"Heimat" and the German Left: The Anamnesis of a Trauma

Abstract

In the fall of 1984, the First (West) German Television Network, ARD, telecast Edgar Reitz's 16-hour television epic, Heimat,' a miniseries consisting of eleven episodes of varying length. Co-produced by Reitz and the ARD stations WDR and SFB, the series realized an ambition which very few products of the New German Cinema (of which Reitz is a charter member) can boast: it was both a critical and tremendous popular success. While the two-part theatrical version (a weekend commitment like Fassbinder' s Berlin Alexanderplatz and a sensation at the 1984 Biennale), was enthusiastically celebrated by cinephiles in West Germany, France and England, the television productions were seen by more than nine million viewers 26% of the total viewing public (with 25 million viewers or 54% of the viewing public watching at least one or several episodes).2 Heimat's location is the Hunsrtick, a small, impoverished rural area in the west of the Federal Republic, hitherto remembered by only a few as the retreat of the famous 18th-century outlaw Schinderhannes (Johannes B6ckler), Germany's Robin Hood. Spanning 61 years of German history (1919-1980), the series is loosely centered around the life of the female protagonist, Maria Wiegand, who early in the first installment marries Paul Simon, the blacksmith's son. Paul has brought back from the war both an expertise in radio technology and a far-away look in his eyes. When, at the end of the first episode, he disappears without a trace, without a word of explanation, the series has established two of its major themes: on the one hand, there is the dialectical relationship between the development of mass communication (radio, telephone, television figure prominently in the series) and the destruc-