IN LIVING MEMORY

MADE BY A NATIVE OF THE NO-LONGER-EXTANT GERMAN Democratic Republic, Thomas Heise’s historical memoir–cum–three-generational family history begins somewhere in the Black Forest with an invocation of a Brothers Grimm Kindermärchen—a slow tilt up a wooden post to a faux rustic sign reading “According to Legend, Here Stood the Grandmother’s House.” Life-sized wooden cutouts of fairy-tale creatures lurk among the trees. Once upon a time…

If Heimat Is a Space in Time were a fiction film like A Hidden Life or Jojo Rabbit (to name two recent features glossing over the worst episode of Germany’s recent past), it would be an avant-garde masterpiece—a narrative interweaving multiple voices, including that of the state, eschewing transitions, and alternately doubling back on itself or jumping unexpectedly into the future. As it is, Heise’s scrupulous, sometimes recondite 218-minute collection of documents, diaries, letters, and landscapes is a powerful work of material thought excavated and assembled, under a suitably gnarly Heideggerian rubric, by a man whose grandfather, Wilhelm Heise, helped found the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany), and whose father, Wolfgang Heise, was the leading dissident philosopher in the old GDR.

Twentieth-century German history may be the filmmaker’s birthright, but in defiance of family tradition, Thomas Heise dropped out of school and sought manual labor before working his way toward cinema via radio and theater. The documentaries that he has been making for nearly four decades are at once