Home, Sweet Home Building and Destabilizing the Home Sphere (symposium article)

Everyone, it seems, has opinions about the topic of “home.” Some of these opinions are on the surface and some are deeply imbedded. In some ways, home is as straightforward as Robert Frost’s “Home is where they have to take you in” or Thomas Wolfe’s idea that one cannot return home. But in other ways home constitutes one of the most complex concepts and most profound psychologi-

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cal needs of human beings. This paper explores some stabilizing and destabilizing aspects of home I’ve collected from conversations, reflections, and others’ writings.

In the middle of July 2000, two Czech students and I were walking in Olomouc in the Czech Republic and talking about home. The conversation related to a paper that Veronica Sprincova, one of my students in the Olomouc Summer Institute, was completing. “In my part of Bohemia,” she said, “we have no culture and so we have no home.” To my “Really?”, she elaborated, “Well, the Germans left after World War II and we have been in the area only a short time [one generation] so we don’t have any roots.” My observation that she has the larger culture and home of the Czech Republic did not impress her: “You are not right. Home is where we live and where we belong. We don’t yet belong. But of course,” she added, “it [home] may be just a place, for some people anyway, where their crib stood.”

Hers was a specifically focused sense of home, and I was reminded of the South Tyrolian (in Northern Italy) way of saying “do bin I dahoam” (that is where I am at home). In this Old High German dialect, hoam (pronounced like “home” in English) means something like “this is where I come from,” “this is where I live,” or “this is where my roots are.” Home is where one belongs, or home is where one thinks one belongs.

In Eric Maria Remarque’s classic, Im Westen Nichts Neues [All Quiet on the Western Front] (1998), one finds a similar definition. As the hero Bäumer came home on leave from the Western front, he initially rediscovered his original home. It is the landscape, the people, “his” street and its buildings, “his” house and its front door. His mother was at the center of it. (pp. 110-113) But he realized quickly that for him, this original home had become a strange world and that the Western front and his comrades there had with time become his real home. (p. 119) As he put it poignantly, the “shadow falls over me like home [Heimat].” (p. 70) Several writers featured in A Place Called Home (Mickey Pearlman, ed., 1997) expressed similarly complex opinions.

Paul Farmer, the inspiring doctor in The

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New Yorker, recalled a fellow doctor who was about to return to the U.S. from Haiti, saying, “I am an American and I am going home.” (Tracy Kidder, “The Good Doctor,” The New Yorker July 10, 2000, p. 57. See also Kidder, House, 1985) The phrase is reminiscent of Uri Shulevitz speaking on TV a few years ago about arriving in the New York harbor and being impressed by the skyline and feeling at home. The phrase reminds me as well of the customs official who told me, after my third return from Europe one summer and fall, “Welcome home, sir.”

Indeed, on both sides of the Atlantic, home is for some people no more than a place where their crib happened to stand or where they now happen to have a house. But even on the American side of the Atlantic we are conscious of the emotional underpinnings of home, sometimes creating a rather cynical perspective of it. Hotel chains have imbedded into their advertising the idea that staying with their brand is like staying at home. Never mind that many people are glad to leave their house and routines to avoid cooking, cleaning, or laundering their clothes.

Home is indeed shared food and experiences, work, landscape, roots, trust, solidarity, language, music, and a way of being in the world. Thus, a home can be a hut or a mansion. In the South, for example, people insist on calling “home” the place where the family has settled down and has made a house into a home; some even call it “the homeplace.” (See, for example, the mass market paperback, JoAnn Ross, Home, 1994.)

Some people are so deeply attached to a house, or home, precisely because they were born into it. There they slept as infants, took their first steps, spoke their first words, sang their first songs, spied their first love, recovered from illness, and helped their parents die. In this version of home, a house or place has become the collective feeling and recollection of experiences that are the grandeur and ordinariness of life. One of my students, Krista Schmidinger, wrote that home is the family house in the North Carolina mountains where her family and twin sister happen to be.

Often, home is a house to which one has given considerable thought and effort. Joni, my wife, and I have put such attention and work, and experiences, into our house in Beaufort, North Carolina. We recovered it from neglect and abuse, and it rewarded us with becoming home.

Our Beaufort experience is similar to the one in Cortona, Italy, the Tuscan hill town many of us have learned to love from Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) and Bella Tuscany (2000). Mayes and her husband Ed have made their house a home through their labor, their cooking and eating, their love of place, their immersion in the culture, and their understanding of themselves in that world. Two Americans came home at Bramasole in Tuscany.

