Vaterland (Thomas Heise, 2002) (Patreon)

[NOTE: This is something of a subscribers-only preview, I guess, of part of my next article for Cinema Scope, which will be about Thomas Heise's documentaries. It seemed like this was a good place to share my thoughts on this film, as well as to jot them down while they are fresh in my mind.]

Although German documentary filmmaker Thomas Heise remains mostly unknown in North American circles, he is considered a major figure in Europe, particularly in his home country. Originally from East Berlin, he lived and worked in the GDR until the fall of the Wall.  He worked from the East German state studio DEFA as an assistant director from 1975-1978, striking out on his own shortly thereafter. His first documentary, a portrait of East German citizens entitled Why Make a Film About These People?, was promptly banned, as were all the films he made in the GDR. Heise also worked in theater and radio, both independently and as an associate of Heiner Müller, although his plays and radio works were banned as well.

There is a meticulousness, possibly even a rigidity, to Heise's films, which makes them complex and self-effacing at the same time. It would be too simple, a lapse into exoticism even, to attribute elements of Heise's style to having been trained in the "official" mode of the GDR. But as we look at Vaterland, we can see that it is film that, while bracketed by Heise's personal history and concerns, adopts a patient, scrupulously sociological attitude toward its subjects. If one can look at the dialectical films of Harun Farocki and see traces of Theodor Adorno's thought, Heise is, by contrast, more in the vein of Max Horkheimer. His work is disciplined and thorough, asking questions that can be answered according to the strict but non-dogmatic application of method.

Vaterland opens with a tracking shot through the woods, accompanied by a voiceover reading a letter to two boys, essentially advising them to keep their heads down and do as they're told. "To put it bluntly," he says, "a dead person can no longer learn anything." The letter is from Heise's father, who is a prisoner in a labor camp. Heise's brother, also a prisoner, sends a letter to his parents in reply. They are imprisoned for being part-Jewish. 

The camp was in the town of Straguth, and this is town is the subject of Vaterland. Who lives there now, and what are their lives like? How were its occupants affected by the war? What sort of traces still exist of what happened to the Heises, not just in the landscape, but in the fabric of this specific community? (In terms of the questions Vaterland poses , Heise's work also bears an intellectual resemblance to Alexander Kluge, although he would not produce a film as formally extravagant as The Patriotic Woman or Anita G. / Yesterday Girl.)

Heise finds that the social center of Straguth is a pub operated by Otto Natho, a gruff, pragmatic man who explains early on that his establishment happily served the occupiers from the Russian army because, after all, their money was as good as anyone else's, and really, the Germans and the Russians weren't so different. Heise goes to the homes of several of Otto's regular patrons for extended interviews, and we gradually learn that Straguth is solidly working class but on the skids economically, skews conservative, and is saturated with a reflexive machismo that is as invisible to the citizens as oxygen. One man tells the story of going to prison for murder at 16 and having to find his place in the inmates' pecking order, while another man speaks adoringly of his three-year-old daughter but insists that she obey him or there's trouble.

Heise only occasionally asks questions of his subjects. He prefers to give them lots of space to express who they are and what they think, without any overt judgment. Vaterland's project isn't as simplistic as "these are the same kinds of people who destroyed my family years ago." Such a conclusion would be painfully obtuse. Heise is instead interested in a kind of ideological core sample, gathering a sense of how certain attitudes persist but inevitably express themselves differently as history shifts around them. If there is a clear commonality between then and now, it is one that is perhaps obvious but striking nevertheless. Men of good will can firmly believe in very troubling things.