Fragile Refuge: A Rethinking of Levinas on the

Meaning of Home

Ned Strasbaugh

Gettysburg College

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Submitted Fall 2013

In Totality and Infinity (1961) Emmanuel Levinas described the meaning of home as both a refuge for the self and a gateway to the Other. But his philosophical approach to dwelling leaves home incapable of growth or dynamic change from within. This thesis argues that a more adequate conception of home must acknowledge its vulnerability to transformation, dissolution, political violence and reconstitution. To this end, I attempt to reconcile Levinas's conception of home with all that jeopardizes and renders home fragile. I draw on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of statelessness from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and the German-Turk immigrant experience.

Chapter 1: Fragile Understandings of Home

Home is commonly turned to as a safe place, a refuge from the outside world. It has been

thought as such by several well-known Continental philosophers of the 20th century: Edmund

Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. Home as refuge is taken for

granted by each philosopher as a fundamental fact about home. From this belief in the sanctuary

of home, other conclusions have been drawn about home: home is intimately personal, a place

that reflects our inner consciousness, a stable comfort that is either unchanging or lost with no

chance of reclaiming it. Conceptions of home rarely take into account change or transformation,

or the fact that homes are often lost and recreated.

In this thesis, I consider such claims and question whether such an account of home is

complete. Is home adequately described in this way? Is home a static refuge? Is it something

that, once lost, can never be reclaimed? Is home a physical dwelling, or is it where one makes it?

Is home found among our loved ones, among cherished belongings, or just in ourselves? Does

home consist of some combination of these? To be sure, we understand that home, as a physical

object in the world, cannot last forever. To see it as an unchanging sanctuary where we can find

shelter from a cruel world, then, appears contradictory. It appears to be contradictory, both for

those who face natural disaster and the loss of home, and for refugees, immigrants and the

homeless. Such loss of home occurs so frequently that it is surprising that home should be

considered a refuge at all.

What is needed to give an adequate philosophical account of home is to recognize this

element of change in home: it is not a static place, and though it may be a safe haven and even an

extension of us, it is important to recognize the fragility of home. We must recognize that home

can and is affected by a multitude of factors, be they from the outside or even from inner

transformation. The recognition of the dynamism of home is crucial in understanding issues

affecting home, in both an existential and political context. The philosophical account on home is

incomplete.

It’s important to deliberate on home; in fact, the stakes can hardly be greater. If home is

something to which we feel deeply connected, to the point where some suggest that home is a

place where the consciousness dwells and comes into being in the world, then we will have

greater awareness and resolve to address the crucial issues that jeopardize the security and refuge

of home. With greater understanding of the changes that occur in home comes greater

understanding of the risks to home that individuals and families face—people who might not feel

safe in their homes, for instance, or people who might feel that someone else’s home is rightfully

their home. Additionally, if home is a place where we recollect ourselves, yet is constantly in

flux, we need to know how that flux might influence our recollection. Recognition of home as

changing allows us to view home with a new eye: we can judge more adequately what home

means to us and what comprises home for us. We can be more aware of what may jeopardize our

homes, so that we do not become overly attached to home or can respond quickly and

accordingly if home should be lost. Deliberation on home allows us to measure its fragility, how

meaningful something so fragile should be to us, and the political and ethical responsibilities that

are entailed with something both fragile and meaningful.

But given the significance of other topics in metaphysics, ethics or political philosophy,

home is something that is rarely considered by philosophers. Perhaps this is because we feel

home to be safe and untouchable, or perhaps because home is viewed as a place for recollection

on other activities, and is rarely itself the object of recollection. Yet these are fields in which

home has a significant role: questions of home abound as to who deserves a home, how home

shapes our identity and vice versa, what home really is, if home is intimately related to us as

humans, if home can be bestowed or taken away, if home is something to be provided for by the

state, or can even be shaped by the state. These questions about home remind us of the vital

questions at the intersection of personal and community life. Using this idea of home as

something that is in flux, I plan to show the ways in which the nature of home can evolve or else

become endangered and what this means for home as a concept. To do this, I will first trace some

of the history of philosophical thought on home.

Attention to the concept of home by contemporary philosophers first appeared in the

thought of Edmund Husserl gathered now in Husserliana, the collection of his works. Husserl

thought of home less as a particular place and more as a homeworld (XV 430), the place with

family and memories as well as the people who comprise the community and the actions that

people do there. It is an intersubjective place, allowing us all to share a homeworld that means

something for us individually, and is affected by how we relate to our surroundings. It is a “mode

of constitution in which the individual participates; it is a mode of constitution that occurs

‘through’ and ‘beyond’ the ego, and does not simply begin with egological subjectivity”

(Steinbock 189). The homeworld, which stands opposed to the alienworld, is populated by

homecomrades: people who, even if they cannot be called an acquaintance, are familiar and

occupy the same homeworld, such as the bus driver who drives your bus every day (Steinbock

224). It is as if home is a set of overlapping circles for each dimension of life, such as historicity,

culture, language, and societal values and norms, with different people and locations in each

circle: “There are already within a nation differences of homeland and alien” (XXIX 9). All of

these constitute the homeworld for Husserl.

Home can thus have a great deal of meaning for us, yet is not limited solely to being a

place. It can exist in the past, through collective memory or co-constitution of others, as well as

in the future, through a promised homeland (Steinbock 233-234). Thus, people such as the

homeless can still have a home somewhere, since it is not necessarily a physical manifestation,

as well as nomads and those who constitute a diaspora, because such people as the nomad “hat

sein Territorium, in dem er wander und das er als sein Land, sein Herrschaftsgebiet,

Nahrungsgebiet etc. ansieht [has his territory, through which he goes and which he holds as his

land, his dominion, his home etc.]” (A V 10 I 78a). This description also accounts for the

phenomena of homesickness, a longing for the familiar and homey (Steinbock 195). This also

puts an interesting spin on how the homeworld can cease to be, either with the breakup of a

family, the destruction of a territory, or the burial of cultures or values because of irrelevance or

submission to stronger cultures and values.

However, this view seems to take for granted the change that occurs in the homeworld.

Home can be constituted by something of the past, beliefs about the future, or the different

circles that we inhabit in our lives, but Husserl doesn’t discuss how home can grow to have such

meaning in these ways. Likewise, the ways that home can be destroyed seem to constitute an

ultimate end for home, and the people who were victim to such destruction must learn to move

on. Husserl’s view also doesn’t seem to constitute how we can grow into home either: he claims

that, though children can have home, they are not homecomrades because they do not

appropriate or shape their homes, rather being shaped by their homes as they adjust to their

culture, values and norms (Steinbock 226). It seems as if, all of a sudden, they wake up one day

and are homecomrades, as if the homeworld has been there all along for them.

