Heimat is a Space in Time

Thomas Heise's Heimat is a Space in Time (2020) is the culminating work of aGerman documentary filmmaker, well-known in Europe but, until this picture, mostly unknown in the United States. Heimat is 220 minutes long, an epic of "materialist" filmmaking heavily influenced, I think, by the maddening purity of Straub and Huillet.  Heise himself aspires to the role of "archaeologist" -- he finds artifacts and marshals them into a narrative.  The film subscribes to certain conventions:  first, there is no narrative -- although Heise reads the letters and diaries that he molds into the film, he doesn't provide any narrative explanation nor does he interpret explicitly these materials.  Heise provides a date for the letter or diary entry and tells the identity of the correspondents but, beyond that information, he leaves the synthesis of these fragments to the viewer.  Second, Heise doesn't really attempt to "illustrate" the letters and diary entries selected as the film's content -- rather, he films landscapes, trains and winking wind turbines, ruinous corners of terrain, anonymous groups of people coming and going, and leaves it to the viewer to form connections between what we see and what we hear (or, in the case of those dependent upon subtitles, what we read).  On rare occasions, he will use photographs to establish what his protagonists look like -- but, in these instances, the picture always seem a little ill-focused, grainy, and hard to grasp.  An early Polaroid picture showing a little boy with a flag seems to be more stylistically related to Gerhard Richter's queasy paintings of family snap-shots that to any sort of objective photographic evidence.  Repeated shots of trains and train stations inevitably call to mind the similarly materialist film by Claude Lanzmann, Shoah -- although Heise doesn't use interviews or "talking heads".   Heise's subject is family history -- the film recounts the experiences of his family members beginning around 1912 and continuing to the present.  Heise is fortunate in his subject:  everyone in his family seems to be fantastically articulate, literate, and theatrically eloquent:  diaries and letters cited are, often, intensely poetic.  (Heise is no German "everyman" -- in fact, as the film will show us, members of his family were at the center of the literary scene in East Germany and comprise the elite of the East Berlin intelligentsia.)  Heise's tale is spectacular, involving scandals, family mysteries, and elaborate episodes of betrayal.  Relatives dies in concentration camps, are imprisoned by the Gestapo and East German authorities, and tour the burning rubble in Dresden, making diary entries about the corpses and dying people that they encounter.  In terms of his hyper-literate source materials, Heise's correspondents are like the letter-writers in Ken Burns' Civil War on steroids.

Part One of the film begins with color images of a post embedded in leaf-litter.  The camera pans up the post to where there is a sign that says that this was the place where "Grandma's house" was located according to legend.  Another wooden panel has been cut into an old woman's profile and is painted with grandmother's face. After titles, Heise reads an essay written by his grandfather when he was in 8th grade.  The essay is vehemently, if naively, pacifist, an attack on all war that is vitiated, it seems, by the young man making an exception -- if Germany were forced into war than, perhaps, the fighting would be justified.  While this essay, written in 1912 is read, the camera shows us pictures of the young man both as a civilian and dressed in a uniform marked with Red Cross insignia.  We see a huge black train rolling forward inexorably -- a symbol of both war and history.  There are some puzzling shots of people at what seems to be an outdoor festival dancing at their tables -- these are contemporary images, also filmed in black and white.  Heise reads letters written by his grandfather to Edith,a Jewish artist from Vienna, whom he apparently married in 1922.  The film shows us ceramic sculptures made by Edith, eerie-looking expressionistic objects some of them damaged and, even, headless.  In the letters, the young man notes that he has just been paid 8 billion marks but this is nothing since loaf of bread costs 2 billion marks.  A young man says goodbye to his girlfriend in a Berlin subway station -- after kissing her passionately, the young man glances over his shoulder twice as she climbs the impersonal flight of steps to the train platform.  A letter covered with frantic handwritten corrections is read -- Heise stutters and sometimes reads phrases in several different variants:  his grandfather is protesting his forced retirement:  the authorities don't like the fact that he is married to a Jewish woman and have compelled him to give up teaching.  There follows a staggering sequence that is a masterpiece of materialist cinema:  the camera remorselessly tracks down a huge list of names, most of them marked with a green check-- at the upper corner of the sheets of paper on which the names are listed is a date in November 1941.  Voice-over:  Heise reads letters from Edith's Jewish family members in Vienna:  the letters become increasingly fearful and desperate:  Jews are not allowed to sit in street cars until all other people have taken their seats, then, they are not allowed to travel in street cars or public buses at all; they are denied coal and have to heat their flats with gas ovens and there is a rumor that they will be deported to Poland.  The letters are dated and begin in the summer of 1941.  As the camera moves imperturbably and with complete assurance down the huge list of names, we grasp that this is an index of those to be deported in November 1941 -- Edith's family is named "Hirschhorn".  The list begins to identify people with names starting with an "H" -- then, we reach a Hirschhorn, the name and address underlined in red.  Surely, this is the end.  But, then, another list is shown to us, the camera still tracking down the list of names inexorably -- this is a second round of deportations scheduled for February 1942.  The letter-writer wonders why her parents aren't communicating with her from the camps  (She guesses her father is in a rest home somewhere and her mother "is busy with something.").  She is starving and freezing to death.  When the camera reaches her name, also underlined in red, the recitation from her letters stops.  But there is a third letter writer, and, again, the process continues until the camera passes over her name.  She notes that the Jews being deported have to pay for their train fares to the camps.  After a black-out, we see huge heaps of trees that have been bulldozed, massive piles of brush and wood and bricks.  Sometimes, an eerie black shadow sweeps over the woods still standing.  What can this be?  There's a cheerful little ditty on the soundtrack -- something like a German version of "Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side, always on the sunny side of life."  There follow readings from the war-time letters of Hans and Wolf, Edith and grandfather Heise's sons.  The boys are picked up in a Gestapo "sting" and put in a labor camp.  It's February, March, and April 1945 - they write poetic letters to their parents and are homesick.  The bombing comes closer.  The darkness sweeping the woodlands is revealed  to be the shadow cast by the rotors of a huge wind turbine.  The camera tracks across the facades of ruined buildings that seem to date back to the 19th century, broken doors and windows that are slated for destruction.

