Heimat (film series)

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homeland
genre Heimatfilm
Data
Country of production Germany
original language German
Production year (s) 1981 - 2012
Locations Hunsrück
script Edgar Reitz
idea Edgar Reitz
Director Edgar Reitz

Heimat is the title of a film trilogy by director and author Edgar Reitz . The three main locations of the event are the village smithy in the fictional community "Schabbach" in the Hunsrück , the "Fuchsbau-Villa" in Munich-Schwabing and the so-called "Günderrodehaus" in Oberwesel near the Loreley rock. But other places also appear: Berlin, Hamburg, Trier, Venice, Leipzig, Dülmen, Neuburg an der Donau, Wasserburg am Inn and many more. The author and director is interested in an unadulterated chronicle of simple life in the 20th century after the end of the first World War I to German unification and after that.

The movies

The individual parts of the trilogy were named Heimat 1 , Heimat 2 and Heimat 3 in the course of the DVD release . The trilogy was followed by an epilogue.

  • In 2012 Edgar Reitz made a film related to the Heimat trilogy under the title Die Andere Heimat, which deals with the emigration of many Hunsrückers to Brazil in the mid-19th century. The story revolves around members of the Simon family again, but in the year 1840. The focus is again on the Simon forge from the first three home rows. The village of Gehlweiler was set back to the 19th century as the main location with elaborate backdrops. Reitz wrote the script together with Gert Heidenreich . The production of the movie was made possible, among other things, by the cooperation with the ARD subsidiary Degeto and the broadcaster arte . The world premiere was at the Venice Film Festival on August 29, 2013, the German premiere took place on September 28, 2013 with two simultaneous screenings in Simmern in the Hunsrück. It opened in theaters on German Unity Day on October 3, 2013.

Basics

Residence of the Simon family

The 31 individual episodes are not intended as a TV series, even if they were shown on television and therefore often understood that way, but as full-length films; only at the beginning of the project there were also shorter individual films below the standard length of 90 minutes. Therefore, the three rows should not be referred to as "seasons", as has become common practice in TV series.

The events of the films, including the follow-up series The Second Home and Home 3 , are based to a certain extent on actual events. Edgar Reitz, who himself comes from the Hunsrück region, and his co-author Peter Steinbach brought together a lot from old daily newspapers, his own memoirs and from the stories of the villagers and interwoven it with the entire fictional work, which also has documentary features.

The mixed format of narrative and documentation that was created in this way, which is very appealing and which Edgar Reitz repeatedly explained, in view of the total playing time of more than 50 hours, also breaks new ground in quantitative terms, however, problems arose, initially those of cinematic continuity: For example, the two episodes of Paul Simon's life are incongruent. The silent and introverted into his radio tinkering, Paul Simon of the years since his return from the war mutates in America into an outward-looking, affable Mister Moneymaker who is hardly recognizable. The same applies to Hermann Simon in his homeland episodes 10 and 11 and his embodiment there. In the epilogue , the 31st film from the entire homeland , the narrator Lulu Simon, Hermann's daughter, comments on this circumstance somewhat embarrassed by stating that her father was also able to change his face.

The chronic-documentary form of representation also prevents in many cases from accompanying the protagonists' emotional development over a long period of time in a dramatic and creative way. The 'indifferent' story, which is relatively uninterested in the individual, repeatedly breaks off such a design. It is a feature of all Heimat films that massive damage to individuals remains narrative unprocessed. Maria is hit hard in her happiness by the wordless flight of her husband. When her husband reports back after years of absence, as if nothing had happened, she busily tries to organize his entry into Germany. The worst such documentary breakdown, which has no consequences, is the destruction of Hermann's relationship with Klärchen by the older half-brother Anton in episode 9 of the first row; Hermann later returns (in both incarnations) to Anton's friendly, brotherly greeting from Munich, as if nothing had happened. Even the evil deeds of individual people, such as the founder of the publishing house Cerphal in The Second Home , who cheated his Jewish partner out of his property, or the SS man Wiegand in the first row, who saw a crashed British bomber pilot who asks him for help, simply shot, are told, but seem to have no consequences. Reitz'sche poetics for this film series is such that special events that are reported are not "processed" in the usual manner. What happens in a novel or in a film adaptation of a novel after a special event - different reactions of people involved who come into conflict with one another, dramatic acceleration and deceleration of action, occurrence of further events that modify the main event, so-called turning points with problem solving and Heading for a “liberating” ending, be it in a happy ending or in a catastrophe - all of this is almost entirely missing in the Heimat films. The special event, and there is no lack of such, is not developed, but replaced, even repressed, by another special event that is not related to the one before, and this over and over again. In this way, a certain “reader” need is quite deliberately left unfulfilled. As in real life, the film series does not treat events of the greatest importance as components of an authoritative structure of action, but rather "insignificantly". The cinema-goer has to endure this just as he has to endure real life. Like the film characters, the reader / moviegoer sees himself drawn into the course of the indifferent story.

