Obituary: Death of Thomas Heise: The artist as a rival

For Thomas Heise, everything was material for his films, even what others carelessly passed by. “Material” was the logical name of the compilation of twelve films that were made between 1988 and 2008 and premiered at the Berlinale in 2009. An hour-long, brittle flow of images, composed entirely without commentary. You could see Heiner Müller rehearsing in the theater and hear SED Politburo member Günter Schabowski arguing in a hoarse voice for the party’s claim to leadership, when the people were already confidently gathering on Alexanderplatz on November 4, 1989 to protest against censorship and for an assembly – and freedom of the press, as enshrined in the GDR constitution.

Thomas Heise was there everywhere, filming – as a silent witness – the long line of speakers by tying himself diagonally above the tribune, camera in hand (so as not to fall or be pulled down). But he was even more interested in the many listeners on Alexanderplatz than the speakers. His films “The House” about the Berlin-Mitte district office and “People’s Police” from 1985, when he went to a police station and documented everyday life there, became legendary.

After 1990, he spent many hours listening to right-wing extremist youth in the East, documented this in “Traffic Jam – Now It’s Starting” from 1992, but didn’t judge them. If there was one thing he despised from the depths of his soul, it was agitation, the self-celebration of the self-righteous. You shouldn’t try to control the viewer’s judgment.

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Thomas Heise was an extremist, not only an avowed outsider, but also – for a while at least – a downright violent seeker. He thought little of long explanations and nothing of moderate consideration. With him, one of those children of the East who toiled in radical opposition to their country has died. Thomas Heise always looked at the GDR crisis from the inside, never from the outside, which he could then certainly appreciate as a disruption to West German self-celebration.

Born in Berlin in 1955 as the son of the philosopher Wolfgang Heise and the literary editor, Voltaire translator and Walter Benjamin editor Rosemarie Heise, he and his brother Andreas were surrounded from the beginning by the strict clarity of the high ideal standards that their parents had Association.

They lived in their own spiritual world and the sons conquered a place in it in a tangible way. State security noted: “The children appeared as initiators of youth gangs.” Not seduced followers, but initiators! That screamed for discipline, for prison. In retrospect, Thomas Heise knew: It was basically a cry for love from the neglected child’s soul. And indeed, the Heises did not deny their sons, who were on a collision course.

The bond between generations lasted. Thomas Heise made his last major film about this in 2019, “Home is a Space of Time,” an almost four-hour meditation on three generations of his German-Jewish family – and at the same time an uncompromising history lesson. In the meantime, the self-confessed outsider had also become a model documentarian, a professor at several film schools and also director of the film and media art section of the Berlin Academy of the Arts. Now he knew what constraints his father had been in: as a representative, he had to continue to be creative.

He constantly circled around his father. Wolfgang Heise reverently called Wolfgang Heise “GDR Voltaire,” who was otherwise egocentrically contemptuous of everything around him. But his magnificent main work “Hölderlin – Beauty and History”, which was published in 1988, a year after his sudden death, also shows the state-supporting Hegelian, the despiser of romanticism. And Thomas Heise carried out this contradiction in a special way: he chose Heiner Müller, the radical late romantic, as his second father. He even managed to bring Wolfgang Heise and Heiner Müller together for a conversation. And there they sat rather awkwardly, to please Thomas Heise, two master thinkers who were strangers to each other in their understanding of the world, and talked hopelessly past each other.

With “Home is a space made of time,” Thomas Heise proved himself to be a philosopher of images – and showed that his visual language was extremely precise. Someone wants to know why they turned out the way they did. Why he built stubborn protective walls around himself out of skepticism. Here he reads diaries, letters and documents off camera, many of which only came into his hands after his mother’s death in 2014. Some of the anarchist force in these early documents surprised the son. When his brother died in the same year, it was up to him to trace the family’s path through a murderous century.

He did this with all the fury of self-knowledge that is prepared to take long detours. All of his late films are high-concentration spaces that want to be decoded. A lot of angry melancholy becomes noticeable: the grandfather is dismissed from school by the Nazis and the father is in a forced labor camp for “Jewish mixed races” because he is “unworthy of military service.” From there, nineteen-year-old Wolfgang Heise writes to his father, Thomas Heise’s grandfather: “The future in all existence, which affects us all, is so uncertain.” History means promise and threat at the same time, holds the possibility of rescue as well as of Destruction.

The father saw his later task in constantly giving politically powerful people this to consider as an advisor – which initially seemed opportunistic to the radical son. Later he knew what it meant to think about the wheels of conflicting interests.

Thomas Heise died on May 29th, as it is said, after a short, serious illness. The topic was no stranger to Heise, as Heiner Müller had always wanted to think of all utopia from the perspective of the grave. Müller’s life credo also became that of Thomas Heise: “The artist is not someone who transcribes the world – he is its rival.”