Following the failure of Der Schneider von Ulm (1978), Edgar Reitz retired to the island of Sylt to consider his options. He was $70,000 in debt, he owed the taxman another $17,000 and his critical reputation was in tatters. Over Christmas, he began writing poetry for the first time in 20 years. But, he also watched the US mini-series Holocaust on television and his despondency grew at not just its melodramatic depiction of tragic events, but also the positive response bestowed upon it by the media.

Reitz was offended to `see German history reduced to the level of fiction in an American film studio'. But he was even more appalled to witness  the nation's crocodile-tears and `how the question of guilt in German history was being discussed up and down the line by the great German intellectuals on the basis of this travesty'. He experienced `a Tarkovsky-like desire to return to the womb' and `felt the unfulfillable desire to return to childhood and security'.

Consequently, in early January 1979, Reitz began making notes `about why I left home at nineteen, about my mother, my grandmother, my first love, those idyllic bicycle trips in the rain, all those cousins and aunts'. He recalled the fact that a cousin of his mother's had left Morbach in 1928, without pausing to say goodbye and began linking this to his own situation: `I realised that I wasn't the only one who had left his home and not the only one suffering the pains of distance.'

Eventually, Reitz began to conceive of a screenplay based around his youth in the Hunsrück. Having completed a 250-page draught story, he returned to the region and witnessed `the destruction and desecration that had occurred and how different the present was from the past I remembered'.

In June, he invited writer Peter Steinbach (with whom he'd worked on Stunde Null, 1976) to visit the region. Initially, they had planned to lodge for a single night with a farmer in Woppenroth. But having strolled round the village, they decided to take a lease on a small hut (at $2.50 per night) and remained there for the next 13 months, not only chatting with the locals, but also inviting them to comment on the characters and incidents they had concocted.

By July 1980, Reitz and Steinbach had amassed the 2000-page screenplay for what was then known as Made in Germany. But the director knew immediately that the six-hour film he had contracted to make with Joachim von Mengershausen of Cologne's WDR television station was not going to do the project justice. But after further haggling, between September 1980 and April 1981, Reitz manage to persuade Berlin's SFB network to fund another six hours and the remodelling of five Hunsrück villages.

Considering Reitz's standing in the film industry at the time, a 12-hour feature was a considerable risk. But the success of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979) and the Austrian Heimatfilme Alpensaga (Dieter Berner, 1976-80) and Das Dorf an der Grenze (Fritz Lehner, 1979-83) proved there was a market for such monumental heritage sagas.

Shooting began in May 1981 and continued for some 18 months, with much of it taking place within 20km of Reitz's birthplace. In order to cope with the 140 speaking parts and wealth of walk-ons, the cast comprised of 32 full-time actors, 15 non-professionals and 3863 extras. Marita Breuer and ex-footballer Michael Lesch - who played Maria and the young Paul Simon - had only limited stage experience. Yet, as with Eva Maria Bayerwaltes, Heimat: A Chronnicle of Germany marked their screen debuts. Amazingly, Gertrud Bredel, Willi Burger, Arno Long, Markus Dillenburg, Kurt Wagner and many others who took pivotal supporting roles had no prior acting experience at all.

Reitz recalled that `the villagers became fully integrated in our project, which often interfered with their daily lives because we were busy paving streets, changing the façades of the buildings and, above all, switching all modern appliances (including tractors) on and off according to the period'.

He also thoroughly enjoyed wandering `from one village to another, putting advertisements in the local paper asking for bric-a-brac that dated back as far as possible. I met so many people, joyous at the opportunity to turn their cellars, attics and sheds inside out, and with them their lives' history, their fears and hopes, their vivid imagination and memories.'

Yet Reitz was anxious not to transfer ideas, `but to recount concrete happenings, to stay, always, with the detail of existence, and to control, at all times, my "intellectuality", which has a constant tendency to take over'. So, he offloaded his extraneous thoughts into a book entitled Love for Cinema, which combined theoretical essays and entries from the diary he kept throughout filming. 

