ABSTRACT
The term 'Heimat' stands at the centre of a moral and political discussion about 'place, belonging and identity' in Germany and Austria that is almost two centuries old. This chapter traces the Austrian discussion of Heimat out of early debates about the political and geographical balance of the new 'rump state' of post-Habsburg Austria. It defines three dimensions of Heimat in interwar Austrian politics, namely: geographical, ethnic, and constitutional-legislative. The literary label Heimat similarly covers a wide spectrum of ideological positions. Heimat writing represents a conservative pattern of response to the modern world from a provincial perspective, the changes wrought by industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and questions of regional and national identity. Heimat literature reinforces a sense of Germanic identity compatible with the ideologically diffuse 'Greater German' orientation. The pattern of conflict and division is again outwardly maintained in the realm of theatre politics.
