Die zweite Heimat: Chronik einer Jugend

I first saw Heimat 2 on BBC2 in the 90's when I was at art college living and moving among artists and musicians, hoping for future success. So 'The Second Home' - of friendships made after leaving the familial home, of striving for a professional excellence - strongly resonated with my living reality. I was captivated by the characters, the storytelling, the lyrical camera-work and above all by the music. In it I could divine the beginnings of German Electronic music, of 50's Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, Can, Neue, Faust of the 70's, the sound experiments of John Cage, Walter Carlos and the British electronic psychedelia of The White Noise. The soundtrack composer Nikos Mamangakis studied with Carl Orff of Carmina Burana-fame so I found its tastes contemporary to the Electronic Pop/ Sound Effects world.

I hadnt seen Heimat or Heimat 3 so I watched it as a whole in itself without a before or after. As someone else has commented, it is both epic and lyrical - historical and artistic. Many favourite moments including the wonderful voice of Gisela Muller (Evelyn), the Bach marimba of Daniel Smith (Juan), the piano-playing of Henry Arnold (Hermann) and the cello-playing of Salome Kammer (Clarissa).

I could write more but it's already been said here. Why can't British or US TV PRODUCE SUCH MASTERPIECES ? The Wire had the realism and politics and epic sweep of a city, David Lynch and Dennis Potter had imaginative tropes to their serialised TV work too but this is art-house and soap at its most cinematic and narrative sublime. It's never included in critics' choices of Best Films but it should be. Still as poetic and powerful as when I first saw it over 17 years ago. I watch the 3 boxed sets every autumn for their 'mellow fruitfulness'. Inspired and inspiring.

In 1984, Edgar Reitz surprised film-lovers all over the world with his epic opus Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany. Eight years later, he came up with a sequel, The Second Heimat: Chronicle of a Youth, which is even more astounding than its predecessor.

Actually, it's not really a sequel. It's more of a "midquel", as it covers events that took place between the ninth and eleventh episode of the first Heimat cycle.

The Second Heimat begins in 1960, four years after Hermann Simon (Henry Arnold) was separated from his first love, Klarchen, courtesy of his intolerant mother and elder brother (the controversy had to do with him being a minor, while she was about 25). Still angered by those events, the young man vows never to fall in love again (a grandiose, if creepy scene), and decides to move to Munich (like the director himself did in approximately the same period), hoping to become a professional composer after a few years spent at the music academy. He stays in Munich for ten years, and the thirteen two-hour episodes of Heimat 2 cover that time-frame, each of them focusing on a different person among Hermann's fellow students, people who, like him, are searching for a "second home country", be it music, film or something else, in which they can finally live peacefully.

Like the first Heimat, this second cycle is a perfect union of film and television: the episodic structure and the various romantic subplots make it look like a soap opera, in fact The Second Heimat needs to be seen in its entirety to be successfully embraced, whereas some chapters of Heimat 1 could be viewed as separate stories (in particular, the one concerning Hermann's teenage years). The style and content, however, is pure auteur cinema, with the familiar black and white/color transitions (actually, a tad more predictable this time around) and ambiguous characters, the latter element being underlined by the relationship between Hermann and cello player Clarissa Lichtblau (Salome Kammer): they clearly love each other, yet they keep embarking on affairs with other people, delaying the inevitable until it's too late. This time, Reitz seems to be more pessimistic regarding his characters ( at one point, Hermann is so disillusioned he says: "The Beatles are much better than us!"), building entire episodes around dark, controversial themes such as abortion and suicide. The decade he's exploring is not suitable for everyone, as some are scarred in dramatic ways by the pivotal events of the '60s (the '68 revolution especially).

Reitz also seems to have made this mini-series specifically for movie-buffs, given the numerous film references (including a brilliant Casablanca quote) and clever in-jokes (one episode is set in Venice, whose film festival had an important part in the Heimat saga's success). And since 1992, film-lovers have never ceased to thank him for delivering 26 of the most compelling hours ever committed to celluloid.

Zweite Heimat is a very engrossing film with wonderful characterization. After the first two or three episodes, I became very involved with the characters. Some you love, some you hate. It also gives an insight into German society. The story of a group of students trying to find their place in life is, however, universal. Although I am a second generation American, some of the parents in this film reminded me of my own parents, aunts and uncles whose roots are from Germany. I received the set of videos as a Christmas gift so that I could keep up my German. I have some problems understanding the characters who speak in dialect, but most of them speak "Hoch Deutsch." The subtitles do come in handy, although occasionally the white letters are difficult to see, especially when shown against snow! The photography is beautiful and made me long to visit Germany again.

This epic brings together a superbly-gifted cast and crew, a narrative depth superior to most novels, wonderful music, philosophy and a connection to LIFE that I find difficult to explain. To immerse oneself in Die Zweite Heimat is for me akin to a spiritual experience, similar to the awe one gets when looking at the stars in a clear night sky. The language, and use of both colour and monochrome segments adds to the dramatic impact. The film inspired me to go to Munich and visit some of the locations, including the Edgar Reitz office. From then on, I vowed to improve my German skills - after Die Zweite Heimat I feel almost German, as if I am in the head of the characters. I also try to match the piano playing of Henry Arnold (Hermann), but this is the one thing that will always elude me ! This drama is unparalleled and I have been fortunate to see it on BBC2 in the UK and SBS in Australia. The sequel, Heimat 3, is currently being filmed in Germany.

As much as I admire the artistic quality of these 13 films, I still like the original series of 11 "Heimat" films from the 80s even more and I think there's a reason why "Die zweite Heimat" was shown only once on German TV while there have been several reruns of "Heimat". Actually there are 2 reasons:

1) The TV scene in Germany has changed dramatically between 1983 and 1993: the two (+ one local) public channels back then are in competition with more than 15 private channels now. This was not a good thing for the attention span of the audience and the quality of the programming.

2) Apart from this general reason there's a problem with "Die zweite Heimat" itself IMO. Almost all the protagonists are ambitious artists (in various fields like music or film) with a high political awareness. In this sense they form an active avantgarde of Germany's society in the 60s, which is quite in contrast to the mostly passive protagonists of "Heimat", who just react to the turbulent times they live in. Although this gives Edgar Reitz the chance to paint an even more precise and detailed picture (because he was part of this avantgarde and knew people like Clarissa, Juan or Reinhard), it's harder for the viewer to identify with these people. An example: the girl from Detmold (can't remember her name) is on her way to become a left-wing extremist (RAF-terrorist?) long before 'ordinary' people join the APO in 1968. Being so much ahead of your time makes it very hard for your contemporaries (let alone the viewer of the films), to understand your feelings and motivations.

Nevertheless these films belong to the best German films of the 90s and I would love to see them again. If you also like this 'chronicle'-genre let me recommend two other German series made for TV which are nearly just as good IMO and deserve to be better known: "Rote Erde" is about some families who go through the changes in the Ruhr-area mining industry between about 1890 and 1919 (first 9 episodes) resp. 1923 and the 50s (second 4 episodes). "Löwengrube" is about a policeman's family in Munich over three generations in the 20th century (32 episodes).