--- title: "Heimat" year: 1984 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/heimat" fi1m_id: "heimat" imdb_id: "tt0087400" tmdb_id: 43059 wikidata_id: "Q646233" fi1m_score: 91 critics_reviews: 2 published: "2026-10-07T11:08:55.499727+00:00" updated: "2026-10-07T11:08:56.060404+00:00" region: "AU" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Heimat (1984) Created by Edgar Reitz · 1h 30m · Drama ## Identity Heimat - **Canonical:** https://film.one/tv/heimat - **Type:** Series - **Fi1m ID:** heimat - **IMDb ID:** tt0087400 - **TMDB ID:** 43059 - **Wikidata ID:** Q646233 - **Same entity:** https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087400/, https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/43059, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q646233 **Fi1m score: 91** · Critics: 2 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* A German village from 1919 to 1982, watched so patiently you forget a country is going wrong behind it > Edgar Reitz’s chronicle of one family in a Hunsrück village is television of rare patience, acted plainly and shot with a memory’s eye for colour. It asks a great deal of your time and repays most of it; the later episodes drift. ## Synopsis Schabbach, a village in the Hunsrück hills, 1919. Paul Simon walks home from the war to the smithy run by his father Mathias (Willi Burger) and his mother Katharina (Gertrud Bredel), where his brother Eduard (Rüdiger Weigang) fiddles with a camera and his sister Pauline (Eva Maria Bayerwaltes) waits for something to happen. Paul builds a wireless set in the barn, marries Maria (Marita Breuer), daughter of the Wiegand farm, and has two sons. Glasisch Karl (Kurt Wagner), the village odd-job man, watches all of it and will later tell us what became of everybody. Then one morning in 1928 Paul walks out of the village and does not come back, and the series settles down to follow the people he left, through the next five decades, in the same kitchens and lanes. ## Review Edgar Reitz’s *Heimat* follows one family in one village in the Hunsrück hills from 1919 to 1982, across eleven episodes first shown on 16 September 1984, each about the length of a feature film. The tagline calls it a chronicle of Germany, and it behaves like one. Weddings, funerals, a new road, a wireless set, a war, another war. Reitz and his co-writer Peter Steinbach let the big events arrive in Schabbach the way they would have arrived anywhere: late, by post, and mostly as somebody else’s problem. Our verdict is plain. This is one of the great long works of television, and we would tell a stranger to make time for it. The stranger should know that the time required is considerable, and that the last two or three episodes are not the equal of the first six. Marita Breuer plays Maria from a girl of nineteen to an old woman, and she is the reason the thing holds. Maria is left behind in the first episode when her husband Paul walks out of the village, and Breuer plays the years after not as grief but as a patience that narrows a little each decade. She looks up when a door opens, for years, and then stops. Gertrud Bredel’s Katharina, the mother who runs the smithy household, is the one person on screen who sees clearly, and Bredel gives her a plainness that never once asks to be admired. Rüdiger Weigang’s Eduard, the brother with the camera and no sense, drifts into things, and Weigang makes the drift funny until it is not. Karin Rasenack’s Lucie, the Berlin woman he marries, brings ambition into the village like a new appliance. The Nazi years come in through Johannes Lobewein’s Alois Wiegand and Hans-Jürgen Schatz’s Wilfried, Maria’s own father and brother, and the village takes to the new order with the shrug it gives to everything else. We were horrified, and the horror came from how little changed on screen: the same kitchen, the same lanes, a flag, a uniform, a boy who used to be a nuisance now walking differently. Reitz does not show the camps and barely names them. Some will find that an evasion. We think it is deliberate: the village never looked, and Reitz keeps us at the kitchen table with the people who did not look. Gernot Roll shoots nearly all of it in black and white and then, without warning, lets a scene go into colour: a dress, a field, a sky. The switches do not follow a rule we could work out, and we do not think they are meant to; they land like the moments a memory keeps in colour when the rest has faded. Heidi Handorf’s editing lets a harvest or a village dance run for minutes, then jumps a decade in a single cut. Nikos Mamangakis’s music is spare and folk-like, strings and a recurring theme that returns until it sounds like something the village itself hums. Regina Bätz’s costumes are the clearest clock in the piece; you can date a scene by the width of a collar. The narrator is Glasisch Karl, the village odd-job man with scabbed hands, played by Kurt Wagner, who opens each episode sorting through a pile of photographs and telling us who has died. It is a modest device and it works. He is