But now I shall return to the Rhine, to my happy homeland… And the sacred greenery, witness of the eternal, beautiful life of the world, it refreshes and transforms me to youth once more.” The object of this transformation in 1797 was the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. And the place to which he returned lies in present-day Rhineland-Palatinate. The Rhine forms the eastern border of this federal state. This is where the state begins – or ends – with its North Palatinate uplands where I was born, and with its capital of Mainz where I now live. Rhineland-Palatinate, an artificial entity no older than my generation, was created by the French military government on August 30, 1946 from parts of the Electoral Palatinate and Rhine-Hesse, the Prussian Rhine Province and Nassau.
Areas that had never before been a cohesive body became a new homeland. The names Eifel and Hunsrück, Westerwald and Pfälzerwald conjure up associations that have nothing in common with anything “fashionable” or “worldly”. Old documents show that my family has lived here since 1324. The filmmaker Edgar Reitz from Morbach in the Hunsrück has made this area world-famous. His “Heimat” trilogy, a series of episodes totalling 50 hours, focuses on the Hunsrück as a part of the world that symbolizes the world in general. And that’s the way people understood these films which were later broadcast worldwide in about fifty countries. According to a leading film critic, Edgar Reitz is considered Germany’s epic poet of the 20th century and the new millennium. Along with most people from Rhineland-Palatinate I can certainly identify with his films, and we do see ourselves as part of the world. The cast of “Heimat 3” actually includes a real state minister president: Kurt Beck. He plays a premier who comes to the Hunsrück to open a museum.
But Kurt Beck did more than simply appear in this film as a regional figurehead. When the French and American forces withdrew from many areas of this state after German reunification, an economic vacuum was left in this sparsely industrialized area. The renewal policies of the regional government proved effective and, for instance, the old Allied airfield at Hahn received a new, successful role. Now, in the solitude of the Hunsrück, the cheap charter flight organizers have airport facilities to transport tourists throughout Europe. As a result, all the rural women’s groups in the Hunsrück who previously went by bus on daytrips to Luxemburg or Trier have now visited Stockholm, Riga, London, Venice and Gerona for just a few euros – off in the early morning, coffee and cake in the afternoon and back home in the evening.
