Home Again: Revisiting the New German Cinema in Edgar Reitz's Die Zweite Heimat (1993)

© 2003 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

114 Cinema Journal 42, No. 3, Spring 2003

Home Again: Revisiting the New German Cinemain Edgar Reitz’s Die Zweite Heimat (1993)by Johannes von Moltke

This critical reading of Die Zweite Heimat, Edgar Reitz’s 1993 sequel to Heimat,argues that the thirteen-part series elaborates a self-reflexive commentary on theNew German Cinema through tropes of Heimat. The particular focus is on thenostalgic perspective Reitz takes in chronicling the demise of the aesthetic avant-garde toward the end of the 1960s.

Looking back at the 1990s, it would appear that the German cinema rediscoveredits audience but lost its identity. Backed by American distributors, German filmssuch as Abgeschminkt (Makin’ Up, Katja von Garnier, 1993), Der bewegte Mann(Maybe, Maybe Not, Sönke Wortmann, 1994), and Stadtgespräch (Talk of the Town,Rainer Kaufmann, 1995) generated revenues and market percentages that wereunthinkable for German films before the 1990s.1 The use of successful genericformulas—in particular, the so-called Beziehungskomödie (comedy of relations)—stabilized both production and reception patterns. The burgeoning multiplexeshave been elbowing the smaller art houses out of the market by integrating theirprogramming strategies into the multiplex line-ups, including showing the currentGerman releases alongside American blockbusters. Moreover, German filmmak-ers have not been shy about articulating their interests in connecting with, if notpandering to, the domestic audience.2

Meanwhile, it became unclear what, if any, distinctive identity German cin-ema retained amid these changes. As Eric Rentschler aptly noted, “We have atpresent no convincing paradigms or even useful catch phrases.”3 Unlike earlierphases in German film history that had produced internationally recognizable“styles” or “movements,” such as Weimar, the East German DEFA studios, or theNew German Cinema, the 1990s produced no coherent “national” cinema in thissense. The term that Rentschler coins with a view toward filling this gap is conse-quently deliberately vapid. He suggests that we can speak at best of a “cinema ofconsensus,” characterized by a disdain for the generation of 1968 and its dreams,as well as by a tendency to seek the lowest common denominator in its efforts toforge a collective subject.

To suggest there has been such a trade-off between success with the domesticGerman audience on the one hand and the loss of an identity on the other is toimply, as Rentschler is well aware, the passing of a moment when the opposite wastrue. In other words, the vantage point from which we survey the German cinematic

Johannes von Moltke teaches film/video studies and German studies at the University ofMichigan. He is completing a book entitled No Place Like Home: Locating Modernity in theHeimatfilm.

chf

Cinema Journal 42, No. 3, Spring 2003 115

landscape of the 1990s remains one in which the German cinema had no audiencebut in which it did have a unique identity; to fathom the successes and failures ofrecent years, therefore, we are likely to hark back to the years of the New GermanCinema in the West and, to a lesser extent, to some landmarks of DEFA cinema inthe East.4 The New German Cinema in particular remains the gold standard ofcinematic value in both the Federal Republic and abroad.

Declared passé by critics since Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s death in 1982, aswell as by a new generation of filmmakers (not to mention the more populist formsin which it is attacked5), the New German Cinema might appear to have beenrelegated to the pages of film history books. Yet tied as it always was to the namesand works of a number of canonized auteurs, the “New German Cinema’s shadowstill lingers,”6 as John Davidson puts it, in the divergent but ongoing careers ofEdgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Helma Sanders-Brahms, andWim Wenders.

Attempts by a younger generation to keep its distance notwithstanding, the gen-eration of filmmakers who signed the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962 continue toloom in the background. In fact, the often perceived need to declare a break with theNew German Cinema might be read as just another symptom of the discursive forcewith which both the successes and the failures of an earlier era still constitute themeasure of film practice, criticism, and scholarship today. As Davidson reminds us,“The New German Cinema has left a very palpable presence in the attitudes of crit-ics toward new films, in some of the institutions offering financial support, and in theminds of international audiences.”7 Both in Germany and perhaps even more soabroad, new releases are often still judged by whether they attain the standards thisnational cinema set for itself in the 1960s and 1970s.

If indeed we are bound to view the German productions of the 1990s in therear-view mirror of the 1970s, it becomes important to consider how we constructthe relationship between the two eras. Rentschler diagnoses two equally one-sidedtendencies in this regard. On the one hand, we find the flat-out dismissal of recentproductions based on an ardent nostalgia for the alternatives formerly propoundedby the New German Cinema. “While deploring the present state of affairs,”Rentschler suggests, critics of this bent “frequently hold up New German Cinemaas an object of comparison and a positive alternative, fondly recalling its stylisticidiosyncrasy, narrative subversion, and political rebellion.”8 On the other hand, wefind “industry partisans,” as Rentschler calls them, who defend the 1990s Cinemaof Consensus for its “user-friendly” aspects, as opposed to “the Autorenkino’s [Ger-man auteur cinema’s] arrogance and introspection, its artistic indulgence, intellec-tual pompousness, and economic incapacity.”9

Both of these approaches remain problematic for their short-sighted use of amythologized past as a stick to beat the present and vice versa. Thus, to embracethe past nostalgically is, as Rentschler puts it, “to remain the captive of formerenthusiasms which even in the past prompted serious critical objections (e.g., aboutthese films’ negotiations of history, gender, and otherness). . . . To embrace thismyth uncritically today means potentially to ignore past insights as well as per-spectives that subsequently surfaced—a decided drawback for any film historian.”10


At the same time, to insist in a triumphant vein on the commercial successes of the1990s and thus to deride the more embattled, idiosyncratic successes of the 1970sis gratuitous at best and populist at worst; to let “user-friendliness” and customersatisfaction become the standard of value would mean forfeiting our role as filmhistorians and critics altogether.

If we do not stand to gain anything more by simply disavowing the previousera’s aesthetics and politics than nostalgically prolonging them into the changingmediascapes of the 1990s, we need at least to elaborate a more nuanced approachto the relationship between the two eras. This is the spirit in which this article willlook at the second installment of what is designed to become Edgar Reitz’s Heimattrilogy.

Released theatrically in 1993 and then broadcast under the title Die ZweiteHeimat (literally “The Second Heimat”), the thirteen episodes of this twenty-five-hour-long “cine-novel” constitute far more than simply the continuation of Heimat(1984)—although Die Zweite Heimat does tie in with the earlier series in its plot,its characters, and, perhaps most significantly, its persistently wistful, nostalgicnarrative “tone.” In moving beyond the scope of the first series, Die Zweite Heimatnotably adds an important self-reflexive, film-historiographic dimension to Reitz’scontinuing project of narrating the history of the Federal Republic “from below”and through the trope of Heimat. In particular, Die Zweite Heimat engages in asustained—if often mediated—reflection on the origins of the New German Cin-ema from the perspective of the 1990s. In what follows, I propose to look at theways in which Die Zweite Heimat tells that story and to define the perspective itaffords us on the historiographical issues outlined above.

Screening the New German Cinema. It is the early 1960s and a group ofyoung students have gathered in a villa in Munich for a film premiere. The salonhas been converted into a perfunctory screening room, and the house is abuzzwith anticipation. As one of the students ushers in the crowd, he announces thatthe film is an early work of the late avant-garde. Eventually, a middle-aged womancalled Fräulein Cerphal (Hannelore Hoger) appears, expresses her delight at thebustling young crowd that has convened in her salon, and takes a seat. Stefan (FrankRöth), a serious and somewhat anxious young man with heavy-rimmed glasses,gets up in front of the makeshift screen and tells the audience by way of introduc-tion not to “expect too much. We’re celebrating a kind of anti-premiere tonight,unavoidable in an anti-cinema. And in this sense, our film is also a kind of anti-film.”11 When Fräulein Cerphal comments that she hopes “we aren’t the ‘anti-audience’ who’ll laugh at all the wrong moments,” Stefan solemnly replies, “I’mafraid there isn’t much to laugh about, Fräulein Cerphal.”

As it turns out, the images that flash on the bedsheet screen are full of pathosindeed. Together with the diegetic audience, we see the ruins of the Munich operahouse after World War II, accompanied by foreboding opera music.12 Heavy cloudsmove over the destroyed building as pieces of the remaining walls topple down. Thecredits read: “Ein Film von Stefan Aufhäuser, Reinhard Dörr, Rob Stürmer.”


By the time these three young filmmakers begin handing out stickers with theslogan “Papas Kino ist tot” (Daddy’s cinema is dead), the film-historical context ofthis scenario is firmly established. A number of the references, ranging from the airof anxious excitement that accompanies the screening to the seemingly insignificantwording of the film’s credits (“ein Film von . . .” [a film by . . .]), indicate that thethree men are obviously members of the “Oberhausen moment,” known for its de-sire to do innovative filmmaking, its aim of displacing the entrenched film industry,its generational rhetoric of pitting Young German Film against Papas Kino—and itsunlimited faith in the concept of a German auteur cinema. Moreover, the staging ofthis particular screening, with all its programmatic (“anti”-)verve, goes a long way tosuggest some of the Oberhauseners’ incorrigible seriousness, their anxiety aboutfinding an audience, and their always lingering distrust of their own images.13 In-deed, Stefan’s nervous attempt to explain the film to his audience, as well as FräuleinCerphal’s ironic but also quite pertinent remark about the “anti-audience,” neatlyillustrate the perceived need in much filmmaking after Oberhausen to get a specificmessage across to the spectator and to exercise control over the way in which thatmessage is read.14

For all its factual, film-historical resonance, the “anti-premiere” takes place inthe fictional world of a film, and the Autoren are fictional characters invented bythe Autor of Die Zweite Heimat, Edgar Reitz.15 Written, directed, and coproducedby a filmmaker whose biography is almost completely tied up with the history ofthe Young and then New German Cinema, Die Zweite Heimat revisits an era when“at every corner you can see the German Jungfilmers,” as one character tells abusload of American tourists. Thus, as a film by one of the signatories of theOberhausen Manifesto, Die Zweite Heimat inevitably stages its film-historiographi-cal references self-reflexively, integrating them into a work that is as much a partof the history of New German Cinema as it is about that history.

