by Allan Fish
(Germany 2013 225m) DVD2
Aka. Die Andere Heimat: Chronik einer Sehnsucht; Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision
Where the sun goes when it sets here
p Christian Reitz d Edgar Reitz w Edgar Reitz, Gert Heidenreich ph Gernot Roll ed Uwe Klimmeck m Michael Riessler art Anton Gerg, Hucky Horngerger
Jan Dieter Schneider (Jakob Simon), Antonio Bill (Henriette Niem), Maximilian Scheidt (Gustav Simon), Marita Breuer (Margarethe Simon), Rüdiger Kriese (Johann Simon), Philine Lembeck (Florine), Mélanie Fouché (Lena Seitz), Eva Zeidler (grandmother), Reinhar Paulus (uncle), Martin Habersheidt (Fürchtegott Niem), Christoph Luser (Franz Olm), Barbara Phillip (Mrs Niem), Andreas Külzer (Pastor Wiegand), Werner Herzog (Alexander von Humboldt),
After making the greatest trilogy of the German screen Edgar Reitz could be forgiven for considering his life’s work done. There had been Heimat: Fragments, but that had been no more than a retrospective highlights package, adding nothing to the work that had gone before. In 2013 the BBC unveiled the first series of Peter Moffat’s The Village, a series he intended to be a British Heimat. What he probably didn’t know in writing it was that Reitz was penning a new chapter himself, not a continuation, but a prologue, a prequel to the original work.
The location, the village of Schabbach, is the same, except that it’s the early 1840s not 1918. The village itself is barely a village, little more than a hamlet with a kirche, but with many other such villages in the vicinity. It’s the period before the revolutions of 1848, a time when Schabbach was still a part of the Rhineland state in western Germany, with its capital in Mainz. The Holy Roman Empire was no more and it was essentially under Prussian overlordship, but a bigger influence was coming from Emperor Pedro II of Portugal, who was campaigning for Europeans, and especially Germans, to up sticks and emigrate to the plains of South America. Here we find Jakob Simon, a dreamer who has learnt the native language of Cayacachua and dreams of escaping. Sadly, like another dreamer in Bedford Falls, his dreams are put on hold by familial devotion and essentially stolen by his brother Gustav, who first takes his girl Henriette when Jakob is imprisoned for a minor misdemeanour, and then later announces his intention to quit Germany and go to Brazil himself, leaving Jakob home with his otherwise helpless consumptive mother and blacksmith father.
There’s a sense of Dylan Thomas’ immortal words about his native Wales; land of my fathers, well my fathers can keep it. It’s a bleak tale, bracing as the poor villagers suffer bad harvests, terrible winters and outbreaks of diphtheria which send the child mortality rate through the roof. Cinematically it owes something to both Béla Tarr and Jan Troell, while sequences of departing wagon trains cannot help but recall images from a thousand westerns of frontier pioneers, but it’s clearly Reitz’s own work that casts the largest shadow. We know that Maria, the heroine of Heimat is a descendant of the village pastor here – they share the same name, Wiegand – and that the smithy will remain the Simon family’s meat and drink for a century to come. Even Marita Breuer, the original Maria, is on hand as Jakob’s mother. We as foreigners are made more aware than ever of the proximity of Schabbach to the French border and of its place in German geography (the red, black and gold of the German flag was essentially adopted from the flag of the Rhineland). But we’re also aware of a relationship to Germany’s artistic heritage, both before and after the 1840s, of Goethe, Karl May, Wagner, Heidegger, Syberberg and Herzog, another German who dreamt of South American jungles and succeeded where Jakob failed (he even makes a cameo appearance for his friend Reitz as a scientist). Like so many things in life, it comes full circle, ending as the first Heimat ended, with a death. “I have disowned my heritage” Jakob declares at one point, the exact opposite of Reitz’s own beliefs. A great final – or opening – work to a monumental achievement.
