The Myth of Heimkehrillusion
in German Politics and Society
Many observers of the German scene have argued that the long-term
non-German resident populations have become de facto permanent
members of German society. Beginning in the 1980s, the term
Heimkehrillusion, the “illusion of returning home,” gained prominence
in accounts of the guest workers’ trajectories, as many social scientists
and policy makers came to dismiss the continued assertions of some
migrant populations of their intention to eventually return “home.”
The increasingly accepted view was that “even though many [migrants]
have the goal to return sometime, this goal becomes increasingly
unlikely the longer they stay in Germany. For many families who have
established themselves here, there are no possibilities left in the country
of origin” (Institute für Zukunftsforschung, 15). The evidence that
“most of the ‘guest-workers’ would not return to their home countries”
continues to be pointedly cited in more recent efforts to push the German
state into reforming citizenship laws and taking responsibility for
the multicultural reality of German society (Hagedorn 2000, 4). The
permanence of the non-German population and their growing commitment
to life in Germany has, over the years, been the cornerstone of
progressive arguments that non-German residents merit full membership
in the German polity and that notions of “Germanness” must be
de-ethnicized and made more permeable. Explicit reference to
Heimkehrillusion has largely dropped out of current discussions of citizenship
reform and forms of belonging, but the conclusion that all resident
migrants in Germany are unambiguously there to stay has come
to form the unquestioned basis of contemporary debate.