To be sure, such self-reflexive moments are characteristic of the New GermanCinema since its beginnings16; yet what distinguishes Reitz’s “meta-film” from ear-lier exercises in self-reflexivity is its historicizing mode. Whereas films such asKluge’s Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed (1968) or Fassbinder’s Beware of aHoly Whore (1970) were concerned, in Wenders’s words, with the contemporary“state of things” in the New German Cinema, Reitz revisits that cinema as a mo-ment in the past. The carefully researched mise-en-scène both authenticates thestory and gives the film a period-piece touch: the individual characters’ past-tensevoice-overs firmly place the narrative of Die Zweite Heimat in their own past; andthe introductory narrative of each of the thirteen feature-length episodes (spokenby Hannelore Hoger as Fräulein Cerphal) puts the entire series in a patentlyrecollective mode with comments such as “That’s how firmly one still believed inthe future back then” (episode 3).

In addition to signaling the historical nature of its subject matter, these andother formal devices serve to mark the film-historical present from which Die ZweiteHeimat is told. By the time of the film’s premiere at the 1992 film festival in Venice,Edgar Reitz had just turned sixty, and like the other (post)Oberhauseners, he nolonger counted as a “young” German filmmaker. Fassbinder had died ten years


earlier, and more than one obituary had taken the opportunity to proclaim thedeath of the New German Cinema altogether. Scholarly texts soon followed suit,diagnosing “the aesthetic and organizational paralysis” of German cinema in the1980s and calling into question some of the fundamental programmatic tenets ofthe German Autorenfilm.17 Eventually, Eric Rentschler concluded that “as a sealof quality the term ‘New German Cinema’ no longer quite seems to fit: few pro-ductions are stylistically innovative or specifically German, and most of them hardlyever reach the cinema.”18 Under these circumstances, any return to the New Ger-man Cinema, let alone in a film by one of its canonized auteurs, becomes a highlyoverdetermined exercise in the historiography of German film.

To the degree that the film memorializes the Oberhausen moment, we mightask, What aspects does Die Zweite Heimat single out as memorable?19 Which devel-opments does Reitz choose to follow? Does he explore paths that have been aban-doned and perhaps suggest fictional alternatives to the history that followed? Mostimportant, perhaps, how does Reitz tell the story of the New German Cinema fromthe vantage point of the 1990s? What is the “tone” of the narrative, and what re-sponses, investments, and memories does Die Zweite Heimat solicit from viewers?

As Reitz himself suggests in an early treatment for the film, Die Zweite Heimatrepresents the German cinema “not historically, but rather as the description of amood (Stimmungsbericht) and as a fiction about fiction.”20 To make matters even

Figure 1. Reinhard, Rob, and Stefan: a trio of young German filmmakers in EdgarReitz’s Die Zweit Heimat (1993). Courtesy Edgar Reitz Produktion.


more complicated, Reitz’s fiction about the early days of the New German Cinemais organized not only around his role as a “native informant,” as an Autor of thefirst days, but also in terms of Reitz’s persistent obsession with the cultural logicsof Heimat—that untranslatable, at once utopian and dystopian, and, it appears,endemically German notion of home, place, and belonging. While the notion ofHeimat has had a firm place in the human geography of Germany since the begin-ning of the nineteenth century, it has always been a thoroughly “mythological”concept. As Celia Applegate points out, Heimat “has never been a word about realsocial forces or real political situations. Instead it has been a myth about the possi-bility of a community in the face of fragmentation and alienation.”21

As in the original Heimat series, Reitz explores this possibility of community,as well as its gradual fragmentation, by following a tightly knit ensemble of figuresover many years; unlike the earlier installment, however, Die Zweite Heimat lo-cates this process not in a remote community (Schabbach) but in a metropolis(Munich). Indeed, Reitz goes one step further, dissociating the notion of Heimatfrom the politics of place altogether in order to attach the idea to the aestheticpolitics of avant-garde art of the 1960s, including his own medium of film.

The resulting nexus between Heimat and the New German Cinema within DieZweite Heimat produces a remarkably nostalgic tone for the series. Reitz self-reflex-ively posits an aesthetics of the art cinema to which Die Zweite Heimat remains com-mitted, even as it mourns the passing of that cinema into film history. One way ofreading this nostalgic narrative is as an attempt to “rescue” the decade of the 1960s,and Young German Cinema after Oberhausen in particular, as an unfinished project.

From Schabbach to Munich: Relocating Heimat. By the time Reitz beganmaking Die Zweite Heimat, the obsession with Heimat had already become a sortof trademark of the director; after all, the epic depiction of Heimat in his 1984series had gained Reitz an international reputation. Both the overwhelming popu-larity of that series with a domestic television audience (garnering ratings of up to26 percent) as well as the scandalized reactions it aroused in critics and scholarsowed much to Reitz’s decision to face head-on the problem of Heimat as a com-promised but stubborn popular cultural formation. The series thus engaged a broadsection of the television audience on an experiential level; at the same time, in theminds of its critics, Heimat failed to reflect on the processes that necessarily medi-ate such experiences.22 Contrary to many of his fellow New German filmmakerswho had generated the short-lived but important subgenre of the “Antiheimatfilm”some fifteen years earlier,23 Reitz quite obviously had, and continues to maintain,an enormous investment in the notion of Heimat. Above and beyond the impor-tant continuities on the plot levels or the shared aesthetic strategies of Heimat andDie Zweite Heimat, the two series are connected in their concern with the culturallogics and the generic merits of Heimat itself, even as Die Zweite Heimat seem-ingly reverses the meanings of that term.

Heimat begins at the end of World War I and chronicles life in the fictionaltown of Schabbach over more than six decades. Living up to its title and to thehistory of the Heimat genre, the film addresses questions of place, belonging, and


identity on the level of individual and communal experience.24 A small-scale ver-sion of German history anchored in rural life and in the “folkloric time”25 of famil-ial traditions, Heimat focuses on the shifting constructions of community(“Gemeinschaft”). The central, in some respects allegorical, figure of the series isMaria (Marita Breuer). Born in 1900, she is always as old as the century, and as theonly major figure who does not leave Schabbach, she represents both continuityand home for her family, the Simons, on whom most of Heimat focuses. AlthoughSchabbach does not cease to exist just because Maria dies at the end of the series,her death suggests that a particular figuration of Heimat is now part of the past.Reitz’s film can be, and has been, read as a way of mourning this loss.26

Based on the linear generational logic of Heimat, one might have expectedReitz’s follow-up project to continue the story, to be a sort of Schabbach updatefor the 1990s, or Heimat, the Next Generation. It appears, however, that Reitzreserved this project for the third installment of the series, entitled Heimat 2000;currently in production, this six-part series traces the fate of selected Heimatcharacters from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 through New Year’s Eve of2000. Die Zweite Heimat, by contrast, interrupts the chronological story thatHeimat 2000 picks up again. Although it was clearly marketed as a sequel ofsorts, the second installment did not exactly pick up where Heimat had left off.Instead, Die Zweite Heimat goes back to the Hunsrück of the late 1950s andbranches off to an untold aspect of the original narrative, leaving the provincesbehind. Die Zweite Heimat thus turns out to be not a sequel but a counterpart[“Gegenstück”] to Heimat.27

Die Zweite Heimat opens with a lingering shot of Maria’s kitchen in Schabbach,a kind of feminized “inner sanctum” of Heimat. In the first series, that kitchen waslargely synonymous with the integrative function of the film. At the beginning ofDie Zweite Heimat, the kitchen becomes a site of painful separation; as the cameralovingly circles the carefully staged room, with filtered rays of sunshine lighting upthe objects of a culinary still life, a voice-over reads a farewell letter to Maria’s son,Hermann (Henry Arnold), from Klärchen, his first true love. The interception ofthis letter by his family prompts Hermann’s furious departure from his hometown.Solemnly swearing never to fall in love again, never to return to Schabbach or tohis mother, and to dedicate his life to art (“Music shall be my only love and myHeimat), Hermann leaves the village to make a new home for himself in Munich.

On the occasion of his departure, Hermann articulates the link, or rupture,between a first and a second Heimat. As he puts it at the end of the first episode,on his way to the bus that will take him away from Schabbach, “I was born a sec-ond time. Not by my mother this time, but out of my own head. I set out to look formy ‘second home’ [‘zweite Heimat’].”28

Of course, Hermann’s is also an intertextual departure, addressed to the loyaland massive domestic audience of Heimat, which is invited to recognize the set-tings it has come to love in the first series, to acquaint itself with the new series inthe parameters of the old. As a narrative tie-in with Heimat, the first episode ofDie Zweite Heimat facilitates the spectator’s transition to a new universe wheresome things remain the same, while others—most centrally the notion of Heimat


itself—undergo substantial revisions. In particular, by leaving the Hunsrück be-hind, Die Zweite Heimat seems to negate a more “primary” concept of Heimat asdefined in the first series, where the notion is associated with community, familiar-ity, place of birth, and mother. In Hermann’s mind, Heimat is no longer bound tothe notion of place, or at least not to the Hunsrück provinces that are the inescap-able locale of his biological roots. Moreover, since Die Zweite Heimat explicitlychallenges the stereotypical feminization of Heimat as associated with mother-hood, the film needs to redefine the commonly held meanings of the term for thetitle of the film to make any sense.

In its focus on student life in Munich in the 1960s, Die Zweite Heimat expandsgeneric boundaries along the lines suggested by the authors of a study on theHeimatfilm, who identify the reinscription of Heimat in urban settings with asubgenre they call the urban Heimatfilm, or “Stadtheimatfilm.”29 As such, Die ZweiteHeimat obviously suggests not only that the city can become a second home to some-one like Hermann but that there is another dimension to the notion of Heimat thatadds to, and intersects with, its primary set of meanings (as elaborated in Heimat).

By the same token, the redefinition of Heimat goes beyond its merereinscription in urban settings and its (sub)generic classification as a Stadtheimat-film. As Hermann’s insistence on reinventing himself “out of my own head” sug-gests, Die Zweite Heimat no longer ties Heimat to territoriality but to moreperformative modes of subjectivity—in this case, an existentialist freedom to chooseone’s “authentic” self. This redefined concept of Heimat would seem to representthe anti-essentialist counterpart to the biological, traditional, and territorialessentialisms of Heimat. Whether or not Reitz’s film actually bears out this redefini-tion remains to be seen; for now I want to suggest only how Die Zweite Heimatformulates this project as the character’s explicit goal on the diegetic level.