This sense of home is again similar to that of Ivana Mrozkova and her family as they recover a place near Sternberk in the Czech Republic. Czech-Germans built it with a solid foundation and 90 centimeter[three feet]-thick walls and after years of neglect Ivana and Zdanek have been recovering it room by room. It is home. In other words, home is not a “trophy house” on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston, South Carolina. That sort of place can be sold at a moment’s notice when the “right” price frees the owner for another trophy.

But our American home base may change quickly as we shift from job to job. We even linguistically differentiate home from homeplace. The homeplace is the house in which we were born or grew up; home is where we live, however permanently or transiently. That may be one of the reasons we can be so adamant about speaking of our house as home; the more transient we have become, the more rooted we would like to think we are. Occasionally, a Web site is still called a “home page,” a starting point or base. I suspect that this was also a way of saying that we actually have a home. When we abandoned this quaint term for a Web site, we surely were not thinking that home implies more than a series of electric impulses.

Nevertheless, for Europeans and Americans, home is and stays home. Home is not a page, however well designed; it is a house, earth, food, culture, landscape, and much more. It is a tragedy when the real house is not rooted in a context, as the 17-year-old told me in Olomouc. One of the reasons the displacement of Jews and other minorities in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany and Russia (and their murder in millions of cases) was so palpable is that they lost their homes and roots. The Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Chechens, Ingushetians, Baltics, Germans, and many thousands upon thousands of others who were driven from their homes in that awful period, if they survived, suffered not only the trauma of maltreatment and incarceration but also the removal from their homes. In most cases, their families had lived in their cities and

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villages for many generations and they were deeply embedded in their culture and landscape. Yet, in one unspeakable moment of darkness, they lost their houses or apartments and the very essence of what connected them to a street, town, and region.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Mein Leben [My Life], 1999, pp. 263-265, writes about having been assigned, after the “Great Selection,” an apartment in the Warsaw Ghetto. He described in touching detail the apartment, the home, that a few hours earlier had been abandoned by a couple who surely found their death at Treblinka. Elie Wiesel, Night (transl. Stella Rodway, 1960, p. 17), writes similarly about being relocated into a house in a smaller ghetto near his home town of Sighet, Romania. The trauma of the relocation was intensified because they were betrayed by their known and understood world; they were betrayed by the people who were part of home. This loss and the effort to stay connected to home is told forcefully by Edith Hahn Beer who had to flee Vienna and create a very unique home in Brandenburg, with her first husband, as they were hiding from the Nazis. (With Susan Dworkin, The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust, 2000) In a sense this is also the story of the colonials who came “home” to the mother country, England, during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, having had to give up their real home. (Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, “Race,” and National Identity, 1945-64, 1998)

Of course, there is a difference between those who left home voluntarily and those who were forced to do so. It is the difference between Arnold Schwarzenegger and me and Henry Kissinger and Peter Gay. The latter two were forced to leave their homes in the 1930s because their families were pressured out of Germany. (The English “pressure” does not express the highly pointed German hinauseckeln, which means something like “to sicken out” or “to disgust out.”) The former two left because there was little work and “action” in Austria and Northern Italy in the 1950s.

Those who left freely over the last century or so have had the ability to return but for the most part have never come home fully, to infuse once more Wolfe’s phrase. Partially this inability stems from their rejection of their first homes. Sometimes they came “home” once or twice and then were done with the past. In other cases, like mine, they rediscovered their home and felt a need to return frequently to “re-place” themselves. But even those of us who return to a certain place to be home find that it, too, does not remain stable. For example, the house in which I grew up, the Egarter Hof (farm) and after which I am still named “Egita Peatr” (Peter from the Egarter farm) in the village, has been abandoned for at least 15 years. Thus, we all see it gradually lose its luster and with its decline specific memories fall away. But amazingly, the overall context remains intact and home has been shifted to the house of one of the women who brought me up on the Egarter farm. (See Peter W. Petschauer, “Rediscovering the European in America: From the Boy in Afers, Italy, to the Man in Boone, North Carolina,” Paul Elovitz and Charlotte Kahn, eds., Immigrant Experiences: Personal Narrative and Psychological Analysis, 1997, pp. 29-46.)

For those who were forced from their homes, one can identify at least four responses. One group abhors the very thought of having anything to do with their original home and its people because it was taken from them and it, together with culture and context, was destroyed. Then there are those who settled somewhere else and often retained a longing for their “real” home. A third group wanted to retake their home forcibly. The fourth group is probably the smallest; its members somehow found their way back to their original home and yet live there at some discomfort.

