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Now, a fourth instalment has been issued on DVD. Recapping key moments from the previous 30 episodes, Heimat Fragments: The Women follows Lulu Simon (Nicola Schössler) as she thinks back from the new millennium on the strong women who shaped her family's destiny. Running for a mere 146 minutes, this has also largely been disdained as a collection of out-takes that adds little to the magnum opus. But, for those whose favourite rural hamlet is Schabbach rather than Ambridge, this offers intriguing new insights into one of the masterworks of European cinema.

Following the failure of Der Schneider von Ulm (1978), Edgar Reitz retired to the island of Sylt to consider his career options. He was $70,000 in debt, owed the taxman another $17,000 and his critical reputation was in tatters. Over Christmas, he saw the US mini-series Holocaust on television and his despondency grew at not just its melodramatisation of tragic events, but also the positive response bestowed upon it by the media.

Reitz was offended to `see German history reduced to the level of fiction in an American film studio'. But he was even more appalled to witness the nation's crocodile-tears and `how the question of guilt in German history was being discussed up and down the line by the great German intellectuals on the basis of this travesty'.

So he began working on a film to correct these false impressions and the result was the 924-minute feature, Heimat. Armed with a 2000-page screenplay, he returned to his childhood home in the Hunsrück and spent 18 months putting 140 actors and 3863 extras through their paces to assess the impact of national history on a single family and their neighbours between 1919 and the mid-1950s.

What resulted is a kind of highbrow costume serial that takes the rise and ramifications of the Nazi regime as its backdrop. Although the focus is on one family, the Simons, Reitz is also keenly aware of the wider community and how Germans responded in very different ways to the socio-political events for which the victorious Allies insisted the whole nation took responsibility. Thus, we're asked to empathise with losers like Alois (Johannes Lobewein) and Eduard (Rüdiger Weigang), who join the Party to acquire a semblance of civic status, as well as Maria (Marita Breuer), the mother who sees husband Paul (Dieter Schaad) and sons Anton (Michael Kausch), Ernst (Matthias Kniesbeck) and Hermann (Jörg Richter) depart from the simple values that she has always cherished.

Although it provoked some angry domestic responses for its perceived romanticising of a traumatic era, Heimat was lauded by international critics and became a must-see series on German television. Yet, surprisingly none of its principals went on to cinematic stardom, even though Marita Breuer excels as the outsider who becomes the mainstay of family life after she's abandoned by her wanderlustful spouse.

Reitz waited almost a decade before returning to the Simons and took the risk of replacing Richter with Henry Arnold, who became the linchpin of Die Zweite Heimat: Chronik Einer Jugend (1992). Sprawling over 1538 minutes, this became the longest feature film in screen history. Its 13 episodes were populated by 71 recurring characters, whose freewheeling interaction touched on many of the key social, political and cultural issues that helped define the 1960s.

But, despite its spectacular scale, this chronicle of Hermann's turbulent decade in the big city has the intimacy of a book, in which each chapter explored a facet of a Cold War Germany still coming to terms with its Fascist past. There are clearly autobiographical elements in the scenario, with Stefan (Frank Röth), Reinhard (László I. Kish) and Rob (Peter Weiss) being part of the Junger Deutscher Film movement in which Reitz had played a pivotal role. But everyone can recognise snapshots from their own youth in the diverse storylines, which are played with authentic conviction by a splendid ensemble, led by Henry Arnold, as the impressionable Hermann, and Salome Kammer, as his elusive Muse, Clarissa.

The triptych reached its climax with Heimat 3: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings (2004), a six-part masterpiece that brought the influence of America, Russia and the German Democratic Republic to bear on the insular Hunsrück.

The way in which Reitz contrasted the tempestuous on-off relationship between Arnold's conflicted composer and Kammer's avant-garde chanteuse with the tensions that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall was exemplary, not only for the assuredness of Reitz's storytelling, but also for his command of the complex politico-cultural details that made the action so engrossing and authentic.