Hermann spends precisely a decade in Munich, where he continues to nur-ture his scorn for “this hatred, this jealousy, this outrage, this petty incomprehen-sion, this constricting, . . . hopeless shithole that we call Heimat.” If he nonethelessfinds a home—that is, a sense of belonging and a community in the city—it isdefined as a circle of bohemian friends who, like him, have fled the provinces toreinvent themselves in Munich. Up to about its midpoint, Die Zweite Heimatchronicles the growing cohesion of this group—referred to in the film simply as“die Freunde” (the friends). They gravitate to Fräulein Cerphal’s villa, called the“Fuchsbau” (foxhole), which becomes the site not only of film premieres but alsoof parties, artistic happenings, love affairs, and fallings apart. Even after thisneoromantic avant-garde “salon” is disbanded and the group begins to drift apartin the last five episodes, it is evident that, rather than the city of Munich or eventhe Fuchsbau, it is the 1960s “youth” of the subtitle who make up the secondHeimat of the sequel.

These artists are a specific version of 1960s youth, to be sure. Although the filmdoes make a number of passing references to the politicization of an entire genera-tion by the student movement, and although we are treated to music by the Beatleshere and there,30 the shared ideals of die Freunde are defined primarily in terms ofhigh art. For Reitz, the 1960s began with the innovative aesthetic impulses of various


avant-garde artists, most notably musicians and filmmakers, and the series repre-sents an epic attempt to capture the excitement of a moment when anti-films andmusical anti-compositions could take on connotations of Heimat. Envisioned as amovement that had the power to integrate not only different aspiring artists but alsodifferent arts, the bohemian avant-garde becomes the film’s privileged site for theconstruction of collective identities; to put it bluntly, avant-garde art becomes a re-placement for our mothers’ kitchens.

Die Zweite Heimat constructs the avant-garde movement as the galvanizingforce of a generation that was looking for ways to deal with the past of its parentsbut turned out to be “exactly eight years too old for 1968,” as one of the charactersputs it in the film. As Reitz himself would have it, there is a generational sense ofcollectivity, an emerging “Wir-Gefühl” (we-feeling), at the heart of the narrative.31

The representative status of that collective would seem to be confirmed by a num-ber of identificatory viewer reactions applauding the authenticity of the mise-en-scène. However, we should also keep in mind that by focusing on a fairlywell-defined group of art students in one particular city, Die Zweite Heimat pre-sents a highly selective portrait of a generation.

In addition to offering quasi-sociological definitions of generational identity,the film elaborates a specifically aesthetic discourse on Heimat. If the youthfulavant-garde of the early 1960s becomes a home for the film’s protagonists, thusresignifying the very notion of Heimat, this has as much to do with the spirit of amovement as with the specific function of art as an expressive medium. In thissense, the film takes seriously Hermann’s oath to make his home (Heimat) in mu-sic—the only one of his three solemn commitments that he will not have brokenby the end of the film. In their search for a second home, for a place that estab-lishes their identities, invests them with a mother tongue, and replaces the bio-logical ties that bind them to their parents, nearly every one of die Freunde canultimately lay claim to a home in art. In other words, Reitz’s film sets up a chias-matic relationship between art and Heimat. That is, by staging aesthetic practiceand the avant-garde in terms of the collective identifications they make possible,Die Zweite Heimat invests art with the connotations of Heimat. At the same time,by dislodging Heimat from any essentialist anchoring in territorial identity anddefining it in terms of an avant-garde movement, the series invests Heimat withaesthetic meaning. One way of reading the Heimat “sequel” is simply as the aes-thetic version of the first.

Nowhere is this new meaning of Heimat made more explicit than in thenumerous performances that provide one of the unifying threads in Die ZweiteHeimat’s otherwise labyrinthine narrative. Not only do these performances ex-emplify what it might mean to make one’s home in art, but the self-reflexivestaging of these performances begins to supply us with an internal commentaryon the film’s overall aesthetic project. Although one might expect such a task tobe focused mainly on the representation of film, there are a number of reasonsfor reading music, the central art of Die Zweite Heimat and the calling of itsmain protagonist, as a self-reflexive allegory on filmmaking and on Reitz’s narra-tive in particular. Contrary to Wolfram Schütte’s insistence that we should not


misunderstand Die Zweite Heimat as a game of “quid pro quo” in which refer-ences to music are really covert references to film, Reitz’s own medium doesindeed loom large behind the elaborate staging of musical compositions, tech-nique, and performance.32 Not only do filmmakers and musicians belong to oneand the same “in-group” in the film, they also use their different media to regis-ter similar, if not identical, experiences, making both music and film equallyauteur-centered modes of self-expression.

Moreover, since Heimat, Hermann has been firmly established as Edgar Reitz’salter ego.33 Under these circumstances, it is difficult not to read Reitz’s career as afilmmaker back into Hermann’s fictional career as a musician. It is equally difficultto resist the temptation to decipher the first names of Hermann’s musician friendsin terms of Reitz’s colleagues of those years: Alex for Alexander Kluge, Volker as inSchlöndorff, Jean-Marie as in Straub, and so forth.

Finally, as Merhnoosh Sobhani has recently detailed,34 Die Zweite Heimat quiteplausibly connects music and cinema at a formal level by foregrounding commonaesthetic principles, such as montage, rhythm, and the segmentation of time, as wellas the shared experimental stance with which both musicians and filmmakers aimedto “épater le bourgeois” in the early 1960s.35 This proximity of the two arts is stagedmost explicitly in the episodes in Die Zweite Heimat that feature the avant-gardeproject Variavision, a kind of proto-multimedia event in which Hermann’s electronicmusic is combined with Rob’s complicated projection devices.36

The Art of the Requiem, or “Heimat ist etwas Verlorenes” (Heimat issomething lost).37 By the time Hermann supplies the soundtrack for theVariavision experiment in episode 11, we have had ample opportunity to familiarizeourselves with the role of music in his life. The first glimpse of Hermann as a musi-cian comes at the very beginning of the film, when we see him at the organ inSchabbach, dramatically lit and framed from a low angle. Tears running down hischeeks, he furiously attacks the instrument, venting his rage at the entire Hunsrückfor destroying his one and only love. Despite, or because of, its pathos, the sceneestablishes a pragmatic function for artistic expression that runs through the entirenarrative of Die Zweite Heimat and that in the end refers back self-reflexively to aHeimat aesthetics of the art cinema: in proper auteurial fashion, Hermann’s music isprimarily a means for self-expression, a medium for the formulation, acting out, and,perhaps, working through of personal experience.

Like virtually all the artistic endeavors represented in Die Zweite Heimat,Hermann’s performance illustrates Reitz’s opinion that “every author eventuallydiscovers the importance of autobiographically inflected subject matter.”38 Frommusic through poetry to film, the protagonists in Die Zweite Heimat envisiontheir respective art forms as ways of giving shape to their personal experiences.Thus, Hermann’s rage at the organ, a direct repetition of the same scene fromthe end of episode 9 of the first series, is indirectly quoted again in a scene inepisode 5 of Die Zweite Heimat. On his way back from a music lesson, Hermannhappens to get caught up in the Schwabinger Krawalle, a historic clash betweenstudents and the police that rocked Germany in the early 1960s. But like his


friends, Hermann is politically naïve. As he looks around with a wide-eyed stare,the police spot his guitar and immediately assume that he is one of the youngstudents who provoked the conflict by playing rock ‘n’ roll in public. The policecould not be further off the mark, but Hermann cannot convince them other-wise. His attempt to escape ends with his guitar in pieces, “atomized,” as he putsit. Exasperated, he flees back to the Fuchsbau and (predictably) turns his exas-peration into art: he begins hammering at the keys of his piano and eventuallystarts writing down notes for a composition.

At first glance, the prominence of artistic expression, whereby the charactersact out or work through their experiences by giving them aesthetic form, is simplya function of the particular milieu Reitz has chosen to depict in Die Zweite Heimat.Most of the characters are adolescents deeply engaged in their aesthetic studiesand projects, and the sustained intensity of the film has much to do with the inten-sity of these pursuits. In this respect, Reitz deliberately references the energy notonly of the youthful artists but of the forms of expression they choose. Both theiconoclasm of the New Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, or Luigi Nonoand the oedipal break undertaken by young filmmakers such as Alexander Kluge,Volker Schöndorff, Herbert Vesely, or Peter Schamoni in the early 1960s thus be-come tangible in Reitz’s Stimmungsbericht, as does the perceived oppressivenessof the 1950s that these movements helped to shed.

In addition to evoking the historical relevance of the avant-garde movementof the 1960s and indexing the forward-looking energy of its youthful artists, Reitzgives them a particular function in the context of his narrative whereby he looks atthe past not only with iconoclastic glee but also with more than a hint of regret.For as the aestheticization of experience repeats itself in one performance afteranother, one form of experience in particular begins to stand out as the privilegedoccasion for artistic expression. The most intrinsically aesthetic experience, Reitzseems to suggest, is the sense of loss. Consequently, the majority of the composi-tions of the young artists, both musical and filmic, turn out to be requiems of onekind or another. This preference for elegiac forms of expression is adumbrated atthe end of Heimat, when Hermann returns to the Hunsrück only to be confrontedwith the loss of Heimat on various levels. Not only has Hermann returned for hismother’s funeral, which, in the formal logic of the film, connotes the death ofHeimat itself, but he is forced to realize that he has also lost his “mother tongue,”the Hunsrück dialect. His reaction to this multiple sense of loss consists in thecomposition of a requiem that functions as a mise-en-abyme of the film in which itis performed. As Eric Santner points out, Hermann’s requiem constitutes a “musi-cal resumé of the Trauerarbeit [mourning work] that the film enacts. . . . Therequiem, as well as the film as a whole, are meta-elegies: elegies for the disappear-ance of the world of pastoral elegy.”39

While the object of elegiac art becomes reconfigured in Die Zweite Heimat, therecurrence of the requiem in Reitz’s work is difficult to miss. Thus, when charactersdie, they are sure to be remembered in a work of art. Hermann composes a piece forthe student Ansgar (Michael Seyfried), for example, after he is dragged to his deathby a streetcar in episode 4, and Rob (Peter Weiß), one of the filmmakers, creates an


homage to his colleague Reinhard (Lazlo I. Kisch) one year after he disappears whilerowboating on a lake.

The losses that occasion the protagonists’ various requiems are not alwaysactual deaths. More than once their artistic endeavors articulate some vaguelyexistentialist loss associated with the passage through adolescence that the se-ries chronicles. Moreover, the one requiem in Die Zweite Heimat that is explic-itly composed and labeled as such is dedicated to the “death” of a building—theFuchsbau. This symbolic site of Heimat, which stood for the collective identityof die Freunde, is sold and dismantled to make room for high-rise apartments,leading Hermann to compose a piece entitled Requiem für den Fuchsbau. In anelaborately staged performance, he brings together his friends, as though forthe last time, to commemorate the lost coherence of the group. As at the end ofthe first Heimat series, the requiem is thus occasioned by the loss of Heimatitself; artistic production becomes a way of mourning this loss.

