**** THE SECOND HEIMAT
(Masterpiece) Directed and written by Edgar Reitz With Henry Arnold, Salome Kammer, Daniel Smith, Noemi Steuer, Armin Fuchs, Martin Maria Blau, Laszlo I. Kish, Frank Roth, Anke Sevenich, Franziska Traub, Michael Schonborn, Hannelore Hoger, Susanne Lothar, Alexander May, and Peter Weiss.
The point of citing all these examples is that the revolutionary politics and artistic ferment we associate with the 60s and early 70s weren’t independent phenomena. They were separate manifestations of the same radical impulses, all relating to the same compulsion to break the ossified habits of postwar prosperity in Europe and the U.S., to transform the quality and potentiality of life itself.
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That the subject of this train of thought should be the 60s seems entirely appropriate, though that, along with the running time, may help to account for the deafening critical silence with which this major work has been greeted in most places. To the best of my knowledge, it has not been reviewed in London’s Sight and Sound or Paris’s Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, and it received next to no attention when it showed in New York several months ago. I’ve also been told that the film flopped in Germany–unlike its nearly 16-hour predecessor by Reitz, Heimat (1984), which I’ve sampled only briefly. The German history professor who told me this hadn’t seen The Second Heimat, but speculated that its commercial failure was attributable to bad timing on Reitz’s part–dealing with the 60s a few years before most people, including historians, feel ready to deal with the subject.
This is surprising given Reitz’s multiple connections with Marxist filmmaker Alexander Kluge, as codirector and as cofounder of a Munich film school. But Reitz, who was born in 1932, is eight years older than his hero, perhaps the least politically committed of all the major characters; the generation Reitz is chronicling isn’t fully his own, which creates a distance that has certain negative as well as positive aspects. It’s worth adding that the actions of the major women characters in the film–who take their politics much more seriously than most of the men–anticipate the developments of feminism in the 70s, which Reitz seems sympathetic to.
Another delayed rhyme effect occurs seven episodes and many years later, when Hermann–having momentarily fled his wife and child in Munich to stay in a hippie commune in Berlin–becomes involved in another freewheeling group grope: he freaks out and retreats after another man starts to fondle his temporary girlfriend Kathrin. The game of freedom, one might say, makes him a loser rather than a winner in his own mind when he, rather than Helga or her friends, has to agree to the sexual sharing. This demonstrates one of the film’s countless dialectical views of freedom, countercultural and otherwise–most often beginning with hope and ending in disillusionment. But where Helga’s romantic frustrations ultimately drive her into radical politics and then terrorism, the film’s virtual heroine, Clarissa (Salome Kammer)–a gifted cellist and singer Hermann hankers after for all 13 episodes–arrives at her own form of dissidence and revolt as a logical fulfillment of her artistic destiny, which takes her a full decade to find and achieve. (The last and longest episode, in which this finally becomes apparent, is significantly called “Art or Life.”)
Though I can’t speak with any authority about Heimat, it’s generally known that Reitz was provoked to make it in part by the sensation caused by the showing of the U.S. miniseries Holocaust on German TV in 1979. “After the screening of this awful film,” Reitz was quoted as saying the following year, “it has become clear that we must offer a work from our point of view, the Germans, and not from America; all the discussions which took place after Holocaust have shown that we must dare to confront this past, that distancing ourselves we arrive at nothing and change nothing.” Elsewhere, according to Thomas Elsaesser in New German Cinema: A History, Reitz argued that “whatever happens in future to the cinema as a physical place where films are being shown publicly, what matters is that every country should be able to preserve a space where human beings can ‘encounter their own lives, their own world of experience in the constructed and heightened form which is the work of film.’”
What emerges from this is an extremely dense, textured group portrait that achieves many of its finest moments in parties, concerts, nightclubs, and other gatherings, where the mise en scene generously offers us many separate points of entry into the narrative and where the narrative development is often quite musical. (One character or set of characters that figures as “accompaniment” or “harmony” in one sequence may later become the solo melody, only to return to the orchestral ensemble afterward.)
