The term “Heimat” is difficult to grasp. It is a profoundly German term that is only inadequately translated by the English term “homeland”. It is also a term that has been burned more than once in the course of German history – including cultural history. The Nazis used it as a foil for their blood-and-soil ideology of the “national community”, and even today, for the extreme right, “Heimat” primarily means the exclusion of migrant cultures. The fact that the infamous Heimat films of the Adenauer era – the only originally German film genre – primarily constructed an ideal world at their end also contributed to the skepticism towards this term. But the Heimat films of the 1950s, which always dealt with the conflicts of the majority society with minorities and their integration, also showed that Heimat is above all a search – for identity and for an attitude.
This could be seen very well at this year’s Munich International Film Festival (Filmfest München) in the New German Cinema section in a film like In the Rose Garden (Im Rosengarten), the directorial debut of screenwriter Leis Bagdach. Kostja Ullmann plays the famous pop star Yak, a rapper in a crisis of creativity and meaning, who is confronted with the news that his father who had returned to his native Syria decades ago is now terminally ill in a Cologne hospital.
Waiting in the hospital is his half-sister Latifa (Safinaz Sattar), of whom he previously knew nothing and who only speaks Arabic, which, in turn, Yak does not speak. Yak tries to find Latifa somewhere to stay, and an odyssey begins into his past and to the places he has lived, to a friend (Tom Lass) whom he hasn’t seen for decades, to his German grandparents who live in the Black Forest, to the love of his life (Verena Altenberger) who is getting married there. Not every encounter in this film is free of clichés, but it brilliantly describes the fact that home can also mean finding one’s way back, which is certainly associated with great pain.
If you describe Heimat as a system of fixed coordinates, as a precisely defined region in which people have perhaps lived for decades, know each other and are connected to each other, then it is fair to say that the opening film in the Munich Film Festival was also close to a kind of Heimat film: Natja Brunckhorst’s Two to One (Zwei zu eins). Location: a so-called “Plattenbau” (a prefabricated housing estate) near Halberstadt in East Germany. Time: Summer 1990. The GDR still exists, but the days of the East German Mark are numbered, and there are only a few days left in which it can be exchanged two to one (the ratio that gives the film its title).
When Maren (Sandra Hüller), Robert (Max Riemelt) and Volker (Ronald Zehrfeld) notice that trucks are permanently driving to an underground storage facility where they used to play as children, they set off on a search with the help of Robert’s uncle (Peter Kurth) and find out that the government is depositing tons of banknotes there. They are worthless at first glance (most GDR citizens had already exchanged their savings), but the sales representatives from the West were still accepting GDR money for vacuum cleaners, fridges and microwaves. And so, with the participation of all residents, a large-scale exchange campaign begins with the aim of buying back the state-owned metal processing company in which everyone worked – to socialize it again under capitalism, so to speak.
Two to One is based on an actual theft and clearly comes across as a feel-good movie, to which the love triangle between the main characters is intended to give a somewhat strained depth. But as a story about an uprising of those who have been sidelined against those at the top, it works perfectly.
“Heimat” is also when you stay anyway. This could be the motto of many German films of recent years set in the East German provinces, where the streets are lined with houses plastered in the uniform grey of the GDR. One such village is Wiesenwalde, where, it can be assumed, not much actually happens – until an American film company shoots a tv series about the Second World War in the old factory. Not only is there an abandoned tank standing around, but the electricity has suddenly gone. Another German Tank Story by Jannis Alexander Kiefer develops its comedy from this culture clash and is full of absurd details on the periphery, such as the driver only moving at walking pace in a minibus (because he doesn’t have a driver’s license) or the guard that the mayor places in front of the tank. The fact that a returned and failed sensationalist journalist also tries to take advantage of Hollywood activities is more in the standard repertoire of German comedy.
Micha Thinks Big (Micha denkt groß) by Lars Jessen and Jan Georg Schütte, shown in the New German TV Films section, also tells of a homecoming: Micha (Charly Hübner), who has become rich with a computer game, wants to turn his parents’ run-down inn in his home village of Klein-Schappleben into a luxury hotel. But the plan soon threatens to fail when the water suddenly dries up. Micha Thinks Big is more bitter and also closer to reality than many provincial comedies, and in the end Micha decides to stay, in line with a saying by legendary Bavarian poet and filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch: “You have no chance, so take it!”.
Katinka does not want to leave her village either. She wants to become a farmer, even though farming is in crisis not only in this region, the Southern German Hohenlohe region. The idyllic picture of the farmer’s family on the jar of sausage is deceptive. Smell of Burnt Milk (Milch ins Feuer), shot in the Hohenlohe dialect and in an almost square format, delivers an authentic-looking portrait of a rural farming family with Katinka, her sisters and a friend. Only Johanna Wokalek, who plays the mother, is a trained actress, the other women are amateurs, but director Justine Bauer manages to lead them convincingly.
The film’s title refers to the neighbor’s protest action, setting fire to a bale of straw in order to extinguish it with milk (which the farmers can no longer produce profitably). He later hangs himself, but before going to the police, Katinka and her mother first have to collect the hay because it’s going to rain soon. Work plays a major role in this gem of a movie: starting up the milking machine, cleaning the barn, castrating an alpaca. At the same time, it is also summer, and in Smell of Burnt Milk the heat wafts over the landscape, which probably holds no future for Katinka.
Rudolf Worschech
Edited by Jason Gorber
© FIPRESCI 2024