The documentarian Thomas Heise, who died in May aged 68, was drawn to the marginalised and ostracised – the working class, the unemployed, the incarcerated, the politically extreme. Across his more than two dozen documentaries, individual lives open onto larger historical forces. Yet his work is always animated by a humanist intimacy, by Heise’s radically open-minded curiosity about the experiences and outlook of his subjects – how they think and feel, and why. He was interested in those who don’t have a voice; ‘Heise makes people talk who are not used to it’, as Mathias Dell observed in an obituary for Die Zeit. His films are at once indelible portraits and rich, ambivalent documents of modern German history.

Heise was born in East Berlin to an intellectual family – his father was a Marxist philosopher, his mother a literary scholar. After cutting his teeth as a director’s assistant at DEFA, the GDR’s state-owned film studio, he enrolled at film school in Babelsberg in the late 1970s, but left to avoid expulsion for political reasons. Two early documentaries about life in the GDR – including one, Volkspolizei, set during a night shift at a police station in central Berlin – did not accord with official visions of East German society and were banned from public viewing. He began making radio features in the 1980s, hoping the medium would offer more freedom, but this work ended up being censored too.

It wasn’t until the fall of the Berlin Wall that Heise could resume his documentary work. Eisenzeit (Iron Age), a film of painful beauty released in 1991, set the tone for what followed. A continuation of work begun at film school, it is a fragmentary account of the trajectories of four troubled boys in Eisenhüttenstadt, a town on the Polish border. Two of the four take their own lives; the other two emigrate to the West. Their stories are told largely through interviews with their friends and acquaintances. Carefully composed montages of mundane locations would become a trademark.

The fall-out from the unification of Germany – especially its disappointments and unsettling effects – became a major concern of his work. Perhaps his best-known and, at the time, most controversial, film is STAU – Jetzt Geht’s Los (1992), the first in a trilogy which chronicled the lives of a group of neo-Nazi youth and their families over a decade and a half. (The practice of long-term observation was something older DEFA filmmakers, including Volker Koepp, had specialised in.) Strongly criticized when it came out – the premiere in Berlin was cancelled due to protests – today the documentary seems an invaluable account of the rise of right-wing extremism in the early 1990s, a period that came to be known as the ‘Baseballschlägerjahre’ (‘baseball bat years’) due to the regularity of fascist riots and attacks on immigrants and leftists, especially in the freshly integrated Eastern Bundesländer.

The trilogy is set in Halle-Neustadt, a planned city built in the mid-60s to house workers employed in two nearby chemical plants. STAU opens with a shot of a burning car in an empty parking lot. Clouds of black smoke billow towards a busy street, but nobody seems to care; there is no fire truck or police car in sight and the traffic keeps flowing – a vivid metaphor for social conditions in Neustadt at the time. The film develops a divided relationship to its subjects, alternately remote and intimate. When the young neo-Nazis are together, the camera tends to keep its distance, capturing their aggressive, raucous energy from afar as they brawl drunkenly and shout fascist slogans. But much of the film is composed of one-on-one interviews: we see the young men in their homes, sitting more or less uncomfortably in front of the camera, talking about their frustrations and longings.

Early critics argued that the film gave its protagonists too much control over their self-presentation, disregarding their victims, and failing to condemn their behaviour. The documentary certainly displays a lot of patience with its characters. We learn about the boredom and listlessness that comes with unemployment, about absent fathers and overworked mothers. ‘We want to be noticed’, one youth says. But Heise does not provide clear-cut psychological explanations. He is interested in understanding the lives of these alienated young men without making excuses or inviting easy judgements.

In the austere living rooms of their working-class families, the young men are often polite and friendly, sometimes embarrassed, even shy. Of course, they do their best to present themselves well, often fishing for sympathy and downplaying the radicalism of their beliefs, claiming they only carry weapons for self-defence or that ‘Sieg Heil’ is an expression of protest without concrete political meaning. Heise listens and films. His interventions are subtle: ‘Do you know them?’, he asks one youth when he mentions his aversion to ‘the foreigners’. Juxtapositions reveal contradictions: one of the boys is shown talking about his resistance to ‘mixing different cultures’, and then in the next shot is seen enjoying a meal at an Asian restaurant.