Significantly, the end of the Fuchsbau also prompts an aesthetic reaction by afilmmaker, giving Reitz the opportunity to investigate the elegiac potential of hisown medium. Episode 10, entitled “Das Ende der Zukunft” (The End of the Fu-ture), begins with Reinhard’s return from Mexico, where he and Rob have beenmaking documentary films about cotton for half a year. The return becomes alesson in Heimat. As he contemplates the empty pit that once was home to dieFreunde, Reinhard suddenly realizes what this home meant to him. “I had alwaysthought that I didn’t quite belong to this circle of friends. But now . . .” His subse-quent pause allows the spectator to register the retroactive force of Heimat, thesense of moving from the periphery to the center after both an absence from andthe disappearance of the place that was once home. As Reitz puts it in the novelwritten after the completion of the film, “Reinhard has come back from a triparound the world and now he finds his friends, an entire generation, taking leaveof the ‘yesterday’ that once held them together.”40 It is hardly surprising that thefilm by means of which Reinhard plans to work through this experience of lossbegins to take shape as a Heimat film of sorts; in Reinhard’s own words, “It’s goingto be the story of one who leaves for the wilderness. One day, he is overcome byhomesickness and wants to go back to where his friends are. But when he comes tothe house, he discovers that it’s gone.”

Formulated after Reinhard has discovered that the Fuchsbau has been de-stroyed, his desire to come home reflects precisely the mythological function ofHeimat. For, as Rentschler points out, “it is only after Heimat ceases to be takenfor granted that the notion is articulated.”41 Consequently, those texts in whichHeimat is articulated, whether in the form of literature, films, or musical requi-ems, belong to an overarching Heimat genre not by virtue of their form but be-cause of their shared sociopragmatic function; the cultural articulation of Heimatalways already ritualizes the passing of Heimat into a bygone era. The correspond-ing ritual theory of this genre still remains to be written42; its implications, how-ever, have already found their way into Eric Santner’s reading of Reitz’s first Heimatepic as a mourning process, “whereby an object that was part of our ongoing livesis ritually guided into the past tense of our lives.”43


Reinhard’s immediate reaction to the loss of the Fuchsbau neatly illustratesthe continuity of this logic of ritualized mourning from Heimat to its sequel.Reinhard calls Rob, telling him to bring their film equipment, because he wants to“investigate this situation with the camera” and to “look for images that remind usof the house.” Rob remains skeptical but sets up the camera anyway. The ensuingdiscussion turns on the limits of film as an expressive language.

Rob insists that movie images have no power to convey the meanings withwhich Reinhard would like to endow them; in particular, the camera seems inca-pable of responding to Reinhard’s need to “register” (festhalten) the loss that in-habits the empty space. As he pans the site through the camera’s viewfinder, Robdryly enumerates the objects he sees (“a toppled tree, three oil tanks, a televisionantenna lying on the ground, a basement wall”), in an effort “to teach his friend alesson about the objectivity of the camera,” as Reitz puts it in the script. For Rob,the “incorruptible realist,” the camera is nothing but a factographic eye, withoutany intrinsic narrative or other connotative powers.

Reinhard has a story to tell, though. From his perspective, a narrative has al-ready taken shape that associates the empty pit with real-estate speculation, dis-turbed “local spirits” (Ortsgeister), and the meaning of home in antiquity.44 AsReinhard’s cameraman, however, Rob remains skeptical and willfully obtuse, askingReinhard whether he would like him to film the scene in a long shot or a panningshot and whether he plans to render his impressions in a voice-over commentary.When Reinhard becomes agitated over the fact that “even the aerial space in which[the house] once stood is gone,” Rob counters, “The aerial space. . . . You can’t seethat space in the picture,” and invites Reinhard to take a look. Reinhard looksthrough the viewfinder and comments, “All this bloody glass eye can do is goggle!Without hope and without pity. There’s nothing more idiotic than a camera.”

While it seems, then, that Rob’s technical and factographic arguments haveproven more convincing than Reinhard’s imaginary investment of the image, amomentary insert, which ever so briefly breaks the black and white of the scene aswell as its diegetic continuum, convinces us that this is not so and that therecollective powers of film depend on how you construct your fictions. For just asRob insists that it is impossible to see an empty “aerial space” through the cameraeye, we are presented with a highly aestheticized shot that captures the refractedlight of the sun in a brownish hue that contrasts strongly with the black and whiteof the Fuchsbau scene.

Although it is not uncommon for Die Zweite Heimat to switch between blackand white and color, there are no other instantaneous “flashes” of color in a black-and-white scene or vice versa; both this peculiarity and that the image of refractingsunlight in the camera lens is not entirely from either character’s point of viewsuggest that more than a diegetic exchange of opinions is at stake here. For even asReinhard has to admit that “there’s nothing quite as idiotic as a camera,” the vieweris led to recognize its power to register and give meaning even to “aerial space”(fig. 2). Not only do the refracting rays of sunlight foreground the presence of thecamera lens as a medium that always focuses and refracts light but the shot alsoclearly emphasizes the ability of the camera to convey connotative meanings. Thus,


we are quick to read the rays of light not just as a particular pattern of refractionbut as “aerial space”45 (fig. 3). In other words, Reitz’s camera makes visible pre-cisely what Rob, the cameraman, considers to be forever invisible to the cameraeye. Where Reinhard scorns the “damn glass eye” for its lack of hope and pity, weinvest it with precisely those qualities; and although Rob does not think it is pos-sible, we fill that space with the memory of a loss.

There is a close parallel to this rhetorical device in Die Zweite Heimat thatallows the film to construct its meaning around the seeming negation of meaning-fulness. As Hermann marches his musicians down the road to the empty pit toperform his requiem for the Fuchsbau, he reflects in a voice-over on how “pitiful”(jämmerlich) his music sounds and how “embarrassed” he feels about his musicalantics (fig. 4). The result, of course, is that the film brings home all the moreforcefully that moment of loss that the seemingly ineffective requiem was sup-posed to underline. It is as though the aesthetic form of the requiem skips fromthe diegetic register, where, according to Hermann, it fails, to the authorial regis-ter, where it succeeds. That is, by recording the failure of Hermann’s composition,Die Zweite Heimat is able to suggest precisely the deep-seated sense of loss ac-companying the destruction of the Fuchsbau.

One final example will serve to illustrate the implications of this mise-en-abyme.Reinhard’s research for his script eventually leads him to Venice, where he meets

Figure 2. “There’s nothing more idiotic than a camera.” Courtesy Edgar ReitzProduktion.


Esther (Susanne Lothar), the daughter of an ex-Nazi, Gattinger (Manfred Andrae),and of an unnamed Jewish woman whom Gattinger eventually betrayed to theNazis. All that Esther has to remind her of her murdered mother is a photograph,and, as Reinhard suggests at one point, her way of dealing with this loss has beento turn to the art of photography.46 This reading of Esther’s motivation is borne outand literalized when, after Reinhard’s death, Esther comes to Munich in search ofher lost lover and her mother, who died at Dachau. At one point, we see Estheralone on the vast expanse of the camp’s central court, where she has come to mournher mother. Significantly, she turns to her camera, cradling it in her arms “as thoughit were a human being,” and half-addresses the following monologue to it:

Her [i.e., Esther’s mother’s] traces have become lost, like the traces of all the otherhuman beings who were abused and pitilessly tortured to death here. Of all this, youcan see nothing anymore, you can’t hear anything, everything is so clean and tidy. There’sa wreath that some hypocrite politician placed over there to relieve his conscience.Everything here has been photographed a thousand times over. I can just feel it: howthey stood over here and shot their photos, and then someone stood over there, and theother one also stood over there, just like dogs who lift their legs simply because theother one lifted its leg there too. And photography is no different. I’ll give it up.

Esther has come to Dachau to deal with the loss of her mother through hercamera, and she leaves having decided to give up photography. On closer inspec-tion, her monologue moves from her lost mother (“her traces have become lost”)

Figure 3. Representing the unrepresentable. Courtesy Edgar Reitz Produktion.


to her own lost art (“I’ll give it up”)—not because art “after Auschwitz” is barbaricbut because media images after Auschwitz have blocked the recollective capaci-ties of art: “Everything here has been photographed thousands of times.” Thisself-reflexive comment is doubly significant in the context of Die Zweite Heimat.For Esther’s eulogy on the loss of art is couched in a kind of media pessimism thatarguably provides a paradoxical basso continuo for the New German Cinema; oneneed only think of Wim Wenders’s distrust of images, of Alexander Kluge’s claimthat “in film, I often have the feeling that the image rather bothers me.”47

This fundamental ambivalence toward the means of representation in cin-ema, which Thomas Elsaesser diagnosed as the “cinephobic” impulse in the NewGerman Cinema,48 became the self-reflexive starting point for that movement’sapproach to German history, mirrored in the scene quoted above. As Anton Kaessuggests in his book From Hitler to Heimat, German history has become asimulacrum of endlessly recycled images; the films of the New German Cinema,however, are characterized by their ability to “provide alternative ways of seeingwith their self-reflexive narrative and visual style, their autobiographical tone andexperimental form, and, above all, their refusal for the most part to recycle end-lessly repeated and clichéd images of the Third Reich.”49

As a film that is about the New German Cinema, Die Zweite Heimat takes upthis refusal to which Kaes alludes in Esther’s monologue, but also in the way the filmengages the formal structures of self-reflexivity. Although for somewhat different

Figure 4. Hermann’s requiem for the Fuchsbau. Courtesy Edgar Reitz Produktion.


reasons, Esther’s attempt to find meaningful images of loss with her camera fails justas did Reinhard’s attempt to capture “aerial space” and Hermann’s attempt to mark amoment of loss with his requiem. But as in those cases, Reitz uses the shortcomingsof Esther’s camera to invest his own camera with the ability to give meaning to themeaningless, overphotographed, empty expanse of the concentration camp. Pre-cisely by registering Esther’s frustration about the lack of authenticity, of individual-ity, and of pure, unmediated suffering in any picture that she might take, Reitz seemsto outrun that very dilemma. Thus, the image we see as viewers of Die ZweiteHeimat is not identical to Esther’s gaze through her camera. Whereas she sees emptyspace and imagines the stereotypical scenario of concentration camp tourism, we areled to invest the images at the camp with Esther’s story, individualizing the massexperience that took place there and reading authentic grief even though the photo-graphic media may have destroyed the very possibility of such authenticity.