The action of `Fernweh/The Call of Far Away Places (1919-28)' opens at the end of the Great War, as Paul Simon (Michael Lesch) is released from a French POW camp and returns to his home village of Schabbach in the Hunsrück determined to pursue his fascination with radio communications rather than the traditional family trade of blacksmithing. Alois Wiegand (Johannes Lobewein) - a wealthy farmer, who has become Mayor of Schabbach - shares Paul's enthusiasm for technology (he has just purchased a motorcycle and will later own the village's first motor car) and provides the financial backing for Paul's first wireless set.

In 1922, a war memorial is dedicated in the village in a sombre downpour that takes on an eerier significance when the sheet covering the stonework is raised and hovers above it like a spectre.

By now, Paul has become attracted to Apollonia (Marliese Assmann), the innkeeper's maid, who is accused of being a gypsy by the insular locals because of her black hair. Even though she had a child by a French soldier, the couple still plan to run away together. But, even though a flight in a visiting American's plane has increased his dissatisfaction with village life, Paul loses his nerve and marries Wiegand's daughter, Maria (Marita Breuer), instead.

With two sons to support - Anton (Rolf Roth) and Ernst (Ingo Hoffmann) - Paul returns to the forge owned by his father, Mathias (Willi Berger). His sister, Pauline (Karin Kienzler), has married Robert Kröber (Arno Lang), a watchmaker from the neighbouring town of Simmern, where she had previously witnessed anti-Semitic violence during a visit with her brother, Eduard (Rüdiger Weigang). Excused war duty and too sickly for heavy labour, Eduard begins 1927 hoping to get rich quick by prospecting for gold in the nearby river. But Robert reveals that his precious nuggets are only copper oxide.

Shortly after the body of a naked woman is found in the forest, Mathias asks Paul to set a trap for a pine marten that keeps scavenging on his land. Clearly feeling ensnared himself, Paul sets off for a beer the following day - but fails to return.

At the start of `Die Mitte der Welt/The Centre of the World (1929-33)', Paul arrives at Ellis Island in New York, while back in Schabbach the pine marten is finally caught in the trap and the dead woman's bloodied clothes are found in the wood. The arrival of an aristocratic French horsewoman also causes a momentary stir, but the villagers are too bound up in their daily round to remain curious about her for long.

As a result of his exposure to the cold river, Eduard contracts tuberculosis and is sent to an exclusive Berlin clinic. While recuperating, he is lured into a brothel, where he misleads the madam, Lucie (Karin Rasenack), into believing that he belongs to a landed family. They marry and return to the Hunsrück on the day that Pauline pays a visit to inform her mother, Katharina (Gertrud Bredel), that Robert's business has started booming.

Lucie is disappointed by the state of Eduard's finances, but with the National Socialists now a force to be reckoned with, she urges him to become a Party activist. Wiegand also sees the Nazis as a means to social advancement and sends his son, Wilfried (Hans-Jürgen Schatz), to the capital to join the SS. Only Katharina, has misgivings and refuses to celebrate Hitler's birthday and objects to Anton wearing a Hitler Youth uniform. Instead, she pays a visit to her brother in Bochum in the Ruhr, where she witnesses the arrest of her nephew, Fritz, a Communist sympathiser and union official, who is deported to the Mühlheim concentration camp for re-education. Depressed that she no longer understands the world in which she lives, Katharina returns to Schabbach with Fritz's young daughter, Lotti (Andrea Koloschinski), who narrowly survives a bout of diphtheria.

By the start of `Weihnacht Wie Noche Nie/The Best Christmas Ever (1935)', Schabbach is now connected to the telephone network. But Lucie is far from content with the pace of her husband's progress. Consequently, she ingratiates herself with the district's new Gauleiter, who not only shares Eduard's surname, but also his interest in photography. Exploiting their new Party connections, the couple move to the neighbouring village of Rhaunen, where Eduard becomes mayor and Lucie commissions a luxurious villa - paid for with a loan from a Jewish bank in Mainz.

Eduard has befriended Hans (Alexander Scholz), the one-eyed son of Rhaunen's only socialist, who discovers a talent for sharpshooting after meeting a soldier guarding the labour camp under construction nearby. Lucie, however, has made a beeline for Wilfried, who has returned to the Hunsrück in his black uniform. Indeed, Eduard compares so disfavourably with this handsome go-getter that Lucie asks Maria why they ever married into this mediocre family.

