HEIMAT 3
Outline

The story begins on 9th November 1989. On the evening that the Wall came down two musicians (the conductor Hermann Simon and the singer Clarissa Lichtblau), beset by the stress of their work and rootlessness, meet in a West Berlin hotel. Once they had been lovers and had lost each other in 17 years of jetting around after success. Infected by the euphoria of the Germans and their reunification ecstasy they set off for the Hunsrück. They are attracted by a romantic timber-framed house high above the Rhine valley and decide that henceforth it shall be the centre of their restless lives. What begins here and is followed throughout an entire decade is the story of a love after the happy ending.


The adventures of Hermann and Clarissa, which begin with the upheaval of a reckless house renovation, draws a chain of people in its wake. Young building labourers from Leipzig and Dresden, Clarissa’s relatives from Hamburg, friends from Berlin or Munich, as well as Hermann’s relations in the Hunsrück. As well as these there are American GI families or newly settled Russian Germans from distant Kazakhstan. We meet familiar characters from HEIMAT 1, but new characters too, among whom the four young building labourers from East Germany, Gunnar, Udo, Tillmann and Tobi are particularly prominent. In the months after the fall of Communism they discover a world of new opportunities and touchingly (movingly) try to carry out their plans in the ensuing years, although the future that was promised them would never come about.


The stories which involve the lovers, sometimes closely but also at the margins of their struggles with love, are colourfully woven together and frequently follow the often irrational logic of real life. Favourite characters are Gunnar, the tragi-comic magnet for bad luck from Leipzig, who wins a million and cannot find happiness with it; Tobias, called Tobi, a jack-of-all-trades from Dresden who feels he has the strength to conquer any task and who lives to see how things pass him by; Rudi, the diplomatic innkeeper from Schabbach, who manages, in the midst of all the changes, to save a piece of old Schabbach; Lulu, Hermann’s gadabout daughter, who evolves from a freefloating lifestyle of sport and adventure into a wonderful single mother, architect and efficient building supervisor.


The narrative drive inspired by the history of the period comes up with ever more new characters and follows their experiences. The courageous Russo-German Galina, the desperate young entrepreneur Hartmut, Arnold, the computer hacker who was found out, Reinhold the music historian, who is in love, and his Saxon lover Petra who discovers her self-confidence. In the older generation there is Hermann’s brother. Anton is the patriarch who started his own business from HEIMAT 1, and Ernst, the adventurer, aviator and connoisseur. He crashes one day on the legendary Loreley rock and leaves behind him a priceless hoard of works of art which he had squirrelled away throughout his life and hidden in a cave near Schabbach.
The stories tell of love, success, sickness, death, birth and family ties, which refuse to be broken despite the independence of the modern characters. And so, like HEIMAT 1, HEIMAT 3 is also a family chronicle, in which the generation of Maria’s grandchildren, HEIMAT’s adored matriarch is portrayed. It emerges that family feeling can still come into being even today and draw together the diverging stories of our time. The little world which is created is linked to all the significant changes of the time – the new mobility, the triumph of computers and telecommunications, the changes in jobs, families, the new way of life. In six 90-minute films the audience is confronted with a wealth of situations, people and stories which remind them of their own lives.


The old timber-framed house, which Hermann and Clarissa have lovingly restored, acts as the crossroads for the stories. It is here that conflicts are resolved. From here the young people start off in life and it is to here that everyone returns to greet the new millennium on the New Year’s Eve with which HEIMAT 3 closes.