Die Heimat

Germany, early seventies: a country full of fear of everything foreign. The only Italian at school seems like an alien being. In the eighties, it is the Turks who put the tables in front of the economy for the first time. While the Wetterau people celebrate the first kebab in the district as resistance food, the long vanished Hitler conquers public space on radio and television. In the nineties, the narrator dreams his big dream of the Wetterauer Land, but first disappears with his cousin under a duvet on the eastern edge of the new republic. The grandmother's house is reconstructed as a museum, while in the village at least the ground plan of the synagogue, which burned down in 1938, is restored. But even in the new millennium, when the whole republic is constantly discussing the term "homeland", no one wants to know about the former life in the concrete homeland, when it still existed, which has not existed since their deportation.
With an unerring sense for everything abysmal in lived normality, Andreas Maier tells of Germany between the world war, the fall of the Wall and the turn of the millennium; of how people make themselves comfortable in forty years of history. His view of a homeland that has always been fiction is incorruptible.