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Over the past few years, the German Heimatfilm has experienced a rebirth. Its recipe for success includes regional authenticity and dialect. For Heimat is one thing above all: the language. By Susan Vahabzadeh

A brass band, traditional costumes and people speaking dialect – all of things exist, of course, yet to show them in the cinema was long frowned upon. Last year, the film My Life in Orange, in which all of these things are seen, was launched very successfully in Germany. It is about a group of people from Berlin who move to a village in Upper Bavaria where they only gradually begin to settle in due to the above idiosyncrasies. The children in particular, though, want to learn to feel at home there.

My Life in Orange is a film by Marcus H. Rosenmüller, one of the most successful and productive German directors at present. He has become the primary representative of a new kind of Heimatfilm, which originated mainly in Bavaria, where regional pride is more pronounced than anywhere else in the Federal Republic of Germany. Rosenmüller’s Die Perlmutterfarbe (2008) is about a childhood in a Bavarian small town in the 1930s. Räuber Kneißl (2008) tells the biography of a Bavarian legend, Matthias Kneissl, a rebellious thief who lived in the late 19th century.



The historic material and Rosenmüller’s contemporary stories have one thing in common: a feel for one’s own roots. Rosenmüller is perhaps so successful because he not only describes places he knows well in film, but also due to his grasp of the Bavarian dialect. Michael “Bully” Herbig, whose Schuh des Manitu (2001) is one of the biggest German box office hits of all, also makes use of Munich dialect in his films. Besides Rosenmüller, the new Heimat filmmakers include directors such as Felix Mitterer, Hans Steinbichler and Stefan Betz.

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This article originally appeared on de-cn.net: To the portal for German-Chinese cultural dialogue

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There are many reasons why dialect is uncommon in German cinema. For one, it is federalism, which attempts to reduce regional characteristics to a common denominator. And then there is history, which makes the relationship of Germans to their homeland complicated. As a result, since the 1970s German cinema and television have driven the regional colour from dialogue; any dialect was considered provincial.



They sought out hardly recognizable places and a language that seemed universal. It was an erroneous idea. Gripping stories need descriptive precision; it is very difficult and rarely possible to bring an invented, unrealistic place to life. The result of this erroneous idea was an artificial language in the films, which no one in reality really speaks. This also rubbed off on the plots, which became increasingly unrealistic.

Finding the right dosage of Heimat

Most of these films, such as Rainer Kaufmann’s Stadtgespräch (1995), centred around singles living in huge, luxurious, high-ceilinged flats who have nothing better to do all day than search for Mr (or Ms) Right. Or implausible rebelliousness was the subject, such as in the much vilified Bandits (1997) by Katja von Garnier about four prison inmates who form a band, break out of prison, climb the charts and constantly use the word “fuck.” If German film has become more successful in recent years, it has something to do with the fact that it is returning to its homeland. And one’s homeland is found chiefly in one’s language.



Since the Second World War German films have either demonstrated too much or too little Heimat; a proper dosage was rare. The uprooted cinema of the 1970s was also a reaction to the original Heimatfilm that arose in the years between the end of the war and the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, which marked the beginning of New German Cinema. Films like Der Förster vom Silberwald (1954) or Die Mädels vom Immenhof (1955) focused on artificially idyllic settings and exaggerated bonds to origins and traditions, as if these films were meant to be the antidote to the terror of the Second World War, expulsion and flight.

In those years between the end of the war and the 1960s, Germans found it difficult to grapple with their homeland. This becomes particularly clear when one compares the German Heimatfilm with its far more relaxed American counterpart: the Western. Once the wave of Heimatfilme had ebbed, films defined Heimat mainly as a common history. Edgar Reitz’s Heimat trilogy, a cycle of films in 30 parts shot in 1984, 1992 and 2004, reeled out German history from the end of the First World War until the turn of the millennium. War movies have become rare now; the cinema is presently processing more recent events. A whole array of films such as the RAF drama If Not Us, Who? (2011) by Andres Veiel and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) by Bernd Eichinger and Uli Edel deal with 1970s terrorism.



Times change and the meaning of the word Heimat has also changed. In our society, flexibility plays a far greater role than ever before. It is no longer uncommon to spend a few years overseas for career reasons. Lately, half a dozen docu-soaps on television focus on Germans attempting to make a home for themselves somewhere in foreign climes. In the cinema, it is exactly the opposite, where the children of the first guest worker generation tell the story of how their parents arrived in Germany.

For example, in 2011 Almanya by Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli was in the cinemas, which tells a German-Turkish family story from the first Turkish generation of immigrants in Germany to today in a very humorous way. Here, as well, language and homeland have much in common: only those who are able to communicate feel at home. Cem, the youngest in the family, asks his aunt’s pardon – he doesn’t know Turkish well enough to understand her stories.