Obituary for an Unfinished Project. I have focused on such seemingly minutedetails of a twenty-five-hour narrative because they exemplify the central function ofReitz’s self-reflexive staging of aesthetic performance. Die Zweite Heimat puts suchself-reflexivity to use first by privileging the requiem as the paradigmatic form ofartistic self-expression and then by suggesting precisely the shortcomings of suchforms of expression at the diegetic level, thereby authenticating its own recollectivediscourse. Thanks to this self-reflexive figuration of loss, Die Zweite Heimat becomesa requiem in its own right. With the help of an elaborate soundtrack, which oftenmelodramatically underlines the wistful images and stories of loss, the viewer is ledto experience these twenty-five hours of film in a deeply melancholic mode. Thecharacters sing Schubert songs and compose music for Nietzsche poems whosethemes invariably involve the loss of Heimat,50 and because of the extraordinarylength of the film, Reitz is able to indulge in the retelling not only of high hopes but,more important, of their failure. In terms of the overall narrative, the decade of the1960s is ultimately figured as one of general disintegration, metonymically indicatedby the figure of Fräulein Cerphal, whose name is just a slight phonetic shift awayfrom Zerfall, the German word for disintegration.

The question remains, though, What is really disintegrating; in other words, ifDie Zweite Heimat is a requiem (indeed, if “film is,” according to Reitz, “an inher-ently elegiac medium”51), what is this film mourning? What exactly is the lost ob-ject if not the traumatic moment around which Die Zweite Heimat circles in itscharacteristically wistful mode? One answer is suggested by the film’s subtitle. Asthe “chronicle of a youth,”52 Die Zweite Heimat revisits the trauma of adolescenceand acts out the transition (and, as in the case of the eternal student Alex, whodrinks himself to death instead of growing up, the possible failure to make thistransition) from youth to adulthood, from child to parent, from student to teacher,and from being part of the renegade avant-garde to being part of the bourgeoisie.Indeed, the film’s emphasis on the existential dimension of such rites of passagepresumably accounts at least in part for its extraordinary success internationally, incontrast to the historically more specific narrative of the first series, which ap-pealed mostly to German audiences.53


However, Die Zweite Heimat negotiates other, more particular historically andculturally specific moments of loss, as well as those of a more universal nature.Though it may be exaggerating to call these moments traumatic in their own right,the film chronicles the structural traumas of adolescence to provide a master tropethrough which to read other moments of loss and transition as similarly shattering,in a manner evocative of the idiosyncratic historical materialism of Kluge’s projectin Case Histories.54 Originally published as Lebensläufe in 1964, this collectioncontained the narrative that would form the basis for Abschied von Gestern (Yes-terday Girl, 1966). Reitz resolutely proceeds from the subjective to the historical,so as to explain historical events such as the emergence of the avant-garde of theearly 1960s, but also the student movement later in the decade, through individualbiographies rather than vice versa. Indeed, the film suggests that the disappear-ance of the avant-garde of the 1960s and of its attendant aesthetic paradigms wascoextensive with the passing of the youth of a particular generation. In this re-spect, I remain particularly interested in Die Zweite Heimat as a self-reflexive epicof the Autorenkino, for as such, the series insistently returns us to the question offilmmaking and to the (pre)history of the New German Cinema; in particular, ifwe follow Elsaesser’s description of the New German Cinema as unified, “aboveall, [by its] remarkably consistent tone (often of melancholy, regret, nostalgia, andloss),”55 we can begin to trace the line back to the properly cinematic lost object ofReitz’s narrative.

According to Wolfram Schütte, “In many respects, Die Zweite Heimat tellsthe story of the birth of the New German Film out of the spirit of the artisticbohème in Munich. . . . [It tells this story] as a farewell to the illusion that it hasbecome, especially now that the New German Cinema only exists as a myth in thememory of its aged contemporaries. Reitz has written its obituary.”56 Indeed, DieZweite Heimat ends up staging the death of the New German Cinema far moreliterally than the metaphorical language of the above review suggests. When thefilm’s narrative draws to a close in 1970, the three filmmakers who set out to makeanti-films at the beginning of the decade have paid a high price for their ideals.After having completed his script for a film entitled Esther, Reinhard has presum-ably drowned (though his body is never recovered), and Rob has been temporarilyblinded while experimenting with the Variavision project. Finally, Stefan sells outone of his actors to Hollywood rather than completing the shooting of Reinhard’sscript. When Stefan ultimately does produce the film—with the telling title DieDeutsche Angst (The German Fear)—he is mistakenly shot by the police in theanti-terrorist hysteria of the early 1970s.57 Although a newspaper report suggeststhat he survives, the symbolic fate suffered by the Jungfilmer trio is clear enough:whether the cause is death, disappearance, blindness, or selling out, there is nomovement to speak of by the end of the decade. Die Zweite Heimat registers the(allegorical and literal) deaths of its filmmakers with deep regret, lamenting boththe disbanding of a group and the end of an avant-garde movement that at thebeginning of the narrative was celebrated as Heimat.58

What remains at the end of Die Zweite Heimat are several unfinished projects:the production of Esther falls prey to the activist politics of the student movement,


leaving Stefan exasperated. Compared to the intensity of Reinhard’s experiences inVenice, which led to the writing of the script, the shooting stage amounts to a farce,hinting that Esther remains an unrealized project even after its makeover into DieDeutsche Angst. Further, as its name suggests, Variavision remains a vision with noaudience to match the excitement of its creators; the botched (“anti-”)premiere ofthis highly endowed experiment is open only to the press, while guards and dogspatrol the perimeter of the pavilion that houses the project.

Overall, though, the conception of Die Zweite Heimat suggests that the unfin-ished nature of these cinematic visions by no means invalidates the underlying“Utopie Kino” (Reitz) that fuels them. To be sure, Reitz’s commemorative gestureremains powerful, particularly in view of some of the “Zeitgeist scenarios” thatGermany’s troubled national film culture had been offering its audiences since the1980s.59 Yet the pervasive nostalgia that fuels Reitz’s remembrances also marks thelimits to the staging of (film) history through the tropes of Heimat. Among themany uses and abuses of that term, one moral dimension stands out: inasmuch asit always functions to denote “something lost,” the notion of Heimat indicts the(modernizing) forces that occasion that loss.

In that Die Zweite Heimat chronicles the Zerfall of a utopian moment througha (revised) trope of Heimat, it too implicitly indicts particular historical events orconstellations for having brought about that disintegration. Inasmuch as this cri-tique is part of the nostalgic poetics of Die Zweite Heimat, we need to ask how thestory ends. According to Die Zweite Heimat, what brought the early 1960s to anend? How does Reitz characterize the 1960s, and from what vantage point? Morespecifically, to the degree that this series contains a self-reflexive historiography ofthe New German Cinema, how does the series evaluate the shifts in cinematicculture from the early 1960s to 1990s?

These questions refer to two different trajectories, only the first of which isobviously contained within the diegesis. As a “chronicle of a generation” that is“eight years too old for 1968,” Die Zweite Heimat draws to a close as the nextgeneration takes the podium. The figure of Schnüßchen (Anke Sevenich), whoarrives from Hermann’s hometown in the Hunsrück to become his wife, serves toillustrate the distance between the protagonists’ aspirations and the politics of thestudent movement. Never quite integrated into the (predominantly male) groupof artist-friends around Hermann and always a rival of Hermann’s true love, Clarissa,Schnüßchen at one point befriends some younger students and decides to take herlife into her own hands. She enters the university to study psychology as a“Spätstudent” (literally a “late student”). At a teach-in during the eleventh epi-sode, she takes the microphone to recount her experience with fascism in theHunsrück and to explain her personal allegiance to the working class. Schnüßchen’shesitant autobiographical narrative, delivered from the bottom of a rising audito-rium, is gradually drowned out by the students seated above her, who aggressivelytell her to “get to the point,” to avoid “unscientific” use of the term “worker,” andto stop recounting such “privatistische Scheiße” (private shit). Confronted withangry demands for “analysis” and “the economical aspect,” Schnüßchen is unableto complete her narrative.


This painful scene depicts the politicization of the student movement in al-most sarcastic terms, demonstrating the alienating effect of its overburdened rheto-ric on Schnüßchen as the hapless victim of an ever so slightly older generation.While the force of this victimization clearly derives at least in part from Schnüßchen’scharacterization as a down-to-earth girl from the provinces, throughout the laterepisodes of Die Zweite Heimat there is a tendency to caricature the student move-ment as abstract, insensitive, overblown, and inauthentic.

For instance, after a fight with Schnüßchen over her new-found political be-liefs and her dope-smoking friends, Hermann flees to Berlin. The psychedelicmontages in the penultimate episode depict his dazed visit to what occasionallylooks like a cartoon version of the Kommune I, a famous Berlin-based communefounded in 1967. These scenes provide a markedly superficial treatment of thestudents’ political motivations; the reduction of a rebellion to missing bathroomdoors and graffiti slogans on the living-room wall contrasts sharply with the prob-ing explorations of the bohemian souls who had gathered in the Fuchsbau in Munichearlier in the decade.

Finally, the downright farcical aspect of Stefan’s attempt to film Esther in aBerlin villa further illustrates Reitz’s treatment of the latter part of the decadewith which Die Zweite Heimat is concerned. In the penultimate episode, entitled“Die Zeit der vielen Worte (The Time of Many Words) Stefan, 1968/69,” the po-litically charged atmosphere during the shooting in the Berlin villa is nothing shortof paralyzing: technical equipment is commandeered for political activism; sit-insand drug use make working impossible; and political differences lead to rifts in thefilm crew. Again, this portrayal contrasts significantly with the treatment of similarincidents that took place in the earlier half of the decade. The aesthetically chargedatmosphere in Venice, for example (Esther’s disconcerting photography, the soli-tude of the artist, and evocative images of barges and canals seemingly lifted straightout of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice [1971]), were depicted as vitalizing andconducive to Reinhard’s work on the script. This atmosphere is literally reversedin the scene in Berlin. When Stefan finally withdraws from the collective to reaf-firm his “autocratic” position as the film’s director by selling his star to a pair ofAmerican producers, we understand him to be motivated not so much by financialgain as by political disappointment; the spectator is invited to place the blame forStefan’s sellout not simply at Hollywood’s doorstep (though this too is suggested)but with the failure of the political climate at home.60

In part because of the sheer length of Reitz’s trademark “cine-novels,” butalso because of the steady decline of the narrative trajectory toward a pervasivedisillusionment,61 the dominant emotional tone of Die Zweite Heimat is one ofmelancholy and loss. If we consider the overall trajectory of the series, then, the1960s are treated as a period of high-flung utopian aspirations succeeded by home-grown disappointment at the hands of the “generation of ’68.” While this storyprovides a careful and unique corrective to an oversimplified image of the ’60s asdetermined exclusively by the revolt of 1968, the scenes sketched above suggestthat Reitz contributes some simplifications of his own. In its emphasis on the avant-garde artists of the 1960s, the film provides at best a thumbnail sketch and at worst


a misleading caricature of the political upheavals of the decade. This is not a mat-ter of simple omission; rather, the film gains its ideological purchase precisely byincluding debates within the student movement about alienation, inequality, andliberation and making these discussions appear rather ridiculous compared to theearnest endeavors of Hermann and his friends at the academy of arts in Munichhalf a decade earlier. For the biographies Reitz has chosen to chronicle, the youthrevolt articulated in the Schwabinger Krawalle far outweighs the political demandsmade by the students at rallies in Berlin in 1968 and later. While this may simplybe an effect of the material Reitz has chosen to work on (i.e., the generation thatwas “eight years too old” for 1968), the nostalgia that pervades Reitz’s portrait ofthat generation contains a barely veiled ideological message: in the end, Die ZweiteHeimat explicitly indicts “1968” for its politicization of a movement that Reitzdeliberately chooses to portray mainly in aesthetic terms.

