History and the Politics of Nostalgia

In 1688 the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer published a tract in which, after consider­ ing the terms nostomania and philopatridomania, he settles on a combination of the Greek words nostos and algos to describe the pain resulting from the desire to return to one’s home (381). Thus the word nostalgia was born, in a text claiming that a properly scientific term was lacking in order to accurately identify a condition that Hofer insisted was a clinical entity and, as such, was above all of medical interest. Throughout eighteenth-century Europe the word would gradually be adopted by specialists and laypeople alike to describe a disease provoked by excessive attachment to a distant homeland, a condition at first thought to be common particularly among natives of mountainous regions. By the end of the eighteenth century, the notion was expanded to include pathological attachment to any faraway place and, later, to distant times and persons. The fact that Hofer considered previously existing terms to be inadequate and felt the need to create an entirely new word, a word that, in turn, gained increasing currency in Europe, suggests that something new—a new way of feeling or a new way of thinking about an old feeling—was entering the world. Indeed, it will be argued here that nostalgia is a distinctly modern word, an idea dependent on a way of worlding that is distinctive to modernity. In due time, the disease came to be associated increasingly with groups—