Part II ends with a narrative coup that will be spoiled by my description.  (It's curious to think that an austere, highly theoretical documentary of this sort could be "spoiled" by this review, but Heise's film is sufficiently gripping to create significant suspense and it is full of surprises.)  While the camera implacably tracks a pipeline running at the edge of a field, a girl named Rosi describes a ski trip in early 1945 and how she met a boy named Udo.  Udo tries to kiss Rosi but, although she's sexually attracted to him, she "closes her teeth" and doesn't return the endearment.  A few minutes later in the film, Rosi witnesses the bombing of Dresden and rides into the smashed and burning city on her bicycle, seeing all sorts of vividly described horrors.  It's now dark at the edge of the woods with the camera tracking in the opposite direction, the lights on big wind turbines blinking in the distance.  After the war, Udo studies law in Mainz.  Rosi remains in the East, presumably near Dresden.  She seems to be Communist, devoted to the regime.  Udo is opposed to all ideologies and writes bitterly pessimistic letters -- he uses the extravagantly cynical diction of a poet like Gottfried Benn, clipped and bitter, a bit like Hemingway a writer he admires (he reads For Whom the Bell Tolls).  Udo persistently begs Rosi to join him in the West -- from time to time, they meet, but, then, quarrel.  In his letters, Udo says that he will release her to see other men -- she doesn't need his permission; she's already had a number of affairs with other men.  At least, once Udo uses his letters to propose to her, but she temporizes.  Claiming an initiative that he doesn't really possess, Udo says that he will end the relationship -- she has waited too long to reciprocate his affection.  (But two years later, he is writing to her again and suggesting that they should have got married in 1951.)  Rosi is clearly an emancipated woman and takes her pleasure where she finds it -- Heise even has a nude photograph of her, presumably found in one of her letters.  The film's imagery shows train stations crowded with young people -- this accompanies accounts of Udo's studies at law school -- and train yards where cars couple and uncouple.  In her diary, Rosi describes an encounter with someone called Wolfgang.  They talk until late in the night and, then, walk through endless suburbs to Wolfgang's house.  Rosi is planning to have sex with the young man and, in fact, later, while engaged in some preliminary negotiations about birth control, both of them vow that they don't ever want to have children.  Rosi is concerned because Wolfgang lives with his mother and she expects it will be embarrassing to see her in the morning.  Wolf's mother is Edith and, suddenly, we grasp that he entire lengthy affair with Udo has been a misdirection -- Rosi, who vows never to have children, will, in fact, be the mother of Thomas Heise, the filmmaker, born in East Germany in 1955.   Rosi is a truly liberated woman in the Communist mold and she is more than a little scary.

