WRITER AND ACADEMIC W. G. SEBALD, in his book on Austrian literature, declares: “Je mehr von der Heimat die Rede ist, desto weniger gibt es sie.” Elsewhere, speaking of fiction in the German language in general, he elaborates: Heimat is “ein mirage, eine Luftspiegelung.” It is, of course, literature itself that is the most important instrument of this myth, deploying “ihre ganze ethnopoetische Kraft” to deliver “authentische Beschreibungen,” Sebald claims, “aus einer sagenhaften Provinz.” Heimat and Provinz — these are two recurring themes in German-language writing, and, needless to say, of the effort to define German identity.

The tradition of writing about Heimat upon which Sebald draws begins, as Norbert Mecklenburg has established in a number of canonical studies, with the opposition of the province and modernity during the period of rapid industrialization towards the end of the nineteenth century. On the one side, therefore, Mecklenburg depicts a literary avant-garde which celebrated the urban, the cosmopolitan and the complexity of modern life. Opposed to this, he describes the anti-modern impulse of a body of writing stressing traditional values and community. It was precisely this inherently conservative desire for order and the exclusion of all traces of difference that came to be seen as discredited from the late 1960s because of the way it seemed to function as a precursor of Nazi ideology.