Heimat - a German chronicle
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Heimat - a German chronicle |
| Country of production | Federal Republic of Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1984 |
| length | 924 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK from 6 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Edgar Reitz |
| script | Edgar Reitz , Peter Steinbach |
| production | Hans Kwiet , Edgar Reitz , Joachim von Mengershausen |
| music | Nicos Mamangakis |
| camera | Gernot Roll |
| cut | Heidi Handorf |
| occupation | |
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| chronology | |
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Successor → |
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Heimat - Eine deutsche Chronik was filmed in 1981/1982 and is the first part of the Heimat trilogy by director Edgar Reitz . It consists of eleven parts of varying lengths between 58 and 138 minutes. The film tells the story of Maria Simon, geb. Wiegand and her family from the fictional village of Schabbach in the Hunsrück . It is accompanied from the age of 19 (1919) to the age of 82 (1982). Embedded in village life, the life paths of the Schabbach families connect and disconnect in chronological order.
action
Part 1: Wanderlust (1919–1928)
The first film begins in 1919 with the return of Paul Simon from the First World War . He enters the world of the local blacksmiths around his father Mathias, mother Katharina, ailing brother Eduard and sister Pauline. The archaic family group, which gathers in the living room when Paul's homecoming, is hardly affected by the events of the war, despite the lost war.
A war memorial is inaugurated in memory of the numerous fallen soldiers in the area . The silent, withdrawn war returnee Paul has a great passion: radio technology . As a skilled hobbyist, he builds a receiver and thus creates access to the world for his home town of Schabbach.
In 1922 Paul falls in love with Apollonia, who is expecting a child from a French occupation soldier. Since Apollonia is not well-liked in the village and is persecuted by bad gossip - she is insulted as a gypsy and wrongly accused of having killed her child in a cesspool - she flees to Koblenz and later marries the child's father. Despite his unhappy love for Apollonia, Paul finally married Maria, the daughter of Mayor Alois Wiegand, and had children with her, Anton and Ernst.
In 1923 Pauline and Eduard witnessed how a separatist Jew was attacked by wanderers and the windows of his apartment were smashed with stones.
When Paul's brother Eduard saw geologists working on the local gold brook in 1927, he believed that he could find gold there and began to dig intensively with friends. But there is no gold, only copper oxide .
Paul, who also works as a forest worker, discovers a naked woman's corpse during his daily work. However, the perpetrator cannot be identified.
One day Paul leaves the house to “have a beer”. In fact, however, he is leaving Schabbach and his family for an indefinite period of time. Maria searches in vain for her husband and remains helpless and desperate.
Part 2: The Middle of the World (1928–1933)
Paul can be seen again in a scene after arriving on Ellis Island , USA. There he talks to a World War II veteran about his escape from home.
Brother Eduard Simon goes to Berlin to see Professor Sauerbruch because of his lung disease , who operates on him. Eduard's stay coincides with the National Socialists' seizure of power , and he witnesses the torchlight parades through the capital. While walking through the city at night, he met the prostitute Lucie, whom he married and took to Schabbach.
When he gets home, Eduard introduces Lucie to his family. He explains that Lucie comes from the “finest circles” in Berlin. The opportunistic Lucie instigates Eduard to join the SA ; she hopes to gain wealth and social prestige in this way.
Paul's mother Katharina travels to Bochum for the birthday of her brother, who, like the " Führer ", was born on April 20th . With her relatives she witnessed how her nephew Fritz, an avowed but now moderate communist , was arrested by the police and taken to a concentration camp.
At home in Schabbach there is no trace of the political events. The family enjoys their material happiness and is not interested in politics. Only Katharina criticizes the behavior of people in the new age and says that everything was only bought "on credit".
Part 3: Christmas like never before (1935)
Eduard's entry into the party is paying off. He becomes mayor of the larger neighboring village of Rhaunen and, at Lucie's urging, has a representative villa "with 52 windows" built. Lucie is blessed. She now has great hopes for the social rise.
Hans, the son of a socialist from the village, who is blind in one eye, discovers concentration camp inmates at work near Schabbach on one of his forays and is there by a guard who is instructed to shoot fugitive inmates to shoot Instructed about the rear sight and grain, which Hans was particularly capable of as a one-eyed man. When Hans tried out his new skills with an air rifle on the porcelain insulators of the recently erected telephone poles, he was picked up by a police officer and led to the mayor Eduard Simon. Eduard shows mercy and encourages Hans to develop his talent further.
