The home of Edgar Reitz
A film director made the Hunsrück region famous. A voyage of discovery.
Tranquillity reigns over this valley while sturdy cows graze on lush green pastures. Often, when the bells are not pealing from the church tower in Schlierschied and Jürgen Wolf is not driving his tractor across his fields, the only thing you can hear is the whistling of the wind. And it is the wind that Wolf mentions first when he is asked about his home region: “The raw climate and the wind are typical of the Hunsrück,” says the 52-year-old farmer. What may appear not particularly cozy to a stranger is an immutable part of Wolf’s life. “My father, my grandfather and their forefathers before them were farmers in Schlierschied,” he explains.
Jürgen Wolf shares his Hunsrück home with a world-class film director who immortalized the region between the Mosel and the Rhine in film: Edgar Reitz, son of Morbach clockmaker Robert Reitz, began shooting his Heimat series about the fictional village of Schabbach in 1980. It is an incomparable chronicle of the 20th century, told through the stories of Hunsrück lives. Heimat 1 was filmed in villages like Gehlweiler, Rhaunen and Woppenroth. His latest feature film, Home from Home (German title: Die andere Heimat), which was recently celebrated at the Venice Film Festival, now tells the story of Schabbach in the 19th century and was partially made on Jürgen Wolf’s fields. He planted an old two-metre-tall variety of rye that is otherwise no longer grown. As a young man he experienced how increasing numbers of foreign visitors came to the Hunsrück to discover Edgar Reitz’s home. The series of films has been broadcast in over 30 countries. Jürgen Wolf likes the fact that Edgar Reitz has focused so many eyes on the Hunsrück. But he doesn’t waste a lot of time talking about it. “Home is home,” he says simply and succinctly in the Hunsrück dialect.
What fascinates people even more than the raw beauty of the Hunsrück region is the theme of Edgar Reitz’s fictional film series, which also gave it its name. “Heimat” means home or home country. In his epic the director describes the very normal lives of different generations who remain attached to their home region even when they are far away. “Everyone can empathize with Heimat wherever he or she is from,” says Marga Molz. She sits at one of the wooden tables in her inn, which she has been running for 60 years. These seats have been used by Canadians, Brazilians, Britons and Dutchmen who were all attracted to the Hunsrück by the Heimat chronicle. And, of course, Edgar Reitz and his co-author Peter Steinbach also spent many evenings in the crowded inn listening to stories about life in the region. If these tales threatened to enter the realm of legend, it was mainly Marga Molz’s husband Rudi who put them right. Today his widow no longer needs to work for her living, but when she is home, the inn is open to friends and strangers alike. However, the traditional inns are gradually becoming fewer in the Hunsrück; their significance as the nerve centres of communal life is declining. What remains of our home, the place we grew up?
In the Hunsrück, answers to this question are also found in unusual places. Energielandschaft Morbach has been established on the site of what was once the US Air Force’s largest munitions depot in Europe – and is an outstanding example of the use of alternative energy sources. Photovoltaic cells collect sunlight and wind turbines turn on its 146 hectares. The project also has a biogas plant, and grazing sheep stop everything becoming overgrown. Landscape planner Michael Grehl coordinates the development of the facility, which he co-initiated eleven years ago, for Edgar Reitz’s home town of Morbach. The project on the fenced off site offers the people of the Hunsrück jobs and prospects and also enables them to live in harmony with nature. However, Grehl says too: “We have to be careful.” He considers the chaotic expansion of wind power throughout the whole of the Hunsrück region dangerous despite all the benefits. “If the whole place is full of wind turbines, you can no longer feel at home,” says Grehl. He looks over the gentle rolling hills around Morbach and enthuses: “The large forests are fantastic – and so are the daffodil fields and all the orchids.” Grehl admits that even he sometimes overlooks the beauty around him. He talks about the mayor of the Turkish Mediterranean city of Alanya, with which Morbach is twinned. Asked what anyone from Alanya with its idyllic Riviera would find attractive about Morbach, the mayor replied: “You don’t know what you have! So much greenery! Forests in which you can walk for hours undisturbed. That’s real life!”
People often underestimate their home, where they come from. “You don’t see what you always see,” says Brunhilde Dämgen. She is sitting with her husband Heribert in their living room in Gehlweiler, a village with 250 inhabitants. When the Dämgens look out of the window in autumn they see a wonderful sea of colour: the nearby Lützelsoon and Soonwald forests with the deciduous trees turning red, yellow and brown alongside the green hues of the conifers. Jürgen Wolf’s farm lies on the other side of the hill. From their house the Dämgens only have to walk a few steps to the half-timbered houses of Gehlweiler that Edgar Reitz used as the setting for his Heimat films. Brunhilde Dämgen comes from the smithy whose typical combination with house and barn are today known by people all over the world because they were also the home of the Simons, the Hunsrück film family. A few metres away stands the house in which the life of the Simons in the 19th century is set in Home from Home.
Heribert Dämgen worked hard to ensure that this authentic film setting was preserved after the filming ended: the dark brown wall beams, the open hearth with its soot-blackened iron pots and the painted flowers as simple wall decorations. It is an almost magical memorial to the past. When Dämgen talks about his home region, however, he is very much in the present – among his friends in the Hunsrück, among the fields, meadows and forests, among the apple trees in front of his house: “The apples might have spots and an acidic taste, but if one takes my fancy, I eat it. Who still has that nowadays?” ▪
