heimwē - Wie das Heimweh Eingang in die Barockmusik fand

heimwē - How homesickness found its way into Baroque music

Homesickness is a complex emotional phenomenon that encompasses not only the longing for a distant homeland as a lost paradise, but also nostalgia and longing for a familiar human and material environment. Its origins as a cultural, social and medical concept are closely linked to Switzerland.

As early as 1569, a letter from mentioned that someone had "died of heimwe". In a Swiss collection of insults, homesickness was then used as an official term for the first time in 1651 and associated with "soldiers and journeymen" who "are outside the fatherland". In this context, "homesickness can get so bad that they die of it".

In 1688, the physician Johannes Hofer defined the phenomenon of homesickness as an independent and serious illness for the first time in his Basler Dissertatio medica de Nostalgia, or Heimwehe. The symptoms he describes convey a picture of profound psychosomatic upheaval: "Constant sadness, frequent sighs, restless sleep, loss of strength, poor appetite, anxiety in the heart [...], fever, digestive disorders, emaciation, weakness." The permanent mental fixation on the fatherland exhausted the vital energy of those affected, as the spiritus animales, the spirits of life, were no longer transported unhindered through the nerve tracts, but were bound in those fibers of the brain marrow that were associated with ideas of the fatherland. As a result, they are no longer able to penetrate into other areas of the brain and support the necessary functions there. Hofer attributed the cause of so-called homesickness to the change of environment, which is accompanied by different air, a different way of life, foreign customs and also a lack of maternal care. Young people in particular find it difficult to adapt to foreign customs or to give up familiar elements of home, such as the local milk. Hofer believed that the most effective way to cure homesickness was to return home. As a workaround, he recommended an enema to improve the disturbed imagination or various concoctions to alleviate the symptoms. The term he coined, pothopatridalgia (formed from "potho", "patria" and "algia", meaning "pain of longing for the fatherland"), did not catch on.

At the beginning of the 18th century, the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Jakob Scheuchzer also saw the actual cause of homesickness in the change in air pressure in his Natural History of Switzerland. If the Swiss came from the fine, light air of their mountains to the lowlands, the higher air pressure would compress their less stable skin fibers, drive the blood against the heart and brain and thus cause homesickness. As a therapy, Scheuchzer recommended moving homesick people to higher mountains or at least towers and taking substances containing compressed air, such as saltpetre, gunpowder or young wine, in order to increase the pressure inside the body. The mechanistic view of the human being, including the soul, is unmistakable in such statements. Mental processes were only conceivable as metabolic products. The spirit of the times - including and especially the scientific spirit - also demanded tangible, materialistic explanations for mental phenomena.

Homesickness was regarded as a Swiss disease and was also called Morbus helveticus or Mal du Suisse. Switzerland's role as an important supplier of mercenaries in the 17th and 18th centuries contributed significantly to the creation of the homesickness myth. Thousands of young men left their villages every year to serve in foreign armies - often under difficult conditions, far away from family and home. Commanders reported an above-average number of cases among Swiss troops. Homesickness was considered so dangerous that it could lead to desertion or even death and could be triggered or intensified by acoustic stimuli such as cowbells. Some armies forbade the singing of traditional folk songs such as the Guggisberg song or the so-called cow rows, which were used to lure cows home for milking. In 1798, the doctor Johann Gottfried Ebel wrote that even Swiss cows became homesick when cow rows were sung to them abroad: "They immediately throw their tails up, start to run, break all fences and gates and are wild and furious."

With the advent of modern psychiatry and psychology, the view of homesickness changed in the 19th century. The phenomenon was increasingly depathologized and lost its status as a medically tangible illness. Homesickness was increasingly understood as a psychological reaction to separation and uprooting - a development that also went hand in hand with the general secularization and scientification of the concept of man. The scientific paradigm shift was in turn embedded in the zeitgeist; homesickness became a literary and artistic motif. Swiss authors and painters such as Gottfried Keller and Arnold Böcklin took up the theme and stylized it as an expression of an inner longing for originality, nature and identity.

In national Romanticism, homesickness ultimately became the symbol of a collective, albeit polyvalent, feeling of home, which contributed to the construction of Swiss identity. The motif of homesickness and rows of cows became famous as a topos. For example, Ludwig Achim von Arnim wrote in 1805 in his poem Der Schweizer: "Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz | Da ging mein Trauren an | Das Alphorn hört ich drüben wohl anstimmen | Ins Vaterland musst ich hinüber schwimmen | Das ging nicht an. [...] You brothers all too often | Today you see me for the last time; The shepherd boy is only to blame | The alphorn did this to me | I lament that." Entire operas such as Joseph Weigl's Die Schweizer Familie or Wilhelm Kienzl's Der Kuhreigen dealt with this theme. The popularity of homesickness and cow rows in literature and music was one of the reasons for the enthusiasm for the Alps and Switzerland that gripped the cultural elite in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Confederation was now regarded by educated Europeans as a kind of Alpine Arcadia, where people - still unspoilt by civilization - lived largely in harmony with themselves and nature. In the princely gardens of this period, village idylls were laid out, which were known as Schweizerei and, like the Meierei, were part of the props of the pastoral play. Even in the sanatoriums of the 19th century, there were Swiss houses with stables on the ground floor in order to put the ambience and scents of healthy country life at the service of convalescence. At the beginning of the 20th century, Johanna Spyri's "Heidi" was a long-lasting success with young readers - the story of a child of nature from the Alps who becomes increasingly ill from homesickness in faraway Frankfurt, until she blossoms again on her return to Switzerland and lets her sick friend from Frankfurt heal with her.

In the 20th century, the theme of homesickness increasingly shifted to the areas of migration, mobility and tourism. Many Swiss emigrated overseas - especially to North America - and wrote about their homesickness in letters and diaries. At the same time, the feeling of homesickness was commercialized: In advertising and tourism, it became a romanticized reminder of an idealized "old Switzerland", characterized by sunlit mountains, cows and alpine huts. With increasing globalization, homesickness regained importance - albeit in a new context. It was no longer just understood as a return to the geographical homeland, but also as an expression of an emotional place, a feeling of familiarity that people can also seek and find far away from their physical home.

Historical homesickness in Switzerland is a fascinating example of how an emotional state can be culturally constructed, medically defined and socially perceived. Switzerland - with its unique topography, history and cultural structure - provided fertile ground for the emergence of a phenomenon that gained significance far beyond its borders and found its unique expression in music.

Ensemble Le Grand Trianon
Martina Joos, recorders
Sibylle Kunz, recorders
Johannes Kofler, baroque cello
Johannes Ötzbrugger, lute
Johannes Hämmerle, harpsichord


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.