Fantasy Worlds and Realism - Dossier Heimat Film

Schwarzwaldmädel

The fifties in Germany. The decade tried to forget the terrors of war. It tried to repress the past of the Third Reich and its own guilt.

The country ravaged by war was rebuilt. Those years were called the "Adenauer Era" after the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic. They were years when traditional values were restored – aided and abetted by the cinema. It was a popular genre cinema: comedies, melodramas, war films, adventure films, thrillers and – heimat films. Their popularity has never been surpassed since by any other kind of German film. In one year, a total of 14 million cinema-goers went to see Hans Deppe's Schwarzwaldmädel (i.e. Black Forest Girl), the first colour film to be shown in the cinemas after the war; special stamps were distributed at the première in Stuttgart.

'Heimat' had been a key term in the fascist ideology. After the war had been lost, this term was virtually deprived of its meaning: the country was occupied by the Allies, part of the former homeland had become another country, the German Democratic Republic. In the post war years, reverting to the old heimat and to an intact picture of the heimat at least evoked a feeling, an illusion of heimat. One could nestle into these pictures. They promised solace. "After 1945 the term "heimat" described a new political and cultural orientation, and heimat films also had the function of a social and psychological balsam." (Heide Fehrenbach)

An Idyllic World

Die Fischerin vom Bodensee

The best mirror of the restorative 1950s is indeed to be found in the heimat films – the only original genre ever to be created by German film. It was not actually invented in the fifties, but in the late twenties and early thirties by Arnold Fanck in his mountain films, also by Luis Trenker, the mountaineer, actor and director, nor was the world of Leni Riefenstahl far removed. In the 1950s the heimat films presented a portrait of the epoch, as it were, in a kind of negative. The everyday cares and sorrows were contrasted with a very different kind of life, with an idyll.

People struggling with conflicts in a country which had lost a war only a few years ago were offered a view of another world, unviolated and intact. While the Federal Republic was still searching for a new identity, the heimat films depicted a small, easily comprehensible and well-ordered world of villages with their folklorist traditions, as in for example Die Fischerin vom Bodensee (i.e. The Fisherwoman from Lake Constance) or Die Landärztin (i.e. The Country Doctor). In their décor they reflected the aesthetics of the fifties:

Hoch droben in den Bergen

vibrant colours, dominated by red and green; sweeping curves – reminiscent of the kidney-shaped tables in people's homes or of the writing used for film posters and cinema programmes. And heimat films often joined forces with the popular songs of the epoch, such as Hoch droben auf dem Berg (i.e. High up on the mountains) by the then extremely popular singer Rudi Schuricke.

The experience of nature is one of the central motifs in the heimat film. In the 1950s, its role was all the more important due to the fact that the ruins left by the Second World War were being cleared away, and the nation had embarked on a building spree: department stores, high-rise buildings, owner-occupied homes. It was not uncommon for old architectural substance to be heedlessly modernized beyond recognition (Edgar Reitz shows this in his Heimat series). Unspoiled nature presented an idyllic counterpart to this consumer landscape then emerging in the Federal Republic and the concomitant modernization.

Der Förster vom Silberwald

The success of the film Der Förster vom Silberwald (i.e. The Forester from the Silver Forest) with its extensive, semi-documentary nature shots was due not least to this experience of nature. The mountains, the Alps (on the German as well as on the Austrian side) provide the most favoured backdrop for the heimat film. The landscape: a beautiful décor, as one would say nowadays a "fantasy", far-removed from reality, sometimes almost surreal, but very pleasant to look at.

Revival of interest in the portrayal of the fifties

The pleasure to be found in watching these films nowadays resembles the pleasure one might find in kitsch, in romantic love stories, in melodramas with sensational twists and turns. The genre movies of the fifties are enjoying a new popularity: they are once again included in the programmes of the TV channels, much of the popular dramaturgy of that time has also been incorporated into prime-time series and TV movies. Whether this means that now, at the beginning of the millennium, a new flight from reality is under way, a new yearning for an intact world (hardly surprising in view of the present economic crisis) – this is another question. The heimat films of the fifties are in any case a fascinating subject: for the pleasure which they brought to large audiences – and still do – as also for the critical distance required in order to understand their enmeshment with the zeitgeist.

One thing is clear: the idyllic landscapes of that time are in touch with people's dreams. They still spirit us away into worlds, which are better than the world we live in.