poetic fancies of the past into grand narratives with which communities adjust their history. They comfort over hurtful, distressing, troubling, unresolved, guilty elements in their history but do not heal them because they suppress painful or regretful parts and elude conscious processing. In the Hofer myth, the Tyroleans soothe—from a psycho-historical point of view—their history as residents of a small and always occupied passport country. From a social-psychological point of view, they alleviate the social misery that in 1809 depressed the country far more than the culturally and linguistically familiar Bavarian occupation. And they appease—from an individual psychological point of view—their fear of vulnerability and death. The myth of a Heimat that needs to be defended against foreign influences and intruders, however, also reduced the ability to integrate “good” and “bad” parts, prevented (and still essentially prevents) an internal debate about individual freedoms and social rights in Tyrol.

This is the tricky thing with the manifestation of distorted cures by splitting off, repressing, and projecting: It does relieve you of inner pressure, fears, feelings of guilt, and aggression. But by disposing of all justified dissatisfaction and all internal contradictions on the intruder from the outside, outdated patterns are solidified, the concrete examination of one’s reality withers. Since this process is largely unconscious, it is beyond reflection, communication and thus also beyond active intervention.

The ambivalence between relief and constraint from identity offers such as Heimat

Heimat as a symbolic idea of an ideal world, for which one goes to war or surrenders faithfully as a wife and mother, was one way of coping with actual Heimat losses. At the same time, it could have been a relief to project the aggression that had to be suppressed against one’s own—ultimately innocent—father, against one’s own economic and rule system, onto external enemies (Peterlini H.K. 2010b, pp. 75 ff.). It is easier to live when your imagination—concentrated in Heimat—is intact and the misfortune is caused by a foreign power, by a fate that is not well-meaning. Efforts for political change are more likely to be avoided for the sake of harmony with one’s group unless the danger comes from the outside. The closeness of the personal live-experiences for generations and the political victim history of the country is illustrated in a metaphor by the South Tyrolean historian Claus Gatterer about the South Tyrolean lifestyle after the annexation: “The path from Tyrolean to South Tyrolean was one descent, a downgrading. It was the way from the lord to the bondsman.” (Gatterer 2003, p. 15). A descent to the farmhand (and to the maidservant) was also a very individual fate for most farmers’ children.

Myths also offer models of action and roles, which are easier to slip into—when the old patterns are reactivated—than new solutions that would first have to be tried out. The South Tyrolean dynamite attacks of the 1960s (cf. Peterlini H.K. 2021a) can be seen as the latest violent reactivation of the Tyrolean defense myth. In the guerrilla-like uprising of 1809, the attackers in the 1960s found 150 years later a mythically transfigured pattern from their history that they could use. What used to be the pitchforks and stone avalanches in 1809 were primarily self-made explosive sticks in the 1950s. “There was no other way” is the title of a book published by the Association of Former Political Prisoners (Mitterhofer and Obwegs 2000). The myth didn’t let them see any other way. Role models and myths were missing for different strategies, such as passive resistance or civil society protest; they only knew (and know) from their history, long-endurance, and sudden outbreaks with mostly helpless but uninhibited violence. A later series of attacks in the 1980s with iron tube bombs and machine guns—partly stimulated by provocateurs—shows how such role models do not lose their fascination even if they seem to be out of date.

Some young people got inspired, some old bombers wanted to go for it (Peterlini H.K. 1992, pp. 51–73) though South Tyrol in the 1980s had a solid political Autonomy status (cf. Peterlini O. 2009). The Tyrolean leader against Napoleon Andreas Hofer is still a strong identification figure among young shooters and marketers in the twenty-first century. The state is seen as the enemy, an intruder into the Heimat, frightening and challenging. At the same time, the state is also a possibility for a contra-phobic attitude, as shown by the statement “Südtirol ist nicht Italien” (“South Tyrol is not Italy”) provocatively placed on the Austrian-Italian border on the Brenner.

Such a country offers itself as a laboratory for the attempt to understand the ambivalences of Heimat. The theoretical approaches will be reflected in their relevance for political and personal identity formation in the following chapter.