Husserl based these views on his phenomenology, and these were the views that opened a

new train of thought in his student, Martin Heidegger. In his work Poetry, Language and

Thought Heidegger used the etymological origin of the German word bauen, to build, and

showed that it originally also meant to dwell in Old English and High German, buan, as well as

showing that the word bauen is related to the word bin, the conjugated form of “to be”. In other

words, dwelling is encompassed by building, which is encompassed by being, and “The way in

which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling”

(Heidegger 144-145). As Heidegger continues his discourse of dwelling, he also says that it is to

remain or stay in the place, but in the Gothic language, the same word also has the implication of

being at peace, and thus to dwell is to be at peace (Heidegger 147). This describes the sense of

belonging that home can entail for us, and he is thus able to tie home to the four states of being in

the world, as sky, earth, mortals and divinities: “When we speak of mortals [human beings], we

are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple

oneness of the four. This simple oneness of the four we call the fourfold. Mortals are in the

fourfold by dwelling” (Heidegger 148). In this view, mortals dwelling gives them the property of

being a part in the fourfold, that is, taking up their role in the fourfold. And so, dwelling is to

accept one’s role in the fourfold, and to maintain a status of belonging in it.

Dwelling is allowed for by space, where room has been made for dwelling and being to

occur (Heidegger 152). These spaces can be physical, but as mortals, we dwell in space by

definition; and because of our role in the fourfold, we are connected to each other by way of our

thoughts, which can traverse space. Thus we can find home even if we are physically far

removed from it, for “The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling,

strictly thought and spoken” (Heidegger 155). He also talks about how we grow into our homes,

since the word for building also means to cherish and care for (Heidegger 145); when we put a

lot of time and effort in growing our dwellings, we earn them more and more, and so belonging

to these dwellings is obtained. Heidegger also makes a distinction between feeling at home and

being at home, for instance feeling at home when one is at work, saying that dwelling is where

we can take shelter (Heidegger 143-144). It’s not that one doesn’t feel at home when one is at

home, but one can feel at home in places which are not home too.

Heidegger’s thought on home is a turn away from Husserl’s thought, and it is a more

complete analysis of what it means to have a home and to be at home. Heidegger does include

growth, making home something that one cultivates and really becomes invested in, such that

this is how one’s consciousness can be embedded in home. But he doesn’t really describe the

fragility that also comes with home. Heidegger considers home as something that gives us place

in the fourfold, which gives us purpose, and that even if we are far away from home, we can

think of it and be brought back to it. This makes it seem as if home can’t really be broken open,

and that if we should lose our home, we also lose our place in the fourfold; anything less drastic,

and we haven’t really lost home at all. This doesn’t account for people who have lost their

homes, for instance immigrants or refugees, and implies that they should be at home when they

think back to their home.

A fellow student under Husserl with Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, describes home as

the gateway between the outer, physical world, and the inner world of the consciousness in

Totality and Infinity: “Simultaneously without and within, [man] goes forth outside from an

inwardness [intimité]. Yet this inwardness opens up in a home which is situated in that outside”

(Levinas 152). This allows the consciousness to come and go from the outer world by means of

the home, and that after we have been in the world, we can come back to this refuge and

recollect in safety: “To exist henceforth means to dwell. To dwell is… a recollection, a coming

to oneself, a retreat home with oneself as in a land of refuge, which answers to a hospitality, an

expectancy, a human welcome” (Levinas 156).

For Levinas, home is also a place by which one can interact with the Other. The

hospitality of one’s home that can be bestowed on the Other is an act of transcendent

selflessness, because “No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of economy;

no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home. Recollection in a home open to

the Other—hospitality—is the concrete and initial fact of human recollection and separation; it

coincides with the Desire for the Other absolutely transcendent” (Levinas 172). But the

relationship with the Other is concretized in language, the pinnacle of which is teaching;

teaching embodies how the Other makes a connection with us, because teaching “signifies the

whole infinity of the exteriority” (Levinas 171), that is, we are given information that is not ours

from interaction outside of our own consciousness, and thus our world changes to accommodate

it. Thus, we transcend into a new world when we come in contact with the Other, and our home

changes or grows because it is limited as a totality, “whereas the relation with the Other breaks

the ceiling of the totality” (Levinas 171).

What Levinas has in his conception of home that Husserl and Heidegger don’t have is the

belief that home should be a place not just for us but for those around us, the Other. This really

adds an ethical weight to home that Husserl’s and Heidegger’s accounts did not have. Whereas

the others still allow that home can exist in a place, Levinas takes place out of it for the most

part, only saying that home is the physical place where our consciousness can come into

existence in the world; it makes home that much more inclined to change, since it’s not tied

down much by its physical manifestation. Yet this version of home, while different in its

approach, still doesn’t quite have what we need: it makes home more fragile, capable of

changing from the outside, but at the cost of not allowing for change from the inside. This

definition of home in terms of the Other, while also allowing for home as a refuge for

recollection, also makes it extraordinarily dependent on the Other, almost too much so; it means

we would have to surrender some of our own autonomy in our home.

Greatly influenced by Levinas’ line of thought was Jacques Derrida, who was a good

friend of Levinas. Derrida also comments on the home as a social ground in On Hospitality, a

place of hospitality towards others, and that with respect to being an outsider in a community. In

doing so, he draws an argument from The Sophist that the foreigner disturbs the norm for

society-dwellers. It is as if the foreigner commits parricide: he is not a political relative in any

way to a citizen of a society, not like a fellow citizen is. And therefore, the identity of being a

political relative, a fellow citizen, has been destroyed (Derrida 7). But Derrida goes on to reject

this, recalling Socrates’ argument in his Apologia that he wanted to be treated as a foreigner

since there is a right granted to foreigners in his Athens of old: the right, or norm, to be accepted

as perhaps different, the first act of hospitality to a foreigner (Derrida 19).