In some respects, then, Reitz comes disconcertingly close to offering a cri-tique like that launched by Doris Dörrie from the “other” side of the generationaldivide in Männer (Men, 1985), a film that, according to Rentschler, “more thanany German film of the 1980s, articulated a generation’s deep disdain for the dreamsof 1968 about a better life and an alternative existence.”62 However, whereas Männer“also took dramatic leave from the New German Cinema” in political, aesthetic,and financial terms, Reitz’s intention seems to consist precisely of rescuing thatcinema for the new millennium. In any case, this would seem to be the secondmeta-diegetic trajectory on which Die Zweite Heimat places the decade. Still, theconflagration of the two lines that Die Zweite Heimat traces in recent Germanpolitical and cinematic history, respectively, raises a number of questions. If theseries as a whole seems to mourn the politicization of the aesthetic, how are we toevaluate those developments in German cinema that grew out of the student move-ment? If Die Zweite Heimat is an obituary for the New German Cinema, does itnot also declare that movement dead with the end of the 1960s? Are films likeHelke Sander’s Der subjektive Faktor (The Subjective Factor, 1981) or Redupers(The All-Round Reduced Personality, 1978) compromised by their obvious links toa politics that Die Zweite Heimat discredits? What of a film like Deutschland imHerbst (Germany in Autumn, Alf Brustellin et al., 1978), with which the directorsof the German Autorenkino, among them Edgar Reitz, hoped to “pull the emer-gency brake” in a highly volatile moment of German political history? Or, to stickeven more closely to the time frame of Reitz’s epic, what of the renegade works ofthe “Neue Münchner Gruppe,” whose treatment of communes and rebellion in1969 in a film like Rote Sonne (Rudolf Thome, 1969) seems considerably morenuanced and radical than Reitz’s treatment of events in 1969 in Die Zweite Heimat?63

In retrospect, Reitz’s film draws the line surprisingly early, leaving little concep-tual room for important developments that followed.

Conclusion. This returns us to our initial question regarding the contemporarystate of German cinema. Given his unmistakable nostalgia for the early 1960s,what cinema would Edgar Reitz have us inherit at the turn of the century? DieZweite Heimat clearly stakes a claim in favor of a return to something that was left


unfinished because of the revolt of the late 1960s. Like many of his writings sincethe 1960s, as well as his ongoing interventions in the debates about the Germancinema,64 Reitz in Die Zweite Heimat clearly aimed to stem the perceived crisis ofGerman filmmaking in the 1990s by appealing to an “Utopie Kino” that still liesburied in the now-historical concept of a New German Cinema.65 Because themelancholy of Die Zweite Heimat attaches itself to cinema, it enlists the spectatorin a return to a canonical image of the New German Cinema at a time when thatcinema had been reduced to a mere shadow. As a farewell to that era, Die ZweiteHeimat registers precisely this double bind, thereby begging the question of whatto do with the legacy of the New German Cinema.

Contrary to the rather disconcerting inclusiveness of German film historyimagined in Reitz’s own Die Nacht der Regisseure (Night of the Directors, 1995),in which “Leni Riefenstahl sits comfortably between Werner Herzog and VolkerSchöndorff,”66 Die Zweite Heimat offers little room for multiple histories, let alonea “cinema of consensus.” As opposed to the “industry partisans” of the Beziehungs-komödie referred to in Rentschler’s gloss of the 1990s, with Die Zweite Heimat,Reitz wants to return us to the historical and aesthetic origins of the New GermanCinema. This recollective mode produces a powerful aesthetic texture, and it wascertainly timely enough in the media landscape of the 1990s. Reitz’s particularnostalgia for the 1960s, though, also remains problematic to the degree that thisreturn is apparently imagined at the expense of both the politicization broughtabout by the events of 1968 and the shifts in the status of the Autor that occurredin the intervening decades.

Together with the other arts celebrated in Die Zweite Heimat, the cinemaappears to be in decline after the mid-1960s—which, of course, was precisely whenthe New German Cinema was beginning to celebrate its first international suc-cesses. Those successes, in turn, were based on the valuation of a “cultural” modeof production that centered on a German version of auteurism—a platform thatwas at once political and aesthetic. Indeed, what united the divergent voices in theNew German Cinema was precisely the political dimension of the concept of theFilmautor, its usefulness in mounting collective arguments for the restructuring ofthe film subsidy system and for mounting an opposition to the entrenched indus-try of “Papas Kino.” As Elsaesser reminds us, “The Autorenfilm . . . does not namea particular genre of films or range of subjects, but is first of all a political con-cept.”67 Once these political objectives were reached, however, the limits of thenotion of the Filmautor as an aesthetic and practical notion also began to emerge.

This is not the place to rehearse the extensive arguments about the Autorenfilmin Germany or about authorship in film studies more generally.68 However, in thecontext of this discussion, it does seem pertinent to suggest that arguably theNew German Cinema floundered, among other things, on its own successes inrenegotiating state subsidies and television coproductions around the idea of in-dividual, idiosyncratic Autoren, rather than around a common interest that wasat least in part also defined as commercial. In this situation, in which fundingsources were increasingly democratized and spread out according to what cameto be known cynically as the “Gießkannenprinzip,” or “watering-can principle,”


the industrial “establishment” could all too easily during the 1980s reestablishitself with continued productions of blockbusters once the New German Cinemahad lost its center in Fassbinder. Seen in this light, the rise of the Beziehungskomödieas well as of the “post-Wall cinema of consensus” needs to be understood as aconsequence not only of the demise of the Autorenkino but also of its internalcontradictions, if not of its successes. If this is true, the present situation rulesout a nostalgic return to a politics—let alone a poetics—of authorship as imag-ined by Die Zweite Heimat. As Wenders puts it in a discussion of the Autorenfilm,“Nostalgia is always devastating. Nostalgia is the complete opposite of power-ful authorship. Perhaps this habit of reflecting on the cinema [within the auteurcinema] is largely nostalgic and therefore becoming increasingly counterpro-ductive.”69 If we are to “avoid dismissiveness and nostalgia” vis-à-vis the NewGerman Cinema, as Rentschler insists, the depoliticization and nostalgic cel-ebration of the origins of that cinema as depicted in Die Zweite Heimat shouldgive us pause.

Sabine Hake has suggested that the “decline” of the New German Cinema“may in fact be used to reassess the critical discourses that have accompanied[it].”70 However, for “a notion such as ‘decline’ [to] actually turn out to be produc-tive,” as Hake proposes, we need to move beyond Reitz’s version of film history,with its circular inscription of Heimat as a mythology for reconstructing a nationalcinema, in order to mourn its passing. In other words, we need to adopt an ap-proach to the New German Cinema that recognizes its historical boundaries andinternal contradictions. Only then can we hope to mine the 1960s for the ways inwhich they speak to the film-historical present in Germany.

Notes

1. During the first quarter of 1997, German films accounted for an unprecedented 37percent of the market share, although the figure for the year leveled out at 17 percent.See Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Con-sensus,” in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (London:Routledge, 2000), 275, n.1.

2. Asked about his relationship as a young filmmaker to the generation of Wim Wenders,Sönke Wortmann (best known for his enormous success with Der bewegte Mann(Maybe, Maybe Not, 1994) insists that “the difference has grown to be quite substan-tial. [People like Wenders] were basically Autorenfilmer, . . . but this phase of auteurcinema has run into a dead end just like any development that needs to be replaced bya new one.” Wortmann, “Talent allein reicht nicht: Interview mit Sönke Wortmann”(Talent Alone Is Not Enough: Interview with Sönke Wortmann), Film-Dienst 10 (Oc-tober 1993): 15.

3. Rentschler, “From New German Cinema,” 260.4. One is tempted to reference those films that literally had no audience at all—to wit,

the banned “Kaninchenfilme” (“Rabbit Films”) screened at the first post-Wall BerlinFilm Festival in 1990.

5. Though populist sentiment against Autorenkino and the avant-garde or art cinemagenerally expresses itself indirectly by way of declining audience numbers or causticinterjections in a review that betray the critic’s tacit assumption that we all know how


horribly superfluous German cinema has become, there is at least one book-lengthversion that proffers this argument: Hans-Joachim Neumann, Der Deutsche Film heute(German Film Today) (Berlin: Ullstein, 1986).

6. John Davidson, Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1999), 158.

7. Ibid.8. Rentschler, “From New German Cinema,” 263.9. Ibid., 264.

10. Ibid., 261. Although Rentschler does not spell out what these insights and perspec-tives might have been, they would certainly include a reevaluation of the role of theAutor (see note 68), a critique of the Autorenfilm’s gender politics (see Julia Knight’sdiscussion of the inherently masculinist construction of this central tenet of the NewGerman Cinema in Women and the New German Cinema [London: Verso, 1993]); anda reconsideration of the value of generic frameworks, often seen as anathema to aprogressive Politik der Autoren with its emphasis on individuality and innovation overformula and repetition. See Johannes von Moltke, “Between the Young and the New:Pop Sensibilities and Laconic Style in Rudolf Thome’s Rote Sonne,” Screen 41, no. 3(autumn 2000): 257–81.

