MODERN GERMANY: A TWISTED VISION
Barkin, Kenneth D.
Occasionally, a book is published or a film released that leads one to realize that the old verities no longer hold. Heimat is such a work. A fifteen-and-one-half-hour film written and...
...His insensitivity in seeking sex with his wife, Maria, whom he abandoned nineteen years earlier, again categorizes him as contemptible...
...255...
...The older Simons never own a car, nor do they have hot water or a toilet in their two-hundred-year-old house...
...In this sense it is reminiscent of Thomas Mann's evocation, through the Buddenbrook family of Liibeck, of the changes engulfing Germany in the nineteenth century...
...Reitz is not haunted by the Nazi period nor is he particularly concerned with the issue of guilt for World War II and the Holocaust...
...With Heimat, Reitz has emerged as a devastating critic of all of Germany's presumed postwar successes...
...But Heimat is also a film about German history in the twentieth century and about the current malaise in West Germany, where the Green Party is providing a stiff challenge to the Social Democrats for primacy on the left and among university students...
...One must remember, there are no Jews, Communists, homosexuals, or Jehovah's Witnesses in Schabbach...
...REITZ'S CHOICE OF THE YEAR 1865 is no accident...
...When Maria dies in 1982, a Catholic priest presides at the funeral...
...By picturing the two local Nazis as a bumbling fool and the town bully, Reitz simplifies the villagers' political choices and, in a sense, trivializes the Nazi experience...
...War and technical inventiveness are indisputably linked together in Reitz's mind...
...Just as German nativists in the past rejected Britain as a model of soulless capitalism, Reitz now rejects America as a false God, conjured up by postwar liberals and socialists...
...The funeral of Maria leads all three brothers, Anton, Ernst, and Hermann, to recognize how important family and community are to them...
...Is Reitz taking a step forward...
...THE AMERICAN OCCUPIERS, in what is artistically the weakest part of the film, appear as shallow, rootless, money-grubbing materialists...
...that is a conjuring trick that even a village magician would have found difficult to carry off...
...Hermann's Porsche gets struck in traffic jams, which Reitz sees as the hallmark of the new Germany...
...Driving to Baden Baden (no doubt because the phone would be too impersonal a means of communication), Anton is disgusted to find his overweight father in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt...
...252 Since there is no synagogue in the village, Kristallnacht does not occur in Schabbach nor is it mentioned...
...Somewhat pompous and very nationalistic, Wiegand proudly sees his son become an SS recruit...
...He is clearly influenced by the current generation of social historians who believe that history can only be resurrected at the local or vernacular level...
...They lack any sense of Heimat...
...In a warehouse he has a work force tearing apart the chests to make three out of two, which can then be sold to young urban couples as authentic antiques...
...His only virtue is his willingness to finance an optical factory (smog-free) near the village to be run by his son, Anton, who has just returned from the Eastern front...
...His status mocks American denazification efforts and concern about German racism...
...By attacking the Americans, Reitz can reject both major parties in contemporary West Germany because the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats have been consistently pro-American...
...However, this approach also leads Reitz to slight all events that, in his view, had little impact on remote Schabbach...
...He is the only one in the village who refers to Berlin as the Reichshauptstadt (imperial capital...
...Anton returns to tell his workers that he will not sell and no one can destroy his business because it is based on Gemeinschaft (close primary ties...
...Thus, we hear little about: the Kapp Putsch, the inflation and beerhall putsch of 1923, the Great Depression, the mass slaughter of Jews or, for that matter, the student movement in the 1960s and the Turkish guest worker problem of recent vintage...
...Reitz is very clear about this: The Americans have money and nothing else to offer...
...In the respective houses, the viewer discerns a painting of Jesus on the Simons' wall and in succession photos of Hitler, Adenauer, and Erhard on the Wiegands' wall...
...Ostensibly, the film is an attempt to view German history from 1919 to 1982 through the lives of two farming families, the Simons and the Wiegands...
...Thus, most of the action in the film takes place in Schabbach or nearby Simmern with brief interludes in Berlin and on the Eastern front during World War II...
...For the villagers the Nazi years do not constitute a sea change in their lives or much of a change at all...
...The Nazis courted and won substantial support among farm253 ers and shopkeepers...
