Homelessness and Emancipation. Revisions of ‚Heimat‘ in Modernity
At the beginning of the 20th century, concepts of homelessness („Heimatlosigkeit“) were increasingly understood as ideas for emancipation. We explore this discourse in literature, philosophy and journalism.
Project desription
The aim of project A07 is to identify discursive re-evaluations of homelessness („Heimatlosigkeit“) that emerged between 1870 and 1933 in German literary, journalistic and scholarly texts. We explore concepts and aesthetic programmes to determine how and why concepts of homelessness can be understood as intellectual projects of emancipation. Until the end of the 19th century, the attribution of homelessness generally had an exclusionary function: it stigmatised minorities. At the turn of the 20th century, the commitment to homelessness responded to real experiences of exclusion and threat, some of which were re-evaluated in astonishing ways. We want to understand how this re-evaluation revises the continuing notions of „Heimat“ in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Gastwissenschaftler 2025/26
Pascal Ongossi Assamba studierte Germanistik und Afrikanistik in Yaoundé (Kamerun) und promovierte im Fach Germanistik an der Universität Jena im Rahmen des Graduiertenkollegs „Modell Romantik“. Neben seiner Tätigkeit als Sozialpädagoge in Ellwangen, mit der er den interkulturellen Dialog und die Integration fördert, widmet er sich als Visiting Scholar nun seinem Forschungsvorhaben „Heimat im kolonialen Kreislauf: Export, Verlust und Reimport des Heimatdiskurses zwischen Deutschland und Kamerun (1870–1933)“.
