1992 • 1532 min
Heimat 2: Chronicle of a Generation
Die zweite Heimat — Chronik einer Jugend
Synopsis
(FILM CULTURE Section)
In the autumn of 1960, the young Hermann Simon — a musician raised in the village of Schabbach amid the hills of the Hunsrück — leaves his native ground to pursue in Munich his calling as a composer. Enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik, he takes lodgings in the bohemian quarter of Schwabing, where he soon falls in with a small community of students of art, cinema, philosophy and music, destined to become for him and for them a "second homeland." Among his companions emerge the cellist Clarissa Lichtblau — a magnetic, sorrowful figure, the unappeased object of Hermann's desire —, the Chilean composer Juan, the febrile filmmaker Stefan Aufhäuser, the instrumentalist Volker, the aspiring director Helga, the candid Schnüsschen whom Hermann will marry almost out of inertia, and a host of further presences who will shape an era. Across thirteen chapters, spanning the decade 1960–1970, the film follows the loves and betrayals, the triumphs and failures, the artistic illuminations and bereavements of this generation, traversing the unresolved legacy of Nazism, the effervescence of 1968, the revolution of mores and the birth of the New German Cinema. When the work draws to a close, Schwabing and its dreams already belong to an all-but-mythological past, and the Heimat just won reveals itself, melancholically, as a Heimat lost.
In the autumn of 1960, the young Hermann Simon — a musician raised in the village of Schabbach amid the hills of the Hunsrück — leaves his native ground to pursue in Munich his calling as a composer. Enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik, he takes lodgings in the bohemian quarter of Schwabing, where he soon falls in with a small community of students of art, cinema, philosophy and music, destined to become for him and for them a "second homeland." Among his companions emerge the cellist Clarissa Lichtblau — a magnetic, sorrowful figure, the unappeased object of Hermann's desire —, the Chilean composer Juan, the febrile filmmaker Stefan Aufhäuser, the instrumentalist Volker, the aspiring director Helga, the candid Schnüsschen whom Hermann will marry almost out of inertia, and a host of further presences who will shape an era. Across thirteen chapters, spanning the decade 1960–1970, the film follows the loves and betrayals, the triumphs and failures, the artistic illuminations and bereavements of this generation, traversing the unresolved legacy of Nazism, the effervescence of 1968, the revolution of mores and the birth of the New German Cinema. When the work draws to a close, Schwabing and its dreams already belong to an all-but-mythological past, and the Heimat just won reveals itself, melancholically, as a Heimat lost.
Review
8 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 28. April 2026
Whoever strives with all his might, / him we can redeem.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To approach Die zweite Heimat is to enter one of those rare monuments of European cinema that dare to measure themselves against the great tradition of the German Bildungsroman — from Wieland to Goethe, from Stifter to Thomas Mann — and to carry its breath into the luminous matter of film. Reitz here does not limit himself to narrating: he sculpts time, to borrow Tarkovsky's formula. The twenty-five hours that compose the cycle are no caprice of duration but the very substance through which experience becomes consciousness, and consciousness is transmuted into destiny. In this length, demanded and willed, something profoundly Heideggerian vibrates: time does not flow, it unfolds, and every shot becomes a Lichtung, a clearing in which the being of the characters manifests itself in its naked fragility.
Hermann, having escaped the provincial Schabbach of the first Heimat, embodies the archetype of the existential exile: not a geographical refugee but a metaphysical orphan of a land he no longer recognizes as his own. His "second homeland," Munich, is first of all not a place but a Stimmung: an affective tonality, an atmosphere, a condition of feeling. Schwabing — with its nocturnal cafés, its garrets heavy with scores, its untuned pianos — does not offer itself to the protagonist as a dwelling, but as a phenomenological space in which to experience his own Geworfenheit, that thrownness of which Sein und Zeit speaks. Reitz grasps, and shows us, that youth is not a chronological age but an ontological structure: the one in which man, still without sediment, measures himself for the first time against the irrevocability of choice and the vertiginous abyss of anguish.