11. Edgar Reitz, Die Zweite Heimat: Chronik einer Jugend (The Second Heimat: Chronicleof a Youth) (Munich: Goldmann, 1993), 198. This publication, identified by Reitz as a“novel” written after he completed the film, is identical with the film in its arrange-ment of the narrative and the dialogue; however, the prose occasionally compensatesfor the lack of images by interpreting what in the film remains invisible. In quotingfrom the film, I will be following the screen version but will refer to divisions intoepisodes and scenes suggested by the novel for easier reference.

12. We also see a bit more than the diegetic audience, as the film we are watching cutsback and forth between the screening and a discussion between Frau Riess, a ser-vant of Fräulein Cerphal, and Evelyne, Fräulein Cerphal’s niece. This discussiontakes place in an adjoining study. Evelyne has come from the provinces in search ofher mother, and in this particular scene, Frau Riess (nicknamed “the memory of thevilla” [“das Gedächtnis der villa”] by one of the boarders) reveals to Evelyne thather mother died during a bomb attack on Munich during World War II. The revela-tions in the study and in the film in the adjoining salon thus turn out to be relatednot only by virtue of their simultaneous occurrence in contiguous rooms: both scenesrevolve around themes of loss (of family, of history). These themes pervade the nar-rative of Reitz’s film.

13. See, for example, Alexander Kluge’s comment on his aversion to the image in a recentinterview with Edgar Reitz, in which Kluge states that “in film, I often have the feelingthat the image rather bothers me.” Quoted in Edgar Reitz, Bilder in Bewegung: Es-says, Gespräche zum Kino (Images in Motion: Essays, Conversations on Cinema)(Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1995), 75.

14. Thomas Elsaesser has identified and discussed this tendency as the New GermanCinema’s “search for the spectator.” Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (NewBrunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 117–207; the central argument ofhis book is that “far from the New German Cinema constituting only acts of self-ex-pression by a small number of highly gifted and personal directors, the logics of pro-duction, the history of its failures and successes, and the aesthetic-formal strategiesthat give it a degree of stylistic coherence derive from the various ways the films at-tempt to address spectators” (5).


15. On the other hand, if Stefan, Rob, and Reinhard exist only within the diegetic frame-work of an imagined scenario, their film does not exist. Long before it becomes re-cycled in the above scene of Die Zweite Heimat, this film was actually directed bythree Oberhauseners: the scenes are taken from a short film entitled Schicksal einerOper (An Opera’s Fate) by Stefan Meuchel, Bernhard Dörries, and Edgar Reitz, whosedebut film this was in 1957.

16. “In what other national cinema does one encounter the consistent and persistent meta-films which one finds in the FRG?” asks Eric Rentschler in West German Film in theCourse of Time (New York: Redgrave, 1984), 57.

17. See Hans-Joachim Neumann, “Ästhetische und organisatorische Erstarrung: DerDeutsche Film in den achtziger Jahren” (Aesthetic and Organizational Paralysis: Ger-man Film in the Eighties), in Uli Jung, ed., Der Deutsche Film: Aspekte seinerGeschichte von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (German Film: Aspects of Its Historyfrom the Beginnings to the Present) (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1993), 247–66.

18. Eric Rentschler, “Endzeitspiele und Zeitgeistszenarien: Film der achtziger Jahre”(Apocalyptic Games and Zeitgeist Scenarios: Film of the Eighties), in WolfgangJacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, eds., Geschichte des Deutschen Films(History of German Cinema) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 285. Indeed, Reitz himself isacutely aware that “there is already a new generation at work that is seeking its dis-tance from everything that came before, especially from the New German Cinema[and] the Autorenfilm after Oberhausen.” Reitz, Bilder in Bewegung, 14.

19. The series has been released in English under the title Leaving Home: Chronicle of aGeneration.

20. Edgar Reitz, Drehort Heimat (Shooting Location Heimat) (Frankfurt: Verlag derAutoren, 1993), 144.

21. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1990), 19.

22. As Dieter Saalmann points out in his incisive critique of Heimat, Reitz’s

surprisingly unsophisticated view of the critical potential of unfiltered personal re-membrances as a means of explicating historical phenomena completely ignoresthe need to “process” these memories. . . . As a result, the process of anamnesis thatundergirds his cinematic ambitions tends to inspire amnesia rather than cognitionin his protagonists as well as among those in his audience whose historical “horizonof expectation” is either factually deficient or adversarially inclined.

Saalmann, “Edgar Reitz’s View of History: The New Religion of Regionalism and theConcept of Heimat,” Germanic Notes 19, nos. 1–2 (spring-fall 1989): 11–12. Othercommentators who have aligned Reitz’s project in similar ways with the revisionisttendencies in Germany during the 1980s, deploring his glaring omissions of the Holo-caust in particular, include Ruth Perlmutter, “German Revisionism: Edgar Reitz’sHeimat,” Wide Angle 9, no. 3 (July 1987): 21–37; Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourn-ing, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989);and Michael Geisler and Gertrud Koch in the special issue on Heimat of New GermanCritique 36 (fall 1985).

23. On the “critical” or “anti”-Heimatfilm, see Daniel Schacht, Fluchtpunkt Provinz: Derneue Heimatfilm zwischen 1968 und 1972 (Escape to the Provinces: The New Heimatfilmbetween 1968 and 1972) (Münster: MAkS, 1991), and Rentschler, West German Filmin the Course of Time.


24. On the history of the Heimat genre, see Johannes von Moltke, “Evergreens: The HeimatGenre,” in Tim Bergfelder, Erica Cater, and Deniz Göktürk, eds., The German Cin-ema Book (London: BFI, 2002), 18–28.

25. This term, drawn from Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, was first used to describethe commemorative function of Reitz’s Heimat in Ruth Perlmutter’s trenchant cri-tique of the series’ revisionist politics (Perlmutter, “German Revisionism”). Santnerlater makes the same reference to describe the dominant temporal mode of Heimat.Santner, Stranded Objects, 60.

26. Santner, Stranded Objects.27. This is the term Reitz preferred to describe the relationship between the two projects.

For a detailed discussion of that relationship, see Lena Scholz, Die Konstruktionvon Geschichte in Edgar Reitz’s “Zweiter Heimat” (The Construction of History inEdgar Reitz’s “Zweite Heimat”) (Siegen: Universität-Gesamthochschule Siegen, 1996).

28. This refusal of biological filiation becomes a persistent concern for Hermann. Inepisode 2 (scene 9), he and Juan decide to “forget the fathers” so as to insist “wehave given birth to ourselves. We are bringing ourselves into the world.” Hermannrepeats this decision to Schnüßchen in episode 8 (scene 10): “I have to find my ownway. Things like the Hunsrück, my mother, my home [Elternhaus] are nothing butcoincidences. . . . Do you know what I often think: We have to give birth to ourselvesall over again, out of ourselves.” Clearly, these claims resonate with the patricidallogic of the slogan “Papas Kino ist tot” (Daddy’s cinema is dead). The Heimat of theNew German Cinema was the radical refusal of, rather than the attempt to dealwith, “Papas Kino.” The female version of this in Die Zweite Heimat is Evelyne’ssearch for her mother, which culminates in her recognition, “I am my own mother”(episode 3, scene 58).

29. Projektgruppe Deutscher Heimatfilm, Der Deutsche Heimatfilm: Bildwelten undWeltbilder. Bilder, Texte, Analysen zu 70 Jahren Deutscher Filmgeschichte (The Ger-man Heimatfilm: Image Worlds and Images of the World. Images, Texts, Analyses onSeventy Years of German Film History) (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung fürVolkskunde, 1989), 190.

30. Three times, to be exact: once as the accompanying record to Hermann andSchnüßchen’s romantic “babysitting” (episode 8, scene 12), once during the wedding(episode 8, scene 59), and again in a wistful scene in a bar (episode 10, scene 11), whenthe soundtrack—one is not sure whether it is extradiegetic or whether a record isplaying somewhere in the bar, audible to the characters as well as to the viewers—usesthe song “Yesterday” to record and comment on Reinhard’s sense that “his friends, awhole youth, is taking leave of a ‘yesterday’ that once connected them all to each other.”Reitz, Die zweite Heimat, 689.

31. “It is a time that saw the development of a feeling of ‘we,’ of a generation; this isactually the heart of the narrative.” Edgar Reitz, “Interview,” Frankfurter Rundschau,August 19, 1992.

32. “For Reitz, music is not a quid pro quo, no game with concealed cards. This film doesnot speak of music when it really means film.” Wolfram Schütte, “Eine DeutscheL’éducation sentimentale in den 60er Jahren” (A German L’éducation sentimentale inthe Sixties), Frankfurter Rundschau, September 19, 1992.

33. Indeed, the biographical similarities make Reinhold Rauh’s biography of the filmmakerlook as though Reinhold’s life was modeled on the character of Hermann rather than viceversa. Rauh, Film als Heimat: Edgar Reitz (Film as Heimat) (Munich: Heyne, 1994).


34. Merhnoosh Sobhani, “Avant-Garde Music and the Aesthetics of Film: On Edgar Reitz’sDie Zweite Heimat,” in Paul Goetsch and Dietrich Scheunemann, eds., Text und Tonim Film (Text and Sound in Film) (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1997).

35. “Between film and music, there are some enormous formal similarities. Think, forexample, of the importance of rhythm, of the organization of time, the succession ofthemes. All the musical forms, such as variation, inversion, the moment of recognition,the use of motives and leitmotifs exist in film as well. . . . [The New Music of the 1960s]attempted something that is in turn related to work in film. As much as I, for one,benefited from the formal universe of music, the New Music adapted a lot from theformal universe of cinema. For example, the technique of montage. With the additionof electronic music, things became even more similar; one began to work with tapesand editing.” Miriam Niroumand, “Aisch will heim” (I Want to Go Home), die tages-zeitung, February 11, 1993.

In a recent discussion with his colleague Alexander Kluge, Reitz gets Kluge tounderline the analogies that allow Die Zweite Heimat to focus on music in lieu of film:“I see no difference [between film and music]. The images, the movements of light,are musical in their own right. You don’t just make music with violins or with orches-tras; everything that can move constructively in a polyphonous manner is music, andthat goes for film images as well. Film is, in fact, a form [ein Zweig] of music.” Reitz,Bilder in Bewegung, 82.

36. This was an actual project that Reitz had elaborated for the 1965 “InternationaleVerkehrsausstellung” in Munich. For a description of the construction of Variavision,see Reitz, Liebe zum Kino: Utopien und Gedanken zum Autorenfilm, 1962–1983 (Loveof the Cinema: Utopias and Thoughts on the Autorenfilm, 1962–1983) (Cologne: VerlagKöln 78, 1984), 32–40.

