The most sublime case of monomania in European cinema, director Edgar Reitz has dedicated much of his life to recreating modern German history on screen. Heimat, his 1984 TV series, ran for more than 15 hours, tracing the fortunes of a family from its rural Prussian roots, starting in 1919; its title, meaning homeland, reclaimed the term from the disreputable connotations it had acquired in the Nazi era. Reitz later made a second tranche covering the 1960s in detail, then a third series which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you include the female-focused “annexe”, Heimat Fragments, that makes 54 hours – now rounded up to 58 with the addition of Home From Home, Reitz’s prequel to the series.
This new chapter focuses primarily on a single character, Jakob, a 19th-century forebear of the Simon clan from Reitz’s fictional village of Schabbach in the Hunsrück region. The Hunsrück of the 1840s is beset by poverty and profound social injustice, although French-inspired ideas of revolution are in the air. It’s also a time of widespread migration to Brazil – the “andere Heimat”, or other homeland, of the German title. Jakob Simon is a poor blacksmith’s son but an enthused autodidact and scholar of South American languages. He fervently dreams of emigrating, but much conspires to delay his departure, beginning with his hesitant courtship of Jettchen, a girl from a nearby village. But Jakob’s destiny doesn’t follow the expected path, largely because of events on the fateful night of the annual “smearcase” fair (it’s a traditional cottage cheese, apparently). This is the film’s centrepiece, a tense, thickly populated accumulation of events that Reitz orchestrates with the whirling dynamism and complexity of a scene from Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.
Photographed magnificently in widescreen black and white by Gernot Roll, and designed with encyclopedic minuteness, initially by the late Toni Gerg, every image has the ring of authenticity – each hat, each wagon wheel, even each horse somehow looking quintessentially 1840s. But in this film, Reitz slightly veers away from his customary realism to catch the spirit of the epoch’s romanticism. Now and then he’ll insert patches of colour into the digital black and white – a blazing horseshoe, a patch of blue wall, a deep orange translucent stone. The effect is magical at first, but soon wears off to become distracting or, worse, kitsch. This is not the only effect that distracts. There’s also a sometimes over-flamboyant use of Steadicam – whirling round the village, sweeping over fields, over-emphatically reminding us: “You are there – in the thick of it all!” And, for all the rigour of his realism, Reitz sometimes can’t resist such overstatements as planting a barefoot urchin in a gutter to remind us that times are hard.
But what’s consistently brilliant is the casting. The script may initially overstate the case for Jakob’s visionary character by having everyone bang on about him “always staring into the distance” – you almost expect him to walk in and announce that’s he swapped the cow for magic beans. But throughout, Jan Dieter Schneider’s breathless, engagingly candid performance tells us all we need to know about the lad’s wide-eyed exaltation. Antonia Bill is very affecting as the disarmingly up-for-it Jettchen, Maximilian Scheidt brings a sombre weight as Jakob’s more muscular brother, and they’re accompanied by a vivid host of wizened grandparents, deranged relatives, contemptuous nobles. Then there’s Jakob’s mother, played by Marita Breuer. I thought she looked familiar, then realised it was because she played a central figure (therefore this character’s descendant) in the first Heimat. There’s also a last-minute cameo from a certain very well-known German film-maker, playing an eminent historical figure; it’s entertaining but it breaks the illusion catastrophically.
No doubt the time is ripe for reappraisal of the vast landmass of the overall Heimat project: it seems to have gone down in history as a magnificent prodigy rather than as a masterpiece, and it would be interesting to see how the whole thing stands up now (yes, but then there’s Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain waiting to be read…). As for this latest chronicle, for all its flaws, it’s evocative, surprising and very entertaining. It rounds off – or starts – the series satisfyingly and marks the completion of a remarkable achievement. Unless, of course, Reitz, now 82, takes an interest in the 18th-century reign of Frederick the Great, in which case we’ll continue this discussion 10 years from now.