Maria Simon's brother Wilfried Wiegand returned from an SS training in Berlin at Christmas 1935 and left a lasting impression on Lucie. Together with her, on the eve of the remilitarization of the Rhineland , he organized a meeting in the villa with the NSDAP party officials Alfred Rosenberg , Robert Ley and Wilhelm Frick . The three Nazi greats only stay short, so that Lucie hardly has the opportunity to put herself in the limelight as the hostess.
Part 4: Reichshöhenstrasse (1938)
The Hunsrück gets a trunk road, the Reichshöhenstrasse . Several thousand road construction workers from the Todt organization come to the Hunsrück for this and are quartered in the villages. The Franconian site manager Otto Wohlleben comes to live with the Simons in Schabbach and soon becomes friends with Maria's sons Anton and Ernst. He and Maria are also gradually getting closer, mainly because Otto has to wear his arm in a cast for a long time after an accident and Maria needs help. At a dance evening, the two are inseparable. Maria is still reluctant because she discovered a photo of a woman in Otto's room. She learns from Otto that it is his cousin, with whom he seems to have a close relationship. Nevertheless, there is hardly anything in the way of the love between Maria and Otto.
At the same time, Lucie gets a visit: Martina would like to see her former brothel boss from Berlin times again and stays in Lucie's and Edward's villa for a while. Eduard is happy about the memory of the time in Berlin. Lucie, on the other hand, doesn't want to know anything about her past and feels disturbed by Martina. In addition, she can hardly stand Edward's lethargy.
Part 5: Up and Away and Back (1938–1939)
The Reichshöhenstraße is finished and now does not lead from village to village to village like the old local roads, but from bunker to bunker, as the Schabbachers discover. Lucie brings her parents from Berlin to the Hunsrück, but she has a car accident on Reichshöhenstrasse. Your parents are killed.
Meanwhile, Maria had a brief happy time with Otto. Robert and Pauline are also getting better and better. Robert firmly believes in a good future and has put a hundred bottles of wine from the 37th vintage, a "vintage of the century", in the cellar. At this moment a letter from Paul arrives in Schabbach - the first sign of life after more than ten years. Paul lives in America and founded an electronics company in Detroit . Now he wants to see Schabbach again and announces his visit.
Maria is completely confused. In spite of everything, she feels obliged to her husband and prepares everything at home for his arrival. In the end, as if in a panic, she even separates from Otto, not knowing that she is already expecting a child from him. Shortly afterwards, at the end of August 1939, she goes to Hamburg with Anton to meet Paul at the port. But Paul is not allowed to leave the ship yet. He needs an Aryan certificate , but this cannot be provided so quickly. When the war began on September 1st, the ship with Paul on board left the port of Hamburg for America. Maria remains in Hamburg with Anton, completely confused - with the feeling that she has done everything wrong.
Part 6: Home Front (1943)
All men from Schabbach fit for war have moved in. Only the old people and the party officials stayed at home. Maria's brother Wilfried Wiegand, who is now a local farmer's leader, is one of them. He oversees several French prisoners of war who have to help with field work on the farms. When a British bomber crashes near Schabbach, Wilfried searches the forest for the pilot who survived seriously injured and asks Wilfried for help. However, Wilfried shoots the soldier in cold blood and later says that he had to shoot him while he was fleeing.
Maria now works for the Reichspost. She uses the company car to pick up Martha, Anton's bride, who is now in Russia, from the train station. Martha comes from Hamburg and is very pregnant. In Schabbach she is married to Anton in a long distance marriage.
“Hermännchen”, Maria's illegitimate child from Otto, is three years old. Meanwhile Otto had himself transferred to the demolition squad to defuse duds. When he came to the air force training center in the Eifel, he learned from Ernst, who was stationed there, that he had a son with Maria.
Part 7: The Soldiers' Love (1944)
On the Eastern Front, Anton learns how war propaganda works. He is a camera assistant at the German newsreel , and the more desperate the war situation becomes, the more the army command expects heroic images from the propaganda company. The reality of war must not be filmed. In a secret mission, Anton witnesses how the Wehrmacht shoots several partisans in the forest. His team has to film the process for the secret registry.
At home, Otto Wohlleben was given the opportunity to come to Schabbach on the way to work. He would like to see Maria again and get to know his son Hermann. After initial caution, Otto and Maria are soon as familiar again as they were before the war and spend the night talking long while the enemy bomber formations fly over the village outside. The next morning Otto drives on to his next assignment. He has to defuse a dud on a railway site. But this time the bomb explodes and kills Otto. Grandfather Mathias Simon also dies at the beginning of 1945 after lying in bed sick for a long time.
A little later, American soldiers march into the region. They confiscate Lucie and Eduard's villa. However, Lucie quickly senses the possibility of achieving social advancement, perhaps with the help of the Americans.
