REVIEWED - HEIMAT 3: Edgar Reitz's German epic comes to an unsatisfactory finale, writes Donald Clarke
When Edgar Reitz began planning the first batch of Heimat - either a television series with a cinematic sensibility or a huge film that works well on the small screen - his main models were literary. And, sure enough, Reitz's unhurried meander through 20th-century German history did have the quality of an engrossing roman fleuve about it.
Like Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time or the Barsetshire novels of Anthony Trollope, Heimat (initially released in 1984, followed by a second sequence in 1992) revealed its patterns and purposes slowly. Detailing the adventures of a rural family from the end of the second World War to the early 1980s, the series stitched together the personal and the historical - an episode in Heimat 2 was coloured by the assassination of Kennedy - to produce a gripping saga that somehow managed to avoid smelling of soap.
Since the release of Heimat 2, we have been treated to similar dramas such as the BBC's fine Our Friends in the North and the recent Italian epic The Best of Youth. Sad to relate, Heimat 3 (subtitled A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings), though exquisitely acted and rich in memorable images, does not compare favourably with those series or with its own predecessors.
Taking up the story of the composer and conductor Hermann Simon (actor Henry Arnold's hair now inexpertly dyed a battleship grey), the new sequence leads us from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the new millennium without ever satisfactorily engaging with any of the various zeitgeists it encounters along the way. Sombre about the future, cautious about technology, totally unengaged with popular culture, Heimat 3 feels like the work of a man uncomfortable in his own time.
As Germany celebrates its coming unity, Hermann meets up with his old girlfriend, the singer Clarissa Lichtblau (Salome Kammer), and they decide to fall in love again. Moving back to the town where Hermann grew up, the couple set out to refurbish a beautiful but dilapidated house that once belonged to a poet. They enlist the help of some workers from the newly liberated GDR.
Will the building stand up? Will the cooperation between east and west produce harmony or discord? Might there be a metaphor in here somewhere?
The optimism expressed by the individual chapters' uneasily jolly titles (Everybody Is Doing Well, The Happiest People in the World, The Champions) gradually withers as the less happy consequences of unity set in. One of the eastern workers loses his wife to Hermann's snooty factotum. Ernst Simon, the composer's brother, a reclusive art collector, is arrested after flying to Russia in a private plane. Later he becomes involved in a dispute with local politicians over his plans to establish a museum. Meanwhile, Hartmut, Ernst and Hermann's oily nephew, emerges as the unacceptable face of capitalism: brash, insensitive and barely competent.
Reitz's despair at the age is best expressed in a terrific sequence which sees the ashes of the eldest Simon brother lowered into a grave on a tiny mechanical platform. Here, as a distraught Ernst tries to explain, is a world diminished by materialism and venality.
The cynicism about the pursuit of prosperity reminds one of the askance glances at the German post-war miracle that characterised the films of Fassbinder and Schlöndorff. But those directors seemed more connected to the 1970s than Reitz does to the 1990s.
Heimat 3, at 11 hours the shortest of the three series, might very well have been conceived in Hermann and Clarissa's mountainside retreat. Modern Germany is certainly here: right-wing skinheads appear briefly, the easterners lose their identity, the economy falters. But the films are assembled with the cool distance you might expect from a man who, like Hermann, thinks a classical symphony is still a fit way to communicate the political convulsions of the late 20th century.