The sequel, Neustadt. Stau – Der Stand der Dinge (2000), homes in on a couple of the young men and their families. After several court cases – two of them for violent assault – Ronny has turned away from the scene, although it’s clear that his worldview hasn’t changed. Konrad, on the other hand, who had dreamt of becoming a baker, has made politics his main purpose. No longer getting drunk and beating up leftists, he instead reads books by right-wing thinkers. Compared to the crude sloganeering we witness in the first part, Konrad is eloquent and seems politically sophisticated, confidently discussing the construction of a different system ‘with authoritarian elements’. With Jeannette, Ronny’s sister, a woman comes into focus for the first time. She is recovering from an abusive relationship that ended with her partner’s suicide. She was pregnant at 15 and the older of her two sons, Tommy, is now about 8 years old and already showing signs of rebellion. ‘Schade drum’ (‘too bad’), Jeanette says looking sadly at his photograph. By the time of the final film, Kinder. Wie die Zeit Vergeht (2007), Tommy has dropped out of school and spends his time with a much older neo-Nazi.

As in many of Heise’s documentaries, the landscape itself becomes a protagonist: Neustadt’s monumental, increasingly run-down housing blocks, the decaying facades of empty apartments, deserted streets and train stations. Like many parts of East Germany, Neustadt suffered heavily from the economic shock of reunification. The derelict buildings and drug trafficking cause many residents to feel unsafe; some blame the increased presence of immigrants. Kinder moves away from the housing estates to the industrial periphery. It opens with a tracking shot of the grounds of a huge refinery. Rendered with an abstract beauty, it appears inimical to human flourishing. Although shot in colour, Heise decided to make the film black and white in the edit. In an interview he explained that he had a hard time adapting to the garish colour schemes dominant in Western advertising, which by the 2000s had invaded East Germany too, even its most deprived neighbourhoods. The reduction to black and white helped him to concentrate on the essentials: on facial expressions and the texture of the landscapes (‘Black and white creates clarity in the images’).

Heise’s last and arguably most accomplished film, Heimat Ist ein Raum aus Zeit (Heimat Is a Space in Time, 2019) tells the history of his own family across the twentieth century. Running to nearly four hours, it combines materials from the family archive – letters, diary entries, school essays – read in voiceover by Heise himself, with footage of contemporary Germany: abandoned buildings and construction sites, woods and beaches, stations and schools, the crowded square behind the Brandenburg Gate. The effect is to transform biography into a kind of collective history. Heimat begins with love letters between Heise’s grandmother, a Jewish sculptor from Vienna, and his grandfather, a communist teacher from Berlin, where the two marry and settle down. We follow their correspondence with her family in Vienna until their deportation in 1942. A slow tracking shot over a historical document shows the names and addresses of the deported; the sequence ends with the words, ‘I am travelling today.’ The film continues with the next generation: Heise’s mother Rosemarie corresponds with a lover in West Germany, whose love letters are studded with cynicism about the political systems on each side of the divide. Ruptures in time and perspective are not acknowledged or glossed. Though the film is essayistic, the material is not coerced into an argument. It stands for itself, first and foremost.

‘There is always something left over, something that doesn’t add up’, Heise says at one point in the voiceover of Eisenzeit. His striking documentary Material (2009) is largely assembled from such remainders. A feature-length montage of miscellaneous footage collected over years, including much shot around the time of the fall of the Wall, it is perhaps the purest expression of Heise’s bricolage approach (history is not linear but ‘a heap’, he says in the film). The account it offers – fragmentary, variegated, contradictory – challenges the bullish official history propagated by West German media: it features recordings of GDR residents speaking about their hopes for the future of their East German state – hopes that dissipated when Germany was reunited on terms dictated by the West. Heise was interested in such untidy ambiguities, and was always willing to doubt preconceived opinions, including his own. Refusing to explain or cast judgement on what we are being shown, his films are deliberate without being imposing, leaving the complexities of history intact.

Read on: Julia Hertäg, ‘Germany’s Counter-Cinemas’, NLR 135.