Yet, the Simons and the Wiegands unite to attend mass on Christmas Eve. But while they listen to the choir singing `Silent Night', Alois (who was the first in the region to grow a Hitler moustache) remains at home listening to the `Horst Wessel Song' on the radio. Shortly after the holidays, Lucie's social climbing is completed when a delegation of high-ranking Nazi officials holds a top secret meeting at her villa. However, they're in too much of a hurry to partake of the lunch she has meticulously prepared for them. But she has had a taste of Party prestige and starts exploring ways in which Eduard can further raise his profile.

As `Reichshohenstrasse/The New Road (1938)' begins, Maria and Pauline go to the cinema to see the latest Zarah Leander movie in Simmern. Back home, they get tipsy and dress up as Spanish dancers. Maria confides that she is keen on Otto Wohlleben (Jörg Hube), the engineer supervising the six thousand-strong Todt's labour brigade that is building a new road through the region. Robert returns from buying jewellery and shows them the death's head rings that are so popular with the Todt crew.

Otto has been billeted with the Simons and is helping Maria's younger son, Ernst, build a model aeroplane. One day, he returns from work with a broken arm and Maria - who has resigned herself to the fact that Paul will never return and is keen to make a fresh start - takes pleasure in nursing him. They go dancing and declare their love and Katharina gives her daughter-in-law her blessing.

Meanwhile, Anton has come to share his Uncle Eduard's passion for photography and not only develops his own prints, but also gives film shows to his young friends using a cheap projector. In Rhaunen, Lucie receives an unexpected blast from her past in the form of Martina (Helga Bender), a co-worker from Berlin who flirts openly with the Todt men. Lucie fears that her checkered history could damage Eduard's reputation, but he is more than content with the way things have turned out and wishes that things could remain just as they are.

Tragedy strikes at the start of `Heimat/Up and Away and Back (1938-39)', when Lucie's visiting parents are killed in a car crash in the woods, confirming the villagers' suspicions that the outside world can no longer be kept at bay because of the intrusive road. Maria and Otto are now an item and go to see Zarah Leander in Carl Froelich's new film, Heimat. After the show, Marina makes a play for Rudolf Pollack (Joachim Bernard), an apprentice clockmaker staying with Robert and Pauline and all seem content and oblivious to Europe's growing political tensions.

But Maria's happiness is short-lived, as a letter arrives from the Simon-Electric Corporation of Detroit announcing that Paul intends to visit - 12 years after he left Schabbach. The family is impressed by his new-found status. But Maria is distraught to learn that she has been committing adultery and breaks up with Otto - who moves to Trier and loses his job because the Party has discovered that his mother is half-Jewish.

Accompanied by Anton, Maria travels to Hamburg to meet Paul's ship. But, even though the Simons have practised Protestantism since 1650, official records indicate an ancestor called Abraham and Paul is forbidden to disembark until he can prove his Aryan heritage. Maria telegraphs Eduard to search local records for evidence and even Wilfried lends his assistance. However, they are unable to secure documentation in time and Paul is forced to sail back to the States without having set foot on German soil. With her world turned upside down, Maria returns to the Hunsrück in time to hear the radio announcement that Germany has invaded Poland.

With the war beginning to turn against the Nazis as `Heimatfront/The Home Front (1943)' commences, the Hunsrück's menfolk have been called up, leaving the women to manage the farmland with the help of some French POWs. Wilfried is now the region's SS commander and when some boys inform him that an RAF plane has been downed in nearby woods, he takes pitiless delight in shooting the injured airman. He then informs his superiors that he killed the pilot as he was trying to escape.

Anton (Markus Reiter), who had remained in Hamburg in 1939, is now serving as a cameraman with a propaganda unit bound for the Eastern Front. Consequently, he sends his pregnant fiancée Martha (Gertrud Scherer) to Schabbach, where she is welcomed by Katharina and Mathias (who is now nearly blind) and Maria's mischievous four year-old son, Hermann (Frank Kleid). Meanwhile, Ernst (Roland Bongard) has joined the Luftwaffe as a trainee and bumps into Otto, who - along with his old friend Pieritz (Johannes Metzdorf) - is now attached to a bomb disposal unit. Only now does Otto learn that he is Hermann's father.

