Scoring Heimat

The idea of a nature removed from modern civilization has shaped an enduring sense of Heimat in German culture since the Romantic period and was rendered in the images and sounds of the twentieth-century Heimatfilm. Giuseppe Becce’s symphonic underscoring of Ludwig Ganghofer’s Das Schweigen im Walde (1955) exemplifies (following Tom Gunning) “musical landscapes of attraction,” specifically how musical topoi of Heimat entered into the cultural unconscious of the postwar Heimatfilm. By contrast, Julian Pölsler’s 2012 cinematic adaptation of Marlen Haushofer’s 1963 dystopian novel The Wall uses excerpts from Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin in “landscapes with musical attractions,” which create a distinctly modern and anti-Romantic sense of nature. These two oppositional deployments of music not only epitomize the difference between “unheard” generic underscoring and “heard” masterworks of classical music, but manifest the dialectical relationship between Heimat and anti-Heimat in post–World War II German culture.