Edgar Reitz' film epic "Heimat", which invented a new, horizontal narrative form for the cinema in the last century at a time when Netflix was still a long way off, was preceded by a grandiose failure - the flop of the film drama "Der Schneider von Ulm".

Anyone who reads the recently published autobiography "Filmzeit, Lebenszeit" by the artist, who was born in 1932, cannot help but see the cornerstone for his later main work in this very crisis of the watchmaker's son from the Hunsrück.

Because the insult, which was perceived as catastrophic, gave the impetus to sweep away everything that had gone before and make a clean sweep.

Confronted with the blank canvas, the blank slate, the rupture forced a new beginning.

Sandra Kegel

Responsible editor for the feuilleton.

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Edgar Reitz wasn't just offended after "Der Schneider von Ulm" was so panned by the press in 1978 that the cinema operators took the film out of the program again within a very short time.

The then forty-six-year-old, who as the protagonist of the "New German Film" had long since declared Papa's cinema dead in numerous theoretical texts and had received awards for films such as "Mahlzeiten" (1966) or "Stunde Null" (1976), stood also facing a mountain of debt.

With what was his most expensive film to date, he overran the budget so much before shooting was over that Reitz had to bear the remaining costs himself.

Faced with bankruptcy from which he had no idea how he would ever recover, and nagging self-doubt, he broke down as a suspicion tormented him:

Reitz considered giving up filmmaking and starting an engineering degree, as his father, who didn't think much of an artist's career anyway, had always wanted.

And while he was pondering, he delved deeper and deeper into his own history and that of his ancestors.

Because the misfortune that followed him "was perhaps the misfortune of all those fugitives and fortune-seekers."

Finally, he began researching the causes of his own pain: the result made film and television history.

The tension between origin, departure and return

After five years of work, the first "Heimat" was released in 1984. Beginning in 1919 with a returnee from the First World War in the fictitious village of Schabbach in the Hunsrück, the film spans more than six decades in sixteen hours of cinema - with "dat Maria", played by Marita Breuer, in the center.

Cameraman Gernot Roll's amazing mixture of color and black-and-white aesthetics, even before Wender's "Himmel über Berlin", was established in film history through works such as "The Wizard of Oz", Truffaut's "American Night" or Scorsese's "Wie ein wild bull".

Rather, the film was a risk that had never existed in the history of cinema, because it took a whole day to tell the story of a human life.

From then on, Reitz couldn't let go of the subject: "Second Homeland" followed in 1992, which followed "Hermännche" from the Hunsrück to the Munich artist milieu of the 1960s, where he studied composition.

In the third "Heimat" chronicle (2004), after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hermann Simon, who is now fifty and has been the director's alter ego since the beginning, meets his childhood sweetheart Clarissa again.

Together they buy a half-timbered house on the Rhine.

And the eighty-year-old Reitz still follows his own dictum of endless storytelling: "The other homeland - chronicle of a longing" is the name of the four-hour prequel from 2013 about the fate of the people of Schabbach, who moved from the Hunsrück to Brazil in the nineteenth century.

The chronicle, which together covers a period of more than 150 years of German history, broken down into individual fates, not only explores the question of the accident, Reitz makes, more decisively, the tension between origin, departure and return productive.

Because even if he, the first artist in his family, differed in many ways from his ancestors, he certainly shares with them the urge to seek happiness in the distance.