The authorities allow Anton and Martha to marry by proxy over the phone. Lucie implores Martha to include religion somewhere in the ceremony, but she refuses. So Lucie goes to the village church to pray, where Eduard finds a card commemorating Hans, who has perished in Russia.

Alois supervises the phone call in Schabbach, while Anton is filmed taking his vows for the weekly newsreel to reassure audiences that all is well in the East. Ernst concludes the celebrations by commandeering a plane and flying over the village to drop Martha a bouquet of 50 red carnations, which land before her on the snow-covered street. That evening, Lucie holds a reception, during which Wilfried makes a remark about Jews and chimneys that no one really understands. A violinist plays and Eduard frets about Hans, the basket-maker's son whose sacrifice has virtually gone unnoticed, even amongst his neighbours.

As the Wehrmacht goes on the retreat in Russia as the opening of `Die Liebe der Soldaten/The Love of Soldiers (1944)', Anton's propaganda unit is detailed to fake newsreel footage of Partisan activity by executing POWs in the woods.

The conflict is also coming closer to home, with Allied bombers now passing over the Hunsrück on a regular basis. The incidence of unexploded bombs provides Otto with a pretext for visiting Maria and he finally meets Hermann. The lovers spend the night discussing what might have been and tentatively plan for the future. But the next day, Otto is blown to pieces while defusing a bomb in a railway siding.

Shortly afterwards, the anti-aircraft battery at Schabbach is destroyed in a raid and several locals are wounded or killed. As US forces close in, Lucie and Eduard face ruin, as their villa, with its 52 windows, is requisitioned as the Allied HQ. Wilfried is also a broken man, but the ever-resourceful Lucie begins considering the advantages of fraternising with the Yanks. 

By the start of `Der Amerikaner/The American (1945-47)', The conflict may be over in the Hunsrück. But Martina has returned to war-ravaged Berlin, where she encounters a badly wounded Pollack in a dilapidated building. He dies while waiting for a doctor and Martina is killed in crossfire in the street outside. Meanwhile, Ernst (Michael Kausch) has been shot down over France and finds sanctuary with a pretty country girl. Things are quieter in Schabbach, with the locals and their occupiers establishing an easy rapport.

Then, in mid-1946, when Paul (Dieter Schaad) returns to the village in a chauffeur-driven limousine. He announces his presence by clanging the hammer on his late father's anvil and Katharina recognises him instantly. Maria is reticent. But Lucie rushes over to make Paul's acquaintance and arrives at the same moment as Klärchen Sisse (Gudrun Landgrebe), who claims that Ernst has entrusted her to the family's keeping. She shows Martha, Lotti and Maria her photo album and Maria suspects that Ernst is involved in black marketeering.

Paul holds a reception in the village hall for his family and friends. Although she still hankers after her Nazi grandeur, Lucie makes the most of her new situation. But Maria feels she no longer knows her husband and rebuffs his request to sleep with her. Later, when she asks why he left, he's unable to provide a satisfactory answer. Paul and Eduard drive round the region and stop in a bar, where Ernst is showing his latest flame the diamonds that he has acquired through his various misdemeanours since the war ended.

Back at the forge, having just passed a typically acerbic comment on the political propaganda she has read in the newspaper, Katharina dies in her sleep. But Paul is unable to stay for the funeral and Maria is sceptical about his promises to stay in touch. Anton returns from Russia, having walked 5000 kilometres through Turkey, Greece and the Tyrol. In a field overlooking the village, he tells Martha of the 27 patents that he has stored in his head and of his ambition to open an optical instruments factory on his grandfather's meadow. Paul provides financial backing for the enterprise that will change Schabbach forever.

Very much his mother's pride and joy, Hermann (Jörg Richter) is set to become the first member of the Simon family to go to university, as `Hermännchen/Little Hermann (1955-56)' opens. While cycling along the Rhine with friends from the Gymnasium in Simmern, he drops in on Ernst, who has acquired a Sikorsky helicopter and is now transporting lumber for his father-in-law's sawmills in Trarbach. Anton (Mathias Kniesbeck) has also prospered and many locals, including Pieritz, Lotti (Gabriele Blum) and Klärchen, are now employed at his factory. Agriculture is in decline and, during a festival to celebrate Schabbach's share in the Economic Miracle, Anton tries to persuade the region's smaller farmers to sell up and join him.