Here, Derrida makes his first connection from inside the family or society to an outsider

as an act of hospitality: “It is not, here, although the things are connected, a question of the

classical problem of the right to nationality or citizenship as a birthright—in some places linked

to the land and in others to blood…. It is not only a question of the citizenship offered to

someone who had none previously, but of the right granted to the foreigner as such, to the

foreigner remaining a foreigner, and to his or her relatives, to the family, to the descendants”

(Derrida 21-23). Recognition of one as a foreigner, and fair treatment to them as such, is what is

important for Derrida. One’s nationality, citizenship, or birth should not be determining factors

in this treatment, and home should not be judged on that basis.

In discussion of how hospitality can be managed by rights, Derrida brings up occasions

when the state violates these rights, especially in the context of our increasingly technological

age, with phone lines, emails and faxes acting as an extension of our homes. If the state should

tap someone’s phone for malicious intent, for instance, “then the intervention of the state

becomes a violation of the inviolable, in the place where inviolable immunity remains the

condition of hospitality” (Derrida 51). And here we see how he connects home and hospitality

together: home is where hospitality can be bestowed unto others. It allows for hospitality to

occur, and is in a sense the act of giving home to others. Likewise, if the home is violated, as in

his example, the negative consequences will occur: “wherever the ‘home’ is violated, wherever

at any rate a violation is felt as such, you can foresee a privatizing and even familialist reaction,

by widening the ethnocentric and nationalist, and thus xenophobic, circle: not directed against

the foreigner as such, but, paradoxically, against the anonymous technological power (foreign to

the language or the religion, as much as to the family and the nation), which threatens, with the

‘home,’ the traditional conditions of hospitality” (Derrida 53). Home is a very personal thing that

one can connect to, and one violation of it would have repercussions that affect whatever is

linked to home.

But there is a problem with hospitality in Derrida’s eyes: when one is entirely hospitable

to an outsider, when one gives their home completely to them, then the outsider is not an outsider

anymore, since they are in possession of the home now: “absolute hospitality requires that I open

up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the

social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that

I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer

them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names”

(Derrida 25). Absolute hospitality, is therefore, not possible, since to offer absolute hospitality is

a paradox in itself.

The biggest problem with Derrida’s account is, perhaps even more than the account of

Levinas, he seems to put too much stock in how we should relate to others when considering

home. It’s certainly understandable since he’s looking at home from an ethical perspective, but

surely there’s more to home than that. An adequate account should also be about how we

individually relate to home.

Meanwhile, a rising philosopher named Hannah Arendt was learning under Martin

Heidegger, and also coming to her own conclusions about home in The Origins of

Totalitarianism. In contrast to the others, she examines the political meaning that home has for

us, and does so in the context of minorities and people who are stateless. In the years following

the First World War, with the establishment of the Minority Treaties, it was declared officially

what had since been implicitly true, that “only nationals could be citizens, only people of the

same national origin could enjoy the full protection of legal institutions, that persons of different

nationality needed some law of exception until or unless they were completely assimilated or

divorced from their origin” (Arendt 350-351). The Stateless, then, could not be citizens of a new

place, and could not receive any rights or protections from that place, in a denial of their

differences and origins.

Arendt continues her historical development in The Origins of Totalitarianism of how

states tried to deal with displaced minorities after the First World War with two solutions,

repatriation and naturalization. The first failed when no country wanted to accept those stateless;

the second, because it was designed for those people born and made citizens of a territory since

birth, could not get rid of the otherness ascribed to the stateless (Arendt 360-361). The stateless,

as they came into the political eye in the twentieth century, were left on the fringes of societies

that didn’t want to give them a home. They were neither pushed away nor were they accepted in

totally, and so they were caught in limbo, without any real solution provided by the state they

inhabited. This happened everywhere, not only in states where the stateless were openly rejected:

“The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to

be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their

own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect

them and no institution was willing to guarantee them” (Arendt 370). This loss of the political

rights, and the human rights so closely related to them, left the stateless to feel alienated in a

world away from home.

The right to a home is one of the first rights lost for the stateless that Arendt mentions:

“the loss of the entire social texture into which [the rightless] were born and in which they

established for themselves a distinct place in the world…. What is unprecedented is not the loss

of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one” (Arendt 372). This loss of home, and the

condition of being homeless and stateless in the world, was devastating for the people who were

left alienated. The political rights, which they could not gain from the state they sought refuge in,

were inevitably linked to basic human rights. It was the kind of condition that led the stateless to

want to do something to change it, and perhaps get these rights back. They “were as convinced

as the minorities that loss of national rights was identical with loss of human rights, that the

former inevitably entailed the latter. The more they were excluded from right in any form, the

more they tended to look for a reintegration into a national, into their own national community”

(Arendt 371). For Arendt, this alienation from a community, from home, is something

antithetical to the human condition, whether we are considering someone who is stateless, or

whether we are the stateless ourselves.

The human being who has lost his place in a community… is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in all matters of public concern. This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy. (Arendt 382).

It is not as if systems of politics can eliminate inequalities such as personal qualities or

origins. But Arendt feels that we have an obligation to seek justice, for instance in spite of

someone’s lack of state, to offer someone a right to home.

Arendt gives the notion of home urgency. She doesn’t so much ask what home is, but

goes into details of who has lost it and in what ways the political systems of the twentieth

century failed to give it back to them. While this leaves open the questions of what is home and

how we should consider it, it closes questions that the others couldn’t answer, such as different

ways home can grow and be broken, as well as what home can mean to us.

The ideas of these philosophers, while enlightening and provocative for our purposes in

finding the meaning of home, must be examined carefully. For instance, all of these philosophers

are of the Western traditions, and no Eastern thought is being given consideration. As we try to

remember the transitoriness of home, we must remember that we are sifting only through one

school of thought, and so conclusions we come to, while more adequate than before, may still

not be complete. Something else to bear in mind is that four of the mentioned philosophers are of

Jewish background, and so their philosophical conceptions of home may be influenced by the

particular historical experience, perhaps with emphasis on a diasporic way of life. However, we

can judge this by seeing how the conclusions I draw here about their work hold up when placed

into the context of immigrant Turks in Germany as well as other contexts I examine in the third

chapter.

Levinas’ view of home particularly interests me because of how he tries to bring together

both the subjectivity of home as a refuge of recollection and make it a connection with the Other

and the outside world. This blend will allow us to understand the different ways in which home

can be shaped, from outside and from inside, and can lead us to a new understanding of home’s

fragility. Arendt will also be most useful for my purposes because of her unique approach to

understanding what home can mean for us in a practical, political context; I will assume, as she

does, that home is a political good, and will show the importance of understanding home’s

fragility through her thought.

Chapter 2: Developing Conceptions of Home

There is a deeper reason why I will examine Levinas and Arendt in greater detail. I seek

to develop a way of thinking of home as embodying change and growth, lest we fail to

acknowledge its susceptibility to loss. In the third chapter I will examine a home situation which

is complex, and can only be properly understood with a version of home that allows for change.

As such, I choose to examine the situation of German-Turks in Germany, from the original

workers of the Gastarbeiter movement (1961-1973) to their descendants that live in Germany

today. Much pressure faces the German-Turks, such as political inequality and social differences

from other Germans, and this can make their home seem unbearable; yet, they consider Germany

their home, although it is a different home from their ancestry. I choose to examine Levinas most

closely, in light of this, because of the connection he draws between home and the outside world,

mirrored in the vulnerability of German-Turks to the wider German society. This vulnerability,

appreciated by Levinas, thus allows me to consider home in the German-Turkish context as an

ethical issue that deals with the Other.

Levinas understood that a sense of home can manifest in a particular place, but this is

neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding what home means to us. Rather, Levinas

describes home as a way to recollect oneself, a retreat to the soul, away from the intersubjectivity

of the rest of the world, to try and make sense of it. The home is a reflection of the soul, where

we can feel safe and personal, almost as if in a land of refuge; though we are present as part of

the world, the home allows us to simultaneously step back and look at the world calmly and

composedly. Home also gives us labor, because with the recollection of who we are and what our

place in the world is comes understanding of what we are going to do next: it transforms the

being of our consciousness into the action of our exteriority. The condition for this recollection is

the Other: the Other shakes up the paradigm of subjectivity, and gives us reason to think about

our existence and how it is to be lived on earth meaningfully. The relationship with the Other is

defined by teaching, the production of exteriority that allows the Other to impress his or her

consciousness on our home and make a connection between us: we learn new things from the

world because if we are left to ourselves, there would be no reason to change. Our interaction

with the world is the reason that we grow.

This idea of home as a gateway to the soul that is affected by our relationships with the

outside world seems to explain both the personal feeling we can individually have for home,

which must be tailored to the many different kinds of homes, and the universality of the

existence of home throughout the world. Yet there is something about this definition of home

that seems odd when re-examined: we learn from others because if we are left to ourselves, we

don’t change and don’t grow. That seems peculiar to say, especially for a philosopher, for whom

inner reflection should perhaps be one of the most important means of inner growth. Is it true

that the home, the physical manifestation of our soul, only grows from connection to the outside?

I can think of an example that affirms this, such as bringing in new decorations from an outside

source to hang up. Yet, even this example is not totally clear-cut: hanging new decorations, even

if they were obtained from elsewhere, reflects my own inner taste. Maybe I suddenly feel that my

beige dining room doesn’t allow enough light, and a key lime green is more fitting. Maybe I just

moved into a new home, and I need to settle into it on my own to feel at home there. Maybe my

home reflects more my parents’ tastes, so that when I move into my own place, I finally have a

chance to make it my own. Growth can come from consideration, deliberation; not just from

events that happen on the outside, but learning from the events that happen on the outside.

Levinas seems to agree that this is an odd principle for a philosopher to stand by,

defending himself by saying “In this commerce with the infinity of exteriority or of height the

naïveté of the direct impulse, the naïveté of the being exercising itself as a force on the move, is

ashamed of its naïveté…. Commerce with the alterity of infinity does not offend like an opinion;

it does not limit the mind in a way inadmissible to a philosopher” (Levinas 171). In this, I do not

disagree: we can and do most certainly grow from our interaction with the outside world. Yet it

seems a mistake to me to imply that this is always how we should learn: to deny what the

philosopher has done over the course of history. He describes the limit of growth within a home

as a totality, because “Limitation is produced only within a totality, whereas the relation with the

Other breaks the ceiling of the totality” (Levinas 171). The metaphor is made all the more

complete with the destruction of the ceiling of the totality, or the ceiling of one’s home, opening

up to the Other beyond.

This is further elaborated on when he talks about hospitality. When relating to the Other,

Levinas claims that “No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of economy;

no face can be approached with empty hands and closed heart” (Levinas 172). The interaction

with the Other is formed out of the desire to become whole, that is, to find that exterior

personality that gives our soul life and meaning. To this end, we must transcend both our worldly

possessions through hospitality and our worldly knowledge through language and teaching:

when we give everything we have to another, when we make these transactions in possession and

teaching, then our homes grow as we do. Yet this seems to be wrong at its very foundation: how

is it that relationships with other people can always involve transactions of this or that nature?

Especially when the point of more intimate relationships, such as those of friends and lovers, is

that you don’t expect anything from the other but just enjoy their company. Again, while it

seems true that we can and do grow from our interactions with others, this doesn’t always need

to be the case. We are very capable of growing from within, and since our homes are a reflection

of our inner selves, they are capable of growing from within too.

It was something that his contemporary, Heidegger, had noticed. In his etymological

study into the meaning of home, Heidegger mentions that the word for dwelling is encompassed

by the word for building, bauen. But he points out that bauen also has another meaning, that of

cultivating or growth: “to cherish or protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil,

to cultivate the vine. Such building only takes care—it tends the growth that ripens into its fruit

of its own accord” (Heidegger 145). Based on Levinas’ belief in the importance of relations with

the Other as the culmination of our existence, it is hardly surprising that he might have

overlooked how the home is also a place for growth; yet this must be kept in mind as we try to

create a fitting description of home. The question for both seems to be where growth in the home

can lie, if home is both deeply personal and a gateway to the world. Heidegger doesn’t regard the

importance of the Other as Levinas does, whereas Levinas seems to disregard the idea of

personal growth in the home.

Perhaps Levinas was inclined to overlook growth within the home because of his belief

that the home, admittedly a part of who we are personally, is nevertheless still within the world.

This was a critique that he had of Heidegger, one that must be kept in mind: “In Being and Time

the home does not appear apart from the system of implements. But can the ‘in view of oneself’

characteristic of care be brought about without a disengagement from the situation, without a

recollection and without extraterritoriality—without being at home with oneself?” (Levinas 170).

If the home is intimately connected to the exterior world, the Other, as well as to each of us, we

must allow for how we can be part of this world. This thought complements his view of the

Other well, and could explain why he feels the Other must be linked to growth of the home. Yet

this claim seems to go too far, now making home more of something that is totally encapsulated

within the world. It seems to bypass the simultaneous nature of the home as both an extension of

each of us personally and still a part of the world around us.