Part 8: The American (1945-1947)
Shortly after the end of the war, the presence of the occupying power in Schabbach is commonplace. In May 1946 Paul Simon appeared in Schabbach, in a large limousine and with a chauffeur. The whole of Schabbach is excited, the family gathers around the American, who is clearly enjoying the hustle and bustle. Only Maria stays at a distance. When Paul grandly treats the Schabbachers to a reunion party and wants to go to Maria's bedroom after the party, she rejects him. Maria later tries to find out from Paul why he disappeared without a word, but she gets no answer.
Maria's sons Ernst and Anton survived the war. Ernst, a passionate aviator since his youth, gets by with disreputable deals, but avoids coming to Schabbach, even though he lives nearby. Anton comes home in 1947. He escaped from Soviet captivity and walked more than 5,000 kilometers home from Novosibirsk. During his long march he planned his future very carefully.
Shortly after Anton arrived in Schabbach, grandmother Katharina Simon dies. Son Paul is returning to America before his mother's funeral because his residence permit has expired. Maria shows Paul that she can live better with this “real” farewell than with Paul's sudden disappearance in 1928.
Part 9: Hermännchen (1955–1956)
The Schabbachers have achieved the economic miracle . Anton founded an optical factory based on many patents that he developed. The former war pilot Ernst, supported by his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy timber merchant, also runs his own company in the wood processing industry. However, he later went bankrupt because wood transport by helicopter turned out to be uneconomical. His marriage also falls apart as a result.
The 16-year-old Hermann is still going to school, the only one from Schabbach, to the grammar school 35 kilometers away, looked after by his mother Maria, whose pride he is. One day he should become an engineer like his father, but above all he develops musical talents. He plays self-composed and self-written songs on his guitar. He falls in love with Klärchen Sisse, who is eleven years his senior. She has lived with the Simons since the end of the war and came to the Hunsrück from the destroyed Ruhr area. Now she works as a secretary in Anton's optics company.
A passionate love story develops between Hermann and Klärchen, which of course nobody is allowed to find out about. But then Klärchen becomes pregnant by Hermann and has the child aborted. The whole thing is exposed and shakes family life. Maria is badly hit. Hermann's brother Anton threatens to destroy Klärchen's life if she does not immediately disappear from Hermann's life. Klärchen and Hermann then only see each other once more. Finally, Klärchen leaves the Hunsrück, and Hermann, in desperate mourning for his broken love and in profound hatred for his family, decides to leave Schabbach forever as soon as he is old enough.
Part 10: The Proud Years (1967–1969)
In the 1960s, Anton became increasingly successful and attracted the interest of a foreign group with his optical factory. He is offered 60 million marks for his company and for all patents. Anton is quite shocked and asks for time to think it over. Together with his wife Martha, he decides to talk to his father in America about it.
Anton learns that his father Paul is currently in Baden-Baden. There Paul financially supports his stepson Hermann, who is now a well-known composer and who is preparing the performance of an electronic sound symphony on Südwestfunk .
Paul advises Anton to sell his factory, as he, Paul, has meanwhile also done. But Anton feels completely misunderstood and leaves again. He is attached to his life's work and decides to turn down the offer to buy. In the meantime, rumors and unrest have spread among his employees, but Anton can calm the workforce with his decision. With his attitude, Anton is increasingly alienating himself from his brother Ernst, who buys up the facilities of old farms in the area in order to sell them, among other things, as rustic restaurant facilities throughout Germany, while he persuades the homeowners to use ugly modern facades.
Meanwhile, the performance of Hermann's symphony on the radio is approaching. The villagers gather to listen in the village mug, but are then disturbed and irritated by the modern, puzzling sounds with which they cannot do anything. Maria is also disappointed that Hermann has become so strange to her. Only Glasisch-Karl, the village original, likes the music because he hears birds singing in it - and hits the nail on the head, because Hermann actually built nightingales into his music.
Part 11: The Festival of the Living and the Dead (1982)
Maria Simon dies in 1982 at the age of 82, she was always as old as the century. For her funeral, husband Paul also finds his way to Schabbach. Hermann is late because he did not find out about his mother's death in time. As he drives into the village, he comes across his mother's coffin, which the mourners had to leave in a rush in the middle of the street during a thunderstorm. He and his stepfather Paul feel how much they miss Maria.
At the village funeral feast, the mourners remember events that they experienced with Maria. When workers from Ernst's antique company wanted to inspect the furnishings in the Simon House on the day of the funeral, Anton indignantly confronted his brother Ernst and boarded up his parents' house. Anton is in trouble with his optics factory and is hoping for subsidies from the federal government. The uncertainty puts him under increasing stress. At the annual village fair, which begins shortly thereafter, he suffers a hearing loss.