He also handled the impressive supporting cast with supreme delicacy to show how Hermann's uncles, Anton and Ernst saw their dreams shattered after decades of toil, how East German labourers Gunnar (Uwe Steimle) and Udo (Tom Quaas) dealt with the disintegration of their hated homeland while restoring Hermann and Clarissa's mountain retreat, and how Hermann's daughter Lulu (Nicola Schössler) began to grow apart from both her father and her mother, Schnüsschen (Anke Sevenich).

At the time of its release, Heimat 3 felt like a fitting climax to a monumental achievement. Some wondered whether a fourth series would be made to encompass such events as the election of a German pope and a female chancellor, the disappearance of the Deutschmark and the economic crisis that exacerbated the rivalry between the Ossies and the Wessies, who have fared very differently since the recreation of a single state in 1990. Perhaps Reitz and his son Christian will eventually bring the Simon story up to date. But Heimat Fragments is a highly acceptable stop gap, especially as it is much more than a glorified DVD extra designed to use up some discarded off-cuts, as some commentators have rather cynically suggested.

The reminiscences begin as Lulu arrives from a night out with friends to see her son playing the piano in Hermann and Clarissa's idyllic home. Her fears for his future, as well as her own, prompt her to think back to Maria, who married into the Simon family shortly after Paul had returned from the trenches and who held things together in the tough decade after the Second World War. However, her preoccupation with maintaining the household (even after being forced to sell her last cow) led Hermann to seek affection in the arms of Klärchen (Gudrun Landgrebe), a refugee who had found work in Anton's optics factory and whose seduction of the underage boy would lead to her ostracisation.

However, Lulu concentrates primarily on the women her father met as a student in Munich, as they not only helped to shape his personality and his art, but also the moral codes by which she was raised. She particularly ponders on her mother Schnüsschen's time as a tour guide and her struggle to win Hermann's heart by trying to remind him of home just as he was striving to lose his rustic accent and reinvent himself as a city sophisticate at the Conservatory.

However, several other women competing for Hermann's affections pass by on Lulu's stream of consciousness, including Helga (Noemi Steuer), whose bid to become a writer was deflected by her involvement with radical politics; Olga (Lena Lessing), the actress who wants so desperately to appear in Stefan's films, but has to content herself with taking minor roles in TV programmes; Renate (Franziska Traub), the wallflower who blossoms into a saucy cabaret star; Dorli (Veronica Ferres), the life-loving girl from Dülmen who comes to visit Marianne (Irene Kugler) and develops a lusty crush on Hermann; and Evelyne (Gisela Müller), the gifted musician ashamed of her humble roots, whose Aunt Elisabeth (Hannelore Hoger) ends up being landlady to Hermann and his South American classmate, Juan (Daniel Smith).

And, amidst all these friendships and flings, there was always Clarissa Lichtblau, the brilliant cellist who entranced Hermann when she came to complain to Volker (Armin Fuchs) about his plan to include her in an experimental piece he was composing for a Conservatory concert. Yet it's fascinating to note that Lulu tends to marginalise her stepmother, even though she was so central to Hermann's happiness and success. Indeed, she would rather dwell on failures (perhaps because she is so disappointed by the way her own life has turned out) and the most poignant scenes in the film show Evelyne fleeing an awkward reunion with her mother, Olga pouring out her heart to Schnüsschen in a department store canteen and the elderly Marie-Goot (Eva Maria Schneider) and Pauline (Eva Maria Bayerwaltes) looking decidedly out of place when they travel from Schabbach to Hermann's wedding at Elisabeth's chic suburban villa.

However, Lulu is also central to much of the action, albeit as a small girl being carried by her father or transported in a buggy or a battered old car, as his rebellious and creative cabal seeks to make sense of notions of Germanicism in the aftermath of the Third Reich that had so impacted upon their own childhoods. And Reitz leaves us with the disconcerting thought that, through Lulu's eyes as she faces an uncertain future with considerable trepidation, the tumultuous events of the 20th century now seem cosily nostalgic, even though they were anything but for those who endured them. Thus, while Heimat Fragments may finds its appeal limited, it still teems with provocative ideas and affecting human stories that will not only send aficionados back to the earlier entries, but may also entice a few new converts.