Urban modernity and the politics of heimat: Gabriele tergit’s kaäsebier erobert den kurfuürstendamm

Abstract

This essay explores an irony running through Gabriele Tergit’s Berlin novel K¨asebier erobert den Kurf¨urstendamm (1931): Heimat kitsch serves as a marketing brand for property speculation that is destroying Heimat in the sense of homes and familiar city localities. The novel conveys different ways of feeling at home in a great city, whether at work, or in caf´es, parks, and streets full of personal memories and cultural associations. The politics of Heimat is a major theme as Jewish citizens increasingly face threats of exclusion from the German Heimat. Instead of domestic confinement as in traditional Heimat discourse, economic and educational emancipation gave women in the Weimar Republic access to civil society, but new tensions in the emotional economy of relations between the sexes and across generations bring new anxieties as well as new freedoms.