Packing up the Past: Vicki Baum’s Quest for Heimat

• Main Author: Rose Simpson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Silesia Press 2021-06-01
• Series: Postscriptum Polonistyczne
• Subjects: Heimat in exile; transcendental homelessness; therapeutic journeys; travel letters
• Online Access: https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/PPol/article/view/10440
• ISSN: 1898-1593; 2353-9844

The best-selling Austrian novelist Vicki Baum took ship alone for America in 1932 but emigration soon became exile for the Jewish author. The feeling of ‘Heimatlosigkeit’, or rootlessness, which oppressed Baum at that time was emotional and spiritual rather than physical. Child of a Jewish immigrant family in the anti Semitic society of nineteenth-century Vienna, Vicki Baum had long questioned the loci and the politics of Heimat, a German term whose significance far exceeds the simple definition of home or homeland. Cut loose from Heimat, she began her travels to far-away destinations, seeking to identify a common humanity and the universal moralities which could guide Europe to a better future. She wrote her travel experiences into novels which allowed her to narrate the landscapes and customs but also the inner lives of the peoples she encountered. A long-standing belief in the inauthenticity of verbal communication encouraged her to transcend linguistic barriers with confidence but it was her gender, she believed, which enabled her to share and interpret other cultures. Commonality rather than difference is the focus of her travel-letters and their fictional transpositions. Focusing on Baum’s experiences on Bali seen in a postcolonial perspective, the article argues that the island was for the novelist a space of transcendence, where the inhabitants held on to values already lost in Western societies.