...When faced with this kind of rampant nostalgia in the 1890s, Max Weber termed it Harmoniesuppe (harmony soup or stew...
...Anton, Paul and Maria's son, employs 180 workers from nearby villages in his optical factory...
...Mathias is either ploughing with his oxen or making horseshoes on his anvil, as his father and grandfather did and as he expects his son to do...
...a Solzhenitsyn calling his compatriots home to their traditions and away from the ignoble West...
...Since the Nazi era is not a wastershed for Reitz, 1945 does not constitute the year zero, a new beginning...
...Many observers are troubled by the pervasive romanticism that characterizes much of the Green approach to issues and Heimat will, if anything, intensify this concern...
...At this point a German historian begins to get a sense of dijà vu...
...The years from 1940-43 are skipped entirely and we do not learn about the villagers' reaction to the victories over Poland, Holland, or France...
...If this were all, one could praise Reitz for the superb artistry of his 2,000 page manuscript and the haunting quality of his eleven-part epic tracing three generations in the remote fictitious village of Schabbach...
...While it would not be fair to say the Nazi years are a mere episode in the film, they certainly are not its focal point...
...Even folk medicine is shown to be the equal of professional medicine...
...As one moves into the postwar period, Reitz becomes an Old Testament prophet warning his fellow Germans that they have sold their souls for a bag of fool's gold...
...Hermann, now convinced that the village sounds are the source of his musical inspiration, moves his recording team to Schabbach, while Ernst decides to marry a local girl...
...As the film draws to a close in 1982, we see Hermann, the much younger half-brother of Ernst and Paul, who had left the village at nineteen (like Reitz) and is now a very successful composer in Munich, returning too late for his mother's funeral...
...Not only does Paul seek to sleep with his alienated and abandoned wife, Maria, but a trip by Paul and his brother, Eduard, to an American army base reminds Eduard of the brothel in Berlin where he met his wife before the war...
...in the 1920s a motorbike, in the 1930s a car, and after the war the latest pesticides and an electric milking machine...
...And, indeed, there is very little serious conflict or exercise of power (Herrschaft) in Reitz's Schabbach...
...The Nazis, for instance, are not faceless uniformed marching soldiers, but Eduard, the bumbling Simon boy who is convinced that there is gold in the village stream, and Wilfried, the cruel and arrogant son of Herr Wiegand, the mayor...
...The rhythms of village life are altered primarily by the introduction of new technology such as telephones, automobiles, and television rather than by elections or political events in distant Berlin...
...He knows all of his workers personally and if an error is made, he can track the error to the worker and correct it...
...Reitz has no Rousseauian view of rural life...
...It is disturbing that Reitz appears to be following the path of Rudolf Bahro, once a leading East German Marxist thinker, who upon coming to West Germany in 1979 joined the Greens and began to revive the tradition of Kulturpessimismus with his Spenglerian jeremiads about the West having gone off the right track in the Renaissance...
...A further parallel with earlier nativism comes with Reitz's portrait of the Americans as sexually loose...
...So it appears...
...His aim is to change radically the nature of the discourse about Germany's recent past...
...a fantasy of a conflict-free preindustrial social order in which power was absent and justice prevailed...
...This is interpretation with a vengeance...
...Or is he circling back to the latter part of the nineteenth century, when German nativists were decrying industrial capitalism and the perverse Jewish influence on German life...
...We also notice that the old World War I monument to the dead has been removed from the village center to ease traffic flow...
...They gradually become prosperous in the 1930s and Eduard Simon, now Nazi mayor of the district, expresses the wish that history would stop in the year 1935...
...Subsequently, Wilfried remains in Schabbach during the war, claiming poor health as the reason for his inability to fight...
...The three brothers are reconciled when they wander through their old house, searching for links with their past...
...By 1866 it was clear that Germany would shortly emerge as a major power...
...Reitz left this pastoral area, not far from Trier, in 1951 at the age of nineteen...
...To ensure that the prospective buyers will not be suspicious of these altered antiques, he has a chemist create an artificial scent similar to that of old German cupboards...
...When a team of Belgian industrialists seek to buy Anton out by threatening to have their multinational firm break his patents, Anton turns to his father for advice, only to discover that Paul has already sold his Detroit firm to IBM and lives in southern Germany...
...THIS APPROACH LEADS TO GREAT CONCRETENESS...