Glasisch-Karl, the village original and illegitimate son of Marie-Goot, who has appeared in each of the ten films so far and is a kind of local chronicler, but has no part in any of the human problematic relationships in the village, also dies at the fair. In a dream-like film scene, he leaves his body and, as a young man, approaches the brightly shining entrance of the village hall and enters. All of the deceased Schabbachers gather in the hall for their own festival, the climax of which is the arrival of Maria. At these moments, the living villagers try in vain to get into the hall, which for some inexplicable reason is locked but brightly lit.
The longest sequence in the film is the repetitive village fairground attractions. Two unemployed prostitutes stand at a counter. One speaks broad Bavarian, the other Hamburgisch.
Hermann, who is very preoccupied with the return to Schabbach and the memories of his own roots, finally composes some choral songs in the Hunsrücker Platt . In the slate caves near Schabbach, he has a Hunsrück choir perform his latest work.
This ends the first series of Heimat films.
backgrounds
Edgar Reitz developed the story of the Simon family out of an artistic crisis. When his film “ Der Schneider von Ulm ” flopped in 1978 and almost ruined it economically, Reitz withdrew to Sylt, where he stayed for some time in a holiday home owned by friends. There he thought for a long time about his origins and his career. A first script emerged from this reflection.
In 1979/80 Reitz finally retired to the Hunsrück to work on the script together with Peter Steinbach . Both rented a log cabin in Woppenroth and kept meeting numerous villagers at Gasthof Molz in order to be inspired by the stories and anecdotes of the region. At the same time, the documentary film “Stories from the Hunsrückdörfern”, a kind of prologue to “Heimat”, was made from this work.
Reitz initially wanted to call the project “Made in Germany”, as it says on the stone that can be seen in the opening credits of the film. “Geheischnis”, a term from the Hunsrück plateau, was also considered a brief title. Allegedly it was then the film producer Bernd Eichinger who convinced Reitz to name the film "Heimat", which was a courageous decision in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, the term Heimat had a negative connotation, partly because of the Nazis' blood and soil ideology, but also against the backdrop of the so-called Heimatfilme of the 1950s.
The shooting of "Heimat" began in 1980, mainly in the two Hunsrück villages of Gehlweiler and Woppenroth , which formed the core of "Schabbach". Edgar Reitz came up with the idea for the place name when he came across the family name Schabbach in the cemetery in Bischofsdhron near his birthplace in Morbach .
Part 9 - "Hermännchen" - is the longest of the first season and has special significance for the entire work, as here, not after part 11, for example, the second series ( The Second Home ) continues. Film 1 of "Second Home" begins with Hermann's desperate scenes from part 9 of the first series and with his departure for Munich.
The shooting lasted until 1982. The premiere took place on June 30, 1984 in the ARRI cinema in Munich .
In 1987, it was broadcast in the UK on eleven consecutive nights on BBC Two , where it became a cult series .
In 2005, due to a cinema inquiry from Italy, Reitz found that the last cinema copy received could no longer be played. In addition, the materials in his archive could no longer be used due to aging processes. He tried to raise funds for a restoration of the film negatives in the Federal Archives. The digitization and processing took almost five years, and he carefully edited the films so that the series now consists of 7 parts in a length suitable for the cinema. On 7./8. February 2015 the premiere of the elaborately digitally restored theatrical version of Heimat took place in Mainz on 6/7. June 2015 the series ran in Munich's ARRI cinema, the location of the 1984 cinema premiere.
Awards
- In 1984 the film won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice International Film Festival .
- In 1985 Edgar Reitz , Peter Steinbach and Gernot Roll received the Adolf Grimme Gold Prize for the series Hermännchen and for the entire series .
- In 1985 Marita Breuer was awarded the Bavarian Film Prize as an actress.
- In 1986 the film won an ALFS Award for Best Foreign Film at the London Critics Circle Film Awards .
literature
- Manuela Reichart: Heimat - A chronicle in eleven parts. In: Norbert Grob , Hans Helmut Prinzler , Eric Rentschler (Ed.): New German Film. Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-019016-6 , pp. 338-345. (With references)
- 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)
Web links
- Heimat - A German Chronicle in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Film protocol, information about actors and locations and much more at heimat123.de
- www.heimat-fanpage.de Portal about Reitz and his films
Individual evidence
- ↑ Die Andere Heimat: Edgar Reitz's epic German drama gets a cinematic prequel , in The Guardian of October 1, 2013; accessed on June 23, 2016
- ↑ Heimat - The theatrical version. Remastered ( Memento of the original from August 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
