Die zweite Heimat: Chronik einer Jugend

I remember watching this - presumably all however-many-hours (26?!) -it-was - on BBC2 as a teenager who had just started learning German. How I long for it to be repeated again. It was a great (though obviously not a commercial) success here in Britain, thanks to the Beeb. Sadly the German public state broadcaster, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), which funded Die Zweite Heimat, chose to relegate it to a very late night slot when it was premiered, so in its own country it is less well known.

Meanwhile, though, if you can read German, try and get a copy of the screenplay. A massive hardback, to read the scripts and directions is just as engrossing as watching the films themselves - and there's some lovely colour and black-and-white stills too.

And if you haven't seen Heimat, the prequel, do so too!

This film was the most important event in Rome in 1993. The film was shown during 13 weeks in the Movie Theater "Sacher" of Nanni Moretti. A week for each episode. The description of students' life in Germany between 1963 and 1968 was extremely informative and poetic. I cannot mention an episode that I liked best, everything in the 6 episodes I saw was wonderful. The images, the music, the plot, the characters touched the heart. It was very exciting seeing the director and the two main stars in the movie theater one night. Italy did not distribute this film on TV so I want to thank Nanni Moretti to have made the screenings possible. Many people I am sure all over the world would be interested in seeing those movies again...

This epic brings together a superbly-gifted cast and crew, a narrative depth superior to most novels, wonderful music, philosophy and a connection to LIFE that I find difficult to explain. To immerse oneself in Die Zweite Heimat is for me akin to a spiritual experience, similar to the awe one gets when looking at the stars in a clear night sky. The language, and use of both colour and monochrome segments adds to the dramatic impact. The film inspired me to go to Munich and visit some of the locations, including the Edgar Reitz office. From then on, I vowed to improve my German skills - after Die Zweite Heimat I feel almost German, as if I am in the head of the characters. I also try to match the piano playing of Henry Arnold (Hermann), but this is the one thing that will always elude me ! This drama is unparalleled and I have been fortunate to see it on BBC2 in the UK and SBS in Australia. The sequel, Heimat 3, is currently being filmed in Germany.

In September 1992, something extraordinary happened at the Venice Film Festival: the festival audience from all over the world enthusiastically celebrated a quality German series.

Don't worry, there's no mistake, even though HBO wasn't supposed to start with the "Sopranos" until 1999. Edgar Reitz consciously conceived his "mini-series" as a long feature film in 13 individual films and, like eight years before with "Heimat", essentially invented the streaming of quality series.

THE SECOND HEIMAT accompanies Hermännche (Henry ARNOLD) from the Hunsrück village of Schabbach, which we had already gotten to know in HEIMAT, to study in the million-dollar village of Munich. And we were able to see how the good-looking village boy sleeps his way through many beds and gradually matures into a composer. We met fellow students of his who had so many talents that they were unsuccessful, and others who very gradually slipped into terrorism. The nights in Munich were filmed in color, while the gray everyday life appeared in black and white.

Six months after the sensational success in Venice, the German television station ARD broadcast the 13 films of this extraordinary film experiment on 13 evenings during prime time with unusually low ratings. And those responsible for the ARD committee really stuck with it, but after that the great era of television experiments on German television was almost finally over. For me personally, DIE ZWEITE HEIMAT was a very important viewing experience at the time. At around the same age as the protagonists in the film, I was still stuck in my small town due to lack of money and was saving up for my long-awaited studies.

Edgar REITZ knew exactly what he was talking about.

In 1984, Edgar Reitz surprised film-lovers all over the world with his epic opus Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany. Eight years later, he came up with a sequel, The Second Heimat: Chronicle of a Youth, which is even more astounding than its predecessor.

Actually, it's not really a sequel. It's more of a "midquel", as it covers events that took place between the ninth and eleventh episode of the first Heimat cycle.

The Second Heimat begins in 1960, four years after Hermann Simon (Henry Arnold) was separated from his first love, Klarchen, courtesy of his intolerant mother and elder brother (the controversy had to do with him being a minor, while she was about 25). Still angered by those events, the young man vows never to fall in love again (a grandiose, if creepy scene), and decides to move to Munich (like the director himself did in approximately the same period), hoping to become a professional composer after a few years spent at the music academy. He stays in Munich for ten years, and the thirteen two-hour episodes of Heimat 2 cover that time-frame, each of them focusing on a different person among Hermann's fellow students, people who, like him, are searching for a "second home country", be it music, film or something else, in which they can finally live peacefully.

Like the first Heimat, this second cycle is a perfect union of film and television: the episodic structure and the various romantic subplots make it look like a soap opera, in fact The Second Heimat needs to be seen in its entirety to be successfully embraced, whereas some chapters of Heimat 1 could be viewed as separate stories (in particular, the one concerning Hermann's teenage years). The style and content, however, is pure auteur cinema, with the familiar black and white/color transitions (actually, a tad more predictable this time around) and ambiguous characters, the latter element being underlined by the relationship between Hermann and cello player Clarissa Lichtblau (Salome Kammer): they clearly love each other, yet they keep embarking on affairs with other people, delaying the inevitable until it's too late. This time, Reitz seems to be more pessimistic regarding his characters ( at one point, Hermann is so disillusioned he says: "The Beatles are much better than us!"), building entire episodes around dark, controversial themes such as abortion and suicide. The decade he's exploring is not suitable for everyone, as some are scarred in dramatic ways by the pivotal events of the '60s (the '68 revolution especially).

Reitz also seems to have made this mini-series specifically for movie-buffs, given the numerous film references (including a brilliant Casablanca quote) and clever in-jokes (one episode is set in Venice, whose film festival had an important part in the Heimat saga's success). And since 1992, film-lovers have never ceased to thank him for delivering 26 of the most compelling hours ever committed to celluloid.