Lotti and Klärchen return from the evening's entertainment and promptly seduce Hermann. He rapidly realises the depths of his feelings for Klärchen - despite the fact she's nearly twice his age - and begins writing her songs and poetry. Ernst's marriage collapses and he comes to borrow money from Anton to further his flying ambitions. But his brother refuses, as he suspects he will always remain an adventurer.

One day, Lotti finds Klärchen jumping from the hay loft in the hope of miscarrying Hermann's baby. Anxious not to get him into trouble, she decides to leave the village. She tells Hermann than Anton has fired her and needs to find work elsewhere. Meanwhile, Anton falls out with the Wiegands because the new insecticides they are using on their farm are polluting the air around his factory. He returns to an argument with Hermann, who accuses him of driving Klärchen away. Unable to believe that she would desert him, Hermann cycles to Koblenz and the lovers go camping in the rain.

They write regularly, but Maria intercepts one of the letters and learns about Klärchen's illegal abortion. Anton joins in the admonition, but Ernst agrees to act as the couple's go-between. On New Year's Eve, Hermann steals Anton's Mercedes and meets Klärchen for a final assignation. She shows him a note from Anton threatening legal action if they ever meet again.

By the start of `Die Stolzen Jahre/The Proud Years (1967-69)', Anton's factory has acquired an international reputation and industrialists from Brussels arrive in Schabbach with a takeover offer of 60 million marks. Unsure how to proceed, Paul seeks out his father, who has sold his own business and is now in Baden-Baden, where he's set up a studio with Hermann. Having studied in America, Hermann (Peter Harting) has become a renowned pioneer of electronic music.

Ever the opportunist, Ernst has begun supplying the locals with replacement windows and doors, convincing them that aluminium and stone facing are the epitome of 60s chic. However, he then sells the traditional wooden doors, along with any furniture he can procure, to café owners in Düsseldorf and Cologne seeking rustic retro for their interiors. Paul encourages Anton to demand more for his factory and enjoy his fortune. But, Anton is disillusioned by Paul's casual approach to the power of his wealth and Ernst's willingness to exploit his neighbours. So he assembles his staff in what remains of his grandfather's meadow to witness him rejecting the deal.

Shortly afterwards, Anton catches Ernst scouring Maria's house for heirlooms that he can sell in his struggling business and they argue. In the summer of 1969, Hermann is invited to give a live concert on national radio. The residents of Schabbach gather at the inn to listen, as the piece has been inspired by the sounds of the Hunsrück. However, only Glasisch (Kurt Wagner) - the village simpleton - is impressed by the composition and Maria's fears that she no longer understands her son are confirmed when he pays a flying visit accompanied by two girlfriends. As the war memorial is removed from the village, Ernst buzzes overhead in his plane.

Maria has died before the start of the final episode, `Das Fest der Lebenden und der Toten/The Feast of the Living and the Dead (1982)', and the family has assembled in Schabbach to pay their respects - including Paul and some relatives from Brazil. However, Hermann almost misses the funeral and arrives in the village during a torrential downpour to see his mother's coffin abandoned on the road. Both Paul and Glasisch feel unwell during the post-burial meal, which is interrupted when Anton learns that Ernst's employees are preparing to plunder Maria's house. Hermann goes to the cemetery to visit the family graves and returns to find Anton boarding up the door to Maria's house.

Schabbach is preparing for its annual festival when Ernst breaks into his childhood home and reminisces about the past. Meanwhile, Anton stands in the forge recalling the celebration for Maria's 70th birthday. Hermann also returns to see the room where he fell in love with Klärchen and the three Simons meet in the hallway. They hear a drilling and emerge to find workmen fitting a plaque proclaiming that Paul has donated the house to the village.

The mood lifts during the festival, where Anton gets drunk with a couple of tarts as the locals dance in a snaking line around the village. Clearly in pain, Glasisch staggers towards the hall and enters to return instantly to his younger self. Maria arrives in a shimmering white nightgown and greets the people who have shaped her destiny - including Katharina, Pauline, Robert, Wilfried, Eduard, Lucie and her beloved, Otto.