Within this horizon the figure of Clarissa Lichtblau acquires an extraordinary symbolic density. A cellist of wounded elegance, a woman who traverses the decade like a string stretched between desire and renunciation, Clarissa is the Other who always remains other — the unattainable upon whom Hermann projects his entire thirst for the absolute. Their perpetually unfinished relationship, which the director refuses to resolve into either consummation or definitive rupture, evokes the Sartrean dialectic of the gaze: each is for the other at once transcendence and object, freedom and obstacle. Music, which both of them practise, becomes then the third place where bodies cannot meet and yet, for a few suspended bars, their souls coincide. When Clarissa lifts the bow and Hermann lays his fingers on the keyboard, what occurs is what Adorno would call a moment of truth incommunicable except through the aesthetic medium.
Around this missed couple orbit the other figures of the choral fresco, each treated with an anthropological scruple reminiscent of Robert Walser and, further back, of Tolstoy: no instrumental function, no submission to thesis, but veritable monads — the word may already be uttered — each of which mirrors the world from its own irreducible angle. Juan, the Chilean, twice exiled (from his geographical homeland and from the German tongue that remains foreign to him), brings into the group the echo of another latitude and another historical time; Stefan is the impatient director searching for a cinema still to be invented, anticipating the season of Fassbinder and Wenders; Volker embodies the virtuoso besieged by his own talent; Helga, Renate and Evelyne decline in divergent registers the condition of woman on the threshold of a hard-won emancipation; Schnüsschen, the bride whom Hermann chooses almost as a compromise with reality, is perhaps the most moving character of the entire cycle, for she embodies the innocence that pays the price of other people's dreams.
Through this gallery of figures Reitz constructs an imposing representation of the arts as horizons of meaning and as concrete practices of life. Never before on screen had the lecture halls of the Hochschule, the recording studios, the editing tables, the small projection rooms and the cafés of Schwabing — where pages of Marcuse, Adorno and Wittgenstein are debated until dawn — appeared with such phenomenological fidelity. The film shows how counterpoint is studied, how a reel is edited, how a framing is quarrelled over, how a quartet is composed, how — between ecstasy and second thought — the first staging of a young director is born: not the cliché of bohemian talent, but the meticulous portrayal of intellectual labour in its laborious materiality.
The arts, here, are not the ornament of the Bildungsroman but its very fabric, that through which the characters individuate themselves, collide, wound one another, recognize one another. Reitz, a theorist of cinema as well as a director, restores to the representation of the creative gesture an ontological dignity that recalls, by analogy, other great pages on the entwining of dodecaphonic music and philosophy: art is not described from outside but caught in its making, in its small daily obstinacies, in its pauses of dismay, in its rare radiances.
The arts, here, are not the ornament of the Bildungsroman but its very fabric, that through which the characters individuate themselves, collide, wound one another, recognize one another. Reitz, a theorist of cinema as well as a director, restores to the representation of the creative gesture an ontological dignity that recalls, by analogy, other great pages on the entwining of dodecaphonic music and philosophy: art is not described from outside but caught in its making, in its small daily obstinacies, in its pauses of dismay, in its rare radiances.
Nor could one pass over in silence the prodigious score by Nikos Mamangakis, a genuine co-author of the work. The sweeping Titelmusik that accompanies the entire architecture, the recurring themes — the celebrated Kennen Sie ihn? that returns as a metaphysical question, the chamber pieces that mark each threshold, the learned citations from Bach to Mahler interwoven with jazz, with the songs of protest and with the sweetness of the Romantic Lied — do not constitute an external commentary on the images but a second narrative level, a parallel dramaturgy in which the unconscious of the characters finds its voice.
Hermann's leitmotiv, in particular, behaves like a musical memory that precedes and follows the protagonist, anticipating his bereavements and ratifying his rebirths, according to a Wagnerian logic restrained to the intimate, sorrowful measure of the Klavierstück. It is rare that a film — and rarer still that a series of such duration — achieves so complete a fusion of vision and listening: in Die zweite Heimat Mamangakis's score does not illustrate the images, it breathes them, and ends by constituting the most secret of the "homelands" in which the characters — and the spectator with them — choose to dwell.
