Heimat was already one of cinema’s most extraordinary, majestic achievements. Edgar Reitz’s three series of films for German TV spent 53 hours exploring the humanity of the inhabitants of Schabbach, a Rhineland village much like Reitz's own roots, throughout Germany’s cataclysmic 20th century. It was a chronicle built from often fond, sometimes horrifying memories, mesmerically deep, leisurely detail, and a gorgeous cinematic eye. Reitz was 79 when he added nearly four further hours, revisiting Schabbach in 2012. This could have been hubris. Instead it’s a wonderful (presumably) last visit to the ordinary, magical world Reitz first conjured over 30 years ago.
Heimat is the particularly resonant German word for home, and leaving or staying there defines Reitz’s heroes; Heimat 2 follows precocious Hermann Simon’s adventures in Sixties Munich, before finally returning to a village which seems to think he never left. Home from Home finds his similarly bookish, idealistic young ancestor Jakob Simon (Jan Dieter Schneider) dreaming of a life in Brazil. Schabbach in the 1840s is groaning under economic depression and feudal oppression. The 1848 European revolutions are brewing, and processions of children’s coffins and families fleeing for Brazil’s promised land fill the roads.
Reitz draws unforced parallels between these economic migrants leaving a ravaged Europe and today’s prosperous continent, as it’s asked to receive similar hordes. But he is more interested in the loving and heartbreaking verities of human nature, unchanged even in 1942’s Nazi madness, or here 100 years before. Jakob’s seemingly doomed romance with Henriette (Antonia Bill, pictured above, with Philine Lembeck), his youthful passions, and his caring relationship with his mother Margarethe (Marita Breuer), all come together in a hugely moving closing scene as the villagers gather to hear a letter from Brazil. Emotions chase across their faces as they listen, imagining a faraway epic very like cinema.
Breuer was also the maternal hero of the original Heimat in 1984. Her presence here brings Reitz’s saga full circle, suggesting Schabbach, like Heimat, is eternal.