Heimat is about human destruction and recovery. But the documentary stream of the fates of those performing in their homeland is also a chronicle of German history. “The film reports on the road to fascism, the Nazi era, reconstruction and the economic miracle with its late effects. It is a film about love and death, about remembering and forgetting. Heimat is the story of those who always remain losers and of the others who - like Katz or Lucie - keep falling on their feet. "Karsten Witte, critic of the time wrote:" Heimat translates great German history into a dimension in which she is stripped of greatness, namely that of the little people who lead their lives with dignity even without greatness. Reitz steers his film through the heat flow of the story: a rare stroke of luck! "

In contrast to the Heimatfilm genre of the post-war years, the term “Heimat” in Edgar Reitz is not kitsched up, falsified and transported into a fairy tale, but appears realistic. At the same time, Reitz also transfigured Heimat insofar as he made it a place from which no one can escape, but remained romantically and emotionally connected, even if he tried to escape from it - like Paul or Hermann, for example. This is emphasized again and again by numerous means, including z. B. by the full-length song Robert Schumann's In der Fremde op. 39/1 based on a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff (“Red from the home behind the lightning bolts / The clouds come from here / But father and mother are long dead , / Nobody knows me there anymore. ... “). Conversely, however, this would mean that homeless individuals, who ultimately also exist, have no chance of fate. Because this is not the case, Reitz had his home followed by the sequence The Second Home , in which he shows that home can also be created secondary, as it were. In Munich's “Fuchsbau” a cohesive collective does not emerge as a group of blood relatives, but as a group of intellectual relatives in a cultural avant-garde, a family of a different kind that takes the greatest conceivable opposition to the archaic village family. In Heimat 3 there is finally a kind of synthesis between the genetic-local and the intellectual-worldwide home. The so-called Günderrodehaus in Oberwesel , in the vicinity of the Loreley , finally merges the Schabbacher Dorfschmiede with the Munich Fuchsbau to form a kind of final refuge for the contemporaries who are particularly similar. The last, 30th film calls this "Farewell to Schabbach". Edgar Reitz himself says: "In today's globalized world, home is no longer a term of place, but a term of time."

Edgar Reitz also broke new ground in terms of film craftsmanship. First of all, his almost complete departure from the film studio should be mentioned. Wherever he could, he shot at the original location in order to hear its 'participation' and 'whispering' and to make it visible. Such a procedure naturally required an extraordinarily large amount of technology, if only to avoid anachronisms. But bomb explosions or mining disasters also had to be arranged in the location , and the technically extremely difficult restoration of an old half-timbered house was almost completely documented on film.

A particularly noticeable design element is the constant alternation between black and white and color film, which of course sparked an extensive discussion of interpretation. Reitz and his cameraman Gernot Roll insisted, however, that they did not want to put a sophisticated idea into practice with this process, but that they had often made the choice of material spontaneously for practical reasons. An essential criterion was the idea that in our memories of the past color impressions rarely played a role, but that certain processes, such as the flying sparks in blacksmithing, could only be shown in color. It is noteworthy that the black and white portion predominates in the first home, while black and white and color film in home 2 is roughly the same. In Heimat 3, colored film material predominates.

