That’s the reason that *fatherland * and *motherland * don’t really bother me. I just think of them as the English equivalents of the *dulce et decorum * usage (or the French allons enfants de la patrie).
Rather naively perhaps I assumed that *homeland * was a version that the US dreamt up as a more modern, supposedly non-sexist version.
Besides what we always called it before 9/11: domestic security.
Another vote for all three being creepy.
Department of Homeland Security has always overloaded my creep-o-meter. It sounds like it should be headed by the Reichmaster.
Curious - in Norwegian, the word is fedrelandet, which is literally not Fatherland but Fathers-Land. Which makes it more of “the land of {my|our} fathers” than “this land that is the father of all” - that, and the fact that no one says “for konge og fedreland” (“for king and fathers-land”) with a straight face, at least while sober, softens the term considerably. What’s the exact word in Danish?
When I was a teen in the Reagan era, I lived in a suburban development called Homeland and heard lots of jokes about whether any of the missing Nazi war criminals ever turned up. So weird feelings about the term Homeland definitely predate the DHS…
Did Nazi Germany ever use the German equivalent of “homeland”? I thought they used the term “fatherland” (Vaterland)?
Of course it depends on your translation, but basically yes, all the time. Two dictionaries give Heimat and Heimatland, but no further alternatives (I’ll ignore the note that the South African Homeland is usually left untranslated.)
Heimatland seems more literal at first, but actually it’s closer to “country of origin”. It’s a completely generic word and not specific to Germany. See for example this Travel Brochure that invites us to visit the Führer’s Heimatland.
Heimat was an important keyword in NS Propaganda. See for example this poster: Front and Homeland - The Guarantors of Victory. Although the term was used a lot for emotional appeal, it was also used in fairly neutral ways where you would probably choose “home” in English (for the general area, not your house.)
Arrgh. I found several examples and promptly mixed them up. This one uses Heimat as well.
Another vote for all three being creepy. First hearing about “Homeland Security” send shivers down my spine, and for good reason, since we now have an administration more bent on gathering power and secrecy to itself than any in a good long while.
In a lot of ways, I think “homeland” is the creepiest of all–since the others in some places have historical antecendents, although they have since been sullied by Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. But … “homeland” … eesh. Goering knew what he was talking about.
Now, indigenous peoples of North American speaking of ancestral homelands is very different. Bush and his regime using that rhetoric, however … shudder. It plays right into the kind of manipulation Goering understood all too well.
From what I read of Nazi-era texts Germany usually was referred to as “Deutschland” (Germany) or “das Reich” (the Reich) - the latter more in a political/legal context, the former more in a cultural context. In a sentimental context “die Heimat” (the homeland) was also often used (this term does not necessarily refer to a country or other political entity but rather to that geographical region that the person in question feels the most attachment to, in the context - someone who does not get around much would consider his village or even his street as his Heimat while an astronaut on Mars would refer to the Earth as his Heimat). “Vaterland” was also used (more in a speechifying/lofty context), but not as often as the terms referred to above because the term requires context (it’s a generic term, someone’s fatherland, so when conversing with Austrians, Alsatians etc. it would have been ambiguous - did the speaker mean Germany? Austria? France?). Also my impression is that “Vaterland” was already a bit dated at the time, with a bit of 19th century flavour.
My impression FWIW is that the use of the “Fatherland” term and its specific connection with Nazism is much overestimated in the English-speaking world - possibly the usage of the term was much stressed because of its exoticism?
Generally speaking, the term Vaterland (fatherland)