THE CONCEPTUAL OPPOSITION “HOME – FOREIGN LAND” IN ORAL NARRATIVES OF UKRAINIAN EMIGRANTS ABOUT GERMANY

Abstract

The article analyzes the conceptual opposition «home – foreign land» in the oral narratives of Ukrainian migrants about Germany. Oral autobiographical stories reveal the mechanisms of self-identification, cultural perception of the «other», and intercultural adaptation. A key semantic tool for organizing experience is the binary category «one’s own – the alien», which in contemporary narratives is realized through the conceptual pair «home – foreign land». The concept of «home» represents security, family ties, and traditional norms of life, whereas «foreign land» reflects distance from one’s roots, the need to adapt to an unfamiliar order, while simultaneously acquiring traits of organization, social justice, and opportunity. The study is based on approximately 100 transcribed narrative interviews with Ukrainians aged 18 to 60 who lived or worked in Germany. Analysis of the narratives showed that the opposition «home – foreign land» is realized through spatial, axiological, and symbolic markers, including the image of a paradise garden as a utopian model of foreign space, which reinforces the contrast with the native environment. In the narratives, Germany emerges as both a heterotopia and a utopia: orderly, disciplined, clean, just, and predictable, while «home» functions as the space of familiar everyday life and implicit critique. The study demonstrates that the motif of «distant lands» transforms in contemporary migration narratives into a cognitive-semantic model through which narrators verbalize the experience of migration, construct the value coordinates of their personal «I» and collective «we», and delineate the boundaries between «own» and «alien». The results highlight the significance of oral autobiographical narratives as a source for understanding cultural representations of space, identity, and intercultural communication among contemporary Ukrainians.