31. October 2022
On 1 November, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier congratulates Edgar Reitz on his 90th birthday. The President writes:
“My best wishes go to one of the most important directors and directors of German cinema.
From a young age you were fascinated by moving images. She was part of the movement for the renewal of German cinema and one of the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto, the official starting signal for a new generation of film artists who wanted a new start and declared “daddy’s cinema” dead.
With the “Heimat” trilogy and the film “The Other Home – Chronicle of a Longing” that followed in 2013, you have created an epic of the century. Here a universe opens up to us spectators, here you tell stories with large arches, resistance and changing rhythms. Here the films unfold their memory: there are no other German films that claim to be a chronicle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Hunsrück, the fictional village of Schabbach, became the “center of the world” and spectators from all over the world were taken on a long journey through German history.
Be it in the grand form of epic cinema or in the short scene of drama: behind the small or large catastrophes, behind the failure there is actually the desire of the people of another life, to get out of the provisional and finite nature of our limited. existence.
Your visual language, your stories, your art of watching closely have given German cinema, and also German television, a high reputation far beyond our country. You and your work have shown us that it is the stories that remain. They are the stories that confront us with ourselves, that allow us to distance ourselves from ourselves – and that reconcile us with ourselves.
I would like to say a big thank you to you today for all of this. Happy ninetieth! “
