HEIMAT 3 – PERIOD OF THE STORY
Of Endings and Beginnings


Martha‘s Distance Wedding 1944: In her womb she carries the destiny of the family of 1995. A courageous look into the future.

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“Anyone who gets really involved in telling stories will never be able to stop“. In the 20th century the people of Germany were whirled around in a particularly dramatic way. They had to rethink their lives from the bottom up time and again. And in the last decade of the millennium the face of the world has changed once again, especially for the East Germans. With the collapse of the Wall and the events which followed it, the concept of HEIMAT, surprisingly, once again becomes an issue. The memories of those who lived through it have once again dammed up a flood of stories. Stories urgently waiting to be told. We want to tap into these collective memories once again. HEIMAT 3 is not only to be the third part of the HEIMAT Trilogy, but a narrative inventory of the century in its final decade. Its inner theme is one of endings and beginnings.


HEIMAT 3 is a tragi-comic film, telling of the spirit of renewal of the early ‘90s, recording what German dreams we began to dream and how they became less and less German and lost themselves instead in global immensity.





Hermann and Clarissa (HEIMAT II) are made for each other. But they only realise this later when the whole nation is embracing.

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It took ten years for us to be able to take in the living profusion of the first weeks and months of the ‘90s and to pursue them in narrative to the present day. We can see the difficulty that this experience remains divided to this day into two separate perspectives. The memories of the West Germans are different from those of the East Germans, although so many meetings took place and there was a shared happiness in the first weeks. When we begin to draw from the well of the stories of this period we keep falling into this confusion of perspectives. One and the same thing has two different facets. But what could be more attractive than to look at these glittering contradictions from their comic side and to laugh at our German confusion?


Thomas Brussig, the co-author, from his origins and his literary experience of the East, is a guarantee for a humorous and authentic rendering of the East Germans, their life stories, their ways of thinking and modes of speech.



All stories need time and space even an arduous love story. (HEIMAT II)

For a short time between the fall of the Wall and reunification all the rules were in abeyance. Work was done without tax registration, friendships were forged unhindered by cultural differences, strangers met and embraced souls and wallets were opened. Those people who felt that history had suddenly released them from its stranglehold were unbelievably moved. It was not only in the East that the sun rose more brightly than before. And there had never been such a thrilling New Year’s as 1989. It seemed only natural that Germany then won the World Cup.







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The ideology of the end of the 20th century says bluntly that in times of falling prosperity everyone must look out for himself – and it is a marketing myth that the young were better off than the old. Walter Momper’s statement to the Bundestag on 10th November 1989 now sounds decidedly outlandish: “We Germans are the happiest people in the world!”