Nuits Blanches III: Home(land)lessness

​At about the same time I was looking through the IKEA catalogue in an effort to recreate the home I left behind, nostalgically affixing feelings of belonging to a salad bowl, Alexander Gauland, leader of the German right wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD), blamed the ills of the homeland on the “Heimatlosigkeit”, the “homelandlessness” of the urban “elites”.
These “elites”, writes the university-educated lawyer and journalist, control the media and higher education, work for transnational companies and organizations like the UN, and set today's cultural and political trends. And, God forbid, since English is their lingua franca, they are all, at the very least, bilingual. 
So how does one reclaim the lost homeland, according to the AfD platform?  By closing the borders, arming so-called honest citizens, deporting all Germans who are Muslim, supporting the traditional family structure, and requiring mothers to be the sole caretakers of their children for the first three years of their lives. Home sweet home. 
At times like these, I seek solace in the words of the philosopher Ernst Bloch who in Principle of Hope also wrestled with the concept of “Heimat."  Exiled in the U.S. in 1938, he denounced the world of business that, “placed under the sign of swindle, … chokes any other human impulse” in its thirst for gain, degrading human beings and their home environment, both natural and urban.  For Bloch, “Heimat” was a future concept, a place we strive for, not a return to some past imagined in the interest of ideology.  
This new homeland that many of us are struggling to build, surely means loosing some of our local color.  It also means being comfortable with not understanding everything that the person next to me in the check-out line at IKEA is saying to his son.  He is probably discussing how to put together that IKEA table they are about to buy rather than plotting my displacement.  After all, all of us are at IKEA searching for “Heimat”, for that perfect bowl around which to gather our friends and family.