Time & Perspective Quote by Erich von Stroheim

Homesickness is doing double duty here: it’s an alibi and a love letter, and von Stroheim knows exactly which parts to overplay. “It is not because I do not love my adopted land” opens like a defensive press statement, the kind an immigrant artist has to issue when admiration for the new country is assumed to require amnesia about the old one. The phrasing anticipates accusation. He’s preempting the charge of ingratitude before the feeling can even be named.

Then he pivots into pure cinema. Memory becomes a tracking shot: “happy, carefree days” when “life flowed at full tide,” then “flashing past… like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance.” This is an actor translating emotion into spectacle, and it’s also a sly confession: the past is being edited. Nostalgia isn’t an archive; it’s a highlight reel that erases the dull scenes and keeps the swashbuckling ones. By framing youth as “without responsibility,” he admits what’s really being mourned isn’t just Austria or Europe, but an earlier self unburdened by consequences.

The subtext sits in the word “adopted.” Adoption implies chosen belonging, but also an original separation that can’t be undone. For von Stroheim, an Austro-Hungarian emigrant who built a career in early Hollywood mythmaking, that tension is biography turned rhetoric: gratitude shadowed by loss, assimilation shadowed by performance. The quote doesn’t beg permission to miss home; it insists that missing home is the price of having more than one home at all.