...The real gold is where Eduard Simon searched, but it is not in the stream, rather it is the stream itself, the surrounding forests and the brisk, clean air of the Hunsrück region...
...Like his earlier nativist forebears, Reitz makes a distinction between schaffendem (creative) and raffendem (exploitative) Jewish capitalism...
...On the other hand, Wilfried's sister, Maria, marries Paul Simon, moves into the Simon household and gradually replaces the aging Katharina as Schabbach's much-loved matriarch...
...She is compassionate, nonjudgmental and always has some words of folk wisdom and, when needed, home remedies for illness as well...
...Like Ginter Grass's The Tin Drum and Heinrich Boll's Billiards at Half Past Eight, Heimat signals a dramatic change in German thinking...
...In his essay of 1928 on "Conservative Thought," Karl Mannheim argued that the Marxian socialists purloined their critique of industrial capitalism from the romantic right...
...In contrast, Wiegand, their affluent Protestant neighbor, whose wife is rarely seen, is always the first in the village to buy the latest technology...
...Have the Americans replaced the Jews as the rootless cosmopolitans who threaten German innocence and probity...
...Outsiders in the 1920s are regarded with suspicion, especially those with dark complexions...
...A boy on a bike does come across a work camp, where a friendly guard instructs him in shooting accuracy, and in the 1920s young men in the nearby town break the windows of a Jew who is suspected of being a separatist (wanting the Rhineland to become independent of Germany...
...Paul's cowboy hat (although he lives in Detroit) and his smiling face in a village where no one smiles, mark him as a foreigner, a convert to another religion like his New Testament namesake...
...It is remarkable and inexplicable that Reitz ignores the successful Nazi appeal to the peasants and artisans in terms of the preservation of traditional values against the bolshevism emanating from the cities...
...The film devotes approximately as much time to the years 19331945 as to the succeeding twelve years and the twelve years after that...
...All Germans, he tells Anton, seek the year 1865, and he has spray cans that can make anything, even steel, 254 smell like that year...
...Like Ranier Werner Fassbinder, he is unimpressed with this new Germany, but unlike Fassbinder, he finds healthy traditions in Germany's rural past that can be revived...
...But that is all...
...For Reitz the hard life and simple verities are rewards in and of themselves...
...For Reitz the wrong turn clearly came with the Reformation and the end of Mariolatry...
...National history is rejected as too abstract and too far removed from the everyday life of the common citizen...
...Is this very far from older portrayals of swarthy Jews seducing innocent blond German women...
...His cowardly brutality is apparent when he coolly kills a wounded British flyer who can scarcely move...
...The old Simons do not sit around asking, "Who am I?" as their young grandson Hermann will in the 1950s, nor is old Mathias concerned with his appearance or obsessed with comfort...
...After her son Paul leaves his wife, Maria, and children without a word, she does not even pester him with questions upon his return nineteen years later...
...The village has a dung pit and flies are a continuing nuisance...
...Farm life is hard and one does not get rich from it...
...For Reitz, modernization is the false Messiah that lured Germany away from a vernacular world of traditional values and humane ideals...
...A fifteen-and-one-half-hour film written and directed by Edgar Reitz for German television, Heimat (which may be translated as home or roots) is at one level the nostalgic journey of a middle-aged German back to the provincial Hunsriick region in which he was raised...
...And one must admit that however disturbing its view of history, Heimat is, both in its range and acting, superior...
...Katharina, a large, warm-hearted matriarch, allows her kitchen to become the village center where townspeople meet to discuss their problems...
...HEIMAT IS ABOVE ALL A FILM ABOUT COMMUNITY and scale...
...At the end of the film, prostitutes have penetrated even Schabbach, where they confide to each other that farmers have become their best customers, and muse about the old days when they began with American soldiers paying in dollars...
...Paul, the Simon son who disappeared in 1927, returns briefly in 1946, now an American millionaire with a fancy car, black chauffeur and endless chocolate bars to distribute to the sounds of an army band (without baton twirlers) playing Glenn Miller's "In the Mood...
...It is one year before the German civil war between Prussia and Austria-Hungary, and five years before the German victory over France and the proclamation of the German national state...
...The Final Solution is mentioned casually at a village party by Wilfried Wiegand, who clearly understands what is happening, and one does see some civilian partisans shot on the Russian front...