the one person in Schabbach who notices everything and matters to nobody. The faults are those of length. Once the series passes the war the family scatters, and the episodes set in the 1950s and 1960s spend a long time with characters who have not earned it. The colour switches, so sharp early on, become a habit. And the series is so attached to its village that the wider country stays a rumour; a viewer wanting to know what Germany did, rather than what Schabbach failed to notice, will have to look elsewhere. Set aside a winter. Watch it in order, an episode a week, and let the gaps between viewings do what the gaps between decades do. By the end you will know these people’s kitchens better than your own, which is what the title means. *Fi1m score 91, published 7 October 2026.* ## Straight answers **Is Heimat worth watching?** *Heimat* is worth watching for anyone prepared to give a winter to one German village across six decades, and we scored it 91. Marita Breuer's Maria, played from nineteen to old age, holds eleven feature-length episodes together, and Gernot Roll's shifts from black and white into colour land like the moments a memory keeps. The last two or three episodes drift and are not the equal of the first six. **How long is Heimat, and what is it rated?** *Heimat* has episodes of about 1h 30m. It is a drama series. **Where can I watch Heimat in Australia?** *Heimat* is not on any streaming or rental service in Australia at the moment. Availability is checked daily. **How does Heimat compare to The Tree of Wooden Clogs?** *Heimat* and [*The Tree of Wooden Clogs*](https://film.one/film/the-tree-of-wooden-clogs) share a patience with rural life, but the German series follows one family across sixty years while Olmi's film spends a single year with Lombard sharecroppers played by real farmers. The film is the tighter of the two and the easier to finish in an evening; *Heimat* asks far more time and repays most of it, with a longer, slacker final stretch. **What should I watch after Heimat?** After *Heimat*, try [*The Tree of Wooden Clogs*](https://film.one/film/the-tree-of-wooden-clogs) (1978, Fi1m 89): A year with Lombard peasants, played by farmers, shot with the same patience. Then [*Our Friends in the North*](https://film.one/tv/our-friends-in-the-north) (1996, Fi1m 88): Four Newcastle friends across three decades of Britain, politics arriving through the front door; and [*The Best of Youth*](https://film.one/film/the-best-of-youth) (2003, Fi1m 86): Two Italian brothers from the 1960s to the 2000s, six hours that feel short. ### Reviews we read (2) - **Empire**, David Parkinson (90/100, inferred): The critic presents Heimat as a major artistic achievement and enduring landmark. They praise Reitz’s assured storytelling and command of complex political and cultural detail. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/heimat-review/) - **The Guardian**, Rob Mackie (90/100, inferred): Mackie calls the series an unassuming masterpiece. He praises its warmth and subtlety, along with its patient, in-depth exploration of its characters. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/oct/29/dvdreviews2) ## Details - **Created by:** Edgar Reitz - **Creator:** Edgar Reitz - **Director:** Edgar Reitz - **Screenplay:** Edgar Reitz, Peter Steinbach - **Writer:** Edgar Reitz, Peter Steinbach - **Story:** Edgar Reitz, Peter Steinbach - **Cinematography:** Gernot Roll - **Editor:** Heidi Handorf - **Music:** Nikos Mamangakis - **Costume design:** Regina Bätz - **Producer:** Hans Kwiet, Edgar Reitz, Joachim von Mengershausen - **Cast:** Kurt Wagner as Glasisch Karl; Marita Breuer as Maria Simon; Rüdiger Weigang as Eduard Simon; Gertrud Bredel as Katharina Simon; Karin Rasenack as Lucie Hardtke; Willi Burger as Mathias Simon; Johannes Lobewein as Alois Wiegand; Hans-Jürgen Schatz as Wilfried Wiegand - **Runtime:** 1h 30m - **Release (Australia):** 16 September 1984 - **Genres:** Drama ## Where to watch in Australia Not streaming, renting or buying in Australia at the last check. ## If you liked this - *Berlin Alexanderplatz* (1980): Fassbinder’s fifteen-hour Weimar novel on film, louder and angrier than Reitz’s village - *The Tree of Wooden Clogs* (1978), Fi1m 89: A year with Lombard peasants, played by farmers, shot with the same patience — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-tree-of-wooden-clogs.md) - *Our Friends in the North* (1996), Fi1m 88: Four Newcastle friends across three decades of Britain, politics arriving through the front door — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/our-friends-in-the-north.md) - *The Best of Youth* (2003), Fi1m 86: Two Italian brothers from the 1960s to the 2000s, six hours that feel short — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-best-of-youth.md) - *Fanny and Alexander* (1982), Fi1m 92: Bergman’s family chronicle, warmer and stranger, best in its five-hour television cut — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/fanny-and-alexander.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/heimat