Heimat is a Space in Time

“Why do we have to live through these times?” This ques­tion found in doc­u­ments drawn from 1942 is one that is just as per­ti­nent today. Con­struct­ed from cor­re­spon­dences plucked from the filmmaker’s own fam­i­ly archives, Heimat is a Space in Time works through a great num­ber of ques­tions over its near 100-year-long time span (and near four-hour run­time), many of which are unan­swer­able, too great, or else rhetor­i­cal by design.

Heimat is the lat­est film by Thomas Heise, an East Berlin born film­mak­er who has been liv­ing and mak­ing films long enough to have seen the times change – his first films, made in the ear­ly 1980s, were banned under the GDR. The cen­tral obser­va­tion of Heimat is history’s propen­si­ty to repeat itself. The var­i­ous char­ac­ters – all mem­bers of Heise’s imme­di­ate fam­i­ly – all suf­fer per­se­cu­tion or oppres­sion under sev­er­al dif­fer­ent state pow­ers, and humankind’s unwa­ver­ing capa­bil­i­ty for tor­ment and treach­ery (both active and uncon­scious) is a thread that runs through­out. Is it pos­si­ble, Heise asks, to retain your human­i­ty with­in a dictatorship?

Span­ning from the end of the 19^th cen­tu­ry into the start of the 20^th, the film reroutes the sto­ries that emerge from Heise’s own geneal­o­gy into a broad­er nation­al his­to­ry, ren­der­ing the per­son­al polit­i­cal in a scale and seri­ous­ness rarely seen on screen. Along­side scanned doc­u­ments and pho­tographs, let­ters are read aloud by the direc­tor for most of the film’s dura­tion, paired with extra­or­di­nar­i­ly well com­posed cin­e­matog­ra­phy by Ste­fan Neu­berg­er accom­pa­ny­ing scenes of con­tem­po­rary Ger­many. It is stark, strik­ing and always in sober­ing black-and-white.

Through these let­ters, famil­iar sto­ries emerge: wars are waged; peo­ple are put into camps; cou­ples fall in love; fam­i­lies are formed and then torn apart. Some of the scenes described are uni­ver­sal, oth­ers are more idio­syn­crat­ic and spe­cif­ic. Despite all that is endured, romance remains a reg­u­lar motif. An enor­mous­ly dense and dif­fi­cult film, no fam­i­ly tree or time­line is pro­vid­ed to tie these sto­ries together.

No map is pro­vid­ed around the web of net­works, nor a com­pass for nav­i­gat­ing them. Cer­tain assump­tions are made about the viewer’s abil­i­ty to not just piece these frag­ments togeth­er, but place them against a nation­al his­to­ry which in turn imbues them with a greater weight and potency.

Heise’s unerr­ing monot­o­ne voiceover plows ever for­ward through his mass of mate­r­i­al. He retains an emo­tion­al neu­tral­i­ty despite the intense­ly per­son­al nature, and main­tains the film’s impres­sive, if impos­ing, rigour through­out. Years pass, regimes change, yet the let­ters con­tin­ue, always pre­cise in their descrip­tions of the present and pre­scient in their per­cep­tion of imag­ined futures.

Wolf­gang Heise, Thomas’ father and a famed philoso­pher, once wrote that, ​“this state, like any state, is an instru­ment of dom­i­na­tion; and its ide­ol­o­gy, like any ide­ol­o­gy, is a false con­scious­ness.” It’s a piv­otal line, mir­ror­ing the film in its clin­i­cal, punch-pack­ing pre­ci­sion. ​“What can we do?” asks anoth­er char­ac­ter in response. Thomas reads Wolf­gang aloud, one Heise echo­ing anoth­er. The answer? ​“Remain decent.”