37. Reitz, Drehort Heimat, 267.38. Reitz, Bilder in Bewegung, 238.39. Santner, Stranded Objects, 97/-99. Santner’s work on Reitz’s initial Heimat series pro-

vides one of the most rigorous discussions of that film in the context of German historyand Trauerarbeit (mourning work) after the Holocaust. While these contexts ratherobviously and explicitly frame much of Reitz’s work in the original series, as Santnershows, it would not seem immediately evident that they also inform the narrative ofDie Zweite Heimat; and yet, as I hope to show, the “idyllic matrix called Heimat”(Santner) underlies the second series as much as the first, even as the mourning pro-cesses that the second series fuels focus not on the Holocaust or a specific geographi-cal location but on youth, art, and cinema. In this sense, my discussion of Die ZweiteHeimat is designed to parallel some of Santner’s analysis of Heimat in order to showthe underlying continuity of the elegiac matrix of Heimat and loss.

40. Reitz, Die Zweite Heimat, 689.41. Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time, 105.42. For a helpful starting point, see Georg Seeßlen, “Der Heimatfilm: Zur Mythologie

eines Genres” (The Heimatfilm: On the Mythology of a Genre), in Christa Blümlinger,ed., Sprung im Spiegel: Filmisches Wahrnehmen zwischen Fiktion und Wirklichkeit(Broken Mirror: Cinematic Perception between Fiction and Reality) (Vienna:Sonderzahl, 1989), 342–62.

43. Santner, Stranded Objects, 67.44. From episode 10, scene 7:

REINHARD: Rob! Real-estate speculation, destruction, disturbed local spiritsthat have been chased away! The people of antiquity used to believe in such


things. Every place had its own deity, and if it got insulted, it could take the mostbitter revenge!ROB: And you’re going to use that as a voice-over commentary?

45. Of course, this has to do mainly with the difference between the documentary ideol-ogy of the film within the film and the fictional mode of the frame: for us, these im-ages, including the empty space, are part of a story, whereas especially for Rob’sfactographic eye, they are not.

46. “You were nine years old when they killed your beautiful mother at Dachau. Now allthat you had left was this photograph, the beautiful Jewish woman on the only imageyou had. . . . Maybe you began taking pictures because of this photograph” (episode10, scene 36).

47. Kluge in conversation with Reitz in Reitz, Bilder in Bewegung, 75.48. Elsaesser, New German Cinema, 25.49. Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1989), 197.50. Episode 6 (“Kennedys Kinder. Alex 1963”) begins with contemplative images of the

Englischer Garten in Munich, where crows are settling in the trees in droves. Thesoundtrack contributes a rendition of a Nietzsche poem: “Die Krähen schrein / undziehen schwirren Flugs zur Stadt / Bald wird es schnein—/ Wohl dem, der jetzt nochHeimat hat!” (The crows cry / and head to the city aflutter / Soon it will snow / Fortu-nate is he who still has Heimat now). The script comments: “Hermann once put thistext to music when he was still a foreigner [fremd] in Munich and was lamenting theloss of Heimat deep down inside.” Reitz, Die Zweite Heimat, 413.

51. Santner, Stranded Objects, 68.52. Although the subtitle for English-language distribution is “Chronicle of a Genera-

tion,” the German subtitle “Chronik einer Jugend” translates literally as “Chronicleof a Youth,” where “youth” refers not to a youthful individual but precisely to ageneration’s (lost) youth.

53. One might argue that Reitz’s elegiac insistence on adolescence as somehow traumaticalso contrasts sharply with the comedies produced during the same years as Die ZweiteHeimat. Quoting Karl Prümm, Rentschler notes that these comedies “‘move betweenthe makeshift student lifestyle that one is loath to give up and the fixed professionalsecurity that one aspires to but dislikes, between rundown communes and well-ap-pointed penthouses.’ These films focus on identity crises which are in fact pseudo-crises for they have no depth of despair, no true suffering, no real joy.” These areprecisely the emotional qualities Reitz strives—and often manages—to depict.Rentschler, “From New German Cinema,” 263.

54. Cf. Alexander Kluge, Case Histories (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988).55. Elsaesser, New German Cinema, 40.56. Wolfram Schütte, “Reise zu den siebziger Jahren in drei Wochen” (Journey to the

Seventies in Three Weeks), Frankfurter Rundschau, August 24, 1994.57. It is difficult to decide whether one should read this invented title as an ironic spoof

on, or as a respectful gesture to, the proliferation of “Angst” titles in the New Ger-man Cinema of the 1970s, including Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,Fassbinder, 1971), Die Angst des Torwarts vorm Elfmeter (The Goalie’s Anxiety atthe Penalty Kick, Wenders, 1971), Angst vor der Angst (Fear of Fear, Fassbinder,1975), and Die Angst ist ein zweiter Schatten (Fear Is a Second Shadow, NorbertKückelmann, 1975). Stefan’s fate as a filmmaker who is suspected of sympathizingwith terrorists, of course, indexes another canonical title of the New German Cinema


that counted Reitz among its contributors: Deutschland im Herbst (Germany inAutunm) (Alf Brustellin et al., 1978).

58. A clear overall narrative structure formally underlines this development and lends itits distinctly sentimental ring. Whereas episodes 1–7 trace the growing cohesion ofthe group of Freunde, culminating in Hermann and Schnüßchen’s wedding in epi-sode 8, the end of that episode ushers in a narrative movement of decline, disinte-gration, disillusionment, and loss. The wedding party ends in drunken escapadesand even a suicide attempt, which prompts Fräulein Cerphal to ban the young stu-dents from her villa.

59. Rentschler, “Film der achtziger Jahre.”60. Needless to say, some of the activists who jeopardize the shooting of Esther wind up as

terrorists. To add injury to sabotage, their presence in Stefan’s apartment leads to hisshooting by the police.

61. In this respect, one need only compare Hermann’s excitement about “reinventing”himself in the beginning with the closing line of the film, uttered by Glasisch-Karl, thenarrator of the original Heimat series. As Hermann walks down the road to Schabbachat the close of the Die Zweite Heimat, a familiar shot from the first series, he is greetedby Glasisch with the disheartening comment, “Hermann, you haven’t changed a bit.”

62. For a reading of Männer as an indictment of 1968, see Rentschler, “From New Ger-man Cinema,” 272–73.

63. I elaborate this argument with respect to the Neue Münchner Gruppe (New MunichGroup) and Rote Sonne in particular in von Moltke, “Between the Young and the New.”

64. For Reitz’s continuing contributions to the debates on German cinema since the 1960s,see the volumes already cited (Utopie Kino for the earlier essays, as well as DrehortHeimat for the diaries and reflections accompanying the filming of both Heimat andDie Zweite Heimat). More recently, Reitz contributed a film entitled Die Nacht derRegisseure (The Night of the Directors) to an international series of films celebratingthe centennial of the cinema. Reitz’s film brings together a number of German direc-tors and actors in a virtual film museum to review one hundred years of filmmaking inGermany. The interviews that Reitz conducted for this project were subsequently pub-lished, along with additional essays by Reitz, in Reitz, Bilder in Bewegung.

65. More recently, that utopia has taken on a virtual dimension thanks to Reitz’s apparentfascination with the possibilities of digital images, from their production to their distri-bution. Reitz explores these possibilities, if somewhat heavy-handedly, in Die Nachtder Regisseure and is now pursuing them more actively at the European Filminstitutat Karlsruhe, where he is the director. He has aired his views on the subject of cinema,the Internet, and the future of the image in “Die Zukunft des Kinos im digitalenZeitalter” (The Future of Cinema in the Digital Age), in Edgar Reitz, Kino: EinGespräch mit Heinrich Klotz und Lothar Spree (Cinema: A Conversation with HeinrichKlotz and Lothar Spree) (Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994), and in Andreas Rost, ed., Der zweiteAtem des Kinos (The Second Breath of Cinema) (Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren, 1996).

66. Rentschler, “From New German Cinema,” 274.67. Elsaesser, New German Cinema, 314.68. But see, for example, Annette Brauerhoch’s particularly nuanced historical and theo-

retical critique, in which she asks whether the Autorenfilm functioned as an“emancipatory concept” or whether it was not, rather, an “authoritarian model”:

The concept of the Autorenfilm enabled a discourse on film that pits the artist-subject against film as an industrial commodity, and thereby represses the implications


of its collective mode of production. Instead, we are presented with an approachto film that will tie it into an aesthetic discourse only through the figure of theauthor, seeing this as the only way to tear it loose from “low” culture and purecommerce. This approach, which is modeled on the bourgeois categories of artcriticism, spells doom for the notion of authorship, which was originally intendedin an emancipatory sense.

Brauerhoch, “Der Autorenfilm: Emanzipatorisches Konzept oder autoritäres Modell?”(The Autorenfilm: Emancipatory Concept or Authoritarian Model?), in HilmarHoffmann and Walter Schobert, eds., Abschied vom Gestern: Bundesdeutscher Filmder sechziger und siebziger Jahre (Farewell to Yesterday: Film of the Federal Republicof Germany in the Sixties and Seventies) (Frankfurt: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1991),154–67.

For less nuanced positions, see the arguments of Klaus Kremeier and Jan Berg inthe discussion on the Autorenfilm on the occasion of Wenders’s reception of the MurnauPrize in 1991 in Berg, ed., Am Ende der Rolle (Winding Down) (Marburg: Schüren,1993). Berg, in particular, is highly critical of the exercises in auteurial self-reflexivitythat also inform Die Zweite Heimat:

I believe that today, far from being the essence of the film (Inbegriff des Filmischen),self-reflexivity often becomes an excuse—it has become an Autorenfilm ideology toproblematize film language when one should really be demonstrating one’s abilityto tell a story. . . . Intentional reflexivity has become an excuse for people who nolonger have any new ideas and therefore place themselves at the center of theAutorenfilm as Autorenfilmer (27).

The critique of auteurism has, of course, occupied film studies, and film theory inparticular, for quite some time; see John Caughie, ed., Theories of Authorship: A Reader(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).

69. Wim Wenders in Berg, ed., Am Ende der Rolle, 35.70. Sabine Hake, “New German Cinema,” Monatshefte 82, no. 3 (fall 1990): 268.

Home Again: Revisiting the New German Cinema in Edgar Reitz's Die Zweite Heimat (1993)

Documents

Transcript of Home Again: Revisiting the New German Cinema in Edgar Reitz's Die Zweite Heimat (1993)