They briefly watch the revels outside, as Anton succumbs to a minor stroke that leaves him temporarily deaf. Glasisch's body is found in the street and carried inside, as the sounds of the fair continue in the distance. Hermann returns to Schabbach some time later, as he has discovered an old mine shaft that has atmospheric acoustics. As the film ends, he listens from a caravan as a choir below ground perform a piece called `Geheischnis'.


By the time the production wrapped in November 1982, Reitz and cinematographer Gernot Roll had exposed some 320,000 metres of 35mm stock - at the surprisingly low cost of some $3 million. Much of it was monochrome, but during the shooting, it was decided that certain elements required the extra emphasis that only colour could provide. But Reitz was quick to deny an aesthetic theory behind these alternations.

A further 13 months were required for Reitz and Heidi Handorf  to complete the editing. The rough cut produced a single continuous film lasting 18 hours. Eventually, however, it was trimmed to 28,000 metres to give a running time of 924 minutes. Post-production and processing work continued until May 1984, so that by the premiere at the 1984 Munich Film Festival, the entire project had taken five years and four months to complete.

Heimat - Eine Chronik in elf Teilen was subsequently screened at the Venice, London and New York festivals and was shown in movie theatres around the world in two or four parts. Yet it was its television exposure in 26 countries that guaranteed its status as one of the towering achievements of German cinema.

In order to shape the 15-plus hours into 11 coherent parts, Reitz devised introductory segments, in which Kurt Wagner as Glasisch sifted through Eduard Simon's photographs to provide a brief overview of the story so far, as well as more specific details of the action from the previous episode. The eleventh installment, `The Feast of the Living and the Dead', opened with a guided tour of the Simon family tree.

Acclaimed by festival audiences and a resounding success with over 15 million German armchair viewers, Heimat earned Edgar Reitz the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1984 Venice Film Festival, while Marita Breuer won the Darstellerpreis for Best Actress at the following year's Bavarian Film Awards, for her performance as Maria Simon. The saga was particularly well received in the UK, where it won a BAFTA and the London Critics Circle award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Critics on either side of the Atlantic were enthusiastic. Vincent Canby championed it in the New York Times as a cinematic rather than a small-screen experience - `Heimat never looks like a television movie...Unlike TV films it does not place the most important information at the centre of the screen, in tight close up. Heimat looks big.'

Philip French in The Observer called it `one - perhaps several - of the finest movies of our time'. He also identified the two motifs, which, along with the characters, tied the picture together. `The first is about leaving and returning...The second, and most fascinating, concerns communications, the ways we receive and send messages, how the outside world impinges on us and we perceive it. Radio, photography, the telephone, telegraph, the cinema, television, and road-building figure prominently throughout.'

But there were cautious voices amidst the post-release clamour. Writing in the Monthly Film Bulletin, Thomas Elaesser noted that `Heimat's leisurely pace, the emphasis on the changing seasons, the idyllic moments of picnics and outings are not, as in a Hollywood production, the preludes or counterpoints to dramatic climaxes or scenes of cathartic violence: they are the drama. In the sense that the good things of life - which for Katharina means listening to a Christmas choir, for Lucie owning a villa, for Pauline going to the movies, for Martina making raisin and potato pancakes, or for Maria buying her son a model aeroplane - are undermined not by the dramatic intrusion of political events, or even the war, but by the scars that the small sins of commission or omission, petty injustices, moments of cowardice, indecision or opportunism leave on relationships. Given the century and the country that Reitz is dealing with, such political minimalism may seem excessively conservative.'

Elaesser went on to warn that `Reitz might well be accused of telling a revisionist sentimental history of Germany' after a decade in which audiences had become used to feeling guilt for the perceived national vices of `character, conviction and self-righteousness' instead of celebrating their sociability and fortitude. Moreover, he was concerned by the enthusiasm and gratitude with which Reitz's depiction of the `misguided idealism of the 20s and 30s' and `the spirit of survival and reconstruction of the 40s and early 50s' was received in the apolitical 1980s.

