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6 Heimat 3: Edgar Reitz’s Time Machine
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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6 Heimat 3: Edgar Reitz’s Time Machine Alasdair King Abstract According to filmmaker Edgar Reitz, we are experiencing the end of the provincial in spatial terms and must instead reconfigure Heimat as a temporal category . Heimat 3 works as a complex filmic “time machine,” recording the changing nature of everyday life after the fall of the Wall, chronicling the social impact of historical change in Germany, and registering the being-in-time of its key characters. The third part of his trilogy is an attempt by Reitz to use cinema to construct a “safe home” in time, a Heimat composed of time-images—everyday, historical, durational. Introduction E dgar Reitz’s Heimat 3: Chronik einer Zeitenwende (Heimat 3: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings, 2004) was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 2004. It completed Reitz’s monumental trilogy of films on the changing nature of provincial life in the twentieth century that was initiated with the release of the much-discussed Heimat in 1984, an exploration of modernization within the particular spaces of the Hunsrück region in western Germany where Reitz originated. In his second film cycle, Die zweite Heimat: Chronik einer Jugend in 13 Filmen (Heimat 2: Chronicle of a Generation, 1992), Reitz moved away from these village landscapes in order to explore the urban environment of Munich in the 1960s, particularly the utopian potential of the student avant-garde there. With the six episodes of Heimat 3 (which constituted a running time of almost twelve hours),1 Reitz returned to the Hunsrück to address the changing German landscape over the decade between the fall of the Wall and the millennium celebrations. 97 This chapter seeks to explore Reitz’s assertion that in our contemporary epoch of increased transit and instant communication, we are experiencing the end of the provincial in spatial terms. In this current period of globalization, according to Reitz, a sense of belonging is possible only if we reach a new understanding , not of the spatial ties that defined community in the first Heimat, nor of the artistic experiments of the avant-garde that were mooted as an alternative in Die zweite Heimat, but of a shared sense of time as Heimat, as the structuringprincipleofcommunity .ReitzclaimsinthiscontextthatHeimat3explores the notion of a “Zeit-Heimat” and acts as a filmic time machine that registers the substantial social changes in both eastern and western Germany in the decade after unification. Heimat 3 concerns an exploration of the role of cinema in constructing a Heimat built on local time-images as a counterpoint to the placelessness of the globalized world. Questions of Space and Time With this assertion of the significance of time in thinking about the contemporary location of Heimat, Reitz seems initially to be moving against a tide in the arts and social sciences, which has attempted to answer some of the political challenges of late modernity by arguing for the prioritizing of space over time as a fundamental building block in conceptualizing contemporary society . This trend—the so-called “spatial turn”2—has given impetus to productive research in film analysis, which considers not only the representation of Germany ’s troubled history on film, but also the significance of the symbolic and real landscapes within which events take place, and which have always featured so prominently in German cinema. It is of particular use in considering both the Heimatfilm itself as a genre with its emphasis on the construction of territories , borders, inclusions and exclusions at specific historical moments,3 and also Reitz’s response to these central generic concerns in his own Heimat film cycle. The earliest waves of scholarly reception after the first Heimat in 1984 centred, often negatively, given the sensitivity toward such issues in the years of the Historikerstreit in West Germany, almost exclusively on the relationship of Reitz’s filmmaking to questions of historiography and of the politics of memory. Until recently, little attention was given to Reitz’s spatial constructions, despite the foregrounding of territorial questions in the very title of the trilogy. Matters of geography remained largely unexplored until Johannes von Moltke’s “spatial reading” of the first Heimat, published in 2005, in which he attempts to shift the focus on Reitz’s work to a discussion of what he termed the director’s “spatialization of history.”4 As the cultural geographer Mike Crang has recently argued, however, the rush to embrace newly fashionable spatial paradigms REASSESSING AND CONSUMING HISTORY 98 [35.171.159...