Why Schabbach

My book Schabbach holds two stories about two old people and their memories of the war. The name is not mine. Edgar Reitz invented the village for his television series Heimat, and I borrowed it on purpose, because in the book the village has no other name and I wanted one that already carries an argument about memory.

A fictional village

Heimat was first shown in 1984. It runs to eleven films, just over fifteen hours in all, and follows the families of one fictional village, Schabbach, from the end of the First World War to 1982.¹ The historian Frank Bösch puts the audience at about 25 million viewers, nine to ten million for each episode, and calls the series probably the most influential interpretation of National Socialism in any medium after the American miniseries Holocaust.²

It earned that audience. Timothy Garton Ash, who had serious objections to it, called the first half, up to 1945, “superb: funny, sad, and haunting.”³ Reitz follows a village through weddings, funerals, harvests and quarrels, with a patience television rarely has.

The idea I took from the series is that memory itself is the subject. The story reaches us through a villager’s memory, prompted by old photographs, as Bösch points out.⁴ The film moves between black and white and color, and Garton Ash reads those shifts as the film telling us that we are watching recollection, not judgment.⁵ Memory in Heimat is warm, selective and unreliable, and the series knows it.

My two stories begin with two people being asked what they remember.

What the village forgot

Garton Ash reviewed Heimat together with Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, and his conclusion was hard:

Reitz allows the Germans their forgetting. Claude Lanzmann compels everyone to remember.⁵

The persecution of the Jews is almost entirely missing from the series.⁶ There are a few scenes and a few remarks, but the village’s Jewish neighbors stay at the edge of the frame.

Reitz did not hide that this was deliberate. In an interview in Paris when the series came out, he explained why the murder of the Jews appeared only in passing: “The question of the Jews under National-Socialism is a theme which has been treated in an infinite number of stories and if I had included this aspect, the whole story would have taken a different turn.”⁷

The film critic Gertrud Koch answered that “in order to tell the myth of Heimat, the trauma of Auschwitz has to be bracketed from German history.”⁸ The historian Saul Friedländer used her critique as an example of how far apart German and Jewish memory had drifted, and he added a sentence I keep coming back to: “By dealing only with the destruction of the Jews, Claude Lanzmann was, in a way, answering Edgar Reitz.”⁹

I think the critique is fair, because the omission was a choice and Reitz said so himself. His defenders argue that the villagers probably saw no more than the film shows them seeing, and that may be true. But a story told from inside a village’s memory takes on the village’s silences. A director who knows this and goes ahead has decided what the village is allowed to forget.

Taken away

Reitz conceived Heimat as a counter to Holocaust, which had been broadcast in West Germany in 1979.¹⁰ He described his motive in one sentence: “With Holocaust, the Americans have taken history away from us.”¹¹

I hear three things in that sentence, and I believe all three.

First, what was taken was comfort, not history. What a West German family lost in front of the television in 1979 was the version in which the war happened somewhere else, to someone else, and the village simply went on with the harvest.

Second, Reitz had a point about the kitsch. Holocaust was a melodrama, with invented families and music that tells you what to feel. I think a village has a right to be shown with its own speech and its own ordinary business, not in a shorthand made for an audience on another continent. Reitz wanted the provinces to tell their own story, and in many ways he succeeded.

Third, there is resentment in it. “Taken away from us” treats history like property, and it is worth asking who “us” is. The Jewish families of those villages also had a history there, going back generations, and it was taken from them along with everything else. When I read the sentence, I think of them first.

A place that holds you

Garton Ash wrote of Heimat that “the word itself has no adequate English equivalent,” and offered “homeland,” “motherland” and “native soil” as failed attempts.¹² I translate Heimat as “a place that holds you.” I like the phrase because it works in both directions. A place can hold you the way an arm does, and it can hold you the way a hand on your collar does.

Reitz himself has been more honest about the word than its admirers often are. In 2004 he said that “Heimat is always something lost,” and that everything one remembers, “a dream or a feeling from childhood, is irretrievably lost.”¹³ In 2019 he went further: “Heimat is a skin, a shell,” and “Heimat was always a skin I break out of.”¹⁴

The word has also been used to decide who belongs and who does not. So I am wary of it, and I still use it. To me Heimat is usable only if the people driven out belong to it too. The Jewish families deported in 1942 were held by their villages as much as anyone. A Heimat that leaves them out is a false account of the place.

Why the name

I borrowed Schabbach for three reasons.

The first is shorthand. To many readers who saw the series, Schabbach is the German village, the one where the war came from outside and the neighbors went on with their lives. It stands for every village’s memory, including the ones that never made it onto television.

The second is homage. I would not write about memory without acknowledging the work that showed me memory could be the whole story.

The third is a quarrel. The book takes Reitz’s village and puts back the people it left out, and you cannot quarrel with a work without naming it.

The name does not point at a place on a map. It is an emblem, borrowed openly.

I know this may be presumptuous. Reitz spent decades on Schabbach, and the name belongs to him and to the millions who watched it. Borrowing it for a book about the neighbors his series passed over can look like a claim to have corrected him. I do not claim that, and a short book of two stories does not settle an argument serious critics have had since the 1980s. The name says which argument the book belongs to. If that is presumptuous, I would rather be presumptuous in the open than borrow the argument without naming it.

There is also an echo I did not plan. The third film in the series is called Weihnacht wie noch nie, “the best Christmas ever.”¹⁵ My stories begin at Christmas too.