...We feel Reitz's blood rising as we come to 1948...
...Telephones enable parents to speak to their sons at the front and modern farm technology destroys the pure Hunsruck air...
...Thus, a modest attempt is made to foreshadow the atrocities of World War II...
...But Reitz's model is more current...
...to ignore this is to distort history...
...When Eduard tries to romanticize his family to his new wife, Lucy, from Berlin, Katharina cuts him short...
...Karl Glasisch, a village farm worker who uses folk remedies for his illnesses, outlives all of his contemporaries...
...When the war comes in 1939, she says Germany will now pay the bill...
...IN CONTRAST TO THE "CREATIVE" CAPITALISM of Anton is his brother Ernst's business of selling aluminum siding and furniture to the local farmers so they will be up to date like the city people...
...Heimat drew an audience in the millions when it was shown on German television recently and was deemed a great success...
...Like many "Small Germans" of that period, Reitz would expand the walls surrounding Germany's medieval towns to the national borders so as to isolate the country from aliens...
...SINCE 1949 WEST GERMANY HAS ENJOYED an uninterrupted period of peace, prosperity, and democracy that has no parallel in the German past...
...The Nazis received their lowest vote in the cities that Reitz despises...
...Indeed, Reitz set about writing the script because he was so outraged at the stereotyped portrayal of Germans in the American television series on the Holocaust...
...When a drenching rain begins during the funeral, the villagers drop the coffin in the road and seek shelter...
...In many respects the heroes of Heimat are the eldest Simons, Mathias and Katharina, who were born in the 1870s and are constantly seen working in the fields, at the blacksmith's forge, and in the kitchen...
...Ernst, whom the farmers trust because of his local dialect, generously agrees to cart away their old rustic chests and door frames as well as the old beams that he replaces...
...Thus, Reitz launches a minor attack on the Common Market, although Anton, when frightened by the Belgian threats, whispers, "typically American...
...The black chauffeur is a reminder of American hypocrisy...
...In 1945 the Nazis depart, old Mathias dies, and black G.I.s with bubble gum arrive in Schabbach...
...something inconceivable in an earlier Schabbach where farmers worked in the rain...
...In short, he is a confidence man who buys Heimat from those who have it and sells it to those who feel the loss of it...
...Katharina's folk wisdom causes her to warn everyone about the modern habit of buying the latest mechanical playthings on credit...
...Wilfried abandons the local dialect for the harsh, clipped north German associated with the Nazis...
...Is the smile engraved on Paul Simon's face a substitute for the caricature of Jewish noses that marked nineteenth-century anti-Semitic tracts...
...That is, the scale of his firm and the local character of the work force allow for quality, which larger enterprises inevitably sacrifice in a frantic search for immediate profit...
...His indictment of postwar Germany is remorseless...
...It is a parallel that corresponds to nineteenthcentury allegations of excessive Jewish sensuality...
...FOR REITZ, INSOFAR AS HE SEEKS TO EXPLAIN the Nazis' coming to power, it is a result of upwardly mobile young Germans entranced with high technology and comfort...
...In a final scene a village family is shown to have adopted two Vietnamese orphans, which serves to remind us that the village has become more tolerant over time and that the Germans have to pay for the belligerence of the Americans in Asia...
...there are no voluptuous milkmaids or philosophical shepherds...
...Its success in the 1950s and 1960s is based on Anton's creativity and the clean air of the region...
...Heimat, which is bound to appeal to young German Greens and the few surviving pensioners who still believe that peasants are the fountain of youth for the German people, may once again denote a right-wing critique moving to the left...
...In Heimat, highways result in accidental deaths and ease the movement of troops...
...She repeatedly stands up to the Nazi Wilfried Wiegand and is not awed by his threats to report her to higher authorities...
...Paul does not even stay for his mother's funeral, making lame excuses about his visa running out and the call of business...
...Germany, the home of romanticism in the early nineteenth century, may well be on the verge of another wave of rejection of the modern world for an idealized past...
...In the new villagecentered German history of the twentieth century, Nazism and Hitler no longer occupy center stage...
...Paul advises him that it is easier to spend money than to make it...
...He is constantly in conflict with Katharina over the treatment of French POWs working in the village fields...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
