Southern Heimat

July 5, 2012 Blog, Culture, History, Music, Southern Print Page

 

I recently discussed the concept of the German word Heimat, a word without a direct English equivalent, defined as the special sense of a person belonging to a specific place, time, culture, and community.  The meaning is broader than “home,” but is narrower than “homeland.”  A few days ago, I entered the word Heimat into one of those free online translators and it gave the English definition as “habitat.”  In a crude sort of way, I think this is the best word-for-word translation I’ve seen yet.  Heimat is a person’s geographical, cultural, and spiritual habitat, the place from which he has sprung and where he feels most at home.  To illustrate, the following song is about the Heimat that belongs to many Southern Americans.

 

 

Print Page

About Nathanael Strickland

Nathanael Strickland is the owner and chief editor of FaithandHeritage.com. He was born in Dallas, TX, grew up in upstate SC, and now resides in SE TX. He received both his BS in Political Science with a minor in Economics and his MBA from Clemson University and now works in project management, SEO, and web design. He has ancestors who fought with the patriots in the American Revolution, with the Texans at the Alamo, and with the Confederacy in the War for Southern Independence. You can reach him by email at editor [at] faithandheritage.com.

Related Posts

    • No Related Post
  • Jetbrane

    Destroy a people’s Heimat and you will destroy that people. 

    The destruction of a people can come from the inside out or the outside in. Inside out is an attack on the people themselves. Outside in is indirect and is an attack on their cultural environs. Chip away at their cultural  environs and they will die with their cultural environs. This is so because to destroy a people’s cultural environs is successful only if you break the hold of their God over them. 

     

  • Jetbrane

    “An ideology, however remote from obvious biological needs, is found in practice to be biologically useful, that is favorable to the species survival. Without such spiritual equipment, not only do societies tend to disintegrate, but the individual composing them may just stop bothering to keep alive. The destruction of religion among primitive peoples is always cited by experts as a major cause in their extinction … evidently societies can not live by bread alone.” G. Childe

    And of course this applies as much to non primitive people as it does to primitive people.