Edgar Reitz's Heimat is not just a brilliant film about Germany. It is a brilliant film about our time, anywhere - perhaps about any time anywhere. The war between continuity and change, staying at home and leaving home, is part of the human condition. This war is the true subject of Reitz's huge and absorbing masterpiece. It begins in 1919, when Europe has destroyed itself and the future is moving to the new world, America. The old world, essentially unchanged for centuries, has just died, and Heimat is an elegy for a way of life which no one has properly valued until it was over.

LRB 22 January 1987 | PDF Download