Outspoken socialist film-makers like Alexander Kluge and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg applauded Reitz's achievement. Yet, critic Leonie Naughton accused him of presenting `a bourgeois history of the Third Reich, a homespun tale of innocence' that `recovers and expresses [a] mythical past, oblivious to violent class conflicts and political struggle' both in the Nazi era and during the postwar division.

In discussing Stunde Null (1976), Reitz had stated, `I was born three months before Hitler came to power. I experienced the Third Reich as a child, from a worm's eye view, so to speak. When I was old enough to think for myself, I became aware of a world at pains to erase the memories of this era...[But] the people I have described in this film, and some of them were members of my own family, were capable of being part of the Third Reich. To me, it still remains a mystery how Hitler's Germany could have come about: all that murderous brutality on a political level, and at the same time, that feeling of warmth and cosy well-being in the privacy of one's own home. As a result of this, I too have learned to live with this ambivalent love/hate feeling that is typical of my generation. The war is still far from over.'

Yet by 1984, he was insisting that if Germans were ever to `come to terms with the Third Reich and the crimes committed in our country, it has to be by the same means we use every day to take stock of the world we live in. We suffer from a hopeless lack of meaningfully structured, aesthetically communicated experience...One should put an end to thinking in categories even where this terrible past of our history is concerned. As far as possible, we must work on our memories. This way, films, literary products, images come into being that enlighten our senses and restore our reflexes.'

Tony Barta, who had some sympathy with Naughton's misgivings, conceded that `Heimat certainly could function as an aid to sentimentalising and de-politicising the past: for many people it is bound to be self-exonerating, as every other historical representation has been'.

Yet, he agreed with Reitz that `in as far as it is possible to free any representation of people's experiences from references to family drama and still retain accessibility for a popular audience, Heimat succeeds'. He also acknowledged that it approached the past in a much less obviously manipulative manner than Holocaust and that its `rhythms and visual style are thoroughly different from those of TV soap or the romance of the "Heimat film" genre. It aims to show characters and situations as having been less clear-cut than the script formulae of TV drama allow and it makes a fair fist of avoiding simplistic oppositions.'

Barta concluded that Reitz's achievement was to `reconstitute history and to restore contact with it' and, thus, enable `people who have suppressed their participation in "German history" to see the history in terms closer to their memory of the experience'. The thousands of letters that Reitz received after Heimat was first televised from ordinary people thanking him for retrieving and unlocking their memories of the 1919-82 period seemed to suggest that he had succeeded in the task he outlined in his press notes:-

`Telling stories has a great deal to do with remembering. Memories are always a part of one's experience; they are personal. When the ability to remember is joined with the ability to organize the images that are recalled, stories originate. That doesn't mean sticking exactly to the memories. The original truth is best contained when told freely. We Germans have a hard time with our stories. It is our own history that is in our way. The year 1945, the nation's "Zero Hour", wiped out a lot, created a gap in people's ability to remember.

As Mitscherlich put it, an entire people have been made "unable to mourn". In our case that means "unable to tell stories" because our memories are obstructed by the great historical events they are connected with. Even now, 40 years after the war, we are still troubled by the weight of moral judgements, we are still afraid that our little, personal stories could recall our Nazi past and remind us of our mass participation in the Third Reich. That is the problem. We have so many little stories that make up our past that can't be told, can't be true, that are stifling us, perhaps because they are so normal and for that reason so blind to history they don't dare be told.

`Our film, Heimat, consists of these suppressed or forgotten little stories. It is a chronicle of both a family and a village and is an attempt of sorts to revive memories. The closer we look, the more we discover positive human values and hopes that seem extraordinarily valuable to us, because we also see them slowly disappearing.'

Writing in Empire, this critic countered claims that Heimat was merely a sophisticated soap opera by declaring it `a cinematic landmark'. Revisiting Schabbach only confirms the epic mastery of Reitz's achievement, which he supplemented with Heimat 2: Chronicle of a Generation (1992), Heimat 3: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings (2004), Heimat Fragments: The Women (2006) and Home From Home: Chronicle of a Vision (2013). Taken together, these films not only represent a monumental undertaking that can only be rivalled by Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, but they also remind us that there is much more to the moving image than superheroes and CGI.