2025 Theses Doctoral

(Un)Homely Encounters The Poetics and Politics of Heimat Between 19th Century Orientalism and Contemporary Literatures of Migration

Kahveci, Varol

The dissertation engages the concept of Heimat, home(land), from new angles. Over its long and fraught history, this (to many scholars) “quintessentially German” concept has prominently acquired autochthonous, politically regressive significations. The present study, however, traces how these static and exclusionary implications shift in the deployments of Heimat by German Orientalists, German-Jewish émigrés in Istanbul, and contemporary writers of migration.

Its scope, therefore, cuts across periods, locales, and genres. In comparative and interdisciplinary configurations, the dissertation investigates new articulations of Heimat in Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe, Leo Spitzer, Meral Kureyshi, Mehrnousch Zaeri-Esfahani, and Fatih Akın. In its reformulation of Heimat from these readings, it demonstrates the indispensable role of cross-cultural engagements and the integral function of the so-called East in constructing Heimat and German identities.

In this way, the project at hand re-envisions the lingual and cultural heritages of the field to flesh out a complex nexus of multilingual, transcultural, and intergenre literary engagements while rethinking paradigms from postcolonial, trauma, and diaspora studies, among others.