'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

If German films are to make use of what is their last chance internationally, they
must come to terms with their Nazi past. Our generation is the only one that can
deal with the period at all, for we can drop the whole moral burden, we were
never Nazi. We can tell the story of 1940 with open eyes. (Quoted in Fischli n.
pag.)
Reitz addressed the German past in his fifteen-and-a-half-hour filmic epic,
Heimat I, which was released as an eleven-part series on West German television in
1984. As one of the most ambitious West German film and television projects, Heimat
took five years to complete. Reitz‟s mammoth work traces the history of Schabbach, a
small village in the Hunsrück mountains, from the 1920s to the 1950s through the
destinies of various villagers, primarily the members of one family, the Simons.
Twentieth-century German history is presented as a backdrop to the characters‟ personal
lives. As Eric Santner explains, “Located initially on the outermost margins of history
writ large […] the village offers the opportunity to bear witness to the slower rhythms of
history from below” (59). Criticized for its sentimental tendencies, but praised for its
close attention to the organization of quotidian life, Heimat provoked intense debates
about the relationship between history, memory, narrative, and national identity.
Specifically, the series was criticized for its affirmative recreation of Germanness outside
the realities of anti-Semitism. Gertrude Koch, one of the most outspoken critics of
Heimat, accused the film of marginalizing the fate of the Jews. She states,
The film reproduces the standard ellipses concerning the extermination of the
Jews […] Whenever real horror would have to be thematized, the film resorts to
[…] fade-out strategies which are analogous to the defense mechanisms of
experience and as such elude critical reflection. (16-17)
Despite such criticism, Heimat was enthusiastically received by West German
television audiences and at film festivals in Venice, London and the United States
(Santner 57). Riding on the wave of Heimat‟s international success, Bernhard Sinkel
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