We need to bear the importance of growth in mind, then, when we examine the rest of

Levinas’ ideas on home. Are his other ideas affected by this need for growth in home? Not all of

his ideas are, such as how home allows someone to feel at home, or how home can allow the

private self to manifest in the world. However, some ideas are affected. Levinas claims that “to

exist henceforth means to dwell. To dwell is… a recollection, a coming to oneself, a retreat home

as if in a land of refuge, which answers to a hospitality, an expectancy, a human welcome”

(Levinas 156). We have already seen that the second half of this thought, while still true, is not

the entire story of what is needed for home. So it can be true that to exist is a coming to oneself

which answers to a human welcome, but this need not necessarily be the case. If that human

welcome is not there, then for Levinas, that existence is a coming to oneself that stays exactly as

it is. Yet this can’t be the case, because we know of examples where there isn’t necessarily a

human welcome, for instance with an exile from his or her country who can learn what about his

or her home really matters, or with an immigrant who must come to terms with his or her home

when they might not be considered to totally belong there. Do we say that their homes do not

grow, or that their feeling of home cannot possibly grow at all?

Two other ideas that are intimately related to Levinas’ idea of home are his ideas on labor

and on language. These must then be explored to see how the change in my idea of home affects

them as well. With the reflection that comes with dwelling, labor becomes simply the action that

guides what one possesses, or comes in contact with. It again is an idea of how we relate to

things outside of our home, our subjective world. We come into contact with, meet, know,

experience other things, by acquiring them, and labor is how that happens: “The hand

accomplishes its proper function prior to every execution of a plan, every projection of a project,

every finality that would lead out of being at home with oneself…. Labor in its primary intention

is this acquisition, this movement toward oneself” (Levinas 159). It is a similar way or relating to

things as Levinas described relating to others; yet, in this case, it does not seem we are capable of

growing on our own as we were without relating to the Other. The Other opens us up to new

possibilities, as do objects of our labor, yet the purpose of the labor is to come into this contact

with other things: therefore, labor and the Other must be thought of as separate. Labor is a

specific way of coming into contact with and growing through the exteriority; the Other is in that

exteriority through which we can grow.

Language is explained by this conclusion too. Levinas explains language as “contact

across a distance, relation with the non-touchable” (Levinas 172), an attempt to connect with the

Other. It puts us in a world in common with the Other, and is “a first action over and above

labor, an action without action, even though speech involves the effort of labor, even though, as

incarnate thought, it inserts us into the world, with the risks and hazards of all action. At each

instant it exceeds this labor by the generosity of the offer it forthwith makes of this very labor”

(Levinas 174). Language is like a labor, since it is a method to help us relate to the exteriority,

but this is specifically a way of communicating the soul across to the Other. We can only

examine this as if we were examining labor, since it involves the effort of labor, though we must

bear in mind that it is not exactly like labor. Labor requires dwelling in that the hand recollects

and knows what it wants; so can we assume that language also acts after a retreat in on itself, that

language knows specifically that it is to connect with the Other. But since this is also a method,

and not an object, we do not need to make exceptions for growth in home because growth is not

what we are striving for here: we are simply striving for growth through the Other, and language

is thus only one method of obtaining that growth.

What about the first home, the body? For Levinas, it is not as if we are our bodies. The

body is something that we must give up someday when we die, a shelter for our soul, “my

possession according as my being maintains itself in a home at the limit of interiority and

exteriority” (Levinas 162). It is something that is at once home, intensely natural for each of us

to wield, responding to our thoughts and needs instantaneously through our body’s wiring, and

also a thing that houses the consciousness, a part of the environment that surrounds us. This state

is something that crops up often in Levinas’ work, that “To be a body is on the one hand to

stand… to be master of oneself, and, on the other hand, to stand on the earth, to be in the other,

and thus to be encumbered by one’s body. But… this encumberment is not produced as a pure

dependence; it forms the happiness of him who enjoys it…. To be at home with oneself in

something other than oneself… is concretized in corporeal experience” (Levinas 164). How is it

that we should grow within a body when we are in on only ourselves? If the body is our home,

then Levinas must be implying that we do not grow by ourselves, just from exposure to the

Other. Yet how can that be so, when growth is one of the fundamental parts of maturation into an

adult, when the body both literally grows by itself into a taller human and mentally grows with

the development of thought, as it learns to think for itself and comes to know more about itself?

An idea intimately related to the body, and the home in general, that Levinas considers is

the idea of death, and how home relates to it:

The dwelling, overcoming the insecurity of life, is a perpetual postponement of the expiration in which life risks foundering. The consciousness of death is the consciousness of the perpetual postponement of death, in the essential ignorance of its date. Enjoyment as the body that labors maintains itself in this primary postponement, that which opens the very dimension of time…. In patience the

imminence of defeat, but also a distance in its regard, coincide. The ambiguity of the body is consciousness. (Levinas 165)

This seems to be an understanding that recollection, which occurs in the home, gives rise

to consciousness of who we are, awareness. This consciousness moves us away from pure

physicality, which takes no stock of what is going on, and is not capable of recollection or,

importantly, is unaware of time. With this unawareness of time, we are unaware of the passage

of time as well as unable to foresee the future, that is, death. The recollection allowed for in

home, then, makes us conscious of death; but because we become conscious of it, we become

aware of how it is not here yet, how far away it can be for us. At the same time, we become

conscious of the time we are alive, and so our death is postponed. This postponement is not, nor

can it ever be, total: we all must die. It seems that Levinas is suggesting that the permanent

postponement of death would be logically possible if we could retreat completely out of the

world and into our homes, ourselves. However, this is physically impossible because the home is

a part of the world. The idea of home with growth doesn’t greatly impact Levinas’ view of death,

though it clarifies his own thoughts on home a little bit more. This view of death and home is

also compatible with the idea of home capable of growth, since a home with growth is still a

home where recollection can occur.

What we need, then, is an idea of home that does allow for growth. Such a conception is

not just for people who can build on new tastes, but also for people who might have a different

conception of home. The homeless, who, though they have by definition lost their home for one

reason or another, can find refuge or stability in carrying the same collection of newspapers or

resting at the same street corner, members of the diaspora, who spread to different places around

the world yet maintain a sense of connection with others in the diaspora, and immigrants, who

might be part of a country yet considered outsiders to it, to name a few. Home has to be

considered more dynamic than Levinas allows.

Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the matter can provide us with a springboard to an

enlightened conclusion. Her political and historical thoughts on what it means to be displaced

from one’s home are very insightful for chronicling growth and development within a home. She

describes how, following the chaos of World Wars I and II, large groups of people were all of a

sudden stateless, and became the responsibility of new and different governments that either

didn’t necessarily want them or know what to do with them. The rights that they had were

minimal, making their lives in their new countries difficult and “perfectly ‘superfluous’” (Arendt

375), from which their lives would then be in danger. These people, put simply, don’t belong to

“a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever” (Arendt 377), and the

hardships they suffer therefrom are numerous.

Home comes into play this way because the first loss for the rightless was the loss of

home, and the “social texture into which they were born and in which they established for

themselves a distinct place in the world” (Arendt 372). This is reflective of the great changes that

can overcome home, and shows the necessity that homes should have growth as well. People

who were stateless, or refugees, or immigrants in a new land, had lost or given up their original

homes and needed to make a new home elsewhere. This was to develop into their home from the

ground up, grown from their new situation by their comfort and belonging in their new society.

Arendt is aware that, following the loss of one’s home, the finding of a new one is hardly

possible because of the political organization. Once they were thrown out of the political life,

they were thrown out of active life altogether. For once one is inside the political life, “The more

highly developed a civilization, the more accomplished the world it has produced, the more at

home men feel within the artifice—the more they will resent everything they have not produced,

everything that is merely and mysteriously given to them” (Arendt 382). In here, we can see the

disagreement with Levinas’ conclusions again, that home should not allow for growth from

within but should be bestowed on us from the outside. Without a political life to include the

stateless, the existence with only the things they have not produced and have been given since

birth “can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and

sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love” (Arendt 382). This is in accord with

Levinas’ beliefs on how ethics should be conducted, though Arendt’s analysis reveals the

inadequacy felt by humans who believe in the bestowal of growth from the outside. Levinas’

belief can’t be the end of it.

This means that there should most certainly be room for growth in the concept of home.

Sometimes circumstances are unavoidable in which a home is no longer home. Suddenly, people

who are stateless are left to forge home anew, and if the state cannot provide it for them, they

have to do the best they can on their own. Imagine the immigrant, who is considered an outsider

in a new country and is not socially accepted into the country as a comrade; he or she was born

there, grew up there and knows no other home. Home is something that he or she would need to

come to terms with, and the longer the immigrant stays there, the more they feel at home there.

Imagine the refugees, who must abandon home due to unsafe conditions like war. We can

understand if they never lose their desire to return to that home someday, yet they have to learn

to adapt to a second home in a new place, and get used to the conditions that are there. Imagine

the nomad, who never has the ideal conception of home to begin with; he or she feels most at

home when he or she is not at home at all, and this feeling of being at home comes from the

inner necessity of journeying to new places. Arendt saw that such people could not live with

stationary concepts of home, and must be accounted for as well.

With this combination of Levinas’ and Arendt’s thought, we can reach a better

understanding of home that can account for many diverse types of experiences of home, even if

it might seem that they have lost or given up an essentialist notion of home completely. It

provides us with an ethico-political account of home that is quite useful in understanding what

home should entail and how we must view home. I will explore how this version of home as a

place of growth holds up in a case study of German-Turks in Germany, as immigrants and

outsiders in their society. By doing so, I hope to show that home must be viewed as fragile, that

it takes on a greater significance when we view it as fragile, and that it then leads us to become

more aware of the political and ethical responsibilities that might surround issues of home

around the world.

Chapter 3: Necessary Responsibilities of Home

Where does the German-Turk belong, Germany or Turkey? Someone of Turkish descent

born in Germany faces problems when answering that question. There is undoubtedly a political

spin on it: since the Gastarbeiter movement in the 1960’s, German-Turks have encountered

problems such as leaving behind their families, differences and blends between the two cultures,

prejudice and intolerance, identity questions, hostilities based on culture, and power issues

(Horrocks 47-53). When we consider each of these hardships individually, it seems surprising

that there would be a question that German-Turks should belong in Germany at all.

In response to each obstacle: home can seem incomplete without having one’s family

around, people who seem as much a part of our life as to make home livelier. Without the family,

unless one isn’t comfortable with one’s family, it seems more likely that one would feel alone.

Meanwhile, if one leaves a familiar culture and goes to a place with different beliefs and

customs, naturally it will feel strange to be in this new culture. While it may feel like a breath of

fresh air for some, who might really feel compatible in this new culture, it cannot be said that

everyone will enjoy leaving familiar contexts in this way. Certainly, since immigrant Turks were

outsiders to this new culture, there was and is prejudice and intolerance on the part of the

Germans towards these outsiders. Such prejudice makes it harder for one to settle in this new

home, where one does not feel welcomed or hospitality from the citizens living there. It deprives

one of the sense of belonging which can help to make home the refuge we seek. In addition to

the social prejudice and intolerance, which operates at a sociological level, there is political

prejudice too, such as citizenship laws that can only grant dual citizenship between Germany and

Turkey to the younger generations but not the older ones, legislation which was only passed

recently and is part of a debate that still rages (Heinrich). There are issues of power on the

political level that harken back to Arendt’s analysis, and are still trying to be resolved; but until

they are resolved, German-Turks are made to feel less welcome in a place that they might

consider home. All of these factors conspire together to complicate the issue of identity for

German-Turks living in Germany: do they really belong there? Are they German, or Turkish?

Are they both, or neither? This uncertainty, raised with the issues surrounding their home in

Germany, help to make this refuge not very safe.

This echoes Arendt’s thoughts that home, a human right, has not been granted to

foreigners in a new country; indeed, this status has proven to be so accurate for German-Turks

that Horrocks and Kolinsky describe them as “‘resident non-Germans’ to highlight the

paradoxical status of Turks and other foreign nationals who find themselves between acceptance

and exclusion” (Horrocks xi). For the vision of home as Levinas has it, a place for the self both

to find refuge as well as serve the Other, this simply cannot be home. The German-Turks are

made to feel as if this home is not theirs, and that they are not welcome there. There is hardly any

refuge for them. And yet, for the German-Turks as they settled in Germany for the Gastarbeiter

movement, and especially for the second- and third-generation German-Turks who were born

there, Germany became home. It was the land they lived in, where their families may have

moved too, where they received education, where they grew up. Here, we see that the immigrant

Turks, who for the most part decided not to leave Germany following the expiration of their

contracts as Gastarbeiter, home grew from within. It was not something that came from the

Other, in an environment where they were made to feel unwelcome, but it became their home

nonetheless. This illustrates clearly that home, as a refuge, is susceptible to any number of

factors that might inhibit it or allow for it to grow.