Hermann's leitmotiv, in particular, behaves like a musical memory that precedes and follows the protagonist, anticipating his bereavements and ratifying his rebirths, according to a Wagnerian logic restrained to the intimate, sorrowful measure of the Klavierstück. It is rare that a film — and rarer still that a series of such duration — achieves so complete a fusion of vision and listening: in Die zweite Heimat Mamangakis's score does not illustrate the images, it breathes them, and ends by constituting the most secret of the "homelands" in which the characters — and the spectator with them — choose to dwell.
The chromatic choice — black-and-white punctuated by sudden epiphanies of colour upon a red coat, a candle, a bouquet of flowers — is no formal indulgence but an authentic Benjaminian meditation on aura. Colour erupts as Proustian reminiscence, as mémoire involontaire that tears the opaque patina of memory. Reitz here dialogues openly with Benjamin's philosophy of the fragment: the past does not allow itself to be reconstructed in its entirety, but flashes up in discontinuous gleams that suspend for an instant the inexorable march of chronological time. The coloured frame is the Jetztzeit, the "now-time" that blasts open the continuum of history.
Beneath the surface of the generational chronicle — the Sixties, the protest movements, the long shadow of the Nazi fathers, the rift of the Federal Republic, the irruption of consumerism — pulses a deeper disquiet: the slow awareness, acquired by the protagonists chapter after chapter, that the freedom so eagerly pursued does not emancipate one from solitude, but merely renders it more lucid. The bitter Adornian teaching of the Minima Moralia resounds here: to live authentically, in an administered and reified world, is a task one pays for with a scar. The failure of the dreams of Schwabing is therefore not defeat but revelation: the Heimat is always second, always posthumous, always built in the very act of losing it. Ernst Bloch would have spoken of a principle of hope; Reitz, more sober and melancholic, inverts the sign and speaks of a principle of memory.
It would not be idle, before concluding, to observe how Die zweite Heimat inscribes itself, within Reitz's path, into a meditative trajectory that culminates in his recent Leibniz — Chronik einer verschollenen Malerei (2023), in which the nearly nonagenarian director carries to their most rarefied consequences his enquiry into time, memory and the image. Filmed in a black-and-white of baroque clarity, that work accompanies the philosopher of Hanover as he grapples with the commissioning of his own portrait and with the properly philosophical consciousness of being a thinker of the monad, of the individual as a speculative universe in which the whole converges without dissolving.
Having addressed collective identity in Heimat and generational identity in Die zweite Heimat, Reitz now turns to metaphysical identity: what is a man who beholds himself from outside, who lets himself be portrayed, who seeks in the image the seal of his own persistence? The secret dialogue between the young Hermann lost in Schwabing and the elderly Leibniz- chronicle of a lost painting before his own effigy is, at bottom, the same question, posed from the two opposite ends of a life: who am I, when time gives me back an image in which I struggle to recognize myself?
Having addressed collective identity in Heimat and generational identity in Die zweite Heimat, Reitz now turns to metaphysical identity: what is a man who beholds himself from outside, who lets himself be portrayed, who seeks in the image the seal of his own persistence? The secret dialogue between the young Hermann lost in Schwabing and the elderly Leibniz- chronicle of a lost painting before his own effigy is, at bottom, the same question, posed from the two opposite ends of a life: who am I, when time gives me back an image in which I struggle to recognize myself?
We are dealing, therefore, with a Bildungsroman of an extreme species: not the edifying kind in which the protagonist is reconciled with the world, but the tragic kind in which he discovers that the adult self is not a goal but a residue — what remains after the evaporation of illusions. The existential pedagogy Reitz stages, through his immense duration, teaches that to live means, above all, to learn to take leave: of the Heimat of one's fathers, of the Heimat of one's friends, of the Heimat of oneself. Only the one who accepts this manifold leave-taking gains, in exchange, the retrospective gaze that saves.
It is part of morality not to feel at home in one's own home.
— Theodor W. Adorno
— Theodor W. Adorno
