Rethinking Home, Belonging, and the Potentials of Transnationalism: Australian Hungarians after the Fall of the Berlin Wall

This article investigates how first‐generation Australian‐Hungarians’ physical and social conceptions of home have been reconfigured by the changing political settings in Hungary after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I investigate whether the structural transformation after 1989 enabled Hungarians in Australia to shift their perception of the homeland from an abstract image to the homeland as a lived experience. This article suggests three main theoretical implications for scholarly work on home. First, this article draws attention and provides a corrective to the often‐overlooked tension between home's dual meaning, its practical and symbolic, lived and yearned‐for dimensions. Second, the article theoretically delinks but does not disconnect the concepts of “home” and “belonging” making the relationship between the two something to be investigated rather than something to be assumed. And third, I argue for the importance of emotions within experiences of migration and finding home and belonging.