How can we say that home is perfect for the German-Turks? How can we say that

homeworlds are perfect reflections of the different circles that people inhabit, or where they

make good on their existence, or a safe place from the outside, or a source of hospitality to

others, as Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida have it? Home is a fragile refuge for them: it

can only be viewed as a place of refuge that is subject to change, which might at any point be

affected by both the outside and inside. If it is a safe place, it must contend with factors that

threaten it, or do affect it. Home is far from perfect: home is a place that is changing, and can

change at any moment, and we need to be aware of this if we are to understand the precarious

homes that some people have.

With this realization, what can we do to offer a more complete understanding of home?

We now have Levinas’ view of home as working for the Other, and we are now aware that it is a

place that is delicate and susceptible to a great many factors, as Arendt saw. We have seen that

this is not only the situation of German-Turks who have found home in Germany, but that it is

necessarily so. Because of these conclusions, home takes on a much greater significance. It is not

simply the untouchable refuge that we view it, but a part of the world that is susceptible to a

great many factors from without or within that cause it to change or develop. Lest we lose home

to such factors, it becomes something not to be taken for granted, that is, something that we must

cherish.

If you or I were told that we would lose our home in such a way, that we would

immigrate to a new country, where we were considered outsiders by that country’s citizens, how

would we react? We might do what we could to try and preserve the home that we have, so that

we wouldn’t lose it so easily. Failing that, we might cherish the time that we have left in our

home, actively trying to preserve every memory, every detail, everything that we love about our

home. Perhaps, in our new home, we would do what we could to try and bring old decorations or

old traditions from our home with us. When we recognize that home is under the threat of

change, it attains an added significance and becomes something that we truly appreciate for

when it is a refuge.

But with German-Turks in Germany, it’s more complex. The home that they have made

in Germany is under threat from forces such as leaving family behind or facing prejudice and

intolerance in their new societies, forces which can either be unavoidable or expected. Yet, with

home as such a fragile refuge, we know that there must be a greater awareness of the need to

preserve and appreciate home, especially for those most vulnerable. Thus, ethical and political

responsibilities exist in responding to the fragile or lost homes of vulnerable populations. Home

is under threat for German-Turks in Germany, and this on an ethical and political scale, as

Levinas and Arendt understood: and so we can learn how home is threatened ethically and

politically, and what ethical and political responsibility that entails.

Home can be recognized as a political good, not only for the German-Turks but for others

as well. Home, be it a political good or a political casualty, has a link to politics which is forged

through one’s political identity: the identity that one can feel by belonging to a nation is

powerful, to the point that “A nation – like all ‘imagined communities’ – is not merely an

extended web of relationships between those who share a certain identity; it also involves a

conception of the community to which the members belong” (Alcoff 272). This gives those in

the community, with a common identity, a sense of belonging and comradeship with each other

that is not given to those who don’t belong. This sense of belonging also includes having a home

in the community: “This identity provides us with a land in which we are at home, a history

which is ours, and a privileged access to a vast heritage of culture and creativity. It not only

provides us with a means to understand this heritage; it also assures us that it is ours” (Alcoff

272). There is a link between home and the political community: the political community defines

our identity, grouping us together with our comrades, and this gives us a sense of belonging,

from which we feel at home. If there is no sense of home, then there is no sense of belonging in

the political community, and anyone who doesn’t belong to the community politically shouldn’t

have a home.

But here we see a fallacy: someone who doesn’t belong to the community politically still

has the possibility of having home there, though that home manifests in a different way. This is

what we see in the situation of the German-Turks in Germany. Arendt provides a critique of

these political problems: that German-Turks are different and don’t belong in Germany, that they

are outsiders, and that they might be corrupting the culture. Such outsider status is also analyzed

well by Anderson in his book Imagined Communities. Anderson accurately describes the nation

as an anthropological concept, without any real, physical boundaries or characteristics, but as

such lives in the consciousness of people as much as gender and race:

It is an imagined political community…. imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion…. It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. (Anderson 6-7)

It seems remarkably curious, based on this, that nations should reject certain people,

citizens by right, as foreign or different, when the concept of the nation itself is superficial and

only arisen from past cultural ideals.

Moreover, this exclusion of political outsiders from having a home is challenged is

through the idea of transmigration: in this view, the earlier conception of the word ‘migrant’ is

abandoned in favor of a definition that accounts for both one’s former and current society based

on the interactions with both through networks and patterns of life (Kaya 486). This explains

how, in the case of German-Turks, they can live in Germany with pressures that threaten their

home, and yet still be able to call it home: as if they have one foot in each country, “Frequent

visits to Turkey, making investments in both places, constructing a ‘new home’ away from home

architecturally resembling the place left behind, having affiliations in both countries, and paying

relatively equal attention to German and Turkish media all show that German-Turks

simultaneously dwell in both countries” (Kaya 487). But even though German-Turks have been

able to settle in Germany as a home in spite of pressures they may face, it is still necessary to

recognize the responsibilities that come with home politically.

Therefore, if home is to be recognized on this political scale, then the political

responsibilities toward home must also be recognized. For the German-Turks, we have seen that

Germany is a home in spite of the pressures that may face them from the society or the politics.

This is perhaps because Germany has become as much a home as Turkey in the ways that

German-Turks connect with both lands, to the point that German-Turks have ceased viewing

Turkey as the place of eventual return and are weighing both countries equally (Kaya 489). We

have also seen that it is perhaps naïve to judge too swiftly who belongs to a nation and who

doesn’t when nations are imagined communities that are tied together by past cultural ideals; to

continue to judge people this way is to not allow for change in the nation, either. To try and

intervene in home politically, at least to inhibit one having home in a certain place, is not what

we should do: it becomes our political responsibility to allow for someone to have a home at a

place that they choose. Hannah Arendt states:

Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which are rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice, or when one is placed in a situation where, unless he commits a crime, his treatment by others does not depend on what he does or does not do. This extremity, and nothing else, is the situation of people deprived of human rights. They are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion. (Arendt 376)

This deprivation of rights by states, or the allowance by the state of conditions of

homelessness to persist, is inhumane since it leaves people without a sense of belonging to a

community. It becomes a political responsibility to allow people to belong.

