A young composer moves from Berlin to the island of Ibiza and begins a friendship with an elderly woman whose painful past has caused her to reject everything to do with Germany, including her native language.
Lulu, the daughter of musician Hermann Simon, is looking for something she feels is missing from her life. She delves into the past and is transported to the lives of her ancestors via dreamlike sequences that show the hopes and realities of her female relations over the course of an entire century. Heimat Fragments is an intoxicating trip into the lives of venerable characters from different periods in Lulu's family history, from long-forgotten scenes of war to every day family life on the farm. This gripping film shows fragments of the lives that shaped her own. Her gaze into the past does not simply signal the end of her youth, it means the beginning of a newly gained freedom.
With the death of her mother, eight-year-old Anna ends her childhood: From now on, she has to look after the nine-member family. Deprivation-rich years, which also find no end when Anna marries: Her husband Albert must be a soldier in the Second World War, and the pregnant Anna has to work hard in the farm and care sick relatives. Lonely and exposed to the harassment of the tyrannical mother-in-law, she waits for Albert, with no certainty that he will ever return.
Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.
In July 1945, US troops are leaving Saxony and Thuringia while the Red Army takes control of the territories. In a small village near Leipzig, the inhabitants try to adjust to the new authority.
