Lacks humanity

You have to separate the medium from the message. The series isn't lacking in compassion, just because it shows people that are lacking in compassion. On the contrary. The series tells a story about people that may be lacking in compassion, but to tell that story you simply need enormous amounts of compassion. It isn't easy showing the ugly parts of humanity, but it takes compassion to do so.

Also, you have to take into account the self-biographical aspects of all the Heimat stories. Of course I understand that there's enormous amounts of fiction and artistic license involved, but the fact is, in Zweite Heimat, Edgar Reitz tells us the story of his own generation.

Edgar Reitz is Hermann. When he left his own heimat in the fifties and became a filmmaker, he was a part of that kind of group of people. They went to the Academy, they were angry, they were snobbish, they were rebellious, they were self absorbed, their parents were nazis during the war, and they grew up as adults in the sixties, to the tune of the German economic wirtschaftswunder.

When Edgar Reitz did the first Heimat series, he told that story in a slightly rebellious manner. He depicted them as the lovely bunch of rural people they were, for better and for worse. Some where seen as stupid, poor and misguided. Because, that was the way he saw them. It was a personal revenge, and a way of coming to terms with his own background. The series was made with love and compassion, but also with quite a bit of mockery of their folkish way.

Having come to terms with his own background, he made the Zweite Heimat to come to terms with himself and his entire generation, the "angry young men". And that means analysing oneself, and everything one has gone through in ones entire life. I don't think that's an easy task, and it's very easy to just take the easy way out and sugar it all up, only showing the good parts, or the fun parts.

That Reitz manages to show such a complex era in humanity, for better and for worse, speaks of his ability as a story teller and filmmaker. The 60's was a crazy time in history, with all that went with it. Those people were self absorbed, and totally in love with their own quite irrelevant obsessions. But that is how young, gifted and talented people are in that age.

If you see them as lacking in compassion and humanity, that's because that is what they are and were, and that is how Edgar Reitz saw them, and that is why he shows them to us in that way. That lack of compassion is also something they all had to come to terms with, in time, and with experience in life. In that context, Heimat 3 is the tale of closure, how his generation found their inner peace.

Taken as a whole, the Heimat saga is one of the most compassionate works of art I have ever seen. It's so rich, and have such a depth, emotionally, historically. The characters are complex, there's ambiguity, even people lacking in compassion. But that is also a human trait, the world is a very complex place. There are more shades than black or white, people simply aren't just good or bad, but good and bad at the same time. And Edgar Reitz shows us all that, because that's how he sees us, for what we are.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder