Our Innate Heimweh

John B. Lyon, Crafting Flesh, Crafting the Self, (Bucknell University Press, 2006), ch. 2, Trauma and the Self: Clemens Brentano’s Godwi, p. 89:

Brentano describes love as the source of living motion in humans, and also describes a fundamental human tendency toward otherness. From birth, humans are given a longing for what is foreign, for what takes them away from their origin (‘‘Humans were initiated into that distance’’). As a result, however, we are also born with Heimweh, a longing for an origin from which we are constantly drawn away. At times, Brentano attributes this Heimweh to external nature, as in the first letter of the novel: ‘‘ich glaube, daß der Sturm in der Natur und dem Glücke, ja daß alles Harte und Rauhe da ist, um unsern unsteten Sinn, der ewig nach der Fremde strebt, zur Rückkehr in die Heimath zu bewegen’’. [I believe, that the storm in nature and in fortune, indeed, that everything that is hard and coarse is there to move our unconstant mind, that eternally strives towards what is foreign, to return to its home.] . . . this drive is also innate. As humans we strive toward the other, but need to return constantly to our Heimath. To find the nature of the self in Godwi is to recognize these contradictory impulses within the self and to determine the nature of the Heimath to which the self longs to return. . . .