In 2010, the screenwriter and producer Alex Gansa finished the script for a political thriller involving a deeply troubled C.I.A. agent and a soldier who had been turned by the Taliban, and began thinking about a title. He recalls that he wanted a word or phrase to conjure an atmosphere of “creepy subversion” — something sinister, xenophobic, un-American. “Shadowland”? No, not quite. “Homeland”? Perfect.  Ever since President George W. Bush, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, vowed to “strengthen the homeland” and authorized the establishment of a Department of Homeland Security, this peculiar coinage has burrowed its way into the American lexicon as if it were an earwig. In the current presidential campaign, “homeland” fills the air. In a December debate, both Senator Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich included among a president’s core obligations “protecting the homeland.”  Yet as Gansa intuited, a word ostensibly deployed to offer a sense of comfort instead unleashes deep undercurrents of anxiety. When the D.H.S. was first proposed in June 2002, the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan complained that the president should have found some less spine-chilling entity to secure from attack. Even Tom Ridge, the department’s first director, conceded that he had heard grumblings that “homeland” was un-American.  What is it about “homeland” that feels more like a violation than an affirmation of American identity? In traditional usage, the word evokes the link between a people and the state that is theirs, or that they wish to be theirs. With the founding of Israel in 1948, Jews gained a homeland. Palestinians lost one. “Homeland” throbs with the primal forces of state formation. The word points to a world of solidarity forged through blood ties, through ancient ritual and legend.  This ethnocentric conception of nationhood is what America’s founding generations gratefully left behind when they reached the New World, where they built a nation out of acquiescence to a shared social contract. It’s true that Americans identify intensely with the physical landscape — the little house on the prairie, the amber waves of grain, the Rockies and the Mississippi. In the novels of James Fenimore Cooper or the paintings of Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Cole, we see how the New World shapes a new people. And yet, save for the Native Americans, the people were not indigenous.  In “Landscape and Memory,” the historian Simon Schama describes the influence of topography — of forest, mountain and stream — on the formation of European identities. Long before it was a nation, he writes, Germany was an amalgam of tribes inhabiting a world of swamp and forest. The German Romantics revived this ancient cult as a means of fostering a national identity. Germans were not just people but a people, with an immemo­rial link to their land. They used the word heimat, or homeland, to evoke this deep bond and this racial identity. Heimat is a feminine noun, and it thus conveyed the idea of “motherland.”  Celia Applegate, a professor of German history at Vanderbilt University, writes that heimat “carries overwhelmingly cozy, warm, childhood, affectively tender connotations.” Hitler very consciously revived the cult of heimat, posing for photographs in sylvan settings and revitalizing the ancient rites of forest worship. Heimat was the warm alternative to the sterner vaterland (“fatherland”), also in common usage. The use of the former, Applegate notes, allowed the Nazis to “talk about loving your hometown, not hating the Jews.” Heimat converted the idea of the homeland into racial propaganda and rallying cry. Applegate says that she found it “incredibly creepy” — that word again — that the D.H.S. would hijack the cozy associations of heimat, as Hitler did, to rally citizens to the defense of the nation.  The nature bond of “homeland” need not be saturated in blood: In Israel, the Hebrew word moledet, also translated as “homeland,” evokes a very German sort of topographical mania, the naming of every rock and tree, the love of hiking and the outdoors. In its political aspect, however, the cause is less benign: The small Moledet Party called for the transfer of Palestinians from the West Bank so that Israel could reclaim all of what it sees as its historic territory — and what the Palestinians see as theirs.
In other countries, the word calls to mind a warm, shared past. In the United States, it has come to signify a permanently endangered, fearful place.