III begins with an eulogy to Wolfgang Heise, spoken by Christa Wolf, the formidable doyenne of East German literature -- the speech is apparently after the collapse of the DDR because Christa Wolf notes that she and Heise suffered from physiological symptoms of their repression under the Communist regime and had to periodically convalesce at sanitariums.  Heise suffered from stomach trouble.  At the climax of the eulogy, Wolf says that Wolfgang Heise told her that all regimes were instruments of domination and all ideological -- that is, based on "false consciousness".  The answer, he says, is that the individual must attempt to remain "decent" (Anstaendig bleiben  -- "Anstaendig" meaning something like "upright", righteous, but, generally, translated as "decent").  Wolfgang Heise predictably gets in trouble with the Party, ends up denounced for his support of Wolf Biermann (one of his students who became a folksinger and famous dissident).  Tom Heise and his brother, Andreas, break into an abandoned movie theater when they are about 12; Tom kisses someone, thinking it's a girl, but it turns out to be Andreas.  (It's implied that Thomas Heise may be gay.)  Andreas later confesses that he just doesn't like Tom and writes that he has a red spot on his head due to his forceps delivery that flashes bright scarlet when he is angry.  Rosie tells Wolfgang to be "less German" about his troubles with the authorities:  "be Viennese," she says, "give them the finger."  But Wolfgang's health problems catch up with him and, harassed by the police, he resigns his position at the Humboldt University.  In this section, we see the university apparently being remodeled from within.  Walls are being torn down.  Wolfgang's removal from his position at the University is associated with pictures of a horribly ripped-up Autobahn, presumably destroyed in a flood or something on that order. 

Part IV is, more or less, about the experiences of Andreas and Thomas during their mandatory military service.  Andreas is assigned to the crumbling barracks at Oranienburg where he drinks heavily, gets dressed-down from time to time, and drives on pointless errands in a Trabant.  The film shows us more ruins, parking lots, half-demolished woods.  Thomas serves at Peenemunde on the Baltic Sea where he tours the ruins of Werner von Braun's villa and reads Borges.  Andreas writes to Rosie, his mother, and tells her about his service and how he feels estranged from his father, Wolfgang.  There are audio clips from a North Vietnamese propaganda film and a jaunty marching song about happy comrades and pretty girls.  This part of the film ends with a recitation of the Stasi (State Security file) on the Heise family.  We are told that they don't have a car and travel by cab, that Rosie dresses well and is attractive, that Wolfgang flies a red flag to show "solidarity" with the workers but is otherwise unreliable with respect to party-functions, and that their home is frequented by people with "southern complexion", possibly "Turks or Arabs".  This comically petty report, we learn is the product, of about ten different snitches all living as neighbors around the Heise family apartment.  The final shots in part IV seem to show a swan dining on debris within the rib cage of another, completely decomposed swan -- although I must confess I'm not exactly sure that was the tenor of the shot. 