In the first group are Jews, Czechs, Poles, and Germans who lost every aspect of their homes as they were chased out of their ancestral places by Germans, Russians, Poles, Czechs, and their allies. They were generally incapable of thinking about returning “home.” Home “there” ceased to exist. Yet, they spoke often about the place and people that betrayed them; indeed, dealing with the pain is so difficult that we have a vast literature of those who endeavored to deal with the betrayal. (See Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 1996; Wiesel, Night; and Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, 1998.)

Then there is the group who retained a deep and yet ambivalent attachment for their place of origin. In the mildest form, members of this group shared a homesickness; in the more expressive forms, they had an intense desire “to go back” (in place and time). The longing for home expressed itself in many different ways. For example, as a younger man, I listened in on hundreds of conversations of former Yugoslav-Germans who were displaced at the end of World War II. Their families had lived since the 1320s in what was Yugoslavia (Erich Petschauer, Das Jahrhundert-

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buch der Gottscheer, 1980, pp. 27-52) and they decried the loss of family members, friends, homes, lands, villages, and a peculiar fit in the world. As they spoke their version of Old High German, they tasted their ancestral dishes, they smelled their barns, and they visualized their landscapes. The desire of others to be back home expressed itself in the tours to areas of Eastern and Central Europe that used to be home. They returned from these excursions, saying, “It is not the same.” But then they promptly signed up for another tour the next summer. They went back over and over to find someone and something that reminded them of a lost world. After all, West Germany, the U.S., or Canada of the 1960s and 1970s was not their home.

To this day, we have still another group, the one that represents the most extreme form of expression, namely the people who engage in running battles between themselves, who want to be in their former homelands, and those who deny them this wish. The most recent example in Europe is the Chechens. All of them were driven from their homes in 1944 by Joseph Stalin’s NKVD, were returned there in 1957 by Nikita Khrushchev’s government, and were denied their homeland once more in the 1990s by two successive Russian governments. The Soviet and Russian effort to wipe out this people speaks volumes about a 200-year Russian ethnic policy that categorized and devalued all non-Russians and the profound desire of people to retain their homeland at almost any cost. (See Anatoly Isaenko and Peter Petschauer, “A Failure that Transformed Russia: The 1991-94 Democratic State-Building Experiment in Chechnya,” International Social Science Review, 75 (1 and 2), 2000, pp. 3-15; the same, “Visitors to the Caucasus: History and Present in an Ethnically Charged Area,” in Kathleen Nader, Nancy Dubrow, and Beth Hudnall Stamm, eds., Cultural Issues and the Treatment of Trauma and Loss: Honoring Differences, 2000, pp. 150-177; and the same, “The Long Arm of the Past,” Mind and Human Interaction, 6 (3), August, 1995, pp 103-115.)

The smallest group is the people who have somehow found their way back to their original homeland and live there in some ambivalence. One powerful example from this group is Marcel Reich-Ranicki, one of the finest literary critics writing in German today. Having escaped the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, and survived under very difficult circumstances in Poland, he returned to Germany in the late 1950s and became the astute observer we know today. He was asked several years ago in an interview if he was German; he said, No, he was a Jew living in Germany. In his Mein Leben, Ranicki elaborated in at least two contexts that his only home is German literature. He wrote that he has a “portatives Vaterland” (a portable fatherland), like the Jews who saved only the Bible from the burning Second Temple, and that it is German literature. (p. 373) One of his most insightful comments is that with his death will pass one of the last remnants of the unique and brilliant German-Jewish culture of the 19th and early 20th century. Home is culture; home is language; home is ambivalence. Yet another home about to disappear!

Every year, students in my Russian history classes ask me why people in Eastern and Central Europe did not run away when they knew that the secret police or the army was about to descend upon their apartment or house and to carry them off. As one woman put it a few years ago, “That [waiting for the police] was so stupid!” Indeed, but only from an American’s perspective. In magnificent descriptions in Generations of Winter (transl. John Glad and Christopher Morris, 1995), Vassily Aksyonov gives a hint of the reason for the European response, as does Ryszard Kapuscinski in Imperium (transl. Klara Glowczewska, 1994), the subtle cultural/political exploration of Eastern Europe and Russia. The Europeans saw, and still see as we learned anew from Bosnia and Kosovo, their home as the castle that had been inviolate. Home was the place where one could hide; somehow its inhabitants seem forever surprised that the police did not pass on to another floor or another house and instead knocked on their front door and that they dared enter.

