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Heimat 3 - Part 4 - Everybody Is Doing Well (15)

• Consumer Advice: Contains strong sex and nudity
• Run time: 2 hours 12 mins

• Language: German
• Genre: Drama
• Release date: 1st January 2005

• Starring: Jorg Altmeyer, Jutta Altmeyer, Casper Arnhold
• Directed by: Edgar Reitz

• Distributor: Artificial Eye

Plot Synopsis

Autumn 1995. Being happy together cannot be forced. Clarissa saw the tinnitus in her ears as an alarm signal. She knows that the stage, singing and her career are what are important to her and so she has accepted new engagements. When Hermann collects her at the station on a beautiful spring day after a week’s concert tour, his hopes for the continuation of their idyll are rudely disappointed. Clarissa can only stay for a few hours because a new concert tour already awaits her. Hermann, once such a passionate musician, should really understand her, but blind jealousy prevents him. Clarissa seems to him to be far too euphoric and - flirting with her singing partner on the telephone - he can already see his beloved lying in his arms. He makes a scene, failing to understand Clarissa’s pride. Clarissa loves Hermann but she clams up in the face of his remonstrances.

Hermann walks mindlessly out of the house and, racing down the hill, he reaches the village of Oberwesel, boards the very next bus and seeks consolation in a shopping spree. When he returns, Clarissa has left. In his haste he had forgotten to take a key with him and while looking for the spare key hidden in the garden he steps onto the brutal pine marten trap which Gunnar had once set behind the house and since forgotten. Hermann’s foot is badly injured. He spends weeks in hospital before returning to Günderrode-House full of melancholy. The whole life style which he had worked out with Clarissa when the Wall came down seems to be destroyed. In his despair, however, Hermann finds his way back to composing again. In a single creative spurt he finishes the piece he has been working on when Tillmann finds him one morning.

Hermann wants to establish whether the rift he feels in himself is affecting the rest of the world. Full of foreboding he seeks out his village Schabbach. Everything is cheerful there. His 75-year-old brother Anton is revelling in success. Having received an Order of Merit and having thoroughly terrorised his son Hartmut over his affair with Galina, he has now thrown himself into the management of the Schabbach football club. Hermann is witness to a soccer game, which the village team wins and Anton is celebrated as their patron. Everyone seems to be doing well and, even as an earthquake rocks the area one night, the world seems to be peaceful. Hermann has doubts about himself and his feelings of impending disaster.

The next morning, however, he receives a telephone call telling him of Anton’s death following a heart attack. Hermann finds no support even from among the mourning family. An absurd argument about the format of the funeral breaks out around the dead man’s deathbed. Mara votes with Anton’s modern-thinking children for a cremation. Hermann sets of on an aimless journey. At the Hunsrück motorway services he runs into his brother Ernst. They spend the evening explaining themselves to each another. Anton’s death has made them reflect on their own situations. It is approaching old age which is troubling them and directing their thoughts towards questions of the afterlife.

Anton’s cremation and the burial of his urn is a strain for everyone in Schabbach. A tradition is being broken and it goes so far that not even his company employees are invited to the burial, let alone the Schabbach football club and the local dignitaries. In the silence of despair and the loss of a tradition the urn is quietly buried. It is Ernst, who was his brother Anton’s childhood rival, who puts it into words: “Anton, if you had been alive such a stupid farce would never have happened” and lists all of those who are missing at the graveside.

On his return to the Günderrode-House Hermann finds a desperately weeping Clarissa. She became ill and had to break off her tour. Concerned, he takes her in his arms.