Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease

Chapter 1. Nostalgia’s Early Modern Origins: Cultural Backgrounds

29 Linguistic origins can tell us much about a word’s initial semantic charge as well as the historical moment that felt the need to create it. It was in the opening words to his dissertation (which I used as one point of departure in my introduction) that Johannes Hofer in 1688 coined his neologism, nostalgia , to identify the object of his inquiry which, as he emphasized, already had a name in the Helvetian vernacular, though, lacking a medical name, it had never been scrutinized scientifically. The name had been heimweh or maladie du pays, and Hofer in his introduction hastens to add that it denoted a “wasting disease.” But he invented this new term, nostalgia, not only because he needed a title for his dissertation but also because he had to find its proper “place” in the then emerging field of nosology, because he had to justify the particular place of the phenomenon he investigated within a larger taxonomic system. Hofer coined the name well before the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) documents the first usage of nostalgia (1770) in the English language; even homesickness (1756) is first documented only more than a half-century later. Homesickness, thus the OED, was “at first a rendering of Ger. (Swiss) heimweh,” and it occurs first only in the English translation of Johann Georg Keyssler’s Neueste Reise durch Deutschland (1740; trans. 1756), a then standard travel guide. Keyssler in fact introduces both terms, homesickness as well as nostalgia, at the same time and as designating the same phenomenon . In detailing his “Observations on Switzerland and the Alps,” a “description of the Cantons, and the city of Bern,” Keyssler tutors his readers about an exotic disease whose local occurrence he thinks can be quantified with enlightened precision. He is in no doubt that the disease is intimately bound up with the unique locale of Switzerland and thus affects only the Swiss when abroad: Chapter 1 ��� Nostalgia’s Early Modern Origins: Cultural Backgrounds 30 Chapter 1 To this extraordinary height of the country is owing the fineness and subtility of the air in Switzerland, so that the Swissers, however bold and hardy, when abroad, feel a kind of anxiety and uneasy longing after the fresh air to which they were accustomed from their infancy, without being able to account for such disquietude. At least it is thus Scheuchzer endeavours to vindicate the nostalgia, pathopadridalgia [sic], or the heimweh, i.e. home-sickness, with which those of Bern are especially afflicted. Instances are not wanting, that on the recruits for the Swiss regiments piping or singing the cow-brawl, a common tune among the Alpine boors, the old soldiers have been seized with such passionate longings after their country, as have produced lassitudes, palpitations of the heart, watchings, an aversion to food, and slow hectic fevers, so that to prevent desertion, the singing or piping of this tune has been suppressed. In the Piedmontese service, every offence of this nature is punished with the gantlope.1 To verify his observations, Keyssler references two academic sources, an illustrative proof that nostalgia’s original scientific theories (the subject of chapter 3) played a vital role in the popular dissemination of both terms, homesickness no less than nostalgia.2 By mid-century, it seems, the seriousness of the disease first identified by Hofer had been widely recognized, well beyond the medical community. This first brief chapter will amplify the cultural and then the scientific background to Hofer’s linguistic creation. In singling out the “Swissers” and especially “those at Bern” as prone to this affliction, Keyssler also calls attention to the Swiss’s bold hardiness, a quality which however seems to vanish immediately and turn into a “slow hectic fever” when abroad. Keyssler’s scanty remarks about Swiss infantrymen deprived of the fresh air of their infancy point to military life yet also to the extraordinary height of the country, both as possible answers to this exotic phenomenon. It may be suggestive to call nostalgia a historical mobility disorder, and it may be suggested already by imagining a very different experience of travel in eighteenth-century Europe, especially in the German-speaking regions where to move from one local area to another really meant to voyage into a foreign place with a different dialect, foreign customs and laws. But the historical reasons for the emergence of pathological nostalgia in the seventeenth century are more specific, as we shall see, and...