Aside from the political responsibilities towards home, there is also the ethical dimension

of issues related to home, which Levinas also sought to account for. Although Levinas did not

allow for as much change in home as is needed, he did make home as much a place for meeting

the Other as a place for refuge of the self, which is why I found his analysis of home intriguing.

In order to best illustrate this in terms of German-Turks in Germany, I turn now to one particular

example: the infamous Döner-Morde. In the case of the Döner-Morde, nine German-Turkish

immigrants were murdered between 2000 and 2006. German-Turkish relatives and the German-

Turkish Mafia were suspected, but the real culprits were members of a neo-Nazi cell (Witte).

However, it was revealed that the police had sufficient reason to investigate the cell and didn’t,

leading to an uproar. Following this revelation, 55% of German-Turks believed that right-wing

extremists were protected by the state and about two-thirds of German-Turks believed that

German politicians tried to hush up the crimes (Witte).

The Döner-Morde, so named (and as such, politically incorrect) because of the stereotype

that German-Turks mainly work in Germany as owners of döner-kebap stands, stands that sell

the fast food marketed as Turkish food, led to overwhelming sorrow in the German-Turkish

population, as well as feelings of insecurity and distrust in the German government that once

invited them to their country as Gastarbeiter (Daği). This incident, with other incidents of ethnic

violence and discrimination, shattered the feeling of being at home in Germany: about 95% of

people of Turkish descent born in Germany say that they feel Turkish first (“Turks in

Germany”). These are not conditions of the natural environment that have come together to make

German-Turks feel unwelcome in a nation they have begun to call home; this is the work of the

people who live in Germany with them, from the media who dubs the murders with a politically

incorrect name, to the neo-Nazi cell who committed these heinous acts, to the police who didn’t

act. This schism between Germany and German-Turks culminated in 2010, when Chancellor

Angela Merkel proclaimed that the attempt at multiculturalism in Germany had failed (Weaver).

It further highlights the German state as having German citizens and the ‘resident non-Germans’,

rather than one people.

The belief that German-Turks will one day return to Turkey is long gone. Today, more

than three-quarters of German-Turks feel “well integrated into German society and want to stay

in the country long-term” (Witte). It leaves the German-Turks in a predicament: they feel

pressured from all sides, making their home very precarious, yet they still consider Germany

their home. This situation only serves to make the German-Turkish home that much more

unstable, with tension that has little outlet, and makes the sorrow that they feel with incidents

like the Döner-Morde associated with the home they live in.

From an ethical perspective, this surely cannot be right. To allow people to live in a home

where they constantly feel sorrow, mistrust, or insecurity is to expect them to live constantly on

edge, which isn’t healthy. Coming back to Levinas’ thoughts, that home is a place where one can

show hospitality to the Other, native Germans have failed to do so with regard to the German-

Turkish immigrants. According to Levinas, home is a place where one can be at home, where

one comes into the world “from a private domain, from being at home with himself, to which at

each moment he can retire” (Levinas 152). This is not the case for the German-Turks, who make

their home in a sometimes hostile environment. For the duty of one to the Other is to show

hospitality in the home, which is something fundamental to being human. “Recollection in a

home open to the Other—hospitality—is the concrete and initial fact of human recollection and

separation; it coincides with the Desire for the Other absolutely transcendent” (Levinas 172).

There is not enough hospitality being shown to German-Turks in Germany, who live in a state of

sorrow in their home. From the viewpoint of Levinas, greater ethical responsibility is needed to

insure a safe and welcome home for German-Turks.

We have now seen, in the case of the German-Turks in Germany, that home is a fragile,

delicate refuge that is susceptible to change of many kinds, both from without and within. This

state of home as a fragile refuge not only leads us to view it as more precious, and more

conscious of what affects it; we are now aware of different ethical and political responsibilities

that come with home. Though the German-Turkish case is very specific, and only one example

of many diverse issues regarding home, I consider the German-Turkish example to embody the

change I believe characteristic of home. For the German-Turks, their home in Germany is

threatened by incidents in the community as well as by evolving attitudes and resistance in

German-Turkish citizens. At the same time, Germany is still considered their home, a refuge

nonetheless, and thus this entails different political and ethical responsibilities to help maintain it

as such. The German-Turkish settlement into German life is far from resolved, however a deeper

understanding of the factors that come into play helps in formulating a more complete account of

home.

Finally, if home does embody an element of change, how far can home change? If home

does allow for change, then it can change in any which way, until every situation that can be

imagined would be home. However, we know this not to be true: some place might be home, but

not every place is home. How far a home can change until it is no longer a home? This is a

worthy problem, and though I have concluded that home must allow for change, I can only

speculate how far that can go. We have seen in the case of the German-Turks that home can be

affected by society, politics and ethics, as well as location, and yet hold fast. It is a refuge, and

though that refuge is fragile and can be affected from all sides, it is a refuge nonetheless. The

most I can offer is that home is rooted in one’s culture. Whether it is in the way one interacts

with the Other, how one is treated by the state, or in the history of one’s family, or the current

conditions of one’s family, home seems to be consistently rooted in culture, customs and

traditions. If these were to be changed against one’s wishes, one would be alienated from home.

Finally, it must be noted that though home must be viewed as a fragile refuge, the desire

to rebuild and recreate a home returns from where it was struck down. This is seen in the

unsettled case of the German-Turks, who face social and political resistance to their making a

home in Germany. German-Turks left home to come to work in a new country, and after

deciding to stay, new generations have faced inequality on many levels of society. Yet for most

German-Turks, Germany is still home to them, and rather than give up and go back to Turkey,

they seek to feel at home in Germany. This fragile refuge has durability to it; it endures harsh

challenges, and when it is destroyed in one way or another, can be recreated again. We must take

care in noting the fragility of home, and in our responsibilities to protect it. At the same time, we

can appreciate how home is cultivated, both by individuals and by communities who insure

security, how assistance is given when homes are damaged, and how political protection is

extended when homes are threatened or individuals risk being driven from their homes.

As Hannah Arendt has argued, the rightless have no protections if they lose their homes.

Having an adequate and complete philosophical conception of home insures that we can confront

the threats that jeopardize the right of people to have a secure home and address the difficult

philosophical questions that derive from the fragility of home.

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