In addition, the pictorial precision in detail - for example, house flies running over their faces in close-up shots remind of the village ambience - and the immense deliberation of Reitz's narrative style received a lot of praise from viewers and critics, stylistic devices that could only be realized because the temporal extension of the There were literally no limits to the project.

Finally, it must be mentioned that this is probably the first time in a feature film in which musicians appear significantly and not just casually, they are all played by actual musicians. The second home , in particular, consists of a good third of filmed musical performances. This could never have been achieved with the usual procedure, such as not showing the hands of a playing pianist or letting the player of a string instrument only gesticulate on his instrument. We experience Hermann's works live, including numerous original concert appearances by others, especially those by Salome Kammer , Edgar Reitz's wife, who is Clarissa Lichtblau in the film.

The musicality of the German dialects is also used authentically over and over again: In addition to the ubiquitous Hunsrücker Platt , authentic Swabian, Bavarian (for obvious reasons, particularly common), East Prussian, Berlin, Hamburg, Saxon, Franconian, Westphalian appear. Yes, even German with a foreign accent (Hungarian, Russian, Spanish) is presented meticulously. In this way, too , Heimat became an absolute novelty in film history, and the series received a great deal of international attention because of these film aesthetic innovations alone. The project received numerous awards.

literature

  • Marion Dollner: Longing for self- confinement . The endless odyssey of the mobilized hero Paul in the film "Heimat". With an interview with Edgar Reitz. Röhrig, St. Ingbert 2005, ISBN 978-3-86110-384-4 (= Mannheim Studies in Literary and Cultural Studies , Volume 35, also a dissertation at the University of Mannheim ).
  • Hans Kobialka: Woppenroth - a border town in the middle of the world . Ortsgemeinde, Woppenroth 1994, pp. 445–466 - to Heimat 1 .
  • Rachel Palfreyman: Edgar Reitz's "Heimat": Histories, Traditions, Fictions , Lang, Oxford / Bern / Berlin / Bruxelles / Frankfurt am Main / New York, NY / Vienna 2000, ISBN 978-3-906765-87-7 (= British and Irish Studies on German Language and Literature , Volume 21, English).
  • Edgar Reitz, Petra Kiener: The home trilogy . Rolf Heyne Collection, Munich 2004, ISBN 978-3-89910-240-6 .
  • Edgar Reitz: Heimat 3, chronicle of a turning point , story based on the six-part film Heimat 3, Knaus, Munich 2004, ISBN 978-3-8135-0248-0 .
  • Edgar Reitz; Michael Töteberg (ed.): Home location , work notes and future plans. Publishing house of the authors, Frankfurt am Main 2004; ISBN 978-3-88661-272-7 .
  • Edgar Reitz, Peter Steinbach: Home. A German chronicle. Script and reading book with all 658 scenes . Greno, Nördlingen 1988, ISBN 3-89190-899-7 .
  • Edgar Reitz: Home. A Chronicle in Pictures , Bucher, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-7658-0487-8 .
  • Edgar Reitz: Home - The Second Home. A documentation of the Heimat projects 1995 and 1997 , literature office, Mainz 1997, ISBN 3-930559-39-0 .

Web links

Commons : Heimat (Reitz)  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ SWR report on the shooting including an interview with Edgar Reitz
  2. ↑ Historic village for a new “Heimat” film ; Rheinzeitung, issue of December 31, 2011
  3. ↑ Eckhard Fuhr: Our village should get older , Die Welt, April 13, 2012
  4. ↑ Homepage of the Biennale 2013, with reference to “The Other Home” ( Memento from September 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Entry on the Facebook page of Heimat-Fanpage.de from June 20, 2013
  6. ↑ source unknown; In any case, the quote cannot be found under the now invalid URL Heimat - a chronicle in pictures and eleven parts 5 VHS in a package ( memento from April 5, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), which is still accessible via the Internet Archive .
  7. ↑ Karsten Witte: European Film Festival in Munich: Nobody is looking for a lost home . In: Die Zeit , No. 29/1984.