Conclusion: Voices in Ruins? Radio and Normalization After 1945

Abstract

In the first episode of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat, several families from the village of Schabbach go for a picnic in the nearby ruined castle of Baldenau one Sunday in 1923. Paul, the young man whose sudden unexplained departure is the opening gesture of the series, sets up an antenna for his home-built radio in the castle, and in the middle of the picnic tunes in the mass from Cologne Cathedral. Although this radio serves throughout the episode as a symbol of Paul’s fernweh (‘longing for far-off places’), for the other villagers hearing the mass, it does not so much bring them ‘out’ to distant realms, but rather re-enchants their familiar surroundings with new meaning. ‘We needn’t have gone to church this morning!’ says Wiegand, the town bigwig, clearly far more moved by the distant mass than he had been by the local one. Paul’s mother exclaims, ‘all of Baldenau is one single church!’ and then within this‘church’ all fall silent, listening in rapt attention to the music. Once Paul stops the music to tune the antenna better, this trance breaks and the elder villagers fall to complaining (with no sense of irony) about other signs of the modern world—in particular the behaviour of young women—and the moment of national communion quickly gives way to the divisions in the small community. A short time later, as the villagers gather for a group photo, Paul shouts excitedly that he’s received a ‘distant station’.