Heimatlos [Heimatlos]

Abstract:

This article looks at the concept of Heimatlosigkeit in the work of German writer and poet Emmy Hennings (1885–1948). Although Hennings’s debut novels were lauded in her own time, today she is best remembered as the wife of Hugo Ball and— thanks to a recent wave of feminist Dada scholarship—as the overlooked co-founder of Dada. Her own literary works are slowly beginning to receive more scholarly attention. This article focuses on select expressions of Heimatlosigkeit from across Hennings’s writings and argues that this phrase (being “heimatlos”) conveys the central affective force of her aesthetic project, namely a longing for an alternate world in which her subjects recognize themselves and feel at home. In my reading, which draws on insights from queer affect theory, this longing situates Hennings’s subjects in a negative and yet anticipatory state of being bereft, being -los.