My father's side of my family is German. They came to America in the late 19th century, looking for work and opportunity in the furniture trade. My great great grandfather was a cabinet maker and an otherwise successful future was cut short by tragedy in 1929 when my great grandfather, an only child, was killed in a night club fire in Detroit just one month before the stock market crash. He left one son behind, my grandfather, and that narrow thread leads to me.
I've spent a good deal of time at the library trying to reconnect with these roots. To understand the patterns of thought in my own mind. It's a romantic dream I suppose. The stories handed down to me feel more like legends than truths. Among them is the fact that an ancestor of mine was once the burgermeister of Baden-Baden. My grandfather was supposedly among the first to cross the bridge into Baden-Baden, liberating that town with the Third Army. He shot a Nazi officer and took a French police pistol off his body. This is now in my father's possession. A family treasure.
Watching this series was the most powerful signifier of the characteristics I inherited down this path. It traces an extended German family in a small village in the Hunsbuck from the end of WWI to 1982. There were innumerable moments watching this series (Netflix has it) where I recognized myself in the choices characters made. This sort of cultural resonance was a real coming home for me.
Maria, Paul, Anton, Hermann, Maria Goot, Glassich: these were like long lost family. When Anton goes to Baden-Baden to visit Paul to ask his advice about the sale of his optics company to a multi-national corporation, I was on the edge of my seat. That was my ancestral home. Finally, I got a taste of that German spa town. Baden-Baden. My Baden-Baden.
I've always been a fan of German cinema. Fassbinder and Herzog have inspired me and confounded me. But here, with this monumental work by Edgar Reitz and the sequels, I have a true glimpse of what my family history might have been had we stayed in Germany all those years ago.
My family's history could have easily been a branch of this tree, a narrow thread off in America that might have circled back around to attend a funeral if the timing were right, much like the Brazilians who attended Maria's funeral.
This connection to what is German in me is a great service Reitz has done for the German people. I can't express enough how important this series has been to me. When Glassich scooted his chair closer to the speakers to hear over the racket of confused pub patrons the premiere of Hermann's avant-garde composition, (poor Glassich the town fool, his scabby hands hidden in his gloves), his eyes wide, his lips open, he alone hearing the beautiful sound of the nightingale amidst the electronic processing, he alone overwhelmed with the beauty, I wept as well. I felt like poor Glassich, hearing at last the strange and beautiful music of his homeland.