Today while singing an old German farewell song, I was reminded of some passages I had just read concerning the German concept of Heimat. But first, from Wikipedia:

"Heimat is a German word that has no simple English translation. It is often expressed with terms such as home or homeland, but these English counterparts fail to encapsulate centuries of German consciousness and the thousands of connections this quintessential aspect of German identity carries with it."

And now, from The Vanished Kingdom:

"'To plant your feet in the ground, to know it's yours and that the beautiful fields and the woods so carefully tended are only that way because your family made it that way -- that is my idea of a homeland. And I do not mean your father, or even your grandfather, hired a few men with a team of oxen or a tractor to clear your land, and then you farmed it. I mean ancestors your never knew about, hundreds of years ago, who first had to fight for the land and Christianize it, had to lose it perhaps, then win it back again I don't know how many times before they could truly call it their own. Always, always prepared to die for it... The land out there has been a sponge for my family. It soaked our sweat and our blood and it bloomed like an oasis in the desert.'" (Roy, pg. 28)

"'You won the countryside with guns and bullets, the great iron of railroads, technology, and advanced civilization... our knights bathed in blood, it was so highly personal a conquest, so 'up-front,' to use an American expression. Can any modern man coming from a civilized country, especially those of us who are not keen on blood sports or hunting, imagine what it must have been like to skewer another human being with a sword, or cleave a man's skull down through to his neck with an axe? When you win a combat of that sort, and the prize is land -- an estate and a future -- your kinship with that land is intense beyond description -- It is our notion of purpose, service, steadfastness, and duty to both our race and our land.'" (ibid, pg. 35)

It's interesting to me, completely removed from this sort of experience, how much heimweh I feel for my patriarchal heimat -- I guess it is, as they say, in the blood.