Part V is very dense and philosophical.  Rosie is impressed by the East German playwright and man of the theater, Heiner Mueller.  (Heiner Mueller was East Germany's heir to Brecht, a man who staged audacious and obscene variants on classical plays -- his most famous work, at least as known in the West, is Hamletmaschine, a series of scatological monologues based on situations in Hamlet.  At one time, Mueller was enormously important in literary circles -- I tend to think of him as an arrogant, bombastic poseur, but may be wrong in my assessment.)  Rosie invites Mueller over and he becomes friends with Wolfgang.  (It appears to me that he also becomes Rosie's lover, although this is implied only and never made explicit -- it is clear from Rosie's notes and letters to Mueller that she was in love with him.)  Mueller and Wolfgang Heise record one of their colloquies, possibly for East German TV, and they discuss Brecht's observation that the masses can really endure just about anything -- this is why revolutions are so infrequent and, generally, doomed.  Mueller asserts, however, that you can beat someone down until they are subservient, but there is a "wisdom" that arises among the defeated -- this is the wisdom of the masses that are always defeated.  (These words take on resonance in light of the impending collapse of the Berlin Wall and the absorption of East Germany into the West German federation -- these historical developments were not universally celebrated; Christa Wolf, for instance, defied German reunification arguing that her country was the DDR -- it's very clear that Rosie, at least, would not have been enthused about the West Germans taking over East Germany; she seems to have remained an unapologetic Communist to the bitter end.)  Heise is not without touches of the comic -- after a long didactic (tape-recorded) conversation between Mueller and his father, you can hear the ice cubes clicking in their glasses of whiskey, he cuts to a shot of an elegant looking lizard and, then, a crocodile.  The sound track is a letter about how Thomas and Andreas in 1987 were asked to sign letters of intent signifying that they wished to join the East German officer corps.  Horrified by this demand, the young men consult with Mueller, who is like a second father to them.  Mueller pauses and says:  "Sign it and wait and see."  The young men do this but feel a deep sense of shame and go to the zoo to silently look at crocodiles "for an hour."  An elaborate sequence follows in which a train with a car maked "Chronos" backs up, while the camera glides to the side and somehow ends up ahead of the train which now pulls forward into the darkened the switching yard -- this balletic camera movement signifies going back in time to the Nazi-period, perhaps, and, then, forward:  Thomas describes in dream-like language a demonstration in which he is arrested, interrogated, and, then, released in time to see Mueller's new play, Germania.  The idea seems to be that Fascist mechanism of repression are now increasingly visible in the DDR government. Mueller sensing that the DDR is about to be kaputt buys some expensive suits (eschewing his blue collar working man's uniform) and begins to "talk about money" -- to the utter horror of Rosie who sees her lover deteriorating before her eyes.  Christa Wolf denounces the Pax Americana and notes that only a few months into reunification that US has forced Germany into war -- I think she is referring the police-actions in Bosnia.  Heise next reads a letter from Rosie to Christa Wolf, who has landed very much on her feet in Santa Monica -- in this 1993 letter, Rosie criticizes Wolf for being publicly apologetic about her serving as an informal Mitarbeiter (collaborator) with the Stasi in the early sixties.  Rosie says she also collaborated with the Stasi on the basis that she was compromised due to a "short, but ardent" love affair that she wanted to keep quiet.  But Rosie goes on to say that she thought helping the secret police was her duty and, even, a good thing.  Rosie says she informed and didn't use a pseudonym -- the snitching that she did, she didn't try to hide and did under her own name.  "We thought the Stasi necessary in those days," Rosie reminds Christa Wolf.  (Those not familiar with German literature and the career of Christa Wolf will likely not understand this part of the film-- Rosie doesn't directly say what has caused Christa Wolf's anguish and her public apology; this has to be inferred.)  Heiner Mueller publishes an article in a Frankfurt newspaper called "The Shores of Barbarism".  He cites a recent documentary about a young man denied the opportunity to be a pastry chef in the German economy who has become a Fascist skin-head.  This documentary, Mueller says, is by Thomas Heise -- he is referring to Heise's first film, Vaterland.  Democracy means oligarchy, Mueller says, and makes the dispiriting observation that "everybody is alone...the boat is full and there's no room for any one else and it can only land on the cannibal shore."  This article is published in September 1992, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and during the reunification.  There's a brief coda:  in May of 2014, Rosie is living in a nursing home, partially demented, and continuously asking "What must be done?"  Thomas Heise's companion, probably his boyfriend, Mark is ill and dying.  Rosie's apartment in Berlin has to be cleaned-up and it is filthy.  Andreas calls and says he will have to be admitted to the hospital with some unnamed condition.  We see darkened suburban streets, trains creeping through switching yards, some anonymous-looking apartment buildings.

The film is epic in all respects and beautifully made.  Despite the foregone conclusions that history imposes on the movie, the film is actually very suspenseful, even gripping -- we want to know what will happen to these people.  There is a bit of self-justification in the final hour -- but I think Heise is not without malice in coupling, for instance, Christa Wolf's bitter denunciation of American consumer society (an image of a heap of dead trees and the sound of jets in the air) with the next citation, Rosie's letter to Wolf now comfortably residing in Santa Monica.  Heise calls the film an Entwurf in a short Q & A that accompanies the movie -- if the film is a mere improvised sketch, I would hate to see what the finished product would be like.  At the American premiere at Lincoln Center, someone asked Heise what they should take-away from the film.  He replies:  "If I knew the answer to that question, I wouldn't have made you sit in a dark theater for almost four hours."  The film, he says, is a family chronicle and has no "message".  An artist isn't obligated to provide a "message" and, in fact, the film's themes are mixed, intricate, and contradictory.  Heise's nostalgia for the old DDR -- symbolized I think by the dozens, if not hundreds of shots, of ruined, half cut-down forests (one of the final train shots shows a freight car heavily laden with tree trunks) -- is made problematic by his acknowledgment of the crimes committed by that regime.  In his remarks at Lincoln Center, Heise said that some families were not affected by history, but that his family was totally destroyed by historical events -- "until not a single stone was left standing on stone."