“IT’S A very beautiful German word. It describes a central experience in all our lives, a sense of our roots, of yearning for home.” The director Edgar Reitz is talking about the title of Heimat, his chronicle of 20th-century German life that has now culminated in Heimat 3.

Once tainted by Nazi ideology, “Heimat” came second in a poll last year to find the most beautiful word in the German language. It’s thanks to Reitz’s remarkable series of films that began with Heimat in 1984. An 11-part saga that spanned 1919 to 1982, it covered the rise of Nazism and the postwar economic miracle as experienced by the Simons, an extended family from a fictional hamlet, Schabbach, in the Hunsrück region of Reitz’s childhood.

Heimat gripped BBC viewers in 1986 and was eventually seen by 100 million viewers around the world. Here were ordinary people one could relate to being touched and buffeted by history.

The 15-part, 25 hour-plus Heimat: The Next Generation followed in 1992 with young Hermann Simon arriving in Munich in the 1960s to study music. Out of his unfulfilled love/rivalry with the singer Clarissa, we experienced a decade of drugs, feminism, the Berlin wall, Kennedy’s death, student riots and the breakdown of the nuclear family.

Now comes the six-part Heimat 3. “I knew there had to be a third Heimat while we were shooting part of Heimat 2 in 1989,” recalls Reitz, who had just been denied permission to shoot a scene in East Germany about crossing into West Berlin. “Then we heard that the Wall was coming down and to us it felt as if it was happening just for our film. History kept forcing me to react to it.”

Heimat 3 begins with Hermann, now a successful conductor, being reunited with Clarissa on the night the Berlin Wall begins to crumble and ends on the eve of the new millennium. As Hermann builds a house near Schabbach around which many characters come and go, they try to find an identity and a place one can call home. American troops withdraw from the country, new ties are forged with the old enemy Russia, and mass migration begins from the East.

“The story starts with the euphoria of reunification but within a few years Germany’s borders have been subsumed into the new Europe,” says Reitz. “Dreams of wealth and happiness have crumbled. There is no clear sense of the future. Is it more important to have a job or to know who you are? That’s why there is a melancholy throughout Heimat 3.”

Reitz has returned to the Hunsrück, a rural corner of the Rhineland near the Luxembourg border. This not only allows us to become reacquainted with Hermann’s older half-brothers, including the art collector Ernst (Michael Kausch, the standout performance in the series), but also to preserve the story’s personal focus.

“Away from the cities you can avoid all the historical clichés of big events with big figures,” says Reitz. “You can see how times and attitudes have changed more clearly in a small place like Schabbach.”

When the original Heimat was shown in Germany in 1984, “it seemed to liberate memories that had been stifled for half a century,” says Reitz. “And abroad, though it was a personal, very German story, people related to the characters. Its success taught me that the way to communicate is to first look into yourself in order to understand others.”

Yet he denies that there is pure autobiography in Heimat, even though, like Hermann, he left the Hunsrück to follow his artistic ambitions in Munich. He began making films in the late 1950s. His first feature, Mahlzeiten (1967), won an award at the Venice Film Festival. Other films, little seen outside Germany, followed until disaster struck in 1978: his costume drama The Tailor from Ulm flopped and left Reitz critically and financially mauled.

He retreated to stay with friends on the island of Sylt on the North Sea coast where a snowbound exile led him to reassess his life. He began writing about his Rhineland past: “Out of the history of my family came the beginnings of Heimat. Now here I am, 25 years later, with the same project.”

Some critics have likened Heimat to a high-class soap, with which it shares a big cast and time devoted to the dramatisation of the everyday. Yet there are no predictable dramatic curves and jolts, no manipulative cliffhangers. Instead, it has the kind of cumulative emotional attachment to the characters that gives The Sopranos and The West Wing a huge head start on any single feature film that has to introduce characters you will know only briefly and then discard.

Reitz likens its narrative sweep to Proust and Balzac: “I see Heimat as a series of cinematic novels. Each film is a chapter. And although I know a project like this needs TV backing, I always prefer it to be seen in cinemas. I’m a film-maker — I’ve shot it in 35mm and Dolby sound. You don’t get that in a living room.”

So is Reitz now eager to explore a post-9/11 Germany? “It took five years of struggle to secure the funding for Heimat 3. Ironically, in our multi-channel age, it’s hard to find room for a project like this. So I doubt there’ll be a Heimat 4.”

• Heimat 3 is at the Renoir Cinema, WC1 (020-7837 8402) from tomorrow until June 2 and on the BBC this autumn. Heimat 1 is out now on DVD (Tartan) with Heimat 2 released on May 23

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