Heimat

I've been watching Heimat on DVD this evening. It's a really affectingly written and shot piece...it's as if it reshapes your ideas about Germany after World War One, and about the lead up to Nazism and WW2.

More specifically, it focuses on the ordinary lives of ordinary people in a village in post-1918 Germany, a place touched by the war, but not obviously seeded with any ideas that would feed into/be drawn upon by National Socialism. It reminds you that things aren't inevitable, and that your ex post facto convictions can colour your perception of the past...(ie, because you know that Hitler came to power, and the Nazis did all the things they did, you somehow think that there was an inevitablity about it all, as if the Nazi destiny was sitting inside the stone of Germany's history, just waiting for Hitler's chisel to chip away at the outside layers and reveal the irresistible core.)

Things are more contingent than that, I think.

There's a lovely scene where the villagers are picknicking in a ruined castle, in 1923. One of the characters is a wireless geek, and all the people's faces light up with fascination and pleasure as he tunes his valve-based radio set in to distant stations. You can feel the sense of novelty. It reminds you how much of the electronic/digital world we take for granted now, as if its always been there; and yet I can remember the thrill of my first transistor radio in the early 70s...