Another side to staying put is that people had no other place to go and that those who “moved out of the way” were the exception and even then rarely successful. In The Seamstress, the audacious Seren went off to Budapest but to no avail; she, too, was caught. (Sara Ruvel Bernstein, with Louis Loots Thornton and Marlene Bernstein Samuals, The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival, 1999, pp. 116ff) One is additionally reminded of Elie Wiesel’s account in his Night, when his family chose not to hide with their servant and fell victim to a roundup. (pp. 1-20) These scenes and false hopes about the future are repeated in Reich-Ranicki’s account in Mein Leben. People simply did not believe that their fellow Germans would engage in the terrible activities for which they became so infamous. (pp. 163-177) Home to these

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Jews had been invincible and inviolable.

One can literally feel the trust that people had in their world, their home, and their political authorities. “Surely here nothing untoward can happen!” they said to one another. After all, they had managed to survive many previous onslaughts; this place had been and was their sanctuary and it was impenetrable. One can argue that the fear of staying put in the known environment, whatever the consequences, was less than the fear of facing the world beyond it. The German word ausharren (to wait out) adds a further descriptor; it offers the sense of being able to outlast any adversity. The word also reminds of the Czech sense of lying low until the current storm has blown over. Even running into a nearby forest seemed inconceivable. So, Jews, Poles, Germans, and others waited—inside their homes and villages.

A home can be dissolved in other ways that are forceful. Whatever the innocence or guilt of the individual, or his or her family, millions of people have lost their homes to natural disasters and, in the last several wars and lesser military engagements, to bombs and artillery. The examples of avalanches in the Alps, floods in North Carolina, typhoons in Bangladesh, and the bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, or London only indicate the horror of all those who saw or heard their houses and apartments wiped away or torn to shreds.

The mother of an acquaintance lost what she considered home 13 times; is it any wonder that she never quite regained her balance? When my stepmother was 17 she cowered in her apartment building’s basement in Nuremberg when a bomb fell into the staircase above and left four stories in a heap of rubble; in the five decades we have known each other, that incident came up only twice in conversations. A woman in whose small hotel in Düsseldorf Joni and I stayed often in the 1980s told us every time of a bomb landing in her bed; although it was removed unexploded, she saw her entire district go up in flames. The barbarians in Berlin who started World War II never once felt a moment of guilt about the destruction they unleashed on all of their people.

One can lose home in still a further forceful way, this one not caused by politicians. When my mother fell into senior dementia in the early 1990s, Joni and I had to disassemble the apartment that she had created in a quiet street in Düsseldorf. Her home was on the fourth floor of an apartment building; we, too, felt at home there. For my mother, home was two rooms and a small bathroom; there she had created her “own world” and everything was arranged to suit her needs and purposes. Taking her home apart was the dismantling, or should I say the deconstructing, of what had been my mother. (See Peter Petschauer, Human Space: Personal Rights in a Threatening World, 1997, pp. 120 and 122.) Her apartment was an extension of herself, from the stunning Jugendstil (art deco) armoire to the stark black coat hangers in a closet. In taking this place apart, we “closed down her home” and sadly ended her private life. While we had no choice but to dissolve this charming place in view of her institutionalization, this is not an act to repeat. Our sadness received further reinforcement a few months later when we visited her sister’s apartment near Goslar and found the same ambiance, the same sort of paintings and carpets, and the same odor. Home, sweet home! It, too, does not exist anymore. A generation has passed and with it a certain perception of home.

My mother’s experience points to the final move of almost all persons who today grow older and cannot do so in family contexts. Each of us knows of a parent, a friend’s parent or relative, or a story of a person nearby, who has had to make the awful decision to “give up their home.” As insiders and outsiders to this drama, we hardly seem to comprehend why “older people” have such a difficult time leaving their home for “a home for seniors.” A time may have been in which seniors grew toward death in a family context. This final journey could not have been easy for anyone in a family, neither the children and grandchildren nor the aging. In the households in South Tyrol in which this aging took place in my lifetime and observation, it has been difficult as seniors, children, and grandchildren, guided by love, understanding, religious belief, and duty but also disdain and dislike, endeavored to manage adjusting to aging and dying. These are processes about which no one had any literature, hardly any experience, and no societal help, and for which others usually had no more than a knowing smile.

