The Six Episodes:

The Happiest People in the World (1989)
The Champions (1990)
The Russians are Coming (1992-1993)
Everyone's Doing Well (1995)
Follow Me (1997)
Goodbye to Schabbach (1999-2000)

The Heimat Trilogy

The two film sequels Heimat and Heimat II are recognized as milestones in the history of television. This is due largely to the literary character of their narratives and to their focus on people. The characters in this epic story of a total of 42 hours duration are more than mere cinematic fictions. Their realism and involvement in historical events have led to their being compared with the great characters of world literature. The "Corriere della Sera" placed and Heimat and Heimat II among the greatest achievements of European cinema. The New York Times included them among the best of world television. It has often been said that audiences become "addicted" to these two film epics as soon as they enter into their inner world and become caught up in the current of their narrative. The Heimat sequels have been shown in every part of the world and have given people a new sense of the links between their lives and the course of history. The German word "heimat" has become familiar throughout the world. Rarely has a film fixed its landscape and people so firmly in the hearts of its audiences as Heimat has done. The Hunsrück and the valleys of the Rhine, Moselle and Nahe have become symbols of heritage, change and return.

The secret of the success of the Heimat sequels is that they tap into our collective experiences and memories. The audience sees more than just a film: their own lives become the theme and the aesthetic subject matter. In the first sequel it was the memory of a rural past, which plays so large a role in the life of the towns. Who has not had a grandmother who lived in the country side? Who does not long for the easy intimacy of a settled family life? With Heimat II it was the student years of the sixties which opened up a flood of exciting memories for the many people who lived through them. With the fall of the wall and the events that followed, "heimat" suddenly became an issue again.

Heimat 3 tells of the climate of disruption during the time following the fall of the Wall and the dreams that were dreamt in the East and in the West, and which, more or less came true. Ten years later, the words spoken by Walter Momper, mayor of Berlin, before the Lower House of the German Parliament on November 10, 1989, sound decidedly exotic: "We Germans are the happiest people in the world!" Heimat 3 takes narrative stock of the century during its last decade.

Narrator and director Edgar Reitz sees himself as an observer of ambiences and of people in the flow of contemporary history. Joining him as co-author is Thomas Brussig, a partner who, by virtue of his origins and his literary experience of the East, guarantees the authentic rendering of the East Germans, the stories of their lives, their way of thinking and talking.

The 20th century had a particularly dramatic whirlwind effect on the German people. They had to rethink their lives from top to bottom time and again. And in the last decade of the millennium the view of the world changed yet again, especially for the East Germans. For a short time between the fall of the Wall and reunification all the rules were in abeyance. Work was done without tax registration, friendships were forged unhindered by cultural differences, surprise encounters and embraces took place between strangers, souls and wallets were opened. Those people who felt that history had suddenly released them from its stranglehold it was a very emotional time. For the two protagonists of Heimat II, Hermann and Clarissa, the fall of the Wall brought with it a new life and a new attitude to life.

Schabbach, the Center of the World?

Up until the fall of Communism, the Hunsrück was the centre of the Western lines of defense, a whole arsenal of weapons of destruction, the military, and defense technology. The American military airfield at Hahn Airbase was the most terrifying launch pad for nuclear bombers and intermediate range rockets. Thousands of American soldiers had been based here since the end of the war and had shaped the landscape and ways of speech. Early in the 1990's these military facilities were dismantled, more than 20,000 American soldiers and their dependents departed and left them behind them ghostly bunkers and thousands of homes. At the same time, countless emigrants poured in from the territories of the former Soviet Union through the now open eastern borders. These people, whose German ancestry went back some 200 years, brought their histories, their outlooks and their dreams of a better life from Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz, Tachikistan or Georgia to the Hunsrück because it had vacant housing and the smell of success. The empty GI housing was filled with householders who spoke only Russian, who looked upon the refuse of American civilization with the hungry eyes of the impoverished and had no idea of the absurd historical joke that their arrival represented.

The chronicle of these events from 1990 to the millennium reveals a remarkable wealth of stories in the Hunsrück. The third part of Heimat 3 is devoted to these changes and is entitled "The Russians are Coming."