Returning to a foreign home: When ethnologist Heike Behrend visited her grandfather’s house after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she encountered the Christian prophet Gustaf Nagel at Arendsee in the Altmark region. Nagel was born in 1874 during the German Empire and died in 1952 in a mental asylum in the GDR. As part of the Lebensreform movement, the German nationalist prophet was subjected to various forms of persecution throughout his life. Heike Behrend reconstructs Gustaf Nagel’s biography on the basis of his self-portraits on postcards and his texts, which local historians had already collected and archived during the GDR era, as well as in conversations with them and the deceased. She also recounts conflicts, cooperation and friendship in a present in which disappointment and dissatisfaction with reunification are also finding expression in new forms of self-assertion among the inhabitants of the Altmark. In dialogue with them, she learns not only to recognise her own questions, but also what it means to generate ethnographic and historical knowledge together and in solidarity.

Searching for answers in times of social uncertainty is a recurring instinct. In her book on Gustaf Nagel, who offered supposed guidance around 1900, Heike Behrend brings a colourful figure of the era into focus. Nagel’s affinity with the Lebensreform movement (life reform movement) attracted many people – not least because he skilfully staged himself through postcards and photographs, the mass media of his time. Rather than presenting her ethnological perspective as a shortcoming, Behrend productively brings it into dialogue with, for example, the historian Christine Meyer. The result is an analysis that is as insightful as it is readable, showing how experiences of crisis, a longing for orientation, alternative ways of life, media staging and discourses of “home” are intertwined.

Heike Behrend, born in Stralsund in 1947, studied ethnology and religious studies in Munich, Vienna and Berlin. She worked ethnographically, especially in East Africa, taught at various universities in Germany and abroad and lives in Berlin. Her book “Incarnation of an Ape” (2020) has been awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2021 and has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Chinese.