Home is more and less than all of these perspectives. Throughout history, and in our present considerations, it is not just a place of momentary grief and inordinate adjustments. Home is where one works, eats, sleeps, loves, and finds safety, renewal, family, privacy, and even individuality. Like the Japanese, most Europeans take their street shoes and street clothes off as they enter their homes. Hardly any act presents so poignantly one major difference between present-day Europe-

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ans and Americans. Europeans consider their homes to be a private sphere, a sphere that is not to be soiled by the dirt and concerns of the street. (Conversely, they used to avoid washing their laundry in public, a rather private activity in part because it was women’s work.) Americans used to have a similar attitude, reflected in the cartoons and movies in which mom or the children brought dad the slippers when he returned home from work. But now we wear the same shoes and clothes inside and outside our houses; we are always inside and outside.

The image of the mother and the children at home reflects also, of course, another, older image: the one about men’s work being outside the home and women’s inside. It is a division of labor and a division of chores in households that goes back to the ancient world but that found particularly poignant expression in the German Hausväter (housefathers) and Hausmütter (housemothers) literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. (See Peter Petschauer, The Education of Women in Eighteenth-Century Germany: New Directions from the German Female Perspective, 1989, pp. 228-323.) In those houses, the inside and outside were more starkly separated than they were in the 19th century when farmers and storekeepers probably did not even wipe their feet on every occasion they entered their own private sphere.

Ten door locks cannot protect us, psychologically at any rate, from any outsider because we have ceased to separate with simple acts the outside from the inside. Older European houses—some I have studied date to the 17th century—had hallways that assured that the outsider could not penetrate the innermost sphere of a house immediately upon entering it. One is reminded of newer castles, those of the 18th century and later, that separated the private from the public spheres. (Human Space, p. 120) Home was home in part because of its private sphere.

Americans greatly value privacy, and many of our houses were conceived to solve the problem of privacy similarly to those in Europe. One used to access a vestibule or entryway or now enters a living area. The foyer and the living room serve to shield the rest of the home from outsiders and make the other part of it private. But since we also admire informality, people often enter through the kitchen, traditionally one of the most sacred places of a home if for no other reason than its being the sphere of women. Today, people increasingly shy away from a living room and so we have “deprivatized” the private sphere by permitting others into most parts of our homes. Wearing street clothes and shoes into all parts of a house affirms this practice. We are always in public and never in private.

One of the most private and home-reaffirming acts is eating. About a century after Louis XIV, European nobles discovered the pleasure of eating in private. (See also Human Space, pp. 34-37.) While eating in public for fun and as a demonstration of having “arrived” spread with an increasingly vibrant restaurant culture, eating in private remained a reaffirmation of family and home. Recently Americans have abandoned this practice. As my friend Jack Tyrer put it, “McDonald’s has become our dining room”; we have made eating a public act and removed it from the home. For the sake of convenience, we have allowed our private sphere to be overtaken by the public sphere. But neither McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, nor any other restaurant is home; they are simply places to eat. The act of eating is central to the sense of home but the obvious publicness and thoughtless frequency of this activity, together with the lack of camaraderie, dignity, appreciation, family, sense of purpose, and even tension, described for example in All Quiet on the Western Front and A Place Called Home, deprives it of deeper meaning.

The cell phone (a “handy” to Europeans) and the Internet are the latest contribution to this “deprivatization.” We now answer our phone and e-mail everywhere and at any time because we have their extensions attached to our bodies. Probably because we deem ourselves so important that we can never be out of reach for anyone, we allow almost all aspects of society to enter every part of our presence and our lives.

“Deprivatization” has recently taken on a new perspective. During Bill Clinton’s Presidency, Americans discovered that neither private conversation nor private act was deemed off-limits either. Oddly, the most conservative Americans were least likely to notice that they had embarked on a massive erosion of home and privacy. As in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe, the men (and women) who spoke so consistently of family and home, in their hatred destroyed the homes and private spheres of their political enemies; with this act they undermined as well their own homes and privacy. One cannot willfully destroy the homes of some without undermining the concept of home for all.

In practical terms, home is eating, working

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and loving, even hating together; it is language, music, art, purpose, landscape or cityscape; it is cultural roots. In the ideal it is love, devotion, care, individual expression, patriotism, and commitment. We are born into our home, we create our home, we leave our home, and we may be forced to abandon our home. Home is the private sphere; we can retreat into our homes. Home is also an extension of a person or family; there we can express who we are and what we stand for. Home is a safe haven where we can be ourselves, and it is where we could trust—until overexercised patriotism in some periods and divorce nowadays—the members of the community.

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