Pleasant company

At Christmas I asked my grandmother and her companion what they remembered about the war.

She remembers Jewish friends and neighbors being deported from her village in 1942.

He remembers playing cards in Kröv with Baldur von Schirach, the former Hitler Youth leader whom the tribunal at Nuremberg convicted of crimes against humanity, among them his part in deporting the Jews of Vienna.¹⁶ He remembers him as pleasant company.

I report that as he said it. It is not my job to soften it, explain it away or shout over it. It should make a reader uneasy, and it makes me uneasy.

The book holds both memories against the record. The record says what Schirach was convicted of. The memory says what he was like across a card table on an ordinary afternoon. Both can be true. And that is the problem of Heimat in small: ordinary warmth on one side, and on the other the people who were taken away while the game went on.

What I hope a reader takes

I hope a reader takes three things from the book.

The first is that kindness and complicity can live in the same person, and in the same village. A man can be good company and responsible for deportations. A community can look after its own and watch its neighbors go.

The second is curiosity about their own family. Anyone who still has old relatives can ask them what they remember, and then listen for what they leave out. The listening is the harder part.

The third is doubt about any village story, including this one. Reitz built his series from memory, and he let memory leave the Jewish neighbors out. My stories are built from memory too. I have tried to check them against the record where the record exists, and I have tried to give the people who were deported the place in the story that the village took from them. But I tell a village’s story from inside its memory, which is where Reitz was standing, and I would be foolish to think I am immune to what happened to him.

That is why the book is called Schabbach. The name keeps in view what a village story can leave out.

This note was written with the help of AI. Its arguments, its conclusions and its mistakes are mine.

Footnotes

1. “Heimat (film series)” and “List of Heimat episodes,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. The full title is Heimat – Eine deutsche Chronik. ↩

2. Frank Bösch, “Film, NS-Vergangenheit und Geschichtswissenschaft. Von ‘Holocaust’ zu ‘Der Untergang’,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 55, no. 1 (2007), 12, ifz-muenchen.de: „Die Fernsehserie Heimat war vermutlich nach Holocaust die einflussreichste mediale Deutung des Nationalsozialismus.” The paraphrase is mine. ↩

3. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Life of Death,” The New York Review of Books, December 19, 1985, nybooks.com. ↩

4. Bösch, “Film, NS-Vergangenheit und Geschichtswissenschaft,” 12. He adds that viewers hardly appreciated this sophisticated way of telling the story. ↩

5. Garton Ash, “The Life of Death.” Beside Shoah, he wrote, “Heimat looks like a monument to forgetting.” He also rejected the charge that Reitz idealizes the war. ↩ ↩²

6. Bösch, “Film, NS-Vergangenheit und Geschichtswissenschaft,” 12, notes that the series “nahezu vollkommen” (almost completely) left out the Holocaust, but also that its sequences offered critical readings of guilt and responsibility as well as nostalgic ones. The public, in his view, chose the nostalgic reading. ↩

7. Quoted in Saul Friedländer, “‘A Past That Refuses to go Away’: On Recent Historiographical Debates in the Federal Republic of Germany About National-Socialism and the Final Solution,” Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Jahrbuch 1985/86, 113, wiko-berlin.de. ↩

8. Gertrud Koch, quoted in English in Friedländer, “‘A Past That Refuses to go Away’,” 114. Her essay “Kann man naiv werden? Zum neuen Heimat-Gefühl” appeared in Frauen und Film 38 (1985), and in English in the “Dossier on Heimat,” New German Critique 36 (Autumn 1985), doi.org. ↩

9. Friedländer, “‘A Past That Refuses to go Away’,” 114. ↩

10. Bösch, “Film, NS-Vergangenheit und Geschichtswissenschaft,” 3 and 12. Bösch calls the series an explicit „Gegenentwurf” (counter-design) to Holocaust. ↩

11. Edgar Reitz, Liebe zum Kino (Cologne, 1984), 100, as quoted in Bösch, “Film, NS-Vergangenheit und Geschichtswissenschaft,” 12: „Die Amerikaner haben mit Holocaust uns Geschichte weggenommen.” The translation is mine. Friedländer, 113–114, gives a longer English version that begins with “the most fundamental process of expropriation.” ↩

12. Garton Ash, “The Life of Death.” ↩

13. Armin Pongs and Carmen Eller, “‘Heimat ist immer etwas Verlorenes’, sagt Edgar Reitz,” taz, December 15, 2004, taz.de: „Heimat ist immer etwas Verlorenes” and „Alles, was man in Erinnerung hat, ein Traum oder ein Kindheitsgefühl, ist unwiederbringlich verloren.” The translations are mine. ↩

14. Edgar Reitz, interviewed by Hans Jessen, Politik & Kultur 03/2019, 17, as released by the Deutscher Kulturrat, “Interview: Edgar Reitz über Heimat,” March 12, 2019, kulturrat.de: „Heimat ist eine Haut, ein Gehäuse” and „Heimat war immer eine Haut, aus der ich ausbreche.” The translations are mine. ↩

15. “List of Heimat episodes,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. The film is set in 1935. “The best Christmas ever” is the usual English title; a more literal rendering would be “Christmas as never before.” ↩

16. International Military Tribunal, “Judgment: Von Schirach,” October 1, 1946, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, avalon.law.yale.edu. The tribunal found him not guilty of conspiracy and guilty of crimes against humanity, and found that he “participated in this deportation after he had become Gauleiter of Vienna.” ↩