Pictures of Germany

Heimatland

Having missed some episodes when it was screened on BBC4 18 months ago, and to indulge in a minor obsession of mine, Dave bought me Heimat 3 on DVD for my birthday. And because he’s even nicer than that, he then booked us 2p-plus-tax-plus-suitcase-charges-plus-Stansted-Express-train-tickets-so-really-about-£60 return flights with Ryanair to Frankfurt Hahn so we could spend a long weekend “on location” in Heimatland.

Frankfurt Hahn is famed for being nowhere near Frankfurt and a bit of a tinpot dump in comparison to Frankfurt Main Flughafen, given that its departure lounge used to consist of a large tent, but to me it’s the equivalent of a world heritage site, being in the heart of the Hunsrück, close to Edgar Reitz’s fictional hamlet of Schabbach. Hahn airport features in Heimat 3 as an American nuclear weapons facility that protestors are anxious and determined to remove, and after the Amis leave, Russian immigrants move in in their droves and Hartmut, Anton Simon’s useless son, sets up his rival Simon Optik business in its abandoned hangars. So even though Ryanair doesn’t exist in Heimat world, Hahn airport was a very good point indeed from which to start our tour.

In summer, you can actually go on official Heimat tours with the actress who played Marie Goot in the original series, but as these weren’t an option in early March, we decided we could invent our own. We chose to base ourselves in Mainz rather than Simmern or one of the many Schabbach-alike villages around Hahn, for two reasons – firstly because we didn’t want to hire a car and Mainz is a good transport hub, and secondly because Mainz actually has a bit more going on of an evening outside of the main tourist season. Quite by chance, on our first evening in Mainz, we started the night’s activities in the beautiful bar/restaurant where Lulu has dinner with her Frenchman in the final episode of Heimat 3. It’s a former Spitalkirche called the Heiliggeist, atmospheric with tealights, with cavernous ceilings and fine Hefeweizen on tap. We sank into leather armchairs and let a couple of hours slip by, before moving on to the Weinkeller next door for far too many glasses of wine and our first of many portions of hearty German pork.

The following day, bleary eyed with shameful “how-old-are-we-again?” hangovers, we went up the Rhine on a Rheinland-Pfalz-Ticket, hopping on and off the local trains travelling up the valley to Koblenz and back. (When did the dregs of humanity start using German trains? I remember them being nice.) The most important stopping point was the town of Oberwesel, where high up on the hillside surrounded by vineyards, you can see the Günderrodehaus, Hermann and Clarissa’s lovenest, and the setting for Heimat 3. Other featured locations in the vicinity included St Goarshausen and the Loreley rock, into which Ernst Simon crashes his plane. And more, and more. I was very excited. This was a good day.

Actually, for the rest of the weekend, to spare Dave his sanity, we abandoned the Heimat theme a little. Further locations were visited, such as the riverbank in Frankfurt and Heidelberg railway station (our only acknowledgement to Heimat 2, since most of that is set in Munich), but they were more coincidental asides rather than focused destinations. We enjoyed spectacular weather – 20 degrees and not a cloud in the sky, though of course that’s still far too chilly for the Germans to consider opening any windows or undoing their neck scarves. It is now about 14 years since I lived in Heidelberg, but amazingly, in comparison to Mainz, the city had barely changed at all. A couple of new buildings near the station and a renumbering of its tram system, but that was about it. The Hauptstrasse (known to locals as the “idiot’s racetrack”) still gives you footache, the Mensa food still looks inedible, the university library toilets are still conveniently located, and Cafés Burkardt and Knösel are still open for business, as is the microbrewery Vetter. It is a timeless but impenetrable city – for a year it was my home, yet it never felt like home or made any attempt to make me feel welcome. But it is a beautiful place, and the view from the Philosophenweg over the river Neckar, across the red roofs and baroque churches to the ruins of the castle on the other side of the valley, is one I shall never tire of.