Heimat
Homeland Security
The Word They Chose
In February 2001, seven months before the attacks that would reshape American governance, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo in which he observed: "The word 'homeland' is a strange word. 'Homeland' defense sounds more German than American." He was right. And then they used it anyway.
When the Bush administration unveiled the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, a word floated into American political discourse that had no history in our national vocabulary. We had fought two world wars, a Cold War, a Civil War. We had the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the National Guard. We had patriots and nationalists and flag-wavers of every stripe.
But we had never called our country "the homeland."
I remember hearing it and feeling something cold crawl up my spine. The word had weight. It had echoes. It sounded like something translated from another language by someone who didn't quite understand why the original carried such freight.
That's because it was.
Heimat. The German word for homeland. Prior to 1934, Germans referred to their country as the Fatherland, the Motherland, their nation. Then at the Nuremberg Rally, Rudolf Hess—Hitler's deputy—announced that "thanks to the Führer's leadership, Germany will become the homeland." The Nazi regime loved the word. They attached it to everything. Blut und Boden. Blood and soil. We Germans are products of this earth, a race unique from all others. This is our homeland.
After Germany's defeat, the word nearly vanished from German vernacular. Post-war Germans were ashamed to use a term that had become synonymous with genocide, territorial expansion, and racial supremacy.
But here in the United States, in 2002, the media managed to completely ignore this history. Twenty-two federal agencies were merged into a new department, and nobody in Washington seemed to notice—or care—that we had named it after a Nazi concept.
