Immediacy and Heimat in the Present Populist Moment

In recent years, Germany has witnessed a resurgence of discourses and practices of Heimat (home, homeland) as well as a steep rise in the political power of a nationalist, populist far right. In this article, I examine the historical and present links between Heimat and populist nationalism as a point of departure for an anthropology of political immediacy. Drawing on intellectual and historical sources as well as ongoing fieldwork in the Brandenburg countryside, where the far-right Alternative for Germany has scored unprecedented success, I trace the uses and effects of Heimat and other related tropes of immediacy such as lived experience, cultural intimacy, linguistic authenticity, and political promises and desires within the framework of nationalist populism. The populist invocation of the people as a national self-identical collectivity, I argue, rests not only on the constitution of its members as horizontally related through organic, prepolitical forms of kinship and the imagination of an unmediated, direct vertical relation with a leader presumed to embody and enact its will, but always also on the affect-laden figuration of a particular territory as its authentic, rightful, and intimately familiar home(land). Sustained, close attention to notions of immediacy, I conclude, has much to offer to scholars of populism.