Home ist ein Raum aus Zeit (2019)

Directed by: Thomas Heise | 218 minutes | documentary, history

For ‘Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit’, film director Thomas Heise delved into his family archives. This resulted in a special and sometimes spicy three and a half hour documentary. On the basis of love letters, among other things, he made a penetrating portrait of his family. Moreover, Heise’s family history is close to historical events of twentieth-century Germany. The documentary starts with a class essay by grandfather Heise from 1912 about an imminent great war. Furthermore, the persecution of the Jews, the Second World War, the GDR and the fall of the wall pass by almost naturally. All this is subtly intertwined with Heise’s family history.

It must be said, ‘Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit’ is an unusual documentary, certainly by today’s standards. There are no talking heads in it; no direct explanations as to why Heise’s relatives were persecuted by the Nazis or spied on by the Stasi; or no fat Netflix soundtrack ‘when things get exciting’. For some viewers, this approach can therefore come across as monotonous. For others, it may be a relief that Heise’s minimal approach avoids certain clichés from the documentary world. By the way, it can help that you are well-versed in German history. This documentary does not exactly take you by the hand in this area. As a viewer you can also puzzle along with Heise.

‘Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit’ takes the word documentary quite literally. Heise overwhelms you with a countless number of letters that he reads in an almost monotonous way in the voice-over. Almost any kind of sentimental approach to the viewer is missing in those three and a half hours. Yet it touches you, because the letters are primarily about universal matters, such as love (sadness). Heise thus seems to want to let the material speak for itself. In addition, you see anonymous landscapes or streets passing by under the voice-over. Sometimes you sit for a scene looking at a deserted square in a city, a lush landscape or a train. The relationship between the words and images therefore seems quite arbitrary. However, the places in the picture are definitely related to Heise’s family history. As a viewer, you are slowly made aware that not only cultural-historical places such as the Brandenburg Tor contain German history, but also, to a lesser extent, Thomas Heise’s favorite bar.

The variegated stream of images in ‘Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit’ also looks somewhat arbitrary for another reason. In this way, the documentary asks you to take in the images extra carefully. For example, Heise displays a list of names for minutes until the document suddenly stops at the last name Heise. As it turns out: with this list, the Nazi regime tracked down Jews and then deported them to concentration camps. In this way, the film shows in an unsentimental way the tragic overlap of personal and national history. It also shows that a banal-looking list of names was not always so innocent. It was also a product of a bureaucratic killing machine.

Nevertheless, ‘Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit’ does not detract so much from the German history of the twentieth century. Above all, it painfully exposes how personal tragedy is intertwined with the political and intellectual wind that blows in a country. The acute despair in some of the letter exchanges also shows that what happened to the Heise family was far from isolated, but was typical for many people in Germany.