HEIMAT 3 – LOCATIONS
Schabbach, the Centre of the World?

1

Up until the fall of Communism the Hunsrück was the centre of the Western lines of defence, a whole arsenal of weapons of destruction, the military, and defence technology. The American military airfield HAHN AIRBASE was the most terrifying launch pad for nuclear bombers and intermediate range rockets. Thousands of American soldiers had been based here since the end of the war and had shaped the landscape and ways of speech. Early in the ‘90s these military facilities were dismantled, more than 20,000 American soldiers and their dependants departed and left behind them ghostly bunkers and thousands of homes. At the same time countless emigrants poured through the now open eastern borders from the territories of the former Soviet Union. These people, whose German ancestry went back for 200 years, brought their histories, their outlook, and their dreams of a better life from Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz, Tachikistan or Georgia to the Hunsrück, because here was vacant housing and it smelled of prosperity. The empty GI housing was filled with householders who spoke only Russian, who looked upon the refuse of American civilisation with the hungry eyes of poverty and had no idea of the absurd historical joke that their arrival represented.
The chronicle of these events from 1990 to the millennium reveals a remarkable wealth of stories in the Hunsrück. Once again Schabbach proves itself to be the “middle of the world“ for the narrative of the film.

2

When we close our eyes and picture the period between the fall of the Wall and today we can perhaps imagine how “Heimat“ has changed. Only ten years ago it meant, at least to our memories, a fixed place. Now, on the threshold of the millennium, we long to remain children of our time, not to be banished from it when the world has become boundless and places undifferentiated. “Heimat” is no longer an expression for a place, but has become an expression for a time and thus a thoroughly cinematic subject. “Cinema is the only art form able to conquer time, which is always fleeting. Even the cinema cannot stop time, but it can tell of it. The cinema can be “Heimat””. (Edgar Reitz)